We could not be further away from Aristotle...

We could not be further away from Aristotle; he is, said Luther, “that buffoon who has misled the church.” The true transformation of the individual is entirely internal; to be before God in fear and trembling as a justified sinner is what matters. It does not follow from this that there are not actions which God commands and others which he forbids. But what matters is not the action done or left undone, but the faith which moved the agent.

Yet there are many actions which cannot be the fruit of faith; these include any attempt to change the powers that be in the social structure. Luther’s demand that we attend only to faith and not to works is accompanied by prohibitions uttered against certin types of work. He condemned peasant insurrection and advocated the massacre by their princes of peasant rebels against lawful authority.

The only freedom he demands is the freedom to preach the gospel; the events that matter all occur in the psychological transformation of the faithful individual. Although Luther had medieval Catholic predecessors on many individual points of doctrine, he was and boasted that he was unsurpassed in his upholding of the absolute rights of secular authority. In this lies his importance for the history of moral theory.

This handing over of the secular world to its own devices is made the easier by his doctrine of sin and justification. For since in every action we are at the same time totally sinners and totally saved and justified by Christ, the nature of this action as against that does not come into the picture. To suppose that one action can be better than another is to be still using the standards of the law, from bondage to which Christ delivered us.

Luther once asked his wife, Katharina, if she was a saint, and when she replied, “What, a great sinner such as me a saint?” reproved her and explained that everyone justified by faith in Christ was equally a saint. In such a perspective it is natural that the word merit should be expunged from the theological vocabulary, for it becomes impossible to raise the question of the merit of one action as against another.

The law of God becomes, therefore, only a standard against which we judge ourselves guilty and in need of redemption; and the commandments of God become a series of arbitrary fiats for which to demand any natural justification is at once impious and meaningless.