Part III ◈ Protestantism

Although popular accounts of the origins of Protestantism often identify Martin Luther’ s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgences (31 October 1517) as marking the origins of the Reformation, the real origins of Protestantism are better seen as lying in the wider intellectual and social upheavals of that era, which both created a crisis for existing forms of Christianity and seemed to offer means by which it might be resolved. There is no evidence for a concerted, pan-European reforming movement within the church, defined by single theological issues, or coordinated by any single individual. From the outset, what came to be known as ‘ Protestantism’ was a cluster of independent movements, which gradually aligned themselves and came to see themselves as part of something greater. Some of these movements focussed on doctrinal issues – such as the doctrine of justification. Others, particularly in the cantons of Switzerland, 3 were more concerned with the reform of the life and morality of the church. A controlling narrative was required to bring unity and coherence to this diverse movement. That which gradually emerged saw the doctrine of justification as the formal principle, and a recognition of the supreme authority of the Bible as the material principle, of the Reformation. Historians, however, tend to see this strategy as a retrojection, an attempt to enfold and contain diversity, noting that writers of the early sixteenth century did not use this way of conceptualising the movement.

It is certainly true that the articulus iustificationis is the leading feature of the theology of Martin Luther. 4 It achieved, however, at best a limited acceptance within the more radical wing of the Reformation, 5 which stressed the importance of obedience and discipleship, tending to affirm doctrines of grace which stressed human responsibility and accountability towards God. 6 Nevertheless, the considerable personal influence of Luther over the majority of the evangelical factions within Germany and elsewhere inevitably led to his personal high estimation of the doctrine of justification being adopted elsewhere, and becoming a determinative and distinctive mark of the mainstream Reformation. Thus by the beginning of the seventeenth century the articulus iustificationis appears to have been generally regarded as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae , the ‘ article by which the church stands or falls’ .

It is generally agreed that the origins of the Swiss Reformation seem to owe little, if anything, to Luther’ s insights into justification. The relation between Luther’ s own theological insights and the dawn of the Reformation itself is now seen to be a historical question of the utmost complexity, and it is no longer possible to assert with any degree of historical or theological precision that the Reformation, considered as a movement, began as a fundamental consequence of Luther’ s new insights into human justification coram Deo , although it is unquestionably true that Luther’ s own personal theological preoccupations centred upon this matter.

The part of the work is concerned with the documentation and critical analysis of the understandings of justification associated with the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland – in other words, with the origins and subsequent development of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. In view of the crucial importance of the development of Martin Luther’ s theological insights to any account of the origins of the Reformation, we begin by considering his break with the theology of the medieval period associated with his ‘ discovery of the righteousness of God’ , and the leading features of his doctrine of justification.

At a popular level, the Reformation is often portrayed as a rediscovery of the Bible, particularly of the Pauline corpus. Although there is some truth in this description, it is more accurate to see the Reformation as emphasizing a particular reading of Paul’ s epistles, set in a context of a selective reappropriation of Augustine’ s theology of grace. This renewed interest in Augustine is characteristic of the sixteenth-century Renaissance as a whole; what is distinctive about the Reformers is their critical theological assessment of Augustine, which included explicit divergence from his views on three issues relating to the doctrine of justification. The most accurate description of the doctrines of justification associated with the Reformed and Lutheran churches from 1530 onwards is that they represent a radically new interpretation of the Pauline concept of ‘ imputed righteousness’ set within an Augustinian soteriological framework.

It is clearly of importance to account for this new understanding of the nature of justifying righteousness, with its associated conceptual distinction between justification and sanctification. Attempts on the part of an earlier generation of Protestant apologists to defend this innovation as a recovery of the authentic teaching of Augustine, and of their Catholic opponents to demonstrate that it constituted a vestige of a discredited and ossified Ockhamism, can no longer be taken seriously. It is the task of the historian to account for this new development, which marks a significant break with the tradition up to this point.

It must be made clear that it is quite inadequate to attempt to characterise the doctrines of justification associated with the Reformation by referring merely to their anti-Pelagian structure. Such doctrines of justification can be adduced from practically every period in the history of doctrine, particularly in the later medieval period – think of writers such as Gregory of Rimini and others within the schola Augustiniana moderna . Nor is it helpful to see the phrase ‘ justification by faith alone’ as an adequate summary of the Reformation’ s views on this doctrine. The phrases sola fide or per solam fidem can be found at many points in western patristic commentaries on the Pauline epistles, especially when highlighting that Christians are not justified by ‘ works of the law’ (here understood to mean the Mosaic law), but only by faith. Luther himself, it must be remembered, was adamant that his contribution to recapturing the New Testament’ s vision of the Christian gospel lay at least as much in reconsidering what ‘ faith’ meant as in insisting on its priority.

The notional distinction, necessitated by a forensic understanding of justification, between the external act of God in pronouncing sentence, and the internal process of regeneration, along with the associated insistence upon the alien and external nature of justifying righteousness, must be considered to be the most reliable historical characterisation of Protestant doctrines of justification. As the Osiandrist controversy made clear, an anti-Pelagian doctrine of justification could still be rejected as unrepresentative of the Reformation if justifying righteousness was conceived intrinsically . The history of the Reformation itself indicates that the criterion employed at the time to determine whether a given doctrine of justification was Protestant or not was whether justifying righteousness was conceived extrinsically. This criterion served to distinguish the doctrines of justification associated with the magisterial Reformation from those of Catholicism on the one hand and from the radical Reformation on the other.

In view of the significance of the concept of the imputation of righteousness both as an idea itself and as a criterion of the Protestant character of a doctrine of justification, much of this part of the book is concerned with documenting its development within the churches of the Reformation. The importance of the concept is also reflected in other parts of the present volume, particularly in the attention paid to the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century disputes over the formal cause of justification.

This part begins by considering the question of how it is possible to speak of a characteristic ‘ Reformation’ doctrine of justification.