Voices of World Christianity 3.2 Martin Luther on Faith
Excerpt from the Preface to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans (1552):
Faith is not that human illusion and dream that some people think it is. When they hear and talk a lot about faith and yet see that no moral improvement and no good works result from it, they fall into error and say, “Faith is not enough. You must do works if you want to be virtuous and get to heaven.” The result is that, when they hear the Gospel, they stumble and make for themselves with their own powers a concept in their hearts which … is a human fabrication and thought and not an experience of the heart, it accomplishes nothing, and there follows no improvement…
Faith is a work of God in us, which changes us and brings us to birth anew from God. It kills the old Adam, makes us completely different people in heart, mind, senses, and all our powers, and brings the Holy Spirit with it. What a living, creative, active powerful thing is faith! It is impossible that faith ever stop doing good. Faith doesn’t ask whether good works are to be done, but, before it is asked, it has done them. It is always active. Whoever doesn’t do such works is without faith; he gropes and searches about him for faith and good works but doesn’t know what faith or good works are…
Faith is a living, unshakeable confidence in God’s grace; it is so certain, that someone would die a thousand times for it. This kind of trust in and knowledge of God’s grace makes a person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and all creatures.
Martin Luther, Preface to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans (1552), https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/pdf/luther_prefaceromans.pdf.
Another issue that has troubled Protestants from the beginning of the movement is the question of precisely how an individual can tell if they have truly been saved. If salvation is something obtained, rather than something one hopes eventually to gain (the Catholic and Orthodox view), how do you know if you have it? For Protestants, the correct answer is faith, but faith can seem like a thin and wavering reed easily blown about by doubt, and for many Protestants their own wavering sense of faith is not enough to make them feel secure. Even Martin Luther, the great champion of faith as the foundation of Christianity, felt this tension. He had faith, but also doubts, and he sometimes experienced violent mood swings between ecstatic hope and abysmal depression as a result. In light of this reality, different groups of Protestants have developed different ways of trying to assure themselves that they are indeed saved.
One common Protestant response has been to link faith with correct doctrine. These kinds of Protestants reason that faith is based on truth; faith works only if it is faith in God rightly understood. These Protestants have concluded that as long as one’s beliefs are correct (different Protestant churches define correct belief differently) then one’s faith is solid and one’s salvation is assured. Other Protestants assume that being a good church member is the surest sign that one’s faith is solid and salvation is secure. Yet other Protestants have found assurance in their ability to pinpoint a specific date and time when they “invited Christ into their heart” and were “born again.” From that day on, regardless of what might happen in life, they regard themselves as saved. Still other Protestants have emphasized their own emotional sense of connection with God as proof of their salvation. This was the experience of Charles Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who said that while sitting in church one day “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”1 While Protestants believe that salvation is obtained through faith alone, simultaneously many Protestants are glad to have something more than mere faith to help them feel like they really are saved.
Structure
Unlike Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Protestantism has no overarching church structure that holds the tradition together. Protestantism is a movement, not a church, supported and carried forward by a variety of denominations, congregations, missionary agencies, parachurch service organizations, and schools (ranging from grade schools to universities and seminaries). No one controls this varied assemblage of organizations, and their sheer number is overwhelming. In fact, Protestantism is so divided and unfettered as a movement that some Catholic and many Orthodox Christians find it difficult to think of Protestant churches as genuine churches at all. Instead they consider Protestant denominations to be something like Christian clubs.
Focusing on Protestant diversity and fragmentation can, however, make it easy to get lost in the trees and miss the Protestant forest. Viewed from a distance, Protestantism is more organized than it looks close up. Two thirds (67 percent) of Protestants identify with one of five large Protestant families or sub‐traditions: Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, and Reformed (which includes Presbyterian). During the last century and a half, all five of these groups have organized themselves into worldwide fellowships of churches (see Table 3.1).
A different way to make sense of the Protestant world is to see each church as historically aligned with one or another of two institutionalized forms of organization, either the nation‐centered Protestantism that has flourished in Europe or the more free‐wheeling, start‐from‐scratch Protestantism that has flourished in the United States.
Almost all the earliest forms of Protestantism followed the European model, which resulted in the creation of a host of Protestant state churches in Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. While the leaders of these Protestant state churches believed that Christian faith was personal, they also assumed it was necessarily public and even political. Following that way of thinking, they believed that only one church should prevail in any given nation. Having different individuals determine their own beliefs or multiple churches existing within one state was considered to be antithetical to public order. Europe’s Protestant state churches were (and still are) intended to serve the spiritual needs of everyone in the nation. Historically their duties included instruction in right doctrine, opportunities for worship, and administration of the sacraments, but they also included practical concerns such as caring for the sick, the poor, and the orphaned. Today, Europe’s state churches no longer enjoy the legally enforced monopoly status they once had, but many of them continue to provide a host of social services to the nation and still receive some support from tax revenue. Membership and participation in these state churches, which are now frequently called “folk churches,” has declined in recent decades, but they continue to dominate the European Protestant landscape both spiritually and architecturally (see Figure 3.3).