In my last two posts, we considered the issue of salvation, as it is understood from both the
Catholic and Protestant positions. From
the Catholic perspective, salvation consists in being made a sharer in God’s
own life, and by this gift or grace, man is justified, or made right, in the
eyes of God. From the Protestant
perspective, God’s grace is not something that justifies man interiorly, rather
it is God’s declaration of justification. In other words, God declares man to be
justified, apart from any real interior justification of the soul. Today, we will consider the reason for the
Protestant position. At the end of this week, we will
consider the foundation for the Catholic answer.
The
reason for the difference between the Protestant position and that which the
Catholic Church has traditionally given is rooted in the confused spirituality
of Martin Luther. Luther, a Catholic
monk, struggled with the problem of scrupulosity; a problem which led him to a
distorted view of salvation. As a good
monk, Martin Luther examined his conscience continually, always seeking to root
out any sins which may have been lurking in the darkest parts of his soul. By his own account, Luther tells us, “I
was a pious monk, and so strictly followed the Rule of my Order, that I dare
say if ever any man could have been saved by monkery, I was that monk. I was a
monk in earnest…. If
it had continued much longer, I should have carried my mortifications even to
death, by means of watchings, prayers, readings, and other labours.”1 For Luther, dedication to prayer and
penance became an obsession, and drew him to sacramental Confession and
extraordinary penances more and more frequently. According to some accounts, Luther sought out
sacramental confession daily, and on one occasion Martin Luther is said to have
spent six hours confessing his sins. Exhausted with Luther’s extreme
scrupulosity, his confessor finally exclaimed: “God is not angry with you. You
are angry with God.”2
At
the root of Martin Luther’s problem, which led him to his revolutionary view of
salvation, was a confused understanding of sin.
Feeling within himself a struggle between virtue and vice, Luther began
to see his disordered appetites as formal sins.
In other words, when Martin Luther examined his conscience, he
identified not only his disordered actions as sinful, but even the urges which
were the foundation for his actions.
Seeing within himself a disordered appetite, that which the Church calls
concupiscence, Luther declared that in every action, he sinned, since in every
action some struggle for virtue was to be found.
A
helpful way to understand Luther’s confusion is to consider the case of a
former smoker. Even many years after a
former smoker has quit the habit, it is common for him to have urges which
incline him toward smoking. No one in
their right mind would consider these urges themselves to be equivalent to
smoking, any more than one who has them can be called a smoker. Similarly, tradition has always considered
disordered desire, or concupiscence, one of the effects of original sin, to be
the “tinder” for sin, but not sin itself.
Martin Luther, however, who saw concupiscence as sin, declared that in
every action, man sins. “When I was a
monk,” Luther wrote, “I used immediately to believe that it was all over
with my salvation every time I experienced the concupiscence of the flesh…. I
used to try various remedies; I used to go to confession every day, but that
didn’t help me at all. For this concupiscence of the flesh was always
returning, so that I could never find peace, but was everlastingly tormented
with the thought, ‘You have committed such and such a sin; …and all your good
works are just useless.”3
Believing
that he sinned in every act, Luther concluded that God had not justified man
interiorly, but rather declared him free from divine wrath, regardless of the
true state of his soul. Seeing all of
his actions as tainted by sin, and yet believing that God had saved him, Luther
concluded that a man’s works could not be a determining factor in his
salvation. Thus, Luther declared, “Be a sinner and sin on bravely, but have
stronger faith
and rejoice in Christ,
who is the victor over sin,
death, and the world. Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding
place of justice:
sin must be committed. To
you it ought to be sufficient that you acknowledge the Lamb that takes away the
sins of the world, the sin cannot tear you away
from him, even though you commit adultery a hundred times a
day and commit as many murders.”4
Please continue reading later this week.
1 Msgr.
Patrick O’Hare, The Facts about Luther,
P. 50, TAN, Rockford, Illinois, revised ed., republished 1987.
2 Philip
Hughes, A Popular History of the
Reformation, revised ed., P. 95, Image Books, New York, 1960.
3 John A.
O’Brien, Martin Luther, The Priest who
Founded Protestantism, P. 8-9, The Paulist Press, New York, 1953.
4 The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume
IX. 1910. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
Quoting Enders, Briefwechsel,
III, 208.
