A Treatise on Good Works

A Treatise on Good Works (Von den guten Werken) appeared in the spring of 1520, the year in which Luther also published the Address to the Christian Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian. Georg Spalatin, the Saxon court chaplain, had urged him to write something on the subject because critics were already charging that justification by faith made works unnecessary and bred moral laxity. Luther began a sermon and found it growing under his hand into a book; he dedicated it to Duke John of Saxony, brother of his protector Frederick the Wise, and wrote to Spalatin that he thought it the best thing he had yet produced. It is Luther's first extended attempt to show what the Christian life looks like once faith, rather than merit, is placed at its center.

The treatise's governing move is to define a good work not by its outward form but by its source. The first and highest work is faith itself, because it is faith that trusts God and therefore honors him; without it, fasting, pilgrimage, almsgiving, and the whole apparatus of ecclesiastical observance are not good works at all but anxious attempts to purchase what has already been given. Where faith is present, by contrast, ordinary acts become good works: eating, sleeping, working, caring for a household. Luther organizes the argument as an exposition of the Ten Commandments, treating the first three at length and the remaining seven more briefly. The first commandment yields faith; the second, the right use of God's name in praise, confession, and prayer; the third, a Sabbath understood as letting God work in us rather than as ritual rest. Under the fourth commandment he discusses obedience to parents, to secular rulers, and to spiritual authority, and here he openly criticizes a papacy that he says has used the demand for obedience to shield its own avarice. Throughout, he insists that the commandments are a complete rule of life, so that the invented works of the religious orders add nothing and often distract from what God actually asks.

The work has continued to matter because it answers, in Luther's own voice and at the very moment of his break with Rome, the oldest objection to his theology: that it leaves no room for ethics. His reply is not that works do not matter but that they are relocated, flowing from trust rather than earning it, and that the humblest vocation can be the site of genuine obedience. The exposition of the Decalogue also anticipates the structure of his later catechisms, and the treatment of the Sabbath and of the first commandment remains among his clearest statements on what faith is.

Who should read this: readers who want to see how Luther understood the moral shape of the Christian life, and anyone who has absorbed the slogan of justification by faith alone and wants to know what Luther thought it required of a person on Monday morning. It is less suited to those seeking Luther's polemical fireworks or his technical arguments about the sacraments; this is a pastoral and ethical work, closer to the catechisms than to the disputations.