Transcript

When speaking about Christian morality, the greatest virtues that motivate and enliven the Christian life are what are known as the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love.

The catechism of the Catholic Church goes so far as to describe them as the foundation of Christian moral activity.

And among these three all-important virtues, love, also known as charity, is the most primary.

As Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, Faith, hope, and love remain, these three, but the greatest of these is love.

Because of the virtue's centrality in Christian living, tinkering with or misunderstanding them is deeply wounding to the life of the Church and to the life of the individual Christian.

And among the many errors of the Protestant movement, the emphasis on or distortion of faith to the exclusion or detriment of love is one of the movement's greatest crimes.

Though there were earlier revolutionaries, heretics, and schismatics who resemble the later Protestant figures, such as Jan Hus in the 1400s, it is none of these that the various Protestant denominations remember with their Reformation Day on October 31st, but rather, an Augustinian priest and theology professor at Wittenberg, Germany named Martin Luther.

On the eve of the Feast of All Saints in 1517, Martin Luther first published his 95 Theses, marking an important step on the journey that would lead to his separation from the Church.

Like most men who end up separating from the fullness of Christianity, Luther believed that he was authentically recovering a truth of Christianity about which the ecclesiastical hierarchy was mistaken.

In and of itself, the desire for reform that motivated Luther could have been pious and upright, and we might be remembering him as a true reformer and saint.

After all, there were genuine moral evils in Luther's day due in part to ignorance of theology.

And as an educator and confessor, it's easy to see how Luther would have been concerned for the well-being of the laity, and felt an urgent need to correct scandal and error among the clergy, especially as it pertained to misunderstandings around indulgences.

Yet Luther went beyond attempting to correct errors, and began instead to develop a novel theory of the virtue of faith.

Luther's theology on faith developed throughout his life.

If you read the Luther of 1509, he comes across as a much more orthodox man than the Luther of the 1520s.

But the central problem of Luther's work, his elevation of his version of faith over and above love, gradually can be seen to filter through all of Luther's work, eventually corrupting his understanding of a Christian's relationship to God, the relationship to their fellow Christians, and how a Christian receives justification or salvation from God Himself.

Beyond the social issues of Martin Luther's day, what prompted Luther to posit his new understanding of faith?

A major culprit seems to be Luther's turbulent mental state.

Martin Luther was a man who suffered from intense scrupulosity, a psychological and moral phenomenon which afflicts a person with a deep desire to know that their salvation is certain before God, and a tendency to hyper-fixate on minute actions as sins to the detriment of a good relationship with the Lord.

While most people struggle with sins like pride in a more conventional sense that makes them minimize their own failings, scrupulous persons such as Luther have a tendency to inwardly exaggerate their flaws and intensely doubt their own salvation, even after making a good confession.

In a 1518 anecdote about an anonymous man, a man that both Catholics and Protestants understand to be Luther referencing his own life, we hear a firsthand account of the spiritual struggles which plagued Luther.

I myself also know a man who has stated that he suffered these punishments several times.

They're so intense and so infernal that no tongue can say and no pen can describe them.

God seems horribly wrathful.

There is no escape, no consolation.

In this moment, it is astonishing to say this, the soul cannot believe that it will ever be redeemed.

The true antidote to scrupulosity, like all vices that relate to pride, is humility and a willingness to see God working through others, and in the case of scrupulosity, an openness to the virtue of hope.

Yet with episodic attacks of such intense stress, it's easy to see how Luther would be open to temptation to find an easier way.

In Luther's Catholic days, he rightly recognized the virtue of hope in the midst of desolation, but as Luther's theology evolved towards Protestantism, he created a new solution.

But before we explain Luther's solution, we need to understand two things.

One, what is justification?

And two, what is faith?

The Catholic understanding of justification is expressed well in the Council of Trent, where we read that, The beginnings of justification must be attributed to God's prevenient grace through Jesus Christ, that is, to his call without any previous merits.

Thus, justification, both in a Catholic and a Lutheran view, puts the first movement upon God, who calls man out of a state of sin in which he could not be redeemed on his own and gratuitously invites him into the salvific mystery of Christianity.

Faith, meanwhile, is defined by the catechism as, The theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that He has said and revealed to us.

But in Luther, faith is something very different.

Luther equates faith to, A lively and undoubted belief that makes a man absolutely certain of his being pleasing to God.

The absoluteness of that belief and being pleasing to God is the key element here.

In Luther, the function of faith is as an, Inward confidence or certitude of personal salvation by Jesus Christ that, by the very power of the certitude itself, justifies a soul before God.

Luther alludes to this, noting, If you find your heart confident that the work is agreeable to God, then it is good, and conversely, if you think God is wrathful, then it is so.

This confidence that Luther expresses is an error not because it clings to Christ, but because it ultimately fails to cling to Christ, holding a sufficient and inward presumption of salvation by virtue of that confidence.

We might compare this negative sort of certitude that subjectively hangs its salvation on the inner man's disposition with Doctor of the Church, Saint Therese of Lisieux's certitude of finding it in Christ Himself.

Saint Therese notes, It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to love.Pope Francis explains the saint's thinking on our reliance on Jesus by saying, Therese, for her part, wished to highlight the primacy of God's action.

It is most fitting then that we should place heartfelt trust not in ourselves, but in the infinite mercy of a God who loves us unconditionally and has already given us everything in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Luther himself once embraced this cross-focused approach, and before the Reformation, he characterized his outlook as a theology of the cross.

He even goes so far as to say in his 1517 to 1518 lectures on Romans that no man can claim certitude of his own salvation, a viewpoint which accords with 1 Corinthians 4:4.

But as Luther's theology developed, he began to see certitude as the essential guarantee of salvation.

In this way, Luther opens the door for a new subjective sort of Christianity, a Christianity where the inner self's perception controls his justification.

Now, to be fair to Luther, he does not think that a person who is justified under his model of faith should embrace hedonism or wanton murder.

Rather, after inward faith is established, the fruit of a Christian's inward movement is righteous action.

And even after 1517, Luther wrote encouraging Christians to follow the moral law and the Ten Commandments, like in his short catechism.

But following the Ten Commandments and staying close to the sacramental life becomes more indirectly connected to eternal life, since even deadly sins for Luther can be covered simply by confidence in one's own salvation, whether or not one makes direct use of the sacramental power of the priest through confession.

Now, a Catholic might rightly ask, how can Luther possibly justify his view of Scripture in light of the references to the necessity of faith being put into action throughout the New Testament, as well as the references to the possibility of losing salvation?

To name a few, James 2:17 says that, Faith does not profit man if works do not follow from it.

James 1:22 says that, Those who are hearers but not doers of the Word do not profit.

Galatians 5:6 says that, Faith must work through love, and 2 Timothy 4:7 alludes to, The necessity of completing the Christian life well so as to achieve eternal reward.

The answer to all this is that Luther is failing to do what the early Church and the Church Fathers did with the Scriptures, which is read them in a hermeneutic of continuity.

Rather, Luther is doing the opposite.

He is looking at a verse such as Romans 5:1, which says, Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace, deciding that verses such as these represent a thesis for the New Testament, and importing that idea back into the rest of Scripture so that he can get the outcome he believes is authentic, and thereby receive assurance that his inward confidence-based method of salvation is true and upright.

Luther created a new hermeneutic, or lens, with which to look at Scripture that differs from the original one, and whenever things didn't look right through that lens, Luther did not adjust his own thinking, but rather adjusted the authority of those Scriptures.

The most famous example of this is his attempt to discredit the Book of James, which heavily contradicts Luther's reading of the other books of the Bible.

Now, contrary to popular myth, Luther did not attempt to have this book removed entirely from the category of Holy Scripture as he would eventually do with the Deuterocanon.

But although Luther respected the book enough to not ban it utterly, in his 1522 preface to James, Luther makes it clear that he does not consider the book to be doctrinally sound, for it is flatly against Saint Paul and all the rest of Scripture.

It ascribes righteousness to works and says that Abraham was justified by his works.

In other words, Luther correctly identified that the Book of James is incompatible with Protestantism and sought to deprioritize its importance so as not to interfere with the books that could be twisted to support his view.

He goes on to say, It is an epistle that need not be counted among the chief books, which are to lay the foundation of faith.

Though this incident with the Book of James is an especially damning one for Luther's viewpoint on the canonicity of Scriptures, there is a much more subtly erroneous bent to his thought.

As mentioned at the start of this video, Saint Paul says that love is the greatest of the three theological virtues.

This framing is eminently consistent with the Gospels such as Matthew 22, where Christ summarizes the Ten Commandments by saying, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.

This is the greatest and the first commandment.

The second is like it.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.

Here, Christ emphasizes that love rather than faith is at the core of Christian living.

Yet contrastingly, Luther declares that faith is the highest and most precious of all good works.

How does Luther bring Christ around to his way of thinking?

Well firstly, as previously mentioned, Luther thinks that good works flow out of an authentic faith, but do not affect one's salvation, conflating Saint Paul's use of the law to refer to Jewish ritual practices with Christ's moral commands.

Luther states in his 1535 commentary on Galatians, Since Christ has displaced the law which commands charity, it follows that charity has been abrogated with the law as a factor in our justification, and only faith is left.

Saint Augustine famously noted in his Confessions that, Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.

This love of God should therefore be our ultimate object in all that we do.

In Luther's own mind, he agrees with Augustine's principle of unity with God.

Indeed, in certain passages, it can at first appear as though he is in accord with Catholic thought on the matter.

Luther says, It is wrong and not to be allowed, as some stupid spirits now say, although you do not keep the commandment and do not love God and your neighbor, although you are even an adulterer, that makes no difference.

But Luther equates the love of God and neighbor with the Mosaic Law that Paul says is dissolved, and thus Luther separates out Christ's law of love from its connection to salvation.

Luther says that, He delivers us from the Law.

For when the Law says, 'Love God with all thy heart,' I cannot do it.

Then Christ says, 'Come to me, take me and cling to me by faith, then you shall be rid of the Law.' Though Christ claims that His yoke is easy and His burden is light, in Luther, loving God directly is not a possible avenue, but rather you are to cling to certitude of salvation in Christ through faith .

the interior life, therefore, that great treasure of so many saints both before and after Luther, is reduced into confidence in salvation.

Luther drives this home in a commentary on Isaiah, which touches on Christ's call to love by recasting it as a call to faith.

For in these two things, the entire Christian life is consumed, both internal and external.

The internal life deals with God through faith alone.

This naked faith is righteousness before God, which God imputes His righteousness without any preceding or following works.

The external life deals with people, to love your neighbor as yourself.

Luther thus collapses a whole branch of Christian living, indeed the most important branch, into his theory of faith.

With the role of the interior life so drastically reduced in Lutheran thought, it makes sense that monks and religious sisters, who separate themselves from the world to perform the important work of prayer, are so rarely emphasized in Protestant traditions.

To say nothing of Luther's abandonment of the discipline of clerical celibacy, himself wedding a former nun.

For Luther, all grace and sacramental life is contained by his maxim of faith.

He says, Now, since I believe in Him, my sins are forgiven and I am called a child of grace.

Luther thinks that the one who believes, simply because he believes, is filled with grace, and therefore does good works.

Luther points to this as a work of the Holy Spirit within us, for we cannot secure this faith in Jesus Christ by your own works or power.

The Holy Spirit must do it.

Yet in seeming to promote reliance on God, Luther does the opposite, for the actual mechanism by which Luther imagines the Protestant Christian must secure salvation is through a work, namely the work of asserting confidence in one's own salvation, Luther's definition of faith.

Now, as said above, initial grace really is unmerited, which is a point upon which Protestants and Catholics can agree.

As the Decree on Justification from the Council of Trent says, Nothing that precedes justification, neither faith nor works, merits the grace of justification.

For what merit can we who are born with original sin possibly offer to the omnipotent God, our creator to whom we owe an infinite debt?

And how can a man have faith unless God first gives it to him?

In the Catholic view, faith holds an extremely important place in our relationship with Christ, and it is involved in our salvation.

However, it is not the justification itself.

Christ is the source of our justification, the instrumental cause of which is the Sacrament of Baptism.

When God expiates our sins through the grace of this sacrament, our souls are permanently stamped with baptismal grace.

And if someone were to die immediately after receiving baptismal grace, he would need nothing further to inherit eternal life.

Yet a soul justified through baptism can always lose that justification through sin, and it makes his crime all the worse, because he has been introduced into special relationship with God through baptism.

As Jesus says in Luke 12, Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.

In addition, though initial grace is unmerited, a Christian can both advance or recede toward Christ in the moral life, and do deeds which either increase or decrease the soul's standing in God's eyes.

For as Jesus also says, In my Father's house, there are many dwelling places, indicating that even among those who enter into paradise, their deeds will be rewarded them differently.

The merits of our works are also alluded to in many other places throughout the Scriptures, such as Matthew 10:22, which speaks of endurance until the end, Hebrews 6:10, which says that both work and love will be rewarded, or 1 Corinthians 15:58, that says our labor is not in vain.

In all these verses, we see an authentically Christian response to the unscriptural doctrines of Martin Luther, and of the many sects that adopted various positions after him, yet still claiming to cling to the Holy Scriptures while holding to an extreme or exaggerated confidence in one's justification before God through simple assertion, which is really the sin of presumption.

Matthew 24:13 spoke truly when it said that only the one who endures to the end will be saved, not the one who assumes that the start of the moral life is its conclusion.

Likewise, 1 Corinthians 4 says, I am not conscious of anything against me, but I do not thereby stand acquitted.

The one who judges me is the Lord.

Therefore, do not make any judgment before the appointed time.

Ultimately, however, no matter how many verses one points to, a Lutheran or other Protestant can always brush these verses aside and reread them in the light of their own hermeneutic of Scripture.

They will say that this or that verse does not really mean what the Catholic says it does, and will cling to their own particular reading.

Now, as God's Word, the Holy Scriptures are boundless in their overflowing grandeur and the many shining sentences of the Bible.

It is therefore true that they can often hold many different meanings.

As Saint Ephraim the Syrian, the early Christian theologian, noted, Lord, who can comprehend even one of your words?

We lose more of it than we grasp, like those who drink from a living spring.

For God's Word offers different facets according to the capacity of the listener.

Yet it is this multifaceted nature of the Scriptures that is precisely why there is need of the Church as our starting point.

If no one man in a single lifetime can hope to understand the Scriptures in their fullness, then how can it be the source of truth from which a person abstracts particular moral and theological teachings?

The answer is that God's Holy Spirit gives us a true and certain arbiter of Scripture through His Holy Church, working infallibly to interpret the Scriptures and know their meaning.

It is pure vanity, pride, and error to believe in any private discernment over the discernment of the Church working in and through the Holy Spirit.

Any individualist readings of the Bible, which stand apart from the source of truth, are deeply flawed.

The Bible only really works as a guiding light for religion if it can be interpreted by the Church, and if the Church's sons and daughters understand and follow this interpretation in their own meditations upon Scripture.

The Scriptures were compiled in and by the Catholic Church in the context of her sacramental life, and with the insight of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and holy saints of the Church.

As the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council notes in Dei Verbum, Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the same spirit in which it was written.

The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account, along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith.

A couple things before I close.

One, I am indebted to the work of German scholar and former Lutheran Paul Hacker for his book, Faith in Luther, upon which this video draws heavily.

Secondly, for further reading on the Church's understanding of justification, you should read Trent's Decree on Justification, particularly Chapter Seven.

And as always, check the resources in the video description for full context on what was presented in this video.