Philipp Melanchthon

Overview

Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) was a German humanist scholar and theologian who taught alongside Martin Luther at the University of Wittenberg and became his closest colleague in the Protestant Reformation.¹ In 1521 he published the Loci Communes, the first systematic exposition of the new Wittenberg theology, and in 1530 he drafted the Augsburg Confession, Lutheranism’s founding statement of faith.² He shared Luther’s doctrine of justification by grace alone throughout his life, but in the 1530s began to modify Luther’s teaching on the bondage of the will, a shift that hardened after Luther’s death into the synergism controversy that split the Lutheran movement he had helped found.^{3 4}

Life and Ministry

Melanchthon was born in 1497 at Bretten, near Karlsruhe. His great-uncle, the humanist scholar Johann Reuchlin, urged him to render his family name, Schwarzerd (“black earth”), into its Greek equivalent, Melanchthon.¹ After studying at Heidelberg and Tübingen, he was called to Wittenberg in 1518 as professor of Greek, where he was drawn into Luther’s theology and became his closest friend and most ardent supporter.^{1 2}

While Luther was preoccupied with his conflict with Rome, Melanchthon wrote the Loci Communes, published in 1521 as the first systematic theology of the Reformation.² In 1530 he represented the Wittenberg reformers at the Diet of Augsburg, where he drafted the Augsburg Confession and, after objections were raised against it, its formal defense, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession.² He remained at Wittenberg for the rest of his career, continuing to revise the Loci Communes through several editions until his death in 1560.²

Theological Contribution

The 1521 Loci Communes tracked Luther’s own theology closely: it denied the freedom of the will, distinguished sharply between law and gospel, attributed justification solely to God’s mercy, and held that faith itself, not any infused quality, constitutes righteousness before God.³ On the sinfulness of remaining corruption in believers, Melanchthon argued that God’s own law, not human judgment, defines what counts as sin: “We are saints insofar as we are spirit, insofar as we have been renewed. Sin still adheres in the flesh, the old man, the outer man. … There is nothing more evident than that sin is everything which resists the law of God.”² When the 1530 Augsburg Confession’s account of this point drew objections at the diet, Melanchthon defended it the same year in the Apology, appealing to Augustine’s own definition of original sin as concupiscence.²

Melanchthon’s doctrine of justification held, against later charges that it rested on an arbitrary or nominalist view of God, that God’s righteousness is itself absolute and uncompromising, and that only Christ’s imputed righteousness can satisfy it: “it is precisely Melanchthon’s commitment to the uncompromising justice of God that drives him to a doctrine of imputation,” grounded in Paul’s own arguments in Romans 4:1-8 and 2 Corinthians 5:21.³ Even in his last edition of the Loci he held that the law demands a perfect obedience fallen nature cannot supply, “since this corrupted nature of men cannot produce perfect obedience, as Paul so clearly testifies in Romans 7-8 … it follows that men are not pronounced righteous, that is, accepted before God by reason of the Law.”³

Beginning in the 1530s, however, Melanchthon revised the strict doctrine of necessity he had shared with Luther. The 1521 Loci had sounded “virtually identical” to Luther’s later Bondage of the Will, but by 1535 Melanchthon had begun to deny that all things happen by necessity.³ In its mature form this became a doctrine of synergism: “Melanchthon viewed the concurrently cooperative causes of conversion as the Word, the Spirit, and the cooperating human will.”⁵ This change did not disturb the doctrine of justification itself, which Melanchthon held to the end of his life, but it did introduce into Lutheran theology a role for human cooperation in conversion that Luther’s own earlier teaching had excluded.⁶

Historical Significance

After Luther’s death, Melanchthon’s departures from strict Lutheran orthodoxy produced open conflict within the movement. At the Leipzig Conference of 1548, he “explicitly declared his agreement with the Synergists, who maintain that in the regenerating act the human will co-operates with divine grace,” and he held a view of the Lord’s Supper “much more nearly conforming to opinions of the disciples of Zwingle and Calvin than generally prevailed in his own Church.”⁴ Both positions “gave great offence to the Old Lutherans, and occasioned protracted and bitter controversies,” a dispute the “Old or Strict Lutheran party” eventually won, stating their contrary position in the 1580 Formula of Concord.⁴ Melanchthon’s own party came to be called Philippists, after him, in the controversy that followed.

The Reformation era’s shared assumption that civil authority should suppress heresy also implicated Melanchthon in the 1553 execution of Michael Servetus at Geneva. As one historian put it, “every famous theologian of the period, Melanchton first of all, approved of the death by fire of Servetus.”⁷

Related Doctrines

• Augsburg Confession
• Justification
• Free will
• Lutheranism
• Martin Luther
• Synergism

References

1. The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. 7 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910), s.v. “Melanchthon, Philipp.” No library-held source treats Melanchthon’s early biography as its own subject; this article’s theological-content claims are sourced independently of this encyclopedia throughout. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Jared H. 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,” 86-87. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. 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), 100-104. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 100-101. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 43n109, quoting Thomas Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 99. ↩

6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004): “Luther’s anthropological orientation and Melanchthon’s synergism meant that predestination was set aside in Lutheranism, and eventually seventeenth-century Lutheran theologians approximated the Remonstrant confession.” ↩

7. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 301-2, quoting Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 129. ↩