Aquinas and Luther on Justification I Dr. Nathaniel Peters
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
Dr. Nathaniel Peters explores and compares the theological views of Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas on justification, focusing on grace, faith, merit, and the fundamental differences shaping Catholic and Lutheran perspectives.
This lecture was given on February 25th, 2025, at University of Virginia.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speaker:
Nathaniel Peters is the Director of the Morningside Institute. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College, his M.T.S. from the University of Notre Dame, and his Ph.D. from Boston College. He has published article on many topics on religion and public life, and his first book, The Trinitarian Dimensions of Cistercian Eucharistic Theology, is forthcoming from Catholic University of America Press.
Keywords: Aristotelianism, Ethics, Faith and Works, Grace, Incarnation, Justification, Law and Gospel, Martin Luther, Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. |
| 0:06.0 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
| 0:12.0 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. |
| 0:19.0 | To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at |
| 0:21.9 | to mystic institute.org. I am going to speak this evening on Luther and Aquinas in dialogue |
| 0:31.4 | on justification. And I want to begin by setting the context. So at the risk of kind of belaboring something for people |
| 0:39.8 | who might already be familiar with the term, what is justification and why would it prove |
| 0:45.6 | so controversial? What does it mean for these authors and what might it mean for us? So justification |
| 0:51.8 | matters because human beings are made for perfect union with God, |
| 0:57.5 | but A, we're not God, and B, we're sinful, which means that we do evil, and that evil |
| 1:04.9 | separates us from God. So justification matters because we want to be happy. Happiness requires union with God, |
| 1:14.2 | and union with God requires kinds of perfections that we lack. Now, it's also the case that our |
| 1:21.6 | sin is a moral offense against God, against his goodness, and against his justice. And so something has to be |
| 1:30.6 | done about this. Something has to happen so that I, sinful and imperfect, can be forgiven by |
| 1:39.1 | and united to a good and perfect God. And both Luther and Aquinas see this as the problem behind the question of justification, |
| 1:48.7 | and you could argue behind kind of the driving problem behind the life and work of Christ |
| 1:53.8 | and of the Christian life. |
| 1:55.7 | The words incarnation, life, death, and resurrection in the person of Jesus bring about salvation objectively |
| 2:04.0 | in history. But justification is kind of the subjective application of the work of Christ |
| 2:13.7 | to the life of an individual person. So Luther and Aquinas are both concerned with questions |
| 2:21.5 | like, how can we be made righteous and worthy of eternal life with God? How can God fulfill both |
| 2:29.0 | his justice and his goodness or his mercy? And how can we give an account of justification that makes the best sense of scripture, |
... |
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