From the desk of the pastor for Dec. 7, 2025

The Lord be with you! Today we examine Martin Luther’s key propositions about Faith, Sanctifying Grace, and Divine Revelation. Although Luther rightly highlighted the centrality of Grace, he misunderstood what God intended to achieve through it.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, Martin Luther proposed that grace alone (sola gratia) saved. The Church has always affirmed that human beings are saved by the gift of grace. Luther argued, however, that human salvation consisted only in the acceptance of Christ as Savior and nothing else. In other words Luther holds that grace remits the punishment of sin without changing human nature or the person’s fundamental relationship with God. His most famous example is that grace is like snow covering up a piece of dung: God sees Christ (the pure snow) and ignores the vile excrement (us). Grace has achieved a legal but not a real remission of sin for Martin Luther.

If grace does not remove humanity’s actual sinfulness, what will humanity be like in Heaven? Luther has no real good answers here. His entire criticism of the Church’s theology of grace is that it leaves room for people to reject grace and salvation. Luther wanted a theology that guaranteed once a person accepted Christ he could never go to Hell. To achieve that version he created the contradiction that grace did not remove sin but just allowed God to ignore it.

When the Church condemned Luther’s theology, he began attacking the Church’s role as guardian of Divine Revelation. The Church has held that Christ revealed God to mankind through Scripture and Tradition. Tradition is the lens through which we read Scripture and live it out in our daily lives. Devotions and liturgies help us to experience the Word of God in a living practice (Tradition) that grows and matures over time. Luther, in contrast, argued that Scripture by itself is the Revelation of Christ for each individual without any shared context or community. We certainly want to affirm that the Holy Spirit will move the hearts of individuals through Scripture. God, however, wisely foresaw that people of good will would disagree over the interpretation of various passages. Accordingly, the Church acts as the arbiter and keeps the community together and united.

Perhaps ironically, most Lutherans (and most Protestants for that matter) believe that Faith and Works go together. All Christians have experienced the phenomenon that the more we love God and neighbor, the more our Faith in God grows and vice versa. The Church’s theology of merit is our articulation that the soul can and should grow in grace over time. Although only Christ merited in strict justice, all Christians can merit congruously with the saints being the best examples. It is tragic that Luther reduced the scope of grace to mere forgiveness when God’s life is the entryway to infinite goodness. May we all desire to grow in God’s love.

In His Sacred Heart,
Fr. John