Friday, November 11, 2022

Excerpts from Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero (1999)

The following are excerpts from:

 

Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520-1620 (Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought], Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books; Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster Press, 1999)

 

 

In 1520 Ulrich Zwingli—later no friend of Luther at all—wrote that he and others in the circles of south German and Swiss humanists regarded Martin Luther as a contemporary Elijah (Ulrich Zwingli, letter to Oswald Myconius, 4 January, 1520). (p. 17)

 

Even more prominent in [Cyriakus] Spangenberg’s picture of Luther was the ascription of the prophetic office. This motif had already been thoroughly expounded by another of Luther’s students at Wittenberg, Andreas Musculus, who was professor at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder was also engaged in transforming the authority of the mythical figure of Martin Luther into authority for his writings. In the preface of a treatise “on the devil’s tyranny, power, and might, particularly in these last days,” published in 1561. Musculus examined the prophecy of Malachi (4:5) that Elijah would return before the last day. Echoing Luther’s own judgment, he explained why that prophecy would not be fulfilled by Elijah himself brought back from the dead, but rather by one who would exercise the same office and responsibility. Just as John the Baptist had been called a true Elijah in his day (Matt. 11:14; 17:10-12), so Martin Lither was a genuine Elijah whose coming had signaled the imminent approach of the end of the world. The figure of Luther had become a commonplace in the eschatological delineation of the era; viewed as a signpost of the horizon of human history, his person and message were already altering the apocalyptic imagination.

 

Musculus proceeded to compare Luther with the original Elijah, in much the same fashion in which Spangenberg would. The ancient spokesman of God and the contemporary Reformer possessed the same spirit and teaching, and both had stood against the priests of Baal, Luther in his opposition to pope, monks, and priests. They lived in similar times when God’s teaching and true worship had been covered by terrible darkness. Both exhibited the strength of God, the strength of one poor individual man with the sword of the Spirit against the four hundred fifty priests of Baal and against the might of popes and emperors. “Since the apostolic era no greater man than Luther, who had so many great and superior spiritual gifts bestowed by God, has lived or come to earth,” Musculus concluded. (pp. 51-52)

 

[Cyriakus ] Spangenberg agreed with those who at the beginning of the Reformer’s carer had regarded Luther as a modern-day apostle and evangelist. Three of his sermons on Luther, preached in 1564 and 1565, analyzed his significance in such terms. When the Swiss theologian Henrich Bullinger disputed the claim that Luther was an apostle for his age, Spangenberg undertook a refutation of Bullinger. He traced Luther’s struggles as a youth to find Christ. As in the case of Peter, it was not flesh and blood, but the heavenly Father, who revealed Christ to the despairing monk (Matt. 16:17). Like Paul, Luther had been raised by pious parents and sent at an early age to school. Like Paul, he relied on his own works as a Pharisaic monk. Like Paul, he was converted by God’s miraculous working. Luke Paul’s his teachings were based solely on the Scripture, was absolutely certain, and focused on Christ alone. The two of them shared similar gifts of wisdom, prophecy, disputation, courage, and spirit. They both had the same virtues—faithfulness, zeal, candor, patience, joy in the Spirit, constancy, humility, prudence, and mercy. Both suffered persecution at the hands of the religious and political leaders of their time.

 

In the next sermon in the series Spangenberg sketched twelve ways in which Luther resembled the evangelist John. He regarded his mentor as a true evangelist, a German Cicero and Demosthenes, because of his skill in presenting the gospel. Luke John, Luther could be called “the beloved of the Lord.” John had prepared the way for the paschal Lamb, and Luther prepared the way for the Lamb as he was about to return to judge all things (here Spangenberg’s references seem to point to John the Baptist rather than the evangelist). Both lay at Christ’s breast. As Christ commended his mother into John’s care, so the Lord commended the church into Luther’s care. Both fought heretics and both clearly taught the two natures of Christ. Both fought heretics, and both clearly taught the two natures of Christ. Their writings are similar because Luther depended on John to a great extent. Both prophesied the future, both possessed any gifts, both had their own Patmos (to designate the Wartburg during his period of hiding there, Luther chose the name of the island on which the evangelist had spent his last days), and both brought the erring to repentance and faith. Both longed for the second coming of Christ. As artificial as some of these comparisons seem to moderns, they represent an honest effort to convey the significance of am an who had changed the world for the likes of a Cyriakus Spangenberg.. . .  Spangenberg regarded Luther as a true Elijah. He noted six similarities between Luther and Elijah. Elijah means “strong man” in Hebrew, and Martin is the Latin equivalent of “He(e)rmann,” man of hosts. Both received their strength from the Lord and exhibited it. Elijah came form a small, insignificant village just as Luther cam from modest Eisleben. Both lived in times if idolatry and persecution. God performed miracles to preserve the lives of both, and just as Elijah had raised the son of the woman of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:21-22), so Luther had raised up those who were in the grip of death under the papacy. Both Elijah and Luther had exhibited the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Their greatest similarity in Spangenberg’s view, however, was that both proclaimed God’s law and God’s gospel. Throughout the sermons on Luther, Spangenberg used the simple rhetorical device of comparison to reinforce his larger-than-life picture of the teacher whom he had experienced as God’s prophet. These comparisons with biblical figures ascribed to Luther the authority of the prime interpreter of Scripture, authority which, Spangenberg was convinced, he exercised as a living voice of God’s gospel. (pp. (pp. 50-51, 54)

 

Beyond Elijah and Enoch, the angel of Revelation 14:6-7 stood ready for use as a symbol of Luther’s significance. In 1522 his fellow Augustinian Michael Stiefel published a song entitled “On the Christ-Formed, Properly Grounded Teaching of Doctor Martin Lither.” Luther’s message struck a sympathetic chord in Stiefel’s mind, strongly influenced by later medieval apocalyptic longing as he was. The first of the thirty-two stanzas of his poetic appeal for Luther’s cause played on Luther’s name as it recalled the angel that John had described in Revelation 14: “John wrote for us of an angel who would set forth God’s Word with complete charity [gantz luter offenbar].” Stiefel set the stage for an eschatological battle in which this angel was to engage the wolf in God’s stall, that is, the pope. A reference to Daniel’s apocalyptic visions (8:26) makes it quite clear that Stiefel believed contemporary events were transpiring in an eschatological setting. Nonetheless, Stiefel did not lift Luther to the heavenly plane. Instead, he interpreted the angel as someone who would come “with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth” (Rev. 14:6). For Siefel, God was working within the context of human history. He was sending his angel to proclaim the gospel and to confront his foes. Luther had done both with his fearless confession of the truth at Worms. (pp. 29-30)

 

According to popular tales, Luther fulfilled several prophecies. The astronomer Johannes Lichtenberger had prophesied that a “small prophet” would be born in 1484, and some believed that Luther was indeed that prophet even though Luther had dismissed Lichtenberger’s claim as fantasy. Much more popular was the prophecy constructed out of utterances of Jerome of Prague and John Huss as they were condemned to the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415. Huss predicted that although his goose (in Czech “Huss”) would be cooked, eagles and falcons with greater power and insight than he had would arise to complete his work of reform. His colleague, Jerome of Prague, expressed his wish to see what the church would be like a century later. From these two statements came the popular belief that Huss had predicted that a swan would come to grace Christendom a hundred years after his burning. Robert Scribner had traced the evolution of this prophecy from Luther’s own designation of himself as a swan singing the “clear, sweet song of the evangelical message,” through Bugenhagen’s phrasing of Huss’s prophecy in the words “You may burn a goose, but in a hundred years will come a swan you will not be able to burn,” to the assertion in 1556 that this sentence was uttered by Huss as he was taken to his execution. Both populace and theologians took this prophecy very seriously as a confirmation that Luther was indeed a special agent and hero whom God had commissioned against the papacy for the reform of his church.

 

Johannes Mathesius listed two other predictions which he regarded as certain indications of Luther’s role as a divine prophet. As Luther lay deathly ill at some time during his youth, an old man had prophesied that he would not die but become an important man. And while imprisoned in Eisenach in 1483, a Franciscan heretic, Johann Hilten, predicted that another reforming monk would be sent to the church in 1516. In the popular imagination Luther clearly it into God’s plan. (pp. 83-84)