LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

34 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW IX
Saepe se angelos vidisse. If the content of this sentence was in fact
uttered by Luther in direct speech, it prepares us to register the fact that the
Reformer never lived for a moment in the closed universe of the
Enlightenment. The crisis of the First World War led Karl Barth to believe
in many articles of faith that had been cast aside by his Ritschlian teachers;
but while Barth was ready to defy the worldview of modernism by accepting
the existence of good angels, his conviction of the ontological nothingness
of evil prompted him to keep one foot in the Enlightenment camp by
denying the reality of the devil and his hosts. 7 From hoary tradition we have
learned that the Reformer threw an ink pot at the evil one during his
enforced sojourn at the Wartburg, but the earliest account of this event,
penned by John Mathesius in his Luther biography of 1591, relates that
Luther was the object and the devil the subject of the missile throwing. At
all events, the universe inhabited by the Reformer throbbed with the acts of
angels and demons in the world of men.
The holy angels may often have formed the sugar-coating of cosy piety,
their function being little more than the offering of a warm fuzzy in
assurance of the deep-down goodness of the universe. Far removed from the
world of fairy tales and make-believe is Luther’s Michaelmas sermon of
1530, in which a robust angelology appears as the obverse of a coin whose
better known tail side is the Reformer’s equally realistic demonology. 8
Luther’s angels are not effeminate youths who could never make a sports
team, but rather steely warriors in the army of the Lord.
The Coburg Michaelmas sermon begins with two paragraphs of
introduction to the topic of angelology. A swipe is aimed at mediaeval
Rome, which stands accused of leading people to shift the locus of their
fiducia (i.e., the trust of the heart) from Almighty God to the angels. 9
Michaelmas is appropriately celebrated:
For the understanding or knowledge of the dear angels should and must
abide among Christians, and it is very useful and comforting to us to
7 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, The Doctrine of Creation, trans. G. W.
Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960) 519-31. In these closing pages
of a section entitled “The Ambassadors of God and their Opponents”, Barth deftly practises
the “demythologisation” for which he otherwise lambasted Rudolf Bultmann.
8 “Luther possessed the most concrete satanology it is possible to imagine.” Adolf
Köberle, The Quest for Holiness, trans. John C. Mattes (New York & London: Harper &
Brothers, 1936) 228.
9 WA 32:111.27: “Also ist man von Gott auff die lieben Engeln gefallen und
gewichen.” All translations from the 1530 Michaelmas sermon given in the body of the essay
are by the present writer.