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52 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XII the Roman Pontiff as on the infallible rule of faith from which even Sacred Scripture draws its strength and authority, is a heretic.” 10 Prierias’ paradigm, which simply expresses the state of affairs that had existed in Rome at least since the so-called Cluniac reform of the 11 th century, no longer allows Sacred Scripture to breathe freely. Instead the written Word of God is straitjacketed by the solo interpretation of the Roman pontiff, who has arrogated the whole episcopal office, once shared among many equals, into his own hands. Roman Catholic scholars have no qualms about admitting the moral corruption of the Renaissance papacy, but they must hold that the rule of faith propounded by Alexander, Julius, and Leo was essentially orthodox. This proposition, and its converse, divide the Lutheran from the Roman Catholic pattern of 16 th -century Reformation. According to the church historian Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), Luther’s significance consists in the fact that he abolished from the Church’s life the age-old factor of the rule of faith. This is what is meant by Harnack’s contention that the Reformer brought about the “end of dogma”. The Berlin Liberal Protestant got his facts completely wrong, for in his work of purifying and promulgating the rule of faith Luther gave dogma a fresh lease on life which lasted until the so-called Enlightenment. Indeed, the whole Lutheran Reformation is best understood as a multi-dimensional collegial endeavour of a united ministerium to remove the rust that had corroded the rule of faith and thus to restore the balance among Scripture, office, and confession that had seemed so self-evident to Irenaeus. It is no accident that the Reformer issued his Bible translation with the accompaniment of his celebrated Prefaces. In these brief documents Luther did not speak as a private citizen, but as a bearer of the Dominically instituted office instructing the sheep of Christ in the rule of faith which arises from Scripture and in terms of which Scripture is rightly understood. His acceptance of the grammatical sense of Scripture is customarily qualified with the admission that it cannot stand if it finds itself in conflict with an article of faith. 11 The Reformer’s devotional writings and his Catechisms, along with his liturgical reforms and hymn compositions, are all evidence of his aim to promulgate a purified rule of faith. From this fivefold root the trunk of the Lutheran Reformation arose as a distinctive way of teaching and learning Christ in the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. Chemical analyses of the bark of this tree will yield the finding that not one article of the Reformer’s faith is, as such, unique to Lutheran Christendom. Our Christology is shared with Cyril and the Christian East. Our anthropology and soteriology stand in the succession of 10 See B. J. Kidd, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation (Oxford: At The Clarendon Press, 1911) 31f.; my trans. 11 AE 40:157 (Against the Heavenly Prophets [1525], Part Two) et passim.
STEPHENSON: THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION 53 St Augustine. Our confession of the Real Presence is robustly at one with the united testimony of Ignatius, Justin, and Irenaeus, which was given long before Scripture, office, and confession split up to go their separate ways. Nor is there anything unique about Luther’s appeal to Sacred Scripture as such. For as Beryl Smalley wrote two generations ago, “The Bible was the most studied book of the Middle Ages.” 12 The only unique element in the whole Lutheran Reformation was the Reformer’s discernment of the distinction between Law and Gospel. Not only Erasmus but also such 16 th - century Biblical humanists as the Englishman John Colet and the Frenchman Lefèvre d’Étaples were moralists without any inkling of the distinction between Law and Gospel. The closest any theologian prior to Luther came to explicitly articulating the distinction between Law and Gospel occurred in Augustine’s writing of On the Spirit and the Letter at the height of the Pelagian controversy. 13 Theologians had only dimly sensed the distinction between Law and Gospel, and yet the proper distinction resounds through the mediaeval sequence Dies irae, ascribed to Thomas of Celano, the first biographer of St. Francis of Assissi. Hymn 607 of The Lutheran Hymnal (1941) affords liturgical evidence that the actual life of the Church has always proceeded from the distinction between Law and Gospel, and historical theology as practised by Lutherans is faced by the still largely undischarged task of demonstrating that the best of non-Lutheran divinity in fact hinges on the distinction whose explicit recognition is the unique preserve of Lutheran Christendom. In closing we glance briefly at the foliage currently put forth by this ecclesial tree with fivefold root. Remarkably, a certain aspect of Luther’s own fate has been repeated in the fortunes of the segment of Christendom named after him. In the spring of 1521 the monk excommunicated by Leo X was also declared an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire through the Edict of Worms promulgated by Charles V. By the time of the Formula of Concord German princes of Reformed stripe were promoting what today is known as the “Second Reformation”. Calvin was here recognized as the true secondgeneration interpreter of Luther, and heavy pruning shears were taken to Lutheran liturgy and practice as these were reduced to the Reformed lowest common denominator. Bodo Nischan applauds the brutal persecution of the Lutheran Church in the territories of the Reformed Hohenzollerns, which began in earnest after the public apostasy of John Sigismund in 1613. In his narrative Nischan singles out for special honour a class of divines known as 12 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) ix. 13 Here Augustine discerns that the Pauline contrast between “spirit” and “letter” in II Cor. 3:6 has to do not with the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture, but with the distinction between Law and Gospel.
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