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A Place to Stand

A Place to Stand

Last updated on: October 15, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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A Place to Stand 2025-10-05T16:47:52-04:00 Gene Veith

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Rummaging through my files of old writings, looking for something else, I came across this, which I wrote as the introduction to a little book I was asked to write by a small publisher on Martin Luther. It is entitled A Place to Stand: The Word of God in the Life of Martin Luther. I bet none of you have read it!

But I love the metaphor, which I found in a book that deserves to be more widely known: John Carroll’s Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture.

Introduction

If I had a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “I could move the world.” The great Greek engineer was referring to the wonders of the lever, that simple yet astonishingly powerful machine whose properties Archimedes was discovering. He realized that, in principle, the capability of the lever was unlimited. An ordinary weakling could move a boulder the size of a house. All he needed was a fulcrum and a pole strong enough so that it would not break and long enough to multiply the force. That, and a place to stand. The force-multiplying physics of the lever are a function of distance. The heavier the object or the weaker the person trying to move it, the longer the pole you would need and the farther away from it you would have to stand. But with the right fulcrum, the right bar, and the right distance, all you would have to do would be to push the lever down, and the boulder, no matter how heavy it was, would move.

Theoretically, with the right fulcrum, bar, and distance, you could put a lever to planet Earth and move the world itself. If, of course, you had a place to stand. That, naturally, is the rub. You can’t move the world because you cannot get out of the world. You are in it, so it becomes impossible to step outside the world so as to move it or even change it.

Archimedes did not know about space travel, nor did he realize that the world is moving on its own, though we cannot perceive it. But his point holds, and not just for physics.

Try to change the universe. You can’t. You are part of it. You have no place to stand.

Try to change the culture. Social reforms are maddeningly frustrating because the people making the reforms tend to be part of the problem. They themselves have been shaped by the culture they are trying to shape. Even conservatives trying to change the postmodern culture often find that they are conservative in a distinctly postmodern way. They have no place to stand.

Or, for an even more difficult challenge, try to change yourself. The problem is, you are yourself. You can work as hard as you can to get rid of that bad habit, that persistent sin. You might make some progress if you have enough willpower. But what if the source of your sin is precisely your will? How can willpower correct the weakness of your will? You have no place to stand.

The Archimedean paradox applies over and over again.[1] It helps to explain the difficulties of leadership: how to move a family, a business, a church, a government. If you are the leader, what if the problem is the leadership? What do you do then? You need a place to stand.

It helps explain the futility of humanism. Why have we not created the perfect world? Why do we still have wars and poverty and cruelty and misery? We all want peace and happiness. So why have we never been able to achieve them? And why do the very schemes to engineer a perfect society, every utopian system and every socialist scheme of economic justice, only make things worse, creating more war and poverty and cruelty and misery? Human beings cannot change themselves. We need a place to stand.

On April 18, 1521, a thirty-seven-year-old monk from a small town in Germany found himself hauled in front of the emperor. The monk had struggled with guilt and futile attempts to improve himself until he started studying the Bible and came to understand what had been all but forgotten in the church of his day: the gospel that our salvation depends not on our works but on the grace of God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This was such good news to this monk that he started teaching it, which, in turn, required him to teach against the false spiritual system that had kept him and that continued to keep most people in bondage.

Being an academic in a small backwater university, he posted some theses he wanted to debate. He took issue with the way the church was selling indulgences—a way to buy yourself out of divine punishment—instead of proclaiming the gospel. The sound of his hammer nailing those theses to the church door reverberated far beyond his small town in ways he never anticipated or intended. Before long, the pope of Rome was trying to destroy him. Then the Holy Roman emperor joined the fray.

On that April day, it all came to a head. The monk was being tried by the emperor and all his nobles, with the one church through the pope’s representatives serving as prosecutor. The monk was all by himself against the ultimate political and spiritual authorities of his day. At the end, it all came down to a very simple question: Will you take back everything you have been teaching about the gospel? Or will you be cast out of the church and state as a heretic and be burned at the stake?

The monk replied that his conscience was bound by the Word of God: “Here I stand.”

Martin Luther had a place to stand. And he did move the world. He changed his life. He changed the church. He changed the culture.

At the turn of the millennium, a number of publications surveyed experts and the public to determine who were the most influential people of the last thousand years. Life magazine ranked Luther number three, after Thomas Edison and Christopher Columbus.[2] The Toronto Globe &Mail ranked Luther number two, just after Albert Einstein.[3] Those periodicals were looking for the top hundred, but a more ambitious and possibly more scholarly assessment, in a book ranking the top thousand, placed Luther as number three.[4] Number two was Columbus, and number one was Johannes Gutenberg, hailed as “the man of the millennium” for his printing press, which made possible the information age.

Of course, it was Luther who turned Gutenberg’s invention into an engine—consider it a lever—of revolutionary change as his theses and writings were printed and distributed throughout Europe, so that his understanding of the gospel spread like wildfire. Gutenberg is known for printing the Bible, but it was Luther who made the Bible the printing press’s biggest seller. He did that by making the Bible central in both theology and the culture, and he made it central in the lives of ordinary people by translating it into a language they could read.

But first the largely illiterate public had to be taught how to read, and Luther was largely responsible for igniting an explosion of education. Luther wanted everyone to be able to stand on the Word of God, so he started schools that would pursue his goal of universal education—bringing literacy not just for a clerical elite but for women, peasants, and everyone. Luther wanted them to read the Bible, but once they could read the Bible, they could read anything. And once the underclasses were educated, class barriers were undermined, former peasants started businesses and became rich, social mobility started to happen, and political freedom and self-government were just a matter of time.

So even secularists admit the influence of Luther in the secular arena. They also credit him for breaking the shackles of the Middle Ages, for a new valuation of marriage and the family, for his doctrine of vocation that created a new work ethic, for the concept of individual thinking, for being the first example of the “modern mind,” and for much else.

But he could not have had any of this influence as a mere obscure monk locked in his cloister when he was not teaching his classes at his little university. He was able to exert this influence because he had found a place to stand: the Word of God, which he, in turn, made available in all its liberating power to others. By the Word of God, he meant the Bible, yes, and more specifically the Word of the gospel that he found as he read the Bible. That Word gave him faith in Jesus Christ and in the free gift of salvation that He accomplished on the cross. That faith changed Luther’s life—from the outside—and it gave him the freedom and the confidence to face down the world.

That faith also turned Luther, very much against his will, into a leader who had to manage the forces he had unleashed. He was put into the position of having to apply the Word of God to all of life. He had to lead despite overwhelming opposition from seemingly every side. But true, saving faith, Jesus Himself tells us, can move mountains (Matthew 17:20).

Luther moved the world because he had a place to stand. And since we have that same Word, so can we.

Notes

[1]This discussion of the Archimedean paradox, including the failures of humanism and Luther’s having overcome the dilemma, is drawn from John Carroll, Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture (London: Fontana, 1993), 2-7.

[2] The Life magazine list can be found at http://www.life.com/Life/millennium/people/01.html.

[3] The Canadian list can be found at http://www.adherents.com/largecom/influ_mil100.html.

[4] Agnes Hooper Gottlieb et al., 1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1998).

Illustration: Archimedes’ Lever. ZDF/Terra X/Gruppe 5/ Susanne Utzt, Cristina Trebbi/ Jens Boeck, Dieter Stürmer / Fabian Wienke / Sebastian Martinez/ xkopp, polloq, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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