Was There a “Reformation Doctrine of Justification”?

In this essay I take up cudgels against a central construct in the confessional historiography of the Protestant Reformation: The notion that there existed a clear, well-defined doctrine of justification shared by all the major reformers from the earliest stages of the conflagration and that this “Reformation doctrine of justification” served as the “material principle” in the formation of the emerging Protestant self-identity.1 In contrast with this traditional view, I argue that the first-generation reformers, galvanized by Luther's protest against the indulgence trade, adopted a common “rhetoric of dissent” aimed at critiquing the regnant Catholic orthopraxy of salvation in the interest of a common set of primarily existential-religious concerns. During the course of the next several decades following the initia Lutheri, however, an “orthodox” doctrine of justification quickly emerged'several of them, in fact. The Roman Catholic church and the emerging Protestant confessions, Lutheran and Reformed, quickly found it necessary to formulate their teachings in increasingly precise terms, so as both to integrate their central soteriological affirmations within a wider body of contested doctrines and practices and to demarcate clearly the boundaries of confessional identity in opposition to competing confessions. As with earlier periods of intense theological controversy within the Christian tradition, this conflict represented not a sudden breakthrough, but rather “a search for orthodoxy, a search conducted by the method of trial and error.”2 Unlike earlier debates, however, what emerged in the aftermath of the Reformation was not a single, dominant orthodoxy which carried the field, but rather multiple, competing orthodoxies, each one with its own Gospel.