Themes in Tension: Luther

Sources: Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Blackwell, 1996); Denis R.. Janz, A Reformation Reader: Primary Texts with Introductions (Fortress, 1999); Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform (Yale, 1980); Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Doubleday, 1992); Diarmaid MacCulloch, "The Reformation 1500-1650" in Richard Harries and Henry Mayr-Harting, Christianity: Two Thousand Years (Oxford, 2001).

Reading: Romans 3, Romans 7.

Luther's Style of Thought
Biblical: guided above all by the biblical text as he read it.
Existential: arising out of personal experience of life, God, God's Word, and evil.
Occasional: worked out in specific situations and addressed to specific audiences.
Dialectical: regarding God's mysterious truth as couched in apparent contradictions.
Nominalist: treating God's expressed will, not God's works of creation, as determinative.
Versatile: crafted in disputations, sermons, commentaries, letters, prefaces, hymns, catechisms, polemics, conversations.

Solus Christus: The Cross as Criterion of All Things
The Word of God is threefold: Christ, written gospel, preached gospel.

So Lutheran theology is radically Christ-centered, Bible-centered, and faith-centered.
Luther rejects Thomas Aquinas' Aristotelian analogy of being as a reliable way to know God.
Reliable theology pursues a theologia crucis, not a theologia gloriae (Heidelberg Disputation).

Sola Scriptura: The Word Judging All Tradition
Luther's 'themes' of scripture inform Luther's doctrine of scripture and vice versa.
The Bible's authority is God-given, through prophets and apostles.
Its content is Christ-centered: more incarnational than inspired.
Its Word of God is law and gospel

... to us (so interpreted coram deo, 'before God' and pro me, 'directed at me').

God's Word came, and comes, prior to and above later tradition and church structure.

The Word stands over, relativizing and empowering traditions.

With those qualifications, scripture is a norma normans, a 'norming norm'

that judges and governs all traditions.
Tradition is norma normata ('normed norm'): fruitful if it aligns with God's Word.

Biblical material that does not express the Word of God is not authoritative (so James, apocrypha, etc.).
Tradition is necessary for living, but scripture is sufficient for conveying the Word of God.
A Protestant issue: Must Scripture generate all proper tradition, or does it merely govern it?

Lutheranism, Anglicanism/Methodism: Traditions that conflict must be abandoned; traditions that can co-exist (adiophora) can stay. This is 'conservative'.
Radical Reformation and Calvinism: The Church's life is strictly 'biblical'. Traditions not originating in scripture must be abandoned. Luther calls this 'fanaticism'.