Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, meaning he belonged to a school of thought following St. Augustine, and a professor at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony. In 1517 he posted his 95 Theses. The famous image of him nailing them to the door of the Wittenberg church is almost certainly a later legend rather than a documented event.

Contrary to popular belief, Luther did not protest papal indulgences as such. In Thesis 71 he writes: “Let him who speaks against the truth concerning papal indulgences be anathema and accursed.” So what was his actual complaint? His dispute was with how indulgences were being preached and understood, especially in the campaign run by Johann Tetzel, who preached, “As soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.”

Luther’s specific objections were:

Indulgences were being presented as guaranteeing salvation (Thesis 32). Preachers claimed indulgences removed guilt outright. Repentance itself was being commercialized, when Luther insisted genuine repentance, not a purchased document, is what Christ commands. The poor were being exploited: Luther argued Christians should give to the needy rather than spend money on indulgences, especially if it meant depriving their own families. And preachers were exceeding papal teaching, which is why Thesis 72 immediately follows Thesis 71: “But let him who guards against the lust and license of the indulgence preachers be blessed.”

A Personal Note

I once had an online debate with a Catholic. I was still a Protestant at the time, and like most Protestants I knew almost nothing about church history. I claimed the Catholic Church “sells holy things,” that they sell indulgences, or sell the Eucharist, something along those lines. When pressed for a source, I said I had seen a Catholic do it. I was bearing false witness, and he pointed out that this is literally a violation of the Ten Commandments. That exchange made me realize how little I actually knew about church history, and it set me on the path that eventually led me to Orthodoxy.

Luther on Orthodoxy

Luther himself had striking words about the Eastern Church. He wrote: “I assert now that on this point the Greeks and the Bohemians are neither heretics nor schismatics, but the most Christian people and the best followers of the gospel on earth.” He went on to say of the pope, “He lifts his shameless, blasphemous mouth to heaven and slanders the Greek church, claiming it is schismatic and apostate. It is he himself who is the chief cause and sole author of all schisms and divisions.” This is documented in the historical record.

Sola Scriptura

Luther is best known for the five solas: sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, and soli Deo gloria. Sola scriptura, scripture alone, is arguably the most problematic.

Luther taught that scripture alone is the final judge of doctrine, since popes and councils can err. But what counted as “scripture” was his own version of the Bible. He removed books from the canon that conflicted with his theology, placing them in a section called the Apocrypha (from the Greek, meaning “obscure” or “hidden”). He even moved the Epistle of James, Jude, Revelation, and Hebrews into an appendix. He called James “the epistle of straw” because it conflicted with his interpretation of Romans 3:28, and he famously inserted the German word “allein” (alone) into that verse, even though no such word exists in the Greek text.

If these decisions had been made by a council, that would be one thing. Instead, a single man granted himself the authority to alter the canon of scripture and then had the audacity to declare “scripture alone” as the standard.

Sola scriptura is also philosophically circular. Scripture nowhere instructs its readers to use it alone as the sole authority and judge above all things. What scripture does say is that the church is “the pillar and foundation of truth.” The scriptures came out of the church, so the church holds interpretive authority over them. Scripture is not a self-interpreting text, and the fruit of that assumption is visible in Protestantism itself: thousands of denominations, all theologically distinct.

I recently saw an Episcopalian preacher, dressed in vestments imitating Catholic garments, preach on the Samaritan woman at the well. He claimed that when Christ said “a spring will open up in you, I am the living water,” this was a first-century euphemism for semen. There is no source for this claim. It is simply his own corrupted interpretation. If this is how scripture is to be interpreted, it explains why there are so many competing churches.

We need an authoritative interpreter, in the same way the United States needs a Supreme Court to determine what the Constitution actually means. This is the role the Orthodox Church fills. Its dogma was established through the writings of the church fathers. The church established the dogma, which is why scripture cannot be left to private interpretation. Paul agrees: the church is “the pillar and foundation of truth,” and he writes, “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15).

Acts 15 records the first council, gathered by the bishops and guided by the Holy Spirit, to settle doctrine. The council established that the church is universal: a Gentile did not first need to become Jewish to be Christian. The Judaizers held that converts needed to adopt Jewish law first. The bishops, including Peter and James, gathered and were guided by the Holy Spirit, so much so that the council’s letter states, “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” This is the first ecumenical council, and the later councils, Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and others, continue that same tradition.

Sola Fide

Luther taught that believers are justified by faith alone, inserting the word “alone” into his translation even though it does not appear in the original Greek. Orthodoxy does not disagree with Paul when he writes that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law (Romans 3:28). What Orthodoxy rejects is that a person is justified by faith alone, a phrase Luther effectively put into Paul’s mouth.

James, in the original Greek, uses the word “monon” (alone) explicitly: “You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone” (James 2:24). He asks earlier, “Do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead?” Paul himself writes that God “will render to each one according to his works” (Romans 2:6).

The Eucharist

Luther taught that Christ’s body and blood are truly present in, with, and under the bread, but that the bread never actually becomes the body and blood of Christ. This is consubstantiation. It rejects both the purely symbolic or memorial view (which Justin Martyr already refuted in the second century, writing that the Eucharist “is not common bread and drink” but is transformed into the body and blood of Christ) and the doctrine of transubstantiation.

The apostolic church has consistently held, since the time of the apostles, that the Eucharist truly becomes the real body and blood of Christ. Not a single church father taught anything resembling Luther’s consubstantiation. Some point to Theodoret in the fifth century as a possible precedent, but he lived after the consensus already articulated by St. Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote, “Rightly then do we believe that now also the bread which is consecrated by the word of God is changed into the body of God the Word.” This is echoed in St. John Chrysostom’s liturgy, still used today, in which the priest prays: “And make this bread the precious body of your Christ… and that which is in this cup the precious blood of your Christ… changing them by your Holy Spirit.”

The Deuterocanon

Every Protestant reads a different Bible than Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Modern Protestant translations have quietly dropped the word “alone” from Romans 3:28, since even Protestant scholars acknowledge it does not belong there. But the deeper issue is the deuterocanonical books: Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Tobit, Maccabees, and others, which Luther judged not to be scripture, though he still considered them worth reading.

The Wisdom of Solomon contains what many read as a direct prophecy of Christ’s crucifixion: “He saved others, let him save himself” is prefigured there. Sirach contains much of the wisdom later echoed in the Sermon on the Mount. The apostles and the early church quoted these books directly as scripture, because that is what they were understood to be. And it was Luther who, with no council or consensus behind him, decided this on his own, going so far as to demote the Epistle of James, calling it the “epistle of straw” because it directly contradicted his theology.

Who gave him that authority? He gave it to himself. This is the fundamental error of Protestantism: submission to no authority but one’s own interpretation of scripture.

My Own Journey

This is exactly what happened to me when I first opened the Bible on my own. I was drawn in by the words of Christ: “Blessed are the poor… love your enemy… forgive those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he sends his sun on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Those words saved me. But then I began reading all of scripture without any interpretive authority guiding me, and I arrived at conclusions I now recognize as errors: that baptism is not essential for salvation, that the Eucharist is merely symbolic (“are we cannibals?” I thought).

But Christ said plainly, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53), words repeated in every Divine Liturgy before communion, even as many Protestants dismiss this reading as “unbiblical” while quoting the very same scripture. At the consecration of the Eucharist, we recall Christ taking the bread, breaking it, and saying, “This is my body, which is broken for you, do this in remembrance of me,” then taking the cup after supper and saying, “This is the blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for many, do this in remembrance of me.” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that whoever eats and drinks in an unworthy manner is guilty of sinning against the body of Christ.

At the Baptist church I attended, communion was a mass-produced cracker and cranberry juice, offered while quoting the exact same passages Orthodox Christians read, yet interpreted in the opposite way. That contrast is telling. One tradition reads “this is my body” and understands it as symbol; another reads the same words and understands real transformation. This is precisely why an interpretive authority is necessary. Paul goes on to say that because some received communion unworthily, treating it as common food, coming to the assembly drunk, many among them became sick and some died (1 Corinthians 11:29-30). This is consistent with what Justin Martyr wrote in the second century: it is not common food and drink, but is transformed into the body of Christ.

Grace, Faith, and Works

We are saved by grace alone, but everything depends on what “alone” means. We are saved by the grace of God because our own works, apart from grace, are as filthy rags. No work of ours earns salvation on its own. But we will be judged according to our works, as Romans 2 makes clear.

The gospel is this: Christ became man so that we might become like Christ. Romans 8 says he emptied himself, taking on the likeness of sinful flesh in order to condemn sin in the flesh. St. Athanasius wrote that God became man so that man might become god. St. Peter writes that we are called to “share in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Paul writes that we are to be “conformed to the image of the Son of God” (Romans 8:29). There is no greater word than grace to describe the crucifixion, and it is by that grace that we are enabled to do good works at all.

Christ says, “If you truly believe in me, you will do the works I have been doing, and even greater works than these” (John 14:12). He raised the dead and cast out demons, and he says that those who believe in him will do the same. That is unmistakably a call to works, empowered by grace, not apart from it. Yet in Matthew 7, Christ warns: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you, depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’”

This life is one of transformation, day after day, through suffering and constant repentance, becoming more like the Son of God. Christ became man so that we might become god by grace. That is what “grace alone” properly means. It does not mean grace excuses us from any response. As one Protestant put it to me once, “Christ died for me, so I don’t have to do anything.” But scripture consistently calls believers to works, works that do not save on their own, but that flow from participation in the grace of God, by which we climb what St. John Climacus called the Ladder of Divine Ascent toward him.