A Reformation Day Meditation

In the late 1520’s Suleiman the Magnificent was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. His grandfather, Mehmet II, had shocked the Christian world in 1453 by destroying the Eastern Christian kingdom known as Byzantium. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul and the Haggia Sophia (Church of Holy Wisdom) was transformed into a mosque. Upon ascending the throne, Suleiman felt the need to prove himself worthy of the sultanate and so began a conquest of Christian powers in Eastern Europe. Belgrade, Rhodes, and Hungary each fell to the overpowering force of Suleiman’s army. Next up, in the late 1520’s was Vienna itself. To Christendom, it looked like an unstoppable avalanche of evil moving from East to West.

It was in this context, somewhere between 1527 and 1529, that Martin Luther wrote his famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott). You can catch the spirit of Luther’s anxiety in the title, A Mighty Fortress. A fortress is a defensive structure. It is something within which one takes safety. It is where one hides and hopes, not an element of offensive warfare. Luther, like his fellow Christians, was worried. What was to become of the Christian faith in the face of this marauding horde of Ottomans? Was any fortress strong enough to withstand their onslaught?

Listen to how Luther describes the crisis in his first stanza:

A mighty fortress is our God,

A mighty shield and weapon;

He helps us free from ev’ry need

That hath us now o’ertaken.

The old evil foe

Now means deadly woe;

Deep guile and great might

 Are his dread arms in fight; 

On earth is not his equal.

In more modern translations we have tended to sanitize Luther’s fear and dread, but in the late 1520’s things did not look hopeful. Still, Luther is not totally undone. Listen to his second stanza:

Though devils all the world should fill,

All eager to devour us,

We tremble not, we fear no ill;

They shall not overpow’r us.

This world’s prince may still

Scowl fierce as he will,

He can harm us none.

He’s judged; the deed is done;

One little word can fell him.

That Word, of course, was the power of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Luther was confident that come what may (and in the third stanza he makes clear that earthly survival may not be an option), God can be relied upon to carry the day—and more than that, to carry the arc of history.

Life deals all of us dark days from time to time, but Luther reminds us that in the Kingdom of God, darkness never wins.

David Yeager

Sr. Warden