Protestants: Obedient Rebel

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What drove Luther to health-crack ing rigors of austerity—he sometimes fasted for three days, slept without a blanket in freezing winter—was a profound sense of his own sinfulness and of God's unutterable majesty. In the midst of saying his first Mass, Luther wrote, "I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, 'Who am I that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin, and I am speaking to the living, eternal and true God.' " No amount of penance, no soothing advice from his superiors could still Luther's conviction that he was a miserable, doomed sinner. Although his confessor counseled him to love God, Luther one day burst out, "I do not love God! I hate him!"

From Faith to Faith. Luther found that missing love in the study of Scripture. Assigned to the chair of Biblical studies at Wittenberg University, he became fascinated and puzzled by the emphasis on righteousness in the Psalms and in Paul's epistles—notably Romans 1: 17: "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith." As Luther later explained: "Night and day I pondered, until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that 'the just shall live by faith.' Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise."

The doctrine of justification—the cornerstone of the Reformation—was not in itself novel or un-Catholic. Yet from this central teaching, Luther was eventually to draw several conclusions that more bluntly challenged the spiritual structure of post-medieval Catholicism. If faith saves, man therefore has less need of clerical mediators between him and the Almighty. If man is to have faith, he will find it primarily through God's word, both written and preached.

Treasury of Merits. Luther's faith-centered theology ran strongly counter to the religious practice of 16th century Catholicism, which overemphasized the belief that man could earn his salva tion, and the remission of temporal punishment for sin, by good works. Central to this thinking was the church's system of indulgences. In exchange for a meritorious work—frequently, contributing to a worthy cause or making a pilgrimage to a shrine—the church would dispense a sinner from his temporal punishment through its "treasury of merits." This consisted of the grace accumulated by Christ's sacrifice on the cross and the good deeds of the saints.

All too frequently in church preaching, the indulgence was made out to be some sort of magic: a good deed automatically got its reward, regardless of the disposition of the doer's soul.