Martin Luther: AVisit to Rome

The light of Gospel truth began to dawn upon Luther’s soul in the second decade of the 1500s. The freeness of God’s forgiveness of sins astounded him, for the Spirit caused him to realize that it was without money and without price; in other words, without the painful toiling that he had engaged in while under the law, as he strove to merit the favor of God. The Spirit-taught lessons now impressed upon the Reformer never left him, and when the Reformation began in Germany it was simply a pouring out of blessing similar to that which had already been bestowed upon the monk in the monastery at Erfurt. The Reformation, it has been truly said, was first worked out in Luther’s own soul. Not that he was as yet clear of many superstitions and misbeliefs. Unlike John Calvin, who passed from darkness to light with remarkable speed, Luther grew in knowledge over a period of years, and it is needful for students of his theology to take careful note of its chronological development.

Luther remained in the monastery for a little more than three years and then his friend Staupitz secured him an appointment as Professor of Theology in the University of Wittenberg. At first he found little pleasure in the work, for it was expected that his lectures would expound man’s words and man’s wisdom rather than the divine wisdom found in Scripture. But shortly Luther is found delivering evangelical sermons in profusion. Indeed, the old clay-plastered wooden chapel, a mere thirty feet in length and twenty in width, in which the sermons were delivered to “a handful of monks and professors,” has been described as “the cradle of the German Reformation.” Although these early sermons fell far short of the “full-orbed Gospel” which Luther later proclaimed, yet they reflected his new-born experience of the grace of God. Much truth he had yet to learn. But if Luther’s beginnings were small, his latter end was destined greatly to increase.

The anonymous author of this submitted article focuses on Luther’s watershed visit to Rome in 1510, which served to pave the way for his embracement of the cardinal Reformation doctrine—justification by faith as God’s gracious gift.

While the Reformer was thus occupied at Wittenberg, he was suddenly called aside to undertake a mission to Rome on behalf of Staupitz. The prospect of such a journey filled him with delight, for to him Rome was a veritable holy of holies, where lived the choicest of saints, and not least the Pope himself, whom Luther regarded as a kind of god upon earth. Accompanied by a brother monk, he set out across the Alps and so came into Italy, expecting to find that the nearer he got to Rome the more holy everything and every place would appear. But to his deep sorrow he found, on the contrary, that Italy was a land of darkness rather than light. Many of the churchmen with whom he came into contact revelled in the lap of luxury, and gave to the simple-minded Germans the impression that there was in them more of that carnal-mindedness which is death than of that spiritual-mindedness which is life and peace.

When the two men arrived within sight of Rome, Luther fell upon his knees, raised his hands to heaven, and exclaimed with deep emotion, “Hail, holy Rome! made holy by the holy martyrs, and by the blood which has been spilt there.” His admiration for the so-called holy city was, however, soon dispelled, but the explanation of this is best given in Luther’s own words, written twenty years after his visit: I remember that when I went to Rome I ran about like a madman to all the churches, all the convents, all the places of note of every kind; I implicitly believed every tale about all of them that imposture had invented. I said a dozen masses, and I almost regretted that my father and mother were not dead so that I might have availed myself of the opportunity to draw their souls out of purgatory by a dozen or more masses and other good works of a similar description. It is a proverb at Rome, “Happy the mother whose son says mass for her on the eve of St. John.” How glad I should have been to have saved my mother. We did these things then, knowing no better; it is the pope’s interest to encourage such lies. Now, thank God, we have the Gospels, the Psalms, and the other words of God. To them we can make pilgrimages more useful than any others; in them we can visit and contemplate the true promised land, the true Jerusalem, the true paradise. In them we walk, not amid the tombs of saints, or over their mortal relics, but in their hearts, their thoughts, their spirit.

Luther was repeatedly shocked in Rome by the wicked and worldly lives lived by many of the highest officers of the church, and, most of all, by the lightness with which they often referred to the most sacred subjects. Julius II, the Pope at this time, was scarcely anything more than a scheming statesman, greedy of gain, and willing to obtain his ends by fair means or foul. When the Reformer arrived in Rome, Julius was engaged in a war against the French.

The Reformation, it has been truly said, was first worked out in Luther’s own soul.

From such scenes Luther turned with a sorrowful heart to try to find consolation in the performance of the various works which engaged the attention of Christendom’s pilgrims. It was customary, for example, for a pilgrim to climb on his knees, while muttering prayers, the marble staircase which, it was claimed, had belonged to the Judgment Hall of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. Accounts of what happened here to Luther vary between 19th century and 20th century historians. The former tend to make much of Luther’s experience at this crisis of his career, the latter to play it down. The fact is that such records as exist supply somewhat divergent accounts of the climbing, and it is not easy to weave them together into a consistent narrative. On the one hand there is a letter preserved in the handwriting of Paul Luther, Martin Luther’s younger son, in which he states: In the year 1544 my late dearest father, in the presence of us all, narrated the whole story of his journey to Rome. He acknowledged with great joy that, in that city, through the Spirit of Jesus Christ, he had come to the knowledge of the truth of the everlasting gospel. It happened in this way. As he repeated his prayers on the Lateran staircase, the words of the prophet Habak-kuk came suddenly to his mind: “The just shall live by faith.” Thereupon he ceased his prayers, returned to Wittenberg, and took this as the chief foundation of all his doctrine.

On the other hand, in a sermon on Colossians 1:9 ff., preached on September 15, 1545, Luther himself stated:

As at Rome I wished to liberate my grandfather (Heine Luther) from purgatory, I went up the staircase of Pilate, praying a pater noster [Our Father…] on each step, for I was convinced that he who prayed thus could redeem his soul. But when I came to the top step, the thought kept coming to me, “Who knows whether this is true?”

It is clear that the visit to the imperial city was of crucial importance to Luther’s development as a reformer. In his anticipation Rome was an earthly Paradise, the scene of all that was fairest and most to be revered in Christian story. In the outcome his reverence was turned into loathing. “I must see Rome,” the apostle Paul had once exclaimed (Acts 19:21), and in the Lord’s good time he arrived in the pagan capital. Luther’s visit, a millen-ium and a half later, must have caused him to wonder whether in any respect at all Rome’s professed Christianity was superior in moral and spiritual value to ancient paganism.

Yet it must be confessed that the German Reformer did not lack credulity. He seems to have believed that the relics which he saw were genuine. Rome was filled with them. Obviously Luther still had to learn the difference between blind credulity and Spirit-imparted faith, and from this point of time that knowledge came with increasing rapidity. Later he said, “I would not have missed seeing Rome for 100,000 florins; I should have always felt an uneasy doubt whether I was not, after all, doing injustice to the Pope. As it is, I am quite satisfied on the point.”

As for Christian doctrine, it is clear that Luther had still to become well established in the great truth of justification by faith. As the apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was of vital importance to him in this connection, we conclude this “Visit to Rome” by quoting the opening and closing paragraphs of the Preface to the Epistle which Luther prepared when his translation of the Bible into German was made at a later date:

This Epistle is the right corner-stone of the New Testament, and the purest gospel, and is in itself so valuable that a Christian should not only know it by heart, word by word, but should have daily intercourse with it as with the daily bread of the soul. For it can never be too much and too well read and considered, and the more it is examined the more precious it becomes, and the more it will be relished… We find in this Epistle most copiously treated whatever a Christian ought to know, namely, what are the Law and the Gospel, sin, punishment, grace, faith, and righteousness, Christ and Cod, good works, charity, hope and crosses; how we ought to act towards every one, whether he be a religious man or a sinner, strong or weak, friend or foe, and how we ought to act towards ourselves. And all this so admirably laid down with examples from Holy Writ, and so exemplified both by himself and from the Prophets, as to leave nothing to wish for. It would seem as if St. Paul in this Epistle wished to epitomize the whole faith and doctrine of the Gospel of Christ, and thus prepare us an introduction to the whole of the Old Testament. For without doubt he who has this Epistle well by heart has in him the light and the power of the Old Testament. Every Christian should, therefore, make it his own, and observe it constantly in practice. May the grace of God be with him! Amen.

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