![]() ![]() This experience was refreshing as well as convincing about the fact that mercy finally could be offered to him as justice through faith. This new comprehension of the relationship between justice and mercy – of a justice to be now seen from mercy and only as something passive that renounces punishment – is indeed the new foundation stone of Luther’s Christian building. In the tower, he had an instantaneous comprehension of Romans 1:17: “ The just man lives by faith ” and could later recount, in one of his Table Talks: “When I learned that the righteousness of God is his mercy, and that he makes us righteous through it, a remedy was offered to me in my affliction” (n. His prayer to find a merciful God was finally heard. The “Tower experience” was not only light to his mind but also a liberation from a burden. It was not about mulieres, that is a problem of chastity, but a real deep moral suffering, like a knot that one can interpret as a distance from God. Yet these extenuating exercises of piety led him to despair since he believed not to be able to offer them as he should, becoming the object of God’s wrath without His forgiveness. According to Heinz Shilling – a German historian whose biography on Luther is held as one of the most accurate – Luther prayed the rosary, meditated, sang the Psalms until getting exhausted. It is worth considering a detail of Luther’s life before approaching his vision. The ‘shared priesthood’ of Luther is the result of this personal vision, putting together the search for a ‘magisterial free zone’ by calling on the Nobility of the German Nation and the sacraments. But the only way to tear down that Roman wall was to abolish the Sacrament of Orders and to state that everyone was a priest, a bishop and even a pope. He claimed his own authority based on personal understanding of the Bible. ![]() Luther wanted a Church without the papal magisterium so as to interpret the Sacred Scriptures with no other mediation. Above all this, common priesthood is ontologically distinguished from the Sacrament of Holy Orders and hierarchically subordinated to it in order to comply with its nature: exactly what Luther denied with his new theological vision of a Church without hierarchy (basically without the Pope) and without the Sacred Order, considered a source of power for the Romanists. “That’s pure Luther”, Stanford says, but perhaps not remembering that the common priesthood of all faithful is not a ‘shared one’ horizontally speaking, as for Luther, but it derives from a consecration of all people in Christ out of their Baptism. This is the title of Peter Stanford’s book, in which he makes Luther, among other accomplishments, the prophet of Vatican II in foreseeing the equality of the people of God rooted in a ‘shared priesthood’ of all Catholics. Also among writers and scholars Luther is praised as a ‘Catholic dissident’. ![]()
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