1.3 Luther and Lutheranism Flashcards
What are the 4 topics of this section on Lutheranism?
a) Background of times
b) Martin Luther
c) John Calvin
d) Ulrich Zwingli
Describe the background situation that gave rise to Lutheranism.
As the 16th century was ready to begin, it was clear that the Church needed to reform: Church needed interior reform and to better respond to the need of the current times.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, a series of reformers began to question the teaching of the Church, shaking the very foundations of Christendom. Many of these reformers’ ideas can be traced to the earlier heresies of Jan Hus and John Wycliffe. With this new movement, heretical ideas took hold in Europe in an unprecedented way. The political chaos caused by the Hundred Years War, the breakdown of feudal loyalties resulting from the plague, and the tarnished moral authority of the papacy after years of schism and political preoccupations, created a situation ripe for rebellion.
Why was reform needed in the Church?
Reform was needed in the Church. Simony, nepotism, abuse of indulgences. and improper veneration of relics had spread throughout western Europe. Many clerics collected benefices for personal gain, some failed to keep their promises of celibacy and obedience, and others had been corrupted by the lure of wealth and worldliness. Along with moral character, the level of learning among parish priests had also declined. Many could neither read nor write in Latin, and superstition grew in many rural areas where ignorant peasants often resorted to witchcraft or astrology to determine the fate of their lives. (***)Leo X (1425-1521), the reigning Pope who excommunicated Luther, typified the worldly lifestyle of Renaissance Rome.
Society: Given the moral crisis in the Church and the different vested interests among ecclesiastics, unity among the hierarchy was seriously compromised. Society was changing. Despite the advancements of the Renaissance on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth century, most of Europe was still primarily an agrarian society. Nonetheless, increasing divides between the nobility and the poor contributed to animosity between the classes. New monarchs emerged who undermined older feudal arrangements and consolidated their power with new taxes and centralized law. Impoverished gentry landholders began to fear loss of authority and sought ways to recover their wealth and position. As a result, various princes fought each other for their own personal aggrandizement [agrándisment].
Papacy: While this was occurring in Northern Europe, the papacy was caught up in the political intrigue of the Italian city-states and the cost of rebuilding Rome and patronizing the arts. (***) One sad side effect of the Church’s prolific patronage of Renaissance art and architecture was the increasing abuse regarding the sale of offices and indulgences. These transactions served as lucrative means of raising funds needed to pay for dazzling churches and works of art. The now infamous sale of indulgences would also provide an opportunity for a young monk to voice dissent that would snowball into a crisis of unparalleled gravity.
Describe Luther’s early life
Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Saxony, in 1483. He was the second of eight children and he received the customary education of his time. Luther’s father had risen slightly in society, starting as a poor peasant and then a copper miner, eventually gaining some wealth and obtaining a minor elected position in his village. As a father, he was a strict disciplinarian, and he had hoped that his son would enter the field of law. However, Martin Luther would choose a very different path.
Rather than study law, Luther joined the Augustinian Friars in 1505. Legend has it that he made the decision to enter the monastery after surviving a violent thunderstorm. After a bolt of lightning crashed near the young Luther, he made a vow, promising that if he survived the storm he would dedicate his life to God. Although the importance of this event may have been exaggerated over time, similar events in Luther’s early life all seem to have helped solidify a spirituality that sought comfort in God as a response to great difficulty. As a monk, Luther believed he could better seek perfection and forgiveness from a God who seemed indifferent to the life and death of his people.
Describe Luther’s life from his time in the monastery to the 95 theses.
Luther took his vows and was ordained after only nine months in the monastery. He showed to be a promising scholar and lived an exemplary life as far as his piety and ascetical struggle were concerned. Luther was promoted rapidly as a professor. and after only a year and a half of formal theological studies, he was appointed to lecture at the university. But despite his success, Luther’s life in the monastery was far from happy.
It was during his early years in monastic life that he had a problem with scrupulosity. More and more, Luther began to see God exclusively as a righteous lawgiver and administrator of justice. Much of Luther’s understanding of God’s judgment and his misconception of his love and mercy- through grace- was a consequence of the severe image of God stirred up by the culture of the day, particularly in Germany. The heavy emphasis on damnation, divine justice, and the absolute necessity of contrite repentance fostered the notion of a God who would deal out abundant punishment and whose wrath towards sinners was difficult to appease. Luther wondered how much penance a sinner could possibly do before finally obtaining God’s mercy.
Stricken with an acute sense of his own unworthiness. he imagined that God, the all-righteous judge, would most likely withhold forgiveness and salvation from him. In turn, he began to seek comfort through intense prayer, fasting, and penance. Unfortunately for the young monk, no amount of prayer or fasting would give him relief from his internal turmoil. He would ask how weak, sinful humans could ever possibly achieve a state of grace and the necessary righteousness to win God’s approval and mercy. For Luther, they obviously could not.
Despite his moral anguish, Luther’s life was normal, reputable, and according to many accounts, upstanding. He was an exceptional scholar and preacher, and his efforts in both capacities won him popular praise and advancements within his order.
Luther’s objections to the Church developed over time, and in some sense, they were all rooted in the spiritual struggles of his own soul and not the politics of ecclesiastical life. Luther’s exaggerated understanding of God as judge began to influence his conception of God’s love and mercy.
His own theological inclinations found a counterpart in a popular, though heretical, theologian that Lutherencountered in his studies: William of Ockham. For someone like Luther, the teachings of William of Ockham offered little comfort. Ockham taught that man could not overcome sin without grace and that all meritorious human action must be willed by God. This reduced man’s ability to perform good deeds.
The teachings of Ockham appealed to Luther. and he began to speculate about similar theological tendencies in the writings of St. Paul and St. Augustine. These misreadings and miscomprehensions of the nature of divine justice and man’s sinfulness laid the foundation for Luther’s future heresy, and in 1517 they helped fuel his distaste for the practice of selling indulgences. He became outraged with the Church’s teaching that indulgences, which, when obtained within the context of the Sacrament of Penance, could help lessen or remit one’s temporal punishment due to sin. His inner tensions over personal salvation and the practice of selling indulgences prompted him to write and then nail the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Church at Wittenberg.
What were the 95 Theses?
On October 31, 1517 Martin Luther nailed to the Cathedral door ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences. None of Luther’s theses was explicitly heretical, but implicitly they undermine the teaching authority of the Church. In them, Luther criticized the use of indulgences as distracting sinners from true repentance.
Luther argued that indulgences imply the forgiveness of sin through human as opposed to divine authority, and he saw this as a grave deviation. Luther questioned the validity of indulgences since the Church seemed to be usurping the authority of Christ in his role as mediator of grace and reconciliation with God the Father. Moreover, Luther started to place personal interpretation of Scripture over the teaching authority of the Church. These arguments reveal trends in Luther’s thought that, in hindsight, point towards his future break with the Catholic Church.
How did Luther go from debate to dissension?
Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg was not, in and of itself, an action provoking scandal. It was the academic custom of the age to offer an argument in this manner and invite public debate on an issue. At first, no one came forward to argue with Luther on the subject of indulgences. In earlier years. this kind of dissent would not have spread, but due to the advent of the printing press, copies of Luther’s theses were able to be printed and circulated, finding their way to the doorsteps of most of the prominent clerics and scholars in Germany.
His ideas met a mixed response. The theses, which now sound unmistakably Protestant, were not immediately condemned. In fact, many students began to rally behind Luther and praise the monk’s bold criticism of the abuses that detracted from the Church’s spiritual mission.
Luther’s criticism did, however, upset the Archbishop of Mainz who forwarded Luther’s theses to Rome. At first Pope Leo X considered the critique a minor incident. Luther was summoned before the Dominican Cardinal Cajetan (***) at Augsburg who had asked the theologian Sylvester Prierias as to study Luther’s theses and issue a rebuttal.Applying Prierias’s findings, Cajetan objected to circulation of Luther’s attack on the notion of merit and his questioning of the Church’s infallibility. He sent a response to Luther that the Pope himself hoped would settle the matter and allow the monk to fade back into obscurity.
Luther did not recant. Instead, while retaining a certain tone of respect and subordination towards the Pope, he issued his Resolution on the Virtue of Indulgences, which restated his position on the matter. Surprised by Luther’s bold reply, the Holy See responded more authoritatively. Pope Leo had the head of the Dominican order draw up an indictment that summoned Luther to Rome in order to explain his position before Cardinal Cajetan. In his efforts to drive home his theological position, the Dominican’s letter, which was a strong reprimand of Luther, gave much importance to some of the points of disagreement, including the scope of papal authority. The change in tone and severity on the part of the papal representative angered Luther, who still believed that his arguments were sound. He also reacted to the harsh letter from Rome by becoming firmer in his sense of righteousness.
Rather than having Luther travel to Rome, Duke Frederick of Saxony intervened on behalf of Luther and arranged for a public debate between Cajetan and Luther in Augsburg (Germany), in Fall of 1518. When Luther arrived, Cajetan instructed Luther, scolding him like a father and urging him to return to the teachings of the Church. However correct Cajetan’s theology was, his fatherly method did not take into account that Luther, more than a simple wayward monk, was a celebrated theologian and considered an expert in his field. Tired of dismissals and still desiring a debate, Luther felt very much offended and did not recant.
At this point Luther still did not wish to break with the Church. He wrote a letter to Leo X, subordinating himself to the authority of the Supreme Pontiff and showing his desire for the problem to be resolved. Theologically, Luther was still unconvinced, and the longer his points remained unresolved, the more justified he felt in his position.
At the same time, Luther was also winning popular support, which further reassured and justified the monk in his theological position. However, many of his supporters were indifferent to theology and instead wanted to merge their own social discontent with the revolutionary spirit of the theologian. As Luther started disobeying his superiors, he became known as the ringleader for a long-awaited social upheaval. For Luther, the problems were still exclusively theological, and the longer he waited for a debate, the more radical his ideas became.
Luther was finally invited to debate beginning on June 27,1519, at Leipzig. There, many of the foremost Catholic theologians of the day met with Luther, hoping to put the matter to rest for good. Among them was Johann Eck (***), the well-known professor at Ingoldstagt. Eck, a master rhetorician, required Luther to expound on his positions more extensively and concretely than ever before, perhaps in much more depth than Luther had actually considered up until that time. Then Johann Eck revealed the true philosophy behind Martin Luther’s thought, which led Luther to voice direct opposition to the Church. He dismissed papal supremacy, the authority of the councils, and at one point the Epistle of St. James because that portion of Scripture disagreed with Luther’s own ideas about the efficacy of good works. Backed into a corner, Luther further committed himself to the idea of justification by faith alone and the limitations of free will.
By the end of the debate, Luther’s ideas were clearly heretical. Even those scholars who had at one time sympathized with Luther’s criticisms, such as the renowned humanist Erasmus, began to withdraw their support. Germany was divided into two camps: those who supported Luther and those who recognized
his heresy and stood firmly with the Church. Pope Leo X issued a bull, which gave Luther two months to formally retract his opinions under threat of excommunication. He was now forced with the decision to recant or separate himself from the Church.
Despite Luther’s mixed emotions over the matter, he responded to the bull in a proud and aggressive manner, burning it in a bonfire along with the code of canon law. During his lecture on the following day, Luther said that the act was symbolic since it was the Pope who should have been burned. Luther then wrote the pamphlet Against the Bull of the Antichrist. which called for an all-out rebellion against the Church. His words did not fall on passive ears, and shortly after there were disorders at Leipzig, Erfurt, and Magdeburg. The matter now fell into the hands of the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who had risen to the throne in October 1520 at the age of nineteen. Threatened with revolts throughout his realm, Charles called the Diet (Assembly) of Worms (***) in January 1521. There Luther was again questioned on his position, and when asked to retract his writings. the reformer famously retorted, “I cannot submit my faith either to the Pope or the Councils, because it is clear as day that they have frequently erred and contradicted each other. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or on plain and clear grounds of reason, so that conscience shall bind me to make acknowledgement of error, I cannot and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything contrary to conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me. Amen”.
Judgment was passed, and Luther was granted twenty-four hours of safe passage before being subject to execution. Under fear of death, Luther fled to Wittenberg. Along the journey, he was escorted by a band of knights who brought the monk to the Castle of Wartburg where he was kept in hiding under the protection of Duke Frederick of Saxony.
Summarize Luther’s Theology
Luther remained at the castle in Wartburg for one year. During this time, he translated the New Testament into German and continued to develop his theories, writing his three most famous works: Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian. In these works, Luther worked out the theological principles that would become the cornerstone of Protestantism.
Many of Luther’s ideas were inspired by the writings of John Wycliffe, William of Ockham, and Jan
Hus. These writers, who criticized the Church and downplayed man’s capacity for theological knowledge and the merit of good works, appealed to Luther’s pessimistic view of human nature. Luther believed that sinfulness was impossible to overcome and that man could never fully escape the deceptive attraction to sin. Since, according to Luther, any act was essentially sinful, good works could not play a role in perfecting the human person or obtaining God’s forgiveness. Incapacitated by sin, an individual can simply have faith in God, and it is through this faith that God will grant salvation. For Luther, salvation is not a matter of perfecting oneself for God by taking advantage of his grace, but simply believing that God’s mercy will ultimately grant salvation. He thought the soul will always remain corrupt, but through faith the grace of Jesus Christ covers over sin so that one may be saved.
Luther referred to this idea of justification by faith alone (***) as his major theological “discovery.”
Taking a passage from the letter of St. Paul to the Romans which reads, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written. “He who through faith is righteous shall live” (Rom 1: 17), Luther began to believe that it is only “through faith” that one becomes righteous. In this passage, Luther thought that he finally found the answer to his scrupulosity and spiritual anguish: Righteousness, that lofty goal towards which Luther’s thought rendered man incapable, was now possible through faith. Good deeds, penance, and works of charity do not contribute to righteousness. Faith alone saves a person, he concluded.
From this idea of justification through faith, Luther developed four major theological principles: sola
Scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, and solo Christo (Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, and Christ alone). Each of Luther’s four main theological principles was conceived in reaction to what he believed were false teachings of the Church.
Scripture alone (which held Sacred Scripture as the sole authority on faith and doctrine) rejected the role of Sacred Tradition in its close link with the Scripture, the authority of the councils and the Pope, and the idea that the Holy Spirit continues to dwell and teach through the Church.
Faith alone dismissed the value of corporal and spiritual works of mercy as a means to attaining righteousness.
Grace alone: held that every good action is a direct result of God’s saving grace since it is beyond human capacity to do good. Along with this principle of sola gratia, Luther abandoned the idea that people can freely choose to do good (although he would certainly hold that they can choose evil freely and that they sin by their own will).
At the center of these three principles was Christ alone: Martin Luther held that Christ must be the sole content of the Scriptures, the mediator of grace, and the subject of faith. Luther objected to some books of Scripture, including the Epistle of St. James, which he considered insufficiently centered on the Person of Christ.
Luther’s theology brought into question the entirety of Christian worship and practice. He attacked the Sacraments, arguing that God did not need material means through which he could impart grace, so one
is normally saved not through the Sacraments but only by faith.
He denied all but the two Sacraments explicitly instituted in the Gospels, Eucharist and Baptism, but even with those, he gradually replaced the Church’s teaching with his own interpretation. He maintained that after the consecration, both the substance of bread and wine together with Christ’s Body and Blood are present. He used the term consubstantiation, explaining that Christ is present in the Eucharist in the same way heat is present in a red-hot iron. His ideas about consubstantiation contradict the Church’s teaching that the substance of the bread and wine completely change into the Body and Blood of Christ, called transubstantiation, with only the accidents (or properties) remaining.
In addition to his translation of the Bible and major theological works, Luther wrote On Monastic Vows and The Abolition of Private Masses while at Wartburg. In these works. Luther virulently attacks celibacy and the monastic life. He claimed that living celibacy was an impossible burden and called for all religious to break their vows and marry. In 1525, Luther himself married an ex-nun, Katherine von Bora.
While Luther was hiding in Wartburg, the Reformation began to gain momentum. In Wittenberg, two
friends and followers of Luther, Carlstadt (***) and Melanchthon (***), brought extreme reforms to the university town. The Augustinian monastery saw forty members leave their order and a Franciscan monastery was attacked, its altars demolished and its windows smashed. In answer to Luther’s call to marriage, Carlstadt married, and on Christmas Day 1521, Carlstadt proceeded to say Mass in German without vestments, publicly denying the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Luther would condemn Carlstadt and try to bring about more moderate reforms. Carlstadt. and later his successor Zwingli, would continue to push his ideas further, contributing to the eventual growth of Calvinism.
Summarize the aftermath of Luther and list 3 events that resulted from his efforts
After 1520, Germany and other countries were set ablaze by Luther’s words. The expected reform-change- was beginning to be set in motion. Other reformers rose up.
- German Princes’ supported him
- Peasant Rebellion
- Augsburg Confession
How did the German Princes respond to Luther?
Frederick of Saxony (***) and other princes of the realm became concerned with some of Carlstadt’s tendencies and called upon Luther to moderate affairs in Wittenberg. The princes of Germany had little in common with Luther’s religious sentiments. They did, however, share in his rebelliousness toward the papacy. They saw in Luther’s new movement a way to free themselves from the Pope and the Catholic emperor and to enrich themselves with expropriated Church lands.
After 1524 other German princes joined Frederick of Saxony in support of Luther. Albert of Brandenburg, the cousin of the Bishop of Mainz and head of the Teutonic Knights, used the Lutheran cause to declare himself Duke of Prussia. The Teutonic Order was disbanded and Albert, a priest, broke his vows in order to marry. The future kings of Germany would now descend from the House of Brandenburg.
Other relations between Luther and the princes proved embarrassing. Philip of Hesse demanded that
Luther support his bigamous marriage, a measure he was hesitant to condone. A compromise was made with Philip. There would be no general law permitting dual marriage, but Philip would be granted a dispensation and he would thus continue to live with both wives. In defending his position. Luther argued that all things are proper for the sake of the Church.
What was the Peasant Rebellion?
Luther became a pawn of the German princes. The greatest example of this was his reaction to the great peasant uprising in 1524. Luther’s attack on the authority of the Church had wide-ranging consequences. Denying the authority of the Church was a kind of model for denying secular authority. This radical democratization of the Church, which gave everyone the same authority to preach and interpret the Gospel, led to an attempt to overthrow the feudal system of rule by the nobility. Peasants throughout Germany rebelled in social revolution.
Luther was called upon to condemn the uprising. He urged the princes to “Strike, slay front and rear;
nothing is more devilish than sedition. There must be no sleep, no patience, no mercy; they are the children of the devil” Over 100,000 men, women, and children were slain; hundreds of villages were burned and crops destroyed. The civil authorities were willing to usurp the authority of the Church in Germany but not share that same power with common people below them.
What was the Augsburg Confession?
Between 1522 and 1530 Charles V was beset with problems of even greater magnitude outside of Germany. The Turks had seized parts of Hungary and were besieging the city of Vienna. Italian city- states and the king of France were supporting the Turkish offensive against the Hapsburg dominions of Austria. Charles was divided between civil war in Germany and the problems within the rest of his realm and he therefore could not take the necessary actions to stamp out the Lutheran revolution.
In 1530 a diet (legislative assembly) was to be held in Augsburg to attempt to resolve the conflict between Lutherans and Catholics in the hopes of forming an alliance against Turkish aggression. Melanchthon was sent to draft a list of principles from which a compromise could be made. The draft of these principles became known as the Augsburg Confession, establishing the basic tenets of Lutheranism for the future. The principles understated the basic theological differences between Lutheran theology and the teachings of the Catholic Church. Cardinal Campeggio, the papal legate at Augsburg, noted these divergent views and admitted the need for studying a reform of some of these abuses in the Catholic Church. The diet ended with a call for reform and for the princes of the north to return to the Church.
In response to the Diet of Augsburg, the northern princes met in Schmalkalden, Thuringia (Germany). The northern princes formed a pact among themselves that insisted on their rights as independent monarchs, refusing to accept the terms of Augsburg in order to increase their control. With the need to gain their support in his wars against the Turks. Charles V authorized a temporary truce with the League of Schmalkalden in 1532, a turning point in the history of the conflict. The truce allowed the rebellious nobles equal rights and was a latent recognition of the existence of a permanent Protestant state. (***) Though future conflict would erupt between Charles V and the League of Schmalkalden. a precedent was created and would be formalized thirty years later at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. There it would be decided that the religion of the prince would be the religion of the people within his realm.
What was the end of Luther’s life like?
Luther was eventually pushed to the side in the newly constituted Protestant Germany. His marriage to Katherine von Bora gave him six children. In his later life, he would continue to write, but his style became increasingly coarse and crude. He continued attacking the papacy and added anti-Semitic attacks as well. Slowly his irascible nature, caused by physical impairments and unchecked disease, along with a vicious temper, would drive his friends and colleagues away. “Hardly one of us,”; lamented one of his followers, “can escape Luther’s anger and his public scourging”.
Luther died in his sleep on February 18, 1546, without having reconciled with the Church.
Who was John Calvin?
The first to give Protestantism a system of theology and a permanent ecclesiastical organization was John Calvin. It was through him that Protestantism became a world power. Calvinism invaded Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, and America, and for a time threatened the supremacy of the Catholic religion in France.
-Calvin and His Doctrine:
Calvin was born at Noyon, France, in 1509. He was at first intended for the Church, receiving the tonsure at the age of twelve. Later he changed his mind and took up the study of law. At Bourges he made the acquaintance of the German Melchior Wolmar, professor of Greek, whom Margaret of Navarre, sister of Francis I, had invited to France. Wolmar was a Lutheran and had little difficulty, it seems, in making a “convert” of the young law student (1529). Calvin immediately became one of the leaders of the party in France that favored the Lutheran movement. When active measures were taken against the heretics, he fled to Basel, where he published his principal work, “The Institutes of the Christian Religion” (1535) in Latin; a French translation appeared in 1540 dedicated to Francis I.
Describe Calvin’s belief in Predestination, 2 Sacraments and 2 Churches
Calvin taught that man as a result of Adam’s fall, has no freedom of will, but is an absolute slave of God; God has predestined each one of us, some to hell, and some to heaven from eternity, irrespective of our merits; if we are predestined for heaven, we cannot be lost; there are only two sacraments instituted by Christ: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; the Body of Christ is virtually present in the Eucharist, that is, the communicant, if he is predestined, receives something of the spiritual life and strength of Christ; there are two churches: the invisible, which is composed of the predestined; and the visible, which comprises all the believers.
Unlike Luther, Calvin refused to give supreme control of his organization to the state. It was to be governed by a Consistory consisting of a certain number of representatives, called Elders (six ecclesiastics and twelve laymen), appointed by the different churches. After his death laymen were excluded from the Consistory, which was placed under the authority of the state.
