The extensive index of Ulrich Asendorf’s massive study about the theology of Martin Luther (Die Theologie Martin Luthers nach seinen Predigten—Göttingen, 1988), based on his sermons, contains no words for the concepts of experimentality or experientiality (Erfahrung, Erlebnis). That is characteristic for Luther’s preaching. What we now call “experientiality” is not an independent theme in either his preaching or any of his theological work. In Luther’s work, one cannot find expressions that have the pregnant undertones they received later, including “experiential knowledge,” “experiential life,” “experiential preaching,” and “experiential theology.” I would not want to say that what we have come to call “experientiality” since the 17^th and 18^th century Pietism is completely absent in Luther’s work. However, Luther knew of no other experience than experientia fidei, the experience of faith. Faith is primary here, and the experientia or the “experience” or “experientiality” has no other role than identifying the nature of the faith. It always refers to the experience of (faith).

If we want to focus especially on Luther’s sermons and other edifying works, which are the best places to find connections to our theme and also provide a faithful image of his entire theology, we discover that key concepts in his work include Law, gospel, the devil, reason, works, conscience, temptation, faith, forgiveness, and justification, and also the Holy Spirit, church, love, and the cross.

We will have to start with these concepts when speaking about “experientiality” with Luther, as they bring us to the heart of his theology and preaching.

By faith alone⤒🔗

The core of Luther’s preaching is justificatio sola fide, justification by faith alone, and we want to take this in the broadest sense of the word. That is the point Luther always returns to! Based on the righteousness gained through Christ, poor sinners who have nothing but sins and guilt are acquitted of all guilt and punishment. Our works, whatever they are, can never appear as merits before the face of God. Faith is what counts. We are not justified by love and its works, but by faith alone, as it relies on God’s mercy in Christ. For his entire life, the Christian must rely on this divine mercy. After all, he always remains a sinner, even though he may be justified through faith.

For Luther, the fact that the Christian always remains a sinner implies that he always lives with temptation. There are evil desires, sin, the wrath of God, hell, death, and the devil, who all tempt a Christian as long as he lives, and not in the least as death approaches. Yet, amid these temptations, the Christian hears the gospel, God’s promise. God’s Spirit works in him to cling by faith to God’s mercy in Christ. Such is a Christian’s life! This is how Luther sketches its essence.

Yet, other matters do arise in addition to these as well. Faith regenerates the sinner; he changes. Even as God justifies us, the head of the old man in us gets crushed. Its tail, however, continues to whip about. This places the task before the Christian to kill the old man. God comes to help him in this by sending the “holy cross.” In our life as Christians we cannot do without this cross. For that reason, people have called Luther’s theology a theology of the cross. (suffering, trial, and consolation as marks of true faith; suffering and trial, as opposed to the theology of glory).Good works

This does not mean the absence of joy and spontaneity. Amidst fear, distress, and death, when the law accuses us or when the wrath and the judgment of God oppresses us, the Christian experiences courage and joy though faith in the Gospel. In that way, he also comes to do true good works. All that the Christian does, living by faith in the gospel, may be called a good work. Good works are not all sorts of separate, notable deeds done by us, without there being an explicit command of God for them. Very natural deeds and activities like eating, drinking, sleeping and going about our daily occupation are also good works, if they are done out of faith.

However, the Christian does not gain merit based on his good works. He is not a person who constantly spies on himself to see how wonderfully far he has already come in sanctification and virtue. He does not look back to see how much he has already accomplished. Luther radically rejected this monastic piety with its mystical ladders and virtues. At times he speaks of the abconditas (hiding place) of the Christian. A Christian’s life has its “concealment” (verborgenheid), not in the least for himself. He does not even know he does good works. He is outwardly faced towards God and the neighbour, not towards himself. He does not spend his days in self-reflection. He has no time to keep a spiritual diary. He lives outside of himself, in Christ! Christ is his life.

In fact, Luther never speaks about “converted people” as a separate category of members of the congregation. He also never sums up certain marks by which they could recognize themselves or could be recognized for others.

At some point, Luther briefly toyed with the idea of a “core congregation,” an ecclesiola in ecclesia, a group of true Christians around the Lord’s Supper table, but he never wanted to work that out into some actual reality. Despite significant pain and difficulty from disappointing experiences in Wittenberg and elsewhere, Luther always remained faithful to the people’s church of Wittenberg. This was not because of holding to a people’s church concept, but because he was convinced that the preaching of the Word of God could not miss its effect, also when much was missing in visible holiness. Furthermore, if people, like Luther, do not want to lift the true Christian life above the temptations of sin, the devil, and hell, the desire can naturally not be great to isolate the better part of the church from the rest, just to reserve especially the Lord’s Supper for the better ones alone.

Luther and mysticism←⤒🔗

Proceeding from these observations, I now want to further define Luther’s relation to experientiality in two propositions.

First proposition: Luther was not a mystic; with him, the way to salvation is very different than with medieval or later mystics. I underline what Martin Brecht wrote in his great Luther-biography: “Luther was not born a mystic” (Martin Luther, Vol. 1, Stuttgart, 1981, page 101). It is true that when he was young, and long before he sent his ninety-five theses against indulgences into the world, Luther was affected for a time by the charm of mysticism. And yet it was not mysticism in the real sense of the word that filled him with some sympathy. Rather, it was certain elements from it. In the writings of Gerson, and in the sermons of Tauler, Luther came across expressions like tentationes, that is, temptations, which appealed to him. In Tauler’s work he read about a resignatio ad infernum, that is, a nearly complete desperation, in which he recognized his own spiritual struggles. Luther did not see that all these concepts, and the realities behind them, did not fully match what he experienced himself.

In his later life as well, but in a much less positive sense, Luther occasionally pointed to certain sayings of mystics like Gerson and Bernard of Clairvaux, and also Gerhard Zerbolt of Zutphen of the modern devotion (who he wrongly took to be Thomas à Kempis).

It is of great importance, however, that Tauler and the mystical booklet Theologia Deutsch increasingly disappeared from Luther’s view; and also, that he said of the medieval Bonaventura that he almost drove him crazy; and even more so, that in his writings Luther repeatedly sharply condemned Dionysius the Areopagite, the founder of western mysticism.

The extent to which Luther applied the content of medieval mystical writings to himself when he read them, is evident from what he said to his superior, Johann von Staupitz, in a letter he wrote in 1518. In this letter, he said that the real essence of the sermons of Tauler and of Theologia Deutsch was that man should trust in nothing else than Jesus Christ alone, that is, not in his own prayers, his merits or works, as we are only saved by God’s compassion (WA.Br.1.160; Ci.6.10). Even H.A. Oberman , who tries to keep Luther as closely associated with the Middle Ages as possible, must admit that this description of the main content of Tauler’s sermons and of Theologia Deutsch is definitely not mystical (Heiko A. Oberman, “Simul genitus et raptus: Luther und die Mystik” In: Kirche, Mystik, Heiligung and das Natürliche bei Luther, Göttingen, 1967, page 39). Evidently, Luther read his own doctrine of justification by faith alone, without works of the law, into the just mentioned mystical writings.

I want to briefly draw attention to Luther’s evaluation of Bernard. In his sermons, Luther refers to Bernard numerous times. The remarkable thing is however, that in all cases Luther appreciates Bernard’s life more negatively than positively, and his death exclusively positively. Luther says somewhere that “dear Bernard” had tormented and tortured himself day and night by praying, fasting, studying, and bodily chastisements, even to the point that his health suffered severely, but when he faced the agony of death, he said, “Dear God, do not reject me!” Then Luther adds, that was his salvation; if he had trusted his good life and his ascetic exercises (take note that these belonged to Bernard’s mysticism) he would have “zum Teufel gefahren” (gone to the devil)  (WA.21.111). With this, Luther significantly relativized Bernard’s asceticism and mysticism. They would not have saved Bernard from the devil and hell. In the end, it was God’s mercy that saved Bernard. As I said, Luther repeated this numerous times in his sermons.

A sensitive knowledge←⤒🔗

My second proposition. Even though Luther was not a mystic, and even though he never put “experientiality” into a thematic system, he was a theologian and a preacher with whom experiential notions were clearly and even strongly present.

Luther’s theology is the opposite of speculative theology. In 1539, when he looks back on his life’s work, he issues a qualification of his own theology, and reaches for three concepts: oratio, meditatio, and tentatio—prayer, meditation, and temptation (WA.50.659). These are three very practical matters. It does not include speculatio. Luther noted all kinds of speculations among medieval scholastics, and among the medieval mystics as well. He often presented tough criticisms of them. He once said that with them it would have never come “zum Treffen” (to a real encounter or confrontation, as with Tetzel in 1517). Speculation is without obligation, allowing people to keep their distance, and it occurs outside of the experiential meeting between God and man.

In Luther’s preaching, one bumps into that “Treffen” (encounter, confrontation),  time and again. Everything is present: God is there, the devil is there; death, God’s judgement, God’s wrath, and hell are present. The law is there, too, and it instills fear in one’s conscience. There is a feeling of sin, a feeling of guilt; there also is the comfort of the gospel. It gets hotly intense. Faith believes God’s law, which brings anxiety and despair to the soul. The devil fans the confrontational flames. All of that belongs to the experientia of faith. It is real, it is experiential (see Martin Micol, Meditation bei Luther, Göttingen, 1984. page 91). But it also includes what God tells us of joy and happiness (Psalm 51:10-12).

In his beautiful explanation of Psalm 51 Luther emphasizes that it is essential that we have a delicate knowledge of sin (WA.40.I.328). In his lectures about this Psalm, he told his students to envision the monks who would sing, daily, “Miserere mei, Deus” (be merciful to me, O God), but meanwhile depended entirely on their own works. They confessed their sins alright, but did not feel them, as it would imply letting go of their own righteousness. Within that context Luther then urges us to feel our sin. Only remorse truly felt can be true remorse.

This does not mean that, to Luther, feeling remorse would be a condition of sorts for receiving salvation. Luther has rejected that in as many words. The ground for receiving salvation is exclusively God’s mercy. Our appeal to his promise makes us partners in his grace. To Luther, it is not about feeling remorse more or less. It is about true remorse, and even more about the conviction that God can really give his grace to us. It is about the fact  that this remorse is a conditio sine qua non (an absolutely necessary condition), as Luther puts it himself. God cannot share his mercy with self-possessed, self-righteous people who live without a care. That is the real reason that there ought to be remorse.

We do not need to gauge whether our remorse is sufficient. The question is whether there is room for God’s mercy in Christ, whether we, as sinners, as godless people, are willing to be made righteous, be justified.

Work of the Spirit←⤒🔗

Luther knows that this is a work of the Spirit. He also says so repeatedly. But he does not say it to halt all labours of faith. Above all else, his intent is to make us give the glory to God alone for all our salvation.

We already noted that the Christian can never walk away from being a sinner before God and being justified by him only out of grace for Christ’s sake. We can do nothing but return each time to the God who justifies without merit of our own.

Yet, that does not mean that Luther did not also know of joy in God, and of cheerfully praising him. His experientiality also stretches to that extent. Yet, the Christian’s life — with all its joy, all its good works, all its holiness and glory — never gets separated from its beginning: justification by faith alone.

Now we still live, Luther said, in the realm of “hearing,” not in the realm of “seeing.” On this point, too, Luther spoke anti-mystically. In mysticism, it is about seeing and enjoying, but Luther kept the Christian in the Word of God and hearing it. We still only have the “firstfruits”; the full harvest is in the future.

Luther’s preaching of faith saw the limits of two perspectives, and so it stayed real. The one side is chilly objectivism, a form of doctrinal holiness, apart from whether it is speculative and scholastic or not. The other side is that of sensational reveling in all sorts of mystical experiences, endless self-reflection, a completely introverted piety, and a legalistic systematizing of the way of the Spirit in the hearts of sinners. In this regard also, Luther — using an expression of himself — went a via media, a middle-road between the dangers of a Scylla and a Charybdis, instead choosing the way of the Word and of faith.