Hartmann Grisar

END OF LUTHER’S LITERARY LABOURS. THE WHOLE REVIEWED

1. Towards a Christianity void of Dogma. Protestant Opinions

With the concluding years of Luther’s life we reach a point whence may be undertaken with advantage a survey of the character of his theological and literary labours from several sides from which we have not as yet had opportunity to approach them.

We naturally turn first of all to the religious content of his literary life-work; here it may be advisable to hear what Protestant theologians have to say.

These theologians will tell us how many of the olden dogmas Luther, explicitly or implicitly, relinquishes, and whether and how he undermines the very idea of faith as known to Christians of old; we shall also have to consider the Protestant strictures which assert that the doctrines, which he either retained or set up for the first time, were fraught with so much that was illogical that they may be said to bear within them the seeds of dissolution. The conclusions reached will show whether or not he was actually heading for a “Christianity void of dogma.”

(a) Protestant Critics on Luther’s Abandonment of Individual Christian Dogmas and of the Olden Conception of Faith

It is hard to deny that a certain amount of truth lurks in the contention of a certain modern school of Protestant thought which insists that Luther practically made an end of “the old, dogmatic Christianity.”[1705] Luther did not, of course, look so far ahead, nor were the consequences of his own action at all clear to him, and when Catholics took pains to point them out he was not slow to repel them with the utmost indignation. Still, logic is inexorable in demanding its rights.[1706]

Here we are happily able to state the case almost entirely in the words of Protestant theologians of the modern school, such as, for instance, Adolf Harnack.

“The acknowledged authorities on dogma,” says Harnack, speaking of Luther’s attitude towards the pillars of the Church’s teaching, “have been torn down, and thereby dogma itself, qua dogma, i.e. the unfailing teaching institution ordained by the Holy Ghost, has been done away with.... The revision has been extended even beyond the second century of the Church’s history and up to its very beginnings, and has everywhere been carried out radically. An end has been made of that history of dogma which started in the age of the apologists, nay, of the Apostolic Fathers.”[1707] Harnack therefore, in his detailed work on the history of dogma, refrained from dealing with any theologians later than Luther, instead of following the usual course among Protestant authors, and giving an account of the development of doctrine in later Protestantism and among Luther’s followers. He pertinently asked: “How can there be in Protestantism any history of dogma after Luther’s Prefaces to the New Testament and his great reformation writings?”[1708]

Addressing the representatives of Lutheran “dogmatic theology,” Harnack says: “Luther’s reformation created a new point of departure for the development of the Christian belief in the Word of God”; “it set aside every form of infallibility that might have offered an outward assurance for one’s belief, the Church’s infallible organisation and infallible tradition and the infallible code of Scripture. Thus an end was made of the conception of Christianity from which dogma had sprung, viz. the Christian faith, the sure knowledge of the final causes of all things and thus of the whole Divine scheme of salvation. Christian faith has now become merely a firm assurance of receiving forgiveness of sins from God, as the Father of Jesus Christ, and of living under Him in His kingdom. This at the same time spells the ruin of any infallible dogma; for how can any dogma be unchangeable and authentic, thought out and formulated as it was by finite men, living in sin, and devoid of every outward guarantee?” If, nevertheless, Luther accepted and maintained certain aspects of ancient dogma, he did so, not as establishing “side by side with faith a law of faith based on particular outward promises,” but rather “from his unshaken conviction that much of this dogma corresponded exactly with the Gospel or Word of God, and that this correspondence was self-evident”; “as dogma, it did not constitute a rule.”[1709]

In some respects, for instance in this very matter, what Harnack says stands in need of correction. He is at times too fond of making out his own Christianity without dogma to have been also that of Luther. We just heard him say that the remnant of olden dogma which Luther preserved, “as dogma, did not constitute a rule.” He would, however, have been nearer the truth in saying that, logically, as dogma, it ought not to have constituted a rule. There can be no doubt that Luther—as will be shown below—insists, though in contradiction with other “basic ideas and with the spirit of his reformation,” that the Christian verities which he leaves standing must be embraced as revealed articles of the Christian belief and indubitable truths of faith. Even where he does not insist upon this he still takes it for granted that faith in the whole of revelation (“fides historica”) precedes that faith which consists in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Even Harnack has to admit, that, with Luther, “dogma qua dogma, remains to some extent in force” owing “to the logic of things.”[1710]

Luther, according to another passage in Harnack, “under the pressure of circumstances” and the storms raised against him by the fanatics and the Anabaptists, was drawn into a dogmatising current of which the issue was the Augsburg Confession. To the question: Did Luther’s reformation do away with the ancient dogma? we must reply, that, at least, it “demolished its foundation—as indeed our Catholic opponents rightly object against us—that it was a mighty principle rather than a new doctrine, and that its subsequent history through the age of Orthodoxy, Pietism and Rationalism down to the present day is less a falling away than a natural development.”[1711]

Even before Harnack’s day this was virtually the standpoint of some of the best Protestant judges. It had been perceived long before that the purely Evangelical theory led much further from the ancient dogmas than Protestant orthodoxy was disposed to admit. Even according to so conservative a theologian as Johann August Neander, “the spirit of the Reformation did not at once attain to a clear consciousness of itself”; Luther indeed, even here, “had reached the consciousness of the pure Evangelical belief, thanks to the principle of a faith which is a free outgrowth of the Divine power within; yet, owing to the controversies on the Supper and to the Peasant War, this clear consciousness again became eclipsed.”[1712] Neander finds the best statement of Luther’s new ideas in those works which are most radically opposed to the traditional teaching of the Church of old. Albert Ritschl, the well-known leader of the free Protestant school, likewise declared: “The Lutheran theory of life has not remained true to itself; it has been hemmed in and dulled by the stress laid on objective dogma. The pure doctrine as taught in the schools is in reality merely a passing, not the final, form of Protestantism.”[1713]

All these critics, Harnack in particular, though blaming Luther for not drawing the right conclusions, are nevertheless at one in their outspoken admiration of the powerful thinker and brave spokesman of the new belief, and particularly of those theses of his which approach most closely their own ideal of an unfettered theology. In their opinion Luther is to remain the hero of yore, though his garb and attitude will no longer be the same as those to which Protestantism had previously been accustomed. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention this because otherwise the strong things some of the critics say might, taken together, give the impression that their main aim and endeavour was to decry Luther. Probably enough Harnack and his friends failed to foresee how unfavourable a view their censures, taken in the lump, might produce of Luther’s person and work. Harnack, however, in one passage, pays a strange tribute to Luther’s conservatism, one, no doubt, which would appeal to the Reformer’s more old-fashioned friends. He points out, that, “we owe it to him, that, even to the present day, these formularies [the olden creeds] are still in Protestantism a living power”; nay, such is his ignorance of the state of things in Catholicism, that he is convinced that it is only in Protestantism that these creeds still “live,” whereas, “in the Roman Church, they are but a dead and obsolete heirloom”; Luther, according to one bold dictum of Harnack’s, was really “the restorer of ancient dogma.”[1714]

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Among the olden doctrines thrown over by Luther his Protestant critics rightly instance the Canon of Scripture and the right of the Church to interpret the Bible. They corroborate strikingly from Luther’s writings the results which we reached above,[1715] a circumstance which may surprise Protestant readers.

If, according to Luther, the doctrine of the oldest confessions of faith are only to be retained because they can be directly proved from the Bible, then the Bible itself with all its books, so such Protestants argue, must stand firm and inviolable. Now, awkwardly enough, Luther himself saps the authority of the Canon.

“If the attitude is justified which Luther takes up in his famous Prefaces to the various books of the New Testament,” says Harnack (cp. prefaces to the Epistle of James, to the Epistle to the Hebrews and to the Apocalypse), “then an end is made of the infallible Canon of Scripture. It is here of the utmost importance historically, though in itself a matter of indifference, that we find Luther, especially after the controversy on the Supper, making statements to the effect that every letter of Scripture is fundamental to the Christian faith; the flagrant contradiction involved in the assertion that a thing holds and at the same time does not hold can only be solved by saying that it does not. The same follows from Luther’s views on faith, for, according to him, this is produced by the Holy Ghost through the preaching of the Word of God. To-day too, all Protestants are agreed that historical criticism of Scripture is not unevangelical, though this unanimity of opinion extends only as far as the ‘principle,’ and many refuse to carry it out in practice.”[1716]—“Luther, at the very time when he was waging so brave a war against the authority of the Councils, also opposed Scriptural infallibility, and, indeed, how could he do otherwise?... There can be no doubt that Luther’s attitude towards the New Testament, as we find it set forth in the Prefaces and in one or two other passages, is the correct one, i.e. that which really tallies with his belief.”[1717]

As F. Loofs points out, Luther leaves us without any outward guarantee for the authority of the Canon of the Bible.[1718] Loofs quotes, for instance, Luther’s saying: “Hence God must tell you within your heart: This is God’s Word.”[1719] “Luther’s criticism,” the same writer says, “did not spare even those books which he allowed to be truly prophetic or apostolic.... He frankly admitted the human element in Scripture.”[1720]

If Luther’s fundamental opposition to the faith once delivered is already apparent from his criticism of the Bible, still more is this the case when we come to look into the freedom he allowed in the interpretation of the sense of the Bible.

As Harnack puts it: In Luther’s view “the Church is based on something which every Christian, no matter how humble, can see and test, viz. on the Word of God as apprehended by pure reason. This, of course, was tantamount to a claim to ascertain the true verbal sense of Holy Scripture.... But Luther never foresaw how far this rule would lead.”[1721]

Luther himself often put his principle to such arbitrary usage as to prove a warning to others (above, vol. iv., pp. 406 f., 418 f.), and to exclude the possibility of any settled dogma. “The flagrant contradiction,” says Harnack, “into which he was led by criticising the Bible whilst all the time holding the idea he did about its inspiration, he contrived to explain away by reading the Evangel itself into texts which presented a difficulty.”[1722] “In Holy Scripture, the infallible authority, only that was to be found, which on other grounds was already established as the true doctrine.”[1723]

Hence in the matter of the Bible, so Harnack has it, “Criticism, in order to be according to Luther’s mind, would have to go against him in the interests of faith.”[1724]

Luther’s abandonment of the Church’s standpoint with regard to the Bible is closely bound up with his renunciation of the Church’s teaching office, of the hierarchy and of all respect for tradition. This meant, as modern Protestant critics admit, the destruction of the whole theory of tradition and, in fact, of all ecclesiastical authority, though, on Harnack’s own admission, ancient Church writers, especially “subsequent to IrenÆus,” rely much on such authority.

“Luther was antagonistic to all these authorities,” says the same scholar, “to the infallibility of Church, Pope, and Councils, to every constitutional right of the Church to pronounce on the truth and, on principle, to all the doctrinal formularies of the past.”[1725] His later writing: “Von den Conciliis,” etc. (1539) proves this.

Nor have we yet exhausted the list of grievances against Luther. Not only did he forsake the ancient teaching on justification, merit and works, but he even declared war on human free will, though belief in its existence is a truth of natural philosophy and though the Church had ever held it in the highest esteem. He put aside in its primitive form the basic dogma of original sin. The doctrine of actual sin and its distinction into mortal and venial found no favour with him,[1726] nor did the related doctrine of the existence of a purgatory. He completely destroyed the teaching of antiquity on Grace by his new discovery of the law of absolute necessity which rules all things, not excluding even the actions of the human mind and heart; according to Luther “Grace is the fatherly disposition of God towards us, Who for Christ’s sake calls sinful man to Him, accepts him and wins his confidence through faith in the Christus passus.”[1727] This fatherly disposition of God no man can ever in the least resist if destined by the Divine Omnipotence to receive the faith; those, however, who are not numbered among the elect, know not any such invitation, or rather constraint, for the secret Will of God unfailingly dooms them to damnation.[1728]

After giving the above definition of Grace, Harnack asks, “What room then is there for a Sacrament?” For Catholics the Sacraments were pillars of the Church’s life and of her teaching. With them Luther was perfectly willing to dispense.

“He not only strove,” says Harnack, “to break away completely from the ancient or mediaeval conception, but he actually brought it to nought by his doctrine of the one sacrament, which is the Word.”[1729] The Sacraments being to him a “peculiar form of the saving Word of God, viz. of the realisation of the ‘promissio Dei,’ he reduces them to two (three), or, indeed, to one, viz. the Word of God. He showed that even the most enlightened Fathers had had but a dim notion of this so important matter.... Having practically laid the whole system in ruins, he rests again on the one, simple grand act, which is constantly being repeated in every Christian’s life, viz. the awakening of faith thanks to the ‘gratia.’”[1730]

Luther turned his back not only on the ancient teaching concerning the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also on the whole outward worship of the Church.

“His attitude towards Divine Worship in the Church was a radical one. Here too he destroyed not only the mediaeval tradition, but even that of the ancient Church such as we may trace it back right into the 2nd century. The public worship of the Church, to him, is nothing more than the worship of individuals united in time and place.... The priest and the sacrifice in the usual sense of the terms are done away with, and all worth is denied to those specific ecclesiastical actions which were formerly held to be both wholesome and necessary.” “The ‘divine service,’ particularly that of the Word, in which he nevertheless wished the congregation to take part,” “can have no other motive ... than to promote individual worship, for God deals with us only through the Word which is not tied up with any particular persons.”[1731] Hence public worship does no more than “edify faith through the preaching of the Divine Word and the common offering of prayer and praise.”[1732]

Of vast importance in this change and even more far-reaching in its consequences was Luther’s abrogation of the ancient conception of the Church. As bound up with it, he also harshly set aside the invocation of Saints, that vital element of the olden worship.

The ancient teaching on perfection had to make room for new theories, for it seemed to him to lay too much stress on man’s own works.[1733] And yet “we cannot but admit,” says Harnack, “that Luther’s efforts to create a new ideal of life were not characterised by any clear discrimination.” The reason may be “that the times were not yet ripe for it.” In those days of public stress “religion’s chief business was to bring consolation amidst the miseries of life. To heal the soul oppressed with sorrow for sin and to alleviate the evils in the world,” this was what was mainly aimed at.[1734] This, however, was scarcely to do justice to religion and to its sublime tasks.

According to Luther the Church had, even from the outset, given to human reason a larger sphere than was due to it. Even at the cradle of the Church Christian philosophy had taken her stand, and, with her torch of reason, had pointed out the road to faith. Luther, however, conceived “a distrust of reason itself not to be explained simply by his distrust of it as the main prop of self-righteousness. He grew hardened in his bold defiance of reason, surrendering himself to that suspicious Catholic [!] way of looking at things, which reveres the wisdom of God and sees the stamp of the divine truth in paradox and in the contradictio in adiecto.... No one, however, can despise reason and learning with impunity, and Luther himself was punished by the darkening of his own views on faith.”[1735] “That is a dangerous kind of theologism which fancies that the knowledge which comes from worldly education may simply be ignored. The reformers were too ready to cut themselves adrift from worldly culture where the latter seemed to trench on the domain of faith.... The Reformation buried beneath a mass of hatred and injustice much of the valuable learning the age possessed and thereby made itself responsible for the later crises of Protestantism.”[1736]

“Luther,” says Loofs, “by laying stress on that antithesis between human reason and the divine ‘foolishness,’ which was so intimately bound up with his own deepest and most fundamental views (and who ever thundered more loudly against the ‘Frau Hulda’ of natural reason, that ‘devil’s whore’ and ‘arch enemy of the faith’ than did Luther?), imposed on his following the old Catholic idea (which he himself had overthrown) of the verbal inspiration of the Canon, and did so so thoroughly that after-ages were unable to shake themselves free of it. Nay, by rightly proscribing any allegorical exegesis, he made the burden of this old Catholic heritage even more oppressive in Protestantism than it had ever been before.”[1737]

Depreciation of reason, had, in Luther’s case, a bad effect on his whole teaching concerning God. As far back as theology went this had formed the centre of religious discussion. The Fathers had by preference dwelt on questions which concerned God, His Oneness and Triunity, His attributes and His relations with the world and man. Luther, according to the admission of Protestant critics, introduced here certain arbitrary and very unfair limitations. It was his wish, as he frequently declares, that God should be meditated on only as Jesus Christ our Consoler and our Saviour. He has a strange and seemingly instinctive aversion to concerning himself with the Almighty Being, in Whom nevertheless “we live, and move, and are.” The Deus absconditus appals him. According to him it is impossible to “treat of Predestination without being crucified and suffering the pains of death, or without loss to ourselves and secret anger against God.” Predestination “determines in the first instance who is and who is not to believe, who is and who is not to be saved from sin”; of this Luther cannot speak without at the same time solemnly emphasising that it is only thanks to it that we can “hope to conquer sin,” as otherwise the devil, “as we know, would soon overpower us all.” Yet we ought not, like the “reprobate spirits,” “explore the abyss of Divine Providence,” because otherwise we shall either “be brought to despair or kick over the traces.” The old Adam must “have been put to death before being able to endure this and to drink the strong wine,” i.e. a man must first have learnt, like Luther, “to stake all in God,” and “defy” all things in Him.[1738]

Thus it comes about that Luther ladles out reproaches indiscriminately to the philosophers who occupy themselves with God as known to reason, and the theologians who pursue the supernatural knowledge of God.

“Often enough did Luther deride as a product of blind reason,” writes Harnack, “that knowledge of God, which instead of thinking of God in Christ alone, ‘sophistically’ enumerates His attributes and speculates on His will, viz. the whole ‘metaphysical’ doctrine of God.”[1739] If “God be considered apart from Christ,” then He appears, according to Luther, merely as the “terrible Judge from Whom we can await nothing but punishment.”[1740]

According to Luther, “there is, outside of Christ, no certainty concerning the Will of God”; for the secret Will of God threatens us with the dreadful sword of predestination to hell. Hence Harnack even goes so far as to say, that what is presupposed in Luther’s theories on the assurance of salvation is a belief “not in God in se—for God in se belongs to the Aristotelians—but rather in the God Whom the Holy Ghost reveals to the soul as manifest in Christ.”[1741]

“God in se” and “God quoad nos” are two different things. By establishing such a distinction Luther “sets himself at variance with all theology as it had existed since the days of the apologists; here his aversion to the olden dogma is even more evident than in his reprobation of certain of its parts. Again and again, whenever the occasion arises, he repudiates what the olden theology had said of God and Christ, of the Will and Attributes of God, of the two natures in Christ, etc., with the remark: ‘This He has in se. Thereupon he immediately proceeds, with the words ‘But, quoad nos,’ to introduce his own new view, which to him is the main thing, if not the whole.”[1742]

Such doctrines as have nothing to do with the justification of the sinner or the “confession of faith, as a personal experience,” recede so much into the background that Harnack feels justified in saying: “Though, under the formulas ‘God in se,’ ‘the Hidden God,’ ‘God’s Hidden Will,’ Luther left these old ideas standing, still they had practically ceased to exist as doctrines of faith. Of this there can be no doubt. That he did not throw them over completely is due to two facts, on the one hand to his impression that he found them in the Bible, and, on the other, to his never having systematically thought out the problems involved.”[1743] It must, however, be noted, that, as will be seen more clearly when we come to discuss Luther’s idea of faith, he was by no means ready to allow that such dogmas were not real “articles of faith.” This may be what leads Harnack here to say that they had “practically” ceased to exist as “actual articles of faith.”

In connection with the dogmas touching God it must not be lost to sight that Luther, by his doctrine of predestination, of man’s unfreedom and of the inevitability of all that occurs, really endangered, if indeed he did not actually destroy, the Church’s olden conception of God as the Highest and Most Perfect Being. The cruel God of absolute predestination to hell is no longer a God worthy of the name.

“Nor can it be gainsaid,” writes the Protestant theologian Arnold Taube, “that, given Luther’s idea of God and His Omnipotence, the negation of man’s free-will is a simple and natural consequence.” “Luther’s conception of God is at variance with the ethical personality of the God of Christianity, just as Schleiermacher’s whole pantheistic scheme of theology is useless in enabling us to grasp a religion so eminently moral as Christianity.” “Schleiermacher was quite logical in carrying to their consequences Luther’s ideas on predestination and free-will.” Luther’s idea of God, according to Taube, is simply “determinist.” “The negation [of free-will] can be escaped only by a theory of the Divine Omnipotence which regards God as controlling His own Power and thus as practically exercising restraint over Himself and limiting His Power. This, however, was not Luther’s theory, who takes the Divine Omnipotence to signify that which works all in all.”[1744]

To an outsider it sounds strange to hear Harnack and others affirm that Luther swept away all the positive doctrines of antiquity; no less strange is it to see Luther, the furious opponent of Catholicism, being made by men who call themselves his followers into an advocate of the Rationalism which they themselves profess. In the interests of Rationalism these theologians take as their watchword Wilhelm Herrmann’s dictum of Luther’s doctrine of penance: “We must strive to push ahead with what Luther began and left undone.” The least they demand is, that, as Ferdinand Kattenbusch puts it, Protestant theology should hold fast to the “earlier” Luther, to those days “when Luther’s genius was as yet unbroken.” In this wise they contrive to wrench away Luther from the foundations of that faith to which he still wished to remain true and which the “orthodox” at a later date claimed him to have ever retained.[1745]

It is well known how, following in Ritschl’s footsteps, Harnack’s ability, learning, and outspokenness have proved extremely awkward to the more conservative theologians. He “carried on Luther’s interrupted work,” declares Herrmann, and set up again in all its purity Luther’s early conception of faith against a theology which had been stifled in orthodoxy and pietism.[1746]

We must, however, in the light of Protestant criticism, examine a little more closely Luther’s attitude towards the ancient Christian conception of faith.

Starting first of all from faith subjectively considered and examining Luther’s doctrine of the personal appropriation of the content of faith, we immediately find ourselves brought face to face with his doctrine of justification, for he has scarcely anything to say of the faith of the individual save in so far as this faith operates justification. Here all the other truths to be believed tend to disappear from his purview and one only truth remains, viz.: Through Christ I am pleasing to God. It is no wonder if many of his followers, even to the present day, see in this doctrine of the certainty of having in Christ a Gracious God, the only dogma handed down by Luther. Does he not, for instance, in one of the most widely read passages of his works, viz., in the Preface to Romans in his translation of the New Testament, concisely define faith as a “daring and lively trust in the grace of God, so strong that one would be ready to die for it a thousand times over”? “Such a trust makes a man cheerful, defiant and light-hearted in his attitude towards God and all creatures; such is the working of the Holy Ghost by faith.” “Faith is the work of God in us whereby we are transformed and born anew in God.”[1747]

Again, if we take faith objectively, i.e. as the sum-total of revelation, then again, at least according to many passages, faith must be merged in the one consoling conviction that we receive the forgiveness of sins from God in Christ.

“The Reformation,” says Harnack quite rightly, regarded all the rest of dogma as little more than “a grand testimony to God, Who has sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to liberate us from sin, to save us and set us free. Finding this testimony in dogma, every other incentive to determine it more accurately disappeared.” It is, however, important to note, that “ancient dogma was not merely the witness of the Gospel to a Gracious God, to Christ the Saviour, and to the forgiveness of sins”; it comprised a number of other profound and far-reaching doctrines also binding upon all, “above all a certain knowledge of God and of the world, and a law of belief.” According to Harnack, however, “faith and this knowledge of God and law of belief were unguardedly jumbled up.” In short, “a conservative attitude towards olden dogma is not imposed on the Reformation by its principles.”[1748]

“The orthodoxy of the Luther-zealots of the 16th century had its basis in the reformers’ retention of a series of old Catholic presuppositions and dogmas which were really in disagreement with their own fundamental ideas.”[1749] “Thus,” proceeds Harnack, “the Reformation, i.e. the conception of the Evangelical faith, spells the end of dogma unless indeed, in the stead of the old-time dogma, we put a sort of phantom dogma.” The Reformation replaced the demand for faith, which corresponds with the law, by the freedom of the children of God, who are not under the constraint of the law of belief but rejoice in the gift bestowed on them, viz. in the promise of the forgiveness of sins in Christ.[1750]

In this, again, there is much that is true, even though we may not be willing to subscribe to all the author says. Luther undoubtedly lays undue stress on those tenets of the faith which seem to him to refer to justification and spiritual freedom, and he does so to the detriment of what remains. “Hence the Gospel,” Luther says for instance, “is nothing else but the preaching of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of David, true God and Man, Who by His death and again-rising from the dead has overcome sin, death and hell for all those who believe in Him.” The Evangelists, so he says, describe the conquest of “Sin, death and hell” at great length, the others “more briefly like St. Peter and St. Paul”; at any rate the “Gospel must not be made into a code of laws or a handbook.”[1751] This was indeed to raise the standard of revolt against doctrine. Well might Adolf Hausrath, in a passage already quoted, speak of Luther as “the greatest revolutionary of the 16th century.”

The question touched upon above deserves, however, to be looked into still more closely in the light of what other more moderate Protestant theologians say.

Gustav Kawerau, speaking from such a standpoint, points out that Luther “runs the risk of confusing the Evangelical view of faith with that which sees in faith the acceptance of a string of doctrinal propositions, i.e. with that faith which is made up of so and so many articles, all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1752]

This is so true that the historian and theologian in question rather understates the case by saying that Luther merely “runs the risk.” It is no difficult task in this connection to instance definite statements to this effect made by him, or even to enumerate the actual “articles” of faith he regarded as essential. In No. 12 of the articles of Schwabach (Torgau) he says, as Kawerau himself points out: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful who hold, believe and teach the above articles and propositions.... For where the Gospel is preached and the Sacraments are rightly used, there we have the holy Christian Church.”[1753]

Amongst such articles Luther, following the example of the oldest Creeds, includes even the Virginity of Mary.[1754]

It was to this that the theologian, Otto Scheel, recently alluded when compelled to make a stand against those theologians who, particularly during the years 1519-1523, miss in Luther any adherence to the articles of the faith. Scheel appeals to what Luther says of Mary’s Virginity in his German version of his “De votis monasticis” (1521 and 1522). In one passage Luther, referring to the thesis that every single article of faith must be believed, otherwise, no matter how earnest and virtuous be one’s life, everlasting damnation is certain, brings forward as an instance our Lady’s virginity: The religious, in their “bawdy-houses of Satan” [the monasteries], by their blasphemous vows deny the whole Gospel truth, consequently far more than merely that article concerning Mary. Hence they cannot be saved even did they possess “Mary’s virginity and holiness.” “Here we have,” rightly concludes Scheel, “even as early as 1521-22 a view of faith which does not differ materially from that which we meet with in Luther after the controversies on the Sacrament.” This, however, means, according to him, “that we must regard Luther’s development in a light different from that now usual.”[1755]

Which then does Scheel hold to be the correct view? He finds in Luther at all times contradictions which admit of no escape: “The contradictions which clearly exist at a later date in Luther’s life’s work were, in point of fact, always latent within him.... This is equivalent to saying that we must regard Luther’s work as a whole, and that, too, just in its most vital parts, as one marred by contradictions which it is impossible to explain away.”[1756]

Since Luther’s demand that all the articles of faith should be accepted without distinction was one which he had taken over from Catholicism, we should, continues Scheel, “seek in the Middle Ages the clue to his attitude instead of assigning to him the solution of modern problems as some are disposed to do.” In this, however, Scheel is proposing nothing new, but rather something that stands to reason; the method he suggests has, moreover, always been followed by Catholic critics of Luther’s theology.

Catholics found without difficulty plentiful statements of Luther’s in support of the inviolability of the whole chain of olden dogma, so great had been the influence exerted over him by the convictions of his youth. It was an easy matter for controversialists to turn such statements of his against Luther himself, the more so, since, eminently justified though they were within Catholicism, they were utterly out of place on his mouth and furnish a striking condemnation of his own rash undertaking—a fact to which he, however, refused to open his eyes. For instance, in the very evening of his days when he himself could look back on his destruction of so many of the dogmas of the olden Church, speaking to the Sacramentarians, Luther says of the traditional doctrines: “This is what I thought, yea and said too, viz. that the devil is never idle; no sooner has he started one heresy than he must needs start others so that no error ever remains alone. When the ring has once been broken it is no longer a ring; it has lost its strength and is ever snapping anew.... Whoever does not or will not believe aright one article assuredly does not believe any article with a true and earnest faith.... Hence we may say straight out: Believe all, or nothing! The Holy Ghost will not allow Himself to be divided or sundered, so as to teach or make us believe one article aright and another awry.” “Otherwise,” so he concludes, all unconsciously justifying his Catholic critics, “no heretic would ever be condemned nor would there be a heretic on all the earth; for it is the nature of heretics to tamper first with one article only and then bit by bit to deny them all.... If the bell have but a single crack, it no longer rings true and is quite useless.”[1757]

It was on the strength of this principle of the absolutely binding character of all the truths of religion (at least of those which he himself retained) that he ventured to depict Zwingli as the biggest rebel against the faith.

“Zwingel, who was miserably slain on the battlefield, and Œcolampadius who died of grief on that account, perished in their sins because they obstinately persisted in their errors.”[1758] He could not “but despair of Zwingel’s salvation,” for the latter was an arch-heretic.

So harsh a judgment on Zwingli is, however, quite unjustifiable if we start from the more liberal conception of faith which Luther had once advocated together with the stricter view, and which indeed he never in so many words retracted. On such grounds Kawerau may well take Zwingli under his wing against Luther. His words will be quoted a little further on. Meanwhile, however, it must be pointed out that Luther’s unkindly criticism of Zwingli is not to be explained merely by the above view of faith. In his Life of Luther Adolf Hausrath throws some light on its psychological side. “Language so insulting as Luther’s,” he says, “no bishop had ever used against Zwingli,”[1759] and he lays his hand boldly on the weak spot with the object of bringing out Luther’s astounding want of logic. He had proclaimed the right of examining Scripture freely and without being tied down by the teaching of the Church, yet he refused to allow Zwingli such freedom; the latter “had applied the principle indiscriminately to everything (?) handed down by the Church, whereas Luther wished to put aside merely what was contrary to his convictions on justification by faith alone, or to the plain sense of Scripture.”[1760] Luther “fancied he could guess who had inspired the Sacramentarians with their blasphemies. Thereby he envenomed the controversy from the very outset. For him there could be no truce with the devil.”[1761] “In any sign of life given by the Swiss he at once sniffed the ‘devil’s breeches.’”[1762] Luther himself admits that “to begin with, it was Zwingli’s wrong doctrine and the fact ‘that the Swiss wished to be first,’”[1763] which had led to the estrangement. The “wrong doctrine” he detected, thanks to that gift of infallibility which led the Sacramentarians to call his behaviour “papistic.” We have here, according to Hausrath, a “religious genius, who, by the force of his personality and word, sought to make all others bow to the law of his mind.” “We must resign ourselves to the fact that this great man had the shortcomings which belong to his virtues. Disputatiousness and love to pick a quarrel, faults which simply represented the other side of his firm faith, and which some had already deplored in the young monk at Erfurt, Wittenberg and Leipzig, had naturally not been abated by his many victorious combats, and, now, more than ever, Oldecop’s words were true: ‘He wanted to be in the right in all the disputations and was fond of quarrelling.’ The fact is that Luther was no exception to the rule, that man finds nothing harder to bear well than success.”[1764]

Nevertheless, to return to the question of faith, Luther had already laid down in his writings certain marks by which it might be ascertained whether a man is a believer or not, and which at any rate scarcely tally with the criteria he applies to Zwingli. Judged by these Zwingli would emerge quite blameless.

Kawerau points this out in defence of Zwingli: “The idea of faith,” he says, “which Luther had newly evolved, in opposition to the Catholic assent to the teaching of the Bible and the Church, led logically to determining from a man’s attitude towards Christ and His saving Grace whether he was a true believer or not; Luther himself frequently made this his criterion; for instance, in answer to the question: Who is a member of the Church, and whom must I regard as my dear brother in Christ? He replies, all those ‘Who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us to Him by His death and to obtain for us grace’; or again: All ‘those who put their trust in Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or yet again: ‘All those who seek the Lord with their whole heart and soul ... and who trust in nothing but in God’s mercy.’”[1765] But had not Zwingli loudly proclaimed himself to be one of these?

“In such utterances of Luther’s we find,” according to Kawerau, “summed up the purely religious and Evangelical conception of faith.” Here there is no question of any accepting of the several articles of faith, of any submission to a “string of doctrinal propositions,” of any “faith made up of so and so many ‘articles’ all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1766] According to this theologian Luther was untrue to his own basic theories when he assailed Zwingli as he did. Kawerau also agrees with Hausrath in holding that the principal cause of Luther’s estrangement was a psychological one which indeed constituted the weakest spot in his whole position, viz. his identification of his own theological outbuilding of an article of faith, with its religious content,[1767] or, to speak more plainly, his setting himself up as the sole authority after having set aside that of the Church.

(b) The Melting away of Luther’s Dogmas viewed in the Light of Protestant Criticism

We have already put on record those doctrines of the olden Church, which, inclusive of the idea of faith itself, Luther threw overboard; we now come to the doctrines which he retained, which deserve to be considered in connection with the strictures of modern Protestant theologians, particularly of Harnack. At least these strictures bring out very clearly their contradictory and illogical character. Evidently Harnack is not altogether wrong when he uses as a page-heading the words “Exit dogma in Protestantism,”[1768] and elsewhere:[1769] “Embarrassments and problems in Luther’s heritage.”

Luther, to quote Harnack, “frequently hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.”[1770] But “if ‘the whole Luther’ is to be set up as the law of faith for the Evangelical Church, then, where it is a question of matters of history, such consequences cannot be simply ignored.” “The Lutheran Reformation,” writes Fr. Loofs, “would have ended otherwise as regards the history of dogma, had Luther braved tradition and followed up his theories to their logical conclusion. The shreds of the old which remained hampered the growth of the new ideas, even in Luther’s own case.”[1771]

Original Sin and Unfreedom; Law and Gospel; Penance

Luther took over from the olden Church the doctrine of the existence of original sin, but he so changed it, particularly by affirming that it resulted in the destruction of free-will, that the doctrine itself becomes untenable.

Of this all-important groundwork of his anthropology the theologian Taube says: “It is not surprising that Luther fails to remain faithful to the attitude he has assumed. It is as impossible to him, as to any other thinking mind, to fail to find freedom presupposed in every corner, in his personal Christianity, and in his own work as pastor, preacher or reformer. Facts are stronger than theories and a priori reasonings.... Either the data of experience must be held to be mere illusion, or absolute determinism must be thrown over. We cannot answer the same question both in the negative and in the affirmative and then declare it to be a mystery; it would be no mystery but simply a contradiction.”[1772]

Still, Luther found it easier than Taube thinks to proclaim things to be mysteries which palpably were nothing but contradictions. A glance at KÖstlin’s “Luthers Theologie” shows how often Luther attempts to distract the reader from the difficulties he himself enumerates with the consoling words: This we must not seek to pry into.—Taube too is optimistic with regard to the fate of the doctrine of unfreedom in modern Protestant theology; appealing to the above contradictions, he writes: “It is not surprising that the Lutheran theology, closely as it keeps to Luther’s views in many other matters, has never ventured to follow him on this all-important point, and, in fact, has departed ever further from him.”[1773] The truth is that the period of withdrawal inaugurated by Melanchthon in 1527 has been succeeded in our own day by one of closer approximation. (Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 292, n. 4.)

Apart from the theory of man’s absolute depravity and lack of free-will there are other things which are damaging to Luther’s doctrine of original sin, particularly his opinion that original sin persists after baptism.

“The doctrine of original sin as taught by the olden Church,” says Harnack, “was amended by Luther and made to agree with his own principles,” but it was against his principles “to make of such things articles of faith. His own sense of sin and the need he felt of pacifying his conscience occupied in it so large a place that he transformed what was in reality a piece of Christian self-judgment into an historical fact of universal appliance concerning the beginnings of the human race.” At any rate Luther’s exaggeration of the impotence of fallen man served “as a ground of excuse for our own guilt.”[1774]

As regards his doctrine of the Law and the Gospel; Luther hoped, by contrasting it with the Gospel, to bring the Law into prominence. By the Law he understood the sum-total of what was commanded not merely in the Old but also in the New Testament; the teaching of the Gospel, on the other hand, contained only consoling thoughts on the fulfilment of the Law by Christ and the appropriation of Christ’s merits by faith.[1775]

In the question of penance we again see Luther assume an attitude which is, as a matter of fact, subversive of his own doctrine. His ideas on this point are so contradictory that Protestant writers on dogma have not been able to agree in their accounts, and needless to say, still less in their judgments.

Luther’s Doctrine of Justification and Good Works, as seen by Protestant Critics

According to Harnack, “the idea of justification,” the central point of Luther’s teaching, “shrinks into a merely outward act of God’s designed to quieten consciences. Here again the superiority of the Catholic doctrine could not fail to appear; for to be content with the ‘fides sola’ could not but involve a very questionable laxity. It would, from this point of view, have been far better to have represented the ‘fides caritate formata’ as alone of any value in God’s sight.”[1786] In his doctrine of justification by faith alone, Luther never got over the weak point, viz. his exclusion of charity, at least a commencement of which, together with faith, hope and repentance, had been required by the olden Church as a preparation for justification. Some return to the Catholic requirements was called for. “Hence it is not in the least surprising, ... that Melanchthon at a later date abandoned the ‘sola fides’ and came to advocate a modified form of synergism. The Luther-zealots were thrown into hopeless confusion by the necessity in which they found themselves, of harmonizing the older Evangelical theory with the doctrine of penance whilst avoiding the pitfall of Melanchthon’s synergism.” They found themselves, so Harnack says, face to face with two “iustificationes,” that by faith alone, and that by law and penance, not to speak of a third, the “iustificatio” of infants by the act of baptism. “These contradictions become still further accentuated when the ‘regeneratio’ was taken into account,” etc.[1787] It is not worth while to pursue any further Harnack’s criticism which at times tends to become carping.

As regards the doctrine of good works, Protestant theology of late has been disposed to take offence at Luther’s undue extension of freedom, which seems to endanger good works and the zealous keeping of the Law.

Loofs is certainly not overstating things when he says that, “Luther was not clear in his own mind”[1811] as to his doctrine on the great questions of works and the Law, and that his “opinion comprised much that did not tally.”[1812]

Loofs adds: “How far Luther himself was aware that much of what he said voiced merely his own personal opinion it would be hard to tell.... Without his wealth of ideas and his ability to insist now on one, now on another side of a subject Luther would not have been so successful as a reformer. But he was hampered by his own qualities so soon as it became a question of putting his new views in didactic form.”[1813]

Loofs, like Harnack, spares no praise when speaking of Luther’s “qualities” and the “happy intuition” which enabled him to overthrow the olden order and to call into being a new, “religious,” Christianity.

Luther’s Doctrine of Merit in the Eyes of Protestant Critics

One such “happy intuition” Loofs sees in the fact, that, in the question of works and merit Luther “clearly perceived and got the better of the opinion, untenable in religion, that a scale of merit exists as between God and man.”[1814] The critic abstains from discussing the Catholic teaching on supernatural merit. Its earlier no less than its later defenders rightly emphasised, in opposition to Luther, that the olden doctrine of merit rested on the express promise of God to reward faithful service, and not, as Luther insinuated, on any absolute right of the works in themselves to such reward. The act which was to meet with such a reward must, they said, be not only good in itself but also supernaturally good, i.e. it must be performed by man’s powers aided by supernatural grace; even this, however, would not suffice were there not the gracious promise on God’s part, guaranteed by revelation, that such an act would be requited by a heavenly reward. Yet this was not to deny a certain “condignitas in actu primo” inherent in the act itself.

Luther, it is true, laughs to scorn the Popish doctrine of merit which makes God Himself our debtor. Yet long before St. Augustine had answered the objection: “God has become our debtor, not as though He has received something from us, but because He has promised what pleased Him. It is a different thing when we say to a man: You are my debtor because I have given you something, and when we say to God: Give us what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1815]

In the fragments of the ancient doctrine of religious morality which Luther saw fit to retain he put germs of disintegration owing to his failure to recognise the above truth. Because he would hear nothing of merit and everywhere scented righteousness-by-works, he built up a theory of good works which lacks a foundation. In the last resort everything is coloured by his dread of self-righteousness and of any human co-operation. “The ‘Law,’ to Luther, seemed conditioned by that ‘condicio meriti,’” says Loofs, “which belonged to the Law of Moses, and, which, owing to the craving of the natural man for self-righteousness, also becomes part of the natural law.”[1816]

So strongly does Luther denounce merit and self-righteousness that he practically does away with his own doctrine of works.

First, his denial of free-will and the absolute determinism of his doctrine makes an end of all spontaneous, meritorious action on man’s part. Further, he is untrue to his position, repudiating it in his sermons and popular writings as far as possible, and replacing it by one morally more defensible. In later years we find him casting over his own teaching even in his theological disputations; in his anxiety to counter the Antinomians, he goes so far as to declare works necessary for salvation.

Even earlier the fanatics and Anabaptists had helped to some extent in the work of demolition. Their conclusions as to the dangers of Luther’s system and their protests against its evil moral consequences are really much more vigorous and damaging than might appear from Luther’s bitter rejoinders. “The unjust attitude of the reformers towards the ‘fanatics,’” says Harnack, “was disastrous to themselves and their cause. How much might they not have learnt from these despised people even though obliged to repudiate their principles.”[1817]

The work of demolition was, moreover, being carried out under Luther’s very eye by Philip Melanchthon and his friends. Luther’s doctrine, as has already been pointed out, was not at all to the taste of the dialectician of Lutheranism. “The Philippists,” says Loofs, “were very far from holding Luther’s own views,” “as far removed as” the Antinomians. Luther himself, however, “was partly to blame for the confusion.” From the standpoint adopted by Melanchthon “it was impossible to comply” with Luther’s demand for a clear “distinction to be made between Law and Gospel”;[1818] yet, according to Luther, this was one of “the things on which theology hinges.”[1819] According to Loofs, Melanchthon’s theology was a means of spoiling some “valuable reformation truths,” nay, “the most priceless of Luther’s new ideas.”[1820] As for Melanchthon’s allegation, viz. that he had merely put Luther’s doctrine more mildly, Loofs says bluntly: “If he meant this, then he deceived himself.”[1821] As to the points under discussion, Luther not only thought differently from Melanchthon at an earlier date, but persisted in so doing till his very death. Luther, nevertheless, never expressed any disapproval of Melanchthon’s ideas, widely as they differed from his own.

Luther’s teaching on the Sacraments and on the Supper according to Protestant Teaching

In Harnack’s opinion Luther, by his teaching on the one sacrament, viz. the Word, “destroyed the olden ecclesiastical view. Yet he unconsciously retained a certain remnant ... which had fatal results on the development of his doctrine. Though here again we find truth and error side by side in Luther, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that he opened the door to errors of a grave character.”[1822]

Luther’s views on the Church and on Divine Worship according to Protestant Criticism

A mass of inconsequence lies in the doctrine on the Church, which he is supposed to have retained, though, as a matter of fact, he completely altered it. Thanks to his conception of the Church as a practically invisible body his view of it was so broad as to leave far behind the old, Catholic idea; nevertheless, by and by his conception of the Church grew so narrow, that, as Harnack justly remarks, “in comparison, even the Roman view of it seems in many respects more elastic and consequently superior.... The Church threatened to become a mere school, viz. the school of ‘pure [Wittenberg] doctrine.’” In this way arose “the Christianity of the theologians and pastors.... Luther on his own side repeatedly broke away from this view.”[1842] It is quite true that many contradictions are here apparent, as we shall have occasion to see later (vol. vi., xxxviii.). “His idea of the Church became obscured. The conception of the Church (communion of faith and communion of pure doctrine) became as ambiguous as the conception of the ‘doctrina evangelii.’”

Then, with regard to his teaching on public worship. Though, as remarked above (p. 147 f.), he had in principle abandoned the view held by the olden Church regarding the necessity of external worship, and had robbed it of its focus, viz. the Sacrifice of the Altar, yet he was very far from logically following this out in practice.

His standpoint, according to Harnack, was originally this: “If it is certain that man may not, and indeed cannot do anything for God’s sake, if the very idea of moving God by our works is the death of true piety, if the whole relationship between God and man depends on a believing disposition, i.e. on unshakable trust in Him, humility and constant prayer, if lastly no ceremony has any worth, then there can be no ‘Divine Service’ in the true sense of the term. The only direct service of God there is, is faith, otherwise the rule that obtains everywhere is that we serve God by charity towards our neighbour.”[1843]

Very soon, however, we find that in practice Luther reverts to some sort of common worship for the sake of the “common man,” who requires to hear the Word, to assist at public prayers, and who must also have some kind of liturgy. At times Luther seems to speak of public worship as merely a “school for the imperfect,” and, occasionally, he may really have meant it (above, p. 149 f.). By reforming the Mass and by the other directions he gave concerning public worship, scanty and faltering though they be, he introduced a practice which is at variance with his principles. “The seemingly conservative attitude he adopted in his emendation of the Missal, and his refusal to undertake a thorough reconstruction of divine worship led to many ‘Lutherans’ in the 16th, and again in the 19th century, entertaining questionable views on the specific religious value of public worship, its object and its practice. How very unlike Luther this is—seeing that Luther here can, and must, be corrected in his own light—and what a vast difference exists between the Evangelical and the Catholic doctrine of divine worship.”[1844] Harnack appeals to Gottschick’s “Luthers Anschauungen vom christlichen Gottesdienst” (1887), as clearly demonstrating this. According to Gottschick the old Lutheran liturgy is not “even relatively a genuine product of the real spirit of the Reformation.” In this theologian’s opinion, Luther “really adopted the Roman Mass, contenting himself with a few alterations.” Gottschick urges that an attempt should be made to construct “an entirely new edifice on the basis of the principles embodied in Luther’s reforming views,” etc.[1845]

Gottschick is also right when he points out, that Luther “took but little interest in liturgy.”[1846] He was, however, set on bringing the people into the new faith and Church with the utmost circumspection and with as little fuss as possible. It is not necessary to recall here how successful was his policy of retaining the external forms, particularly on the unschooled masses who were unable to see below the surface. (Cp. vol. ii., p. 319 ff.)

Luther declared that he himself, “with a few friends, really constituted the ancient Church”—“a remarkable point of view,” says Harnack, “explicable only by the idealism of his faith.”[1847]

This enabled him, so Harnack continues, “to abandon and assail the Catholic Church, and nevertheless all the while to protest that he stood with the olden Church. Though in assuming this attitude his faith was so strong that it mattered nothing to him how great or how small was the number of those who refused to bend the knee to Baal, yet it was of the greatest interest to him to show that he was a true member of that Church which had existed through the ages. Hence, he was compelled to prove the historical continuity of his position. But how could this be proved more surely than by means of the old creeds of the ancient Church still in force?”[1848]

Here, again, we are confronted by the contradiction which runs through the whole of Luther’s theology.

Even the very Creeds he had undermined by that subjectivism which he had exalted into a principle. Every Creed must submit to being tested by the Word of God, either by Luther himself or by any other man who considered himself equal to the task. Furthermore, the Word of God is subservient to the Canon set up by Luther or any other Christian scholar, and its sense may be determined by any Christian sufficiently enlightened to understand it. This was to open up the road to a Christianity minus any creed or dogma.

Luther’s claims, whether to represent the olden Church or to have furnished a better and firmer basis for the future, have never been more vigorously questioned by any Protestant theologian of modern days than by Adolf Harnack.

If we sum up in Harnack’s words the results of modern Protestant criticism exercised on Luther’s teaching, we find that they do not in the least countenance the obsolete view of some of Luther’s latest admirers, viz. that he preserved what was good and “wholesome” of the existing dogmas and merely added “one, or two supplementary doctrines.”[1849] Even to-day we still hear it said that his belief and the “ancient dogma” were really “in complete harmony”; people, in support of this statement, appeal to what might naturally be considered the best witness, viz. to Luther himself, who was quite of this opinion. But when the defenders of this view begin to speak of Luther’s “alteration” of dogma and of his having “reconstructed” it, then, says Harnack, it becomes “hard to tell what the words are intended to convey,” in any case, it is an admission that “Luther’s conception of faith in some way or other modified the whole of dogma.”[1850]

It would be more correct, according to Harnack, to say, that “Luther overthrew the whole doctrine of the olden and mediÆval Church, retaining only a few fragments.”[1851] His own “attitude of mind towards ancient dogma” was not “altogether consistent.” His “Christianity” is, as a matter of fact, “no longer inwardly bound up” with ancient dogma; his “conception of faith, i.e. what admittedly constituted his main contribution,” stands in no need of the olden doctrinal baggage.[1852] “In Luther’s Reformation the old, dogmatic Christianity was set aside and replaced by a new, Evangelical conception. The Reformation is really [for Harnack’s Protestantism] the end of the history of dogma.... If Luther agrees with this or that definition of the ancient or mediÆval Church, the agreement, seen from this standpoint, is partly only apparent, partly a coincidence which can never be the result of any a priori submission to tradition.”[1853]

“So far as Luther left a ‘Theology’ to his followers it appears as an extremely complicated affair.... He did not therein give its final expression to Evangelical Christianity, but merely inaugurated it.”[1854] A philosopher may, at a pinch, find the dogmas of the Greek Church wise and profound, but no philosopher could possibly find any savour in Luther’s faith. Luther himself was not aware of the chasm that separated him from the ancient dogma, partly because he interpreted it in his own sense, partly because he retained some vestige of respect for the definitions of the Councils, partly, too, because he was only too pleased to be able to confront the Turks, heathen, Jews and fanatics with something definite, assured, exalted and incomprehensible.[1855]

We may well make Harnack’s concluding words our own: “It has been shown that the scraps of the olden belief which he retained do not tally with his views as a whole.... The whole does not merely rise above this or that dogma, but above all dogmatic Christianity in general,”[1856] i.e. the doctrines of the Christian faith are no longer binding.

2. Luther as a Popular Religious Writer. The Catechism

During the last years of his life Luther was able to put the last touch to his literary labours by undertaking a new revision of some of his more important earlier works, and by assisting in the compilation of complete editions of his writings.

Thanks partly to his own literary labours, partly to the help and support of friends and pupils, he succeeded in gathering together those works which he desired to see handed down to posterity.

In 1541 and 1545 Luther’s German translation of the Bible also received its finishing touch, and a new, amended edition was brought out, which, though slightly altered, still serves the Protestant congregations to-day. Moreover, the sermons of the Postils were revised afresh in order to furnish reading matter for the people and to help the preachers. In 1540 he himself published the first part of the Church-Postils (the winter term) and, in 1543, appeared the second portion, previously revised by Cruciger.[1857] The Home-Postils appeared for the first time in 1544, edited by Veit Dietrich. At the same time a beginning was made with the complete editions of his literary works, the first volume of the German edition appearing in 1539 and the first volume of the Latin edition in 1545.

His Collected Works; his New Edition of the Church-Postils

Luther’s German writings were collected by Cruciger and RÖrer and printed at Wittenberg. The second volume was published only in 1548, after Luther’s death. The compilation of the Latin writings was carried out with the aid of various friends, for instance, of Spalatin and RÖrer, and also first saw the light at Wittenberg. Both these editions were eagerly sought after by the booksellers and a great sale was anticipated.

In the introductions which Luther prefixed to both collections he not only followed the then universal fashion of seeking to make a favourable impression on the reader by an extravagant display of humility, but also gave free play to his love for grotesque exaggerations. He had no intention of writing any “Retractations,” as St. Augustine had done, however much such might be called for. Instead of this he professes to repudiate his books wholesale—though only, of course, to bring them forward again all the more vigorously. Whoever is familiar with Luther’s ways will not need to be told how to interpret and appreciate what he here says. There is no doubt, however, that countless readers of these introductions fell into the trap and exclaimed: How great and yet how humble is the man who speaks in these pages!

In the preface to the first volume of his Latin works Luther seeks, not so much to enhance his knowledge of Scripture as he does in the German preface, but rather to explain in his own way how he was led to take up the position he did.

In the evening of his life Luther could look back with a certain satisfaction on the numerous popular works he had composed for the instruction and edification of the masses and the “simple,” and on the success with which they had been crowned. Again and again his fondness for thus instructing the populace had drawn him into this sphere of work; he had always striven with great perseverance and patience to better, both as to their language and their matter, the little tracts he composed. How highly he valued such works of instruction we can see from the writings which appeared from time to time as precursors of his Catechisms. They show how diligent he was in dealing with popular religious subjects.

He himself bears witness to his laborious literary labours and their results in the preface to his Church-Postils of 1543.[1861] Conscious of what he had achieved he there quotes the passage where St. Paul says that the faithful were “enriched in all things, in all knowledge and understanding,” etc. (1 Cor. i. 5). “In the same way we may say to our Germans that God has richly given us His Word in the German tongue.... For what more can we have or desire?” He points to the catechism which he has preached “clearly and with power,” to his exposition of the Commandments, of the Our Father and the Creed; in his writings they would find explained “Holy Baptism, the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord, the keys, the ban, and absolution. We have been instructed definitely how each one is to understand his own state and calling and behave himself; whether he be a cleric or a layman, or of high or low estate. We know what conjugal life is, what widowhood and maidenhood, and how we are to live and act therein in a Christian manner.”—Although the people were already sufficiently instructed on these points, and though Luther’s teaching in so far as it was something new cannot meet with our approval, yet it must be admitted that in his writings for the people Luther treated of these things, according to his light, in language both popular and forcible.

Herewith, so he says in the same preface, you receive from my friend Cruciger the Church-Postils amended and enlarged, with its “lucid and amusing” explanations of the Gospel-lessons. Just as a mother pulps the food for her baby, so the Epistles and Gospels of the year have been pulped for you. As now they had already in print a corrected edition of the lives of the Saints, a German version of the Psalter and, in particular, the whole Bible in “good German,” the preachers should be better able to teach the people how to be saved. “We have done our part faithfully and in full measure; let us therefore be for ever thankful to God, the Father of all mercies.” Luther’s allusion to his Postils as being “lucid and amusing,” and to the “good German” of his translation of the Bible, are perfectly justified.

Luther, in 1527, spoke of his Church-Postils as the “best book I ever wrote ... which, indeed, pleases even the Papists.”[1862] It is obvious that he bestowed this praise upon it in view of its positive contents. It is true that, some eight or nine years later, he declared with his customary exaggeration, he wished the “whole of this book could be blotted out”; this was, however, at a time when he was already planning a new edition to be undertaken by Cruciger, “which might be useful to the whole Church.”[1863] The work, however, even in its first dress, undoubtedly contained much that was good.

Good Points and Shortcomings of Luther’s Popular Works

Not only is the number of popular writings Luther composed surprising, but they are distinguished by the energy and originality of their style, and, in many passages where no fault is to be found with what he says, his instructions and exhortations are admittedly seasoned with much that is truly thoughtful and edifying. In spite of all the admixture of falsehood to the ancient treasure of doctrine a certain current of believing Christianity flows through these popular writings and contrasts agreeably with both the more or less infidel literature of recent times and the shallow religious productions of an earlier date.

The mediÆval language, feelings and world of thought, all so instinct with faith and piety, find a splendid exponent in Luther as soon as, putting controversy aside, he seeks to seize the hearts of the people; such passages even make the reader ask whether the author can really be one and the same with the writer who elsewhere fulminates with such revolting malice against the Church of the past. Then, again, the plentiful quotations from the Bible in which he was so much at home, impart a devout tone to what he says without, however, in the least rendering it insipid or unnatural. From the latter fault he was preserved by a certain soberness of outlook, by his native realistic coarseness and his general tendency to be rude rather than sentimental.

Nor would it by any means be right were Luther’s opponents to attribute the above favourable traits in his writings exclusively to the influence of the Catholic past. It is true that it is the latter which is mainly responsible for the elements of truth found in his writings, and also, not seldom, for the attractive and sympathetic way in which he presents his matter to the reader; but to deny that the author’s peculiar talent for speaking to the people and his rare gift of adapting himself to his German readers had also its share, would be to go too far. Luther, who hailed from among the lower class and had ever been in touch with it, knew the German character as well as any man (see vol. iii., p. 93 ff.). In his style he embodied to some extent the nation’s mode of thought and speech. Hence his success with the Germans, whom he drew by the strongest ties, viz. those of nationalism, into circles where the motherly warnings of the Church were no longer heard.

We are, however, unable to discern in his writings the mystical qualities which some of his admirers find everywhere. Echoes of the sayings of the olden mystics, such as we have had occasion to quote from his earlier works, obviously do not suffice to prove his own mystic gifts. Moreover, these echoes tend to become feebler as time goes on, and the nearer his literary labours draw to their close the less can they be considered to bear the character of true mystical productions. Certain leanings met with in Luther at the beginning, and even later, we have already had to characterise as the outcome of an untheological pseudo-mysticism.[1864]

Later on we often miss this sympathetic tone, for it was blighted by his polemics. As for his aptitude for instructing the people he retained it, however, to the end.

In the Exposition of the Our Father, of which the dialogue of the soul with God forms a part, he lays down at the outset in striking, popular guise the need of prayer, the value of the simple Paternoster, the profit to be derived from weighing well its contents, and also the beauty of the virtue of humility.[1872] His explanation of the Hail Mary, for all its brevity, contains practical and valuable hints as to how God is to be honoured in all.[1873]

In a very useful booklet entitled “Einfeltige Weise zu beten”[1874] (1534), Luther assumes the garb of an instructor on prayer and attempts to show how the forms in common use, the Our Father, Ten Commandments and Creed, provide matter for prayer even for busy laymen, and how the latter, by meditating on each separate word or clause, may rise to perfect prayer. “When good thoughts press in upon us,” he says, for instance, explaining the latter practice, “then the other prayers may be neglected and all our attention given to such thoughts which should be listened to in silence and on no account be thwarted, for then the Holy Ghost Himself is preaching to us; one word of His sermon is far better than a thousand prayers of ours. And I, too,” he adds, “have often learnt more in one such prayer than I could from much reading and composing.”[1875]

In the “Vermanunge zum Gebet wider den TÜrcken,”[1876] exhorting all to pray for the public needs, he speaks alluringly and with great religious fervour. Urging his readers to pray for the divine assistance, he takes one by one, as was indeed his wont, the thoughts suggested by the Our Father.[1877] “Our comfort and defiance, our pride, our daring and our arrogance, our insistence, our victory and our life, our joy, our honour and our glory are seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. There, devil, just you touch a hair of His!” The power of his words is heightened by his references to the nearness of the Last Day, the advent of which was foreshadowed in the downfall of both Papal and Turkish power. He even declares that the certainty of being heard depended on the spiritual struggle being waged in defence of the Evangel against the popish “blasphemers, persecutors and God-forsaken children of the devil”; where these had their way and were fighting, there nothing was to be looked for save ruin; there God’s “angry hand was raised in vengeance against all the devils and Turks, against Mahmed, Pope, Meinz, Heinz and all the miscreants.”[1878] Hence, even in a tract intended as an exhortation to prayer and to promote a great work of Christian charity, quite other sentiments gain for the time the upper hand.

As to what is lacking in Luther’s religious writings: Any reader familiar with the manuals of instruction and piety in use towards the close of the Middle Ages will at once perceive a great difference between the importance they attach to self-denial, self-conquest and the struggle against the evil inclinations of nature and that attached to them by Luther.

In the “Imitation of Christ,” for instance, the great stress laid on self-denial gives an effective spur to every inward virtue. In Luther, with his twin ideas of faith alone and the irresistible power of grace, this main feature of the religious warfare falls decidedly into the background. Is it a mere coincidence that in the Larger Catechism self-denial and penance are not mentioned among the means for preserving chastity?[1895] Chastity itself is there dealt with in a curiously grudging fashion. The so-called Evangelical Counsels, which fell from our Lord’s own lips and had been eagerly pursued in the past by those seeking to lead a life of perfection, are naturally altogether ignored by Luther. With him, too, the wholesome incentive to good provided by the hope of supernatural merit for heaven had also, owing to his theory, to be set aside. The appeals to the motive of holy fear which he makes are too rare and too powerless to be of much avail. He had clipped with a rude hand the two wings of the spiritual life, viz. fear and the hope of reward, which bear it upwards and without which man cannot rise above the things of sense.

In Luther’s works of edification, as pointed out above, we miss the school of virtue, the advance from one step of virtue and perfection to another, such as had grown up into a wise and recognised system, thanks to the experience of antiquity and the Middle Ages.[1896] With him everything begins with a rash breach with the past. Even the use made of the example of the Saints is painfully defective. An easy-going tendency hides the poverty of the aims and a shallow mediocrity lames the upward flight. Here, again, the fact that the author turns his back so rudely on the traditions of the earliest ages and the holy practices of his fathers, brings its own punishment. For a multitude of inspiring and perfectly legitimate acts of prayer and virtue in which the Christian heart had found strength and gladness are passed over by him in dead silence, or else scoffed at as mere “holiness-by-works.” While this is true of his practice, his theory, too, was wanting in that clear and solid justification and development which the theology of the older divines had enabled them to introduce into their teaching.

Lovers of Luther can, however, claim that in him two qualities were united which are rarely to be found combined, and possibly belong to no other popular religious writer of the age, viz. first, a wealth of ideas suggested by reminiscences, now of the Bible, now from the pages of human life; secondly, the writer’s wonderful imagination, which enables him to clothe all things in the best dress in order the more easily to win his way into the hearts of his readers.

In consequence of this his writings will always find approving friends, not only in Lutheran circles but also among those who for literary or historical reasons are interested in a form of literature bearing so individual a stamp, and know how to overlook their imperfections. The reasons, however, are sufficiently obvious why the Church by a general prohibition (though it does admit of exceptions) has set up a barrier against the study of any of Luther’s works by her children, and why she bids her faithful to seek spiritual food only in those books of instruction and edification which she sanctions.

The Catechism

The ignorance of the people in religious things, of which Luther was made aware during the Visitation in the Saxon Electorate in 1527, led him to compose a sort of Catechism, “which should be a short abstract and recapitulation of Holy Scripture.”[1897] He was desirous of providing in this way a manual for the “instruction of the children and the simple,” and more particularly of supplying fathers of families with an easy means “of questioning and catechising their children and dependents at least once a week (as was their duty), and seeing what they knew or had learnt of it.”[1898]

Thus, at the commencement of 1529, or possibly as early as 1528, he was at work, first, on the (Shorter) Catechism “for the rude country-folk,” as he writes to a friend,[1899] and also preparing mural tablets (“tabulÆ”) which set out the matter “in the shortest and baldest way.”[1900] Of these tablets his pupil RÖrer says, on Jan. 20, that some of them hung on his walls while the Catechism (“prÆdicatus pro rudibus et simplicibus”) was still in process of making.[1901] It was in this form that the “Shorter Catechism” first appeared, but, in the same year (1528) these tablets were collected into a booklet entitled the “Enchiridion.”[1902]

Luther was at the same time at work on a fuller German Catechism which was intended to supply the heads of families, and more particularly the preachers, with further matter for their instructions. This work, under the title of “Deudsch Catechismus,” was finished and printed in April, 1529,[1903] and in May appeared a Latin translation of the same. This was what was eventually termed the Larger Catechism.

In the preface to the Shorter Catechism Luther puts on the shoulders of the Catholic bishops the blame for the fact, that, the “common folk, particularly in the villages, knew nothing whatever of Christian doctrine.” He also admits, however, that, among the Evangelicals, there were “unfortunately many pastors who are quite unskilled and incapable of teaching.” Hence it came about that the people “knew neither the Our Father, the Creed nor the Ten Commandments,” and “lived like so many brute beasts and senseless swine.” “And how can it be otherwise,” he asks the pastor and preacher, “seeing that you snooze and hold your tongue?” He accordingly requires of the ministers, first, that, in their teaching, they should keep to one form of the “Ten Commandments, Creed, Our Father and Sacrament,” etc., and not “alter a syllable”; and “further, that, when they had taught the text thoroughly, they should see that the meaning of it is also understood”; finally, the pastor was to take the Larger Catechism and study it and then “explain things still more fully to his flock” according to their needs and their power of comprehension.

In spite of all this he has no wish that the particular method and form of his Catechism should be made obligatory; here again, according to his principle, everything must be spontaneous and voluntary. “Choose whatever form you please and then stick to it for ever.”

Nevertheless whoever refuses to “learn by heart” the text selected is to be treated as a denier of Christ, “shall be allowed not a shred of Christian freedom, but simply be handed over to the Pope and his officers, nay, to the devil himself. Parents and masters are also to refuse them food and drink and to warn them that the sovereigns will drive such rude clowns out of the land,” etc. This agrees with a letter Luther wrote to Joseph Levin Metzsch on August 26, 1529, in which he says that those who despise the Catechism and the Evangel are to be driven to church by force, that they may at least learn the outward work of the Law from the preaching of the Ten Commandments.[1904]

Filled with anxiety for the future of his Church he warmly exhorts the pastors to provide for a constant supply of preachers and worthy officials. They were to tell the authorities and the parents, “of what a gruesome crime they were guilty, when they neglected to help to educate children as pastors, preachers, and writers, etc.... The sin now being committed in this respect by both parents and authorities is quite beyond words; this is one way the devil has of displaying his cruelty.” We see from this that Luther’s solicitude for the teaching of the Catechism had a practical motive beyond that lying on the surface. He wished to erect not only a bulwark but also a nursery for the Church to come; for this same reason, in his efforts about this time on behalf of the schools (see vol. vi., xxxv., 3), what he had in view was, that, with the help of the Bible and the Catechism, they should become seminaria ecclesiarum.

In the preface to the Larger Catechism of 1530 Luther lashes those among his preachers who turned up their noses at the Catechism.

Many, he says, despise “their office and this teaching, some because they are so very learned, others out of laziness and belly-love”; they will not buy or read such books; “they are, in fact, shameful gluttons and belly-servers, better fitted to look after the pigs and the hounds than to be pastors having the cure of souls.” To them he holds up his own example. He too was “a Doctor and preacher, nay, as learned and experienced as any of them,” and yet he read and recited every morning, and whenever he had time, “like a child, the Ten Commandments, Creed, Our Father, Psalms, etc.”; he never ceased being a student of the Catechism. “Therefore I beg these lazy bellies or presumptuous saints, that, for God’s sake, they let themselves be persuaded, and open their eyes to see that they are not in reality so learned and such great Doctors as they imagine.”

The exhortations in this preface, to all the clergy to make use of and teach the Catechism diligently, contain much that is useful and to the point.

In other passages he nevertheless sees fit to emphasise what he says by false and odious reflections on the Papacy. “Our office is now quite other from what it was under the Pope; now it is serious and wholesome, and thus much more arduous and laborious and full of danger and temptation.”[1905] Before him “no Doctor on earth had known the whole of the Catechism, that is the Our Father, Ten Commandments and Creed, much less understood them and taught them as now, God be praised, they are taught and learnt even by little children. In support of this I appeal to all their books, those of the theologians as well as those of the lawyers. If even one article of the Catechism can be learnt aright from them, then I am willing to let myself be broken on the wheel or bled to death.”[1906]

In the plan of both the Larger and Smaller Catechism Luther keeps to the traditional threefold division, viz. the Ten Commandments, Apostles’ Creed and Our Father. To these he appends a fourth part on baptism and a fifth on the Supper, the only two sacraments he recognises. He also slipped in a short supplementary instruction on the new form of Confession before the chapter on the Supper.[1907] The Smaller Catechism was provided from the very first with morning and evening prayers, grace for meals and an eminently practical “Household Table of Texts,” consisting of appropriate verses for pastors, for their subordinates and pupils in general, for temporal authorities, for subjects, married people, parents, masters, children and also for the “young in general, for widows and for the parishes.”

The language, more particularly of the Shorter Catechism, is throughout a model of simplicity and clearness.

We may find an example of his brevity and concision at the end of the “Creed”; the passage will also serve to show how greatly his teaching differed from that of the Church. After the words: “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting, Amen,” there follows in the Catechism the usual question: “What means this?” and the answer, with regard to the Church, is that the Holy Ghost “calls, gathers together, enlightens, hallows and holds the whole body of Christians on earth in Jesus Christ in one true faith; in which body of Christendom He free-handedly forgives me and all the faithful all our sins daily,” etc. The paragraph ends, as do all the articles on the Creed, in the usual form: “This is true.”

In spite of all peculiarity of doctrine in the Shorter Catechism all polemical attacks on the olden Church are carefully eschewed. In the Larger Catechism, on the contrary, they abound. Even under the First Commandment, speaking of the worship of God, the author alludes to what “hitherto we have in our blindness been in the habit of practising in Popery”; “the worst idolatry” had held sway, seeing that we sought “help, consolation and salvation in our own works.” In the explanation of the article on the “Holy Christian Church, the Communion of Saints” it is set forth at the outset, that, “in Popery,” “faith had been stuck under the bench,” “no one having acknowledged Christ as Lord.” “Formerly, before we came to hear [God’s Word] we were the devil’s own, knowing nothing of God or of Christ.”[1908]

On the other hand, several of Luther’s doctrines find no place whatever in either of the Catechisms. For instance, those, which, according to the testimony of Protestant scholars quoted above, necessarily lead to a “Christianity void of dogma” (above, p. 432 ff.). The people and the pastors learn nothing here of their right of private judgment with regard to the text of the Bible and the articles of faith. Nor is anything said of that view of original sin which constituted the very basis of the new system, viz. that it is destructive of every predisposition to what is good; nor of the enslaved will, which is ridden now by God, now by the devil; nor of the fact that man’s actions have only the value imputed to them by God; nor, finally, do we find anything of predestination to hell, of the “Hidden God” Who quashes the Will of the “Revealed God” that all men be saved, and Who, to manifest His “Justice,” gloats over the endless torment of the countless multitudes whom He infallibly predestined to suffer eternally.[1909] The reason for the suppression of these doctrines in catechisms intended for the general reader is patent. The dogmas they embody, in so far as they vary from the traditional, are too contradictory to form a solid theological structure. To what dangers would not the new doctrine have been exposed, and what would have been the bad impression on the reader, had mention been made in the Catechisms of such theories, even though, in reality, they formed the very backbone of the new theology?

Luther’s Catechisms were well received and were frequently reprinted.[1910] Many enactments of the secular rulers, particularly in the Saxon lands, insisted that his Shorter Catechism should be learnt by heart and his Larger Catechism be made the basis of the sermons.[1911]

Luther had nevertheless taken great pains over his work.

He had been thinking of it long before he actually set to work on it. As early as 1526 he had spoken in his “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” of the need of a “rude, homely, simple and good work on the Catechism” for the congregation of true Christians which he was planning; indeed, he had already dealt with certain portions of the Catechism in his “Kurcz Form der czehen Gepott” (1520), and in his “BetbÜchlin” (1522). It was probably owing to his influence that Jonas and Agricola were entrusted with the drafting of a catechism for boys. While engaged on this work, in 1528, he, as a final preparation for it, preached three courses of sermons on the Catechism. These sermons were first published in 1894 by G. Buchwald in “Die Entstehung der Katechismen Luthers,” being taken from the notes by RÖrer; Buchwald draws attention to the close connection existing between the sermons and the text of the Catechism.[1916]

So well did Luther promote the teaching of the elementary truths of religion, that, in a notice given from the pulpit on Nov. 29, 1528, he was able to speak of a rule according to which it was the custom at Wittenberg four times in the year to preach four sermons on the Catechism spread over a fortnight.[1917]

This custom lasted long and spread to other places.[1918] Bugenhagen, so it is said on reliable authority, always carried Luther’s Catechism with him.[1919] He declared, in 1542, that he had already preached about fifty times on the Catechism,[1920] and he seems to have organised and kept up the practice of the “catechism weeks” when pastor of Wittenberg; at any rate the rules he drew up subsequent to 1528 insist repeatedly on such sermons being preached on the Catechism.[1921]

Luther’s Catechism and Ecclesiastical Antiquity

In the passage of his “Deudsche Messe” where he speaks of his idea on the teaching of the Catechism, Luther says, that he knew no better way to give such instruction than “that in which it had been given from the earliest days of Christianity and until now, viz. under the three heads: The Ten Commandments, the Creed and the Our Father”; these three things contained all that was called for.[1922] Hence he himself was far from sharing the opinion of certain later Protestants, viz. that, in the selection and methodical treatment of these three points he had struck out an entirely new line. He simply adapted the existing form of instruction to his new doctrines, which he cast into a shape suitable for popular consumption.

The Decalogue, together with Confession with which it naturally goes hand in hand, had assumed, ever since the 13th century, an ever-growing importance in the instructions intended for the people. In esteeming, as he did, the Ten Commandments, the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, Luther was simply following in the footsteps of the 14th and 15th century. Johann Wolff, the Frankfurt preacher, who is described on his tombstone as “Doctor decem prÆceptorum,” as his Handbook for Confession of 1478 shows, was quite indefatigable in his propaganda on behalf of the use of the Decalogue in confession and in popular instructions.[1923]

We must here call attention, above all, to the instruction habitually given in the home by parents and god-parents before Luther’s day; this “consisted chiefly in teaching the Creed and the Our Father, two points belonging to the oldest catechetical formularies of the ancient Church.”[1924] Luther himself had learnt these in the Latin school with the rest contained in the hornbooks, and on them in turn he based his own Catechism.[1925]

Before Luther’s day the term Catechism had not been taken to mean the book itself, but the subject-matter which was taught by word of mouth and was confined to the points indicated above. It was in this sense that he said, for instance in the Table-Talk: “The Catechism must remain and be supreme in the Christian Church.”[1933] It was he and Melanchthon[1934] who initiated the custom of applying the term not only to the contents of the volume but also to the volume itself.[1935] Hence, it is verbally true, that, before Luther’s day, there existed no “Catechism”; the religious writings dealing with the subject bore other and different titles. Nor was the arrangement of question and answer regarded as essential to the body of instructions which went under the term of Catechism, a circumstance which also seemed to favour the assertion, that, before Luther’s day, no such thing was known. But if question and answer be essential, then, even his own Larger Catechism could not rightly have borne the title, seeing that it has not this form. Nevertheless the system of question and answer had always been highly prized and had sometimes been made use of on the model of the questions put at baptism.

Amongst the older writings that most nearly approach the ideal of the Catholic Catechism, deserve to be mentioned two books then widely known which are constantly making their appearance in the thirty years before Luther’s day, viz. the “Fundamentum ÆternÆ felicitatis” and the “Discipulus de eruditione Christi—fidelium compendiosus,” the second of which also contains questions and objections. Both go beyond the three main points given above and include a popular summary, intended for the use of the clergy, of the seven sacraments, the nine sins, the works of mercy and the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost.[1936] It was also the usual thing for books on the Decalogue to include other points of importance, and thus to deal with almost the whole of the matter treated of in the Catechism. In fact, as Zezschwitz says, there was rather an “over-abundance of material in the domain of catechetics” than any dearth.

Finally, the use of the so-called tables, i.e. sheets printed only on one side and each giving a different point of the Catechism, which, as we saw, was the form under which Luther’s Shorter Catechism first appeared (above, p. 483), was nothing new either. “Luther followed in this respect a custom then widespread,”[1937] as is shown by the studies of Geffcken, Cohrs and Falk (1908); Falk, in particular, carefully sought out the Catholic tablets of the kind still in existence. So far only one example of Luther’s printed tablets, and that in Low German, has been brought to light.[1938]

Hence the statement that Luther’s Catechism was his own “creation” calls for considerable revision.

The directness and concision of his style must, however, always commend themselves to the reader, even to those who regret that in this work he tampered with the doctrines of the olden Church. But, as regards the division, the work rests on a foundation hallowed by centuries of ecclesiastical usage. This even Protestants have now begun to see.

Such a view also fits in with Luther’s own words far better than did the exaggerations formerly current. He says, for instance, in 1532, in his “Brieff an die zu Franckfort am Meyn”: “This we have received even from the first beginnings of Christianity. For there we see that the Creed, the Our Father and the Ten Commandments were summarised as a short form of doctrine for the young and the simple, and were, even from the very first, termed the Catechism.”[1941] Even in the original preface to the Larger Catechism he had declared that, “for the sake of the common people he was keeping to the three points which have ever been the rule in Christendom in ages past.”[1942]

3. The German Bible

Already at the Wartburg Luther had begun the great work of substituting for the existing vernacular translations of Holy Scripture one written in good German and based on the original languages of the books of the Bible.

The idea seems to have dawned on him during his enforced rest at the Wartburg, when, as he tells a friend, he passed his time reading the Bible in Greek and Hebrew and in studying these two languages.[1943] Just then he was entirely under the sway of those new views of his which prompted him to set up the Bible in the stead of all ecclesiastical authority. Melanchthon, too, so it would appear, had also some share in his resolution.

The Work of Translation and its Conclusion

In his solitude Luther first broached the New Testament, first because its contents more nearly touched the controversy in which he was engaged, and, secondly, because the New Testament could be translated more easily without learned assistance. When first announcing his plan, on Dec. 18, 1521, he mentions, that, “our people are asking for it.”[1944] “I shall put the Bible into German,” so he tells his Wittenberg colleague, Canon Nicholas Amsdorf, on Jan. 13, 1522, “though in so doing I am taking upon myself a burden beyond my strength. Now I see what translating means, and, why, so far, no one who undertook it ever put his name to it. As for the Old Testament I cannot touch it unless you are here and give me your help. Could I find a hiding-place with one of you, I would come at once so as to start the work of translation from the outset with your assistance. The result ought to be a translation worthy of being read by all Christians. I hope we shall give our German folk a better one than that which the Latins have. It is a great and glorious work at which we all should toil, for it is a public matter and is meant to serve the common weal. Tell me what hopes you have of it.”[1945]

In barely three months, with the aid of the few helpers he was able to secure in his Patmos, he had finished the first rough draft of the New Testament, which he took with him on leaving the Wartburg for revision among his friends at Wittenberg. “Philip and I,” so he wrote from Wittenberg, on March 30, 1522, to Spalatin, who was then Court preacher, “have now begun to furbish the translation of the New Testament; it will, please God, turn out a fine work. We shall need your help too, here and there, for the choice of words; hence get ready. But send us simple words, not the language of the men-at-arms or of the Court; the translation must, above all, be a homely one. May I ask you to send me straightaway the [German] names and the colours of the precious stones mentioned in Apocalypse xxi., or better still the stones themselves, if you can get hold of them at Court or elsewhere.”[1946] Luther finally received specimens of the stones through the good offices of Cranach. In order the better to understand certain texts, he also wrote to Spalatin, Mutian and Dr. George Sturz on the subject of ancient coinage.[1947] He also incidentally consulted the Court preacher as to the exact German translation of the names of various wild animals with which the latter would probably be acquainted owing to the hunts indulged in by the Court in that neighbourhood.[1948]

The printing of the New Testament was begun at Wittenberg by Melchior Lotther in the first days of May. Proofsheets were sent to Spalatin and Duke Johann of Saxony. From the beginning of July three printing presses are said to have run off daily 10,000 “chartÆ,” i.e. 5000 folio sheets, so as to produce an edition of 3000 copies. On Sep. 21, 1522, the New Testament appeared with a frontispiece and a number of woodcuts by Lucas Cranach; the title-page bore the words: “Das Newe Testament Deutzsch. Vuittemberg.” Neither year nor printer’s name were given, nor even the name of the translator, probably in order not to prejudice the sale of the book in those regions where Luther stood in bad odour. Luther received no fee for the work any more than for his other writings. As the first edition was at once sold out a new and amended one was published in Dec.; the two editions afterwards became known as the September and December Bibles. Editions still further amended were published at Wittenberg in 1526 and 1530. Altogether some sixteen editions of the New Testament were printed in this town before 1557, while at the same time more than fifty reprints saw the light in Germany, for instance, fourteen at Augsburg, thirteen at Strasburg and twelve at Basle.

While still busy on the New Testament Luther set to work on the Old, this time with the regular and expert assistance of Melanchthon and MatthÆus Aurogallus, the Wittenberg Professor of Hebrew. Owing to the difficulty of the work and the constant hindrances encountered by the author, the work did not appear all at once, but only piecemeal. As early as 1523 the Books of the Pentateuch were published at Augsburg and Basle in two successive editions, four times reprinted in the same year. The historical books from Josue to Esther followed in 1524. The remainder, comprehensively described as the “Prophets,” followed in separate parts, Job, the Psalms and the “Books of Solomon” in 1524, and the Prophets, properly so-called, only at longer intervals.[1949]

The difficulties of the work and the unwearied pains taken by the compiler are frequently apparent in Luther’s letters to his friends.

At the commencement of 1534 his Bible, which was now finished, was published for the first time as a complete work under the title: “Biblia, das ist die gantze Heilige Schrift Deudsch,” with his name and that of the printer, Hans Luft (Lufft). The Old, like the New Testament, was illustrated by Lucas Cranach, the subjects having been selected and distributed by Luther himself. The Old Testament was also furnished by Luther with marginal glosses in the form of short notes explanatory of the text, or giving his own commentary on it. Prefaces were prefixed to each division. A new edition of the Old Testament was ready as early as 1535.

New reprints of the whole Bible or of portions of it were constantly making their appearance, those appearing at Wittenberg always embodying the author’s latest emendations. From 1530-40 the latest bibliographer of Luther’s Bible enumerates thirty-four Wittenberg editions and seventy-two reprints in other parts of Germany; from 1541-46 there were eighteen Wittenberg editions and twenty-six similar reprints.[1954] According to a fairly reliable authority no less than 100,000 complete Bibles left Lotther’s press at Wittenberg between 1534 and 1584.[1955] The same bibliographer describes in the Weimar edition eighty-four original editions and 253 reprints as having appeared during Luther’s lifetime. Since each edition may be reckoned to have comprised from one to five thousand copies, one is almost justified in saying that Germany was flooded with the new work or portions of it. Half the South-German printers found a living in printing Bibles. In this respect the history of Luther’s works supplies the best data for the history of the printing and bookselling trade in that age.

It is true, no doubt, that many bought Bibles, because, among Protestants, it was considered the right thing for every man of means to have his Family-Bible. In the case of many alienated from the practices of the Church, the possession and the reading of the Bible constituted, as a Protestant recently put it, a sort of “opus operatum,” yet, according to the same writer, “the contradiction between the Bible and the moral behaviour” of some of its most zealous readers “cannot in many instances be questioned.”[1956] Others, however, no doubt provided themselves with the new Bible from really religious motives and interests, and refreshed and fortified themselves with its sublime and edifying eloquence. We may assume this to have been the effect of Luther’s Bible in the case of the simple folk who had been led unconsciously into Lutheranism, or had grown up in it, and who owed their acquaintance with the work to its use in public worship, though they themselves may have been unable to read, or, maybe, not rich enough to purchase a Bible of their own.[1957]

At the meetings the minutes were taken by RÖrer, a capable amanuensis. What has been preserved of them gives us a glimpse into the workshop, where, from 1539 to 1541, the revision of the Bible undertaken by Luther was carried out. Of RÖrer’s minutes those are still extant which record the conferences on the revision of the translation of the Psalms, and also a considerable portion of those on the work of 1539 on the Old Testament of which Mathesius speaks.[1960]

The outcome of the work of revision was a great improvement in the Wittenberg Bible of 1540 and 1541 printed by Hans Lufft. Another edition, dating from 1542, embodied in the main most of the new emendations. The edition most highly prized is, however, the last that appeared during Luther’s lifetime, viz. that of 1545, which also contains new corrections. It has been called the “editio typica” of Luther’s Bible, though, possibly, that of 1546, with new alterations by RÖrer, to which Luther is supposed to have given his approval, should be regarded as such.

The detailed account of this revision is not the only witness we have to the care and pains Luther bestowed on the work, for we have also the recently discovered manuscript copy of his translation, which Luther sent to the printers. The latter consists of portions of the Old Testament written with his own hand: Part of the Book of Judges, then Ruth, Kings, Paralipomena, Esdras, Nehemias and Esther, also Job, the Psalter, Proverbs, the Preacher and the Canticle of Canticles. They were published by the Magdeburg pastor, E. Thiele, in the Weimar edition from two MSS. at Zerbst and Berlin.[1965] Here we see how assiduously Luther corrects and deletes, how frequently he wrestles, so to speak, after the correct expression and cannot at times satisfy himself.[1966] Luther’s manuscript copy of the New Testament has not so far been discovered.

In consequence of the above publications the examination into the origin of the text of Luther’s Bible and into the principles which determined its compilation enters upon a new phase. In the same way the significance of the text for the history of the German language stands out more clearly because such discoveries bear the strongest testimony to Luther’s untiring endeavours to adapt himself to the true German mode of expression, to his dexterity in finding synonyms and to his skill in construing.

On the Language and the Learning Displayed in Luther’s Bible

The excellence of Luther’s translation of the Bible from the point of view of its German is unquestionable.

For, what the author above all aimed at, viz. a popular rendering of the text which should harmonise with the peculiarities of the German language, that he certainly achieved. Through his Bible, too, owing to its general use throughout so large a portion of the nation, he exerted a greater influence on the upbuilding of the German tongue than by all his other vernacular works.

In his other writings, in which he was ever striving to improve his mode of speech, we may often find real models of good German, which, consciously or not, had a widespread influence on the language. In the case of his Bible, however, this was far more noticeable, for not only was his language there more polished, but the fact of the text being so frequently committed to memory, quoted from the pulpit and surrounded by that halo which befits the Word of God, helped to extend its sway.

Not only did he take infinite pains to translate aright such phrases as ring unfamiliar to Western ears, but he was also assisted by his happy gift of observation and his knack of catching the true idiom. His habit of noting the words that fell from the lips of the populace, or, as he says, of “looking into the jaw of the man in the street,”[1967] was of the utmost service to him in his choice and use of terms. “No German talks like that,” “that is not put ‘germanice,’” “the German tongue won’t stand that,” and similar utterances, frequently recur in the minutes of the conferences when he is finding fault with the renderings proposed by others or even with his own earlier ones.

It was fortunate for him, that, as his medium of intercourse, he chose to use a kind of German, not indeed unknown before, but, which, with his rare gifts, he exploited with greater independence and vigour. Wittenberg was favourably situated from the geographical point of view, and the students who flocked thither from every part of Germany were ever bringing Luther fresh elements, thus enabling him to select among the various dialects what was common to all. The short journeys he made and his correspondence with so many people in every part of Germany were also of assistance to him.

“I have,” Luther says himself, “no particular, special German language of my own, but I use the common German language so that both the Upper and the Lower Lands may understand me. I write according to the speech of the Saxon Chancery which is used by all the princes and kings of Germany. All the Imperial Cities and Royal Courts in writing make use of the language of the Saxon Chancery and of our sovereign; hence this is the kind of German most widely spoken. The Emperor Maximilian, the Elector Frederick and the Duke of Saxony, etc., have fused all the different modes of German speech in the whole Roman Empire into a uniform language.”[1968] Hence, on his own admission, the language was not new. “The language of Upper Germany,” he says, “is not the real German; it is broad and uncouth and sounds harsh. But the Saxon tongue flows quietly and easily.”[1969]

When we try to determine in detail the language of which Luther made use, and how much he actually did to further its development, we are met by great difficulties. German philologists have not yet been able thoroughly to explore this domain, because so little is known of the German prints of the 15th century, of the manuscripts and the various groups of writers.[1970] Protestant theologians have often contented themselves with a few quotations from certain German philologists and historians, which exaggerate the case in Luther’s favour.[1971] Of such exaggerations Protestant scholars had been guilty even in the 16th century;[1972] for instance, the German preacher and grammarian, Johann Clajus, says, in 1578: “As the Holy Ghost spoke pure Hebrew through Moses and Greek through the Apostles, so He spoke pure German through His chosen instrument Martin Luther. It would not otherwise have been possible for a man to speak so accurately.”[1973]

In answer to the question, “What is the task imposed upon learned research by Luther’s Bible?” Risch, an authority on this subject, remarks: “The historical connection of the language used by Luther in his Bible with the German language of yore has still to be brought to light”; the studies undertaken so far have dealt too exclusively with one particular side of the question, viz. with the vowel sounds used by Luther and by his predecessors; too much stress has also been laid on the Middle-High German diphthongs (Î, Û, Ìu[Ü], becoming ei, au, eu).[1974] Luther’s relations with the past in the matter of the construction of sentences and arrangement of words, and more particularly in his vocabulary and the meaning he gives to his words, have not been set forth scientifically enough, though abundant material for so doing is to be found in Grimm’s German dictionary, in Hermann Paul’s and elsewhere.

Then again, as Paul Pietsch points out in the introduction to the 1st volume of Luther’s Bible in the Weimar series, we have not been sure hitherto even of the exact text of Luther’s translation. Owing to the divergencies in the text it was “not possible, with the help of the various editions scattered throughout the world, to arrive at any final opinion concerning the language employed in the Bible or the alterations it underwent.” Hence, only on the completion of the Weimar series shall we be able to form “an adequate idea of the position Luther’s translation holds in the history of New High German.”[1975]

Finally, there is still some doubt as to what Luther actually meant by his statement concerning the German of the Chanceries of Saxony, the Empire and the Imperial Cities being the model on which his own language was based, and as to how far he was speaking the truth. We must in all probability go much further back than the time of the Emperor Maximilian of whom Luther speaks, viz. to the Chancery of the Luxemburg kings of Bohemia, for it was the latter who established, about the middle of the 14th century, a sort of New High German which later on spread to Silesia, to Upper and Lower Lusatia, and, then, thanks to the Emperor Frederick III, to the Chancery of the Hapsburgs and to those of the Saxon Electorate, Hesse and Mayence. In those early days the new language was a mixture of the dialects of Upper and Central Germany, of those of Austria and of Meissen.[1976]

Chancery German, however, restricted as it was by its very nature within certain well-defined limits and hampered by the stiffness of the Court, was not likely to prove of much service to Luther, who sought a language which should be understood by the people and be full of strength and variety. Hence we are driven to surmise that it was rather in the homes of the people that he sought his language, turning to good account his gift for coining what he needed from the various German dialects.

As regards the state of the language in Germany at that time, E. Gutjahr has recently endeavoured to prove that the efforts at colonisation and the movement of the people, more particularly from the 12th to the 14th century, had paved the way in Saxony for the rise and spread of a new, common language (New High German), and that in towns like Halle a new patrician type of language had sprung up which Luther had only to assimilate. In his “AnfÄnge der neuhochdeutschen Sprache vor Luther” (1910), the author gives us an outline of the conclusions he has reached and which he hopes to set forth at greater length later. Whether he will succeed in making out his case remains, however, to be seen.

The language of the Saxon Chancery was, according to Gutjahr, even in Luther’s day, not merely the “polite language of general intercourse,” but one in which all the German Courts were versed, the Imperial, Austrian one of Maximilian, as much as that of the Saxon Electorate under Frederick the Wise.[1977] From this language, “into which he infused new elements taken from the mouth of the people,” Luther forged a mighty weapon for his work, being all the more readily led to do so seeing that the “reforming movement found its mainstay among the patrician classes of the Saxon Electorate.”[1978] Nevertheless we must not assume the existence in Luther’s day of any common written language in the modern sense. The foundation for such a common language had indeed been laid, but as yet it did not exist. Before our nation could lay claim to a common language of its own—our Modern High German as written—a long time had still to elapse.[1979]

The language used by Luther in his Bible was made still more widely known owing to the work being at once reprinted even where other dialects prevailed, though as a rule some alterations were made to bring it into line with the idiom in use; at times the printers did no more than append a short vocabulary explaining such Saxon phrases as might be strange to the reader. In this way the new Bible, the language of which was so admirably suited to become a common one, penetrated everywhere, even into out of the way districts where the most divergent dialects obtained.[1980]

Its influence was all the more important now that small principalities were springing up at the expense of the unity of Germany and threatened the language with further disintegration. The Lutherans were the first to perceive and work against this danger, though the Catholics were by no means unmindful of it too. Catholics, too, sought to take advantage of the translation, and, in some cases, even went too far in this. Luther once declares in his usual vein: “Our opponents read it more than do our own people”;[1981] he also mentions that Duke George had said: “Let the monk finish translating the Bible into German and then get himself gone.”[1982]

What in the case of Protestants favoured the influence Luther’s Bible exerted on the language, was, on the one hand the profound interest aroused in the reader by his inspiring pen, and, on the other, its appearance at a time when, though the art of printing had been invented, the whole world, and more particularly Germany, judged from a literary, theological standpoint, was still lying to a large extent fallow and was thus more readily dominated by such a work as his, and that not merely as regards the matter but also as regards the style. Men of learning, owing to humanistic influences, wrote almost exclusively in Latin. The use of the German language for theological and religious subjects, save in sermons and popular writings, was something unusual; in fact, such a thing was rather discountenanced owing largely to the publication of German works which had made a wrong use of Scripture.

In Lutheranism the New High German of the Bible found its way not only into educated, ecclesiastical circles but also to the common folk, into whose ears the preachers assiduously dinned countless favourite texts in their new form; it also became familiar to the teachers and children in the schools. No more powerful lever for the furtherance of New High German could have been found. A century after, New High German had become the language of the churches and schools in the regions subject to Luther’s influence, whilst the South German and Low German dialects had largely lost their hold.

When all is said, however, the secret of such success is not to be entirely understood unless we also take into account the religious position Luther occupied in the eyes of his followers. All who venerated him as having thrown a new light on religion, valued and honoured the language used by a mind so imperious, so strong and versatile, and, when it so pleased, so sympathetic. H. BÖhmer says very truly of the old German Protestants: “Luther became for the Germans the authority on speech because he was their supreme authority on faith and personal conduct. Had he not been a religious reformer and had he not bequeathed to Evangelical Germany in his Bible a book, which, on account of its religious importance was bound to be looked upon as a model of language, he would never have exercised so powerful an influence on the written and spoken language.”[1983]

Nevertheless, to assert, that, by his German Bible and his other writings Luther was the actual founder of New High German is to go too far, quite apart from the fact that German, as now written, is no longer identical with the German of Luther’s Bible and other writings. We cannot take seriously Grimm’s assertions that “New High German may in point of fact be called the Protestant dialect,” or that “Luther’s language, owing to its noble, almost marvellous purity and its mighty influence, was both the germ and the foundation of the New High German tongue.”[1984]

“Protestants,” says Pastor Risch, “have hitherto been disposed to undervalue the literary use made of the German language before Luther’s day, particularly in the religious domain, and to exaggerate Luther’s importance in the history of the tongue. Only in so far as he succeeded in seizing upon and bringing out all the forces and possibilities latent in the language, was it possible for his work to be truly creative and epoch-making. To catch the idiom of the people, not to force a new language upon it with his German Bible, was, on his own admission, Luther’s aim. The German language prepared the way for Luther to a greater extent than at first sight appears.”[1985]

Two other considerations will serve still further to curtail the importance of Luther’s services to the German tongue.

First of all it must be pointed out that many very coarse elements found their way into his popular works, and thus, unhappily, into the written language, and, secondly, that a large number of words and phrases peculiar to South Germany and which were accordingly unknown to Luther, find, for this reason, no place in works, with the result that the German language suffered.

We may speak with less reserve of the merits of the new translation so far as it is based on the original languages of the Bible, and on the Latin Vulgate then in general use. Even before Luther started on his work attention had been called to the original text; indeed, as it happens, the scholar who was the primary cause of Luther’s studying the original language was his Catholic opponent, Erasmus, who himself brought out the Greek edition of the New Testament. To Luther, however, belongs the honour of having been the first to tread the new philological paths with a German version.

In his somewhat hurried version of the New Testament he used the Greek text as well as the Vulgate. In the same way, in his translation of the Old Testament, he went back to the original so far as his knowledge of Hebrew allowed, and, where this was insufficient, sought the help of others.

The principle he followed, viz. to make the Bible plain to the German reader by explaining its meaning, so far as this can be done by a translation, brings us, however, face to face with other questions.

Luther had a high opinion of the accuracy and clearness of his work. He says of it: “I can with a good conscience testify that I have shown the utmost fidelity and diligence therein, and have never thought to deceive.”[1986]

“No one would believe what labour it has cost except those who worked with us,” so he said in his last years according to Mathesius, when looking back on the success of his undertaking. “This Bible—not that I would praise myself but the work speaks for itself—is so good that it is better than the Greek or Latin translation, and more is to be found in it than in all the commentaries. For we remove the hindrances and stumbling-blocks out of the way so that other people may be able to read without difficulty.”[1987] Reducing this eulogy to its proper proportions we may indeed allow that Luther eliminated the “hindrances and stumbling-blocks” from his German translation, being no literalist, but anxious above all to put into plain German what sounded strange or difficult.

Yet such a system of translation can only within certain limits be regarded as the right one. As to whether Luther always kept within these limits, and as to how we are to regard the use he made of this freedom in particular instances, is a point on which even the greatest admirers of the German Bible disagree. Pastor Risch, the expert repeatedly referred to above, remarks pessimistically: “Scarcely any of those who have written on Luther’s method of translating have gone beyond mere generalities. They are satisfied with dishing up again more or less skilfully Luther’s principles as set forth in his ‘Von DolmetzscheÑ.’ Not even my own work on the German Bible (1907) do I exempt from this criticism. Research must bring us by inductive reasoning to the recognition of the root principle which alone can explain the many thousand variant readings we meet with to-day in the [Weimar] German Bible (vols. i. and ii.), and in Bindseil’s critical edition,”[1988]—It is, however, to be feared that in very many instances the “root principle” supposed to underlie Luther’s work will fail in practice. His hasty, precipitate work in the Wartburg (the completion of the New Testament in three months) puts any real scholarly method out of the question. The fact that barely a week was allotted to each Gospel precludes the use of any well-considered principles in the work of translation.

Again, Luther often deviates far too much from the original text and takes too many liberties in his efforts to be plain. To this must be added the fact, that, owing to his insufficient linguistic attainments, he fails in many instances to reach the real sense of the original sacred text, to say nothing, of course, of the numerous critical emendations made at a later date in the texts. Hence Protestants have sometimes judged the scholarship of Luther’s Bible rather harshly. Josias Bunsen, for instance, called Luther’s translation “one of the most inaccurate, though showing signs of great genius,” and declared that, in it, there are “three thousand passages which call for revision.”[1989] E. Nestle, the Protestant philologist and Bible expert, referring to the revision which had taken place in Germany, says of the defects of Luther’s Bible: “A comparison with the English or Swiss work of revision shows how much further we might and ought to have gone.”[1990]

With still greater show of reason De Lagarde finds fault with other wilful deviations from the text; he refers to those pointed out by DÖllinger in “Die Reformation” and again insisted on by Janssen, and then by Paulsen in his “Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts.” These false renderings have, however, out of a wrong regard for Luther, been retained in the Lutheran Bible even to the present day.

Luther’s scant concern for the text where it runs counter to his ideas calls for further discussion.

Luther’s German Bible Considered Theologically

Bearing in mind Luther’s character we can well understand how sorely he was tempted during his work to make the text square with his own doctrine, the more so since the translation was intended as a popular explanation of the Bible. When, moreover, one remembers his arbitrary way of proving his doctrine, and the entire freedom with which he was wont to handle other religious matters connected with antiquity, which, though not in the Word of God, were nevertheless historical facts easy of verification, it will not greatly surprise even those readers who are prejudiced in his favour to find, that, in his treatment of the original text of Holy Scripture—which most people are not able to verify—he did not scruple here and there to introduce ideas of his own. “What does it matter,” so he said later in his blind conviction of being in the right, in reply to those who accused him of having altered the text, “so long as at bottom the thing is clear,” so long as “it evidently is so,” and “is demanded by the state of the case?” “Not only is it right but even highly necessary that it should be set forth in the clearest and fullest manner,” etc.[1994]

It is chiefly in the question of justification by faith alone that he twists his text so much that his version ceases in reality to be a translation. He indeed speaks of his additions as “commentaries,” but no one could thus have “commented” on the passages who was not, like Luther, entirely taken up with the new dogma of grace, justification and faith.

In addition to the mistakes and the wilfulness of the translation, the character of the glosses appended by Luther, and still more his attitude towards the Canon of the Bible, laid his work open to objections of the most serious kind.

In the glosses on many passages he shows wonderful skill in manipulating the text in favour of his wrong views. This is carried so far that, to the account of the anointing of Our Lord’s feet by the Magdalen (Mat. xxvi. 10), he adds the marginal gloss: “Thus one sees that faith alone makes the work good,” because only faith could transform this seeming waste into a good work.[2009] Of Mat. xvi. 18: “Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build my church,” he gives the following explanation, which plainly rests on his own partisan and anti-Papal standpoint: By Peter all Christians together with Peter are meant, and their confession is the rock. “All Christians are Peters on account of the confession which here Peter makes, which also is the rock on which Peter and all the other Peters are built. The confession is common to all; hence also the name.”[2010]

It was partly the defects of the translation itself, partly the cleverly calculated and thus all the more dangerous marginal glosses, which called forth objections and warnings from Catholic writers as soon as the work was published.

In his treatment of the Canon of the Bible Luther proceeds with his customary licence. Those books of the Bible in which he thought he found his own doctrines most clearly enunciated he speaks of in the Prefaces as “the best,” viz. the Gospel and 1st Epistle of St. John, the Epistles of St. Paul, particularly those to the Romans, the Galatians and the Ephesians, and the 1st Epistle of Peter; the remaining books he arbitrarily ranks below these, and sometimes goes so far in depreciating them that their biblical character is jeopardised (below, p. 522, n. 6).

Says Carlstadt’s biographer: “What lent Carlstadt a decided advantage in his polemics (against Luther’s attitude towards the Epistle of James) was the utter inconsistency of Luther’s critical attitude towards Holy Scripture at that time.”[2038] Luther “read his theology into the Bible,” remarks another Protestant critic, “just as his mediÆval predecessors had done with theirs.”[2039] “With a wondrous pertinacity he pitted his theology and his Christ against everything that did not accord with it, against Popery, against Tradition, yea, against the Bible itself.”[2040]

The halo of learning that had so long surrounded Luther’s German Bible seemed to threaten to fade when, after long preparation, the revised edition was published at Halle in 1883 (and, with new emendations, in 1892). A commission of learned Protestant theologians “of various shades of opinion” was entrusted by the German-Evangelical Conference of Eisenach with the work. Out of too great respect for Luther the alterations made were, however, all too few; veneration for his memory explains why the translation was not raised to the present standard of learning. The result was that many Protestant congregations, more particularly in North Germany, looked askance at the new edition and it was not generally introduced.[2041] A proposal was made, but to no purpose, that an exact counterpart of the Luther Bible of 1545 should be reproduced as a literary monument which would best serve to honour the author’s memory. The severe objections which scholars have brought against the revised edition cause it to resemble already a ruin, which, having had the misfortune to date from a period when the demands made by learning were less insistent than to-day, now towers lonely and forsaken in our midst.

It is true that the revised Bible, with its heavy type showing exactly where it departs from the wording of the old Luther Bible, exhibits a huge number of freshly hewn stones built into the old, crumbling fabric. Nevertheless De Lagarde could say of the scholars who had taken part in the work:

“These theologians of acknowledged standing have given us a Bible in a language which is not our own, a Bible in which one seeks in vain for the indispensable emendations with which the revisers were familiar, a Bible the revisers of which have of set purpose ignored the labours of their most painstaking and self-sacrificing colleagues, a Bible which passes over in silence all the essential developments in theology and religion.”[2042]

“A language that is not ours,” is also the main complaint of the Protestant theologian S. Oettli concerning this Bible; he also numbers among its failings its retention of certain old German words and of Luther’s German rendering of the Divine names and the expressions Scheol, Hades, Daemon, etc. The principles which ruled the revision were “anything but unexceptionable,” and the result of the work seemed “unsatisfactory.” Oettli demonstrates the “backwardness” of the church Bible by comparing portions of the Bible taken from the revised text with exact translations of the same passages.[2043]

All the surreptitious alterations and ambiguities we have alluded to above, for which Luther’s theology was responsible, have been left untouched, save for the few exceptions already mentioned. And yet the introduction which tells the story of the revision and is printed at the beginning of the edition of 1883 admits, though with extreme caution, that, in places, Luther “had been led to put his own explanations into his translation of certain passages.”[2044] In spite of the admitted incorrectness of the renderings in question the revisers chose to be governed by the strange principle, that “texts to which the people have become attached under the form given them by Luther, owing to their use in the church and in works of piety, are, as far as possible, to be retained unchanged, or only to undergo slight alteration.”[2045] Owing to their laxity in this respect they were to hear from their co-religionists that, in the new Bible, they had “sacrificed their understanding” to Luther,[2046] and again: “If the [Lutheran] Church after three and a half centuries, with the help of her best-esteemed theologians, can produce nothing better than this revision of her principal treasure, then sentence has already been passed on her. What can flourish in the Lutheran Church if the study of the Word of God does not?”[2047]

We may add: How much better would not the results have been, and with what emulation would not the work have been undertaken had Protestant scholars been summoned to labour in unison to supply the members of their communion with a brand new translation, quite independent of Luther’s, which should tally with the best present-day knowledge? In asking this question we are, of course, ignoring the inward difficulties presented by the difference of standpoint. In any case, however, the unprejudiced observer will see in the history of this revision and of similar attempts at revision made in the past, how heavily the burden of a single great name may weigh on whole generations.

A result of greater importance for the present subject is, however, that Luther’s German Bible, in spite of all the pains taken by its author, falls far short of the ideal of scholarship and impartial fidelity. For these defects the real merits of its German garb cannot compensate.

Psychological Aspects of Luther’s Work on the German Bible

In Protestant works on Luther written in a pious vein we often find him depicted as animated solely by the desire to enjoy the heavenly consolation of the holy Word of God and to make it known to his fellow Germans. In such works all his secondary, personal and polemical motives tend to disappear from view, and his guiding star during the three and twenty long years during which he was busy on the Bible seems to be nothing but the desire to satisfy the soul that craves for God and the glory of the Master.

Were this the case, then the task chosen was certainly of an eminently peaceful and religious character. Yet we find often enough in Luther allusions to purposes of a different kind to which too little attention is generally paid in Protestant literature of the sort we are referring to. Indeed the question arises whether, psychologically, the secondary aims are not to be regarded as quite as powerful as his supposed leading motive.

The tendencies which his statements betray are various; first and foremost we have those of a polemical nature, also his desire to enhance his own personal position. As we are here dealing with the German Bible, which a recent writer has described as the “crown of Luther’s creations,” we are amply justified in looking into these psychological motives, the more so since they throw a new light on the alterations in the sacred text referred to above which Luther undertook in the interests of his theology.

The Bible, so he declares in his “Von den letzten Worten Davids” in 1543, could not be interpreted by Papists or Jews but only by those who “truly and rightly” possess Christ. Speaking from the standpoint of his own teaching he says: “Whoever does not really and truly hold, or wish to hold, this man Who is called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Whom we Christians preach, let him leave the Bible alone.... What else did the Pope lack? Had they not the sure, bright and mighty word of the New Testament? What else is wanting to our sects at the present time?”[2048] Since the Papists will not join those who had rediscovered the “mind of Christ”[2049] and revealed it to humanity, let them keep their hands off the Bible. Another will interpret it for them.

But, even apart from the “mind of Christ,” something else was wanting to the Papists which Luther could boast of possessing, viz. learning and a knowledge of the German language: “If I, Dr. Luther, could have felt sure,” so he wrote in his “Sendbrieff von DolmetzscheÑ” of 1530, “that all the Papists taken in a lump were sufficiently skilful to be able to translate even one chapter of the Bible into German faithfully and rightly I should in good sooth have been humble enough to beg their help and assistance in translating the New Testament into German. But because I knew and still see with my own eyes that not one of them knows how to translate or to speak German aright, I have not troubled about it.”[2050]

It was now his intention, as he declares at the beginning of his preface to the German New Testament, that the great work he had produced should make an end of the “old delusion” in which the whole world was sunk, viz. “that men do not really know what is the Law or the Gospel, or what the New or the Old Testament.”[2051] He is determined, so he tells us, by popularising his New Testament to show the people that the Gospel is not to be turned into a “code of laws or a handbook,” as had “hitherto been the case and as certain earlier prefaces even by St. Jerome” had proposed. For the Gospel does not really require our works that we may become devout and thus be saved, nay, it condemns such works, but it does demand that we should believe that Christ has overcome sin, death and hell for us and therefore that He makes us pious, vivifies us and saves us, not by our own works but by His work, i.e. by His death and passion. “Hence it is, that, no Law is given to the believer whereby he may be justified before God.”[2052] It was his old antagonism to the importance of man’s co-operation with grace and to good works that made him place at the head of both his German Testaments his motto against works, so indicative of his tendency. In the beginning of the preface to the first part of the Old Testament (1523) we read that Moses, in his 1st Book, taught that “it was not by the Law or by our own works that sin and death were to be vanquished,” but only by the seed of the woman, that is Christ; “in order that faith may be exalted from the beginning of Scripture above all works, Law or merit. Thus the 1st Book of Moses contains hardly anything but examples of faith and unbelief, and of the fruits of faith and unbelief, and is thus almost an evangelical book.”[2053]

That the German Bible was intended as a bulwark of the Evangel was also plain from the illustrations. For the New Testament contained, as Duke George complained when interdicting it, “many disgraceful pictures, ridiculing and deriding His Holiness the Pope and fortifying his [Luther’s] doctrines.”[2054] Emser, too, refers to these pictures in his protest: “How should Christians accept the work of one who has been openly branded as a heretic, a work which lacks the approbation of the church, and, moreover, insults and reviles the Pope in abusive figures, pictures, words and insinuations?”[2055] Thus, for instance, in the woodcuts appended to the Apocalypse the scarlet woman of Babylon and likewise the dragon, the monster from the pit, both wear the papal tiara. In Apoc. xiv. Babylon is depicted as Rome, Sant’ Angelo, St. Peter’s, the Belvedere of the Pope’s palace and Santa Maria Rotunda are all collapsing, whilst in chapter xviii. these same buildings are shown in flames.[2056]

In Luther’s Bible the Catholic rulers were directly attacked in the heading chosen in 1529 for the book of Wisdom: “The Wisdom of Solomon for the Tyrants.” “The book should above all be read,” he here says, “by the big Johnnies who rage against their subjects and against the guiltless on account of the Word of God”; for “in this book the tyrants are violently taken to task and scourged.” “Hence this book is very much in place in our day.”[2057]

The introduction to Romans (1522) not only exposes at length the doctrine of faith alone, which Luther supposed Paul to have taught in this Epistle, but also warns all against the “verminous medley of men-made laws and ordinances under which the whole world groans.” Rightly enough had Paul said of the makers of these laws, that their God is their belly.[2058]

As we are here less concerned with the theological importance of Luther’s German Bible than with the spirit which inspired its composition, we shall only remind the reader briefly, that the work of translation was intended as a solemn expression of the author’s root ideas according to which the Bible was the only true source of faith. From the Bible alone, so he taught, all must derive their faith and find the way of salvation under the direct inspiration of the spirit from on high; it ought to be in the hands of all, even of the unlearned. Hence, in his “To the German Nobility” of 1520, he had declared that the Bible, and particularly the Gospel, ought to be in the hands of everybody, even of the boys and girls.[2059]

A surprising psychological trait is the haughty self-satisfaction evinced by Luther with his grand achievement when objections were raised.

He had repeatedly proclaimed that he intended everything solely for the honour of God.[2066] But woe to anyone who in any way attacked his own honour! For, by this work, Luther had vindicated his mission as the appointed preacher to the Germans; only at Wittenberg, where the Bible was taken really seriously, were people able to fathom the secrets of this sealed book.

To irritate (“irritare”) the Papists by his work, to rouse them to fury (“furiam concitare”) and to let loose their “calumnious attacks” on his translation, was a real pleasure to him.[2075] As in the case of the Papists, so also in that of rivals within his fold, his work for the Bible spelt their undoing. This it was which justified him against all opponents.

Which of his rivals had ever had to contend with “temptations” when engaged on the Bible? He, however, had to thank his “combats” for having been his instructors.[2081] MÜnster, so Luther said in 1536, accused him of making certain mistakes in his translation of the book of Jonas. “Yes, dear MÜnster, you have never been through these temptations. I, like Jonas, have looked into the belly of the whale where all seemed given over to despair.”[2082] “The pious are like unto Jonas; they are cast into the sea of despair, nay, into hell itself.”[2083]

Discontent and vexation—temptations of another kind—frequently overwhelmed him whilst engaged on his Bible. Even his unprecedented success did not satisfy him; the Bible did not seem to him to be selling quick enough, nor to be made use of to the extent he wished; again, he feared, that in the future, it would lose its interest.

What appears to have afforded him most satisfaction was that he had been able to counteract the false translations and commentaries of the Jews. Often does he mention this as one of the advantages of his Bible, and it is perfectly true that his felicitous and correct exposition particularly of the Messianic predictions based on the Hebrew text is deserving of all praise.

Julius KÖstlin, Luther’s best-known biographer, from whom the words just quoted are taken, declares, that, in his translation of the Bible, Luther “bestowed on his German people the greatest possible gift”; Luther wished to make of the Book of Books “an heirloom of the whole German nation.”[2092] Similar enthusiastic allusions to “the gift to the nation” are often met with in Protestant writers. They, however, overlook the fact that it was only to a fraction of the German nation, viz. to his co-religionists, that Luther offered this gift; moreover, they seem forgetful of a remark once made by Luther to a very intimate friend, which is far from enthusiastic and anything but complimentary to his German fellow-countrymen. The remark in question occurs in a letter of Luther’s dated Feb. 4, 1527, and addressed to Johann Lang of Erfurt; evidently he was extremely annoyed at the time. It runs as follows: “I am busy with Zacharias [the translation of which was then in the press] and have begun the translation of the Prophets, a work that is quite in keeping with the gratitude I have hitherto met with from this heathenish, nay, utterly bestial nation.”[2093] Even so severe a stricture must not be lost to sight by the historian desirous of tracing a psychological picture of the author’s feelings at the time he was engaged on the translation.

Finally it is instructive from the psychological standpoint to trace the development in Luther’s mind of the fable—to be dealt with more fully below—that, under Popery, the Bible had been discarded and that he, Luther, had brought it once more to light.[2094]

Luther utterly discarded the principles of antiquity concerning the Bible, but nevertheless he made abundant use in his translation of the literary assistance afforded him by the Catholic past.

In the Old Testament, the Church’s Latin translation, viz. the Vulgate, and the Greek Septuagint were of great service to him, but he also made use of the Latin translation of Santes Pagninus (not to speak of that of the Protestant, Seb. MÜnster) and likewise of the Commentaries, as, for instance, of the “Glossa ordinaria” and the works of Nicholas of Lyra († 1340).

An unkindly saying current at a later date in Catholic circles concerning Lyra’s widely-known Bible Postils declared: “Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset.” The saying is, however, met with under another form even before Luther’s day, and in this older guise serves to show the high esteem in which Lyra’s Commentary was held; here it runs: “Nisi Lyra lyrasset, nemo doctorum in bibliam saltasset.”[2097] Not only Lyra but many other Bible commentators stood in high favour among Catholic scholars at the close of the Middle Ages, nor was there before Luther’s day any such absence of respect for the Bible or ignorance of its contents, whether in the original text or in German translations as he would have us believe.

The Bible in the Ages before Luther

It would be to perpetuate a prejudice all too long current among Protestants, founded on Luther’s often false or at least exaggerated statements, were one to fail to recognise how widely the Bible was known even before Luther’s day and to what an extent it was studied among educated people. Modern research, not seldom carried out by open-minded Protestants, has furnished some surprising results in this respect, so that one of the most recent and diligent of the Protestant workers in this field could write: “If everything be taken into account it will no longer be possible to say as the old polemics did, that the Bible was a sealed book to both theologians and laity. The more we study the Middle Ages, the more does this fable tend to dissolve into thin air.” “The Middle Ages concerned themselves with Bible translation much more than was formerly supposed.”[2098]

The psychology of Luther’s gradual approach to the statement that the Bible before his day lay under the bench, has already been described (p. 534 f.). As some Protestants have sought to clear him of the authorship of so glaring a fable and to insinuate that the expression belongs rather to his pupil Mathesius, we must here look a little more closely into the words.

Luther himself uses the saying, for instance, when claiming credit in his Commentary on the Prophet Zacharias (chap, viii.) with having rendered the greatest possible service to Scripture. He says: “They [the Papists] are still angry and refuse to listen when people say, that, with them, Scripture lay under the bench, and that their mad delusions alone prevailed.” In this connection the Weimar editor of the Commentary refers to a work of the former Dominican, Petrus Sylvius, aimed at Luther and entitled “Von den vier Evangelein, so eine lange Zeit unter der Bank sein gelegen.”[2105]—Popery, Luther says in another passage, “kicked Scripture under the bench.”[2106] He speaks repeatedly in the Table-Talk[2107] of the “Bible under the bench,” which, since “it lay forgotten in the dust,” he had been obliged to drag again into the light of day.[2108]

Elsewhere he describes in detail the trouble he had in pulling the Bible from “under the bench,” particularly owing to his theological rivals and the sectarians within the camp; on this occasion his black outlook as to the future of the Bible he had thus set free scarcely redounds to the credit of his achievement. He says in his tract against Zwingli (“That the words of Christ, ‘This is My Body,’ still stand fast,” 1527): “When in our own day we saw how Scripture lay under the bench, and how the devil was deluding us and taking us captive with the hay and straw of men-made prayers, we tried, by the Grace of God, to mend matters, and have indeed with great and bitter pains brought Scripture back to light once more, and, sending human ordinances to the winds, set ourselves free and escaped from the devil.” But then, so he goes on, others [on his own side] fell upon him, raised up an uproar and raged against him; Zwingli, in particular, had riddled a single line of Scripture “with ten holes,” “so that I have never read of a more disgraceful heresy”; which, even in the beginning, “comprised as many factions and divisions as it had heads.” There would, however, in future “be such a turmoil in Scripture, such dissensions and so many factions, that we might well say with St. Paul ‘the mystery of ungodliness is already at work’” (2 Thess. ii. 7). “He [the devil] will bring about factions and dissensions in Scripture so that you will not know what is Scripture, or faith, or Christ, or even where you stand.”[2109]

The honest admission made by a Protestant, viz. “that, so far as outward acquaintance with the Bible went, it would be untrue to say that it lay under the bench before the Reformation,”[2115] does not, however, sufficiently counter what Luther says, for his grievance in reality was, that, among the Papists, it was rather the true meaning of the Bible that “lay under the bench.”

It is plain that they “abuse and revile Scripture, thrust it under the bench, pretend that it is shrouded in thick fog, that the interpretation of the Fathers is needed and that light must be sought in the darkness.” Thus did he write against Emser in 1521.[2116] A recent champion of Luther has also thought it worth while to write: “The Bible before Luther’s day was not regarded as in Luther’s opinion it should have been regarded, or treated as it should have been treated; it was indeed studied by the learned but only in the same way as people studied Augustine, Jerome and Thomas Aquinas—and, moreover, not with the same zeal or to the same extent.”

Did one wish to deal adequately with the standing thus taken up by Luther and his defenders there would be a whole book to be written full of interesting facts; for what Luther presupposes in such repeated statements is that his theology was right and that of the Church all wrong. Sufficient light has, however, already been thrown in this work on the value of this assertion of Luther’s.

Denifle, who, thanks to his expert acquaintance with the material, was able to examine so many of Luther’s theological assertions concerning the Middle Ages, deals amongst other things with the question, whether Luther was really the first to advance the theory, “that Christ is the whole content of Scripture,”[2117] the enunciation of which had been claimed as “the greatest service rendered by Luther to the Church and to theology.”—The truth is, however, that the Church of old was so full of the idea that the “Holy Scriptures before Christ were written only to proclaim Him and His Church,” that it was an easy task for Denifle to overwhelm his adversaries beneath a mass of quotations, for instance, from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and J. Perez of Valencia (the latter representing Luther’s older contemporaries).

Catholics have rightly gone even further, and asked whether it was not Luther himself, who, by his arbitrary treatment of some parts of Scripture, and its actual words,—to say nothing of its interpretation—thrust the Bible under the bench? Surely, his destruction of the Canon of Scripture, his alterations in the text and the liberty he arrogated to himself in his glosses[2118] are but little calculated to qualify him to be called the saviour and liberator of the Bible.—It is nothing more than an appeal to the imagination of the populace, when, in connection with this, popular works on Luther refer to the Bible, which the youthful Luther when still a student in the world, found chained in the library at Erfurt (though this itself is a matter of history). To hear of the Bible having been “bound in chains before Luther’s day” may sound very dreadful, but, as all should know, the only reason why valuable books were chained in those days was to guarantee their preservation for the use of the reader. Scholars are well aware that the printed works which were then so costly, and still more the manuscripts, were usually kept chained in the libraries in order to prevent visitors carrying them off; the custom still obtains in Rome to-day in the parlours of some of the convents, where books are displayed for the perusal of those waiting. Wattenbach in his “Schriftwesen des Mittelalters”[2119] enumerates a whole series of instances from earlier centuries. One of the most remarkable which goes back to about Luther’s day, is that of the Medicean library of manuscripts, the so-called Laurentiana at Florence, where, even to-day, the valuable MSS. in their splendid book-cases are fastened by chains and have to be unlocked when called for for use in the Reading-Room. In his catalogue of the Greek Codices in the Laurentiana Bandini gives an interesting sketch of these curious book-cases. Even under the Elector Johann Frederick of Saxony, in 1535, in Luther’s own time, the books belonging to the Princely Library at Wittenberg were chained.[2120] On the other hand, the copy of Holy Scripture which Luther was given during his student years at the Erfurt monastery, and the diligent study of which was enjoined upon him both by the rule of his Order and the words of his Superior, was evidently not thus chained.

Finally as regards the German translations of the Bible before Luther’s day. Of the seventeen printed editions of the whole Bible referred to above (p. 536) as dating from the years 1450-1520, the oldest is the so-called Mendel edition of Strasburg, probably dating from 1466,[2121] in which year the copy was purchased which now lies in the Munich State Library. The German Plenaries commence with the year 1470. We hear, for instance, of a printed German Bible being bought for nine florins.[2122] The lower price of the Plenaries, on the other hand, made them easier to obtain. Thus according to the data collected by Franz Falk, Johann SchÖffer, a printer, in 1510, sent from Mayence to the Easter fair at Leipzig, amongst other books, seventy-three German Postils (Plenaries), priced at five copies a florin. In the following year SchÖffer’s agent had to render an account after the Michaelmas fair for the sale of seventy-two postils.[2123] The German postils in those days served much the same purpose as Goffine does to-day.

Besides the printed editions, the manuscript translations still preserved must also be taken into account. Some twenty years ago Wilhelm Walther, the Protestant theologian, devoted a study to this particular branch of research.[2124] The results he then arrived at have since been amplified and corrected by Franz Jostes and others, and still await further additions. Walther examined 202 MSS. German Bibles, or portions of Bibles, and came to the conclusion that they represented no less than thirty-four various forms of translation. They have indeed much in common, though they differ slightly according to the dialect of the locality they hail from, or the alterations made by their writers. The translations are, in every case, made on the Latin Vulgate.

Yet all the printed German Bibles dating from before Luther’s time resemble each other so much in the translation that we can, in reality, speak only of one German Bible. They all sprang originally from a single MS. translation and practically constitute a sort of German vulgate. The type was not, however, of Waldensian origin, as some formerly thought owing to the fact that the Tepler Bible, which had been placed first on the list, shows traces of that heresy. The earliest German translation is, on the contrary, as orthodox as the printed editions. This is probably the fragmentary Bible translated by Master Johann Rellach. It seems to be older than the Tepler Bible, and the first Mendel edition and all the others might well go back to it. Franz Jostes was the first to suppose that “the pre-Lutheran printed version of the Bible is the work of Master Johann Rellach.”[2125] The translator was, so he opines, a Dominican belonging to a convent in the diocese of Constance. He happened to be in Rome in 1450, the Jubilee year, and, hearing from Bishop Leonard of Chios of the destruction of the magnificent library at Constantinople he and his brethren were led to vow to make good this loss to the best of their ability by translating the Bible into German. They doubtless made use of even older translations in their work.

As for the slight difference shown in the seventeen printed editions of this translation still extant, they are easily explained. The printers, out of consideration for their readers, were pretty free in introducing dialect forms.

If we glance at the language, we shall find here some good points, but as the original manuscripts of which Johann Rellach made use were not all equally good, the same holds of all the printed translations. Of the different varieties which never appeared in print at all, Walther praises some on account of their excellent German, for instance, the one he places second on his list, and which may date from the second half of the 14th century. As a whole, however, particularly in the printed translation, the language suffers from a too slavish adherence to the style of the Latin text. A more exact classification, according to the excellence of the language, is, however, impossible until the whole field has been explored by our German philologists.[2126]

Owing to the matter not having yet been sufficiently investigated, we cannot determine accurately what influence the earlier translations had on the German Bible published by Luther. Luther himself says never a word of having used them.

It would, however, be just as bad to say, on the one hand, that Luther made no use whatever of the older version and had not even a copy of it to refer to in the Wartburg during his work on the New Testament or, on the other, as some have done, that Luther stole the best part of his work from earlier German translators.

When he wrote from the Wartburg that now he knew what it was to translate, and why, hitherto, no translator had dared to put his name to his work,[2127] he proves that he was aware that all previous German translations were anonymous, a fact which presupposes some acquaintance with them. Older translations cannot have been inaccessible to him at the Wartburg, and might well have been sent him by friends at Eisenach or Wittenberg, who, as we know, did occasionally send him books; when he had returned home, moreover, he could easily have found copies in his old monastery or at the University. Portions of the Bible, viz. the Plenaries, were doubtless within his reach from the first, and since he finished his translation of the New Testament in so short a time as three months, though all the while engaged on a number of other works, it is only natural to suppose that he lightened his labours by the use of other versions within his reach as any other scholar would have done, though undoubtedly he used his own judgment in his selection. That, in the work of revision at Wittenberg at a much later date, the mediÆval text was employed, appears quite plain from the alterations introduced by Luther.

J. Geffcken was probably not far wrong when he wrote in 1855 in “Der Bilderkatechismus des 15. Jahrhunderts,” “that the similarity between Luther’s version and the old translations could not be merely fortuitous.”[2128]

The same was repeated with still greater emphasis by Krafft in 1883 after he had instituted fresh comparisons: “Whoever compares these passages can no longer doubt that the agreement between Luther’s work and the mediÆval German Bible is not merely accidental.”[2129] The result of further research will probably be to confirm the guarded opinion expressed as long ago as 1803 by G. W. Meyer of GÖttingen in his “Geschichte der SchrifterklÄrung”: to assume that “the older translation was not unknown to him,” “that he consulted it here and there,” and even “made his own some of its happy renderings,” is quite compatible with a high esteem for Luther’s translation.[2130]

Modern Protestant writers in this field are also somewhat sceptical about the theory of Luther’s complete ignorance of the older translation of the Bible, and the assertion that he made no use whatever of it. O. Reichert, for instance, in his new work “Luthers deutsche Bibel” makes the following remarks on Luther’s work in the Wartburg, with which we may fittingly conclude this section: “Although he probably was able to make use of Lang’s translation of 1521 in his rendering of Matthew, and as a matter of fact did have recourse to it, and though he most likely also had the old German translation at his elbow, as is apparent from many coincidences, nevertheless, what Luther accomplished is an achievement worthy of all admiration.”[2131]

4. Luther’s Hymns

Amongst the means to be employed for the spread and consolidation of the new Evangel Luther included, in addition to his Bible, German hymns for use in public worship.

In 1523 and 1524 especially, he busied himself in the making of verses. In his Formula MissÆ (1523) he expresses the wish that as many German hymns as possible be introduced into the revised service of the Mass and sung, not only by the choir, but by the whole congregation, though, for the nonce, the customary Latin hymns might be used.[2132] With his wonted energy and industry he at once entrusted the work of composing hymns to some of his Wittenberg friends, and despatched letters so as to obtain help even from afar. He was particularly anxious to see the Psalms in a German dress. His translation of the Psalter, which he had just completed, naturally drew his thoughts to the Psalms which so admirably express all the religious emotions of the soul, especially its trusting reliance upon God. He was not very confident of his own powers of composition: “I have not the knack of doing this as well as I wish to have it done,” he writes to his old friend Spalatin at Nuremberg.[2133] He asks him and his other friends for an eminently simple, popular versification of the Psalms, in pure German, “free from the new-fangled words used at Court”; it should keep as closely as possible to the sense and yet not be stilted. For this Spalatin was qualified by “a rich flow of eloquence, and by many years’ experience.” Luther sends him at the same time a poetic effort of his own.

In view of the beauty and the deep albeit simple grandeur of the olden Catholic hymns the task Luther had undertaken of composing something new was naturally not an easy one. He himself had much to say in praise of the magnificent old hymns in which the faithful praised their Creator or poured forth their griefs before Him. “In Popery,” he once said in a sermon, “they used to sing some fine hymns: ‘He who broke the might of Hell,’ item ‘Jesus Christ to-day is risen.’ This comes from the heart.”[2134] “A beautiful sequence is also sung in Advent,” he says, thus paying tribute even to a Latin hymn, viz. the Mittitur ad Virginem. “It is well done and not too barbarous.”[2135]

Luther nevertheless persevered in his own efforts in spite of his misgivings, especially as the contributions of his assistants failed to reach his standards. Of the eight hymns contained in the so-called Wittenberg “Achtliederbuch” four were composed by Luther, while of the twenty-five in the Erfurt “Enchiridion” eighteen were his; the collection, however, which he characterised as having been started by himself, the “Geistliche GesangbÜchlein” of Johann Walther, consisting chiefly of translations or adaptations, contained thirty-two hymns, twenty-four of them being written by Luther. This was the result of his efforts up to the end of 1524.[2136]

In later years only twelve other hymns were published by him, of which some, like the familiar “A safe stronghold,” and that intended in the first instance for children: “In Thy Word preserve us, Lord,” were not originally meant for use in public worship. A hymn, likewise not written for public worship, yet one of the oldest, as it dates from the summer of 1523, is the one where Luther extols the glorious martyrdom of two of his followers, who were executed in the Netherlands as heretics. Including this the number of his compositions rises to thirty-seven.

The number is not excessive considering how prolific his genius as a rule was, but among them are hymns, which, owing to their simple vigour and fine wording, bear witness to the author’s real talent for this form of literature. Thus, for instance, “From highest heaven on joyous wing,” “Ah God, look down from heaven and see,” “Dear is to me the Holy Maid” (the Church), finally and above all the hymn “A safe stronghold our God is still” (“Ein’ feste Burg”), which for ages has had so stimulating an effect on his followers. When, in these compositions, Luther shakes off the trammels of pedantry and leaves his spirit to go its own way, he often strikes the true poetic note.[2137] He was endowed with a powerful fancy, nor was there ever any lack of warmth, nay passion, in his expression of his inward experiences; in addition to this there was his rare gift of language, his keen appreciation of music and song, which he regarded as the “very gift of God” and to which, “next to theology,” he allotted the first place;[2138] the art he possessed of making the whole congregation to share in what he himself felt, and his careful avoidance of any conscious striving after originality contributed to render many of these productions acknowledged works of genius.

Most characteristic of all in this respect is the rousing hymn “Ein’ feste Burg.” The result, as shown above,[2139] of outward circumstances as well as of inward experiences, it gives the fullest expression to Luther’s own defiance. In so far as Luther succeeded in depicting his cause as that of all his followers, and, with rare power, made his own defiant spirit ring from every lip, we may accept the opinion of a recent Luther biographer on the hymn in question, viz. that it expresses the “defiance of Protestantism.” “So entirely does Luther’s hymn spring from the feeling common to the whole of Protestantism, that we seem to hear Protestants yet unborn joining in it. The trumpets of Gustavus Adolphus and the cannon of LÜtzen are audible in this hymn of defiance. It reminds us of Torstensson and Coligny, of Cromwell and William of Orange.”[2140] We must, however, remember that part of the impression it creates must be attributed to the powerful pre-reformation melody to which the words are set.

We give the hymn below in Carlyle’s fine rendering[2141]:

Psalm XLVI. (XLV.)

Deus Nosier Refugium et Virtus

1. A safe stronghold our God is still,
A trusty shield and weapon.
He’ll help us clear from all the ill
That hath us now o’ertaken.

The ancient Prince of Hell
Hath risen with purpose fell,
Strong mail of Craft and Power
He weareth in this hour,
On Earth is not his fellow.

2. With force of arms we nothing can,
Full soon were we down-ridden.
But for us fights the proper Man
Whom God Himself hath bidden.

Ask ye, Who is this name?
Christ Jesus is His name,
The Lord Zebaoth’s Son,
He and no other one
Shall conquer in the battle.

3. And were this world all Devils o’er
And watching to devour us,
We lay it not to heart so sore
Not they can overpower us.

And let the Prince of Ill
Look grim, as e’er he will,
He harms us not a whit,
For why? His doom is writ,
A word shall quickly slay him.

4. God’s Word, for all their craft and force,
One moment shall not linger,
But, spite of Hell, shall have its course,
’Tis written by His finger.

And though they take our life,
Goods, honour, children, wife,
Yet is their profit small.
These things shall vanish all,
The City of God remaineth.

Though Protestants are fond of extolling the sincere faith expressed in Luther’s hymns (nay even speak of the “overwhelming fervour of his faith”[2142]) we must not forget, that in some of them bitter polemics strike a harsh and very unpoetic note, quite out of harmony with the otherwise good and pious thoughts. The “Children’s Hymn” to be sung against the two arch-enemies of Christ and His holy Church, viz. the Pope and the Turk, dating from 1541 at the latest, begins with the verse:

Lord, by Thy Word deliverance work
And stay the hand of Pope and Turk
Who Jesus Christ Thy Son
Would hurl down from His throne.[2143]

This hymn became ultimately “One of the principal hymns of the Evangelical flock.”[2144]

No less noticeable is Luther’s anti-Catholic prejudice in his “Song of the Two Martyrs of Christ at Brussels” and in the hymn “To new strains we raise our voices.” But even when the words do not sound directly controversial the substance often serves as a weapon against the old faith and was thus understood by his followers; this was the case, for instance, with the hymn just referred to on the Church. The hymns, in fact, were intended, as he says in his preface to Johann Walther’s collection, “to advance and further the Holy Gospel which by the grace of God has once more dawned.” To this end he would gladly see “all the arts, more particularly that of music, employed in the service of Him Who created them and bestowed them on us.”[2145] The more he was animated by the fighting instinct, the better he fancies he can compose. “If I am to compose, write, pray or preach well, I must be angry.” “Then my blood boils and my understanding grows keener.”[2146] His opponents complained that his popular hymns against the Church excited the people and that they “sang themselves into” the new faith.

Just as the polemics of their author detracts from the real poetic value of some of the hymns, so, in spite of all his good-will, there are other defects to decrease the value of his work. Owing to hasty workmanship his poesy has suffered. His roughness explains how “much in his work sounds harsh and clumsy.”[2147] Nevertheless the very fact that they were Luther’s own made them praiseworthy in the eyes of his olden admirers.[2148]

Owing to their hearty reception in Protestant circles, to their use both in public worship and elsewhere, and also because they served as a model and exerted a powerful influence on later Protestant efforts to promote hymnology, they won for their author the proud title of the Father of Protestant psalmody. The earliest Protestants, in their ignorance of what obtained in Catholicism previous to his day, even pushed their esteem for his labours so far as to call him simply the Father of Hymnology. “What made him the great poet of our nation,” a modern Protestant historian declares, “was his individuality and the boldness of his expression. He was not, nor did he wish to be, the Father of German psalmody, but he was in very truth the Father of Evangelical psalmody.”[2149]

When the introduction of hymns in the new form of public worship came up for discussion, Luther, owing to the exigencies of the case, showed himself by no means intolerant of the numerous hymns dating from Catholic times then still in use.

We can the more readily understand this seeing the praise he himself lavished on these hymns, the inspiring strains of which still rang in his ears from the days of his youth. It is true that not many of them appeared to him to have the “true spirit.” In his service of the Mass where this remark occurs he wished only three of these to be retained for the time being, viz. the Communion hymn, “Praised be God and blest, Who Himself becomes our Guest,” the Whitsun hymn, “Now we crave of the Holy Ghost” and the Christmas hymn, “A tender Child is born To us this very morn.” The Whitsun hymn and the Communion hymn were enlarged later, i.e. revised. He also took from an older model the first verse of another Whitsun hymn which he composed. His Easter hymn, “Christ lay in His Winding-sheet,” was a revision of the older Catholic hymn, “Jesus Christ to-day is risen,” into which he has introduced part of the Latin Easter sequence. His hymns, “In the midst of life cruel death surrounds us” and “God our Father bide with us” are also adaptations of older Catholic hymns for use in processions. In his rendering of the Ten Commandments into German verse he seems to have taken as his model a similar composition dating from earlier days and also used in processions. “Heirlooms of Catholicism” are also three old chants which he translated from the Latin, “Come, Holy Ghost, Creator, come,” “Saviour of the heathen known” and “Now praise we Christ the Holy One.”[2150]

The Middle Ages had always been noted for their renderings of the Psalms and hymns of the Church, and their productions compare favourably with Luther’s compositions, the more so since he is seldom at his best when he is not free to develop his own thoughts.[2151] Speaking of translations and alluding to those made by his colleagues Luther declared in 1529: “Some have now given proof of their ability and have increased the number of hymns; they far outstrip me and must be regarded as experts in this field.”[2152] Many had been the poets who had turned the old Latin hymns into German; particularly worthy of mention were the monk of Salzburg in the 14th and Heinrich of Laufenberg in the 15th century. Many of these hymns can take their place beside Luther’s rendering of Psalm xlvi. (xlv.), “Ein’ feste Burg,” though the trust in God they express and the unshaken faith of their childlike language is far removed from any presumptuous reliance on private judgment in religious matters or subjective revelations. Of the use of German hymns Provost Gerhoch of Reichersberg wrote as early as the 12th century: “The whole people breaks out into praise of the Saviour in the hymns of their mother tongue; especially is this the case with the Germans whose language lends itself so well to melody.”[2153] At the close of the Middle Ages it might be said with truth: “The German nation possessed a hoard of hymns, such as no other nation in the world could show.”[2154]

It is not only Luther who frequently admits that he had “included in his hymnbook some of the songs of our forefathers” as “bearing witness to the good Christians who lived before our day,”[2155] but even the Apologia for the Confession of Augsburg had to admit in its defence of the Protestant ritual: “The use [of German hymns] has always been regarded as praiseworthy in the churches; though more German hymns are sung in some places than in others, nevertheless, in all the churches the people have always sung something in German, hence the practice is not at all novel.”[2156]

That something was always sung in German is perfectly correct; in the liturgy properly so-called, viz. the Mass, the rule was to sing in Latin the Proper, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc. Hence the standing of vernacular hymns was different in the case of Catholics from what it was with Protestants. With the latter the edification of the congregation was the principal thing, whereas, for the Catholic, public worship had in the eucharistic sacrifice something quite independent of private devotion; it was in keeping with the character of this universal sacrifice offered by all nations and tongues that its rites should be conducted in Latin, the universal language. The only strictly liturgical Psalmody in the Middle Ages was the Latin Gregorian chant. The German hymn held only a subordinate place in the liturgy, being inserted sometimes in connection with the sequence after the Gradual, or, more usually, before and after the sermon. On the other hand, recourse to German hymns was usual in extra-liturgical devotions, in processions, pilgrimages and in pious gatherings of the people whether at home or in the church.

The hymn tunes made use of in the Middle Ages were also in every case either Gregorian or quasi-Gregorian. Thus the musical language of popular piety was able to maintain its dignity, was preserved faithful to the traditions of the great ages of the Church and secure from the inroads of private fancy.

The melodies to which Luther set his own compositions and those of his friends had also been handed down from earlier times. Some of them were purely Gregorian, others were those of older Catholic hymns or of popular ditties. The melody of “A Safe Stronghold,” as already observed, is derived from the Latin chant, and so is that of “Jesaia dem Propheten” and others. Even the setting of the versified creed “We all believe in one true God” is borrowed from a 15th-century composition.

Protestant admiration for Luther has indeed led “to his being represented as a notable composer,[2157] and thus many of these tunes bear his name. Careful research has, however, shattered this delusion.... Many other melodies, which so far it has been impossible to trace to the Middle Ages, probably form part of the pre-reformation treasury of hymns.... Whether, as modern research is inclined to think, the simple new melody to ‘Saviour of the heathen known,’ ... is Luther’s own, it is not possible to determine.”[2158]

The traditional fondness of Germans for song was used to spread erroneous doctrines not by Luther alone, but also by others of the New Believers; this was particularly the case with the followers of Schwenckfeld, who exploited it in the interests of their sect. Luther’s hymnbook even stood in danger of being “spoilt” by outside additions, hence the precaution he took of appending the authors’ names to the various hymns; he also prefixed a special “Warnung” to the Preface of an edition brought out towards the end of his life (1542).[2159]