Hartmann Grisar

THE NEW DOGMAS IN AN HISTORICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LIGHT

1. The Bible text and the Spirit as the “True Tests of Doctrine”

Luther’s theological opinions present an attractive field to the psychologist desirous of studying his character. They are in great part, as has been several times shown, the result of his experiences, inward or outward, and appear peculiarly suited to meet his own case. Hence an examination of his doctrines will be of great value, particularly towards an understanding of his inner history.

The specifically Lutheran doctrine of the Bible as sole judge in matters of faith, i.e. the old, so-called “formal principle” of Protestantism, deserves to be considered first, though, in point of time, it was not the first to be reached by Luther. Actually it was first broached by the author of the schism only when the opposition between his newly discovered views and the Church’s teaching determined him to set aside both her claim to act as judge, and all other outward authority on doctrine. Refusing to be bound by the Church, in place of the teaching office with its gift of infallibility, which, according to the belief of the ancient Church, guards the treasure of revelation and therefore also decides on the sense of Holy Scripture, Luther set up as supreme arbiter the letter of the Bible. From this source, so he teaches, the faithful draw the doctrines of the faith, each one according to his ability and enlightenment.

The interpretation of the Sacred Books, in his view, takes place under the illumination of the Holy Ghost, and such an illumination he claimed first and foremost for himself. “Any believer who has better grounds and authority from Scripture on his side, is more to be believed than the Pope or a whole Council.”[1369]

Liberty for the Examination of Scripture and Luther’s Autonomy.

Luther only gradually reached his teaching concerning the supremacy of Holy Scripture.

His examination at Augsburg drew forth from him his first statements on this subject. In the postscript to his own report of the interview he places Holy Scripture first amongst the theological sources, adding that it was merely being corrupted by the so-called sacred Decrees of the Church;[1370] in his appeal to the Council he also places the Bible and its decision (i.e. his interpretation) above the Pope. Even then, however, he admitted the authority of the Council side by side with that of the Bible only in so far as he confidently looked to the Council for a decision in his favour. The fact that about this time he fancied he could descry Antichrist in the Pope reveals at once the wide gulf he was about to create between all ecclesiastical authority and Scripture privately interpreted.—Without having as yet formally proclaimed the new principle on Holy Scripture, he nevertheless declared at the Leipzig Disputation, that Scripture ranked above a Council,[1371] and that Œcumenical Councils had already erred in matters of faith. Only when driven into a corner by his defence of the heresy of Hus, and after fruitless evasions, were these admissions wrung from him by Eck. Any light thus thrown on the matter by the Catholic speaker was, however, at once obscured by the following ambiguous clause added by Luther: “Councils have erred, and may err, particularly on points which do not appertain to faith.”[1372]

Immediately after the Leipzig Disputation, in a letter addressed by himself and Carlstadt to the Elector, Luther lays it down that “a layman with the Scripture on his side is more to be believed in than the Pope and a Council without Scripture.”[1373] Then, in the “Resolutiones super propositionibus LipsiÆ disputatis,” he gives utterance to an assertion behind which he seeks to shelter his views: “Faith does not originate in authority but is produced in the heart only by the Holy Ghost, though man is indeed moved to faith by word and example.”[1374]

Yet, as though he himself wished to demonstrate the perils his new principle involved, not merely for the interpretation of the Bible but even for the integrity of the Sacred Books, he makes in the very same writing, on ostensibly intrinsic grounds, his famous onslaught on the Epistle of St. James which had been urged against him. Because this canonical Epistle tells against his doctrine of Justification, he will have it that, “its style is far beneath the dignity of an Apostle and is not to be compared with that of Paul.”[1375] Already at the Leipzig Disputation he had attacked the second Book of the Machabees, which did not suit his views, again for intrinsic reasons and because it ran counter to true doctrine; the Church had indeed admitted it into the Canon, but “she could not raise the status of a book nor impart to it a higher value than it actually possessed.”[1376]

From that time forward Luther gives the most varied expression to the principle of the free interpretation of Scripture: He declares, that the Bible may be interpreted by everyone, even by the “humble miller’s maid, nay, by a child of nine if it has the faith.”[1377] “The sheep must judge whether the pastors teach in Christ’s own tone.”[1378] “Christ alone, and none other than the Crucified, do we acknowledge as our Master. Paul will not have us believe him or an angel (Gal. i. 8, 12) unless Christ lives and speaks in him.” He is at pains to inform “the senseless Sophists, the unlearned bishops, monks and priests, the Pope and all his Gomorrahs” that we were baptised, not in the name of any Father of the Church, “but in the name of Jesus Christ.”[1379]

“That a Christian assembly or congregation has the right and the power to judge of doctrine and to appoint and dismiss preachers” is the title of one of Luther’s writings of 1523.[1380] Later we meet the downright declaration: “Neither Church, nor Fathers, nor Apostles, nor angels are to be listened to except so far as they teach the pure Word of God (‘nisi afferant et doceant purum verbum Dei’).”[1381]

In his bias against his foes he does not pause to consider that the very point at issue is to discern what the “pure Word of God” is, for, where it exists, any opposition on the part of “Church, Fathers and Apostles” is surely inconceivable. It is merely an echo of his early mystic theories when, in a dreamy sort of way, he hints, that the pure Word manifests itself to each believer and reveals itself to the world without the intervention of any outward authority. It was clearly mere prejudice in his own favour which led him to be ruled by the one idea that the “pure Word of God” was to be found nowhere but in his own reading of the Bible.

How greatly he allowed himself to be deceived by such fancies is already apparent in Luther’s earliest known statements on Scripture at the very beginning of the public controversy. His devotion to Biblical study from his youth, and the academic laurels he had won in this branch of learning, led him, consciously or not, to find in himself an embodiment of Holy Scripture. Only in this way can we explain his strange language concerning the Bible in his “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons” against Tetzel. Here, at the very commencement, instead of setting quietly about his task, which was to defend his new interpretation against the tradition, objected by his opponent, he sings a pÆan in praise of the unassailable Divine Word. “All who blaspheme Scripture with their false glosses,” he writes, “shall perish by their own sword, like Goliath (1 Kings xvii. 51).... Christ’s doctrine is His Divine Word. Whence it is forbidden, not only to this blasphemer [Tetzel], but to any angel in heaven, to change one letter of it. For it is written: ‘God does not deny what He has once said,’ Job xiii. [xiv.], and in the Psalter [cxviii. 89]: ‘For ever, O Lord, Thy word standeth firm.’ Not a jot or tittle of the most insignificant letter of the law of God shall pass; everything must be fulfilled.”[1382] Here Tetzel becomes a rude ass, “who brays at Luther,” reminding the latter of a “sow” that defiles the venerable Scripture.[1383]

How uncalled for his emphatic words quoted above on the value of the Bible really were can be more readily perceived now from a distance; for his opponents’ esteem and that of the Church generally for the Word of God was certainly not behind his, whilst the Church provided a safeguard for Holy Scripture which Luther was unwilling to admit. But in those days, in the midst of the struggle, such praises showered by Luther on Holy Writ served to make people think—not at all to his disadvantage—that he was the herald and champion of the Bible, which the Popish Church did not reckon at its true worth, whereas, all the while, he should have been striving to show that his contentions really had the support of Scripture. Even later his misleading cry was ever: Back to the sacred stronghold of the Bible! Back to the “true, pure and undefiled Word of God!”

“Thy Word is the Truth” was his habitual battle-shout, though about this there had never been the least dispute.

“Against all the sayings of the Fathers,” he says in 1522 in his reply to King Henry VIII, “against all the arts and words of angels, men and devils I set the Scriptures and the Gospel.... Here I stand and here I defy them.... The Word of God I count above all else and the Divine Majesty supports me; hence I should not turn a hair were a thousand Augustines against me, and am certain that the true Church adheres with me to God’s Word.” “Here Harry of England must hold his tongue.” Harry would see how Luther “stood upon his rock” and that he, Harry, “twaddled” like a “silly fool.”[1384]

Experience given by the Spirit.

The “rock” on which Luther’s interpretation of the Bible rests is a certain inward feeling and perception by the individual of the Bible’s teaching.

In the last resort it is on an inward experience of having been taught by the Spirit the truth and meaning of the Divine words that the Christian must firmly take his stand. Just as Luther believed himself to have passed through such an experience, so, according to him, all others must first reach it and then make it their starting-point.

This is the Spirit from on High that co-operates with the Word of Scripture.

“Each man must believe solely because it is the Word of God and because he feels within that it is true, even though an angel from heaven and all the world should preach against it.”[1385] We must not regard the “opinion of all Christendom” but “each one for himself alone” must believe the Scriptures.[1386] “The Word itself must content the heart and embrace and seize a man and, as it were, hold him captive till he feels how true and right it is.”

“Hence every Christian can learn the truth from Scripture,” so a present-day Protestant theologian describes Luther’s then teaching;[1387] “he is bound by no human school of interpretation, but the plain sense of Scripture and the experience of his heart suffice.” He adds: “This might of course draw down upon Luther the charge of subjectivism.” “What Luther said of the ‘whisper’ of the word of forgiveness is well known. Thus [according to Luther] God can, when necessary, work without the use of any means.” Thanks to the “whisper” the Bible becomes a sure guide, “for [according to him] the Holy Ghost always works in the heart the selfsame truth.” “From the peculiar religious standpoint of his own experience of salvation,” Luther, so the same theologian admits, determined his “attitude towards Scripture.” In this we have one of the results of his “personal experience.”

“How it comes to pass,” says Luther, “that Christ thus enters the heart you cannot tell; but your heart feels plainly, by the experience of faith, that He is there indeed.”[1388] “When the Holy Ghost performs His office then it proceeds.”[1389] “No one can rightly understand God or the Word of God unless he receives it directly from the Holy Ghost.”

When his friend Carlstadt, together with whom Luther had at first insisted on Scripture only, later struck out a path of his own in doctrine and ecclesiastical practice while continuing to appeal to Scripture and to his own enlightenment, even the controversy with him and the “fanatics” failed to make Luther relinquish in theory his standpoint concerning the Bible and the Spirit as the one source and rule of faith. He became, however, more cautious in formulating it and endeavoured at least to leave a back door open. He was less insistent in his assertion that the Spirit instructed, by the inward Word, each one who read the Scriptures; so much the more did he emphasise the supposed “clearness of the outward Word,” viz. the Bible, and deprecate any wanton treatment of it (by anyone save himself); at the same time he began to lay stress on the outward side of the Church, on the preaching office and the administration of the Sacraments.[1390] The fanatics he reproves for “merely gaping at the Spirit in their hearts,” whereas the outward articles must necessarily precede this.[1391] At times what he says almost looks like a repudiation of his earlier theory of enlightenment through the Spirit; for instance, when he describes how the fanatics wait “till the heavenly voice comes and God speaks to them.”[1392] Now, the outward Word of the Gospel, proclaimed by men truly “called,” is to be the guiding star amidst the mischief wrought by the sectarians; this outward Word, so he now fancies, will surely avail to decide every issue, seeing that it is so clear; only by dint of juggling could the sense of the Bible, as manifest in the outward Word, be distorted; looked at fairly it at once settled every question—needless to say in Luther’s favour; to understand it, all that was needed was the “natural language,” the “Lady Empress who far excels all subtle inventions.”[1393]

As to the alleged clearness of the word of Scripture it is sufficient to recall that he himself indirectly challenged it by accusing the whole Church of having misunderstood the Bible, and to consider the abyss that separated his interpretation, even of the most vital texts, from that of the scholars of the past. “Though we had the Bible and read it,” he says, “yet we understood nothing of it.”[1394]—Nevertheless he fancied he could save his theory by appealing to the clearness of the text and the assistance rendered by a knowledge of languages. “St. Paul wills” (1 Cor. xiv. 29), so Luther says, in a writing on the schools, “that Christians should judge all doctrine, though for this we must needs be acquainted with the language. For the preacher or teacher may indeed read the Bible through and through as much as he chooses, but he will sometimes be right and sometimes wrong, if there be no one there to judge whether he is doing it well or ill. Thus in order to judge there must be skill or a knowledge of tongues, otherwise it is all to no purpose.”[1395]

But above all, as he impresses on the reader in the same tract, he himself had thrown light on the Bible by his knowledge of languages; his interpretation, thanks to the “light” of the languages, had effected “such great things that all the world marvels and must confess that now we have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it, that it is restored to its pristine purity, and is even more undefiled than at the time of St. Jerome or Augustine.”[1396] His willingness, expressed from time to time, to submit himself or any other teacher to the judgment of anyone possessed of greater learning and a more profound spiritual sense, attracted many enlightened minds to his party.[1397]

Luther’s self-contradiction in speaking, first, of the great clearness of the Bible, and then of its great obscurity, cannot fail to strike one.

“Whoever now wants to become a theologian,” he says, for instance, “enjoys a great advantage. For, first, he has the Bible which is now so clear that he can read it without any difficulty.” “Should anyone say that it is necessary to have the interpretation of the Fathers and that Scripture is obscure, you must reply, that that is untrue. There is no book on earth more plainly written than Holy Scripture; in comparison with all other books it is as the sun to any other light.”[1398] Elsewhere he says: “The ungodly sophists [the Schoolmen] have asserted, that in Holy Scripture there is much that is obscure and not yet clearly explained,” but according to him they were not able to bring forward one vestige of proof; “if the words are obscure in one passage, they are clear in another,” and a comparison makes everything plain, particularly to one who is learned in languages.[1399]—Thus the Bible, according to a further statement, is “clearer, easier and more certain than any other writing.”[1400] “It is in itself quite certain, quite easy and quite plain; it is its own explanation; it is the universal argument, judge and enlightener, and makes all clear to all.”[1401]

Later, however, the idea that Holy Scripture was obscure preponderated with him. Two days before his death Luther wrote in Latin on a piece of paper, which was subsequently found on his table, his thoughts on the difficulty of understanding Scripture: “No one can understand the Bucolics of Virgil who has not been a herdsman for five years; nor his Georgics unless he has laboured five years in the fields. In order to understand aright the epistles of Cicero a man must have been full twenty years in the public service of a great State. No one need fancy he has tasted Holy Scripture who has not ruled Churches for a hundred years with prophets like Elias and Eliseus, with John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1402] In all likelihood his experiences with the sectarians in his own camp led him towards the end of his life to lay more stress on the difficulty of understanding the Bible.

Even with the “plain, arid Scripture” and a clear brain it may easily happen, as he says, to a man to fall into danger through the Bible, by looking at it from “his own conceit,” as “through a painted glass,” and “seeing no other colour than that of the glass.”[1403] Such people cannot then be set right, but become “masters of heresy.”[1404] All heresy seems to him to come from Scripture and to be based on it. There is no heretic, he says in a sermon in 1528, who does not appeal to Scripture; hence it came about that people called the Bible a heresy-book.[1405] The “heresy-book” was a favourite topic with him. Two years earlier he had used the expression twice on one day,[1406] and in 1525, when complaining in a sermon that the fanatics decked themselves out with Scripture, he said: “Thus it is true what people say, viz. that Holy Scripture is a heresy-book, i.e. a book that the heretics claim for themselves; there is no other book that they misuse so much as this book, and there has never been a heresy so bad or so gross that it has not sheltered itself behind Scripture.”[1407] These preachers from among the fanatics, he says, boast of the voice of God and of the Spirit, but they were never sent; let them prove by miracles their Divine mission![1408]

Thus he had retracted nothing of his strange doctrine concerning private enlightenment; on the contrary, when not actually dealing with the sectarians, he still declared with that persistence of which he was such a master and which shrank from no self-contradictions, that the Spirit alone taught man how to understand the Scriptures, now that man, owing to original sin, was quite unable to grasp even the plainest passages. “In it [the Bible] not one word is of so small account as to allow of our understanding it by reason.”[1409] Only by virtue of the higher light by which he understood Scripture could a man “impartially prove and judge the different spirits and their doctrines.” This he wrote in his “De servo arbitrio” at a time when he had already engaged upon the struggle with the “Heavenly Prophets.”[1410] And to these principles he remained faithful till death without, however, as a Protestant scholar repeatedly points out of the several sides of Luther’s theology, “explaining more clearly” their relation to the difficulties involved.

Concerning the inward Word or the enlightenment by the Spirit some words of Luther’s in 1531 may be given here.

In that year he preached on the Gospel of St. John. He dwelt at some length on his favourite passage: “Whoever believeth in Me hath everlasting life,” and its context. Here, speaking repeatedly of the outward and the inward Word, he insists especially on the former and particularly on the hearing of sermons with faith, though so far was he from relinquishing the inward Word that he combines it in a strange way with the outward, and finally arrives once more at his earlier pet idea: Whoever is taught inwardly by the Spirit is free to judge and decide on all things.

“The Lord Christ intends,” so he explains, “that we should hold fast and remain by the outward, spoken Word, and thereby He has put down reason from its seat,” i.e. has repudiated the objections of the fanatics who differed from him. Christ, according to Luther, exhorts us “diligently to listen to and learn the Word.”[1411] The beginning of Justification is in this, that “God proclaims to you the spoken, outward Word.”[1412] To this end God has His messengers and vicars. “When you hear a sermon from St. Paul or from me, you hear God the Father Himself; yet both of us, you and I, have one schoolmaster and doctor, viz. the Father ... only that God speaks to you through me.”[1413] Here he does not enter into the question of his mission, though he shows plainly enough that he was not going to be set aside. “God must give the spoken Word,” “otherwise it does not make its way. But if you are set on helping yourselves, why then should I preach? In that case you have no need of me.... We may be angered and stupefied over it” (viz. at the apparent divergence between the Word of God and reason), yet we must listen and weigh “the Word that is preached by the lips of Christ.”[1414]

Excellent as this exhortation may be so far as St. Paul was concerned, the speaker is at no pains to supply his hearer with any proof of his own saying, viz. “that God speaks to you through me.” He insists upon it, however, and now comes the intervention of the Spirit: God must “inspire the conviction that it is His Word”[1415] which has been heard. “Without the Word we must not do anything, but must be taught by God.”[1416] “When the heart can feel assured that God the Father Himself is speaking to us [when we listen to a sermon], then the Holy Ghost and the light enter in; then man is enlightened and becomes a happy master, and is able to decide and judge of all doctrine, for he has the light, and faith in the Divine Word, and feels certain within his breast that his doctrine is the very Word of God.”[1417] When you “feel this in your heart, then account yourself one of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will allow Him to be Master and surrender yourself to Him. In this way will you be saved.”[1418]

The real breathing of the Spirit of God, however, confirms the utterances only of the “preaching office,” viz. Luther’s and the Lutherans’. This he proclaims in the following words: “The true breathing and inspiration of the Holy Ghost is that which is wafted through the preaching office and the outward Word.”[1419]

In what follows, for the better understanding of Luther’s attitude towards the Bible, we shall examine two consequences of his subjective ways, viz. their effect on the inspiration and the Canon of Scripture, and the exegetical disagreement which was the result of the principle of inward experience, also the means he chose to remedy it.

Inspiration and the Canon of Scripture.

In the matter of the inspiration of Scripture Luther never went so far as the fanatical enthusiasts of later Lutheranism, who, in their systems, taught an actual verbal inspiration, according to which the writers of the Bible had not merely been impelled, enlightened, and infallibly preserved from error, but had received every word from God. On the contrary, owing to his wanton handling of the Bible, he takes the inspiration of its writers so widely and vaguely that the very idea of inspiration is practically evaporated. The Bible is indeed, according to him, an outcome of the inspiration of God and is the writing and Word of the Holy Ghost (“Spiritus auctor est libri”),[1420] and may accordingly be described as “the Holy Ghost’s own especial book, writing and Word”—which he sometimes explains almost as though he had been a believer in verbal inspiration.[1421]

The fact is, however, that he sees “in the sacred writers no other form of spiritual illumination than that displayed in the verbal preaching of the Divine witnesses.”[1422] “Moreover we occasionally find him questioning whether in certain passages the Holy Ghost ... is really so unquestionably present as in other parts of Scripture.” The truth is “he never formulated any detailed theory of Scriptural inspiration. With Luther the action of the Holy Ghost, on the witnesses of both Old Testament and New, is always one and the same, whether they proclaim the Word verbally or by writing; nowhere do we meet with the thought that they were under the influence of any other inspiration when they wrote.”[1423]

The freedom he allowed himself, no less in the matter of inspiration than in the principle of the Bible only, explains the distinction he so often makes between the character and importance of the various parts of the “Word of God,” which he will have one keep in view when searching in Scripture for the truths of faith. In passages where religion is not concerned, particularly in historical statements, he believes that the tools of the Holy Ghost both could and did err.[1424] He thinks that “the predictions of the prophets concerning the Kings and secular affairs often turned out wrong.”[1425] The inspiration of the Apostles (and Evangelists) in the New-Testament writings was merely a part of their general “office,” not a “special inspiration” in the nature of a “second power added to and independent of it.” “The predominant importance of the Apostles he traces back to their general inspiration in the sense described above.”[1426]

Catholic doctors before Luther’s day had showed themselves far more jealous of the sacredness of the Bible, as regards both the idea of inspiration and the equal value of all the books, and their every part. In spite of this Luther would have it that he had been the first to make the Bible respected.

One point deserving of consideration as an instance of Luther’s wantonness is his attitude towards the Canon of the Sacred Books.

How was he to prove that this or that book was to be included amongst the writings which constituted the Word of God, now that he had rejected the testimony of ecclesiastical tradition? According to the teaching of the ancient Church, it was tradition and the authority of the Church which vouched for the canonical character of the books of the Bible. Luther was confronted with this objection by Johann Eck at the Leipzig Disputation, who quoted the well-known words of St. Augustine, that he was compelled “to believe the Gospel only on the authority of the Catholic Church.”[1427] No longer recognising the authority of the Church, Luther met the objection by some strange evasions.[1428] When at last he saw that no other meaning could be read into the passage he threw it overboard and wrote: “If this meaning be not in St. Augustine’s words then it were better to repudiate his saying. For it is contrary to Scripture, to the Spirit and to all experience.”[1429] Even for the inspired value of the books included in the Canon he appealed in his arbitrary fashion, not to the infallible Church, but to the “inward testimony of the Spirit.”

He could hardly escape being thus thrown back on this inward, mystical attestation, seeing that, according to him, human reason is of little assistance in the matter. Here the “inner sense” has to come in and, just as under the illumination of the Spirit of God, it imparts certainty concerning the meaning of the Bible, so also it discerns the dignity and godly value of Scripture. For obvious reasons, here again, he fails to favour us with any “clearer explanation” of his theory. One thing, however, emerges clearly, viz. that the feeling of certainty regarding both the meaning and the contents is practically identical with the feeling that the writing in question is Divine; since the Spirit from on High teaches me the truth which lies in the sense of Scripture, so also it must teach me that it is Scripture; the apprehension of the sense and of the Divine character of the sacred pages is one and the same.[1430]

It is thus that Luther clothes in intangible, mystical language the vital question of religion here involved; at the Leipzig Disputation he had used terms no less elusive: Every book that really belongs to the Canon has authority and certainty “per se ipsum.”[1431] His mystical words were the outcome of deep-seated tendencies within him; Tauler’s language, which Luther had so skilfully made his own, was to assist him in concealing the obscurity and lack of logic inherent in his views.

In reality, nevertheless, like the Catholics, he accepted the Canon of Holy Scripture as handed down by antiquity; only that he granted to the subjective influence of the “testimony of the Spirit” a far-reaching and destructive force. He arbitrarily struck out of the Canon quite a number of authentic writings,[1432] which will be enumerated elsewhere[1433] together with his statements concerning them. His literary opponents had a right to represent to him that so “strange and arbitrary”[1434] a proceeding was merely a result of his theory that the sacred books must prove their character and value to each man individually. At any rate, his attitude towards the Bible cannot be regarded as at all logical.[1435]

Inward Assurance and Disagreements Without.

The second consequence of Luther’s biblical subjectivism which we have to consider lies outside him. It is the disconcerting divergence in interpretation which was the immediate result of his doctrine of “inward experience,” to correct which he had recourse to some curious remedies.

First of all we may append some further quotations from his writings to those already adduced. The significance of this remarkable side of the psychology of his doctrine is often not fully appreciated, because it seems scarcely believable that Luther should have ventured so far into the airy region of idealism. And yet, on the other hand, we have here the principal reason for describing the new doctrine as something interior, and as one doing better justice to our feelings and personality, which was Luther’s own claim and, after him, that of Protestants generally. The difficulty, however, is that almost every sentence of Luther’s regarding the part played by “inward assurance” in respect of the Bible, raises the question how that oneness of interpretation which he ever presupposes, is to escape shipwreck, even in the case of essential doctrines.

As early as Jan. 18, 1518, in his advice to Spalatin on the reading of Scripture, Luther had appealed to the mystic “influence,” telling him to distrust himself and to rely solely on the “influxus Spiritus”; this appeal he supports on his own inward experience.[1436] In this case his experience, however, mainly concerned the confirmation of his chief doctrine; for it was under an inspiration from on High that he had begun to feel his way to the new Evangel of Justification (see vol. iii., p. 110 ff.). But what was to be done when others, too, laid claim to a similar experience and inspiration?

At a later date he described to his friends how he had learnt to understand Scripture “in maximis agonibus et tentationibus”; it was thus he had found in the Bible the Divinity of Christ and the articles on the Trinity; even now he was more certain of these truths by experience than by faith.[1437] Even the absolute predestination of the damned to hell, the entire absence of free-will for doing what is good and other extravagant opinions questioned even by his own followers, he declares he had learned directly from the Bible. In 1534 he places Scripture side by side with inward experience (or the Spirit), as the warrant—even in the case of others—for all knowledge of things Divine.

This he likewise applies to the Apostles’ Creed.[1438] In 1537 he said in a sermon at Schmalkalden, “not only did all this [what is professed in the Creed] take place as we read in the Word of the Gospel, but the Holy Ghost also writes it inwardly in our heart.”[1439] He accepts the teaching of the Apostles’ Creed because he has convinced himself that it is based on Holy Writ.[1440] But how if others are not thus convinced? Were they too to be fastened to the dogma?

R. Seeberg gives a good account of Luther’s views on the character of the dogmas of the ancient Church.[1441] “He treats the symbols of the ancient Church with great respect, particularly the Apostles’ Creed which contains all the chief articles of faith.[1442] But this does not mean that he believes in each creed or Council as such.” “In his work ‘Von den Conciliis’ with masterly historical criticism [?] he denies all binding authority even to the ancient Councils”; even the Council of the Apostles passed resolutions which were afterwards rescinded, and so did the Nicene Council. “Dogma is true,” so runs Luther’s teaching as given by Seeberg, “only so far as it agrees with Scripture; in itself it is of no authority. But the truth of Scripture is one that is attested interiorly. Hence we can say that the Holy Ghost produces in us the assurance of the true doctrine [of the Apostles’ Creed].”[1443]—The page-heading where these words occur runs: “Luther’s independence of dogma.”

A highly important statement on the interior instruction that goes on when we read Scripture is contained in Luther’s quite early work “De Captivitate Babylonica” (1520): The soul, he says there, referring to a misunderstood passage of St. Augustine’s on a well-known fact in the natural order, is so affected by the truth, that, thanks to it, it is able to judge rightly and surely of all things; it is forced to confess with unfailing certitude that this is the truth, just as reason affirms with unfailing certitude that three and seven make ten; the same is the case with all real Christians and their spiritual sense which, according to 1 Cor. ii. 15, judges all things and is judged of no man.[1444]—The last words of the Apostle refer, however, to the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, bestowed for a while by God on some few Christians in the early days of the Church, and cannot apply to the ordinary conditions of later times.

Luther simply ignores the objection, that, if every man is judge, unutterable discord must ensue. The way in which he contrived so long to conceal this from himself is psychologically remarkable. For instance, in one of the principal passages where this objection should have been faced, viz. in his work against King Henry VIII, he glosses over the difficulty with the assertion that, even under the Pope, there was also no unity of doctrine; he then consoles himself with the words of Christ (John vi.), that all true Christians “shall be taught of God” and that every one that hath heard the Father cometh to the Saviour; the Spirit of God makes all to be one and effects an “idem docere, idem confiteri, idem sequi.”—We can only wonder at the idealism that could expect such results in a world inhabited by human beings.—In the end, however, since this was scarcely to be looked for, “external unity would be sufficiently safeguarded by the one Baptism and one Supper,” whereby all “testify to the oneness of their faith and spirit.”[1445] At any rate, he is confident that the true explanation (viz. his own) of the truths of salvation will gain the upper hand. For the Church cannot perish.

In point of fact Luther really fancies himself justified in appealing to this entirely new meaning put by him on the promise to the Church that she shall never perish; she is indestructible because true believers will always be there to maintain Luther’s interpretation of revelation and of the imputed righteousness of Christ, and because any general falling away from the truth is not to be thought of. Even though very many, indeed the greater number, deny the true Scripture teaching, still, many others remain, as, of yore, the seven thousand when Israel fell away from God. According to him even these may be held captive all their life in some error concerning the faith and reach the right road and faith in the grace of Christ only on their death-bed, according to the promise in John x. 28.[1446] In view of the darkness prevalent in former ages this appears to him to suffice in order to enable us to say that the Church has not really perished,[1447] and to save the cause of private enlightenment on the Bible. For this must stand fast, viz. that the Spirit of God most surely bears witness to the contents of the Divine Word in the hearts of the hearers and readers. “Luther,” says a Protestant exponent of his theology, “laid this down time after time.” “His statements on this subject cannot fail, however, to raise certain questions in our minds.”[1448]

They gave rise to questions in his own day, and to something more than mere questions. The bitter theological dissensions already hinted at were the result. The inevitable divergency in the interpretation of the Bible was seen everywhere, and a hundred different opinions, some based on the inward assurance given by the “Spirit of God,” some on the reflections of reason, took the field. We know to what an extent Luther had to suffer from the discord born of his principle, not merely from such comparatively unimportant persons as Jacob Schenk[1449] and his “disgracefully arrogant” colleague, Johann Agricola, not merely from the fanatics and Anabaptists who found in the Bible a different teaching on Baptism, divine worship and morality, or from the Zwinglians with their divergent biblical interpretation of the Eucharist, but even, so to speak, in his own family, from Melanchthon, who was rash enough to incline to the Swiss reformed doctrines and to fight shy of the stricter Lutheranism. “The presumption,” Luther declares, strangely enough, “is really unbearable, that people should rise up against the authority of the Church,” despise the teaching of the best and ablest, and only worship their own views in Holy Scripture. “The name of the Church should be held in high honour.”[1450] He forbore, however, to specify which Church he meant, and moreover he had set himself above every Church. “All other forms of arrogance,” he declares, “can be endured and allow of improvement, as in the healing art, in philosophy, in poetry, in mechanics and in the case of the young.... But that shocking ‘arrogantia theologiÆ’ is the source of all evil, and a consuming fire.”[1451]

So little did he succeed in repressing “theological arrogance,” but rather, by his action, threw open the doors to it, that in 1525 he was forced to lament:[1452] “There are as many sects and beliefs as there are heads. This fellow will have nothing to do with baptism, another denies the Sacrament, a third believes that there is another world between this and the Last Day. Some teach that Christ is not God, some say this, some that.... There is now no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it must be the whisper of the Holy Ghost and he himself a prophet.... There is no one who does not wish to be cleverer than Luther; they all want to try their steel on me.... They speak like madmen; I have during the year to listen to many such wretched folk. In no other way can the devil come so close to me, that I must admit. Formerly the world was full of noisy, disembodied spirits giving themselves out to be the souls of men; now it is full of uproarious spirits with bodies, who all declare that they are real angels.”[1453]

He has this crumb of comfort: The world is the devil’s playground; and uproars there must be.[1454]

“This is all due,” he says finally, truly and aptly, “to their bringing their conceit with them to the study of Scripture, which has to submit to being judged, moulded and led by their head and reason,”[1455]—surely a bitter punishment for throwing over the divinely appointed authority of the Church, which decides on the sense of the Bible.

“By thus making individual experience the test,” remarks a Protestant theologian, “the door seemed opened wide to neverending dissension.... Luther did not succeed in carrying his theory to its right conclusion. Indeed we even find him formulating thoughts which seem to tend back to the old, mechanical authority of Scripture.” According to this writer, Luther’s conception of Scripture presented certain “imperfections” which, “even in principle, were practically at variance with it; these, however, disappeared as the fanatic movement taught Luther their disastrous effects.” The same writer asks finally: “But was it really a question merely of ‘imperfections’ which did not endanger the very essence of his views?”[1456]

“What did Luther set up, instead of tradition, as a principle of interpretation?” another Protestant theologian recently queried. He answers: “In theory, that Scripture interprets itself; in practice however, as it doesn’t, his own theology.”[1457]

Remedies against Disagreement. The Outward Word.

Since the harmony of the “Spirit,” which Luther had so confidently looked for, failed to show itself in people’s minds and not a glimmer of hope of any future agreement was visible, he found it necessary to insist far more strongly than heretofore on the outward Word;[1458] this was to check unwelcome inward revelations, to put everything in order and to be a bulwark against unusual views. “Now that the Apostles have preached the Word,” so runs one of his most interesting pronouncements on this subject,[1459] “and left us their writings, so that there is nothing more to reveal than what they have written, there is no need of any special new revelation, or miracles. This we know from the writings of the Apostles.” It would be a different matter if all were filled with the Holy Ghost and His gifts; “were this so it would be an easy thing to preach and to govern and all would go on quite smoothly and well, as indeed it ought. But unfortunately this is not the case, and those who have the Holy Ghost and a right understanding are not so common,” but “there are plenty who fancy they have mastered Scripture and have the Holy Ghost without measure.” These want to be thought “far more deeply and profoundly initiated” than Luther himself, and “much more learned than we are.” This he is not unwilling to allow, but on one thing he must insist, viz. on the “Word!” “This old and tried doctrine of the Apostles” he has “again brought to light,” having found “all this darkened by the Pope and his human teaching”; “by the Grace of God we have brought it to light once more”; “it is the very same as the Apostles first taught. But it has not been brought to light again without a revelation of the Holy Ghost.... He had to illumine our minds that Holy Scripture might be rightly viewed and understood”; hence “no other word or revelation is to be expected” “contrary to this doctrine, even were an angel from heaven visibly to bring” a new doctrine. Everyone can see “that God is tempting the people, particularly in these latter days of which it is said, that the devil shall rule mightily over Christendom by means of Antichrist.”—Here, consequently, his teaching is put on a level with the “outward Word.”

The outward Word, according to other passages where Luther is rather more reticent concerning the “revelation” he had received, was that plain and unassailable Bible teaching on which all “Spirits” must agree without any danger of divergency. This Word he now identifies with preaching. Preaching, however, is part of the office, and both office and preaching were controlled by Luther; indeed the office had been instituted chiefly by him and his sovereign. Hence, in effect, the outward Word is still Luther’s word.

“Faith,” we read of the outward Word, seemingly contradicting the freedom Luther had formerly proclaimed, “comes of hearing, i.e. from preaching, or from the outward Word. This is the order established by God and He will not derogate from it. Hence contempt for the outward Word and for Scripture is rank blasphemy, which the secular authorities are bound to punish, according to the second Commandment which enjoins the punishment of blasphemy.” This occurs in the booklet officially circulated in 1536 among the pastors of the Saxon Electorate.[1460] A Protestant researcher who has recently made a special study of the “Inquisition” in the Saxon Electorate has the following remark concerning this statement, which is by no means without a parallel in Luther’s works: “Thus even contempt for Scripture—here meaning contempt for Luther’s interpretation of the Bible text—was already regarded as ‘rank blasphemy’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish. To such a pass had Evangelical freedom already come.”[1461]

In order to uphold his own reading of the Bible against others which differed from his, Luther incidentally appealed with the utmost vigour, as the above examples show, to the Church, to tradition and to the Fathers, whose authority he had nevertheless solemnly renounced.

This was the case especially in the controversies on the Zwinglian doctrine of the Supper. In defending the Real Presence and the literal sense of the words of consecration, Luther was in the right. He could not resist the temptation to adduce the convincing testimony of tradition, the voice of the “Church” from the earliest ages, which spoke so loudly in defence of the truth. It was then that he wrote the oft-quoted words to Albert of Brandenburg, in order to retain him on his side and to preserve him from Zwinglian contamination: “That Christ is present in the Sacrament is proved by the books and writings, both Greek and Latin, of the dear Fathers, also by the daily usage and our experience till this very hour; which testimony of all the holy Christian Churches, even had we no other, should suffice to make us remain by this article.”[1462] It is true that elsewhere we find him saying of the tradition of the Fathers: “When the Word of God comes down to us through the Fathers it seems to me like milk strained through a coal-sack, when the milk must needs be black and nasty.” This meant, he says, “that the Word of God was in itself pure and true, bright and clear, but by the teaching of the Fathers, by their books and their writings, it was much darkened and corrupted.”[1463] “And even if the Fathers agreed with you,” he says elsewhere, “that is not enough. I want Holy Writ, because I too am fighting you in writing.”[1464]

In his controversy with Zwingli, Luther even came to plead the cause of the Catholic principle of authority. In his tract of 1527, “Das diese Wort Christi, ‘Das ist mein Leib’ noch fest stehen,” he declared that Zwingli’s interpretation of the Bible had already given rise to “many opinions, many factions and much dissension.” Such arbitrary exegesis neither can nor may go any further. “And if the world is to last much longer, we shall on account of such dissensions again be obliged, like the ancients, to seek for human contrivances and to set up new laws and ordinances in order to preserve the people in the unity of the faith. This will succeed as it succeeded before. In fine, the devil is too clever and powerful for us. He hinders us and stops the way everywhere. If we wish to study Scripture he raises up so much strife and dissension that we tire of it.... He is, and is called, Satan, i.e. an adversary.” He here attributes to the devil the defects of his own Scriptural system, and puts away as something wrong even the very thought that it contained faults, another trait to his psychological picture: “The devil is a conjurer.” “Unless God assists us, our work and counsel is of no avail. We may think of it as we like, he still remains the Prince of this world. Whoever does not believe this, let him simply try and see. Of this I have experienced something. But let no one believe me until he has himself experienced it.”[1465] There is no doubt, that, in 1527, Luther did have to go through some severe struggles of conscience.

The Swiss held fast to “Scripture” and to their own “Spirit.”

H. Bullinger, the leader of the Zwinglians, proved more logical than Luther in his interpretation of the new principle of Scripture. In his book on the difference between the Evangelical and Roman doctrines (ZÜrich, 1551) he deliberately rejected quite a number of traditional, Catholic practices which Luther had spared; for instance, the use of religious pictures in the churches, ceremonies, the liturgical chants, confession, etc. With this same weapon he attacked not only Catholicism, but also Luther’s doctrine of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament and the whole Church system as introduced by the Wittenbergers.

Luther, for his part, in order to retain the Bible on his side, used a very arbitrary method of Scripture interpretation both against the Swiss theologians and against Catholicism and its defenders. In many cases it was only his peculiar exegesis (to be considered below, xxviii., 2) that furnished him with the Scriptural arguments he needed.

Thus, in his attitude towards Scripture, the Wittenberg Professor wavers between tradition, to which he frequently appeals almost against his will, and that principle of independent study of the Bible under enlightenment from on high, which is ever obtruding itself on him. The latter principle he never denied, in spite of his sad experiences with the doctrine that everyone who is taught by the Holy Ghost can draw from Scripture his own belief, and, according to St. Paul, with the help of this light, test the teaching and opinions of all.[1466] Yet—strange as it may seem on the part of an assailant of authority—the last word on matters of faith belongs, according to him, to authority. This is his opinion for practical reasons, because not everyone can be expected, and but few are able, to undertake the task of finding their belief for themselves in the Bible. Moreover, what one may possibly have learnt from Scripture at the cost of toil and with the help of inspiration, cannot so readily become the common property of all. On the other hand, according to Luther, the “exterius iudicium” which is supported by the “externa claritas” of Scripture, as interpreted by himself and proclaimed with authority by the preachers, was intended for all.[1467]

The Way of Settling Doubts Concerning Faith. Assurance of Salvation and Belief in Dogma.

When we come to examine Luther’s teaching on the nature of the faith which is based on the Bible and to enquire how doubts regarding this Bible teaching were to be quieted, we are again faced by the utmost waywardness.

He thus leaves the anxious man “to himself” at the most awful of moments; elsewhere, too, he does the same. When he invites every man to “taste the Word of God” betimes and to “feel” how directly “the Master speaks within his heart,” this is merely a roundabout way of repeating the comfortless warning that “each one must fight for himself.” In other words, what he means is: I have no sure warrant to give in the stead of the Church’s authority; you must find out for yourself whether you have received the true Word of Christ by consulting your own feelings.

In addition to this, in the opinion of many Protestant theologians, the faith to be derived from the Bible which everyone must necessarily arrive at was very much circumscribed by Luther. “Man’s attitude towards Christ and His saving Grace” loomed so large with him, that it “decided the question whether a man was, or was not, a believer.” If, in the Protestantism of to-day, Luther’s “idea of faith” is frequently taken rather narrowly, it must be admitted that in many of his statements and demands he himself goes even further. We have here to do with that “two-sidedness in his attitude towards Scripture,” which “is apparent at every period of his life.”[1471] If we keep to the earlier and more “liberal” side of his “Evangelical conception of faith,” then indeed the trusting and confident assumption of such a relationship with Christ would certainly be “decisive in the question whether a man was a believer or not, and Luther himself frequently used this criterion, for instance, when he answers as follows the question: Who is a member of the Church and whom must one regard as a dear brother in Christ: ‘All who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us by His death and to obtain grace for us’; or again elsewhere: ‘All those who cling to Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or, yet again: All those ‘who seek the Lord with all their heart and soul, and trust only in God’s mercy.’[1472] In such utterances we have the purely religious conception of Evangelical faith clearly summarised.” (Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 13.)

Agreeably with this conception of faith, some Protestants have contended that Luther should have been much more broad-minded with regard to doubts and to doctrines which differed from his own; his opposition to other views, notably to those of the Zwinglians, brought him, however, to another conception of faith, to one more closely related to the Catholic theory. According to Catholic doctrine, faith is a firm assent to all that God has revealed and the Church proposes for belief. It is made up of many articles, not one of which can be set aside without injury to the whole. Luther, so we are told, “owing to his controversy with Zwingli, ran the risk of exchanging his conception of faith for this one [the Catholic one], according to which faith is the acceptance of a whole series of articles of faith.”

In reality he did not merely “run the risk” of reaching such a doctrine; he had, all along, even in earlier days, been moving on these same lines, albeit in contradiction with himself. It was in fact nothing altogether new when he wrote in the Articles of Schwabach: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful in Christ, who believe, hold and teach the above Articles.”[1473] The faith for which he wishes to stand always comprised the contents of the oldest Creeds, and he prefers to close his eyes to the fact that they were really undermined by his other propositions. By these articles he is determined to abide. Hence it is hardly fair to appeal to him in favour of their abrogation, and any such appeal would only serve to emphasise his self-contradiction. Luther himself, when dealing with opponents, frequently speaks of the breaking of a single link as being sufficient to make the whole chain fall apart. “All or nothing” was his cry, viz. the very same as Catholics had used against his own innovations. In short, in his “two-sidedness,” he, quite generally, seeks a sure foothold against difficulties from within and from without in the principle of authority in its widest meaning, and, when trying to safeguard the Apostles’ Creed and the “oecumenical symbols,” he appeals expressly to the Catholic past. He says that by thus vindicating the Apostles’ Creed and that of NicÆa he wished to show that he “was true to the rightful, Christian Church, which had retained them till that day.”[1474] The Fathers preserved them and, as in the case of the Athanasian Creed, supplemented and enlarged the traditional formulas, the better to counter heretics; Luther is even willing to accept new terms not found in Scripture, but coined by the Church, such as “peccatum originale” or “consubstantialis” ????s???,[1475] since they might profitably be employed against false teachers.

Protestant Objections to Luther’s so-called “Formal Principle.”

“It is not for us to tone down or conceal the contradictions which present themselves,” writes a Protestant theologian who has made Luther’s attitude towards Scripture the subject of particular study. “... Even judged by the standard of his own day Luther does not display that uniformity which we are entitled to expect.... The psychological motives in particular are very involved and spring from different sources. The very fact that throughout his life he exhibited a certain obstinacy and violence towards both himself and others, must render doubtful any attempt to trace everything back to a single source. Obstinacy always points to contradictions.” This author goes so far as to say: “We might almost give vent to the paradox, that only in these contradictions is uniformity apparent; such a proposition would, however, hold good only before the court of psychology.” “To-day it is not possible to embrace Luther’s view in its entirety.”[1476]

In an historical account of Luther’s teaching (and it is in this that most Protestant scholars are interested) we must, as we advance, ever keep in view Luther’s whole individuality with all its warring elements. The difficulty thus presented to our becoming better acquainted with his views is, however, apparent from the words already quoted from one of Luther’s biographers concerning Luther’s wealth of ideas, which also, to some extent, apply even to his statements on dogma: “Every word Luther utters plays in a hundred lights and every eye meets with a different radiance which it would gladly fix.”[1477]

In spite of the difficulties arising from this character of the Wittenberg Doctor, early orthodox Lutheranism taught that he had set up the “sola scriptura” as the “formal principle” of the new doctrine. According to eminent authorities in modern Protestantism, however, this formal principle was stillborn; it was never capable in practice of supporting an edifice of doctrine, still less of forming a community of believers. Hence the tendency has been to make it subservient to the “Evangelical” understanding of the Bible.

2. Luther as a Bible-Expositor

“Luther in his quality of Bible-expositor is one of the most extraordinary and puzzling figures in the domain of religious psychology.”[1494]

Some Characteristics of Luther’s Exegesis.

It is true that some of Luther’s principles of exegesis are excellent, and that he has a better perception than many of his predecessors of the need of first ascertaining the literal sense, and, for this purpose, of studying languages. He is aware that the fourfold sense of Holy Scripture, so often wrongly appealed to, must retire before the literal meaning, and that we must ever seek what the sacred writer really and obviously meant, in whatever dress we find his ideas clothed. Some quite excellent observations occur in his works on the danger of having recourse to allegorical interpretations and of not taking the text literally.

Luther himself, it is true, in his earlier postils, frequently makes use of the allegory so dear to mediÆval writers, often investing what he says in poetic and fantastic forms. Later on, however, he grew more cautious. Here again the abuse of allegory by the fanatics had its effect. In addition to this his constant efforts to prove his doctrine against theological gainsayers within and without his camp, forced him in his arguments to use the literal sense of the Bible, or at least what he considered such. The advantages of his German translation of the Bible will be spoken of elsewhere (see vol. v., xxxiv., 3).

Yet he lacked one thing essentially required of an expositor, viz. theological impartiality, nor was he fair to those means by which the Church’s interpreters were guided in determining the sense of Scripture.

Concerning the latter, it is enough to remember how lightheartedly he threw overboard the interpretation of the whole of the Christian past. His wantonness, which led him to esteem as of no account all the expositions and teachings of previous ages, deprived his exegesis of much help and also of any stable foundation. Even considered from the merely natural standpoint, real progress in religious knowledge must surely be made quietly and without any sudden break with what has already been won by the best minds by dint of diligent labour.

The rock on which Luther suffered shipwreck was however above all his complete lack of impartiality. In his work as expositor his concern was not to do homage to the truth in whatever shape he might encounter it in the texts he was interpreting, but to introduce into the texts his own ideas. Bearing in mind his controversy and his natural temperament, this cannot, however, surprise us. Hence it is not necessary to take too tragically the tricks he occasionally plays with Bible texts. Some of these have been most painstakingly examined,[1495] and, indeed, it was not without its advantages to have the general complaints raised thus verified in individual instances. Thanks to his investigations DÖllinger was able to write: “False interpretations of the most obvious and arbitrary kind are quite the usual thing in his polemics. It would hardly be possible to carry this further than he did in his writings against Erasmus in the instances quoted even by Planck. Indeed, examples of utter wilfulness and violence to the text can be adduced in great number from his writings.” Most frequently, as DÖllinger points out, “his interpretation is false, because he foists his own peculiar ideas on the biblical passages, ideas which on his own admission he reached not by a calm and dispassionate study of the Bible, but under conditions of painful mental disturbance and anxiety of conscience.” To this he was urged by the unrest certain Bible-sayings excited in him; in such cases, as DÖllinger remarks, he knew how “to pacify his exegetical conscience by telling himself, that all this disquiet was merely a temptation of the devil, who wanted to puzzle him with passages from Scripture and thus drive him to despair.”[1496]

The whole of his exegesis is pervaded by his doctrine of Justification. In this sense he says in the preface to Galatians, the largest of his exegetico-dogmatic works: “Within me this one article of faith in Christ reigns supreme. Day and night all my ideas on theology spring from it and return thereto.”[1497]

Thus, in all questions of exegesis the “preaching of Christ” is conclusive. We must, first of all, see whether each book commonly reckoned to form part of the Bible really “preaches Christ,” and, where this is so, the same thoughts will control everything else.[1505]

In the question of the relation of faith to the interpretation of Scripture, Luther hobbles strangely. On the one hand the Bible is to be interpreted strictly according to faith, on the other, faith is to be won solely from the Bible. The former proposition he thus explains in a sermon: It is a command that the interpretation of Scripture must “rhyme with faith and not teach anything contrary to or differing from what faith teaches.” True faith, however, is that which is directed against the power of works, so that any interpretation of the Bible which contradicts this is wrong. Whatever teaches us “to have a good conscience towards God, except by faith alone and without any works, neither resembles nor rhymes with faith.”[1506] Of the content of faith we are assured above all by inward experience and the Spirit. It is indeed on the “feeling and sentiment” that, in the case of faith, i.e. the acceptance of the Gospel message of salvation, Luther lays the chief stress.[1507] “If you feel it not, you have not the faith, the Word merely rings in your ears and hovers on your lips like foam on water.”[1508]

Luther is just as determined in proving faith from Scripture as he is in making Scripture subservient to and dependent on faith. “Without Scripture faith soon goes,” he exclaims after labouring to bring forward arguments from the Bible in support of the new faith in Christ.[1509] “Whatever is advanced without being attested by Scripture or a revelation need not be believed.”[1510] “To this wine no water must be added”;[1511] to this sun no lantern must be held up![1512] “You must take your stand on a plain, clear and strong word of Scripture, which will then be your support.”[1513]

The worst of it is, as O. Scheel aptly remarks, that Luther pits his Christ against Scripture and thus makes the latter void.[1514]

On the one hand, according to Adolf Harnack, Luther, when making faith the rule of Bible interpretation, becomes a “mediÆval exegete” and borrows from the past even his types and allegories. Yet he cuts himself adrift in the most decided fashion from the mediÆval exegesis, “not merely when it is a question of Justification,” but even “in regard to such Scripture passages as contain nothing whatever about the doctrine of Justification and faith, or only alien matter.”[1515]

For instance, he finds righteousness by works condemned and faith exalted in the very first pages of the Bible; for Cain, his brother’s murderer, “clung to works and lost the faith,” that was his misfortune; whereas Abel held aloof “from free-will and the merit of works” and “kept the faith in a pure conscience.” “The same thing happened later with Isaac and Ismael, Jacob and Esau, and others.”—Yet, in spite of such condemnation of works, many passages, particularly in the New Testament, seem to tell in favour of works. This, however, is only due to the fact that at the time of the New Testament writers it was desirable to raise up a bulwark against any too great esteem for faith. Thus it was really not meant quite seriously; in the same way even he himself, so he says, had been obliged to oppose this excessive esteem for faith, because, in his day, and owing to his preaching, the people “wanted merely to believe, to the neglect of the power and fruit of faith” (in good actions).[1516]

Owing to his habit of ever reading the Bible through the glass of his doctrine of Justification, his handling of Rom. xi. 32 (in the Vulgate: “Conclusit Deus omnia in incredulitate ut omnium misereatur”) was such that DÖllinger found in it no less than “three falsifications of the words of Paul.”[1517]

Luther’s marginal glosses to his translation of the Bible are open to plentiful objections, for their purpose is to recall the reader as often as possible to the basic theories of his doctrine.[1518]

Some Protestants have been exceedingly frank in characterising the strained relations often noticeable between Luther’s exegesis and true scholarship.

Luther’s Exegesis in the Light of His Early Development.

With the help of the newly published Commentary on Romans, written by Luther in his youth (vol. i., p. 184 ff.), we can trace the beginnings of his curious exegesis more easily than was possible before.

What we want first of all is a key to that more than human confidence which prompts the new teacher to blend in one his own interpretation and the actual text of the Bible and to say, “My word is the truth.” This key is to be found in his early history. It was then, in those youthful days when he began morbidly to brood over the mysteries of the Epistle to the Romans, all unable to grasp the profound thoughts it contained, that the phenomenon in question made its first appearance.

We must call to mind that the young and ardent University professor, though deficient in humility and in the capacity to assimilate the sublime teachings of the Epistle to the Romans, stood all the more under the spell of two misleading ideas which had long dominated him, viz. on the one hand, the supposed depth and transforming power of the knowledge of Scripture he had already acquired and, on the other, the need of assailing the self-righteous and hypocritical Little Saints and all excessive esteem for good works. In the latter respect the passages in Romans on works, faith and merit—of which he failed to see the real meaning—became dangerous rocks on which Luther’s earlier religious convictions suffered hopeless shipwreck. So greatly was he attracted and, as it were, fascinated by the light that seemed to him to stream in on his soul from this Epistle, that he came to see the same thing everywhere. Its suggestive power over him was all the greater because in his then pseudo-mystical train of thought he was fond of comparing himself to the Apostle and of fancying, that, as in that case so in his, inner self-annihilation would lead to his receiving similar favours from God. This self-annihilation in Luther’s case was, however, a morbid one.

Luther, in his younger days, had also been grievously tormented with thoughts on predestination. He now fancied, according to what he supposed was Paul’s teaching, that to abandon oneself in the hands of God, without will, strength or wish, was the sole means by which he and all other men could find tranquillity. Thus, on the strength of misunderstood inward experiences, he hailed the Epistle to the Romans and, a little later, the Epistle to the Galatians, as the only guide along the strange paths of his future exegesis.

His supposed “experiences of God” became the ruling power by which, thanks to an exegesis entirely new, he was to bring salvation to the whole of mankind.

Hitherto, in spite of all his diligence in the study of the Bible, any idea of upholding his own new interpretation against the existing doctrines of the Church had been altogether foreign to him. In his first manuscript notes and in the Commentary on the Psalms which has only recently come to light, likewise in his earlier sermons, he still looks at everything from the Catholic standpoint; the Church’s authority is still the appointed guardian and interpreter of Holy Scripture. There the Bible is to him unquestionably the divinely inspired book and the true Word of God, though it is, not the individual’s, but the Church’s duty to draw from its inexhaustible treasures arguments in her own defence and in refutation of the teaching of the heretics. To the teaching of Scripture and to the infallible interpretation of the Church based on the tradition of the Fathers, everyone, so he then held, must submit as Christ Himself had ordained.

Even then, however, he was already convinced that he had received an extraordinary call to deal with Holy Scripture. The very admiration of his fellow-monks for his familiarity with his red leather copy of the Bible, fostered the self-love of the youthful student of the Scriptures. This Staupitz increased by his incautious reference to the future “great Doctor,” and by his general treatment of Luther. The written Word of God in which the wide-awake and quick-witted monk felt himself at home more than any of his fellows quite evidently became so much his own peculiar domain, that, in his opinion, Bible scholarship was the only worthy form of theological learning and ruled every branch of Divine knowledge. He even went further, attributing all the corruption in the Church to “neglect of the Word,” i.e. to ignorance of and want of compliance with the Bible Word. On the strength of his accounted profounder knowledge of the “Word,” he also reproves the “holy-by-works.” Even previous to the lectures on Romans, his conviction of the antithesis between human works and Christ’s grace made him read everywhere Christ into Scripture; the Bible, so he says, must be taken to the well-spring, i.e. to the Cross of Christ, having done which we may then be “quite certain to catch” its true meaning. Before Luther’s day others in the Church had done the same, though within lawful limits. Among contemporary Humanists even Erasmus had insisted on Christ’s being made the centre of Scripture.[1521]

Widely as Luther, in his Commentary on Romans, already diverges from the Church’s interpretation of St. Paul regarding the doctrine of Justification, yet he still admits, at least in theory, the principle of authority both in the interpretation of the Bible and in general.[1522] He rejects without compunction all those heresies which deviate from the Church’s guidance. In practice, however, he sets himself above the teaching of the Fathers where-ever this runs counter to his views; St. Augustine is forced to witness in his favour even at the expense of the other representatives of tradition, and, as for mediÆval scholasticism, it is treated as though it were not at all one of the links in the venerable chain of tradition. On the other hand, Luther allows his exegesis to be influenced by those later and less reputable exponents of scholasticism with whom alone he was acquainted.

On such lines as these did his exegesis of the Bible proceed; on the one hand there was his excessive regard for his own acquaintance with Scripture, and, on the other, his pseudo-mysticism leaning for its support on misunderstood interior revelations and illuminations. A certain sense of his vocation as the Columbus of the Bible ever accompanies him from that time forward.

This psychological condition manifests itself in utterances contained in the lectures on Romans and in later works.

“Here,” so he writes in the lectures, “a great stride has been made towards the right interpretation of Holy Scripture, by understanding it all as bearing on Christ ... even when the surface-sense of the letter does not require it.”[1523] “All Scripture deals everywhere with Christ alone.”[1524] “All this is said, written or done that human presumption may be humbled and the grace of God exalted.”[1525] He is ever reading his own thoughts into the oftentimes obscure words of St. Paul, though, that he is so doing is evident neither to his hearers nor to himself. That same eloquence and wealth of imagery are to be found here which are to characterise his later expositions. “Quite unmistakably his language, thought and imagery throughout the work is that of the mystic,” remarks the editor of the Commentary. “How much Tauler—whom Luther extols so highly, even when as yet he was so little acquainted with him—has taken possession of Luther’s mind and influences his language, would be clear from the Commentary on Romans, even were Tauler’s name not mentioned in it.”[1526]

With the mental attitude assumed quite early in his career the scant regard for Humanism and philosophy he evinces in this Commentary well agrees; further, his use of the Bible as a whip with which to lash unsparingly the abuses rampant in the Church, another peculiarity which was to remain in his treatment of Scripture. The better to appreciate his first attempts at exegesis we may recall, that, even then, he was concerned for the text and its purity, and that, no sooner was Erasmus’s Greek edition of the New Testament published, than Luther, who had now reached chapter ix. of the Epistle, began to use it for his lectures.[1527]

That Luther’s first attempts in the exegetical field were so successful was in great part due to his personal gifts, to his eloquence and to his frankness. Oldecop, a pupil of his, who remained true to the Church, wrote as an old man, that, being as he was then twenty-two years of age, he “had taken pleasure in attending Martin’s lectures.”[1528] The lectures on Romans commenced immediately after Oldecop’s matriculation. Christopher Scheurl, the Humanist Professor of Law, reckoned the new exegete among the best of the Wittenberg theologians and said: “Martin Luther, the Augustinian, expounds St. Paul’s Epistles with marvellous talent.”[1529]

In the matter of private interpretation as against the Church’s, in these earliest exegetical efforts, he remained, outwardly at least, true to the traditional standpoint, until, little by little, he forsook it, as already described (above, p. 387 ff.). Even his academic Theses of Sept., 1517 (“Against the Theology of the Schools”), based though they were on a misapprehension of Scripture, conclude with the assurance, that, “throughout, he neither intended nor had said anything contrary to the Church or at variance with her doctrines.”[1530]—Then, however, with startling suddenness the change set in.

When, after the storm aroused by the publication of the Indulgence Theses, he wrote his German “Sermon von dem Ablass und Gnade,”[1531] he appealed in it repeatedly to the Bible as against the “new teachers,” i.e. the Schoolmen, and indeed in as confident a manner as though he alone were learned in Scripture. He says on the first page: “This I say: That it cannot be proved from any Scripture, etc. Much should I like to hear anyone who can testify to the contrary in spite of the fact that some doctors have thought so.” And at the end he sums up as follows: “On these points I have no doubt, and they have sufficient warrant in Scripture. Therefore you too should have no doubt and send the Scholastic doctors about their business!” Shortly before this, in a letter about the Scholastic theologians of his day, particularly those of Leipzig, he declares: “I could almost swear that they understand not a single chapter of the Gospel or Bible.”[1532] He was, however, greatly cheered to hear that, thanks to his new interpretation of the Bible, prelates, as well as the burghers of Wittenberg, were all saying “that formerly they had neither known nor heard anything of Christ or of His Gospel.”[1533]

After Tetzel had attacked his Sermon and accused Luther of falsifying the sacred text, and of cherishing heretical opinions, the latter indited his “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons Bepstlichen Ablass und Gnad belangend,” where he emphasises even more strongly and pathetically the supremacy of Holy Scripture over all outward authority: “Even though all these and a thousand others of the holiest of doctors had held this or that, yet their opinion is of no account compared with a single verse of Holy Writ.... They are not in the least to be believed, because the Scripture says: The Word of God no one may set aside or alter.”[1534]

Carlstadt, whom Luther himself had instructed, outdid his master and advocated entire freedom for the private interpretation of Scripture before Luther could make up his mind to do this. He did not shrink from making his own the following defiant Thesis: “The text of the Bible does not take precedence merely of one or several Doctors of the Church, but even of the authority of the whole Church.”[1535] It was only after Luther, thanks to his obstinacy and curious methods of reasoning, had extricated himself from his examination at Augsburg, and fled, that he admitted in the statements already given (p. 388) that the word of Scripture was to be set in the first place, and, that, in its interpretation, no account need be made of ecclesiastical authority.[1536] This prelude to Luther’s new exegetical standpoint, more particularly towards the end, was marked by much fear, doubt and anxiety of conscience. He was worried, to such an extent that his “heart quaked for fear,” by a number of Scripture passages and still more by the question: Could the Author of Scripture hitherto have really left His work open to such dire misunderstanding?

While his powerful rhetoric, particularly when it came to polemics, was able to conceal all the failings of his exposition of the Bible, his real eloquence, his fervour and his popular ways of dealing with non-controversial things imparted to his pulpit-commentaries no less than to his written ones a freshness of tone which improved, stimulated and inspired his followers with love for Holy Scripture and also brought them Bible consolation amidst the trials of life.

3. The Sola Fides. Justification and Assurance of Salvation

The two propositions considered above, fundamental though they are, of the Bible being under the enlightenment of the Spirit the sole rule of faith, and of the untrustworthiness of ecclesiastical authority and tradition, far from having been the first elements to find their place in Luther’s scheme, were only advanced by him at a later date and in order to protect his pet dogma.

His doctrine of Justification was the outcome of his dislike for “holiness-by-works,” which led him to the theory of salvation by faith alone, through the imputation of the merits of Christ without any co-operation on man’s part, or any human works of merit. This doctrine, from the very first as well as later, was everything to him. This it was which he made it his earliest task to elaborate, and about it he then proceeded to hang the other theories into which he was forced by his conflict with the Church and her teaching, some of which were logically connected with his main article, whilst, in the case of others, the connection was only artificial. Later exponents of Lutheranism termed his doctrine of Justification the material principle of his theology, no doubt in the same sense as he himself reckons it, in a sermon of 1530 in his postils, as: “the only element, article or doctrine by which we become Christians and are called such.”

This Evangel, Luther’s consoling doctrine, as a matter of fact was simply the record of his own inner past, the most subjective doctrine assuredly that ever sought to enlist followers. As we know, it is already found entire in his Commentary on Romans of 1515-1516.

In order to strengthen, in himself first and then in others, the assurance of salvation it comprised, he amplified it by asserting the believer’s absolute certainty of salvation; this was lacking in his Commentary on Romans, though even then he was drifting towards it. It was only in 1518-1519 that he developed the doctrine of the so-called “special faith,” by which the individual assures himself of pardon and secures salvation. Thereby he transformed faith into trust, for what he termed fiducial faith partook more of the nature of a strong, artificially stimulated hope; it really amounted to an intense confidence that the merits of Christ obliterated every sin.

Of faith in this new sense he says that it is the faith. “To have the Faith is assentingly to accept the promises of God, laying hold on God’s gracious disposition towards us and trusting in it.”[1537] In spite of this he continues in the old style to define faith as the submission of reason to all the truths revealed, and even to make it the practical basis of all his religious demands: Whoever throws overboard even one single article of faith will be damned; faith being one whole, every article must be believed.[1538] We can understand how opponents within his own camp, of whom he demanded faith in the doctrines he had discovered in the Bible, when they themselves failed to find them there, ventured to remind him of his first definition of faith, viz. the fiducial, and to ask him whether a trustful appropriation of the merits of Christ did not really meet all the demands of “faith.” Recent Protestant biographers of Luther point out that Zwingli was quite justified in urging this against Luther. Attacked by Luther on account of his discordant teaching on the Lord’s Supper, and that on the score of faith, Zwingli rudely retorted: “It is a pestilential doctrine, by a perversion of the word faith which really means trust in Christ, to lower it to the level of an opinion”; with this behaviour on Luther’s part went “hand in hand a similar change in his conception of the Church founded on faith.”[1539]

Some Characteristics of the New Doctrine of Justification.

If we take Luther’s saving faith we find that, according to him, it produces justification without the help of any other work or act on man’s part, and without contrition or charity contributing anything to the appropriation of righteousness on the part of the man to be justified.

Any contrition proceeding from the love of God, or at least from that incipient love of God such as Catholicism required agreeably with both revelation and human psychology, appeared to Luther superfluous; in view of the power of man’s ingrained concupiscence it amounted almost to a contradiction; only the fear of God’s Judgments (“timor servilis”), so he declares (vol. i., p. 291), with palpable exaggeration, had ruled his own confessions made in the monastery. At any rate, he was in error when he declared that this same fear had been the motive in the case of Catholics generally. He persuaded himself that this fear must be overcome by the Evangel of the imputed merits of Christ, because otherwise man can find no peace. The part played by the law is, according to him, almost confined to threatening and reducing man to despair, just as he himself had so often verged on hopelessness through thinking of his own inevitable reprobation; the assurance of salvation by faith, however, appears to every Christian as an angel of help and consolation even minus any repudiation of sin on the part of man’s will, for, owing to the Fall, sin cannot but persist.

When he attempts to prove this by his “experiences,” we must remind the reader how uncertain his statements are, concerning his own “inward feelings” during his monastic days. It will be pointed out elsewhere (vol. vi., xxxvii.) that these “recollections,” with their polemical animus, were of comparatively late growth, though they would have been of far greater service at the outset when still quite fresh.

A more solid basis for estimating the value of his doctrine of Justification is afforded by its connection with his other theological views. As we know, he regarded original sin and the concupiscence resulting from it as actual sin, still persisting in spite of baptism; he exaggerated beyond measure man’s powerlessness to withstand the concupiscence which remains with him to the end. Owing to the unfreedom of the will, the devil, according to Luther, holds the field in man’s heart and rules over all his spiritual faculties. The Divine Omnipotence alone is able to vanquish this redoubtable master by bestowing on the unhappy soul pardon and salvation; yet sin still reigns in the depths of the heart. No act of man has any part in the work of salvation. Actual grace is no less unknown to him than sanctifying grace. Good works are of no avail for salvation and of no importance for heaven, though, accidentally, they may accompany the state of grace, God working them in the man on whom He has cast His eye by choosing him to be a recipient of faith and salvation. Such election and predestination is, however, purely God’s work which man himself can do absolutely nothing to deserve.—Thanks to these errors, the “sola fides” and assurance of salvation stand bereft of their theological support.

We must, however, revert to one point again and examine it more closely on account of its historical and psychological importance. This is Luther’s doctrine of the slavery of the will, and of God’s being the sole agent in man.

From such a standpoint all that was possible was a mere outward imputation of the merits of Christ, no Justification in the sense in which it was taken by the ancient Church, viz. as a supernatural regeneration by means of sanctifying grace.

Any reliable proofs, theological or biblical, in support of this altogether novel view of Justification will be sought for in vain in the works of Melanchthon and Luther. When Luther speaks of the power of faith in the merits of Christ and of the promises of faith concerning eternal life, as he does, for instance, in the written defence which he handed to Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, his words and the Bible passages he quotes merely express what the Church had always taught concerning the necessity and efficacy of faith as the condition of the supernatural life to be further developed in the soul by God’s Grace and man’s co-operation.[1549] In spite of this, in that very writing he alleges that he has satisfactorily proved that Justification is effected by fiducial faith.

“No one can be justified,” he there writes, “but by faith, in the sense that he must needs believe with a firm faith (‘certa fide credere’) that he is justified, and not doubt in any way that he is to attain to grace; for if he doubts and is uncertain, he will not be justified, rather he spits out the grace.”[1550]

His doctrine of faith alone and of the imputed merits of Christ, was, of all his theological opinions, the one which underwent the least change during his lifetime.[1551] Until old age he continued to lay great stress on it both in the University Disputations and in his sermons and writings.[1552] Even the inferences drawn from it by Johann Agricola in his Antinomian theses did not cause Luther to waver in the least.

In the Schmalkalden Articles he declares explicitly that Justification consists merely in God’s “looking upon” the sinner “as righteous and holy.”[1553] According to one of his sermons our righteousness comes “altogether from without and rests solely on Christ and His work”;[1554] elsewhere he says, with the utmost assurance: The Christian is “righteous and holy by virtue of a foreign or outward holiness.”[1555]

In view of such statements undue stress must not be laid on that Luther says in another passage, which recalls the teaching of the olden Church, viz. that the Spirit of God dwells in the righteous, and fills him with His gifts, nay, with His very “substance,”[1556] and that it was this Spirit which gave him the “feeling and the certainty” of being in a state of grace.[1557] This is much the same as when Luther describes man’s active love of God whereby he becomes united and “one kitchen” with God,[1558] whilst, nevertheless, insisting that the strength of the sola fides must never be the least diminished by work. “No work must be added to this” (to faith), he says in his postils, “for whoever preaches that guilt and penalty can be atoned for by works has already denied the Evangel.”[1559] Only at times does he allow himself to follow the voice of nature speaking on behalf of man’s co-operation; this he does, for instance, in the passage just referred to, where he admits that human reason is ever inviting man to take a share in working out his salvation by means of his own works.[1560]

The forgiveness which God offers “must be seized and believed. If you believe it you are rid of sin and all is right.” “This all the Gospels teach.”[1561] Unfortunately there are “many abandoned people who misuse the Gospel ... who think that no one must punish them because the Gospel preaches nothing but forgiveness of sins. To such the Gospel is not preached.... To whom is it preached? To those who feel their misery,” i.e. to those who are sunk in remorse of conscience and in fears, similar to, or at least faintly resembling, those he had himself once endured. When he applies the words of Psalm 50 to the yearning, the prayers and the struggles of those who thirst for salvation: “A contrite and humbled heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise,” he finds himself again, all unconsciously, on the road to the Church’s olden view on man’s share in repentance.

What we read in the important notes “De iustificatione,” written during Luther’s stay in the fortress of Coburg and only recently published, differs not at all from his ordinary, purely mechanical view of Justification.[1562] These notes are from Luther’s amanuensis, Veit Dietrich, and record some conversations concerning a work Luther had planned in reply to the objections against the new doctrine of Justification. Dietrich entitled the collection “Rhapsodia.”[1563]

The Striving after Absolute Certainty of Salvation.

Luther was chiefly concerned in emphasising the indispensable necessity of particular faith in personal justification and personal salvation.

Whereas the Church had required faith in our real, objective redemption by Christ, Luther demanded over and above a further faith in one’s subjective redemption, in spite of the difficulty which circumstances might present to the attaining of this assurance. It was something very different when the olden theologians taught that there were signs from which the good man’s state of grace might be inferred with moral certainty, and that such signs were, for instance, the determination to commit no grievous sin, the desire to perform good works more especially such as were difficult, joy and peace of soul in God, and, above all, the consciousness of having done everything that was necessary for reconciliation with God. That, by such marks, it was “possible to arrive at the practical certainty of being in a state of grace” had been taught by Gabriel Biel, with whom Luther was acquainted.[1567] Later on, the Council of Trent laid down as the Catholic doctrine, against the Lutheran theory of absolute faith in personal justification, “that no good Christian may doubt of the mercy of God, of the merits of Christ or the efficacy of grace,” but that at the same time “no one can know with the certainty of faith which precludes all possibility of error that he has attained to God’s grace.”[1568]

Luther’s teaching was quite different.

We are already acquainted to some extent with the struggle against himself, and the better voices within him, which the unhappy man had to wage; this distress of soul remains to be treated of more in detail later (vol. v., xxxii.). It may, however, be pointed out here that he knew how to make this struggle part of his system; even when depressed by one’s painful inability to reach this unshaken consciousness of salvation he still insists that one must feel certain; faced by doubts and fears on account of his sins, man must summon defiance to his aid, then, finally, he will come to rest secure of his personal salvation.

Luther, according to the legend which he evolved later when defending his doctrine of faith alone and Justification, had started from the intense inward need he felt of certainty of salvation, and with the object, as he says, of “finding a Gracious God.” By his discovery regarding Justification, so his admirers say, he at last found and retained for the rest of his life the sense of a merciful God. The strange thing is, however, that in his severe and protracted struggles of conscience he should, at a later date, have again arrived at this very question: “How can I find a Gracious God?”

The “Article on which the Church Stands or Falls”: According to Modern Protestants.

Protestant scholars are far from sharing Luther’s high regard for his dogma of Justification, and what they say throws a curious light on the fashion in which he deceived himself.

Amongst the Protestant voices raised in protest against this doctrine, the following deserve to be set on record. It is clear, says K. Hase, that the Catholic doctrine is more closely related to the “Protestant view now prevailing”; he avers, that the “Protestant theologians of our day, even those who are sticklers for the purity of Lutheranism, have described saving faith as that which works by love, quite agreeably to the scholastic conception of the ‘fides formata,’ and have opposed to it a pretended Catholic dogma of Justification by good works.”[1593]

This well-known controversial writer when expressing it as his opinion that Luther’s doctrine of Justification is now practically discarded, was not even at pains to exclude the conservative theologians of his party: “DÖllinger[1594] is quite right in charging the so-called ‘old believers’ amongst us with having fallen away from the Reformer’s dogma of Justification as strictly and theologically defined.”[1595]

Thus oblivion seems to be the tragic fate of Luther’s great theological discovery, which, if we are to believe what he says, was to him the light of his existence and his most powerful incentive in his whole work, and which figured so prominently in all his attacks on Rome. Was it not this doctrine which played the chief part in his belief in the utter corruption of the Church of earlier days, when, instead of prizing the grace of Christ, everything was made to depend on works, which had led to the ruin of Christendom, to the debasement of the clergy and to the transformation of the Pope into Antichrist?

The sole authority of Scripture, Luther’s other palladium, had already suffered sadly since the Revolution period, and now the doctrine of Justification seems destined to a like fate. Albert Ritschl was pronouncing a severe censure when he declared, “that, amongst the differences of opinion prevalent in the ranks of the evangelical theologians, the recognition of two propositions [the sole authority of Scripture and Justification by imputation] was the minimum that could be expected of anyone who wished to be considered Evangelical.”[1596] For the fact is that the minimum required by Ritschl, is, according to the admission of Protestant critics themselves, frequently no longer held by these theologians.

Of the Lutheran doctrine of Justification here in question, P. Genrich, a theologian, in his work on the idea of regeneration, says: “If we glance at the process of salvation as described in the evangelical theological handbooks of the 19th century, we may well be astonished at the extraordinary divergencies existing as regards both the conception of regeneration, and the place it is to occupy in the system of doctrine. There are hardly two theologians who entirely agree on the point.”[1597]—Of the practical side of the Lutheran doctrine in question the same writer states: “It is an almost universal complaint that this chief article of Evangelical faith is not of much use when it is a question of implanting and fostering piety, in the school, the church or in parish-work. Perhaps the preacher says a few words about it ... the teacher, too, feels it his duty to deal with it in his catechetical instructions.... Justification by faith is extolled in more or less eloquent words as the treasure of the Reformation, because Church history and theology have taught us so to regard it. But at heart one is glad to be finished with it and vaguely conscious that all one said was in vain, and that, to the children or congregation Justification still remains something foreign and scarcely understood.”[1598] Genrich himself lays the blame on the later formularies of Lutheranism for the mistaken notion of a righteousness coming from without; yet the formularies of Concord surely voiced Luther’s teaching better than the new exponents who are so disposed to tone it down.[1599]

Of the actual theory of Luther, de Lagarde wrote some fifty years ago: “The doctrine of Justification [Luther’s] is not the Evangel.... It was not the basic principle of the Reformation, and to-day in the Protestant Churches it is quite dead.” De Lagarde did not allow himself to be misled by the flowery language concerning personal religious experience which is all that remains of Luther’s doctrine in many modern expositions of it.[1600]

“Research in the domain of New-Testament history and in that of the Reformation,” says K. Holl, “has arrived at conclusions closely akin to de Lagarde’s.... It has been made impossible simply to set the Protestant doctrine of Justification on the same level with the Pauline and with that of the Gospel of Jesus.” Amongst the Protestant objections to the doctrine, he instances “its narrowness, which constitutes a limitation of the ethical insupportable to present-day tastes.” He attempts to explain, or rather to amend, Luther’s theory, so as to give ethics its due and to evade Luther’s “paradox of a God,” Who, though inexorable in His moral demands, Himself procures for the offender salvation and life. As the new dogma originally stood “both its Catholic opponents and the Anabaptists were at one in contending that Luther’s doctrine of Justification could not fail to lead to moral laxity. Protestant theologians were not able to deny the weight of this objection.” In point of fact it involves an “antinomy, for which there is no logical solution.”[1601]

The same author writes elsewhere concerning the assurance of salvation which, according to Luther, accompanies justifying faith: Luther, standing as he did for predestinarianism, “clearly abolished thereby the possibility of attaining to any certainty of salvation. All his life Luther allowed this remarkable contradiction to remain, not because it escaped his notice, but because he had no wish to remove it.” Holl finds, moreover, in Luther’s opinions on Predestination “the climax of the thoughts underlying his doctrine of Justification”; “the strength of [justifying] faith has to be tested by one’s readiness to submit even to the sentence [of damnation].”[1602]

In conclusion we may cite what W. KÖhler says of the unreasonableness of Luther’s denial of free-will, according to which either God or the devil sits astride man’s back.

“With the rejection of man’s pure passivity, or, as Luther says, of his being ridden by the Lord God, Luther’s theology suffers a set-back, and the Catholic polemics of the 16th century receive a tardy vindication.” Only owing to his “lucky lack of logic” did Luther steer clear of the disastrous moral consequences of such a view; “in practice” he still laid stress on good works in spite of the danger that the “feeling of security” and the idea of “sinlessness” might lead people “to sink into the mire.” His doctrine, however, in itself leads “either to his usual thought: We are sinners after all, or to extravagant praise of the Divine mercy which flings ‘black sheep’ into the ‘kingdom of grace.’”[1603]

Evangelical theologians generally are, however, full of admiration for the spirit in which Luther, thanks to his “inward experiences,” convinced both himself and others of the certainty of Justification. His “experience of God” had at any rate made him capable of an “heroic faith” and, by his “risking all for God,” he pointed out to the religion of the heart the true road to contentment for all future time. Luther’s doctrine of Justification was the “final deepening of the sense of personal religion” (K. Holl).

The objections on this point, raised against Luther in his own camp, are all the more significant seeing he made all religion to consist in the cloaking of sin and the pacifying assurance of forgiveness; his Evangel had come as a “solace for troubled consciences”; it is “nothing else but forgiveness, and is concerned only with sin, which it blots out, covers over, sweeps away and cleanses so long as we live.”[1604] Thanks to it the long-forgotten true conception of the Kingdom of God had at last been happily brought again to light.

The title of a sermon of Luther’s printed in 1525 expresses this idea as follows: “A Sermon on the Kingdom of Christ, which consists in the Forgiveness of Sins,” etc. The words of Christ to the man sick of the palsy (Mat. ix. 2) form the subject: “Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee.” “These words,” the preacher says, “indicate and sum up shortly what the Kingdom of Christ is.” Since the Kingdom of Christ must be defined in relation to the question: “How must we behave with regard to God?” it cannot and must “not be regarded otherwise” than according to these words: “Thy sins are forgiven thee”; for “this is the chief thing, viz. that which can quiet the conscience.” “Whence it follows that the Kingdom of Christ is so constituted that it contains nothing but comfort and forgiveness of sins.” The chief fault of our reason is its “inclination, everywhere manifest, to forsake this faith and knowledge and to fall back upon works.”

In Holy Scripture the object of the Kingdom of Christ is differently given. There it culminates in the glory of God. God’s glorification is the real aim of Christ’s coming, and must also be the supreme object of every believer. This does not in the least tally with that trumped-up holiness-by-works which Luther saw in Catholicism. This far higher, general, Catholic thought of God’s glory pervades the first petitions of the prayer taught by our Saviour Himself in the Our Father: “Hallowed be Thy Name,” etc.; only in the fifth petition do we hear of the forgiveness of sins for which, indeed, every human creature must implore. In the Our Father we acknowledge first of all our obligation to serve God with all our powers and strive to comply with our duty of glorifying His name. Hence Catholic religious instructions have never commenced with “the simple forgiveness of sin,” with attempts to cloak it and to induce a fancied security in the sinner; their purpose has ever been to show that man is created to serve God and to honour Him, and that he can best do so by imitation and love of Christ.

This high object, the only one worthy of man and his spiritual powers, leads us to consider the doctrine of good works.

4. Good Works in Theory and Practice

Man is naturally disposed to believe that, built as he is, he must take his share in working out his salvation, if he be in sin, by preparing himself with God’s help to enter the state of grace and then by seeking to retain it by means of good works.

The Church before Luther had taught, as she still does, and that on the strength of Holy Writ, that such co-operation on man’s part, under God’s assistance, is quite essential. Though the attaining to and the perseverance in the Divine sonship is chiefly the work of God, yet it is also man’s, carried out with the aid of grace. She assured the faithful, that, according to the order graciously established by God and warranted by Scripture, all good works have their value for temporal and eternal reward. She sought indeed to kindle religious fervour by pointing to the promises held out, yet she had no wish to see man stop short at the thought of his reward, but rather expected him to rise to a more perfect love. Generosity, so she taught, was in no way impaired by the prospect of reward, on the contrary such hopes served as stepping-stones to facilitate the ascent.[1605]

Luther, owing to his implacable, personal aversion to any good works or human co-operation, laid violent hands on this so reasonable scheme of salvation.

Nature and Origin of the New Doctrine of Works.

Luther demanded that no importance should be set on co-operation by means of works in the business of Justification, because salvation was to be looked for from on high with simple faith and blind confidence. After reconciliation, too, man must not vainly fancy that he is capable of deserving anything by good works even by the greatest penances, sacrifices or deeds of love, but the doing of good must be allowed to follow simply as the effect of the Spirit of Christ now received, in those feelings towards God which Christ produces in us and in that love of our neighbour which is indispensable to human society.

Further light may be thrown on this standpoint of Luther’s by some traits from his inward history and writings.

Here we cannot fail to notice echoes of his transition period, of his conflict with his brother-monks and those pious folk who were intent on good works and the heaping up of merits; of his subsequent remissness in his vocation and in the performance of his duties as a monk; finally of his later prejudice, largely a result of his polemics, against so many of the Church’s public and private practices, of penance, of devotion and of the love of God. He closed his eyes to the fact, that he could have found no more effectual means of increasing amongst his followers the growing contempt for moral effort, neglect of good works and the gradual decline in religious feeling.

His estrangement from what he was pleased to call “holiness-by-works” always remained Luther’s principal, ruling idea, just as it had been the starting-point of his change of mind in his monastic days.[1606]

His chief discovery, viz. the doctrine of Justification, he was fond of parading as an attack upon works. It is only necessary to observe how persistently, how eagerly and instinctively he seizes the smallest pretext to launch in his sermons and writings a torrent of abuse on the Catholic works. It is as though some unseen hand were ever ready to open the sluice-gates, that, whether relevant or not to the matter on hand, his anger might pour forth against fasting, and the ancient works of penance, against “cowls and tonsures,” against the recitation of the Office in choir, rules, collections, pilgrimages and Jubilees, against taking the discipline, vows, veneration of the Saints and so many other religious practices.[1607] In his habitual slanders on works, found on his lips from the beginning[1608] to within a few weeks of his death, we can hardly fail to see the real link which binds together his whole activity. As against the Popish doctrine of works he is never weary of pointing out that his own doctrine of works is based on Christ; “it allows God to be our Lord God and gives Him the glory,” a thought that pleased him all the more because it concealed the error under a mantle of piety; this deceptive idea already casts its shadow over the very first letter in his correspondence which touches on the new doctrine.[1609]

Johann Eck could well answer: “Luther is doing us an injustice when he declares that we by our works exclude Christ as Mediator.... On the contrary, we teach, that, without Christ, works are nothing.... Therefore let him keep his lies to himself; the works that are done without faith, he may indeed talk of as he likes, but, as for ours, they proceed from the bottom rock of faith and are performed with the aid of Divine grace.”[1610]

Equally deceptive was the idea, so alluring in itself, that Luther’s doctrine of works bore the stamp of true freedom, viz. the freedom of the Gospel. Here, again, we can only see a new expression of his profound alienation from works and from the sacrifice entailed by self-conquest. He is desirous, so he says, of hoisting on the shield the freedom of the man who is guided solely by God’s Spirit. But will this not serve as an excuse for weakness? Here we seem to find an after-effect of that late-mediÆval pseudo-mysticism which had once been a danger to him, which went so far as to demand of the righteous complete indifference to works, and, that, in language apparently most affecting and sublime.

These two thoughts, that Christ would thus be restored to His place of honour and man secure evangelical freedom, were a great temptation to many hearers of Luther’s call to leave the Catholic Church. In all great intellectual revolutions there are always at work certain impelling ideas, either true ones which rightly prove attractive, or false ones which yet assume the appearance of truth and thus move people’s minds. Without the intervention of the two thoughts just referred to, the spread of the religious movement in the 16th century is not fully to be explained.

How many of the apostles and followers of the new preaching were really moved by these two thoughts must even then have been difficult to determine. Noble and privileged souls may not have been wanting amongst them. The masses, however, introduced so earthly an element into these better and pious ideals that the ideals only remained as a pretext, a very effective pretext indeed, to allege for their own pacification and in extenuation of their other aims. Great watchwords, once put forward, often serve as a useful cloak for other things. In this respect the demand for the freedom of the Gospel proved very popular. The age clamoured to be set free from bonds which were proving irksome, for instance, to mention but one point, from exorbitant ecclesiastical dues and spiritual penalties. Hence evangelical freedom was readily accepted as synonymous with deliverance, and, in time, ceased to be “evangelical” at all.

That Luther’s doctrine of works and of the freedom bestowed by Christ the fulfiller of the Law, embodied a great moral danger, is now recognised even by Protestants.

Before quoting the opinion of other critics of the preaching against works in his own time, we may give Luther the chance to describe the extent of his opposition to the olden doctrine.

If all the faithful are, as the new Evangel teaches, by virtue of their right of primogeniture great Lords and Kings, then that fear of God’s chastisements is no longer justified which the ancient Church had always put forward as one of the motives for performing good works and leading a moral life. On the contrary, we are not to open our hearts too readily to such fear. Luther’s injunctions concerning fear of the Judge go to form a further chapter in the psychological and historical criticism of his doctrine of works. Here we see plainly his instinctive aversion to the views and practice of the olden Church.

Luther’s attitude here was as ambiguous as elsewhere, for instance, in the case of his whole doctrine of grace and justification, no less than in its premises, viz. unfreedom, concupiscence and original sin. Everywhere we meet with contradictions, which make it almost impossible to furnish any connected description of his doctrinal system.

Augustine as the Authority for the New Doctrine of Works.

We have an example of Luther’s want of theological acumen in his appeal to Augustine in support of his doctrine of works.

In order to understand this we must recollect that, from the beginning, Luther had described his new theology as simply that of Augustine the great Father of the Church. Of Augustine’s—of whom he said in 1516 that he had not felt the slightest leaning towards him until he had “tumbled on” his writings[1626]—he had merely read in 1509 a small number of works, and he became acquainted with what were for him the more important of this Father’s writings only after he had already largely deviated from the Church’s doctrine.[1627] Even later, his knowledge of Augustine was scanty. He was, however, as a monk, fond of identifying his own new doctrine of grace with Augustine’s;[1628] he tried to enlist the help of his colleague, Amsdorf, by a present of St. Augustine’s works; in this he was completely successful.[1629] On May 18, 1517, he wrote to Lang on the state of things at Wittenberg, the triumphant words already quoted: “Our theology and St. Augustine are making happy progress with God’s help and are now paramount at the University,” etc.[1630] From that time forward he was fond of saying, that Augustine was opposed “to Gabriel Biel, Thomas of Aquin and the whole crowd of Sententiaries, and would hold the field against them because he was grounded on the pure Gospel, particularly on the testimony of Paul.”[1631] To what extent he really in his heart believed this of Augustine must remain a moot question.

“Luther,” says Julius KÖstlin, one of the best-known authorities on Luther’s theology, “could, indeed, appeal to St. Augustine in support of the thesis that man becomes righteous and is saved purely by God’s gracious decree and the working of His Grace and not by any natural powers and achievements [which is the Catholic doctrine], but not for the further theory that man is regarded by God as just purely by virtue of faith ... nor that the Christian thus justified can never perform anything meritorious in God’s sight but is saved merely by the pardoning grace of God which must ever anew be laid hold of by faith” [i.e. the specifically Lutheran theses on faith and works]. The same author adds: “Only gradually did the fundamental difference between the Augustinian view, his own and that of Paul become entirely clear to Luther.”[1632]

When this happened it is hard to say; at any rate, his strictures on Augustine and the Fathers in his lectures of 1527 on the 1st Epistle of St. John, and in his later Table-Talk prove, that, as time went on he had given up all idea of finding in these authorities any confirmation of his doctrine on faith alone and works.[1633]

The real teaching of St. Augustine is best seen in his anxiety that man should co-operate with all the power furnished by the assistance of God’s grace, in the attainment of his salvation. The wholesome fear of God he reckons first, after the necessary condition of faith has been fulfilled. Of the acts of moral preparation (fear, hope, love, penance and good resolutions) for obtaining the grace of Justification from God, he regards fear as the element, without which a man “never, or hardly ever,” reaches God.[1646] To show the necessity of works and a good intention he appeals to texts in the Epistle of St. James rejected by Luther, where we read: “You see that by works a man is justified and not by faith only” (ii. 24). Here he goes so far as to suggest that James probably spoke so explicitly of works because the passages on faith in Paul’s Epistles had been misunderstood by some.[1647]

“We say,” so he teaches in opposition to Luther concerning the destruction of sin in man by baptism, “that baptism brings the remission of all sins, and not merely erases them, but actually removes them (‘auferre crimina non radere’); the roots of sin do not remain in the corrupt flesh, so that the sins have not to grow again and be again cut off like the hair of our heads.”[1648]

The righteousness which is bestowed on the sinner is, in his view, no imputed righteousness of Christ but a personal righteousness actually residing in man. Hence he explains that the “Justice of God,” referred to in Rom. iii. 21 f., is not that whereby God is just, but that with which He provides the impious man when justifying him; in the same way the “faith of Christ” mentioned there is “not a faith by which Christ believes, but the faith that is in us.” “Both are ours, but they are ascribed to God and Christ because bestowed on us by the Divine favour.”[1649] The righteousness bestowed on us is “that which Adam lost by sin”; Adam’s righteousness was a quality inherent in him, not the imputed righteousness of Christ.[1650] It is also the same grace which is infused into adults in Justification and which children receive in baptism.[1651] By sanctifying grace the soul is inwardly ennobled, “for when nature’s Creator justifies it by grace, it ceases to be an object of horror and becomes a thing of beauty.”[1652] The Holy Ghost dwells in us and “God gives us therewith no less a gift than Himself.”[1653] Thus “as the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul.”[1654]

Our state of grace may, however, be dimmed, and that not only by lack of faith; for it has its enemies in imperfections and sins. “Though our righteousness is a true one, yet in this life the forgiveness of sins plays a greater part than the perfection of virtue.”[1655] “If our will turns against God, we separate ourselves from Him, and the light which enlightened us during His presence at once changes into darkness.”[1656] In order to prevent any such danger on the part of the will, Augustine frequently reminds his readers of such exhortations of our Saviour, as: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.”

Man is also spurred to be faithful, so he says, by the merit of good works. “God Himself has become our debtor,” so he said when preaching to the assembled faithful; “not as though He had received something from us, but because He has promised what He pleased. To a man we speak differently and say: You are my debtor because I have given to you. To God we say, on the contrary: Thou art my debtor because Thou hast made me promises; ... in this sense therefore we may urge on God our demands and say: Give what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1657]

To recommend the practice of good works out of love of God and zeal for His honour, and to heap up merit for heaven, is the purpose of long and eloquent portions of the literary legacy which Augustine left behind him. The whole of the book “De fide et operibus” and long chapters of his “Enchiridion” were written with this object. In the former work he introduces, for instance, the Judgment scene described by our Saviour, and says: “Those who are placed on the left hand of Christ, according to this passage (Mat. xxv. 41), He will reproach not for not having believed in Him, but for not having performed good works. How could this be true if we were to attain to salvation without keeping the commandments or by faith alone (‘per solam fidem’), which without works is dead? Christ wished to impress on us that no one can promise himself eternal life by a dead faith, minus works. Hence He causes all the nations who have received the same spiritual food [of faith] to be separated out before Him, and clearly it is such as have believed but have not performed good works who will say: When did we see Thee suffering this and that [and did not minister to Thee]? They had fancied that by a dead faith they could attain to everlasting life.”[1658]

The voice of the bishop of Hippo, supported by the whole Church whose doctrine was also his, was re-echoed by later ecclesiastical writers who made greedy use of his works; nor were the exhortations of the Fathers without result among the faithful. Later Fathers frequently discourse on the testimony of Holy Writ in favour of works just as Augustine had done; the following texts were frequently adduced: “God will render to every man according to his works”; “Not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified”; “The Son of Man will come and render to every man according to his works” (Rom. ii. 6, 13; Mat. xvi. 27).

Gregory the Great, who trained himself on Augustine’s model, states, in a homily to his congregation: “Possibly we may say to ourselves: I believe, hence I shall be saved. This is only true when we prove our faith by our works.” “Then are we true believers when we execute in work what we confess in our faith.”[1659]

A faith proved by works was the sign manual of the Middle Ages. Nor did Luther and his preachers ever complain of the lack of works of piety in the days previous to the Reformation, although they thought it their duty to blame the spirit in which those works had been performed.

What, however, did Luther and his followers think of the moral consequences of the preaching directed against all merit of good works?

The New Doctrine of Works in Practice, as Judged by Lutheran Opinion in the 16th Century.

We have already listened to Luther’s own complaints and those of many of his contemporaries concerning the parlous state of morals amongst the adherents of the new teaching, and the almost entire absence of any practical fruits of piety under the amended Gospel.[1660] Since the mainstay of the innovations was the doctrine of grace and works it is necessary to seek out more closely the connection between the new doctrine of works and the sad moral results of the revolt against the Church. Luther himself makes no odds about referring to these results and their real cause: “The surer we are of the freedom won by Christ, the more indolent do we become”; “because we teach that man attains to grace without any works whatever, we grow lazy”; he almost wishes “that the old teaching again came into its own.”[1661] Only his shortsightedness and the psychological effect of his passionate temper prevented his foreseeing the inevitable consequences of his theory of the all-sufficiency of faith and of his reckless denunciation of the regard for commandments and works previously obtaining. How little his own frequent exhortations to lead a moral life and to perform works of Christian charity (see below, p. 472 ff.) could prevail against the fell charm of the doctrine of Evangelical freedom, remained hid from his eyes, until the extent of the moral corruption and the growing savagery of the people in certain regions began to frighten him and to cause him to long ardently for the end of the world and even to predict its imminence.

There was some truth in what he said, viz. that, as the world was constituted, if one preached faith (i.e. the justifying faith so much belauded by him) works went to the wall, and that, on the other hand, “faith” must needs perish wherever works were preached.[1662] The two were indeed self-exclusive, however much, in his recommendation of works, he might affirm the contrary.

This is not the place to point out anew the dangers inherent in Luther’s doctrine of justification, for we have already seen the necessary result of one of its presuppositions, viz. the denial of free-will, and how right Erasmus was when he urged against Luther, that, on this assumption, all laws and commandments, even those of Scripture, were simply superfluous. A Protestant has aptly remarked, that, in the last instance, “the difference between good and evil becomes quite illusory”; we might well ask: “How can we feel ourselves responsible towards God ... if we do nothing and God works all in all?” Luther himself even goes so far as to make Scripture teach that “the will not only desires nothing good, but is even unaware of how much evil it does and of what good is.”[1663] Since the imputed merits of Christ are, as a matter of fact, merely like a screen set up in front of the soul, many might naturally feel tempted to extenuate and excuse all that the sin which persists in man still does behind it.

To appreciate the peculiar nature of the danger it is necessary to take Luther’s teaching, not by itself, but in conjunction with the mental atmosphere of the day. We must of course take it for granted that many of his followers refrained from putting into practice Luther’s teaching in its entirety, for instance, his peculiar doctrine of the lack of free-will. Many well-disposed Lutherans whose good faith was above suspicion, doubtless remained more or less outside the influence of such ideas, were actuated by good religious motives and expressed them in Christian works. Assisted by the grace of God, which is at the disposal of all men of good-will, they, all unknowingly, were gaining merit in heaven. On the other hand, the ill-disposed, those who sought the enjoyments of life—and of such there were thousands—found a sanction in the Wittenberg doctrine for neglecting good works. In the case of many the “joyful tidings” could not under the circumstances of the age be expected to produce any other result. We have only to think of what was going on all about; of the prevalent yearning after release from irksome bonds; of the unkindly feeling towards rulers, both ecclesiastical and secular; of the seething discontent among the peasants on account of their oppression and toilsome duties; of the spirit of independence so vigorous in the towns; of the boundless ambition of the mighty; of the influence, sometimes sceptical, sometimes immoral, of Humanism, and of the worldliness and degradation of so many of the clergy and monks, to be able to understand how momentous was the effect of Luther’s doctrine of justification and his preaching concerning works.

We know on the one hand from many examples with what zest the newly-won promoters of Lutheranism—for the most part former ministers of the Church who had discarded their calling—concentrated their attacks on the practice of good works, and, on the other, how the better-disposed followers of the new doctrine admitted the danger to works accruing from Luther’s views and even their actually evil consequences.

The above is sufficient to show that there was a consensus of opinion in tracing back the moral decadence to the Lutheran doctrine of works. As against this there is a certain strangeness in the explanation variously given by Protestants of this real retrogression: The complaints of Luther and his preachers, so they aver, only prove that they were dissatisfied, as it was their right and duty to be, with what had been achieved in the moral order.—At any rate, the distressing results of the doctrine of faith alone proved strikingly how ineffectual had been all Luther’s exhortations to good works.

Luther’s Utterances in Favour of Good Works.

Many and earnest are Luther’s exhortations to prove our faith by works of love towards God and our neighbour; to sinners he frequently speaks of the path of penance which they must tread; conversion he wishes to be accomplished with lively faith and the state of grace preserved by practical piety. It was assuredly not the lack of such counsels which occasioned the decline described above; this was rather due to the system itself, combined with the evil effects of the general overthrow of the old ecclesiastical law and practice which safeguarded morals, and with the contempt aroused for the sacraments, for public worship and the spiritual authorities. History must, however, allow Luther’s exhortations on behalf of good works and the keeping of the commandments to speak for themselves.

Nicholas Amsdorf, Luther’s intimate friend and most docile pupil, published in 1559 a tract entitled “That the proposition ‘Good works are harmful to salvation’ is a good and Christian one preached both by St. Paul and by Luther.” Their “harmfulness” resided in their being regarded as meritorious for salvation. We may wonder what Luther would have thought of this writing had he been alive? In any case the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577 contains a mild protest against it: “The assertion that good works are necessary is not to be reprehended, seeing that it may be understood in a favourable sense”;[1693] it also appeals to what had been laid down in the Augsburg Confession; it could “not be gainsaid that, in both the Confession and the ‘Apologia,’ the words: ‘Good works are necessary,’ are frequently used.”[1694]

As for the attitude of the Augsburg Confession, it declares concerning works—a declaration for which Melanchthon’s cautious pen was solely responsible—“We also teach that such faith [in Christ, whereby man is justified] must produce good fruit and good works, and that we must perform all manner of good works which God has commanded, for God’s sake.”[1695]

No one was so much concerned as Melanchthon in insisting that the performance of good works should be represented as indispensable to the people, particularly from the pulpit. It vexed him, the more prudent of the two, to hear Luther again and again, and that often in hyperbolical and paradoxical form, laying such stress on faith alone. How far Melanchthon’s name may justifiably be quoted against what was undesirable in the olden Protestant teaching on works, should be clear from what has already been said concerning this theological henchman of Luther’s (cp. vol. iii., p. 347 ff.).

Luther’s admirers are wont to quote the following utterance of his when praising his attitude towards works: “Good, pious works never made a good, pious man, but a good, pious man performs good, pious works. Wicked works never made a wicked man, but wicked men perform wicked works.”[1696] That “wicked deeds never made a wicked man” he probably found some difficulty in really convincing many. If Luther meant that an unjust man or sinner, who is not cleansed by faith in Christ, can never act but wickedly, then it is the same error as we find in other passages and which is repeated in connection with the words just quoted: “Unless a man believes beforehand and is a Christian [’consecrated by faith’] all his works are of no account, but are vain, foolish, criminal and damnably sinful.” This is surely as much beside the mark as the above statement of Luther’s concerning the relation between a “pious man” and “pious works.” Of supernatural works that are meritorious for heaven what Luther adds is indeed correct: “Hence, in every instance the person must first be good and pious previous to all works, and the good works follow and proceed from a good and pious person.” We must, however, decline to accept Luther’s other inferences, viz. that the sinner is not in a position to perform natural good works of his own, and that the just man does not become more righteous through good works.

Hence Luther’s statement, however apparently ingenious, cannot remove the unfavourable impression produced by his doctrine of works. That it was highly valued by its author is plain from the number of times he repeats it under different forms. “Works do not make a Christian, but a Christian performs works,” so he exclaimed in a sermon in 1523, summing up in these specious words the instruction he had just given, viz. that the faithful must struggle to remove whatever of evil there is in them, and that they must “work good to their neighbour,” but not on any account try “to blot out sin by works, for this would be to shame and blaspheme God and Christ and to disgrace their own heritage,” viz. Justification by faith alone.[1697]

Works of Charity. Luther and the Ages of the Past.

For the purpose of recommending the Lutheran doctrine of works it is sometimes urged that Luther, while slighting other works of less account, assigned a place of honour to active works of charity, done for the sake of our neighbour, that he placed them on a firmer moral basis than they had hitherto occupied and promoted them so far as the unfavourable circumstances of his age allowed. A few words on the conception and particularly on the practice of charity as advocated by him may serve as a fit conclusion to the present section.

First, we may mention that Luther is disposed to exaggerate the importance of works of charity done to our neighbour.

It was an unjustifiable and paralysing restriction on the pious impulse towards works pleasing to God that Luther embodied in the rule he repeatedly lays down regarding works, viz. that they must be directed exclusively towards the benefit of others. “On this earth,” so he teaches in his Church postils, “man does not live for the sake of works, nor that they may profit him, for he has no need of them, but all works must be done for the sake of our neighbour.” “Thus must all works be done, that we see to it that they tend to the service of other people, impart to them the right faith and bring them to Christ’s Kingdom.” They bring them the “right faith” when they serve to “quiet their conscience.” Thus even here the Kingdom of God, which consists in the forgiveness of sins, must also play its part.

Catholic doctrine recognises a wider field for good works. It regards as such even the works which the faithful perform directly for their own soul without any reference to their neighbour, such as self-conquest in contending against one’s own passions, or those works which are concerned primarily with honouring God whether in public worship or in the private life of the Christian. Luther himself, at least incidentally, also knows how to speak of the value of such works, though thereby he contradicts his other statements like the above.

If, however, we neglect the principle, we have to admit, that Luther’s frequent exhortations to neighbourly charity and kindness contain some fine and truly Evangelical thoughts. With deep feeling he expresses his sorrow that his admonitions are not heeded to the extent he would have wished.

In his statements already quoted concerning the corruption of morals consequent on the change of religion, we have heard him several times lamenting the notorious falling off in private benevolence and the quite remarkable decrease of public works of Christian charity. Everywhere avarice reigns supreme, so we have heard Luther repeatedly exclaim, and a reprehensible indolence in the doing of what is good has spread far and wide; everything is now different from what it had been “in the time of the monks and parsons,” when people “founded and built” right and left, and when even the poorest was anxious to contribute.[1698]

His defenders now declare, that he “unlocked the true source of charity” by denying any meritorious character to works, thus sending to limbo the imperfect, mediÆval motive of charity and substituting a better one in its place, viz. a “grateful love springing from faith.” Luther’s own words have been used to decry earlier ages, as though charity then had “merely had itself in view,” people in those days having been intent solely on laying up merit “for them and theirs.”

It is perfectly true that the Catholic Church gladly emphasises the reward charity brings to the giver.

If in the times previous to Luther’s day, both in the Middle Ages and before, the Church frequently extolled the temporal and everlasting reward of charity, and if this proved to the faithful an incentive, she could at least in so doing appeal to those passages in the Gospel itself which promise to the charitable a heavenly recompense. Yet the thought of this reward did not exclude other high and worthy motives. So little were such motives slighted in the mediÆval practice of charity, that, side by side with the heavenly reward, the original deeds of foundations, gifts and pious legacies still extant allege all kinds of other reasons, for instance, compassion for the helpless and concern for their bodily and spiritual welfare, or the furtherance of the common good by the establishment of institutions of public utility. One formula frequently used, which, taken literally, seems actually to ignore all merit and reward, runs variously: “For God’s sake only”; “for God”; or, “in order to please Him with temporal goods.” Thus the author of the “Wyhegertlin fÜr alle frummen Christenmenschen,”[1699] a German work of edification, wrote in 1509: “Thanks to God’s grace there are still in our towns many hundreds of brothers and sisters who have united themselves out of Christian charity and compassion for the purpose of serving the poor sick people, the infirm, plague-stricken and lepers, purely for God’s sake.”

Duke George of Saxony, in his reply to Luther’s “Widder den Meuchler zu Dresen,” really expresses the motive for the active Catholic charity formerly so lavishly displayed, when he speaks of the great possessions given by past ages of which the religious revolt had robbed the Church; of the “gifts freely given by nobles, burghers and peasants out of ardent Christian love and gratitude for His sacred bitter Passion, bright blood and guiltless death, to cloisters, parish churches, altars, chapels, cells, hospitals, religious houses, crafts,” etc.[1700]

Neither did such motives or the motive of reward curtail the spirit of charity towards the close of the Middle Ages, as some Protestants have chosen to assert. On the contrary they served to animate it.

On the basis of the data furnished by German archives a modern historian remarks of those times: “The spirit of Christian charity showed itself most active in the foundation of benevolent institutions, in which respect hardly any age can compare with the 15th century.”[1701] “Towards the close of the Middle Ages the gifts to hospitals, pest-houses and hostels were simply innumerable”; such is the opinion of another researcher.[1702] Even G. Uhlhorn, in his “Geschichte der christlichen LiebestÄtigkeit,” had to admit: “No period did so much for the poor as the Middle Ages,” though, agreeably to the standard of his peculiar Lutheranism, this author would fain make out that good works then were done out of mere egotism.

Other Protestant authorities allow, that, even according to Luther’s own admission, the Catholic charity far exceeded that displayed by the new faith. “Here” (among the Catholics), says one historian, “Confraternities for the care of the poor and sick arose in the 16th and 17th centuries which far surpassed anything hitherto known in the purity of their aims and their extraordinary achievements.... Among the Catholics the reform in the nursing of the sick proceeded from Spain, which also produced the men who loomed largest in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, viz. the Jesuits and the Dominicans. From Spain came the model of the modern hospital with the nursing staff as we now know it.” “The Protestant communities during the two centuries which followed the Reformation showed a great lack of fruitfulness as regards works of charity.” “The hospitals in the Protestant districts, with few exceptions, were and remained bad, nor was anything done to improve them.”[1703]

Although Luther’s praiseworthy efforts to awaken charity were not altogether wasted, yet neither his success in some localities nor the supposed purer and higher spirit he introduced into deeds of love were so apparent as to bear comparison with the charity so sedulously cultivated on the Catholic side. On the contrary, his complaints confirm the suspicion that in Lutheran circles works of charity were as a rule lamed by the lack of that very spirit of piety which should have been so manifest. (More in vol. vi., xxxv., 4.)

In 1528 he told the inhabitants of Wittenberg: “This week your offerings will be solicited. I hear that people say they will give nothing to the collectors, but will turn them away. Well, thank God! You most ungrateful creatures, who are so grudging with your money, refuse to give anything, and, not satisfied with this, heap abuse on the ministers of the Church! I wish you a happy year. I am so horrified, that I do not know whether to continue preaching any longer to you, you rude brutes who cannot give even four half-pence ungrudgingly.” It was a disgrace, he says, that so far the fiscal authorities had been obliged to provide for the churches, the schools and the poor in the hospitals, whom it was the people’s duty as Christians to support. “Now that you are called upon to give four beggarly half-pence, you feel it a burden.” “Deceivers will come who will wax fat at your expense as happened formerly [in Catholic times]. I am sorry that you have arrived at such a glorious state of freedom, free from all tyrants and Papists, for, thankless brutes that you are, you don’t deserve this Evangelical treasure. Unless you mend your ways and act differently I shall cease to preach to you in order not to cast pearls before swine and to give what is holy to the dogs, and shall proclaim the Gospel to my real students who are the poor beggar-men. Formerly you gave so much to the wicked seducers [the Catholic clergy] and now ...!”[1704] Already, the year before, he had vigorously complained from the pulpit, though, as it would appear, all to no purpose: “Amongst those who hear the Word, faith is dull and charity has grown cold and hope is at an end, etc. There is no one who pities his brother’s distress. Once upon a time we gave a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand pieces of gold to the monks, canons or priests for the building of monasteries and churches. To-day no one can be found who will give a coin, let alone a piece of gold, for the poor. For this reason God sends His judgments on the world and curses the earth on account of the contempt for His Word and His Evangel; but we may look for yet worse things in the future.”[1705]

Amongst the reminiscences of his journey to Italy, Luther retained a kindly memory of the charity as practised by the Catholics, particularly at Florence. We read in Lauterbach’s Diary on Aug. 1, 1538: “Then Luther spoke of charity in Italy and how the hospitals there were cared for. They are located in princely buildings, are amply supplied with food and drink, the servants are most diligent and attentive, the physicians very skilled, the bedding and clothing are perfectly clean and the beds are even painted. When a patient is brought in, he has at once to strip, an inventory of his clothes is made in the presence of a notary and they are then kept carefully for him. Then he is dressed in a white shirt and put in a nice painted bed with clean sheets, and after a little while two physicians are at his bedside; servants come and bring him food and drink in perfectly clean glass goblets, which they do not touch even with a finger, carrying everything on a tray. Even the greatest ladies come there, muffled up completely so as to be unrecognisable, in order to serve the poor for some days, after which they return to their homes. At Florence I have seen what great care is bestowed on the hospitals. Also on the foundling homes where the children are admirably installed, fed and taught, are all dressed alike and in the same colour and treated in a right fatherly way.”[1706]

5. Other Innovations in Religious Doctrine

The absence of any logical system in Luther’s theological and moral views is so far from being denied by Protestants who know his theology that they even reproach Luther’s opponents for expecting to find logic in him. No system, but merely “the thought-world of a great religious man” is, so they say, all that we may look for in his works; it is true that he had a “general religious theory,” but it was “faulty, in its details not seldom contradictory, and devised for a practical and polemical object.” “Luther was no dogmatic theologian or man of system,” hence his individual sayings must not always be treated as though they were parts of a system.

There can be no doubt that this is a defect in a teacher who comes forward as the founder of a denomination and as the restorer of Christian doctrine, and who, in his quality of “Prophet of the Germans,” declares: “Before me people knew nothing.” After all, precision and coherence of doctrines form a test of their truth.

In reality the facts of the case are only indicated in a veiled way in the Protestant admissions just recorded. The truth is, as the reader has already had many an occasion to see, that, with Luther, one assertion frequently invalidates the other. Even in the field of moral teaching we find him at utter variance with himself, and his contradictions become particularly glaring as soon as he passes from theory to practice. Here it is easy to seize the “consummate contradictions of his theology,” of which a present-day Protestant theologian ventures boldly to speak; we may also subscribe to what this same writer says, viz. that Luther hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.[1707] (Cp. p. 415, 447; vol. ii., p. 312, etc.)

The Regula Fidei.

Such a denial of the consequences of the principles of his doctrine lies first and foremost in the fact that Luther summed up in a Rule of Faith the various dogmas to which it was his intention to remain true. The “regula fidei,” such as he wished to bequeath to posterity, he saw expressed in the Confession of Augsburg, and in the oldest Œcumenical Creeds of the Church.

It has already been seen that the radicalism involved in his religious attitude should by rights have issued in a freedom, nay, licence, which would have rendered impossible any binding formularies of faith.

It is also the opinion of most modern Protestant theologians that the definition of doctrine which began with the Confession of Augsburg, or in fact with the Articles of Marburg, really constituted an unjustifiable encroachment on the freedom of religious thought inaugurated by Luther. Luther indeed invested these doctrinal formularies with all the weight of his authority, yet, according to these theologians, they represented a “narrowing” of the Evangelical ideas advocated by him; nor can it be gainsaid that the revolutionary ideas for which Luther stood from about 1520 to 1523 justify such strictures.[1708]

Some Peculiarities of the New Doctrine on the Sacraments, Particularly on Baptism.

The theological pillars of the edifice of public worship are the seven sacraments, the visible signs ordained by Christ by which grace is given to our souls. Held in honour even by the Nestorians and Monophysites as witnesses to ecclesiastical antiquity, they enfold and hallow all the chief events of human life. Luther debased the effect of the sacraments by making it something wholly subjective, produced by the recipients themselves in virtue of the faith infused into them by God, whereas the Church has ever recognised the sacraments as sublime and mysterious signs, which of themselves work in the receiver (“ex opere operato”) according to the extent of his preparation, Christ having made the grace promised dependent on the outward signs instituted by Himself. Luther, on the other hand, by declaring the sacraments mere symbols whereby faith is strengthened, operative only by virtue of the recipient’s faith in the pardon and forgiveness of his sins, reduced them to the status of empty pledges for soothing and consoling consciences. Only later did he again come nearer to the Catholic doctrine of the “opus operatum.” With his view, however, that the sole object of the sacraments is to increase the “fides specialis,” we arrive again at the point which for Luther is the sum total of religion, viz.: “mere forgiveness.”

He was not at all conscious of the contradiction involved in his vigorous insistence on the absolute necessity of the sacraments for salvation. From his standpoint Carlstadt was far more logical when he said: “If Christ [alone] is peace and assurance [of salvation], then lifeless creatures [the sacramental, outward signs] can surely not satisfy or make secure.”[1717]

Luther raised no objection to infant baptism. He also wished it, and baptism in general, to be given in the usual way in the name of the Trinity. But how did he try to solve the difficulty arising from his theory of the sacraments: If the sacrament only works in virtue of the faith of the receiver and the effect is merely an increase of faith, of what advantage can it be to the infant who is incapable of belief? He endeavoured to remedy the defect with the help of the faith of the congregation.

Meeting difficulties on this line he did not shrink from claiming a perpetually recurring miracle, and proposed to assume that, during the act of baptism, the new-born infant was momentarily endowed by God with the use of reason and filled with faith.

In his “De captivitate babylonica” he had already attempted to cut the Gordian knot presented by infant baptism by this assumption, which, however arbitrary, is quite intelligible from his psychological standpoint. Thanks to the believing prayer of the congregation who present the children for baptism, so he said, faith is infused into them and they thus become regenerate. In 1523 he states that children have a hidden faith. “From that time onwards the tendency of his teaching was to require faith from candidates for baptism.... Even after the Concord he continued to speak exactly as before.”[1718] The Bible teaches nothing about infant baptism. Yet Luther declares in 1545 in a set of theses: “It is false and outrageous to say that little children do not believe, or are unworthy,” while at the head of the theses these words stand: “Everything that in the Church, which is God’s people, is taught without the Word of God, is assuredly false and unchristian.”[1719]

It is of interest to follow up his arguments for the faith of infants. In 1522 already he had attempted in a letter to prove to Melanchthon the possibility of such unconscious faith. He referred him to the circumstance, which, however, is irrelevant, “that we retain the faith while asleep or otherwise engaged.” Moreover, since to him who believes, everything is possible with God, so, too, to the congregation which prays for the children; the children are presented by the congregation to the Lord of all, and He, by His Omnipotence, kindles faith in them. In the same letter, aimed at the Anabaptists, who were then beginning to be heard of, we find an emphatic appeal to the authority and belief of the Church (“totius orbis constans confessio”), which, as a rule, Luther was so ruthless in opposing. “It would be quite impious to deny that infant baptism agrees with the belief of the Church; to do so would be tantamount to denying the Church”; it was a special miracle that infant baptism had never been attacked by heretics; there was therefore good reason to hope that Christ, now, would trample the new foemen “under our feet.” Luther forgets that the ancient Church was not hampered by such a heel of Achilles as was his own teaching, viz. that the sacraments owed all their efficacy to faith. We can, however, quite understand his admission to Melanchthon: “I have always expected that Satan would lay violent hands on this weak spot, but he has chosen to stir up this pernicious quarrel, not through the Papists, but with the help of our own people.”[1720] The rise of the Anabaptist heresy was indeed merely a natural reaction against Luther’s doctrine of baptism.

Seeing that the doctrine of baptism is of such importance to the Christian Church, we may be permitted to consider the inferences regarding the sacrament of baptism drawn in modern times from Luther’s conception of it, and from his whole attitude towards faith and Christianity. A domestic dispute among the Protestants at Bremen in 1905 on the validity of baptism not administered according to the usages of the Church, led to a remarkable discussion among theologians of broader views, some of whom went so far as to argue in Luther’s name and that of his Reformation, that baptism should be abolished.

Luther arbitrarily reduced the sacraments to two; “there remain,” he says, “two sacraments; baptism and the Supper.”[1731] With regard to Penance his attitude was wavering and full of contradiction. In later years he again came nearer to the Catholic teaching, arguing that Penance must also be a sacrament because, as he said in 1545, “it contains the promise of and belief in the forgiveness of sins.”[1732] He had much at heart the retention of confession and absolution under some shape or form as a remedy against the moral disorders that were creeping in.[1733] Yet, according to him, Penance was only to be regarded as the “exercise and virtue of baptism,”[1734] so that the number of the sacraments underwent no actual increase.

Here, as everywhere else, the changeableness of Luther’s doctrinal opinions is deserving of notice. The numerous instances where he relinquishes a position previously held and virtually betakes himself to another, are scarcely to the credit either of his logic or of his foresight. Such wavering and groping hither and thither is the stamp of error. In the “Histoire des variations” which might be written on the fate of Luther’s views even during his lifetime, much would be found truly characteristic of them.

One sacramentarian doctrine, which to the end of his life he would never consent to relinquish, was, as we know, the Presence of Christ in the Supper. And relentless as he was in combating the Sacrifice of the Mass (see below, p. 506 ff.), yet he insisted steadfastly on the literal acceptance of Christ’s words of institution: “This is My Body.”

His Teaching on the Supper.

Luther’s retention of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist may to some extent be explained by the influence which, side by side with the Bible, tradition and the authority of the Church still exercised over him, at least on such points as did not call for modification on account of his new doctrine of Justification. He had grown up in this faith, and was accustomed to give practical proof of it even when on other scores he had already broken with the Church. In this matter Scripture presented no difficulty. Had he shared Zwingli’s rationalistic leanings it is likely that, like him, he might have sought for some other interpretation of the words of institution than the obvious and literal one. It is also possible that the mysticism to which he was addicted in early years may have contributed to make him acknowledge the “mysterium tremendum” of the Sacrament, as he terms it in the language of olden days.

It is true there came a time—according to him the year 1519-1520—when he felt strongly tempted to throw the Sacrament overboard, because, as he says in the well-known words, “I could thus have given a great smack in the face to Popery.” At that time I “wrestled and struggled and would gladly have escaped.” But from the plain text of the Bible, he had, so he declares, been unable to free himself. This statement, which is on the whole worthy of belief, we find in “Eyn Brieff an die Christen zu Straspurg” which he published in 1525, and it is further corroborated by the fact, that he there refers to two men who had been anxious to move him to the denial of the Presence of Christ, but who had failed to convince him. The two, whose names he does not mention, were probably Cornelius Hendriks Hoen, a Dutchman, and Franz Kolb of Baden, whose letters to Luther, in 1522 and 1524, trying to induce him to accept the Zwinglian sense of the Sacrament, still exist.[1735]

When Carlstadt began his attack on the Real Presence, this, in view of the then situation, so Luther declares in his letter to the people of Strasburg, merely “confirmed his opinion.” “Even had I not believed it before, I should at once have known that his opinions were nought, because of his worthless, feeble stuff, devoid of any Scripture and based only on reason and conceit.” Offended vanity and annoyance with Carlstadt were here not without their effect on Luther; to deny this would argue a poor acquaintance with Luther’s psychology. It is true that the arguments of his opponent were very weak; it was not without reason that Luther speaks of his “stuff and nonsense” and “ridiculous tales.” He ranks the objections of the two letter-writers mentioned above higher than the proofs adduced by Carlstadt; at least they “wrote more skilfully and did not mangle the Word quite so badly.” Luther was, however, tactless enough to give the Strasburgers a glimpse of the secondary motives which led him to defend the Presence of Christ so strongly and defiantly from that time forward. He complains that Carlstadt was making such an ado as though he wanted “to darken the sun and light of the Evangel,” so “that the world might forget everything that had been taught them by us [by Luther] hitherto.” “I have up till now managed well and rightly in all the main points, and whoever says the contrary has no good spirit; I trust I shall not spoil it in the matter of the externals on which alone prophets such as these lay stress.”[1736]

It is unnecessary to show anew here how Luther’s later defence of the Real Presence in the Eucharist against the Zwinglians contains indubitable evidence in its virulence that Luther felt hurt. This personal element is, however, quite insufficient for one to base upon it any suspicion as to the genuineness of his convictions.

If, on the other hand, we consider the strange and arbitrary form he gave to the doctrine of the Supper, more particularly by insisting that the sole aim and effect of communion is to inspire faith in the personal forgiveness of sins, then his belief in the presence of Christ appears to a certain extent to harmonise with his peculiar theological views. Amidst the storm of his struggle after certainty of salvation the pledge of it which Christ bestows in the Sacrament seems to him like a blessed anchor. That this Body was “given” for us, and this blood shed for us, and that the celebration is in memory of the saving death of Christ, as the very words of institution declare, was frequently brought forward by him as a means to reassure anxious souls. The need of strengthening our faith should, according to him, impel us to receive the Sacrament.

He demands accordingly of others the same traditional faith in the Eucharist in which he found his own stay and support. While clinging to the literal interpretation of the words of the Bible, he, as we already know, is quite ready to appeal to the “dear Fathers” and to the whole of the Church’s past, at least when thereby he hopes to make an impression.[1737] To such lengths does he go in the interests of the confirmation of faith to which he strives to attain by means of this indispensable Sacrament.

He overlooks the fact, however, that his view of the Supper, according to which its only purpose is to be a sign for the stimulating of saving faith, in reality undermines the doctrine of the Real Presence. True to his theory of the Sacrament and of faith he reduces the Supper to an outward sign destined to confirm the forgiveness of sins. One might ask: If it is merely a sign, is so sublime a mystery as the Real Presence at all called for? And, if it is a question of assurance, how can we be rendered secure of our salvation by something which is so far removed above the senses as the belief in the Real Presence of Christ, or by an act which makes such great demands on human reason? Luther’s theory requires a sign which should appeal to the senses and vividly remind the mind of the Redemption and thus awaken faith. This is scarcely the case in the Eucharist where Christ is invisibly present and only to be apprehended by “the Word.” If bread and wine are merely to call forth a remembrance of Christ which inspires faith, then the Zwinglian doctrine of the Sacrament fulfils all that is required. Luther does not face this difficulty, but Protestants were not slow to urge it against him.[1738]

A peculiarity of Luther’s teaching on the Sacrament is to be found in his two theories of Impanation and Ubiquity. Impanation, viz. the opinion that the substance of the bread persists in the Sacrament and that Christ is present together with the bread, served him as a means to escape the Catholic doctrine of a change of substance (Transubstantiation). With the help of the theory of Ubiquity which affirmed the presence everywhere of the Body of Christ, he fancied he could extricate himself from certain difficulties raised by opponents of the Sacrament. The history of both opinions presents much that is instructive. Here, however, we shall consider only the second, viz. the ubiquity of Christ’s Body.

The theory of the omnipresence of the Body of Christ which Luther reached together with his doctrine of the Supper, like his other theory of the faith of infants, shows plainly not only of how much his imagination was capable, but also what curious theses he could propound in all calmness and serenity. Thus we hear him asserting that the Redeemer, the Lord of Creation, is present, in His spiritualised Body, everywhere and penetrates all things! He is present bodily at the right hand of God according to the Scriptures; but the right hand of God is everywhere, hence also in the consecrated Bread and Wine lying on the altar; consequently the Body and Blood of Christ must be there too.[1739] To the question how this comes about, he replies: “It is not for us to know,” nor does reason even understand how God can be in every creature.

Much more important is it, so he says, that we should learn to seize, grasp and appropriate this ever-present Christ. “For though Christ is everywhere present, He does not everywhere allow Himself to be seized and laid hold of.... Why? Because it is one thing for God to be present and another for Him to be present to you. He is present to you then when He pledges His Word to it and binds Himself by it and says: Here you shall find Me. When you have His Word for it, then you can truly seize Him and say: Here I have Thee, as Thou hast said.”[1740] In this way Christ assures us of His presence in the Sacrament, and invites us, so Luther teaches, to partake of Him in the Bread of the Supper. This, however, is practically to explain away the presence of Christ in the Bread (to which Luther adheres so firmly) and to dissolve it into a purely subjective apprehension. Nevertheless, at least according to certain passages, he was anxious to see the Sacrament adored and did not hesitate to do so himself.[1741]

To the belief that Christ’s Body is truly received in Communion he held fast, as already stated, till the end of his life.

The report, that, in the days of extreme mental tension previous to his last journey to Eisleben, he abandoned the doctrine of the Real Presence, hitherto so passionately advocated, in order to conciliate the Zwinglians or Melanchthonians, is a fable, put into circulation by older Protestant writers.[1742] In view of the proofs, met with up to the very last, of his belief to the contrary, we may safely dismiss also the doubtful account to be mentioned directly which seems to speak in favour of his having abandoned it.

Luther’s “Kurtz Bekentnis” of September, 1544, certainly was true to his old standpoint and showed that he wished “the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, ‘Zwingel,’ Œcolampadius, Stinkfield [Schwenkfeld] and their disciples at ZÜrich, or wherever else they be, to be sternly condemned and avoided.”[1743] In his last sermon at Wittenberg on Jan. 17, 1546, he warned his hearers against reason, that “fair prostitute and devil’s bride,” and, indirectly, also against the Sacramentarians and those who attacked his doctrine of the Supper. George Major relates that when he was sent, on Jan. 10, 1546, by Luther to the religious conference at Ratisbon he found scribbled on his door these words: “Our professors must be examined on the Supper of the Lord”; Luther also admonished him not to endeavour to conceal or pass over in silence belief in the Real Presence. On his journey Luther said much the same in the sermons he delivered at Halle and Eisleben; even in his last sermon at Eisleben we find the Sacramentarians described as seducers of mankind and foes of the Gospel.[1744]

That Luther changed his opinion is the purport of a communication, which, after his death, Melanchthon is said to have made to A. R. Hardenberg, a friend of his. Hardenberg speaks of it in a document in his own handwriting preserved in the Bremen municipal archives. There he certainly affirms that Melanchthon had told him how that Luther, before his last journey, had said to him: People have gone too far in the matter of the Supper; he himself had often thought of writing something so as to smooth things down and thus allow the Church again to be reunited; this, however, might have cast doubts on his doctrine as a whole; he preferred therefore to commend the case to God; Melanchthon and the others might find it possible to do something after his death.[1745]—Evidently it is our duty to endeavour to understand and explain this account, however grounded our suspicions may be. One recent Protestant writer has justly remarked: “There must be something behind Hardenberg’s testimony”[1746]; and another, that it “cannot be simply set aside.”[1747]

J. Hausleiter, in 1898, seems to have given the most likely explanation of it:[1748] After Luther’s death Amsdorf complained bitterly that the Wittenberg edition of Luther’s German works, then in the press, had not preserved the real Luther undefiled; he pointed out, that, in the second volume, Luther’s violent attack on the Sacramentarians had been omitted where (at the end of the work “Das diese Wort Christi ‘Das ist mein Leib, etce.,’ noch fest stehen,” 1527) he had said that the devil with the help of Bucer and his denial of the Sacrament had “smeared his filth” over Luther’s books; that Bucer was a “sly, slippery, slimy devil”; where Luther had spoken of Bucer’s “poisonous malice, murderous stabs and arch-scoundreldom,” thanks to which he had “defiled, poisoned and defamed” Luther’s teaching, and where a protest was registered against the assertion that “to begin with,” Philip too had taught the same as the Sacramentarians, viz. that there is “nothing but bread in the Lord’s Supper.”[1749] It was known that those pages had been suppressed in the new edition at Luther’s own hint. This was stated by George RÖrer, Luther’s former assistant, who supervised the correction. He said, “he did this with the knowledge and by the request and command of Luther, because M. Bucer, who had there been so severely handled as a notable enemy of the Sacrament, had since been converted.” Of any real conversion of Bucer there can be no question, but as he was then doing good work at Ratisbon in the interests of the new Evangel it may be that Luther—perhaps moved thereto by his Electer at the instance of the Landgrave of Hesse—consented to display such indulgence. This may well have formed the subject of the communication Hardenberg received from Melanchthon, only that the one or the other, or possibly both, in the interests of the movement hostile to Luther’s Sacramental teaching, distorted and exaggerated the facts of the case, and thus gave rise to the legend of Luther’s change of views.

Support for it may also have been seen in the circumstance that Luther, in spite of Melanchthon’s defection on the doctrine of the Sacrament, never broke off his relations with him. In his severe “Kurtz Bekentnis” (1544) he forbore from attacking Melanchthon either openly or covertly. Even in 1545, in the Preface to his own Latin works, Luther bestowed his well-known eulogy on Melanchthon’s “Loci theologici.”[1750] It has been pointed out elsewhere that the services his friend rendered him had been and continued to be too important to allow of Luther’s breaking with him.[1751]

Though Luther was unflinching in his advocacy of the Presence of Christ together with his pet theories of Impanation and Ubiquity, yet he waged an implacable war on the Sacrifice of the Mass. As, however, we have reserved this for later consideration we shall here only point out, that both his doctrine and his practice with regard to the Sacrament of the Altar suffered by his unhappy opposition to the Mass in which it is celebrated and offered, even more so than by the modifications he had already introduced into the older doctrine.

Invocation of the Saints.

Among those doctrines of the Church from which Luther cut himself adrift only little by little and at the expense of a wrench, must be numbered those dealing with the invocation of the Saints and with Purgatory.

The grand and inspiring belief of the Church in the Communion of Saints, which weaves a close and common band between the living and those souls who have already passed into heaven and those, again, who are still undergoing purification, had at first taken deep root in Luther’s mind. Later on, however, the foundations of this doctrine became more and more undermined, partly owing to his theories on the Church and the Mediatorship of Christ, partly and even more so by his ardent wish to strike a deadly blow at the practical life of the Catholic Church and all that “Popish” worship had erected on this particular doctrine. Veneration of the Saints and intercession for the dead loomed very large among the religious practices dear to the Christian people, though, at that time, they were disfigured by abuses. Luther adroitly used the abuses as a lever for his work.

Mary.

As long as he admitted the invocation of Saints, Luther assigned a prominent place to that of the Blessed Virgin. “She is to be invoked,” he writes in 1521, “that God may give and do according to her will what we ask.”[1758] After he had changed his mind concerning the saints, he was unwilling to allow this any longer.

Owing, however, to the after effects of his Catholic education, here particularly noticeable in him, we meet with many beautiful sayings of his in support of the worship of Mary, although as time went on he grew ever more hostile to it.

Purgatory.

In the Schmalkalden Articles the olden doctrine of Purgatory was rejected by Luther as follows: Purgatory, “with all its pomp, worship and traffic, must be held to be nothing more than a mere phantom of the devil,” born of “that dragon’s tail” the Mass.[1775]

Although in this condemnation Luther’s customary polemical exaggeration of abuses clearly plays a part, yet from his Indulgence Theses and “Resolutions” down to the sentence in the Articles of Schmalkalden the working of his mind can clearly be traced, expressed as it is, now in rejection on principle, and on theological or biblical grounds, now in opportunist and cynical attacks on the Church’s ancient doctrine of Purgatory. The temporal penalties which, according to the teaching of the Church, must be paid by the suffering souls notwithstanding their state of grace, found no place in Luther’s new theory of a faith which covered over everything. According to the usual view venial sins also are forgiven in the next world, thanks to the purifying pains of Purgatory. But of venial sins as distinct from grievous sins Luther refused to hear. He had nothing but evasive replies to the objection which presented itself of its own accord, viz. that mortals when they die often seem ripe neither for heaven nor for hell.[1776]

At first Luther was content to modify merely the doctrine of Purgatory which is so deeply implanted in the consciousness of the Christian, by denying that it was capable of making satisfaction while nevertheless asserting his belief in the existence of a place of purgation (“mihi certissimum est, purgatorium esse”);[1777] then he devoted himself to countering the many legends and popular tales of the appearance of ghosts, a comparatively easy task.[1778] The Pope, he went on to say, had merely made Purgatory an article of faith in order to enrich himself and his followers by Masses for the Dead, though in fact “it may be that only very few souls go there.”

Later he preferred to think, that God had in reality told us practically nothing about the existence or non-existence of Purgatory, or of the condition of the Saints in heaven; the preachers would do well, he says, gradually to wean the people from their practices in this regard; they had merely to decline to discuss the question of the dead and of the Saints in heaven. He was indeed unwilling to sever the close ties, so dear to the Catholic, binding the faithful to the deceased members of his family and to the beloved patterns and heroes of former days, yet his writings do tend in that direction.

From 1522 onward he inclined strongly to the idea that those who passed away fell into a deep sleep, from which they would awaken only on the day of Judgment; those who had breathed their last in the faith of Christ would all, so he fancies, sleep as in Abraham’s bosom; but since this depended on the “good pleasure of God,” it was not forbidden “to pray for the dead”; the petition must, however, be cautiously worded, for instance, as follows: “I beseech Thee for this soul which may be sleeping or suffering; if it be suffering, I implore Thee, if it be Thy Divine Will, to deliver it.” After praying thus once or twice, then “let it be.”[1779] In 1528 we still meet, in his writings, with similar concessions to the olden teaching and practice.[1780]

In 1530, however, his writing “Widderruff vom Fegefeur,”[1781] made an end of all concessions; here he is compelled to combat the “shouting and boasting of the Papists,” for the “lies and abominations of the sophists with regard to Purgatory” had passed all endurance. He now wants the sleep of the soul to be understood as a state of happy peace, and when it becomes a question of answering the Bible passage alleged by the Catholics, viz. 2 Machabees xii. 45 f., where it is said of the offering made for the fallen, that it is “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sins,” Luther simply strikes out this book from the Canon of Scripture, as indeed he had done even previously; the Church, so his curious argument ran, could not bestow more authority and force on a book than it possessed of itself, because the sacred books must themselves bear witness to their inspiration.

It would be superfluous to enumerate in detail the other points of theology on which he set himself to oppose the Catholic teaching he had himself in earlier days advocated, sometimes on excellent grounds. We know his exclamation: Were I to teach to-day everything that I formerly taught, particularly in the beginning, then “I should be obliged to worship the Pope.” Moreover, not only were there contradictions due to his falling away from doctrines of the Church which he had formerly vindicated, but also many others resulting from his modification of his own views, or implied in his new opinions.

His views on indulgences, satisfaction, penance and contrition, original sin and predestination, on marriage, priestly ordination, spiritual jurisdiction and secular authority, on Councils and the Roman Primacy, have already been dealt with historically in what has gone before. Other points of doctrine will have to be discussed elsewhere in a different connection; for instance, the far-reaching question of the Church and her visibility and invisibility, and—what is of no less importance for a due appreciation of the man—the end of all and the devil.

One only point, on which indeed Luther opposed the doctrine and practice of the Church with all his heart and soul, must here be considered more closely.

6. Luther’s Attack on the Sacrifice of the Mass

All Luther’s new doctrines referred to above might be regarded in the light of attacks on the Church’s teaching and practice. None of his theological views were put forward by him merely to be discussed in the calm domain of thought. They are always quickened by his hatred of the Church and the antichristian Papacy. This holds good in particular of his antagonism to the sacrificial character of the Mass.

By his violent assault on the Mass he robbed the churches and public worship of the Holy Sacrifice,[1782] and removed the very focus of Divine service in the Church.

Whereas to the Catholic Church the celebration of the Sacrament of the Altar was always a true sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving and atonement, which Christ, as the High Priest, offers to the Eternal Father through the instrumentality of a priest, according to Luther it is merely a memorial on the part of the congregation, which stimulates faith and gives a public testimony to God’s glory.[1783] In 1538 he characterised the struggle against the Mass as one vital to the new faith;[1784] he was very well aware how closely allied it was with the worship to which he himself had once been devoted: “Had any man twenty years ago tried to rob me of the Mass, I should have come to blows with him.”[1785]

Sacrifice is the supreme and at the same time the most popular expression of the worship of God. “From the rising of the sun even to the going down,” the Prophet Malachias had prophesied (i. 11), “my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation,” viz. the Eucharist. The common oblation throughout Christendom formed a sublime bond uniting all the Christian nations of the earth in one holy family. The words of Christ concerning the “Body that is given for you,” and “Blood that is shed for you” were rightly regarded as proving both the institution of the common sacrifice and its atoning power.

Luther not only burst asunder the bond of unity, but also overthrew the altar of sacrifice. It is against the correct idea of Divine worship to deprive it of all sacrifice, and to make its principal object consist in the edification and instruction of the congregation, as Luther decreed. Here again we see Luther’s individualism and the stress he laid on the subjective side, even to the extent of robbing religion of the sacrifice of the Lamb, which had the misfortune to be independent of fortuitous piety. The very walls of his temples seemed to utter a chill protest against being given over to a worship so entirely at the mercy of the feelings of the visitor. Luther was against the abuses connected with the Mass, and so were all well-instructed Catholics. But the latter argued, that, in spite of the abuses, the Mass must be honoured as the sacrifice on which the spiritual life rests. To the many contradictions of which he was guilty Luther added a further one, viz. of advocating as a purer and higher worship, one that does not even come up to the true standard of worship. (See vol. v., xxix., 9).

Luther’s deep-seated and almost instinctive antipathy to the Sacrifice of the Mass affords us, in its various phases, a good insight into his plan of campaign. On no other point does his hate flame forth so luridly, nowhere else is he so defiant, so contemptuous and so noisy—save perhaps when attacking Popery—as when assailing the Sacrifice of the Mass, that main bulwark of the Papacy. One thing is certain; of all the religious practices sacred to Catholics none was branded by him with such hideous and common abuse as this, the sublimest mystery of faith and of Divine Love.

First Attacks. “On the Abomination of the Silent Mass.”

In spite of Luther’s assurance given above of his former high regard for the Mass, he must quite early have grown averse to it, probably at the time when his zeal in the religious life first began to flag.

Even in 1516 we learn from his correspondence that he rarely found time for its celebration or for the recitation of the Canonical Hours.[1786] At a much later date he lets fall the remark, that he had never liked saying Mass.[1787] In view of his disturbed state of soul we can readily credit what he says, viz. that, in the monastery Gabriel Biel’s book on the Mass, in which the dignity of the Holy Sacrifice is extolled with the voices of antiquity, had often made his heart bleed.[1788] It is rather curious, that, according to his own account, it was on the occasion of his first Mass after ordination that his morbid state of fear showed itself strongly for the first time.[1789] No less remarkable is it that his most extravagant self-reproaches for his past life had reference to his saying Mass. He tells us how, even long after his apostasy, he had often been brought to the verge of despair by the recollection of the terrible sin of saying Mass whereby he had at one time openly defied and offended God. He morbidly persuades himself that he had been guilty of the most frightful idolatry; that, as a priest and monk, he had performed the most criminal of actions, one subversive of all religion, in spite of his having done so in ignorance and in perfect good faith.[1790]

In his sermons on the Commandments, published in 1518, we still find a tribute to the Sacrifice of the Mass as Catholics understood it.[1791] But in his “Sermon von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des heyligen waren Leychnams Christi” of 1519 he is curiously reticent concerning the nature of the Mass, whilst expressly recommending and praising the communion of the congregation—under both kinds—as the work of that faith “wherein strength lies.”[1792]

The first open attack on the Holy Sacrifice was made in his “Sermon von dem newen Testament das ist von der heyligen Messe” (1520). The latter appeared almost simultaneously with his “An den christlichen Adel” and prepared the way for his subversive treatment of the Mass in his “De captivitate babylonica.” In the Sermon he declared that it was “almost the worst abuse,” that in the older Church the Eucharistic celebration had been turned into a sacrifice to be offered to God.[1793] Statements such as these predominate in the virulent chapter devoted to the Mass in the “De captivitate babylonica”: Christ’s sacrifice on the cross had been made out to be insufficient and the Sacrifice of the Mass set up in its place; the Supper was the Lord’s work for us, but, by ascribing a sacrificial value to the Mass, it becomes a work of man for God, whereby man hopes to please God.

The close ties connecting the Sacrifice of the Mass with both the Church’s ancient traditions and the institution of Christ are here ruthlessly torn asunder. A lurid and grossly exaggerated account of the abuses which had arisen in connection with the money-offerings for Masses served to stimulate the struggle, essentials faring as badly as what was merely accidental.

At the Wartburg the “Spirit” of the place further excited Luther’s hatred of the Mass. He poked fun at the “Mass-priest” who served the stronghold and wrote to Melanchthon: “Never to all eternity shall I say another Low Mass.”[1794] This he says in the same letter which witnesses to his inner contest with the monastic vows, and in which we find the sentence: “Be a sinner and sin boldly but believe more boldly still.”[1795] At the time of his spiritual baptism in the Wartburg he also wrote both his “De abroganda missa” and his “De votis monasticis.” The former he published in 1522, also in a German version entitled “Vom Missbrauch der Messen.”

This was the bugle-call to the struggle he immediately commenced at Wittenberg against the continued celebration of Mass by the Catholic clergy in the Castle and Collegiate churches of the town. We have already treated of the phases of that campaign in which his impetuosity and intolerance manifested itself in all its nakedness.[1796] From the inglorious combat, thanks to the help of the mob, he was to come forth victorious. On Christmas Day, 1524, for the first time, there was no Mass, and in the following year Justus Jonas wrote of the completion of the work: “On the Saturday after the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist, the whole Pope ... was flung out of All Saints’ church at Wittenberg, together with the stoles, albs, etc.; the olden ceremonies were replaced by pious ones such as accord with Scripture.”[1797]

Luther was convinced that the “whole Pope” could not be destroyed throughout the world save by the abolition everywhere of the Mass. “When once the Mass has been put away,” he declares in 1522, in his screed against Henry VIII., “then I shall think I have overthrown the Pope completely.”[1798]

In this writing his consciousness of his mission and his defiant insistence on the new teaching were largely directed against that palladium of the old Church: “Through me Christ has begun to reveal the abomination standing in the Holy Place” (Dn. ix. 27). It is in denying the sacrificial character of the Mass that he uses those odd words of bravado: “Here I stand, here I sit, here I remain, here I defy with contempt the whole assembly of the Papists,” etc.[1799]

The last act in his warfare on the Mass at the Collegiate church of Wittenberg had been anticipated by Luther’s stormy sermon against the Canon of the Mass (Nov. 27, 1524).[1800] This identical sermon, taken down by his pupil George RÖrer, formed the groundwork of the writing he published in 1525, “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse so man den Canon nennet.”[1801]

When Johann Eck took up his pen to refute Luther’s “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse” he felt it almost superfluous to prove how unfounded the latter’s assertions were, that, by the sacrifice of the Mass, Catholics “denied in deed and in their heart that Christ had blotted out sin”[1809] by His Sacrifice on Golgotha, or that they maintained, that, not the merits of Christ, but rather “our works, must effect this.”[1810] He enters at greater length into the theological proofs of the truly sacrificial character of the consecration and of the correctness and value of the Canon, supplementing the biblical passages on the Sacrifice of the New Covenant by the clear and definite witness of tradition.[1811]

He and his Catholic readers were, however, quite prepared to find Luther refusing even to listen to such proofs taken from tradition. “Ah, bah, tradition this way, tradition that!” he had already cried, with regard to this very question, when striving to shake himself free of the fetters of the Church’s doctrine.

Eck, however, also attacked Luther from another point. Luther had placed in the very forefront of his writing the assertion, that he had never advised the people to have recourse to violent measures, whether with regard to the Mass or the Catholic worship generally, or invited them to revolt; in the preface Eck accordingly promises to take him to task both concerning the Canon and for his responsibility in the rising. “I shall, please God, prove Luther a liar on both counts.” He convicts him of inciting to revolt on the strength of “five proofs” taken from various works of his.

The pecuniary aspect of the Mass supplied Luther and the preachers with an effective means of exciting the people which they were not slow to seize. The abuses, real or apparent, of the system of Mass-stipends, were worked to their utmost by the demagogues.

In Luther’s extravagant language the Sacrifice of the Mass is simply made to appear a rich field for vulgar greed of gain, discovered and exploited by the Papists because it filled their pockets. The amount brought in by Masses for the Dead was chiefly to blame for the spread of the Mass. “This invention [Masses for the Dead] has been worth money to them,” he cries, “so that they need not say Mass for nothing.”[1812] “At All Saints’, here at Wittenberg, the money is godlessly thrown away [by foundation-Masses, annual commemorations, etc.]; the three Mass-priests there, ‘three pigs or paunches,’” celebrate it “in the house of infamy simply because they worship money.”[1813]

Many of the apostles of the new faith preached in the same strain as Luther. Others, as Stephen Agricola for instance states he did, were content to scourge “the great superstition and hindrance to the true honour of God,” i.e. the abuses. Agricola, if we may trust him, “was loath to see Masses for the dead said for money, as this should be done out of pure charity.”[1814] When, later, Flacius Illyricus made similar charges against the Catholics on the pretext of the alms given for Masses, the Dominican, Johann Fabri, replied: “What do you sectarians do gratis? People can never give enough for your preaching, your psalm-singing, your Supper, etc., so that yearly a very large sum has to be spent on your support.... Why then do you abuse the poor priests who take payment for their work and unkindly twit them for saying Mass solely for money? What answer would you make were I to say: You too, Illyricus, preach for the sake of money?”[1815]

The charges of self-seeking and avarice had, however, in some places so strong an effect as to lead to popular risings against the celebration of Mass. This recalls the account given by Erasmus of the ready success he had noticed attended the addresses of the preachers: “The Mass has been abolished,” he writes, “but what more holy thing has been set in its place?... Their churches I have never entered. I have occasionally seen those who listened to their sermons come out like men possessed, with anger and fury writ large upon their faces.... They walked like warriors who have just been harangued by their general. When have their sermons ever produced penance and contrition? Do they not devote most of their time to abuse of the clergy and their lives?... Are risings rare amongst these evangelicals? And do they not resort to violence on the slightest provocation?”[1816]

The peaceable union of Christians before the Altar of Sacrifice in the “Mystery of Faith” had made way for warfare. The absence of the sacrifice avenged itself, however, in the Churches given over to the new religion by the dreariness and utter desolation of the sacred buildings once so full of life; not to mention the dreadful controversies, the bare “ministry of the Word” and the one-sided effort to make of the Supper simply a source of edification and increase of faith, could not suffice to attract the multitude to the Eucharistic celebration. The great sacrifice, which by its own infinite worth and quite independently of its power to edify, glorifies God in His Temple, and so powerfully stimulates the faithful to unite their offering with the sacramental oblation, had been torn from the midst of the congregation.

If we seek here for the connecting link between Luther’s bitter hostility to the Mass and his system as a whole, we shall find, that, granted the doctrine of the imputation of the merits of Christ by faith alone, the Eucharistic Sacrifice had no real place left. Luther said in 1540: “Where the ‘locus’ [’iustificationis’] is rightly taught and stands, there can be nothing evil; for the antecedens, ‘faith alone justifies,’ spells the fall of the Mass,” etc.[1817]

In the new faith everything turned on the saving and the pacification of the sinner by virtue of a sort of amnesty furnished by the merits of Christ’s death on the cross. Faith alone secures all the fulness of the Redeemer’s work of satisfaction; no ordinance of Christ, sacrament, sacrifice or priesthood can assist in the work of clothing the soul with the mantle of these Divine merits; anything of the sort would only diminish the dignity and the efficacy of the confidence of faith. Only what promotes the personal faith which saves—that master-key to the forgiveness, or better, to the cloaking of sin—is here admitted, but no work, no “opus operatum” of Christ’s institution, which, through sacrament and sacrifice, imparts grace to the faithful Christian who is duly prepared to seek salvation; on the contrary, according to Luther, such institutions, which the ancient Church looked upon as sacred, only detract from the merits of Christ.

And since, in his view, every Christian by his faith is a priest, the hierarchy falls, and thus sacrifice too, at least as the prerogative of a special sacerdotal class, also ceases to exist.

Hence the warfare on behalf of the Evangel of faith alone and against sacerdotalism, naturally, and of necessity, led to the warfare against the Mass. This particular combat, in which (as in the attack on the Church’s visible head, viz. the Pope) Luther’s animosity against the Catholics reached its culminating point, necessarily occupied a place in the forefront, because the Mass, which united the congregation before the altar, was the most public and most tangible expression of Catholic life and the one most frequently seen.

Luther’s theological perversions of the Church’s doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass, in the above works and elsewhere, are all the more astonishing, seeing that Gabriel Biel, the theologian, with whom he was so well acquainted and whose “Sacri canonis missÆ expositio” he had studied with keen interest, had, in his exposition of the ancient doctrine of the Mass, forestalled these very misrepresentations, almost as though he had actually foreseen them.[1818] The respected TÜbingen University-Professor, in this explanation of the Mass, which appeared in 1488, was frequently reprinted, and was much used by both parish clergy and preachers, insists, in close unison with the past, that there was but one great and atoning sacrifice of the cross, and that the sacrifice of the Mass did not in the least detract from it but rather applied it to the individual believer. He points out with great emphasis the uniquely sublime character of the sacrifice on Calvary (“unica oblatio et perfectissimum sacrificium”), in its fourfold aspect as a sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving, petition and atonement. In support of this he quotes a number of passages from the Bible: “By it [the sacrifice on the cross] our sins are blotted out (Romans iv.). Through it we have found grace whereby we are saved (Hebrews v.): for, being consummated by suffering, He (Christ) became to all who obey Him the cause of eternal life. By the one oblation of the cross He hath for ever perfected them that are sanctified (Hebrews x.),” etc. “If you seek the blotting out of sins, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; if you seek thanksgiving, Christ gives thanks to the Father; if you seek for deliverance from evil, He heals and sets us free.”[1819] In several passages he dwells in detail on the idea of the saving Lamb of God, once in connection with the thrice-repeated Agnus Dei of the Mass.

But, a comparatively short time after, another was to come, who would assert that the world had long ago lost the Lamb of God, and who presumed to take upon himself the task of pointing Him out anew to all men and of making Him profitable to souls.

In unison with Fathers and theologians, Biel sums up the mutual relations between the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacrifice on the Cross in the words: “Although Christ was once only offered visibly in the flesh, yet He is daily offered concealed under the appearances of bread and wine, though painlessly, for the Sacrifice of the Mass is the representation and memorial of the sacrifice consummated on the Cross and produces the same effects.”[1820]

When describing more minutely its efficacy for the obtaining of grace and forgiveness of sins he dwells on the thought, that it has no quasi-magical effect, but acts “according to man’s preparation and capacity,” so that the Holy Sacrifice does not by any means blot out sin if man’s heart is still turned away from God: to souls that show themselves well-disposed it brings contrition and sorrow for sin and finally forgiveness.[1821] Unlike Baptism and Penance, it does not reconcile the soul with God directly, but only indirectly, by arousing the spirit of penance which leads to the wholesome use of the sacraments and appeases the anger of the Heavenly Father by the offering of His Son, and prevents Him withdrawing the help of His grace. Biel elucidates the idea of sacrifice, deals with the figurative sacrifices of the Old Testament, which found their fulfilment in the clean oblation (Mal. i. 10 f.) to be offered from the rising of the sun even to the going down, with the twofold efficacy of the Mass (“ex opere operato” and “ex opere operante”)[1822] and many other points which Luther unjustly attacks; with the lawfulness of private Masses, with or without any Communion of the faithful, with the advantage of Masses for the souls of the faithful departed, with Mass-stipends[1823] which he defends against the charge of simony, and with the practice of repeating silently certain portions of the Mass, an ancient usage for which he gives the reasons.[1824]

“On the Corner-Mass.” Continuation of the Conflict.

In his war against the Mass Luther was never to yield an inch. His “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse” was followed by fresh pronouncements and writings which bear witness to the intensity of his hatred.

The occasion for another lengthy writing against the Mass and the hierarchy seems to have been furnished in 1533 by the religious conditions in the province of Anhalt, where the Princes, under pressure from their Catholic neighbours, had begun to tolerate the former worship and the saying of Mass. In Dec. of that year Luther published his booklet “Von der Winckelmesse und Pfaffen Weihe.”[1825]

It was designed primarily as a protest against “the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and Ordination,” i.e. against the hierarchy and priesthood, and broadly hinted to the “bishops and priests” that their Order was doomed to destruction. At the Diet of Augsburg he declared his followers had “very humbly informed the Pope and the bishops, that we had no wish forcibly to infringe on their rights and authority in ecclesiastical matters, but that, so long as they did not compel us to any unchristian doctrines, we were quite ready to be ordained and governed by them, and even to assist them in their administration,” but his overtures having been rejected, nothing remained for him but to await the end of the priesthood when God should “in good time” so dispose. “God is wonderful”; He had “overthrown by His word” so much “papistical Mammon-service and idolatry”; “He would also be able to wipe away the rancid Chresam,” i.e. to make an end of the bishops and priests in whose ordination Chrism was used.[1826] Towards the end of the tract he returns to the attack on priestly ordination. He is determined “again to adjudge and commit to the Churches the call, or true ordination and consecration to the office of pastor.” The members of the Church must have the “right and authority to appoint people to the office,” and to entrust it to simple believers of blameless lives, even “without Chrism or butter, grease or lard.”[1827]

The greater portion of the writing is, however, devoted to the “Corner-Mass,” i.e. the Mass generally, which according to the Catholic doctrine is equally valid whether celebrated by the priest alone in a lonely chapel or amid a concourse of faithful who unite their prayers with his and communicate. For reasons readily understood, Luther prefers to use the contemptuous term “Corner-Mass.”

The book on the “Winckelmesse” is celebrated for the disputation between Luther and the devil which it describes. The devil sets forth the proofs against the Mass with marvellous skill, and, by his reproaches, drives the quondam monk into desperate straits. Here Luther is describing the deep remorse of conscience which he will have it he had to endure on account of his Masses. He is, however, merely using a literary artifice when he introduces the devil as the speaker; of this there will be more to say later.[1829] Here, in addition to a letter, which so far has received but little attention, in which he himself furnishes the key to the form in which he casts his argument,[1830] we may mention the fact that Luther’s first draft of his writing on the “Winckelmesse,” which has recently been examined, gives a portion of the devil’s arguments against the Mass and without any reference to the devil, as the author’s own; only later on was the devil made the spokesman for Luther’s ideas.[1831] We can see that it was only as the work proceeded that there occurred to Luther the happy thought of making the devil himself speak, not so much to reveal to the world the worthlessness of the Mass, as to cast if possible poor Luther into despair, because of his former Mass-sayings, and to reveal the utter perversity of the Papists, who, far from being in despair, actually boasted of the Mass.

Luther expected great things from his ruthless attack and from the scene in which the devil appears. It would be, so he fancied, a “test of the wisdom and power of the Papacy.”[1832] His friend Jonas, in a letter of Oct. 26, 1533, speaking of the yet unpublished “Winckelmesse,” calls it a real “battering-ram” to be used against the Papacy; it was long since the Professor had been heard speaking in such a way of the Mass, the Pope and the priests.[1833] Those of the preachers who were fallen priests rejoiced at the advice they found in the book for the quieting of their consciences when tempted by the devil, and at its hint that they should rub their anointed hands with soap and lye the better to obliterate the mark of the Beast.

The writing was translated by Jonas into Latin, but his rendering was a very free and rhetorical one.

The interest it aroused was increased by the negative attitude which Luther seemed to assume towards the Real Presence. To many of his followers Luther seemed to come to an opinion not far removed from the Zwinglian denial of the Presence. Luther learned that Prince Johann of Anhalt and others had expressed their anxiety lest the booklet “should be understood as though I agreed with the fanatics and enemies of the Sacrament.” Hence he at once issued a fresh writing entitled: “A Letter of D. Mart. Luther to a good friend concerning his book on the Corner-Masses” (1534).[1834]

To attack the Sacrament and the Real Presence was, he there declared, far from his thoughts. I shall prove “that I do not hold, nor ever shall hold to all eternity, with the wrong doctrine of the foes of the Sacrament—or to speak quite plainly—with that of Carlstadt, Zwingli and their followers.”[1835] But by this he stood: “Whoever, like the Papists, did not celebrate the Sacrament according to the ordinance of Christ, had no right to say Christ was there”; “a counterfeit florin, struck contrary to the King’s order, can never be a good one.”[1836] “May God bestow on all pious Christians such a mind, that, when they hear the Mass spoken of, they quake with fear and cross themselves as they would at the sight of some abomination of the devil.”[1837]

Johann CochlÆus at once replied to the “Winckelmesse” with an appeal to the correctness of ecclesiastical tradition. In the same year he published Innocent the Third’s “De sacro altaris mysterio” and Isidore of Sevilla’s “De ecclesiasticis officiis.” These venerable witnesses of Christian antiquity had, he declared, “a better claim to be believed than Luther’s furies.” In addition to this he also wrote a popular theological defence in the vernacular “On the Holy Mass and Priestly ordination” (Leipzig, 1534). In this writing he begins by emphasising the claims of ecclesiastical tradition and the teaching office of the Church: “The Church understands Scripture far better and more surely, thanks to the Holy Spirit promised by Christ and duly sent her, than Luther does by his evil spirit.” He laid down the principle which he urged was the only true and reliable guide in the controversies of the age: Hold fast to the teaching of the Church rather than to the subjective interpretations of the Bible, which are often so divergent. He was not, however, altogether happy in his choice of expressions, for instance, when he exclaims: “Bible hither, Bible thither!” for this might well have given the impression, that, on his side, small account was made of the Bible. In reality this was merely his way of retorting on Luther’s: “Tradition hither, Tradition thither.” The theologian, who elsewhere is careful to set its true value on the Bible, seeks in this way to brand the tricks played with the Bible; similar phrases then in use were the one we already know, “Bible, Babble, Bubble,” and Luther’s own sarcastic saying: “The Bible is a heresy-book.”[1838]

CochlÆus not only brought forward, in support of the Mass, besides Holy Scripture, that tradition which Luther had treated so scornfully, but also replied to his opponent’s perversions and charges on all the other counts. Of the grievous disorders which Luther said had come under his notice during his stay in Rome, what CochlÆus says is much to the point: “It is quite possible, that, among so many thousands from all lands, there may have been some such desperate villains. But it is not seemly that Luther on that score should seek to calumniate pious and devout monks and priests and make the people distrustful of them.”[1839]

In his familiar conversations Luther repeatedly reveals the psychological side of his attack on the Mass.

Denunciation of the Mass naturally occupies a place in Luther’s Articles of Schmalkalden.[1852] Since the latter were incorporated in the “Symbolic Books” of the Lutheran Evangelical Church and figure in the Book of Concord with the three oldest Œcumenical Creeds, the Confession of Augsburg, etc., as writings “recognised and accepted as godly truths by our blessed forefathers and by us,” condemnation of the Mass became as much a traditional canon within the Protestant fold as Luther himself could have desired.

In the Schmalkalden Articles we find, after the first article on Justification by Faith alone, a second article on the office and work of Jesus Christ which declares: “That the Mass among the Papists must be the greatest and most frightful abomination” because it is “in direct and violent opposition” to the first article, according to which the Lamb of God alone delivers man from sin, not “a wicked or pious minister of the Mass by his work.” The Mass is a “work of men, yea, of wicked knaves,” a source “of unspeakable abuses by the buying and selling of Masses,” defended by the Papists only because they “know very well, that if the Mass falls, the Papacy too must perish.” Over and above all this, that dragon’s tail, which is the Mass, has produced much filth and vermin and many forms of idolatry: First of all Purgatory; for the execrable market of Masses for the dead produced that “devilish spectre” of Purgatory. Secondly, “on account of it evil spirits have performed much trickery by appearing as the souls of men”; the devils “with unspeakable roguery” demanded Masses, etc. “Thirdly, pilgrimages, whereby people ran after Masses, forgiveness of sins, and the Grace of God, for the Mass ruled everything” and caused men to run after “hurtful, devilish will-o’-the-wisps.” “Fourthly, the brotherhoods” with their Masses, etc., are also “contrary to the first article of the Atonement.” “Fifthly, the holy things” (relics) were also “supposed to effect forgiveness of sin as being a good work and worship of God like the Mass.” “Sixthly, here belong also the beloved Indulgence” in which “Judas incarnate, i.e. the Pope, sells the merits of Christ.”—Hence even Indulgences are made out to be one of the unhappy consequences of the Mass!

It is a relief, after such lamentable utterances which could only have been accepted by people whom prejudice in Luther’s favour had rendered blind, to recall the clear statements—so full of conviction—on the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, which occur in the very writings in which Luther attacks the Mass. Our second volume concluded with a cheering confession on the part of the Wittenberg Professor of his faith in the Trinity and Incarnation, a confession which both did him honour and expressed those consoling and incontrovertible truths which constitute the common treasure of the Christian creeds. The present volume also, after the sad pictures of dissent of which it is only too full, may charitably end with the words in which Luther voices his belief in the Sacrament of the Altar, the lasting memorial of Divine Love, in which our Lord never ceases to pray for unity amongst those bidden as guests to His table.

“I hereby confess before God and the whole world that I believe and do not doubt, and with the help and grace of my dear Lord Jesus Christ will maintain even to that Day, that where Mass is celebrated according to Christ’s ordinance whether amongst us Lutherans or in the Papacy, or in Greece or in India (even though under one kind only—though that is wrong and an abuse), there is present under the species of the Bread, the true Body of Christ given for us on the cross, and, under the species of wine, the true Blood of Christ shed for us; nor is it a spiritual or fictitious Body and Blood, but the true natural Body and Blood taken of the holy, virginal, and really human body of Mary, without the intervention of any man but conceived of the Holy Ghost alone; which Body and Blood of Christ now sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty of God in the Divine Person, which is Christ Jesus, true, real, and eternal God, with the Father of Whom He is begotten from all eternity, etc. And that same Body and Blood of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, not only the Saints and those who are worthy, but also sinners and the unworthy truly handle and receive, bodily though invisibly, with hands, mouth, chalice, paten, corporal, or whatever else be used when it is given and received in the Mass.”

“This is my faith, this I know, and no one shall take it from me.”

He had always, so he insists, by his testimony upheld the “clear, plain text of the Gospel” against heresies old and new, and withstood the “devil’s malice and work in the service and for the betterment of my dear brothers and sisters, in accordance with Christian charity.”[1853]

END OF VOL. IV