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Luther's Development of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith Only

1913; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0017816000016539

1475-4517

Preserved Smith,

Historical Legal Studies and Society

One of the best-known stories about Luther relates that while at Rome in December, 1510, he began climbing on his knees, for the indulgence to be thus acquired, the Scala Santa, but that, before he reached the top he remembered the text, “The just shall live by faith,” and he desisted. If authentic, this anecdote proves that he had thus early attained to the fundamental doctrine of the Reformation. The source of the story is a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul, who says that he heard it from his father when he was eleven years old but did not write it down until thirty-eight years later. Such testimony to any fact is necessarily unreliable at least in details, and now that the same story has been found, in a very different form, in one of Luther's own sermons, Paul's version of it must be abandoned. In 1545 the Reformer relates that, while at Rome, he ascended the Holy Stairs with the purpose of getting the soul of an ancestor out of purgatory, but that when he arrived at the top he thought, “Who knows whether this prayer avails?” As this is assuredly no proof that he had by this time arrived at the sola fides , the only decisive reason for placing his acquisition of that doctrine prior to 1510 disappears, and we are thrown back on the earlier, contemporary sources, which in any case are more trustworthy, to trace the gradual development of that important dogma in his mind.