Albert the Great and Martin Luther on Justification

ALBERT THE GREAT AND MARTIN LUTHER ON JUSTIFICATION ONE RESULT of the ecumenical revolution which occurred in that remarkable decade, the 1960s, was the appearance of a number of studies comparing Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther. Stephen Pfiirtner uncovered similarities between Luther's understanding of faith and Aquinas's theology of hope. Harry McSorley displayed in Augustine, Aquinas and Luther a triad of interpretations of free will, sinful bondage and grace. H. Vorster's book on freedom in Aquinas and Luther represented a Protestant contribution to this conversation between two of the great Western theologians. The final position of consummate achievement belongs to Otto Pesch's one thousand page study of justification in Aquinas and Luther.1 Some German reviewers of these books, sensitive to history and historicity, pointed out the cultural and intellectual distance between Aquinas and Luther. As if in support of this gap, McSorley and Pesch had shown that Luther had little if any direct knowledge of Aquinas's writings.2 Nonetheless, cultural history and the question of comparing one thinker and his 1 S. Pfiirtner, Luther and Thomas on Sol,vation (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965); H. McSorley, Luther, Right or Wrong (New York: Paulist, 1969); H. Vorster , Das Freheitsverstiindnis bei Thomas von Aquin und Martin Luther (Gottingen : Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1965); O. Pesch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas. von Aquin (Mainz: Griinewald, 1967); C. Hennig, Cajetan und Luther (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1966). This enterprise began with Y. Congar, "Luther," Vraie et fausse reforme dans l'eglise (Paris: Cerf, 1950), pp. 377ff. On the changing view of Luther in Catholic scholarship in general , cf. R. Stauffer, Luther as Seen by Cavholics (Richmond: John Knox, 1967). 2 Cf. McSorley, pp. 139f., and Pesch, "Existential and Sapiential Theology. The Theological Confrontation between Luther and Thomas Aquinas," Catholic Scholars Diol,ogue with Luther (Chicago: Loyola, 1970), pp. 6lfl'. 539 540 THOMAS F. O'MEARA, O.P. Zeit.geist with another cannot be quickly dismissed. To select thinkers from different ages and to claim that they easily or clearly agree, or that they participate in some single, eternal, transcendental truth is to deserve the critique of scholars and the burial ·Of history itself. Weltgeschichte will be the Weltgericht of such an enterprise. If, however, we wish to understand why two thinkers from admittedly different cultural worlds (such as the Parisian thirteenth and the German sixteenth centuries) do disagree, then our enterprise is legitimate. For to compare two thinkers adequately and fairly is at the same time to compare their cultural worlds and to see both the similarities and differences therein. The following essay does indeed abstract from the thought-forms of Luther and Albert, which are quite different. We will look at the issue of justification , especially of justification within or apart from the activity of the human personality of the one justified. Although truth is not easily timeless, it is possible to examine how an Albert and a Luther, an Augustine and a Biel maneuver within the dialectic of the grace of an omnipotent God and the fallen freedom of a creature. In counterposing Aquinas and Luther, scholars in the 1960s were doing more than comparing two of the great figures in Western Christian theology. They were doing more than composing the counterpoint of an ecumenical fugue. For Aquinas and Luther are not only individuals: they formed the collective consciousness of parts of Christianity. And this primal role belongs also to Aquinas's teacher, for not only is he a medieval thinker of import but before Aquinas he gave the momentum to the great thirteenth century. The Roman Catholic has until recently thought almost exclusively out of an Aristotelian-Thomist framework; the catechisms of Catholicism since Trent are, in the main, simplified scholasticism. The Lutheran family of the Reformation, however , thinks out of the framework of Paul and Augustine which Luther vivified anew. For instance, for the Roman Catholic, sin is a free, disoriented action contrary to the natural and ALBERT AND LUTHER ON JUSTIFICATION 541 eschatological plan of God; for the Lutheran, sin is the human condition, the prior and present ecology of our world before God's wrath and word. Despite the recent...