What’s in a (Mis)quotation? Martin Luther’s Use of St. Augustine and Its Legacy

Text 1. St. Augustine of Hippo, “On Marriage and Concupiscence,” I.25

In this text, Augustine counters an accusation from Pelagius. He had claimed that Augustine denied the efficacy of God’s activity in baptism for cleansing the soul from original sin. To the contrary, then, Augustine affirms baptism’s efficacy as a gift, a conduit of grace that frees people from sin. Through reflection on Paul, Augustine develops the doctrine of sin as stemming from systemic, disordered desires that he calls “concupiscence of the flesh” (concupiscentia carnis). In baptism, people are freed from original sin: Augustine calls it “the sacrament of regeneration.” Yet he notes how after baptism, people as finite, mortal creatures continue to struggle with disorderly desires throughout their lives. But here, he carefully distinguishes an ongoing, post-baptismal provocation to sin from that provocation itself being sin per se. For the baptized, concupiscence remains because a nature that is freed from sin is not the same as a nature that is perfected. Concupisence can certainly lead to sin; but the very fact of imperfect desires no longer qualifies as sin proper (i.e., if x can lead to y, it does not follow that x is y). Through the gift of baptism, original sin is removed, even though concupiscence or disorderly desire remains. What Augustine says here is important because he is differentiating between the ontology of sin (i.e., what it is, what kind or degree of reality it has) and the phenomenology surrounding it (i.e., people’s personal experience, feelings, and awareness as individual subjects).

Text 2. Martin Luther, WA 56.273–274

Luther, the one-time Augustinian friar, was a deeply affective, introspective individual, and his personal reflections on inner experiences of struggle are widely known. When quoting Augustine’s text On Marriage and Concupiscence, Luther—presumably by accident—misplaced the word “sin” (peccatum) in Augustine’s discussion and juxtaposed it directly with “concupiscence.” Luther’s quote makes it look as though Augustine identified the two. The effect of Luther’s mistake was to gloss over a distinction that was central to Augustine’s argumentation. Unfortunately, then, Luther’s portrayal of Augustine actually contradicts what Augustine had argued against Pelagius. At the same time, Luther’s adjustment of Augustine just so happened to align with Luther’s own developing idea that the grace mediated through baptism does not free people from original sin (this would inform his new theology of justification as “imputation”).

It is unclear whether Luther was aware that he misrepresents Augustine. It continued and worsened in his later writings that still (mis)appealed to On Marriage and Concupiscence as though Augustine shared Luther’s view of baptism’s relation to original sin. Perhaps Luther tried quoting from memory, which was not unusual practice (for more discussion of the primary texts and versions, see Richard Rex, The Making of Martin Luther, 92 n. 51). But the reformer’s misrepresentation of Augustine and scholastics was real, and he eventually dropped talk of “concupicence” and used only “sin” in references to Augustine’s text. In this inaccurate portrayal of the 4th century Alexandrian bishop, Luther had a guise of patristic authority when claiming that not only concupiscence, but also sin proper, remains after baptism. Much of the time, baptism on Luther’s account does not free people from original sin. And significantly, he realizes that his claim differs from earlier Augustinians:

“Either I have never got it, or the scholastic theologians have not spoken well enough about sin and grace. They imagine that original sin is wholly taken away, just like actual sin, as if they could both be removed in the blink of an eye, the way darkness is by light.”

What Luther portrays as unacceptable is what Augustine himself argued; earlier medieval theologians had maintained the Augustinian position that baptism is regenerative and also that concupiscence and sin are not interchangeable. Yet in this same statement, Luther refers to “the sin concupiscence,” attributing the idea of concupiscence-as-sin to Augustine himself, who argued quite differently in “On Marriage and Concupiscence” (i.e., the text Luther is discussing). Luther’s awareness of divergence from earlier Augustinians is premised on his own misquotation.

A conceptual consequence for Luther is that original sin remains after baptism, but is not counted as sin. From this angle, baptism is distanced from God’s regeneration of the human person. On Luther’s de-sacramentalized account of justification, the human person is not transformed. Rather, with sin remaining, Christ’s righteousness is “imputed” to the human person.

Luther is inconsistent, though. Elsewhere, even in Babylonian Captivity of the Church (pub. 1520) which targets the sacraments, he still affirms the classical link between baptism and regeneration: “We should be even as little children, when they are newly baptized, who engage in no efforts or works, but are free in every way, secure, and saved solely through the glory of their baptism” (in the discussion of “The Sacrament of Baptism”). This latter stance is what Lutherans to this day officially affirm.

Luther’s two stances on baptism are not the same. Their logical incoherence seems to have impacted later Protestants. Some Reformed varieties of Protestantism went in a direction different from Babylonian Captivity.

Text 3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2

Calvin wrote as a disciple of Luther, having regarded the Wittenberg reformer himself as a modern, European apostle. Defending himself as faithful to a Protestant cause, Calvin responded to Swiss claims from 1554 that Calvin wrote too meekly about Luther. The Genevan reformer affirmed the following:

“Concerning Luther…we openly bear witness that we consider him a distinguished apostle of Christ whose labor and ministry have done most in these times to bring back the purity of the gospel.”

(see Opera Calvini 6:250).

It is important to submit to apostolic authority. Accordingly, in a discussion of baptism, Calvin adopts the “apostle” Luther’s idea that baptism does not free people from original sin (Institutes IV.15.10). To the contrary, Calvin holds that “we are vitiated and corrupted in all parts of our nature,” claiming of infants that “their whole nature is a seed of sin.” Moreover, “lust never actually dies and is extinguished in men until, freed by death from the body of death, they are completely divested of themselves” (IV.15.11).

Calvin affirms the sacramentality of baptism. It is thus questionable whether his sacramental view of the rite is consistent with his line of reasoning on sin. For example, Calvin argues that, via baptism, people share in Christ’s sacrificial death (IV.15.5) and that they are assured by God that “complete remission has been made, both of the guilt that should have been imputed to us, and of the punishment that we ought to have undergone because of the guilt” (IV.15.10). This sounds like an affirmation of baptismal regeneration. But the issue is complicated further by Calvin’s foundational commitment to Luther’s non-transformative conception of justification as “imputation,” which Calvin affirms explicitly at the end of IV.15.10 (another point at which both Luther and Calvin rejected Augustine). Hence, on the one hand, Calvin suggests a transformative conception of baptism going back to ancient Christianity, while, on the other hand, he thinks in terms of an ossified corruption of human nature during this life. This problem of internal coherence resembles Luther’s misquotation of Augustine that led him to conflate concupiscence itself with original sin. Like Luther, Calvin jettisoned the classical differentiation between ontology and phenomenology in considerations of sin.

Summary and (an incomplete set of) implications

In summary, here are a few points. First, it matters that Augustine distinguished between sin’s ontology and the phenomenology surrounding it. It is a differentiation to maintain. Collapsing these considerations easily results in a de-sacramentalized, overly individualized, even emotive approach to Christianity. Second, Luther’s theological anthropology converged with an objectively misleading use of Augustine’s treatise on baptism. Theological novelty was not something reformers wished to claim; Luther’s misreading was part of his novel sacramental theology; that novel theology needed bolstering, which seems to have been possible, in part, through Luther’s presentation as a new apostle. Third, the new “apostle” helped secure a rather new, non-regenerative conception of baptism, but one that sat uneasily with and even contradicted other claims by Luther himself and later reformers. Fourth, select strands of Reformed Protestantism claim to maintain Augustinian thought. But an idea like the doctrine of “total depravity,” in combination with a non-regenerative conception of baptism (which is fairly standard in Reformed circles), relies either on a misrepresentation or rejection of Augustine’s theology of grace if and when such a Reformed person claims an Augustinian pedigree. For Augustine, a theology of grace is a theology of sacramental mediation.