Feb. 11, 2026
Luther Goes to Rome: Corruption, Crisis, and the Breakthrough in Romans
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In this episode of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Greg Quiggle pick up the story after Luther’s intensifying crisis of conscience. If the monastery wasn’t bringing peace—what could? Luther’s mentor, Johann von Staupitz, attempts an intervention, first by sending Luther to Rome, hoping the pilgrimage and the center of the Church might relieve the pressure.
Instead, Rome does the opposite. Luther returns disillusioned by the moral and spiritual decay he sees—corruption, scandal, and a religious economy saturated with spiritual “transactions.” Rather than loosening Luther’s burden, Rome deepens the problem.
The turning point comes through Luther’s move to Wittenberg, where rigorous study of Scripture in the original languages (and in the intellectual wake of the Renaissance and renewed interest in Greek texts) forces Luther to confront a question that had been crushing him: How can an unrighteous sinner stand before a righteous God?
Greg explains how Luther’s breakthrough forms as he wrestles with texts like Psalm 31 and then Romans 1—and begins to grasp righteousness not as something he can achieve, but something God can give. Luther’s language for this is striking: “alien righteousness”—a righteousness that belongs to God, received by faith, and credited to the believer.
The episode also highlights a key detail that becomes explosive: Luther starts noticing where the Church’s claims don’t match the text itself—especially when he reads Scripture in Greek. The famous early example is the shift from “do penance” to “repent” (metanoia)—a translation issue with massive theological consequences.
This segment ends by setting up what comes next: the 95 Theses, the Diet of Worms, and why Luther’s translation work (and his commitment to Scripture as final authority) becomes the fuse that ignites the Reformation.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to Thanking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer, and I'm glad you're here. In this special series, we're stepping back into one of the most pivotal times in Christian history, the German Reformation. This was a time when the Gospel was being rediscovered, the Church was being challenged, and the course of Western civilization was being reshaped with ripples that still reach into our lives today. And to guide us through this journey, I'm joined by a true expert, someone who doesn't just know the Reformation from books, but from the cobblestone streets and cathedral halls where it actually happened, Doctor Greg Quiggle. Greg is a Reformation historian and the owner and operator of Kotelis Travel, a company that runs what they call tours for ten, intimate travel experiences designed for people who want something deeper than a typical tour. They offer a three to one guest to guide ratio, and these trips give you consistent access to guides who've been on location multiple times, who know not only the history, but also where to find the best able strudal and other German delicacies along the way. You can learn more about Greg and Kotellus at kotellistravelservice dot com. And if this series piques your interest, Greg actually has a German Reformation trip coming up this May, and last I heard, there are still a few seats available. In this series, Greg is going to help us explore the people, places, and theological stakes of the Reformation as well as helping us understand why it still matters for Christians today.
00:01:17
Speaker 2: So let's get started.
00:01:19
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome back to this segment of Thinking Christian. We just finished talking a little bit about Martin Luther and his conscience and some of the things that his conscience ultimately led him to. And so in this segment, what we want to talk about a little bit is what was done to try to shake Martin Luther out of this sort of downward cycle we might call it, that he was on. And one of the first things that his mentor triede was to send them to Rome. And so I want to talk a little bit about what he found in Rome and then ultimately what he finds in Vittenberg. But maybe before that, let's talk a little bit about the context of the Augustinian monetary necessary, what they're practicing there and how that matched up with the actual teachings of Augustine, not in depth, but just in general. So what's going on in this Augustinian monastery we've already mentioned, you know, they're kind of taking care of the things in daily life. They're begging on the street. This is a fairly poor regiment. But what sort of things are they doing there as a cadence of life and particularly from a religious perspective.
00:02:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, they're following the Augustinian order, which is an order that you know, Augustine is writing. So in that sense, there are they are Augustinian, I think the layer that's on top. And well, let me back up a little bit. Sure, there's a tendency to try to make Augustine either Roman Catholic or Protestant. So is he Roman Catholic or Protestant? And the answer to that is yes. Yeah. He believed in purgatory, he accepted the apocrypha, he believed in justification by faith. He talked about the necessity of good works. So you've got this, all these things that you and I see as incompatible because we're post Reformation.
00:03:31
Speaker 2: He is not. He is not.
00:03:37
Speaker 3: Forced to make the kinds of decisions that we are being forced to make ironically because of Luther. So the piece that's layered on top is there's a whole bunch of stuff that has been added post Augustine into Catholic thought and practice that we've talked about in previous programs. We talked about seven old Sacramental system and.
00:04:14
Speaker 2: Da da da da Da Da Da da da Da.
00:04:17
Speaker 3: So those layers are all on top, and this is I think it's fair to say, more Pelagian in orientation.
00:04:28
Speaker 2: That's a kind of big term.
00:04:31
Speaker 3: There's more of an emphasis on free will in that sense in the medieval Catholic Church than than there is in Augustine himself or Augustine depending on whether you're from the North of the South.
00:04:47
Speaker 2: I guess I don't know whatever. And so.
00:04:55
Speaker 3: Is it pure Augustinianism, No? Is it Augustinianism, Yes, it's Augustinian and this Augustinianism being practiced in the context of late medieval early modern Europe Catholicism. So there's there's a layer on top, and that layer is both reinforcing elements but also adding elements to the whole Augustinian piece.
00:05:27
Speaker 1: Okay, and the Augustinian monks, and this may be delving into an area where or maybe.
00:05:37
Speaker 2: We just have to decide. We don't know right now.
00:05:39
Speaker 1: But if you were to look at a at a Dominican monastery at the time, and then you're to compare it to the Augustinian monastery, I'm envisioning some commonalities, but I'm also envisioning some really vast differences. So you know, daily life still has to be taking care of, right, But within a Dominican monastery, I'm almost picturing like and maybe i'm you can correct this picture, but you know, a Dominican monastery, I almost view it as like there's going to be a hierarchy in the rookies that are coming in are really taking care of most of the menial labor tasks to support the intellectual and spiritual life of the upper tier monks, and then you move up the ranks, almost like the army, right versus what I think I understand the Yugustinian side is like, yeah, there may be a hierarchy, there's seniority, there's you know, different things, but we're all really just involved in this impoverished lifestyle and really trying to live it as best we can.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: How fair is that characterization? Fairly fair? Okay.
00:06:50
Speaker 3: The difference is Dominicans tended to be associated with the upper class in terms of their ministry. Yeah, so they're not a begging order. They're they're a wealth that they have, they have more money.
00:07:06
Speaker 1: They're getting donations essentially from this upper echelon of people within society.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: The better support that. So if who who is who are.
00:07:19
Speaker 3: The ministers around the court, They're likely to be Dominicans.
00:07:28
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:07:28
Speaker 3: The Augustinians are not going to be hanging out with the prince very much, so there they tend to be. I think that's a fair Yeah, I don't. I don't believe that Dominicans are a begging order the same way Augustinians are. And the the Augustinian order in air Fort is they don't have cash. It's a poor order. Yeah, they are not well funded. Maybe that's another way to put it.
00:08:13
Speaker 1: You know, I almost envisioned and I realize any of these analogies have we're gonna have their shortcomings. But when I think about the Augustinian monks, my mind goes to the Jesus people in the nineteen seventies, right, you know, like almost the hippies who are just coming into town to say Jesus with people they really don't have that much, and you're kind of like, why is this strange person here. You know, he's saying he has something for me, but it sure seems like he wants something from me too, you know, that kind of idea. And we did hear about this when we visited the Augustinian monastery in Germany. We hear a little about the community's negative reception of the Augustinian monks when they come and sort of the winding road that brought them to the place where they actually then could build a monastery in what was essentially a marsh or swamp area there in the town. They gave him the most worthless piece of land they could find and said, here, use this exactly.
00:09:11
Speaker 3: Yeah that, Yeah, you're you're getting the picture. And you know, I'm not an expert on every order in every place throughout the Empire, throughout Europe, but my understanding is it was less prestigious to be an Augustinian than it was to be a Dominican.
00:09:43
Speaker 2: Example.
00:09:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so we've got this Augustinian order that sort of has a that's been contextualized or immersed within this particular time and place. So it's taking on the character of that particular time and place, but it's still at its core has sort of a backbone that's Augustinian.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: That's not working for Luther.
00:10:08
Speaker 1: You know, we talked last episode about all these different things Luther's doing, spending eight hours in confession, beating himself, all these different areas, and his mentor then ultimately sends him to Rome, hoping I think he's if I remember right, well, maybe you can just explain it why he sends him to Rome, what task he's actually sending him there to do, and then what Luther's impression is of Rome. Having visited and lived there for a bit.
00:10:36
Speaker 3: There's a dispute that develops among the Augustinians, and I don't remember exactly.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: What it was, but he gives.
00:10:49
Speaker 3: Luther the opportunity to go to Rome. He hopes part of this will be going to Rome will loosen lessen some of this burden that he's struggling. Luther's very excited about this. He gets to Rome and what he finds, frankly, just discuss him. Rome is fairly corrupt. There is a high degree of corruption in the church.
00:11:22
Speaker 2: There is.
00:11:27
Speaker 3: Lots of illicit sexual activity going on among the clergy. There is the buying and selling of trinkets all over the place. He is appalled by what he finds, frankly.
00:11:45
Speaker 2: And so.
00:11:47
Speaker 3: Instead of this loosening his burden, he comes back disenchanted by what he sees. And so at this point there's this new university that's developing.
00:12:06
Speaker 2: He knows that Luther is very.
00:12:08
Speaker 3: Smart, and so he gives him an opportunity to go study the scriptures at this new university in Wittenberg. The crown prince there is Frederick the Wise. He has one of the largest collections of relics, which the irony here is this gets you time off purgatory.
00:12:33
Speaker 2: So he is going to bite.
00:12:35
Speaker 3: The hand that feeds him, and so he sends Luther there to get his doctorate in theology, which is basically means he's going to lecture from or preach from the scriptures virtually every day of the week. That's eventually what he's going to end up doing.
00:12:58
Speaker 1: So he doesn't it's not like a trade showing we hear go and get a doctorate. It's not that traditional sort of I'm going to sit in the library and research amounts of stuff and then eventually write a paper that nobody reads. It's a little bit more pastoral and focus, although there is deep study and research involved.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: Yes, I cannot tell you the details of the curriculum in an early modern doctoral program, but I do know it would have been rigorous study. It would have been significant time working through texts in original languages. And this would have been on the cusp of the Renaissance. The Renaissance is moving up from Italy into Germany, and so, for example, fifteen sixteen, Erasmus's Greek New Testament appears. There's all this new interest in texts and original languages moving beyond the Latin et ceterac, et cetera, et cetera, And so Luther is going to be going to texts and going to text in the original languages, and that's going to be revolutionary for him, non Latin texts, both Latin and non Latin.
00:14:19
Speaker 1: Yes, he would have done both, but he's he's diving into the Greek and potentially the Hebrew.
00:14:25
Speaker 2: I don't remember that exactly.
00:14:26
Speaker 1: Yes, he does, Okay, definitely though the Greek in the New Testament. He's diving into the Greek, not the Latin. And just to give people a little bit of insight into what we're what we're really talking about here, right, the sequencing of the Greek, you know, the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin manuscripts. I'll give my little spiel, and then I'll let you correct what needs to be corrected or filling gaps. Old Testament, or as Dan Block would say, First Testament is written in Hebrew originally, that's translated ultimately into Greek, which is called the septuagen Uh. Then you have the New Testament, which is largely written in Greek. It's actually all written in Greek. I shouldn't say largely. It's written in Greek. And that was eventually translated into Latin, which became the lingua franca of the time for kind of a short a relatively short period, and then was almost transitioned into a language of the hierarchy, the you know, the the hegemony, right. It was a more formal language that wasn't really spoken. It was almost like a language for bureaucrats and religious muckety mond wage scholarly language there. Yeah, so is that a that's a fair characterization. The only thing I think I might have gotten wrong is I don't know that Latin was ever really the lingua franca. I think it was almost always a little bit obscure, was it not people.
00:15:56
Speaker 3: Did well, there would have been there would have been a period of time when it would have been the language of the of the Roman Empire. But as as that as the Western Empire disintegrates, yeah, so it.
00:16:12
Speaker 2: Right, So.
00:16:15
Speaker 3: It becomes the standard language of the academic community, particularly in the West. And as modern Europe develops, and we get the development of these what were originally tribal languages German, French, in all these sorts of things, the common language in the academic communities, in the in the scholarly was Latin. And so Jerome's Latin Vulgate became the Bible for Christian Europe. And it was a Bible, sorry, go ahead, that was both that was Old and First and Second Testament.
00:16:58
Speaker 1: And it was it was translated from the Hebrew and the Greek, or at least from the Greek and the Greek, you know, like from a septuagen to.
00:17:08
Speaker 2: Latin.
00:17:09
Speaker 1: And so what we're dealing with as Luther is and now there's this renaissance of Greek manuscripts coming in at the time when Luther is kind of beginning his doctoral studies. What we're really dealing with is a situation where you could read the Latin Vulgate, the Latin manuscripts of the Bible, and go, huh, that doesn't seem quite to fit with what I'm seeing in the Greek manuscripts.
00:17:33
Speaker 2: And so this whole.
00:17:35
Speaker 1: Area of translation, what counts as an accurate translation, How is a translation really more of an interpretation of an original manuscript? All those kind of conversations that we're relatively familiar with now that we have Bibles in English, Like we know those English Bibles aren't the original manuscripts, but we also because we have so many, we can kind of see that these interpretive decisions, these translation decisions are relatively common across and so Luther's not he doesn't have that sort of benefit that we do today. He's really just now comparing a Latin manuscript a Greek manuscript and then trying to figure out, how do I convey this in German in a way that stays faithful to the text. And it's within that sort of nexus that he begins to realize something he didn't know before.
00:18:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not driven by his translation work per se. Yeah, it's driven by his own anxiety. So I meant most people agree that the critical years for Luther are between fifteen thirteen and fifteen sixteen. Somewhere in that framework, he starts to develop a new understanding of the scriptures.
00:18:57
Speaker 2: And so.
00:19:00
Speaker 3: He's reading, for example, in the Book of SOMs and he gets the Psalm thirty one, verse one, and you, oh Lord, I have put my faith or something like that, deliver me in your righteousness. I'm paraphrasing, but yeah, that's right. Yeah, the critical phrase for Luther is deliver me in your righteousness. This is a psalm of David as he understands it, and what drives him nuts about this text is David seems to be saying to God, because you are righteous, deliver me.
00:19:39
Speaker 2: Now.
00:19:40
Speaker 3: The implication is that David is saying, I am a righteous person and since you are a righteous God, you should deliver me.
00:19:50
Speaker 2: Now.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: The problem is or Luther knows David is not a righteous person, right, and so he is absolutely flummixed by this statement. What is wrong with this?
00:20:04
Speaker 1: God never ask God.
00:20:07
Speaker 3: To deal with you on the basis of his righteousness. So in Luther's understanding, and this is again we've talked about this before. Why does God damn people to hell?
00:20:19
Speaker 2: Answer?
00:20:20
Speaker 3: Because he is righteous? What is wrong with David? David is praying, Dear Lord, damn me to hell. Who never ask God for never ask God to give you what he owes you.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he cannot figure this out. He cannot figure out why David is not saying, deliver me in your mercy, deliver me in your grace, deliver me in your He's just completely stuck there. What turns him is when he goes to the Book of Romans and he starts reading, I'm not a shame to the Gospel.
00:21:01
Speaker 2: It's the power of God issavation.
00:21:02
Speaker 3: When niry One believes that the Jew first and under the Greek in the Gospel, a righteousness of God is revealed. Yeah, that's interesting. A righteousness that is from first to last. And then he quotes it back at four and forth, just as it is written, the just shall live by faith faith. And at some point he begins to connect ideas and he starts to say, maybe David is righteous, and maybe David is righteous because the good news of the Gospel is that righteousness is a gift. If the righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel. It must be different than what it was at the First Testament somehow or something. What is this revelation of righteousness in the Gospel?
00:22:14
Speaker 2: And he argues.
00:22:16
Speaker 3: Then that God makes his righteousness available to us on the condition of faith, That is that when people put their faith in God, God in turn grants them righteousness, so that they are righteous, not because they are righteous, but because they have received God's righteousness. Now theologians call this imputed righteousness. I like Luther's term much better. He calls it alien righteousness. It's in us, but it's not ours sides in us, but is not generated by us. That is going to be the huge difference. He believed that the Church was teaching him that he could become righteous, that is, that when he received grace from the sacraments, it would cause him to become a righteous person. He came to the conclusion that he could never become righteous, yeah, that his only hope was an external righteousness, not his own righteousness. That even by grace, he could not become righteous. By grace, he could receive righteousness but not become righteous, at least not to the extent that he would merit God's favor or acceptance, and so that that is the twist, and he's getting that from the text. Now that's going to start spinning the way through. So so our listeners probably you know, the only thing that some of the man have said, well I've heard about Luther in fifteen seventeen, the third ninety five thesis, right, well, you ought to read them. The first thing you're going to do is say, well, this is crazy. This has nothing to do with justification by faith. It really I don't even understand this stuff. Why are we seeing almighty fortresses? Are God in my community's Baptist church or in my you know whatever, because this doesn't make any sense to me at all. Yeah, well, the first one, when our Lord and Savior said repent, he did not mean do penance. The first two, Yeah, what's that about. Well, here's what that's about. There's a text in Matthew and Luther cites the text the Latin Vulgate says that Jesus said do penance. Yes, and so the Roman church said, aha, that's the sacrament of penance. Jesus said do penance. So when you sin, you must go to the priest and do penance. Luther says, Wait a minute, I get started reading this in Greek.
00:25:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh huh.
00:25:51
Speaker 3: The words metinoia. That doesn't mean do penance, that means turn around and go the other way. It means repent. And so this is a clear Now we're into how am I reading the Bible. I'm reading it in the original, and I can't get the Bible to say what the church says. It says right now, there's trouble in paradise.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I was remembering with the translation piece, that there was some sort of kicker there. So it wasn't related necessarily to his justification by faith piece, It was related to this idea of penance, and then that is ultimately going to cascade. Even in the ninety five feces, you kind of see a cascade into indulgences and purgatory and all these other different practices that he's ultimately going to disagree with on with the Catholic Church and then kind of get himself into a lot of trouble with the Catholic Church as he seeks to reform it.
00:27:00
Speaker 2: Ultimately he gets booted out of it.
00:27:03
Speaker 3: Yes, and this where does this come to a head? Fifteen twenty Actually does before then. But this is the big public blowout fifteen twenty, the diet of worms. And here's the famous popes and councils have aired in the past. Unless I'm convinced by scripture and plain reason, I cannot and will not change my mind. So here's the deal, boys, And he says this to the Emperor. I really don't care that the pope or some council says that we need to do penance, the sacrament of penance. That's not what the Bible says. And my conscience is held captive to the text.
00:27:56
Speaker 2: Not the Pope or the council.
00:28:00
Speaker 3: And when the Pope or the council says something that I can't get out of the Bible, I'm not bound to believe it. That's where the rubber really hits the road. That's where Luther is going to make the break. Unless you show me from the Bible, I will not You cannot force me to believe it, and you cannot force me to practice it. That's where things get. It's just going to go off the rails.
00:28:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, So let's we'll end this episode here and then next episode, let's talk a little bit about the ninety five Feces will go through the diet of arms, and then we'll talk a little bit about the way that or the importance of, maybe the translation of the Bible into German for Luther's overarching sort of new theology that he discovers in this period, why that translation is so crucial. So we'll address that in the next episode. So come on back, everybody to the next episode of Thinking Christian and we'll continue our conversation about the Reformation. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to Thanking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer, and I'm glad you're here. In this special series, we're stepping back into one of the most pivotal times in Christian history, the German Reformation. This was a time when the Gospel was being rediscovered, the Church was being challenged, and the course of Western civilization was being reshaped with ripples that still reach into our lives today. And to guide us through this journey, I'm joined by a true expert, someone who doesn't just know the Reformation from books, but from the cobblestone streets and cathedral halls where it actually happened, Doctor Greg Quiggle. Greg is a Reformation historian and the owner and operator of Kotelis Travel, a company that runs what they call tours for ten, intimate travel experiences designed for people who want something deeper than a typical tour. They offer a three to one guest to guide ratio, and these trips give you consistent access to guides who've been on location multiple times, who know not only the history, but also where to find the best able strudal and other German delicacies along the way. You can learn more about Greg and Kotellus at kotellistravelservice dot com. And if this series piques your interest, Greg actually has a German Reformation trip coming up this May, and last I heard, there are still a few seats available. In this series, Greg is going to help us explore the people, places, and theological stakes of the Reformation as well as helping us understand why it still matters for Christians today.
00:01:17
Speaker 2: So let's get started.
00:01:19
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome back to this segment of Thinking Christian. We just finished talking a little bit about Martin Luther and his conscience and some of the things that his conscience ultimately led him to. And so in this segment, what we want to talk about a little bit is what was done to try to shake Martin Luther out of this sort of downward cycle we might call it, that he was on. And one of the first things that his mentor triede was to send them to Rome. And so I want to talk a little bit about what he found in Rome and then ultimately what he finds in Vittenberg. But maybe before that, let's talk a little bit about the context of the Augustinian monetary necessary, what they're practicing there and how that matched up with the actual teachings of Augustine, not in depth, but just in general. So what's going on in this Augustinian monastery we've already mentioned, you know, they're kind of taking care of the things in daily life. They're begging on the street. This is a fairly poor regiment. But what sort of things are they doing there as a cadence of life and particularly from a religious perspective.
00:02:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, they're following the Augustinian order, which is an order that you know, Augustine is writing. So in that sense, there are they are Augustinian, I think the layer that's on top. And well, let me back up a little bit. Sure, there's a tendency to try to make Augustine either Roman Catholic or Protestant. So is he Roman Catholic or Protestant? And the answer to that is yes. Yeah. He believed in purgatory, he accepted the apocrypha, he believed in justification by faith. He talked about the necessity of good works. So you've got this, all these things that you and I see as incompatible because we're post Reformation.
00:03:31
Speaker 2: He is not. He is not.
00:03:37
Speaker 3: Forced to make the kinds of decisions that we are being forced to make ironically because of Luther. So the piece that's layered on top is there's a whole bunch of stuff that has been added post Augustine into Catholic thought and practice that we've talked about in previous programs. We talked about seven old Sacramental system and.
00:04:14
Speaker 2: Da da da da Da Da Da da da Da.
00:04:17
Speaker 3: So those layers are all on top, and this is I think it's fair to say, more Pelagian in orientation.
00:04:28
Speaker 2: That's a kind of big term.
00:04:31
Speaker 3: There's more of an emphasis on free will in that sense in the medieval Catholic Church than than there is in Augustine himself or Augustine depending on whether you're from the North of the South.
00:04:47
Speaker 2: I guess I don't know whatever. And so.
00:04:55
Speaker 3: Is it pure Augustinianism, No? Is it Augustinianism, Yes, it's Augustinian and this Augustinianism being practiced in the context of late medieval early modern Europe Catholicism. So there's there's a layer on top, and that layer is both reinforcing elements but also adding elements to the whole Augustinian piece.
00:05:27
Speaker 1: Okay, and the Augustinian monks, and this may be delving into an area where or maybe.
00:05:37
Speaker 2: We just have to decide. We don't know right now.
00:05:39
Speaker 1: But if you were to look at a at a Dominican monastery at the time, and then you're to compare it to the Augustinian monastery, I'm envisioning some commonalities, but I'm also envisioning some really vast differences. So you know, daily life still has to be taking care of, right, But within a Dominican monastery, I'm almost picturing like and maybe i'm you can correct this picture, but you know, a Dominican monastery, I almost view it as like there's going to be a hierarchy in the rookies that are coming in are really taking care of most of the menial labor tasks to support the intellectual and spiritual life of the upper tier monks, and then you move up the ranks, almost like the army, right versus what I think I understand the Yugustinian side is like, yeah, there may be a hierarchy, there's seniority, there's you know, different things, but we're all really just involved in this impoverished lifestyle and really trying to live it as best we can.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: How fair is that characterization? Fairly fair? Okay.
00:06:50
Speaker 3: The difference is Dominicans tended to be associated with the upper class in terms of their ministry. Yeah, so they're not a begging order. They're they're a wealth that they have, they have more money.
00:07:06
Speaker 1: They're getting donations essentially from this upper echelon of people within society.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: The better support that. So if who who is who are.
00:07:19
Speaker 3: The ministers around the court, They're likely to be Dominicans.
00:07:28
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:07:28
Speaker 3: The Augustinians are not going to be hanging out with the prince very much, so there they tend to be. I think that's a fair Yeah, I don't. I don't believe that Dominicans are a begging order the same way Augustinians are. And the the Augustinian order in air Fort is they don't have cash. It's a poor order. Yeah, they are not well funded. Maybe that's another way to put it.
00:08:13
Speaker 1: You know, I almost envisioned and I realize any of these analogies have we're gonna have their shortcomings. But when I think about the Augustinian monks, my mind goes to the Jesus people in the nineteen seventies, right, you know, like almost the hippies who are just coming into town to say Jesus with people they really don't have that much, and you're kind of like, why is this strange person here. You know, he's saying he has something for me, but it sure seems like he wants something from me too, you know, that kind of idea. And we did hear about this when we visited the Augustinian monastery in Germany. We hear a little about the community's negative reception of the Augustinian monks when they come and sort of the winding road that brought them to the place where they actually then could build a monastery in what was essentially a marsh or swamp area there in the town. They gave him the most worthless piece of land they could find and said, here, use this exactly.
00:09:11
Speaker 3: Yeah that, Yeah, you're you're getting the picture. And you know, I'm not an expert on every order in every place throughout the Empire, throughout Europe, but my understanding is it was less prestigious to be an Augustinian than it was to be a Dominican.
00:09:43
Speaker 2: Example.
00:09:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so we've got this Augustinian order that sort of has a that's been contextualized or immersed within this particular time and place. So it's taking on the character of that particular time and place, but it's still at its core has sort of a backbone that's Augustinian.
00:10:06
Speaker 2: That's not working for Luther.
00:10:08
Speaker 1: You know, we talked last episode about all these different things Luther's doing, spending eight hours in confession, beating himself, all these different areas, and his mentor then ultimately sends him to Rome, hoping I think he's if I remember right, well, maybe you can just explain it why he sends him to Rome, what task he's actually sending him there to do, and then what Luther's impression is of Rome. Having visited and lived there for a bit.
00:10:36
Speaker 3: There's a dispute that develops among the Augustinians, and I don't remember exactly.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: What it was, but he gives.
00:10:49
Speaker 3: Luther the opportunity to go to Rome. He hopes part of this will be going to Rome will loosen lessen some of this burden that he's struggling. Luther's very excited about this. He gets to Rome and what he finds, frankly, just discuss him. Rome is fairly corrupt. There is a high degree of corruption in the church.
00:11:22
Speaker 2: There is.
00:11:27
Speaker 3: Lots of illicit sexual activity going on among the clergy. There is the buying and selling of trinkets all over the place. He is appalled by what he finds, frankly.
00:11:45
Speaker 2: And so.
00:11:47
Speaker 3: Instead of this loosening his burden, he comes back disenchanted by what he sees. And so at this point there's this new university that's developing.
00:12:06
Speaker 2: He knows that Luther is very.
00:12:08
Speaker 3: Smart, and so he gives him an opportunity to go study the scriptures at this new university in Wittenberg. The crown prince there is Frederick the Wise. He has one of the largest collections of relics, which the irony here is this gets you time off purgatory.
00:12:33
Speaker 2: So he is going to bite.
00:12:35
Speaker 3: The hand that feeds him, and so he sends Luther there to get his doctorate in theology, which is basically means he's going to lecture from or preach from the scriptures virtually every day of the week. That's eventually what he's going to end up doing.
00:12:58
Speaker 1: So he doesn't it's not like a trade showing we hear go and get a doctorate. It's not that traditional sort of I'm going to sit in the library and research amounts of stuff and then eventually write a paper that nobody reads. It's a little bit more pastoral and focus, although there is deep study and research involved.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: Yes, I cannot tell you the details of the curriculum in an early modern doctoral program, but I do know it would have been rigorous study. It would have been significant time working through texts in original languages. And this would have been on the cusp of the Renaissance. The Renaissance is moving up from Italy into Germany, and so, for example, fifteen sixteen, Erasmus's Greek New Testament appears. There's all this new interest in texts and original languages moving beyond the Latin et ceterac, et cetera, et cetera, And so Luther is going to be going to texts and going to text in the original languages, and that's going to be revolutionary for him, non Latin texts, both Latin and non Latin.
00:14:19
Speaker 1: Yes, he would have done both, but he's he's diving into the Greek and potentially the Hebrew.
00:14:25
Speaker 2: I don't remember that exactly.
00:14:26
Speaker 1: Yes, he does, Okay, definitely though the Greek in the New Testament. He's diving into the Greek, not the Latin. And just to give people a little bit of insight into what we're what we're really talking about here, right, the sequencing of the Greek, you know, the Hebrew, the Greek and the Latin manuscripts. I'll give my little spiel, and then I'll let you correct what needs to be corrected or filling gaps. Old Testament, or as Dan Block would say, First Testament is written in Hebrew originally, that's translated ultimately into Greek, which is called the septuagen Uh. Then you have the New Testament, which is largely written in Greek. It's actually all written in Greek. I shouldn't say largely. It's written in Greek. And that was eventually translated into Latin, which became the lingua franca of the time for kind of a short a relatively short period, and then was almost transitioned into a language of the hierarchy, the you know, the the hegemony, right. It was a more formal language that wasn't really spoken. It was almost like a language for bureaucrats and religious muckety mond wage scholarly language there. Yeah, so is that a that's a fair characterization. The only thing I think I might have gotten wrong is I don't know that Latin was ever really the lingua franca. I think it was almost always a little bit obscure, was it not people.
00:15:56
Speaker 3: Did well, there would have been there would have been a period of time when it would have been the language of the of the Roman Empire. But as as that as the Western Empire disintegrates, yeah, so it.
00:16:12
Speaker 2: Right, So.
00:16:15
Speaker 3: It becomes the standard language of the academic community, particularly in the West. And as modern Europe develops, and we get the development of these what were originally tribal languages German, French, in all these sorts of things, the common language in the academic communities, in the in the scholarly was Latin. And so Jerome's Latin Vulgate became the Bible for Christian Europe. And it was a Bible, sorry, go ahead, that was both that was Old and First and Second Testament.
00:16:58
Speaker 1: And it was it was translated from the Hebrew and the Greek, or at least from the Greek and the Greek, you know, like from a septuagen to.
00:17:08
Speaker 2: Latin.
00:17:09
Speaker 1: And so what we're dealing with as Luther is and now there's this renaissance of Greek manuscripts coming in at the time when Luther is kind of beginning his doctoral studies. What we're really dealing with is a situation where you could read the Latin Vulgate, the Latin manuscripts of the Bible, and go, huh, that doesn't seem quite to fit with what I'm seeing in the Greek manuscripts.
00:17:33
Speaker 2: And so this whole.
00:17:35
Speaker 1: Area of translation, what counts as an accurate translation, How is a translation really more of an interpretation of an original manuscript? All those kind of conversations that we're relatively familiar with now that we have Bibles in English, Like we know those English Bibles aren't the original manuscripts, but we also because we have so many, we can kind of see that these interpretive decisions, these translation decisions are relatively common across and so Luther's not he doesn't have that sort of benefit that we do today. He's really just now comparing a Latin manuscript a Greek manuscript and then trying to figure out, how do I convey this in German in a way that stays faithful to the text. And it's within that sort of nexus that he begins to realize something he didn't know before.
00:18:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not driven by his translation work per se. Yeah, it's driven by his own anxiety. So I meant most people agree that the critical years for Luther are between fifteen thirteen and fifteen sixteen. Somewhere in that framework, he starts to develop a new understanding of the scriptures.
00:18:57
Speaker 2: And so.
00:19:00
Speaker 3: He's reading, for example, in the Book of SOMs and he gets the Psalm thirty one, verse one, and you, oh Lord, I have put my faith or something like that, deliver me in your righteousness. I'm paraphrasing, but yeah, that's right. Yeah, the critical phrase for Luther is deliver me in your righteousness. This is a psalm of David as he understands it, and what drives him nuts about this text is David seems to be saying to God, because you are righteous, deliver me.
00:19:39
Speaker 2: Now.
00:19:40
Speaker 3: The implication is that David is saying, I am a righteous person and since you are a righteous God, you should deliver me.
00:19:50
Speaker 2: Now.
00:19:50
Speaker 3: The problem is or Luther knows David is not a righteous person, right, and so he is absolutely flummixed by this statement. What is wrong with this?
00:20:04
Speaker 1: God never ask God.
00:20:07
Speaker 3: To deal with you on the basis of his righteousness. So in Luther's understanding, and this is again we've talked about this before. Why does God damn people to hell?
00:20:19
Speaker 2: Answer?
00:20:20
Speaker 3: Because he is righteous? What is wrong with David? David is praying, Dear Lord, damn me to hell. Who never ask God for never ask God to give you what he owes you.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, So he cannot figure this out. He cannot figure out why David is not saying, deliver me in your mercy, deliver me in your grace, deliver me in your He's just completely stuck there. What turns him is when he goes to the Book of Romans and he starts reading, I'm not a shame to the Gospel.
00:21:01
Speaker 2: It's the power of God issavation.
00:21:02
Speaker 3: When niry One believes that the Jew first and under the Greek in the Gospel, a righteousness of God is revealed. Yeah, that's interesting. A righteousness that is from first to last. And then he quotes it back at four and forth, just as it is written, the just shall live by faith faith. And at some point he begins to connect ideas and he starts to say, maybe David is righteous, and maybe David is righteous because the good news of the Gospel is that righteousness is a gift. If the righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel. It must be different than what it was at the First Testament somehow or something. What is this revelation of righteousness in the Gospel?
00:22:14
Speaker 2: And he argues.
00:22:16
Speaker 3: Then that God makes his righteousness available to us on the condition of faith, That is that when people put their faith in God, God in turn grants them righteousness, so that they are righteous, not because they are righteous, but because they have received God's righteousness. Now theologians call this imputed righteousness. I like Luther's term much better. He calls it alien righteousness. It's in us, but it's not ours sides in us, but is not generated by us. That is going to be the huge difference. He believed that the Church was teaching him that he could become righteous, that is, that when he received grace from the sacraments, it would cause him to become a righteous person. He came to the conclusion that he could never become righteous, yeah, that his only hope was an external righteousness, not his own righteousness. That even by grace, he could not become righteous. By grace, he could receive righteousness but not become righteous, at least not to the extent that he would merit God's favor or acceptance, and so that that is the twist, and he's getting that from the text. Now that's going to start spinning the way through. So so our listeners probably you know, the only thing that some of the man have said, well I've heard about Luther in fifteen seventeen, the third ninety five thesis, right, well, you ought to read them. The first thing you're going to do is say, well, this is crazy. This has nothing to do with justification by faith. It really I don't even understand this stuff. Why are we seeing almighty fortresses? Are God in my community's Baptist church or in my you know whatever, because this doesn't make any sense to me at all. Yeah, well, the first one, when our Lord and Savior said repent, he did not mean do penance. The first two, Yeah, what's that about. Well, here's what that's about. There's a text in Matthew and Luther cites the text the Latin Vulgate says that Jesus said do penance. Yes, and so the Roman church said, aha, that's the sacrament of penance. Jesus said do penance. So when you sin, you must go to the priest and do penance. Luther says, Wait a minute, I get started reading this in Greek.
00:25:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh huh.
00:25:51
Speaker 3: The words metinoia. That doesn't mean do penance, that means turn around and go the other way. It means repent. And so this is a clear Now we're into how am I reading the Bible. I'm reading it in the original, and I can't get the Bible to say what the church says. It says right now, there's trouble in paradise.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I was remembering with the translation piece, that there was some sort of kicker there. So it wasn't related necessarily to his justification by faith piece, It was related to this idea of penance, and then that is ultimately going to cascade. Even in the ninety five feces, you kind of see a cascade into indulgences and purgatory and all these other different practices that he's ultimately going to disagree with on with the Catholic Church and then kind of get himself into a lot of trouble with the Catholic Church as he seeks to reform it.
00:27:00
Speaker 2: Ultimately he gets booted out of it.
00:27:03
Speaker 3: Yes, and this where does this come to a head? Fifteen twenty Actually does before then. But this is the big public blowout fifteen twenty, the diet of worms. And here's the famous popes and councils have aired in the past. Unless I'm convinced by scripture and plain reason, I cannot and will not change my mind. So here's the deal, boys, And he says this to the Emperor. I really don't care that the pope or some council says that we need to do penance, the sacrament of penance. That's not what the Bible says. And my conscience is held captive to the text.
00:27:56
Speaker 2: Not the Pope or the council.
00:28:00
Speaker 3: And when the Pope or the council says something that I can't get out of the Bible, I'm not bound to believe it. That's where the rubber really hits the road. That's where Luther is going to make the break. Unless you show me from the Bible, I will not You cannot force me to believe it, and you cannot force me to practice it. That's where things get. It's just going to go off the rails.
00:28:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, So let's we'll end this episode here and then next episode, let's talk a little bit about the ninety five Feces will go through the diet of arms, and then we'll talk a little bit about the way that or the importance of, maybe the translation of the Bible into German for Luther's overarching sort of new theology that he discovers in this period, why that translation is so crucial. So we'll address that in the next episode. So come on back, everybody to the next episode of Thinking Christian and we'll continue our conversation about the Reformation. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
