What Luther Got Wrong: Rediscovering the Real Aquinas

In some earlier posts, I introduced you all briefly to a book by Franz Posset called Pater Bernardhus. Posset showed how Luther was influenced by the writings of St. Bernard. There is another theologian though whom Luther encountered in his studies, a theologian whom he ultimately opposed. This opposition lead to the Protestant Reformation and the theologian was Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas has often been seen as the enemy of Protestant theology but Steinmetz, in the article below, argues that Luther was influenced by Gabriel Biel's interpretation of Aquinas whose theology tended toward Pelagianism. I find this article incredibly edifying because it is further evidence that Lutheran scholarship is still in its birth-pangs. A closer re-reading of Aquinas may in fact further Protestant-Catholic dialogue. 

What Luther Got Wrong

by David C. Steinmetz

David C. Steinmetz teaches church history at Duke Divinity School. This article appeared in The Christian Century, August 23, 2005, pp. 23 and 25. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

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Thomas Aquinas has had a long but, on the whole, not very happy history among Protestants. While some early Protestant reformers were well versed in Thomistic theology, Martin Luther was not among them.

Most of Luther’s important teachers were disciples of the Franciscan theologian William Ockham. The Occamists taught a theology of grace that tilted in a decidedly Pelagian direction. Pelagianism is theological shorthand for a theology that deemphasizes the role played by grace in human salvation and overemphasizes the role played by human free will. Gabriel Biel, the Occamist theologian Luther knew best, even argued in a burst of anthropological optimism that human beings were able to love God perfectly without the assistance of grace. While Biel admitted that the human intellect and will were fallen, he thought they were nevertheless largely undamaged by sin. He concluded therefore that acts of extraordinary moral heroism, unassisted by grace, merited divine favor. Not surprisingly, Luther found no authorization inSt. Paul or St. Augustine for such a rosy view of human nature, and he rejected all Occamist accounts of salvation.

A prominent early-20th-century Roman Catholic historian, Joseph Lortz, agreed with Luther that Biel’s theology of grace was thoroughly "uncatholic" and he thought Luther was quite right to protest against it. The problem, from Lortz’s perspective, was that Luther seemed unaware of the best Catholic antidote to the Pelagianizing tendencies of Biel -- the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

If only Luther had been trained in Thomistic theology, argued Lortz, he would have had at his disposal all the resources he needed to oppose Bid and to do so without drifting into what Catholics regard as heresy. Had Luther studied Aquinas at Cologne rather than the Occamists at Erfurt and Wittenberg, he would have found a better way through his theological crisis and would have avoided the tragedy of the Reformation.

Lortz’s thesis was immensely influential but not altogether satisfying. The principal difficulty was that it presupposed a state of affairs that did not exist -- namely, that only one Thomas Aquinas was on offer in the 16th century. Actually, there were at least three.

The Dominican theologian John Capreolus (d. 1445) portrayed Aquinas as a thoroughly Augustinian theologian. Whenever readers encountered ambiguous passages in Aquinas that might be interpreted in a less than fully Augustinian way, Capreolus advised them to remember this simple rule: always choose the reading closest to the spirit of St. Augustine. That would uncover the mind of St. Thomas.

Thomas de Vio Cardinal Cajetan (d. 1534) -- also a Dominican -- was not so sure, He was far more impressed by Aquinas the Aristotelian philosopher. In Cajetan’s view, Aquinas, more than any other scholastic thinker, had success-hilly adapted the vocabulary and categories of Aristotle for Christian use. This was not an easy task, and Cajetan could only admire what Aquinas had achieved. Whereas Capreolus read Thomas as a faithful disciple of Augustine, Cajetan read him as the foremost Christian interpreter of Aristotle.

Biel (d. 1495) offered a third version of Aquinas, this one in complete agreement with the Pelagianizing tendencies of the school of Ockham. When Luther read Biel’s account of Thomas’s theology, he encountered a theologian whose doctrine of sin and grace differed in no significant way from the Occamist teaching Luther had come to despise.

In short, Lortz misread the situation. The problem was not what Luther did not know, but what he did know. Far from offering Luther resources to combat the Occamist account of sin and grace, the Aquinas that Luther knew reinforced it.

Nor would Luther have been helped by paying closer attention to the Aristotelian Aquinas offered by Cajetan. Luther thought that Christian theology could be renewed only by breaking free from Aristotle. The problem with Aristotle from Luther’s perspective was not that he believed in the eternity of the world and the mortality of the human soul (which he did), but that his philosophical vocabulary was ill-suited for theological use. Grace cannot be understood as habits and acts, and the Aristotelian notion that the repetition of good acts makes anyone who performs them righteous turns St. Paul’s theology on its head.

In Luther’s view, theology deals with God in his relationship of judgment and grace toward sinners, and deals with sinners in their relationship of faith and faithlessness toward God. Therefore the proper vocabulary of grace is relational rather than metaphysical. One does not become a theologian with Aristotle, cried Luther, but only without him.

In his early lectures on the Psalms, Luther insisted that the word substance in the Bible refers not to the quiddity or whatness of a thing but to what "stands under and supports it," The substance of a human being, therefore, is defined by the foundation on which he or she rests. Who human beings are is determined by what they trust, by what -- when push comes to shove -- they are willing to risk their lives on.

In other words, the vocabulary of the philosophers obscures, willy-nilly, the intention of the Bible, which defines human beings not by their quiddities and qualities but by their faith and hope. No philosophical description of human beings, resting as it does on what can be seen and measured, can reach the profundity of biblical anthropology, which rests upon invisible relationships.

The most important thing about a human being for Luther is what that human being trusts, loves and expects. Human beings are defined by things that cannot be seen, things that in the nature of the case can only be hoped for. When Luther asked, "What, then, is a human being?" he answered that a human being is not a rational soul individuated by a body, as Aquinas might have put it, but a creature who trusts either the true God or an idol. On this question Aristotle can offer no useful insights.

While Protestant thought before Kant found its own uses for the philosophy of Aristotle, Protestant thinkers remained haunted by the ghost of Luther. Aquinas was for them either a Pelagianizing theologian who relied too little on grace and left too much to human free will or a philosophical theologian who counted too heavily on human reason and too little on divine revelation. Biel and Cajetan had succeeded in driving Capreolus’s account of Aquinas from the Protestant imagination.

Aquinas was not helped by his increasing prestige among Catholic theologians outside the Dominican order -- including, of course, the Jesuits. Since Protestants characteristically thought that Catholic theology was insufficiently Augustinian, they were not surprised that Catholic theologians admired a theologian who embodied this deficiency. There were even some Protestant theologians who thought that Aquinas had constructed an immense philosophical substructure based on reason alone, to which he had added a flimsy theological superstructure grounded in divine revelation.

Other developments made matters worse. Kant put an end to metaphysical speculations for many Protestants, while Friedrich Schleiermacher developed a new kind of liberal dogmatics that took Kant’s critique fully into account. Liberal Protestants in the 19th century were quick to reject all things Greek (that is, metaphysical) and embrace all things Hebraic (that is, ethical).

The heart of the Christian gospel for many liberals from Albrecht Ritschl to Adolf Harnackwas an ethical message. Jesus was a preacher of the kingdom of God in which a new ethic was to be followed, a fact some thought had been obscured by Nicaea and Chalcedon. The ancient councils had lost in their metaphysical categories the liberal Protestant vision of a "young and fearless prophet of ancient Galilee, whose life is still a summons to serve humanity." Not surprisingly, there was no room for Aquinas in this particular theological inn.

The correction to liberal theology made by the dialectical theology of the early 20th century scarcely improved Protestant approaches to Aquinas. Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Friedrich Gogarten and Emil Brunner turned to the teaching of the Protestant reformers of the 16th century for inspiration, and while these so-called neo-orthodox theologians did not simply repristinate the theology of Luther and Calvin, they saw no reason to abandon the prejudices of the reformers against scholastic theology.

Barth was particularly hostile to Aquinas’s appeal to natural theology. He argued that Calvin had rejected natural theology (which was true) and concluded that he had rejected all natural knowledge of God (which was false). Similarly, he argued that Aquinas had affirmed a role for natural theology (which was true) but had overestimated its role in theology (which was false). Aquinas made it clear from the very beginning of theSumma Theologiae how limited was the scope he assigned to natural theology.

As Aquinas understood matters, natural theology could be pursued successfully only by trained people who had both the intellectual power and the leisure to extract from nature, by reason alone, what the natural order has to tell about nature’s God. Even then, whatever they could learn would be fragmentary and inevitably mixed with error. Furthermore, reason could not wrest from nature the mysteries of the Trinity or the two natures of Christ. Indeed, without the self-revelation of God, reason alone could never discover what it most needed to know: namely, how God redeems wayward and erring humanity.

There were intimations by the middle of the 20th century that the old Protestant stereotypes of Aquinas might be crumbling around the edges. Per Erik Persson in 1957 published Sacra Doctrina: Reason and Revelation in Aquinas. The book was notable in treating Aquinas as a theologian rather than a religious philosopher and in offering a sympathetic account of Aquinas’s views not only on reason and revelation, but on a broader range of theological issues central to his thought. Persson pushed aside Biel and Cajetan and engaged Aquinas directly.

Since then, other Protestant thinkers have joined Persson in his direct engagement with the source. Christian ethicists like Stanley Hauerwas have utilized what Aquinas wrote about the cardinal and theological virtues in their own work on the formation of Christian character. Other theologians, newly liberated from the Kantian prejudices of the Enlightenment, have found Aquinas’s subtle and nuanced account on metaphysical questions bracing.

Even the biblical work of Aquinas on Romans and Job has elicited the interest of Protestant historians, who have found his commentaries to be sources of wisdom and insight into the biblical drama of redemption. In short, Aquinas the Augustinian theologian has emerged from behind the older Protestant stereotypes. Protestants have rediscovered the Aquinas Luther never knew -- the Aquinas of John Capreolus.

It would be too much to assume that Aquinas will ever be as central a theologian for Protestants as he has been for Catholics. But Protestants have begun to put an end to their own self-imposed impoverishment. They have opened the ranks of the theologians with whom they are in regular conversation to include Aquinas. It is a development long overdue.

The article was taken from:

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3267

Following Christ in Obedience - the Vocation of a Lay Person

“If however, you want to attribute both of these, the flowers and the fruit, to the one person according to their moral sense, understand the flower as faith, the fruit as action. Nor do I think that this will seem wrong to you, if, just as the flower by necessity precedes the fruit, so faith ought to come before good works. Without faith, moreover, it is impossible to please God, as Paul attests. And he even teaches that ‘whatever does not proceed from faith is sin’. Hence there is neither fruit without a flower nor a good work without faith. But then, faith without good works is dead, just as a flower seems vain where no fruit follows” (191).

The above passage was taken in full from Franz Posset’s book Pater Bernhardus: Martin Luther and Bernard of Clairvaux, and St. Bernard’s sermon on the Song of Songs. If you recall from my previous post, Posset argues that Martin Luther’s reformation theology was greatly influenced by the twelfth century Cistercian Church Father, St. Bernard – more so even than St. Augustine to whom Luther has often been compared. History books often explain that a major difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is that the former teaches that a person is justified by faith and good works while the latter argues that justification is through faith alone. But what is the real difference between the two? Surely, Protestants are not against helping others. So, what is the issue?

One must remember that Martin Luther was responding to the issues of his time. Living in the midst of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, a huge chasm had been built between the often wealthy, politically inclined bishops and cardinals on the one hand and the poor, highly uneducated lay people on the other. Authentic Church teachings were eclipsed by teachings that sometimes, unfortunately, reflected more the interests of the pope than those of God or the souls of his children. For a myriad of reasons, the lay people and even religious of Luther’s world were more familiar with a strict, unloving Jesus who obviously found pleasure in damning people than they were with the Christ of the Gospels whose sacrificial love reconciled the world to God. People were taught that only a few holy people (exceptional Saints) had found favor with God and were thus in Heaven. Everyone else had no right to presume that they could get to Heaven. Purgatory was the best anyone could hope for. Luther’s primary criticisms were aimed at a particular pope and his bishops who falsely taught that grace could be merited. In trusting in Christ’s mercy and following him in obedience through love, Christians were often taught that a person could only be relatively saved (spend less years in purgatory) through pilgrimages, almsgiving, and the buying of indulgences. In this context, it is understandable that someone like Martin Luther would fall into despair (besides he suffered from clinical depression as well). He felt like he never could do enough to merit heaven. And he was right. It struck Luther one day that a person is justified by ‘faith alone.’ But what does Luther mean by this statement? Let’s listen to him in his essay On the Freedom of a Christian:

“We may see the same thing in all handicrafts. A bad or good house does not make a bad or good builder, but a good or bad builder makes a good or bad house. And in general, no work makes the workman such as it is itself; but the workman makes the work such as he is himself. Such is the case too with the works of men. Such as the man himself is, whether [122] in faith or in unbelief, such is his work; good if it be done in faith, bad if in unbelief. But the converse is not true--that, such as the work is, such the man becomes in faith or in unbelief For as works do not make a believing man, so neither do they make a justified man; but faith, as it makes a man a believer and justified, so also it makes his works good…We do not then reject good works; nay, we embrace them and teach them in the highest degree. It is not on their own account that we condemn them, but on account of this impious addition to them, and the perverse notion of seeking justification by them.”


Luther and Bernard both agree that justification is through faith alone. God gives Grace to a Christian as a free, unmerited gift, and the Christian in turn responds in faith which is obedience to Christ. The difference between a person who believes in faith alone and one who believes in faith and good works is that the former seeks God’s face in the person of Jesus Christ and in attempting to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, inevitably does good works. The latter on the other hand only sees good works as a burden or an occasional necessity, only necessary for salvation in the next life. A person who believes in justification through faith and good works believes also that these works are extra special works that a Christian must do to fulfill Christ’s commandment in Matthew 25. Instead, a person who believes in justification by faith alone is freed from the law that condemns and instead turns to Christ who is the only one who can save. Instead of works being an extra, a Christian who trusts Christ in faith alone, actively engages in the suffering of this world like Christ did and continues to do. Instead of looking at good works as a way of entering Heaven, Christians should do these same things out of love for God and His people. Christ calls all people to follow him in obedience and that means that all people must follow in his footsteps. What does this mean for Catholics today?

Christian lay people must actively engage in the problems of their societies. It seems to me that too many "serious" Catholics are more interested in living their own private, pious lives than accepting the responsibility of living in the midst of a suffering world. Catholics should realize that followers of Christ must respond, and not just with prayers. Faith is active engagement in this world as a result of a complete obedience to Christ. I am reminded of Oscar Romero and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who saw social-justice not as an extra good work - a once-in-a-while occurrence - but as something that must be the natural response of faithful Christians in this world. The term "progressive" that is often used to refer to "social-justice Catholics" makes me wonder. What are these Catholics progressing towards if not towards God? I really believe that unless all Catholics come to believe that each and every one of them is called to be actively engaged in the problems of this world, the chasm in the Church (between the so-called Conservatives and the so-called Progressives) will always remain. Then, the Catholic faith ceases to be defined as obedience to the Christ of the Gospels.

Too often, when a Catholic spiritual director finds promise in a Christian, he advises that person to become a religious or a priest. But maybe, people are approaching vocations incorrectly. Of course, the Church needs priests and religious but she also needs faithful lay Christians living in the secular world. For too long, the Church has been solely preoccupied with religious vocations without realizing that the vast majority of Catholics are lay people. Fortunately, at least in the last 50 years, more emphasis has been placed on the lay people and their call to holiness. A person does not need to be a monk or a nun to be Christian. In fact, the way I see it, a shift from the cloistered life to the active life may be necessary to respond to the signs of the times. Could not a doctor or a lawyer or a custodian or a construction worker be a faithful Christian too? Instead of seeing some Christians as the “prayerful” type and others as the “social justice” type I suggest we bridge the chasm and urge all Christians to worship the Christ of the Gospels in obedience. There are hundreds of millions of Catholic lay people in the world. There is so much that a lay person can and should do.

Martin Luther and Saint Bernard - Surprising Similarities

I have recently finished reading a book I bought from a gift shop at the famous Gethsemane Abbey in Trappist, Kentucky. Pater Bernhardus: Martin Luther and Bernard of Clairvaux, written by the German Catholic theologian Franz Posset is a study in the theologies of the last of the Church Fathers, St. Bernard, and the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. As you may have guessed from my previous posts, I tend to focus on Christology through an ecumenical (particularly Lutheran-Catholic) lens to understand Christ and the Church in the modern world. Posset’s thesis is that Martin Luther, though a Protestant reformer, was greatly influenced by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth century Cistercian. Although Luther eventually abandoned monasticism altogether, Luther was knowingly (and unknowingly) influenced by Bernard. Sixteenth century libraries, unlike libraries today, contained Bernardine works alongside pseudo-Bernardine ones, making difficult a correct understanding of the medieval saint. In addition to a handful of authentic Bernardine sermons, Luther leaned much about this Church Father from The Golden Legend written by the hagiographer Jacobus de Voragine and the Vita Bern. Posset breaks down Pater Bernhardus  according to the Reformation solas (Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Christ Alone, Evangelization Alone), and by comparing the two men, attempts to prove that the Reformation cries (the solas) were not Lutheran inventions but were sometimes adopted from Bernard’s own teachings, given nearly four hundred years earlier. Posset argues that Luther and Bernard hold in common what the author calls an “affective christocentrism.”  

When one reviews Luther’s deep appreciation of Bernard’s sermons on the advent, incarnation,  and passion of Christ, and of the bernardine concepts of contrition, humility, self-knowledge, God-knowledge, self-judgment, grace, faith, and Christ’s double right to heaven – which taken together we call his affective christocentrism – one can better understand why the reformer ranked Bernard ‘higher than any monk or priest on earth’ and could state unequivocally that ‘Bernard is above all the teachers in the Church.’(337).

Of course, Luther was not in complete agreement with Bernard, but hostility was often a result of a false understanding of the monk’s teachings, taken from pseudo-Bernardine sources. Interestingly, though an enemy of the cloister, Luther was more influenced by monastic tradition than he was by scholasticism, which Luther openly attacked shortly before his 1517 Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. Martin Luther is certainly a complex character, one whom many people have attempted to understand. Like Bernard, de-mythologizing the life of Luther can be challenging.  Posset has also written a biography of Martin Luther (The Real Luther), another recent attempt to understand this complex man. Posset is convinced that Lutheran scholarship is still in its birth pangs because a huge aspect of Luther’s theology has been overlooked. By acknowledging Luther’s monastic influence, the author hopes that his books will help further ecumenical relations, help Catholics come to a better understanding of St. Bernard and his teachings, and help Lutherans come to a better understanding of the man they claim as the founder of their churches.  I will outline some of Posset’s arguments in the next post. It is not common for a Catholic theologian to invest so much time and effort into understanding the life of an excommunicated “schismatic”, but Posset hopes to help Christians approach ecumenical dialogue responsibly and honestly, with a good understanding of each other’s traditions.

Perhaps the bernardine/cistercian tradition is predestined – because of its specific bernardine spirituality and its affinity with Reformation concerns – to become the agent of further redintegratio between the two separated streams of western Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism. There is no doubt that ‘Bernard can be a meeting ground for catholic-protestant dialogue’. In the future, the two streams may again flow together to form one gospel-centered Catholic Church by reappropriating these two giants of western spirituality. (393-394).

I definitely recommend this book not so much because of its great writing style (the writing is okay) but because of its content and the questions that this book explores. Copies of this book are admittedly expensive though (I own a cheap, faulty copy), so I hope to comment further on this book in the future so that others too may feel inclined to join in the dialogue.

                

Understanding Lutheranism - Luther's Vision & The Evils Of State-Church

Here is an interesting article about the three phases of Lutheranism. The Three Lutheranisms.

It seems to me that all three types of Lutheranism need each other. I am afraid, though, that Bob Benne, the friend mentioned at the end of the article, may be right (to a certain degree). It does seem to me as well that Lutheranism (the church Luther started) is dying, but I would have to disagree that it is "an exhausted tradition." Luther's theology has influenced and continues to influence almost all Christians in the modern world, even the Catholic Church. From a questioning of the immaculacy of scholasticism to a re-emphasis on Christology, the Bible, unmerited Grace, and the suffering God of the cross, the Church (particularly the post-conciliar Church) has adopted much of Luther's earliest reforms. This is because, in the midst of corruption, the Church had forgotten what she had always believed to be true. I tend to think of Luther as a man who tried to reform the Church from the inside. It is the early Luther whom I like because he is what I call a "noble heretic". He spoke out against corruption in the church because he "[could] do no other". Luther urged everyday lay Catholics to make the faith their own.

However, Luther did not see the real evil in the Church. The real evil was the fact that the pope had political power, land, and was basically a monarch. It is because the Church was tied to the state (the Holy Roman Empire) that there was so much corruption. As seen in the Joint Agreement on Justification signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church in 1999, both churches agree that Grace is unmerited. There are of course theological differences as I pointed out in a previous post (Concupiscence as Defined by Catholics and Protestants), but Luther was excommunicated  mainly because he was seen as a political threat to Pope Leo X (who was quite a pathetic Catholic anyway).

But Luther did not understand the evils of state-church. He fell into the same trap. Luther's Lutheran Church was the German state church, established in solidarity with the HRE princes. It is this state-church that saw its own demise during World War II when the Nazis took over the church. German Lutherans reasoned that to be German meant that you were Lutheran (in the same way that many English reason that to be English means that you are Anglican). It was natural that a German would be a Lutheran, without even a personal appropriation of faith. Hitler exploited the Lutherans' weak faith. Hitler questioned the Germans understanding of being German. Who is the true German? For, only the true German could be a true Lutheran. And didn't Luther himself condemn Jews in his last years? (A very physically sick and depressed Luther believing the world was soon coming to an end unfortunately promoted violent antisemitism towards the end of his life). Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth spoke out against this claim, but their pleas often fell on deaf ears. The story of the German Lutheran Church is not just a Lutheran phenomenon as mentioned earlier. The Catholic Church also fell into this trap, but the Catholic Church was not established as a state-church and was able to escape, not unscathed. There are still Catholic nations especially in Latin and South America that tend to see Catholicism as an ethnicity as opposed to faith in Jesus Christ.   History bears witness to the fact that state-church promotes "couch-potato" Christianity at best and a "demonic" church at worst. Lutheranism, if it will survive, will have to reject Luther's idea of a state-church. Maybe, the Lutheranism experienced in America is the best alternative. But what is a Lutheranism that is not affiliated to the state?