Martin Luther

Scripture alone establishes doctrine, over against both the Fathers and the papacy. Luther will discuss Augustine's opinions only after the abuses are gone, because 'it will not do to frame articles of faith from the works or words of the holy Fathers.' The rule he states in their place is absolute and admits no second source. He treats the papal claim to decide 'above and contrary to Scripture' as the same error as the radicals' claim to the Spirit without the Word.

The rule is: The Word of God shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel.Smalcald Articles II.ii.15 (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

Luther's theology of the cross is built against natural theology. Reading God's invisible attributes off creation and history is exactly what he says disqualifies a man from being called a theologian; that wisdom is 'completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened,' and God has deliberately hidden himself in suffering so that he is found in the crucified Christ or not at all. The Large Catechism says the same negatively: the whole world has tried to work out what God is and 'has never been able to attain to any of these things.'

WORTH CORRECTINGThis is not the same as Calvin's position and should not be merged with it. Luther grants that the Ten Commandments 'are written in the hearts of all men' — natural law stands — but denies that anything outside Christ yields knowledge of God's disposition toward us: 'outside of whom we see nothing but an angry and terrible Judge.' He denies natural theology while keeping natural law.

Now it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross.Heidelberg Disputation (1518), Luther's proof of thesis 20 (LW 31, Grimm trans.)

Luther pulled the deuterocanonical books out of their Vulgate positions, gathered them between the Testaments, and gave the section its own title page stating what they are and are not. He does not suppress them — they are printed, and he commends reading them — but the heading denies them parity with Scripture, which is the whole of the question this locus asks.

WORTH CORRECTINGHis judgments on the New Testament antilegomena are a separate matter and are often merged with this one. He ranked James, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation last, called James 'an epistle of straw, compared to them,' and said of Revelation 'my spirit cannot fit itself into this book' — but the 'epistle of straw' passage stands only in the 1522 edition and was dropped from every later printing, and the later preface to Revelation withdraws the flat verdict, leaving authorship an open question and concluding 'with this interpretation we can profit by this book.' None of these books was ever removed from his New Testament.

These books are not held to be equal to Holy Scripture, but they are useful and good to read.Apocrypha section title page, Luther's German Bible (Wittenberg: Hans Lufft, 1534), trans. Ralph W. Klein

Luther opens the Smalcald Articles with the Trinity and treats it as settled ground he shares with Rome: three distinct persons in one divine essence, the Son begotten of the Father, the Spirit proceeding from Father and Son. He says explicitly that 'concerning these articles there is no contention or dispute, since we on both sides confess them,' and refers the reader to the Apostles' and Athanasian creeds rather than arguing the point.

That Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three distinct persons in one divine essence and nature, are one God, who has created heaven and earth.Smalcald Articles I.1 (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

One person, truly God and truly man. Luther states it catechetically rather than as a disputed thesis — the Son alone became man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of Mary, and the confessing Christian says of the same subject that he is 'truly God, born of the Father in eternity and also truly man, born of the Virgin Mary.' The two natures matter to him practically: it is a man's blood that redeems, and it is God's.

WORTH CORRECTINGThe catechetical statements are not the whole of it, and the entry should not be read as saying Luther never worked the technical grammar. In the Confession Concerning Christ's Supper (1528) he attacks by name Zwingli's *alloeosis* — the figure by which "something is said of the divinity of Christ which really belongs to the humanity, or vice versa" — calling it "a devil's mask" and arguing that if it stands "then Christ will have to be two persons, one divine and one human." That is the same two-natures claim, pressed as a weapon.

I believe that Jesus Christ is truly God, born of the Father in eternity and also truly man, born of the Virgin Mary. He is my Lord!Small Catechism II, Second Article (Robert E. Smith trans. from the Triglot German)

Nothing in the works read poses the question of what the other elohim of the Hebrew Bible are. Luther's nearest material is the Large Catechism on the First Commandment, where 'god' is defined functionally — whatever a person trusts for every good — which is an account of idolatry in the heart rather than a claim about the ontology of spiritual beings. He treats the devil and evil spirits as real throughout, but never ranks them as a divine council.

WORTH CORRECTINGThe functional definition of a god in Large Catechism I should not be read as the answer to this locus. Luther is telling a catechumen what it means to have a god, not adjudicating Psalm 82 or Deuteronomy 32.

The will is not neutral and cannot turn itself. Luther is careful about what he means: not compulsion but 'the necessity of immutability' — the unregenerate man sins willingly and cannot stop wanting to. Against the scholastics he denies that fallen man has 'a free will to do good and omit evil' or can 'love God above all things' by natural powers, and calls hereditary sin so deep a corruption of nature that reason cannot grasp it and it must be believed from Scripture.

Thus the human will is, as it were, a beast between the two. If God sit thereon, it wills and goes where God will... If Satan sit thereon, it wills and goes as Satan will. Nor is it in the power of its own will to choose, to which rider it will run.The Bondage of the Will, sec. 25 (Cole trans., rev. Vaughan/Atherton)

Justification is by faith alone, on the ground of Christ's death and resurrection, and nothing may be conceded on it. Luther states it as the article on which everything else depends and from which nothing can be surrendered 'even though heaven and earth... should sink to ruin.' The righteousness is Christ's and is reckoned to the believer: in Concerning Christian Liberty he says the soul 'has in her Husband Christ a righteousness which she may claim as her own.'

Now, since it is necessary to believe this, and it cannot be otherwise acquired or apprehended by any work, law, or merit, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.Smalcald Articles II.i.4 (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

Faith is trust that grasps Christ and, in grasping him, receives what is his. Luther's image is marriage: Christ takes the soul's sin, death and hell as his own and gives her his righteousness, life and salvation, so that she can say 'all mine is His, and all His is mine.' Faith justifies not because it is a virtue but because it lays hold of a person; assent that does not trust is not the thing he means.

Christ, that rich and pious Husband, takes as a wife a needy and impious harlot, redeeming her from all her evils and supplying her with all His good things... she has in her Husband Christ a righteousness which she may claim as her own.Concerning Christian Liberty (The Freedom of a Christian, 1520), on the union of Christ and the believing soul (Wace & Buchheim trans.)

Luther explicitly names and rejects the position that a believer who falls into open sin must never have had faith. He says the opposite: when a holy man falls into manifest sin as David did, faith and the Holy Spirit have departed from him. Baptism remains and can be returned to — 'the ship never breaks... but it happens, indeed, that we slip and fall out of the ship' — but the falling is real, not merely apparent.

WORTH CORRECTINGThis corrects a common assumption that all the magisterial Reformers held eternal security. Luther is not Calvin here. He describes those who say 'if any one sins after he has received faith and the Spirit, he never truly had the Spirit and faith' as sectarists in whom he fears a devil is still hiding.

It is, accordingly, necessary to know and to teach that when holy men... happen to fall into manifest sins, as David into adultery, murder, and blasphemy, that then faith and the Holy Ghost has departed from them.Smalcald Articles III.iii.43 (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

The ground of election is God's own immutable will and nothing in the creature. Luther makes the point as a claim about God's nature rather than about a decree: because God's knowledge and will are eternal and cannot be hindered, everything that happens, including who believes, happens necessarily with respect to that will. He states the consequence bluntly — 'the Elect shall believe it; the rest shall perish without believing it' — and refuses to look for a reason behind it.

WORTH CORRECTINGLuther never turns this into a doctrine of the decrees. He forbids the inquiry that Reformed theology later pursues — on why God works thus, 'it is here the hand is to be laid upon the mouth' — and predestination disappears entirely from the Catechisms and the Smalcald Articles. Reading him as an early Calvin on this locus overstates a case he deliberately left closed.

God foreknows nothing by contingency, but... He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will. By this thunderbolt, 'Free-will' is thrown prostrate, and utterly dashed to pieces.The Bondage of the Will, sec. 9 (Cole trans., rev. Vaughan/Atherton)

Luther answers by what means rather than at what instant. The Spirit is never had apart from the external Word, and Baptism is where he is ordinarily given: the baptized receive 'the entire Christ, and the Holy Ghost with His gifts.' Nobody comes to faith another way — 'neither you nor I could ever know anything of Christ... unless it were offered to us and granted to our hearts by the Holy Ghost through the preaching of the Gospel.'

WORTH CORRECTINGThe locus asks a timing question Luther does not ask. He is answering the enthusiasts, whose claim was that the Spirit comes directly; his counter is instrumental, not chronological. Reading 'through baptism' as ex opere operato inverts him — he denies exactly that in Smalcald Articles III.v, rejecting both Thomas's spiritual power in the water and Scotus's bare divine will.

And in those things which concern the spoken, outward Word, we must firmly hold that God grants His Spirit or grace to no one, except through or with the preceding outward Word.Smalcald Articles III.viii.3 (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

Luther consistently speaks of Christ dying for the world and never restricts the object. The Smalcald Articles' chief article names him "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world," and the 1522 Ascension Day sermon says that to believe the resurrection is to believe "that Christ has taken upon his head our sins and the sins of the whole world, also the wrath of the Father, and thus drowned them both in himself" (§10). The efficacy is tied to faith laying hold of the promise, not to a prior limitation of whom the death was for.

WORTH CORRECTINGMarked contested because the question of extent is not Luther's question. He is arguing about the ground of justification, not about the scope of the atonement, and the controversy that produced the definite/universal distinction is decades after him. What can be said is that he never limits the phrase and repeatedly universalises it.

And He alone is the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world... and God has laid upon Him the iniquities of us all.Smalcald Articles II.i.2 (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

Infants are baptized, and baptism genuinely does something: it is 'a laver of regeneration,' it works forgiveness, and its power, work, profit and end 'is this, namely, to save.' Luther refuses to make the child's faith the ground — 'we do not baptize it upon that, but solely upon the command of God' — and he equally refuses to make the water a physical cause; the efficacy is God's Word joined to the element and received by faith.

WORTH CORRECTINGDo not soften this toward the Reformed covenant-sign reading. Luther attacks precisely that: he warns against regarding 'Baptism as a mere empty sign, as the fanatics dream,' and rejects the scholastic mechanisms too, denying with Thomas that God imparted a washing power to the water and with Scotus that the washing happens by bare divine will apart from Word and water.

Therefore state it most simply thus, that the power, work, profit, fruit, and end of Baptism is this, namely, to save... for by the Word such power is imparted to Baptism that it is a laver of regeneration, as St. Paul also calls it.Large Catechism IV, second part, on what Baptism profits (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

The bread and wine are the true body and blood of Christ, on the strength of Christ's words and nothing else. Luther's test case is the unworthy communicant: the body and blood are "given and received not only by the godly, but also by wicked Christians," which means the presence does not depend on the recipient's faith. Against Zwingli's argument that a body is confined to one place he sets four grounds — the unity of Christ's person, that "God's right hand is everywhere," that "God's Word is not false, nor does it lie," and that God "has and knows of many modes of being in any place." He simultaneously rejects transubstantiation, insisting that real bread remains, since Paul calls it "the bread which we break."

WORTH CORRECTINGMarburg is remembered as a total rupture on this locus and it was narrower than that. At Marburg, 1-5 October 1529, Luther signed fourteen articles with Zwingli and most of a fifteenth, including that the Supper is "the sacrament of the very body and very blood of Jesus Christ"; the recorded disagreement is over whether that body and blood are *corporally* present in the bread and wine. Nor does Luther deny that the Supper is a remembrance — "this do in remembrance of Me" stands in his own text. What he refuses is reading "this is My body" as less than it says.

Of the Sacrament of the Altar we hold that bread and wine in the Supper are the true body and blood of Christ, and are given and received not only by the godly, but also by wicked Christians.Smalcald Articles III.vi.1 (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

Preaching on Mark 16:17-18, Luther takes up the view that the signs belonged to the apostolic era and have since stopped, names it, and rejects it: the power remains in the church. What has changed is the need. The signs were given to confirm the preached Word to unbelievers; that work is done, so the signs are not exercised — but "if it were necessary and conducive to the spreading of the Gospel, we could do easily the signs." He says the same in the earlier sermon on the same text: "where there is a Christian, there is still the power to work these signs if it is necessary," and "if need should arise, and men were to denounce and antagonize the Gospel, then we verily should have to employ wonder-working."

WORTH CORRECTINGThis corrects the common assignment of cessationism to Luther. Both of his Ascension Day sermons on this text distinguish two things that are usually collapsed: whether the signs are still *needed*, which he says they are not, and whether the church still *has the power* to do them, which he says it does. A cessationist Luther is produced by quoting the first half without the second. What he attacks in the radicals (Muenzer, the Zwickau prophets) is claimed revelation that bypasses Scripture, which is a different question again.

Therefore, we must allow these words to remain and not gloss them away, as some have done who said that these signs were manifestations of the Spirit in the beginning of the Christian era and that now they have ceased. That is not right; for the same power is in the church still.Sermon for the Day of Christ's Ascension on Mark 16:14-20, first sermon (Church Postil, 1523), §22 (Lenker trans., Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther, 1905; Bucher scan of the Baker Book House reprint)

Those outside Christ remain under wrath permanently. Luther's statement comes not from an eschatology chapter but from the Creed: everyone who does not have Christ, however monotheistic, 'abides in eternal wrath and damnation,' because they do not know what God's mind toward them is. The Small Catechism keeps the corresponding positive: Christ 'will come to judge the living and the dead,' and eternal life is given to all who believe in him.

WORTH CORRECTINGLuther nowhere in the catechetical writings argues the point against annihilation or universalism — those alternatives are not on his horizon. The stance is secure from what he says; the absence of an argument for it is not evidence of hesitation, but it does mean this locus rests on a passing clause rather than a developed treatment. Matthew 25:46 is the reference the corpus carried before this pass and it is kept: it is the standard text for the position, though Luther's own statement here is creedal rather than exegetical and he does not argue it from that verse.

For all outside of Christianity, whether heathen, Turks, Jews, or false Christians and hypocrites, although they believe in, and worship, only one true God, yet know not what His mind towards them is, and cannot expect any love or blessing from Him; therefore they abide in eternal wrath and damnation.Large Catechism II, Third Article (Triglot, Bente & Dau trans.)

In the longer preface to Revelation Luther reads the book as a picture of church history running to the Last Day, and places the thousand years of Revelation 20 in the past: Satan was bound when the book was written, the binding has now expired, and the loosed Gog and Magog are the Turks of his own century. Judgment follows quickly after. There is no future earthly reign anywhere in his sequence — chapter 20 runs straight into judgment and then the eternal state of chapter 21.

WORTH CORRECTINGThis is amillennial in the sense that matters here — no future earthly kingdom — but it is not the modern amillennial claim. Modern amillennialism treats the thousand years as the whole church age up to Christ's return; Luther treats it as a roughly literal millennium beginning around the writing of Revelation and already ended in his own lifetime, hedged with 'the reckoning need not hold out to the very minute.' He is also tentative about the whole book, offering the reading to 'give other, and higher, minds something to think about.'

For it is our opinion that this picture... has been put in because of the Turks, and that the thousand years are to begin at the time when this book was written, and that at that time the devil was bound; though the reckoning need not hold out to the very minute.Preface to the Revelation of Saint John, longer preface (Jacobs trans., Works of Martin Luther vol. 6, 1932)