One Mighty "Mighty Fortress"!

Among our valley's significant rock formations is "Castlerock,"

which  from some angles looks like a fortress with lookouts.

For the "mighty" in health, it's a popular hiking spot.

This Sunday will mark the quincentenary of a pivotal hammering. On the last day of October, in 1517, a monk named Martin Luther nailed a list of his 95 disagreements with church teachings on the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany.  Among them: the selling of “indulgences” to supposedly pardon peoples’ sins when all it did was pad the church coffers. His own personal struggle over receiving God’s forgiveness led Luther to see in a new light the scripture from Habakkuk and quoted in Romans, “The just shall live by faith.”  His life threatened, Luther went into protective custody at a sympathizer’s castle for a year where he began translating the Bible from Greek into German.

He also composed a hymn book. This was radical for days when “church music” consisted of Latin chants by priests. The most enduring of his hymns is “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” based on Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and strength.” Today known as the national hymn of Germany, it’s been translated into almost every known language. Its translation to English rhyme, by the way, was particularly troublesome because the original German was so vivid. There were at least 80 translations to English; the one most popular in America was done in 1852 by a Harvard professor.

The hymn reflects Luther’s awareness of spiritual battle. Often when he faced difficulty and danger, it’s said he’d often resort to singing this song. Not surprisingly, Luther was a musician, too. As a youth, he sang in a boy’s choir. He played flute and lute (a type of guitar), often helping lead congregational singing. He wrote in the foreword of one book:

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.  It controls our thoughts, minds, heart, and spirits….A person who…does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God…does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.”

Another Luther quote on music: “If any man despises music, as all fanatics do, for him I have no liking; for music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men.  Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful.  Then one forgets all wrath, impurity, and other devices.”

Also, “The Devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as before the Word of God.”

In a preface to a hymn  collection, he wrote that God is “praised and honored, and we are made better and stronger in faith, when His holy Word is impressed on our hearts by sweet music.”

One historian said that, by giving the German people both the Bible in their own language and a German hymnbook, Luther enabled the people to listen to God through His Word and respond back to Him in their songs.  As Luther’s passion ignited the fires, congregational singing spread through the churches. Scholars believe some 25,000 hymns were written in just Germany in the first hundred years of the Reformation.

As an aside, Luther had passion for more than scriptural truth and song. No longer a Catholic monk, he became concerned about the plight of some local young nuns, virtually imprisoned in terrible conditions in a nearby convent. Twelve nuns were smuggled out of there in heavy barrels used to ship herring. He found suitable mates for all but one, Katherine Con Bora. He’d resisted the idea of marrying himself, thinking he’d probably die a heretic’s death. But eventually he married her himself.  She was 26 and he, 41. They had six children, four of whom lived to adulthood.