Theopedia

Lutheranism

Lutheranism is the tradition of Protestant theology and church life descended from Martin Luther’s reform movement at Wittenberg, holding justification by faith alone through Christ’s righteousness credited to the believer, grace conveyed through the Word, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, and a doctrine of Christ’s person in which his human nature shares the divine attribute of omnipresence. It shares sola fide and sola scriptura with the Reformed churches but differs chiefly over Christ’s presence in the Supper and over predestination, remaining a distinct branch of Protestant Christianity worldwide.

Historical Origin

Martin Luther (1483-1546), an Augustinian friar and professor at the University of Wittenberg, posted his Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences in 1517, an act that touched off the controversy from which the Protestant Reformation grew.1 Luther placed the doctrine of justification at the center of the dispute, later recalling that “if this article stands, the Church stands; if it falls, the Church falls.”1 His younger colleague at Wittenberg, Philipp Melanchthon, wrote the movement’s first systematic theology, the Loci Communes (1521), and drafted the Augsburg Confession, presented to Emperor Charles V in 1530 as the new movement’s confession of faith and still, in Philip Schaff’s words, “the fundamental and generally received symbol of the Lutheran Church.”2 (See Augsburg Confession.)

A sacramental controversy divided the Reformation early. From 1524 onward, Luther broke with Andreas Karlstadt and Huldrych Zwingli over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, teaching that Christ’s body, sharing in the ubiquity of his divine nature, is “realistically and substantially present in, with, and under” the bread and wine.3 The Marburg Colloquy of October 1529, called to reconcile the German and Swiss Reformations, failed to resolve the dispute, and Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism have remained divided over it ever since.4 Melanchthon’s own later departures from Luther, particularly on predestination and the Supper, split the Lutheran movement between his followers, the Philippists, and the stricter Gnesio-Lutherans, who considered the Philippists secret Calvinists.5 The dispute was settled, on the stricter side, by the Formula of Concord (1577-1580), which became Lutheranism’s definitive confessional statement and was defended through the following century by Lutheran scholastics such as Johann Gerhard, Johann Quenstedt, and David Hollaz.5 That confessional orthodoxy was in turn challenged during the eighteenth century by the pietism of Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke and by Enlightenment rationalism, both of which shifted parts of the tradition away from its confessional formulations and toward religious experience or autonomous reason.5

Core Tenets

Justification by faith alone. Lutheranism holds that sinners are justified, declared righteous before God, freely by grace for Christ’s sake through faith alone, apart from their own works. The Augsburg Confession states the point directly: “men can not be justified [obtain forgiveness of sins and righteousness] before God by their own powers, merits, or works, but are justified freely [of grace] for Christ’s sake through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and their sins forgiven for Christ’s sake” (Rom. 3-4).6 Because a holy God accepts nothing less than perfect obedience to his law, and no sinner can render it, Christ’s own righteousness must be credited to the believer instead.7 The believer is therefore, in Luther’s own formula, simul iustus et peccator: a sinner in himself, yet righteous in Christ.8

Law and gospel. Lutheran theology reads the whole of Scripture under two categories: the law, which commands and condemns, and the gospel, which promises and gives. Because justification is by faith rather than obedience, Lutheranism insists the two must be sharply distinguished rather than blended. The Formula of Concord presses Paul’s “exclusive particles” (of grace, without merit, without law, without works) against any teaching that mixes faith with a believer’s own “new obedience” as a joint ground of justification.9

The person of Christ and the Lord’s Supper. Lutheran Christology teaches the communicatio idiomatum, the “communication of properties” between Christ’s two natures, in a form the Reformed confessions do not share: because the two natures are united in one person, the human nature has come to share the divine attribute of omnipresence.10 The Formula of Concord states that Christ, “not only as God, but also as man… is present to all creatures,” and that this omnipresence is what allows him “most easily… to distribute his true body and blood in the sacred Supper.”11 Luther put it this way: “Where you put God, there you must put the humanity [of Christ]; they can not be sundered or riven.”12 On this basis Lutheranism teaches that Christ’s whole person, body and blood as well as divinity, is really and corporeally present “in, with, and under” the bread and wine of the Supper, received by mouth by believer and unbeliever alike, though only the believer receives it to blessing rather than condemnation, while denying Rome’s teaching that the bread and wine themselves cease to be bread and wine.13

The means of grace and baptism. Lutheranism teaches that God ordinarily works saving faith through appointed means: the preached Word, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. It holds baptism, including infant baptism, to be the ordinary, God-given means by which the Spirit works faith; Lutheran orthodoxy taught that the Spirit “excites in infants a true, saving, life-giving, and actual faith” through baptism itself.14 Standard Lutheran theology stops short, however, of Rome’s teaching that baptism is unconditionally necessary: baptism is “necessary,” an “ordained ordinary means of conferring grace,” yet not absolutely so, since its blessings are conditioned on faith, an unbaptized person may still be saved, and it is contempt for baptism rather than the mere lack of it that condemns.15 (See Infant baptism and Believer’s baptism.)

Predestination. Lutheran orthodoxy teaches a single predestination limited to the elect: God, foreseeing from eternity who will believe and persevere to the end, has determined to save those persons, without a corresponding decree of reprobation for the rest. Charles Hodge summarized the position this way: “the Lutheran doctrine… answers the question, Why one man is saved and another not? by saying, Because the one believes and the other does not,” so that God’s election itself rests on his foresight of a person’s perseverance in faith.16

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

Lutheranism and the Reformed confessional family, including the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, share a common Reformation inheritance on several points. Both hold sola fide: comparing Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation confessions, Samuel Waldron concludes that “substantial unity exists between[] Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation tradition with regard to justification sola fide.”17 The Formula of Concord’s own insistence that sinners “are justified and saved through faith alone in Christ,” entirely apart from works, stands alongside the Belgic Confession’s and Second Helvetic Confession’s parallel denial that justification rests even partly on human merit.18 The 1689 confession puts the same doctrine in its own words: God justifies the elect “by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death, for their whole and sole righteousness… they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness by faith.”19

The traditions divide sharply, however, over the person of Christ and the Lord’s Supper. Where the Formula of Concord teaches that Christ’s human nature itself shares the divine omnipresence, the Reformed confessions hold that the two natures, though united in one person, retain their own properties without confusion: the Second Helvetic Confession affirms that Christ’s two natures “are not absorbed, nor confused nor mixed,” and denies “that the divine nature in Christ suffered, or that Christ according to his human nature has hitherto been in this world, and so is everywhere.”12 The Westminster Confession teaches the same Reformed Christology, that Christ’s “two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion.”12 Because the Reformed confessions deny that Christ’s human nature is everywhere present, they likewise deny that his body and blood are locally or corporeally present in the Supper’s elements. Calvin’s own doctrine, worked out against both Zwingli’s memorial view and Luther’s, held that believers feed on Christ’s true body and blood not by any physical or local presence but through a real, spiritual communion mediated by the Holy Spirit and received by faith.4 (See Communion.)

Predestination is the other major point of difference. Lutheran orthodoxy limits election to God’s foresight of a believer’s perseverance and teaches no corresponding decree of reprobation; against this, the 1689 confession teaches unconditional election, that God has chosen the elect “without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving him thereunto,” his decree resting on nothing “foreseen [as] future.”20 The wider Reformed, or Augustinian, tradition likewise holds that God has ordained the rest of mankind, in Charles Hodge’s phrase, “to suffer the just punishment of their sins.”21 (See Predestination and Election.)

A further difference, distinctive to the Baptist confessional tradition in particular rather than the wider Reformed family, concerns the subjects of baptism: where Lutheranism baptizes the infant children of believers as recipients of the Spirit’s saving work, the 1689 confession restricts baptism to “those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to, our Lord Jesus.”22

Related Doctrines

Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon are Lutheranism’s founding figures; the Augsburg Confession is its first and best-known confessional statement. Sola fide, sola scriptura, and justification are held in common with the wider Reformed tradition; the doctrines most sharply contested between the traditions are the hypostatic union and communicatio idiomatum underlying Lutheran Christology, communion (the Lord’s Supper), and predestination and election. Infant baptism, believer’s baptism, and means of grace bear on the sacramental differences discussed above. Calvinism is the Reformed tradition most often compared and contrasted with Lutheranism, and Roman Catholicism is the tradition both emerged from in the Protestant Reformation.

References

  1. Brian John Arnold, Justification One Hundred Years After Paul (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 13, quoting Martin Luther’s dictum “quia isto articulo stante stat Ecclesia, ruente ruit Ecclesia.” ↩ ↩2

  2. Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in the Reformation Confessions,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 76-131, at 80-81, quoting Philip Schaff. ↩

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  4. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 43, “The Lord’s Supper,” 639-640. ↩ ↩2

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology,” section “Lutheran Dogmatics.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in the Reformation Confessions,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 76-131, at 81-82, quoting the Augsburg Confession, art. 4, “Of Justification.” ↩

  7. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Justification in the Post-Reformation Period,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 133-158, at 155-156. ↩

  8. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Three Prominent Reformers on Justification,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 69-132, at 91, discussing Luther’s 1535 commentary on Galatians. ↩

  9. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Justification in the Post-Reformation Period,” 133-158, at 141-142, quoting the Formula of Concord. ↩

  10. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 23, “The Person of Christ,” 389. ↩

  11. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 23, 389-390, quoting the Formula of Concord, Epitome, ch. 8, and the Solida Declaratio, ch. 8. ↩

  12. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 23, 390, quoting Martin Luther, and the Confessio Helvetica Posterior (Second Helvetic Confession), ch. 11, and the Westminster Confession, ch. 8, sec. 2. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  13. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 43, “The Lord’s Supper,” 639, on the Lutheran doctrine of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. ↩

  14. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 42, “Baptism,” 628, quoting Johannes Quenstedt. ↩

  15. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 42, “Baptism,” 628-629, summarizing Charles Porterfield Krauth’s account of the Lutheran view of baptism’s necessity. ↩

  16. Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 311-352, at 324-325. ↩

  17. Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Sola Fide in Luther,” in Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 13-48, at 13-14. ↩

  18. O’Kelley, “Justification in the Post-Reformation Period,” 133-158, at 140-141. ↩

  19. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩

  20. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 5. ↩

  21. Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 311-352, at 317-318, stating the infralapsarian (Reformed) doctrine of election and reprobation. ↩

  22. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 29, “Of Baptism,” para. 2. ↩