Glossary of Lutheran terms

Thirty-one terms, plain definitions, one paragraph each. Not a substitute for the tracks on the Learn page, but a place to look something up mid-sentence.

Justification: Being declared righteous before God, not because of anything the person has done, but on account of Christ, received through faith alone. The central Lutheran doctrine — Luther called it the article on which the church stands or falls.
Law and Gospel: The distinction between two things Scripture says: the Law, which shows what a right life looks like and shows that no one lives it; and the Gospel, which announces what God has done about that in Christ. Learning to tell them apart is, in Lutheran teaching, most of the skill of reading the Bible well.
Simul Justus et Peccator: Latin for "simultaneously righteous and sinner." The Lutheran teaching that a believer is, at the same time, fully a sinner and fully justified before God — not a mixture or an average of the two, but both completely, at once.
Sola Scriptura: "Scripture alone." The teaching that Scripture is the final authority for Christian doctrine, above church tradition, councils, or any human teacher.
Sola Fide: "Faith alone." A person is justified through faith alone, not through faith plus good works or religious observance.
Sola Gratia: "Grace alone." Salvation is entirely God's gift, not something earned or deserved. Grace, faith, and Christ together are often called the three solas of the Reformation, along with Scripture alone.
Solus Christus: "Christ alone." Christ is the sole mediator between God and humanity; salvation comes through him alone, not through saints, priests, or any other intermediary.
Theology of the Cross: Luther's term (from the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation) for finding God specifically in suffering, weakness, and the cross, rather than in power and success. Its opposite is the "theology of glory," which looks for God only in strength and triumph.
Theology of Glory: The approach Luther contrasted with the theology of the cross: expecting to find and know God primarily through visible strength, success, and religious achievement, rather than through Christ's suffering.
Means of Grace: The specific, physical ways God delivers grace to people: the preached and written Word, Holy Baptism, and Holy Communion. Lutherans hold that God chooses to work through these ordinary, tangible things rather than only through private inner experience.
Vocation: The Lutheran teaching that God works through a person's ordinary daily roles and work — parent, neighbor, tradesperson, caregiver — not only through formal religious activity. Holiness is not a separate career track.
Two Kingdoms: Luther's distinction between God's rule through the Gospel and the church (the "kingdom of the right hand") and God's rule through civil law and government, for the sake of order among believers and unbelievers alike (the "kingdom of the left hand").
Priesthood of All Believers: The teaching that every baptized Christian has direct access to God and a calling to serve others, without needing a priest as an intermediary. It does not eliminate the pastoral office, but it removes any claim that clergy have privileged spiritual access that laypeople lack.
Real Presence: The Lutheran teaching that Christ's body and blood are truly and substantially present in, with, and under the bread and wine of Holy Communion — not merely symbolized or remembered.
Consubstantiation: A term often used to describe the Lutheran view of Communion, but one Lutherans have historically declined as their own label. Lutherans affirm the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine without offering a philosophical explanation of how — "consubstantiation" implies a specific scholastic mechanism that Lutheran confessional writings don't actually teach.
Absolution: The formal pronouncement of forgiveness of sins. Lutherans treat absolution as a genuine means of grace, closely tied to confession — see Confession, below.
Confession: Naming one's sins, either privately to a pastor or corporately in worship, followed by absolution. Private confession is a normal, if underused, part of Lutheran practice; a layperson can make confession to another Christian even without a pastor present, though only a called minister pronounces the full declarative absolution.
Original Sin: The Lutheran teaching that every person is born already turned away from God and unable to fix that condition through their own effort or will — not merely inclined to occasional wrongdoing, but fundamentally unable to save themselves.
Bondage of the Will: Luther's term (from his 1525 treatise of the same name, answering Erasmus) for the claim that, in matters of salvation, the human will is not free to choose God; a person contributes nothing to their own justification, which is entirely God's work.
Predestination: God's eternal choice to save those who believe. Lutheran teaching affirms single predestination — God predestines people to salvation — and explicitly rejects the idea that God predestines anyone to damnation; responsibility for unbelief rests with the person, not with a hidden decree of God.
Adiaphora: Greek for "indifferent things": practices neither commanded nor forbidden by Scripture, left to Christian freedom and local custom — candles, vestment colors, the exact order of a service. Lutherans have historically fought hardest over insisting that adiaphora stay adiaphora.
Third Use of the Law: The Formula of Concord's teaching that God's law serves a third purpose beyond restraining evil in society and revealing sin: guiding the Christian life, showing believers what a life of gratitude to God looks like.
Book of Concord: The 1580 collection of Lutheran confessional documents — including the Augsburg Confession, both catechisms, and the Formula of Concord — that Lutherans historically confess as a faithful summary of biblical teaching.
Augsburg Confession: The founding 1530 document of Lutheran identity, presented to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Its twenty-one articles on faith and its seven articles on disputed practices remain the primary short statement of what Lutherans believe.
Small Catechism: Luther's 1529 handbook on the essentials of the faith — the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, Baptism, Confession, and Communion — written in plain words for anyone just starting out. It has always worked equally well read alone or read with someone else. Still the standard entry point into Lutheran teaching.
Large Catechism: Luther's 1529 companion to the Small Catechism, covering the same material at greater length and aimed at pastors and educated adults rather than children.
Formula of Concord: A 1577 document written to settle a series of sharp theological disputes among Lutherans after Luther's death, later included in the Book of Concord.
Anfechtung: Luther's word for the experience of being spiritually assaulted — terror of conscience, the sense that God has turned against you, the middle of the night when faith gives no comfort at all. English has no equivalent; "temptation" and "trial" are both too mild. Luther insisted this was not a failure of faith but the normal condition of a Christian under the Law, and said that Anfechtung, together with prayer and Scripture, was what made a theologian. If this is where you are, you are in the oldest company the church has.
Deus absconditus / Deus revelatus: The hidden God and the revealed God. Luther held that God as God is in himself — in majesty, in the raw workings of history and nature — is hidden, terrifying, and not to be searched out. God as God chooses to be known is revealed in Christ crucified, and there God is entirely for you. The pastoral point is practical: when speculation about why this is happening becomes unbearable, Lutherans are taught to stop looking at the hidden God and look at the manger and the cross instead.
Alien Righteousness: From iustitia aliena, righteousness from outside. The righteousness by which a Christian stands before God is not their own and never becomes their own property; it belongs to Christ and is reckoned to them. This is what Lutherans mean when they call justification forensic — a verdict declared over you, not a quality detected in you.
The Happy Exchange: Luther's image (fröhlicher Wechsel) for what happens in faith, taken from marriage law: Christ takes the sinner's sin, death, and damnation, and the sinner receives Christ's righteousness, life, and blessedness. Everything each party owns becomes the other's. It is the engine of The Freedom of a Christian and of the hymn “Dear Christians, One and All, Rejoice.”
Sacramental Union: The Lutheran account of how Christ's body and blood are present in the Supper: truly present in, with, and under the bread and wine, which remain bread and wine. Not transubstantiation, which says the elements cease to be bread and wine; and not consubstantiation, a scholastic term Lutherans have consistently declined. Lutherans confess that the presence is real and decline to explain the mechanism.
Communicatio Idiomatum: “The communication of attributes.” Because Christ is one person in two natures, what belongs to the divine nature can be said of the man Jesus and what belongs to the human nature can be said of the Son of God: God was born, God suffered, God died. Lutherans press this further than most traditions, and it is why they can say Christ's body is genuinely present in the Supper.
Finitum capax infiniti: “The finite is capable of the infinite.” The conviction that created, physical things — a man's body, bread, water, a spoken word — can genuinely bear God without being destroyed or emptied. The Reformed tradition denies this (finitum non capax infiniti), and that single disagreement is the root of most Lutheran–Reformed differences over the Supper, Christology, and the sacraments generally.
Office of the Keys: The authority Christ gave the church to forgive the sins of the repentant and to withhold forgiveness from the unrepentant. It appears in the Small Catechism as one of its parts, and it is why a Lutheran pastor's absolution is spoken as a declaration rather than a wish: not “I hope God forgives you” but “I forgive you all your sins.”
Enthusiasm: Luther's category (Schwärmerei) for the claim to have the Holy Spirit apart from the external Word and sacraments — direct revelation, inner light, a voice in the heart. He regarded it as the oldest error there is, and insisted God comes to us from outside ourselves, through preaching, water, bread, and wine, precisely so that we are not left to authenticate our own religious experience.
Antinomianism: The claim that because Christians are saved by grace, the Law has no further business with them. Luther fought this in the 1530s against Johann Agricola, who had been his own student. The Lutheran answer is that the Law still accuses, still restrains, and still instructs — which is what the Third Use of the Law is arguing about.
Sanctification: The Holy Spirit's work of making a justified sinner actually holy over time. Lutherans insist it is never the ground of salvation and never optional either: good works are necessary, but not necessary for justification. The distinction sounds like hair-splitting until you are the one wondering whether you have done enough, at which point it turns out to be the whole question.
Marks of the Church: How you can tell where the true church is, given that it is not identified with any institution. The Augsburg Confession names two — the gospel purely preached and the sacraments rightly administered. The late Luther, in On the Councils and the Church, lists seven, adding baptism, the Supper, the keys, the ministry, public prayer, and being under the cross. Notably, none of them is a building.
Church Year: The annual cycle of seasons — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and the Time after Pentecost — through which the church tells the story of Christ's life, death, and resurrection each year, marked by changing liturgical colors.
Lectionary: A fixed schedule of Bible readings assigned to each Sunday and festival, so that congregations following it hear a broad selection of Scripture over a repeating cycle rather than whatever a preacher happens to choose that week. This site uses the Revised Common Lectionary.
Time after Pentecost: The longest season of the church year, running from the Day of Pentecost until Advent, marked by the color green. Sometimes called "Ordinary Time." It has no major festival of its own; its theme is the ordinary, ongoing life of discipleship.
Advent: The four-week season before Christmas, marked by the color blue or violet, focused on waiting: for Christ's first coming at Christmas, and for his promised return.

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