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Essay Subject: Examines ideas & assumptions in Heiko A. Oberman's biography "Luther: Man Between God and the Devil."... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines ideas & assumptions in Heiko A. Oberman's biography "Luther: Man Between God and the Devil." Paper Introduction: This research examines Heiko A. Oberman's biography of Martin Luther, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. The research will set forth an overview of the pattern of ideas contained in the work and then discuss the means by which its thesis, assumptions, and evidence are articulated, with a view toward locating the scope and limit of its import in the literature of the Protestant Reformation. The perspective from which Oberman writes about Martin Luther determines the way the biography is structured, and the care with which Oberman explains that perspective does much to clarify the thesis of the book. Oberman takes the view that Luther was very much a man of his time--the close of what has been called the age of belief--and that his career as churchman, earnest reformer, radical shaker of the foundations (to use Paul Tilli Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Oberman takes the view that Luther was very much a man of his time--the close of what has been called the age of belief--and that his career aschurchman, earnest reformer, radical shaker of the foundations (to use PaulTillich's term), and ecclesiastical and theological theoretician cannot beunderstood without reference to his psychological makeup, which was typicalof that age. Even as over the next seven years he rose higher in Churchadministration, he articulated with increasing force his view thatsalvation lay not in indulgences but in faith in God's love as set forth inScripture. Oberman's portrait of the youngman Luther, though evidently an unassuming scholar and monk, is that he wason what today would be called a fast career track in the Church hierarchy.He traveled from Wittenberg to Rome on Church business for the first timein 151 . Good works, abundantly evident in the showiness of Roman liturgyand public assertions of moral authority, will not add anything that faithhas not already accomplished. No one can avoid temptation and enticement as long as we live in the flesh and have the Devil around us; and this will not change (Luther, in Oberman 175). To be sure, he did offer solutions, but he was far fromdispassionate about them. Luther's sola fide (justification-by-faith) doctrine is that Goddoes not demand that human souls pay a debt; no human attempt could besufficient, which means that the human-populated ecclesiastical apparatushad no role to play in the salvation of the individual soul Faith in God,attainable through and reinforced by scripture, is the only obligation Godimposes on a mankind seeking salvation. The textrepeatedly comes back to Luther's personal preoccupation with the peril orhealth of his immortal soul as a fundamental article of his religiousdiscourse. . But on the whole, Obermandocuments his thesis by selecting Lutheran texts that strongly support hisassessment of what drove Luther to adopt the life of a religiousrevolutionary. The research will set forth anoverview of the pattern of ideas contained in the work and then discuss themeans by which its thesis, assumptions, and evidence are articulated, witha view toward locating the scope and limit of its import in the literatureof the Protestant Reformation. The profound consequences of sin, namely fear and insufficient love of God and one's neighbors, cannot be removed by indulgences but only by the Gospel (Oberman 19 ). Oberman cites the distinction that Luther madein the Theses between indulgences granted by the Church to commute Church-imposed penalties, and punishment that may come from or that can berelieved only by God: [I]ndulgences . But he does take the view that Luther was typical of the late-medieval actor in that he held to a dualistic cosmology, such that God andthe Devil were not metaphors for shaping spiritual conscious. Trans. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Luther rejected what he saw as Erasmus'sequivocation; Oberman says (213) Luther considered Erasmus a Christianatheist. Whether selection of alternative texts to support adifferent evaluation of Luther's psychoemotoinal core is possible remainsto be seen. Oberman quotesLuther on an exegesis of the line in the Lord's Prayer that asks God not tolead man to temptation. But without faith as well, salvation is not possible. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel were the net with which one once caught the wealthy. Oberman specifically and straightforwardly articulates hisapproach to constructing the text in this way: This book has been written with the double assumption that, first, the Reformer can only be understood as a late medieval man for whom Satan is as real as God and mammon; and, second, that the relevancy so sought after is not found by purging the record and hence submitting to post-Enlightenment standards of modernity, but rather by challenging our condescending sense of having outgrown the dark myths of the past (Oberman xvii).Over the course of the book Oberman describes Luther's persona, not as adetached observer of the problems in the Roman church, his solution to themready to hand. According to Luther, God "does not lead us into the semi-obscurity of conflicting views on basic questions that, true to the spiritof scholarly detachment, should be left unanswered" (Oberman 215). This does not mean that Oberman presents a psychohistory ofLuther. He entered public life as a reformer, risking being brandedas a heretic because of the implications of his disgust for the advertisingslogan. Oberman sets forth a tight argument about Luther's overweening concernto see life and moral choice--his own and everyone else's--in terms ofsalvation versus damnation. Luther also insists that his authority is Scripture, which is as amatter of logic superior to the authority of the Church--hence solascriptura. But he was also an especially ascetic and contemplativeAugustinian monk and teacher of theology, and found Rome a shockingly laxspiritual environment. Itis around that challenge to previous presentations of Luther that the bookis organized. To an extent, Luther's psyche must have calmeddown over the course of his life, for Oberman (4) gives an account of afairly peaceful death. Heretics were thought to reveal themselves at deathby being taken in apoplexy, evidence of God's wrath, but Luther ratherslipped away gradually, amid expressions of faith. Luther famously disputed with the Christian humanist Erasmus, an eldercontemporary, on the subject of free will, which really came down to adebate over the problem of evil. The real treasure is the Scriptures in generaland the gospel (and Paul) in particular. . Of course good works may be valuable andmoral. But the really important thing about Luther's answer to Luther isthat it was framed as a christological articulation grounded in his view ofthe Gospels. He wanted to stress true repentance and thus make the limited value of indulgences clear: they profit only the living, not the dead in purgatory, because indulgences can only commute punishments imposed by the Church. The perspective from which Oberman writes about Martin Lutherdetermines the way the biography is structured, and the care with whichOberman explains that perspective does much to clarify the thesis of thebook. But it does not mean that the spiritual distress is removed and done away with. Thus in Luther's hands, a declaration of Christian faithgrounded in Scripture elides into a cautionary tale about the fate of theequivocating (doubtless Devil-influenced) soul. Unmerited grace is Luther's response, whichcan be formulated as an affirmation of God's glory, to the view, in thebackground of the doctrine of purgatory, that man could in any way makeamends for sin by undergoing temporal punishment: "God forgives sinswithout recompense, out of unlimited grace at all times, and demandsnothing in return but living a proper life from then on" (Luther's"Wittenberg program," in Oberman 192). TheNinety-Five Theses were a detailed critique of indulgences, but thecritique overlapped and converged with Luther's misgivings about theinstitution that claimed divine authority over their disposition.Initially, he seems to have sought to point out the problem so that theChurch could act on the information. But again and again he wasoverwhelmed, led where he did not wish to go, by a God who . By 1517 many in the Church, including Luther, had protested againstcommercial traffic in indulgences. [Mark 9.34; Matt. . Works CitedFremantle, Anne. Oberman takes Luther to have felt the presence of God andthe Devil locked in combat for souls for all eternity, yet also workingvery much in the real world to accomplish their goals. But Luther's protest went much furtherbecause denying ecclesiastical authority over spiritual matters on onehand, and asserting an authoritative interpretation of the role ofscripture in spirituality on the other created an interrogation of church-as-institution and papal legitimacy. Similarly, it is not by good works but by faith alone; not by worksbut by God's grace alone; not by works but by scripture alone that man canbe saved. But the stakes were so high that he seems to have felt obliged togo on the record. A Mentor Book. . steers . In a universe where God and the Devil competed forsouls, how could that be justified? Instead, theywere each present to the reality of human experience. He appears to have been compelled to engage Romeand its myriad corruptions with a view toward obliging it to see itself inwhole and transform itself and its faithful toward reform accordingly. Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. The profound consequences of sin, namely fear and insufficient love of God and one's neighbors, cannot be removed by indulgences but only by the Gospel (Oberman 19 ; emphasis added). But this treasure is naturally [merito] most odious, for it makes the first the last. history (Oberman 21 ). .. This belies the portraitof overconcern with where the Devil were lurking. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart. The presence of salvation in theequation implicates tension between God and the Devil. Determined to work out his deep anxietyover his own salvation, he turned to Scripture and amplified hisasceticism. This research examines Heiko A. Thus when in 1517 one Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar, showed up inWittenberg openly selling Leo X's indulgences--"A penny in the box, a soulout of purgatory" (Oberman 19 )--Luther, by that time a vicar in the area,had had enough. Erasmus held that free will is a humantrait, though he qualified that assertion by acknowledging the presence ofevil and a certain moral relativity, by suggesting that it is probably justas well to acquiesce in faith as a means of coping with unbreachableambiguity and paradox. For if Martin Luther is filtered through anappreciation of the historical and cultural contexts in which hefunctioned, of which he was a part, and which he was determined to putright, his behavior and thought can the more readily be comprehended.Equally, the reader will have had access to a sharper sense of the realityof the culture on which Luther made such an impact. Luther appears to have been as much distracted by God as by the Devil.Oberman cites his sense of mission to make the Church relinquish itsdeclaration of sole authority to interpret Scripture in his repeated offersto "cease his activities if only the Gospel became public property[interpretable by individuals, not the Church]. But he neverinterrogated whether it mattered to give an account of himself in fullconsciousness that faith and evil were in tension and that an affirmativeembrace of and adherence to faith was the only mechanism for pushing evilaway and rejecting the Devil's overtures to the soul. This colored every encounter--with thosefaithful targeted by his mission the ecclesiastical apparatus of theChurch, with other churchmen, with Christian men of letters who were hiscontemporaries. Oberman explains that implicit in thisargument was a rift that could not later be repaired, that between theclaims of papal/institutional authority and the authority of scripture,irrespective of the very existence of a pope or an institution there was nopossibility for reconciliation: "The decisive event was the subsequentdebate on the question of the fallibility of [institutional] councils, thesupreme power of the pope, and the right to admonish the Church, onscriptural grounds, to change its ways" (Oberman 191). profit only the living, not the dead in purgatory, because indulgences can only commute punishments imposed by the Church. It means, wrote Luther, that God gives us the strength and power to resist. 2 .16] The treasure of indulgences, on the other hand, is very acceptable, for it makes the last the first. Rather,the example of Jesus Christ, set down in Scripture, resolves all paradox,and it is the obligation of the faithful to reject equivocation or riskdamnation. The import of Luther's document is that it positioned Scripture, notthe ecclesiastical authority of the church, as the foundation of the faith,and it criticized the institution from moving away from the message offaith and toward the message of wealth: The true treasure of the church is the most holy Gospel of the glory and grace of God. Because the stakesare so high--the fate of the human soul--it follows that the Church'sspiritual treasury, or treasury of faith, is not something that can bemanaged by ecclesiastical administrators, the very structure of RomanCatholic Church governance. The treasures of indulgences are now the net with which one catches men's wealth (Luther, Theses 62-6, in Oberman 19 ). Inthe process, he came to a new understanding of the universe. Another way of putting it suggests the kind of understanding of Lutherthat Oberman wants to convey. What is happening here is an attempt to tie the notion of salvation tothe notion of Biblical authority, and to the notion of authority overpresentation of the Bible to the faithful. This is why the subtitle of the book is so important. It is on this basis that Oberman explains the content of the knownfacts of Luther's life and analyzes the content of his actions as well astheology and exegesis--inevitable areas of concern to a man who came to seeScripture as the ground of religious being. The tripartite or as it weretrinitarian nature of what constitutes salvation in Luther's view cannot beoverstated, and each "leg" of the trinity is necessary for the other legsto stand. Oberman cites Luther's complex and highly structured elaboration ofsalvation. New York: New American Library, 1954.Oberman, Heiko Augustinus. Oberman interprets Luther's written discourses as if lurking in thebackground of his very presence in the world but certainly in thebackground of his act of writing and organizing his ideas were God and theDevil, waiting, hoping for an opportunity to affect the course of his soulthrough this vale of tears. But the theological implicationsquickly captured his logic. It would emerge from unmerited grace (sola gratia), pureScripture (sola scriptura), and faith alone (sola fide), all of whichflowed out of his intense investigation into scriptures to resolve hisanxiety over his own salvation. According to Oberman, other biographers have erred in dismissingor ignoring as inconvenient or irrelevant this feature of Luther's life. The Age of Belief: The Medieval Philosophers. Oberman's biography of Martin Luther,Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. The shape of his response was the famous Ninety-Five Theses, which areregarded as the first definitive articulation of the Reformation. 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