Two Kinds of Christianity

Unexpected insights from Martin Luther

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(A five-minute read.)

If you ever read Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, which were instrumental in catapulting the Protestant Reformation and recentering Christianity on Jesus and his grace, you’ll probably be struck by something: there’s actually very little in them about grace, salvation, and Jesus.

If you’re not familiar with this document, a little background is in order.

In 1517, Martin Luther, a fairly-anonymous Roman Catholic monk (from the Augustinian order), in a little corner of eastern Germany, wrote a document which essentially contained 95 objections to the Roman Catholic Church. Within short order, due partly to the recent invention of the printing press, the document spread throughout Europe like wildfire and put Luther on the map, calling into question the authority of the Pope and Roman Catholicism as a whole.

Though Luther didn’t single-handedly start the Protestant Reformation, his act—and subsequent preaching and writing—was probably the most influential factor in breaking up the religious monopoly that the Roman Catholic Church had in the Western world. The message of the Christian world became more centered on grace and love, reminding people that they weren’t saved by performing rituals but by accepting Christ’s work on their behalf.

Yet, as I said, there is nary a mention of any of this in Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.

So what gives?

Was Luther’s message not really about grace, salvation, love?

If not, why were the Ninety-Five Theses so influential?

It’s actually interesting, because the original title for Luther’s document—which may or may not have been nailed to the door of a church in Wittenberg—wasn’t the Ninety-Five Theses. It was instead The Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences—which isn’t nearly as memorable.

Thus, even though the sufficiency of grace was in the background of Luther’s reflections, what he was really confronting in his “Disputation” was the Church’s insistence on monetizing God and salvation.

An “indulgence” was essentially a church-granted reduction in a person’s punishment for sin. The Church taught that when a person died, he or she would spend time in purgatory, purifying their characters in order to be fitted for heaven. But buying indulgences could reduce the time a person—either yourself or someone else—had to spend in purgatory (British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch notes a similar practice in some Catholic orders during this time, where people could reduce their time in purgatory by 5,475 years, for example, if they recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary 15 times every day for a year).

As preachers like Johann Tetzel supposedly famously said (or at least Luther claimed he said), “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

Luther saw through this though. He recognized that selling indulgences was essentially a fund-raising exercise for the papacy. After all, the money they were raising through the sale of indulgences was going to fund the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

And this is especially what so animated Luther—and it’s what most of his 95 theses were about.

So rather than being a full treatise on the sufficiency of grace, drawing a dichotomy between faith and works, Luther brought the act of selling and buying indulgences into conflict with living lives of true mercy and love. This was the binary in Luther’s mind.

Thus, as he says in Thesis 43, “Christians are to be taught that the one who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than one who buys indulgences.” Again, in Thesis 45, he writes, “Christians are to be taught that the one who sees a needy person and passes by, yet gives money for indulgences, does not buy papal indulgences but God’s wrath.”

Summing up his overall message, he notes in Theses 62 and 63, “The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last.”

To be sure, Luther would continue to develop his theology of grace and justification and salvation. He was, after all, just getting started in 1517.

But what I see happening here is Luther understanding the implications of the gospel for his specific time and context. After all, as I’ve written before, it’s when we let the gospel confront real-life issues head-on that it becomes so unsettling, scandalous, and even a little frightening.

And what Luther seems to be doing here, among other things, is drawing a distinction between two kinds of Christianity.

The one version of Christianity is exploitative, predatory, coercive, controlling, enslaving, transactional. It’s hierarchical, self-serving, and dehumanizing, treating people as tools rather than the bearers of God’s image.

This version of Christianity could probably be more accurately labeled “Christendom,” most damagingly expressed when church and state work in concert (which, sadly, Luther himself didn’t quite see as a problem).

The other version of Christianity—which Luther began to understand, and which actually reflects the character of Christ—is liberating, empowering, accepting, forgiving, loving. It’s egalitarian, other-centered, and humanizing, honoring God’s image in others and allowing the Spirit to form them into people of love.

This type of Christianity emphasizes the deep love, humility, and sacrifice of Jesus. It doesn’t view others as pawns to be used but as people to be loved. It’s not after conformity and performance but connection and wholeness.

To be sure, all this is, I do believe, manifested in the law versus grace binary that Luther would come to more explicitly develop. It’s also the flesh versus the spirit binary that Paul introduced in his letters—and the Old Covenant versus New Covenant binary he mentions specifically in Galatians.

It is, in short, expressed in two different versions of “salvation.”

But that is just one piece of the Protestant puzzle.

What Luther initiated was a decision we’re all invited to make. And whether we’re Roman Catholic or Protestant doesn’t really get at the heart of the question.

The question is whether we’re moving towards love or away from love—whether we’re allowing ourselves to be shaped to greater degrees by God’s love, which manifests in kindness and love toward God and others, or whether we’re resisting God’s initiating grace, grounded in the story of Christ’s sacrifice, and continuing to relate to God and others as objects to be controlled, manipulated, and conquered.

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Shawn is a pastor and church planter in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational and embodied expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.