LUTERO (LUTHER), MARTIN

LUTHER, MARTIN. – Initiator of Lutheranism and Protestantism, born at Eisleben (Saxony) in Germany on 10 November 1483, to the miner Hans and Margaret Ziegler, and died there on 18 February 1546.

OUTLINE:

I. Life and doctrine up to 1517

II. L. and Lutheranism in Germany (1517–46). –

III. The consolidation of Lutheranism

IV. Lutheranism outside Germany

V. The elaboration of Lutheran dogma

VI. Elements of dissolution in Lutheranism

VII. Numerical consistency of Lutheranism

VIII. Evaluations.

I. LIFE AND DOCTRINE UP TO 1517

Luther’s family was of peasant origin and possessed some means; from this rough peasant environment he retained even later the violence and coarseness of his language, a near-superstitious fear of the devil in his many guises, and for many years a concern bordering on scrupulosity to do what he considered his duty. After privations and with the help of benefactors, he attended the trivium at Mansfeld, then the school of the Brethren of the Common Life at Magdeburg from 1497, moving on to Eisenach in 1498; then, with a scholarship, he entered a university college at Erfurt to study law at his father’s wish. Proper legal studies were preceded by a course in philosophy; he followed it, learning Aristotelianism with an Ockhamist imprint and obtaining the academic title of “magister artium” at Epiphany 1505. He had barely begun his legal studies when, on 2 July 1505, the feast of St Anne, as he was returning with a friend to Erfurt, a lightning bolt struck the companion and Luther—under the impact of the event—made a vow to St Anne to become a religious. Indeed, two weeks later he entered, against his father’s will, the convent of the Augustinian Hermits at Erfurt, where in 1506 he made his monastic profession and on 3 April received priestly ordination.

The convent belonged to a “reformed” congregation: it practiced strict discipline, showed lively interest in study, intense piety, and zeal for preaching. Luther accepted its Rule in the conviction that it represented the sure path to salvation. Having entered the priesthood by order of his superiors, for the same reason he resumed his studies in philosophy and scholastic theology at the convent’s “general study,” whose orientation was the “via moderna,” Ockhamism; in 1508 he became a lecturer in moral philosophy at the convent in Wittenberg, whence in 1509, having become a bachelor in theology, he returned to Erfurt, to the Order’s study as “lector sententarius.”

These years of intense ascetic life, study, and teaching were also years of harsh interior struggles for Luther. He had studied philosophy and theology from the Ockhamist texts then in vogue, by Gabriel Biel, and had absorbed their motifs, learning in the epistemological field to devalue concepts as mere “names” and to contest the claims of Aristotelian metaphysics in order to rely chiefly on experience; in the realm of theology, to recognize as God’s intimate essence His sovereign will and thus to regard dogmas to be believed and laws to be observed as mere expressions of God’s concrete will, in no way deducible from the supreme divine Reason, thereby accentuating the separation between faith and science; in the field of moral theology he had accepted the principle that man is capable of doing good, of pleasing God, of loving Him perfectly, when he truly engages his will: a principle formulated by Biel as “facienti quod in se est, Deus infallibiliter dat gratiam,” which externalized the concept of grace and rejected the Thomistic doctrine of grace as “habitus.” Deeply concerned about his eternal salvation, as he himself asserted, Luther had energetically engaged in the practices of monastic asceticism (fasting, penances, devotions, examinations of conscience, humiliations, etc.) according to his Order’s Rule, convinced that they represented the path to perfection and could assure him peace of conscience and certainty of final salvation. Instead, he failed to achieve the longed-for inner tranquility: the motions of concupiscence did not cease despite mortifications; the thought of infernal punishments dismayed him; sacramental confessions did not reassure him about the forgiveness of his sins; even in reading the Bible he felt as if haunted by the word of God’s justice, which he believed demanded perfection of man. The young religious thus passed through grave crises of despair, to which the nervous tension of meditation and constant self-examination, a timidity dating from childhood and now aggravated into true scrupulosity, certainly contributed. In opening up to his superior, Staupitz, Luther found relief and a first approach to spiritual peace, placing himself on the path of the mystics, of St Bernard, of Tauler, above all of Gerson, author of the *De consolatione theologiae*, learning to renounce his restless activism in order to adopt rather an attitude of quiet, of passivity, letting God and His grace act, entrusting himself entirely to God’s love.

At this time Luther also had intense external activity: besides teaching and preaching, he held governing functions in the Order; in 1515, as district vicar, he had oversight of eleven convents. In 1510–11 he made a trip to Rome to support his convent’s appeal against a decree of union of the observant with the non-observant promoted by Staupitz; later he would give this event a particular significance in the service of his anti-papal polemic. Yet the memories of the time show him chiefly concerned with his inner perfection, with making a general confession, with gaining the indulgences connected with pious practices; and though he noted with scandal the ignorance and laxity of clergy and people, the worldliness of cardinals, he did not receive a disturbing impression of the papacy of Julius II. On returning from his unsuccessful mission, he was definitively assigned to the convent at Wittenberg. At the university, recently founded by the Prince Elector, he obtained the doctorate in theology in 1512 and in 1513 began his lectures on biblical exegesis as Staupitz’s substitute, commenting on the Psalms. In these years, in connection with his interior crisis, Luther’s theological system was also maturing, reflecting strongly his religious experience. Disillusioned in ethics and theology, Luther sought to define his

experience of his relationship with God through the study of St. Augustine, toward whom the traditions of his Order naturally inclined him. What he now approached, however, was not the Neoplatonizing Augustine of the humanists—with whom, at Erfurt, his university of formation, he had had only few and superficial contacts—but the anti-Pelagian Augustine, in whom the themes of Adam’s sin, its consequences, Grace, and Predestination occupy the foreground. These motifs, if one accepts the results of Müller’s researches, were already organized into a recognizable “Augustinian” system among eminent theologians of the Order in the 15th–16th centuries (Favaroni, Giovanni Perez, Simone Fidati da Cascia, and, with Ockhamist admixtures, Gregory of Rimini): this system proceeded from an understanding of original sin with concupiscence, affirmed the inescapable imperfection of all human works, and the necessity of supplementing human “imperfect justice” with the “perfect justice” of Christ bestowed by Grace (the theory of “double justice”). In this late scholastic system Luther found elements to justify theologically his experience of man’s radical sinfulness, enslaved by concupiscence, and of liberation through total abandonment to divine mercy. During the winter of 1512–13, while meditating on Scripture, he became convinced that he had discovered the profound meaning of God’s word in the exegesis of the concept of “God’s justice” (Rom 1:17) in St. Paul, which he now understood not—as he had previously anguished—as “God’s wrath” that punishes, but as that which, in merciful forgiveness, makes sinners just.

LUTHER, MARTIN

The mediating action of a facile papal emissary, the German Militz, remained, to whom Luther in January 1519 had promised only to keep silent, provided his adversaries did likewise. During the Leipzig Disputation with Eck (27 June–16 July 1519), Luther’s doctrinal position became entangled, as he contested not only the primacy of the Pope but also the infallibility of councils. Meanwhile, his opposition to the Pope found fresh arguments in the writings of Hus on the Church, in the refutation of Valla’s “Constantine’s Donation,” in the grievances (“gravamina”) of the German Church against the Curia, cataloged since the 15th century, while the young humanists in Ulrich von Hutten’s circle and the revolutionary knights led by Franz von Sickingen loudly declared themselves in his favor, urging him to turn his theological controversy with Rome into a national German issue, exploiting the widespread aversion to the Curia. It was in this atmosphere that the writings of 1520 were composed, marking his break with the Church and its doctrine: the pamphlet On the Papacy in Rome, the Sermon on the New Testament (against the sacrificial character of the Mass), but above all the three major programmatic writings on reform: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation for the Reform of the Christian Estate (June 1520), On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (October 1520), and The Freedom of a Christian, with an epistle to Leo X (September 1520). In the first, published in vivid popular German and of which 4,000 copies were sold within days, Luther advocates the demolition of the three “walls” of the Romanists: the distinction between priests and laity, the exclusive right of the hierarchy to interpret Scripture, and the pope’s right to convene councils—premises for the reform of the Church—and calls for this reform to be entrusted to an ecumenical council of the kind that had reorganized the Church along national lines at Constance, eliminating the “gravamina” of the German Church, reducing holy days, curbing usury, improving peasant conditions, freeing the clergy from the obligation of celibacy, modifying or abolishing canon law, especially papal decretals, reforming university teaching by removing Aristotelian texts and replacing them with the study of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and mathematics, and establishing biblical commentary in place of Lombard’s *Sentences*. In *On the Babylonian Captivity*, composed and published in Latin in response to a writing by the Cremonese Dominican Isolani, Luther denounces as “captivity” the refusal of the chalice to the laity, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the sacrificial character of the Mass; he denies sacramental status to Confirmation, Holy Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unction, retaining only Baptism, the Eucharist, and Penance—but with a distinctive interpretation. Finally, the tract *The Freedom of a Christian* presents a calm exposition of Luther’s mystical-religious doctrine, according to which the Christian, by entrusting himself to God and trusting in Him, becomes lord of all things and freed from every subjection. Good works, to which he remains obligated (assistance to the neighbor, commandments, etc.), have meaning, but not as a means of acquiring merit before God; rather, they flow from a pious soul, thereby renewing the condemnation of meritorious works for eternal salvation that had been a central part of traditional Christian life.

Thus Luther mobilized national forces for the reform of doctrine and Church structure. This represented a strengthening of the movement, but at the expense of its original religious inspiration. The social, economic, political, and personal motives then predominant among the classes he addressed increasingly asserted themselves, and at times decisively, in the reform.

Meanwhile, the proceedings against Luther in Rome concluded on the basis of the acts of the Leipzig Disputation. The bull *Exsurge, Domine* of 15 June 1520 threatened Luther with excommunication unless, within sixty days, he recanted the propositions declared heretical, false, scandalous, seductive, and contrary to Catholic truth. These concerned human incapacity, faith, justification, Grace, the sacraments, the hierarchy, and Purgatory. The bull also ordered the destruction of books containing such errors. It was published with great difficulty in Germany by Aleander and Eck. Luther rejected it with the writing *Against the Bull of the Antichrist* (October 1520) and, on 10 December 1520 at Wittenberg, publicly burned it along with the *Corpus iuris canonici*, the *Summa* of St. Thomas, and the writings of his adversaries. Consequently, the bull *Decet Romanum Pontificem* of 3 January 1521 declared Luther and his followers excommunicated, to which Luther in turn responded with further and more violent pamphlets and anti-papal caricatures.

The bull, according to the laws of the Empire, was to be enforced by the public authorities. But L. now had supporters among the nobility and princes who were unwilling to sacrifice him. Therefore, when at the Diet of Worms (1521) the papal nuncio demanded the ban against L. and his followers, L. was granted a hearing and was only condemned by the imperial ban (8 May 1521) because of his refusal to recant and due to the decisive intervention of the new emperor Charles V. This entailed the prohibition of preaching his doctrine and the condemnation of his writings to the flames. However, while leaving Worms before the expiration of his imperial safe-conduct, L. was abducted by masked knights of the Elector of Saxony, who took him to the Wartburg, where L. lived for ten months under the assumed name of Jörg. In this refuge, L., rejecting as demonic temptations the doubts that arose in him about the legitimacy of his actions—manifesting as nightmares and hallucinations—became ever more convinced of a special divine calling to combat ecclesiastical institutions, to hate the papacy, and this multiplied his energies as a writer. It was during this period that he wrote De votis monasticis iudicium, which soon emptied the monasteries; De abroganda Missa privata and Dell'abuso della Messa, which declared the sacrifice of the Mass a shameful idolatry; but above all, he began his German translation of the Bible, which created a new instrument for the spread of his doctrine and at the same time became a literary monument destined to decisively influence the formation of the German literary language and to supplant the existing rough or incomplete translations. This translation was the first to be based on the original Hebrew or Greek text; it was not, however, free from errors, partly due to defects in the text and an imperfect knowledge of languages, and partly because of the forced interpretations imposed by L.’s concern to support his thesis of justification by faith alone, which led him even to assign different value to the books of the Bible and to reject as “of straw” the Epistle of St. James, which recommends works.

Meanwhile, his ideas were put into practice: priests were marrying; monks and nuns were abandoning convents; Mass was being celebrated in German; Communion was being distributed under both kinds without the requirement of fasting; and images, altars, and crosses were even being demolished, as by Carlostadio in Wittenberg. The revolutionary knights, banded together in a league (Bridergemeinschaft) under the leadership of U. von Hutten and F. von Sickingen, attacked the territories of the ecclesiastical Elector of Trier to open the way for the word of God. This movement, however, was bloodily suppressed by a league of great Rhenish princes, who deprived the lesser nobility of their initial role in the work of “reform” (Knights’ War, 1521–22).

L. was summoned back to Wittenberg by

DIGNA MERCES PAPAE SATANISSIMI ET CARDINALIVM SVORVM.

Agricola, Bugenhagen reformed Denmark, Osiander reformed Nuremberg, Œcolampadius imposed himself at Basel, and other lesser figures followed their example in other regions, reorganizing ecclesiastical life in a Lutheran sense, examining and approving pastors, establishing parishes, drafting liturgical rubrics, organizing popular educational institutions, writing catechisms and pastoral instructions, which the princes then made obligatory by virtue of the “ius reformandi.”

This preeminent position of the princes in defending and shaping the structure of the new Churches became evident when Charles V, reconciled with the Pope and having concluded peace with Francis I, sought to impose respect for the old institutions where they still existed. Against this decision, taken at the Diet of Speyer (1529), the princes lodged a formal protest (whence the name “Protestants”), appealing “to the Emperor, to the council, to good Christians”; at the same time, chiefly through the efforts of Philip of Hesse, they sought to form a united front against Charles V’s intentions of restoration. To include the Zwinglians as well, Philip of Hesse arranged the Colloquy of Marburg (1–4 Oct. 1529) between L. and Zwingli to resolve the differences between Zwinglian symbolic eucharistic theory and Luther’s doctrine of real presence: an effort that produced no other result than to prompt L. to draft the 15 Articles of Marburg, which he later reworked into the 17 Articles of Schwabach and the 10 of Torgau, which Melanchthon would later use in drafting the Augsburg Confession.

At the Diet of Augsburg (1530), at the request of Charles V, who hoped to resolve the German religious question through a compromise, the dissenting princes presented a profession of faith that was at once a theological-legal justification of religious innovations, the Confessio fidei augustana, drawn up by Melanchthon and revised by the Saxon Chancellery. It sought to demonstrate the substantial conformity of Lutheran beliefs with Scripture and with the doctrines of the ancient Church, and in general with traditional teachings, mitigating divergences and criticizing doctrines not accepted as products of Scholasticism, insisting on the condemnation of the Anabaptists as subverters of doctrine and social order and rejecting Zwinglian doctrines. Regarding institutions, it claimed the use of the chalice for the laity, the marriage of priests, the abolition of monastic vows, extolling in contrast civil activities as service to God, the non-obligation of abstinences and fasts, and the suppression of the Canon in the Mass, since it included the idea of a meritorious renewal of the sacrifice of the Cross.

Luther could not be present at the Diet because he was under the imperial ban; however, he had approved the Augsburg Confession from Coburg, though recommending that no further concessions be made to Catholics. The papal Confutatio, while acknowledging positive elements in the doctrinal section, contested the justification of innovations as contrary to Holy Scripture, Church law, and imperial law; the attempt at compromise failed. Melanchthon, in response to the Confutatio, wrote the Apologia of the Augsburg Confession, and the Lutheran princes renewed the Protest of Speyer, organizing in the League of Smalcald (near Gotha) in March 1531 resistance to the Emperor and the decisions of the Diet, which Luther justified at the urging of Philip of Hesse. Besides Philip of Hesse, the initiator, the League included John of Saxony, Wolfgang of Anhalt, the dukes of Brunswick, the counts of Mansfeld, and several cities—among them Strasbourg, Ulm, Constance, Magdeburg, Bremen, and Lübeck—all united “for the defense of the Gospel.” It formed a broader coalition than that of the signatories of the Augsburg Confession, including wealthy northern cities, the anti-Habsburg dukes of Bavaria, and able to count on the support of Francis I of France.

Taking advantage of Charles V’s political and military difficulties, the League’s adherents obtained a new interim at Nuremberg in 1532, which allowed them to proceed undisturbed in the suppression of monasteries, the confiscation of monastic property, and the reform of worship; to consolidate the organization of the new Churches; and to strengthen their party by attracting new princes and through the secularization of other ecclesiastical territories, scarcely hindered by conservative forces that were divided in purpose and method and uncertain even about the nature of the religious movement itself.

The new political-organizational strength of the Lutherans was revealed in 1537 in the objections and demands they opposed to the Council convoked by Paul III first at Mantua and then at Vicenza: the twenty-three Articles of Smalcald, drawn up by Luther in harsh tones, emphasized—contrary to the Augsburg Confession—the divergences of the new Churches, placing foremost the rejection of the Pope as the “Antichrist” and declaring any agreement with Rome impossible. The Lutherans’ appeal to the Council proved a mere polemical and dilatory expedient: as early as 1538 Luther told the nuncio Vergerio that his participation in the Council would be useless, since he was certain of being in the truth.

The Lutherans also derived substantial reinforcement from the policy of compromise continued by Charles V, the delays of the Council, and the “Religious Colloquies” at Hagenau, Worms, and Regensburg (1540–41), where the most conciliatory figures of both sides met: Melanchthon and Bucer for the Protestants, Gropper and Pflug—albeit with Eck—for the Catholics, the latter supported by the papal legates Contarini and Morone. Agreement was reached on the formulas of original sin and justification, the Catholics having accepted the theory of double justice; the Catholic side, without encouraging it, admitted the marriage of priests and the use of the chalice for the laity. Agreement proved impossible on the number of Sacraments and the authority of the Pope. Thus the doctrinal agreement under imperial auspices (Regensburg Interim of 1541) failed, and the Nuremberg Interim of 1532 remained, to the great advantage of Lutheran expansion.

Meanwhile the Reformation had reached Brandenburg, Württemberg, ducal Saxony, and other cities in the north and south; it could boast an understanding with Denmark and France and the suspension of proceedings against those who had appropriated ecclesiastical property before the Imperial Chamber Court. A moral and organizational weakening, however, was brought to the innovators by the Anabaptist excesses “to establish the Gospel” at Münster in Westphalia (Kingdom of Zion, 1535) and by the bigamy of Philip of Hesse, which Luther—with Melanchthon and Bucer—had justified by appeal to the Old Testament in a secret opinion that instead became public and forced the embarrassed prince to resort to denials and to theorize “the emergency and utility lie” (1539–40).

Charles V took advantage of this situation when, having secretly agreed with the Pope, he prepared to act by force against the innovators after having brought Philip of Hesse into his orbit under threat of a trial for bigamy, the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, and Maurice of Saxony, envious of his cousin the Elector and eager for the electoral dignity. By restoring Catholicism in the duchy of Cleves and by countenancing Maurice’s coup against his cousin’s territories defended by the Smalcaldic League, he succeeded in defeating and capturing the Elector of Saxony (Mühlberg, 24 April 1547) and shortly thereafter Philip of Hesse himself. The Smalcaldic League was destroyed, and the princes undertook to execute the decisions of the next Diet. Yet the Lutheran party remained strong in the north, and at the Diet of Augsburg (1548) Charles V was forced to impose on the Lutherans a church regime that was Catholicizing until the decisions of the Council, to which the princes undertook to send representatives (Augsburg Interim, 1548). This reform, viewed with distrust by the Pope, found no genuine adherence either among Catholics or Lutherans; it did, however, permit the restoration of Catholic institutions in Lutheran territories, especially in Saxony, where it gave rise to lively controversy between the accommodating Melanchthonians and the rigid Lutherans (Gnesio-Lutherans) over Catholic acts of worship deemed by Melanchthon to be religiously indifferent (“adiaphora”).

Meanwhile Luther had died of cardial arteriosclerosis (the legend of suicide is based on late seventeenth-century documents). In his final years he had withdrawn increasingly into the background, leaving to others—both theologians and princes—the direction of the movement. He was physically suffering, embittered by the disorders that had overtaken the new Churches, by the divisions among his followers, by many of their inclinations toward Zwingli and Calvin, and by the harsh interventions of princes and civic magistrates in the life of the Churches. The idea of the nearness of the end of the world often came to his lips and pen. Unshaken to the last, he remained convinced that he possessed the true Gospel and that the papacy was the Antichrist. On the convocation of the Council of Trent, in March 1545 he had written his most violent invective: *Against the Papacy Established in Rome by the Devil*, and had circulated nine of the most vulgar caricatures produced in the workshop of Lucas Cranach, illustrated with sarcastic verses under the title: *Portrait of the Papacy by M. Luther*.

### III. THE CONSOLIDATION OF LUTHERANISM

The humiliation of Lutheranism was short-lived: a new betrayal by Maurice of Saxony renewed resistance in the north; the Smalcaldic League was reorganized in alliance with France. Charles V, caught without an army at Innsbruck in 1552, was forced to abandon his program of Catholic restoration and allow his brother Ferdinand, appointed King of Germany, to grant at Passau free practice of their religion to all adherents of the Augsburg Confession until the next Diet, which was held at Augsburg (1555). This Diet, in its "recess," sanctioned this concession without temporal limitation; the Lutherans retained possession of the secularized goods they had acquired up to 1552. The only limitation on their political-territorial expansion was imposed by the "reservatum ecclesiasticum," according to which bishops and abbots who wished to become Protestants could do so "without diminution of their honor," though they would lose their office; the Imperial Chamber Court would be composed of an equal number of Catholics and Protestants. Lutheranism was thus officially recognized, though restricted to a minority in the Diet and with the general commitment to the restoration of religious unity, should the Council—which the Lutherans had briefly attended in 1552—succeed in achieving II.
### IV. LUTHERANISM OUTSIDE GERMANY

Meanwhile, Lutheranism had spread not only across four-fifths of Germany, forming compact zones or scattered enclaves according to the irregular borders of autonomous territories, but also into northern and eastern regions. More than as a vast and profound movement of conscience, it had been established here through the authoritarian actions of local rulers and thus presented a distinctly conservative character in doctrine, organization, and worship, linking back to the Lutheranism of the German Mass phase and the *Melaiontheo* of the Inquisition’s visitors in 1529. The first northeastern territory "reformed" was that of the Teutonic Order, Prussia, which Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg transformed into a duchy, later adhering to the Augsburg Confession and establishing at Königsberg, with Osiander, a center of Lutheran thought. This was followed by Livonia, under the influence of the Archbishop of Riga, brother of the Duke of Prussia, as well as Courland and Samogitia.

Lutheranism gained only partial acceptance in Poland (Diet of Piotrków, 1556), where it was opposed by Hussites, Calvinists, and Italian antitrinitarians, and was championed by King Sigismund II. In Scandinavia, Lutheranism took on an eminently political-national character. In Sweden, it was established as early as 1527 (Diet of Västerås) through the efforts of King Gustav Vasa, initiator of a national dynasty against union with the Danish crown, and the preachers Olaf and Laurentius Petri, retaining Catholic elements both in its organization, which remained on ancient episcopal foundations, and in its liturgy. In Denmark and Norway, this establishment was the joint work of the monarchy and the nobility, eager for ecclesiastical goods and jealous of clerical autonomy. In Denmark, with the support of King Frederick III, Tausen secured the approval of the Copenhagen Diet (1530) for Lutheran doctrine and liturgy ("Confessio Hafniensis"); the reform of ecclesiastical structure, with the king as supreme moderator of the Church and superintendents replacing bishops, as in Saxony, was implemented in 1536 under Christian III and through the efforts of Bugenhagen. The same system was established in Norway from 1547.

In other southern and western countries, Lutheranism reduced itself more to currents of ideas and groups of initiates than to the formation of compact Churches within defined territories. In the Netherlands, initially Lutheran Churches eventually turned to Calvinism, and in Hungary Calvinists and antitrinitarians soon prevailed. Lutheran groups remained, as in Poland and Croatia, primarily among the German populations, also for ethnico-national reasons. From 1540 to 1575, the expansion of Lutheranism was thus slowed by the Catholic Reformation and the increasingly active competition of Calvinism. In the 17th–18th centuries, Lutheranism experienced no substantial growth but rather decline, and in the 19th–20th centuries its cultural and organizational influence was closely tied to German culture and politics: its expansion was driven by German communities emigrating to non-European countries, particularly the United States of America.

### V. DOGMA

While in Catholic countries the work of renewal and Catholic restoration unfolded, in Lutheran territories lively theological controversies soon arose to disrupt the life of the Churches, which in practice coincided with that of the territories. For reasons of doctrine and social order, the generation following Luther and Melanchthon emphasized the importance of dogmatic principles, sought to establish a new orthodoxy, and accentuated its religious significance. Thus, they not only highlighted the confessions of faith formulated during the struggle (Augsburg Confession, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Smalcald Articles, Luther’s catechisms) but also strove to define their meaning unambiguously. In this theological development, the greater and varied religious and ecclesiastical experience, the pressure of adversarial polemics, the demands of apologetics, and the contentious spirit of the schools naturally made themselves felt.

Nearly every article of the Augsburg Confession became the subject of controversy: regarding the *adiaphora*, or acts of worship deemed indifferent in conscience, the "Philippists," followers of Melanchthon, were opposed by rigid Lutherans (Flacius, Nicolaus von Amsdorf); Osiander, supported by Brenz, revived the Catholicizing idea of intrinsic justification against the extrinsic justification of the Augsburg Confession; Major (hence the Majoristic controversy) argued against Luther and Amsdorf that good works are necessary for salvation; the antinomians Poach and Otto, Luther’s disciples, vehemently denied—despite strong opposition—the obligation to observe the Decalogue, i.e., the moral law, for salvation; the Melanchthonian Pfeffinger, in his *Researches on the Freedom of the Human Will* (1555), defended against Flacius and Amsdorf the active role (synergism) of man in his own salvation. Regarding the "Supper," the *Gnesio-Lutherans* accused the Philippists of "crypto-Calvinism" for inclining toward a merely symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist; Calvinist influences provoked controversies over predestination; even Christology was questioned regarding the communication of properties between Christ’s human and divine natures and the omnipresence of Christ in the Eucharist. Even the text of the Augsburg Confession was debated, with rigid Lutherans contesting the "variata" edition printed in 1541 by Melanchthon, which they condemned as deviating from Luther’s and the Churches’ original thought.

The controversies were conducted with harsh denunciations and counter-denunciations of heresy, which could lead to the exile of the defeated, threatening not only the doctrinal unity of Lutheranism but also its political-organizational unity at the very moment when Catholicism was regaining combative vigor. This danger was recognized by theologians such as Andrea and Chemnitz and by princes, who succeeded—though not without strong political pressure—in establishing a series of regional "concord" agreements that culminated in the approval by all Lutheran princes and their theologians of a

From the monastery of Berg near Magdeburg in 1577, and shortly thereafter with the official publication of the *Book of Concord* containing all Lutheran dogmatic texts (1581). A compromise was reached between the Melanchthonian and Lutheran currents; regarding original sin, free will, and human capacities, Melanchthon’s concept prevailed, acknowledging a certain natural knowledge of God and the ability to fulfill civil duties through natural powers. Justification was reaffirmed, against Osiander, as extrinsic. Regarding good works, the Augsburg Confession’s view was reconfirmed: they are not meritorious but obligatory by divine command and as the fruit of the Holy Spirit within us. Concerning Law and Gospel, the function of the Law in driving one to despair and admonishing the regenerate was reaffirmed against Melanchthon. In the Eucharist, the body of the Lord is truly present according to Lutheran understanding. Regarding the person of Christ, Zwingli’s Nestorianizing Christology was rejected. The *adiaphora* were deemed alterable and suppressible, unless opposition to their modification became a matter of conscience. On predestination and divine election, divine foreknowledge—concerning both salvation and damnation—was distinguished from predestination, which pertains solely to beatitude, thus rejecting Calvinist doctrine. Finally, the condemnation of heresies and sects (Anabaptists, Schwenckfeldian mystics, Neo-Arians, anti-Trinitarians) was confirmed.

This Lutheranism of the *Formula of Concord*, systematized in theological faculties with the aid of Aristotelian-Scholastic logic and metaphysics and the use of Spanish Jesuit manuals, increasingly integrated rational justifications for the foundations of faith, while remaining open to Catholic influences (the dogma as truth to be believed as the foundation of Church membership; the rational preambles of faith; the ethical demands of Christian life; the visible Church with a hierarchical-normative system) and Calvinist influences (in the doctrine of the Eucharist, predestination, and certain democratic-Presbyterian tendencies in ecclesiastical governance). These influences often led individual theologians either back to Catholicism or toward more radical and consistent Calvinism. Doctrinal suggestions, always combined with political calculations, led powerful princes such as the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg and Prussia and the Palatine Elector of the Rhine to adopt Calvinism, which by the 17th century embraced about a third of Protestants in Germany. The presence of this third confession in Germany became one of the causes of the politico-religious Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which, after threatening the economic and political foundations of Lutheranism with the Edict of Restitution in 1629, confirmed the principles of the Augsburg Diet of 1555, extending its benefits to Calvinists and sanctioning the further expansion of Lutheranism by shifting the normal year of grace to 1632.

VI. Elements of Dissolution in Lutheranism

The stabilization of the legal situation and its relations with other Christian confessions did not halt the ferment of theological tendencies and spiritual currents within, nor did it effectively prevent the penetration of later philosophical and political ideas into the Churches. The official orthodoxy was challenged by mystics such as Sebastian Franck (d. 1542), Schwenckfeld (d. 1561), the Neoplatonist Weigel (d. 1588), and above all Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) and the Silesian Angelus (d. 1677), who ended in Catholicism. A more organized and widespread reaction to the dogmatic rigidity of theologians, the secularization of territorial state churches, and the mere customary Christianity of many believers was represented by Pietism, which advocated an active Christianity marked by affective fervor and moral commitment, concretized in a *praxis pietatis*. It was a reform within the Reformation, drawing on Lutheran mystics, and in its reaffirmation of works as the substance of Christian life revealed the influence of post-Tridentine Catholicism, while in its depreciation of dogma it reflected Enlightenment thought (v.).

Its initiator was Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) with his programmatic work *Pia Desideria, or Earnest Longing for a God-Pleasing Improvement of the True Evangelical Church* (1675), which gained support from the Saxon court and dominated the University of Leipzig. Its implementer was August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who worked from Halle, securing Pietism’s victory in northern Germany and extending it into Sweden and the Baltic countries. He established schools, orphanages, teacher and preacher seminaries, and biblical publishing houses. A distinct movement within Pietism was represented by the *Herrnhuter* community, promoted by Count Zinzendorf (d. 1760) on his estate at Herrnhut in Silesia; it sought to be an *ecclesia* within the Lutheran Church, emphasizing affective devotion and heartfelt Christianity.

The political exigencies of the bureaucratic unitary state, combined with Enlightenment spirit, led King Frederick William III of Prussia to forcibly impose a union of Calvinist and Lutheran churches (the so-called “Old Prussian Union,” 1817), though many Lutherans resisted, maintaining their Lutheranism as a “free church” (*Freikirche*), i.e., without public recognition. In these groups, the 19th-century revival movement took hold, affirming revealed dogma as the basis of the Church against rationalist biblical exegesis and idealistic interpretations of Christian theology. This constituted the “Neo-Lutheranism,” which emphasized conservative elements in doctrine, worship, and church structure, while remaining open to ecumenical concerns—especially prominent in the first and second halves of the 20th century. It sought to distance itself from rationalistic and individualistic currents, to claim full organizational autonomy from the state, and thus increasingly inclined toward recognizing doctrinal and ecclesiastical-organizational convergence with Catholicism, as many of the old suspicions faded.

VII. Numerical Extent of Lutheranism

Statistically, before World War II, Lutherans numbered about 62 million, distributed as follows: 1) *Territorial and Free Churches*: in Germany, 16 million; elsewhere in Europe, 21 million; in North America, 4 million; elsewhere, 150,000. 2) *Churches united in originally Lutheran territories*: 21 million. 3) *Lutherans not organized into churches*, in the U.S.: about 10,000.

VIII. Evaluations

The contrasting elements of L.’s personality—imaginative strength, vehement passion, tenderness of affections, concreteness of organization, virulence and vulgarity of language, poetic and musical sensitivity, mystical flights and implacable hatreds, suggestibility and stubbornness, exaltations and depressions—have for centuries provided material for the apologetic exaltation of his followers and the denigration of his adversaries. The historical-theological and psychological contextualization, resulting from studies of the past fifty years, even by Catholics such as Denifle, Grisar, Cristiani, and Lortz, reduces the novelty of L.’s doctrine, finds its fundamental motifs in the theology of the late Middle Ages, acknowledges the psychopathic elements of his character to explain his contradictions, distinguishes in L. what was a religious exigency, a living Christian sense, an aspiration for a renewal of Christian piety, from the formulas in which he expressed it, from the institutions he promoted, and underscores the foreign influences that interfered in II. The multiplicity of motifs in L.’s personality has thus allowed and will always allow for a one-sided interpretation of him, whether as a mystic intolerant of theology, or as an expression of the German soul, or as a subverter of the Church and destroyer of dogmatic conscience.

Lutheranism, having constituted itself into a church-society and dogmatic structure, has imprinted upon the customs and life of the populations that have received it, with its biblicism, with its affective piety expressed in choral music and rich hymnody, with the religious emphasis given to civil professions and the quasi-priestly character attributed to the prince and the paterfamilias, but also with the separation between religion and morality deriving from the pessimistic conception of invincible concupiscence, with the renunciation of social action for the realization of evangelical principles in the conviction that economy and politics are profane realities subject to the Evil One, offering weak and often ineffective resistance to the critical forces of theoretical rationalism, political laicism, pure economism, and radical nationalism.