Martin Luther: ‘Confessional’ Theologian

The nature of ‘confessional’ theology

Understanding that Luther’s theology was a theology of the confessional—a ‘confessional’ theology in the sense that it was always focussed on bringing the comfort of the gospel to unquiet consciences— also helps to explain a feature of his writing which has often been remarked upon: that Luther was not a systematic theologian. ⁴ Unlike Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, he left us no handy compendium of his thought. His theology has to be pieced together from his sermons, lectures, treatises, letters, prefaces, catechisms, hymns, table-talk, and the other disjecta membra of his literary corpus written at different times, and in different circumstances, throughout a long career. His thoughtlessness in this respect has proved a grave inconvenience to generations of undergraduates assigned to write essays on his theology. In his own lifetime, it allowed his literary opponents, King Henry VIII among them, to catalogue his inconsistencies and accuse him of self-contradiction. More significantly, it led after his death to internecine strife among his followers, as they fought over the true meaning of his theological patrimony, each side able to appeal to different proof-texts which were all genuinely Luther’s. No wonder Shakespeare called them ‘spleeny Lutheran[s]’.

Much of this confusion could have been avoided had Luther penned a Summa theologiae or an Institutes of the Christian Religion. But Luther was not a systematician. His writings were occasional; more to the point, they were personal, practical, and consoling. Because he intended his writings merely to be the application of God’s Word to specific individuals in specific situations, he meant them to be used and then thrown away, not preserved for posterity. In what must surely stand as one of the most curmudgeonly publicity puffs in publishing history, he introduced the 1539 Wittenberg edition of his German-language works thus: ‘I cannot prevent [the publishers] from wanting to collect and publish my works through the press (small honour as it is to me), although it is against my will. I have no choice. But let them risk the labour and the expense of the project.’ ⁵ Luther saw no need to write a systematic presentation of his theology, because a much better one than he could write already existed: the Bible. What qualified Luther, in his own eyes, to offer consolation to the perplexed was that he had been there himself. Indeed, he went so far as to declare that one could not be a theologian without having experienced such perplexity: ‘one becomes a theologian not by understanding, reading, or speculating, but by living—or rather by dying and being damned’; ⁶ ‘as soon as God’s Word takes root and grows in you, the devil will harry you, and will make a real doctor [of theology] of you, and by his assaults will teach you to seek and love God’s Word’. ⁷

The making of a confessional theologian

It is significant that Luther’s reminiscences of his early life are sketchy (‘I was born at Eisleben and baptized in St Peter’s there. I don’t remember it myself’), ⁸ and that it was left to his associate Philip Melanchthon to investigate his origins more fully. We know much more from Luther’s own pen about his early spiritual difficulties. These began after he had been an Augustinian friar for some time. He testifies that at first ‘the Devil was quiet’. But then he began to be afflicted by ‘assaults’ (tentationes in Latin, Anfechtungen in German). These were not the temptations one might expect in a young friar: ‘in the monastery I did not think about women, or money, or possessions; instead my heart trembled and fidgeted about whether God would bestow his grace on me.’ His concerns centred on the sacrament of confession.

When I was a monk I tried with all diligence to live according to the rule, and I used to be contrite, to confess and sedulously perform my allotted penance. And yet my conscience could never give me certainty. I always doubted and said ‘You did not do that correctly. You were not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’ The more I tried to remedy an uncertain, weak, and afflicted conscience with the traditions of men, the more each day I found it more uncertain, weaker, more troubled. ⁹

One of the remedies Luther turned to was the writings of Gabriel Biel, whose theology of salvation was an attempt to resolve one of the knottiest problems of western Christianity: if, as St Augustine had taught, we are saved by God’s grace, and can in no sense earn or merit our salvation by what we do, does this mean that our good works and good behaviour are not rewarded at all? And if good behaviour is not rewarded, what incentive is there for Christians to behave themselves? Biel affirmed with Augustine that sinful men and women can be saved only by God’s grace. But he asserted that, as part of this grace, God had freely entered into a covenant with us, by which he graciously agreed to regard our best efforts (which are of course totally without value in his sight) as if they really were valuable enough in themselves to oblige him to reward them on a proper, meritorious basis. This arrangement was summed up in Biel’s slogan: ‘God does not deny his grace to those who do what is in them to love God above all things by their own natural powers’. ¹⁰

Biel’s dictum was intended to encourage Christians in their discipleship, but in Luther’s case it backfired. Luther felt he had no way of knowing for certain that his good works, his contrition and so on, did indeed represent the best he could do. And if they were not the best he could do, surely God was entitled to withhold his grace from him? And, worse than that, if God was not for him, he must have been against him. And so Luther found himself oppressed by the thought that God was positively angry towards him: that he was predestined to damnation. This experience was itself so desolating that it was tantamount to an experience of hell.

The only person who was able to offer Luther help was the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars and sometime dean of theology at Wittenberg (the university town where Luther had moved in 1511), Johann von Staupitz. ¹¹ Staupitz emphasized the importance of the cross of Christ. When a priest gave absolution, he generally concluded with some such formula as ‘And whatever I have omitted, may the cross of Christ supply.’ In other words, the emphasis was on the penance which the penitent was to perform, and the work of Christ on the cross was invoked chiefly as an insurance policy to indemnify the priest in case he had imposed a more lenient penance than was appropriate. Staupitz turned that order of priority upside down: it was, he showed Luther, by the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary that our sins are primarily forgiven: it is the part played by our good works either in recompensing God for sins committed against him, or in increasing our merit in his sight, which is secondary.

This put Luther on the right track. But it did not free him from his ‘assaults’. Up to about the year 1515, when he was 32, he seems to have understood forgiveness in these terms, namely that we are made right (or ‘justified’) with God partly through Christ’s merits and partly through our own. In fact, this was also the teaching of St Augustine and therefore the official teaching of the Church, though for obvious pastoral reasons it put far more emphasis in practice on the human contribution. His ‘Reformation breakthrough’, the point at which all his anxieties about trying—and failing—to please God fell away and a new understanding of how God deals with us dawned on him, took place at some time between 1514 and 1519. (There is dispute about the exact date. Luther himself put it at 1519, which hardly anyone accepts, though a convincing case can be made for 1518.) It occurred while he was wrestling with the meaning of Romans 1:17. This phrase the ‘righteousness of God’ alarmed him. All the biblical commentators with which he was familiar interpreted it in its ‘active’ sense, that is, that righteousness by which God is righteous, and by which he punishes unrighteous sinners. How could God’s punishment be what the gospel—good news—reveals? ‘At last,’ Luther wrote just before his death, remembering this incident ‘As I meditated day and night, God showed mercy’.

I turned my attention to the connection of the words, namely ‘the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written: the righteous shall live by faith’. And there I began to understand that the righteousness of God is the righteousness in which a just man lives by the gift of God, in other words by faith, and that what Paul means is this: the righteousness of God, revealed in the Gospel, is passive, in other words that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’. At this I felt myself straightway born afresh and to have entered through the open gates into paradise itself. There and then the whole face of scripture was changed. I ran through the scriptures as memory served, and collected the same analogy in other words, for example the ‘work of God’ (that which God works in us), the ‘power of God’ (by which he makes us strong), the ‘wisdom of God’ (by which he makes us wise), the ‘strength of God’, the ‘salvation of God’, and the ‘glory of God’. And now, in the same degree as I had formerly hated the word ‘righteousness of God’, even so did I begin to love it and extol it as the sweetest word of all; thus was this place in St Paul to me the very gate of paradise. ¹²

This breakthrough had enormous consequences for Luther’s understanding of justification. He was now able to part company with the teaching of Staupitz and indeed of Augustine himself, that we are justified partly by God and partly by our own efforts. Rather, he believed, our efforts carry no weight with God. Indeed, they are sinful because they spring from our sinful nature. But God, entirely gratuitously, has given us a righteousness which is not ours but his.

Luther’s transformed perception of God as a merciful father, not a vindictive judge, enabled him to see the gospel as good news. But this in itself does not explain what caused him to become so valued as a spiritual counsellor. For that, we need to be aware that his breakthrough, though represented by Luther in his late memoir as a sudden break with the past, was in fact the result of a gradual process. Staupitz had directed Luther to undertake intensive biblical study, leading to his doctorate and his appointment as professor of biblical studies at Wittenberg university. This had exposed him not just to the biblical text (and eventually to the Greek text of the New Testament as newly established by Erasmus) but also to biblical commentators, pre-eminently Augustine. As was customary, in order to balance the academic fare with more directly spiritual nourishment, Staupitz also prescribed mystical works, including the sermons of the Dominican Johann Tauler and an anonymous tract, known since Luther’s day as the Theologia Germanica, thought at that time also to be by Tauler. ¹³

We can trace Luther’s intellectual development between 1513 and 1518 in some detail through the surviving notes for his lectures on the Psalms, Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews. Luther’s debt to Staupitz’s reading list as he grappled with questions about sin and grace is evident from these notes. From Augustine, and from Tauler in particular, he learned that the sense of unworthiness through sin which had so afflicted him was not a delusion, or something to be dismissed by an impatient confessor as a penitent’s over-scrupulosity, but was an essential first step to receiving grace. For Tauler, the greater the descent (into the recognition of one’s own nothingness), the greater the eventual ascent (into oneness with the Godhead). Luther would change the vocabulary and radically modify the theology, but would retain the essential movement to which Tauler testified: God’s Word as Law first crushes our sense of self-righteousness, and then, when (and only when) we have despaired of pleasing God by our own powers, his Word as Gospel offers Christ’s righteousness as a free gift.

Luther’s consolatory booklets always started from the troubled conscience’s overwhelming sense of sinfulness and affirmed it, but managed to turn it into its opposite, the assurance of grace. He learned this method from his mentor, Staupitz. When oppressed by the conviction that God hated him and that he was predestined to damnation, Luther had been comforted by Staupitz’s assurance that this very conviction was itself a sign of election: God afflicted only the elect with such thoughts, to test them, and left untroubled those whom he intended would perish! We can see Luther apply the same technique in his unfortunately little-known consolation pamphlet, A Sermon on the Worthy Preparation of the Heart for Receiving the Sacrament of the Eucharist, printed in 1518 and possibly based on a sermon given on Maundy Thursday of that year. Addressed to those who considered themselves unworthy, even after being shriven, to receive holy communion, the pamphlet assured them that such a state of mind, far from disqualifying one from the sacrament, was in fact the only sign of a worthy disposition. Those who considered themselves worthy of receiving so great a thing thereby demonstrated their unworthiness. The sermon ends with a revealing personal testimony.

I have spoken at length about this because I myself know of the terrors which many preachers have unleashed upon the consciences of Christians. They have made Moses out of Christ, law out of grace, and poison out of balm, by falsely imagining that Christ is a taker rather than a giver, an avenger rather than a propitiator, in short one who condemns rather than one who saves, so that nothing remains in our hearts of the glory of his name (which is ‘Jesus Christ’, or ‘Saviour Anointed’), except the bare sound. Terrible threats of judgement should not therefore be directed to any but the stubborn and insensitive; to the fearful and scrupulous, the more joyful promises of mercy need to be declared, because different ills demand different cures. ¹⁴

This pamphlet (which should not be confused with a similarly-titled one of 1521) was reprinted in Latin a further seven times, and in German a total of thirteen times, within the space of eighteen months—a testimony to the number of ‘fearful and scrupulous’ readers who derived comfort from its message.

The protest of a confessional theologian

The ninety-five theses which Luther nailed to the door of the castle-church at Wittenberg were an invitation to an academic debate, not a manifesto for revolution: the door was used as the university’s general noticeboard, and would have been covered with similar notices for forthcoming disputations and other events. Nonetheless, Luther’s desire to have the theory and practice of indulgences reconsidered went beyond mere academic curiosity. He was greatly exercised by the deleterious effects of indulgences on the Christian life more generally, as is evident from the theses themselves, and from the fact that he sent a copy of the theses, along with a fuller and clearer statement of his own views, to the Archbishop of Mainz.

An indulgence, or Ablass in German, is literally a ‘let-off’ (typically a commutation of punishment into a financial contribution) and this explains Luther’s chief problem with them: why should disciples of Christ wish to be let off punishment? Should they not rather seek to follow their Master along the via dolorosa of suffering? Although there is no clear evidence from the theses that Luther had yet developed his distinctive teaching on justification by faith alone, there is much evidence of the fruits of his reading of the sources set by Staupitz. The opening thesis reflects his biblical studies, especially his encounter with Erasmus’s New Testament in Greek:

[1.] When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent’, he meant that the whole life of believers should be one of penitence.

The final theses reflect his reading of the mystics:

[94.] Christians should be exhorted to seek earnestly to follow Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hell. [95.] And let them thus be more confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through a false assurance of peace. ¹⁵

And despite the academic nature of the theses, Luther’s pastoral concern is at the forefront in many of the intervening theses. He is particularly concerned to counter the excesses and bad theology of the indulgence preachers: theses 42 to 51 all begin with the refrain ‘Christians should be taught …’, while theses 81 to 91 list the ‘conscientious questionings of the laity’ which indulgences themselves can occasion. ¹⁶

In the event, it was another aspect of Luther’s attack on indulgences, his questioning of the extent of papal jurisdiction over souls in Purgatory, which attracted the attention of the authorities and led to his initial censure. ¹⁷ This was a fateful move, because it obliged Luther to direct his energies into examining, and eventually rejecting, the power of the papacy as a whole. ¹⁸ But it should not be forgotten that the protest which brought Luther onto the world stage was not about the pope or even about the Church’s authority more widely, but about a pastoral issue with a potential for confusing and misleading conscientious lay people.

The ministry of a confessional theologian

A comparatively overlooked and underused source of information about Luther’s theology is the collection of 2,800 or so letters of his which survive. They cover the full range of activities of a busy academic, churchman, controversialist, and paterfamilias. But a sizeable proportion consists of responses to correspondents who have requested advice on a variety of subjects ranging from the personal and domestic to weighty matters of state. If one had a wayward son, a daughter pursuing an unsuitable attachment, a nagging wife, a violent husband, or a poltergeist sharing one’s house, one wrote to Dr Luther for help. ¹⁹ His guidance on such issues was sought partly because of his eminence as a public figure, but more usually on account of a reputation for wisdom and spiritual discernment established through his pastoral writings.

Luther’s letters afford just one insight into his contribution towards building up the evangelical community in Electoral Saxony and beyond. Others are provided by his Bible translation, sermons, liturgies, hymns, and catechisms. In all these genres, Luther’s pastoral concern with the consoling power of the Word of God as he had experienced it is evident and, indeed, uppermost. It is particularly transparent in his re-ordering of the catechism. Here he transposed the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments from their traditional positions in the catechetical order to create a new sequence: Decalogue-Creed-Lord’s Prayer. This order reflected Luther’s ordo salutis: the sinner is first crushed by the Word of God as Law, then raised up by the Gospel, which allows her to call upon God as Father. ²⁰ It also reflects the process of Luther’s own conversion experience and, in that respect, bears comparison with Ignatius Loyola’s similar universalizing of personal experience in his Spiritual Exercises. Less immediately obvious, however, is the extent to which the Lutheran order also reflects the traditional stages of the mystical life (purification, illumination, union). Here we have not just an echo of Luther’s indebtedness to Tauler, but also a remarkable experiment in ‘democratizing’ the mystical life: what was formerly reserved only to the most spiritually advanced is now made the common property of all Christians. In its quiet, unheralded way, this is arguably one of Luther’s most remarkable achievements as a pastoral theologian.

The legacy of a confessional theologian

There are of course dangers in emphasizing Luther’s pastoral activity over the other aspects of his life and thought. One is that it might seem to diminish his role as a reformer, relegating his achievements in that regard to a sort of by-product of his main occupation. This was, after all the man who, as Bible translator, liturgist, hymnwriter and homilist did for Germany what it took Tyndale, Coverdale, Cranmer, Isaac Watts, and both of the Wesleys to do for England. But I think that is not too far from the truth, at least as Luther saw it. After all, he famously described his own contribution to the Reformation as sleeping, or drinking beer with Melanchthon and Amsdorf: all he did was to teach, preach, and write, and God’s Word accomplished the rest. ²¹ Another danger is a more serious one, and that is that by highlighting Luther’s pastoral work, one reinforces the view that Luther’s theology was essentially individualistic rather than ecclesial, concerned only with the Christian’s personal relationship with God, and leading ultimately to the privatized, conservative, and socially quietist tendency in Lutheranism which Karl Barth, among many others, famously criticized. It would be unfortunate if that were the case, as Luther’s theology cannot be regarded as individualistic in that sense. It was, however, certainly socially conservative. Luther, notoriously, was unable to challenge the cultural norms of his day other than those which related to the tyranny of the Church over tortured consciences, as is demonstrated by his attitudes towards the role of women in society and towards Jews.

On balance, however, I think that more is gained than lost by, at least occasionally, focussing on Luther’s pastoral theology. It is a useful corrective to depictions of the heroic Luther which can still be found from time to time. And it offers sufficient material for contemplating the ‘strangeness’ of Luther to our own times, preventing us (especially the Protestants among us) from too easily assuming that he is ‘just like us’. Above all, it obliges us to evaluate Luther’s significance for his own day and only then to consider his significance for ours. Through his writings for those with bruised consciences, Luther stressed that Christianity is not a set of performance targets to be met, of hurdles to be jumped, but a relationship, with God, through Jesus Christ. In a society in which relationships are becoming increasingly commodified, and in a church increasingly eager to set up barriers to and hurdles for others, this message still needs to be heard today.

Further reading

Of the making of many books about Luther there is, seemingly, no end and the deluge will only increase as we approach the quincentenary of the nailing up of the indulgence theses in 2017. The reason is partly his intrinsic importance for world history, partly the dramatic appeal of his life story, and partly the result of a fact alluded to above—because he left behind no single summation of his thought, each new generation of Luther scholars attempts to provide the key to unlock it. Like many people, I can trace my abiding interest in this subject to an encounter with Roland H. Bainton’s classic biography Here I Stand. ²² Although it is now nearly sixty-five years old, and long past the statutory retirement age for biographies, it is still a book I often recommend to readers looking for a readable, single-volume introduction to the man as well as to his thought. It is not uncritical but, as the title suggests, it does rather push the image of Luther as the heroic ‘rebel with a cause’ that I have gently chided in this sketch. A useful corrective is Heiko Oberman’s justly famous portrayal of the ‘apocalyptic’ Luther who cannot easily be fitted in to our modern notions of an inspirational religious leader. ²³ The definitive modern biography is that by Martin Brecht in three volumes. ²⁴

There are also many accounts of Luther’s theology. For many years, that by Paul Althaus was the standard reference, though the accounts by two English Methodists, Philip Watson and Gordon Rupp, have always rightly been held in the very highest esteem. ²⁵ It should indeed be noted that some of the most insightful treatments of Luther’s thought have been by scholars writing from outside the Lutheran tradition, not least among them the American Roman Catholic Jared Wicks and the Anglicans James Atkinson (English) and Alister McGrath (Northern Irish). ²⁶ Althaus has now been supplanted by Bernhard Lohse. ²⁷ There are numerous brief introductions to Luther’s thought, though an interesting development in recent years has been the emergence of the multi-contributor volume, testimony perhaps to the fact that the field of Luther studies is now so large and diverse that no one scholar can be expected to master it. ²⁸ The approach I have taken in this brief sketch owes much to works by Ebeling, Hamm, Leppin, Wengert, and Wicks. ²⁹

As for books by Luther, he wished oblivion upon all his works except his reply to Erasmus (The Bondage of the Will) and his catechisms. But he wrote so well that there was never much chance of that happening. Historically, Luther was ill-served by translations of his work into English, both a symptom and a cause of his long neglect in Britain. (For many years he was known only by his lectures on Galatians and the Table Talk translated by the swashbuckling soldier of fortune Captain Henry Bell, though even this thin fare was enough to nourish a notable early nineteenth-century ‘Luther renaissance’ involving S.T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Joseph and Isaac Milner, Julius and Augustus Hare, Thomas Carlyle, and Susanna and Catherine Winkworth.) But since the later nineteenth century, multi-volume collections of Luther’s works in English have regularly crossed the Atlantic from the United States, with its sizeable population of anglophone Lutherans. It is a cause of rejoicing that the greatest of these, the generally excellent ‘American Edition’ of Luther’s Works (55 vols, 1955-1986) has recently resumed publication under the general editorship of Benjamin Mayes. Although a great deal of Luther in English is now available online, accessing the most useful and reliable material requires sifting and common sense: ‘Project Wittenberg’ is a dependable place to start, though its current interface is very much Web 1.0. It is regrettable that Gordon Rupp’s and Ben Drewery’s volume in the ‘Documents of Modern History’ series—a slim but judicious selection of extracts from a variety of sources, not just Luther’s main writings—is no longer in print, as it provides a superb orientation for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the reformer’s works.

Augustine and Manichaean Christianity

Johannes van Oort (ed.), Augustine and Manichaean Christianity: Selected Papers from the First South African Conference on Augustine of Hippo, University of Pretoria, 24-26 April 2012, NHMS 83 (Leiden: Brill, 2012. €103,00//$133.00. pp. xv + 296. ISBN: 978-90-04-25477-0).

This volume arises as part of a new perspective on the relationship between Augustinian and Manichaean studies, which has in part been generated by new manuscript discoveries since the 1970s onwards (pp. ix-x). Manichaeaism is seen not as a separate religious movement, but as a ‘deviant church [that] was … a real and persisting Christian threat’ (p. xi). From this starting point, this volume brings together eleven essays that explore this closer relationship.

Therefore, in the first chapter, Jason BeDuhn sees Manichaean religion as fundamental in Augustine’s path to Catholic Christianity. When he in turn left behind the Manichaean movement, this resulted in his writings that discuss several of the debated issues that divided the two movements (pp. 1-18). In the third chapter (pp. 37-49), Franzmann looks at Augustine’s treatment of almsgiving of food and drink in Manichean practice. It is contended that such practices function sociologically both in terms of universalizing and particularizing the movement. A couple of chapters later (pp. 73-86), Gardner probes the Manichaean notion of the ‘vision of God’, especially as it impinged on their daily prayer practices. It is argued that Augustine’s ‘Christian’ thought about the heavenly realm, ‘the city of God’, is influenced by this Manichaean concept. Thus Gardner observes that ‘[i]tis true that Augustine rejected the Manichaean practice of his youth. But how successful he was in freeing himself from this heritage remains an intriguing and open question’ (p. 86).

The other essays in this volume also have very stimulating insights concerning the relationship between Manichaean and Augustinian thought. While it has only been possible to provide an overview of a few of the contributions, the volume as a whole is a coherent collection that makes a significant contribution to this neglected area of study.

PAUL FOSTER

School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh