Babylonian Captivity: The Breaking Point

1. The “Babylonian Captivity” in the title alluded to the exile imposed on the Jews by King Nebuchadnezzar after he took Jerusalem in 587 b.c.e. and carried the population of Judaea off to Mesopotamia. The pope and his hierarchy were seen as enemies of God who had carried the people of God which means the Church – off into pagan Babylon. The title was therefore loaded with antipapal significance, heightened by apocalyptic overtones from the title’s allusion to the book of Revelation, where on the triumph of the Lamb, an angel cries with a great voice (18:2-8)
2. Luther wrote knowing that the papal bull threatening excommunication was soon to be issued against him in Rome. Eck was there, fulminating and maneuvering. One June 15, 1520, the bull appeared in its official form from the papal chancery principally by Eck himself. The final draft showed the pope’s preoccupation: “Arise, O Lord … A bellowing boar from the forest is trying to demolish thy vineyard … Arise, O. Peter … Arise O. Paul … Arise all saints …” Forty-one articles of Luther’s beliefs were condemned as heretical. The pope did not argue the points; he merely stated them. Luther was commanded to remain silent. His books were to be burned, and no Catholic was to read them, on pain of excommunication. No one was allowed to praise anything Luther had written.. Luther was ordered to recant within sixty days or be excommunicated from the church. Anyone who helped him was also to be excommunicated.
3. Luther went on writing furiously, knowing he was surrounded by enemies thirsting for his death. Opposition to Luther was no longer limited to the perfervid papalist who wanted to hurry him to the rack and the fire. Erasmus was also getting worried. Luther tried to draw Erasmus onto his side. Erasmus resisted, and in May 1519 wrote to Luther advising restraint and announcing his own neutrality in the developing brawl. Erasmus said, that Luther’s style and spirit might be softened so that he might be softened so that he he might render more service to evangelical piety. He sensed in those who attacked Luther, he said, more the spirit of this world than the spirit of Christ; and yet sins lay on both sides.
4. However, Luther was in a fighting mood. Regardless Erasmus’ moderate advise, on October 6, 1520, his Babylonian Captivity emerged from the press of Melchior Lotther in Wittenberg – a forty-four page Latin bomb planted in the midst of the delicate machinery of the Catholic sacramental system.
5. Luther said there was nothing new in the Babylonica. He was right. Everything here he had already either written explicitly or implied. Still, his tone and his radicalism jarred educated Europe. The pope was now unmistakably the Antichrist. The ruler of Babylon.
*6. The Babylonica redefines the sacramental system of the church. Luther makes three major points about sacraments: all sacraments should originate with a command of Christ in the New Testament for reasons unique to the Christian faith; they should be an aid and sign of the direct communion between the Christian and God; and they should be freed from all those ties that enslave the Christian to the corrupt tyranny of the Pope at Rome.
Luther had studied the Greek New Testament of Erasmus. He knew that the Latin word sacramentum translated the Greek word that we usually transliterate as “mystery,” and that it did not denote a “sign” of some secret and sacred act of God but that a “mystery” was the act itself. He found only three sacraments in the New Testament that fitted his first rubric: baptism, the Eucharist, and penance. He rejected four sacraments practiced for many centuries: confirmation, marriage, ordination and extreme unction. He argued that the sacraments he dismissed possessed neither scriptural authority nor great antiquity. By this rejection he attacked the heart of the Catholic tradition, the faith the God would not let all his church err about something so essential to salvation. (In fact through the centuries the number of sacraments had varied. Only in the twelfth century did Peter the Lombard’s great Four Books of the Sentences finally certify the dogma of seven sacraments.” To Luther, scripture prevailed over any tradition, no matter how sacrosanct, and because he found only three sacraments in scripture, he was willing to reject the pious practices of four centuries. Here Luther was the beneficiary of the historical criticism of the Renaissance, the sense of perspective and anachronism that made scholars aware fo the differences between centuries and of the accumulation of new practices in both church and society. Luther’s critique of the sacraments owed something to the notes Erasmus appended to his Greek New Testament of 1516, corrected and issued again in 1519.
7. Much of his attack was directed against priestcraft, the ancient notion that a sacred class of human beings stood between the laity and god. Like Hus before him, he thought the laity should have both the cup and the host in the Eucharist. His tone was insulting and fierce – as was the tone of every Catholic rivalry contesting with him. He recognized the nature of the battle and made a halfhearted effort to lift himself above virulence. He said: “ this I know for certain, if I fight with shit, conqueror or conquered, I am still stained.”
Eucharist: In his opponents, Luther’s most outrageous comments in the Babylonica involved the Mass. Which had always been “ the supreme sacrament.” He regarded at the church’s use of Aristotle to define the doctrine of transubstantiation. Aristotle had divided all things into “essence” or “substance” on the one hand and “accidents” as terms worthless to physics, chemistry, and any other experimental science. But for Aristotle the essence of bread was the quality that makes bread what is is and not merely flour and water or whatever. The accidents of bread are those several qualities we can perceive by our senses – its taste, its appearance, its texture, its smell, and the sound it would make if we dropped it on the floor. The doctrine of transubstantiation held that in the Eucharist, the essence of the bread and the wine are miraculously changed into the body and blood of Christ, while the accidents remain those of bread and wine.
Luther hated these philosophical terms and he used Occam’s razor – without mentioning Occam; the worlds of Christ in the Gospels were simple. Jesus said, “ This is my body… This is my blood.” Explanations of texts should be only as complicated as the text required; elaborate and unnecessary explanations should be cut away. The text indicated a real presence of Christ in the elements. This joining, he said was like the joining of heat to iron, an unseen but felt quality added to what was there already., not the replacement of one thing by another. The doctrine of the Eucharist has been accurately enough labeled “consubstantiation.”
8. In the Eucharist, God was physically present, and in the liturgy of the Mass the believer could share an encounter with Christ, present in the same bodily world in which the Christian must live, and foretelling the resurrection of the body that would come at God’s pleasure. Luther rejected ot rationalize the process of the Eucharist by an elaborate and unscriptural theory based on Aristotle. He saw to sent Christianity into a philosophical arena in a fight was a game that it could not win.
9. Luther also rejected the notion of the Eucharist as sacrifice and a good work. Roman Catholic church says that priests as Old Testament priests who offered sacrifices on the altars of God in the New Covenant. By Luther’s time, received dogma held that the Eucharist was a sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ and that it was also a good work in that masses offered for the living and the dead were assumed to aid the progress of the Christian pilgrim from earth through purgatory and on to paradise. To become a spectator to the sacrifice constituted a good work.
10. The third one, the notion of the Eucharist as sacrifice gave enormous power to priests as the mediators of this essential transaction between Christians and God. It raised theological problems as well, for it gave the Eucharist a physical quality that could be perplexing. Was the Eucharist a repetition of the sacrifice of Christ? If so, was the historical crucifixion and sacrifice of Christ somehow cheapened by not being unique? Was the body of Christ on the altar the same as the historical body of Christ? Could a mouse eat the body and drink the blood of Christ?
11. For Luther, all the substance of the Eucharist lay in the words of institution by Christ. He dwelled on the words, “This is the cup of the new testament in my blood which for you and for many is poured out in the remission of sins. Do this in remembrance of me.” This was the testament of one about to die. The Mass is the promise of the remission of sins, a forgiveness that was a gracious act of God and established by the death of his son.
Thus, only faith in the promise makes the sacrament, Luther sets an order: 1. the Word of God, 2.faith, 3. charity or love. 4. to make good works and fulfills the law. The Eucharist also becomes a paradigm of the Christian life.
Luther’s paradigm of the Eucharist explains why he held the notion of the Christian as simul Justus et peccator. If the only justification is faith, the only sin is unbelief, and these two strive continually in the Christian’s heart, requiring the Christian to continual reaffirmations of faith, reaffirmations that come sacramentally in the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, “ soon afterwards feels spontaneously the sweetest feeling of the heart in which the spirit is expanded and attached to the heart of man.” For his the Eucharist became a profoundly spiritual event.
The Consubstantiation theory on the one hand side critiqued the popular notion of Transubstantiation in the Roman Church, it also set a wall dividing him from Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich, John Calvin of Geneva and the “reformed” tradition that mightily influenced Protestantism in the Modern World.
12. Baptism: Luther’s views on baptism seem to be inconsistence to his scriptural principles. Everywhere he stresses the need for personal faith when we approach the ceremonies of the church. The Eucharist testifies to our faith in the incarnation of Christ, his Passion, and the bloody victory of the cross over sin, death, and the devil. Baptism testifies to the redemption we receive in faith from the curse passed on to us from Adam. Luther scorns the notion that baptism is magic, having in it some power apart from faith. “ For if the sacrament give me grace merely because I accept it, truly it comes out of my own work, and I do not obtain this grace through faith, nor do I apprehend the promise in the sacrament but only the sign instituted and taught by God.” He likes immersion as a mode of baptism because it is most like the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. He expects children to be plunged under the water. However, the Anabaptists were against him by arguing that infants cannot believe God’s promise. Luther’s assertion is that he believes in infant baptism in the same way that he believes children are helped by the praying and believing church.
Here we can see Luther’s sense of his own baptism as a powerful reinforcement in his battle against the fear of death. Like the Eucharist, baptism is a sacrament, an incarnation of sorts, the spirit of God powerfully present in a physical way. Baptism must do something when it is used within the Christian community, and what it does is to bring the child’s body into that community. The physicalness of the sacraments which causes so much conflict among evangelicals, was for Luther part of his faith that the dead must be raised if the Christian faith is to mean anything. The resurrection is not a mere spiritual business; it is physical, as the sacraments are phyusical, and as the resurrection will be physical.
13. Indeed, Luther’s doctrine of faith was fully clarified in his comments on baptism in the Babylonican Captivity. “I say therefore, neither pope nor bishop nor any man has the right to impose one syllable of law upon the Christian man except that the Christian give it his consent.” “For no faith can damn the Christian except unbelief alone.” To Luther’s foes it sounds anarchy. But for Luther it meant nothing about the anarchy. The sentences expressed the life of tension between the promise given but not yet complete – to be completed only in the resurrection. Luther’s rhetoric of baptism implies a Christian life in which fear and faith live in symbiosis, and faith is never sight and certainty, and the visible “sign” of the true sacraments is a necessary help for the faltering Christian—who always falters but who must never despair. The powerful sacrament of baptism is given only once, but faith repeats it again and again as the heart requires it. Faith, Luther always said, is an pus alienum, a work not one’s own, something done outside human power and within God’s dominion.
At the end of his discussion of baptism, Luther rolled into an attack on vows that he was to develop presently into a treatise against monastic vows. For him baptism was the powerful bond that made one a Christian; beside it, all vows were of little account.
14. Penance: Luther’s attitude toward penance was changed when he wrote the Babylonian Captivity. Early in his discussion of confession, he always believed in the worth of oral confession, one Christian to another. He practiced this sort of confession regularly himself. However, in the book he attacked the papal version of penance had turned it into another manifestation of tyranny. Here Luther practiced his hermeneutic of suspicious especially when he attacked indulgences. Confession should became another of the less formal means he employed to make of life continual worship and reassurance. Stripped of its formal liturgical style and the somber confessional, with its anonymous and almost invisible priset hidden behind a screen, confession became an act Christians might perform in private conversation, even at a meal or on a walk. All this broke the clerical monopoly on penance. By stressing simple oral confession and assurance of forgiveness, he eliminated the multitude of liturgical practices associated with satisfactions imposed by priests – the pilgrimage, the relic, the fast, the vigil, the funerary bequest to the church, the vow of service to God for oneself or one’s children, and, of course, indulgences.
15. Marriage: Luther declared himself on the subject of women. However, his dismissed other four sacraments – confirmation, marriage, ordination, and extreme unction, because they were not scriptural.
Matrimony was complicated issue. Since marriage had existed from the beginning of the world and among unbelievers, it could not be a Christian sacrament. By his reading the Greek New Testament edited by Erasmus, Luther points out that the Vulgate’s translation of Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus by saying that “Sacramentum ho magnum est” indeed means mysterion in the Greek word. Erasmus said that it means something holy, hidden. Luther by this philological evidence rejected Marriage as a sacrament.
Tuning from this argument, Luther attacked the vast and ramshackle provisions of the cannon law for matrimony. These legal articles, mostly about blood relations within which marriage was forbidden, rules for divorce, definitions of betrothal, and so forth, made marriage into a Gordian know of regulations where lawyers, theologians, and keepters of genealogical tables swarmed among the threads. For centuries church rules would not let two people marry if they shared an ancestor seven generations back. After 1215, marriage was permitted to share common ancestor earlier than four generations back. The cannon law complicated things by hold that anyone who stood as the god parent of a child at baptism became spiritually related to the child’s family. Luther was unsparing in his denunciation of there legalities and the bargaining cases by cases. Through these laws, he snares that “ the Romanists of today have become salesmen, And what do they sell? Vulvas and penises.”
Luther indeed wanted to get rid of the sterile rules that hindered warm human relations. He wanted affection between husband and wife, unbound by the rigidities of ossified custom. To him marriage was a bond between two people, publicly assumed, marked by love, sexual intercourse, obligations, children, and a shared life. Husband and wife had responsibilities toward each other, but these did not require the definitions of the canon law. They were matters of spontaneous affection and common senses. So the canon law should melt away. But in this melting, the power of the institutional church over marriage was also dissolved.
16. Ordination: Luther had already claimed that all Christians were priests. In the book, he attacked the sacrament of holy orders. Again, he argued that it came not from scripture but from the papal tyranny. Scripture had not one word about it and the only writer to mention it was Dionysius the Areopagite. He rejected a cherished traditional notion, that all the apostles became priests. Priesthood was therefore glorified by its antecedents, and legendary histories of the apostles extolled their virginity or celibacy and raised an impermeable wall between priests and laity. Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers turned priests into ministers of the Word chosen by their congregations, permitted to marry, and commissioned to preach and to teach. He ridiculed the restraints on marriage imposed by the church on candidates for priesthood. A married man might become a priest if his wife had died, but if he had married twice and both wives had died, priesthood was forever barred to him. But said Luther, a man might have had sex with hundreds of whores and defiled innumberable virgins and wives and kept make prostitutes in his house, and might still become bishop, cardinal, or pope. All believers were priests; the duty of priests was to speak the Word of God and for that purpose no ordination by a papal church was necessary.
17. Luther approved of the practice of anointing with oil on those the point of death, but he wold not call it a sacrament. He knew that his foes would cast in his teeth the book of James. (James 5: 14-15) Luther here spoke of the author of the book of James in almost the same terms that he had spoken of Dionysius the Areopagite. So the most radical of his work to date is to start an epoch of the Biblical criticism. Luther had experienced many pious practices within the Catholic tradition, He was not willing to cast them off merely because he found no sanction for them in the Bible. Infant baptism was one. Always his aim was to reform the old, to make it more viable, more meaningful. He never tried to sweep everything away and begin a new with Christian teaching and practice drawn out of scripture alone.
18. But with the Babylonian Captivity he cut himself away from moderates who might have joined him to limit the power of the papacy. His redefinition of the sacraments was more than moderation could bear. And the consequential effect is the rise of Protestantism in the modern European history.