The Holy Fear of Martin Luther

Nick Robison

I love being able to have conversations with people about the “dead guys” whom God has used in our Christian lives. Many of these heroes, though they went to glory long before we were ever a twinkle in our father’s eye, become very close to us. We read them and think of their words so often that it is almost like they become a part of us. We find ourselves quoting them in prayers and conversations without even knowing it. These are not just dead guys to us. They become dead friends and mentors.

There are several dead guys with whom I feel a keen friendship. Men like Thomas Watson and John Calvin come to mind. But of all my dead friends, perhaps the one I love bumping into the most is Martin Luther. And I have to thank R.C. Sproul for being the one to introduce him to me. Of course, I knew who he was. He was the spark that began the Protestant Reformation by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the chapel door in Wittenberg. But the first time I ever encountered Martin Luther the man, rather than the historical figure, was in the chapter on “The Insanity of Luther” in Sproul’s The Holiness of God.

And as soon as I read that chapter, a fascination was sparked for the great Reformer. I began by studying his life and found that we had a few things in common, one being that we had both struggled with an unholy kind of fear.

This was shocking to hear, because Luther was known for his courage in the face of disaster. Think of the steadfastness he exhibited as he stood before the Diet of Worms, being scolded and told to recant everything he had written concerning papal authority, indulgences, and the gospel lest he be put to death. And then, in the face of seemingly certain death, to deliver his “Here I Stand” speech it is simply breathtaking. To have the heart and fire of Luther could start a hundred Reformations!

But then one reads of his life before the gospel had set fire to his heart. He was a man beset by fear for most of his life. He became an Augustinian monk out of a fear that began with a lightning strike. But of course, the fear he had was not of lightning. It was the fear of the holy God who was sovereign over the lightning.

As an Augustinian monk, Luther feared God, but not in the biblical sense. A right fear of God is supernatural, not only in the sense that it comes from above, but in the sense that it is contrary to natural fear. Natural fear triggers a “fight or flight” response, but supernatural fear is contrary to nature. Rather than fighting against or fleeing from our fearful God, supernatural fear causes us to run toward the object of our fear. But this was not Luther’s response. Luther feared God and sought to hide from Him in, of all places, a monastery. This, to Luther’s younger mind, was a

shelter from God, where one could hide from His holiness under the blanket of good works and penance.

And if you were to try to appease the holy appetite of God by yourself, then a monastery would be the place to do it. But the problem Luther ran into was the fact that one does not need the world to have temptations and sins. For that, all you really need is a fallen heart and a will in bondage to sin. This was something Luther was born with, and no amount of penance or good deeds could change his heart.

Because of this, Luther began to do more than fear God. He grew to hate God. Hear Luther in his own words:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteous wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.[1]

Luther had not yet come to understand what was meant by the Apostle John when he wrote, “Perfect love casts out fear.” The reason he had not yet understood this is because Luther had not yet discovered the perfect love of God in Christ Jesus. To Luther, in his season of monkery, God was a tyrant, asking of a slave what only a son could give.

But God would not leave Luther, nor the world, in darkness forever. Through Luther’s careful study of Rom. 1:17, he came to realize that the gospel was not a command to become the righteousness of God through penance and doings. Instead, the gospel was a promise that, by faith, one is freely given the righteousness of God through the gracious imputing of the active righteousness of Jesus. It was upon this awakening to that old revelation of the love of God through Christ that Luther—and soon the whole world—would come to remember that supernatural fear of God, which runs to Him because, though He is a fearful and holy God, He is also a loving God and has set His loving gaze upon us through His beloved Son.  By grace, God gives sinners sonship.

But before this realization would become the light of the Reformation, it was first, for Luther personally, a conversion. He writes:

Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me… And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise. Later I read Augustine’s The Spirit and the Letter, where contrary to hope I found that he too interpreted God’s righteousness in a similar way, as the righteousness with which God clothes us when He justifies us.[2]

It was only in light of God’s love through Christ that Luther was given the boldness with which he set the world ablaze with the gospel. And there is something that his friends today in the Reformed world can learn from his example. If we are going to be about the work of semper reformanda (always reforming), we must be shaken out of the natural fear of God and thrust into the supernatural fear of God by recovering the radical nature of the grace of God as seen in the cross of His Son.

We the Reformed have a firm grasp of human depravity because we see it in contrast to the holiness of God. And this is natural for us, since our whole system of theology hinges on a big view of God. But perhaps why many of us have been given the moniker “frozen” is because we are still petrified by God’s holiness. This may not be the case for most of our ministers and elders, but I do wonder for how many of our members this is the case?

If only we could see what Luther saw: that the holiness of God does more than just function as a mirror to reveal our unholiness. It also functions as a magnifying glass, showing us the indescribable magnitude of the mercy of God to sinners in Jesus Christ. The holiness of God is such that nothing less than the active obedience in life and the passive obedience in death of the Son of God could ever fulfill its demands.

When one looks to the cross of Christ, he sees the holiness of divine mercy; a mercy that could not set aside justice but instead satisfied it. In the cross, sinners find a justice that, left alone, would cause us to hate the righteousness of God. Yet there, justice is not alone. There, justice and mercy kiss. As Psalm 85:7–10 says:

Show us your steadfast love, O LORD,         and grant us your salvation. Let me hear what God the LORD will speak,      for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints;    but let them not turn back to folly.

Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him,    that glory may dwell in our land. Steadfast love and faithfulness meet;            righteousness and peace kiss each other.

It is the revelation of this God of holy mercy that causes our hearts to be consumed with this peculiar fear of Luther’s, which caused him to be so bold as to refute the Pope, indulgences, and salvation through anything short of Christ alone, through faith alone, by grace alone.  In the fear of God, all other fears die. 

The boldness with which our denomination needs in order to spark a new Reformation in our day will not be found in new programs and new ways. It will be found in the old truths of Christ’s cross, publicly portrayed through the preaching of the gospel. Psalm 85, and Luther’s comments on it, are a good place to end this article. Luther writes:

This Psalm is a prayer containing the feelings of a heart that fears God; and it persuades, in the most impressive words, such an one, not to dread God’s anger. For those who fear God are not like the despisers and Epicureans, who are secure and care for nothing that happens; but when calamities fall upon godly men, their first and main concern is to turn to God that smites them, and to make anew their peace with him… The Psalmist, therefore, breaks forth with a wonderful burden of heart, as if he had said, “O that I might again hear the Lord truly speaking! O that the word of God were again truly preached… O that both the worship of God, and the prosperity of our nation, may be restored, and that peace, and concord, and truth, and justice, may flourish among us! That the fruits of the earth, and the produce of the fields and of the vineyards may be blessed; that we may lead a godly life in this our day, and, as St. Paul saith, may ‘look for the glorious appearing of the great God!’”[3]

[1] Martin Luther, Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 11.

[2] Luther, 11-12

[3] Luther, A Manual on the Book of Psalms, trans. Henry Cole (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 2022), 238.