Category: Luther

by Charles Fry /

LUTHER’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL, Part 7

(Today’s post picks up directly from the previous one.)

The Myth of Perfectionism

Another Princeton professor, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, wrote hundreds of pages confronting the errors of perfectionism and the idea that saints no longer are sinners. In his essay on “Miserable-Sinner Christianity” (article one), Warfield did a masterful job of showing how throughout Protestant history and across all denominations and confessions, the Protestant church has always held to Luther’s doctrine that the believer is at the same time sinful and justified.

In his day, such a belief was mockingly labeled, “miserable-sinner Christianity.” In his essay, Warfield observed that such Christianity was the only true Christianity! Yet such Christianity was far from being morose, despairing, and joyless. Rather, it was the only kind of Christianity that knew true and unbounding joy and freedom from despair. “Miserable-sinner Christianity” was the only kind of Christianity that faced the reality of sin in the Christian life and at the same time knew the unchanging love of God for his children. Such Christianity also produced genuine humility, as Warfield explained:

It belongs to the very essence of the type of Christianity propagated by the Reformation that the believer should feel himself continuously unworthy of the grace by which he lives… We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. This is not true of us only “when we believe.” It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to him or to God through him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in Christian behavior may be. It is always on his “blood and righteousness” alone that we rest.[i]

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by Charles Fry /

LUTHER’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL, Part 5

Man’s Inability and the Bondage of the Will

It was September of 1524 when the great Humanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, published Diatribe, which we mentioned briefly previously in this series. This was Erasmus’ first public attack on Luther’s teaching. In it, he opposed Luther’s view of free will. Erasmus believed that Christian conduct—good morals and right behavior—was the primary way by which people could please God, and he downplayed Luther’s emphasis on salvation being a matter of God’s grace, not man’s works. J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston have observed that Erasmus did not even consider free will to be an especially significant issue. Instead, Erasmus believed that Luther had blown the doctrine’s importance out of proportion.[i] In other words, Erasmus accused Luther of making much ado about nothing.

Erasmus’ approach seemed humble and self-deprecating, which is often how false teaching comes across as reasonable and acceptable to the general public. But Luther found Erasmus’ attack and his trivialization of free will infuriating. In response, Luther cast off all restraint: he responded by writing his blistering work, On the Bondage of the Will, which attacked the teaching that man’s will is free with respect to salvation.

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by Charles Fry

LUTHER’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL, Part 3

Justification by Faith Alone

In our contemporary culture we have little idea of the need to be declared righteous before a holy God, for we are dim to the majesty and holiness of God and therefore have a high estimate of ourselves. Yet Luther rightly understood these things. The majesty of God required man’s perfect obedience to the law, a perfection man could never render. To Luther, therefore, the issue of justification by faith alone was the issue of the day.

Luther saw that a sinner who simply looked to the Lord Jesus by faith alone—by trusting in Christ’s work and not personal performance or supposed righteousness—was freely pardoned, loved, forgiven, and fully accepted by God. Jesus’ perfect obedience to his own law met the righteous requirements of the law for the believer, and his death on the cross once and for all paid the debt for the believer’s sin. He realized the life and death of Christ were credited to the believer, securing for him or her a perfect righteousness, permanently freed from all wrath. Hence, there was now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). The believer was fully justified, declared righteous before God.

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by Charles Fry /

LUTHER’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOSPEL, Part 1

I do not nullify the grace of God,
for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly.
Galatians 2:21, NASB

In the year 1496, a boy of around 14 years of age observed a startling sight: a prince named William of Anhalt walking the streets of Magdeburg, Germany, emaciated and begging, carrying a sack on his back like a donkey. “He had so worn himself down by fasting and vigil that he looked like a death’s-head, mere bone and skin.”[i] William had given up the realms of earthly nobility to save his own soul by suffering, self-denial, and purgation.

This was the medieval religious system, a system of self-effort and suffering to gain the halls of paradise—a system that included relics, purgatory, penance, fear, and uncertainty, without providing assurance that one had ever done enough. Years later that 14-year-old would commit himself to this system in hopes of gaining a clean conscience and assurance that he would one day be in heaven.

The young boy, of course, was Martin Luther. No matter how hard he tried to get to heaven by “monkery” or by plumbing the depths of the mystic’s surrender to God, he could never be calm before the majesty, justice, and holiness of God. The more he tried to please God, the more he hated him. Over time, however, as Luther studied the Scriptures, rediscovering the good news of the gospel freed his tormented conscience.

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by Charles Fry /

A BRIEF LIFE OF MARTIN LUTHER: Part 6

Despite his many concerns with the Roman Church, Luther considered a smaller yet growing theological opponent, the Anabaptists, to be more formidable. This group took the Reformation as their starting point, but then went to a radical end in hopes of regaining what they considered to be pure religion. They heartily embraced extra-biblical revelation, trusting in new revelations supposedly from God, rather than resting in the Bible and hearing God speak through the Scriptures alone.

As a result, the Anabaptists plunged themselves into religious excess and disgrace, wreaking havoc and disruption. Sadly, the papacy and the emperor associated Luther with the Anabaptists and their folly. Therefore, Luther zealously attacked the Anabaptist theology. With respect to both Rome and the Anabaptists, the chief battle was ultimately over the same issue: the doctrine of sola scriptura: Scripture alone.

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