Martin Luther's Views on Salvation

The Protestant Reformation was perhaps the most far-reaching Renaissance response to Roman Catholic Church hegemony over religious and secular life. The life and work of Martin Luther were decisive in the whole process. An attentive reading of the history of Martin Luther's break from the Roman Catholic Church reveals that Luther's conception of salvation was at the very center of the Reformation. To understand why, it is necessary to see the context in which that conception emerged: Catholic doctrine.

Catholicism holds that salvation is unattainable for souls in a state of sin. Souls of sinners who die in a state of mortal (unforgivable) sin go to hell, whence there is no escape or possibility of salvation. Souls of those whose sins have been forgiven but for which they have not endured appropriate penance, are sent to purgatory, where temporal punishment, as it is called, purifies the soul and enables it to enter heaven, i.e., achieve salvation. But Catholic doctrine also says that sinners may acquit or lessen the debt of temporal punishment in purgatory before they die. An indulgence, "the remission in whole or in part of the temporal punishment due to sin" (Kinkead 193), is o

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of his life to explain Luther's view of the connection between scripture and salvation: "if anyone keeps my words, he will never see death" (John 8:51). The reference shows how deeply Luther believed that the answer to life's ambiguities, including anxiety over salvation, lay in the text. More than this, the text is meant to be an alternative to institutional authority, particularly if the institution is corrupt, as Luther saw the Church to be. Luther's protest against indulgences went much further than protests of other theologians and set up a conflict between individually obtained and officially sanctioned salvation. Luther insisted on the seriousness of the purpose of human life as salvation, but he completely redirected the explanation of how it could be achieved, away from Church authority. Oberman describes Luther's three-part salvation "platform," consisting of unmerited grace (sola gratia), pure Scripture (sola scriptura), and faith alone (sola fide). Unmerited grace is Luther's response to the doctrine of purgatory: "God forgives sins without recompense, out of unlimited grace at all times, and demands nothing in return but living a proper life from then on" (Luther's "Wittenberg program," in Oberman 192). Luther's au
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Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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