Sunday, October 30, 2022

Reformation Day (Observed)

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.        


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