On Erasmus And Luther's Protestant Reformation Thinking

The Reformation movement in the 16^th century has been a historical event for long. However, its religious thought has not passed away. It is the fascination of thought. The purpose of this dissertation is not to give an all-round study of the Reformation thoughts, but to exposit the different religious thoughts of the two great men in the 16^th century, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, in the background of the religious thoughts in the Later Medieval Age. These differences will reveal three major issues of the Christian thoughts: sin and salvation, reason and faith, and free will and necessity. These three issues are always the central contents of Christianity. From the historical point of view, these three issues have always been the religious themes in every period. If it is expressed by a model or paradigm, these three issues are the contents of the paradigm of every Christian thought and also the pivot of its transformation.The first theme of this dissertation is that the interpretations of Erasmus and Luther, regarding the three issues, constructed their own types of religious thoughts. If they are classified according to the religious types of Kant, namely egocentric religion and theo-centric religion, the thoughts of Erasmus tends to be the former type and the thoughts of Luther tends to be the latter type. When we use "tend" to describe the classification, it implies that it is not a kind of very strict classification. For example, although Erasmus strongly emphasized that Christianity should be human-centered, as the object of God's blessings was the human race, he also stressed that the center of Christian faith was Christ. The essence of Christ was however a super high-class mind to him. Therefore, a human had to receive Christ by his or her mind. It is his theory of "docta pietas". Luther also stressed the conscience of human beings, as he said in Worms that he could not betray his own conscience to retract his own declaration.The second theme of this dissertation is to argue that the significances of their Reformation thoughts lie in: a) Erasmus' inner salvation of moral and Luther's salvation of sole grace have transcended the outer salvation of legal of Scholasticism, b) the harmony between reason and faith basing upon the moral reason by Erasmus and the harmony between reason and faith basing upon the absolute faith by Luther have been superior to the harmony between reason and faith basing upon the natural reason by Scholasticism, and c) Erasmus' theory of co-operation between free will...