biblical theology; and it was not as any kind of activist but as professor of theology that Luther launched his attack on the corruptions of the Church. He would later attribute his theological innovations to a transformative moment, a rebirth, which came to him while grappling with the doctrine of St Paul. ‘For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith:’ said Paul in Romans 1: 17, ‘as it is written: the just shall live by faith.’ Luther would later recount that, while lecturing on the Psalms, he finally came to understand this passage to mean that the righteousness of God was not revealed by punishment. Instead, in his grace, he declared the sinner righteous – or ‘justified’ him – by means of faith alone. Salvation was not, in other words, the uncertain outcome of a lifelong human effort but a free and loving gift of God.
Luther never resolved the question of predestination, and debate still rages about what he meant on this score. Lutherans would come to distinguish themselves from Calvinists on the grounds that, while both theologians believed in election by God, only Calvin insisted on a ‘double’ predestination, according to which God also chose those who are damned. Luther, they maintain, never taught that some were predestined to eternal damnation. Yet, if this is so, some would argue, Luther remained caught in an irreducible contradiction, which undermined belief in God’s total sovereignty. It might be better simply to accept that Luther deliberately refused to confront the conundrum of predestination, because preoccupation with this issue was, in his eyes, a distraction from acknowledging our sinfulness and from unwavering faith in God’s grace and salvation through Christ. This would also, as we shall see, have the effect of strengthening Luther’s doctrine of obedience to secular authority.
Whether or not Luther’s revelation was as sudden as he later made it out to be, the doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ represents a revolutionary moment in the history of Christianity. It is true that St Augustine had elaborated a doctrine of salvation that seemed to leave very little scope for repentance and good works as the road to salvation. For him, too, salvation was a free and unearned gift of God through grace; and he had a particularly uncompromising view of predestination. But Luther, as influenced as he was by St Augustine, was convinced that, once he had experienced his revelation on St Paul, he had put Augustine behind him.
For Augustine, justification by God’s grace was not something that happened all at once. It was a process that occupied a lifetime in this world and could only be completed in the next, while, for Luther, it was God’s immediate and unconditional gift in this life. Augustine may have been no less intent than was Luther on emphasizing that salvation was an unearned gift from God; but his formulation may have seemed open to the interpretation that human beings could in their lifetime, at least in some small way, cooperate in their own transformation by divine grace. In any case, whatever St Augustine had intended, the authority of the Catholic Church clearly depended on maintaining the sinner’s role in achieving salvation, with, of course, the necessary help of sacramental interventions by the Church; and Augustinian theology would be interpreted by medieval popes, such as Gregory the Great (590–604), in just this way. Luther would have none of that – not on the grounds that Christian virtue and good works meant nothing to him, but on the grounds that, while they should be undertaken freely for the love of God, they had nothing to do with earning God’s love and the free gift of justification. Sinners are saved not by their own righteousness but, all at once and in this life, by the righteousness of God, which means that, even while remaining sinners, they are ‘justified’ by faith alone. This doctrine had fatal implications for the sacramental functions of the Church, but its implications for obedience to secular authority may have been even greater.
Whenever Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith reached maturity – and commentators disagree on when and how it happened – Luther’s challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church did not at first depend on it. The most famous moment in his career, which is conventionally depicted as the Reformation’s true beginning, was his attack on the corruptions of the Church, and especially the practice of indulgences, in his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly called the 95 Theses, which he issued in 1517, nailing them, as tradition (if not historical evidence) tells us, to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. His target was the pope’s claims to powers that were, for Luther, God’s alone: the power to award salvation or to affect the scope and duration of penance in the afterlife. This attack on the pope did not require, nor did Luther invoke, the doctrine of justification by faith as he would later formulate it.
Luther would soon be threatened by a papal ban, which would lead to his excommunication; and his personal fate became enmeshed in public conflicts between the Church and secular authorities over the distribution of temporal power. His immediate response to papal threats was a series of treatises in 1520, the first of which was his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Here, his theological preoccupations shifted, significantly, from the disposition of power between God and the pope to the conflicts between the Church – specifically the pope, together with the Holy Roman Emperor – and German secular authorities.
This would be followed in rapid succession by two other treatises, laying the groundwork for his mature theology: On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which, written in strongly vituperative terms, attacked the papacy and challenged the sacramental functions of the Church; and On the Freedom of a Christian, which, though framed in more conciliatory language and even dedicated to Pope Leo X, outlined the principles that would constitute the doctrine of justification by faith. Luther here elaborated on the dualism, or the paradox, at the root of his theology: the simultaneity of human sin and divine justification, the nature of humanity as irreducibly sinful yet saved.
Human beings, Luther argued, are at once sinners by nature and saints by faith. Redeemed by God, they may freely undertake service to others; but, while Luther can be interpreted to mean that justification by faith is simultaneously a free commitment to good works, he insists that ordinary human beings are free as any lord or king and subject to no overlord in matters affecting the soul. Yet, at the same time, as he would soon make clear, the irreducible sinfulness of humanity requires temporal authorities to whom all Christians owe obedience. It is true that, in these early works, Luther not only challenged the division of the world into temporal and spiritual jurisdictions but established the principle that all baptized Christians are equally priests; and the idea of a universal priesthood would be taken up by radical forces as a justification of rebellions far beyond anything envisaged by Luther himself, including the peasant revolt. But this radical appropriation of Lutheran doctrine should not disguise the fact that Luther’s account of the simultaneous duality of sin and justification entailed both a denial of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and an insistence on strict obedience to secular authority.
In 1521, Luther was called before an assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire at the Diet of Worms; and, refusing to recant the views expressed in the 95 Theses and other writings, he was outlawed by the emperor, Charles V. Under threat of arrest, he disappeared for a time. Despite imperial orders for his apprehension and punishment, declaring it a crime to shield him, he was offered protection at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach by a leading German prince, Frederic III, Elector of Saxony. It was then that he began his translation of the Bible into German, which would be printed in 1534 and can reasonably be regarded as his most far-reaching accomplishment, with influences well beyond the German language or Lutheran theology.
The Doctrine of Obedience to Secular Authority
In Luther’s treatises of 1520, ideas essential to the Reformation, challenging the spiritual authority of the Church, its monopoly on the interpretation of scripture and its sole right to call a council of the Church, were formulated with direct reference to the relation between ecclesiastical and secular authority. Whatever effects these treatises may have had in undermining ecclesiastical authority, their implications for obedience to secular government were very different. To challenge the claims of the Church as privileged mediator between humanity and God, it might have been enough to reject, as Luther did in the 95 Theses, its efforts to usurp divine powers of punishment and absolution. Challenging the Church’s claims to temporal power and its usurpation of secular authority
