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Making The Most of It, Counting the Cost: Some Catholic Perspectives on Luther's Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Eamon Duffy
Eamon Duffy*
Affiliation:
Magdalene College, Cambridge, CB3 0AG
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Against the background of greatly improved ecumenical relations between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches, this article discusses Catholic scholarship on Martin Luther, from the four centuries after the reformation, when Luther was subject to consistently hostile distortions of his character, to more positive twentieth century approaches by Joseph Lortz and his followers, who saw Luther as a reluctant dissenter, essentially orthodox on the contested issue of Justification, but forced by circumstances to call for the reform of a corrupt and theologically decadent Church. But more recent reformation scholarship has called into question Lortz's negative view of pre‐reformation Catholicism, while some post‐Lortzian Catholic Luther scholarship has highlighted the reformer's radical departures from Catholic orthodoxy, consequently entailing a less optimistic reading of the doctrinal divisions between Lutherans and Catholics.

Keywords

GrisarIserlohHackerRatzingerLutherCatholic scholarshipDenifleLortzRichard Rex
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 99 , Issue 1080 , March 2018 , pp. 147 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Luther's Works, vol.54, Table Talk, No.4487, p. 346.

2 Text available at http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2016/10/31/pope_and_president_of_lwf_sign_joint_statement/1269150.

3 Text available at https://www.elca.org/Declaration-on-the-Way.

4 Text available at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/lutheran-fed-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_2013_dal-conflitto-alla-comunione_en.html.

5 http://liturgy.co.nz/pope-francis-to-make-martin-luther-a-saint-on-october-31.

6 English text available at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm.

7 Commentaria de actis et scriptis Martini Lutheri Saxonis chronographice ex ordine ab anno Domini 1517 usque ad annum 1546 inclusive fideliter conscripta (Mainz, 1549).

8 H. Denifle and A M Weiss, Luther und Lutherthum in der ersten Entwicklung quellenmässig dargestellt (Mainz 1904).

9 Preserved Smith, review of Denifle in The American Historical Review Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 367‐369.

10 Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God (London 1953) p. 23.

11 English text available at https://archive.org/details/grisarsluther01grisuoft.

12 Heribert Smolinsky, Die Erforschung der Kirchengeschichte. Leben, Werk und Bedeutung von Hubert Jedin (1900‐1980) Münster 2001.

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19 Paul Hacker, Das ich im Glauben bei Martin Luther: Der Ursprung der anthropozentrichen Religion, Graz 1966, translated as The Ego in Faith: Martin Luther and the Origin of Anthropocentric Religion, Chicago 1970.

20 Hacker provided a convenient distillation of his main contentions in his essay “Martin Luther's Notion of Faith” in Wicks, Catholic Scholars Dialogue with Luther, pp. 85‐105, from which the quotations in the text have been drawn.

21 “Luther and the Unity of the Churches”, Communio vol 11, Fall 1984, pp. 210‐226, available online at http://www.communio-icr.com/files/ratzinger11-3.pdf from which the following quotations are taken.

22 Scribner, R.W., “Incombustible Luther: the Image of the Reformer in Early Modern Germany”, Past & Present, Volume 110, Issue 1, 1 February 1986, pp. 38–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 For a useful overview see Peter Marshall, “(Re)defining the English Reformation”, Journal of British Studies 48 (July 2009): pp. 564–586.

24 Both David Batchi's Luther's Earliest Opponents, Minneapolis 1991, and John Frymire's The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany, Brill 2010, suggest that a more extensive re‐evaluation of the theology and pastoral effectiveness of the church in pre‐Reformation Germany might challenge the received narrative.

25 Stanford, Peter, Martin Luther, Catholic Dissident, London 2017Google Scholar.

26 Rex, Richard, The Making of Martin Luther, Princeton 2017, p. 223CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Ibid., p. 218.

28 Ibid., p. 226.

29 Ibid., p. 226.