Martin Luther in 1510

Mar­tin Luther in 1510 is an intrigu­ing figure.

Here we have a the­olo­gian who belongs to both of our churches, and as such is unset­tling to both of our per­cep­tions of who and what we are.

Schol­ars on both sides have tried to man­age this Luther. Some on the Lutheran side have liked to empha­size his “Ref­or­ma­tion break­through” to an extreme degree. There is sup­posed to be an absolute, abject break with his past, a lightning-bolt dis­cov­ery of the true but long obscured gospel, a relent­less rejec­tion of all that came before—you see this even in cer­tain kinds of paint­ings of Luther, where he ham­mers the 95 The­ses to the door of the church with a stri­dent cer­tainty. This is the ultra-Protestant Luther who has no use for Rome, the Catholic church, or pretty much any­thing that came before him.

On the flip side, some Catholic schol­ars have por­trayed Luther as an orig­i­nally good Catholic who got it all wrong, stub­bornly refused to see the truth, pur­sued his own destruc­tive course, lis­tened to no one else, dis­torted the faith, and prob­a­bly came up with those ideas about priestly mar­riage to deal with his own out-of-control impulses. Luther up to the mid-1510s was a Catholic the­olo­gian for sure, but then he went bad. Every­thing after is dis­tor­tion, false­hood, and betrayal.

The com­mon fea­ture in these inverse por­tray­als of Luther is that both of them need the other church as the bad guy. Luther­ans need a cor­rupted Catholic church; Catholics need a hereti­cal Lutheran church. The whole story falls apart if real­ity turns out to be more com­pli­cated than this.

You can prob­a­bly guess by now that we don’t buy either of these sto­ries. That’s exactly why we are intrigued by Luther in 1510. He belongs to both sides in this quar­rel, but doesn’t quite fit into either mold. He’s the monk who prays the psalms, stud­ies Augus­tine and the mys­tics, strives for right­eous­ness, teaches Old Tes­ta­ment, strug­gles with nom­i­nal­ism, and out of these very Catholic expe­ri­ences and sources becomes a reformer. In 1510 he had no idea that he was seven years away from what would become an “anniver­sary year” for future gen­er­a­tions; cer­tainly he was unaware that he was a mere decade away from excom­mu­ni­ca­tion. In 1510 he’s doing busi­ness for his order, the Augus­tin­ian her­mit fri­ars, and on his way to great­est city in the world.

To fol­low Luther in 1510 is to won­der if it all could have turned out dif­fer­ently. We are still hop­ing for a happy end­ing to this story.