My sincere thanks to Michael for inviting me to guest post this series.  I manage the Evangelical Portal at Patheos (you can see the Vision for the Portal here, and you can check out a great sample article , an interview with a Christian professor at Harvard Law School with terminal cancer).

Every now and then, the course of history hinges upon a a single person, a single event, a single year.  Such is the case with Martin Luther and his theological disputation in the city of Heidelberg in the Spring of 1518.  Martin Luther inverted the theological method of his day, and the consequences for the history of western thought have proven nothing short of revolutionary.

In the first installment of this series on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, I described the significance of the Disputation in the unfolding of Luther’s life and thought.  In contrast to the better known ­Ninety-Five Theses, which focused on the selling of indulgences and other abuses of papal power, the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 offers a more expansive vision of the relationship between man and God.

Here, I will consider the first 7 of Luther’s 28 theological theses.  The preface is also significant:

“Distrusting completely our own wisdom, according to that counsel of the Holy Spirit, “Do not rely on your own insight” (Prov. 3:5), we humbly present to the judgment of all those who wish to be here these theological paradoxes, so that it may become clear whether they have been deduced well or poorly from St. Paul, the especially chosen vessel and instrument of Christ, and also from St. Augustine, his most trustworthy interpreter.”

Luther makes clear from the beginning that the theological case he presents is not to be judged by its persuasiveness to ordinary human reasoning, but solely by its fidelity to scripture.  The implication is that worldly wisdom will be offended by the essential “paradoxes” of Christian theology.  This will be a major theme of the Disputation.  The theology of his day, Luther believed, had become an intellectual form of works righteousness.  If God were best encountered in the elaborate edifices of the philosophers and theologians, then knowing God would be a matter of intellectual achievement, and a cause for pride—and our relationship with God would have all the passion of a relationship with a philosophy textbook.  Thus God revealed Himself such that only the humble can receive him.  The wise must become fools, and the mighty meek, if they would know a God who gave Himself as a humiliated and crucified carpenter.

Thus we come to the theological theses.  The fundamental question of the Disputation is implicit in the first: what is the “way to righteousness”? Continue Reading »

Wecome our guest blogger Timothy Dalrymple who heads up the Evangelical Portal at Patheos.com.

The Reformation is often said to have begun when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg on the 31st of October, 1517.  Yet, as their title suggests, the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences was actually quite narrowly focused on the matter of indulgences.  Luther was furious when his parishioners claimed no need to repent for their sins because they had purchased indulgences from a Roman Church eager to finance renovations to Saint Peter’s Basilica.  If God’s forgiveness was up for sale, if a right relationship with God could be purchased, then there was no need for compunction and repentance, no need to confront the eternal debt we could never repay, and thus no occasion for a right reception of the extraordinary grace of God that eliminates our debt nonetheless.  If a copper coin buys absolution, then sin is a matter of small account and salvation is a minor accounting adjustment. 

The Ninety-Five Theses are important less for what they said regarding indulgences than for the process they set in motion.  The Augustinian order (to which Luther belonged) was generally supportive of Luther’s position, and Johannes Staupitz invited Luther to explain himself to a meeting of the order in Heidelberg on April 26th, 1518.  If Luther had not used this opportunity to articulate a more expansive vision of the cosmic drama of grace and forgiveness, and had not set forth a theological method that turned scholastic theology on its head, then he would have been the leader of a minor corrective movement within the Catholic Church and not of the “Great Reformation” as we know it now.  It was in the Heidelberg Disputation that Luther began to explain a way of being in relationship with God, and a way of coming to the knowledge of God, that was fundamentally at odds with the prevailing tendencies in the Roman Catholic Church of his time.  It was in consequence of the disputation at Heidelberg that Martin Bucer (who attended the disputation and would come to be another leader of the Reformation) drew near to Luther’s side, and Johannes Eck challenged Luther to the famous Leipzig debate.

The Heidelberg Disputation is one of the most brilliant and consequential pieces of theological reflection in the history of the Christian faith.  As with the Ninety-Five Theses, Luther enunciated a set of “theses” he was prepared to defend at a medieval-style disputation.  Together they construct a revolutionary argument that I will examine in the later installments of this series.  They convey a “theology of the cross,” a theologia crucis, a way of relating to God first and primarily “through suffering and the cross.”  Lamentably, this is often forgotten: while the Reformers proclaimed sola scriptura and sola gratia, they also proclaimed the imitatio passionis Christi, that all Christians are called to share in the sufferings of Christ and to know Christ and know God through the suffering of the cross—his cross, and ours.  Continue Reading »