Lutheranism

7 Key excerpts on "Lutheranism"

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  eBook - ePub

  Our Ninety-Five Theses

  500 Years after the Reformation

  • Alberto L. García, Justo L. González(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bestsellers Media

    (Publisher)

  2. The legacy of the Reformation

  shows us the rich appropriation of the cultural focus of the Renaissance era in the study of the sources and classic texts, as well as the use of polyphonic music as sources that formed the impetus for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people and the use of polyphonic music in the congregational context. There are expressions of Lutheranism in some parts of the world that have learned to incarnate the spoken and heartfelt musical language of the people, taking into account at the same time the questions and worldview of that culture in the catechetical instruction.

  Nevertheless, in certain parts of Latin America we see Lutheranism as a German immigrant phenomenon that exists relatively isolated from the rest of the Latino population with its own aspirations and problems. Another form of aberration is to see Lutheranism in Latin America as a North American missionary movement that, though well intentioned, tends to form leaders whose language and thought processes tend to reflect the Lutheran churches of North America and not Latin America. For historical and cultural reasons, the Lutheran Church in the United States continues to be one of the churches with the lowest number of Latinos in the entire country. In the face of these challenges, the Lutheran Church has to rediscover its historic disposition toward incarnating in the culture of the people, rejoicing in and evangelically appropriating those cultural expressions that promote the teaching of the Word of God and life in community.

  3. Luther understands the function

  of temporal government in the promotion of peace and order in the society as a gift of God. He also teaches that in the spiritual realm (that is of the Holy Spirit), God redeems his creation by means of the Gospel of justification. Luther distinguishes between the two kingdoms, yet relates them because the Christian lives by faith in this world and has to live out his or her vocation in this world. Nevertheless, the distinction between the temporal and spiritual kingdoms has been used to justify the status quo of the temporal government even when it is not functioning or does not take into account the welfare of significant parts of its population. As long as we assume that only the spiritual welfare within the spiritual kingdom is important, and are not concerned with what happens in everyday life, such an action can lead to a justification of injustices that affect the most vulnerable (or at least a lack of interest in their wellbeing).

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  Politicizing the Bible

  The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300-1700

  • Scott Hahn(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • PublishDrive

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 LUTHER AND THE REFORMATION

  As many have rightly said, it is not sufficient to treat the Reformation as if it were defined by just one man, Martin Luther. However, Luther’s centrality in that movement cannot be denied, and to treat in detail the entire Reformation with all its personalities and permutations is beyond our scope. So let us examine the main principles and implications of the Reformation insofar as they are connected to the politicization of Scripture, using Luther’s life as a loose framework upon which to hang the intellectual developments in the early sixteenth century that helped set the context for the fathers of modern scriptural scholarship almost two centuries later.

  Early Life, Early Education, Early Nominalism

  Martin Luder was born on November 10, 1483, in Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld in Saxon Germany, the son of Hans and Margarete Luder. He was named Martin after St. Martin of Tours (c. 316–397), on whose feast day he was baptized. Later, at the University of Erfurt, he added an “h” to enhance his name, Ludher. The year after nailing his famous ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517,1 he took the spelling familiar to us today, Luther.

  Martin was the second son of the Luders, one of many children, perhaps eight, of whom only one brother and three sisters lived to adulthood. Hans Luder, the son of a successful peasant farmer, started out as a miner, but was able to lease a copper pit, and therefore, as its master, become fairly prosperous. Margarete (or Hanna) was not from the peasantry, but from the more elevated Lindemann family of the burgher class, a family that included those educated at universities, town leaders, lawyers, doctors, even a mayor and a university professor.

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  Luther on Leadership

  Leadership Insights from the Great Reformer

  • Cook(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  Convicted by the power of the Scriptures and the promise that “the righteous shall live by faith,” Luther’s doctrines of justification by faith alone and the authority of Scripture alone shook the theological foundations of the Catholic Church in the eyes of many of his followers. With growing forcefulness, Luther attacked not only the authority of the pope and the corrupt practices within the Church, but also the primacy of the ecclesiastical courts, monastic orders, and many of the economic positions held by the Church. 83 As time went on and the Reformation movement grew, Luther’s success in tearing down the dominance of the pope, the ecclesiastical courts, Catholic poor laws, and similar institutions left a void in many areas of society. Where once the Catholic Church had provided alms for the poor, educated youth in monastic schools, and decided disputes in ecclesiastical courts, now the Lutheran princes and civic leaders looked to Luther and his fellow Reformers for guidance on how to restructure their society. 84 Thus, Luther began to step into these raging debates and provided a plethora of practical and theological works that helped to define the Lutheran position on all areas of society. 85 While Luther’s doctrines of justification by faith and sola scriptura formed the heart of Luther’s theological movement, he also developed practical doctrines that helped define the Lutheran position on many seemingly “secular” areas of society. Three of Luther’s doctrines, in particular, played important roles in shaping the economic, political, legal, and educational systems within Western society: (1) his doctrine of the priesthood of believers; (2) his conception of the “three estates” in society; and (3) his framing of the “two kingdoms” in the world

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  Justification Is for Preaching

  Essays by Oswald Bayer, Gerhard O. Forde, and Others

  • Thompson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  2 For the most part Lutherans in America are just lately emerging from geographic, ethnic, and synodical isolation onto the broader American scene with ambitions towards “inclusivity.” We used to be predominantly Germans, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, Finns, and a smattering of other northern European and Nordic folk, and it was probably more our geographic isolation and ethnicity that kept us together and determined our identity than our Lutheranism. Now that we are apparently about to launch out more into the mainstreams of American Christianity, the identity question is posed with heightened urgency. Who or what in this opulent religious cafeteria shall we be? Shall we be conservative, liberal, confessional, orthodox, charismatic, neo-Pentecostal, fundamentalist, or “evangelical” (perhaps “fundagelical,” as someone recently put it)? Shall we be sectarian or ecumenical; protestant or catholic; high, low, or in the middle? Lutherans are pulled in all these directions today. They seem to be looking for someone to sell out to.

  Is “Lutheran” anything to be in America today? Chances are Americans don’t even know how to spell it. It usually comes out “Lutheran” or something like that. In the “homeland” established Lutheranism was predominantly a folk religion, a quasi-political and ethnic reality, closely identified with national and social life. Take all that away and what is left? What is Lutheranism at rock bottom? Some of my colleagues like to say—and I have echoed the thought myself—that Lutheranism is a confessional movement within the church catholic, or that its primary reason for being is that it has a dogmatic proposal to make to the church catholic,3 or, as Tillich used to say, it advocates the “Protestant Principle” vis-à-vis a catholic substance.4

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  Reformation Observances: 1517–2017

  • Krey(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  Such “good news,” the gospel, is part of a dialectic with the “law.” It leads to repentance, preceded by spiritual anxiety and suffering (Anfechtung); the gospel leads to salvation fully realized after Christ’s second coming. But Luther was sliding into a theological speculation about the Jews against his better judgment grounded in Paul, namely, that faith in Christ can never “justify “the divine punishment of the Jews. They, together with the Christian Gentiles, share the interim leading to a full union when Christ will come again. 64 The Luther Renaissance and the study of Luther’s writings in his context also revealed his indebtedness to the tradition which he both criticized and appropriated. There was an explosion of Luther biographies in the twentieth century. 65 Scholars like Heiko Oberman also showed through intense research of late-medieval theology that Luther both continues and broke with theological debates that prevailed in the schools before him. 66 Like other great reformers before him Augustine and Aquinas through intense scholarship, life as a monk and priest and professor, prayer, and reading—no devouring texts—he plumbed them and came out having turned them upside down and renewed. Scholars of the twentieth century began to recognize the value and contribution of the tradition and Luther’s appreciation for it so that he needed not always represent the liberal ideals of newness and human progress but no matter how radical—retrieval and preservation of the message of Paul and to some extent a revision of Augustine. 67 This same century which became the ecumenical century launched the mergers of Lutheran denominations in the United States and around the world and was also the century in which the Lutheran World Federation was formed (1947). 68 There was a growing sense that the Lutheran movement had become an ecumenical movement in the church catholic and by the power of the Holy Spirit the rifts of sixteenth century could be healed

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  Jesus and the Church

  The Foundation of the Church in the New Testament and Modern Theology

  • Paul Avis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  6 The foundation of the church in Protestant theology Towards a critical revolution

  The creative impulse behind the theology of the Reformation was the power of the biblical word – especially in the form of the preached gospel – to reform and renew the church. These biblical and patristic texts were approached employing the methods of Renaissance Humanism (the study of humane literature). It is perhaps not too much to claim that the Reformers were critical scholars according to their lights. From the first, Protestant scholarship was receptive to critical-historical methods in principle.

  1

  For Martin Luther in particular, the church was the dynamic creation of the word, creatura verbi , including the sacramental word.

  2

  However, Protestant theology lost much of its dynamism in the seventeenth century. It developed three retrograde characteristics: (a) a complacent acceptance, on the part of many, of the existing divisions in the church (between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformation churches, on the one hand, and within Protestantism, between the Lutheran and the Reformed churches, on the other); (b) a confessionalism with regard to the identity of the church and its theology that tended to treat, for example, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530) and the Formula of Concord (1577) and the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism (1563) or the articles of the Synod of Dort (1618–19) in practice as on the same level of authority as Holy Scripture; and (c) a movement towards a basically scholastic model of theological method that promoted logical analysis and systematic coherence, along with an exaggerated emphasis on doctrinal precision.

  In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the movement of spiritual vitality known as pietism, led by P. J. Spener and A. H. Franke, reacted against what it regarded as the dead orthodoxy of the Lutheran Church in Germany. In its spiritual rigour and fervent devotion, it prepared the ground for a renewal of ecclesiology. That renewal came in the work of F. D. E. Schleiermacher, himself a spiritual son of pietism in the form of the Moravian movement. Schleiermacher retrieved the authentic impulse of Reformation theology by approaching Christian doctrine in an existential and pastoral way. Protestant ecclesiology typically stresses the inward, spiritual reality of the church and is suspicious of the institutional, societal and hierarchical model favoured by Catholics (both Roman and Anglican). Schleiermacher was an outstanding critical scholar of the Bible, but his distinctive approach, which is typical of Protestantism, renders ecclesiology less vulnerable to a critique informed by the eschatological horizon of the New Testament.

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  God and Government

  Martin Luther's Political Thought

  • Jarrett A. Carty(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  A study of Luther’s political thought must therefore account for its place in Reformation political thought in general, especially since his political thought was for him so closely connected to his theology and interpretation of the Bible, which had launched programmatic church reform in the first place. It is a contention of this chapter, with its brief comparisons and contrasts to other major reformers, movements, and thinkers of the era, that Luther’s political thought was seminal and unique in the Reformation in that it so strongly and clearly emphasized the divine origins and purpose of temporal government, grounded it in his law and gospel theology and inner and outer ontology, and elevated service to the political order as service to God. Luther boasted several times that this emphasis was his crucial contribution to the understanding of temporal government through the ages; this chapter merely takes Luther seriously at his word by briefly comparing his ideas with Reformation-era political thought. Thus, this chapter accounts for several significant convergences and divergences between Reformation political ideas and Luther’s political thought.

  One striking area of common ground across Reformation political thought was a preoccupation with the nature and extent of political authority over the church and the promotion of the faith (however it was defined in a given confession). Since the support of secular authorities was a crucial and often deciding factor in what kind of church reform would gain a foothold in a given territory, a major political effect of the Reformation across Europe (Protestant or Catholic) was the consolidation and centralization of secular powers and the establishment of territorial and national churches. Though with very different political and ecclesiastical consequences, similar debates over political control over the church raged in, for instance, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and England.

  Yet there were also key political differences among Reformation confessions. The Church of England, or at least the prevailing Elizabethan version of it, in which ecclesial and temporal powers were united under the authority of the crown, could scarcely be contrasted more from the wholesale rejection of political power by the Mennonites. Moreover, even within confessions, differences in political thought were sometimes hotly contested or else radically shifted as events and circumstances changed. John Calvin unequivocally forbade revolution, yet in the midst of the French civil war, particularly in the aftermath of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (beginning on 23 August 1572), the Huguenots developed a doctrine of armed resistance to tyrannies that threatened the Reformed faith. In German lands, evangelical reformers claimed to be faithful to Luther’s two kingdoms teaching; yet they approved of and developed the regular exercise of civil authority over church affairs.

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