Responsible Before God Alone: Eric Metaxas and President Thornbury Discuss Martin Luther

On October 3 at the Union League Club in New York City, President Gregory Alan Thornbury joined New York Times bestselling author Eric Metaxas to discuss Metaxas’s Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (Viking, 2017). Presented by Socrates in the City with The King’s College, the interview attracted hundreds of guests and was livestreamed on Metaxas’s website. Metaxas is the founder of Socrates in the City, a senior fellow at King’s, and host of a nationally-syndicated radio program.

Since the organization’s founding in 2000, Socrates in the City has provided a forum for New York professionals to pursue “the examined life” through conversations with the world’s luminaries, such as Dr. Francis Collins, Sir John Polkinghorne, Baroness Caroline Cox, Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, and Dr. John Lennox. At the Martin Luther event, Metaxas—usually the tongue-in-cheek moderator—was the focal point. He opened with an introduction where he corrected the “tall tales” connected with Luther: Luther’s wife did not, indeed, have the face of a narwhal; Luther’s teeth were human, not wooden; and no, Luther did not have a blue ox named Babe.

WATCH: The October 3 Socrates in the City event

Thornbury first asked how Metaxas found the time to write the 446-page tome. “I do all the research myself,” Metaxas said. “I actually think it would take more time for me if I had people doing research.” He sees his role as a popular writer, not as an academic, so his process is to research from excellent academic books and then to tell the story well with a popular audience in mind.

Metaxas and Thornbury are close friends, and their ease with one another was obvious. At one point Thornbury exclaimed, “There’s tons of goofy asides!” and read from one of Metaxas’ most enthusiastic sentences. Metaxas credits Thornbury and another friend, Markus Spieker, for encouraging him to write a popular biography of Luther in time for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and he dedicated the book to both of them.

The rest of the interview centered around Luther’s impact, for good and ill, upon Western Civilization. “Apart from Jesus of Nazareth, there is no figure more influential in the last 2000 years than Martin Luther,” Metaxas said. Metaxas argued that Luther faced a world where church and state had an exclusive claim on defining truth. Luther’s influence made pluralism thinkable.

Metaxas countered the perception that Luther was “sticking a thumb in the Pope’s eyes” when he nailed the 95 Theses to the door at Wittenberg and spoke before the Diet of Worms four years later. Rather, Metaxas said, Luther was a humble monk who loved the church and was concerned by the Church’s abuses of power, from indulgences to the Vatican’s extravagant spending.

The motivation for his persistence, Metaxas said, came from Luther’s own experience: as a monk, Luther was plagued by guilt over his sin and felt unable to get closer to God. Scouring the Bible for answers, Luther had an epiphany while reading the book of Romans that God had already paid his debt. “Because he had suffered so much trying to please this judgmental, horrible, God—that suffering was so real to him—when he discovered the Gospel, the good news, that Jesus already paid the debt, he said, ‘I’m not going to back down.’”

To close, Thornbury asked to what extent the Reformation, while warranted, was lamentable, and if Luther regretted the events he began. “In the United States alone, there are now over forty thousand Protestant denominations that all have their various different views, and they all excommunicate each other. There’s this scandal of unity.”

This splintering of the church certainly happened, Metaxas agreed, and that was never Luther’s desire. “But, you’re talking about the price of freedom,” Metaxas said. For all its regrettable aspects, the best thing that came out of the Reformation is the understanding that “We are all responsible before God: we’re not responsible to ourselves. There’s something beautiful and terrifying about that. It’s kind of like the felix culpa. We can debate it all day long, but here we are. We can do no other.”