CHAPTER XXXIVEND OF LUTHER’S LITERARY LABOURS. THE WHOLE REVIEWED1. Towards a Christianity void of Dogma. Protestant OpinionsWith the concluding years of Luther’s life we reach a point whence may be undertaken with advantage a survey of the character of his theological and literary labours from several sides from which we have not as yet had opportunity to approach them.We naturally turn first of all to the religious content of his literary life-work; here it may be advisable to hear what Protestant theologians have to say.These theologians will tell us how many of the olden dogmas Luther, explicitly or implicitly, relinquishes, and whether and how he undermines the very idea of faith as known to Christians of old; we shall also have to consider the Protestant strictures which assert that the doctrines, which he either retained or set up for the first time, were fraught with so much that was illogical that they may be said to bear within them the seeds of dissolution. The conclusions reached will show whether or not he was actually heading for a “Christianity void of dogma.”(a) Protestant Critics on Luther’s Abandonment of Individual Christian Dogmas and of the Olden Conception of FaithIt is hard to deny that a certain amount of truth lurks in the contention of a certain modern school of Protestant thought which insists that Luther practically made an end of “the old, dogmatic Christianity.”[1705]Luther did not, of course, look so far ahead, nor were the consequences of hisown action at all clear to him, and when Catholics took pains to point them out he was not slow to repel them with the utmost indignation. Still, logic is inexorable in demanding its rights.[1706]Here we are happily able to state the case almost entirely in the words of Protestant theologians of the modern school, such as, for instance, Adolf Harnack.“The acknowledged authorities on dogma,” says Harnack, speaking of Luther’s attitude towards the pillars of the Church’s teaching, “have been torn down, and thereby dogma itself,quadogma, i.e. the unfailing teaching institution ordained by the Holy Ghost, has been done away with.... The revision has been extended even beyond the second century of the Church’s history and up to its very beginnings, and has everywhere been carried out radically. An end has been made of that history of dogma which started in the age of the apologists, nay, of the Apostolic Fathers.”[1707]Harnack therefore, in his detailed work on the history of dogma, refrained from dealing with any theologians later than Luther, instead of following the usual course among Protestant authors, and giving an account of the development of doctrine in later Protestantism and among Luther’s followers. He pertinently asked: “How can there be in Protestantism any history of dogma after Luther’s Prefaces to the New Testament and his great reformation writings?”[1708]Addressing the representatives of Lutheran “dogmatic theology,” Harnack says: “Luther’s reformation created a new point of departure for the development of the Christian belief in the Word of God”; “it set aside every form of infallibility that might have offered an outward assurance for one’s belief, the Church’s infallible organisation and infallible tradition and the infallible code of Scripture. Thus an end was made of the conception of Christianity from which dogma had sprung, viz. the Christian faith, the sure knowledge of the final causes of all things and thus of the whole Divine scheme of salvation. Christian faith has now become merely a firm assurance of receiving forgiveness ofsins from God, as the Father of Jesus Christ, and of living under Him in His kingdom. This at the same time spells the ruin of any infallible dogma; for how can any dogma be unchangeable and authentic, thought out and formulated as it was by finite men, living in sin, and devoid of every outward guarantee?” If, nevertheless, Luther accepted and maintained certain aspects of ancient dogma, he did so, not as establishing “side by side with faith a law of faith based on particular outward promises,” but rather “from his unshaken conviction that much of this dogma corresponded exactly with the Gospel or Word of God, and that this correspondence was self-evident”; “as dogma, it did not constitute a rule.”[1709]In some respects, for instance in this very matter, what Harnack says stands in need of correction. He is at times too fond of making out his own Christianity without dogma to have been also that of Luther. We just heard him say that the remnant of olden dogma which Luther preserved, “as dogma, did not constitute a rule.” He would, however, have been nearer the truth in saying that,logically, as dogma,it ought not to haveconstituted a rule. There can be no doubt that Luther—as will be shown below—insists, though in contradiction with other “basic ideas and with the spirit of his reformation,” that the Christian verities which he leaves standing must be embraced as revealed articles of the Christian belief and indubitable truths of faith. Even where he does not insist upon this he still takes it for granted that faith in the whole of revelation (“fides historica”) precedes that faith which consists in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Even Harnack has to admit, that, with Luther, “dogmaquadogma, remains to some extent in force” owing “to the logic of things.”[1710]Luther, according to another passage in Harnack, “under the pressure of circumstances” and the storms raised against him by the fanatics and the Anabaptists, was drawn into a dogmatising current of which the issue was the Augsburg Confession. To the question: Did Luther’s reformation do away with the ancient dogma? we must reply, that, at least, it “demolished its foundation—as indeed our Catholic opponents rightly object against us—that it was a mighty principle rather than a new doctrine, and that its subsequent history through the age of Orthodoxy, Pietism and Rationalism down to the present day is less a falling away than a natural development.”[1711]Even before Harnack’s day this was virtually the standpoint of some of the best Protestant judges. It had been perceived long before that the purely Evangelical theory led much further from the ancient dogmas than Protestant orthodoxy was disposed to admit. Even according to so conservative a theologian as Johann August Neander, “the spirit of the Reformation did not at once attain to a clear consciousness of itself”; Luther indeed, even here, “had reached the consciousness of the pure Evangelical belief, thanks to the principle of a faith which is a free outgrowth of the Divine power within; yet, owing to the controversies on the Supper and to the Peasant War, this clear consciousness again became eclipsed.”[1712]Neander finds the best statement of Luther’s new ideas in those works which are most radically opposed to the traditional teaching of the Church of old. Albert Ritschl, the well-known leader of the free Protestant school, likewise declared: “The Lutheran theory of life has not remained true to itself; it has been hemmed in and dulled by the stress laid on objective dogma. The pure doctrine as taught in the schools is in reality merely a passing, not the final, form of Protestantism.”[1713]All these critics, Harnack in particular, though blaming Luther for not drawing the right conclusions, are nevertheless at one in their outspoken admiration of the powerful thinker and brave spokesman of the new belief, and particularly of those theses of his which approach most closely their own ideal of an unfettered theology. In their opinion Luther is to remain the hero of yore, though his garb and attitude will no longer be the same as those to which Protestantism had previously been accustomed. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention this because otherwise the strong things some of the critics say might, taken together, give the impression that their main aim and endeavour was to decry Luther. Probably enough Harnack and his friends failed to foresee how unfavourable a view their censures, taken in the lump, might produce of Luther’s person and work. Harnack, however, in one passage, pays a strange tribute to Luther’s conservatism, one, no doubt, which would appeal to the Reformer’s more old-fashioned friends. He points out, that, “we owe it to him, that, even to the presentday, these formularies [the olden creeds] are still in Protestantism a living power”; nay, such is his ignorance of the state of things in Catholicism, that he is convinced that it is only in Protestantism that these creeds still “live,” whereas, “in the Roman Church, they are but a dead and obsolete heirloom”; Luther, according to one bold dictum of Harnack’s, was really “the restorer of ancient dogma.”[1714]Among the olden doctrines thrown over by Luther his Protestant critics rightly instance the Canon of Scripture and the right of the Church to interpret the Bible. They corroborate strikingly from Luther’s writings the results which we reached above,[1715]a circumstance which may surprise Protestant readers.If, according to Luther, the doctrine of the oldest confessions of faith are only to be retained because they can be directly proved from the Bible, then the Bible itself with all its books, so such Protestants argue, must stand firm and inviolable. Now, awkwardly enough, Luther himself saps the authority of the Canon.“If the attitude is justified which Luther takes up in his famous Prefaces to the various books of the New Testament,” says Harnack (cp. prefaces to the Epistle of James, to the Epistle to the Hebrews and to the Apocalypse), “then an end is made of the infallible Canon of Scripture. It is here of the utmost importance historically, though in itself a matter of indifference, that we find Luther, especially after the controversy on the Supper, making statements to the effect that every letter of Scripture is fundamental to the Christian faith; the flagrant contradiction involved in the assertion that a thing holds and at the same time does not hold can only be solved by saying that it does not. The same follows from Luther’s views on faith, for, according to him, this is produced by the Holy Ghost through thepreachingof the Word of God. To-day too, all Protestants are agreed that historical criticism of Scripture is not unevangelical, though this unanimity of opinion extends only as far as the ‘principle,’ and many refuse to carry it out in practice.”[1716]—“Luther,at the very time when he was waging so brave a war against the authority of the Councils, also opposed Scriptural infallibility, and, indeed, how could he do otherwise?... There can be no doubt that Luther’s attitude towards the New Testament, as we find it set forth in the Prefaces and in one or two other passages, is the correct one, i.e. that which really tallies with his belief.”[1717]As F. Loofs points out, Luther leaves us without any outward guarantee for the authority of the Canon of the Bible.[1718]Loofs quotes, for instance, Luther’s saying: “Hence God must tell you within your heart: This is God’s Word.”[1719]“Luther’s criticism,” the same writer says, “did not spare even those books which he allowed to be truly prophetic or apostolic.... He frankly admitted the human element in Scripture.”[1720]If Luther’s fundamental opposition to the faith once delivered is already apparent from his criticism of the Bible, still more is this the case when we come to look into the freedom he allowed in the interpretation of the sense of the Bible.As Harnack puts it: In Luther’s view “the Church is based on something which every Christian, no matter how humble, can see and test, viz. on the Word of God as apprehended by pure reason. This, of course, was tantamount to a claim to ascertain the true verbal sense of Holy Scripture.... But Luther never foresaw how far this rule would lead.”[1721]Luther himself often put his principle to such arbitrary usage as to prove a warning to others (above, vol. iv., pp. 406 f., 418 f.), and to exclude the possibility of any settled dogma. “The flagrant contradiction,” says Harnack, “into which he was led by criticising the Bible whilst all the time holding the idea he did about its inspiration, he contrived to explain away by reading the Evangel itself into texts which presented a difficulty.”[1722]“In Holy Scripture, the infallible authority, only that was to be found, which on other grounds was already established as the true doctrine.”[1723]Hence in the matter of the Bible, so Harnack has it, “Criticism, in order to be according to Luther’s mind, would have to go against him in the interests of faith.”[1724]Luther’s abandonment of the Church’s standpoint with regard to the Bible is closely bound up with his renunciation of the Church’s teaching office, of the hierarchy and of all respect for tradition. This meant, as modern Protestant critics admit, the destruction of the whole theory of tradition and, in fact, of all ecclesiastical authority, though, on Harnack’s own admission, ancient Church writers, especially “subsequent to Irenæus,” rely much on such authority.“Luther was antagonistic to all these authorities,” says the same scholar, “to the infallibility of Church, Pope, and Councils, to every constitutional right of the Church to pronounce on the truth and, on principle, to all the doctrinal formularies of the past.”[1725]His later writing: “Von den Conciliis,” etc. (1539) proves this.Nor have we yet exhausted the list of grievances against Luther. Not only did he forsake the ancient teaching on justification, merit and works, but he even declared war on human free will, though belief in its existence is a truth of natural philosophy and though the Church had ever held it in the highest esteem. He put aside in its primitive form the basic dogma of original sin. The doctrine of actual sin and its distinction into mortal and venial found no favour with him,[1726]nor did the related doctrine of the existence of a purgatory. He completely destroyed the teaching of antiquity on Grace by his new discovery of the law of absolute necessity which rules all things, not excluding even the actions of the human mind and heart; according to Luther “Grace is the fatherly disposition of God towards us, Who for Christ’s sake calls sinful man to Him, accepts him and wins his confidence through faith in theChristus passus.”[1727]This fatherly disposition of God no man can ever in the least resist if destined by the Divine Omnipotence to receive the faith; those, however, who are not numbered among the elect, know not any such invitation, or rather constraint, for the secret Will of God unfailingly dooms them to damnation.[1728]After giving the above definition of Grace, Harnack asks, “What room then is there for a Sacrament?” For Catholics the Sacraments were pillars of the Church’s life and of her teaching. With them Luther was perfectly willing to dispense.“He not only strove,” says Harnack, “to break away completely from the ancient or mediaeval conception, but he actually brought it to nought by his doctrine of the one sacrament, which is the Word.”[1729]The Sacraments being to him a “peculiar form of the saving Word of God, viz. of the realisation of the‘promissio Dei,’ he reduces them to two (three), or, indeed, to one, viz. the Word of God. He showed that even the most enlightened Fathers had had but a dim notion of this so important matter.... Having practically laid the whole system in ruins, he rests again on the one, simple grand act, which is constantly being repeated in every Christian’s life, viz. the awakening of faith thanks to the ‘gratia.’”[1730]Luther turned his back not only on the ancient teaching concerning the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also on the whole outward worship of the Church.“His attitude towards Divine Worship in the Church was a radical one. Here too he destroyed not only the mediaeval tradition, but even that of the ancient Church such as we may trace it back right into the 2nd century. The public worship of the Church, to him, is nothing more than the worship of individuals united in time and place.... The priest and the sacrifice in the usual sense of the terms are done away with, and all worth is denied to those specific ecclesiastical actions which were formerly held to be both wholesome and necessary.” “The ‘divine service,’ particularly that of the Word, in which he nevertheless wished the congregation to take part,” “can have no other motive ... than to promote individual worship, for God deals with us only through the Word which is not tied up with any particular persons.”[1731]Hence public worship does no more than “edify faith through the preaching of the Divine Word and the common offering of prayer and praise.”[1732]Of vast importance in this change and even more far-reaching in its consequences was Luther’s abrogation of the ancient conception of the Church. As bound up with it, he also harshly set aside the invocation of Saints, that vital element of the olden worship.The ancient teaching on perfection had to make room for new theories, for it seemed to him to lay too much stress on man’s own works.[1733]And yet “we cannot but admit,” says Harnack, “that Luther’s efforts to create a new ideal of life were not characterised by any clear discrimination.” The reason may be “that the times were not yet ripe for it.” In those days of public stress “religion’s chief business was to bring consolation amidst the miseries of life. To heal the soul oppressed with sorrow for sin and to alleviate the evils in the world,” this was what was mainly aimed at.[1734]This, however, was scarcely to do justice to religion and to its sublime tasks.According to Luther the Church had, even from theoutset, given to human reason a larger sphere than was due to it. Even at the cradle of the Church Christian philosophy had taken her stand, and, with her torch of reason, had pointed out the road to faith. Luther, however, conceived “a distrust of reason itself not to be explained simply by his distrust of it as the main prop of self-righteousness. He grew hardened in his bold defiance of reason, surrendering himself to that suspicious Catholic [!] way of looking at things, which reveres the wisdom of God and sees the stamp of the divine truth in paradox and in thecontradictio in adiecto....No one, however, can despise reason and learning with impunity, and Luther himself was punished by the darkening of his own views on faith.”[1735]“That is a dangerous kind of theologism which fancies that the knowledge which comes from worldly education may simply be ignored. The reformers were too ready to cut themselves adrift from worldly culture where the latter seemed to trench on the domain of faith.... The Reformation buried beneath a mass of hatred and injustice much of the valuable learning the age possessed and thereby made itself responsible for the later crises of Protestantism.”[1736]“Luther,” says Loofs, “by laying stress on that antithesis between human reason and the divine ‘foolishness,’ which was so intimately bound up with his own deepest and most fundamental views (and who ever thundered more loudly against the ‘Frau Hulda’ of natural reason, that ‘devil’s whore’ and ‘arch enemy of the faith’ than did Luther?), imposed on his following the old Catholic idea (which he himself had overthrown) of the verbal inspiration of the Canon, and did so so thoroughly that after-ages were unable to shake themselves free of it. Nay, by rightly proscribing any allegorical exegesis, he made the burden of this old Catholic heritage even more oppressive in Protestantism than it had ever been before.”[1737]Depreciation of reason, had, in Luther’s case, a bad effect on his whole teaching concerning God. As far back as theology went this had formed the centre of religiousdiscussion. The Fathers had by preference dwelt on questions which concerned God, His Oneness and Triunity, His attributes and His relations with the world and man. Luther, according to the admission of Protestant critics, introduced here certain arbitrary and very unfair limitations. It was his wish, as he frequently declares, that God should be meditated on only as Jesus Christ our Consoler and our Saviour. He has a strange and seemingly instinctive aversion to concerning himself with the Almighty Being, in Whom nevertheless “we live, and move, and are.” TheDeus absconditusappals him. According to him it is impossible to “treat of Predestination without being crucified and suffering the pains of death, or without loss to ourselves and secret anger against God.” Predestination “determines in the first instance who is and who is not to believe, who is and who is not to be saved from sin”; of this Luther cannot speak without at the same time solemnly emphasising that it is only thanks to it that we can “hope to conquer sin,” as otherwise the devil, “as we know, would soon overpower us all.” Yet we ought not, like the “reprobate spirits,” “explore the abyss of Divine Providence,” because otherwise we shall either “be brought to despair or kick over the traces.” The old Adam must “have been put to death before being able to endure this and to drink the strong wine,” i.e. a man must first have learnt, like Luther, “to stake all in God,” and “defy” all things in Him.[1738]Thus it comes about that Luther ladles out reproaches indiscriminately to the philosophers who occupy themselves with God as known to reason, and the theologians who pursue the supernatural knowledge of God.“Often enough did Luther deride as a product of blind reason,” writes Harnack, “that knowledge of God, which instead of thinking of God in Christ alone, ‘sophistically’ enumerates His attributes and speculates on His will, viz. the whole ‘metaphysical’ doctrine of God.”[1739]If “God be considered apart from Christ,” then He appears, according to Luther, merely as the “terrible Judge from Whom we can await nothing but punishment.”[1740]According to Luther, “there is, outside of Christ, no certainty concerning the Will of God”; for the secret Will of God threatens us with the dreadful sword of predestination to hell. HenceHarnack even goes so far as to say, that what is presupposed in Luther’s theories on the assurance of salvation is a belief “not in Godin se—for Godin sebelongs to the Aristotelians—but rather in the God Whom the Holy Ghost reveals to the soul as manifest in Christ.”[1741]“Godin se” and “Godquoad nos” are two different things. By establishing such a distinction Luther “sets himself at variance with all theology as it had existed since the days of the apologists; here his aversion to the olden dogma is even more evident than in his reprobation of certain of its parts. Again and again, whenever the occasion arises, he repudiates what the olden theology had said of God and Christ, of the Will and Attributes of God, of the two natures in Christ, etc., with the remark: ‘This He hasin se. Thereupon he immediately proceeds, with the words ‘But,quoad nos,’ to introduce his own new view, which to him is the main thing, if not the whole.”[1742]Such doctrines as have nothing to do with the justification of the sinner or the “confession of faith, as a personal experience,” recede so much into the background that Harnack feels justified in saying: “Though, under the formulas ‘Godin se,’ ‘the Hidden God,’ ‘God’s Hidden Will,’ Luther left these old ideas standing, still they had practically ceased to exist as doctrines of faith. Of this there can be no doubt. That he did not throw them over completely is due to two facts, on the one hand to his impression that he found them in the Bible, and, on the other, to his never having systematically thought out the problems involved.”[1743]It must, however, be noted, that, as will be seen more clearly when we come to discuss Luther’s idea of faith, he was by no means ready to allow that such dogmas were not real “articles of faith.” This may be what leads Harnack here to say that they had “practically” ceased to exist as “actual articles of faith.”In connection with the dogmas touching God it must not be lost to sight that Luther, by his doctrine of predestination, of man’s unfreedom and of the inevitability of all that occurs, really endangered, if indeed he did not actually destroy, the Church’s olden conception of God as the Highest and Most Perfect Being. The cruel God of absolute predestination to hell is no longer a God worthy of the name.“Nor can it be gainsaid,” writes the Protestant theologian Arnold Taube, “that, given Luther’s idea of God and His Omnipotence,the negation of man’s free-will is a simple and natural consequence.” “Luther’s conception of God is at variance with the ethical personality of the God of Christianity, just as Schleiermacher’s whole pantheistic scheme of theology is useless in enabling us to grasp a religion so eminently moral as Christianity.” “Schleiermacher was quite logical in carrying to their consequences Luther’s ideas on predestination and free-will.” Luther’s idea of God, according to Taube, is simply “determinist.” “The negation [of free-will] can be escaped only by a theory of the Divine Omnipotence which regards God as controlling His own Power and thus as practically exercising restraint over Himself and limiting His Power. This, however, was not Luther’s theory, who takes the Divine Omnipotence to signify that which works all in all.”[1744]To an outsider it sounds strange to hear Harnack and others affirm that Luther swept away all the positive doctrines of antiquity; no less strange is it to see Luther, the furious opponent of Catholicism, being made by men who call themselves his followers into an advocate of the Rationalism which they themselves profess. In the interests of Rationalism these theologians take as their watchword Wilhelm Herrmann’s dictum of Luther’s doctrine of penance: “We must strive to push ahead with what Luther began and left undone.” The least they demand is, that, as Ferdinand Kattenbusch puts it, Protestant theology should hold fast to the “earlier” Luther, to those days “when Luther’s genius was as yet unbroken.” In this wise they contrive to wrench away Luther from the foundations of that faith to which he still wished to remain true and which the “orthodox” at a later date claimed him to have ever retained.[1745]It is well known how, following in Ritschl’s footsteps, Harnack’s ability, learning, and outspokenness have proved extremely awkward to the more conservative theologians. He “carried on Luther’s interrupted work,” declares Herrmann, and set up again in all its purity Luther’s early conception of faith against a theology which had been stifled in orthodoxy and pietism.[1746]We must, however, in the light of Protestant criticism, examine a little more closely Luther’s attitude towards the ancient Christian conception of faith.Starting first of all from faith subjectively considered and examining Luther’s doctrine of the personal appropriation of the content of faith, we immediately find ourselves brought face to face with his doctrine of justification, for he has scarcely anything to say of the faith of the individual save in so far as this faith operates justification. Here all the other truths to be believed tend to disappear from his purview and one only truth remains, viz.: Through Christ I am pleasing to God. It is no wonder if many of his followers, even to the present day, see in this doctrine of the certainty of having in Christ a Gracious God, the only dogma handed down by Luther. Does he not, for instance, in one of the most widely read passages of his works, viz., in the Preface to Romans in his translation of the New Testament, concisely define faith as a “daring and lively trust in the grace of God, so strong that one would be ready to die for it a thousand times over”? “Such a trust makes a man cheerful, defiant and light-hearted in his attitude towards God and all creatures; such is the working of the Holy Ghost by faith.” “Faith is the work of God in us whereby we are transformed and born anew in God.”[1747]Again, if we take faith objectively, i.e. as the sum-total of revelation, then again, at least according to many passages, faith must be merged in the one consoling conviction that we receive the forgiveness of sins from God in Christ.“The Reformation,” says Harnack quite rightly, regarded all the rest of dogma as little more than “a grand testimony to God, Who has sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to liberate us from sin, to save us and set us free. Finding this testimony in dogma, every other incentive to determine it more accurately disappeared.” It is, however, important to note, that “ancient dogma was not merely the witness of the Gospel to a Gracious God, to Christ the Saviour, and to the forgiveness of sins”; it comprised a number of other profound and far-reaching doctrines also binding upon all, “above all a certain knowledge of God and of the world, and a law of belief.” According to Harnack, however, “faith and this knowledge of God and law of belief were unguardedly jumbled up.” In short, “a conservative attitude towards olden dogma is not imposed on the Reformation by its principles.”[1748]“The orthodoxy of the Luther-zealots of the 16th century had its basis in the reformers’ retention of a series of old Catholic presuppositions and dogmas which were really in disagreement with their own fundamental ideas.”[1749]“Thus,” proceeds Harnack, “the Reformation, i.e. the conception of the Evangelical faith, spells the end of dogma unless indeed, in the stead of the old-time dogma, we put a sort of phantom dogma.” The Reformation replaced the demand for faith, which corresponds with the law, by the freedom of the children of God, who are not under the constraint of the law of belief but rejoice in the gift bestowed on them, viz. in the promise of the forgiveness of sins in Christ.[1750]In this, again, there is much that is true, even though we may not be willing to subscribe to all the author says. Luther undoubtedly lays undue stress on those tenets of the faith which seem to him to refer to justification and spiritual freedom, and he does so to the detriment of what remains. “Hence the Gospel,” Luther says for instance, “is nothing else but the preaching of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of David, true God and Man, Who by His death and again-rising from the dead has overcome sin, death and hell for all those who believe in Him.” The Evangelists, so he says, describe the conquest of “Sin, death and hell” at great length, the others “more briefly like St. Peter and St. Paul”; at any rate the “Gospel must not be made into a code of laws or a handbook.”[1751]This was indeed to raise the standard of revolt against doctrine. Well might Adolf Hausrath, in a passage already quoted, speak of Luther as “the greatest revolutionary of the 16th century.”The question touched upon above deserves, however, to be looked into still more closely in the light of what other more moderate Protestant theologians say.Gustav Kawerau, speaking from such a standpoint, points out that Luther “runs the risk of confusing the Evangelical view of faith with that which sees in faith the acceptance of a string of doctrinal propositions, i.e. with that faith which is made up of so and so many articles, all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1752]This is so true that the historian and theologian in question rather understates the case by saying that Luther merely “runs the risk.” It is no difficult task in this connection to instance definite statements to this effect made by him, or even to enumerate the actual “articles” of faith he regarded as essential. In No. 12 of the articles of Schwabach (Torgau) he says, as Kawerau himself points out: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful who hold, believe and teach the above articles and propositions.... For where the Gospel is preached and the Sacraments are rightly used, there we have the holy Christian Church.”[1753]Amongst such articles Luther, following the example of the oldest Creeds, includes even the Virginity of Mary.[1754]It was to this that the theologian, Otto Scheel, recently alluded when compelled to make a stand against those theologians who, particularly during the years 1519-1523, miss in Luther any adherence to the articles of the faith. Scheel appeals to what Luther says of Mary’s Virginity in his German version of his “De votis monasticis” (1521 and 1522). In one passage Luther, referring to the thesis that every single article of faith must be believed, otherwise, no matter how earnest and virtuous be one’s life, everlasting damnation is certain, brings forward as an instance our Lady’s virginity: The religious, in their “bawdy-houses of Satan” [the monasteries], by their blasphemous vows deny the whole Gospel truth, consequently far more than merely that article concerning Mary. Hence they cannot be saved even did they possess “Mary’s virginity and holiness.” “Here we have,” rightly concludes Scheel, “even as early as 1521-22 a view of faith which does not differ materially from that which we meet with in Luther after the controversies on the Sacrament.” This, however, means, according to him, “that we must regard Luther’s development in a light different from that now usual.”[1755]Which then does Scheel hold to be the correct view? He finds in Luther at all times contradictions which admit of no escape: “The contradictions which clearly exist at a later date in Luther’s life’s work were, in point of fact, always latent within him.... This is equivalent to saying that we must regard Luther’s work as a whole, and that, too, just in its most vital parts, as one marred by contradictions which it is impossible to explain away.”[1756]Since Luther’s demand that all the articles of faith should be accepted without distinction was one which he had taken over from Catholicism, we should, continues Scheel, “seek in the Middle Ages the clue to his attitude instead of assigning to him the solution of modern problems as some are disposed to do.” In this, however, Scheel is proposing nothing new, but rather something that stands to reason; the method he suggests has, moreover, always been followed by Catholic critics of Luther’s theology.Catholics found without difficulty plentiful statements of Luther’s in support of the inviolability of the whole chain of olden dogma, so great had been the influence exerted over him by the convictions of his youth. It was an easy matter for controversialists to turn such statementsof his against Luther himself, the more so, since, eminently justified though they were within Catholicism, they were utterly out of place on his mouth and furnish a striking condemnation of his own rash undertaking—a fact to which he, however, refused to open his eyes. For instance, in the very evening of his days when he himself could look back on his destruction of so many of the dogmas of the olden Church, speaking to the Sacramentarians, Luther says of the traditional doctrines: “This is what I thought, yea and said too, viz. that the devil is never idle; no sooner has he started one heresy than he must needs start others so that no error ever remains alone. When the ring has once been broken it is no longer a ring; it has lost its strength and is ever snapping anew.... Whoever does not or will not believe aright one article assuredly does not believe any article with a true and earnest faith.... Hence we may say straight out: Believe all, or nothing! The Holy Ghost will not allow Himself to be divided or sundered, so as to teach or make us believe one article aright and another awry.” “Otherwise,” so he concludes, all unconsciously justifying his Catholic critics, “no heretic would ever be condemned nor would there be a heretic on all the earth; for it is the nature of heretics to tamper first with one article only and then bit by bit to deny them all.... If the bell have but a single crack, it no longer rings true and is quite useless.”[1757]It was on the strength of this principle of the absolutely binding character of all the truths of religion (at least of those which he himself retained) that he ventured to depict Zwingli as the biggest rebel against the faith.“Zwingel, who was miserably slain on the battlefield, and Œcolampadius who died of grief on that account, perished in their sins because they obstinately persisted in their errors.”[1758]He could not “but despair of Zwingel’s salvation,” for the latter was an arch-heretic.So harsh a judgment on Zwingli is, however, quite unjustifiable if we start from the more liberal conception of faith which Luther had once advocated together with the stricter view, and which indeed he never in so many words retracted. On such grounds Kawerau may well take Zwingli under his wing against Luther.His words will be quoted a little further on. Meanwhile, however, it must be pointed out that Luther’s unkindly criticism of Zwingli is not to be explained merely by the above view of faith. In his Life of Luther Adolf Hausrath throws some light on its psychological side. “Language so insulting as Luther’s,” he says, “no bishop had ever used against Zwingli,”[1759]and he lays his hand boldly on the weak spot with the object of bringing out Luther’s astounding want of logic. He had proclaimed the right of examining Scripture freely and without being tied down by the teaching of the Church, yet he refused to allow Zwingli such freedom; the latter “had applied the principle indiscriminately to everything (?) handed down by the Church, whereas Luther wished to put aside merely what was contrary to his convictions on justification by faith alone, or to the plain sense of Scripture.”[1760]Luther “fancied he could guess who had inspired the Sacramentarians with their blasphemies. Thereby he envenomed the controversy from the very outset. For him there could be no truce with the devil.”[1761]“In any sign of life given by the Swiss he at once sniffed the ‘devil’s breeches.’”[1762]Luther himself admits that “to begin with, it was Zwingli’s wrong doctrine and the fact ‘that the Swiss wished to be first,’”[1763]which had led to the estrangement. The “wrong doctrine” he detected, thanks to that gift of infallibility which led the Sacramentarians to call his behaviour “papistic.” We have here, according to Hausrath, a “religious genius, who, by the force of his personality and word, sought to make all others bow to the law of his mind.” “We must resign ourselves to the fact that this great man had the shortcomings which belong to his virtues. Disputatiousness and love to pick a quarrel, faults which simply represented the other side of his firm faith, and which some had already deplored in the young monk at Erfurt, Wittenberg and Leipzig, had naturally not been abated by his many victorious combats, and, now, more than ever, Oldecop’s words were true: ‘He wanted to be in the right in all the disputations and was fond of quarrelling.’ The fact is that Luther was no exception to the rule, that man finds nothing harder to bear well than success.”[1764]Nevertheless, to return to the question of faith, Luther had already laid down in his writings certain marks by which it might be ascertained whether a man is a believer or not, and which at any rate scarcely tally with the criteria he applies to Zwingli. Judged by these Zwingli would emerge quite blameless.Kawerau points this out in defence of Zwingli: “The idea of faith,” he says, “which Luther had newly evolved, in opposition to the Catholic assent to the teaching of the Bible and the Church, led logically to determining from a man’s attitude towards Christand His saving Grace whether he was a true believer or not; Luther himself frequently made this his criterion; for instance, in answer to the question: Who is a member of the Church, and whom must I regard as my dear brother in Christ? He replies, all those ‘Who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us to Him by His death and to obtain for us grace’; or again: All ‘those who put their trust in Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or yet again: ‘All those who seek the Lord with their whole heart and soul ... and who trust in nothing but in God’s mercy.’”[1765]But had not Zwingli loudly proclaimed himself to be one of these?“In such utterances of Luther’s we find,” according to Kawerau, “summed up the purely religious and Evangelical conception of faith.” Here there is no question of any accepting of the several articles of faith, of any submission to a “string of doctrinal propositions,” of any “faith made up of so and so many ‘articles’ all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1766]According to this theologian Luther was untrue to his own basic theories when he assailed Zwingli as he did. Kawerau also agrees with Hausrath in holding that the principal cause of Luther’s estrangement was a psychological one which indeed constituted the weakest spot in his whole position, viz. his identification of his own theological outbuilding of an article of faith, with its religious content,[1767]or, to speak more plainly, his setting himself up as the sole authority after having set aside that of the Church.(b)The Melting away of Luther’s Dogmas viewed in the Light of Protestant CriticismWe have already put on record those doctrines of the olden Church, which, inclusive of the idea of faith itself, Luther threw overboard; we now come to the doctrines which he retained, which deserve to be considered in connection with the strictures of modern Protestant theologians, particularly of Harnack. At least these strictures bring out very clearly their contradictory and illogical character. Evidently Harnack is not altogether wrong when he uses as a page-heading the words “Exit dogma in Protestantism,”[1768]and elsewhere:[1769]“Embarrassments and problems in Luther’s heritage.”Luther, to quote Harnack, “frequently hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.”[1770]But “if ‘the whole Luther’ is to be set upas the law of faith for the Evangelical Church, then, where it is a question of matters of history, such consequences cannot be simply ignored.” “The Lutheran Reformation,” writes Fr. Loofs, “would have ended otherwise as regards the history of dogma, had Luther braved tradition and followed up his theories to their logical conclusion. The shreds of the old which remained hampered the growth of the new ideas, even in Luther’s own case.”[1771]Original Sin and Unfreedom; Law and Gospel; PenanceLuther took over from the olden Church the doctrine of the existence of original sin, but he so changed it, particularly by affirming that it resulted in the destruction of free-will, that the doctrine itself becomes untenable.
CHAPTER XXXIVEND OF LUTHER’S LITERARY LABOURS. THE WHOLE REVIEWED1. Towards a Christianity void of Dogma. Protestant OpinionsWith the concluding years of Luther’s life we reach a point whence may be undertaken with advantage a survey of the character of his theological and literary labours from several sides from which we have not as yet had opportunity to approach them.We naturally turn first of all to the religious content of his literary life-work; here it may be advisable to hear what Protestant theologians have to say.These theologians will tell us how many of the olden dogmas Luther, explicitly or implicitly, relinquishes, and whether and how he undermines the very idea of faith as known to Christians of old; we shall also have to consider the Protestant strictures which assert that the doctrines, which he either retained or set up for the first time, were fraught with so much that was illogical that they may be said to bear within them the seeds of dissolution. The conclusions reached will show whether or not he was actually heading for a “Christianity void of dogma.”(a) Protestant Critics on Luther’s Abandonment of Individual Christian Dogmas and of the Olden Conception of FaithIt is hard to deny that a certain amount of truth lurks in the contention of a certain modern school of Protestant thought which insists that Luther practically made an end of “the old, dogmatic Christianity.”[1705]Luther did not, of course, look so far ahead, nor were the consequences of hisown action at all clear to him, and when Catholics took pains to point them out he was not slow to repel them with the utmost indignation. Still, logic is inexorable in demanding its rights.[1706]Here we are happily able to state the case almost entirely in the words of Protestant theologians of the modern school, such as, for instance, Adolf Harnack.“The acknowledged authorities on dogma,” says Harnack, speaking of Luther’s attitude towards the pillars of the Church’s teaching, “have been torn down, and thereby dogma itself,quadogma, i.e. the unfailing teaching institution ordained by the Holy Ghost, has been done away with.... The revision has been extended even beyond the second century of the Church’s history and up to its very beginnings, and has everywhere been carried out radically. An end has been made of that history of dogma which started in the age of the apologists, nay, of the Apostolic Fathers.”[1707]Harnack therefore, in his detailed work on the history of dogma, refrained from dealing with any theologians later than Luther, instead of following the usual course among Protestant authors, and giving an account of the development of doctrine in later Protestantism and among Luther’s followers. He pertinently asked: “How can there be in Protestantism any history of dogma after Luther’s Prefaces to the New Testament and his great reformation writings?”[1708]Addressing the representatives of Lutheran “dogmatic theology,” Harnack says: “Luther’s reformation created a new point of departure for the development of the Christian belief in the Word of God”; “it set aside every form of infallibility that might have offered an outward assurance for one’s belief, the Church’s infallible organisation and infallible tradition and the infallible code of Scripture. Thus an end was made of the conception of Christianity from which dogma had sprung, viz. the Christian faith, the sure knowledge of the final causes of all things and thus of the whole Divine scheme of salvation. Christian faith has now become merely a firm assurance of receiving forgiveness ofsins from God, as the Father of Jesus Christ, and of living under Him in His kingdom. This at the same time spells the ruin of any infallible dogma; for how can any dogma be unchangeable and authentic, thought out and formulated as it was by finite men, living in sin, and devoid of every outward guarantee?” If, nevertheless, Luther accepted and maintained certain aspects of ancient dogma, he did so, not as establishing “side by side with faith a law of faith based on particular outward promises,” but rather “from his unshaken conviction that much of this dogma corresponded exactly with the Gospel or Word of God, and that this correspondence was self-evident”; “as dogma, it did not constitute a rule.”[1709]In some respects, for instance in this very matter, what Harnack says stands in need of correction. He is at times too fond of making out his own Christianity without dogma to have been also that of Luther. We just heard him say that the remnant of olden dogma which Luther preserved, “as dogma, did not constitute a rule.” He would, however, have been nearer the truth in saying that,logically, as dogma,it ought not to haveconstituted a rule. There can be no doubt that Luther—as will be shown below—insists, though in contradiction with other “basic ideas and with the spirit of his reformation,” that the Christian verities which he leaves standing must be embraced as revealed articles of the Christian belief and indubitable truths of faith. Even where he does not insist upon this he still takes it for granted that faith in the whole of revelation (“fides historica”) precedes that faith which consists in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Even Harnack has to admit, that, with Luther, “dogmaquadogma, remains to some extent in force” owing “to the logic of things.”[1710]Luther, according to another passage in Harnack, “under the pressure of circumstances” and the storms raised against him by the fanatics and the Anabaptists, was drawn into a dogmatising current of which the issue was the Augsburg Confession. To the question: Did Luther’s reformation do away with the ancient dogma? we must reply, that, at least, it “demolished its foundation—as indeed our Catholic opponents rightly object against us—that it was a mighty principle rather than a new doctrine, and that its subsequent history through the age of Orthodoxy, Pietism and Rationalism down to the present day is less a falling away than a natural development.”[1711]Even before Harnack’s day this was virtually the standpoint of some of the best Protestant judges. It had been perceived long before that the purely Evangelical theory led much further from the ancient dogmas than Protestant orthodoxy was disposed to admit. Even according to so conservative a theologian as Johann August Neander, “the spirit of the Reformation did not at once attain to a clear consciousness of itself”; Luther indeed, even here, “had reached the consciousness of the pure Evangelical belief, thanks to the principle of a faith which is a free outgrowth of the Divine power within; yet, owing to the controversies on the Supper and to the Peasant War, this clear consciousness again became eclipsed.”[1712]Neander finds the best statement of Luther’s new ideas in those works which are most radically opposed to the traditional teaching of the Church of old. Albert Ritschl, the well-known leader of the free Protestant school, likewise declared: “The Lutheran theory of life has not remained true to itself; it has been hemmed in and dulled by the stress laid on objective dogma. The pure doctrine as taught in the schools is in reality merely a passing, not the final, form of Protestantism.”[1713]All these critics, Harnack in particular, though blaming Luther for not drawing the right conclusions, are nevertheless at one in their outspoken admiration of the powerful thinker and brave spokesman of the new belief, and particularly of those theses of his which approach most closely their own ideal of an unfettered theology. In their opinion Luther is to remain the hero of yore, though his garb and attitude will no longer be the same as those to which Protestantism had previously been accustomed. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention this because otherwise the strong things some of the critics say might, taken together, give the impression that their main aim and endeavour was to decry Luther. Probably enough Harnack and his friends failed to foresee how unfavourable a view their censures, taken in the lump, might produce of Luther’s person and work. Harnack, however, in one passage, pays a strange tribute to Luther’s conservatism, one, no doubt, which would appeal to the Reformer’s more old-fashioned friends. He points out, that, “we owe it to him, that, even to the presentday, these formularies [the olden creeds] are still in Protestantism a living power”; nay, such is his ignorance of the state of things in Catholicism, that he is convinced that it is only in Protestantism that these creeds still “live,” whereas, “in the Roman Church, they are but a dead and obsolete heirloom”; Luther, according to one bold dictum of Harnack’s, was really “the restorer of ancient dogma.”[1714]Among the olden doctrines thrown over by Luther his Protestant critics rightly instance the Canon of Scripture and the right of the Church to interpret the Bible. They corroborate strikingly from Luther’s writings the results which we reached above,[1715]a circumstance which may surprise Protestant readers.If, according to Luther, the doctrine of the oldest confessions of faith are only to be retained because they can be directly proved from the Bible, then the Bible itself with all its books, so such Protestants argue, must stand firm and inviolable. Now, awkwardly enough, Luther himself saps the authority of the Canon.“If the attitude is justified which Luther takes up in his famous Prefaces to the various books of the New Testament,” says Harnack (cp. prefaces to the Epistle of James, to the Epistle to the Hebrews and to the Apocalypse), “then an end is made of the infallible Canon of Scripture. It is here of the utmost importance historically, though in itself a matter of indifference, that we find Luther, especially after the controversy on the Supper, making statements to the effect that every letter of Scripture is fundamental to the Christian faith; the flagrant contradiction involved in the assertion that a thing holds and at the same time does not hold can only be solved by saying that it does not. The same follows from Luther’s views on faith, for, according to him, this is produced by the Holy Ghost through thepreachingof the Word of God. To-day too, all Protestants are agreed that historical criticism of Scripture is not unevangelical, though this unanimity of opinion extends only as far as the ‘principle,’ and many refuse to carry it out in practice.”[1716]—“Luther,at the very time when he was waging so brave a war against the authority of the Councils, also opposed Scriptural infallibility, and, indeed, how could he do otherwise?... There can be no doubt that Luther’s attitude towards the New Testament, as we find it set forth in the Prefaces and in one or two other passages, is the correct one, i.e. that which really tallies with his belief.”[1717]As F. Loofs points out, Luther leaves us without any outward guarantee for the authority of the Canon of the Bible.[1718]Loofs quotes, for instance, Luther’s saying: “Hence God must tell you within your heart: This is God’s Word.”[1719]“Luther’s criticism,” the same writer says, “did not spare even those books which he allowed to be truly prophetic or apostolic.... He frankly admitted the human element in Scripture.”[1720]If Luther’s fundamental opposition to the faith once delivered is already apparent from his criticism of the Bible, still more is this the case when we come to look into the freedom he allowed in the interpretation of the sense of the Bible.As Harnack puts it: In Luther’s view “the Church is based on something which every Christian, no matter how humble, can see and test, viz. on the Word of God as apprehended by pure reason. This, of course, was tantamount to a claim to ascertain the true verbal sense of Holy Scripture.... But Luther never foresaw how far this rule would lead.”[1721]Luther himself often put his principle to such arbitrary usage as to prove a warning to others (above, vol. iv., pp. 406 f., 418 f.), and to exclude the possibility of any settled dogma. “The flagrant contradiction,” says Harnack, “into which he was led by criticising the Bible whilst all the time holding the idea he did about its inspiration, he contrived to explain away by reading the Evangel itself into texts which presented a difficulty.”[1722]“In Holy Scripture, the infallible authority, only that was to be found, which on other grounds was already established as the true doctrine.”[1723]Hence in the matter of the Bible, so Harnack has it, “Criticism, in order to be according to Luther’s mind, would have to go against him in the interests of faith.”[1724]Luther’s abandonment of the Church’s standpoint with regard to the Bible is closely bound up with his renunciation of the Church’s teaching office, of the hierarchy and of all respect for tradition. This meant, as modern Protestant critics admit, the destruction of the whole theory of tradition and, in fact, of all ecclesiastical authority, though, on Harnack’s own admission, ancient Church writers, especially “subsequent to Irenæus,” rely much on such authority.“Luther was antagonistic to all these authorities,” says the same scholar, “to the infallibility of Church, Pope, and Councils, to every constitutional right of the Church to pronounce on the truth and, on principle, to all the doctrinal formularies of the past.”[1725]His later writing: “Von den Conciliis,” etc. (1539) proves this.Nor have we yet exhausted the list of grievances against Luther. Not only did he forsake the ancient teaching on justification, merit and works, but he even declared war on human free will, though belief in its existence is a truth of natural philosophy and though the Church had ever held it in the highest esteem. He put aside in its primitive form the basic dogma of original sin. The doctrine of actual sin and its distinction into mortal and venial found no favour with him,[1726]nor did the related doctrine of the existence of a purgatory. He completely destroyed the teaching of antiquity on Grace by his new discovery of the law of absolute necessity which rules all things, not excluding even the actions of the human mind and heart; according to Luther “Grace is the fatherly disposition of God towards us, Who for Christ’s sake calls sinful man to Him, accepts him and wins his confidence through faith in theChristus passus.”[1727]This fatherly disposition of God no man can ever in the least resist if destined by the Divine Omnipotence to receive the faith; those, however, who are not numbered among the elect, know not any such invitation, or rather constraint, for the secret Will of God unfailingly dooms them to damnation.[1728]After giving the above definition of Grace, Harnack asks, “What room then is there for a Sacrament?” For Catholics the Sacraments were pillars of the Church’s life and of her teaching. With them Luther was perfectly willing to dispense.“He not only strove,” says Harnack, “to break away completely from the ancient or mediaeval conception, but he actually brought it to nought by his doctrine of the one sacrament, which is the Word.”[1729]The Sacraments being to him a “peculiar form of the saving Word of God, viz. of the realisation of the‘promissio Dei,’ he reduces them to two (three), or, indeed, to one, viz. the Word of God. He showed that even the most enlightened Fathers had had but a dim notion of this so important matter.... Having practically laid the whole system in ruins, he rests again on the one, simple grand act, which is constantly being repeated in every Christian’s life, viz. the awakening of faith thanks to the ‘gratia.’”[1730]Luther turned his back not only on the ancient teaching concerning the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also on the whole outward worship of the Church.“His attitude towards Divine Worship in the Church was a radical one. Here too he destroyed not only the mediaeval tradition, but even that of the ancient Church such as we may trace it back right into the 2nd century. The public worship of the Church, to him, is nothing more than the worship of individuals united in time and place.... The priest and the sacrifice in the usual sense of the terms are done away with, and all worth is denied to those specific ecclesiastical actions which were formerly held to be both wholesome and necessary.” “The ‘divine service,’ particularly that of the Word, in which he nevertheless wished the congregation to take part,” “can have no other motive ... than to promote individual worship, for God deals with us only through the Word which is not tied up with any particular persons.”[1731]Hence public worship does no more than “edify faith through the preaching of the Divine Word and the common offering of prayer and praise.”[1732]Of vast importance in this change and even more far-reaching in its consequences was Luther’s abrogation of the ancient conception of the Church. As bound up with it, he also harshly set aside the invocation of Saints, that vital element of the olden worship.The ancient teaching on perfection had to make room for new theories, for it seemed to him to lay too much stress on man’s own works.[1733]And yet “we cannot but admit,” says Harnack, “that Luther’s efforts to create a new ideal of life were not characterised by any clear discrimination.” The reason may be “that the times were not yet ripe for it.” In those days of public stress “religion’s chief business was to bring consolation amidst the miseries of life. To heal the soul oppressed with sorrow for sin and to alleviate the evils in the world,” this was what was mainly aimed at.[1734]This, however, was scarcely to do justice to religion and to its sublime tasks.According to Luther the Church had, even from theoutset, given to human reason a larger sphere than was due to it. Even at the cradle of the Church Christian philosophy had taken her stand, and, with her torch of reason, had pointed out the road to faith. Luther, however, conceived “a distrust of reason itself not to be explained simply by his distrust of it as the main prop of self-righteousness. He grew hardened in his bold defiance of reason, surrendering himself to that suspicious Catholic [!] way of looking at things, which reveres the wisdom of God and sees the stamp of the divine truth in paradox and in thecontradictio in adiecto....No one, however, can despise reason and learning with impunity, and Luther himself was punished by the darkening of his own views on faith.”[1735]“That is a dangerous kind of theologism which fancies that the knowledge which comes from worldly education may simply be ignored. The reformers were too ready to cut themselves adrift from worldly culture where the latter seemed to trench on the domain of faith.... The Reformation buried beneath a mass of hatred and injustice much of the valuable learning the age possessed and thereby made itself responsible for the later crises of Protestantism.”[1736]“Luther,” says Loofs, “by laying stress on that antithesis between human reason and the divine ‘foolishness,’ which was so intimately bound up with his own deepest and most fundamental views (and who ever thundered more loudly against the ‘Frau Hulda’ of natural reason, that ‘devil’s whore’ and ‘arch enemy of the faith’ than did Luther?), imposed on his following the old Catholic idea (which he himself had overthrown) of the verbal inspiration of the Canon, and did so so thoroughly that after-ages were unable to shake themselves free of it. Nay, by rightly proscribing any allegorical exegesis, he made the burden of this old Catholic heritage even more oppressive in Protestantism than it had ever been before.”[1737]Depreciation of reason, had, in Luther’s case, a bad effect on his whole teaching concerning God. As far back as theology went this had formed the centre of religiousdiscussion. The Fathers had by preference dwelt on questions which concerned God, His Oneness and Triunity, His attributes and His relations with the world and man. Luther, according to the admission of Protestant critics, introduced here certain arbitrary and very unfair limitations. It was his wish, as he frequently declares, that God should be meditated on only as Jesus Christ our Consoler and our Saviour. He has a strange and seemingly instinctive aversion to concerning himself with the Almighty Being, in Whom nevertheless “we live, and move, and are.” TheDeus absconditusappals him. According to him it is impossible to “treat of Predestination without being crucified and suffering the pains of death, or without loss to ourselves and secret anger against God.” Predestination “determines in the first instance who is and who is not to believe, who is and who is not to be saved from sin”; of this Luther cannot speak without at the same time solemnly emphasising that it is only thanks to it that we can “hope to conquer sin,” as otherwise the devil, “as we know, would soon overpower us all.” Yet we ought not, like the “reprobate spirits,” “explore the abyss of Divine Providence,” because otherwise we shall either “be brought to despair or kick over the traces.” The old Adam must “have been put to death before being able to endure this and to drink the strong wine,” i.e. a man must first have learnt, like Luther, “to stake all in God,” and “defy” all things in Him.[1738]Thus it comes about that Luther ladles out reproaches indiscriminately to the philosophers who occupy themselves with God as known to reason, and the theologians who pursue the supernatural knowledge of God.“Often enough did Luther deride as a product of blind reason,” writes Harnack, “that knowledge of God, which instead of thinking of God in Christ alone, ‘sophistically’ enumerates His attributes and speculates on His will, viz. the whole ‘metaphysical’ doctrine of God.”[1739]If “God be considered apart from Christ,” then He appears, according to Luther, merely as the “terrible Judge from Whom we can await nothing but punishment.”[1740]According to Luther, “there is, outside of Christ, no certainty concerning the Will of God”; for the secret Will of God threatens us with the dreadful sword of predestination to hell. HenceHarnack even goes so far as to say, that what is presupposed in Luther’s theories on the assurance of salvation is a belief “not in Godin se—for Godin sebelongs to the Aristotelians—but rather in the God Whom the Holy Ghost reveals to the soul as manifest in Christ.”[1741]“Godin se” and “Godquoad nos” are two different things. By establishing such a distinction Luther “sets himself at variance with all theology as it had existed since the days of the apologists; here his aversion to the olden dogma is even more evident than in his reprobation of certain of its parts. Again and again, whenever the occasion arises, he repudiates what the olden theology had said of God and Christ, of the Will and Attributes of God, of the two natures in Christ, etc., with the remark: ‘This He hasin se. Thereupon he immediately proceeds, with the words ‘But,quoad nos,’ to introduce his own new view, which to him is the main thing, if not the whole.”[1742]Such doctrines as have nothing to do with the justification of the sinner or the “confession of faith, as a personal experience,” recede so much into the background that Harnack feels justified in saying: “Though, under the formulas ‘Godin se,’ ‘the Hidden God,’ ‘God’s Hidden Will,’ Luther left these old ideas standing, still they had practically ceased to exist as doctrines of faith. Of this there can be no doubt. That he did not throw them over completely is due to two facts, on the one hand to his impression that he found them in the Bible, and, on the other, to his never having systematically thought out the problems involved.”[1743]It must, however, be noted, that, as will be seen more clearly when we come to discuss Luther’s idea of faith, he was by no means ready to allow that such dogmas were not real “articles of faith.” This may be what leads Harnack here to say that they had “practically” ceased to exist as “actual articles of faith.”In connection with the dogmas touching God it must not be lost to sight that Luther, by his doctrine of predestination, of man’s unfreedom and of the inevitability of all that occurs, really endangered, if indeed he did not actually destroy, the Church’s olden conception of God as the Highest and Most Perfect Being. The cruel God of absolute predestination to hell is no longer a God worthy of the name.“Nor can it be gainsaid,” writes the Protestant theologian Arnold Taube, “that, given Luther’s idea of God and His Omnipotence,the negation of man’s free-will is a simple and natural consequence.” “Luther’s conception of God is at variance with the ethical personality of the God of Christianity, just as Schleiermacher’s whole pantheistic scheme of theology is useless in enabling us to grasp a religion so eminently moral as Christianity.” “Schleiermacher was quite logical in carrying to their consequences Luther’s ideas on predestination and free-will.” Luther’s idea of God, according to Taube, is simply “determinist.” “The negation [of free-will] can be escaped only by a theory of the Divine Omnipotence which regards God as controlling His own Power and thus as practically exercising restraint over Himself and limiting His Power. This, however, was not Luther’s theory, who takes the Divine Omnipotence to signify that which works all in all.”[1744]To an outsider it sounds strange to hear Harnack and others affirm that Luther swept away all the positive doctrines of antiquity; no less strange is it to see Luther, the furious opponent of Catholicism, being made by men who call themselves his followers into an advocate of the Rationalism which they themselves profess. In the interests of Rationalism these theologians take as their watchword Wilhelm Herrmann’s dictum of Luther’s doctrine of penance: “We must strive to push ahead with what Luther began and left undone.” The least they demand is, that, as Ferdinand Kattenbusch puts it, Protestant theology should hold fast to the “earlier” Luther, to those days “when Luther’s genius was as yet unbroken.” In this wise they contrive to wrench away Luther from the foundations of that faith to which he still wished to remain true and which the “orthodox” at a later date claimed him to have ever retained.[1745]It is well known how, following in Ritschl’s footsteps, Harnack’s ability, learning, and outspokenness have proved extremely awkward to the more conservative theologians. He “carried on Luther’s interrupted work,” declares Herrmann, and set up again in all its purity Luther’s early conception of faith against a theology which had been stifled in orthodoxy and pietism.[1746]We must, however, in the light of Protestant criticism, examine a little more closely Luther’s attitude towards the ancient Christian conception of faith.Starting first of all from faith subjectively considered and examining Luther’s doctrine of the personal appropriation of the content of faith, we immediately find ourselves brought face to face with his doctrine of justification, for he has scarcely anything to say of the faith of the individual save in so far as this faith operates justification. Here all the other truths to be believed tend to disappear from his purview and one only truth remains, viz.: Through Christ I am pleasing to God. It is no wonder if many of his followers, even to the present day, see in this doctrine of the certainty of having in Christ a Gracious God, the only dogma handed down by Luther. Does he not, for instance, in one of the most widely read passages of his works, viz., in the Preface to Romans in his translation of the New Testament, concisely define faith as a “daring and lively trust in the grace of God, so strong that one would be ready to die for it a thousand times over”? “Such a trust makes a man cheerful, defiant and light-hearted in his attitude towards God and all creatures; such is the working of the Holy Ghost by faith.” “Faith is the work of God in us whereby we are transformed and born anew in God.”[1747]Again, if we take faith objectively, i.e. as the sum-total of revelation, then again, at least according to many passages, faith must be merged in the one consoling conviction that we receive the forgiveness of sins from God in Christ.“The Reformation,” says Harnack quite rightly, regarded all the rest of dogma as little more than “a grand testimony to God, Who has sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to liberate us from sin, to save us and set us free. Finding this testimony in dogma, every other incentive to determine it more accurately disappeared.” It is, however, important to note, that “ancient dogma was not merely the witness of the Gospel to a Gracious God, to Christ the Saviour, and to the forgiveness of sins”; it comprised a number of other profound and far-reaching doctrines also binding upon all, “above all a certain knowledge of God and of the world, and a law of belief.” According to Harnack, however, “faith and this knowledge of God and law of belief were unguardedly jumbled up.” In short, “a conservative attitude towards olden dogma is not imposed on the Reformation by its principles.”[1748]“The orthodoxy of the Luther-zealots of the 16th century had its basis in the reformers’ retention of a series of old Catholic presuppositions and dogmas which were really in disagreement with their own fundamental ideas.”[1749]“Thus,” proceeds Harnack, “the Reformation, i.e. the conception of the Evangelical faith, spells the end of dogma unless indeed, in the stead of the old-time dogma, we put a sort of phantom dogma.” The Reformation replaced the demand for faith, which corresponds with the law, by the freedom of the children of God, who are not under the constraint of the law of belief but rejoice in the gift bestowed on them, viz. in the promise of the forgiveness of sins in Christ.[1750]In this, again, there is much that is true, even though we may not be willing to subscribe to all the author says. Luther undoubtedly lays undue stress on those tenets of the faith which seem to him to refer to justification and spiritual freedom, and he does so to the detriment of what remains. “Hence the Gospel,” Luther says for instance, “is nothing else but the preaching of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of David, true God and Man, Who by His death and again-rising from the dead has overcome sin, death and hell for all those who believe in Him.” The Evangelists, so he says, describe the conquest of “Sin, death and hell” at great length, the others “more briefly like St. Peter and St. Paul”; at any rate the “Gospel must not be made into a code of laws or a handbook.”[1751]This was indeed to raise the standard of revolt against doctrine. Well might Adolf Hausrath, in a passage already quoted, speak of Luther as “the greatest revolutionary of the 16th century.”The question touched upon above deserves, however, to be looked into still more closely in the light of what other more moderate Protestant theologians say.Gustav Kawerau, speaking from such a standpoint, points out that Luther “runs the risk of confusing the Evangelical view of faith with that which sees in faith the acceptance of a string of doctrinal propositions, i.e. with that faith which is made up of so and so many articles, all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1752]This is so true that the historian and theologian in question rather understates the case by saying that Luther merely “runs the risk.” It is no difficult task in this connection to instance definite statements to this effect made by him, or even to enumerate the actual “articles” of faith he regarded as essential. In No. 12 of the articles of Schwabach (Torgau) he says, as Kawerau himself points out: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful who hold, believe and teach the above articles and propositions.... For where the Gospel is preached and the Sacraments are rightly used, there we have the holy Christian Church.”[1753]Amongst such articles Luther, following the example of the oldest Creeds, includes even the Virginity of Mary.[1754]It was to this that the theologian, Otto Scheel, recently alluded when compelled to make a stand against those theologians who, particularly during the years 1519-1523, miss in Luther any adherence to the articles of the faith. Scheel appeals to what Luther says of Mary’s Virginity in his German version of his “De votis monasticis” (1521 and 1522). In one passage Luther, referring to the thesis that every single article of faith must be believed, otherwise, no matter how earnest and virtuous be one’s life, everlasting damnation is certain, brings forward as an instance our Lady’s virginity: The religious, in their “bawdy-houses of Satan” [the monasteries], by their blasphemous vows deny the whole Gospel truth, consequently far more than merely that article concerning Mary. Hence they cannot be saved even did they possess “Mary’s virginity and holiness.” “Here we have,” rightly concludes Scheel, “even as early as 1521-22 a view of faith which does not differ materially from that which we meet with in Luther after the controversies on the Sacrament.” This, however, means, according to him, “that we must regard Luther’s development in a light different from that now usual.”[1755]Which then does Scheel hold to be the correct view? He finds in Luther at all times contradictions which admit of no escape: “The contradictions which clearly exist at a later date in Luther’s life’s work were, in point of fact, always latent within him.... This is equivalent to saying that we must regard Luther’s work as a whole, and that, too, just in its most vital parts, as one marred by contradictions which it is impossible to explain away.”[1756]Since Luther’s demand that all the articles of faith should be accepted without distinction was one which he had taken over from Catholicism, we should, continues Scheel, “seek in the Middle Ages the clue to his attitude instead of assigning to him the solution of modern problems as some are disposed to do.” In this, however, Scheel is proposing nothing new, but rather something that stands to reason; the method he suggests has, moreover, always been followed by Catholic critics of Luther’s theology.Catholics found without difficulty plentiful statements of Luther’s in support of the inviolability of the whole chain of olden dogma, so great had been the influence exerted over him by the convictions of his youth. It was an easy matter for controversialists to turn such statementsof his against Luther himself, the more so, since, eminently justified though they were within Catholicism, they were utterly out of place on his mouth and furnish a striking condemnation of his own rash undertaking—a fact to which he, however, refused to open his eyes. For instance, in the very evening of his days when he himself could look back on his destruction of so many of the dogmas of the olden Church, speaking to the Sacramentarians, Luther says of the traditional doctrines: “This is what I thought, yea and said too, viz. that the devil is never idle; no sooner has he started one heresy than he must needs start others so that no error ever remains alone. When the ring has once been broken it is no longer a ring; it has lost its strength and is ever snapping anew.... Whoever does not or will not believe aright one article assuredly does not believe any article with a true and earnest faith.... Hence we may say straight out: Believe all, or nothing! The Holy Ghost will not allow Himself to be divided or sundered, so as to teach or make us believe one article aright and another awry.” “Otherwise,” so he concludes, all unconsciously justifying his Catholic critics, “no heretic would ever be condemned nor would there be a heretic on all the earth; for it is the nature of heretics to tamper first with one article only and then bit by bit to deny them all.... If the bell have but a single crack, it no longer rings true and is quite useless.”[1757]It was on the strength of this principle of the absolutely binding character of all the truths of religion (at least of those which he himself retained) that he ventured to depict Zwingli as the biggest rebel against the faith.“Zwingel, who was miserably slain on the battlefield, and Œcolampadius who died of grief on that account, perished in their sins because they obstinately persisted in their errors.”[1758]He could not “but despair of Zwingel’s salvation,” for the latter was an arch-heretic.So harsh a judgment on Zwingli is, however, quite unjustifiable if we start from the more liberal conception of faith which Luther had once advocated together with the stricter view, and which indeed he never in so many words retracted. On such grounds Kawerau may well take Zwingli under his wing against Luther.His words will be quoted a little further on. Meanwhile, however, it must be pointed out that Luther’s unkindly criticism of Zwingli is not to be explained merely by the above view of faith. In his Life of Luther Adolf Hausrath throws some light on its psychological side. “Language so insulting as Luther’s,” he says, “no bishop had ever used against Zwingli,”[1759]and he lays his hand boldly on the weak spot with the object of bringing out Luther’s astounding want of logic. He had proclaimed the right of examining Scripture freely and without being tied down by the teaching of the Church, yet he refused to allow Zwingli such freedom; the latter “had applied the principle indiscriminately to everything (?) handed down by the Church, whereas Luther wished to put aside merely what was contrary to his convictions on justification by faith alone, or to the plain sense of Scripture.”[1760]Luther “fancied he could guess who had inspired the Sacramentarians with their blasphemies. Thereby he envenomed the controversy from the very outset. For him there could be no truce with the devil.”[1761]“In any sign of life given by the Swiss he at once sniffed the ‘devil’s breeches.’”[1762]Luther himself admits that “to begin with, it was Zwingli’s wrong doctrine and the fact ‘that the Swiss wished to be first,’”[1763]which had led to the estrangement. The “wrong doctrine” he detected, thanks to that gift of infallibility which led the Sacramentarians to call his behaviour “papistic.” We have here, according to Hausrath, a “religious genius, who, by the force of his personality and word, sought to make all others bow to the law of his mind.” “We must resign ourselves to the fact that this great man had the shortcomings which belong to his virtues. Disputatiousness and love to pick a quarrel, faults which simply represented the other side of his firm faith, and which some had already deplored in the young monk at Erfurt, Wittenberg and Leipzig, had naturally not been abated by his many victorious combats, and, now, more than ever, Oldecop’s words were true: ‘He wanted to be in the right in all the disputations and was fond of quarrelling.’ The fact is that Luther was no exception to the rule, that man finds nothing harder to bear well than success.”[1764]Nevertheless, to return to the question of faith, Luther had already laid down in his writings certain marks by which it might be ascertained whether a man is a believer or not, and which at any rate scarcely tally with the criteria he applies to Zwingli. Judged by these Zwingli would emerge quite blameless.Kawerau points this out in defence of Zwingli: “The idea of faith,” he says, “which Luther had newly evolved, in opposition to the Catholic assent to the teaching of the Bible and the Church, led logically to determining from a man’s attitude towards Christand His saving Grace whether he was a true believer or not; Luther himself frequently made this his criterion; for instance, in answer to the question: Who is a member of the Church, and whom must I regard as my dear brother in Christ? He replies, all those ‘Who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us to Him by His death and to obtain for us grace’; or again: All ‘those who put their trust in Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or yet again: ‘All those who seek the Lord with their whole heart and soul ... and who trust in nothing but in God’s mercy.’”[1765]But had not Zwingli loudly proclaimed himself to be one of these?“In such utterances of Luther’s we find,” according to Kawerau, “summed up the purely religious and Evangelical conception of faith.” Here there is no question of any accepting of the several articles of faith, of any submission to a “string of doctrinal propositions,” of any “faith made up of so and so many ‘articles’ all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1766]According to this theologian Luther was untrue to his own basic theories when he assailed Zwingli as he did. Kawerau also agrees with Hausrath in holding that the principal cause of Luther’s estrangement was a psychological one which indeed constituted the weakest spot in his whole position, viz. his identification of his own theological outbuilding of an article of faith, with its religious content,[1767]or, to speak more plainly, his setting himself up as the sole authority after having set aside that of the Church.(b)The Melting away of Luther’s Dogmas viewed in the Light of Protestant CriticismWe have already put on record those doctrines of the olden Church, which, inclusive of the idea of faith itself, Luther threw overboard; we now come to the doctrines which he retained, which deserve to be considered in connection with the strictures of modern Protestant theologians, particularly of Harnack. At least these strictures bring out very clearly their contradictory and illogical character. Evidently Harnack is not altogether wrong when he uses as a page-heading the words “Exit dogma in Protestantism,”[1768]and elsewhere:[1769]“Embarrassments and problems in Luther’s heritage.”Luther, to quote Harnack, “frequently hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.”[1770]But “if ‘the whole Luther’ is to be set upas the law of faith for the Evangelical Church, then, where it is a question of matters of history, such consequences cannot be simply ignored.” “The Lutheran Reformation,” writes Fr. Loofs, “would have ended otherwise as regards the history of dogma, had Luther braved tradition and followed up his theories to their logical conclusion. The shreds of the old which remained hampered the growth of the new ideas, even in Luther’s own case.”[1771]Original Sin and Unfreedom; Law and Gospel; PenanceLuther took over from the olden Church the doctrine of the existence of original sin, but he so changed it, particularly by affirming that it resulted in the destruction of free-will, that the doctrine itself becomes untenable.
END OF LUTHER’S LITERARY LABOURS. THE WHOLE REVIEWED
With the concluding years of Luther’s life we reach a point whence may be undertaken with advantage a survey of the character of his theological and literary labours from several sides from which we have not as yet had opportunity to approach them.
We naturally turn first of all to the religious content of his literary life-work; here it may be advisable to hear what Protestant theologians have to say.
These theologians will tell us how many of the olden dogmas Luther, explicitly or implicitly, relinquishes, and whether and how he undermines the very idea of faith as known to Christians of old; we shall also have to consider the Protestant strictures which assert that the doctrines, which he either retained or set up for the first time, were fraught with so much that was illogical that they may be said to bear within them the seeds of dissolution. The conclusions reached will show whether or not he was actually heading for a “Christianity void of dogma.”
It is hard to deny that a certain amount of truth lurks in the contention of a certain modern school of Protestant thought which insists that Luther practically made an end of “the old, dogmatic Christianity.”[1705]Luther did not, of course, look so far ahead, nor were the consequences of hisown action at all clear to him, and when Catholics took pains to point them out he was not slow to repel them with the utmost indignation. Still, logic is inexorable in demanding its rights.[1706]
Here we are happily able to state the case almost entirely in the words of Protestant theologians of the modern school, such as, for instance, Adolf Harnack.
“The acknowledged authorities on dogma,” says Harnack, speaking of Luther’s attitude towards the pillars of the Church’s teaching, “have been torn down, and thereby dogma itself,quadogma, i.e. the unfailing teaching institution ordained by the Holy Ghost, has been done away with.... The revision has been extended even beyond the second century of the Church’s history and up to its very beginnings, and has everywhere been carried out radically. An end has been made of that history of dogma which started in the age of the apologists, nay, of the Apostolic Fathers.”[1707]Harnack therefore, in his detailed work on the history of dogma, refrained from dealing with any theologians later than Luther, instead of following the usual course among Protestant authors, and giving an account of the development of doctrine in later Protestantism and among Luther’s followers. He pertinently asked: “How can there be in Protestantism any history of dogma after Luther’s Prefaces to the New Testament and his great reformation writings?”[1708]
Addressing the representatives of Lutheran “dogmatic theology,” Harnack says: “Luther’s reformation created a new point of departure for the development of the Christian belief in the Word of God”; “it set aside every form of infallibility that might have offered an outward assurance for one’s belief, the Church’s infallible organisation and infallible tradition and the infallible code of Scripture. Thus an end was made of the conception of Christianity from which dogma had sprung, viz. the Christian faith, the sure knowledge of the final causes of all things and thus of the whole Divine scheme of salvation. Christian faith has now become merely a firm assurance of receiving forgiveness ofsins from God, as the Father of Jesus Christ, and of living under Him in His kingdom. This at the same time spells the ruin of any infallible dogma; for how can any dogma be unchangeable and authentic, thought out and formulated as it was by finite men, living in sin, and devoid of every outward guarantee?” If, nevertheless, Luther accepted and maintained certain aspects of ancient dogma, he did so, not as establishing “side by side with faith a law of faith based on particular outward promises,” but rather “from his unshaken conviction that much of this dogma corresponded exactly with the Gospel or Word of God, and that this correspondence was self-evident”; “as dogma, it did not constitute a rule.”[1709]
In some respects, for instance in this very matter, what Harnack says stands in need of correction. He is at times too fond of making out his own Christianity without dogma to have been also that of Luther. We just heard him say that the remnant of olden dogma which Luther preserved, “as dogma, did not constitute a rule.” He would, however, have been nearer the truth in saying that,logically, as dogma,it ought not to haveconstituted a rule. There can be no doubt that Luther—as will be shown below—insists, though in contradiction with other “basic ideas and with the spirit of his reformation,” that the Christian verities which he leaves standing must be embraced as revealed articles of the Christian belief and indubitable truths of faith. Even where he does not insist upon this he still takes it for granted that faith in the whole of revelation (“fides historica”) precedes that faith which consists in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Even Harnack has to admit, that, with Luther, “dogmaquadogma, remains to some extent in force” owing “to the logic of things.”[1710]
In some respects, for instance in this very matter, what Harnack says stands in need of correction. He is at times too fond of making out his own Christianity without dogma to have been also that of Luther. We just heard him say that the remnant of olden dogma which Luther preserved, “as dogma, did not constitute a rule.” He would, however, have been nearer the truth in saying that,logically, as dogma,it ought not to haveconstituted a rule. There can be no doubt that Luther—as will be shown below—insists, though in contradiction with other “basic ideas and with the spirit of his reformation,” that the Christian verities which he leaves standing must be embraced as revealed articles of the Christian belief and indubitable truths of faith. Even where he does not insist upon this he still takes it for granted that faith in the whole of revelation (“fides historica”) precedes that faith which consists in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Even Harnack has to admit, that, with Luther, “dogmaquadogma, remains to some extent in force” owing “to the logic of things.”[1710]
Luther, according to another passage in Harnack, “under the pressure of circumstances” and the storms raised against him by the fanatics and the Anabaptists, was drawn into a dogmatising current of which the issue was the Augsburg Confession. To the question: Did Luther’s reformation do away with the ancient dogma? we must reply, that, at least, it “demolished its foundation—as indeed our Catholic opponents rightly object against us—that it was a mighty principle rather than a new doctrine, and that its subsequent history through the age of Orthodoxy, Pietism and Rationalism down to the present day is less a falling away than a natural development.”[1711]
Even before Harnack’s day this was virtually the standpoint of some of the best Protestant judges. It had been perceived long before that the purely Evangelical theory led much further from the ancient dogmas than Protestant orthodoxy was disposed to admit. Even according to so conservative a theologian as Johann August Neander, “the spirit of the Reformation did not at once attain to a clear consciousness of itself”; Luther indeed, even here, “had reached the consciousness of the pure Evangelical belief, thanks to the principle of a faith which is a free outgrowth of the Divine power within; yet, owing to the controversies on the Supper and to the Peasant War, this clear consciousness again became eclipsed.”[1712]Neander finds the best statement of Luther’s new ideas in those works which are most radically opposed to the traditional teaching of the Church of old. Albert Ritschl, the well-known leader of the free Protestant school, likewise declared: “The Lutheran theory of life has not remained true to itself; it has been hemmed in and dulled by the stress laid on objective dogma. The pure doctrine as taught in the schools is in reality merely a passing, not the final, form of Protestantism.”[1713]
All these critics, Harnack in particular, though blaming Luther for not drawing the right conclusions, are nevertheless at one in their outspoken admiration of the powerful thinker and brave spokesman of the new belief, and particularly of those theses of his which approach most closely their own ideal of an unfettered theology. In their opinion Luther is to remain the hero of yore, though his garb and attitude will no longer be the same as those to which Protestantism had previously been accustomed. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention this because otherwise the strong things some of the critics say might, taken together, give the impression that their main aim and endeavour was to decry Luther. Probably enough Harnack and his friends failed to foresee how unfavourable a view their censures, taken in the lump, might produce of Luther’s person and work. Harnack, however, in one passage, pays a strange tribute to Luther’s conservatism, one, no doubt, which would appeal to the Reformer’s more old-fashioned friends. He points out, that, “we owe it to him, that, even to the presentday, these formularies [the olden creeds] are still in Protestantism a living power”; nay, such is his ignorance of the state of things in Catholicism, that he is convinced that it is only in Protestantism that these creeds still “live,” whereas, “in the Roman Church, they are but a dead and obsolete heirloom”; Luther, according to one bold dictum of Harnack’s, was really “the restorer of ancient dogma.”[1714]
Among the olden doctrines thrown over by Luther his Protestant critics rightly instance the Canon of Scripture and the right of the Church to interpret the Bible. They corroborate strikingly from Luther’s writings the results which we reached above,[1715]a circumstance which may surprise Protestant readers.
If, according to Luther, the doctrine of the oldest confessions of faith are only to be retained because they can be directly proved from the Bible, then the Bible itself with all its books, so such Protestants argue, must stand firm and inviolable. Now, awkwardly enough, Luther himself saps the authority of the Canon.
“If the attitude is justified which Luther takes up in his famous Prefaces to the various books of the New Testament,” says Harnack (cp. prefaces to the Epistle of James, to the Epistle to the Hebrews and to the Apocalypse), “then an end is made of the infallible Canon of Scripture. It is here of the utmost importance historically, though in itself a matter of indifference, that we find Luther, especially after the controversy on the Supper, making statements to the effect that every letter of Scripture is fundamental to the Christian faith; the flagrant contradiction involved in the assertion that a thing holds and at the same time does not hold can only be solved by saying that it does not. The same follows from Luther’s views on faith, for, according to him, this is produced by the Holy Ghost through thepreachingof the Word of God. To-day too, all Protestants are agreed that historical criticism of Scripture is not unevangelical, though this unanimity of opinion extends only as far as the ‘principle,’ and many refuse to carry it out in practice.”[1716]—“Luther,at the very time when he was waging so brave a war against the authority of the Councils, also opposed Scriptural infallibility, and, indeed, how could he do otherwise?... There can be no doubt that Luther’s attitude towards the New Testament, as we find it set forth in the Prefaces and in one or two other passages, is the correct one, i.e. that which really tallies with his belief.”[1717]As F. Loofs points out, Luther leaves us without any outward guarantee for the authority of the Canon of the Bible.[1718]Loofs quotes, for instance, Luther’s saying: “Hence God must tell you within your heart: This is God’s Word.”[1719]“Luther’s criticism,” the same writer says, “did not spare even those books which he allowed to be truly prophetic or apostolic.... He frankly admitted the human element in Scripture.”[1720]If Luther’s fundamental opposition to the faith once delivered is already apparent from his criticism of the Bible, still more is this the case when we come to look into the freedom he allowed in the interpretation of the sense of the Bible.As Harnack puts it: In Luther’s view “the Church is based on something which every Christian, no matter how humble, can see and test, viz. on the Word of God as apprehended by pure reason. This, of course, was tantamount to a claim to ascertain the true verbal sense of Holy Scripture.... But Luther never foresaw how far this rule would lead.”[1721]Luther himself often put his principle to such arbitrary usage as to prove a warning to others (above, vol. iv., pp. 406 f., 418 f.), and to exclude the possibility of any settled dogma. “The flagrant contradiction,” says Harnack, “into which he was led by criticising the Bible whilst all the time holding the idea he did about its inspiration, he contrived to explain away by reading the Evangel itself into texts which presented a difficulty.”[1722]“In Holy Scripture, the infallible authority, only that was to be found, which on other grounds was already established as the true doctrine.”[1723]Hence in the matter of the Bible, so Harnack has it, “Criticism, in order to be according to Luther’s mind, would have to go against him in the interests of faith.”[1724]
“If the attitude is justified which Luther takes up in his famous Prefaces to the various books of the New Testament,” says Harnack (cp. prefaces to the Epistle of James, to the Epistle to the Hebrews and to the Apocalypse), “then an end is made of the infallible Canon of Scripture. It is here of the utmost importance historically, though in itself a matter of indifference, that we find Luther, especially after the controversy on the Supper, making statements to the effect that every letter of Scripture is fundamental to the Christian faith; the flagrant contradiction involved in the assertion that a thing holds and at the same time does not hold can only be solved by saying that it does not. The same follows from Luther’s views on faith, for, according to him, this is produced by the Holy Ghost through thepreachingof the Word of God. To-day too, all Protestants are agreed that historical criticism of Scripture is not unevangelical, though this unanimity of opinion extends only as far as the ‘principle,’ and many refuse to carry it out in practice.”[1716]—“Luther,at the very time when he was waging so brave a war against the authority of the Councils, also opposed Scriptural infallibility, and, indeed, how could he do otherwise?... There can be no doubt that Luther’s attitude towards the New Testament, as we find it set forth in the Prefaces and in one or two other passages, is the correct one, i.e. that which really tallies with his belief.”[1717]
As F. Loofs points out, Luther leaves us without any outward guarantee for the authority of the Canon of the Bible.[1718]Loofs quotes, for instance, Luther’s saying: “Hence God must tell you within your heart: This is God’s Word.”[1719]“Luther’s criticism,” the same writer says, “did not spare even those books which he allowed to be truly prophetic or apostolic.... He frankly admitted the human element in Scripture.”[1720]
If Luther’s fundamental opposition to the faith once delivered is already apparent from his criticism of the Bible, still more is this the case when we come to look into the freedom he allowed in the interpretation of the sense of the Bible.
As Harnack puts it: In Luther’s view “the Church is based on something which every Christian, no matter how humble, can see and test, viz. on the Word of God as apprehended by pure reason. This, of course, was tantamount to a claim to ascertain the true verbal sense of Holy Scripture.... But Luther never foresaw how far this rule would lead.”[1721]
Luther himself often put his principle to such arbitrary usage as to prove a warning to others (above, vol. iv., pp. 406 f., 418 f.), and to exclude the possibility of any settled dogma. “The flagrant contradiction,” says Harnack, “into which he was led by criticising the Bible whilst all the time holding the idea he did about its inspiration, he contrived to explain away by reading the Evangel itself into texts which presented a difficulty.”[1722]“In Holy Scripture, the infallible authority, only that was to be found, which on other grounds was already established as the true doctrine.”[1723]
Hence in the matter of the Bible, so Harnack has it, “Criticism, in order to be according to Luther’s mind, would have to go against him in the interests of faith.”[1724]
Luther’s abandonment of the Church’s standpoint with regard to the Bible is closely bound up with his renunciation of the Church’s teaching office, of the hierarchy and of all respect for tradition. This meant, as modern Protestant critics admit, the destruction of the whole theory of tradition and, in fact, of all ecclesiastical authority, though, on Harnack’s own admission, ancient Church writers, especially “subsequent to Irenæus,” rely much on such authority.
“Luther was antagonistic to all these authorities,” says the same scholar, “to the infallibility of Church, Pope, and Councils, to every constitutional right of the Church to pronounce on the truth and, on principle, to all the doctrinal formularies of the past.”[1725]His later writing: “Von den Conciliis,” etc. (1539) proves this.
Nor have we yet exhausted the list of grievances against Luther. Not only did he forsake the ancient teaching on justification, merit and works, but he even declared war on human free will, though belief in its existence is a truth of natural philosophy and though the Church had ever held it in the highest esteem. He put aside in its primitive form the basic dogma of original sin. The doctrine of actual sin and its distinction into mortal and venial found no favour with him,[1726]nor did the related doctrine of the existence of a purgatory. He completely destroyed the teaching of antiquity on Grace by his new discovery of the law of absolute necessity which rules all things, not excluding even the actions of the human mind and heart; according to Luther “Grace is the fatherly disposition of God towards us, Who for Christ’s sake calls sinful man to Him, accepts him and wins his confidence through faith in theChristus passus.”[1727]This fatherly disposition of God no man can ever in the least resist if destined by the Divine Omnipotence to receive the faith; those, however, who are not numbered among the elect, know not any such invitation, or rather constraint, for the secret Will of God unfailingly dooms them to damnation.[1728]
After giving the above definition of Grace, Harnack asks, “What room then is there for a Sacrament?” For Catholics the Sacraments were pillars of the Church’s life and of her teaching. With them Luther was perfectly willing to dispense.
“He not only strove,” says Harnack, “to break away completely from the ancient or mediaeval conception, but he actually brought it to nought by his doctrine of the one sacrament, which is the Word.”[1729]The Sacraments being to him a “peculiar form of the saving Word of God, viz. of the realisation of the‘promissio Dei,’ he reduces them to two (three), or, indeed, to one, viz. the Word of God. He showed that even the most enlightened Fathers had had but a dim notion of this so important matter.... Having practically laid the whole system in ruins, he rests again on the one, simple grand act, which is constantly being repeated in every Christian’s life, viz. the awakening of faith thanks to the ‘gratia.’”[1730]Luther turned his back not only on the ancient teaching concerning the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also on the whole outward worship of the Church.“His attitude towards Divine Worship in the Church was a radical one. Here too he destroyed not only the mediaeval tradition, but even that of the ancient Church such as we may trace it back right into the 2nd century. The public worship of the Church, to him, is nothing more than the worship of individuals united in time and place.... The priest and the sacrifice in the usual sense of the terms are done away with, and all worth is denied to those specific ecclesiastical actions which were formerly held to be both wholesome and necessary.” “The ‘divine service,’ particularly that of the Word, in which he nevertheless wished the congregation to take part,” “can have no other motive ... than to promote individual worship, for God deals with us only through the Word which is not tied up with any particular persons.”[1731]Hence public worship does no more than “edify faith through the preaching of the Divine Word and the common offering of prayer and praise.”[1732]
“He not only strove,” says Harnack, “to break away completely from the ancient or mediaeval conception, but he actually brought it to nought by his doctrine of the one sacrament, which is the Word.”[1729]The Sacraments being to him a “peculiar form of the saving Word of God, viz. of the realisation of the‘promissio Dei,’ he reduces them to two (three), or, indeed, to one, viz. the Word of God. He showed that even the most enlightened Fathers had had but a dim notion of this so important matter.... Having practically laid the whole system in ruins, he rests again on the one, simple grand act, which is constantly being repeated in every Christian’s life, viz. the awakening of faith thanks to the ‘gratia.’”[1730]
Luther turned his back not only on the ancient teaching concerning the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also on the whole outward worship of the Church.
“His attitude towards Divine Worship in the Church was a radical one. Here too he destroyed not only the mediaeval tradition, but even that of the ancient Church such as we may trace it back right into the 2nd century. The public worship of the Church, to him, is nothing more than the worship of individuals united in time and place.... The priest and the sacrifice in the usual sense of the terms are done away with, and all worth is denied to those specific ecclesiastical actions which were formerly held to be both wholesome and necessary.” “The ‘divine service,’ particularly that of the Word, in which he nevertheless wished the congregation to take part,” “can have no other motive ... than to promote individual worship, for God deals with us only through the Word which is not tied up with any particular persons.”[1731]Hence public worship does no more than “edify faith through the preaching of the Divine Word and the common offering of prayer and praise.”[1732]
Of vast importance in this change and even more far-reaching in its consequences was Luther’s abrogation of the ancient conception of the Church. As bound up with it, he also harshly set aside the invocation of Saints, that vital element of the olden worship.
The ancient teaching on perfection had to make room for new theories, for it seemed to him to lay too much stress on man’s own works.[1733]And yet “we cannot but admit,” says Harnack, “that Luther’s efforts to create a new ideal of life were not characterised by any clear discrimination.” The reason may be “that the times were not yet ripe for it.” In those days of public stress “religion’s chief business was to bring consolation amidst the miseries of life. To heal the soul oppressed with sorrow for sin and to alleviate the evils in the world,” this was what was mainly aimed at.[1734]This, however, was scarcely to do justice to religion and to its sublime tasks.
According to Luther the Church had, even from theoutset, given to human reason a larger sphere than was due to it. Even at the cradle of the Church Christian philosophy had taken her stand, and, with her torch of reason, had pointed out the road to faith. Luther, however, conceived “a distrust of reason itself not to be explained simply by his distrust of it as the main prop of self-righteousness. He grew hardened in his bold defiance of reason, surrendering himself to that suspicious Catholic [!] way of looking at things, which reveres the wisdom of God and sees the stamp of the divine truth in paradox and in thecontradictio in adiecto....No one, however, can despise reason and learning with impunity, and Luther himself was punished by the darkening of his own views on faith.”[1735]“That is a dangerous kind of theologism which fancies that the knowledge which comes from worldly education may simply be ignored. The reformers were too ready to cut themselves adrift from worldly culture where the latter seemed to trench on the domain of faith.... The Reformation buried beneath a mass of hatred and injustice much of the valuable learning the age possessed and thereby made itself responsible for the later crises of Protestantism.”[1736]
“Luther,” says Loofs, “by laying stress on that antithesis between human reason and the divine ‘foolishness,’ which was so intimately bound up with his own deepest and most fundamental views (and who ever thundered more loudly against the ‘Frau Hulda’ of natural reason, that ‘devil’s whore’ and ‘arch enemy of the faith’ than did Luther?), imposed on his following the old Catholic idea (which he himself had overthrown) of the verbal inspiration of the Canon, and did so so thoroughly that after-ages were unable to shake themselves free of it. Nay, by rightly proscribing any allegorical exegesis, he made the burden of this old Catholic heritage even more oppressive in Protestantism than it had ever been before.”[1737]
Depreciation of reason, had, in Luther’s case, a bad effect on his whole teaching concerning God. As far back as theology went this had formed the centre of religiousdiscussion. The Fathers had by preference dwelt on questions which concerned God, His Oneness and Triunity, His attributes and His relations with the world and man. Luther, according to the admission of Protestant critics, introduced here certain arbitrary and very unfair limitations. It was his wish, as he frequently declares, that God should be meditated on only as Jesus Christ our Consoler and our Saviour. He has a strange and seemingly instinctive aversion to concerning himself with the Almighty Being, in Whom nevertheless “we live, and move, and are.” TheDeus absconditusappals him. According to him it is impossible to “treat of Predestination without being crucified and suffering the pains of death, or without loss to ourselves and secret anger against God.” Predestination “determines in the first instance who is and who is not to believe, who is and who is not to be saved from sin”; of this Luther cannot speak without at the same time solemnly emphasising that it is only thanks to it that we can “hope to conquer sin,” as otherwise the devil, “as we know, would soon overpower us all.” Yet we ought not, like the “reprobate spirits,” “explore the abyss of Divine Providence,” because otherwise we shall either “be brought to despair or kick over the traces.” The old Adam must “have been put to death before being able to endure this and to drink the strong wine,” i.e. a man must first have learnt, like Luther, “to stake all in God,” and “defy” all things in Him.[1738]
Thus it comes about that Luther ladles out reproaches indiscriminately to the philosophers who occupy themselves with God as known to reason, and the theologians who pursue the supernatural knowledge of God.
“Often enough did Luther deride as a product of blind reason,” writes Harnack, “that knowledge of God, which instead of thinking of God in Christ alone, ‘sophistically’ enumerates His attributes and speculates on His will, viz. the whole ‘metaphysical’ doctrine of God.”[1739]If “God be considered apart from Christ,” then He appears, according to Luther, merely as the “terrible Judge from Whom we can await nothing but punishment.”[1740]According to Luther, “there is, outside of Christ, no certainty concerning the Will of God”; for the secret Will of God threatens us with the dreadful sword of predestination to hell. HenceHarnack even goes so far as to say, that what is presupposed in Luther’s theories on the assurance of salvation is a belief “not in Godin se—for Godin sebelongs to the Aristotelians—but rather in the God Whom the Holy Ghost reveals to the soul as manifest in Christ.”[1741]“Godin se” and “Godquoad nos” are two different things. By establishing such a distinction Luther “sets himself at variance with all theology as it had existed since the days of the apologists; here his aversion to the olden dogma is even more evident than in his reprobation of certain of its parts. Again and again, whenever the occasion arises, he repudiates what the olden theology had said of God and Christ, of the Will and Attributes of God, of the two natures in Christ, etc., with the remark: ‘This He hasin se. Thereupon he immediately proceeds, with the words ‘But,quoad nos,’ to introduce his own new view, which to him is the main thing, if not the whole.”[1742]Such doctrines as have nothing to do with the justification of the sinner or the “confession of faith, as a personal experience,” recede so much into the background that Harnack feels justified in saying: “Though, under the formulas ‘Godin se,’ ‘the Hidden God,’ ‘God’s Hidden Will,’ Luther left these old ideas standing, still they had practically ceased to exist as doctrines of faith. Of this there can be no doubt. That he did not throw them over completely is due to two facts, on the one hand to his impression that he found them in the Bible, and, on the other, to his never having systematically thought out the problems involved.”[1743]It must, however, be noted, that, as will be seen more clearly when we come to discuss Luther’s idea of faith, he was by no means ready to allow that such dogmas were not real “articles of faith.” This may be what leads Harnack here to say that they had “practically” ceased to exist as “actual articles of faith.”In connection with the dogmas touching God it must not be lost to sight that Luther, by his doctrine of predestination, of man’s unfreedom and of the inevitability of all that occurs, really endangered, if indeed he did not actually destroy, the Church’s olden conception of God as the Highest and Most Perfect Being. The cruel God of absolute predestination to hell is no longer a God worthy of the name.“Nor can it be gainsaid,” writes the Protestant theologian Arnold Taube, “that, given Luther’s idea of God and His Omnipotence,the negation of man’s free-will is a simple and natural consequence.” “Luther’s conception of God is at variance with the ethical personality of the God of Christianity, just as Schleiermacher’s whole pantheistic scheme of theology is useless in enabling us to grasp a religion so eminently moral as Christianity.” “Schleiermacher was quite logical in carrying to their consequences Luther’s ideas on predestination and free-will.” Luther’s idea of God, according to Taube, is simply “determinist.” “The negation [of free-will] can be escaped only by a theory of the Divine Omnipotence which regards God as controlling His own Power and thus as practically exercising restraint over Himself and limiting His Power. This, however, was not Luther’s theory, who takes the Divine Omnipotence to signify that which works all in all.”[1744]
“Often enough did Luther deride as a product of blind reason,” writes Harnack, “that knowledge of God, which instead of thinking of God in Christ alone, ‘sophistically’ enumerates His attributes and speculates on His will, viz. the whole ‘metaphysical’ doctrine of God.”[1739]If “God be considered apart from Christ,” then He appears, according to Luther, merely as the “terrible Judge from Whom we can await nothing but punishment.”[1740]
According to Luther, “there is, outside of Christ, no certainty concerning the Will of God”; for the secret Will of God threatens us with the dreadful sword of predestination to hell. HenceHarnack even goes so far as to say, that what is presupposed in Luther’s theories on the assurance of salvation is a belief “not in Godin se—for Godin sebelongs to the Aristotelians—but rather in the God Whom the Holy Ghost reveals to the soul as manifest in Christ.”[1741]
“Godin se” and “Godquoad nos” are two different things. By establishing such a distinction Luther “sets himself at variance with all theology as it had existed since the days of the apologists; here his aversion to the olden dogma is even more evident than in his reprobation of certain of its parts. Again and again, whenever the occasion arises, he repudiates what the olden theology had said of God and Christ, of the Will and Attributes of God, of the two natures in Christ, etc., with the remark: ‘This He hasin se. Thereupon he immediately proceeds, with the words ‘But,quoad nos,’ to introduce his own new view, which to him is the main thing, if not the whole.”[1742]
Such doctrines as have nothing to do with the justification of the sinner or the “confession of faith, as a personal experience,” recede so much into the background that Harnack feels justified in saying: “Though, under the formulas ‘Godin se,’ ‘the Hidden God,’ ‘God’s Hidden Will,’ Luther left these old ideas standing, still they had practically ceased to exist as doctrines of faith. Of this there can be no doubt. That he did not throw them over completely is due to two facts, on the one hand to his impression that he found them in the Bible, and, on the other, to his never having systematically thought out the problems involved.”[1743]It must, however, be noted, that, as will be seen more clearly when we come to discuss Luther’s idea of faith, he was by no means ready to allow that such dogmas were not real “articles of faith.” This may be what leads Harnack here to say that they had “practically” ceased to exist as “actual articles of faith.”
In connection with the dogmas touching God it must not be lost to sight that Luther, by his doctrine of predestination, of man’s unfreedom and of the inevitability of all that occurs, really endangered, if indeed he did not actually destroy, the Church’s olden conception of God as the Highest and Most Perfect Being. The cruel God of absolute predestination to hell is no longer a God worthy of the name.
“Nor can it be gainsaid,” writes the Protestant theologian Arnold Taube, “that, given Luther’s idea of God and His Omnipotence,the negation of man’s free-will is a simple and natural consequence.” “Luther’s conception of God is at variance with the ethical personality of the God of Christianity, just as Schleiermacher’s whole pantheistic scheme of theology is useless in enabling us to grasp a religion so eminently moral as Christianity.” “Schleiermacher was quite logical in carrying to their consequences Luther’s ideas on predestination and free-will.” Luther’s idea of God, according to Taube, is simply “determinist.” “The negation [of free-will] can be escaped only by a theory of the Divine Omnipotence which regards God as controlling His own Power and thus as practically exercising restraint over Himself and limiting His Power. This, however, was not Luther’s theory, who takes the Divine Omnipotence to signify that which works all in all.”[1744]
To an outsider it sounds strange to hear Harnack and others affirm that Luther swept away all the positive doctrines of antiquity; no less strange is it to see Luther, the furious opponent of Catholicism, being made by men who call themselves his followers into an advocate of the Rationalism which they themselves profess. In the interests of Rationalism these theologians take as their watchword Wilhelm Herrmann’s dictum of Luther’s doctrine of penance: “We must strive to push ahead with what Luther began and left undone.” The least they demand is, that, as Ferdinand Kattenbusch puts it, Protestant theology should hold fast to the “earlier” Luther, to those days “when Luther’s genius was as yet unbroken.” In this wise they contrive to wrench away Luther from the foundations of that faith to which he still wished to remain true and which the “orthodox” at a later date claimed him to have ever retained.[1745]
It is well known how, following in Ritschl’s footsteps, Harnack’s ability, learning, and outspokenness have proved extremely awkward to the more conservative theologians. He “carried on Luther’s interrupted work,” declares Herrmann, and set up again in all its purity Luther’s early conception of faith against a theology which had been stifled in orthodoxy and pietism.[1746]
We must, however, in the light of Protestant criticism, examine a little more closely Luther’s attitude towards the ancient Christian conception of faith.
Starting first of all from faith subjectively considered and examining Luther’s doctrine of the personal appropriation of the content of faith, we immediately find ourselves brought face to face with his doctrine of justification, for he has scarcely anything to say of the faith of the individual save in so far as this faith operates justification. Here all the other truths to be believed tend to disappear from his purview and one only truth remains, viz.: Through Christ I am pleasing to God. It is no wonder if many of his followers, even to the present day, see in this doctrine of the certainty of having in Christ a Gracious God, the only dogma handed down by Luther. Does he not, for instance, in one of the most widely read passages of his works, viz., in the Preface to Romans in his translation of the New Testament, concisely define faith as a “daring and lively trust in the grace of God, so strong that one would be ready to die for it a thousand times over”? “Such a trust makes a man cheerful, defiant and light-hearted in his attitude towards God and all creatures; such is the working of the Holy Ghost by faith.” “Faith is the work of God in us whereby we are transformed and born anew in God.”[1747]
Again, if we take faith objectively, i.e. as the sum-total of revelation, then again, at least according to many passages, faith must be merged in the one consoling conviction that we receive the forgiveness of sins from God in Christ.
“The Reformation,” says Harnack quite rightly, regarded all the rest of dogma as little more than “a grand testimony to God, Who has sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to liberate us from sin, to save us and set us free. Finding this testimony in dogma, every other incentive to determine it more accurately disappeared.” It is, however, important to note, that “ancient dogma was not merely the witness of the Gospel to a Gracious God, to Christ the Saviour, and to the forgiveness of sins”; it comprised a number of other profound and far-reaching doctrines also binding upon all, “above all a certain knowledge of God and of the world, and a law of belief.” According to Harnack, however, “faith and this knowledge of God and law of belief were unguardedly jumbled up.” In short, “a conservative attitude towards olden dogma is not imposed on the Reformation by its principles.”[1748]“The orthodoxy of the Luther-zealots of the 16th century had its basis in the reformers’ retention of a series of old Catholic presuppositions and dogmas which were really in disagreement with their own fundamental ideas.”[1749]“Thus,” proceeds Harnack, “the Reformation, i.e. the conception of the Evangelical faith, spells the end of dogma unless indeed, in the stead of the old-time dogma, we put a sort of phantom dogma.” The Reformation replaced the demand for faith, which corresponds with the law, by the freedom of the children of God, who are not under the constraint of the law of belief but rejoice in the gift bestowed on them, viz. in the promise of the forgiveness of sins in Christ.[1750]In this, again, there is much that is true, even though we may not be willing to subscribe to all the author says. Luther undoubtedly lays undue stress on those tenets of the faith which seem to him to refer to justification and spiritual freedom, and he does so to the detriment of what remains. “Hence the Gospel,” Luther says for instance, “is nothing else but the preaching of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of David, true God and Man, Who by His death and again-rising from the dead has overcome sin, death and hell for all those who believe in Him.” The Evangelists, so he says, describe the conquest of “Sin, death and hell” at great length, the others “more briefly like St. Peter and St. Paul”; at any rate the “Gospel must not be made into a code of laws or a handbook.”[1751]This was indeed to raise the standard of revolt against doctrine. Well might Adolf Hausrath, in a passage already quoted, speak of Luther as “the greatest revolutionary of the 16th century.”The question touched upon above deserves, however, to be looked into still more closely in the light of what other more moderate Protestant theologians say.Gustav Kawerau, speaking from such a standpoint, points out that Luther “runs the risk of confusing the Evangelical view of faith with that which sees in faith the acceptance of a string of doctrinal propositions, i.e. with that faith which is made up of so and so many articles, all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1752]This is so true that the historian and theologian in question rather understates the case by saying that Luther merely “runs the risk.” It is no difficult task in this connection to instance definite statements to this effect made by him, or even to enumerate the actual “articles” of faith he regarded as essential. In No. 12 of the articles of Schwabach (Torgau) he says, as Kawerau himself points out: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful who hold, believe and teach the above articles and propositions.... For where the Gospel is preached and the Sacraments are rightly used, there we have the holy Christian Church.”[1753]Amongst such articles Luther, following the example of the oldest Creeds, includes even the Virginity of Mary.[1754]It was to this that the theologian, Otto Scheel, recently alluded when compelled to make a stand against those theologians who, particularly during the years 1519-1523, miss in Luther any adherence to the articles of the faith. Scheel appeals to what Luther says of Mary’s Virginity in his German version of his “De votis monasticis” (1521 and 1522). In one passage Luther, referring to the thesis that every single article of faith must be believed, otherwise, no matter how earnest and virtuous be one’s life, everlasting damnation is certain, brings forward as an instance our Lady’s virginity: The religious, in their “bawdy-houses of Satan” [the monasteries], by their blasphemous vows deny the whole Gospel truth, consequently far more than merely that article concerning Mary. Hence they cannot be saved even did they possess “Mary’s virginity and holiness.” “Here we have,” rightly concludes Scheel, “even as early as 1521-22 a view of faith which does not differ materially from that which we meet with in Luther after the controversies on the Sacrament.” This, however, means, according to him, “that we must regard Luther’s development in a light different from that now usual.”[1755]Which then does Scheel hold to be the correct view? He finds in Luther at all times contradictions which admit of no escape: “The contradictions which clearly exist at a later date in Luther’s life’s work were, in point of fact, always latent within him.... This is equivalent to saying that we must regard Luther’s work as a whole, and that, too, just in its most vital parts, as one marred by contradictions which it is impossible to explain away.”[1756]Since Luther’s demand that all the articles of faith should be accepted without distinction was one which he had taken over from Catholicism, we should, continues Scheel, “seek in the Middle Ages the clue to his attitude instead of assigning to him the solution of modern problems as some are disposed to do.” In this, however, Scheel is proposing nothing new, but rather something that stands to reason; the method he suggests has, moreover, always been followed by Catholic critics of Luther’s theology.
“The Reformation,” says Harnack quite rightly, regarded all the rest of dogma as little more than “a grand testimony to God, Who has sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to liberate us from sin, to save us and set us free. Finding this testimony in dogma, every other incentive to determine it more accurately disappeared.” It is, however, important to note, that “ancient dogma was not merely the witness of the Gospel to a Gracious God, to Christ the Saviour, and to the forgiveness of sins”; it comprised a number of other profound and far-reaching doctrines also binding upon all, “above all a certain knowledge of God and of the world, and a law of belief.” According to Harnack, however, “faith and this knowledge of God and law of belief were unguardedly jumbled up.” In short, “a conservative attitude towards olden dogma is not imposed on the Reformation by its principles.”[1748]
“The orthodoxy of the Luther-zealots of the 16th century had its basis in the reformers’ retention of a series of old Catholic presuppositions and dogmas which were really in disagreement with their own fundamental ideas.”[1749]“Thus,” proceeds Harnack, “the Reformation, i.e. the conception of the Evangelical faith, spells the end of dogma unless indeed, in the stead of the old-time dogma, we put a sort of phantom dogma.” The Reformation replaced the demand for faith, which corresponds with the law, by the freedom of the children of God, who are not under the constraint of the law of belief but rejoice in the gift bestowed on them, viz. in the promise of the forgiveness of sins in Christ.[1750]
In this, again, there is much that is true, even though we may not be willing to subscribe to all the author says. Luther undoubtedly lays undue stress on those tenets of the faith which seem to him to refer to justification and spiritual freedom, and he does so to the detriment of what remains. “Hence the Gospel,” Luther says for instance, “is nothing else but the preaching of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of David, true God and Man, Who by His death and again-rising from the dead has overcome sin, death and hell for all those who believe in Him.” The Evangelists, so he says, describe the conquest of “Sin, death and hell” at great length, the others “more briefly like St. Peter and St. Paul”; at any rate the “Gospel must not be made into a code of laws or a handbook.”[1751]This was indeed to raise the standard of revolt against doctrine. Well might Adolf Hausrath, in a passage already quoted, speak of Luther as “the greatest revolutionary of the 16th century.”
The question touched upon above deserves, however, to be looked into still more closely in the light of what other more moderate Protestant theologians say.
Gustav Kawerau, speaking from such a standpoint, points out that Luther “runs the risk of confusing the Evangelical view of faith with that which sees in faith the acceptance of a string of doctrinal propositions, i.e. with that faith which is made up of so and so many articles, all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1752]
This is so true that the historian and theologian in question rather understates the case by saying that Luther merely “runs the risk.” It is no difficult task in this connection to instance definite statements to this effect made by him, or even to enumerate the actual “articles” of faith he regarded as essential. In No. 12 of the articles of Schwabach (Torgau) he says, as Kawerau himself points out: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful who hold, believe and teach the above articles and propositions.... For where the Gospel is preached and the Sacraments are rightly used, there we have the holy Christian Church.”[1753]
Amongst such articles Luther, following the example of the oldest Creeds, includes even the Virginity of Mary.[1754]
It was to this that the theologian, Otto Scheel, recently alluded when compelled to make a stand against those theologians who, particularly during the years 1519-1523, miss in Luther any adherence to the articles of the faith. Scheel appeals to what Luther says of Mary’s Virginity in his German version of his “De votis monasticis” (1521 and 1522). In one passage Luther, referring to the thesis that every single article of faith must be believed, otherwise, no matter how earnest and virtuous be one’s life, everlasting damnation is certain, brings forward as an instance our Lady’s virginity: The religious, in their “bawdy-houses of Satan” [the monasteries], by their blasphemous vows deny the whole Gospel truth, consequently far more than merely that article concerning Mary. Hence they cannot be saved even did they possess “Mary’s virginity and holiness.” “Here we have,” rightly concludes Scheel, “even as early as 1521-22 a view of faith which does not differ materially from that which we meet with in Luther after the controversies on the Sacrament.” This, however, means, according to him, “that we must regard Luther’s development in a light different from that now usual.”[1755]
Which then does Scheel hold to be the correct view? He finds in Luther at all times contradictions which admit of no escape: “The contradictions which clearly exist at a later date in Luther’s life’s work were, in point of fact, always latent within him.... This is equivalent to saying that we must regard Luther’s work as a whole, and that, too, just in its most vital parts, as one marred by contradictions which it is impossible to explain away.”[1756]
Since Luther’s demand that all the articles of faith should be accepted without distinction was one which he had taken over from Catholicism, we should, continues Scheel, “seek in the Middle Ages the clue to his attitude instead of assigning to him the solution of modern problems as some are disposed to do.” In this, however, Scheel is proposing nothing new, but rather something that stands to reason; the method he suggests has, moreover, always been followed by Catholic critics of Luther’s theology.
Catholics found without difficulty plentiful statements of Luther’s in support of the inviolability of the whole chain of olden dogma, so great had been the influence exerted over him by the convictions of his youth. It was an easy matter for controversialists to turn such statementsof his against Luther himself, the more so, since, eminently justified though they were within Catholicism, they were utterly out of place on his mouth and furnish a striking condemnation of his own rash undertaking—a fact to which he, however, refused to open his eyes. For instance, in the very evening of his days when he himself could look back on his destruction of so many of the dogmas of the olden Church, speaking to the Sacramentarians, Luther says of the traditional doctrines: “This is what I thought, yea and said too, viz. that the devil is never idle; no sooner has he started one heresy than he must needs start others so that no error ever remains alone. When the ring has once been broken it is no longer a ring; it has lost its strength and is ever snapping anew.... Whoever does not or will not believe aright one article assuredly does not believe any article with a true and earnest faith.... Hence we may say straight out: Believe all, or nothing! The Holy Ghost will not allow Himself to be divided or sundered, so as to teach or make us believe one article aright and another awry.” “Otherwise,” so he concludes, all unconsciously justifying his Catholic critics, “no heretic would ever be condemned nor would there be a heretic on all the earth; for it is the nature of heretics to tamper first with one article only and then bit by bit to deny them all.... If the bell have but a single crack, it no longer rings true and is quite useless.”[1757]
It was on the strength of this principle of the absolutely binding character of all the truths of religion (at least of those which he himself retained) that he ventured to depict Zwingli as the biggest rebel against the faith.
“Zwingel, who was miserably slain on the battlefield, and Œcolampadius who died of grief on that account, perished in their sins because they obstinately persisted in their errors.”[1758]He could not “but despair of Zwingel’s salvation,” for the latter was an arch-heretic.So harsh a judgment on Zwingli is, however, quite unjustifiable if we start from the more liberal conception of faith which Luther had once advocated together with the stricter view, and which indeed he never in so many words retracted. On such grounds Kawerau may well take Zwingli under his wing against Luther.His words will be quoted a little further on. Meanwhile, however, it must be pointed out that Luther’s unkindly criticism of Zwingli is not to be explained merely by the above view of faith. In his Life of Luther Adolf Hausrath throws some light on its psychological side. “Language so insulting as Luther’s,” he says, “no bishop had ever used against Zwingli,”[1759]and he lays his hand boldly on the weak spot with the object of bringing out Luther’s astounding want of logic. He had proclaimed the right of examining Scripture freely and without being tied down by the teaching of the Church, yet he refused to allow Zwingli such freedom; the latter “had applied the principle indiscriminately to everything (?) handed down by the Church, whereas Luther wished to put aside merely what was contrary to his convictions on justification by faith alone, or to the plain sense of Scripture.”[1760]Luther “fancied he could guess who had inspired the Sacramentarians with their blasphemies. Thereby he envenomed the controversy from the very outset. For him there could be no truce with the devil.”[1761]“In any sign of life given by the Swiss he at once sniffed the ‘devil’s breeches.’”[1762]Luther himself admits that “to begin with, it was Zwingli’s wrong doctrine and the fact ‘that the Swiss wished to be first,’”[1763]which had led to the estrangement. The “wrong doctrine” he detected, thanks to that gift of infallibility which led the Sacramentarians to call his behaviour “papistic.” We have here, according to Hausrath, a “religious genius, who, by the force of his personality and word, sought to make all others bow to the law of his mind.” “We must resign ourselves to the fact that this great man had the shortcomings which belong to his virtues. Disputatiousness and love to pick a quarrel, faults which simply represented the other side of his firm faith, and which some had already deplored in the young monk at Erfurt, Wittenberg and Leipzig, had naturally not been abated by his many victorious combats, and, now, more than ever, Oldecop’s words were true: ‘He wanted to be in the right in all the disputations and was fond of quarrelling.’ The fact is that Luther was no exception to the rule, that man finds nothing harder to bear well than success.”[1764]Nevertheless, to return to the question of faith, Luther had already laid down in his writings certain marks by which it might be ascertained whether a man is a believer or not, and which at any rate scarcely tally with the criteria he applies to Zwingli. Judged by these Zwingli would emerge quite blameless.Kawerau points this out in defence of Zwingli: “The idea of faith,” he says, “which Luther had newly evolved, in opposition to the Catholic assent to the teaching of the Bible and the Church, led logically to determining from a man’s attitude towards Christand His saving Grace whether he was a true believer or not; Luther himself frequently made this his criterion; for instance, in answer to the question: Who is a member of the Church, and whom must I regard as my dear brother in Christ? He replies, all those ‘Who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us to Him by His death and to obtain for us grace’; or again: All ‘those who put their trust in Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or yet again: ‘All those who seek the Lord with their whole heart and soul ... and who trust in nothing but in God’s mercy.’”[1765]But had not Zwingli loudly proclaimed himself to be one of these?“In such utterances of Luther’s we find,” according to Kawerau, “summed up the purely religious and Evangelical conception of faith.” Here there is no question of any accepting of the several articles of faith, of any submission to a “string of doctrinal propositions,” of any “faith made up of so and so many ‘articles’ all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1766]According to this theologian Luther was untrue to his own basic theories when he assailed Zwingli as he did. Kawerau also agrees with Hausrath in holding that the principal cause of Luther’s estrangement was a psychological one which indeed constituted the weakest spot in his whole position, viz. his identification of his own theological outbuilding of an article of faith, with its religious content,[1767]or, to speak more plainly, his setting himself up as the sole authority after having set aside that of the Church.
“Zwingel, who was miserably slain on the battlefield, and Œcolampadius who died of grief on that account, perished in their sins because they obstinately persisted in their errors.”[1758]He could not “but despair of Zwingel’s salvation,” for the latter was an arch-heretic.
So harsh a judgment on Zwingli is, however, quite unjustifiable if we start from the more liberal conception of faith which Luther had once advocated together with the stricter view, and which indeed he never in so many words retracted. On such grounds Kawerau may well take Zwingli under his wing against Luther.His words will be quoted a little further on. Meanwhile, however, it must be pointed out that Luther’s unkindly criticism of Zwingli is not to be explained merely by the above view of faith. In his Life of Luther Adolf Hausrath throws some light on its psychological side. “Language so insulting as Luther’s,” he says, “no bishop had ever used against Zwingli,”[1759]and he lays his hand boldly on the weak spot with the object of bringing out Luther’s astounding want of logic. He had proclaimed the right of examining Scripture freely and without being tied down by the teaching of the Church, yet he refused to allow Zwingli such freedom; the latter “had applied the principle indiscriminately to everything (?) handed down by the Church, whereas Luther wished to put aside merely what was contrary to his convictions on justification by faith alone, or to the plain sense of Scripture.”[1760]Luther “fancied he could guess who had inspired the Sacramentarians with their blasphemies. Thereby he envenomed the controversy from the very outset. For him there could be no truce with the devil.”[1761]“In any sign of life given by the Swiss he at once sniffed the ‘devil’s breeches.’”[1762]Luther himself admits that “to begin with, it was Zwingli’s wrong doctrine and the fact ‘that the Swiss wished to be first,’”[1763]which had led to the estrangement. The “wrong doctrine” he detected, thanks to that gift of infallibility which led the Sacramentarians to call his behaviour “papistic.” We have here, according to Hausrath, a “religious genius, who, by the force of his personality and word, sought to make all others bow to the law of his mind.” “We must resign ourselves to the fact that this great man had the shortcomings which belong to his virtues. Disputatiousness and love to pick a quarrel, faults which simply represented the other side of his firm faith, and which some had already deplored in the young monk at Erfurt, Wittenberg and Leipzig, had naturally not been abated by his many victorious combats, and, now, more than ever, Oldecop’s words were true: ‘He wanted to be in the right in all the disputations and was fond of quarrelling.’ The fact is that Luther was no exception to the rule, that man finds nothing harder to bear well than success.”[1764]
Nevertheless, to return to the question of faith, Luther had already laid down in his writings certain marks by which it might be ascertained whether a man is a believer or not, and which at any rate scarcely tally with the criteria he applies to Zwingli. Judged by these Zwingli would emerge quite blameless.
Kawerau points this out in defence of Zwingli: “The idea of faith,” he says, “which Luther had newly evolved, in opposition to the Catholic assent to the teaching of the Bible and the Church, led logically to determining from a man’s attitude towards Christand His saving Grace whether he was a true believer or not; Luther himself frequently made this his criterion; for instance, in answer to the question: Who is a member of the Church, and whom must I regard as my dear brother in Christ? He replies, all those ‘Who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us to Him by His death and to obtain for us grace’; or again: All ‘those who put their trust in Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or yet again: ‘All those who seek the Lord with their whole heart and soul ... and who trust in nothing but in God’s mercy.’”[1765]But had not Zwingli loudly proclaimed himself to be one of these?
“In such utterances of Luther’s we find,” according to Kawerau, “summed up the purely religious and Evangelical conception of faith.” Here there is no question of any accepting of the several articles of faith, of any submission to a “string of doctrinal propositions,” of any “faith made up of so and so many ‘articles’ all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1766]According to this theologian Luther was untrue to his own basic theories when he assailed Zwingli as he did. Kawerau also agrees with Hausrath in holding that the principal cause of Luther’s estrangement was a psychological one which indeed constituted the weakest spot in his whole position, viz. his identification of his own theological outbuilding of an article of faith, with its religious content,[1767]or, to speak more plainly, his setting himself up as the sole authority after having set aside that of the Church.
We have already put on record those doctrines of the olden Church, which, inclusive of the idea of faith itself, Luther threw overboard; we now come to the doctrines which he retained, which deserve to be considered in connection with the strictures of modern Protestant theologians, particularly of Harnack. At least these strictures bring out very clearly their contradictory and illogical character. Evidently Harnack is not altogether wrong when he uses as a page-heading the words “Exit dogma in Protestantism,”[1768]and elsewhere:[1769]“Embarrassments and problems in Luther’s heritage.”
Luther, to quote Harnack, “frequently hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.”[1770]But “if ‘the whole Luther’ is to be set upas the law of faith for the Evangelical Church, then, where it is a question of matters of history, such consequences cannot be simply ignored.” “The Lutheran Reformation,” writes Fr. Loofs, “would have ended otherwise as regards the history of dogma, had Luther braved tradition and followed up his theories to their logical conclusion. The shreds of the old which remained hampered the growth of the new ideas, even in Luther’s own case.”[1771]
Luther took over from the olden Church the doctrine of the existence of original sin, but he so changed it, particularly by affirming that it resulted in the destruction of free-will, that the doctrine itself becomes untenable.