Sunday Devotions: The Peasants' Gospel
Sunday Devotions: The Peasants' Gospel
Romans 1, Romans 3
Every year, Lutherans and other Protestants celebrate Reformation Day on the Sunday before October 31st, the date in 1517 that a German monk-scholar named Martin Luther posted 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
I’m happy to have an annual occasion to affirm Martin Luther’s enduring convictions. First, that Scripture alone is the authority for Christian belief. But too often, we Protestants give that authority to a single interpretation of Scripture, which inevitably conflicts with other interpretations and leads to Christian disunity, as individuals and factions, congregations and denominations stand alone, their consciences captive to their own readings of God’s word.
Likewise, I’m grateful for Luther’s insight that sinners are saved not by their own will or works, but by grace alone received through faith alone. Though “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are now justified by his grace as a gift,” receiving “the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Rom 3:22-24). But Luther’s interpretation of Paul’s words so emphasized justification that he sometimes neglected the justice that is integral to God’s righteousness (e.g., Ps 89:14).
To illustrate that point — and to illustrate how Protestants can fundamentally disagree what authoritative scriptures teach us — let me mark the still-unfolding 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation by telling the story of the Peasants’ War, which began in 1524.
The most significant of the many late medieval upheavals that followed the Black Death, the Peasants’ War drew support from urban artisans and miners, not just farmers. But the social revolution that broke out in the Black Forest in May 1524 started as a response to agrarian discontent with high taxes and rents, the loss of hunting and fishing rights, and the erosion of traditional liberties as landlords and princes claimed more power over peasants’ lives. As the uprising spread throughout southern Germany and neighboring regions of the Holy Roman Empire, peasants raised armies — and drafted documents articulating their grievances.
The most famous of these declarations rolled off printing presses in the spring of 1525. Generally known as The Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants, its list of political and economic demands have led some historians to interpret it as a forerunner of the democratic revolutions and human rights movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. But it was no secular appeal to natural law. Likely co-written by a Lutheran pastor named Christoph Schappele, The Twelve Articles is clearly a product of the Protestant Reformation. Its first article defended the community’s right to choose its own pastor, and then only a clergyman who would “teach us the gospel pure and simple, without any addition, doctrine, or ordinance of man.” The authors concluded with a final appeal to the authority of sola scriptura: “…if any one or more of the articles here set forth should not be in agreement with the word of God, as we think they are, such article we will willingly retract if it is proved really to be against the word of God by a clear explanation of the Scripture.”
Among those unconvinced by this argument was Martin Luther himself. While he couldn’t deny the peasants’ plight under oppression, his own reading of the Bible led him to reject their right of rebellion. “Under the outward appearance of the gospel,” he thundered in a May 1525 pamphlet, the peasants “honor and serve the devil, thus deserving death in body and soul ten times over… There is no place for patience or mercy. This is the the time of the sword, not the day of grace.” The German ruling class was only to happy to oblige, killing at least a hundred thousand people before the war ended in the fall of 1525.
To make his case, Luther turned to the familiar words of Romans 13:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. (vv 1-2)
But the peasant insurgents also took inspiration from the epistle that Luther once called “the heart of the New Testament and the purest Gospel.”
While their Christian critics used “the assembling of the peasants to cast scorn upon the Gospel,” the authors of The Twelve Articles argued that “the Gospel is not a cause of rebellion and disturbance, because it is a message about Christ, the promised Messiah, whose words and life teach nothing but love, peace, patience, and unity; and all who believe in this Christ become loving, peaceful, patient, and harmonious. This is the foundation of all the articles of the peasants (as will clearly appear), and they are directed to the hearing of the Word of God and to life in accordance with it.” What Luther took to be godless rebellion “under the outward appearance of the gospel,” the peasants meant to be faithful obedience to the transformational work of the gospel.
When editors included The Twelve Articles in Luther’s Works, they added “Romans 1” as a biblical source for the preamble I just quoted. I suspect they had in mind these verses:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is God’s saving power for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.
Romans 1:16-17
Luther, of course, had pointed to his changing understanding of this passage as key to his own conversion. Having once “hated the righteous God who punishes sinners” incapable of living up to divine expectations, Luther came to focus on the idea of being justified — declared righteous — “by faith.”
This is surely part of “the gospel pure and simple” that the peasants yearned to hear from their pastors. But not all of it. Peasants “earnestly crying to live according to His Word” trusted that the same God who released the enslaved people of Israel “out of the hand of Pharaoh” would hear their pleas: “Can He not today deliver His own? Yea, He will deliver them, and that quickly!” Out of faith in a divine righteousness greater than earthly wickedness, these Christians welcomed the good news of deliverance from slavery, both spiritual and material.
It’s a good challenge to us this Reformation Day, as we hear again Luther’s favorite passages from his favorite epistle. If we truly believe in a gospel that is “God’s saving power for everyone who believes,” then we shouldn’t detach God’s gift of justification from God’s promise of justice. If we share the peasants’ belief that “Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, without exception, by the shedding of his precious blood, the lowly as well as the great,” then we should be open to their argument that “it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free and should wish to be so.”
Or as Martin Luther’s most famous namesake told a white Protestant pastor who criticized his leadership of a more peaceful social revolution: “I can see no conflict between our devotion to Jesus Christ and our present action. In fact, I see a necessary relationship. If one is truly devoted to the religion of Jesus, he will seek to rid the earth of social evils. The gospel is social, as well as personal.”
Next week’s lectionary readings: Ruth 1:1-18; Psalm 146; Mark 12:28-34; Hebrews 9:11-14.