Luther’s Time in Hiding⤒🔗

It was May 4, 1521. On his way back from Worms to Wittenberg, Luther was hardly sure of himself anymore. After all, Pope Leo X had excommunicated him and Emperor Charles V would issue his edict within a few days, forcing citizens to imprison Luther and hand him over to the Emperor.

It was at that time that Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, intervened. By means of a staged robbery, he brought the church reformer to stay safely in the Wartburg. Luther had disappeared from the scene; to the few people who interacted with him at the Wartburg, he was now known as Junker Jörg.

His stay at the Wartburg lasted until March 1, 1522. During this time Luther did much important work, especially being occupied with getting the New Testament into the language of the people.

Right now, however, we are not dealing primarily with those ten months in the Wartburg. We are focusing on the fact that Luther had to deal with serious concerns during this time in hiding: apprehensions about preserving the work of the church reformation in his own city of Wittenberg. The Anabaptist turmoil had infiltrated there behind his back and this radicalism was constantly being stirred up by fanatical preaching and spiritualistic agitation. Andreas Karlstadt, Luther’s promoter in 1512, had intervened in the liturgy in a revolutionary way; Thomas Müntzer and the Zwickau prophets began to subject the people to their dreams and visions with their militant words and actions. Many of the citizens of Wittenberg were swept up in iconoclasm and other destructive revolts. Meanwhile, many students left the university, for why should one study when the Spirit speaks directly into and from the heart of man...?

As everyone will understand, these unbridled scenes presented a more serious attack on the reformation of the church than all the opposition of Roman and imperial authorities. This helps us to understand the deep concerns of Luther since the beginning of the year 1522.

Exactly two months after New Year’s Day, Luther left the protective fortress and arrived in Wittenberg on March 6. Three days later he was on the pulpit calling the people back to scriptural sobriety and patience.

Meanwhile, this Anabaptist insurrection had revealed the weakness of the newly reformed church. There was convincing proof that numerous matters needed to be settled at fairly short notice. Apparently there was a vacuum that the “Radical Reformation” had managed to exploit.

As a result, Luther had much work to do. The liturgy, the schools, the organization of congregational life, the relationship between the reformational church and the government, the revaluation of marriage — all of these matters called out for guidance, proper resolve and reformation.

It is simply impossible to cover all these challenges to Luther in just one article. We will limit ourselves therefore to the revaluation of marriage, and will pay particular attention to Luther’s short treatise that was published by him in the same year, 1522, under the title Vom ehelichen Leben (About married life).

Luther reads the Bible about Marriage←⤒🔗

What was the situation with regard to married life in those early turbulent years of the Reformation? In short: it was especially on this essential matter that a significant vacuum appeared to have been created.

After all, Roman Catholic marriage law had dominated views and practices for centuries. Luther had broken with that specific law, the so-called “canon law,” when he burned the papal codebook demonstratively one and a half years earlier on December 10, 1520, thus putting aside the entire legal system of the church.

      However, the abandonment of one legal system requires the introduction of a different and better order. With regard to the rules concerning marriage, this meant to Luther that the government was called upon to issue new laws for this essential way of living together. But such an order was entirely lacking in the year 1522 and hence the vacuum in regard to marriage regulations. We hear of chaotic situations in this matter: there was fornication, clandestine marriages and concubinage (something we now call “cohabitation”), while everywhere that the Roman system was shaken up; there was much uncertainty about all these things.

Luther immediately began to confront these profound problems upon his return. He did not set himself up as a legislator (how could he?), but presented himself as a minister of the Word. He starts to read the Bible for what it states about marriage and what he found in the Bible he passes along to anyone who will listen to him.

No doubt his writing contains a strong polemic element against the Roman-medieval system. For Rome had turned marriage into a sacrament, such that the ordination of marriages had come increasingly under the control of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Moreover, Roman-Catholic law had expanded so much on the doctrine of the so-called marriage impediments that only astute lawyers could still find their way in all the rules.

At the same time as this ecclesiastical structuring of the marriage ceremony, public opinions had already been formed for centuries, which in fact implied a serious degradation of marriage. Was the marriage vow not surpassed by the monastic vows? And isn’t the promise of sexual abstinence a central tenet of these monastic vows? And indeed, to remain unmarried was considered a higher qualified state of life than the life of Hans and Greta,¹

that is, of the man and the woman who together start a family and who gave their energy to their everyday duties – both professional and domestic work. That was considered as mere drudgery at the level of the “natural” life, while monks and nuns were at a higher level of “spiritual” life.

Luther’s treatise contains a great deal of polemics against all these deeply held beliefs and practices. But Luther did not put anything else in opposition to this than his Bible reading. He rediscovered the glory of the Creator from the first pages of the Bible, as well as from the entire Scripture, and brought this to the attention of his readers. Thus he gave the bride and groom a good conscience on the day they made their nuptial promises.

Over against the contempt for (the role of) women and marriage, he praised God’s creative work and taught the church that marriage is an ordinance of God. This means quite concretely that it does not depend on man’s free choice as to whether or not he will “provide” himself with a marriage. One may or may not “acquire” all sorts of consumer goods, but marrying means to enter into a supra-personal ordinance of God. Someone who marries enters into the “holy matrimony” (as we used to say in a somewhat solemn and old-fashioned way). This state of life is a “holy state,” which means therefore that no one should speak contemptuously about it. For God knows what is “good” for us (Genesis 2:18), better than we do, and it is therefore the devil himself who causes man to be averse to marriage. Hence Luther’s thesis that it is the sin of many people to judge the work of God based on their own feelings, while in reality it is the revealed will of the Lord that should guide their thinking.

In this context, Luther draws attention to one of his favourite texts (Proverbs 18:22): “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favour from the LORD.” He emphasizes the word “find”: God’s hand is to be recognized in the establishment of marriage, because God is the actual Originator of marriage and only for that reason is this state of life “good.” Luther even says that many people have a wife, but few find a wife. Those many are the blind ones who do not notice God’s work. That is why they so easily speak ill of their wives and are unable to find any joy in their marriage when they are living in the midst of sorrows and trials.

In this way, Luther took a stand to defend the noble nature of marriage. He was able to do this because the Scriptures enabled him to rediscover the work of God. For the gospel is the good news of the Son. But this Son teaches us—unwise, short-sighted men — to understand the work of Father anew. Grace does not alienate us from creation nor does it elevate us above the created structures of life. Instead, grace redeems us to such an extent that we learn to appreciate and enjoy the Father’s creation anew, with thanksgiving.

Didn’t Luther also give an exposition on 1 Timothy 4 in that same year, 1522?² This was directed specifically against the Roman Catholics and the Anabaptists. In it he very clearly points out what Scripture has to say, especially in connection with marriage in his interpretation of 1 Timothy 4:4-5: “For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” Therefore, what the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy in verse 6 applies to him as well: “If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed.”

The Topicality of Luther’s Teaching←⤒🔗

The outcomes of Luther’s teaching should now be readily apparent to us. On the one hand, he pours out his wrath on the Roman practices and especially on the contemptuous speaking of women and their daily work. In addition, he sharply criticises the commendation of monastic vows. He considered them to be invalid before God, and he believed that each person can know that he or she is released from them by God himself.

On the other hand, Luther opposed the idea that in the marriage ceremony, husband and wife only have to deal with each other. The divine state of marriage is characterized at the same time as an external and secular matter. This means that marriage also functions in social interactions (“external”) and that the government, as the (“secular”) servant of God, also has a regulating role to play here.

This does not mean that Luther regarded marriage as an external or worldly matter. On the contrary, it was his intention to take marriage out of the hands of the clergy and to entrust it to the government, which had to make room for this essential matter in its legislating task.

Moreover, Luther aimed to counteract the evil of clandestine marriages in this way and to fight against the Anabaptist contempt for the regulating task of the government, for marriage, according to the evident testimony of Scripture, should not be surrendered to human autonomy, whether this is expressed in fornication or through contempt. This is how Luther fought against the clericalization and the profaning of the bond of the sexes. That is why, in 1529, he also prepared a marriage form for use by the churches during the time when the government was either unable or unwilling to conduct and register marriages in the name of God.³

No doubt these are familiar sounds to readers who know the Reformed form for the ordination of marriages. But in this regard we should remember two things. The first is that what may sound familiar to us was at one time a new sound to the church at that time. The Bible was taken from having been buried under a thick layer of dust in the sixteenth century and all its words sounded new then.

The second thing we should consider is the fact that the so-called familiar sounds are in danger of becoming inaudible in our time because of the interfering messaging of the propaganda for so-called “alternative forms of living together”—a euphemism for an otherwise dirty business. The criticism of Scripture is partly at the root of this hype, in which a secularized form of Anabaptism and a base form of self-gratification can easily find each other. Marriage would be no more than a social contract, easily terminated, which could be entered into on the basis of an agreement of two people, even without official registration by the government or parental consent.

In that sense, many men have wives, but they no longer consider them to be good gifts from God. Hence, many men “acquire” wives and then “dispose” of them, as they see fit. Children, too, are no longer expected and received as blessings from God. Instead, they are “accepted” at a time that suits us humans. Therefore we no longer speak of children as a gift, when it pleases God to give them. Apparently we are now supposed to say, “when it pleases us to have them.”

That is why a commemoration of Luther will be hypocritical if we do not bow before this fundamental teaching from the Scriptures and educate our children accordingly. Especially in this present century, we desperately need to hear the old, familiar sounds being interpreted and obeyed again.

When we do this, marriage will be able to keep its lustre even in difficult times. We will be able to know ourselves to be in communion with God the Father, who is the Creator, and who hands us one of his most wonderful works of creation every day.

In his inimitable way, Luther was able to bring back the sparkle on marriages in 1522. Our natural way of thinking, said Luther, turns up the nose at marriage, like a clever whore. It proclaims to the husbands: are you then the ones to cradle the little kids, to wash diapers, to make beds, to listen to the crying of children, and on top of that to listen to and to endure a wife?

But the Christian faith opens our eyes and it sees that these small and less-attractive things are adorned with workings of the Holy Spirit. One who looks at things this way realizes that such things are adorned with divine pleasure, as with the most precious gold. Such a person will say, “Lord, I am not worthy that I should cradle the baby and clean his diapers. How did I ever deserve to have so much joy?” And God laughs, together with all his angels and creation, over such a man. Not because such a husband cleans the diapers, but because he does it in faith.

The man who spoke in this way also saw the way opened for himself as a converted monk. At the age of 41, Martin Luther married a nun who had been abducted, Katharina of Bora. That marriage was for him a sign of his new obedience to God’s ordination. And in Luther’s own words, on that day—June 13, 1525—the angels exulted with laughter, while all the devils were weeping. Wasn’t the created life set free by grace to worship before God?

Is this not the way it goes, when the Spirit reforms the church and its doctrine? True reformation of the church gives the people of God new access to the life that the Father of Jesus Christ has created. How then should the angels keep quiet?

LUTHER←⤒🔗

He was and remained a short-tempered peasant,
Singing so loud that the monastery groaned;
Some nights he banged himself incessant –
‘tWas not the devil, but he who roared and moaned.

Between his laughter and fixation,
This vagabond, seeking his peace restored,
Yet only finding anger and frustration
Till he was calmed before his God and Lord.

Throughout his tortured body he now sensed
The flow of God's free, purifying grace;
Being a new creature, he sang of his release.
With newfound courage he commenced
The power of church and emperor to displace,
It was the Lord who brought him to his knees.
Willem de Mérode  (in ‘Gedichten (Poems), Amsterdam, Baarn