General characteristics of Lutheranism

The main goal that Luther set himself when he entered the struggle with Rome was the return of Christianity to the purity of the Apostolic age. The little Lutheran catechism States that ” Luther is a dear and blessed teacher of Holy Scripture, who transformed the Church of God through the restoration of the purity of teaching and the correct performance of the sacraments in Christianity.” He preached “not a new doctrine, but an ancient doctrine of the Church of God, as preached by his prophets and apostles.” “The true Church is where the Word of God is taught in its original purity and the sacraments are performed according to the establishment of Christ. All this now has a place only in the Evangelical Lutheran Church. By name, it exists only from the beginning of the XVI century, but not by doctrine, since the teaching of her apostles and prophets and the entire ancient Christian Church, for which we must thank Luther, the man of God, who transformed the Church, i.e. restored in Christianity the pure teaching and correct understanding of the sacraments” – so Lutherans THINK about the reform of Luther. In reality, however, his teaching, like that of other reformers, is in no way a statement of absolute, pure gospel truths, a restoration to the purity of Christ’s teaching.LUTHER’s TEACHING is RELATED to TIME AND PERSONS, and it REFLECTS the SPIRIT and CHARACTER of THE AGE. It is very important to know, and it must be emphasized, that the teaching of the Protestants grew not organically out of the fact of the Evangelical Gospel, but out of opposition to the extremes of the Catholic worldview and out of protest against the reigning moral decline of Roman Catholicism, and moreover often out of an unbalanced opposition that denied in the heat of In addition, a non-Church element joined their banner of struggle for the purity of the Church, which was at war with the papacy not from religious motives, but from political, economic and personal motives, and this non-Church element had a negative impact on the development of the reformation and its teachings. Undoubtedly sincere and inspired, Luther and other leaders of the reformation, having set themselves the task of restoring the Church’s teaching in its Apostolic purity, could not cope with this task for the following reasons: first, they were separated from the Christianity of the first centuries by many centuries of history; second, their medieval scholastic education was one-sided and insufficient to perform such a great task; and third, they had no knowledge of the works of the fathers and teachers of the ancient Church in the East. All this made it impossible for them to cope objectively with the task at hand. In fact, Luther and other early reformers, who quite rightly opposed the legal understanding and mechanical perception of the grace of God in Latin and rightly rejected the Roman Catholic interpretation of certain dogmas, because they did not know the works of the ancient fathers of the Universal Church, did not have a true criterion for determining the truth of Christianity in the first centuries. They had only one criterion, only one source of interpretation-their own speculation, personal opinion. It was to this source that Luther, Calvin, and other reformers turned in search of truth.

Speaking of Protestantism in the twentieth century, it is necessary to emphasize that in Protestantism two different currents should be distinguished: the Protestantism of Luther and Calvin with their associates and Orthodox Protestant believers, and modern” modern ” Protestantism, which is now widely prevailing in the Protestant environment, in which each unit (each individual person), his personal experiences become a measure of things, which rejected the need to replenish the individual mind in the knowledge of truth by the conciliar Church mind. By this religious subjectivism modern Protestantism came into sharp contradiction with Luther and even with Calvin, for these ” fathers of Protestantism “were impelled to speak out against the Roman doctrine, against legalism and the mechanical perception of grace by the consciousness of the all-conquering, unrecorded power of God, before which the insignificant human self must be silenced. But the very beginning of religious subjectivism was laid by Luther in his denial of Tradition and ” falling out of the experience of the Church.”

Subjectivism turns religion into the changing experiences of individuals who are not connected with each other, deprived of a solid Foundation, and subjectivism, raised to the principle, disperses faith: hence, instead of a single “pillar and affirmation of Truth”, instead of a single whole — the Body of Christ, a sea of sects spreads before our eyes, which in the doctrine of faith and the Church went much further than the Vatican and the initial Protestantism. In Protestantism, it is not the Holy Scriptures or the experience of the Church that determine theological thinking, but, on the contrary, the latter will determine the validity of the former. To prove their preconceived position, Protestant theologians choose from the Holy Scriptures only those texts that can confirm their preconceived position, and these suitable texts are taken in fragments, without any connection with the context — with the General composition of the narrative of Holy Scripture. Naturally, a fragmentary context is easily distorted or interpreted one-sidedly.