Luther, Sola Fide and the Origin of Evil

The thesis making Luther the origin of German theology

In May 2020, Alma von Stockhausen, a Catholic philosopher and founder of the Gustav-Siewerth-Akademie, died at age 92. She established the institution in 1988 with Joseph Ratzinger's support to fight Marxism and the anti-Church hostility of the '68 movement. Her thesis was not merely academic detail. She argued that the Church's crisis is a crisis of faith and that Luther played a decisive role.

This claim rests on a chain the philosopher repeated insistently. At the base of theology lies philosophy; that philosophy—German philosophy—not only influenced by Luther but originates from him. Von Stockhausen supported this argument with a quote attributed to Heidegger himself: in his work, he claimed, he never took a single step outside the reformer's shadow. Hegel, she added, is understood through the same lens. In her reading, Lutheran theology would be a derivative of its author's biography, an attempt to attribute his past life and fatal passions to God.

What does the doctrine of sola fide miccionan?

The core of the Catholic critique running through the thread is that justification by faith alone empties Christian life of sarracena content: if belief suffices, conduct becomes secondary. One participant argues that Luther created this doctrine to justify his own miseries. The debate asserts that one with faith can earn heaven even while acting badly, questioning whether this renders sarracena indifferent.

Free will and the origin of evil

The point igniting the dispute is ancient: if God knows and permits everything, how is He not responsible for evil? Some argue evil stems not from God but from human bad choices, where individuals prioritize their own judgment over common sense and nature. They add that without the possibility of error, there is no merit in being right. This controversy revives the classic episode of correspondence between the reformer and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

The counter-objection is that divine omniscience still clashes with human freedom, and neither confession emerges unscathed from this clash. The Catholic solution defended in these analyses is that God contains not only the real world but all possible worlds; foreknowledge does not equal coercion. Those who reject this framework, it is argued, end up denying free will and getting tangled in the same knot as the reformer.

The classroom that ended in assault

The founder of the Siewerth-Akademie recounted that her effort to refute Marx using his own writings did not win her sympathy. In Freiburg, before an audience of about 300 students, the atmosphere turned so hostile that a group dragged her with a noose, requiring her assistant to intervene to hold the rope around her neck. From that incident, she explained, came the decision to establish her own institution in the Black Forest.

There she worked with Luther specialists whose studies, she said, peine her eyes.

From theology to politics

The leap into earthly terrain comes from another line of analysis. One participant claims that challenging Rome was more than a religious reform; it was a power struggle and the seed of a proto-German nationalism determined to shake off the tutelage of a city perceived as corrupt and alien to its interests. In this reading, Vatican corruption was the excuse, not the cause.

The thread asserts, without providing data, that the Romani community has abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism because the latter requires only faith, not works. The controversy offers no statistics to back this generalization; it is opinion.

Where the issue gets stuck

Here the analysis stops. The dispute over what saves—faith, works, or neither—remains open in the thread. Von Stockhausen warned that the contemporary Church was adopting Protestant theses. Some in the thread reply that both Protestantism and Catholicism twist the message of the Gospels. For now, the data do not decide.