Martin Luther and His Long Quest for Truth

From Roman Catholic Monasticism to Medieval Mysticism to the Bible

Sep 2, 2009

Regarded by some as a rebel child of the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther has been counted by others, especially among Protestants, as a great hero of the faith.

As the founder of Protestantism, he was hated by many who remained faithful to the Roman Catholic tradition. He has nonetheless been revered by a great company of people who followed him in his cause to reform the corrupt church of Medieval Christendom. At long last, even Roman Catholic historians have recently admitted, after long years of careful research, that his protest was justifiable.

Luther was born on November 10, 1483 in Eisleben, Germany. At the age of 18, he entered the University of Erfurt and after graduation in 1505 set out his pace to the study of law to fulfill his father’s dream for him to become a lawyer.

But in July of that year, Luther almost died in a thunderstorm. This event signaled the beginning of his long quest for truth that eventually gave birth to the Protestant Reformation. This quest started with monasticism, then with mysticism, until he found what he was looking for in the Bible.

Out of his fear of hell and against the wishes of his father, he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt to become a monk where he was ordained in 1507. However, he was stricken by terror the first time he celebrated the Mass upon thinking that he was holding and offering the literal body and blood of Christ (the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation). He felt unworthy of God’s love as he realized all of his good works put together were not sufficient to please Him.

Overpowered by the sense of his own sinfulness before a just and holy God, he discovered that the church’s means of grace were impotent to satisfy his longing, increasing the grip of terror in his soul all the more with no assurance of salvation whatsoever.

Left in the state of despair by monasticism, Luther turned his attention to mysticism in his search for truth. There was a great upsurge at this time of mystical piety in response to the corruption of the church.

The mystics taught Luther that all he had to do to please God was to love Him and everything else would fall into place. This, however, only led him realized that loving God was no easy task. God, for him, was hard to please and difficult to obey – not unlike his strict father and teachers who brought him up in severe discipline during his childhood.

Mysticism ironically created within him a feeling of hatred and contempt of God. Here he discovered he could not love God enough who demanded an account of all his deeds, who in the end would only declare him guilty.

The Bible and Martin Luther

At his advisor’s request, Luther was then sent to the University of Wittenberg in 1509 to prepare to teach the Bible. Having known the Psalms by heart and being himself a doctor of theology since 1512, he must have already known much of the Bible. But here he discovered a very important truth in the Bible that he didn’t know before.

Scholars believe that this discovery came in 1515 when he started lecturing on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The phrase “the righteousness of God” linked to the gospel spoken about by Paul in Romans 1:17 especially troubled him. He hated the phrase which for him was no gospel at all because it meant nothing else but the righteous God punishing the unrighteous sinner.

As Luther confessed, “I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God.” But the theology professor in Luther wanted to know exactly what the apostle Paul meant with the phrase, “the righteousness of God.”

Until it dawned on him that the phrase means the gift of righteousness with which the merciful God justifies the sinner by faith. Luther later testified, “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. Here a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me.” Immediately thereafter, he fell in love with the phrase, “the righteousness of God,” and this he called, “the gate to paradise.”

This discovery of Luther at the end of his long quest for truth laid the foundation for the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, otherwise known in Latin as sola fide. This would later become one of his major points of contention with Rome that eventually led to Protestant Reformation.

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