I’ve been reading more Luther lately—which is a story unto itself. But, in any case, this morning I encountered a striking passage from a letter written by Luther to a fellow Augustinian monk named George Spenlein. Dated April 8, 1516, Luther’s letter predates his famous Ninety-five Theses by well over a year. Hence, though Luther was provincial vicar of Saxony and Thuringia at this time, he was not yet a figure of great social importance. He taught theology and attended to his monastic duties, the latter of which included the supervision of monks under his care. Among this group was George Spenlein, who recently had moved south from Wittenberg to Memmingen—a considerable journey, especially in those days. Perhaps for that reason, Spenlein had left behind several things (clothes, books, etc.) in Wittenberg, which Luther, apparently, was tasked with selling off in order to satisfy Spenlein’s financial debt.
Still, in the midst of such mundanity, Luther slips in a pastoral note. It seems that Spenlein, like Luther himself, had been struggling with his monastic vocation. Indeed, both men were destined to leave the Augustinian Order and to become “evangelical” preachers, albeit not for a few more years. Nevertheless, as Luther’s letter indicates, the seeds of protest were already being sown. As Luther writes:
For in these days the temptation of presumption glowers in many people and especially in those who want with all their strength to be good and righteous. They do not know the righteousness of God…and they attempt to do good until they at last have the confidence to stand before God, garlanded at once with their virtues and merits. This, of course, must be impossible. You also lived among us with this opinion (or rather, this error), and I also believed it. Yes, and I still fight against this craziness and have not yet finished the fight.
In this space, I cannot do full justice to either the context or the meaning of Luther’s words. Instead, I want to open up a problem, which I’m content to leave unresolved (at least for now). While the Lutheran principle of sola gratia is often viewed in the abstract, as if it were merely a soteriological issue, here it appears that it also has to be understood as a concrete historical matter. “In these days,” the translation reads. I have not yet crosschecked Luther’s German, but I suspect he uses either heute or heutzutage, meaning “today” or “nowadays.” Whatever the case, it seems clear that Luther views the attempt “to be good and righteous” as a matter of contemporary relevance, perhaps akin to the question of “virtue signaling”—the public expression of one’s moral rectitude—in our day. Of course, Luther’s concern is often tied to the sale of indulgences in Germany, which, under the direction of Dominican prior Johannes Tetzel, was intended to help fund the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Yet, since “virtual signaling” remains a live issue well into the twenty-first century, it would seem that Tetzel’s endeavor was merely tapping into a permanent aspect of human nature, no matter one’s political, social, or theological proclivities. For Luther, the desire to secure and, in turn, to promote one’s own righteousness is theologically inapt and spiritually destructive. And yet, social media platforms not only tolerate virtual signaling but indeed encourage it via banners, emojis, and memes. Whether or not this fact verifies Luther’s analysis is a matter of debate, but it seems safe to say that his warnings have not proven more persuasive than the inclination.
ML's Letter to George Spenlein, is actually not a text I've heard or read about discussed (or don't at least recall that I have), and so I had to look it up. I wondered where you might be reading this, and so I went to my shelf and found the "Luther's Spirituality" volume in the Paulist Press Spiritual Classics series, and yes, it's the first entry. "Anyway, I would gladly know how things are with your soul. Have you finally become sick and tired of your own righteousness and taken a deep breath of the righteousness of Christ and learned to trust in it?" I notice later in the Letter, ML admonishes patience with others rather than a competitive stance, "make their sins your own, and, if there is something good about yourself, then let it belong to them." To further the application to our present technologically mediated context, it's interesting to recognize how for ML's late monastic era, it was in a way the confluence of the pursuit of righteousness and the monetization and quantification of merit that was so problematic - and it's certainly that way for us too.