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Luther’s Anfechtung vs. Paul’s Spiritual Confidence

Luther’s Anfechtung vs. Paul’s Spiritual Confidence

Last updated on: July 20, 2026 at 2:07 pm by Dave Armstrong

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Luther’s Anfechtung vs. Paul’s Spiritual Confidence 2026-07-20T14:07:53-04:00 Dave Armstrong

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Photo credit: Statue of Martin Luther [public domain / Pixabay]

Full title: “Luther’s Recurring Anfechtung in Contrast to St. Paul’s Robust Spiritual Confidence.” This is chapter 3 of my book, Martin Luther: Dissenter & Defender, available as a free sample, along with the Introduction: “My Intentions and Goals as a Catholic Apologist Writing About Martin Luther.”

*****

I engaged in several fun and constructive, friendly debates about twenty years ago with a highly credentialed Lutheran historian and apologist, who went by the moniker “CPA” online. He wrote an article on his blog, entitled, “’How Do I Get a Gracious God?’ in the Intertestamental Era” (5-29-06; still available online), where he objected to

. . . a sentiment I’ve heard expressed before: that Luther’s agonizing search for a gracious God was a personal eccentricity, or perhaps a sickness of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but in any case not a question that would have made sense to the Apostle Paul from whom Luther sought to find the solution to his great question.

I’d like to explore this line of thought, which has to do with the relationship between temperament and personal, emotional and/or spiritual struggles, and theology. In Martin Luther’s case, many (including myself) have maintained that his well-known recurring depression and various spiritual agonies may have unduly influenced his interpretation of the soteriology (doctrine of salvation) of St. Paul: particularly in the book of Romans, and specifically Romans 7.

If this is true, then it highly influenced the entire course of subsequent Protestant soteriology and one of the two “pillars” of the Protestant Reformation: “faith alone” (sola fide). If so, it would be a case of Luther projecting his own internal states onto the text of Holy Scripture, which would be an instance of eisegesis, which means “reading into” Scripture, to a more or less degree, one’s own prior predispositions, rather than “reading out” of Scripture (exegesis) what is already there and in the mind of the writer.

It’s plausible (at least to some extent) to assert a connection between his psychological states and his theological positions. This doesn’t have to be designed or construed as “anti-Luther” at all. It’s simply common sense: our experiences are part of the overall matrix or framework within which we form and cultivate our theological beliefs. Many Protestant biographers of Luther and other historians have accepted Luther’s psychological difficulties as a documented fact, as I will shortly demonstrate.

In writing about this topic, I want to make it absolutely clear, again, as I did in my Introduction, that I’m not “attacking” Luther as a madman or psychotic, or impugning his character. I don’t hold serious depression or wrestling with the devil or the dark night of the soul, or a tormented conscience against anyone, having experienced severe depression and existential angst myself. I’m also quite familiar with satanic persecution and would never mock Luther’s frequent “wrestlings” with the devil (as even some of his sympathetic biographers do, showing a certain anti-supernaturalistic bias). Those engaged in ministry or some sort of spiritual work – as I am, myself — are routinely acquainted with such spiritual attacks (Ephesians 6:12-13). And apart from that, we know that much depression is largely due to biochemical causes.

Nor is this anything that even the Catholic saints are personally unfamiliar with. St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) wrote a book entitled The Dark Night of the Soul. St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), one of the most beloved and admired of all saints, experienced this “dark night” for a full year-and-a-half before her death at age 24. She felt that Jesus was absent and was tormented by doubts that God existed, and described this experience as a “night of nothingness.” Likewise, St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa: 1910-1997) went through even more profound sufferings of this sort. Her Wikipedia entry elaborates:

Privately, Mother Teresa experienced doubts and struggle in her religious beliefs which lasted nearly 50 years, until the end of her life. Mother Teresa expressed grave doubts about God’s existence and pain over her lack of faith:

Where is my faith? Even deep down . . . there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. . . . If there be [a] God – please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.

After ten years of doubt, Mother Teresa described a brief period of renewed faith. After Pope Pius XII’s death in 1958, she was praying for him at a requiem Mass when she was relieved of “the long darkness: that strange suffering.” Five weeks later her spiritual dryness returned. . . .

Mother Teresa wrote to spiritual confidant Michael van der Peet, “. . . as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see – listen and do not hear – the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak.”

So there’s no judgment or condescension here at all; not in the slightest. Luther regularly experienced what in German is called Anfechtung: a word difficult to precisely translate into English. The usual word is “temptation” but it could also be rendered “spiritual trials” or “assaults”. Google Translate defines it as “contestation” or, alternately, “challenge.” Biographer Roland Bainton describes Luther:

He was extraordinarily sensitive and subject to recurrent periods of exaltation and depression of spirit. This oscillation of mood plagued him throughout his life. He testified that it began in his youth and that the depressions had been acute in the six months prior to his entry into the monastery. . . . similar experiences continued throughout his adult years. (Bainton [1], 20)

The content of the depression was always the same, the loss of faith that God is good and that he is good to me. (ibid., 282)

Bainton implies in several ways that young Catholic Luther’s emotional and spiritual upheavals were in large part caused by medieval Catholicism’s supposed “angry God” and so forth. Certainly there were strains where this motif was emphasized, but it fails as a blanket representation of the Catholic theology of God. Nevertheless, to his credit, Bainton is fair enough to also express clearly false and unCatholic ideas about God that assailed Luther:

The final and the most devastating doubt of all assailed the young man. Perhaps not even God himself is just. . . . God is too absolute to be conditioned by considerations of human justice. The late scholastics, among whom Luther had been trained, thought that God is so unconditioned that he is bound by no rules save those of his own making. He is under no obligation to confer reward on man’s achievements, no matter how meritorious. Normally God may be expected to do so, but there is no positive certitude. For Luther this meant that God is capricious and man’s fate is unpredictable. (Bainton [1], 44)

Young Luther was tormented by the false doctrine of double predestination. Catholics agree that the elect are predestined, but not the reprobate. Bainton (ibid.) sums up the false part of the doctrine simply, as, “The lost are lost, do what they can . . .” He cites the Catholic Luther railing against this hideous doctrine as follows:

Is it not against all natural reason that God out of his mere whim deserts men, hardens them, damns them, as if he delighted in sins and in such torments of the wretched for eternity, he who is said to be of such mercy and goodness? This appears iniquitous, cruel, and intolerable in God, by which very many have been offended in all ages. And who would not be? I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated him! (ibid.)

The irony is that Luther decided to adopt the same belief that rightly elicited in him so much anxiety and contempt, after he parted ways with the Catholic Church. Even his own Lutherans rejected it in their Confessions.

The standard Protestant – – and especially Lutheran – account of how Luther resolved all this in his mind, was his “discovery” of a merciful God and “faith alone” in the year 1518. But the complete truth is both more complex and interesting. Would that life always had fairy tale endings: “and they lived happily ever after.” Historian David C. Steinmetz quickly disposes of this myth:

Throughout his life Luther suffered from periods of depression and acute anxiety. He referred to these episodes as Anfechtungen . . . The terror which Luther felt during such attacks . . . was all too specific. It was an unnerving and enervating fear that God had turned his back on him once and for all, had repudiated his repentance and prayers, and had abandoned him to suffer the pains of hell. Luther felt alone in the universe, battered by the demands of God’s law and beyond the reach of the gospel. He doubted his own faith, his own mission, and the goodness of God – doubts which, because they verged on blasphemy, drove him deeper and deeper into the Slough of Despond. Election ceased to be a doctrine of comfort and became a sentence of death. . . .

Luther’s conversion to a Reformation understanding of the gospel did not put an end to his Anfechtungen. Even after the great shift in his theological outlook, Luther continued to suffer periods of severe spiritual anxiety. (Steinmetz, 1)

Biographer Heiko Oberman wrote about a particularly intense episode of Luther’s depression and doubts that began on 6 July 1527, and cited a letter of Luther to his best friend Philip Melanchthon, dated 2 August 1527:

For more than a week I have been thrown back and forth in death and Hell; my whole body feels beaten, my limbs are still trembling. I almost lost Christ completely, driven about on the waves and storms of despair and blasphemy against God. But because of the intercession of the faithful, God began to take mercy on me and tore my soul from the depths of Hell. (Oberman, 323)

Oberman then applied this information to the topic at hand: its relation to Luther’s theology:

Luther was wrestling to find the merciful God! This comes as a complete surprise and does not fit into the traditional picture of the Reformational discovery. It had, after all, looked as if, after much grumbling and cursing and desperate struggling, Luther had achieved the breakthrough in 1518 (possibly earlier, but not later) that had opened the gates of paradise to him – once and for all. . . . certainty of faith does not exist once and for all, it is not a virtue one can possess, on which one can rely. Certainty of faith is a gift that “exceeds my powers.” (ibid.)

In October [1527] he was still haunted by anguish and urgently requested Melanchthon to remember him in his prayers of intercession since he himself was a “miserable worm,” plagued by the spirit of sadness: “I hope that the God who began His work in me will ultimately have mercy on me, for I seek and thirst after nothing but the merciful God.”

This was a further unequivocal statement: Luther was looking for the gracious God whom he had already been preaching and teaching for so long. The Devil had thrown him back to the monastery: “I have known these tribulations since my youth; but I never expected that they would so increase.” . . . The tension did not ease until the Spring of 1528. (Oberman, 324)

Thus this particular existential crisis (perhaps his worst) started almost ten years after he began his revolt and lasted almost eight months. Bainton described his ongoing difficulties with depression:

They were dreadful . . . His whole life was a struggle against them, a fight for faith. . . . In all the major encounters, God himself was the assailant. The Devil was something of a relief. (Bainton [1], 283)

These psychological / spiritual ordeals of Luther certainly didn’t end in 1527:

She [his wife] was a consolation to him in his bouts with tristitia, a word meaning “sadness” that I think is here best translated by “depression,” attacks that he said in 1533 were greater afflictions than all his enemies and labors . . . He had these attacks often, he said . . . (Marius, 439)

He was frequently plagued by sickness during the remaining decade of his life, especially from pain caused by stones but also by severe headaches and depression. (Schwarz, 33)

When we survey Luther’s illnesses after 1527, it is obvious that in the meantime he had become an unstable man. Again and again can be seen the connection between his circulatory problems and an emotional depression, combined with his spiritual Anfechtungen, . . . (Brecht, 210)

. . . the decade [1535-1545] of his disease and depression . . . (Marty, 182)

Most scholars freely concede the unusual and perhaps even abnormal aspects of Luther’s personality, without accepting the diagnosis that attributes these traits to an underlying psychosis. By most standards, Luther was a neurotic man who, later in life, suffered from bouts of depression. (Mark U. Edwards, Jr., in McKim, 205)

The Anglican Church historian Alister McGrath makes a theological analysis of Luther’s struggles:

The existential nature of Luther’s concept of faith has frequently been emphasized, and is particularly associated with the notion of Anfechtung . . . a state of hopelessness and helplessness . . . (McGrath, 169-170)

God himself must be recognized as the ultimate source of Anfechtung: it is his opus alienum, which is intended to destroy man’s self-confidence and complacency, and reduce him to a state of utter despair and humiliation, in order that he may finally turn to God . . . (ibid., 170)

Anfechtung, it must be appreciated, is not some form of spiritual growing pains . . . but a perennial and authentic feature of the Christian life. In order for the Christian to progress in his spiritual life, he must continually be forced back to the foot of the cross, to begin it all over again . . . and this takes place through the continued experience of Anfechtung. (ibid., 171)

One can see in this analysis – – assuming its accuracy as to Luther’s views – that his experiences had a direct effect on his theology (and perhaps vice versa). This in turn would influence his exegesis of Pauline soteriological passages.

It’s striking to me how Christians can have such vastly different experiences. Speaking for myself, I don’t recall ever denying or doubting for even one second, these past 49 years since I devoted my life wholeheartedly to Jesus as an evangelical Protestant, 1) that God exists, 2) that He is extraordinarily loving and merciful to all, including me, or 3) that He would save me in the end. That’s no reflection on me, personally, at all. It’s probably atypical of the Christian believer, and the experience of the saints is often quite otherwise, as we saw above. In any event, God has gifted me with a very strong faith, which is a great blessing indeed, and very helpful in my work as an apologist and evangelist.

Temperaments are largely put into us by God, and they show up early on, as every parent is readily aware. And we know that any good thing in us, including faithful belief and absence of doubt, derives entirely from God’s mercy and grace, for His purposes. We choose to participate or not, but He is the initiator and cause. My Christian experience is vastly different from Luther’s, and what he – rather remarkably — apparently thought should be the norm for all Christian believers (granting McGrath’s take above). So was St. Paul’s. My point is that various temperaments can and do lead to quite different spiritual experiences: even polar opposite ones.

And I maintain that Luther erroneously projected his temperament and spiritual experience onto St. Paul, in exegeting his epistles. He attempted to “co-opt” Paul — as if the Great Apostle and Evangelist experienced the same spiritual angst and concern and uncertainty concerning a gracious God that he was familiar with. But this is manifestly untrue. Paul was very different in this regard from Luther. I cited my good friend, the late Al Kresta, a Catholic author and talk-show host, in my 1996 book, A Biblical Defense of Catholicism. His words are quite relevant to the present discussion:

Unlike the modern evangelical Protestant revivalistic preaching tradition, the Apostle Paul was not preoccupied with his acceptance as a sinner before a holy and righteous God. That was Luther’s crisis. Protestants have tended to read Paul through the lens of Luther’s experience.

. . . Luther said he feared God but clung to the Apostle Paul. All the constitutive elements of the classic Luther-type experience, however, are missing in both the experience and the thought of the Apostle.

Unlike Luther, Paul was not preoccupied with his guilt, seeking reassurance of a gracious God. He was rather robust of conscience, even given to boasting, untroubled about whether God was gracious or not (Philippians 3:4 ff.; 2 Corinthians 10, 11). He knew God was gracious. He never pleads either with Jews or Gentiles to feel an anguished conscience and then receive release from that anguish in a message of forgiveness . . . Paul’s burden is not to “bring people under conviction of sin” as in revival services. Forgiveness is simply a matter of fact.

When Paul speaks of himself as a serious sinner, it is . . . very specifically because . . . he had persecuted the church and missed God’s new move – opening the covenant community to the Gentiles (1 Corinthians 15:9-10; Ephesians 3:8; Galatians 1:13-16; 1 Timothy 1:13-15). (p. 41)

St. Paul had no difficulty at all “getting to” or “finding” a “gracious God”. He didn’t struggle with appropriating to himself God’s love, mercy, and graciousness. He wrote the magnificently triumphant chapter 8 in his epistle to the Romans, after all: one of the most glorious, hopeful chapters in the entire Bible (and there were no chapter divisions originally). He was quite sure of God’s graciousness there:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (8:1; RSV)

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.” (8:2)

Christians walk “according to the Spirit.” (8:4)

Christians “set their minds on the things of the Spirit.” (8:5)

This brings “life and peace” (8:6)

We Christians all have the Holy Spirit inside of us (8:9-11)

This makes our spirits “alive because of righteousness.” (8:10)

This makes us “sons of God.” (8:14-17)

This gives us hope and patience (8:24-25)

And all things work for good (8:28)

And this brings justification to us (8:30, 33)

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (8:35) Paul then lists seven horrible things which cannot do this, including martyrdom, but “in all these things we are more than conquerors” (8:37)

He concludes that there isn’t “anything . . . in all creation” that “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (8:39)

All this, yet we’re to believe that Paul is somehow analogous to Luther, struggling to figure out that God loves him (and all men) and is merciful and gracious? Protestants typically appeal to the previous chapter 7:

Romans 7:15-24 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. [16] Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. [17] So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. [18] For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. [19] For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. [20] Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. [21] So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. [22] For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, [23] but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.[24] Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

But how does this prove in the least that Paul doubts God’s graciousness and willingness to save? I don’t see it. Paul (using a non-literal rhetorical “I” for dramatic effect, according to many commentators) teaches that the man under the law struggling with concupiscence is destined to fail. But of course this merely proves my point that the Holy Spirit makes an entire difference (precisely the topic of his next chapter, which satisfactorily resolves the spiritual / existential dilemma that he outlines in Romans 7). But he hints at the solution even in Romans 7 itself.

Paul argues that when we were “living in the flesh,” sin and death reigned over us, and that the law actually in some sense “aroused” this (7:5). Of course; all agree on that. But now (i.e., Christians in the age of grace and post-Day of Pentecost) “serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.” (7:6). So Paul gives a sneak preview of Romans 8. He goes on to argue that the law was not, indeed, a bad thing (7:7, 12). But the law (given human propensity to sin and temptation) offers “opportunity” for the sinner to enter into more sin (7:8-11, 13-14). In the carnal flesh dwells no good thing, and we all struggle with it, often hypocritically, with our wills often being weak (7:15-25).

The entire solution to the “dilemma” of Romans 7 is found in Romans 8. It’s interesting that Paul includes suffering — even profound suffering — as part of the “solution”; actually making it an outright condition for being “heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” (8:17) The sufferings of Christ become our own in some mysterious sense, and we are to identify with our Lord’s suffering. This is a rather common motif in Paul (cf. 2 Cor 1:5-7; 4:10, 11:23-30; Gal 2:20, 6:17; Phil 3:10; and above all, Col 1:24), yet one scarcely dealt with or recognized by Protestants at all.

There is plenty of suffering to be had, yet it is a suffering without a despair of God’s mercy and graciousness. That forms no part of it at all. Luther’s experience was not Paul’s. Nor can Pauline soteriology be constructed out of the whole cloth of Luther’s non-typical experience of recurrent existential despair and angst. Not everyone is like him. I think it’s fair to say that most people are not. If he had recognized that himself, the history of theology for the last 500 years may have been very different.

I see no evidence that Paul suffered as Luther did. Paul (quite arguably) went through far more than Luther, yet he maintained his joy and peace, unlike Luther, who was, by his own report, a tormented, torn individual. That looks like it is in some sense God’s will, too (some people are that way and seem to be unable to overcome it). Paul teaches, “let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him” (1 Cor 7:17). A lot of this flows simply from different temperaments and life experiences. But that is far different from the claim that Luther’s experience is widespread, normative (i.e., for devout, observant Christians), and similar to the Apostle Paul’s (let alone having some serious implications for true soteriology or theology proper).

Struggling with the problem of evil is fundamentally different from questioning whether God is gracious and merciful. In fact, it is the literal opposite, because the problem of evil only comes by the assumption of a good God from the outset. One assumes that and then struggles to understand and explain evil, hell, etc. It’s precisely because God is good and merciful that these thorny philosophical/emotional problems arise. Luther’s Anfechtung is the precise opposite: he questions whether God is merciful, and particularly to him.

I think that the following explanation from Paul O’Callaghan (Catholic, I believe) accurately describes the relationship of Martin Luther and his experience and theology to St. Paul:

Luther took it for granted that Paul underwent the same experience he (Luther) had undergone before discovering the true meaning of iustitia Dei, the “righteousness of God,” the justice by which God makes the believer truly just. Before encountering Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul had, in Luther’s mind, suffered long with a distressed conscience. “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24), he cried out. This anguished confession contained in Romans 7 has been commonly applied by Lutherans to Paul’s situation before his conversion. Yet contemporary biblical exegesis is quite contented to apply this passage from Romans to the situation of the converted Christian and does not exclude the possibility that, for Paul, it may not have been entirely autobiographical.

The fact is that Paul elsewhere does explicitly describe his personal situation and mindset before conversion took place. In the letter to the Philippians, he boasts that he was “as to righteousness under the law blameless” (Phil 3:6), and to the Galatians, he exclaimed that he “advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I” (Gal 1:14). There is no reason to think that Paul was riddled with anxiety and scruples before encountering the risen Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus. In fact, he seems to have been very sure of what he was doing in persecuting Christians. (“New Perspectives on Paul: A Reﬂection on Luther’s Contribution to the Doctrine of Christian Grace on the Occasion of the Fifth Centenary of the Reformation”; Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 16, No. 3 [2018]: 799-800)

Likewise, the late James D. G. Dunn (Methodist) and Alan M. Suggate (Anglican) add:

The Protestant reading of Paul was a reading back of Luther’s own experience into Paul. It was a retrojection back into Paul’s ﬁrst-century self-testimony . . . (The Justice of God: A Fresh Look at the Old Doctrine of Justiﬁcation by Faith; Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1993, 14)

The late Heiki Räisänen, considered the most prominent Finnish biblical scholar, and a Lutheran, concurred even more strongly:

We can safely subscribe to the now common opinion that Paul’s critique of the law was not born out of any personal moral difﬁculties. Paul was no Luther before Luther. . . . Luther’s doctrine of justiﬁcation is not the Pauline one. (Paul and the Law; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1986, 231)

Bibliography / Sources

Roland H. Bainton [1]. Here I Stand. New York: Mentor, 1950.

Martin Brecht. Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation, 1483-1521. James F. Schaaf, translator. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Richard Marius. Martin Luther: the Christian Between God and Death. Harvard University Press, 1999.

Martin E. Marty. Martin Luther: A Penguin Life [Penguin Lives]. Viking Adult, 2004.

Alister E. McGrath. Luther’s Theology of the Cross. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1985; reprinted 1994.

Donald K. McKim. The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Heiko A. Oberman. Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart, translator. Yale University Press, 1990, from the German, 1982; Doubleday Image edition: March 1992.

Hans Schwarz. True Faith in the True God: An Introduction to Luther’s Life and Thought. Mark Williams Worthing, translator. Augsburg Books, 1996.

David C. Steinmetz. Luther in Context. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, Second edition, 2002.

*****

Photo credit: Statue of Martin Luther [public domain / Pixabay]

Summary: I contend that Luther’s well-known recurring depression and spiritual crises of doubt (Anfechtung) adversely affected his exegesis of St. Paul’s teachings on faith and salvation.

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