Luther’s Medieval Intellectual Context...Luther’s Medieval Intellectual Context The Theology of Martin Luther Martin Luther was raised in a pious environment at the end of the

The Theology of Martin Luther

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 02 of 24CH509

Luther’s Medieval Intellectual Context

The Theology of Martin Luther

Martin Luther was raised in a pious environment at the end of the period we call the Middle Ages. He went off to school, into a rich intellectual milieu—a milieu with a long tradition, with established practices, and with a number of established, disputing, contending schools of thought. In this lecture, we will glance at the long tradition of medieval theology, and we will focus upon Luther’s intellectual grandfather, we might call him, a German professor, Gabriel Biel (1410/20–1495), who taught Luther’s teachers and whose textbook on the canon of the Mass was one of the primary sources of Luther’s own theology in its earliest form, one of the textbooks he used as a student.

We could perhaps trace the medieval context of Luther’s thought certainly back to the Bible, and certainly back to Saint Augustine, the father of Western theology. In the unfolding of Augustine’s theology, particularly in his treatment of grace, can be gathered and grasped a good many of the elements of medieval teaching within the Christian church.

The formal study of theology became different in the second millennium of the Christian era. In the years from about AD 1100 to AD 1160, lived a man we call Peter Lombard. He taught at the cathedral school in Paris and finally toward the end of his life became Bishop of Paris, but his lasting influence lay in his reorganization of the way in which Christian theologians studied their subject matter. In the work we call his Sentences, which was a gathering of sentencia—of opinions, of expressions, of points of view of the fathers of the church of the teachers of the church in its first millennium. Peter Lombard put together the point of orientation really for all subsequent theological discussion to the time of the Reformation. Lombard’s Sentences included four basic divisions, four basic topics, which then were elaborated in a host of subtopics which wanted to embrace at least all of biblical theology. You recognize that whenever we organize biblical theology according to our topics, we are somewhat changing the focus of the biblical message and we are always limiting the way in which it speaks to us, although that kind of systematization is inevitable within the proclamation of the church. But Lombard

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology

at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri



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had four topics.

He focused, first of all, upon “the Trinity.” The doctrine of God and the relationships within the Trinity and the like were very important topics for the medieval theologians. The second set of topics were entitled “creation and sin.” Theological anthropology and the law and the like were discussed under this second set of topics. The third turned to “Christology” and to the impact the gospel of Jesus Christ makes on our lives. It might be summarized as speaking both of the incarnation and of human virtues. The fourth set of topics included “the sacraments”— the way in which God mediates His grace, and “last things”—eschatology.

In the century or two after Lombard had lived, the Christian church absorbed another factor that became very important in the way in which theology was done. Aristotle arrived on the Western Christian scene. There had been very little of Aristotle’s corpus of writings that had been preserved in Latin in the Christian West. There were a few manuscripts, but very little. Aristotle had thrived in the years between AD 500 and AD 1100, not in the Christian West but in the Muslim East and South. And Aristotle came into the Christian West in the 11th and 12th centuries through Arab and Jewish scholars resident in Spain. As contacts across the Pyrenees were cultivated, Christians began to know that there was a good deal more of Aristotle available than they had thought before. So particularly in the 13th century, particularly by two Dominican figures, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle’s method (Aristotle’s logic, but also his Metaphysics) began to influence the shape of Christian theology as it was taught, as it was discussed, as Christian analysis of the biblical text went on, especially at the universities and at the schools.

The approach of theology in this period then was shaped by a number of theologians, the French theologian in the 12th century, Peter Abelard, as well as (and perhaps above all) by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. The shape of theology, the method of theology developed into a method we label scholasticism, the method of the schools. The scholasticism was not limited as a method simply to theology. There is a scholasticism in the liberal arts, a scholasticism in medicine, and a similar method in the study of the law. There has been a grand debate, I must grant you, in 20th-century medieval scholarship over the question of whether scholasticism is basically a word that ought to be referred to content. And Roman Catholic scholars have often argued that scholasticism is and can be equated with the content of the theological system of Thomas Aquinas. But I think a majority of scholars, including many Roman Catholic scholars, today would argue that scholasticism is a method and that viable forms of



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scholasticism can be found also in the systems of thought that Thomas Aquinas’ thought does not agree with, that Thomas opposed, or in systems that opposed Thomas after his death.

Scholasticism then defined as a method begins with a question and an answer, and it develops then the case for this answer by presenting the opinions of authorities of (in the case of theology) the ancient Christian fathers and, above all, of the Scriptures. It presents these opinions—it presents contrary opinions, contrary arguments from the writings of the fathers—and then it adjudicates these disputes and provides the final answer for the question.

Within the study of theology in the Middle Ages, from at least the 12th and 13th century on, there were two philosophical schools of thought, and a great deal of debate went on between these two schools of philosophical thought. The one group espoused what we call realism. The second group espoused what we call nominalism. The fundamental philosophical issue which separated realists from nominalists had to do with the building blocks of reality.

The realists believed that reality lies in the universals (that is, in the ideas, in the abstract concepts—in the design of chairs in general or horses in general or roads in general) in the mind of God or, I suppose for non-Christian realists, in some eternal plan of things. A kind of Platonic idea is what is real. And in this world, to use Plato’s language, we encounter “only shadows of those heavenly ideals,” those heavenly abstracts.

The nominalists argued, “No, reality exists in particulars.” Reality exists in the individual, the concrete chair, and the idea is only a construction; the idea has no reality of its own. We have an idea of a chair in general only because we have encountered one or two thousand individual concrete chairs. Reality lies in the particular, not in the universal, for the nominalists.

Well, in many ways this philosophical debate does not tell us a whole lot about the specific theological orientation of the people of the Reformation. For, in the 16th century, this particular debate over universals and particulars was more understood, “presupposed,” than debated, and yet it certainly did influence the way in which Christian theologians in the time of the Reformation approached their subject matter. The problem is that there were some people who were influenced more by realism, less by nominalism among the Lutherans or among the Calvinists and vice versa.

There were other important points of orientation, points of



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difference within the various schools at the Christian universities of the high and late Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, was a realist. His system of explaining the Scriptures, within an Aristotelian construction of Christian theology, was opposed in the 14th century by two other groups: the followers of Duns Scotus (1265–1308), also a realist, and the followers of William of Ockham (1288–1348), an English philosopher and theologian who died around 1350. He was a nominalist. Scotus lived earlier in the 14th century.

Thomas, as he developed his theological anthropology, emphasized “the primacy of reason” and of knowing in the human creature. Whereas Scotus and Ockham emphasized “the primacy of the human will.” Scotus and Ockham also shared a view of the law, which was somewhat at odds with that of Thomas.

The temptation for theologians in the 13th and 14th centuries, as they worked with Aristotle and defined the relationship between God and the law, was to fit themselves closer into a Greek system of thought. The ancient Greek philosophers worked in a world in which there was no strong Creator God figure. There may have been for Plato a Creator God beyond the horizon, but the world had to run, had to be unfolded, at the behest of Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” for instance, according to a system, according to a system of law that was simply written into the structure of human life, of the life of the existence of the entire cosmos. So the law existed eternally, as the structure, the plan, according to which all life unfolded. Thomas Aquinas had a view of the relationship between law and God which took seriously this kind of ancient Greek view of things. And so his law and his God are eternally coexistent. The law is not superior, obviously, to God. But God and the law correspond. The will of God and the law of God correspond necessarily because the law is good and God is good.

Scotus and Ockham had a somewhat different view of the relationship between God and the law. We see this in Scotus as we look at his Doctrine of Acceptation—his doctrine of salvation, essentially—which had as its fundamental principle or presupposition the little sentence, “Nothing that is created has to be accepted by God.” Nothing which God has created can force God to accept it. Scotus was moving from an Old Testament concept of God as the One who created the law and who created His human creatures as a potter makes a pot, the image that Paul also picked up in Romans 9, for instance. And therefore, God determines whether something is acceptable to Him or not. He determines the rules. He determines the law by which something becomes acceptable to Him. There is no eternal prescription which human



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performance can take in hand and which human creatures can carry out in order to make themselves pleasing to the Potter. They are simply pots whom He shapes and makes as He wills. And so both the law and the human creature are totally dependent upon God, totally dependent upon His grace, His mercy, His favor.

Ockham in his Doctrine of Salvation, for instance, proceeds from a similar kind of presupposition—the presupposition that God is absolutely and eternally free, and that all rules and regulations, all laws for nature, for human morality, and the like proceed from the mind of God. He determines what reality is and He determines what is right and what is not right. So Ockhamists, following their leader William, developed a presupposition, a point of orientation that distinguished between God’s absolute power by which [and] according to which He could do anything He wishes and it would be right because He is God. And His ordained power, His ordered power, which is His promise, His covenant, His pledge to His human creatures that He will so govern, according to the laws of nature and the relationship to the natural world and according to the laws of human morality which He has set down in the Scriptures and in the natural law that men and women know in their consciences.

From this distinction between, potentia absoluta, the absolute power of God, about which we can only speculate, and the potentia ordinata, the ordered or ordained power upon which we can rely because God has pledged Himself to it, in the distinction between these two kinds of divine power, there developed then a number of theological systems that at the root had a philosophical debt to William of Ockham. We, in discussing Luther’s theology, are chiefly concerned about the Doctrine of Salvation, and so we can comment at this point, just as one illustration of this, that there were among the followers of William of Ockham in the next couple of centuries some very strict predestinarians who emphasized the grace of God very, very strongly; among them, Gregory of Rimini (1300–1358) or Thomas Bradwardine (1290–1349).

But among Ockhamists also were a number of important theologians whom we might classify as semi-Pelagians, as those who stress works so strongly that they obscured the grace of God to a large extent, even though they spoke of the grace of God. And one example of this particular school is a German theologian named Gabriel Biel. Since Biel was Luther’s intellectual grandfather, I would like to say a little bit more about him.

We don’t know for sure when Biel was born. We know that he was studying and teaching already in the early 1430s, so we presume that he must have been born around 1410. He died,



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for that age, a very ripe old age in 1495. His course of studies reflected in his writings included the works of Thomas Aquinas and of Duns Scotus and also of William of Ockham. He was also trained by an associate of the late medieval movement we call The Brethren of the Common Life. The Brethren of the Common Life was actually a group of laypeople who furthered education by serving educational institutions and then finally by taking over some educational institutions. The Brethren of the Common Life had a particular kind of piety reflected, for instance, in the work called The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. It was a kind of garden-variety mystical piety, which aimed at solid, simple Christian service in the daily life of the believer.

Gabriel Biel served as a priest and as an official of the church before 1484. In that year, he was called to the new University of Tübingen (Universität Tübingen) as a professor of theology. And there he wrote theological works and continued his activities as a preacher. As a preacher, he emphasized the importance of proclaiming the Word of God in such a way that it builds faith. For him, faith was largely “a knowledge of what God had said.” He did not emphasize “the trust side” of faith in the way that Luther later would. But he was very strong in his emphasis on the necessity of good preaching in an era in which there was not a lot of good preaching. There was not a lot of preaching at the village level at all.

Biel’s theology, of course, interests us most, and he operated on the Ockhamist basis, which he had learned in his university training. He did not completely ignore Scotus and Aquinas, but he was first and foremost an Ockhamist. And so the distinction between potentia absoluta, God’s absolute power, and His potentia ordinata was important for him. He taught that God alone is absolutely necessary. There is nothing else that has a philosophical absolute necessity. And that means that because nothing else is necessarily so, God is totally unpredictable in Himself. He exercises His absolute power as He wills, and no human mind can plumb the mind of God. No human mind can get behind God’s way of doing things. We will talk later about Luther’s distinction between “the hidden God” and “the revealed God.” And his understanding of God as hidden probably has a debt to this understanding of God’s absolute power in Gabriel Biel. But Biel also taught that God’s absolute power need not really concern us. It is a good subject for philosophical speculation. But we live under God’s ordained power. God has made a covenant in nature and a covenant in human morality, and those covenants govern the way in which we experience life.

Gabriel Biel’s Doctrine of Salvation has been described by one



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modern student of his work as, “a doctrine of salvation by grace alone and by works alone.” In another sense, we might say that it is a grand mixture of grace and works, and it was precisely in that mixture that Luther became confused. Biel’s system has been called “a system of salvation by grace alone” because God was under no compulsion to save any human creature. He was the Potter and He could have done with us pots what He wished to do. But by grace alone, no necessity forcing Him, He set up a system by which we might be saved from our sinfulness. Biel defined God’s mercy as the freedom God has to make Himself a debtor, a debtor who is obliged to reward the acts of human creatures, which are in themselves good, but which are not fully worthy of salvation, not fully worthy of being given the gift of life, of forgiveness, of heaven. So God’s mercy is this freedom by which He decided to be gracious and set up a system for salvation. But in that system for salvation, grace still is operative, but works provide the key—human performance provides the key—for access to God. First of all, God says to the human creature (according to Gabriel Biel), “If on the basis of your purely natural powers you can do your best, you can do what is in you, then I will give you My grace.” And with that grace you can move on to do these works in a God-pleasing way, and if you do these works in a God-pleasing way, you will be saved.

Let me unpack the two key elements in this system. There is a kind of four-stage movement towards salvation. First of all, the human creature, in sin, is moved by conscience and by that spark of natural knowledge that has not been obscured by sin, to do good out of purely natural powers. That was a key phrase for Gabriel Biel, “out of purely natural powers.” When the sinner has done this “out of purely natural powers,” he has done what is in him. He has responded to the conscience that God has planted in the human creature. And this voice of God’s ordained law has moved sinners to do their best. They do this within a certain kind of faith, a knowledge of what is good, and a knowledge of God. They respond to the revelation God has given as information and as exhortation. So they do their best. The second key phrase in this first stage of salvation is Gabriel Biel’s phrase, “to do what is in one,” to do essentially our best. Now, within Biel’s understanding of doing our best, there is a kind of uncertainty principle. We can never know for sure that we have done our best. We know what God demands and we know what we have done, but we don’t know whether it comes close enough to what God demands to really make us eligible for God’s grace.

Nonetheless, when we have done our best out of purely natural powers, then we move on to stage two. Stage two is God’s gift, His bestowal of His grace. And that grace in this case is really the



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power to be able to perform those same works but in a worthy manner. The works of the first stage are good works, and they have a kind of merit. But it is only what the Middle Ages called a meritum de congruo (congruent merit). It is a worthiness that is really unworthy. It is a worthiness that is congruent to God’s demands, but it is a worthiness that does not really merit heaven. But Gabriel Biel’s understanding—that doing our best out of purely natural powers—is enough to merit the gift of grace. And this grace comes through the sacraments in stage two where God is giving, and then we move on to stage three where we are looking at human works again.

Now, these human works in stage three are indeed works, which God gives a certain worthiness to. They are the works of human beings who have combined what they are doing with God’s grace to make works that earn a kind of merit that is called in the medieval system meritum de condigno. This worthy worth, this worthy merit then moves us onto stage four where we receive the gift of heavenly life from God.

We might call Gabriel Biel’s system of salvation “a system of double justification.” There are really two levels in Biel’s understanding of justification, two levels in which the sinner becomes righteous, becomes justified. In baptism or in the sacrament of penance, God gives us sanctifying grace. This sanctifying grace remits guilt. It remits punishment, both for original and for actual sin. It doesn’t take that kindling wood of sin out of us. It doesn’t put out the fire of sin completely, but it diminishes it. It ignores it. It forgives it. The sinner then comes to God and is justified by Him in such a way that he may then proceed to do the works which earn the second justification. To go back to the four stages: (1) We earn grace by doing our best, and (2) when God gives us that grace through the sacraments, (3) then we move on to be able to do the works which are truly God-pleasing so that (4) God may give us salvation in the end.

I think you can recognize the kind of impact that Biel’s theology could have on a sensitive, scrupulous young man like Martin Luther. Again, for most of us it would not be a problem, I suspect. For many people, at least, one would simply presume that one had done his or her best and would move on to presume that the sacraments were working in his or her life. Luther was different, and the story of Luther’s reaction to Biel’s soteriology is really the subject of Lecture 4 on his so-called “evangelical breakthrough.”

Before we leave the whole subject of salvation, I would like to make a short excursus to talk a little bit about Luther and Thomas Aquinas. Because in the scholarship of the 20th century (for



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instance, in the work of Harry McSorley on Luther’s understanding of the bondage and the freedom of the will), the contention is made that Luther, if he had only been able to understand Thomas Aquinas, if he had only read a good deal of Thomas Aquinas, he would not have been lured into the kind of despair that a nominalist system (an Ockhamist system like that of Gabriel Biel) imposed upon a sensitive and scrupulous conscience.

It does seem to me that we need to recognize that Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of grace and of justification was different from Biel’s. Thomas emphasized the good Augustinian tradition from which he came that grace is “prevenient” (to use the medieval term), that it comes before all human works. And so indeed, Luther and Thomas did agree on the primacy of grace. But nonetheless, Thomas had a different understanding of what Christian righteousness is (the subject of Lecture 6, on the two kinds of righteousness). Thomas believed that grace permits us to perform righteous works. And on the basis of these righteous works, we become acceptable to God. Grace empowers us to become righteous, and becoming righteous means basically to perform righteous deeds. Luther, on the other hand, understood righteousness in relationship to God, not in terms of human performance. And so even if Luther had been able to understand Thomas, he probably would still have disagreed, because he understood righteousness not as human performance but as a matter of God’s gracious relationship to us in His mercy and in His love.

As a matter of fact, other scholars have pointed out that Luther did know Thomas. He may not have read a lot of Thomas Aquinas’ works firsthand, but through collections of opinions of the fathers on a variety of topics, Luther knew Thomas. Luther knew Thomas well enough to know that there were serious differences between the two on a range of topics. And so while in one sense the two indeed proceeded from a kind of common ground on the doctrine of grace, the framework, the presuppositions around that doctrine of grace were really quite different.

If we may return to Gabriel Biel and to the Ockhamist background which Luther experienced as a student, there is one final point of his theology and of the influence which he exercised on Luther to which we must pay attention. Gabriel Biel was a typical product of his age. He believed that God had placed the Pope as the Vicar of Christ over the church. And so, Luther grew up in a world theologically in which papal primacy, papal authority was simply taken for granted. And that papal primacy included the authority to interpret the Scripture authoritatively. Luther had learned early on that the Pope was the Vicar of Christ and that his



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voice was Christ’s voice for his day and age. Luther only painfully, I think we must recognize, was dissuaded, was discouraged, from believing that Christ spoke through the Pope in his day and age.

Before we leave the subject of Luther’s medieval context, we must take a few moments to address the subject of biblical interpretation in the Middle Ages. For more than a millennium, Christians had followed the lines of interpretation which were laid out in a so-called Quadriga, the fourfold shape of the Scriptures, we might say, set down originally by Origen and his successors in what we might call the allegorical school of biblical interpretation. Biblical scholars throughout the Middle Ages sought four levels of meaning in the text. They looked at (1) the meaning in its historical context, in its literal context, and then they looked (2) for its present significance for the church, (3) for its significance for the living of the Christian life, and (4) for its significance in the future, in the heavenly realms. So biblical scholars were always assessing what the Bible meant literally, and then allegorically, tropologically, and anagogically. And Luther at Erfurt and then at Wittenberg simply learned these principles of hermeneutics. He turned to the Bible’s literal sense to get his basic orientation, but then he went on to search for the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical levels of meaning as well.

It is important for moderns to recognize that at least in theory medieval biblical scholars always anchored their teaching in the literal text. The principle remained throughout the Middle Ages that the doctrine of the church could not be established without a literal text, simply on an anagogical or tropological or an allegorical interpretation. Of course, one doesn’t always observe one’s own principles, and it is almost certain that many Christian people heard sermons preached in an allegorical, tropological, or anagogical fashion. And the presupposition, the underlying basis for that, was not the literal text of Scripture but the predisposition of the preacher. That happens today too.

It is also important, I think, for us to recognize—because we often herald Luther as a new pioneer in biblical studies—it is also important for us to recognize that Luther never abandoned what we call, in general, allegorical interpretation. He conceded that preachers often will want to use some kinds of allegories; even as Saint Paul does, for instance, in his sketch of Sarah and Hagar in the book of Galatians. Nonetheless, Luther did, during the course of the 1510s, painfully separate himself, slowly separate himself from these principles of biblical interpretation, and insisted really on a literal interpretation. Though, particularly in his treatment of the Old Testament, it was what we might call “a literal prophetic approach,” sometimes labeled a “tropological



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approach,” in which he saw the prophets of the Old Testament indeed giving rectilinear prophecies of Jesus and the salvation we have in Him.

There was a rich biblical tradition that was a part of Luther’s growing up as a theologian. Again, sometimes I think Protestants have said that the Bible simply was not a factor at all in late medieval theology. And Luther himself contributed to that with his harsh attacks on the scholastic theology which he had learned and its failure to understand the biblical message as he understood it. But as Luther was being trained, he indeed began with dogmatic works, such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences and commentaries on it, but he also had exposure to the biblical interpretation that came through a number of traditions within the Middles Ages. There was a homiletical tradition, a strongly people-oriented tradition; and one of Luther’s favorite preachers was one of the medieval authors he quoted most, Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian preacher whose works Luther cited really throughout his entire career. He never tired of going back to Bernard to understand the Scriptures.

Luther then also had access to a significant number of biblical commentaries, glosses, short notes, and longer commentaries, which shaped his own understanding of the Bible as he was being trained as a student, and then to which he referred later as he marshaled his own material for lectures and for commentaries. It was in this rich tradition of biblical interpretation then that Luther formed his own theology. But we need to recognize that biblical commentary always reflects not only the biblical text but also our own presuppositions. And we must always stand under the discipline of the text. So Luther had to learn rather painfully, as he was developing his theology in the 1510s, how to separate himself from not only the method of biblical interpretation that we call the allegorical method (the Quadriga), but he also had to separate himself from the presuppositions of a theology like that of Gabriel Biel—a theology which made sense to Luther as he came out of a kind of piety of works righteousness, as he experienced it in growing up in Eisleben and Mansfeld. But a piety and then a scholastic theology which literally bent him out of shape spiritually to such a degree that the pain of his own sinfulness forced him into the despair out of which then he came to appreciate, to understand, to imbibe the riches and the sweetness of the grace of God as he found it in the proclamation of Jesus Christ.

Without this medieval intellectual context, which bent his sensitive and scrupulous soul in this painful direction, he might never have come, psychologically speaking, to the depth of his


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understanding of the riches, of the mercy and grace of God.

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Luther’s Medieval Intellectual Context...Luther’s Medieval Intellectual Context The Theology of Martin Luther Martin Luther was raised in a pious environment at the end of the