Reformation: Luther's Main Doctrines
Sale of Indulgences. The sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church to finance the building programs and other budgetary needs of Pope Leo X were the spark that ignited the Reformation in Germany under the leadership of Martin Luther. Luther was an indefatigable worker and a tenacious opponent. When his objections to the Church leadership about the problem of indulgences received no satisfaction, he launched into a protracted debate with them about a variety of issues involving Church doctrine. Luther made effective use of the printing press (newly invented at the time) to publicize his views, and he became a charismatic leader of a new religious movement. Not intending at first to leave the Roman Catholic Church (he was himself a monk), he soon found himself at the head of a new religious organization with its own set of doctrines. Luther was a scholar of the Bible, and he researched his objections to the Church with great diligence. Based in his study of the Bible, he developed over time a set of doctrines that offered an alternative to traditional Roman Catholic ideas about salvation, revelation, and the church. These ideas contained within them (unbeknownst to Luther) the spark that deconstructed Christian doctrine over the next four centuries.

Luther's Doctrinal Objections -- Salvation by Faith Alone. Luther was a biblical scholar whose position was heavily influenced by the study of Paul's letters, where he discovered (or so he claimed) doctrines that undercut Papal authority. Central to this revisionist reading of the Bible was his interpretation of Romans, where he asserted that salvation in heaven depended solely upon God's grace and upon the faith of the believer. Connected with this doctrine are a number of others that form the core of Protestant beliefs.

i. Sola Fidei -- "Justification by Faith Alone". This was the main doctrine that Luther thought he had found in Paul's letters, and some others derive from it according to strict logic. Essentially Luther came to believe that all people fell short of the requirements laid upon them by "the law", and thus they fell under its condemnation. That is, human beings are incapable of living up to the requirements placed on them according to the law of God, since human beings are, of their nature, "sinful and unclean". As Luther claimed, all things human are fallible and imperfect. Not being able to keep the requirements of the law, all people stand judged by it. Luther reasoned, and he understood the New Testament to say, that there is nothing humans can do to gain salvation on their own, and we therefore depend entirely on God's grace for our welfare in the afterlife. In fact, strictly speaking humans do not even "earn" their salvation through faith. Rather, faith is the response of gratitude for God's generosity towards sinful, unworthy beings.

ii. Non-existence of Purgatory. Since Purgatory is a place where people go to "purge" themselves of sinful behavior before they enter Heaven, and since a sufficiency of good works has nothing to do with entry into heaven for Protestants, there is no place for Purgatory in Protestant thinking. Thus, for Luther the sale of indulgences was pure sophistry erected for the expropriation of money from the people of Europe. This conclusion was buttressed by the fact that there is no mention of Purgatory in the Bible.

iii. Priesthood of All Believers. Likewise, since people were saved solely through the grace of God, the ritual actions performed by the priesthood for the salvation of the faithful were also unnecessary. Luther denied the Papal claims of authority based on the doctrine of Apostolic Succession, he denied that Papal excommunication damned one to Hell, that only the Roman Catholic priesthood could administer the sacraments (which were reduced to two for the Protestants -- baptism and the Eucharist), and that the RC priesthood had control of the Office of the Keys. Rather, all those things necessary for salvation were directly accessible to those who responded with faith to the grace God had bestowed on them. Faith, conversion, repentance, and salvation all had to do with an inner, personal experience between the person and God. Following this line of reasoning, all believers are in essence "priests", since the means to salvation is contained within their own personal relationship with God, and not with an office holder in an ecclesiastical organization. More properly put, there is no need for priests in Protestantism. Thus, even down to the present, Protestant churches have no priests, per se; congregations are led by "pastors" (i.e., shepherds) or "ministers" (i.e., servants).

iv. Sola Scriptura. Luther based his conclusions about the nature of Christian dogma on his own interpretation of the Scripture. This was a departure from the traditional use of the Bible up to this point, because previously the interpretation of Scripture was seen to be the domain of the RC hierarchy. In fact, according to Roman Catholic tradition the Bible by itself was not sufficient for an understanding of revelation, but the Bible in conjunction with official Church documents (such as Church councils and Papal encyclicals) were seen to give the full picture on Christian dogma. Luther said "no" to this, and asserted that the Bible was sufficient by itself for the learned interpreter; there was no need for the authoritative interpretation of the Church. One main outgrowth of this was Luther's return to the original languages of the Bible to understand its most basic meaning, and a translation of those texts into the German vernacular so as to allow the people to read the text for themselves. (Previously in Roman Catholicism the Vulgate (the official Latin translation) had been the authoritative version of the Bible. This meant that only educated people (primarily priests) could actually read the text of the Bible itself.) In the process of returning to the original languages of the Bible, Luther also reduced the number of books of the Old Testament in accordance with Jewish tradition. The Roman Catholic Old Testament is based on the Septuagint (an ancient Greek translation of early works), which contains a number of books that are not regarded as part of the Tanak in Jewish tradition. These extra books are called "the Apocrypha" in Protestant circles, in order to highlight their less-than-revealed status.

iv. Predestination. Another doctrine prominent in Protestantism is "predestination". Predestination has a more central place in the Reformed tradition of Calvin, but Luther also accepted the basic idea. The doctrine derives from the logical relation of some of the central Protestant ideas, particularly salvation by faith alone, the absolute perfection and transcendence of God, and the fallibility of all things human (including human reason). The argument goes something like this:

Humans can be saved by nothing that is of our own effort. We are saved by God's grace alone. In fact, God is so utterly different from human beings, God is so utterly beyond our ability to understand, that we would be unable even to make conclusions about God's nature or accept God's grace unless God had so blessed us as to be able to receive it. That is, even to be able to believe in God can never be the product of human effort (i.e., reason -- Luther especially rejected scholastic arguments for the existence of God as sophistry), but is itself something God gives us. So, if we are unable on our own merits to be able to receive God's grace, then it must be a matter of God's choice as to whether someone has the faith necessary to be saved. Hence, those people who have faith were "predestined" for Heaven because God willed it. Likewise, (though there is some disagreement on this point), those people who do not believe are "predestined" for Hell, because God did not bestow upon them the faith necessary for salvation.

This doctrine sounds cruel and heartless to those who encounter it for the first time. In fact, when Catholics disputed Protestants about it at the time of the Reformation, the RC Church proclaimed the doctrine heretical and absurd. The RC position was that God would never have been so foolish as to require (in the Law) things of people that they could not do -- hence, both the doctrines of salvation by faith alone and predestination were false. But for the Protestants themselves the apparent absurdity of the doctrine had to be understood in terms of the absolute transcendence of God in comparison with everything in the Creation, including human reason. (Huston Smith [359-364] discusses this as the "Protestant Principle".) As we cannot understand God's ways, God's reasons for acting, or even our own predicament through our own abilities, we must rely on the truths given to us in Scripture. Beyond this, we can do nothing; we must only stand in reverence of God's majesty and in gratitude for his grace.