On the Freedom of a Christian

Overview

In 1520 Luther published three treatises that between them broke the Western church. The first, addressed to the German nobility, was a call to national action against Rome. The second, on the Babylonian captivity of the church, demolished the sacramental system. This is the third, and it is nothing like them. It is calm, affectionate, structured around a paradox, and it was sent to the pope with a covering letter that treats him as a good man surrounded by scoundrels.

The timing gives that courtesy a strange quality. The bull Exsurge Domine, threatening excommunication unless Luther recanted, had been issued in June. He was writing to Leo X in the autumn while it circulated, and he burned it in December. The letter is not naive; it is a deliberate placing of the argument above the quarrel, and a record of what Luther wanted the dispute to be about.

There are two versions, a German one and a longer Latin one, written at the same time for different readers. The German is plainer and more vivid; the Latin develops the theology further. Modern editions usually translate one and note the other, and the differences are worth a glance.

The whole thing is thirty short sections and can be read in an evening.

The argument

Luther states two propositions that appear to contradict each other. A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all things and subject to nobody. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all things and subject to everybody. The treatise exists to show that both are true, and the device that makes it work is a distinction between the inner and the outer man, the soul and the body, the person and the person’s works.

The inner man, sections 1 to 18. Nothing external touches the soul. Fasting, pilgrimage, vestments, holy places and good deeds neither help nor harm it, since an evil man can do all of them and a good man can be deprived of all of them. So what does the soul need? One thing: the Word of God, and specifically the promises in it.

Here Luther draws his sharpest distinction. Scripture contains commandments and promises. The commandments show what we ought to do and, crucially, that we cannot do it; their function is to teach us our helplessness. The promises give freely what the commandments demand. Faith is simply taking the promise to be true, and it is not a work, because it is a matter of receiving.

He then lists what faith does. It fulfils the commandments, since the first of them is to have God as God, and trusting a person is the whole of what honouring them means. It honours God supremely, since to believe someone is to credit them with truthfulness and goodness, and to doubt them is the deepest insult available. And it unites the soul with Christ as a bride with a bridegroom, so that what belongs to each belongs to both: Christ receives the soul’s sin, death and condemnation, the soul receives his righteousness, life and salvation. Luther is delighted by this image and returns to it repeatedly.

From the union he derives two further consequences: every believer shares Christ’s kingship, which is why no external thing can harm the soul, and every believer shares his priesthood, which is why anyone may pray for others and teach the things of God. The priesthood of all believers is stated here as a consequence rather than as a programme.

The outer man, sections 19 to 30. Having established that works do nothing for salvation, Luther has to say what they are for, and the second half is that answer. The body is still here and still unruly, so a Christian disciplines it, not to earn anything but to make it a cooperative servant. And the neighbour is still here and still in need. Works are now aimed entirely outward.

The reversal is stated in the image of the tree. A house does not make a carpenter; a carpenter makes houses. In the same way, good works do not make a person righteous. A person made righteous by faith does good works, freely and gladly, the way a healthy tree bears fruit without being commanded to. Luther adds the image of a bishop’s consecration: the ceremony does not make the man, it marks what he has been made.

The closing sections deal with practicalities, ceremonies and the weak. Luther is willing to observe customs for the sake of people who would be scandalised, and unwilling to have any of them taught as necessary. He ends with the formula that holds the two halves together: a Christian does not live in himself but in Christ through faith and in his neighbour through love.

How to read it

Read the open letter to Leo X first. It sets the tone and shows a Luther most readers have never met, one who distinguishes carefully between the man and the office and blames the Roman court rather than the pope.

Read the two opening theses and then keep checking each section against them. The treatise is unusually well built, and almost every paragraph is developing one half of the paradox.

Bring some New Testament with you, particularly Romans and Galatians. Luther is not inventing a system; he is reading Paul with total concentration, and the argument is much easier to follow if the texts he quotes are familiar.

Watch what happens to works. First-time readers often stop halfway and conclude that Luther thinks conduct does not matter. He spends the second half saying precisely the opposite, and the interest of the book is in how he keeps works serious after removing every reward from them.

Two things to notice about the freedom. It is entirely inward, and Luther says so; it does not entail any change in your outward station. When the peasants rose in 1525 quoting Christian liberty, he wrote against them with a violence that shocked even his allies, and the question of whether they were misreading him or drawing an obvious conclusion is still argued.

Questions it raises

• If works contribute nothing to salvation, what keeps a person from ignoring them? Is Luther’s answer, that a free person serves gladly, an account of human beings or a hope about them?
• The commandments are said to exist in order to demonstrate that we cannot keep them. Is that a reading of the law or a use of it?
• Faith is not a work because it receives rather than does. Is that distinction stable?
• Luther locates the whole relation to God in the individual soul. What is left for a church to be?
• The freedom described is compatible with any external condition. Is that a profound claim about inner liberty, or a way of leaving the world exactly as it is?
• He writes to the pope with real courtesy while denying almost everything the papacy claims. Was reconciliation ever possible on these terms?