Remembering the Reformation

Martin Luther and Catholic Theology

Declan Marmion, Salvador Ryan, Gesa E. Thiessen, Declan Marmion, Salvador Ryan, Gesa E. Thiessen

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506423371
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506423289
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The dramatic unfolding of events after Martin Luther's revolutionary act led to the ultimate, and seemingly irreparable, fissure with Roman Catholicism: excommunication and schism. From the point of that rupture, up to and including most of the 20th century, the history of theological and ecclesial readings of Luther has been controlled largely by a rubric assuming the inevitability of fracture and the portrayal of Luther as a veritable bete noire of Catholic history and theology. Remembering the Reformation enters into this contested history and pursues a more nuanced and considered reading of Luther's relationship with the Catholic tradition, from his Augustinian roots and medieval training to his reading of scripture and investigations of ecclesiology, as well as his continued relevance and challenge to Catholic theology today. An international consortium of scholars, Catholic and Protestant, contribute to this volume and provide a thoughtful, textured reimagining of Luther for an ecumenical future. Marking the 500th anniversary of the inauguration of Luther's movement for reform, this volume aims to bring Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals into conversation in a shared, but distinct, theological space.

2

Luther and the Medieval Tradition

3

Luther and the Legacy of Augustine

Phillip Cary

“What have we yet to learn?” I suggest that the best thing for anyone to learn from Luther’s theology is an explicit awareness of the difference between two kinds of discourse, law and gospel. This is a development of the legacy of Augustine, who had a great deal to say about the difference between law and grace. When Luther thinks of this difference he speaks of law and gospel, because he takes the gospel to be an external means of grace, having a kind of sacramental efficacy. As he puts it in one sermon, “the Gospel words and stories are a kind of sacrament, that is, sacred signs through which God brings about, in those who believe, whatever the story signifies.”^[1] Since what the gospel stories signify is Christ, his grace, and his righteousness, to believe the gospel is to receive the grace and righteousness of God in Christ. But because this sacramental (and, in that sense, quite Catholic) view of the gospel goes beyond anything Augustine teaches, it is from Luther rather than Augustine that we must learn the law/gospel distinction.

About the law, Luther agrees wholeheartedly with Augustine’s teaching against the Pelagians, presented in classic form in Augustine’s treatise On the Spirit and the Letter. The law tells us what to do but cannot give us the power to do it, Augustine teaches, for a sinner’s heart can only produce an outward, servile obedience to God’s law driven by fear of punishment, not the true, inward obedience that is motivated by love. So the way the law helps sinners is not by making them righteous but by showing them their unrighteousness, humbling them and terrifying them, so that they may flee to the grace of God, which alone grants not only the forgiveness of sins but also a delight in doing God’s will, making it possible to genuinely love God and neighbour.^[2] Thus it is grace, not law, that enables us to fulfil the law. Where Luther departs from Augustine is in how he flees to grace. Augustine flees by seeking grace in prayer, whereas Luther flees by finding grace in the gospel. Instead of a human word asking for a divine gift, Luther directs us to a divine word that gives it. To learn theology from Luther is to learn to find grace in this way, in the word of Christ given to us rather than in our own works and prayers. Yet I do not think that one needs to be Lutheran to find grace in this way; it happens whenever a believer hears the scriptural story and is comforted, strengthened, and delighted by finding Christ in it. So the difference between the two forms of discourse—law and gospel—has its effect on believers, whether they notice it or not. But Luther’s explicit way of drawing attention to the difference will help us teach the Christian faith in a way that reaches the heart more deeply, giving us all a concrete place to look for the grace of God in Jesus Christ when we are anxious, guilty, tempted, or forlorn.

Elsewhere, I have explored the systematic reasons why Augustine cannot say exactly what Luther insists on saying about law and gospel.^[3] The grace of God is an inner gift, but the gospel of Christ is an external word. Luther’s sacramental notion of the gospel gives him something external to cling to when he seeks grace, but Augustine does not want us to keep clinging to external things. No external word or sign can be a means of grace for Augustine, because words and signs never have the power to give what they signify. The notion of a specifically sacramental kind of efficacy, whereby external things can be an effective means of grace, arises within the Augustinian tradition of the West long after Augustine. In this respect, Luther is closer to Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas than to Augustine. He is, therefore, if I may put it so, in this respect also more Catholic than Augustine.

Luther’s concept of the gospel, together with the doctrine of justification by faith alone that is based on it, initially arose to solve a problem that, according to the Roman Catholic tradition, we should not have. It is a problem that developed out of a crucial departure from Augustine, which Rome rejected very early on. So we need to look at this not-quite-Catholic problem in order to appreciate Luther’s need for his rather Catholic solution. My hypothesis, which is hardly original, is that this problem is an exaggerated or extreme development of a kind of anxiety that had been brewing in late medieval spirituality for quite some time. But Luther’s solution to this problem, founded on his grasp of the difference between law and gospel, ends up setting a whole range of spiritual anxieties into a new light. In fact, it aims to abolish any anxiety about how well we do at our prayers, penitence, or good works—for these are things the law commands and therefore cannot possibly save us—and instead put all our hopes in Christ alone, whom we receive simply by believing that the gospel really is true.

3.1 All Our Works Are Mortal Sins

The departure from Augustine that Pope Leo X rejected most emphatically in the earliest stages of the Reformation was not the doctrine of justification by faith alone but Luther’s teaching that everything we do is sin. This is the most fiercely contested point in Luther’s response to the papal bull of 1520, which condemned forty-one articles found in his writings. Luther vigorously defends article 31 (“A just man sins in all his good works”) and then, with heavy irony, “recants” article 32 (“A good work, done in the best way, is a venial sin”) by insisting that “a good work done in the best way is venial sin according to the mercy of God but mortal sin according to the judgment of God.”^[4] He reinforces the point a bit further on by insisting that everyone should be quite certain that “he always sins mortally, if his life were measured by the utterly just judgment of God.”^[5]

Article 32 originated in the indulgence controversy in 1518, when Luther argued that the saints did not acquire a treasury of merit that could be bestowed on the rest of us through indulgences, because in fact even the good works of the saints are at best venial sins.^[6] But his view on this point was already fully developed several years earlier, when he contended in the lectures on Romans (from the winter semester of 1515–16) that “there is no sin that is venial by its own substance and nature” and therefore also “no merit.” For, he explains, “we sin doing good works, unless God through Christ covers this imperfection and does not impute it to us; so it becomes venial by the mercy of God not imputing it for the sake of faith and our sighing for this imperfection, accepted in Christ.”^[7] This is a constant in Luther’s theology for the rest of his career: none of us has any merit before God, precisely because apart from God’s mercy every good work, even of a faithful Christian, deserves nothing but damnation.^[8]

3.2 Justification as Process

The Lutheran insistence that everything we do is, in substance, mortal sin, which is to say objectively deserving damnation, remains an ecumenical sticking point in Lutheran–Roman Catholic ecumenism to this day. From it stems Luther’s famous dictum that a believer is both righteous and a sinner at the same time (simul iustus et peccator). The conceptual roots of this dictum are not always well understood, however. The simul (as it is called) is often taken to be a denial that we can make any progress in becoming really righteous. But in fact it is a logical consequence of Luther’s account of how we make progress in becoming really righteous. It is part of Luther’s distinctive way of taking up the Augustinian notion that justification is a lifelong journey in which we are pilgrims on the road (in via) to our homeland (our patria), which is eternal life with God. “The present life is a kind of motion,” Luther says in his first Psalms lectures, “a transition and a Galilee, that is, a migration from this world to the one that is to come, which is eternal rest.”^[9] The word for motion here, motus, is the standard Aristotelian term for any kind of process heading towards a goal. And the name “Galilee” stands in for the Augustinian notion of a journey, as Luther explains a little earlier: “Galileans” means “the pilgrims, strangers in the world and wayfarers” (peregrini, hospites mundi et viatores).^[10]

The Augustinian journey of justification is thus an Aristotelian process or motus, moving from sin to righteousness. As Luther explains, “according to philosophy,” by which, of course, he means according to Aristotle, “a motion is an imperfect act, always in part [partim] acquired and in part to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Contributors’/Editors’ Biographies
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Historical Foundations
• Luther and the Medieval Tradition
• Luther and Catholic Theology
• What Can Catholics Learn From Luther?
• Epilogue
• Index