God's Word in Filthy Language

In a previous post, I quoted from Heiko Oberman's biography of Luther to illustrate how the Reformer's frequent talk of the Devil, while often extreme, usually served evangelical purposes. It turns out the same can be said for another of Luther's embarrassing traits: his penchant for scatological language. Indeed, talk of Satan and talk of crap often went hand-in-hand, usually as a way of expressing contempt for the adversary. Once, after professing his faith in Christ, Luther added: "But if that is not enough for you, you Devil, I have also shit and pissed; wipe your mouth on that and take a hearty bite." As Oberman writes, "Luther's language is so physical and earthy that in his wrathful scorn he can give the Devil 'a fart for a staff': You, Satan, Antichrist, or pope, can lean on it, a stinking nothing... A figure of respect, be he Devil or pope, is effectively unmasked if he can be shown with his pants down."

Luther's filthy language undoubtedly had something to do with his physical ailments. He suffered frequently from constipation, hemorrhoids and perhaps anal fissures. He once wrote to a friend that "after five days of constipation his bowel movement had caused him such pain 'that I nearly gave up the ghost - and now, bathed in blood, can find no peace. What took four days to heal immediately tears open again."

Most shocking of all, perhaps, is Luther's claim that he had his Reformation breakthrough while sitting on the toilet: "The Spiritus Sanctus gave me this realization in the cloaca." Catholic polemicists have seized on this comment as proof of Luther's depravity, and Protestant apologists have tried to explain it by saying he didn't mean the actual toilet, merely the study in the tower above it. But Oberman insists that we take Luther at his word:

"The cloaca is not just a privy, it is the most degrading place for man and the Devil's favorite habitat. Medieval monks already knew this, but the Reformer knows even more now: it is right here that we have Christ; the mighty helper, on our side. No spot is unholy for the Holy Ghost; this is the very place to express contempt for the adversary through trust in Christ crucified... Luther attests to the birth of Christ in the filth of this world. The Son of God was truly born into the flesh, into the blood and sweat of man. He understood men because He experienced - to the bitter end - what it meant to be human."

Luther was not some 16th-century Lyndon Johnson, using crude language to humiliate and intimidate. Instead, his goal was to express the profound earthiness of Christianity, the supreme condescension of God Incarnate who is "with us in mud and in work, so that his skin smokes." As Hamann understood well, God's Word often appears in filthy and vulgar language: "How the Holy Spirit humbled himself when he recorded the most trivial, and the most contemptible events on earth, revealing to man in his own language, in his own transactions, in his own ways, the mysteries and the ways of the deity."