Prayer used to be just an obligation for Martin Luther. He prayed often but for no other reason except to calm his uneasy conscience, to obtain and maintain favor with God. But the more he prayed, the more God appeared to be standing at a great distance, unapproachable, really hard to please, in spite of all his efforts, his religiosity, his self-inflictions.
He had prayed all the prayers available in the prayer books, mastered many, if not all, of them, and carefully followed all the rituals required of him to win God’s attention. In between him and God were the saints of the Church and the Blessed Virgin Mary, with their treasury of merits at their disposal. But still, heaven remained silent. There was no answer, not even a hint that would assure him that his prayers were heard.
Luther's Prayer Life as an Augustinian Monk
That was his story when he was still an Augustinian monk. He actually became a monk to fulfill the vow he made to St. Anne when a thunder almost hit him in 1505 while on the way home from Erfurt University’s law school. This near-death experience made him realize he was not in good terms with God, and for that reason, had no assurance of salvation. His conscience, since then, did not stop condemning him even after he entered the monastery.
While in the monastery Luther’s “heart trembled and fidgeted about whether God would bestow His grace on [him].” He had a strong feeling that he had strayed from faith, and could not but imagine that that he had angered God, whom he had to appease by doing good works.
But the monastery disappointed him; and so did Rome when his mentor and immediate superior Johannes Von Staupitz sent him there. Rome, he believed, was the holiest of all the cities of Christendom. There he offered up his prayers and paid indulgences right before the relics of the saints. To his dismay, he left the so-called holy city disheartened, with no assurance whatsoever that heaven paid attention to all his labors. Prayer, and all the other spiritual disciplines, increasingly became a burden to him.
Luther's Delight in Prayer After His Conversion Experience
But if the monastery and Rome herself disappointed Luther, even to the point of despair, the Scripture did not. Shortly after his pilgrimage to Rome, Staupitz sent him to the then newly established University of Wittenberg in 1509 to teach the Bible, where he also eventually earned his doctorate in theology and later took the chair in Biblical Studies.
There at Wittenberg he searched the Scripture, and in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans he found “the gate to paradise.” This prompted him to say, “At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely . . . ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” He was then struggling with the phrase “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17, which, for him, depicted a righteous God punishing the unrighteous sinner.
That was so, but only until “I began to understand [that] the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith … Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” Prayer from that point on became a delight to him and a mighty weapon against the forces of darkness that were there to wreck the movement birthed by his conversion experience, a movement known today as the Protestant Reformation.
Luther's Evangelical Theology of Prayer
Eventually, he started teaching and writing extensively on the sacred Christian duty of prayer as he “moved away from its professionalization in the monastery into the home.” Following the format of Catholic prayer books but replacing their content with evangelical theology and piety, Luther guided converts to the Protestant faith to a new vigor of prayer and devotion in the ordinary affairs of life.
His theology of prayer was but an extension and heartfelt expression, indeed, an overflow, of the biblical doctrine of salvation that he experienced at Wittenberg. This salvation, Luther proclaimed, can be received by grace alone (sola gratia) through faith alone (sola fide) because of Christ alone (solus Christus), “not as a result of works,” as the Bible confirms, “so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
With this in mind, he would present his teachings on prayer to the people of his time by pointing them first to God’s law and grace. Only after then would he proceed to the subject of prayer. His reason: sinners who come to God must not entertain the notion that their prayers, like all the other so-called “good works,” will merit favor with God. None of us is worthy of everything we ask, he would tell his people, and none of us can earn it. For this reason, he or she who comes to God must come to Him a childlike faith in the name of Christ.
“A genuinely Christian prayer,” Luther argued, “must issue from the spirit of grace, which says: ‘I have lived my best; therefore I implore Thee not to regard my life and my conduct, but Thy mercy and compassion promised me in Christ, and because of this to grant me the fulfillment of my prayer.’” He therefore encouraged Christians not to let their sinfulness keep them from praying.
“Your worthiness does not help you,” he said, “and your unworthiness does not hinder you.” In fact, we should pray simply because God has commanded us to pray, as if inviting us to His presence, though none of us is worthy.
Hence, Luther gifted the new Protestant world and the rest of Christendom, which at the time were undergoing massive theological and ecclesiastical shifts, with a solidly biblical foundation of prayer. He laid this foundation through a number of his woks such as On Rogationtide Prayer and Procession (published in 1519), An Exposition on the Lord’s Prayer (which went through thirteen German editions between 1519 and 1522), Personal Prayer Book (1522) and A Simple Way to Pray (1535), not to mention his many sermons on the subject of prayer.
Sources:
- Kolb, Robert and Timothy J. Wengert. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000.
- Lohse, Bernard. Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1999.
- Piper, John. The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther and Calvin. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000.
- Tomlin, Graham. “Shapers of Protestantism: Martin Luther” in Alister E. McGrath and Darren C. Marks, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Protestantism. Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Edwin Vargas - Edwin joined the faculty of Conservative Baptist Seminary – Asia as lecturer in Systematic Theology and New Testament Survey after ...
