On All Saints’ Eve 1517, Martin Luther changed the shape of Europe and the world forever. However it was done—and I don’t think Luther was beyond the theatrical flourish of nailing his famous Ninety-five Theses to the church door himself—when Luther’s arguments against indulgences were released on the world, the Protestant Reformation began.

Luther remains a controversial figure today, and with good reason. Yet it’s still worth celebrating the monumental things God accomplished through him and the gospel truths Luther uncovered.

Luther’s 1517 stand against the abuse of indulgences (he wasn’t yet at the point of condemning them altogether) rested on a series of discoveries he’d made over the five years since he’d joined the University of Wittenberg faculty. Luther had come to understand the Christian life differently—as all about grace, not moral performance or law. He’d come to understand penitence, or repentance, differently—not as a sacramental act but as the whole of the Christian life.

Looming as large as any of these changes was Luther’s new understanding of the Bible. He came to see that the Scriptures stand over the church and all other writings as the final arbiter in matters of faith and Christian living.

Scripture Is God’s Word

Luther didn’t speak of the Bible’s authority in ways it hadn’t been spoken of before. Even if we leave alone Scripture’s own witness to its authority, the church fathers and the vast majority of medieval theologians repeatedly affirmed Scripture’s qualitative difference from all other writings.

Both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were explicit about this. And men like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus had made biblical authority part of their reforming platforms a century and more before Luther. Luther’s recognition that Scripture is the one true and living God’s written Word wasn’t new.

Luther came to see that the Scriptures stand over the church and all other writings as the final arbiter in matters of faith and Christian living.

What Luther did differently was explore from various angles what it meant to speak of Scripture as God’s Word. Scattered through his writings from 1512 until his death in 1546 are comments on Scripture’s nature and use that have proven extremely influential since. In different contexts, and against different opponents, Luther was resolute. Despite attempts by some historians and theologians to deny it, Luther understood Scripture to be God’s Word.

In a handwritten inscription in a Bible he gave to a friend in 1541, and now housed in the City Museum in Worms, Luther quoted John 5:39, then wrote, “This is because we ourselves hold that the Holy Scripture is God’s saving Word which can make us eternally blessed. Therefore, we should read it and study it so that we find the testimony about Christ within.”

Other writings may be helpful and edifying, but Luther was convinced that the Bible is uniquely God’s written Word. This truth generated his three highly influential convictions about the Bible.

1. Only God’s Word can bind the conscience.

At the Diet of Worms in April 1521, Luther courageously stood before an assembly that concentrated Europe’s political and religious authority. There before the Holy Roman emperor and the pope’s representatives, Luther boldly refused to recant what he’d said and written:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. (LW 32:112)

Scholars have pored over Luther’s words in the centuries since. Most significant is the final clause: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” Scripture determined not only what Luther believed but how he’d act. His conscience was bound to it.

No one has a right to bind the conscience of the Christian more tightly than or in a different direction from Scripture. All else sits underneath God’s Word, whether it be creeds, confessions, or conciliar statements. It’s not that such statements have no authority, but their authority is derivative and subject to the highest authority, the living God’s written Word.

2. The Bible is its own interpreter.

Just prior to Worms, Luther had responded to the pope’s denunciation of him and his teaching. In that context, he made another highly significant statement about the Bible, this time about how it’s understood.

Luther wrote against the pope’s claim that the sole authoritative interpretation of the Bible comes from the church. Luther had earlier argued in his Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation that this was one of the three walls built by the papacy to protect itself from criticism. So in response to the pope’s attack, Luther wrote,

Or tell me, if you can, who finally decides when two statements of the fathers contradict themselves? Scripture ought to provide this judgment, which cannot be delivered unless we give to Scripture the chief place in everything, that which was acknowledged by the fathers: that it is in and of itself the most certain, the most accessible, the most clear of all, interpreting itself, approving, judging, and illuminating all things. (WA 7:97, author’s free translation)

The insistence that Scripture is its own interpreter doesn’t mean we read Scripture in isolation, or without any attention to those who have read this text before us or are reading it alongside us. Luther certainly didn’t do that. We can gain many insights from those who have brought their gifts and experience to reading the Bible. They can be a check on idiosyncratic interpretations. But a true understanding of Scripture doesn’t depend on the imprimatur of a religious institution or even the academic guild.

This conviction fuels the discipline of biblical theology. The whole of Scripture is God’s Word, and by reading it as a whole, comparing one part with another, and immersing ourselves in its language, we more consistently honor Scripture’s authority than we do if we wait on the church or scholarly authorities to tell us what it means. The risen Christ gives the gift of teachers to the churches, but they walk alongside us; they don’t stand over us.

3. The Bible is a means to an end, and that end is Christ.

Luther loved the Bible. He spent his life in it. But he loved the Bible preeminently because it pointed him to Jesus. He was convinced this is the most important thing to grasp about the Scriptures. They don’t reinforce the power of institutions, nor do they merely confirm choices we’ve already made for ourselves. Rather, they present us with Jesus, our Savior and Lord. As Luther wrote,

Now the gospels and epistles of the apostles were written for this very purpose. They want themselves to be our guides, to direct us to the writings of the prophets and of Moses in the Old Testament so that we might there read and see for ourselves how Christ is wrapped in the swaddling cloths and laid in the manger, that is, how he is comprehended in the writings of the prophets. It is there that people like us should read and study, drill ourselves, and see what Christ is, for what purpose he has been given, how he was promised, and how all Scripture tends toward him. (LW 35:122)

Luther’s supreme principle for understanding and using the Bible was discovering how the particular passage under consideration might “promote,” “inculcate,” or “drive home” Christ. Biblical scholarship is good and vital for the church’s health, but if it stops short of that end, it’s worse than inadequate.

Scholarship that misses Christ distorts and misuses the Scriptures. “All the genuine sacred books agree in this”, Luther wrote in 1522, “that all of them preach and inculcate Christ. And that is the true test by which to judge all books, when we see whether or not they inculcate Christ” (LW 35:396).

The Bible isn’t an end in itself. It’s not a book studied to build our self-esteem or to use as a weapon to put down others. It’s first and foremost the testimony to God’s astonishing grace in sending his Son to save sinners like us. We fail to understand the Scriptures if we don’t follow them to the Christ of whom they testify.

Flawed Hero, Faithful Testimony

Luther said many other things about Scripture. He challenged the undisciplined use of allegory, he made a careful distinction between law and gospel, and he stimulated a whole new industry of Bible translation with his concern that every believer have access to the Word that God wrote to us.

Luther’s consistent teaching on the Bible’s nature, place, and use has strengthened Christian faith right across the centuries, and across denominations.

But the above three convictions—only God’s Word can bind the human conscience, the Bible is its own interpreter, and the whole purpose of the Bible (Old Testament and New) is to drive us to Christ—shaped everything else.

Luther was a flawed hero. His anger and frustration with whatever he saw as an impediment to the gospel mission often boiled over into ugly and ungodly invective. What he wrote against the Jews was unconscionable. And he didn’t always listen carefully to faithful Christian brothers and sisters (I think particularly of Zwingli and Bullinger) who thought a little differently from him. He too quickly concluded that every debate was a rerun of his fight to protect the gospel against the Devil’s assaults.

Yet Luther’s consistent teaching on the Bible’s nature, place, and use has strengthened Christian faith right across the centuries, and across denominations. This contribution is certainly worth remembering and celebrating.