ABSTRACT
Coming to prominence first as a monastic reformer, Luther extended his range to take in the wider issue of the reform of the Church at large, to restore it, as Atkinson writes, to ‘its original character and message, to offer re-formatio to that which had suffered de-formatio…. Luther protested as a Catholic within the Catholic Church …. He wanted his Church to be truly and fully Catholic and to take within itself the pure Gospel’. Hendrix adds that for Luther during the second decade of the sixteenth century the Roman Church was the ‘chief part’ of the Church whose faith would not fail. He castigated laxity in the Church, as he did in his own order, but ‘none of Luther’s criticism impugned the authority of the Roman hierarchy or the authority of the pope himself. Luther’s criticism was not revolutionary’. Nevertheless, between 1505 and 1518 Luther discovered in Scripture, in the Epistles of St Paul and above all in Romans, Chapter 8, that Christians were made acceptable to God, forgiven and made just – ‘justified’ – not by their own pious practices and good works but solely through the merits won by Christ’s saving death on the cross. Therefore, with increasing urgency Luther demanded a theological reformatio by which the Church, eliminating its trust in what Luther saw as human devices, including indulgences, would affirm with Luther the truths he had found in St Paul. The 95 Theses of October 1517 should be seen as Luther’s call to the Church to reaffirm a Pauline soteriology of justification by the merits of Christ, received in faith. Seeking to bring the entire Church round to this position, Luther sent his supplement to the 95 Theses to Pope Leo X. However, since it was difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile Luther’s Pauline soteriology of justification by faith alone with the Catholic Church’s routines which rested on assumptions that men and women were saved in part by their own efforts supported by the Sacraments and other procedures of the Church, Luther’s severance from Catholicism was basically unavoidable. Certain circumstances leading to the separation of Luther and the Catholic Church could, perhaps, have worked out otherwise than they did: Luther’s orthodox polemical foes, Johann Tetzel (1465–1519) and Johannes Maier von Eck (1486–1543), were determined to arraign him; the primate of Germany, Albrecht von Hohenzollern (1490–1545), dealt extensively in indulgences and had a vested interest in suppressing Luther’s protest against them. The theological concerns, though, were those of fundamentals rather than of circumstances 30and turned on the means of grace and forgiveness of sinners. The deep rift led to the excommunication of Luther by Leo X in 1520 and his condemnation by the Diet of Worms in 1521. When the Catholic Church turned to these all-important soteriological issues in the course of the Council of Trent, it restated the position that the just were saved by faith but stopped well short of agreeing with Luther’s belief, based on Paul, to the effect that they were saved by faith alone. 1
