Property and Restitution in the Lutheran Tradition: Selected Cases of Interaction with the Scholastic Theologians

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the interaction between Lutheran and scholastic theologians with regard to property and restitution. It explores the use of scholastic sources by a number of Lutheran theologians on selected cases. Philip Melanchthon and Martin Chemnitz defended the idea that private property is a divine institution founded on the seventh commandment of the Decalogue and refuted the monastic ideal of voluntary poverty. In the seventeenth century, theologians like Friedrich Balduin, Balthasar Meisner, Conrad Horneius, and Johann Adam Osiander started to cite scholastic and early-modern scholastic theologians. They sometimes borrowed concepts and solutions to cases of conscience, but that did not prevent them from also criticizing the scholastics on other occasions. The Lutheran attitude toward the scholastics was therefore not uniform. The Lutheran theologians accepted or refused the scholastic opinions depending on the particularities of the questions treated.