Reformation Day
(Observed)
October 30, 2022
Sola Scriptura: 500th
Anniversary of Luther’s German Translation of the New Testament
Text: John 8:31-36
“If
you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth,
and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32; ESV).
In
2017, we celebrated the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation, dating
its beginning to Luther’s posting of the 95 Theses on the Castle Church
door in Wittenberg. But really, when you
get right down to it, it will be the 500th Anniversary of the
Reformation in one way or another for the rest of our lifetimes. Last year, we celebrated the 500th
Anniversary of Luther’s famous “Here I Stand” speech at the Diet of Worms, and
his subsequent “kidnapping” by his own prince’s secret agents, to hide him away
at the Warburg Castle as Junker George.
And we heard that, while he was there, though he was very lonely and sad
and frustrated, he was also quite busy.
Praying. Thinking. Writing.
And translating.
This
year, we celebrate the 500th Anniversary of the publication Luther’s
September Testament, his translation of the New Testament into German. Now, we should not underestimate the
importance of this milestone. Remember,
at this time in history, very few people actually read the Bible for
themselves. For one, Bibles were
expensive. That is why the Bible was
chained to the desk in the library. It wasn’t
because the Pope didn’t want people reading the Bible. It was because the Bible was an expensive
volume, and they didn’t want people to steal it. But it was also only allowed to be printed
and read in Latin. The Latin Vulgate was
the only version of the Scriptures authorized by the Roman Church. So, for most people, their exposure to the
Bible was only at Church, during the Mass, where they heard the readings in
Latin, a language the uneducated (which was most people) couldn’t
understand. If the people had a decent
priest, they may get some preaching in their own language, and perhaps they
knew some of the Bible stories. But
Bibles in the vernacular (the language of the people) were strictly
forbidden by the Roman Church.
So,
when Luther translated the Scriptures into German, it was a watershed
moment. It blew the doors wide open for
vernacular translations. This is
particularly pertinent for us in terms of the English translations we use. The influence of Luther’s German Bible on the
1611 Authorized Version translated under King James, for example, is
incalculable. The translators leaned
heavily on Luther as a translation tool.
And think about this: The translation we use in our worship and in The
Lutheran Study Bible, the English Standard Version, is a descendent of the
King James translation. And even
versions that are not from that branch of the translational family tree, such
the NIV, or the NASB, or whatever you use, are nevertheless the beneficiaries
of the great tradition of translations that came before, including our own Dr.
Luther’s Die Heilige Schrift, his Bible.
So, that you can pick up a Bible anytime you want (as I pray you often
do), and read it in your own language, and understand what it says… And, for that matter, that we read it here in
Church in your own language… That is not a gift to be taken for granted! Thanks be to God, who has given you, and all
Christians, this tremendous gift, largely through the efforts of His servant,
Dr. Martin Luther.
Now,
as heirs of the Reformation legacy, we believe and confess the great solas
of the Christian faith: Sola gratia (grace alone), sola fide
(faith alone), solus Christus (Christ alone), and even the famed
subscript that great Lutheran musician, Johann Sebastian Bach, inscribed at the
end of his every composition, S. D. G., Sole Deo Gloria (to God alone be
the glory). But we know that there is
yet one more sola in the list, and without this sola, we wouldn’t
know, and therefore wouldn’t believe or confess, any of the rest. And that is sola Scriptura (Scripture
alone). It is from God’s revelation of
Himself in Holy Scripture that we come to know Him as the gracious God who
saves us from our sins, by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, into our flesh, to
suffer and die on the cross, and be raised again from the dead in our flesh, to
give us forgiveness and eternal life. It
is through the Scriptures, and the preaching of the Scriptures, and in the
Sacraments (which are Scripture in action), that God grants us His Holy Spirit,
who gives us saving faith in this same Jesus Christ. By the Scriptures, God tears our eyes away
from our own focus on the self, and our own idols, and our own glory (that is,
He brings us to repentance), and directs our sight to His glory in
saving us and bringing us into His Kingdom (that is, he gives us faith in His
Son). When we confess sola Scriptura,
what we are saying is that our whole doctrine, all that pertains to our
Christian faith and life, is ruled and normed by Holy Scripture. Not by human reason. Not by sacred tradition. Not by human will, personality, or
emotion. We certainly use all of these
things, but we must only use them in service to Scripture, and never to
overrule Scripture.
So,
for example, I may not understand something in Scripture, whether it be
because the thing itself is mysterious and not meant for my
comprehension, but rather, for my faithful reception and adoration (here we may
think of the teaching on the Trinity, or how the Lord’s body and blood can
truly be present for us to really eat and drink in the Lord’s Supper). Or, be it because of my own ignorance,
which is a lot more common than we’d like to admit. We don’t know everything. We actually are not the divine
arbiters of what is, or is not, reasonable. The temptation is, “I don’t understand the
Trinity, so I reject the whole teaching”…
Or, “All the people who taught me science, all the people I consider to
be educated and intelligent, say the world was created by random chance in
evolution, so I reject the Bible’s account of Creation”… Well, what am I saying
about myself when I make those judgment calls?
“I’m God, and God is not God (not mine, anyway!),” that’s what I’m
saying. It’s idolatry. And that is what we say about ourselves any
time we reject what God’s Word says. We
don’t like what Scripture says about marriage and sexuality. “We’ve evolved,” we say. “The world has changed,” we say. So we reject Scripture, which is to say, we
reject God. We don’t like what Scripture
says about the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death. “There are lives not worth living,” we say. “There are lives we don’t want, that
inconvenience us, that burden us. There
is no inherent right to life,” we say.
So we reject Scripture. We reject
God. Repent. We must all repent. We do not stand above the Bible, as a judge
of what is right or wrong in it, reasonable or unreasonable, culturally
acceptable or ripe for rejection. The
Bible stands above us. The Bible molds
and shapes us. The Bible judges us, and
preaches to us our only hope in the Day of Judgment, which is Christ
crucified.
Holy
Scripture is God’s inspired and inerrant Word. We confess the plenary verbal inspiration
of Scripture, which is to say, behind every human author of Scripture
across the centuries, there is one divine Author, the Holy Spirit. Every word of it is from Him. St. Peter writes, “no prophecy was ever
produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along
by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).
St. Paul writes to Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God,”
literally “exhaled” from God, His very breath, breathed into (the meaning of
the word inspired) the human author, “and profitable for teaching,
for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of
God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). To be sure, the Scriptures do have human
authors, and their personalities and writing styles and cultural contexts come
out in their writing, but that doesn’t change the fact that behind them, there
is the Holy Spirit. You can think of the
Scriptures as mirroring the Person of our Lord Jesus, in that they have two
natures, divine and human. God is the
Author. And human beings are the
authors. But the human authors serve as
God’s instruments to carry out the writing.
And
so, because the Scriptures are God’s Word, we confess that they are inerrant. Which means we can trust them. God does not lie. God does not make mistakes. Thus, inerrancy. By which we don’t mean that there aren’t
scribal errors in transmission or variants in the text, but these are all very
minor, and none of them affect our doctrine or salvation. Translational errors can and do occur, so we
must be aware of those, but we are inheritors of any number of very fine
translations, which, in spite of their various strengths and weaknesses, give
us God’s pure Word. What a gift. What grace.
Jesus spoke of the Old Testament as God’s own Word. He tells us that the Scripture cannot be
broken (John 10:35). Jesus, Himself, is
the Word of God made flesh (John 1:1, 14), and so every Word that proceeds from
His mouth (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4) is God’s own Word. And He gives His Apostles to preach and write
down His Word. “Whoever receives you,”
He says to the Twelve as He sends them out to preach, “receives me, and
whoever receives me receives him who sent me” (Matt. 10:40). We receive them as we receive their writings. The Church, the Household of God, is built on
the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, St. Paul writes (Eph. 2:20), which
is to say, the Old and New Testaments, Christ Jesus Himself being the
Cornerstone, in whom the whole thing is held together and grows into the Holy
Temple of God (vv. 20-21).
But
we must not fail to understand the overarching purpose of Holy Scripture, why
it is we take such great comfort in knowing the verbal inspiration of the
Scriptures, and their inerrancy. It is
not because the Bible is a book of morals, or wisdom for life (though, to be
sure, these are in the Scriptures). It’s
overarching purpose is to reveal Christ as our only Savior from sin, death,
and the devil. It is to give us
Christ. Holy Scripture, as God’s own
Word, is powerful, with all the power of God.
It is God’s speech. And when He
speaks, it is done. It reveals God’s
Holy Law, to bring us to a knowledge of our sins, so that we repent of our
sins, and it reveals God’s Holy Gospel, to show us Christ, the Savior, and to
actually bestow on us Christ’s salvation, the forgiveness of sins, eternal
life. The Gospel is, as Paul says, “the
power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16). Luther says that the Scriptures are the
manger in which Christ is laid, in which we may always find our dear
Savior. He is on every page, and in
every Word. He is there for us, to save
us, and give us life. When you pick up a
Bible (as I pray you often do, daily, continually) to read it in personal and
family devotions, and when you hear the Scriptures read and proclaimed here at
Church, Christ is delivering Himself and His gifts to you. His Spirit.
His life. His love. His righteousness. His forgiveness. His consolation. His divine counsel and aid. His wisdom.
His peace. His healing and wholeness. A restored relationship to His Father, who is
your Father, who loves you, and makes you His own Child. In short, He gives you His very Kingdom, and
all that belongs to it.
And
Luther put it in the language of his dear German people, and in their hands by
printing it (with a little help from Gutenberg’s invention and the printers who
produced affordable copies). And this
led to others putting the Scriptures into the languages of their own dear
people, and into their hands, so that, for the last 500 years, the Holy Bible
has become the best-selling book of all time.
And well it should be. For it is
the Word of life. It is the Word of
God.
There
is the old story, possibly apocryphal, about Luther in the Wartburg, throwing
his inkwell at the devil. Now, we can be
sure that the devil pestered him plenty as he went about his work in the old
castle. And people said that, well into
the last century, you could still see the ink stain on the wall (though it
turns out that the stain had been “touched up” a bit for the sake of the
tourists, to make it more visible). But
the real throwing of ink at the devil, to which Luther did refer in
his lifetime, was his translation of Holy Scripture. When the devil pesters you, throw the
inkwell at him. Run to your Bible. Read the Word. Hear the Word. That is the Sword of the Spirit to fend off
the evil one, and it gives you the shield of faith to extinguish his flaming
darts (Eph. 6:16-17). Hear the
Scriptures. Pray the Scriptures. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the
Scriptures. And on this day, thank God
for lonely, sad, frustrated Dr. Luther, locked up in the Wartburg with His
Greek New Testament, who put pen to paper, that we may read God’s Word.
Many
other significant things happened in 1522, not least of which were Luther’s Invocavit
sermons. But that story will have to
wait for another time. In the Name of
the Father, and of the Son X, and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment