Upon seeing the title of this piece, one could easily be forgiven for being confused, even startled, by the linking of Martin Luther and the Reformation to the subsequent Enlightenment era of late 17th– and 18th-century Europe (along with the colonial and early American Enlightenment as well). After all, these are part of very different and rapidly changing eras, with different values and assumptions about God, revelation, and eternal realities.
Wasn’t the Enlightenment all about autonomous “reason” set in opposition to divine revelation and Christian faith? Did not Martin Luther himself shockingly call reason “the devil’s whore”? And would not a confessional Lutheran today immediately refer to the Third Article of Luther’s Small Catechism on the Apostles’ Creed and to the words, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him…” to point out the incompatibility, on Lutheran confessional grounds, of “faith” and “reason?”1
Certainly, both post-Reformation progressives and secularists—along with their strange bedfellows, traditionalist Roman Catholics—have long sought to link Luther and the 16th-century Reformation to the rise of modern secularism and religious indifferentism in the post-Christian Western world.2 Yet if Luther or Philip Melanchthon could see the present day, I doubt that they would blame the 16th-century Reformation and its theological proposals and commitments for our current state of Western religious disintegration.
My intention is to demonstrate how aspects of the Enlightenment era, especially its more moderate proponents (albeit problematic Christians or even quiet Deists), dovetail or overlap with Luther, Melanchthon, and the Lutheran Reformation’s teaching on the legitimate uses of reason.
The history of the Christian faith—from patristic times only a few generations after the Apostles, through the time of the Reformation movement in Western Europe—continually wrestled with the relation of reason (i.e., human rationality and reflection) to the Christian faith. From the 2nd-century Church Father Tertullian, who famously complained cynically against the use of reason in matters of faith, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?”, versus his contemporary Church Fathers Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, who both viewed ancient pagan Greek philosophy (especially that of Socrates and Plato) as being virtually proto-Christian in outlook: a tug of war between the approaches, especially in Western theology, is clearly evident for over a thousand years and up through the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.3 The titanic Church Father Augustine of Hippo seemed to resolve these tensions in the West (at least for a while) by granting a proper place for reason in the Christian life, but only in submission to divine revelation that begins completely through the grace of God. St. Augustine famously asserted, “I believe (first) in order to understand,” and in doing so, he “exercised enormous influence on Christian philosophy and on the Christian understanding of the relationship between faith and reason.”4 As I will note, Martin Luther and the confessional Lutheran position in the 16th century in many ways reasserted St. Augustine’s position concerning faith and reason.
The medieval period in Western Christianity witnessed the rise of early universities and the accompanying approach to theology: the scholastic method. This methodology incorporated the rediscovery of the philosophy of Aristotle into the overall theological undertaking. The newer monastic order of the Dominicans, led by their premier scholar, Thomas Aquinas, especially viewed Aristotle’s approach to questioning and categorizations as a key ally in the quest to probe theological depths. As historian R. W. Southern noted, “Now the time had come for a rapid advance in absorbing the whole body of Aristotelian sciences into theology.”5 However, during this period—which is often proclaimed the “medieval synthesis” of faith and reason, especially by traditionalist Roman Catholics even today—there were dissenters from the scholastic approach: “Whereas Aquinas followed the scholastic tradition, a contemporary of his, the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (d. 1274), represented the Augustinian and mystical strand of thought. Bonaventure, like Bernard of Clairvaux, was suspicious of the use of reason.”6
This suspicion of reason, however, centered on the fact that limited and fallible human rationality is unable to probe the eternal depths of the divine mysteries of God, grace, salvation, the Trinity, and other matters only revealed to humanity by the special revelation of God as found in the Holy Scriptures. But everyday, mundane, practical, and this-worldly matters still were aided and helped via reason in the more limited sense. That positive estimation of reason (since all people, even though hopeless sinners, still have the imprint of the Imago Dei), confined to its proper sphere, was retained by all sides in the Western theological debates through the centuries of the Church’s history up to Martin Luther’s times. And Luther, along with Philip Melanchthon and the confessional Lutheran Reformation of the 16th century, like Bonaventure and Bernard of Clairvaux before them, would likewise be suspicious of and eventually reject the inordinate and sinfully audacious confidence in autonomous reason to ascend to the heights of probing theological mysteries that God intended to be received by fallen sinners as matters of simple, trusting faith.
Very tragically, while the Reformation was pivotal in refocusing the Christian faith on the Gospel message of salvation through Christ alone, along with prioritizing the Sacred Scriptures as the ultimate authority for Christians and the Church, nevertheless, the Reformation movements also fractured Western Europe politically and socially. Monarchs and princes (whether genuinely or cynically) used particular Christian confessions as ammunition and even rationales for waging wars over rival territories, or in persecuting those of differing religious beliefs in their realms. Such terrible conflicts included the Thirty Years’ War, the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, and others.
This turmoil and religious-based violence in the era of the brutal “Wars of Religion” of the 1600s—in which millions died all across Europe, ostensibly in the name of some confession of the Christian faith—understandably disillusioned many thoughtful people, who began to search for sources of truth outside of contested religious truth claims. The impetus for enthroning autonomous reason apart from the authority of directly Christian sources of divine revelation arguably emerged with early Enlightenment figures such as René Descartes in France or John Toland in England. For these and other Enlightenment thinkers, contra historic Christianity, independent human reason did stand independent of, or even above, divine revelation sources and claims, including the Bible itself, which began to receive skeptical analysis for the first time in Christian history.
Eventually a range of moderate to radical Enlightenment positions emerged, from the moderate Enlightenment, quasi-Christian Englishman John Locke, to the more aggressive French Deism of Voltaire and Denis Diderot, and to the outright skepticism and atheism of the German Baron d’Holbach.7 The emergence of so-called “liberal Christianity” began at this point during the Enlightenment era and has lasted into the present. Anti-Christian Enlightenment developments are understandably anathema to orthodox Christianity in general and to confessional Lutheranism in particular. Yet, the more positive pre-Enlightenment viewpoint concerning reason found in historic Christian orthodoxy—with reason being in its properly delineated sphere, often termed “general revelation” or “natural law,” and standing under the ultimate authority of special, divine revelation as found in the Holy Scriptures—continued to be supported and promoted in confessional Lutheran circles into the modern era.
Arguably one of the more influential theological voices within the history of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (outside Martin Luther himself and C. F. W. Walther), was the stalwart theologian and church leader Francis Pieper. Pieper’s multi-volume Christian Dogmatics (originally published in German from 1917-1924) has been and remains a foundational text in LCMS seminary instruction and confessional Lutheran circles up to the present time. Pieper distinguished between unbelieving reason that seeks to judge and overthrow the eternal, divine revelation of the Holy Scriptures, versus the positive, pragmatic use of reason in the earthly sphere of human existence.
Pieper says that when “the Scripture principle is rejected and, instead, the human Ego installed as teacher in the Church…natural reason is made the judge. By ‘natural reason’ we mean here man’s natural knowledge of God and of divine things, which, without the revelation of Scripture, is limited to knowledge of God’s existence only and of the divine Law, as we have shown repeatedly, and this knowledge leaves man under God’s wrath and curse, since man cannot keep the Law.”8 Pieper further asserts: “Making natural reason the judge of matters religious is the attempt to set up human unreason as teacher in the Christian Church in place of the Word of God.”9 This anti-Bible stance is definitely the approach of the aggressively anti-Christian proponents of the Enlightenment era. However, the more moderate Enlightenment proponents who still viewed themselves as Christians in some sense, even if problematic in doctrine, would not necessarily employ reason to judge the Scriptures and divine revelation in this way.
And Pieper goes on to note how reason can and does have a much more positive connotation when confined to not only matters of this-worldly practicality but also to the ability to read and understand the Scriptures. Pieper says,
“However, the term ‘reason’ has a second meaning, in Scripture as well as in secular usage. It means also the mental or rational nature of man, that is, the capacity of man to receive the thoughts of another into the mind, the ability to perceive and think. This is the so-called ministerial use of reason, as distinguished from the magisterial use of reason. The ministerial use of reason is, of course, legitimate in theology because the Holy Ghost works and sustains faith only through the Word of God as it is correctly perceived by the human mind.”10
When it comes to the proper relationship between faith and reason for the Christian, Pieper asserts that “by distinguishing between the ministerial use of reason and the magisterial use of reason, the old theologians also decide the question whether there is a real contradiction between theology and reason, or human science (philosophy). They answer: The truth is but one. A contradiction arises only when reason, gone mad, presumes to judge things that transcend its sphere.”11
Pieper was echoing what Philip Melanchthon wrote in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531) concerning objections to the Roman Catholic magisterium’s demands on the issue of mandated clerical celibacy: “We cannot approve this law concerning celibacy which the adversaries defend, because it conflicts with divine and natural law and is at variance with the very canons of the Councils.”12 For Melanchthon, as with Pieper, “the truth is but one” and unites the insights gained from both natural and special revelation, because both come from God.
Martin Luther himself (despite modern analysis often portraying him as an anti-reason fideist), held a high but circumscribed view of reason, as did Francis Pieper centuries later. Certainly, Luther strongly asserted that, because of total human bondage to sin and spiritual darkness, no one by his own independent reason can do anything to merit or even initiate salvation in Christ. Such is a total gift of divine grace by faith alone (see Small Catechism, Third Article).
But in his Postil for Epiphany from the book of Isaiah, Luther says, “In temporal affairs and those which have to do with men, the rational man is self-sufficient: here he needs no other light than reason’s. Therefore, God does not teach us in the Scriptures how to build houses, make clothing, marry, wage war, navigate, and the like. For here the light of nature is sufficient.” Scholar B. A. Gerrish notes that underlying Luther’s stance on reason “is Luther’s fundamental dualism of the Earthly and the Heavenly Kingdom…. Reason’s sphere of competence, the area within which it may legitimately be exercised, is the Kingdom of Earth. Reason is able to do many things: it can judge in human and worldly matters, it can build cities and houses, it can govern well.”13
Similarly, noted German church historian Bernhard Lohse points out that for Luther, “Of all the gifts God has given human beings, the ratio (reason) is the greatest and most important…. The gift of ratio gives humans their peculiar position between angels and beasts.” Lohse also points out that for Luther, prior to the Fall, reason was closely identified with the image of God in humans, and that in a state of sinlessness, Adam and Eve could indeed know God truly through such reason. But after the Fall, that capacity to know God through reason was tragically lost. However, the more limited usage of reason still continued in human beings in dealing with everyday, earthly matters. Lohse even notes that for Luther, ratio remains helpful specifically for believers beyond mere mundane aspects: “A ratio that is conscious of its own limits in this sense and that does not arbitrarily judge in matters of salvation is, of course, extraordinarily significant for service to theology. Such a ratio aids in understanding Scripture.”14
Luther asserts in his commentary on Galatians that “…All men have the general knowledge, namely that God is, that He has created heaven and earth, that He is just, and that He punishes the wicked….” As a result, Luther can say the following about the heathen who have not been blessed by the Word of God: “They are all acquainted with the law of nature. The Gentiles are all aware that murder, adultery, theft, cursing, lying, deceit, and blasphemy are wrong. They are not so stupid that they do not know very well that there is a God who punishes such vices.”15
Finally, as pertaining to education, both Martin Luther and especially Philip Melanchthon sought to reshape education in 16th-century Germany, utilizing the robust understanding of the Gospel message of confessional Lutheranism via in-depth study of Holy Scripture, but also retaining the classical approach of the ancient liberal arts tradition that emerged in pagan antiquity with the Greeks and Romans and that was reasserted during the Renaissance period of European history just prior to (and alongside) the Reformation era. Melanchthon extolled the value of studying much of the pagan classical canon, but only when guided by the overarching commitment to the Gospel message of salvation in Christ alone and of the ultimate authority of Holy Scripture. Such reflects Luther’s and Melanchthon’s distinction between general versus special revelation, including finding great educational and even moral value in the general revelation sphere.16
An educational approach with a robust view of general and special revelation, including esteem for the noble aspects of the ancient Western pagan tradition, supported by a high regard for redeemed human reason seeking clarification and fullness in the divine revelation of Christ and the Holy Scriptures: these were all the integral components of the classical Christian educational vision of Philip Melanchthon, Martin Luther, and the Reformation-era Lutheran tradition. How wonderful to see that same vision being carried on in our times through the formation of Luther Classical College.
1 Martin Luther, Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 2017), p. 17.
2 See Interpreters of Luther: Essays in Honor of Wilhelm Pauck, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), and The Legacy of Luther: Martin Luther and the Reformation in the Estimation of the German Lutherans from Luther’s Death to the beginning of the Age of Goethe, edited by Ernst Walter Zeeden (London: Hollis and Carter, 1954) for the secularizing Luther; versus a more recent traditionalist Roman Catholic critique, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad S. Gregory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
3 Tim Dowley, editor. Introduction to the History of Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), pp. 85-88; 94; 112.
4 Edward A. Engelbrecht, editor. The Church from Age to Age: A History (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 2011), p. 184.
5 R.W. Southern. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 296.
6 Engelbrecht, ed. The Church from Age to Age: A History, p. 312.
7 For good overviews of the Enlightenment era, see Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment: An Evaluation of its assumptions, attitudes, and values (London: Penguin Books, 1968); Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 (London: Penguin Books, 1970; Paul Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 1680-1715 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1935).
8 Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume I (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1950), p. 196. From Christian Dogmatics by F. Pieper © 1950, 1978 Concordia Publishing House, cph.org. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
9 Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume I, p. 197.
10 Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume I, p. 197.
11 Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume I, p. 199.
12 Philip Melanchthon, The Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1530), XXIII, 6.
13 Quoted in B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 12-13.
14 Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 196-197; 204.
15 From Bruce A. Demarest, General Revelation: Historical Views and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 1982), pp. 44-46. Quoting Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, 1537, American Edition of Luther’s Works, 22:149.
16 See Philip Melanchthon, “On Improving the Studies of the Youth” (1518), and Melancthon, “In Praise of the New School” (1526), both essays found in Ralph Keen, ed. A Melanchthon Reader (New York: Peter Lang, 1988). See also the Melanchthon biography: Clyde L. Manschreck, Melanchthon: The Quiet Reformer (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1958).
