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Three church traditions hold a variant, differently accounted stance toward Charity in this atlas: Calvinism (Reformed), Eastern Orthodoxy and Lutheranism. Reading past the shared word finds two real positions, not three: two Reformation traditions independently reach the identical account against Rome, and the third was never arguing inside the same framework at all.

Two Reformations, One Answer

Calvinism's own account: Reformed teaching holds love as the evidence and the consequence of a faith already justifying, not as the thing that gives faith its saving power. Lutheranism's own account states the same position and names what it is answering: Lutheran teaching holds love as the fruit of faith rather than the form that makes faith justifying, which reverses the order Rome gives the two. Two churches, from two separate Reformation traditions, the Swiss and the German lines of the sixteenth century, independently land on the identical shape: love follows faith and does not constitute it.

A Third Tradition Outside the Argument

Eastern Orthodoxy's own account does not take a side in the Reformation dispute over faith and its form, because it never joined that framework: Orthodoxy speaks of love as the end of the ascetic life and the mark of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, outside the Latin ordering of theological and cardinal virtues altogether. Calvinism and Lutheranism are arguing with Rome inside a shared scholastic vocabulary of faith, form and merit; Orthodoxy's own vocabulary, ascesis and the acquisition of the Spirit, was never built to answer that argument in the first place. The honest count is two churches converging on one answer, and a third holding a question the other two's terms do not translate into.

Where To Read More

• CharityTheological VirtuesThe virtue itself; three churches counted, reducing to two positions
• Calvinism (Reformed)ChristianityLove is the evidence and consequence of a faith already justifying, not what gives faith its power
• LutheranismChristianityLove is the fruit of faith rather than its justifying form, reversing the order Rome gives the two
• Eastern OrthodoxyChristianitySpeaks of love outside the Latin ordering of virtues altogether; never joined the Reformation argument