Origen and the History of Justification: The Legacy of Origen's Commentary on Romans

Chapter 6: Luther and Melanchthon’s Reception of Origen’s Exegesis of Romans

Chapter 6 Luther and Melanchthon’s Reception of Origen’s Exegesis of Romans Grech wondered how the Reformers would have received Origen’s exegesis of Paul.1 This chapter will endeavor to answer that question by examining the reception of Origen’s doctrine of justification by Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560). Melanchthon, a Greek scholar, was Martin Luther’s most important theological colleague. At the age of twenty-four he became the first systematizer of Luther’s thought in his work Loci Communes (1521). As the author of Lutheranism’s confession of faith (the Augsburg Confession, 1530) and the Apology for the same, the architect of Lutheranism’s pedagogy, and a very important source for the theology of John Calvin,2 Melanchthon as a magisterial Protestant needs no defending. Melanchthon is an appealing theologian for the current investigation because of the clarity of his attitude toward Origen’s exegesis of Romans. Also, he makes Origen’s doctrine of justification an integral part of his decadence theory of Church history—a fact previously unnoticed in scholarship. 173 Luther’s Postconversion Alienation from the Fathers In order to understand Melanchthon’s criticism of Origen properly, it will first be necessary to introduce Luther’s attitude toward the Fathers, since Luther’s views seem determinative for Melanchthon’s positions. In his article “Martin Luther and the Church Fathers,” M. Schulze rightly recognizes that Luther was not a historian, that patristics was not his concern, and that he did not produce editions of the Fathers like Erasmus of Rotterdam , “who was well-versed in their languages and familiar with their works, and made the Fathers of Christian antiquity accessible to the early modern age.”3 Yet Schulze makes several erroneous judgments. While admitting that Luther was biased in his reading of Augustine, Schulze formulates a ludicrous generalization when he says that “most of the Scholastics ranked Augustine among the embarrassments of church history .”4 Moreover, Schulze’s summary of Luther’s reception of the patristic tradition is seriously flawed. He concludes his essay by saying that Luther rendered an “inestimable scholarly service to the church, to theology, and to historiography by freeing the Fathers from tradition. At long last it was possible for them to be mistaken.”5 In reality, no Christian theologian has ever denied that the Fathers were capable of being mistaken. Thus Luther’s “service” to the Church is not located here. Rather, the originality of Luther appears to be that he was the first to accuse the Fathers of being in fundamental error on several doctrines that he regarded as constituting the essence of Paul’s gospel. Luther is the source for the theory that the exegetical blindness of the Fathers caused Christ to be absent from the visible Church for fourteen centuries.6 Luther’s railing indictments of the Church Fathers included serious criticisms of Augustine, though this is seldom mentioned in modern scholarship . In a recent volume dedicated to the thought of Augustine, P.D. Krey’s article on Luther does not mention a single passage in which Luther sharply criticized Augustine’s understanding of Paul.7 Schulze’s article cited above also overlooks these clear texts where Luther claims that after his religious conversion he could no longer accept Augustine’s basic interpretation of Paul. It is true that Luther made contradictory statements about the subject of Augustine’s fidelity to Paul’s understanding of the “gospel,” as did Melanchthon, and I will attempt to analyze these contradictions below. But it would not be right to neglect the passages in Luther 174 Origen and the History of Justification where Augustine is rejected, especially since these texts bear directly on the Lutheran criticism of Origen. Luther seems to have come to his conviction about Augustine’s departure from Paul as a result of his conversion experience. He describes his own conversion in the Preface to His Latin Writings: At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely, by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely...