CHAPTER XXVIIITHE NEW DOGMAS IN AN HISTORICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LIGHT1. The Bible text and the Spirit as the “True Tests of Doctrine”Luther’stheological opinions present an attractive field to the psychologist desirous of studying his character. They are in great part, as has been several times shown, the result of his experiences, inward or outward, and appear peculiarly suited to meet his own case. Hence an examination of his doctrines will be of great value, particularly towards an understanding of his inner history.The specifically Lutheran doctrine of the Bible as sole judge in matters of faith, i.e. the old, so-called “formal principle” of Protestantism, deserves to be considered first, though, in point of time, it was not the first to be reached by Luther. Actually it was first broached by the author of the schism only when the opposition between his newly discovered views and the Church’s teaching determined him to set aside both her claim to act as judge, and all other outward authority on doctrine. Refusing to be bound by the Church, in place of the teaching office with its gift of infallibility, which, according to the belief of the ancient Church, guards the treasure of revelation and therefore also decides on the sense of Holy Scripture, Luther set up as supreme arbiter the letter of the Bible. From this source, so he teaches, the faithful draw the doctrines of the faith, each one according to his ability and enlightenment.The interpretation of the Sacred Books, in his view, takes place under the illumination of the Holy Ghost, and such an illumination he claimed first and foremost for himself. “Any believer who has better grounds and authority from Scripture on his side, is more to be believed than the Pope or a whole Council.”[1369]Liberty for the Examination of Scripture and Luther’s Autonomy.Luther only gradually reached his teaching concerning the supremacy of Holy Scripture.His examination at Augsburg drew forth from him his first statements on this subject. In the postscript to his own report of the interview he places Holy Scripture first amongst the theological sources, adding that it was merely being corrupted by the so-called sacred Decrees of the Church;[1370]in his appeal to the Council he also places the Bible and its decision (i.e. his interpretation) above the Pope. Even then, however, he admitted the authority of the Council side by side with that of the Bible only in so far as he confidently looked to the Council for a decision in his favour. The fact that about this time he fancied he could descry Antichrist in the Pope reveals at once the wide gulf he was about to create between all ecclesiastical authority and Scripture privately interpreted.—Without having as yet formally proclaimed the new principle on Holy Scripture, he nevertheless declared at the Leipzig Disputation, that Scripture ranked above a Council,[1371]and that Œcumenical Councils had already erred in matters of faith. Only when driven into a corner by his defence of the heresy of Hus, and after fruitless evasions, were these admissions wrung from him by Eck. Any light thus thrown on the matter by the Catholic speaker was, however, at once obscured by the following ambiguous clause added by Luther: “Councils have erred, and may err, particularly on points which do not appertain to faith.”[1372]Immediately after the Leipzig Disputation, in a letter addressed by himself and Carlstadt to the Elector, Luther lays it down that “a layman with the Scripture on his side is more to be believed in than the Pope and a Council without Scripture.”[1373]Then, in the “Resolutiones super propositionibus Lipsiæ disputatis,” he gives utterance to an assertion behind which he seeks to shelter his views: “Faith does not originate in authoritybut is produced in the heart only by the Holy Ghost, though man is indeed moved to faith by word and example.”[1374]Yet, as though he himself wished to demonstrate the perils his new principle involved, not merely for the interpretation of the Bible but even for the integrity of the Sacred Books, he makes in the very same writing, on ostensibly intrinsic grounds, his famous onslaught on the Epistle of St. James which had been urged against him. Because this canonical Epistle tells against his doctrine of Justification, he will have it that, “its style is far beneath the dignity of an Apostle and is not to be compared with that of Paul.”[1375]Already at the Leipzig Disputation he had attacked the second Book of the Machabees, which did not suit his views, again for intrinsic reasons and because it ran counter to true doctrine; the Church had indeed admitted it into the Canon, but “she could not raise the status of a book nor impart to it a higher value than it actually possessed.”[1376]From that time forward Luther gives the most varied expression to the principle of the free interpretation of Scripture: He declares, that the Bible may be interpreted by everyone, even by the “humble miller’s maid, nay, by a child of nine if it has the faith.”[1377]“The sheep must judge whether the pastors teach in Christ’s own tone.”[1378]“Christ alone, and none other than the Crucified, do we acknowledge as our Master. Paul will not have us believe him or an angel (Gal. i. 8, 12) unless Christ lives and speaks in him.” He is at pains to inform “the senseless Sophists, the unlearned bishops, monks and priests, the Pope and all his Gomorrahs” that we were baptised, not in the name of any Father of the Church, “but in the name of Jesus Christ.”[1379]“That a Christian assembly or congregation has the right and the power to judge of doctrine and to appoint and dismiss preachers” is the title of one of Luther’s writings of 1523.[1380]Later we meet the downright declaration: “Neither Church, nor Fathers, nor Apostles, nor angels are to be listened to except so far as they teach the pure Word of God (‘nisi afferant et doceant purum verbum Dei’).”[1381]In his bias against his foes he does not pause to consider that the very point at issue is to discern what the “pure Word of God” is, for, where it exists, any opposition on thepart of “Church, Fathers and Apostles” is surely inconceivable. It is merely an echo of his early mystic theories when, in a dreamy sort of way, he hints, that the pure Word manifests itself to each believer and reveals itself to the world without the intervention of any outward authority. It was clearly mere prejudice in his own favour which led him to be ruled by the one idea that the “pure Word of God” was to be found nowhere but in his own reading of the Bible.How greatly he allowed himself to be deceived by such fancies is already apparent in Luther’s earliest known statements on Scripture at the very beginning of the public controversy. His devotion to Biblical study from his youth, and the academic laurels he had won in this branch of learning, led him, consciously or not, to find in himself an embodiment of Holy Scripture. Only in this way can we explain his strange language concerning the Bible in his “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons” against Tetzel. Here, at the very commencement, instead of setting quietly about his task, which was to defend his new interpretation against the tradition, objected by his opponent, he sings a pæan in praise of the unassailable Divine Word. “All who blaspheme Scripture with their false glosses,” he writes, “shall perish by their own sword, like Goliath (1 Kings xvii. 51).... Christ’s doctrine is His Divine Word. Whence it is forbidden, not only to this blasphemer [Tetzel], but to any angel in heaven, to change one letter of it. For it is written: ‘God does not deny what He has once said,’ Job xiii. [xiv.], and in the Psalter [cxviii. 89]: ‘For ever, O Lord, Thy word standeth firm.’ Not a jot or tittle of the most insignificant letter of the law of God shall pass; everything must be fulfilled.”[1382]Here Tetzel becomes a rude ass, “who brays at Luther,” reminding the latter of a “sow” that defiles the venerable Scripture.[1383]How uncalled for his emphatic words quoted above on the value of the Bible really were can be more readily perceived now from a distance; for his opponents’ esteem and that of the Church generally for the Word of God was certainly not behind his, whilst the Church provided a safeguard for Holy Scripture which Luther was unwillingto admit. But in those days, in the midst of the struggle, such praises showered by Luther on Holy Writ served to make people think—not at all to his disadvantage—that he was the herald and champion of the Bible, which the Popish Church did not reckon at its true worth, whereas, all the while, he should have been striving to show that his contentions really had the support of Scripture. Even later his misleading cry was ever: Back to the sacred stronghold of the Bible! Back to the “true, pure and undefiled Word of God!”“Thy Word is the Truth” was his habitual battle-shout, though about this there had never been the least dispute.“Against all the sayings of the Fathers,” he says in 1522 in his reply to King Henry VIII, “against all the arts and words of angels, men and devils I set the Scriptures and the Gospel.... Here I stand and here I defy them.... The Word of God I count above all else and the Divine Majesty supports me; hence I should not turn a hair were a thousand Augustines against me, and am certain that the true Church adheres with me to God’s Word.” “Here Harry of England must hold his tongue.” Harry would see how Luther “stood upon his rock” and that he, Harry, “twaddled” like a “silly fool.”[1384]Experience given by the Spirit.The “rock” on which Luther’s interpretation of the Bible rests is a certain inward feeling and perception by the individual of the Bible’s teaching.In the last resort it is on an inward experience of having been taught by the Spirit the truth and meaning of the Divine words that the Christian must firmly take his stand. Just as Luther believed himself to have passed through such an experience, so, according to him, all others must first reach it and then make it their starting-point.This is the Spirit from on High that co-operates with the Word of Scripture.“Each man must believe solely because it is the Word of God and because he feels within that it is true, even though an angel from heaven and all the world should preach against it.”[1385]We must not regard the “opinion of all Christendom” but “eachone for himself alone” must believe the Scriptures.[1386]“The Word itself must content the heart and embrace and seize a man and, as it were, hold him captive till he feels how true and right it is.”“Hence every Christian can learn the truth from Scripture,” so a present-day Protestant theologian describes Luther’s then teaching;[1387]“he is bound by no human school of interpretation, but the plain sense of Scripture and the experience of his heart suffice.” He adds: “This might of course draw down upon Luther the charge of subjectivism.” “What Luther said of the ‘whisper’ of the word of forgiveness is well known. Thus [according to Luther] God can, when necessary, work without the use of any means.” Thanks to the “whisper” the Bible becomes a sure guide, “for [according to him] the Holy Ghost always works in the heart the selfsame truth.” “From the peculiar religious standpoint of his own experience of salvation,” Luther, so the same theologian admits, determined his “attitude towards Scripture.” In this we have one of the results of his “personal experience.”“How it comes to pass,” says Luther, “that Christ thus enters the heart you cannot tell; but your heart feels plainly, by the experience of faith, that He is there indeed.”[1388]“When the Holy Ghost performs His office then it proceeds.”[1389]“No one can rightly understand God or the Word of God unless he receives it directly from the Holy Ghost.”When his friend Carlstadt, together with whom Luther had at first insisted on Scripture only, later struck out a path of his own in doctrine and ecclesiastical practice while continuing to appeal to Scripture and to his own enlightenment, even the controversy with him and the “fanatics” failed to make Luther relinquish in theory his standpoint concerning the Bible and the Spirit as the one source and rule of faith. He became, however, more cautious in formulating it and endeavoured at least to leave a back door open. He was less insistent in his assertion that the Spirit instructed, by the inward Word, each one who read theScriptures; so much the more did he emphasise the supposed “clearness of the outward Word,” viz. the Bible, and deprecate any wanton treatment of it (by anyone save himself); at the same time he began to lay stress on the outward side of the Church, on the preaching office and the administration of the Sacraments.[1390]The fanatics he reproves for “merely gaping at the Spirit in their hearts,” whereas the outward articles must necessarily precede this.[1391]At times what he says almost looks like a repudiation of his earlier theory of enlightenment through the Spirit; for instance, when he describes how the fanatics wait “till the heavenly voice comes and God speaks to them.”[1392]Now, the outward Word of the Gospel, proclaimed by men truly “called,” is to be the guiding star amidst the mischief wrought by the sectarians; this outward Word, so he now fancies, will surely avail to decide every issue, seeing that it is so clear; only by dint of juggling could the sense of the Bible, as manifest in the outward Word, be distorted; looked at fairly it at once settled every question—needless to say in Luther’s favour; to understand it, all that was needed was the “natural language,” the “Lady Empress who far excels all subtle inventions.”[1393]As to the alleged clearness of the word of Scripture it is sufficient to recall that he himself indirectly challenged it by accusing the whole Church of having misunderstood the Bible, and to consider the abyss that separated his interpretation, even of the most vital texts, from that of the scholars of the past. “Though we had the Bible and read it,” he says, “yet we understood nothing of it.”[1394]—Nevertheless he fancied he could save his theory by appealing to the clearness of the text and the assistance rendered by a knowledge of languages. “St. Paul wills” (1 Cor. xiv. 29), so Luther says, in a writing on the schools, “that Christians should judge all doctrine, though for this we must needs be acquainted with the language. For the preacher or teacher may indeed read the Bible through and through as much as he chooses, but he will sometimes be right and sometimeswrong, if there be no one there to judge whether he is doing it well or ill. Thus in order to judge there must be skill or a knowledge of tongues, otherwise it is all to no purpose.”[1395]But above all, as he impresses on the reader in the same tract, he himself had thrown light on the Bible by his knowledge of languages; his interpretation, thanks to the “light” of the languages, had effected “such great things that all the world marvels and must confess that now we have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it, that it is restored to its pristine purity, and is even more undefiled than at the time of St. Jerome or Augustine.”[1396]His willingness, expressed from time to time, to submit himself or any other teacher to the judgment of anyone possessed of greater learning and a more profound spiritual sense, attracted many enlightened minds to his party.[1397]Luther’s self-contradiction in speaking, first, of the great clearness of the Bible, and then of its great obscurity, cannot fail to strike one.“Whoever now wants to become a theologian,” he says, for instance, “enjoys a great advantage. For, first, he has the Bible which is now so clear that he can read it without any difficulty.” “Should anyone say that it is necessary to have the interpretation of the Fathers and that Scripture is obscure, you must reply, that that is untrue. There is no book on earth more plainly written than Holy Scripture; in comparison with all other books it is as the sun to any other light.”[1398]Elsewhere he says: “The ungodly sophists [the Schoolmen] have asserted, that in Holy Scripture there is much that is obscure and not yet clearly explained,” but according to him they were not able to bring forward one vestige of proof; “if the words are obscure in one passage, they are clear in another,” and a comparison makes everything plain, particularly to one who is learned in languages.[1399]—Thus the Bible, according to a further statement, is “clearer, easier and more certain than any other writing.”[1400]“It is in itself quite certain, quite easy and quite plain; it is its own explanation; it is the universal argument, judge and enlightener, and makes all clear to all.”[1401]Later, however, the idea that Holy Scripture was obscure preponderated with him. Two days before his death Luther wrote in Latin on a piece of paper, which was subsequently found on his table, his thoughts on the difficulty of understanding Scripture: “No one can understand the Bucolics of Virgil who has not been a herdsman for five years; nor his Georgics unless he has laboured five years in the fields. In order to understand aright the epistles of Cicero a man must have been full twenty years in the public service of a great State. No one need fancy he has tasted Holy Scripture who has not ruled Churches for a hundred years with prophets like Elias and Eliseus, with John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1402]In all likelihood his experiences with the sectarians in his own camp led him towards the end of his life to lay more stress on the difficulty of understanding the Bible.Even with the “plain, arid Scripture” and a clear brainit may easily happen, as he says, to a man to fall into danger through the Bible, by looking at it from “his own conceit,” as “through a painted glass,” and “seeing no other colour than that of the glass.”[1403]Such people cannot then be set right, but become “masters of heresy.”[1404]All heresy seems to him to come from Scripture and to be based on it. There is no heretic, he says in a sermon in 1528, who does not appeal to Scripture; hence it came about that people called the Bible a heresy-book.[1405]The “heresy-book” was a favourite topic with him. Two years earlier he had used the expression twice on one day,[1406]and in 1525, when complaining in a sermon that the fanatics decked themselves out with Scripture, he said: “Thus it is true what people say, viz. that Holy Scripture is a heresy-book, i.e. a book that the heretics claim for themselves; there is no other book that they misuse so much as this book, and there has never been a heresy so bad or so gross that it has not sheltered itself behind Scripture.”[1407]These preachers from among the fanatics, he says, boast of the voice of God and of the Spirit, but they were never sent; let them prove by miracles their Divine mission![1408]Thus he had retracted nothing of his strange doctrine concerning private enlightenment; on the contrary, when not actually dealing with the sectarians, he still declared with that persistence of which he was such a master and which shrank from no self-contradictions, that the Spirit alone taught man how to understand the Scriptures, now that man, owing to original sin, was quite unable to grasp even the plainest passages. “In it [the Bible] not one word is of so small account as to allow of our understanding it by reason.”[1409]Only by virtue of the higher light by which he understood Scripture could a man “impartially prove and judge the different spirits and their doctrines.” This he wrote in his “De servo arbitrio” at a time when he had already engaged upon the struggle with the “HeavenlyProphets.”[1410]And to these principles he remained faithful till death without, however, as a Protestant scholar repeatedly points out of the several sides of Luther’s theology, “explaining more clearly” their relation to the difficulties involved.Concerning the inward Word or the enlightenment by the Spirit some words of Luther’s in 1531 may be given here.In that year he preached on the Gospel of St. John. He dwelt at some length on his favourite passage: “Whoever believeth in Me hath everlasting life,” and its context. Here, speaking repeatedly of the outward and the inward Word, he insists especially on the former and particularly on the hearing of sermons with faith, though so far was he from relinquishing the inward Word that he combines it in a strange way with the outward, and finally arrives once more at his earlier pet idea: Whoever is taught inwardly by the Spirit is free to judge and decide on all things.“The Lord Christ intends,” so he explains, “that we should hold fast and remain by the outward, spoken Word, and thereby He has put down reason from its seat,” i.e. has repudiated the objections of the fanatics who differed from him. Christ, according to Luther, exhorts us “diligently to listen to and learn the Word.”[1411]The beginning of Justification is in this, that “God proclaims to you the spoken, outward Word.”[1412]To this end God has His messengers and vicars. “When you hear a sermon from St. Paul or from me, you hear God the Father Himself; yet both of us, you and I, have one schoolmaster and doctor, viz. the Father ... only that God speaks to you through me.”[1413]Here he does not enter into the question of his mission, though he shows plainly enough that he was not going to be set aside. “God must give the spoken Word,” “otherwise it does not make its way. But if you are set on helping yourselves, why then should I preach? In that case you have no need of me.... Wemay be angered and stupefied over it” (viz. at the apparent divergence between the Word of God and reason), yet we must listen and weigh “the Word that is preached by the lips of Christ.”[1414]Excellent as this exhortation may be so far as St. Paul was concerned, the speaker is at no pains to supply his hearer with any proof of his own saying, viz. “that God speaks to you through me.” He insists upon it, however, and now comes the intervention of the Spirit: God must “inspire the conviction that it is His Word”[1415]which has been heard. “Without the Word we must not do anything, but must be taught by God.”[1416]“When the heart can feel assured that God the Father Himself is speaking to us [when we listen to a sermon], then the Holy Ghost and the light enter in; then man is enlightened and becomes a happy master, and is able to decide and judge of all doctrine, for he has the light, and faith in the Divine Word, and feels certain within his breast that his doctrine is the very Word of God.”[1417]When you “feel this in your heart, then account yourself one of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will allow Him to be Master and surrender yourself to Him. In this way will you be saved.”[1418]The real breathing of the Spirit of God, however, confirms the utterances only of the “preaching office,” viz. Luther’s and the Lutherans’. This he proclaims in the following words: “The true breathing and inspiration of the Holy Ghost is that which is wafted through the preaching office and the outward Word.”[1419]In what follows, for the better understanding of Luther’s attitude towards the Bible, we shall examine two consequences of his subjective ways, viz. their effect on the inspiration and the Canon of Scripture, and the exegetical disagreement which was the result of the principle of inward experience, also the means he chose to remedy it.Inspiration and the Canon of Scripture.In the matter of the inspiration of Scripture Luther never went so far as the fanatical enthusiasts of later Lutheranism, who, in their systems, taught an actual verbal inspiration, according to which the writers of the Bible had not merely been impelled, enlightened, and infallibly preserved from error, but had received every word from God. On the contrary, owing to his wanton handling of the Bible, he takes the inspiration of its writers so widely and vaguely that the very idea of inspiration is practicallyevaporated. The Bible is indeed, according to him, an outcome of the inspiration of God and is the writing and Word of the Holy Ghost (“Spiritus auctor est libri”),[1420]and may accordingly be described as “the Holy Ghost’s own especial book, writing and Word”—which he sometimes explains almost as though he had been a believer in verbal inspiration.[1421]The fact is, however, that he sees “in the sacred writers no other form of spiritual illumination than that displayed in the verbal preaching of the Divine witnesses.”[1422]“Moreover we occasionally find him questioning whether in certain passages the Holy Ghost ... is really so unquestionably present as in other parts of Scripture.” The truth is “he never formulated any detailed theory of Scriptural inspiration. With Luther the action of the Holy Ghost, on the witnesses of both Old Testament and New, is always one and the same, whether they proclaim the Word verbally or by writing; nowhere do we meet with the thought that they were under the influence of any other inspiration when they wrote.”[1423]The freedom he allowed himself, no less in the matter of inspiration than in the principle of the Bible only, explains the distinction he so often makes between the character and importance of the various parts of the “Word of God,” which he will have one keep in view when searching in Scripture for the truths of faith. In passages where religion is not concerned, particularly in historical statements, he believes that the tools of the Holy Ghost both could and did err.[1424]He thinks that “the predictions of the prophets concerning the Kings and secular affairs often turned out wrong.”[1425]The inspiration of the Apostles (and Evangelists) in the New-Testament writings was merely a part of their general “office,” not a “special inspiration” in the natureof a “second power added to and independent of it.” “The predominant importance of the Apostles he traces back to their general inspiration in the sense described above.”[1426]Catholic doctors before Luther’s day had showed themselves far more jealous of the sacredness of the Bible, as regards both the idea of inspiration and the equal value of all the books, and their every part. In spite of this Luther would have it that he had been the first to make the Bible respected.One point deserving of consideration as an instance of Luther’s wantonness is his attitude towards the Canon of the Sacred Books.How was he to prove that this or that book was to be included amongst the writings which constituted the Word of God, now that he had rejected the testimony of ecclesiastical tradition? According to the teaching of the ancient Church, it was tradition and the authority of the Church which vouched for the canonical character of the books of the Bible. Luther was confronted with this objection by Johann Eck at the Leipzig Disputation, who quoted the well-known words of St. Augustine, that he was compelled “to believe the Gospel only on the authority of the Catholic Church.”[1427]No longer recognising the authority of the Church, Luther met the objection by some strange evasions.[1428]When at last he saw that no other meaning could be read into the passage he threw it overboard and wrote: “If this meaning be not in St. Augustine’s words then it were better to repudiate his saying. For it is contrary to Scripture, to the Spirit and to all experience.”[1429]Even for the inspired value of the books included in the Canon he appealed in his arbitrary fashion, not to the infallible Church, but to the “inward testimony of the Spirit.”He could hardly escape being thus thrown back on this inward, mystical attestation, seeing that, according to him, human reason is of little assistance in the matter. Here the “inner sense” has to come in and, just as under theillumination of the Spirit of God, it imparts certainty concerning the meaning of the Bible, so also it discerns the dignity and godly value of Scripture. For obvious reasons, here again, he fails to favour us with any “clearer explanation” of his theory. One thing, however, emerges clearly, viz. that the feeling of certainty regarding both the meaning and the contents is practically identical with the feeling that the writing in question is Divine; since the Spirit from on High teaches me the truth which lies in the sense of Scripture, so also it must teach me that it is Scripture; the apprehension of the sense and of the Divine character of the sacred pages is one and the same.[1430]It is thus that Luther clothes in intangible, mystical language the vital question of religion here involved; at the Leipzig Disputation he had used terms no less elusive: Every book that really belongs to the Canon has authority and certainty “per se ipsum.”[1431]His mystical words were the outcome of deep-seated tendencies within him; Tauler’s language, which Luther had so skilfully made his own, was to assist him in concealing the obscurity and lack of logic inherent in his views.In reality, nevertheless, like the Catholics, he accepted the Canon of Holy Scripture as handed down by antiquity; only that he granted to the subjective influence of the “testimony of the Spirit” a far-reaching and destructive force. He arbitrarily struck out of the Canon quite a number of authentic writings,[1432]which will be enumerated elsewhere[1433]together with his statements concerning them.His literary opponents had a right to represent to him that so “strange and arbitrary”[1434]a proceeding was merely a result of his theory that the sacred books must prove theircharacter and value to each man individually. At any rate, his attitude towards the Bible cannot be regarded as at all logical.[1435]Inward Assurance and Disagreements Without.The second consequence of Luther’s biblical subjectivism which we have to consider lies outside him. It is the disconcerting divergence in interpretation which was the immediate result of his doctrine of “inward experience,” to correct which he had recourse to some curious remedies.First of all we may append some further quotations from his writings to those already adduced. The significance of this remarkable side of the psychology of his doctrine is often not fully appreciated, because it seems scarcely believable that Luther should have ventured so far into the airy region of idealism. And yet, on the other hand, we have here the principal reason for describing the new doctrine as something interior, and as one doing better justice to our feelings and personality, which was Luther’s own claim and, after him, that of Protestants generally. The difficulty, however, is that almost every sentence of Luther’s regarding the part played by “inward assurance” in respect of the Bible, raises the question how that oneness of interpretation which he ever presupposes, is to escape shipwreck, even in the case of essential doctrines.As early as Jan. 18, 1518, in his advice to Spalatin on the reading of Scripture, Luther had appealed to the mystic “influence,” telling him to distrust himself and to rely solely on the “influxus Spiritus”; this appeal he supports on his own inward experience.[1436]In this case his experience, however, mainly concerned the confirmation of his chief doctrine; for it was under an inspiration from on High that he had begun to feel his way to the new Evangel of Justification (see vol. iii., p. 110 ff.). But what was to be done when others, too, laid claim to a similar experience and inspiration?At a later date he described to his friends how he had learnt to understand Scripture “in maximis agonibus et tentationibus”; it was thus he had found in the Bible the Divinity of Christ and the articles on the Trinity; even now he was more certain ofthese truths by experience than by faith.[1437]Even the absolute predestination of the damned to hell, the entire absence of free-will for doing what is good and other extravagant opinions questioned even by his own followers, he declares he had learned directly from the Bible. In 1534 he places Scripture side by side with inward experience (or the Spirit), as the warrant—even in the case of others—for all knowledge of things Divine.This he likewise applies to the Apostles’ Creed.[1438]In 1537 he said in a sermon at Schmalkalden, “not only did all this [what is professed in the Creed] take place as we read in the Word of the Gospel, but the Holy Ghost also writes it inwardly in our heart.”[1439]He accepts the teaching of the Apostles’ Creed because he has convinced himself that it is based on Holy Writ.[1440]But how if others are not thus convinced? Were they too to be fastened to the dogma?R. Seeberg gives a good account of Luther’s views on the character of the dogmas of the ancient Church.[1441]“He treats the symbols of the ancient Church with great respect, particularly the Apostles’ Creed which contains all the chief articles of faith.[1442]But this does not mean that he believes in each creed or Council as such.” “In his work ‘Von den Conciliis’ with masterly historical criticism [?] he denies all binding authority even to the ancient Councils”; even the Council of the Apostles passed resolutions which were afterwards rescinded, and so did the Nicene Council. “Dogma is true,” so runs Luther’s teaching as given by Seeberg, “only so far as it agrees with Scripture; in itself it is of no authority. But the truth of Scripture is one thatis attested interiorly. Hence we can say that the Holy Ghost produces in us the assurance of the true doctrine [of the Apostles’ Creed].”[1443]—The page-heading where these words occur runs: “Luther’s independence of dogma.”A highly important statement on the interior instruction that goes on when we read Scripture is contained in Luther’s quite early work “De Captivitate Babylonica” (1520): The soul, he says there, referring to a misunderstood passage of St. Augustine’s on a well-known fact in the natural order, is so affected by the truth, that, thanks to it, it is able to judge rightly and surely of all things; it is forced to confess with unfailing certitude that this is the truth, just as reason affirms with unfailing certitude that three and seven make ten; the same is the case with all real Christians and their spiritual sense which, according to 1 Cor. ii. 15, judges all things and is judged of no man.[1444]—The last words of the Apostle refer, however, to the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, bestowed for a while by God on some few Christians in the early days of the Church, and cannot apply to the ordinary conditions of later times.Luther simply ignores the objection, that, if every man is judge, unutterable discord must ensue. The way in which he contrived so long to conceal this from himself is psychologically remarkable. For instance, in one of the principal passages where this objection should have been faced, viz. in his work against King Henry VIII, he glosses over the difficulty with the assertion that, even under the Pope, there was also no unity of doctrine; he then consoles himself with the words of Christ (John vi.), that all true Christians “shall be taught of God” and that every one that hath heard the Father cometh to the Saviour; the Spirit of God makes all to be one and effects an “idem docere, idem confiteri, idem sequi.”—We can only wonder at the idealism that could expect such results in a world inhabited by human beings.—In the end, however, since this was scarcely to be looked for, “external unity would be sufficiently safeguarded by the one Baptism and one Supper,” whereby all “testify to the oneness of their faith and spirit.”[1445]At any rate, he is confident that the true explanation (viz. his own) of the truths of salvation will gain the upper hand. For the Church cannot perish.In point of fact Luther really fancies himself justified in appealing to this entirely new meaning put by him on the promise to the Church that she shall never perish; she is indestructible because true believers will always be there to maintain Luther’s interpretation of revelation and of the imputed righteousness of Christ, and because any general falling away from the truth isnot to be thought of. Even though very many, indeed the greater number, deny the true Scripture teaching, still, many others remain, as, of yore, the seven thousand when Israel fell away from God. According to him even these may be held captive all their life in some error concerning the faith and reach the right road and faith in the grace of Christ only on their death-bed, according to the promise in John x. 28.[1446]In view of the darkness prevalent in former ages this appears to him to suffice in order to enable us to say that the Church has not really perished,[1447]and to save the cause of private enlightenment on the Bible. For this must stand fast, viz. that the Spirit of God most surely bears witness to the contents of the Divine Word in the hearts of the hearers and readers. “Luther,” says a Protestant exponent of his theology, “laid this down time after time.” “His statements on this subject cannot fail, however, to raise certain questions in our minds.”[1448]They gave rise to questions in his own day, and to something more than mere questions. The bitter theological dissensions already hinted at were the result. The inevitable divergency in the interpretation of the Bible was seen everywhere, and a hundred different opinions, some based on the inward assurance given by the “Spirit of God,” some on the reflections of reason, took the field. We know to what an extent Luther had to suffer from the discord born of his principle, not merely from such comparatively unimportant persons as Jacob Schenk[1449]and his “disgracefully arrogant” colleague, Johann Agricola, not merely from the fanatics and Anabaptists who found in the Bible a different teaching on Baptism, divine worship and morality, or from the Zwinglians with their divergent biblical interpretation of the Eucharist, but even, so to speak, in his own family, from Melanchthon, who was rash enough to incline to the Swiss reformed doctrines and to fight shy of the stricter Lutheranism. “The presumption,” Luther declares, strangely enough, “is really unbearable, that people should rise up against the authority of the Church,” despise the teaching of the best and ablest, and only worship their own views in Holy Scripture. “The name of the Church should be held in high honour.”[1450]He forbore, however, to specify which Church he meant, and moreover he had set himself above every Church. “All other forms of arrogance,” he declares, “can be endured and allow of improvement, as in the healing art, in philosophy, in poetry, in mechanics and in the case of the young.... But that shocking ‘arrogantia theologiæ’ is the source of all evil, and a consuming fire.”[1451]So little did he succeed in repressing “theological arrogance,” but rather, by his action, threw open the doors to it, that in1525 he was forced to lament:[1452]“There are as many sects and beliefs as there are heads. This fellow will have nothing to do with baptism, another denies the Sacrament, a third believes that there is another world between this and the Last Day. Some teach that Christ is not God, some say this, some that.... There is now no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it must be the whisper of the Holy Ghost and he himself a prophet.... There is no one who does not wish to be cleverer than Luther; they all want to try their steel on me.... They speak like madmen; I have during the year to listen to many such wretched folk. In no other way can the devil come so close to me, that I must admit. Formerly the world was full of noisy, disembodied spirits giving themselves out to be the souls of men; now it is full of uproarious spirits with bodies, who all declare that they are real angels.”[1453]He has this crumb of comfort: The world is the devil’s playground; and uproars there must be.[1454]“This is all due,” he says finally, truly and aptly, “to their bringing their conceit with them to the study of Scripture, which has to submit to being judged, moulded and led by their head and reason,”[1455]—surely a bitter punishment for throwing over the divinely appointed authority of the Church, which decides on the sense of the Bible.“By thus making individual experience the test,” remarks a Protestant theologian, “the door seemed opened wide to neverending dissension.... Luther did not succeed in carrying his theory to its right conclusion. Indeed we even find him formulating thoughts which seem to tend back to the old, mechanical authority of Scripture.” According to this writer, Luther’s conception of Scripture presented certain “imperfections” which, “even in principle, were practically at variance with it; these, however, disappeared as the fanatic movement taught Luther their disastrous effects.” The same writer asks finally: “But was it really a question merely of ‘imperfections’ which did not endanger the very essence of his views?”[1456]“What did Luther set up, instead of tradition, as a principle of interpretation?” another Protestant theologian recently queried. He answers: “In theory, that Scripture interprets itself; in practice however, as it doesn’t, his own theology.”[1457]Remedies against Disagreement. The Outward Word.Since the harmony of the “Spirit,” which Luther had so confidently looked for, failed to show itself in people’s mindsand not a glimmer of hope of any future agreement was visible, he found it necessary to insist far more strongly than heretofore on the outward Word;[1458]this was to check unwelcome inward revelations, to put everything in order and to be a bulwark against unusual views. “Now that the Apostles have preached the Word,” so runs one of his most interesting pronouncements on this subject,[1459]“and left us their writings, so that there is nothing more to reveal than what they have written, there is no need of any special new revelation, or miracles. This we know from the writings of the Apostles.” It would be a different matter if all were filled with the Holy Ghost and His gifts; “were this so it would be an easy thing to preach and to govern and all would go on quite smoothly and well, as indeed it ought. But unfortunately this is not the case, and those who have the Holy Ghost and a right understanding are not so common,” but “there are plenty who fancy they have mastered Scripture and have the Holy Ghost without measure.” These want to be thought “far more deeply and profoundly initiated” than Luther himself, and “much more learned than we are.” This he is not unwilling to allow, but on one thing he must insist, viz. on the “Word!” “This old and tried doctrine of the Apostles” he has “again brought to light,” having found “all this darkened by the Pope and his human teaching”; “by the Grace of God we have brought it to light once more”; “it is the very same as the Apostles first taught. But it has not been brought to light again without a revelation of the Holy Ghost.... He had to illumine our minds that Holy Scripture might be rightly viewed and understood”; hence “no other word or revelation is to be expected” “contrary to this doctrine, even were an angel from heaven visibly to bring” a new doctrine. Everyone can see “that God is tempting the people, particularly in these latter days of which it is said, that the devil shall rule mightily over Christendom by means of Antichrist.”—Here, consequently, his teaching is put on a level with the “outward Word.”The outward Word, according to other passages where Luther is rather more reticent concerning the “revelation” he had received, was that plain and unassailable Bibleteaching on which all “Spirits” must agree without any danger of divergency. This Word he now identifies with preaching. Preaching, however, is part of the office, and both office and preaching were controlled by Luther; indeed the office had been instituted chiefly by him and his sovereign. Hence, in effect, the outward Word is still Luther’s word.“Faith,” we read of the outward Word, seemingly contradicting the freedom Luther had formerly proclaimed, “comes of hearing, i.e. from preaching, or from the outward Word. This is the order established by God and He will not derogate from it. Hence contempt for the outward Word and for Scripture is rank blasphemy, which the secular authorities are bound to punish, according to the second Commandment which enjoins the punishment of blasphemy.” This occurs in the booklet officially circulated in 1536 among the pastors of the Saxon Electorate.[1460]A Protestant researcher who has recently made a special study of the “Inquisition” in the Saxon Electorate has the following remark concerning this statement, which is by no means without a parallel in Luther’s works: “Thus even contempt for Scripture—here meaning contempt for Luther’s interpretation of the Bible text—was already regarded as ‘rank blasphemy’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish. To such a pass had Evangelical freedom already come.”[1461]In order to uphold his own reading of the Bible against others which differed from his, Luther incidentally appealed with the utmost vigour, as the above examples show, to the Church, to tradition and to the Fathers, whose authority he had nevertheless solemnly renounced.
CHAPTER XXVIIITHE NEW DOGMAS IN AN HISTORICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LIGHT1. The Bible text and the Spirit as the “True Tests of Doctrine”Luther’stheological opinions present an attractive field to the psychologist desirous of studying his character. They are in great part, as has been several times shown, the result of his experiences, inward or outward, and appear peculiarly suited to meet his own case. Hence an examination of his doctrines will be of great value, particularly towards an understanding of his inner history.The specifically Lutheran doctrine of the Bible as sole judge in matters of faith, i.e. the old, so-called “formal principle” of Protestantism, deserves to be considered first, though, in point of time, it was not the first to be reached by Luther. Actually it was first broached by the author of the schism only when the opposition between his newly discovered views and the Church’s teaching determined him to set aside both her claim to act as judge, and all other outward authority on doctrine. Refusing to be bound by the Church, in place of the teaching office with its gift of infallibility, which, according to the belief of the ancient Church, guards the treasure of revelation and therefore also decides on the sense of Holy Scripture, Luther set up as supreme arbiter the letter of the Bible. From this source, so he teaches, the faithful draw the doctrines of the faith, each one according to his ability and enlightenment.The interpretation of the Sacred Books, in his view, takes place under the illumination of the Holy Ghost, and such an illumination he claimed first and foremost for himself. “Any believer who has better grounds and authority from Scripture on his side, is more to be believed than the Pope or a whole Council.”[1369]Liberty for the Examination of Scripture and Luther’s Autonomy.Luther only gradually reached his teaching concerning the supremacy of Holy Scripture.His examination at Augsburg drew forth from him his first statements on this subject. In the postscript to his own report of the interview he places Holy Scripture first amongst the theological sources, adding that it was merely being corrupted by the so-called sacred Decrees of the Church;[1370]in his appeal to the Council he also places the Bible and its decision (i.e. his interpretation) above the Pope. Even then, however, he admitted the authority of the Council side by side with that of the Bible only in so far as he confidently looked to the Council for a decision in his favour. The fact that about this time he fancied he could descry Antichrist in the Pope reveals at once the wide gulf he was about to create between all ecclesiastical authority and Scripture privately interpreted.—Without having as yet formally proclaimed the new principle on Holy Scripture, he nevertheless declared at the Leipzig Disputation, that Scripture ranked above a Council,[1371]and that Œcumenical Councils had already erred in matters of faith. Only when driven into a corner by his defence of the heresy of Hus, and after fruitless evasions, were these admissions wrung from him by Eck. Any light thus thrown on the matter by the Catholic speaker was, however, at once obscured by the following ambiguous clause added by Luther: “Councils have erred, and may err, particularly on points which do not appertain to faith.”[1372]Immediately after the Leipzig Disputation, in a letter addressed by himself and Carlstadt to the Elector, Luther lays it down that “a layman with the Scripture on his side is more to be believed in than the Pope and a Council without Scripture.”[1373]Then, in the “Resolutiones super propositionibus Lipsiæ disputatis,” he gives utterance to an assertion behind which he seeks to shelter his views: “Faith does not originate in authoritybut is produced in the heart only by the Holy Ghost, though man is indeed moved to faith by word and example.”[1374]Yet, as though he himself wished to demonstrate the perils his new principle involved, not merely for the interpretation of the Bible but even for the integrity of the Sacred Books, he makes in the very same writing, on ostensibly intrinsic grounds, his famous onslaught on the Epistle of St. James which had been urged against him. Because this canonical Epistle tells against his doctrine of Justification, he will have it that, “its style is far beneath the dignity of an Apostle and is not to be compared with that of Paul.”[1375]Already at the Leipzig Disputation he had attacked the second Book of the Machabees, which did not suit his views, again for intrinsic reasons and because it ran counter to true doctrine; the Church had indeed admitted it into the Canon, but “she could not raise the status of a book nor impart to it a higher value than it actually possessed.”[1376]From that time forward Luther gives the most varied expression to the principle of the free interpretation of Scripture: He declares, that the Bible may be interpreted by everyone, even by the “humble miller’s maid, nay, by a child of nine if it has the faith.”[1377]“The sheep must judge whether the pastors teach in Christ’s own tone.”[1378]“Christ alone, and none other than the Crucified, do we acknowledge as our Master. Paul will not have us believe him or an angel (Gal. i. 8, 12) unless Christ lives and speaks in him.” He is at pains to inform “the senseless Sophists, the unlearned bishops, monks and priests, the Pope and all his Gomorrahs” that we were baptised, not in the name of any Father of the Church, “but in the name of Jesus Christ.”[1379]“That a Christian assembly or congregation has the right and the power to judge of doctrine and to appoint and dismiss preachers” is the title of one of Luther’s writings of 1523.[1380]Later we meet the downright declaration: “Neither Church, nor Fathers, nor Apostles, nor angels are to be listened to except so far as they teach the pure Word of God (‘nisi afferant et doceant purum verbum Dei’).”[1381]In his bias against his foes he does not pause to consider that the very point at issue is to discern what the “pure Word of God” is, for, where it exists, any opposition on thepart of “Church, Fathers and Apostles” is surely inconceivable. It is merely an echo of his early mystic theories when, in a dreamy sort of way, he hints, that the pure Word manifests itself to each believer and reveals itself to the world without the intervention of any outward authority. It was clearly mere prejudice in his own favour which led him to be ruled by the one idea that the “pure Word of God” was to be found nowhere but in his own reading of the Bible.How greatly he allowed himself to be deceived by such fancies is already apparent in Luther’s earliest known statements on Scripture at the very beginning of the public controversy. His devotion to Biblical study from his youth, and the academic laurels he had won in this branch of learning, led him, consciously or not, to find in himself an embodiment of Holy Scripture. Only in this way can we explain his strange language concerning the Bible in his “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons” against Tetzel. Here, at the very commencement, instead of setting quietly about his task, which was to defend his new interpretation against the tradition, objected by his opponent, he sings a pæan in praise of the unassailable Divine Word. “All who blaspheme Scripture with their false glosses,” he writes, “shall perish by their own sword, like Goliath (1 Kings xvii. 51).... Christ’s doctrine is His Divine Word. Whence it is forbidden, not only to this blasphemer [Tetzel], but to any angel in heaven, to change one letter of it. For it is written: ‘God does not deny what He has once said,’ Job xiii. [xiv.], and in the Psalter [cxviii. 89]: ‘For ever, O Lord, Thy word standeth firm.’ Not a jot or tittle of the most insignificant letter of the law of God shall pass; everything must be fulfilled.”[1382]Here Tetzel becomes a rude ass, “who brays at Luther,” reminding the latter of a “sow” that defiles the venerable Scripture.[1383]How uncalled for his emphatic words quoted above on the value of the Bible really were can be more readily perceived now from a distance; for his opponents’ esteem and that of the Church generally for the Word of God was certainly not behind his, whilst the Church provided a safeguard for Holy Scripture which Luther was unwillingto admit. But in those days, in the midst of the struggle, such praises showered by Luther on Holy Writ served to make people think—not at all to his disadvantage—that he was the herald and champion of the Bible, which the Popish Church did not reckon at its true worth, whereas, all the while, he should have been striving to show that his contentions really had the support of Scripture. Even later his misleading cry was ever: Back to the sacred stronghold of the Bible! Back to the “true, pure and undefiled Word of God!”“Thy Word is the Truth” was his habitual battle-shout, though about this there had never been the least dispute.“Against all the sayings of the Fathers,” he says in 1522 in his reply to King Henry VIII, “against all the arts and words of angels, men and devils I set the Scriptures and the Gospel.... Here I stand and here I defy them.... The Word of God I count above all else and the Divine Majesty supports me; hence I should not turn a hair were a thousand Augustines against me, and am certain that the true Church adheres with me to God’s Word.” “Here Harry of England must hold his tongue.” Harry would see how Luther “stood upon his rock” and that he, Harry, “twaddled” like a “silly fool.”[1384]Experience given by the Spirit.The “rock” on which Luther’s interpretation of the Bible rests is a certain inward feeling and perception by the individual of the Bible’s teaching.In the last resort it is on an inward experience of having been taught by the Spirit the truth and meaning of the Divine words that the Christian must firmly take his stand. Just as Luther believed himself to have passed through such an experience, so, according to him, all others must first reach it and then make it their starting-point.This is the Spirit from on High that co-operates with the Word of Scripture.“Each man must believe solely because it is the Word of God and because he feels within that it is true, even though an angel from heaven and all the world should preach against it.”[1385]We must not regard the “opinion of all Christendom” but “eachone for himself alone” must believe the Scriptures.[1386]“The Word itself must content the heart and embrace and seize a man and, as it were, hold him captive till he feels how true and right it is.”“Hence every Christian can learn the truth from Scripture,” so a present-day Protestant theologian describes Luther’s then teaching;[1387]“he is bound by no human school of interpretation, but the plain sense of Scripture and the experience of his heart suffice.” He adds: “This might of course draw down upon Luther the charge of subjectivism.” “What Luther said of the ‘whisper’ of the word of forgiveness is well known. Thus [according to Luther] God can, when necessary, work without the use of any means.” Thanks to the “whisper” the Bible becomes a sure guide, “for [according to him] the Holy Ghost always works in the heart the selfsame truth.” “From the peculiar religious standpoint of his own experience of salvation,” Luther, so the same theologian admits, determined his “attitude towards Scripture.” In this we have one of the results of his “personal experience.”“How it comes to pass,” says Luther, “that Christ thus enters the heart you cannot tell; but your heart feels plainly, by the experience of faith, that He is there indeed.”[1388]“When the Holy Ghost performs His office then it proceeds.”[1389]“No one can rightly understand God or the Word of God unless he receives it directly from the Holy Ghost.”When his friend Carlstadt, together with whom Luther had at first insisted on Scripture only, later struck out a path of his own in doctrine and ecclesiastical practice while continuing to appeal to Scripture and to his own enlightenment, even the controversy with him and the “fanatics” failed to make Luther relinquish in theory his standpoint concerning the Bible and the Spirit as the one source and rule of faith. He became, however, more cautious in formulating it and endeavoured at least to leave a back door open. He was less insistent in his assertion that the Spirit instructed, by the inward Word, each one who read theScriptures; so much the more did he emphasise the supposed “clearness of the outward Word,” viz. the Bible, and deprecate any wanton treatment of it (by anyone save himself); at the same time he began to lay stress on the outward side of the Church, on the preaching office and the administration of the Sacraments.[1390]The fanatics he reproves for “merely gaping at the Spirit in their hearts,” whereas the outward articles must necessarily precede this.[1391]At times what he says almost looks like a repudiation of his earlier theory of enlightenment through the Spirit; for instance, when he describes how the fanatics wait “till the heavenly voice comes and God speaks to them.”[1392]Now, the outward Word of the Gospel, proclaimed by men truly “called,” is to be the guiding star amidst the mischief wrought by the sectarians; this outward Word, so he now fancies, will surely avail to decide every issue, seeing that it is so clear; only by dint of juggling could the sense of the Bible, as manifest in the outward Word, be distorted; looked at fairly it at once settled every question—needless to say in Luther’s favour; to understand it, all that was needed was the “natural language,” the “Lady Empress who far excels all subtle inventions.”[1393]As to the alleged clearness of the word of Scripture it is sufficient to recall that he himself indirectly challenged it by accusing the whole Church of having misunderstood the Bible, and to consider the abyss that separated his interpretation, even of the most vital texts, from that of the scholars of the past. “Though we had the Bible and read it,” he says, “yet we understood nothing of it.”[1394]—Nevertheless he fancied he could save his theory by appealing to the clearness of the text and the assistance rendered by a knowledge of languages. “St. Paul wills” (1 Cor. xiv. 29), so Luther says, in a writing on the schools, “that Christians should judge all doctrine, though for this we must needs be acquainted with the language. For the preacher or teacher may indeed read the Bible through and through as much as he chooses, but he will sometimes be right and sometimeswrong, if there be no one there to judge whether he is doing it well or ill. Thus in order to judge there must be skill or a knowledge of tongues, otherwise it is all to no purpose.”[1395]But above all, as he impresses on the reader in the same tract, he himself had thrown light on the Bible by his knowledge of languages; his interpretation, thanks to the “light” of the languages, had effected “such great things that all the world marvels and must confess that now we have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it, that it is restored to its pristine purity, and is even more undefiled than at the time of St. Jerome or Augustine.”[1396]His willingness, expressed from time to time, to submit himself or any other teacher to the judgment of anyone possessed of greater learning and a more profound spiritual sense, attracted many enlightened minds to his party.[1397]Luther’s self-contradiction in speaking, first, of the great clearness of the Bible, and then of its great obscurity, cannot fail to strike one.“Whoever now wants to become a theologian,” he says, for instance, “enjoys a great advantage. For, first, he has the Bible which is now so clear that he can read it without any difficulty.” “Should anyone say that it is necessary to have the interpretation of the Fathers and that Scripture is obscure, you must reply, that that is untrue. There is no book on earth more plainly written than Holy Scripture; in comparison with all other books it is as the sun to any other light.”[1398]Elsewhere he says: “The ungodly sophists [the Schoolmen] have asserted, that in Holy Scripture there is much that is obscure and not yet clearly explained,” but according to him they were not able to bring forward one vestige of proof; “if the words are obscure in one passage, they are clear in another,” and a comparison makes everything plain, particularly to one who is learned in languages.[1399]—Thus the Bible, according to a further statement, is “clearer, easier and more certain than any other writing.”[1400]“It is in itself quite certain, quite easy and quite plain; it is its own explanation; it is the universal argument, judge and enlightener, and makes all clear to all.”[1401]Later, however, the idea that Holy Scripture was obscure preponderated with him. Two days before his death Luther wrote in Latin on a piece of paper, which was subsequently found on his table, his thoughts on the difficulty of understanding Scripture: “No one can understand the Bucolics of Virgil who has not been a herdsman for five years; nor his Georgics unless he has laboured five years in the fields. In order to understand aright the epistles of Cicero a man must have been full twenty years in the public service of a great State. No one need fancy he has tasted Holy Scripture who has not ruled Churches for a hundred years with prophets like Elias and Eliseus, with John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1402]In all likelihood his experiences with the sectarians in his own camp led him towards the end of his life to lay more stress on the difficulty of understanding the Bible.Even with the “plain, arid Scripture” and a clear brainit may easily happen, as he says, to a man to fall into danger through the Bible, by looking at it from “his own conceit,” as “through a painted glass,” and “seeing no other colour than that of the glass.”[1403]Such people cannot then be set right, but become “masters of heresy.”[1404]All heresy seems to him to come from Scripture and to be based on it. There is no heretic, he says in a sermon in 1528, who does not appeal to Scripture; hence it came about that people called the Bible a heresy-book.[1405]The “heresy-book” was a favourite topic with him. Two years earlier he had used the expression twice on one day,[1406]and in 1525, when complaining in a sermon that the fanatics decked themselves out with Scripture, he said: “Thus it is true what people say, viz. that Holy Scripture is a heresy-book, i.e. a book that the heretics claim for themselves; there is no other book that they misuse so much as this book, and there has never been a heresy so bad or so gross that it has not sheltered itself behind Scripture.”[1407]These preachers from among the fanatics, he says, boast of the voice of God and of the Spirit, but they were never sent; let them prove by miracles their Divine mission![1408]Thus he had retracted nothing of his strange doctrine concerning private enlightenment; on the contrary, when not actually dealing with the sectarians, he still declared with that persistence of which he was such a master and which shrank from no self-contradictions, that the Spirit alone taught man how to understand the Scriptures, now that man, owing to original sin, was quite unable to grasp even the plainest passages. “In it [the Bible] not one word is of so small account as to allow of our understanding it by reason.”[1409]Only by virtue of the higher light by which he understood Scripture could a man “impartially prove and judge the different spirits and their doctrines.” This he wrote in his “De servo arbitrio” at a time when he had already engaged upon the struggle with the “HeavenlyProphets.”[1410]And to these principles he remained faithful till death without, however, as a Protestant scholar repeatedly points out of the several sides of Luther’s theology, “explaining more clearly” their relation to the difficulties involved.Concerning the inward Word or the enlightenment by the Spirit some words of Luther’s in 1531 may be given here.In that year he preached on the Gospel of St. John. He dwelt at some length on his favourite passage: “Whoever believeth in Me hath everlasting life,” and its context. Here, speaking repeatedly of the outward and the inward Word, he insists especially on the former and particularly on the hearing of sermons with faith, though so far was he from relinquishing the inward Word that he combines it in a strange way with the outward, and finally arrives once more at his earlier pet idea: Whoever is taught inwardly by the Spirit is free to judge and decide on all things.“The Lord Christ intends,” so he explains, “that we should hold fast and remain by the outward, spoken Word, and thereby He has put down reason from its seat,” i.e. has repudiated the objections of the fanatics who differed from him. Christ, according to Luther, exhorts us “diligently to listen to and learn the Word.”[1411]The beginning of Justification is in this, that “God proclaims to you the spoken, outward Word.”[1412]To this end God has His messengers and vicars. “When you hear a sermon from St. Paul or from me, you hear God the Father Himself; yet both of us, you and I, have one schoolmaster and doctor, viz. the Father ... only that God speaks to you through me.”[1413]Here he does not enter into the question of his mission, though he shows plainly enough that he was not going to be set aside. “God must give the spoken Word,” “otherwise it does not make its way. But if you are set on helping yourselves, why then should I preach? In that case you have no need of me.... Wemay be angered and stupefied over it” (viz. at the apparent divergence between the Word of God and reason), yet we must listen and weigh “the Word that is preached by the lips of Christ.”[1414]Excellent as this exhortation may be so far as St. Paul was concerned, the speaker is at no pains to supply his hearer with any proof of his own saying, viz. “that God speaks to you through me.” He insists upon it, however, and now comes the intervention of the Spirit: God must “inspire the conviction that it is His Word”[1415]which has been heard. “Without the Word we must not do anything, but must be taught by God.”[1416]“When the heart can feel assured that God the Father Himself is speaking to us [when we listen to a sermon], then the Holy Ghost and the light enter in; then man is enlightened and becomes a happy master, and is able to decide and judge of all doctrine, for he has the light, and faith in the Divine Word, and feels certain within his breast that his doctrine is the very Word of God.”[1417]When you “feel this in your heart, then account yourself one of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will allow Him to be Master and surrender yourself to Him. In this way will you be saved.”[1418]The real breathing of the Spirit of God, however, confirms the utterances only of the “preaching office,” viz. Luther’s and the Lutherans’. This he proclaims in the following words: “The true breathing and inspiration of the Holy Ghost is that which is wafted through the preaching office and the outward Word.”[1419]In what follows, for the better understanding of Luther’s attitude towards the Bible, we shall examine two consequences of his subjective ways, viz. their effect on the inspiration and the Canon of Scripture, and the exegetical disagreement which was the result of the principle of inward experience, also the means he chose to remedy it.Inspiration and the Canon of Scripture.In the matter of the inspiration of Scripture Luther never went so far as the fanatical enthusiasts of later Lutheranism, who, in their systems, taught an actual verbal inspiration, according to which the writers of the Bible had not merely been impelled, enlightened, and infallibly preserved from error, but had received every word from God. On the contrary, owing to his wanton handling of the Bible, he takes the inspiration of its writers so widely and vaguely that the very idea of inspiration is practicallyevaporated. The Bible is indeed, according to him, an outcome of the inspiration of God and is the writing and Word of the Holy Ghost (“Spiritus auctor est libri”),[1420]and may accordingly be described as “the Holy Ghost’s own especial book, writing and Word”—which he sometimes explains almost as though he had been a believer in verbal inspiration.[1421]The fact is, however, that he sees “in the sacred writers no other form of spiritual illumination than that displayed in the verbal preaching of the Divine witnesses.”[1422]“Moreover we occasionally find him questioning whether in certain passages the Holy Ghost ... is really so unquestionably present as in other parts of Scripture.” The truth is “he never formulated any detailed theory of Scriptural inspiration. With Luther the action of the Holy Ghost, on the witnesses of both Old Testament and New, is always one and the same, whether they proclaim the Word verbally or by writing; nowhere do we meet with the thought that they were under the influence of any other inspiration when they wrote.”[1423]The freedom he allowed himself, no less in the matter of inspiration than in the principle of the Bible only, explains the distinction he so often makes between the character and importance of the various parts of the “Word of God,” which he will have one keep in view when searching in Scripture for the truths of faith. In passages where religion is not concerned, particularly in historical statements, he believes that the tools of the Holy Ghost both could and did err.[1424]He thinks that “the predictions of the prophets concerning the Kings and secular affairs often turned out wrong.”[1425]The inspiration of the Apostles (and Evangelists) in the New-Testament writings was merely a part of their general “office,” not a “special inspiration” in the natureof a “second power added to and independent of it.” “The predominant importance of the Apostles he traces back to their general inspiration in the sense described above.”[1426]Catholic doctors before Luther’s day had showed themselves far more jealous of the sacredness of the Bible, as regards both the idea of inspiration and the equal value of all the books, and their every part. In spite of this Luther would have it that he had been the first to make the Bible respected.One point deserving of consideration as an instance of Luther’s wantonness is his attitude towards the Canon of the Sacred Books.How was he to prove that this or that book was to be included amongst the writings which constituted the Word of God, now that he had rejected the testimony of ecclesiastical tradition? According to the teaching of the ancient Church, it was tradition and the authority of the Church which vouched for the canonical character of the books of the Bible. Luther was confronted with this objection by Johann Eck at the Leipzig Disputation, who quoted the well-known words of St. Augustine, that he was compelled “to believe the Gospel only on the authority of the Catholic Church.”[1427]No longer recognising the authority of the Church, Luther met the objection by some strange evasions.[1428]When at last he saw that no other meaning could be read into the passage he threw it overboard and wrote: “If this meaning be not in St. Augustine’s words then it were better to repudiate his saying. For it is contrary to Scripture, to the Spirit and to all experience.”[1429]Even for the inspired value of the books included in the Canon he appealed in his arbitrary fashion, not to the infallible Church, but to the “inward testimony of the Spirit.”He could hardly escape being thus thrown back on this inward, mystical attestation, seeing that, according to him, human reason is of little assistance in the matter. Here the “inner sense” has to come in and, just as under theillumination of the Spirit of God, it imparts certainty concerning the meaning of the Bible, so also it discerns the dignity and godly value of Scripture. For obvious reasons, here again, he fails to favour us with any “clearer explanation” of his theory. One thing, however, emerges clearly, viz. that the feeling of certainty regarding both the meaning and the contents is practically identical with the feeling that the writing in question is Divine; since the Spirit from on High teaches me the truth which lies in the sense of Scripture, so also it must teach me that it is Scripture; the apprehension of the sense and of the Divine character of the sacred pages is one and the same.[1430]It is thus that Luther clothes in intangible, mystical language the vital question of religion here involved; at the Leipzig Disputation he had used terms no less elusive: Every book that really belongs to the Canon has authority and certainty “per se ipsum.”[1431]His mystical words were the outcome of deep-seated tendencies within him; Tauler’s language, which Luther had so skilfully made his own, was to assist him in concealing the obscurity and lack of logic inherent in his views.In reality, nevertheless, like the Catholics, he accepted the Canon of Holy Scripture as handed down by antiquity; only that he granted to the subjective influence of the “testimony of the Spirit” a far-reaching and destructive force. He arbitrarily struck out of the Canon quite a number of authentic writings,[1432]which will be enumerated elsewhere[1433]together with his statements concerning them.His literary opponents had a right to represent to him that so “strange and arbitrary”[1434]a proceeding was merely a result of his theory that the sacred books must prove theircharacter and value to each man individually. At any rate, his attitude towards the Bible cannot be regarded as at all logical.[1435]Inward Assurance and Disagreements Without.The second consequence of Luther’s biblical subjectivism which we have to consider lies outside him. It is the disconcerting divergence in interpretation which was the immediate result of his doctrine of “inward experience,” to correct which he had recourse to some curious remedies.First of all we may append some further quotations from his writings to those already adduced. The significance of this remarkable side of the psychology of his doctrine is often not fully appreciated, because it seems scarcely believable that Luther should have ventured so far into the airy region of idealism. And yet, on the other hand, we have here the principal reason for describing the new doctrine as something interior, and as one doing better justice to our feelings and personality, which was Luther’s own claim and, after him, that of Protestants generally. The difficulty, however, is that almost every sentence of Luther’s regarding the part played by “inward assurance” in respect of the Bible, raises the question how that oneness of interpretation which he ever presupposes, is to escape shipwreck, even in the case of essential doctrines.As early as Jan. 18, 1518, in his advice to Spalatin on the reading of Scripture, Luther had appealed to the mystic “influence,” telling him to distrust himself and to rely solely on the “influxus Spiritus”; this appeal he supports on his own inward experience.[1436]In this case his experience, however, mainly concerned the confirmation of his chief doctrine; for it was under an inspiration from on High that he had begun to feel his way to the new Evangel of Justification (see vol. iii., p. 110 ff.). But what was to be done when others, too, laid claim to a similar experience and inspiration?At a later date he described to his friends how he had learnt to understand Scripture “in maximis agonibus et tentationibus”; it was thus he had found in the Bible the Divinity of Christ and the articles on the Trinity; even now he was more certain ofthese truths by experience than by faith.[1437]Even the absolute predestination of the damned to hell, the entire absence of free-will for doing what is good and other extravagant opinions questioned even by his own followers, he declares he had learned directly from the Bible. In 1534 he places Scripture side by side with inward experience (or the Spirit), as the warrant—even in the case of others—for all knowledge of things Divine.This he likewise applies to the Apostles’ Creed.[1438]In 1537 he said in a sermon at Schmalkalden, “not only did all this [what is professed in the Creed] take place as we read in the Word of the Gospel, but the Holy Ghost also writes it inwardly in our heart.”[1439]He accepts the teaching of the Apostles’ Creed because he has convinced himself that it is based on Holy Writ.[1440]But how if others are not thus convinced? Were they too to be fastened to the dogma?R. Seeberg gives a good account of Luther’s views on the character of the dogmas of the ancient Church.[1441]“He treats the symbols of the ancient Church with great respect, particularly the Apostles’ Creed which contains all the chief articles of faith.[1442]But this does not mean that he believes in each creed or Council as such.” “In his work ‘Von den Conciliis’ with masterly historical criticism [?] he denies all binding authority even to the ancient Councils”; even the Council of the Apostles passed resolutions which were afterwards rescinded, and so did the Nicene Council. “Dogma is true,” so runs Luther’s teaching as given by Seeberg, “only so far as it agrees with Scripture; in itself it is of no authority. But the truth of Scripture is one thatis attested interiorly. Hence we can say that the Holy Ghost produces in us the assurance of the true doctrine [of the Apostles’ Creed].”[1443]—The page-heading where these words occur runs: “Luther’s independence of dogma.”A highly important statement on the interior instruction that goes on when we read Scripture is contained in Luther’s quite early work “De Captivitate Babylonica” (1520): The soul, he says there, referring to a misunderstood passage of St. Augustine’s on a well-known fact in the natural order, is so affected by the truth, that, thanks to it, it is able to judge rightly and surely of all things; it is forced to confess with unfailing certitude that this is the truth, just as reason affirms with unfailing certitude that three and seven make ten; the same is the case with all real Christians and their spiritual sense which, according to 1 Cor. ii. 15, judges all things and is judged of no man.[1444]—The last words of the Apostle refer, however, to the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, bestowed for a while by God on some few Christians in the early days of the Church, and cannot apply to the ordinary conditions of later times.Luther simply ignores the objection, that, if every man is judge, unutterable discord must ensue. The way in which he contrived so long to conceal this from himself is psychologically remarkable. For instance, in one of the principal passages where this objection should have been faced, viz. in his work against King Henry VIII, he glosses over the difficulty with the assertion that, even under the Pope, there was also no unity of doctrine; he then consoles himself with the words of Christ (John vi.), that all true Christians “shall be taught of God” and that every one that hath heard the Father cometh to the Saviour; the Spirit of God makes all to be one and effects an “idem docere, idem confiteri, idem sequi.”—We can only wonder at the idealism that could expect such results in a world inhabited by human beings.—In the end, however, since this was scarcely to be looked for, “external unity would be sufficiently safeguarded by the one Baptism and one Supper,” whereby all “testify to the oneness of their faith and spirit.”[1445]At any rate, he is confident that the true explanation (viz. his own) of the truths of salvation will gain the upper hand. For the Church cannot perish.In point of fact Luther really fancies himself justified in appealing to this entirely new meaning put by him on the promise to the Church that she shall never perish; she is indestructible because true believers will always be there to maintain Luther’s interpretation of revelation and of the imputed righteousness of Christ, and because any general falling away from the truth isnot to be thought of. Even though very many, indeed the greater number, deny the true Scripture teaching, still, many others remain, as, of yore, the seven thousand when Israel fell away from God. According to him even these may be held captive all their life in some error concerning the faith and reach the right road and faith in the grace of Christ only on their death-bed, according to the promise in John x. 28.[1446]In view of the darkness prevalent in former ages this appears to him to suffice in order to enable us to say that the Church has not really perished,[1447]and to save the cause of private enlightenment on the Bible. For this must stand fast, viz. that the Spirit of God most surely bears witness to the contents of the Divine Word in the hearts of the hearers and readers. “Luther,” says a Protestant exponent of his theology, “laid this down time after time.” “His statements on this subject cannot fail, however, to raise certain questions in our minds.”[1448]They gave rise to questions in his own day, and to something more than mere questions. The bitter theological dissensions already hinted at were the result. The inevitable divergency in the interpretation of the Bible was seen everywhere, and a hundred different opinions, some based on the inward assurance given by the “Spirit of God,” some on the reflections of reason, took the field. We know to what an extent Luther had to suffer from the discord born of his principle, not merely from such comparatively unimportant persons as Jacob Schenk[1449]and his “disgracefully arrogant” colleague, Johann Agricola, not merely from the fanatics and Anabaptists who found in the Bible a different teaching on Baptism, divine worship and morality, or from the Zwinglians with their divergent biblical interpretation of the Eucharist, but even, so to speak, in his own family, from Melanchthon, who was rash enough to incline to the Swiss reformed doctrines and to fight shy of the stricter Lutheranism. “The presumption,” Luther declares, strangely enough, “is really unbearable, that people should rise up against the authority of the Church,” despise the teaching of the best and ablest, and only worship their own views in Holy Scripture. “The name of the Church should be held in high honour.”[1450]He forbore, however, to specify which Church he meant, and moreover he had set himself above every Church. “All other forms of arrogance,” he declares, “can be endured and allow of improvement, as in the healing art, in philosophy, in poetry, in mechanics and in the case of the young.... But that shocking ‘arrogantia theologiæ’ is the source of all evil, and a consuming fire.”[1451]So little did he succeed in repressing “theological arrogance,” but rather, by his action, threw open the doors to it, that in1525 he was forced to lament:[1452]“There are as many sects and beliefs as there are heads. This fellow will have nothing to do with baptism, another denies the Sacrament, a third believes that there is another world between this and the Last Day. Some teach that Christ is not God, some say this, some that.... There is now no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it must be the whisper of the Holy Ghost and he himself a prophet.... There is no one who does not wish to be cleverer than Luther; they all want to try their steel on me.... They speak like madmen; I have during the year to listen to many such wretched folk. In no other way can the devil come so close to me, that I must admit. Formerly the world was full of noisy, disembodied spirits giving themselves out to be the souls of men; now it is full of uproarious spirits with bodies, who all declare that they are real angels.”[1453]He has this crumb of comfort: The world is the devil’s playground; and uproars there must be.[1454]“This is all due,” he says finally, truly and aptly, “to their bringing their conceit with them to the study of Scripture, which has to submit to being judged, moulded and led by their head and reason,”[1455]—surely a bitter punishment for throwing over the divinely appointed authority of the Church, which decides on the sense of the Bible.“By thus making individual experience the test,” remarks a Protestant theologian, “the door seemed opened wide to neverending dissension.... Luther did not succeed in carrying his theory to its right conclusion. Indeed we even find him formulating thoughts which seem to tend back to the old, mechanical authority of Scripture.” According to this writer, Luther’s conception of Scripture presented certain “imperfections” which, “even in principle, were practically at variance with it; these, however, disappeared as the fanatic movement taught Luther their disastrous effects.” The same writer asks finally: “But was it really a question merely of ‘imperfections’ which did not endanger the very essence of his views?”[1456]“What did Luther set up, instead of tradition, as a principle of interpretation?” another Protestant theologian recently queried. He answers: “In theory, that Scripture interprets itself; in practice however, as it doesn’t, his own theology.”[1457]Remedies against Disagreement. The Outward Word.Since the harmony of the “Spirit,” which Luther had so confidently looked for, failed to show itself in people’s mindsand not a glimmer of hope of any future agreement was visible, he found it necessary to insist far more strongly than heretofore on the outward Word;[1458]this was to check unwelcome inward revelations, to put everything in order and to be a bulwark against unusual views. “Now that the Apostles have preached the Word,” so runs one of his most interesting pronouncements on this subject,[1459]“and left us their writings, so that there is nothing more to reveal than what they have written, there is no need of any special new revelation, or miracles. This we know from the writings of the Apostles.” It would be a different matter if all were filled with the Holy Ghost and His gifts; “were this so it would be an easy thing to preach and to govern and all would go on quite smoothly and well, as indeed it ought. But unfortunately this is not the case, and those who have the Holy Ghost and a right understanding are not so common,” but “there are plenty who fancy they have mastered Scripture and have the Holy Ghost without measure.” These want to be thought “far more deeply and profoundly initiated” than Luther himself, and “much more learned than we are.” This he is not unwilling to allow, but on one thing he must insist, viz. on the “Word!” “This old and tried doctrine of the Apostles” he has “again brought to light,” having found “all this darkened by the Pope and his human teaching”; “by the Grace of God we have brought it to light once more”; “it is the very same as the Apostles first taught. But it has not been brought to light again without a revelation of the Holy Ghost.... He had to illumine our minds that Holy Scripture might be rightly viewed and understood”; hence “no other word or revelation is to be expected” “contrary to this doctrine, even were an angel from heaven visibly to bring” a new doctrine. Everyone can see “that God is tempting the people, particularly in these latter days of which it is said, that the devil shall rule mightily over Christendom by means of Antichrist.”—Here, consequently, his teaching is put on a level with the “outward Word.”The outward Word, according to other passages where Luther is rather more reticent concerning the “revelation” he had received, was that plain and unassailable Bibleteaching on which all “Spirits” must agree without any danger of divergency. This Word he now identifies with preaching. Preaching, however, is part of the office, and both office and preaching were controlled by Luther; indeed the office had been instituted chiefly by him and his sovereign. Hence, in effect, the outward Word is still Luther’s word.“Faith,” we read of the outward Word, seemingly contradicting the freedom Luther had formerly proclaimed, “comes of hearing, i.e. from preaching, or from the outward Word. This is the order established by God and He will not derogate from it. Hence contempt for the outward Word and for Scripture is rank blasphemy, which the secular authorities are bound to punish, according to the second Commandment which enjoins the punishment of blasphemy.” This occurs in the booklet officially circulated in 1536 among the pastors of the Saxon Electorate.[1460]A Protestant researcher who has recently made a special study of the “Inquisition” in the Saxon Electorate has the following remark concerning this statement, which is by no means without a parallel in Luther’s works: “Thus even contempt for Scripture—here meaning contempt for Luther’s interpretation of the Bible text—was already regarded as ‘rank blasphemy’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish. To such a pass had Evangelical freedom already come.”[1461]In order to uphold his own reading of the Bible against others which differed from his, Luther incidentally appealed with the utmost vigour, as the above examples show, to the Church, to tradition and to the Fathers, whose authority he had nevertheless solemnly renounced.
THE NEW DOGMAS IN AN HISTORICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LIGHT
Luther’stheological opinions present an attractive field to the psychologist desirous of studying his character. They are in great part, as has been several times shown, the result of his experiences, inward or outward, and appear peculiarly suited to meet his own case. Hence an examination of his doctrines will be of great value, particularly towards an understanding of his inner history.
The specifically Lutheran doctrine of the Bible as sole judge in matters of faith, i.e. the old, so-called “formal principle” of Protestantism, deserves to be considered first, though, in point of time, it was not the first to be reached by Luther. Actually it was first broached by the author of the schism only when the opposition between his newly discovered views and the Church’s teaching determined him to set aside both her claim to act as judge, and all other outward authority on doctrine. Refusing to be bound by the Church, in place of the teaching office with its gift of infallibility, which, according to the belief of the ancient Church, guards the treasure of revelation and therefore also decides on the sense of Holy Scripture, Luther set up as supreme arbiter the letter of the Bible. From this source, so he teaches, the faithful draw the doctrines of the faith, each one according to his ability and enlightenment.
The interpretation of the Sacred Books, in his view, takes place under the illumination of the Holy Ghost, and such an illumination he claimed first and foremost for himself. “Any believer who has better grounds and authority from Scripture on his side, is more to be believed than the Pope or a whole Council.”[1369]
Luther only gradually reached his teaching concerning the supremacy of Holy Scripture.
His examination at Augsburg drew forth from him his first statements on this subject. In the postscript to his own report of the interview he places Holy Scripture first amongst the theological sources, adding that it was merely being corrupted by the so-called sacred Decrees of the Church;[1370]in his appeal to the Council he also places the Bible and its decision (i.e. his interpretation) above the Pope. Even then, however, he admitted the authority of the Council side by side with that of the Bible only in so far as he confidently looked to the Council for a decision in his favour. The fact that about this time he fancied he could descry Antichrist in the Pope reveals at once the wide gulf he was about to create between all ecclesiastical authority and Scripture privately interpreted.—Without having as yet formally proclaimed the new principle on Holy Scripture, he nevertheless declared at the Leipzig Disputation, that Scripture ranked above a Council,[1371]and that Œcumenical Councils had already erred in matters of faith. Only when driven into a corner by his defence of the heresy of Hus, and after fruitless evasions, were these admissions wrung from him by Eck. Any light thus thrown on the matter by the Catholic speaker was, however, at once obscured by the following ambiguous clause added by Luther: “Councils have erred, and may err, particularly on points which do not appertain to faith.”[1372]Immediately after the Leipzig Disputation, in a letter addressed by himself and Carlstadt to the Elector, Luther lays it down that “a layman with the Scripture on his side is more to be believed in than the Pope and a Council without Scripture.”[1373]Then, in the “Resolutiones super propositionibus Lipsiæ disputatis,” he gives utterance to an assertion behind which he seeks to shelter his views: “Faith does not originate in authoritybut is produced in the heart only by the Holy Ghost, though man is indeed moved to faith by word and example.”[1374]Yet, as though he himself wished to demonstrate the perils his new principle involved, not merely for the interpretation of the Bible but even for the integrity of the Sacred Books, he makes in the very same writing, on ostensibly intrinsic grounds, his famous onslaught on the Epistle of St. James which had been urged against him. Because this canonical Epistle tells against his doctrine of Justification, he will have it that, “its style is far beneath the dignity of an Apostle and is not to be compared with that of Paul.”[1375]Already at the Leipzig Disputation he had attacked the second Book of the Machabees, which did not suit his views, again for intrinsic reasons and because it ran counter to true doctrine; the Church had indeed admitted it into the Canon, but “she could not raise the status of a book nor impart to it a higher value than it actually possessed.”[1376]
His examination at Augsburg drew forth from him his first statements on this subject. In the postscript to his own report of the interview he places Holy Scripture first amongst the theological sources, adding that it was merely being corrupted by the so-called sacred Decrees of the Church;[1370]in his appeal to the Council he also places the Bible and its decision (i.e. his interpretation) above the Pope. Even then, however, he admitted the authority of the Council side by side with that of the Bible only in so far as he confidently looked to the Council for a decision in his favour. The fact that about this time he fancied he could descry Antichrist in the Pope reveals at once the wide gulf he was about to create between all ecclesiastical authority and Scripture privately interpreted.—Without having as yet formally proclaimed the new principle on Holy Scripture, he nevertheless declared at the Leipzig Disputation, that Scripture ranked above a Council,[1371]and that Œcumenical Councils had already erred in matters of faith. Only when driven into a corner by his defence of the heresy of Hus, and after fruitless evasions, were these admissions wrung from him by Eck. Any light thus thrown on the matter by the Catholic speaker was, however, at once obscured by the following ambiguous clause added by Luther: “Councils have erred, and may err, particularly on points which do not appertain to faith.”[1372]
Immediately after the Leipzig Disputation, in a letter addressed by himself and Carlstadt to the Elector, Luther lays it down that “a layman with the Scripture on his side is more to be believed in than the Pope and a Council without Scripture.”[1373]Then, in the “Resolutiones super propositionibus Lipsiæ disputatis,” he gives utterance to an assertion behind which he seeks to shelter his views: “Faith does not originate in authoritybut is produced in the heart only by the Holy Ghost, though man is indeed moved to faith by word and example.”[1374]
Yet, as though he himself wished to demonstrate the perils his new principle involved, not merely for the interpretation of the Bible but even for the integrity of the Sacred Books, he makes in the very same writing, on ostensibly intrinsic grounds, his famous onslaught on the Epistle of St. James which had been urged against him. Because this canonical Epistle tells against his doctrine of Justification, he will have it that, “its style is far beneath the dignity of an Apostle and is not to be compared with that of Paul.”[1375]Already at the Leipzig Disputation he had attacked the second Book of the Machabees, which did not suit his views, again for intrinsic reasons and because it ran counter to true doctrine; the Church had indeed admitted it into the Canon, but “she could not raise the status of a book nor impart to it a higher value than it actually possessed.”[1376]
From that time forward Luther gives the most varied expression to the principle of the free interpretation of Scripture: He declares, that the Bible may be interpreted by everyone, even by the “humble miller’s maid, nay, by a child of nine if it has the faith.”[1377]“The sheep must judge whether the pastors teach in Christ’s own tone.”[1378]“Christ alone, and none other than the Crucified, do we acknowledge as our Master. Paul will not have us believe him or an angel (Gal. i. 8, 12) unless Christ lives and speaks in him.” He is at pains to inform “the senseless Sophists, the unlearned bishops, monks and priests, the Pope and all his Gomorrahs” that we were baptised, not in the name of any Father of the Church, “but in the name of Jesus Christ.”[1379]
“That a Christian assembly or congregation has the right and the power to judge of doctrine and to appoint and dismiss preachers” is the title of one of Luther’s writings of 1523.[1380]Later we meet the downright declaration: “Neither Church, nor Fathers, nor Apostles, nor angels are to be listened to except so far as they teach the pure Word of God (‘nisi afferant et doceant purum verbum Dei’).”[1381]
In his bias against his foes he does not pause to consider that the very point at issue is to discern what the “pure Word of God” is, for, where it exists, any opposition on thepart of “Church, Fathers and Apostles” is surely inconceivable. It is merely an echo of his early mystic theories when, in a dreamy sort of way, he hints, that the pure Word manifests itself to each believer and reveals itself to the world without the intervention of any outward authority. It was clearly mere prejudice in his own favour which led him to be ruled by the one idea that the “pure Word of God” was to be found nowhere but in his own reading of the Bible.
How greatly he allowed himself to be deceived by such fancies is already apparent in Luther’s earliest known statements on Scripture at the very beginning of the public controversy. His devotion to Biblical study from his youth, and the academic laurels he had won in this branch of learning, led him, consciously or not, to find in himself an embodiment of Holy Scripture. Only in this way can we explain his strange language concerning the Bible in his “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons” against Tetzel. Here, at the very commencement, instead of setting quietly about his task, which was to defend his new interpretation against the tradition, objected by his opponent, he sings a pæan in praise of the unassailable Divine Word. “All who blaspheme Scripture with their false glosses,” he writes, “shall perish by their own sword, like Goliath (1 Kings xvii. 51).... Christ’s doctrine is His Divine Word. Whence it is forbidden, not only to this blasphemer [Tetzel], but to any angel in heaven, to change one letter of it. For it is written: ‘God does not deny what He has once said,’ Job xiii. [xiv.], and in the Psalter [cxviii. 89]: ‘For ever, O Lord, Thy word standeth firm.’ Not a jot or tittle of the most insignificant letter of the law of God shall pass; everything must be fulfilled.”[1382]Here Tetzel becomes a rude ass, “who brays at Luther,” reminding the latter of a “sow” that defiles the venerable Scripture.[1383]
How uncalled for his emphatic words quoted above on the value of the Bible really were can be more readily perceived now from a distance; for his opponents’ esteem and that of the Church generally for the Word of God was certainly not behind his, whilst the Church provided a safeguard for Holy Scripture which Luther was unwillingto admit. But in those days, in the midst of the struggle, such praises showered by Luther on Holy Writ served to make people think—not at all to his disadvantage—that he was the herald and champion of the Bible, which the Popish Church did not reckon at its true worth, whereas, all the while, he should have been striving to show that his contentions really had the support of Scripture. Even later his misleading cry was ever: Back to the sacred stronghold of the Bible! Back to the “true, pure and undefiled Word of God!”
“Thy Word is the Truth” was his habitual battle-shout, though about this there had never been the least dispute.
“Against all the sayings of the Fathers,” he says in 1522 in his reply to King Henry VIII, “against all the arts and words of angels, men and devils I set the Scriptures and the Gospel.... Here I stand and here I defy them.... The Word of God I count above all else and the Divine Majesty supports me; hence I should not turn a hair were a thousand Augustines against me, and am certain that the true Church adheres with me to God’s Word.” “Here Harry of England must hold his tongue.” Harry would see how Luther “stood upon his rock” and that he, Harry, “twaddled” like a “silly fool.”[1384]
The “rock” on which Luther’s interpretation of the Bible rests is a certain inward feeling and perception by the individual of the Bible’s teaching.
In the last resort it is on an inward experience of having been taught by the Spirit the truth and meaning of the Divine words that the Christian must firmly take his stand. Just as Luther believed himself to have passed through such an experience, so, according to him, all others must first reach it and then make it their starting-point.
This is the Spirit from on High that co-operates with the Word of Scripture.
“Each man must believe solely because it is the Word of God and because he feels within that it is true, even though an angel from heaven and all the world should preach against it.”[1385]We must not regard the “opinion of all Christendom” but “eachone for himself alone” must believe the Scriptures.[1386]“The Word itself must content the heart and embrace and seize a man and, as it were, hold him captive till he feels how true and right it is.”“Hence every Christian can learn the truth from Scripture,” so a present-day Protestant theologian describes Luther’s then teaching;[1387]“he is bound by no human school of interpretation, but the plain sense of Scripture and the experience of his heart suffice.” He adds: “This might of course draw down upon Luther the charge of subjectivism.” “What Luther said of the ‘whisper’ of the word of forgiveness is well known. Thus [according to Luther] God can, when necessary, work without the use of any means.” Thanks to the “whisper” the Bible becomes a sure guide, “for [according to him] the Holy Ghost always works in the heart the selfsame truth.” “From the peculiar religious standpoint of his own experience of salvation,” Luther, so the same theologian admits, determined his “attitude towards Scripture.” In this we have one of the results of his “personal experience.”“How it comes to pass,” says Luther, “that Christ thus enters the heart you cannot tell; but your heart feels plainly, by the experience of faith, that He is there indeed.”[1388]“When the Holy Ghost performs His office then it proceeds.”[1389]“No one can rightly understand God or the Word of God unless he receives it directly from the Holy Ghost.”
“Each man must believe solely because it is the Word of God and because he feels within that it is true, even though an angel from heaven and all the world should preach against it.”[1385]We must not regard the “opinion of all Christendom” but “eachone for himself alone” must believe the Scriptures.[1386]“The Word itself must content the heart and embrace and seize a man and, as it were, hold him captive till he feels how true and right it is.”
“Hence every Christian can learn the truth from Scripture,” so a present-day Protestant theologian describes Luther’s then teaching;[1387]“he is bound by no human school of interpretation, but the plain sense of Scripture and the experience of his heart suffice.” He adds: “This might of course draw down upon Luther the charge of subjectivism.” “What Luther said of the ‘whisper’ of the word of forgiveness is well known. Thus [according to Luther] God can, when necessary, work without the use of any means.” Thanks to the “whisper” the Bible becomes a sure guide, “for [according to him] the Holy Ghost always works in the heart the selfsame truth.” “From the peculiar religious standpoint of his own experience of salvation,” Luther, so the same theologian admits, determined his “attitude towards Scripture.” In this we have one of the results of his “personal experience.”
“How it comes to pass,” says Luther, “that Christ thus enters the heart you cannot tell; but your heart feels plainly, by the experience of faith, that He is there indeed.”[1388]“When the Holy Ghost performs His office then it proceeds.”[1389]“No one can rightly understand God or the Word of God unless he receives it directly from the Holy Ghost.”
When his friend Carlstadt, together with whom Luther had at first insisted on Scripture only, later struck out a path of his own in doctrine and ecclesiastical practice while continuing to appeal to Scripture and to his own enlightenment, even the controversy with him and the “fanatics” failed to make Luther relinquish in theory his standpoint concerning the Bible and the Spirit as the one source and rule of faith. He became, however, more cautious in formulating it and endeavoured at least to leave a back door open. He was less insistent in his assertion that the Spirit instructed, by the inward Word, each one who read theScriptures; so much the more did he emphasise the supposed “clearness of the outward Word,” viz. the Bible, and deprecate any wanton treatment of it (by anyone save himself); at the same time he began to lay stress on the outward side of the Church, on the preaching office and the administration of the Sacraments.[1390]The fanatics he reproves for “merely gaping at the Spirit in their hearts,” whereas the outward articles must necessarily precede this.[1391]At times what he says almost looks like a repudiation of his earlier theory of enlightenment through the Spirit; for instance, when he describes how the fanatics wait “till the heavenly voice comes and God speaks to them.”[1392]Now, the outward Word of the Gospel, proclaimed by men truly “called,” is to be the guiding star amidst the mischief wrought by the sectarians; this outward Word, so he now fancies, will surely avail to decide every issue, seeing that it is so clear; only by dint of juggling could the sense of the Bible, as manifest in the outward Word, be distorted; looked at fairly it at once settled every question—needless to say in Luther’s favour; to understand it, all that was needed was the “natural language,” the “Lady Empress who far excels all subtle inventions.”[1393]
As to the alleged clearness of the word of Scripture it is sufficient to recall that he himself indirectly challenged it by accusing the whole Church of having misunderstood the Bible, and to consider the abyss that separated his interpretation, even of the most vital texts, from that of the scholars of the past. “Though we had the Bible and read it,” he says, “yet we understood nothing of it.”[1394]—Nevertheless he fancied he could save his theory by appealing to the clearness of the text and the assistance rendered by a knowledge of languages. “St. Paul wills” (1 Cor. xiv. 29), so Luther says, in a writing on the schools, “that Christians should judge all doctrine, though for this we must needs be acquainted with the language. For the preacher or teacher may indeed read the Bible through and through as much as he chooses, but he will sometimes be right and sometimeswrong, if there be no one there to judge whether he is doing it well or ill. Thus in order to judge there must be skill or a knowledge of tongues, otherwise it is all to no purpose.”[1395]
But above all, as he impresses on the reader in the same tract, he himself had thrown light on the Bible by his knowledge of languages; his interpretation, thanks to the “light” of the languages, had effected “such great things that all the world marvels and must confess that now we have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it, that it is restored to its pristine purity, and is even more undefiled than at the time of St. Jerome or Augustine.”[1396]His willingness, expressed from time to time, to submit himself or any other teacher to the judgment of anyone possessed of greater learning and a more profound spiritual sense, attracted many enlightened minds to his party.[1397]
Luther’s self-contradiction in speaking, first, of the great clearness of the Bible, and then of its great obscurity, cannot fail to strike one.
“Whoever now wants to become a theologian,” he says, for instance, “enjoys a great advantage. For, first, he has the Bible which is now so clear that he can read it without any difficulty.” “Should anyone say that it is necessary to have the interpretation of the Fathers and that Scripture is obscure, you must reply, that that is untrue. There is no book on earth more plainly written than Holy Scripture; in comparison with all other books it is as the sun to any other light.”[1398]Elsewhere he says: “The ungodly sophists [the Schoolmen] have asserted, that in Holy Scripture there is much that is obscure and not yet clearly explained,” but according to him they were not able to bring forward one vestige of proof; “if the words are obscure in one passage, they are clear in another,” and a comparison makes everything plain, particularly to one who is learned in languages.[1399]—Thus the Bible, according to a further statement, is “clearer, easier and more certain than any other writing.”[1400]“It is in itself quite certain, quite easy and quite plain; it is its own explanation; it is the universal argument, judge and enlightener, and makes all clear to all.”[1401]
Later, however, the idea that Holy Scripture was obscure preponderated with him. Two days before his death Luther wrote in Latin on a piece of paper, which was subsequently found on his table, his thoughts on the difficulty of understanding Scripture: “No one can understand the Bucolics of Virgil who has not been a herdsman for five years; nor his Georgics unless he has laboured five years in the fields. In order to understand aright the epistles of Cicero a man must have been full twenty years in the public service of a great State. No one need fancy he has tasted Holy Scripture who has not ruled Churches for a hundred years with prophets like Elias and Eliseus, with John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1402]In all likelihood his experiences with the sectarians in his own camp led him towards the end of his life to lay more stress on the difficulty of understanding the Bible.
Even with the “plain, arid Scripture” and a clear brainit may easily happen, as he says, to a man to fall into danger through the Bible, by looking at it from “his own conceit,” as “through a painted glass,” and “seeing no other colour than that of the glass.”[1403]Such people cannot then be set right, but become “masters of heresy.”[1404]All heresy seems to him to come from Scripture and to be based on it. There is no heretic, he says in a sermon in 1528, who does not appeal to Scripture; hence it came about that people called the Bible a heresy-book.[1405]The “heresy-book” was a favourite topic with him. Two years earlier he had used the expression twice on one day,[1406]and in 1525, when complaining in a sermon that the fanatics decked themselves out with Scripture, he said: “Thus it is true what people say, viz. that Holy Scripture is a heresy-book, i.e. a book that the heretics claim for themselves; there is no other book that they misuse so much as this book, and there has never been a heresy so bad or so gross that it has not sheltered itself behind Scripture.”[1407]These preachers from among the fanatics, he says, boast of the voice of God and of the Spirit, but they were never sent; let them prove by miracles their Divine mission![1408]
Thus he had retracted nothing of his strange doctrine concerning private enlightenment; on the contrary, when not actually dealing with the sectarians, he still declared with that persistence of which he was such a master and which shrank from no self-contradictions, that the Spirit alone taught man how to understand the Scriptures, now that man, owing to original sin, was quite unable to grasp even the plainest passages. “In it [the Bible] not one word is of so small account as to allow of our understanding it by reason.”[1409]Only by virtue of the higher light by which he understood Scripture could a man “impartially prove and judge the different spirits and their doctrines.” This he wrote in his “De servo arbitrio” at a time when he had already engaged upon the struggle with the “HeavenlyProphets.”[1410]And to these principles he remained faithful till death without, however, as a Protestant scholar repeatedly points out of the several sides of Luther’s theology, “explaining more clearly” their relation to the difficulties involved.
Concerning the inward Word or the enlightenment by the Spirit some words of Luther’s in 1531 may be given here.
In that year he preached on the Gospel of St. John. He dwelt at some length on his favourite passage: “Whoever believeth in Me hath everlasting life,” and its context. Here, speaking repeatedly of the outward and the inward Word, he insists especially on the former and particularly on the hearing of sermons with faith, though so far was he from relinquishing the inward Word that he combines it in a strange way with the outward, and finally arrives once more at his earlier pet idea: Whoever is taught inwardly by the Spirit is free to judge and decide on all things.“The Lord Christ intends,” so he explains, “that we should hold fast and remain by the outward, spoken Word, and thereby He has put down reason from its seat,” i.e. has repudiated the objections of the fanatics who differed from him. Christ, according to Luther, exhorts us “diligently to listen to and learn the Word.”[1411]The beginning of Justification is in this, that “God proclaims to you the spoken, outward Word.”[1412]To this end God has His messengers and vicars. “When you hear a sermon from St. Paul or from me, you hear God the Father Himself; yet both of us, you and I, have one schoolmaster and doctor, viz. the Father ... only that God speaks to you through me.”[1413]Here he does not enter into the question of his mission, though he shows plainly enough that he was not going to be set aside. “God must give the spoken Word,” “otherwise it does not make its way. But if you are set on helping yourselves, why then should I preach? In that case you have no need of me.... Wemay be angered and stupefied over it” (viz. at the apparent divergence between the Word of God and reason), yet we must listen and weigh “the Word that is preached by the lips of Christ.”[1414]Excellent as this exhortation may be so far as St. Paul was concerned, the speaker is at no pains to supply his hearer with any proof of his own saying, viz. “that God speaks to you through me.” He insists upon it, however, and now comes the intervention of the Spirit: God must “inspire the conviction that it is His Word”[1415]which has been heard. “Without the Word we must not do anything, but must be taught by God.”[1416]“When the heart can feel assured that God the Father Himself is speaking to us [when we listen to a sermon], then the Holy Ghost and the light enter in; then man is enlightened and becomes a happy master, and is able to decide and judge of all doctrine, for he has the light, and faith in the Divine Word, and feels certain within his breast that his doctrine is the very Word of God.”[1417]When you “feel this in your heart, then account yourself one of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will allow Him to be Master and surrender yourself to Him. In this way will you be saved.”[1418]The real breathing of the Spirit of God, however, confirms the utterances only of the “preaching office,” viz. Luther’s and the Lutherans’. This he proclaims in the following words: “The true breathing and inspiration of the Holy Ghost is that which is wafted through the preaching office and the outward Word.”[1419]
In that year he preached on the Gospel of St. John. He dwelt at some length on his favourite passage: “Whoever believeth in Me hath everlasting life,” and its context. Here, speaking repeatedly of the outward and the inward Word, he insists especially on the former and particularly on the hearing of sermons with faith, though so far was he from relinquishing the inward Word that he combines it in a strange way with the outward, and finally arrives once more at his earlier pet idea: Whoever is taught inwardly by the Spirit is free to judge and decide on all things.
“The Lord Christ intends,” so he explains, “that we should hold fast and remain by the outward, spoken Word, and thereby He has put down reason from its seat,” i.e. has repudiated the objections of the fanatics who differed from him. Christ, according to Luther, exhorts us “diligently to listen to and learn the Word.”[1411]The beginning of Justification is in this, that “God proclaims to you the spoken, outward Word.”[1412]To this end God has His messengers and vicars. “When you hear a sermon from St. Paul or from me, you hear God the Father Himself; yet both of us, you and I, have one schoolmaster and doctor, viz. the Father ... only that God speaks to you through me.”[1413]Here he does not enter into the question of his mission, though he shows plainly enough that he was not going to be set aside. “God must give the spoken Word,” “otherwise it does not make its way. But if you are set on helping yourselves, why then should I preach? In that case you have no need of me.... Wemay be angered and stupefied over it” (viz. at the apparent divergence between the Word of God and reason), yet we must listen and weigh “the Word that is preached by the lips of Christ.”[1414]
Excellent as this exhortation may be so far as St. Paul was concerned, the speaker is at no pains to supply his hearer with any proof of his own saying, viz. “that God speaks to you through me.” He insists upon it, however, and now comes the intervention of the Spirit: God must “inspire the conviction that it is His Word”[1415]which has been heard. “Without the Word we must not do anything, but must be taught by God.”[1416]“When the heart can feel assured that God the Father Himself is speaking to us [when we listen to a sermon], then the Holy Ghost and the light enter in; then man is enlightened and becomes a happy master, and is able to decide and judge of all doctrine, for he has the light, and faith in the Divine Word, and feels certain within his breast that his doctrine is the very Word of God.”[1417]When you “feel this in your heart, then account yourself one of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will allow Him to be Master and surrender yourself to Him. In this way will you be saved.”[1418]
The real breathing of the Spirit of God, however, confirms the utterances only of the “preaching office,” viz. Luther’s and the Lutherans’. This he proclaims in the following words: “The true breathing and inspiration of the Holy Ghost is that which is wafted through the preaching office and the outward Word.”[1419]
In what follows, for the better understanding of Luther’s attitude towards the Bible, we shall examine two consequences of his subjective ways, viz. their effect on the inspiration and the Canon of Scripture, and the exegetical disagreement which was the result of the principle of inward experience, also the means he chose to remedy it.
In the matter of the inspiration of Scripture Luther never went so far as the fanatical enthusiasts of later Lutheranism, who, in their systems, taught an actual verbal inspiration, according to which the writers of the Bible had not merely been impelled, enlightened, and infallibly preserved from error, but had received every word from God. On the contrary, owing to his wanton handling of the Bible, he takes the inspiration of its writers so widely and vaguely that the very idea of inspiration is practicallyevaporated. The Bible is indeed, according to him, an outcome of the inspiration of God and is the writing and Word of the Holy Ghost (“Spiritus auctor est libri”),[1420]and may accordingly be described as “the Holy Ghost’s own especial book, writing and Word”—which he sometimes explains almost as though he had been a believer in verbal inspiration.[1421]
The fact is, however, that he sees “in the sacred writers no other form of spiritual illumination than that displayed in the verbal preaching of the Divine witnesses.”[1422]“Moreover we occasionally find him questioning whether in certain passages the Holy Ghost ... is really so unquestionably present as in other parts of Scripture.” The truth is “he never formulated any detailed theory of Scriptural inspiration. With Luther the action of the Holy Ghost, on the witnesses of both Old Testament and New, is always one and the same, whether they proclaim the Word verbally or by writing; nowhere do we meet with the thought that they were under the influence of any other inspiration when they wrote.”[1423]
The freedom he allowed himself, no less in the matter of inspiration than in the principle of the Bible only, explains the distinction he so often makes between the character and importance of the various parts of the “Word of God,” which he will have one keep in view when searching in Scripture for the truths of faith. In passages where religion is not concerned, particularly in historical statements, he believes that the tools of the Holy Ghost both could and did err.[1424]He thinks that “the predictions of the prophets concerning the Kings and secular affairs often turned out wrong.”[1425]The inspiration of the Apostles (and Evangelists) in the New-Testament writings was merely a part of their general “office,” not a “special inspiration” in the natureof a “second power added to and independent of it.” “The predominant importance of the Apostles he traces back to their general inspiration in the sense described above.”[1426]
Catholic doctors before Luther’s day had showed themselves far more jealous of the sacredness of the Bible, as regards both the idea of inspiration and the equal value of all the books, and their every part. In spite of this Luther would have it that he had been the first to make the Bible respected.
One point deserving of consideration as an instance of Luther’s wantonness is his attitude towards the Canon of the Sacred Books.
How was he to prove that this or that book was to be included amongst the writings which constituted the Word of God, now that he had rejected the testimony of ecclesiastical tradition? According to the teaching of the ancient Church, it was tradition and the authority of the Church which vouched for the canonical character of the books of the Bible. Luther was confronted with this objection by Johann Eck at the Leipzig Disputation, who quoted the well-known words of St. Augustine, that he was compelled “to believe the Gospel only on the authority of the Catholic Church.”[1427]No longer recognising the authority of the Church, Luther met the objection by some strange evasions.[1428]When at last he saw that no other meaning could be read into the passage he threw it overboard and wrote: “If this meaning be not in St. Augustine’s words then it were better to repudiate his saying. For it is contrary to Scripture, to the Spirit and to all experience.”[1429]Even for the inspired value of the books included in the Canon he appealed in his arbitrary fashion, not to the infallible Church, but to the “inward testimony of the Spirit.”
He could hardly escape being thus thrown back on this inward, mystical attestation, seeing that, according to him, human reason is of little assistance in the matter. Here the “inner sense” has to come in and, just as under theillumination of the Spirit of God, it imparts certainty concerning the meaning of the Bible, so also it discerns the dignity and godly value of Scripture. For obvious reasons, here again, he fails to favour us with any “clearer explanation” of his theory. One thing, however, emerges clearly, viz. that the feeling of certainty regarding both the meaning and the contents is practically identical with the feeling that the writing in question is Divine; since the Spirit from on High teaches me the truth which lies in the sense of Scripture, so also it must teach me that it is Scripture; the apprehension of the sense and of the Divine character of the sacred pages is one and the same.[1430]
It is thus that Luther clothes in intangible, mystical language the vital question of religion here involved; at the Leipzig Disputation he had used terms no less elusive: Every book that really belongs to the Canon has authority and certainty “per se ipsum.”[1431]His mystical words were the outcome of deep-seated tendencies within him; Tauler’s language, which Luther had so skilfully made his own, was to assist him in concealing the obscurity and lack of logic inherent in his views.
In reality, nevertheless, like the Catholics, he accepted the Canon of Holy Scripture as handed down by antiquity; only that he granted to the subjective influence of the “testimony of the Spirit” a far-reaching and destructive force. He arbitrarily struck out of the Canon quite a number of authentic writings,[1432]which will be enumerated elsewhere[1433]together with his statements concerning them.His literary opponents had a right to represent to him that so “strange and arbitrary”[1434]a proceeding was merely a result of his theory that the sacred books must prove theircharacter and value to each man individually. At any rate, his attitude towards the Bible cannot be regarded as at all logical.[1435]
The second consequence of Luther’s biblical subjectivism which we have to consider lies outside him. It is the disconcerting divergence in interpretation which was the immediate result of his doctrine of “inward experience,” to correct which he had recourse to some curious remedies.
First of all we may append some further quotations from his writings to those already adduced. The significance of this remarkable side of the psychology of his doctrine is often not fully appreciated, because it seems scarcely believable that Luther should have ventured so far into the airy region of idealism. And yet, on the other hand, we have here the principal reason for describing the new doctrine as something interior, and as one doing better justice to our feelings and personality, which was Luther’s own claim and, after him, that of Protestants generally. The difficulty, however, is that almost every sentence of Luther’s regarding the part played by “inward assurance” in respect of the Bible, raises the question how that oneness of interpretation which he ever presupposes, is to escape shipwreck, even in the case of essential doctrines.
As early as Jan. 18, 1518, in his advice to Spalatin on the reading of Scripture, Luther had appealed to the mystic “influence,” telling him to distrust himself and to rely solely on the “influxus Spiritus”; this appeal he supports on his own inward experience.[1436]In this case his experience, however, mainly concerned the confirmation of his chief doctrine; for it was under an inspiration from on High that he had begun to feel his way to the new Evangel of Justification (see vol. iii., p. 110 ff.). But what was to be done when others, too, laid claim to a similar experience and inspiration?At a later date he described to his friends how he had learnt to understand Scripture “in maximis agonibus et tentationibus”; it was thus he had found in the Bible the Divinity of Christ and the articles on the Trinity; even now he was more certain ofthese truths by experience than by faith.[1437]Even the absolute predestination of the damned to hell, the entire absence of free-will for doing what is good and other extravagant opinions questioned even by his own followers, he declares he had learned directly from the Bible. In 1534 he places Scripture side by side with inward experience (or the Spirit), as the warrant—even in the case of others—for all knowledge of things Divine.This he likewise applies to the Apostles’ Creed.[1438]In 1537 he said in a sermon at Schmalkalden, “not only did all this [what is professed in the Creed] take place as we read in the Word of the Gospel, but the Holy Ghost also writes it inwardly in our heart.”[1439]He accepts the teaching of the Apostles’ Creed because he has convinced himself that it is based on Holy Writ.[1440]But how if others are not thus convinced? Were they too to be fastened to the dogma?R. Seeberg gives a good account of Luther’s views on the character of the dogmas of the ancient Church.[1441]“He treats the symbols of the ancient Church with great respect, particularly the Apostles’ Creed which contains all the chief articles of faith.[1442]But this does not mean that he believes in each creed or Council as such.” “In his work ‘Von den Conciliis’ with masterly historical criticism [?] he denies all binding authority even to the ancient Councils”; even the Council of the Apostles passed resolutions which were afterwards rescinded, and so did the Nicene Council. “Dogma is true,” so runs Luther’s teaching as given by Seeberg, “only so far as it agrees with Scripture; in itself it is of no authority. But the truth of Scripture is one thatis attested interiorly. Hence we can say that the Holy Ghost produces in us the assurance of the true doctrine [of the Apostles’ Creed].”[1443]—The page-heading where these words occur runs: “Luther’s independence of dogma.”A highly important statement on the interior instruction that goes on when we read Scripture is contained in Luther’s quite early work “De Captivitate Babylonica” (1520): The soul, he says there, referring to a misunderstood passage of St. Augustine’s on a well-known fact in the natural order, is so affected by the truth, that, thanks to it, it is able to judge rightly and surely of all things; it is forced to confess with unfailing certitude that this is the truth, just as reason affirms with unfailing certitude that three and seven make ten; the same is the case with all real Christians and their spiritual sense which, according to 1 Cor. ii. 15, judges all things and is judged of no man.[1444]—The last words of the Apostle refer, however, to the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, bestowed for a while by God on some few Christians in the early days of the Church, and cannot apply to the ordinary conditions of later times.Luther simply ignores the objection, that, if every man is judge, unutterable discord must ensue. The way in which he contrived so long to conceal this from himself is psychologically remarkable. For instance, in one of the principal passages where this objection should have been faced, viz. in his work against King Henry VIII, he glosses over the difficulty with the assertion that, even under the Pope, there was also no unity of doctrine; he then consoles himself with the words of Christ (John vi.), that all true Christians “shall be taught of God” and that every one that hath heard the Father cometh to the Saviour; the Spirit of God makes all to be one and effects an “idem docere, idem confiteri, idem sequi.”—We can only wonder at the idealism that could expect such results in a world inhabited by human beings.—In the end, however, since this was scarcely to be looked for, “external unity would be sufficiently safeguarded by the one Baptism and one Supper,” whereby all “testify to the oneness of their faith and spirit.”[1445]At any rate, he is confident that the true explanation (viz. his own) of the truths of salvation will gain the upper hand. For the Church cannot perish.In point of fact Luther really fancies himself justified in appealing to this entirely new meaning put by him on the promise to the Church that she shall never perish; she is indestructible because true believers will always be there to maintain Luther’s interpretation of revelation and of the imputed righteousness of Christ, and because any general falling away from the truth isnot to be thought of. Even though very many, indeed the greater number, deny the true Scripture teaching, still, many others remain, as, of yore, the seven thousand when Israel fell away from God. According to him even these may be held captive all their life in some error concerning the faith and reach the right road and faith in the grace of Christ only on their death-bed, according to the promise in John x. 28.[1446]In view of the darkness prevalent in former ages this appears to him to suffice in order to enable us to say that the Church has not really perished,[1447]and to save the cause of private enlightenment on the Bible. For this must stand fast, viz. that the Spirit of God most surely bears witness to the contents of the Divine Word in the hearts of the hearers and readers. “Luther,” says a Protestant exponent of his theology, “laid this down time after time.” “His statements on this subject cannot fail, however, to raise certain questions in our minds.”[1448]They gave rise to questions in his own day, and to something more than mere questions. The bitter theological dissensions already hinted at were the result. The inevitable divergency in the interpretation of the Bible was seen everywhere, and a hundred different opinions, some based on the inward assurance given by the “Spirit of God,” some on the reflections of reason, took the field. We know to what an extent Luther had to suffer from the discord born of his principle, not merely from such comparatively unimportant persons as Jacob Schenk[1449]and his “disgracefully arrogant” colleague, Johann Agricola, not merely from the fanatics and Anabaptists who found in the Bible a different teaching on Baptism, divine worship and morality, or from the Zwinglians with their divergent biblical interpretation of the Eucharist, but even, so to speak, in his own family, from Melanchthon, who was rash enough to incline to the Swiss reformed doctrines and to fight shy of the stricter Lutheranism. “The presumption,” Luther declares, strangely enough, “is really unbearable, that people should rise up against the authority of the Church,” despise the teaching of the best and ablest, and only worship their own views in Holy Scripture. “The name of the Church should be held in high honour.”[1450]He forbore, however, to specify which Church he meant, and moreover he had set himself above every Church. “All other forms of arrogance,” he declares, “can be endured and allow of improvement, as in the healing art, in philosophy, in poetry, in mechanics and in the case of the young.... But that shocking ‘arrogantia theologiæ’ is the source of all evil, and a consuming fire.”[1451]So little did he succeed in repressing “theological arrogance,” but rather, by his action, threw open the doors to it, that in1525 he was forced to lament:[1452]“There are as many sects and beliefs as there are heads. This fellow will have nothing to do with baptism, another denies the Sacrament, a third believes that there is another world between this and the Last Day. Some teach that Christ is not God, some say this, some that.... There is now no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it must be the whisper of the Holy Ghost and he himself a prophet.... There is no one who does not wish to be cleverer than Luther; they all want to try their steel on me.... They speak like madmen; I have during the year to listen to many such wretched folk. In no other way can the devil come so close to me, that I must admit. Formerly the world was full of noisy, disembodied spirits giving themselves out to be the souls of men; now it is full of uproarious spirits with bodies, who all declare that they are real angels.”[1453]He has this crumb of comfort: The world is the devil’s playground; and uproars there must be.[1454]“This is all due,” he says finally, truly and aptly, “to their bringing their conceit with them to the study of Scripture, which has to submit to being judged, moulded and led by their head and reason,”[1455]—surely a bitter punishment for throwing over the divinely appointed authority of the Church, which decides on the sense of the Bible.“By thus making individual experience the test,” remarks a Protestant theologian, “the door seemed opened wide to neverending dissension.... Luther did not succeed in carrying his theory to its right conclusion. Indeed we even find him formulating thoughts which seem to tend back to the old, mechanical authority of Scripture.” According to this writer, Luther’s conception of Scripture presented certain “imperfections” which, “even in principle, were practically at variance with it; these, however, disappeared as the fanatic movement taught Luther their disastrous effects.” The same writer asks finally: “But was it really a question merely of ‘imperfections’ which did not endanger the very essence of his views?”[1456]“What did Luther set up, instead of tradition, as a principle of interpretation?” another Protestant theologian recently queried. He answers: “In theory, that Scripture interprets itself; in practice however, as it doesn’t, his own theology.”[1457]
As early as Jan. 18, 1518, in his advice to Spalatin on the reading of Scripture, Luther had appealed to the mystic “influence,” telling him to distrust himself and to rely solely on the “influxus Spiritus”; this appeal he supports on his own inward experience.[1436]In this case his experience, however, mainly concerned the confirmation of his chief doctrine; for it was under an inspiration from on High that he had begun to feel his way to the new Evangel of Justification (see vol. iii., p. 110 ff.). But what was to be done when others, too, laid claim to a similar experience and inspiration?
At a later date he described to his friends how he had learnt to understand Scripture “in maximis agonibus et tentationibus”; it was thus he had found in the Bible the Divinity of Christ and the articles on the Trinity; even now he was more certain ofthese truths by experience than by faith.[1437]Even the absolute predestination of the damned to hell, the entire absence of free-will for doing what is good and other extravagant opinions questioned even by his own followers, he declares he had learned directly from the Bible. In 1534 he places Scripture side by side with inward experience (or the Spirit), as the warrant—even in the case of others—for all knowledge of things Divine.
This he likewise applies to the Apostles’ Creed.[1438]In 1537 he said in a sermon at Schmalkalden, “not only did all this [what is professed in the Creed] take place as we read in the Word of the Gospel, but the Holy Ghost also writes it inwardly in our heart.”[1439]He accepts the teaching of the Apostles’ Creed because he has convinced himself that it is based on Holy Writ.[1440]But how if others are not thus convinced? Were they too to be fastened to the dogma?
R. Seeberg gives a good account of Luther’s views on the character of the dogmas of the ancient Church.[1441]“He treats the symbols of the ancient Church with great respect, particularly the Apostles’ Creed which contains all the chief articles of faith.[1442]But this does not mean that he believes in each creed or Council as such.” “In his work ‘Von den Conciliis’ with masterly historical criticism [?] he denies all binding authority even to the ancient Councils”; even the Council of the Apostles passed resolutions which were afterwards rescinded, and so did the Nicene Council. “Dogma is true,” so runs Luther’s teaching as given by Seeberg, “only so far as it agrees with Scripture; in itself it is of no authority. But the truth of Scripture is one thatis attested interiorly. Hence we can say that the Holy Ghost produces in us the assurance of the true doctrine [of the Apostles’ Creed].”[1443]—The page-heading where these words occur runs: “Luther’s independence of dogma.”
A highly important statement on the interior instruction that goes on when we read Scripture is contained in Luther’s quite early work “De Captivitate Babylonica” (1520): The soul, he says there, referring to a misunderstood passage of St. Augustine’s on a well-known fact in the natural order, is so affected by the truth, that, thanks to it, it is able to judge rightly and surely of all things; it is forced to confess with unfailing certitude that this is the truth, just as reason affirms with unfailing certitude that three and seven make ten; the same is the case with all real Christians and their spiritual sense which, according to 1 Cor. ii. 15, judges all things and is judged of no man.[1444]—The last words of the Apostle refer, however, to the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, bestowed for a while by God on some few Christians in the early days of the Church, and cannot apply to the ordinary conditions of later times.
Luther simply ignores the objection, that, if every man is judge, unutterable discord must ensue. The way in which he contrived so long to conceal this from himself is psychologically remarkable. For instance, in one of the principal passages where this objection should have been faced, viz. in his work against King Henry VIII, he glosses over the difficulty with the assertion that, even under the Pope, there was also no unity of doctrine; he then consoles himself with the words of Christ (John vi.), that all true Christians “shall be taught of God” and that every one that hath heard the Father cometh to the Saviour; the Spirit of God makes all to be one and effects an “idem docere, idem confiteri, idem sequi.”—We can only wonder at the idealism that could expect such results in a world inhabited by human beings.—In the end, however, since this was scarcely to be looked for, “external unity would be sufficiently safeguarded by the one Baptism and one Supper,” whereby all “testify to the oneness of their faith and spirit.”[1445]At any rate, he is confident that the true explanation (viz. his own) of the truths of salvation will gain the upper hand. For the Church cannot perish.
In point of fact Luther really fancies himself justified in appealing to this entirely new meaning put by him on the promise to the Church that she shall never perish; she is indestructible because true believers will always be there to maintain Luther’s interpretation of revelation and of the imputed righteousness of Christ, and because any general falling away from the truth isnot to be thought of. Even though very many, indeed the greater number, deny the true Scripture teaching, still, many others remain, as, of yore, the seven thousand when Israel fell away from God. According to him even these may be held captive all their life in some error concerning the faith and reach the right road and faith in the grace of Christ only on their death-bed, according to the promise in John x. 28.[1446]In view of the darkness prevalent in former ages this appears to him to suffice in order to enable us to say that the Church has not really perished,[1447]and to save the cause of private enlightenment on the Bible. For this must stand fast, viz. that the Spirit of God most surely bears witness to the contents of the Divine Word in the hearts of the hearers and readers. “Luther,” says a Protestant exponent of his theology, “laid this down time after time.” “His statements on this subject cannot fail, however, to raise certain questions in our minds.”[1448]
They gave rise to questions in his own day, and to something more than mere questions. The bitter theological dissensions already hinted at were the result. The inevitable divergency in the interpretation of the Bible was seen everywhere, and a hundred different opinions, some based on the inward assurance given by the “Spirit of God,” some on the reflections of reason, took the field. We know to what an extent Luther had to suffer from the discord born of his principle, not merely from such comparatively unimportant persons as Jacob Schenk[1449]and his “disgracefully arrogant” colleague, Johann Agricola, not merely from the fanatics and Anabaptists who found in the Bible a different teaching on Baptism, divine worship and morality, or from the Zwinglians with their divergent biblical interpretation of the Eucharist, but even, so to speak, in his own family, from Melanchthon, who was rash enough to incline to the Swiss reformed doctrines and to fight shy of the stricter Lutheranism. “The presumption,” Luther declares, strangely enough, “is really unbearable, that people should rise up against the authority of the Church,” despise the teaching of the best and ablest, and only worship their own views in Holy Scripture. “The name of the Church should be held in high honour.”[1450]He forbore, however, to specify which Church he meant, and moreover he had set himself above every Church. “All other forms of arrogance,” he declares, “can be endured and allow of improvement, as in the healing art, in philosophy, in poetry, in mechanics and in the case of the young.... But that shocking ‘arrogantia theologiæ’ is the source of all evil, and a consuming fire.”[1451]
So little did he succeed in repressing “theological arrogance,” but rather, by his action, threw open the doors to it, that in1525 he was forced to lament:[1452]“There are as many sects and beliefs as there are heads. This fellow will have nothing to do with baptism, another denies the Sacrament, a third believes that there is another world between this and the Last Day. Some teach that Christ is not God, some say this, some that.... There is now no rustic so rude but that, if he dreams or fancies anything, it must be the whisper of the Holy Ghost and he himself a prophet.... There is no one who does not wish to be cleverer than Luther; they all want to try their steel on me.... They speak like madmen; I have during the year to listen to many such wretched folk. In no other way can the devil come so close to me, that I must admit. Formerly the world was full of noisy, disembodied spirits giving themselves out to be the souls of men; now it is full of uproarious spirits with bodies, who all declare that they are real angels.”[1453]
He has this crumb of comfort: The world is the devil’s playground; and uproars there must be.[1454]
“This is all due,” he says finally, truly and aptly, “to their bringing their conceit with them to the study of Scripture, which has to submit to being judged, moulded and led by their head and reason,”[1455]—surely a bitter punishment for throwing over the divinely appointed authority of the Church, which decides on the sense of the Bible.
“By thus making individual experience the test,” remarks a Protestant theologian, “the door seemed opened wide to neverending dissension.... Luther did not succeed in carrying his theory to its right conclusion. Indeed we even find him formulating thoughts which seem to tend back to the old, mechanical authority of Scripture.” According to this writer, Luther’s conception of Scripture presented certain “imperfections” which, “even in principle, were practically at variance with it; these, however, disappeared as the fanatic movement taught Luther their disastrous effects.” The same writer asks finally: “But was it really a question merely of ‘imperfections’ which did not endanger the very essence of his views?”[1456]
“What did Luther set up, instead of tradition, as a principle of interpretation?” another Protestant theologian recently queried. He answers: “In theory, that Scripture interprets itself; in practice however, as it doesn’t, his own theology.”[1457]
Since the harmony of the “Spirit,” which Luther had so confidently looked for, failed to show itself in people’s mindsand not a glimmer of hope of any future agreement was visible, he found it necessary to insist far more strongly than heretofore on the outward Word;[1458]this was to check unwelcome inward revelations, to put everything in order and to be a bulwark against unusual views. “Now that the Apostles have preached the Word,” so runs one of his most interesting pronouncements on this subject,[1459]“and left us their writings, so that there is nothing more to reveal than what they have written, there is no need of any special new revelation, or miracles. This we know from the writings of the Apostles.” It would be a different matter if all were filled with the Holy Ghost and His gifts; “were this so it would be an easy thing to preach and to govern and all would go on quite smoothly and well, as indeed it ought. But unfortunately this is not the case, and those who have the Holy Ghost and a right understanding are not so common,” but “there are plenty who fancy they have mastered Scripture and have the Holy Ghost without measure.” These want to be thought “far more deeply and profoundly initiated” than Luther himself, and “much more learned than we are.” This he is not unwilling to allow, but on one thing he must insist, viz. on the “Word!” “This old and tried doctrine of the Apostles” he has “again brought to light,” having found “all this darkened by the Pope and his human teaching”; “by the Grace of God we have brought it to light once more”; “it is the very same as the Apostles first taught. But it has not been brought to light again without a revelation of the Holy Ghost.... He had to illumine our minds that Holy Scripture might be rightly viewed and understood”; hence “no other word or revelation is to be expected” “contrary to this doctrine, even were an angel from heaven visibly to bring” a new doctrine. Everyone can see “that God is tempting the people, particularly in these latter days of which it is said, that the devil shall rule mightily over Christendom by means of Antichrist.”—Here, consequently, his teaching is put on a level with the “outward Word.”
The outward Word, according to other passages where Luther is rather more reticent concerning the “revelation” he had received, was that plain and unassailable Bibleteaching on which all “Spirits” must agree without any danger of divergency. This Word he now identifies with preaching. Preaching, however, is part of the office, and both office and preaching were controlled by Luther; indeed the office had been instituted chiefly by him and his sovereign. Hence, in effect, the outward Word is still Luther’s word.
“Faith,” we read of the outward Word, seemingly contradicting the freedom Luther had formerly proclaimed, “comes of hearing, i.e. from preaching, or from the outward Word. This is the order established by God and He will not derogate from it. Hence contempt for the outward Word and for Scripture is rank blasphemy, which the secular authorities are bound to punish, according to the second Commandment which enjoins the punishment of blasphemy.” This occurs in the booklet officially circulated in 1536 among the pastors of the Saxon Electorate.[1460]A Protestant researcher who has recently made a special study of the “Inquisition” in the Saxon Electorate has the following remark concerning this statement, which is by no means without a parallel in Luther’s works: “Thus even contempt for Scripture—here meaning contempt for Luther’s interpretation of the Bible text—was already regarded as ‘rank blasphemy’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish. To such a pass had Evangelical freedom already come.”[1461]
In order to uphold his own reading of the Bible against others which differed from his, Luther incidentally appealed with the utmost vigour, as the above examples show, to the Church, to tradition and to the Fathers, whose authority he had nevertheless solemnly renounced.