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Martin Luther's Treatise On Good Work

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Martin Luther was a brave German theologian and monk whose revolutionary ideas prompted millions of Catholics across Europe to question some of the main pillars of their faith. Ever since its establishment, the Roman Catholic Church has argued that as important as faith may be, people need to perform good deeds in order for God to grant them eternal life. Since salvation is not a free gift and human beings are not passive recipients of God’s grace, Christians can and should cooperate with God if they are to secure their salvation; in practical terms, this means performing good deeds, acting ethically and staying away from evil. Protestantism as a critical movement is said to have emerged during the Leipzig Debate, a theological disputation …show more content…

Provided that the only good works are the ones commanded by God, all one has to do to find out what actions please the Lord is examine the Ten Commandments. The first and highest commandment instructs mankind to have no other idols before God, which means that the Christian God is the only god that Christians should have faith in. As reported in the Gospel According to John, when the Jews asked Jesus Christ what actions they could perform to “do the works God requires” (John 6:28), Jesus responded that all they had to do was believe in him. Luther sees this passage as incontrovertible proof that faith is the only good deed that God wants His followers to perform. As for all those people who pray, go to church, make donations, fast and do their best to lead a good life hoping that their good actions will one day allow them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Luther observes that none of those people is certain whether what they are doing reflects God’s commandments and expectations. Their confusion stems from the fact that the Bible does not explicitly state that fasting, praying, and making donations to the church will automatically result in eternal salvation. Since any assertion related to the Christian faith that isn’t backed up by biblical verses is nothing more than a subjective opinion, believers …show more content…

To paraphrase Luther, if a person acknowledges with his own lips that Jesus Christ is God and that the Lord, his Father, resurrected him, he will be certainly saved (Luther, 280). With regards to the irrelevance of good works, Luther specifies that if people could be justified by their deeds, then they would not need to believe in the Word of God to be saved; since faith in the Word is the only way for believers to attain eternal life, Luther concludes that good deeds play no role in human salvation. Does this mean that believers can commit all sorts of crimes without having to worry about going to hell? The answer is no. As Wingren points out, Luther’s theology rests on the assumption that while God does not need people to do good deeds, other human beings do. This is because the German theologian sees faith in the Word and willingness to serve one’s neighbor as two sides of the same coin, two inseparable concepts that constitute an “organic unity” (Wingren 74). Since the Bible clearly instructs Christians to serve their “neighbors”, people need to help and support one another in order to fulfill God’s second most important Commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew, 22:39). As Matthew (22:36-40) reports, when the apostles asked Jesus to identify the

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