Hi Edwin,
Thanks for your response.
In answer to the OP question: Luther himself claimed that he taught nothing about sola scriptura that went beyond what he had learned at the University of Erfurt from his professor Jodocus Trutvetter.
I think the problem with answering this question is that the positive elements of sola scriptura are to be found in pre-Reformation tradition. What was new about sola scriptura was the distrust of the Church. Even that wasn’t entirely new–folks like Wycliffe and Hus had already identified the true Church with the elect, and some relatively more mainstream (but still controversial) figures like William Ockham (in whose tradition Trutvetter stood) had said somewhat similar things.
But essentially sola scriptura is the scholastic doctrine of the material sufficiency of Scripture as the authoritative theology textbook with the medieval belief in the authority of the institutional Church stripped away.
Edwin
I am not familiar with Luther’s claim that his teaching on SS went no further than what he had learned from Trutfetter. Could you please provide the reference so I can check it out?
In fact, IF Luther actually did make that claim, he would have to have realized that it was false. After all, very early in his ‘reformation’ (1518) Trudfetter solidly rebuked him. The two never did reconcile. It would have been impossible for Luther to have believed that he was following Trutfetter’s teaching on SS.
“Some time during the early spring of 1518 Luther had received a letter from his former professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Jodocus Trutfetter, a man whom he deeply respected and who had expected great service to the Church from so able a mind and so strong a personality as Luther.
Now Professor Trutfetter solemnly warned his former student against the path he was taking, urging him to turn back before it was too late. On May 9 Luther replied: ‘To speak plainly, my firm belief is that the reform of the Church is impossible unless the ecclesiastical laws, the papal regulations, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic as the at present exist, are thoroughly uprooted.’ Such uprooting, he said, had now become his fixed purpose, ‘a resolution from which neither your authority, although it is certainly of the greatest weight for me, much less than that of any others, can turn me aside.’ Martin Luther, (Carrol quoting Fife, ‘Revolt of Martin Luther’, pg. 267)
This is one of the most important of the thousands of letters Luther wrote in his long, full lifetime.
It reveals that as early as May 1518 he was essentially committed to the destruction of the Church as he knew it, though he had not yet proceeded to total public defiance of all Church authority. It shows his revolutionary temper, his purpose to ‘uproot’ rather than simply to reform, which is the goal of every revolutionary. It provides our first evidence that the upheaval to come was rightly to be called a revolt or a revolution, not a ‘reformation’. It also shows Luther in the act of coldly and deliberately breaking a bond whose quality and strength only the dedicated teacher and his former student know: the love and loyalty that emanate from their memories of each other.
Luther wrote this letter just before completing his defense in Latin of his position on indulgences. He sent a copy to the Pope with a cover letter, later printed with is as a preface. IN the preface he says that he ‘cannot recant’ from his position on indulgences, yet still insists on his willingness to listen to Leo X ‘as the ‘Voice of Christ’, who presides in him and speaks through him…….enliven me, kill me, call me back, confirm me, reject me, just as it pleases you’……despite the fact that in the text itself, sent with this letter, he had flatly and insultingly declared: ‘I do not care what pleases or displeases the Pope. He is just a man like other men. There have been many Popes inclined to errors, vices, and even very strange things.’
In mid-June the papal procurator, Mario de Perusco, made a formal charge of heresy against Luther – not for condemning the granting of indulgences for money, which the Church itself, through the Council of Trent, was later also to condemn, but for denying the existence of the treasury of grace and questioning the authority of the Pope. In early July Luther was summoned to appear at Rome for trial within sixty days. He responded with his characteristic defiance, declaring that he would not accept excommunication if the Church decreed it for him. On July 25 he reiterated that defiance, along with references to ‘eternal predestination,’ in another sermon before Duke George of Saxony and his court. Shouting matches broke out afterward between Luther and professors defending scholastic theology.
Undoubtedly the entire academic brawl deepened Duke George’s concern about the damage Luther was already doing and much greater damage he was capable of doing.” William H. Carroll, “The Cleaving of Christendom’, pg. 7-8
As we have seen on this thread, it was Luther who introduced Sola Scriptura and also Private Interpretation. They were NOT things which he learned from his teachers. Furthermore, rather than Luther wanting to ‘reform’ the Church, this quote shows that even in early 1518, he was committed to uprooting the ‘ecclesiastical laws, the papal regulations, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic as the at presently exist.’
Luther’s letter to Trutfetter shows him to be bent on the destruction of the Church rather than as a ‘reformer’. In addition, it shows that he could NOT have believed that Trutfetter supported Sola Scriptura or any of Luther’s other radical innovations. That being said, I am still very much interested in the reference which says that Luther believed that he learned SS from Trutfetter.
God Bless You Edwin, Topper
