Do not disregard Luther’s early disputations, but appreciate their specificity and recognize their pastoral and theological continuity with his later works.
In Reformation scholarship there is a recurring distinction between the early and late “Luther.” Often this manifests as a distinction between the ideas of a younger, more confrontational set of writings, and a more mature, measured, and consistent author. While it is undeniable that any author develops with time and experience, the distinction between “young and old,” or “early and late” for Luther often goes beyond literary style or identifying historical context. Instead it has at times been leveraged to discount particular phrases, writings, or assertions of Luther and contrast them against the later reformation movement. [1]
The most common works on the chopping block are those that are polemical in nature such as the disputations and debates of the late 1510s and early 1520s which largely pre-date Luther’s formal excommunication from the Roman church in 1521. These disputations do not constitute an organized confession of faith like that found in the Augsburg Confession (1530) but instead are more “occasional,” meaning they were written in response to a specific occasion or against issue by issue errant positions. Some of the notable disputations and debates include, The Ninety-Five Theses, the Heidelberg Disputation, The Disputation Against the Scholastic Theology, and the Leipzig Debate. While the method and style of disputation never fully disappeared from Luther’s quiver, these early debates and their frequency were formative to the evangelical movement. A staple of the scholastic convention and process of doing theology, the genre of disputation empowered Luther to address the medieval doctrine of God. [2] This scholastic theology had positioned the relationship between God and the human creature squarely within the realm of the law and in doing so distorted the corpus of theology taught and preached by the church. The gospel of Christ, his saving person and work, had been reinterpreted––viewed primarily as an enhancement and perfection of God’s law.
The evangelical shift of Luther’s theology occurred as he found that the Scripture divorced the righteousness of the law from the righteousness of God’s final word, the Gospel. As Robert Kolb and Charles Arand observe:
“Luther’s reformation breakthrough occurred when he realized that with the phrase ‘The just shall live by faith’(Rom 1:17), the gospel reveals a different kind of righteousness, a righteousness not demanded us from God, but a righteousness God bestows on us.” [3]
The disputation became a tool for applying the distinction between the law and the gospel to each occasion or challenge. Through these, Luther addressed the doctrine of God, the depth of sin, the role and nature of good works, the question of human free will, and many other theological questions.
Today, an assumption is often made that whatever was essential or good from these pre-confessional works was absorbed and properly synthesized into the more mature writings and whatever was overstated or unuseful was left behind. As such, one would be better off reading something like Luther’s Large Catechism than his Treatise on Good Works when investigating how Lutherans ought to speak about good works. Or in other terms, perhaps Luther was at his best when he was psychologically the most stable––meaning neither in his early years, when his reformation was impassioned and inflamed, nor in his latest years, as the stress of the reformation weighed on him and death knocked at his door. In his work, Luther The Reformer: The Story of The Man and His Career, James Kittelson critiques both the pure psychoanalysis on the one hand and the historical dogmatizing approach to understanding Luther on the other. [4] Instead Kittelson's biography demonstrates changes, evolutions, but also returns and continuity of thought by following Luther through five eras and identifying eighteen different occasions or vocations through which Luther was called to proclaim.
Luther’s writings have a vocational through-point across his life’s work.
With this more humanizing lens, the early disputations themselves present not as something immature or lacking the doctrinal depth or completeness of later works. Instead, they largely characterize Luther’s mission to address the depth and scope of errors whenever the proper opportunity or occasion arises. In this way, Luther’s writings have a vocational through-point across his life’s work. For instance, the Augustianian gathering at Heidelberg in April of 1518, “Luther would have attended it even without the fame and notoriety that had come with his attack on indulgences.” But he was instead invited to describe and defend theological and philosophical theses. To this audience he described the “Theologian of the Cross” with assertions about God, the law, good works, and free will. He rose to the occasion and addressed his audience with a distinctly Augustinian set of propositions. [6] This does not mean Luther’s “theologian of the cross” is incompatible or lacks usefulness for teaching and preaching confessional evangelical Lutheran theology. Instead, this occasion - along with his later treatise on The Bondage of the Will, catechisms for the church, and Antinomian Disputations work together to give us a fuller understanding of the breadth and necessity for God’s law and his gospel to be preached and distinguished.
Consider thesis one of the Heidelberg Disputation: “The law of God, which is the most beneficial doctrine of life, is not able to advance man towards righteousness but rather speaks against him.” [7] Here Luther quickly and pointedly asserts the goodness of God’s law while distinguishing it from the righteousness of Christ given to sinners by the Gospel. Luther accomplishes this without using the word “Christ” nor the word “Gospel.” He shocks an audience who has become obsessed with organizing and categorizing God’s law. A full twenty years later he addresses the near opposite dilemma, not of pro-nomian, law-categorizing monks, but antinomian, law-disregarding enthusiasm. Here he echoes the very same: “the gospel is the promise concerning Christ which liberates from the terrors of the law, from sin and death, gives grace remission of sin, righteousness, and eternal life. Nonetheless he [Christ] still interprets the law, not as a lawgiver or some Moses, but so that we might understand what kind of work or fulfillment it is that the law requires of us.” and “Therefore this righteousness, which the law requires, is not attained by means of the law that reveals sin and works wrath, but by means of Christ who alone has done the will of God and fulfilled his law and received the Holy Spirit.” [8] These speak congruently, rather than one usurping the other. Together, they give us tools for understanding that evangelical theology includes the preaching of the law, but excludes the possibility of obtaining righteousness by the law.
The distinction between the young and the mature Luther has at times been leveraged to cast doubt and uncertainty not only on the life and works of Martin Luther, but on the entire proposition of evangelical theology itself. Inheritors and readers of the Reformation should be careful not to excessively contrast Luther’s works through the lens of later dogmatic consolidation or psychological analysis. Instead, we are given the benefit of a public career and ministry that rose to meet the specific and varied occasions and callings of a church in desperate need of the clarity of Christ and his gospel.
The span of Luther’s career, from the young professor engaged in academic debate, to the mature leader of a reforming movement, to the dying pastor clinging to the hope of Christ, provides the church with rich and diverse examples of teaching and preaching. Do not disregard Luther’s early disputations, but appreciate their specificity and recognize their pastoral and theological continuity with his later works. Across the whole of Luther’s career we see not a man abandoning one theology for another, but a preacher increasingly sharpening and applying the same evangelical confession: that sinners are justified by grace alone through faith alone on account of Christ alone.
[1] The most famous example is Young Man Luther by Erik Erikson, who presents a shift in Luther’s works and theology through the process of psychoanalysis. Erickson tends to argue that Luther’s theological assertions change, mature, or even contradict one another because of an ever-evolving psychology of fear, anxiety, and identity. This tradition of psychological analysis has continued with authors like Lyndal Roper in Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. Likewise, a tradition of anti-Protestant Catholic apologetics has argued along similar lines, with Heinrich Denifle claiming that Luther’s Reformation was born out of a personal crisis of faith rather than true theological conviction.
[2] “Luther’s struggle with God took place against the backdrop of the medieval conviction that a person’s entire life, present and future, depends on what God the creator at the last judgement will say about the way human creatures have fulfilled their creative purposes.” Robert Kolb and Charles P. Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 33.
[3] Kolb and Arand, Genius of Luther’s Theology, 36.
[4] “Each of these ways of looking at Luther has serious limitations. The first ignores Luther’s humanity and turns him into a theological system. The second sidesteps the fact that he was a theologian and a pastor and presents him as a bundle of social or psychic impulses. The third loses sight of his significance altogether. None confronts the full reality of the man.” James Kittelson, Luther The Reformer: The Story of The Man and His Career, (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2003), 12.
[5] Kittelson, Luther the Reformer, 110.
[6] For an extensive treatment of Luther’s contextualization of the Heidelberg theses as an agustinaian for Augustinians see Marco Barone Martin Luther’s Agustinian Theology of the Cross.
[7] Thesis 1 in “Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation 28 Theses and Proofs” (1518) translated by Caleb Keith in Theology of the Cross, edited by Caleb Keith and Kelsi Klembara (1517 Publishing, 2018).
[8] Martin Luther, edited and translated by Holger Sonntag, Solus Decalogus Est Aeternus: Martin Luther’s Complete Antinomian Theses And Disputations, (Minneapolis, Lutheran Press), 85.
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