LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Concordia Lutheran Seminary
LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Concordia Lutheran Seminary
LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Concordia Lutheran Seminary
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50 <strong>LUTHERAN</strong> <strong>THEOLOGICAL</strong> <strong>REVIEW</strong> XII<br />
Luther thanked Erasmus for attacking him on this very point rather than<br />
focusing on some minor issue. In this conviction, which took him back to the<br />
Augustinian root of mediaeval Christendom in the West, Luther did not<br />
stand alone, but had many sympathizers in Calvin, the theologians of the<br />
English Reformation, and even in some Fathers of the Council of Trent.<br />
(3) Luther was above all a theologian of the means of grace, which he<br />
may not have become had not the media salutis been so terribly clogged up<br />
in his own day. Indulgences were a phenomenon that stood not at the heart<br />
but more towards the margin of the mediaeval Sacrament of Penance, whose<br />
“form” was Absolution but whose “matter” consisted of three works<br />
demanded of each penitent soul. In order for Absolution to be yours you<br />
must be contrite in heart, you must confess with your lips, and with body and<br />
soul you must discharge the satisfaction imposed on you by the priest who<br />
heard your confession. Even though Calvin in one of his better moments<br />
advocated pastorally administered private Absolution, 9 and even though the<br />
classic Anglican Books of Common Prayer retained private priestly<br />
Absolution in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, <strong>Lutheran</strong>ism is the<br />
only non-Roman pattern of 16 th -century reformation which dramatically<br />
highlighted private pastoral Absolution as the very heart of the Gospel. Two<br />
decades after the 95 Theses, Luther lamented in the Smalcald Articles that<br />
back in those days we had no appreciation of the power of Absolution (SA<br />
III.iii:20). The reformation discovery was that, even though our contrition<br />
and confession and getting our lives together after reconciliation are marred<br />
by many defects, nevertheless the soul that despairs of its own works can<br />
trust in Absolution. Unclogged, the means of grace were experienced in the<br />
early Reformation as a majestic, doxology-producing cataract of divine love.<br />
In the closing theses of 31 October 1517 Luther despises indulgences as a<br />
cowardly running away from confronting the scarred tissue that remains<br />
after Absolution. In the peace and pardon of God, the Christian should bear<br />
all crosses and thus be conformed to Christ his head.<br />
(4) A fourth root of the <strong>Lutheran</strong> Reformation can be discerned in<br />
Luther’s recovery of the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria, which began no<br />
later than 1519 and which was complete by the mid-1520s. While all<br />
mainline Western theologians accepted the Chalcedonian Definition of 451,<br />
most of the scholastics had interpreted this dogma from a moderately<br />
Antiochene standpoint. This tendency would be carried much further by<br />
Calvin and the Reformed Church, which viewed Chalcedon through<br />
radically Antiochene, nay veritably Nestorian spectacles. The view,<br />
advocated in the 16 th century and widespread today, that <strong>Lutheran</strong> and<br />
9 See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, two vols., ed. John T. McNeill, trans.<br />
Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977) III.iv.14; Library of Christian<br />
Classics 20:638f.