Tradition · 1517

Lutheran

The churches that grew from Martin Luther’s reform movement, starting with the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. Their teaching is summed up in the Book of Concord (1580).

History

Roots

Lutheranism began as an argument about forgiveness. In October 1517 Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar teaching Bible at Wittenberg, posted ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences (Project Gutenberg). He meant to start an academic debate. Printers turned it into a public one, and within three years Luther had moved from criticizing a church practice to challenging the authority behind it.

His 1520 treatises set the program. To the Christian Nobility attacked the clergy’s claim to stand above lay rulers. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church cut the seven sacraments to baptism, the Lord’s Supper and (for a time) penance. The Freedom of a Christian argued that the believer is justified by faith and then serves the neighbor freely (all three in Wace and Buchheim’s First Principles of the Reformation, CCEL). Rome excommunicated him in 1521, and at the Diet of Worms that year he refused to recant unless convinced “by Scripture and plain reason.” That stand made Sola Scriptura the movement’s first principle alongside justification by faith.

Causes

Three things turned a professor’s protest into a church. The first was theology: Luther’s reading of Romans 1:17 and Romans 3:28 convinced him that God declares sinners righteous for Christ’s sake, received by faith alone, and that the penitential system obscured this. The second was politics: German princes, starting with Frederick the Wise of Saxony, protected him and later took charge of reforming the churches in their lands. The third was print, which spread his German pamphlets and his German Bible (New Testament 1522, complete 1534) faster than anyone could suppress them.

The movement defined itself on two fronts. Against Rome, Philip Melanchthon drafted the Augsburg Confession, read to Emperor Charles V in 1530 (BookOfConcord.org). Its fourth article states the core claim: people “cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith” (Article IV). Against other Protestants, Luther refused to give ground on the Lord’s Supper. At the Marburg Colloquy (secondary) in 1529 he and Huldrych Zwingli agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and parted over whether Christ’s body is truly present in the bread. That split separated the Lutheran and Reformed traditions for good.

Consolidation

Luther died in 1546, and his followers nearly tore themselves apart. After the emperor’s victory in the Schmalkaldic War, Melanchthon accepted compromises on ceremonies that stricter followers saw as betrayal. The Gnesio-Lutherans (secondary) around Matthias Flacius fought the “Philippists” for thirty years over good works, free will, the law, and the Supper. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) gave Lutheran princes legal standing; it did not settle what Lutherans believed.

The Formula of Concord (1577) did. Drafted chiefly by Jakob Andreae and Martin Chemnitz, it ruled on each dispute in turn (Epitome, Solid Declaration). In 1580 it was published with the three ancient creeds, the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, the Smalcald Articles, the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, and Luther’s two catechisms as the Book of Concord. That collection is still the doctrinal standard of confessional Lutheran churches.

Influence

The next century was the age of Lutheran orthodoxy, when theologians such as Johann Gerhard built systematic theology on the confessions (overview, secondary). Pietism answered it. Philipp Jakob Spener’s Pia Desideria (1675, Archive.org) called for Bible study groups, lay participation and a lived faith. August Hermann Francke made Halle a center of education and mission. Through the Moravians, Pietism reached John Wesley, who felt his heart “strangely warmed” in 1738 while hearing Luther’s preface to Romans read, and so shaped the Methodist and later evangelical movements.

Lutheranism spread as a territorial church across northern Germany and Scandinavia. Sweden kept bishops in an unbroken line of consecration; Denmark-Norway replaced its bishops in 1537 with superintendents ordained by a presbyter. In 1817 Frederick William III merged Lutheran and Reformed churches in the Prussian Union (secondary). “Old Lutherans” who refused it emigrated, and Saxon emigrants who left in 1838–39 founded what became the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (secondary) under C. F. W. Walther.

In the twentieth century the tradition was tested by Nazism. The pro-Nazi “German Christians” captured much of the German Protestant church, and the Confessing Church (secondary), including the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, resisted. After the war the Lutheran World Federation was founded at Lund in 1947. Its center of gravity has since moved south: the largest Lutheran churches today are the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (secondary), the largest member church of the Lutheran World Federation, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (secondary).

Key ideas and contributors

Justification by faith alone. Everything else hangs here. God declares the sinner righteous on account of Christ, and the sinner receives this by trust, not by merit. The Smalcald Articles (1537) call it the “first and chief article” and say that “of this article nothing can be yielded or surrendered” even if “heaven and earth” should sink to ruin (Part II, Art. I). The vault note Lutheran Justification treats the doctrine in detail.

Law and gospel. Scripture speaks in two ways. The law commands and accuses; the gospel promises and gives. Preaching that mixes them, Lutherans argue, either crushes consciences or leaves sinners comfortable. Walther’s lectures The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel (published 1897) gave the idea its classic pastoral form (overview, secondary).

Simul iustus et peccator. The believer is at the same time righteous and a sinner: wholly righteous in Christ, still fighting sin in the flesh (Romans 7:15–25). This is why Lutherans are wary of any account of the Christian life that measures progress as proof of salvation.

Theology of the cross. In the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) Luther contrasted a “theologian of glory,” who reasons up to God from visible works and power, with a “theologian of the cross,” who finds God hidden in suffering and weakness (overview, secondary). The idea shaped later Lutheran thought from Bonhoeffer to the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén, whose Christus Victor (1931) presented the atonement as God’s victory over sin, death and the devil (see Christus Victor).

The bound will. Against Erasmus, Luther’s The Bondage of the Will (1525, CCEL) argued that fallen humans cannot turn to God by their own power. The Formula of Concord kept this but taught single predestination: God elects to salvation, but those who are lost are lost by their own fault, not by a decree of reprobation (Solid Declaration XI). That puts Lutherans between Calvinism and Arminianism and fully satisfied with neither.

Real presence. The Augsburg Confession teaches that “the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present” in the Supper (Article X). The Formula of Concord rejects both Transubstantiation and a merely symbolic meal, and approves the forms “under the bread, with the bread, in the bread” (Solid Declaration VII). Later writers called this Sacramental Union. Lutherans also baptize infants and teach that baptism gives forgiveness and new birth (Infant Baptism; Large Catechism).

Two kingdoms and vocation. God rules the world in two ways: through the gospel in the church and through law, government and the sword in society. Ordinary work, from ruling to milking cows, is a calling in which God serves the neighbor through the worker. Luther’s Small Catechism (1529), with its “What does this mean?” questions, carried these ideas into households (BookOfConcord.org).

Other contributors: Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession and the first Lutheran systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521); Martin Chemnitz, whose Examination of the Council of Trent (1565–73) answered the Council of Trent point by point; and Spener and Francke for Pietism.

Key controversies

Rome and justification. The original quarrel was whether justification is God’s declaration (the Lutheran view) or a process of being made righteous through grace infused and cooperated with (the Catholic Justification view). The Smalcald Articles went further and called the papacy the Antichrist, a charge the Missouri Synod still holds as confessional. In 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican signed the Joint Declaration on Justification, saying the sixteenth-century condemnations no longer apply to each other’s teaching as now stated. The Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Synod rejected it, arguing that it blurs exactly what the Reformation fought over.

The Reformed and the Supper. Lutherans and Reformed have argued since Marburg over Christ’s presence, over the Christology behind it (whether Christ’s human body can be present wherever the Supper is held), and over predestination. The Leuenberg Agreement (secondary; texts at CPCE) of 1973 declared church fellowship between most European Lutheran, Reformed and United churches, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) reached a similar agreement with three Reformed churches in 1997. Confessional Lutherans answer that these accords paper over the difference between Sacramental Union and Spiritual Presence instead of resolving it. The same concern drives the practice of closed communion in the Missouri and Wisconsin synods.

Bishops and the Anglicans. Lutherans have always said that the gospel and sacraments, not a form of church order, make a church. In practice that left them with bishops in Scandinavia and synods elsewhere. The Porvoo Communion (statement 1992) united Nordic and Baltic Lutherans with British and Irish Anglican churches. In the United States the ELCA’s Called to Common Mission (secondary) with the Episcopal Church (1999) required it to adopt the historic episcopate. Opponents saw a human tradition being made necessary, and some formed Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (secondary) in 2001. See Episcopal Polity.

Scripture and confessional subscription. Do pastors subscribe to the Book of Concord because it agrees with Scripture or only insofar as it does? In 1974 that question, joined to a fight over historical-critical method and Biblical Inerrancy, led most faculty and students of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis to walk out and form “Seminex” (secondary). The departing moderates later helped form the ELCA (1988). The Missouri Synod became one of the clearest inerrantist bodies in world Protestantism.

Women and sexuality. Danish, Swedish and other Scandinavian churches began ordaining women in the late 1940s and 1950s, and two predecessor bodies of the ELCA followed in 1970. The Missouri and Wisconsin synods do not, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia stopped in 2016 (see Women in Ministry). In 2009 the ELCA adopted a social statement on human sexuality and opened its ministry to pastors in same-sex relationships (ELCA social statements); the Church of Sweden began marrying same-sex couples the same year. Dissenting congregations formed the North American Lutheran Church (secondary) in 2010, and the Ethiopian Mekane Yesus church broke fellowship with both bodies in 2013. The split runs between Affirming Theology and the Traditional Marriage Ethic, and increasingly between Northern and Southern churches.

Luther’s antisemitism and the two kingdoms. Luther’s late tract On the Jews and Their Lies (1543, secondary) urged burning synagogues and expelling Jews, and Nazi propagandists quoted it. Critics have also argued that the two-kingdoms teaching encouraged German Lutherans to leave politics to the state. The ELCA formally repudiated Luther’s anti-Jewish writings in 1994, and the Missouri Synod denounced his “hostile attitude” toward Jews in 1983 (secondary). Defenders of the two-kingdoms doctrine point to Bonhoeffer and to Norwegian bishops who resisted the occupation as evidence that it can also ground resistance.

What remains unresolved

The tradition agrees on its center: sinners are justified by grace through faith for Christ’s sake, and Christ is truly given in word and sacrament. It disagrees about how tightly the Book of Concord binds, and therefore about how far fellowship with Rome, the Reformed and the Anglicans can go without giving up something Luther said could not be yielded. The global Lutheran family now divides less by country than by that question and by the sexuality debate that overlays it.