He was always attempting to develop a clear distinction between philosophy and theology, which freed theology from the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy and from the limits of Aristotelian logic, but the same time respected the significance of philosophy. Quite early in his theological career, Luther became aware of the problematic dominance of Aristotelian scholastic philosophy in the formation and definition of theological concepts. In many parts of Luther’s work, there are explicit discussions of philosophy, in the interpretation of biblical texts and in the definition of theological concepts.
He was prepared for this with a substantial study of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, finishing with a master of arts degree. I conclude by arguing that until Christian virtue ethicists have reckoned with this experiential argument, they have not engaged with one of the strongest theological critiques of virtue-based paradigms of Christian moral transformation.Throughout his academic life, Martin Luther was in constant discussion with philosophy. This is because it fails to recognize that Luther’s view of human agency and his critique of virtue are based to a significant degree on a different kind of argument: namely, empirical reflection on the experience of sin, including especially experience of the unmasterability of sinful affections through discipline, habit, or effort of will. This article demonstrates through close analysis of Luther’s arguments that this philosophical critique does not succeed in refuting Luther’s theology of passivity. According to Reinhard Hu€tter and Jennifer Herdt, among others, Luther’s theology of passivity is primar- ily the product of a philosophical failure to recognize that divine and human agency can be conceived in non-competitive terms.
This article examines a critique that has been levied against Martin Luther’s account of the passivity of the human agent in salvation, and his corresponding critique of Aristotelian and Scholastic accounts of virtue. In short, the voluntarism and science thesis is seriously flawed and its major contentions should be abandoned. Finally, voluntarism is inconsistent with the physico-theological motivations of most early modern natural philosophers, and in particular those usually mentioned in connection with the thesis. Fourth, close examination of the expressed positions of a number of those early-modern empiricists thought to exemplify the thesis shows that they were not voluntarists in any significant sense of word. Third, the now familiar story about the impact of various forms of medieval voluntarism on the thought of the early modern period is in much of its detail simply wrong. Second, the central categories ‘voluntarism’, ‘necessity’, and ‘contingency’ are used with such imprecision and ambiguity as to render many versions of the thesis virtually meaningless. First, there were significant early modern voluntarists who were not empiricists. In this paper I will suggest that the ‘voluntarism and science thesis’ is attended with numerous difficulties. The idea that divine voluntarism played a central role in the development of the empirical sciences is now commonplace amongst historians of the early modern period.
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