Rev. Brummel is pastor of Cornerstone Protestant Reformed Church in Dyer, Indiana.

Did you know that…

By his death, Martin Luther had written more than 60,000 pages, yet he hoped that “all my books would disappear and the Holy Scriptures alone be read.”

Luther knew most of the New Testament and large sections of the Old Testament by heart.

Luther said: “A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or cardinal without it.”

Exploring Luther on Scripture is a rich field of study. Under Luther’s leadership Sola Scriptura became a rallying cry of the Reformation. Under the theme of Luther and Scripture we could look at a number of issues, including: 1) biblical authority, 2) biblical translation, or 3) doctrine of inspiration. We will concentrate on the latter issue. Our main purpose will be to answer the question: Did Martin Luther believe in verbal inspiration and the accompanying doctrine of inerrancy?

There are attempts to portray Luther as the father of Neo-orthodoxy. Neo-orthodoxy is a term used to describe theologians who claim that the Bible errs with respect to mere historical, geographical, and scientific facts. The Neo-orthodox claim that the Bible is infallible only with respect to its “redemptive message.” On the other hand, confessional Lutheran and Reformed believers claim that Luther believed in verbal inspiration (that the very words of Scripture were inspired) and that he therefore believed the Bible to be inerrant (without error on whatever topic it addresses).

Luther: the Father of Neo-Orthodoxy?

Luther is being portrayed today as the father of Neo-orthodoxy with respect to his doctrine of inspiration. Was Luther a forerunner of the Higher Critics? A. Skevington Wood notes such attempts:

Some of the more extreme biblical critics and radical theologians are attempting to depict Luther as the precursor of modern liberalism (Captive to the Word, p. 129).

In 1947 the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church published a three-volume set entitled The Abiding Word to celebrate the centennial of their denomination. One theologian took issue with Neo-orthodox Lutherans:

Men who pretend to be confessional Lutherans call “all Scripture” the Word of God only in a restricted sense. The Bible is not really God’s Word, but the Bible contains God’s Word. The Bible is a human book in which God’s Word lies buried for him who can find it and sort it out…. But due to the fact that Scripture after all is only a human representation of divine revelations experienced by the writers, their account cannot be inerrant, but must today be cleansed of many errors which have been discovered (Vol. 2, p. 8).

The Neo-orthodox emphasize a human element in the Scriptures. As a result they claim that the human writers were “time bound” and “culturally conditioned.” What they wrote about creation, history, science, chronology, or homosexuality is culturally conditioned. Since the human writers were limited in their knowledge, it is not surprising that they would have made many errors with respect to matters of history, science, and geography.

Some of Luther’s statements about various books of the Bible seem to be evidence of a higher critical approach to Scripture. Willem Kooiman says:

About various authors of the Old and New Testament, Luther can say that they did not build solely of “gold, silver, and precious stones,” but also of “wood, hay, and stubble.” Therefore he adds that although the foundation will endure the combustible material will be destroyed by the fire of “the day” (Luther and the Bible, p. 227).

Apparently Luther never gave up his negative attitude towards the book of James. In 1540 he said: “Today or tomorrow I will set a bright fire with little Jim.” In 1542 he said:

The Epistle of James is written by a Jew, who so far as Christianity is concerned has indeed heard the bell ring, but does not know where the clapper is. Here in Wittenberg we have cast James out of theology; indeed we have almost thrown him out of the Bible (p. 226).

In a lecture on Genesis he says, “James talks nonsense” (p. 226).

With respect to historical criticism, Luther was convinced that certain prophetic books were “not written by the men whose names were attached to them, but were rather assembled by redactors” (p. 227). When one of his table companions brought up that many theologians believed that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, Luther’s response was: “What does it matter?”

Kooiman claims:

Disagreements in the accounts of Kings and Chronicles did not escape him and he regarded the historical reliability of the latter more highly than the former. When the prophets foretold events that would occur in the secular realm, they often made mistakes. This did not detract, he says, from the value of their spiritual witness, since faith does not make mistakes in men who prophesy concerning the truth of God in Christ (p. 228).

Heiko Oberman, in Luther: Life between God and the Devil, seems to present Luther as a Father of Neo-orthodoxy. He clearly wants to drive a wedge between Luther and fundamentalists who believe in inerrancy. Oberman does this in two different ways. First, he argues that it was post-Reformation Protestantism that promoted verbal inspiration. This issue arises when Oberman is discussing how the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura did not bring the certainty that Luther anticipated. Rather it seemed to be “responsible for a multiplicity of explanations and interpretations that seem to render absurd any dependence on the clarity of the Scriptures” (p. 220). Oberman then denigrates post-Reformation Protestantism because it allegedly “tried out many variants of ‘fundamentalism’ to counter the trend, often declaring the letters of the Scriptures sacrosanct” (p. 220). By “declaring the letters of Scriptures sacrosanct,” Oberman is apparently referring to verbal inspiration. The doctrine of verbal inspiration says that the letters, words, and grammar of Scripture are inspired.

Secondly, Oberman presents a caricature of the doctrine of verbal inspiration—as if it reduces the Bible to mere propositional statements. He says:

The term authority as a description of Luther’s understanding of the Bible could be misleading if—as happened before and after him—the Scriptures were taken for a collection of objective truths that had to be compared and rearranged in ever new systems, depending on the issue in question (p. 224).

Verbal inspiration implies that the very words of Scripture are inspired—and therefore God does communicate in terms of propositional statements that express objective truths. Oberman tries to connect a belief in verbal inspiration with scholasticism. The fact is that one can believe that the Bible is filled with many objective truths—and not be concerned only about arranging them logically.

Why Luther is not the Father of Neo-Orthodoxy

There are at least four reasons why it is a mistake to depict Luther as the father of Neo-orthodoxy.

First, Luther’s criticisms of the canon must not be interpreted as Higher Criticism of canonical books. We need to distinguish between being a critic of the canon and being a Higher Critic. Notice that Luther’s criticisms of certain books in the canon had to do with the extent of the canon. For Luther the extent of the canon was an open question. He was not being a biblical critic—doubting what the Word of God said. For him the issue was only this: are certain books part of the canon? He used his Christ-centered criticism to analyze the various books in the canon. He analyzed whether certain “questionable” books were part of the canon in terms of the clarity with which they presented Christ crucified. But questioning the extent of the canon is distinct from using Higher Criticism to rip apart biblical books. Carl F.H. Henry says:

Whatever Luther’s questions may have been about the canonicity of certain books…he had no question whatever about the authority and inerrancy of the books viewed as canonical (Wood, p. 157).

Second, Luther made explicit claims about verbal inspiration and inerrancy. Listen to some statements by Luther that show his belief in verbal inspiration and inerrancy:

To put it briefly, believe everything or nothing.

We must regard every tittle and letter of the Bible as more important than the whole world and tremble before it as before God himself.

The Holy Scripture is God’s Word, written, and so to say, “in-lettered.”

The Scriptures have never erred.

The Bible is “God’s Word written, presented in letters, as Christ is the eternal Word presented in human nature.”

The Scriptures did not grow on earth.

This selection of statements from Luther shows that he did not distinguish between the inspiration of the message and the inspiration of the terms and words in which that message is communicated. A. Skevington Wood sums up Luther’s view of inspiration:

So close is the connection between the actual words of the Bible and the instrumentality of the Spirit that it must be concluded that Luther believed not only in inspiration, but verbal inspiration (p. 141).

Luther never claimed that only a redemptive message in Scripture is inspired, and that other aspects of the Bible are not. In fact, if some of the Bible was of human origin and other parts of it were divine, it would be impossible for mere humans to use their reason to distinguish between the two. According to Wood,

If only some of it comes from Him and some of it is no more than what man has said, by what means can we distinguish between the two? Luther would not be content with anything less than plenary inspiration (p. 142).

Luther’s statements about inspiration show that he believed that everything that God says in the Bible is true—whether it is about geography or history or chronology. Wood states:

The Holy Spirit was concerned not merely with the inspiration of the writers or of their message. He descended to details and was responsible for the words and even the letters. “All the words of God are weighed, counted, and measured,” Luther declared…. The prophets are those “into whose mouth the Holy Spirit has given the words” (p. 142).

It is unquestionable, as A. Skevington Wood has shown, that Luther believed in verbal inspiration. Luther as a biblical expositor cared about the minute details of grammar in the Scriptures. In fact, his Reformation discovery of justification by faith alone grew out of his careful analysis of the grammar and meaning of the Greek word for “righteousness” in Romans 1:17.

Third, it is anachronistic to read Higher Critical methods back upon Luther. In The Schmalkald Articles: Luther’s Theological Testament, William Russel says:

Luther never wrote a treatise on the authority of the Bible. He did not express himself in terms of what recent generations might call the “inerrancy/errancy debate’ (p. 70).

Luther did not live in the twentieth century. For that reason he does not use twentieth century terminology. But from his writings we find him dealing with the same basic issues. Neo-orthodox theologians claim that it is anachronistic to apply the inerrancy/errancy debate back to Luther, but then they go on to argue that Luther supports their position! What is naïve about this approach is that the very idea that the Bible is filled with errors became popular in the modern era. At the time of the Reformation both the Roman Catholics and the Protestants assumed inerrancy.

Finally, Luther’s whole approach to exegesis, preaching, and Bible study shows that he believed in verbal inspiration and inerrancy. Luther did not lose himself in a labyrinth of questions about original texts and editors. He does not come up with subtle questions that undercut the miracles plainly recorded.

In The Abiding Word, a Lutheran theologian defends inerrancy, but he is also very practical:

The Bible must be used with absolute reliance upon its divine authorship, with unquestioning acceptance of all of its statements, with unreserved assent to all its teachings. But it must be used! (Vol. 1, p. 80).

Certainly children of the Reformation must read their Bible. When Luther learned that his father had died, he took the Psalms with him into a room where he cried so hard he was not himself the next day. But the Scriptures were his strength and nourishment.

That is the last point that I want to leave with you who are children of the Reformation. If you believe that the Bible is God’s very Word—read it, study it, meditate upon it, and obey it. What does it gain you if you believe that the Bible is God’s Word and yet do not listen to God speak in His Word?