Theopedia

Martin Luther

Overview

Martin Luther (November 10, 1483 - February 18, 1546) was a German Augustinian monk and theologian whose doctrine of justification by faith alone launched the Protestant Reformation. Samuel Waldron calls him “the widely recognized pioneer of the Reformation,” the figure through whom the doctrine of sola fide first took its distinctive Reformation shape, even though Waldron judges John Calvin the more careful and systematic expositor of the same doctrine.1

Life and Ministry

Luther entered the University of Erfurt’s law school in 1501 but left it for an Augustinian monastery after a storm nearly killed him. According to James Atkinson’s account, “he and his companion were overtaken by a violent storm, when Martin had the horrifying experience of seeing his friend struck dead by lightning… In this Luther believed he saw the hand of God in His wrath; and in great fear, and gratitude for his preservation, he immediately offered himself to God and His service.”2 He was ordained in 1507 and began teaching theology at Wittenberg the following year, earning his doctorate in 1512.

Monastic life did not bring Luther the peace he sought. Waldron describes the years that followed as dominated by Anfechtung, “an unnerving and enervating fear that God had turned his back on him once and for all… and had abandoned him to suffer the pains of hell.”3 Jaroslav Pelikan locates the origin of Luther’s mature theology in this same struggle: “Luther’s discovery of justification by faith took place in the struggle of his own conscience as it sought an answer to the question, ‘How do I obtain a God who is gracious to me?’”4 His confessor, Johann von Staupitz, pointed him toward “the wounds of Jesus,” but Waldron notes that “Luther’s spiritual needs exceeded Staupitz’s ability to meet them.”5

Luther eventually traced his distress to the theological system in which he had been trained. Late medieval scholasticism, mediated to him through Gabriel Biel’s via moderna, held that justification came about through an infused grace joined to human merit, a position Waldron summarizes as simultaneously “sola gratia and solis operibus” (by grace alone and by works alone).6 Jared Heath Moore dates Luther’s conversion “to the Protestant gospel between 1513 and 1517,” as his lectures on the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians moved him away from this system.7

In 1517 Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences by the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel. Moore recounts the episode: “Tetzel sold indulgences under the guise that if the laity purchased them, they would free their loved ones from purgatory. Luther’s rhetoric in his 95 Theses was cutting and opposed the Pope publicly. Yet, the laity was largely on his side, and the Reformation spread as a result.”7 Rome’s response came in 1520, when Pope Leo X condemned Luther as a heretic in the bull Exsurge Domine, citing among other things his teaching on original sin and concupiscence alongside the indulgence controversy.7

Theological Contribution

Justification by faith alone

Luther’s central and lasting contribution was a doctrine of justification built on what Waldron calls an “alien righteousness,” a righteousness that comes from outside the sinner entirely rather than being infused into him. Commenting on Romans 1:17, Luther “contrasts the righteousness of humanity, which is the result of works, with the righteousness of God, which is ‘by faith alone, by which the Word of God is believed.’”8 For late medieval theology, faith had value only insofar as it was “formed by charity,” an inward moral transformation; Luther’s insistence on faith alone, defined instead as that which simply believes God’s word, moved “the locus of divine saving action from within the sinner to the external promise of God.”9

Luther made the point explicit in his comments on Romans 4:7: “all our good is outside of us [extrinsecum nobis], and this good is Christ… And none of these things are in us except through faith and hope in Him… Thus in the Song of Solomon the church confesses that she is often naked and described as having no other desire than for her Bridegroom.”9 His own lectures on Romans state the same extrinsic logic even more sharply: “The saints are intrinsically always sinners, therefore they are always extrinsically justified… they are before themselves and in truth unrighteous, but before God they are righteous because he reckons them so.”10 Waldron describes the resulting concept of faith as fides apprehensiva, “a grasping… of a righteousness extrinsic to ourselves,” in contrast to the Augustinian and medieval view in which a faith formed by love itself constitutes the righteousness by which one is justified.11

The Bondage of the Will

In 1525 Luther answered Erasmus’s 1524 defense of free will, De Libero Arbitrio, with De Servo Arbitrio (“On the Bondage of the Will”), a title chosen to directly oppose Erasmus’s own.12 Loraine Boettner notes that Luther’s tone in the controversy went beyond even Calvin’s own polemical language: “Calvin… was surpassed by Luther in the use of harsh language as will readily be seen by an examination of the latter’s work, The Bondage of the Will, which was a polemic written against the freewill ideas of Erasmus.”13

The Lord’s Supper

Luther’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper became one of the Reformation’s deepest and most lasting fractures. Herman Bavinck describes how the German and Swiss Reformations reached “schism and controversy” over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Supper, a dispute “settled neither by the Marburg conference on religion nor by the mediating attempts of Bucer on the Reformed side and Melanchthon on the Lutheran side. People just did not understand one another when it came to the ‘true presence.’”14 Against Zwingli’s memorialist view, Calvin himself “put himself on Luther’s side,” holding that “Christ is present in the Supper and is received there, not physically and locally, to be sure, but certainly truly and essentially, with his whole person, including his body and blood.” Bavinck locates the remaining disagreement between Luther and Calvin narrowly: “not over the fact but only over the manner of that presence.”14

Catechisms

Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms became durable doctrinal standards cited well beyond Lutheranism itself. Charles Hodge quotes the Larger Catechism’s statement of baptism’s purpose directly: that it serves “ut homines salvos faciat” (“that it may save men”), delivering the baptized “a peccati, mortis et diaboli tyrannide” (from the tyranny of sin, death, and the devil).15

Historical Significance

Despite real differences in precision between Luther’s own writing and the more systematic treatments that followed him, Waldron argues that “substantial unity exists between… Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation tradition with regard to justification sola fide.”1 Luther’s Eucharistic theology had the opposite effect: it permanently divided the Lutheran and Reformed wings of the Reformation and shaped the mediating position Calvin later staked out between Luther and Zwingli.14 His debate with Erasmus over the will likewise set lasting terms for later Reformed argument about ability and free agency.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), chap. 2, “Sola Fide in Luther,” 14. ↩ ↩2

  2. James Atkinson, quoted in Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 23. ↩

  3. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 22-23. ↩

  4. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 22. ↩

  5. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 23-24. ↩

  6. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 24-25. ↩

  7. Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” 83. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Three Prominent Reformers on Justification,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 78-79. ↩

  9. O’Kelley, “Three Prominent Reformers on Justification,” 79. ↩ ↩2

  10. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 36-37. ↩

  11. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification, 37. ↩

  12. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), chap. 9, “Free Agency,” 289. ↩

  13. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 292. ↩

  14. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  15. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. 20, “The Means of Grace,” 602. ↩