Divine Comfort in the Midst of Affliction

In April of 1518, six months after Martin Luther infamously nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Castle Church door—kick-starting the Protestant Reformation—Luther appeared at a formal disputation in the German city of Heidelberg to examine the practice of selling indulgences in light of Scripture.

It was at the Heidelberg Disputation that Luther first publicly articulated his famous teaching on the “theology of glory” and the “theology of the cross.” Usually, we would think of a theology of glory as a good thing. But Luther used the term to describe an approach to Christianity that stumbled over the shame of Christ’s cross—a theology that expected the life submitted to Jesus to be filled with personal glory, and to be emptied of shame and suffering. It was a theology that expected all of the spiritual blessings promised to faithful believers upon entrance into heaven to be manifested in physical fashion here and now. Jesus was a conqueror of sin and death, the believer is said to have overcome the world through Him, and so suffering and difficulty were viewed as pure, unmixed evils. There is no reason for faithful Christians to experience suffering, they reasoned, and so those who did were looked down upon. In Luther’s own words, he said that the theologian of glory “does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers works to suffering, ‘glory’ to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.”...