MARTIN LUTHER DAN REFORMASI

Luther, Martin (1483–1546)

Though Luther was honored among the Reformed for his contributions to the theology and reformation of the church generally, the Reformed thought he did not go far or deep enough in his changes. The attack on indulgences and papal power, the assertion of justification through faith alone, and the authority of sola Scriptura have been applauded and affirmed by all Protestants. Equally supported by Calvinists was Luther’s controversy with Erasmus over bondage of the will where Luther asserted a position not far from Calvin’s double predestination (though grounded differently for Luther in the “hidden God”).

The initial point of dissension came with a dispute over the Lord’s Supper—first with Luther’s colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and then with Huldrych Zwingli and John Oecolampadius. Disagreements focused on the bodily presence of Christ (whether in the bread and wine or in heaven) and the sacramental benefits (forgiveness, life and salvation—according to Luther). Attempts to heal the split began with the Marburg Colloquy (1529), the Wittenberg Concord (1536), and the Zurich–Geneva Consensus Tigurinus (1549).

Philipp Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession, to which Calvin subscribed while in Strassburg, was described as the only “confession” written in the sixteenth century: all the rest were church “constitutions” (G. Hendry). The growing ecumenical role of Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague at the University of Wittenberg, brought him—with Luther’s initial encouragement—into dialogue with Martin Bucer, eventuating in the Wittenberg Concord and the Cologne Book (1543), the latter producing serious tension with Luther. Melanchthon’s revision of the Augsburg Confession (1540; the Variata) and his work with Calvin at the Regensburg (Ratisbon) Colloquy (1541–42) brought Melanchthon to a more open position on the Lord’s Supper. But Calvin was troubled by Melanchthon’s more synergistic position on human bondage, his rejection of double predestination, and even Melanchthon’s own “deterministic” position which he had affirmed in his Loci communes (1521; a book that Luther had suggested, with characteristic exaggeration, should be in the canon).

Differences over baptismal regeneration (never a major controversy), Pre–destination, the real presence and benefits of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, along with certain christological implications (bringing charges from Lutherans of Nestorianism and against Lutherans of Monophysitism), and the related issue of whether unbelievers receive Christ’s body in the sacrament (manducatio impiorum) became hardened. In the formula of Concord (1577) the Lutherans tried to settle their internal theological controversies and establish their own theological identity, in part by differentiating their positions over against the Reformed. Thus double predestination was rejected and single predestination affirmed. The “crypto–Calvinism”; with which Melanchthon was charged was met with the Formula’s eucharistic Christology and the Lutheran shibboleth of Christ’s body and blood “in, with, and under” the bread and wine. Ironically, John Williamson Nevin’s interpretation of Calvin’s view of the real presence (The Mystical Presence [1846]) was characterized by a contemporary Princeton theologian as “crypto–Lutheran” ! The publication of collected Lutheran confessional writings as The Book of Concord (1580) tended to reinforce the Lutheran Reformed barriers as they shaped Lutheran identity.

Some Lutherans and Reformed were driven farther apart, even emigrating, because of their forced merger in the Prussian Union Church (1817). The experience of World War II, the fellowship of protest and suffering in the Confessing Church and its Barmen Declaration, led after the war to the Arnoldshain Theses and the Leuenberg Agreement which has established intercommunion between most European Lutherans and Reformed Dialogues in the United States since the 1960’s are working toward such fellowship.

P. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (1966); H. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (1989); H. Sasse, This Is My Body (1959); L. W. Spitz and W. Lohff, eds., Discord, Dialogue, and Concord (1977).

Ralph W. Quere

Professor of the History of Doctrine

Wartburg Theological Seminary

Dubuque, Iowa

McKim, Donald K. ; Wright, David F.: Encyclopedia of the Reformed Faith. 1st ed. Louisville, Ky.; Edinburgh : Westminster/John Knox Press; Saint Andrew Press, 1992, S. 228

IMAN LUTHERAN

Lutheran Confessions and Catechisms

Origin. The Lutheran confessional tradition originated with a work which has never achieved official ‘confessional’ standing in the Lutheran churches—*Martin Luther’s Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper of 1528. In the third part of that work, following his extensive polemic against *Zwingli, Luther presented an overview of his teaching, in order to hinder the use of his name in support of error after his death: ‘I want in this work to confess my faith, point by point, before God and the whole world. I mean to abide in this faith until death, and in it to depart from this world (may God help me so to do) and come before the judgement seat of my Lord Jesus Christ’ (WA 26:499).

Luther’s personal confession was not only a crucial source for other confessional writings, especially the Augsburg Confession, but it also shaped in an abiding way the Lutheran understanding of what is at stake in confessions of faith. A confessional statement is not only an instrument of church order or an expression of negotiated consensus; it is always also an eschatological declaration, a public account of that by which a community pledges to live and die and stand before divine judgement. In the background are the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:32: ‘Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven’ (nrsv). This eschatological dimension of ‘confessions’ should not be forgotten even as other factors in the development of Lutheran confessionalism are taken seriously. Two such factors are of particular importance.

In the first place, in sixteenth-century Europe questions of religious faith were inevitably public questions, which engaged civil society as a whole. It was thus necessary for those who accepted the Wittenberg Reformation to give a public account of their doctrine before the larger Christian community, within which church and state were not easily disentangled. This is the background especially of the Augsburg Confession (1530), its Apology (1531), the Schmalkaldic Articles (1537) and the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (1537). A second factor was the internal need of the Lutheran churches themselves. The Saxon Church Visitation of 1528 disclosed a level of ignorance and disarray in the congregations which Luther and his colleagues found shocking. Luther’s Small Catechism (1529) and Large Catechism (1529) were written in part to address this situation. Another form of internal need arose from intra-Lutheran controversy, especially after Luther’s death, when the unity of the German Lutheran churches was nearly shattered by contending parties claiming to represent the true legacy of the Reformer. This was the background to the ‘Formula of Concord’ (1577), as well as to the gathering of the whole body of Lutheran confessional writings in the Book of Concord (1580).

The following summary follows the order in which the Confessions appear in the Book of Concord, which deviates from chronological sequence in its placement of the Catechisms.

The three chief symbols or creeds of the Christian faith. The Book of Concord begins not with sixteenth-century writings but with three texts from the ancient church: the *Apostles’ Creed, the *Nicene Creed and the so-called *Athanasian Creed. This was not an afterthought of the compilers but corresponds to the content of the sixteenth-century confessions themselves, which persistently refer to and ground themselves on the creedal inheritance represented by these documents. The Augsburg Confession begins by affirming the ‘decree of the Council of Nicaea’ as ‘true and to be believed without any doubting’ (Art. 1). The Schmalkaldic Articles likewise begin with the ‘high articles of the divine Majesty’ (Pt. 1), the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the ancient church. At the centre of the Catechisms is the exposition of the Apostles’ Creed. The ‘Formula of Concord’ pledges itself to the creedal orthodoxy of the ancient catholic church and describes the Lutheran Reformation as continuing the struggle of the Fathers on behalf of pure doctrine. This consistent and unambiguous affirmation of continuity in faith with the ancient church is of considerable importance for the interpretation of the confessional writings as a whole.

The Augsburg Confession. On 21 January 1530, the Emperor Charles V summoned a diet to address the widening religious division in the empire, ‘so that we might all live in one fellowship, church, and unity’ (‘Preface’, citing the imperial summons). The imperial estates met in Augsburg starting in May of that year. The Augsburg Confession (or Confessio Augustana, sometimes referred to simply as the ‘Augustana’) was produced there on behalf of the evangelical estates amidst a complex process of negotiation, going through multiple drafts and redrafts in a comparatively short period of time. *Philip Melanchthon acted as chief theological adviser to the evangelical princes and city governments, and he was the chief author of the confession. Luther, who was outlawed in the empire, could not attend but stayed restlessly at Castle Coburg, where he was consulted by letter. The confession was written in both German and Latin; while it was the German text which was publicly read to the emperor, both versions have been regarded as authoritative in the subsequent Lutheran tradition.

The initial assumption of the Wittenbergers was that the diet would chiefly discuss disputed points of church practice, since the imperial summons seemed to assume that all parties shared a common faith. Upon arriving at Augsburg, however, they discovered a much chillier atmosphere than anticipated. The emperor was in any case inclined to defend established belief and practice, and Luther’s old enemy, *Johann Eck, had presented him with a list of 404 heretical statements drawn both from the Wittenberg theologians and their opponents on the left. The catholic faith of the evangelical estates and churches was therefore under attack. It was in this context that the confession took its eventual form.

As finally presented to the emperor on 25 June 1530, the Augsburg Confession falls into two main parts. The first part (Art. 1–21) deals with matters of faith. In Articles 1–3, the evangelicals declare their agreement with both the Trinitarian and Christological teaching of the ancient church, and the western *Augustinian consensus on original sin. Articles 4–20 set forth the evangelical theology of salvation, treating the themes of justification, church, sacraments and newness of life, as well as a handful of miscellaneous issues. The second part (Art. 22–28) takes up a series of disputed points of church practice: the distribution of the cup to the laity in the Lord’s Supper, clerical marriage, the Mass, private confession, rules regarding fasting and other ceremonies, monastic vows and church government.

The overall strategy of the Augsburg Confession is to argue (1) that the faith of the evangelicals is grounded in Scripture and not contrary to the teaching of the universal church; and (2) that in view of such agreement in faith, differences in practice do not give the old-believing bishops and estates legitimate grounds to break church fellowship, for example by the bishops refusing to ordain evangelicals to the priesthood. In its historical context, therefore, the Augustana was anything but a denominational declaration of independence; it was an ecumenical appeal written not to justify, but if possible to prevent, the division of the church.

Signed by seven princes and the representatives of two free cities, the Augsburg Confession nonetheless speaks on behalf of ‘the churches among us’ and thus claims ecclesial significance. Given its solemn and highly public character, as well as its own intrinsic merits, it quickly became an authoritative identity marker for the churches of the Wittenberg Reformation; eventually it was recognized in law as the confessional basis for the Lutheran estates within the empire. Thus, contrary to its original ecumenical intention, the Augustana came to function as the charter of a special denominational tradition within a divided church.

Philip Melanchthon, it should be noted, continued throughout his life to regard the confession as an instrument of Christian unity. However, he put this concern into practice by periodically rewriting the text to address new ecumenical junctures, not only with Roman Catholics but also with the Reformed. This was greeted with suspicion and anger by many other Lutherans, who regarded the text as the public property of the Lutheran churches, no longer under its author’s control. Thus subsequent Lutheran tradition often refers pointedly to the ‘Unaltered Augsburg Confession’ (Confessio Augustana Invariata) of 1530 as the authoritative text.

The Apology of the Augsburg Confession. On 3 August 1530, the Roman party at Augsburg presented the emperor with a point-by-point rebuttal of the Augsburg Confession, known as the Roman Confutation (Confutatio Pontificia). The emperor demanded that the evangelicals admit on the spot that their views had been refuted, and he refused to allow them to have a copy of the Confutation until they did so. Instead, Melanchthon was assigned the task of writing a response on the basis of notes taken during the reading; though a draft was prepared by 22 September, the emperor refused to receive it. After his return to Wittenberg, Melanchthon continued to revise and enlarge his response, finally acquiring the text of the Confutation in October. The completed Apology of the Augsburg Confession was published at the end of April or the beginning of May of 1531. Originally appearing as a private work of Melanchthon, it acquired corporate standing when it was adopted as a statement of faith by the Schmalkaldic League in 1537.

In character, the Apology is unmistakably a theological treatise. It deals extensively with the points at which the Roman Confutation rejected the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession, especially the doctrine of justification. The original Augsburg strategy is continued: Melanchthon argues that the teaching of the Augustana is founded on Scripture and consistent with the consensus of the Fathers, differing only from the distortion of the faith by late-medieval scholastic theologians, especially the *nominalists.

The Apology is in certain respects unique among the Lutheran confessional texts. On the one hand, its presence in the confessional tradition prevents the much starker formulations of the Augsburg Confession from being received in too bare and schematic a fashion, for Melanchthon’s defence roots the confessional formulations deeply in the history of doctrine and thus provides them with a richness of resonance that would otherwise be lacking. On the other hand, how is its authority as public doctrine to be understood, if it is not to bind the whole subsequent theological tradition to Melanchthon’s particular development of Reformation themes? The ‘Formula of Concord’ (Solid Declaration, Rule and Norm) suggests that it be read as an interpretive guide to the Augsburg Confession, which thus retains its central place. On the basis of the Apology, readings of the Augustana that caricature or distort its doctrine can be ruled out, and the precise scope of its positive teaching can be clarified.

The Schmalkaldic Articles. In June 1536, Pope Paul III called a council to meet in Mantua the following year. Though the council did not actually convene until 1545 in Trent, the papal summons presented the Lutherans with a challenge. The elector of Saxony responded by asking Luther to draw up a statement distinguishing those issues on which the faith itself was at stake from those on which concessions might be made. Luther complied despite severe illness and produced what later became known as the Schmalkaldic Articles, which were reviewed, amended and signed by a small group of theologians in December of 1536.

The subsequent history of the Articles is a complex lesson in the dynamics of the reception of doctrine in the church. The elector took the Articles with him to Schmalkalden in February of 1537 in the hope that they might be adopted as an official statement of the Schmalkaldic League, a defensive alliance of the evangelical estates. Yet despite these hopes, and despite the name eventually attached to them, the Schmalkaldic Articles were not adopted by the Schmalkaldic League at Schmalkalden. Philip Melanchthon, who had signed, the Articles in December, was instrumental in persuading the representatives of the League that they would be counterproductive if officially adopted (Luther was present at Schmalkalden, but he was bedridden the entire time). At the same time, the Articles were signed by a large number of the theologians and clergy who were present. Luther published the Articles in 1538, and over subsequent decades they came to be widely acknowledged as an authentic witness to Lutheran teaching and were received as such into the Book of Concord.

In the background is the character of the Articles themselves, and the circumstances of their composition. Luther was suffering with excruciating attacks of kidney stones and gallstones while he wrote them, and he believed quite soberly that he was dying. Thus the Articles are an intensely personal document, written in Luther’s least accommodating style—clear, pointed and almost flamboyantly polemical. The division of the evangelicals from the ‘Papists’ is declared to be eternal and irreparable, and the pope is solemnly declared to be the antichrist prophesied in Scripture. Their character as ‘Luther’s theological testament’ added immensely to the authority of the Articles in the churches, while at the same time rendering them less plausible for the purposes of the League. The tension between the ecumenical hopefulness of the Augsburg Confession and the apocalyptic defiance of the Schmalkaldic Articles is perhaps impossible to resolve. At the same time, the Articles contain some of Luther’s most lucid theological writing, including the strongest articulation within the confessional writings of the characteristic Lutheran doctrine of the essential role of the ‘outward’ or ‘bodily’ word (Pt. III, Art. 8).

The Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope. This brief essay was written by Melanchthon at the request of the authorities assembled at Schmalkalden; unlike Luther’s Articles, it was adopted officially by the League, along with the Augsburg Confession and the Apology. The Treatise was commissioned as a supplement to the Augsburg Confession, which had deliberately avoided any discussion of the papacy; by 1537 it had become clear that the issue was inescapable. The Treatise attacks the claims of both pope and bishops to govern the church by divine right; its arguments must be carefully situated against the background of late-medieval papal and episcopal theories, and it should not be assumed to respond directly to subsequent accounts of papal and episcopal authority. In the course of its primarily negative arguments, the Treatise sets forth many important principles of the early Lutheran understanding of church, ministry and authority.

The Small and Large Catechisms. Luther’s Catechisms were written in response to the internal needs of the evangelical churches. As early as 1525, Luther had delegated the writing of a handbook of religious instruction to his friends Justus Jonas and Johannes Agricola, but this did not take place, and in the context of the Saxon Church Visitation of 1528 Luther himself undertook the task. Drawing on three series of sermons preached in 1528, Luther started writing the Large Catechism in the autumn of that year and began the Small Catechism in December. The Large Catechism was published in April 1529 as the German Catechism; it received its present title after 1541. The completed Small Catechism was published as an illustrated pamphlet in May 1529.

The Catechisms are, in essence, commentaries on five basic Christian texts: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the biblical passages in which baptism and the Lord’s Supper are instituted. Both Catechisms in their final form deal also with private confession and absolution; the Small Catechism incorporates a brief liturgical order for this rite. The Small Catechism also adds instructions for family prayer, and a ‘Table of Duties’ (Haustafel), made up of Scripture passages which specify the obligations of the various members of the household. In addition, many editions of the Small Catechism have included Luther’s ‘Baptism Booklet’ (Taufbuchlein) and ‘Marriage Booklet’ (Traubuchlein), liturgical orders with theological prefaces. Some editions have also included the ‘German Litany’.

The two Catechisms are independent, if closely associated, works. The Small Catechism is not merely an abridgement of the large Catechism, nor is the latter an expansion of the former. The Small Catechism, written in question and-answer form with lucid simplicity and a complete absence of polemic, was intended for laypeople—and especially for children. Its resonant phrasing lends itself to memorization. The Large Catechism is a manual for those with the responsibility for teaching, especially pastors and schoolmasters. More discursive, and therefore more polemical than the Small Catechism, it nonetheless displays a comparable clarity and vigour, as well as a disciplined focus on the basic structure and inner coherence of the faith.

Despite their independence in detail, the two Catechisms display a common theological structure. The Ten Commandments and the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed are bound together as instruction about the will of the Creator, who calls human creatures to live before him in fear, love and trust. The Second and Third Articles of the Creed describe God’s rescue of human beings when we had fallen under the tyranny of the devil: the Son of God has acquired our salvation by shedding his holy and innocent blood on the cross, and the Holy Spirit distributes this salvation through the word and the sacraments in the Christian church. The exposition of the Lord’s Prayer then depicts the embattled holiness of the little flock, which is sanctified by the Spirit in daily conflict with the world, the flesh and the devil. The presentation of the sacraments describes the concrete means by which we are protected from the devil’s spite and brought to Christ in order to live under his gracious rule. Thus the five main parts of the Catechism form a sort of triptych, with the Decalogue and the First Article of the Creed as one side panel, the Third Article, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments, as the other, and in the centre the exposition of the Second Article, focused in both Catechisms on the confession of Jesus Christ as ‘Lord’.

The Catechisms were immediately popular, and they had been through many printings and been included in several church orders and collections of confessional documents before they were received into the Book of Concord. Their significance in the Lutheran tradition is indicated by the description given them in the ‘Formula’: they are ‘the layperson’s Bible, in which everything is contained which is treated more extensively in Holy Scripture, and which is necessary for a Christian to know in order to be saved’ (Epitome, Rule and Norm). The Small Catechism in particular has been not only a textbook but also a prayer book for generations of Lutherans; it has perhaps shaped *Lutheranism as a form of lived and practised Christianity as much or more than the Augsburg Confession.

The ‘Formula of Concord’. Martin Luther died in 1546, and in 1547 the evangelical estates suffered crushing military defeat at the hands of the emperor. German Lutheranism entered the 1550s demoralized and dispirited, and under strong pressure to seek religious and political alliances in either the Reformed or the Roman direction.

During the 1550s, moreover, theological tension mounted between rival theological factions. On the one side were the so-called ‘Gnesio-Lutherans’, (the ‘authentic’ Lutherans) who took their stand on what they believed to be Luther’s teaching, while at the same time often pressing his thought to extreme conclusions. Thus Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the brilliantly obdurate theologian who was the most distinguished representative of this tendency, taught that after the Fall sin has become the very essence of the human creature; while Nicholas von Amsdorf, an old comrade-in-arms of Luther’s, taught that good works were actually detrimental to salvation. Both theologians were making serious points, but at the price of a rupture with the western theological tradition which other Lutherans were not willing to countenance. On the other side were the so called ‘Philippists’, named after their teacher, Philip Melanchthon, who were ready to make concessions to Rome on both the doctrine of grace and issues of church practice, and to Geneva on the theology of the Eucharist. A whole array of secondary controversies arose at the same time to complicate the situation. By 1557 it had become clear that the Lutherans were seriously divided, and attempts by evangelical princes to negotiate a truce in 1558 and 1561 were ineffective.

The ‘Formula of Concord’ was the outcome of a process of consensus-formation led by a diverse team of younger theologians—especially Jakob Andreae and *Martin Chemnitz—who were convinced that the authentic Lutheran ground lay somewhere between the two conflicting parties. Like the Gnesio-Lutherans, they were committed to a robust reception of Luther’s teaching on justification and the sacraments; but they shared with the Philippists a commitment to articulating Lutheran themes in substantial continuity with the western theological tradition. With financial support from a group of evangelical princes, these theologians orchestrated a Large-scale doctrinal colloquy that lasted from 1568 to 1577. Draft texts were produced by individuals or small committees of theologians and circulated to universities, conferences of clergy and distinguished colleagues, and then new drafts were prepared on the basis of comments received. The final text in the process was achieved at Bergen Abbey in 1577, and it largely achieved its goal of halting the disintegration of German Lutheranism by marking out a common ground capable of wide acceptance. Between 1577 and 1580 it was signed by three electors, 20 dukes and princes, 24 counts, four barons, 35 imperial cities and 8,188 theologians, pastors and teachers.

The ‘Formula of Concord’ in its final form consists of two parts, the so-called Epitome and the Solid Declaration. The Epitome is a relatively concise summary of the Solid Declaration, which is itself the final text of 1577, the so called ‘Bergen Book’. The ‘Formula’ contains an opening account of the criteria of pure doctrine and the confessional basis of Lutheranism, followed by twelve articles which address the divisive issues of the previous three decades: (1) original sin, (2) grace and free will, (3) the righteousness of faith, (4) good works and salvation, (5) the distinction of law and gospel, (6) the function of the law for believers, (7) the Lord’s Supper, (8) the person of Christ, (9) his descent into hell, (10) church practices not commanded by divine law (known as adiaphora or ‘things indifferent’) and (11) divine election. The twelfth article repudiates a disparate bundle of miscellaneous errors ascribed to *Anabaptists, Schwenkfelders and anti—Trinitarians. A Catalog of Testimonies was also added to the ‘Formula’, which was essentially an anthology of patristic citations supporting the Christological teaching of Article 8.

The ‘Formula’ was decisively important for the definition of Lutheranism as a particular confessional theology in the post-Reformation divided church. Combining a strong emphasis on sola scriptura with a lively appreciation for church doctrine, an austerely Augustinian theology of sin and grace with rejection of *Calvinist double-predestinarianism, a forensic account of justification with an articulate concern for sanctification and renewal of life, and a high doctrine of Christ’s bodily real presence in the Eucharist with rejection of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the Mass, the ‘Formula’ marked out the distinctive ground Lutherans would occupy for centuries to come—and at the same time it set up tensions that would motivate, energize and sometimes frustrate the subsequent Lutheran theological tradition.

The Book of Concord. A last stage in the formation of the Lutheran Confessions was the assembly and publication of the Book of Concord itself by the same team of theologians who had produced the ‘Formula’. The establishment of a normative canon of confessional texts is itself necessarily a confessional act—a point not wasted on the theologians, who saw to it that the Book of Concord was published on 25 June 1580, fifty years to the day after the presentation of the Augsburg Confession to Charles V. The collection was introduced by a preface discussing at some length the preceding history and describing the nature of the doctrinal ‘concord’ achieved; this preface was written in the name of the princes and city governments who accepted the Book of Concord as a body of public doctrine in their territories, and it is they who are its signatories.

Reception and interpretation. The ‘Formula of Concord’ was addressed primarily to the woes of the Lutheran churches in Germany, and it was never received as a normative confession of faith in the churches of Norway, Denmark and Iceland. Indeed, in 1580, the sovereign of all three realms, Frederick II, fearing the introduction of the German controversies into his dominions, declared it a capital offence to import, sell or possess a copy of the ‘Formula’! Even in Germany, moreover, acceptance of the ‘Formula’ by the Lutheran territories was not universal, though it was sufficient to redefine the Lutheran theological centre.

Still today, the Lutheran churches of the world receive the Lutheran confessional tradition in different ways. Particular Lutheran church bodies accept different documents as normative and ascribe different weights to the documents they receive. Three patterns of reception are most common. Some churches receive the entire Book of Concord as a unified body of doctrine without internal differentiation among its parts. Other churches receive the Book of Concord in a differentiated way, giving special weight to the Augsburg Confession and the Small Catechism. Finally, still other Lutheran bodies accept only the Augsburg Confession and the Small Catechism as normative.

These differences in reception are complicated by differences in the way the Confessions are interpreted. In the post-Reformation period, the confessions of faith received by a particular church came to have the force of public law, prescribing the boundaries within which church life and theological teaching were constrained to proceed. Since these legal arrangements came to an end all over Europe in the nineteenth century, and since they were never operative to begin with in non-European Lutheran churches, issues of confessional hermeneutics have been continually under discussion among Lutherans.

Some Lutherans have regarded the Book of Concord as a body of essentially timeless theological teaching, all of which is normative in the same way. Other Lutherans have insisted on reading the Confessions historically: they record normative decisions made in specific historical circumstances in the face of specific challenges. It is these decisions which are confessionally normative on this view, and not necessarily the conceptualities in which they are articulated, or the terms in which the alternatives are described.

In another direction, many Lutherans have viewed the Confessions primarily as exegesis of Holy Scripture. For some, the Confessions faithfully gather and present the revealed truths taught in Scripture, so that agreement with Scripture and agreement with the Confessions turn out simply to coincide with one another. For others, the relation between Scripture and Confession is more complex. The Confessions provide a perspective on Scripture, a way into its essential dynamic, yet at the same time it is possible that the fullness of Scripture exceeds the scope of the confessional formulations and may indeed correct them.

Still other Lutherans have interpreted the Confessions with primary reference to Christian experience. For some Lutherans coming out of the nineteenth-century revivals, a full account of the inner experience of the converted individual required the whole panoply of confessional doctrine. Other Lutherans have thought more in terms of corporate experience: the Confessions represent the theological underpinnings of the Christian communal life form in its purity. This perspective helps recapture the intertwining of faith and common life that is especially visible in different ways in the Augsburg Confession and the Catechisms, but without the reference to Scripture it risks devolving into a view of the Confessions as the charter of denominational or even ethnic folkways.

Finally, Lutherans differ in the way they relate the Confessions to the ecumenical situation of the divided church. One hermeneutic of the Confessions reads them as constitutive of a distinctive and self-contained form of Christianity; the very function of the Confessions is to found the separate reality of ‘Lutheranism’ as a mode of corporate life and individual believing irreducible to any other. A different hermeneutic takes its lead from the priority of ancient creeds within the Book of Concord and the ecumenical intentionality of the Augsburg Confession. On this account, the Confessions propose to the whole church a way of receiving the faith and life of the ancient catholic church in fidelity to the gospel. Thus for this hermeneutic the ecumenical hope of the Augsburg Confession remains valid, while the other regards the sixteenth-century disappointment of that hope as having permanent normative significance for the way in which the Confessions must now be read.

David S. Yeago

FURTHER READING: Charles P. Arand, Testing the Boundaries: Windows to Lutheran Identity (St Louis, MO, 1995); Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelischlutherischen Kirche: Herausgegeben im Gedenkjahr der Augsburgischen Konfession 1930 (Göttingen, 12th edn, 1999), the standard edition of the primary texts; George W. Forell and James F. McCue (eds.), Confessing One Faith: A Joint Commentary on the Augsburg Confession by Lutheran and Catholic Theologians (Minneapolis, 1982), an ecumenical milestone; Günther Gassmann and Scott Hendrix, Fortress Introduction to the Lutheran Confessions (Minneapolis, 1999); Eric W. Gritsch and Robert W. Jenson, Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and Its Confessional Writings (Philadelphia, 1976); Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, 2000); Wilhelm Maurer, Historical Commentary on the Augsburg Confession (Philadelphia, 1986), detailed study of the development of the text which also pays significant attention to theological issues; Albrecht Peters, Kommentar zu Luthers Katechismen (5 vols.; Göttingen, 1990–), theologically rich study; Edmund Schlink, Theology of the Lutheran Confessions (Philadelphia, 1961); Gunther Wenz, Theologie der Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche: Eine historische und systematische Einführung in das Konkordienbuch (2 vols.; Berlin / New York, 1996–), magisterial study.

WA Weimarer Ausgabe. D. Martin Luthers Warke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe

Hart, Trevor A.: The Dictionary of Historical Theology. Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K. : Paternoster Press, 2000, S. 335

TENTANG MARTIN LUTHER

Luther, Martin (1483–1546)

The diverse symbolic roles which Martin Luther has played in subsequent religious and cultural history have ensured continuing controversy over the development, structure, content and significance of his theological teaching. Modern Protestant and Catholic interpretations have, for different purposes, tended to stress the novelty of his theology over against the previous doctrinal, spiritual and theological traditions of the church. While this vein of interpretation has by no means been exhausted, contemporary research is also bringing into focus the rich and subtle ways in which Luther’s thought is embedded in wider traditions of Christian thought and practice.

Approach to theology. Luther’s early thought (c. 1514–18) is marked by his struggle for a new form of theological discourse, centred in a close reading of Scripture and oriented towards the preaching and pastoral life of the church. Luther thus brought the concerns of medieval monastic theology (e.g. *Bernard of Clairvaux) and vernacular theology (e.g. Tauler and the Theologia Germanica) into the university context. Like Bernard, Luther criticized scholastic tendencies to treat the conceptual elaboration of Christian belief as an end in itself; the aim of theology is rather to bring the apostolic word to bear transformatively on human life, to rebuke and console the conscience, as well to reform and build up the church. Theology so conceived is the attempt to identify and learn to practise the modus loquendi apostolicus, the ‘apostolic mode of discourse’, the distinctive logic and grammar of gospel proclamation.

These concerns brought Luther into conversation with humanism, whose hermeneutical organon he substantially appropriated. Yet despite his scorching attacks on the scholastic ‘sophists’, in some ways he remained more closely bound to the scholastic tradition than many of his contemporaries. While he collaborated with *Philip Melanchthon in the humanist reorganization of studies at Wittenberg, he never ceased to make creative use of the sophisticated analytical techniques acquired in his *Ockhamist schooling, putting the logical tools of *Scholasticism in service to the rhetorical and pastoral goals of the monastic and vernacular traditions. This continuing bond with Scholasticism bore fruit in his efforts to revitalize the custom of public theological disputation at the University of Wittenberg in the 1530s and 1540s.

Early developments. Along with these concerns, Luther’s early thought is characterized by a protracted engagement with the *Augustinian theology of grace, in the course of which he became alienated from the Ockhamist theology in which he had been formed. As Luther understood it, this teaching betrayed the Augustinian tradition at two crucial points. Though technically non-Pelagian, it made of grace only a qualification of good works which we can achieve by our own strength. Thus Ockhamist theology underestimated both the corruption of fallen humanity and the disruptively transforming effect of divine grace. Grace, Luther came to believe, is no mere qualification of the religious and moral achievement possible for human beings dominated by sin and the devil; it means the death of the ‘old Adam’ and the painful birth of a new humanity.

These were the concerns that Luther took into the struggle over indulgences, which exploded unexpectedly in the wake of his famous theses of 31 October 1517. Luther regarded indulgences chiefly as a cheap substitute for the pain of authentic transformation, and he saw deep connections between their popularity and the nominalist soteriology he had rejected in his academic work.

However, in the course of the conflict, Luther was forced to attend seriously to sacramental theology, perhaps for the first time, and to consider the role of the sacraments in the working of grace. While Luther’s development remains a focus of debate, many scholars believe that his thought achieved its mature configuration only after the indulgence controversy was underway, as the outcome of this new consideration of the sacraments. Key to the new dimension in his thought, on this view, is the doctrine of the outward word of the gospel, and the associated account of faith as confident trust in God’s promise.

Justification by faith alone. At the centre of Luther’s mature thought is the doctrine of justification sola fide, ‘by faith alone’, which Luther describes as the ‘chief article’, the criterion of authentic Christian teaching and practice. Yet ‘justification by faith alone’ turns out to summarize a teaching of considerable complexity, not so much a single doctrine as a way of understanding the coherence of Christian doctrine as a whole. Luther’s theology of justification juxtaposes two bodies of teaching in particular: teaching about Jesus Christ and teaching about the verbum externum, the ‘external’ or ‘bodily’ word, Luther’s code-phrases for the public ecclesial practices of preaching and sacrament. It is the specific interrelation of these themes that constitutes the distinctiveness of Luther’s doctrine of justification.

Luther teaches that we are saved by an alien justitia, often translated ‘alien righteousness’ but literally meaning ‘the righteousness of another person’. Luther insists very strongly that Christ himself, in the unity of his divine-human person, is the righteousness by which human beings are saved. This is connected with his central understanding of Christ as the one who is utterly pro nobis, ‘for us’. The Son of God has assumed mortal flesh and become the ally of sinners, not for his own sake, but for ours. His whole incarnate existence is thus sheer gift, sheer benefit to the needy. On the cross, Christ endured and overcame in his own person all that threatens sinful humankind—sin, death, God’s wrath and curse—and triumphed over them in the resurrection. ‘And so all who adhere to that flesh are blessed and freed from the curse’ (WA 40/1:451).

Luther therefore defines the faith by which we are saved as fides apprehensiva Christi, ‘a faith which takes hold of Christ’. Salvation involves an intimate union of the believer with Christ, not only a mental connection but a joining in ‘one body and flesh … so that his flesh is in us and our flesh is in him’ (WA 33:232). This union brings both free forgiveness and acceptance by God: ‘Faith justifies because it grasps and possesses this treasure, the present Christ … Therefore the Christ who is grasped by faith and dwells in the heart is the Christian righteousness on account of which God reckons us righteous and gives us eternal life’ (WA 40/1:229). Those who take hold of Christ by faith are received with him into the Father’s favour, their sins forgiven for Christ’s sake. At the same time, Christ’s presence does not leave believers unchanged; he lives and acts in them by the Spirit and grants them new life.

This all takes place by means of the ‘external word’, the preached and sacramentally enacted gospel of Christ. For Luther, the gospel is defined primarily by its Christological content; it is ‘a chronicle, history, or tale about Christ, who he is, what he has done, said, and suffered … a discourse about Christ, that he is God’s Son and became a human being for us, suffered and rose again, and has been appointed a lord over all things’(WA 10/I/1:9). But just because Christ is the one who is unreservedly ‘for us’, pro nobis, the telling of this tale is at the same time the conferral of a blessing, the presentation of a gift. Or as Luther likes to put it: this story constitutes a promise on God’s part which cannot be received by any answering achievement on our part but only acknowledged in thankful trust and confidence.

The preaching of the gospel and its enactment in the sacraments are the instruments of the Spirit by which he ‘brings us to the Lord Christ to receive the treasure’ (Large Catechism, Third Article of the Creed). Luther’s insistence on the work of the Spirit is the background for his denial of the ‘free choice of the will’ (liberum arbitrium), most uncompromisingly stated in The Bondage of the Will (1525). The freedom to respond to God in faith is not an abstract property of the individual, like the power to lift heavy objects; it is a freedom granted by the Spirit’s concrete intervention in a human life through the bodily word of the gospel.

Hearing and trusting this word of Christ, moreover, the believer encounters Christ himself and is joined to him. Without this concrete presence, Luther believed that the redemptive work of Christ in the flesh would lose its graciousness. We would be trapped in a new legalism, with the salvation won by Christ as the elusive prize that we must seek anxiously to appropriate by good works and devotion. To forestall this, the Spirit brings us the treasure of salvation, which is inseparable from Christ himself, and ‘lays it in our laps’ (Large Catechism, Third Article of the Creed) through the word and the sacraments. In this way faith is freed to be pure receptive acknowledgement of God’s mercy in the particularity of its bestowal.

Conflicts and controversy. The doctrine of justification thus construed is for Luther not so much a ‘systematic principle’ from which other teachings are derived as a constant critical reference point with which all other teaching and practice in the church must be co-ordinated. In his efforts to carry out the testing and sifting this implies, Luther entered into a series of conflicts in which various aspects of his thought underwent further development.

Luther initially came into conflict with the Roman See against his own expectations and intentions. Nevertheless, as the conflict escalated Luther accused the Roman Church not only of teaching a false doctrine of justification, but also of making false ecclesiological claims. Luther believed that the papacy claimed absolute authority to prescribe the doctrine and practice of the whole church, in such a way that whatever wastaught by the Roman See had authoritative force simply because it was taught by the Roman See. By contrast, Luther came to hold that formal authority in the church—authority inhering in a person, office or institution by virtue of its position within the Christian community—could only acquire legitimacy from its substantive faithfulness to the apostolic gospel, which all church authority is appointed to serve.

At the same time, Luther also rejected any absolute division of the church into rulers and ruled. Christ established the church not by endowing a special clerical group with power to form and govern a community in his name, but by entrusting the message of salvation to his apostles. The whole church has received the gospel, and with it the anointing of the Holy Spirit, from the apostolic company; the distinction between pastors and people, which Luther by no means wanted to erase, must be placed within the context of this common reception of salvation. This is Luther’s doctrine of the universal priesthood of the faithful; its theme is not so much the rights of the individual as rather the shared reality of salvation in Christ, Which is the foundation of the church. Authority in the church must be exercised in such a way as to acknowledge this shared relationship of all members of the body to Christ their head. Authentic church governance therefore seeks the ‘Amen’ of the Spirit-anointed people of God by its intelligible appeal to Holy Scripture as the authoritative word entrusted to the whole church.

By the mid-1520s, Luther was engaged in a whole series of new controversies on very different fronts. Most vehement was the conflict with a range of opponents, most prominently the Zurich Reformer *Ulrich Zwingli, who denied the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and who more broadly called into question the relation of faith to ‘external things’, such as preached words and sacramental signs. Luther believed that the gospel was just as much at stake in this conflict as in the conflict with Rome; without the concrete bestowal of Christ’s presence in public, bodily acts, faith is once again condemned to anxious insecurity. Or, as he wrote of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, an erstwhile faculty colleague who denied the Eucharistic presence: ‘he mocks us and brings us no further than to show us the holy thing in a glass or container. We can see it and smell it until we are full, indeed we may dream of it, but he does not give it to us, he doesn’t open it up, he doesn’t allow it to be our own’ (WA 18:203).

Luther was also alarmed in these years by the emergence of anti-Trinitarian groups, and he devoted much attention from the close of the 1520s until the end of his life to working out the interrelations of the theology of justification and the ecumenical Trinitarian and Christological doctrines. This concern can be seen especially in his extended expositions of Johannine texts from those years, but it is also visibly present in the great Commentary on Galatians of 1535.

Mention should be made also of Luther’s involvement with the Saxon Church Visitation of 1528, an official inspection of the parishes of Electoral Saxony. The ignorance and disorder brought to light thereby brought home to Luther in a powerful way that legalistic works-righteousness was not the only enemy with which an evangelical theology had to contend. This experience was an important motivation for the writing of the two Catechisms of 1529, undoubtedly the writings by which Luther has exercised the widest influence in subsequent history. It is remarkable that the Small Catechism, intended to be taught to the lay faithful, never speaks explicitly about justification by faith; the point of the doctrine is communicated indirectly in an exposition of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments.

Moreover, the emphasis on repentance and the Decalogue to which the Church Visitation brought Luther and the other Wittenberg theologians provoked a bitter controversy years later (in 1539) with Johannes Agricola of Eisleben, originally a close adherent of Luther’s. Agricola taught that divine law had no place in the proclamation of the church. God in Christ meets sinners with no demand but only with the sheer mercy embodied in the crucified. Luther argued in response that the good news of God’s mercy in Christ was only intelligible in the context of the condemnation of sinners under the law. Therefore the law must be proclaimed precisely for the sake of the gospel. Furthermore, Christ by his death on the cross has not only merited forgiveness of sins for us; he has also gained for us the gift of the Spirit so that we might begin to obey the law. Thus the gospel of Christ makes it possible for us to love the commandments of God, despite our sin; Christ’s office, Luther says, is not to abolish the law but to ‘render the law pleasing and undefiled’ (WA 39/1:372–3).

A legacy of tensions. Luther’s greatest influence has undoubtedly been exercised through the Catechisms, in the nurture of faith and the formation of life far beyond the academic sphere. For theology, however, Luther’s legacy has been controversial from the first; both by its own internal complexity, and through its involvement with epochal historical shifts, it has often seemed a legacy chiefly of acute tensions, a few of which should be noted.

The doctrine of justification notoriously gives rise to critiques of church teaching and church practice: do they promote trust in Christ alone or do they deflect trust from Christ to human achievement or indeed to the church’s own institutions and officers? Yet this critique does not lead Luther, as it has some Protestants, to disengage salvation from church, so that ‘faith alone’ becomes synonymous with ‘private experience alone’. For Luther, salvation remains tied to public ecclesial practice, to preaching and sacramental rites. The result is a tension between critique and affirmation of the visible ecclesial community that is by no means easy to negotiate.

A related tension is that between continuity and discontinuity in Christian history. Luther’s critical posture towards the existing western church took extreme and apocalyptic shape in his belief that the papacy as an institution was the antichrist prophesied in Scripture. Yet, for Luther, salvation itself depended on the continuous integrity of core ecclesial practice, on the ongoing presence of the true gospel and the sacraments in the church through time. Therefore Luther found himself arguing that the Roman Church was both the dominion of antichrist and the vehicle through which the gospel had been brought into his own day. He thus came into conflict with both the traditionalism of his Roman opponents and the radicalism of those for whom the Roman provenance of a practice was already reason to reject it.

On another front, Luther’s thought generates tension concerning the relationship between faith and renewal of life. We never have confidence in God on the basis of any achievements or qualifications of our own; Christ alone remains our righteousness. Our good works in themselves are never more than Isaiah’s ‘filthy rags’ (Is. 64:6). Yet the faith that grasps Christ as its righteousness can never leave the believer unchanged; believers are joined to Christ by faith and Christ is neither weak nor idle. The believer is therefore both ‘a sinner and righteous at the same time’ (simul peccator et iustus), which means both ‘still defiled inwardly but accepted by God for Christ’s sake’, and ‘truly transformed but no less utterly dependent on the undeserved mercy of God in Christ’.

Finally, there is the tension in Luther’s thought between law and gospel. The gospel is the word which presents Christ as God’s gift of righteousness. Law, by contrast, makes known the will of God without providing for its accomplishment. If heard accurately, it is a death sentence on sinful humanity; if distorted, it motivates the doomed quest for self-justification. Yet, as we have seen, Luther does not draw the conclusion that the church should proclaim gospel and renounce law. Both modes of discourse are necessary in a complex interplay that responds equally to the inner dynamics of Scripture and the diverse modes of human confusion and misery. The resulting tension between critique and affirmation of the discourse of law has been another of Luther’s enduring legacies.

David S. Yeago

FURTHER READING: Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (ed.), Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids, 1998), the most challenging recent departure in Luther-interpretation; Martin Brecht, Martin Luther (3 vols.; Philadelphia, 1985—), standard and extensive biography; Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis, 1999), will now be the standard overview; Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (New Haven, 1989), lively study emphasizing Luther’s apocalypticism; Otto Hermann Pesch, Hinführung zu Luther (Mainz, 1983), ecumenically-oriented study by an important Roman Catholic interpreter; Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, 1959), still the best study in English of this controversy—important corrective to interpretations of Luther which focus too exclusively on the controversy with Rome; Jared Wicks, Luther’s Reform: Studies on Conversion and the Church (Mainz, 1992), lucid essays by one of the most important Roman Catholic interpreters of Luther.

WA Weimarer Ausgabe. D. Martin Luthers Warke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe

Hart, Trevor A.: The Dictionary of Historical Theology. Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K. : Paternoster Press, 2000, S. 331

MARTIN LUTHER

LUTHER, Martin (1483–1546), German Reformer, stands at the headwaters of that vast movement of ecclesial and spiritual renewal known as the Reformation. He was born on 10 November 1483 in the Thuringian village of Eisleben. He was the son of Hans Luder, a copper miner, and his respectable wife, Margaret Ziegler. He was named Martin because he was baptized on 11 November, the feast day of St Martin of Tours.

Although Luther later complained of the harsh discipline he received as a young boy, his parents recognized that he was a precocious child and provided for his early education at Latin schools in Magdeburg and Eisenach. In 1501 Luther matriculated at the University of Erfurt, where he received his baccalaureate (1502) and master’s (1505) degrees. He then took up the study of law in accordance with his father’s wishes.

In the summer of 1505, however, Luther’s career underwent a dramatic change when, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, he cried out in panic, ‘Saint Ann, help me, I will become a monk.’ To the chagrin of his friends and parents, Luther insisted on fulfilling his vow. He joined the monastery of the Observant Augustinian friars, a strict religious order in Erfurt. By all accounts, Luther was a conscientious monk and kept the rule of his order scrupulously. But his many prayers, vigils and fastings only made him more uncertain of his own salvation. At every turn he was frustrated in his quest to find a gracious God.

Luther was overwhelmed by his sense of God’s sovereign power and holiness. After being ordained priest in 1507, Luther nearly fainted at the altar while presiding at his first mass. The idea that a finite creature could hold in its hands the very body of Christ terrified him. But Luther was troubled even more by his fallenness and falling short of God’s standard. Could he be sure that he had remembered every single sin in the confessional? On one occasion Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s confessor, admonished him to forget his scruples and simply love God. ‘Love God?’ retorted Luther, ‘I hate him.’ Luther experienced the dark night of the soul, when he seemed to tremble on the verge of the abyss, when the rustling of a mere leaf was enough to produce in him the terrors of hell. Luther later described these bouts of dread as Anfechtungen, times of testing and fierce assault from the devil.

Luther found relief only through his ‘discovery of the Gospel’, which he made after a long, arduous study of the Scriptures. In the preface to the collection of his Latin writings in 1545, Luther recalled this process: ‘I did not learn my theology all at once, but I had to search deeper for it where my trials and temptations took me ... living, nay rather dying and being damned make a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculation.’ Luther wrestled with the Bible, especially the Psalms and Paul’s letter to the Romans. He stumbled over the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ in Romans 1:17. This verse brought him no comfort so long as he interpreted the righteousness of God as the exacting justice by which God condemned sinners. By focusing on the atoning work of Christ on the cross, Luther came to believe that the righteousness of God to which Paul referred was the righteousness secured by Christ alone. On the basis of the righteousness secured by Christ, God declared unworthy sinners acceptable in his sight. On the basis of this insight, Luther developed his doctrine of justification by faith alone (per solam fidem).

Luther claimed to have made this major exegetical breakthrough while studying the Bible in the tower of the monastery. His insight into the gracious character of God, he said, was like being born again. Scholars debate the exact date of Luther’s famous ‘Turmerlebnis’ (tower experience), with suggested dates ranging from 1512 to 1519. They were probably two separate developments: an initial breakthrough and conviction of God’s gracious mercy and salvation in Christ, and the later formulation of a mature doctrine of justification, a new standing with God based on the imputation of Christ’s alien righteousness by faith alone. This teaching became the guiding principle of Luther’s thought and the cornerstone of Reformation theology.

As early as 1509, Luther had begun to lecture on Peter Lombard’s Books of Sentences, the standard medieval textbook in theology. At the behest of Staupitz, he completed the requirements for his doctorate in theology in 1512 and was appointed Lectura in Biblia at the University of Wittenberg, succeeding Staupitz himself. Luther was influenced by the prevailing nominalism of the day as well as by the German mystical tradition and currents of humanistic thought. However, it was his regular study of the Bible that led him to question the theology and practices of the medieval Catholic church. In the winter of 1512, Luther began preparation for his lectures on the Psalms (1513–1515), which were followed in turn by those on Romans (1515–1516), Galatians (1516–1517), Hebrews (1517) and Psalms again (1518–1519). He later remarked: ‘In the course of this teaching the papacy slipped away from me.’

Luther’s conflict with the church of Rome was the result of both his biblical studies and his pastoral labours in Wittenberg. Within the space of five years, Luther was catapulted onto the stage of European history. The obscure monk became a famous theologian at the centre of an international movement that would leave the church in the West permanently divided.

On 31 October 1517 Luther posted on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg ninety-five theses protesting against the selling of indulgences and calling for a public debate on this issue. Luther was incensed because members of his own church had purchased indulgences from the Dominican Johann Tetzel. Luther attacked the assumption that forgiveness of sins or release from purgatory could be bought by such a monetary exchange. The sale of indulgences, Luther argued, undermined the sacrament of penance and reinforced a theology of cheap grace.

Using Erasmus’ Greek New Testament of 1516, Luther interpreted poenitentiam agite (‘do penance’) in the original biblical sense of metanoiete, ‘change you mind and heart; be converted’. Thus, in the first of his ninety-five theses, Luther declared: ‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘‘Repent’’, he meant for the entire life to be one of repentance.’ Other theses called into question the treasury of merits, the invocation of the saints, and the power of the papacy. Luther’s call for an academic debate became an ecclesiastical cause célèbre as his ninety-five theses were disseminated far and wide.

The pope sent Cardinal Cajetan to Germany to persuade Luther to recant his teachings, but to no avail. In April 1518 Luther further clarified his views in the Heidelberg Disputation, at which time he also won over Martin Bucer, later the Reformer of Strasbourg. On this occasion Luther challenged certain fundamental assumptions of medieval theology, which he called the theology of glory, in favour of a more Christocentric ‘theology of the cross’.

In July 1519 Luther confronted John Eck at the Leipzig Debate. In this famous exchange Luther set forth the Reformation principle sola scriptura. He aligned himself with certain statements made by John Hus, who had been condemned (unfairly, Luther thought) as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. In the course of the debate, Luther denied both the infallibility of church councils and the primacy of the pope. Only the Holy Scriptures, Luther asserted, could be trusted as the normative rule for Christian belief and church policy.

At first the papacy was slow to react to Luther’s challenge, thinking that the matter was just another quarrel among monks. By 1520, however, Luther’s campaign had become a serious crisis. Luther set forth his ideas with passion and clarity in three famous treatises (1520). In An Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation Luther exploited the rising national sentiment in Germany to demolish the ‘three walls’ that he believed the partisans of the pope had erected against true church reform: first, the claim that church officials were exempt from the authority of civil magistrates; secondly, the elevation of church tradition over Scripture; and, not least, the assertion that papal decrees took precedence over church councils.

On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church was published in October 1520. This treatise was a frontal assault on the medieval sacramental system. Luther found two, not seven, sacraments in the Bible. He denounced the mass as an abomination. And, finally, he redefined sacraments as visible signs of God’s holy promises.

On the Freedom of the Christian, Luther’s third great work of the year, further challenged the claims of the papal church system by emphasizing Christian liberty, the priesthood of all believers, the sufficiency of Scripture and the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This treatise also contained the basis of Luther’s ethics: good works are to flow from faith as its fruit. God’s grace is a radically free gift and cannot be earned by any merits of our own.

Luther was excommunicated in the papal bull Exsurge Domine, which he burned publicly along with the corpus of canon law in December 1520. He was then summoned to appear before the Diet of Worms, where he was asked to retract his writings. He refused to do so, claiming that his conscience was captive to the Word of God. Unless he was persuaded by reason and conscience, he said, he would not recant. His famous words, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’, became the watchword of the Reformation.

The 1520s witnessed the consolidation of the Lutheran Reformation, culminating in the famous Augsburg Confession of 1530. Following his defiant stand at the Diet of Worms, Luther had been taken secretly to the Wartburg Castle near Eisenach, where he lived in seclusion for several months under the protection of his territorial prince, Elector Frederick III. He spent his time wisely, however, translating the New Testament into German. His Das Newe Testament Deutsche was published in 1522. His work on the Old Testament took much longer, and his complete translation of the Bible appeared only in 1534. Luther’s translation of the Bible influenced the development of the German language in the same way as the King James Version influenced English.

The year 1525 was pivotal in Luther’s life and career. One of his most substantial theological works, On the Bondage of the Will, was published as a response to Erasmus’s earlier attack on the doctrine of predestination, On the Freedom of the Will (1524). For Erasmus, humans, though fallen, remained free to respond to grace and thus to cooperate in their salvation. Luther, however, saw the human will as enslaved by sin and Satan. We think we are free, he contended, but we only reinforce our bondage by indulging in sin. Grace releases us from this enslaving illusion and leads us into ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’. God wants us to love him freely, but we can do this only when we have been freed from captivity to Satan and self. After this fierce debate, neither Luther nor Erasmus spoke or wrote to one another again. Many humanists who had earlier applauded Luther’s attack on abuses in the church now went their separate way, unable to accept Luther’s radical Augustinian theology.

Also in 1525 many of Luther’s erstwhile followers abandoned his cautious approach to reform in favour of violent revolution (the bloody Peasants’ Revolt) led by Thomas Müntzer and other radicals. One happy note in Luther’s life at this time was his marriage to Katherine von Bora, a runaway nun, who brought stability, order and great joy into Luther’s harried life. Luther and his ‘Katie’ established the tradition of the Protestant parsonage as they presided over a bustling family and numerous student boarders in the remodelled monastery that became their home in Wittenberg.

Luther continued to shape the Reformation through his sermons, letters, hymns, polemical treatises and commentaries. His sermons on Genesis and the Gospel of John circulated widely as models of good Protestant preaching. He himself regarded his 1535 commentary on Galatians (which he called ‘my Katie von Bora’) as his greatest work. It was a ringing affirmation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the ‘article that makes or breaks the church’. In 1539 he published Of the Councils and Churches, which emphasized the catholicity of the Reformation and Protestant commitment to the trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the early church. Many of Luther’s off-the-cuff remarks were recorded by his students and published in several volumes as his Tischreden (Table Talks). Among his several hymns, Ein’ Feste Burg (‘A Mighty Fortress’) is best remembered, as the anthem of the Reformation.

As Luther grew older, his health began to fail. He was beset by numerous ailments, including kidney stones, gout, constipation, urine retention and depression. Near the end of his life, his attacks against his enemies became even more extreme. He excoriated the papacy, which he equated with the Antichrist. He was never reconciled with Zwingli and his followers, whose memorialist doctrine of the Lord’s Supper Luther regarded as a betrayal of the Christian faith. Most disturbing of all in the light of recent history were Luther’s virulent attacks against the Jews, whose refusal to embrace the gospel led him to call for their banishment from Germany. Although Luther’s disdain for the Jews had little in common with Hitler’s racist policies, it is not surprising that the Nazis cited Luther as a precursor of their own antisemitism.

Luther’s legacy does not lie primarily in the saintliness of his life. His faults were many; his vices were sometimes more visible than his virtues. Yet despite his foibles and sins and blindspots, he was able to conceive with remarkable clarity his belief in the paradoxical character of the human condition and the great possibility of human redemption through Jesus Christ. Luther’s true legacy is his belief in the gracious character of God. ‘What else was Luther,’ asked Karl Barth, ‘than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?’

Bibliography

R. H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: 1990); M. Brecht, Martin Luther, trans. J. L. Shaaf, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: 1985–1992); G. Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought, trans. R. A. Wilson (Philadelphia: 1970); T. George, Theology of the Reformers (Leicester: 1990); H. A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. E. Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: 1986); D. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Bloomington: 1986).

T. George

Larsen, Timothy ; Bebbington, D. W. ; Noll, Mark A.: Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals. Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill. : InterVarsity Press, 2003, S. 375