On the Councils and the Church

Von den Konziliis und Kirchen is Luther's longest sustained treatment of church authority, written in 1539 when the question of a general council had become unavoidable. Pope Paul III had summoned a council to Mantua in 1537 and then repeatedly postponed it; the Protestant estates had to decide whether they would attend, on what terms, and what they would say if the gathering actually met. Luther had already drafted the Schmalkald Articles for that purpose. Now, with the council still hanging in the air, he turned to the deeper question underneath the diplomacy: what a council can and cannot do, and what the church actually is. To answer it he worked through the histories of Eusebius, Rufinus, and the Historia Tripartita, along with the recorded acts of the ancient councils, and the treatise shows the marks of that reading on nearly every page.

The argument moves in three parts. In the first, Luther rejects the demand that reform simply return to the fathers and the councils, because the fathers contradict one another, the councils issued canons that no one now keeps, and Augustine himself refused to place any writer above Scripture. In the second, he examines the four great councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon in detail and draws a consistent lesson: each was called to defend an article already given in Scripture against a specific heresy, none created a new article of faith, and their disciplinary rulings were temporary measures rather than binding law. A council, then, is a court of appeal, not a legislature; its office is to confess the old faith, not to invent a new one. The third part answers the question that has been building throughout. Luther sets aside the word Kirche as too vague and speaks instead of a holy Christian people, recognizable not by institutions or succession but by seven marks: the preached Word of God, baptism, the Lord's Supper, the public exercise of the keys in absolution and discipline, the calling of ministers to serve these, public prayer and praise together with catechesis, and the holy cross of suffering borne for Christ's sake. Where these are found, the church is present, whatever else is lacking; where they are absent, no title or lineage can supply them.

The treatise endured because it gave Protestantism a working definition of the church that did not depend on papal recognition, and because its historical method anticipated later critical study of conciliar authority. The seven marks have been reprinted, preached, and argued over ever since, and the inclusion of suffering among them remains one of Luther's most searching insights.

Who should read this: pastors, seminarians, and thoughtful laypeople wrestling with what makes a congregation a church, and anyone who wants Luther's mature ecclesiology in his own words rather than secondhand. It is long, polemical, and dense with fourth-century detail; readers seeking devotional warmth or an irenic approach to Rome should look elsewhere.