Image 7.4 LUCAS CRANACH, WITTENBERG ALTARPIECE, PREDELLA (1547)1 The Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) worried about how to achieve salvation. Two Christian paradoxes troubled him. First, if man has free will, then he can choose to love and serve God. If he is fundamentally corrupted by Original Sin, however, then he cannot possibly choose aright. Second, the distance between God and man is infinite, so no amount of good deeds can bridge the gap. He concluded that we can be made right with God only by His grace, or sola gratia. Luther summed up a second key belief as sola fide, or “faith alone.” The church taught that faith and “good works” together justify a Christian. Luther argued on the contrary that only faith could do so. Once the soul is transformed by grace, it will naturally perform good deeds, but the deeds do not actually help bring about the transformation. Yet where did faith come from? Sola scriptura. Luther meant that God had revealed Himself to mankind through the Bible. By reading the holy text, Luther argued, any believer can find all the truth and meaning of his relationship with God. This doctrine was revolutionary. It implied a corollary: solus Christus or “through Christ alone.” In other words, man can reach God directly without the mediation of priests. The image below is part of the altarpiece of the civic church in Wittenberg, where Luther celebrated mass in German and served both bread and wine to the congregants—key elements of the Reformation. The painting embodies Luther’s idea of the solas: Christ in simplicity, suffering, and accessibility is the central focus; the Bible is open before Luther; and the ordinary people in the church are open to both. Cranach was a close friend of Luther and painted himself as well as Luther’s wife and son into the congregation. For the image’s original Internet location, click here. 1
Image provided courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to Manthan Shah for bringing this image to my attention.