[article] Luther's Sola fide - was it all?

The statement that “the single and most important part of Luther’s teaching was his belief in salvation by faith alone” is largely correct. Luther’s concept of “sola fide” or “faith alone” dictated that good works were spiritually worthless without the good motivation to back them up. However, other secular concerns such as nationalism did find their way into Luther’s teachings because of the political climate of the time. The catholic church was a vast institution and naturally since its’ foundation, the texts that it relied upon such as the official Latin Vulgate edition of the bible contained various scribal errors that humanists of the period such as Desidesmus Erasmus, Johannes Von Richelieu and Melancanthon were keen to highlight. However, not all of the errors found by these humanists and later, Luther, in the official vulgate version of the bible were intrinsically linked to Luther’s later theory of “sola fide” or “faith alone” . However, this investigation brought with it the wrath of the pope, who was keen to exploit the traditional, admittedly pseudo-Christian beliefs and practices for his own nepotism and financial means – for example, the belief in the same of indulgences.

The indulgences mission sanctioned by Pope Leo X in 1517 was one of the initial reasons that Luther wrote his “95 theses”, and was directed against the belief that many German peasants had that if they brought pieces of paper signed by the pope, they or the souls of their relatives would instantly be released from purgatory and straight into heaven. These indulgences were, for the short and painful life of the German peasantry, a blessing, yet Luther saw many be “led to sin” because they were convinced that when they had purchased the indulgence, they were guaranteed a place in heaven. By this stage, Luther’s ideas were clearly distinctive, but he had not come to the conclusion of “sola fide” or “faith alone” at this point in any considerable sense. Much of Luther’s preoccupation was the academic issue of the pope ignoring what Luther thought were just local abuses, and as he illustrated in a letter to Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg “if the pope knew about these abuses in Germany…”. Even when the concept of “faith alone” was characterized by Luther’s three 1520 publications – “address to the Christian nobility”, “on the liberty of the Christian man” and “On the Babylonian captivity of the church”, Luther’s new form of Christian humanism was mainly noticed for it’s rejection of indulgences and therefore the ready cash that Germany – the “Milk cow of the Vatican” – used to readily provide to the church. Arguably, it was indulgences that characterized Lutheranism, and is one of the key reasons why German leaders were keen to use it and manipulate it for their own means, as well as it’s wide scale rejection of the structure of the Catholic church itself.

Lutheranism rejected the power and hierarchy of the Catholic church mainly through Luther’s concept of “sola fide” or “faith alone”. Luther rejected the clergy because he thought that there was no need for people to need to use intermediaries in their relationship with god, which was supposedly personal. For this reason, Lutheranism threatened the structure of the Catholic church that gave it the immense amount of power that it had enjoyed for centuries. The concept of a “priesthood of all believers”  furthermore meant that the “lord temporal” would technically have much more power than a “lord spiritual”, undermining the power of Catholic high ranking Clergy members in Holy Roman states. These beliefs all stemmed from the principle of “sola fide” – that god was a personal matter. For this reason also, when Frederick the wise died in 1525, his successor to the state of Saxony – John the steadfast – initiated a wide spread campaign of dissolving monasteries in the manner that Cromwell would perform in the 1530s in England. Such theological principles gave “lords temporal” an excuse on he pretext of religion to opportunistically seize land and resources. For example, the declining class of the imperial knights, lead by the humanist knights Ulrich Von Hutten and Franz Von Sickingen, invaded the lands of the immensely powerful bishops of Trier, Mainz and Cologne to gain land. Some, such as the famous “Zwickau Prophets” group of 1520 of whom Thomas Müntzer was a member, used Lutheranism as an excuse to instate wide scale social uprising. The so called “Munster experiment” throughout the 1520s turned Luther’s home town – Wittenberg – into chaos and anarchy, as people used the opportunity to rob houses and churches. Such actions culminated in the 1525 peasant’s war, which Luther attacked in his 1525 “Against the robbing and murdering hordes of peasants”. The concept of “sola fide” had caused a chain reaction which was interpreted by some as not only removing much of the theological need for a hierarchical church, but also the hierarchy of society in general. In a rather contradictory manner, Luther’s teachings condemned some of the almost inevitable outcomes of the concept of “sola fide” and maintained that it was the express right of the “lord temporal” to be the ruler over not only the church in his state, but also to keep an iron grip on his people by a god-given right. It is therefore of no surprise that immensely powerful leaders such as Albrecht Hohenzollern - Duke of Prussia and Frederick the wise – Elector of Saxony, converted to Lutheranism in 1525 and 1526 respectively. Moreover, the later military leagues of the protestant princes (league of Torgau 1526, league of Schmalkalden 1531) actually enforced Lutheranism on some states – for example, in 1534 Philip of Hesse reinstated the odious Ulrich Von Württemberg to his state after being ousted in a coup. It was, again “sola fide” that in many cases gave these advantages to the German princes. In some cases, however, “sola fide” was not all that characterized Luther’s theology.

In the Marburg Colloquy in the 1540s, where Luther and Zwingli debated, the main emphasis of the debate was not “sola fide”, which both essentially agreed upon, but the issue of transubstantiation. Zwingli and other humanist Christian movements were much more radical in that they actually rejected the entire principle, maintaining that it was purely symbolic. Luther, however, rejected transubstantiation, but instead advocated “consubstantiation”, which maintained that no miracle had actually taken place, but the “essence” of Christ was in ordinary wine and ordinary bread. Moreover, the seven sacraments of Christianity – baptism, confirmation, marriage, confession, last unction and rites and masses for the dead were supposedly all based on biblical sources. However, in 1519 when Cardinal Cajetan confronted Luther and stated that it was only the pope’s right to interpret the texts, Luther began to read deeper into them. He researched into biblical texts in the official Vulgate Latin as well as new translations in Hebrew and Greek, and maintained that there were only actually two sacraments that had any basis for worship. Therefore, much of the theological basis of Lutheranism also came from a rejection of instated Catholic rituals that were considered almost pseudo-pagan by Luther, who relied only on the scriptures – “sola scriptura” – and rejected the idea that the pope was a direct representative of Christ and god on earth. Luther also put great emphasis on the rejection of the cult of saints, which he believed constituted as idolatry and put emphasis away from the worship of Christ. For this reason, Lutheran churches were almost all sparsely decorated, so that the worshippers did not feel that they were physically directing their energies towards anything in particular. For the same reason, Luther rejected the principles of relics and pilgrimages to saints’ graves, and even managed to convince the Elector of Saxony – Frederick the wise – to disassemble his relic collection by 1523. These rejections of such principles are on the whole not surprising for the period, and it was often stated that there were “enough pieces of the true cross to plant forests, enough of the virgin’s milk to float ships”. Many of the princes who Luther associated with were humanists for a long time before they had any connection with Luther (in 1520 Ulrich Von Hutten wrote a pamphlet defending the radical biblical scholar Johannes Von Richelieu), and rejection of idols was nothing new – Erasmus mocked both the cult of saints and monastic life in his satire “In praise of folly”. Luther, like Erasmus, rejected monastic life because he felt that this was not necessary for one to achieve salvation and moreover, because nobody could pray for someone, and a person had to pray for themselves. Luther had lived a life as an Augustinian monk for years during his personal spiritual crisis, which arose from feelings that was never being a good enough Christian. Moreover, it can be said that Lutheranism was later not recognized by the emphasis on “sola fide” or “faith alone”, because in 1526, at the first diet of Speyer, Melancanthon and the papal representative cardinal Conditeri actually agreed that both faith and good works were both intrinsic to salvation, although the pope rejected this large step towards reconciliation between the two sides.

In conclusion, despite many of the other theological considerations of Luther, it would appear that “sola fide” was his main point of Lutheranism, and that it was perhaps more intrinsic than any other point. His rejection of monastic life, the cult of the saints, indulgences and relics can be seen (even though indulgences was before the concept of “sola fide” was fully instated in the 1520 “on the liberty of the Christian man”) to rely on the basis that all of these intermediaries were unnecessary if one had true belief and faith in god. Moreover, many of the political advantages that came from Lutheranism were fundamentally based on Luther’s rejection of the church, which in turn came from, as mentioned above, his belief that no intermediaries were needed – faith alone. Issues such as that of “consubstantiation” and Zwingli’s rejection of Catholic “transubstantiation” represent a very small part of Luther’s theological beliefs, and the texts of 1520 do not place much emphasis upon them. However, the political decrees such as the Augsburg confession of 1530 and the Schmalkaldic articles at the 1545 council of Trent all place much emphasis upon these other issues. Therefore, “sola fide” was in any case one of the most if not the most distinctive belief behind the Lutheran theology.