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Luther

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

Martin Luther would be shocked to hear that he is appearing in a series called pillars of theology. To be sure, the professor of biblical interpetation with a doctorate in theology was a theologian. In fact, teaching theology for thirty-four years at the University of Wittenberg brought into Luther's large household, managed by his wife Katharina von Bora, the only salary he ever earned. Still, like most theologians, Luther never thought of himself as having a theology. A theologian becomes a pillar of the discipline in the estimation of admiring readers, but they are not the focus of this book. My purpose is to lay the groundwork and identify the pieces that were later used to construct what is now called Luther's theology.

Five principles will help us understand how Luther himself practiced theology.

First, Martin Luther's theology cannot be presented or understood apart from the world in which he lived. His life and his work were defined by four contexts: (a) sixteenth-century Germany, where he lived and died; (b) Electoral Saxony, an important territory in the Holy Roman Empire, to which Luther was confined after being declared an outlaw in 1521; (c) the small town and University of Wittenberg, where Luther worked from 1512 to 1546; and (d) the Wittenberg cloister of Augustinian Hermits, in which Luther dwelled initially as a monk and then as a husband and father after his marriage in 1525.

All four settings contributed vital elements to Luther's theological practice. He was reared and schooled in the deep piety of late medieval Germany, and he profited from the intellectual currents of Christian humanism that insisted on the value of education and the study of languages. With the help of his colleagues, he became a gifted translator of the Bible and a master of lucid and expressive German that made him—through the new printing technology—a popular writer. Because the Holy Roman Empire was a patchwork of independent cities and territories, the political clout of the electors of Saxony shielded Luther from the imperial ban and permitted their young university at Wittenberg, founded in 1502, to develop into a haven of the new evangelical theology.

Within the university, Luther was one member of a talented faculty that for the most part supported his judgments of scholastic theology and popular piety. A brilliant young scholar of Greek, Philip Melanchthon, who was hired in 1518 at the age of twenty-one, became his closest theological collaborator, and they formed the core of a Wittenberg movement that Luther described as "our" theology even before Melanchthon arrived on the scene:

Our theology and St. Augustine are progressing well and with God's help rule at our university. Aristotle is gradually falling from his throne, and his final doom is only a matter of time. It is amazing how the lectures on the Sentences are disdained. Indeed, no one can expect to have any students, if [they] do not want to teach this theology, that is, lecture on the Bible or on St. Augustine or another teacher of ecclesiastical eminence.

Courses on the Bible and early Christian thinkers were replacing the lectures on medieval scholastic theology, in which Luther and his colleagues had been trained. Scholasticism was built on principles taken from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and its basic textbook was the Sentences, a collection of debatable opinions from earlier writers that were organized into topics by Peter Lombard (1100–60). In Erfurt, where he was among those monks chosen to pursue an academic career, Luther studied both Aristotle's philosophy and scholastic theology. Like other teachers-to-be he delivered the required lectures on Lombard's Sentences, to which he applied the logical skills he had learned from Aristotle and developed during his scholastic training. Teaching theology on the basis of scripture and Augustine (354–430) departed from the scholastic method, but it was not entirely new. It harkened back to the way theology had been taught in schools attached to cloisters, and it revealed the debt that Luther owed to his monastic heritage. Luther lived as a monk for almost one-third of his life, and the monastic goal of an intentional Christian life, in different dress, made its way into his Reformation theology.

Second, Luther's theology grew out of his interpretation of scripture. This axiom is not the same as the principle "by scripture alone" (sola scriptura), that is, making scripture the chief authority for theological assertions. As a theologian Luther's job was to glean from the biblical text insights for his students about God and the world. His first attempt, a course on Psalms, lasted two years (1513–15) and made use of explanations by his predecessors. After the psalter Luther lectured on Romans (1515–16), Galatians (1516–17), Hebrews (1517–18), and again on Psalms (1519–21). He had reached only Psalm 22 when he was summoned to Worms in April of 1521, and after he returned to Wittenberg from hiding in 1522, he did not pick up where he had stopped. During the turbulent years that followed, Luther offered his courses on a regular basis. The lectures commonly used for reconstructing his theology are the second series on Galatians, which were delivered in 1531 and published in 1535, and the extensive course on Genesis, on which Luther lectured from 1535 to 1545 and that now take up the first eight volumes of the American Edition.

Although these lectures are sometimes called "commentaries," especially in their edited and printed forms, they were not commentaries in the modern sense of biblical aids but theology in the raw, that is, direct applications of the biblical text to the world of Luther and his students. For that reason Luther's lectures on scripture often sound like sermons and demonstrate how Luther's theology was both biblical and contextual. About two thousand of his actual sermons have been preserved in the Weimar Edition of Luther's works. In 1538 Luther reflected on his early preaching activity: "Often I preached four sermons on one day; during the whole of one Lent I preached two sermons and gave one lecture every day." The sermons are probably the least utilized resource for appreciating Luther's theological mind, although several important treatises developed from sermons or ideas for sermons. For example, the treatise on good works (1520), a major early book, was an exposition of the Ten Commandments, which Luther started as a sermon that outgrew his intention. The catechisms published in 1529 were actually based on sermons. One way or another, therefore, Luther was frequently interpreting scripture when he was thinking, speaking, and writing about theology.

Third, Martin Luther thought of himself as a teacher before regarding himself as a theologian or a reformer. In 1520 Luther wrote:

Although I know full well and hear every day that many people think little of me and say that I only write little pamphlets and sermons in German for the uneducated laity, I do not let that stop me. Would to God that in my lifetime I had, to my fullest ability, helped one layperson to be better! I would be quite satisfied, thank God, and quite willing then to let all my little books perish.... I will most gladly leave to anybody else the glory of greater things. I will not be ashamed in the slightest to...