Luther’s Personal Issues and the Protestant Concept of Salvation
Romans is about what Jewish and Greek converts shared despite their different backgrounds—sin, salvation, grace, and faith are incidental to its main points
Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German priest, theologian, author, hymn writer, professor, and Augustinian friar. As a young man he was obsessed with, and helplessly perfectionistic about his spiritual performance as an individual, mired in the very ego that religion seeks to transcend. The idea that good works are an effect of God’s favor, and not the cause of it was not new, but while reading in Romans 1 (quoting Habakkuk 2 in the Hebrew Bible) that, “the one who is righteous shall live by faith,” Luther experienced a revelatory peak experience of personal freedom, in that his salvation depended on faith alone (sola fide).
Luther’s interpretation might have surprised Paul (and certainly James), but it spoke to the needs of a generation that found traditional approaches meaningless and spiritually unproductive. Faith for Luther was not belief in the modern sense as based on evidence, but a practice of free surrender. Some contextual background on the epistle to the Romans is needed to understand how Luther read his own concerns into it and created a somewhat distorted interpretation that profoundly shaped how Protestants have understood salvation for the last five centuries.
The first church in Rome brought together people from the imperially sanctioned ethnic religion of Judaism with people from the Greco-Roman religions promoted by the empire. They were turning away from what were seen as religions of this world’s empire to become part of a gathering that identified with Jesus’ empire of God. The epistle to the Romans was written primarily to address how these two groups could live together and express their respective religious concerns together as a unified body.
For Paul, Jewish people should go on being observant Jews if they wished. Some Greeks felt they needed to become circumcised and/or start observing Jewish customs and laws in order to join a local gathering of Jesus’ followers. Paul saw this as completely unnecessary and was against the Greeks appropriating Jewish customs.
In Romans, Paul complains about Jewish people in the church judging Greek gentiles for not observing the Jewish law. The whole epistle is about how Jews and Greeks are both equally unrighteous, how together in Christ they are both acceptable to God anyway, and about all the matters of spiritual concern that they share. In Romans, sin, salvation, grace, and faith are incidental to the ways being Jewish or being Greek are both related and unrelated to them. Paul was trying to forge a multicultural gathering based on a new shared commonality in Christ.
Luther was obsessed with personal salvation to a degree that Paul was not. For Paul, salvation meant being set aside individually and collectively for God's empire through faith practices and identification with Jesus's ways. Jewish and Greek people following this path are both acceptable to God just as they are. What they share as followers of Christ unites them.
Luther’s interpretation of Romans, with the help of Augustine before him, made salvation a personal affair. The natural shortcomings that put us all on the same level became a crisis of guilt. Grace functioned as an intervening mechanism, and faith was the switch that turned it on. None of these represents the core focus that Paul addressed in the epistle to the Romans, but they have unfortunately become the core focus of Protestant Christianity.
Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.
Luther was deeply and rightly concerned that the church was offering salvation for a monetary price. Where Paul wrote of “works” as being observances of Jewish law and custom that were unnecessary for Greeks, who were being “saved” with or without them, Luther read a blanket statement against works of any kind being connected with personal salvation. Luther was right about the evil of indulgences and the materialism that infected the church, but that is not what Paul was writing about; and, Paul was certainly not rejecting the spiritual value of works as an expression of the empire of God to address the poverty and injustice created by the empires of this world.
The Reformation was more than a mere reaction to corruption in the church. That idea serves as a kind of shorthand, or even an excuse for a more complex set of social, cultural, and material changes. In some ways, the Reformation represents a religious revival among the laity, who for the first time felt at liberty to criticize abuses of the clerical hierarchy, and for whom the rituals and ideas set forth by the medieval church as representative of the Christian faith had finally become abhorrent.
Under the logic of emergent capitalism, the church had monetized piety and commodified spiritual salvation, which the reformers rightly criticized; however, these same reformers presupposed the monetization of good works, then rejected them because they attempted a vain and blasphemous form of exchange with God. Put another way, they rejected the commodification of salvation, but uncritically accepted the commodification of good works, rejecting them, in turn, as having no spiritual value. In so doing, they threw away something of great spiritual and social worth, while appropriately discarding the notion of purchasing grace or salvation for oneself.
Consistent with the teaching of Jesus, acts of piety and charity, or the advocacy of systemic change for moral reasons, should not be seen as forms of exchange for personal merit, or as virtue signals; they should be seen as the fundamental and vital spiritual practices that they are. Such good works were soundly rejected in the world of reforming Christianity and the emerging Protestant ethos, both because they had been abused by the church, and because they were wrongly understood by reformers in the context of emergent capitalism. Protestants in particular must now reaffirm the spiritual significance and vitality of good works, and of social advocacy, consistent with the words of the prophets, the sayings of Jesus, and the teachings of the apostles found in scripture.
As for salvation as a concept, Christianity needs to unhitch it from Augustine’s original sin and eternal damnation, from Medieval fixation with the violence and gore of Jesus’ execution, from the vicarious substitutionary atonement of Anselm, from the obsessive personal focus of Luther’s neuroses, and from the hyper-individualism of the evangelical religion that developed another two centuries on. For Jesus and the apostles, salvation on an individual level meant not being annihilated after the resurrection because one had endeavored to love God and neighbor fully while maintaining enough of a spiritual practice to make that possible. On a collective level, it meant restoration of the world with God dwelling among the people who inhabit it. On the deepest level, what we are saved from is alienation from the source and ground of our being in the eternity of the ever-present moment.