Martin Luther's Views On Good Work

For hundreds of years the Catholic Church preached that good works were essential to attaining salvation, and John Fisher did the same in his sermon denouncing Luther’s ideals. Contrasting the Catholic Church, within Martin Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian and Hans Staden’s True History, both men, in their own terms, claim good words are meaningless in salvation and attaining God’s grace. For this argument, good works is an umbrella term where prayer can be considered a good work, but good works are not exclusive to prayer, as good works can include charity, being true to oneself, etc. Fisher, aligning his beliefs with the Catholic Church, believed good works such as charity to be just as essential to salvation as prayer. In his sermon, Fisher argued, “if a man had such a faith, but lacked the heart of charity, he would be a dead tree,” claiming faith, no matter how strong, is meaningless in God’s eyes without …show more content…
Luther, despite believing a pious Christian should do good works, believed they “must not be done in the opinion that man thereby becomes pious before God” in doing such works (Luther, p. 32). Luther argued acts do not define a person as good or evil, but a good person should do good acts for the sake of being good, not to gain something in the eyes of God. Staden came to his beliefs of the effect of good works on salvation and attaining God’s grace through his experience in captivity. When Staden was a captive of the Tupinambá, he “began to lie, dissimulate, and play the sides against each other” (Staden, p. 56). These are not the good works Fisher preached to be necessary in order to receive God’s grace but Staden saw no negative consequences for his actions. Overall, Staden and Luther’s beliefs were more similar, despite different reasons, than Fisher’s, as their beliefs directly contradicted those of the British Catholic