By Matt Giesman
Read the biographies of the Reformers. That’s the advice someone gave me when I was in my 20s, wrestling with my calling (to ministry and everything else), trying to figure out if I was a Baptist or a Presbyterian. (The latter prevailed. I credit RC Sproul, whom my dad loved, and Ligon Duncan, whose Covenant Theology class swayed me during my first year of seminary. Plus a few dozens others along the way.)
But thanks to a pastor’s daughter who worked at the same summer camp as me, I decided I needed to read about the Reformers. I borrowed Dad’s weathered copy of Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland Bainton. I added my own underlines and marginal notes, and nearly 20 years and a few bookshelf purges by my Dad later, I think this book officially belongs to me now, even though Dad’s name is still written in pen on the inside cover page.
While I don’t claim to be a Lutheran historian or a church historian, I thought my nearly 20-year-old conclusions (written in pen on the back cover page) were worth sharing on Reformation Day 2023:
“He never wanted to be a leader.
“He never wanted to be a married man.
“He never wanted to be famous.”
(Sometime later I scribbled in – “He also never wanted to start a revolution.”)
“He was all three because he realized that none of them made him a man. His deep, abiding relationship with Christ showed him who he was as a man: a redeemed product of divine grace. Every other action and role of his stemmed from that one foundational fact.”
I’m happy to leave those thoughts unedited and let them remain what they were and are: impressions from a giant in history upon a man in his 20s wrestling with his own calling to ministry. But perhaps it would be better to finish with Luther’s own, words, recorded by Bainton, from pages 49-50 at the end of chapter 3, reflecting upon Romans 1:16-17- “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” (ESV)]
I did not love a just and angry God but rather hated and murmured against him. … Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his 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 whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.
A paragraph later, he writes, “He who sees God as angry does not see him rightly but looks only on a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face.”
From consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29) to loving heavenly Father (Matthew 6:9). This is but one of Luther’s many contributions to theology and the doctrine of God. Soli Deo Gloria.