A Life like Luther’s

When society becomes corrupt, to a certain extent the evil that is present in it is overwhelming to individuals. Life is only bearable under institutions, but when these institutions lose their commitment to what is good, there is trouble ahead for everyone. For most of us in our daily life, our souls actively depend upon the economy and the institutions such as government, church, and university. Now it is clear that we must interact with such things. But when we depend upon them—rely on them in some ultimate way—we are unable to stand against the evil that is in them. No amount of will power or high ideals can change this.
Accordingly, to bring fundamental moral change to institutional evil requires people who depend directly on God for their lives. That is why the Hebrew prophets went out into the wilderness and lived upon whatever God would give. This was essential in their training because it allowed them to stand in the kingdom of God. Similarly, when Jesus was teaching his apostles to be moral revolutionaries, he sent them out with nothing, not even extra money or food, so that they would rely directly on God. Jesus owned no property, and many of the great saints followed suit.
Now this has often been misunderstood as somehow indicating that possessions are bad or evil. But this is not the case, as we can see from the Bible as a whole and the full teachings of Jesus. And most of us could not survive a 20-year stint in the wilderness without going crazy or being devoured by animals. But for our own safety and ability to do good, we must learn to depend on the kingdom of God and Christ above all. Otherwise we will be at the mercy of the systems of evil in the world. We will feel like we have to do wrong in order to survive.
This is one of the main motivations for the passages in the Sermon on the Mount regarding food, clothing, and possessions. “Do not lay up treasures on earth,” Jesus said, “where moth and rust destroy and thieves break through and steal.” Clearly, if our hope is in the American economy or the institutions under which we live, the fundamental needs of our soul are at the mercy of these conditions. Jesus thus encourages us to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is there your heart will be also.”
Now all of this is important for individual life and morals, but I think it is even more important for those who wish to lead. We now live in a world where our governing institutions have forsaken Christ and are running more or less on their own. If we desire to stand up to them, or at least not be mastered by their evil ourselves, we must learn how to rely on and make use of the “treasures in heaven.”
Martin Luther gives a particularly good example of how this is done. At the beginning of his life the Catholic Church was the most powerful institution in the world, and he took his stand against it. What did this involve? It involved being committed to the truth and trusting “not in princes” but God directly. As it turned out, people emerged throughout Europe that sheltered him from the Church while he preached his message. The net result of this was that over the next century the truth about the corruption in the church was widely told, and new institutions were formed. Reform came also to the Catholic Church, and it lost power too.
Those who wish to stand up against the evil of the world must take their stand with Christ in his character and power, trusting God alone for protection and the outcome. This will sometimes involve resisting the state. A century after Luther, the Anabaptists were persecuted in Europe because they would not baptize their children as infants. Now today this seems like a minor issue, and perhaps for us it is difficult to imagine why they would be persecuted for this. But government records at the time depended upon the christening of infants. They were resisting the state.
How do we do this? A lot of personal reflection is required, as well as good teaching. We must ask God to illumine the basic sources of our lives. If we can we should spend time alone, and in nature, and think about what we find there. At the present time this may not involve overtly resisting the institutions, but it may involve us taking some small steps to free ourselves from them. We must also learn to love God and truth above all else.
Five centuries later Luther’s great advice still rings true: “let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; the body they may kill; God’s truth abides still; his kingdom is forever.”