Concerning Christian Liberty

A friar under threat, 1520

Martin Luther (1483–1546), Augustinian friar and professor of Bible at Wittenberg, put forward the Ninety-five Theses on indulgences in October 1517. They are this book's companion in the library, and their sixty-second thesis names its subject: "The true treasure of the Church is the Holy Gospel of the glory and grace of God" 62. His wider teaching is told in Luther: the theology of the cross and justification, and the events in The story of the Reformation.

Three years of conflict followed, told in the letter from Luther's side: Cardinal Cajetan demanded at Augsburg in 1518 that he recant, and Johann Eck debated him at Leipzig in 1519 on the primacy of the pope Letter 13. In 1520 came To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (August), teaching that all the baptised are priests Luther, To the Christian Nobility; The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (October), on the sacraments; and in November this book, also called The Freedom of a Christian. The first two of these great treatises fight; this one teaches and consoles.

Meanwhile, on 15 June 1520, Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine (‘Arise, O Lord’), condemning forty-one propositions of Luther's and giving him sixty days from its publication to recant. In late August, at the urging of the papal envoy Karl von Miltitz, Luther's order asked him to write humbly to the pope Letter 16; the bull reached him in October. The letter is dated 6 September Letter 22, but many historians think he wrote it after meeting Miltitz in mid-October and dated it back, lest it look forced from him by the bull. No peace came: Luther burned the bull on 10 December, was excommunicated on 3 January 1521, and in April stood before the Diet of Worms.

A letter and a little book

The library holds the whole work, the letter to Pope Leo X and the treatise in numbered paragraphs. Luther issued the treatise in German and in Latin (which came first is debated) and sent the longer Latin to the pope; the English is R. S. Grignon's translation of it, in Wace and Buchheim's First Principles of the Reformation (1883). Eccius is Eck, to contemn is to despise, for nought means for nothing, and conversation is a way of life.

The letter honours Leo as a man while it savages his court, "more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom" Letter 5. Luther will not recant, "since the Word of God, which teaches liberty in all other things, ought not to be bound" Letter 17, and he reminds Leo that the apostles called themselves "the servants of a present Christ, not the vicars of an absent one" Letter 19. His small gift is, rightly understood, "a summary of the Christian life put together in small compass" Letter 21.

The treatise begins with two propositions:

A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.

3

Both, Luther says, are Paul's 4:

Though I am free of obligation to anyone, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.

1 Corinthians 9:19

Love, Luther explains, serves the one it loves; so Christ, the Lord of all, was born under the law, free and a servant at once. Luther then distinguishes the inner man from the outer, as Paul does: "Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day" 5. The first half, from 6, concerns the inner man; the second, from 50, the outer; and from 93 he adds a word on liberty's misuse.

Free lord of all

Nothing outward can make the soul righteous or free, Luther argues: vestments, holy places, prayers and fasts are open to hypocrites too 8. The soul needs one thing, "the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ" 9, and since that word is received by faith, not works, the soul "is justified by faith alone and not by any works" 12: "The righteous will live by faith" (Romans 1:17).

Why, then, so many commands? Scripture has "two parts, precepts and promises" 17. The precepts show what is good but give no power to do it, and "thou shalt not covet" 18 alone convicts us all; the promises bid us believe in Christ, and "the promises of God give that which the precepts exact" 20. This is Luther's distinction of law and gospel.

Faith does three things. The soul that clings to the promises takes on their virtue, "just as iron exposed to fire glows like fire" 22. Faith honours God by holding him true, for "The highest worship of God is to ascribe to Him truth" 24. And faith "unites the soul to Christ, as the wife to the husband" 27.

In this marriage Christ takes the bride's sin, death and hell, and she receives his grace, life and salvation 28. He takes them on "by the wedding-ring of faith" 29 and swallows them up, so that she may say, "all mine is His, and all His is mine" 31. This has come to be called the ‘happy exchange’, union with Christ told in the language of love more than of the law court. Luther hears it in Hosea 30:

So I will betroth you to Me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in loving devotion and compassion. And I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will know the LORD.

Hosea 2:19-20

What is the husband's becomes the bride's, kingship and priesthood too: "all we who believe on Christ are kings and priests in Christ" 37, "a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9). The kingship is spiritual: the more Christian a man is, the more he suffers 39, yet all things serve his salvation. The priesthood is to come before God, to pray for others and to teach one another 41. This priesthood of all believers does not abolish the ministry: "we are all equally priests" 44, but not all are to teach in public. And preaching must make Christ "a Christ for you and for me" 47 (see Prophet, priest and king).

Servant of all

The second half meets the objection, "Are we then to take our ease and do no works, content with faith?" 50, with a flat no. Until the last day we are not wholly spiritual, so the body is schooled by fasting, watching and labour, not to earn justification but to obey the spirit 53. Like Adam tending Eden in "works of perfect freedom" 55, the believer works only to please God: "Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works" 58, as "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit" (Matthew 7:18).

Above all, a Christian "lives only for others and not for himself" 70. His pattern is Christ 75:

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness.

Philippians 2:5-7

Rich in all things by faith, the Christian empties himself of his liberty: "I will therefore give myself, as a sort of Christ, to my neighbour, as Christ has given Himself to me" 77. Luther concludes that "a Christian man does not live in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour" 91, in Christ by faith and in his neighbour by love, rising to God and descending to the neighbour like "the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man" (John 1:51).

The last pages face two misuses of liberty, scorn for fasts and trust in them 93. "It is not from works that we are set free by the faith of Christ, but from the belief in works" 95. Resist the hardened teachers of works, Luther says, but spare the weak: "Fight vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep" 98.

Luther insists, "We do not then reject good works; nay, we embrace them and teach them in the highest degree" 66. Still, the churches have received his teaching on justification and good works differently. The Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent (1547), taught that justification is not only forgiveness but the renewal of the inner man by grace, that nothing before it merits that grace, and that the good works of the justified truly merit eternal life, since God wills his gifts to be their merits Council of Trent, Decree on Justification; so Trent rejected justification by faith alone where that meant that nothing else need cooperate.

In 1999, at Augsburg, the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, affirming together that we are accepted by God by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not for any merit, and that good works follow justification as its fruits. The sixteenth-century condemnations, they said, do not apply to the teaching each side set out there; differences remain Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.

Protestants place their accents differently. Lutherans confess that faith must bring forth good fruits, though no one may rely on them for justification Augsburg Confession, art. 6. Reformed Christians, with Calvin, speak of "a twofold benefit" 3.11.1 received by faith in Christ, reconciliation and sanctification: faith alone justifies, but justifying faith is never alone Calvin, Antidote to the Council of Trent, and the law remains a rule of life. Wesleyans agree that "Faith is the condition, and the only condition, of justification" III.1, but stress that sanctification begins in that moment, "a real as well as a relative change" I.4, and seek Christian perfection in this life.

The Orthodox, outside this Western quarrel, speak of salvation as theosis: not that we become God by nature, but that by grace we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). As Athanasius wrote, "He was made man that we might be made God" 54.3. Grace and human freedom work together, and Luther's iron in the fire is an image several Greek Fathers had used for the union of God and man in Christ. See Faith and justification, Holiness and perseverance and How do Catholics and Protestants differ?

Reading it well

The book takes a sitting or two. Read the letter first, and hold the two propositions together: the first alone becomes licence, the second alone a new law. Luther warns that no one understands faith well "who has not at some time tasted of its spirit, under the pressure of tribulation" 1.

Some pages are hard. The letter calls the papal court "the most lawless den of thieves" Letter 5, and the treatise sees in the popes' traditions "the work of Antichrist" 99. The corruption was real; yet these words wound Catholic readers, and many Protestants find them harsher than love allows. The Second Vatican Council owned that both sides were to blame for the division Second Vatican Council, Unitatis Redintegratio. Read past Luther's anger to the Christ he points to.

Nor is this a book against works. Its fasts sound monastic, but now they govern the body and serve the neighbour. Ceremonies are like a builder's scaffolding, valued for the building but never mistaken for it 101, and the Reformation's teaching on calling in daily work grows from the same root (Vocation: every sphere of life).

Christian liberty is not freedom to please ourselves, but the freedom of those who have received everything in Christ and so can serve for nothing (see What is true freedom?). Paul puts both propositions in one verse:

For you, brothers, were called to freedom; but do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. Rather, serve one another in love.

Galatians 5:13