Of this all-important groundwork of his anthropology the theologian Taube says: “It is not surprising that Luther fails to remain faithful to the attitude he has assumed. It is as impossible to him, as to any other thinking mind, to fail to find freedom presupposed in every corner, in his personal Christianity, and in his own work as pastor, preacher or reformer. Facts are stronger than theories anda priorireasonings.... Either thedataof experience must be held to be mere illusion, or absolute determinism must be thrown over. We cannot answer the same question both in the negative and in the affirmative and then declare it to be a mystery; it would be no mystery but simply a contradiction.”[1772]Still, Luther found it easier than Taube thinks to proclaim things to be mysteries which palpably were nothing but contradictions. A glance at Köstlin’s “Luthers Theologie” shows how often Luther attempts to distract the reader from the difficulties he himself enumerates with the consoling words: This we must not seek to pry into.—Taube too is optimistic with regard to the fate of the doctrine of unfreedom in modern Protestant theology; appealing to the above contradictions, he writes: “It is not surprising that the Lutheran theology, closely as it keeps to Luther’s views in many other matters, has never ventured to follow him on this all-important point, and, in fact, has departed ever further from him.”[1773]The truth is that the period of withdrawal inaugurated by Melanchthon in 1527 has been succeeded in our own day by one of closer approximation. (Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 292, n. 4.)Apart from the theory of man’s absolute depravity and lack of free-will there are other things which are damaging to Luther’s doctrine of original sin, particularly his opinion that original sin persists after baptism.“The doctrine of original sin as taught by the olden Church,” says Harnack, “was amended by Luther and made to agree with his own principles,” but it was against his principles “to make of such things articles of faith. His own sense of sin and the need he felt of pacifying his conscience occupied in it so large a place that he transformed what was in reality a piece of Christian self-judgment into an historical fact of universal appliance concerning the beginnings of the human race.” At any rate Luther’s exaggeration of the impotence of fallen man served “as a ground of excuse for our own guilt.”[1774]As regards his doctrine of the Law and the Gospel; Luther hoped, by contrasting it with the Gospel, to bring the Law into prominence. By the Law he understood the sum-total of what was commanded not merely in the Old but also in the New Testament; the teaching of the Gospel, on the other hand, contained only consoling thoughts on the fulfilment of the Law by Christ and the appropriation of Christ’s merits by faith.[1775]“Plain as it is,” says Harnack, “what Luther really desired by his distinction between the Law and the Gospel, still, coming to details, we find that the Reformer’s statements do not always agree. Thus it is partly left to our own private judgment to select those utterances which we consider more important; Luther himself nevertheless gives the preference to certain ideas whichin perpetuuminvest the Law with a peculiar independent significance. Is it not, however, our duty to depict the Reformer in accordance with his most original ideas?”[1776]Such an “original” idea is that of the abrogation of the Law for the Christian who is really redeemed and who voluntarily and without compulsion leaves faith to express itself in action. “Certainty of the abrogation of the Law constitutes a certain demand which can be met only in one way.” Luther carries the paradox so far as to say: The Law is given to be broken. And yet ... Luther ever cherishes the “assumption that the Law is the expression of God’s immutable will, and, in this sense, has its own enduring sphere of action side by side with the Gospel, as though the Will of God were not implicitly contained in the latter. But this admission involved a place being found for the Law even in Christianity.” Of this difficulty Luther was perfectly conscious, but he was deft enough in circumventing it. “The Lawqua lexis undoubtedly abrogated for the Christian; whoevertries to act up to the Law must needs go to hell; but in God’s sight it still holds good, i.e. God’s Will remains expressed therein and He must watch over its fulfilment.” If the law is not fulfilled God must demand penance.[1777]In the question of penance we again see Luther assume an attitude which is, as a matter of fact, subversive of his own doctrine. His ideas on this point are so contradictory that Protestant writers on dogma have not been able to agree in their accounts, and needless to say, still less in their judgments.Alfred Galley, one of the most recent writers on “Luther’s doctrine of penance,” admits: “The various attempts made to solve the matter have so far yielded no satisfactory result.”[1778]And yet for ten years Lipsius, Herrmann and others had been carefully exploring this central point of Luther’s practical theology. Galley’s own efforts, kindly disposed as he is to Luther, and in spite of his mastery of the texts, have not as yet rallied other theologians to his opinion.Luther’s original doctrine of Penance, to which frequent allusion has already been made, started, according to Loofs, (1906) with the assumption that contrition is produced solely by the “love of righteousness,” and that true penance “does not come from the Law,” because the latter does nothing but “kill, curse, render guilty and pronounce judgment”; penance produced by the Law led only to hypocrisy. “Thus, before one has faith, to think of sin and of the Law is harmful.” Luther, however, gradually acquiesced in the modifications introduced by Melanchthon in favour of the Law and of that sorrow which arises from the thought of the penalties. That “Luther to a certain extent adopted Melanchthon’s ideas on penance is still more apparent in the Antinomian controversy [1537-1540],” yet the ideas of his opponent, Agricola, bore some “resemblance” to “Luther’s earlier ideas” on Christian penance.[1779]As for Harnack, he emphasises the confusion which arose in the Lutheran theology owing to Luther’s illogical attitude towards so eminently practical a question as the doctrine of penance; even during Luther’s lifetime the doctrine of penance had been a real “labyrinth.” “Here too,” says Harnack, “Luther himself took the lead, and then quietly winked at what was contrary to his own early principles, which, moreover, he had never retracted. That the mediaeval Catholic view had its after effect on him ought not to be denied.” “He was convinced that faith works penance, the ‘dying daily,’ which indeed is but the negative side of faith,” and that “only such penance as comes from faith [from the Gospel] is of value in God’s sight.... This is certainly a view which may easily grow into its dreadful opposite,viz. the comfortable presuming on salvation.... If people are told that they must always be performing penance, and that particular acts of penance are of no avail, few will ever have recourse to penance at all.”[1780]Hence, according to Harnack, Luther made a change in the doctrine of penance and more importance was given to the Law; “for each separate act of sin on the part of the baptised” satisfaction must be made, and “Christ must intervene anew with His fulfilment of the Law.”[1781]By this means, by the creative action of God, “faith” is constantly revived in the man who has fallen, and God, as Luther now assumes, works by means of the Law. In this wise, faith, however, becomes, says Harnack, “a meritorious work,” seeing that it is the seal of our reconciliation; moreover “personal responsibility and personal action must play some part.”[1782]But how is man to do this, devoid as he is of any freedom of the will?Again, for all his alteration of his doctrine of penance Luther failed to “attain the object he was after, viz. to check laxity and frivolity. On the contrary, the new doctrine tended, in its later developments, to promote and foster them.”[1783]Nor was much gained, when, in order to promote penance and greater earnestness of life the Law was “placed before the Gospel. This Melanchthon did with Luther’s consent in the ‘Instructions for the Visitors.’[1784]Occasion was taken at the same time to insist strongly on the use of the confessional in order to check at least the worst sins.” “The intervention of the clergyman, which was undoubtedly needed by the ‘common people,’” constituted merely “a Lutheran counterpart of the Catholic sacrament of penance,” though, adds Harnack, “minus its burdensome Romish additions.”[1785]Luther’s Doctrine of Justification and Good Works, as seen by Protestant CriticsAccording to Harnack, “the idea of justification,” the central point of Luther’s teaching, “shrinks into a merely outward act of God’s designed to quieten consciences. Here again the superiority of the Catholic doctrine could not fail to appear; for to be content with the ‘fides sola’ could not but involve a very questionable laxity. It would, from this point of view, have been far better to have represented the‘fides caritate formata’ as alone of any value in God’s sight.”[1786]In his doctrine of justification by faith alone, Luther never got over the weak point, viz. his exclusion of charity, at least a commencement of which, together with faith, hope and repentance, had been required by the olden Church as a preparation for justification. Some return to the Catholic requirements was called for. “Hence it is not in the least surprising, ... that Melanchthon at a later date abandoned the ‘sola fides’ and came to advocate a modified form of synergism. The Luther-zealots were thrown into hopeless confusion by the necessity in which they found themselves, of harmonizing the older Evangelical theory with the doctrine of penance whilst avoiding the pitfall of Melanchthon’s synergism.” They found themselves, so Harnack says, face to face with two “iustificationes,” that by faith alone, and that by law and penance, not to speak of a third, the “iustificatio” of infants by the act of baptism. “These contradictions become still further accentuated when the ‘regeneratio’ was taken into account,” etc.[1787]It is not worth while to pursue any further Harnack’s criticism which at times tends to become carping.As regards the doctrine of good works, Protestant theology of late has been disposed to take offence at Luther’s undue extension of freedom, which seems to endanger good works and the zealous keeping of the Law.It is the Christian’s art, so Loofs sums up Luther’s teaching, to allow no thought of the Law to trouble his conscience, but simply to regard Christ as the bearer of his sins. “Here the one-sided view of the ‘Law,’ seen only from the standpoint of the need of acquiring merit by works, has a disturbing effect”; such is Loofs’s opinion. According to Luther such contempt for the Law is often impossible, hence he determined to conquer the “dualism of the old-new man” of which we like St. Paul (Gal. ii. 20) are conscious: I live, and yet I do not; I am dead, and yet I am not; a sinner, and yet no sinner; I have the Law and yet I have it not. We ought, according to Luther, to say to ourselves: There is a time to die and a time to live, a Law to be obeyed and a Law to be despised. “Even during the Antinomian controversy,” concludes Loofs, “Luther did not abandon such thoughts.”[1788]Luther’s want of discrimination is most apparent, he says, in the fact, that, owing to his “peculiar interest in the preaching ofthe grace of God,” he depreciated works and the Law as the very fount of self-righteousness.[1789]Loofs rightly refers to a sermon in the Church-postils where Luther inveighs against the “Papists, Anabaptists and other sects” who scream against us: “What is the use of your preaching so much of faith and Christ? What good does it do the people?”[1790]Luther could not in fact “sufficiently decry the Law or urge too strongly that it was useless to Christians.”[1791]In the passage quoted Luther says of the exhortations to works and the preaching of the Commandments: “This preaching does nothing else but kill, i.e. far from being good or useful it is only harmful ... rank poison and death.”And he goes on: “All our works, however precious they may be, are nothing but poison and death.... People may indeed boast loudly and say: ‘If you live in this way, take pains to keep the Law and perform many good works, you will be saved.’ But that these are only vain words, nay, a harmful doctrine, will soon be apparent.”[1792]It is not in man’s power to keep the Commandments by the performance of the right and necessary works, hence he becomes troubled and at last despairs if he strives after works. “The human race is so depraved that no one can be found who does not transgress all God’s commandments even though the wrath of God and his eternal damnation be held up before him and preached to him daily; indeed if this is impressed upon a man over much he only begins to rage against it more horribly.”[1793]It is merely “reason with its human ideas” which “cannot get beyond this, viz. that God is gracious to all who live in this manner and do what the Ten Commandments require; for reason knows nothing of the misery of our depraved nature, nor does it know that no one is able to keep God’s command.” For this cause Luther had at last brought to light and taught “that other doctrine in which grace and reconciliation are proclaimed” to us according to the “spirit and letter of St. Paul, whereas even the old doctors, Origen, Jerome and others, had not grasped St. Paul’s meaning.”[1794]In Popery “Scripture and St. Paul’s Epistles” were pushed under the bench, and, instead, we wallowed in human foolishness like the swine in their sties.[1795]“Of what use is it to us that Moses and the Law say: This shalt thou do, this would God have of thee? Yes, good Moses, I know this well and it is indeed quite true. But do you tell me how it is that, unfortunately, I neither keep it nor am able to keep it? It is no easy thing to spend money with an empty purse or to drink out of an empty can; if I am to pay my debtsand to quench my thirst, then please tell me how I may come by a full purse and a brimming can. To this the babblers have no answer,” etc.[1796]And yet the Catholic writers whom he dubs babblers, Erasmus and Eck for instance, had demonstrated from Scripture and tradition that first, man is by no means so helpless and depraved as Luther assumes, and, secondly, that the grace of God is at his disposal every moment in order, by supernatural assistance, to enable his natural powers to keep the Law. While pointing this out they appeal at the same time to those passages of Scripture which spur us on to good works, and even make our heavenly reward dependent on them.Of these latter passages Loofs also asks: “In reality are not those alone saved who, besides their faith, can point to good works or at least to their fulfilment of the first Commandment? Does not Scripture over and over again speak of our being judged according to our works, and of the eternalreward?” Luther, however, so he remarks, got over the difficulty “by assuming, that, in such passages, faith is meant even when they speak of good works”; Luther actually finds a parallel in the “rule of the ‘communicatio idiomatum’” which deals with the Divine attributes of Christ made man.[1797]Another attempt to evade the difficulty, so Loofs declares, is found in Luther’s statement regarding the reward promised in the Bible to the just for their works. He argued that there must be some difference between the saved in their “degree of brightness and glory,” and thus, “accidentaliter,” he makes some account of the reward.[1798]Loofs, however, also draws attention to the fact that in the same sermons on Matthew, when touching cursorily on this, Luther “pokes fun at the idea of God setting some ‘particular Saint’ in a topmost place in heaven, and inveighs against the traditional idea of the ‘præmium accidentale.’”[1799]This is quite true, for Luther’s statements do not agree even here. In the passage quoted he is explaining his doctrine according to which, in this world, all the justified are equal in sanctity, the sinner who has just been converted being as pleasing to God as the Apostles. “For were St. Peter a better Christian than I am, he would have to have a better Christ, a better Gospel and a better baptism. But, seeing that the heritage we enjoy is one and the same, we must all be equal in this.”[1800]There are few sayings of Luther’s where the wholly mechanical nature of the forgiveness and sanctification taught by him, stands out more clearly.That, in spite of all this, he does not exclude works, is sufficiently remarkable. In the very passage where Luther brings forward the objection of the Papists and Anabaptists: It must bedone, i.e. good works, must be performed, he hastens to reply: “We have the Ten Commandments which we teach and keep as well as they”;[1801]the only difference was, that, he by his Evangelical preaching taught how the Commandments were really to be honoured.Loofs can even say that Luther proclaims the need of good works. He quotes the following utterances, for instance, from Luther’s later years: “Opera habent suam necessitatem”; “they, too, must be there”; “On account of the hypocrites we must say that good works are requisite for salvation (‘necessaria ad salutem’),”[1802]“he did not shrink from speaking in this way when giving counsel.”[1803]It is quite true, that, when preaching to the people, mindful of their faults and vices, he is fond, as Loofs shows, of recalling how Christ says “drily and clearly”: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments [Mt. xix. 17]; item, Do this and thou shalt live, etc. [Luke x. 28]. This must be taken as it stands and without debate.”[1804]Hence Luther even calls those folk “mad” who say: “‘Only believe and you will be saved.’ No, good fellow, that will not do, and you will never get to the kingdom of heaven unless you keep the Commandments.... For it is written plainly enough: ‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.’”[1805]And Luther supports this text by others which speak of works, of their merit and demerit, their reward and punishment.[1806]And yet immediately after he goes on to complain: “How are we to do what the Law perpetually urges and requires, seeing that we are unable to comply with its demands?”[1807]Finally he reaches his usual answer: “I will do it, says Christ, and fulfil it”; first of all He again and again obtains forgiveness for us, “seeing that we are unable to keep the Law”; Christ, however, did not wish us “to continue sinning”; on the contrary, the grace He infuses makes us keep the Law “willingly and gladly”; good works, more particularly those of charity towards our neighbour, spring up of themselves after “we have crept beneath Christ’s mantle and wing.”[1808]Where faith is present “it cannot but work unceasingly what is good. It does not ask whether there be a call to do good works, but even before the question is put it has already done them, and is ever after doingthem.”[1809]Those Christians—presumably the majority—who fail to find themselves in such a state receive but poor consolation: “Whoever does not perform such works is an unbelieving man, who gropes and looks about for faith and good works but knows neither the one nor the other.”[1810]Luther did not see that he was endangering both faith and works and undermining their very foundations.For, as his opponents objected, the last category of Christians, however careless they might be in the matter of good works, and however much they might fail to keep the Commandments, could, nevertheless, for the most part, at least boast of having the faith, whether regarded in the light of a “loving confidence in God’s grace” or in the more usual and ordinary sense of an acceptance of the divine revelation as true. Their faith, it was urged, was according to Luther at the outset very closely in touch with sin, indeed they had been justified by faith without either repentance or change of heart, faith having merely spread a cloak over their evil deeds; and yet now here was Luther telling them that they had lost the faith unless they lived by it, or if they transgressed the Commandments even by a venial sin—for Luther sees no distinction between mortal sin and venial.Loofs is certainly not overstating things when he says that, “Luther was not clear in his own mind”[1811]as to his doctrine on the great questions of works and the Law, and that his “opinion comprised much that did not tally.”[1812]Loofs adds: “How far Luther himself was aware that much of what he said voiced merely his own personal opinion it would be hard to tell.... Without his wealth of ideas and his ability to insist now on one, now on another side of a subject Luther would not have been so successful as a reformer. But he was hampered by his own qualities so soon as it became a question of putting his new views in didactic form.”[1813]Loofs, like Harnack, spares no praise when speaking of Luther’s “qualities” and the “happy intuition” which enabled him to overthrow the olden order and to call into being a new, “religious,” Christianity.Luther’s Doctrine of Merit in the Eyes of Protestant CriticsOne such “happy intuition” Loofs sees in the fact, that, in the question of works and merit Luther “clearly perceived and got the better of the opinion, untenable in religion, that a scale of merit exists as between God and man.”[1814]The critic abstains from discussing the Catholic teaching on supernatural merit. Its earlier no less than its later defenders rightly emphasised, in opposition to Luther, that the olden doctrine of merit rested on the express promise of God to reward faithful service, and not, as Luther insinuated, on any absolute right of the works in themselves to such reward. The act which was to meet with such a reward must, they said, be not only good in itself but also supernaturally good, i.e. it must be performed by man’s powers aided by supernatural grace; even this, however, would not suffice were there not the gracious promise on God’s part, guaranteed by revelation, that such an act would be requited by a heavenly reward. Yet this was not to deny a certain “condignitas in actu primo” inherent in the act itself.Luther, it is true, laughs to scorn the Popish doctrine of merit which makes God Himself our debtor. Yet long before St. Augustine had answered the objection: “God has become our debtor, not as though He has received something from us, but because He has promised what pleased Him. It is a different thing when we say to a man: You are my debtor because I have given you something, and when we say to God: Give us what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1815]In the fragments of the ancient doctrine of religious morality which Luther saw fit to retain he put germs of disintegration owing to his failure to recognise the above truth. Because he would hear nothing of merit and everywhere scented righteousness-by-works, he built up a theory of good works which lacks a foundation. In the last resort everything is coloured by his dread of self-righteousness and of any human co-operation. “The ‘Law,’ to Luther, seemed conditioned by that ‘condicio meriti,’” says Loofs, “which belonged to the Law of Moses, and, which, owingto the craving of the natural man for self-righteousness, also becomes part of the natural law.”[1816]So strongly does Luther denounce merit and self-righteousness that he practically does away with his own doctrine of works.First, his denial of free-will and the absolute determinism of his doctrine makes an end of all spontaneous, meritorious action on man’s part. Further, he is untrue to his position, repudiating it in his sermons and popular writings as far as possible, and replacing it by one morally more defensible. In later years we find him casting over his own teaching even in his theological disputations; in his anxiety to counter the Antinomians, he goes so far as to declare works necessary for salvation.Even earlier the fanatics and Anabaptists had helped to some extent in the work of demolition. Their conclusions as to the dangers of Luther’s system and their protests against its evil moral consequences are really much more vigorous and damaging than might appear from Luther’s bitter rejoinders. “The unjust attitude of the reformers towards the ‘fanatics,’” says Harnack, “was disastrous to themselves and their cause. How much might they not have learnt from these despised people even though obliged to repudiate their principles.”[1817]The work of demolition was, moreover, being carried out under Luther’s very eye by Philip Melanchthon and his friends. Luther’s doctrine, as has already been pointed out, was not at all to the taste of the dialectician of Lutheranism. “The Philippists,” says Loofs, “were very far from holding Luther’s own views,” “as far removed as” the Antinomians. Luther himself, however, “was partly to blame for the confusion.” From the standpoint adopted by Melanchthon “it was impossible to comply” with Luther’s demand for a clear “distinction to be made between Law and Gospel”;[1818]yet, according to Luther, this was one of “the things on which theology hinges.”[1819]According to Loofs, Melanchthon’s theology was a means of spoiling some “valuable reformation truths,” nay, “the most priceless of Luther’s new ideas.”[1820]As for Melanchthon’s allegation, viz. that he hadmerely put Luther’s doctrine more mildly, Loofs says bluntly: “If he meant this, then he deceived himself.”[1821]As to the points under discussion, Luther not only thought differently from Melanchthon at an earlier date, but persisted in so doing till his very death. Luther, nevertheless, never expressed any disapproval of Melanchthon’s ideas, widely as they differed from his own.Luther’s teaching on the Sacraments and on the Supper according to Protestant TeachingIn Harnack’s opinion Luther, by his teaching on the one sacrament, viz. the Word, “destroyed the olden ecclesiastical view. Yet he unconsciously retained a certain remnant ... which had fatal results on the development of his doctrine. Though here again we find truth and error side by side in Luther, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that he opened the door to errors of a grave character.”[1822]The principal error in his doctrine of the sacraments consisted, according to Harnack, in his having made his own a reminiscence of the Catholic view. Instead of teaching that the Holy Ghost acts by the Word alone, he came, as his statements subsequent to 1525 show, to regard this Spirit as operating by the “Wordandthe Sacraments.”[1823]“In his teaching on the sacraments he forsook the attitude he had once adopted as a reformer and accepted views which tended to confuse his own doctrine of faith and still more the theology of his followers. In his efforts to thwart the fanatics he came to embrace ... some highly questionable propositions.... This relapse in his views on the means of grace wrought untold damage to Lutheranism.”[1824]Here his desire to get the better of the fanatics played a part, and so did likewise the psychological starting-point of his whole teaching. He reverted to the means of grace, “because he wished to provide real consolation for troubled consciences, and to preserve them from the hell of uncertainty concerning that state of grace of which the fanatics appeared to make so small account.... It was, however, not merely by his rejection of certain definite acts asmeans of grace that Luther returned to the narrow views of the Middle Ages which he had previously forsaken—the spirit lives not (as Luther knew better than any other man), thanks to any means of grace, but thanks rather to that close union with its God on Whom it lays hold through Christ—he did so still more by seeking, first, to vindicate Infant Baptism as a means of grace in the strict sense; secondly, by accepting Penance as at least a preparation for grace, and, thirdly, by maintaining that the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Supper constitutes the essential part of this sacrament.”[1825]It is true he “never ceased to maintain that the means of grace were nothing but the Word whereby faith is awakened,” but, in spite of this, the “opus operatum” of the olden Church “had again made its appearance and weakened or obscured the strict relations between Gospel and faith.”[1826]Of Infant Baptism in Luther’s system Harnack rightly says: “If Luther’s Evangelical theory holds good, viz. that grace and faith are inseparably linked,[1827]then Infant Baptism is in itself no sacrament, and can be no more than an ecclesiastical rite; if it is a sacrament in the strict sense, then evidently his theory is at fault. We cannot escape the dilemma, either by appealing to the faith of the parents or god-parents [as Luther, to begin with, did]—for this is the worst kind of the ‘fides implicita’—or by assuming that faith is given in baptism,[1828]for an unconscious faith is almost as bad as that other ‘fides implicita.’ Hence the proper thing for Luther to have done would have been either to abolish Infant Baptism ... or to admit that it was a mere rite to be completed later.... Luther, however, did neither; on the contrary, he retained Infant Baptism as the sacrament of regeneration and accepted as an efficacious act what should, given his theory, have at most been a symbol of God’s preventing grace. This was, however much he might deny it, to hark back to the ‘opus operatum’ and to dissolve the link between faith and the working of grace.”[1829]Again, according to Harnack, the mould in which Luther cast his doctrine of the Supper once more involved him in contradictions which rendered his position untenable.On the one hand, by so strenuously insisting on the belief in the Real Presence as a binding doctrinal formula he was untrue to his own theory that doctrine was not to be formulated; on the other hand, his restatement of the doctrine of the Supper emptied it of all content. It was “in part the fault of hisformulating of the faith that the later Lutheran Church, with its Christology, its teaching on the Sacrament ... and the false standard by which it judged divergent doctrines and pronounced them heretical, threatened for a while to become a sort of caricature of the Catholic Church.”[1830]Harnack notes how Luther, the better to reach the real meaning of the words “This is My Body,” actually called tradition to his aid, in his case an extremely illogical thing to do. His consciousness that in holding fast to the Real Presence he was backed by the whole Church of yore lends his words unusual power. “Even were a hundred thousand devils and all the fanatics to fall upon it, still the doctrine must stand firm.”[1831]We may add, that, with regard to this sacrament, Luther outdid his adversaries in his attachment to tradition and antiquity, reintroducing communion under both kinds as being alone in strict accord with Scripture.There was also much that was personal and arbitrary in the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar as shaped anew and established by Luther. For one thing, he dwelt far too exclusively on this sacrament being the pledge of the forgiveness of sins. Again, in his desire to counter Zwingli, he put forward theories on the sacrament, which embody all sorts of disadvantages and contradictions not to be found in the teaching of the earlier Church. He, indeed, denied Transubstantiation, but the “Swiss could not for the life of them see why he did, since he admits that a stupendous miracle takes place in the Supper.”[1832]For the Church’s ancient doctrine of Transubstantiation he substituted Impanation, and even this he admitted only in the actual celebration and reception.[1833]“The awkward part was,” says Harnack, “that, according to Luther, the Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Supper only for the purpose of reception, though they might be partaken of even by an unbeliever or a heathen.”[1834]The concomitance (presence of both Body and Blood under either kind) taught by the olden Church, which, indeed, was a natural corollary of the Real Presence, he set aside, urged thereto by his theory that in Communion both kinds must be received; the only result was to introduce a new and uncalled-for miracle. To this must be added what Harnack calls the “crazy speculations on the ubiquity of the Body of Christ,”[1835]which furnished Melanchthon his principal reason forgiving up Luther’s doctrine of the Supper, and, like Zwingli and Bucer, denying the Real Presence. According to Luther, the ubiquity of the Body of Christ rested on the supposed “real communication of the Divine ‘idiomata’ (and consequently of the Divine omnipresence) to the humanity of Christ.”[1836]Nor does the Real Presence, according to Luther, begin at the consecration; as to when it does, he leaves the faithful in the dark; nor does he enlighten them as to when it ceases in the remains left over after communion; in the latter regard his practice was full of contradictions.—In allowing communion to be carried to the sick in their own houses he was again unfaithful to his tenets.[1837]To any processions of the sacrament he was averse, because Christ was only present at the time of reception.He proposed, as the better plan, that the sacrament should not be adored save by bending the knee when receiving it, and yet his own behaviour did not tally with his proposal.[1838]It was enacted at Wittenberg, in 1542, that there should be no elevation, and yet Luther had retained this rite at an earlier date, in order to defy Carlstadt, as he says, and so as not to seem in this “indifferent matter” to sanction by his attitude Carlstadt’s attack on the sacrament.[1839]He was, to say the least, verbally illogical when he termed the Eucharist the “sacrificium eucharisticum,” meaning of course thereby that it was a “thank-offering” on the part of the faithful.It is not surprising that belief in the Real Presence, though so strongly defended by Luther, gradually evaporated in his Church largely owing to the inconsistencies just noticed. Eventually the Lutherans made their own the views of Zwingli and Melanchthon on the sacrament, though they retained an affection for certain vague and elastic terms concerning the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ.[1840]Luther spoke of the attempts to introduce Zwingli’s rationalistic doctrine of the sacrament at Frankfurt-on-the-Main as “a diabolical jugglery with the words of Christ,” “whereby simple souls are shamefully duped and robbed of their sacrament.” The thing was “handled in such a way that no one was certain what was meant or what to believe.”[1841]Luther’s views on the Church and on Divine Worship according to Protestant CriticismA mass of inconsequence lies in the doctrine on the Church, which he is supposed to have retained, though, as a matter of fact, he completely altered it. Thanks to his conception of the Church as a practically invisible body his view of it was so broad as to leave far behind the old, Catholic idea; nevertheless, by and by his conception of the Church grew so narrow, that, as Harnack justly remarks, “in comparison, even the Roman view of it seems in many respects more elastic and consequently superior.... The Church threatened to become a mere school, viz. the school of ‘pure [Wittenberg] doctrine.’” In this way arose “the Christianity of the theologians and pastors.... Luther on his own side repeatedly broke away from this view.”[1842]It is quite true that many contradictions are here apparent, as we shall have occasion to see later (vol. vi., xxxviii.). “His idea of the Church became obscured. The conception of the Church (communion of faith and communionof pure doctrine) became as ambiguous as the conception of the ‘doctrina evangelii.’”Then, with regard to his teaching on public worship. Though, as remarked above (p. 147 f.), he had in principle abandoned the view held by the olden Church regarding the necessity of external worship, and had robbed it of its focus, viz. the Sacrifice of the Altar, yet he was very far from logically following this out in practice.
Of this all-important groundwork of his anthropology the theologian Taube says: “It is not surprising that Luther fails to remain faithful to the attitude he has assumed. It is as impossible to him, as to any other thinking mind, to fail to find freedom presupposed in every corner, in his personal Christianity, and in his own work as pastor, preacher or reformer. Facts are stronger than theories anda priorireasonings.... Either thedataof experience must be held to be mere illusion, or absolute determinism must be thrown over. We cannot answer the same question both in the negative and in the affirmative and then declare it to be a mystery; it would be no mystery but simply a contradiction.”[1772]Still, Luther found it easier than Taube thinks to proclaim things to be mysteries which palpably were nothing but contradictions. A glance at Köstlin’s “Luthers Theologie” shows how often Luther attempts to distract the reader from the difficulties he himself enumerates with the consoling words: This we must not seek to pry into.—Taube too is optimistic with regard to the fate of the doctrine of unfreedom in modern Protestant theology; appealing to the above contradictions, he writes: “It is not surprising that the Lutheran theology, closely as it keeps to Luther’s views in many other matters, has never ventured to follow him on this all-important point, and, in fact, has departed ever further from him.”[1773]The truth is that the period of withdrawal inaugurated by Melanchthon in 1527 has been succeeded in our own day by one of closer approximation. (Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 292, n. 4.)Apart from the theory of man’s absolute depravity and lack of free-will there are other things which are damaging to Luther’s doctrine of original sin, particularly his opinion that original sin persists after baptism.“The doctrine of original sin as taught by the olden Church,” says Harnack, “was amended by Luther and made to agree with his own principles,” but it was against his principles “to make of such things articles of faith. His own sense of sin and the need he felt of pacifying his conscience occupied in it so large a place that he transformed what was in reality a piece of Christian self-judgment into an historical fact of universal appliance concerning the beginnings of the human race.” At any rate Luther’s exaggeration of the impotence of fallen man served “as a ground of excuse for our own guilt.”[1774]As regards his doctrine of the Law and the Gospel; Luther hoped, by contrasting it with the Gospel, to bring the Law into prominence. By the Law he understood the sum-total of what was commanded not merely in the Old but also in the New Testament; the teaching of the Gospel, on the other hand, contained only consoling thoughts on the fulfilment of the Law by Christ and the appropriation of Christ’s merits by faith.[1775]“Plain as it is,” says Harnack, “what Luther really desired by his distinction between the Law and the Gospel, still, coming to details, we find that the Reformer’s statements do not always agree. Thus it is partly left to our own private judgment to select those utterances which we consider more important; Luther himself nevertheless gives the preference to certain ideas whichin perpetuuminvest the Law with a peculiar independent significance. Is it not, however, our duty to depict the Reformer in accordance with his most original ideas?”[1776]Such an “original” idea is that of the abrogation of the Law for the Christian who is really redeemed and who voluntarily and without compulsion leaves faith to express itself in action. “Certainty of the abrogation of the Law constitutes a certain demand which can be met only in one way.” Luther carries the paradox so far as to say: The Law is given to be broken. And yet ... Luther ever cherishes the “assumption that the Law is the expression of God’s immutable will, and, in this sense, has its own enduring sphere of action side by side with the Gospel, as though the Will of God were not implicitly contained in the latter. But this admission involved a place being found for the Law even in Christianity.” Of this difficulty Luther was perfectly conscious, but he was deft enough in circumventing it. “The Lawqua lexis undoubtedly abrogated for the Christian; whoevertries to act up to the Law must needs go to hell; but in God’s sight it still holds good, i.e. God’s Will remains expressed therein and He must watch over its fulfilment.” If the law is not fulfilled God must demand penance.[1777]In the question of penance we again see Luther assume an attitude which is, as a matter of fact, subversive of his own doctrine. His ideas on this point are so contradictory that Protestant writers on dogma have not been able to agree in their accounts, and needless to say, still less in their judgments.Alfred Galley, one of the most recent writers on “Luther’s doctrine of penance,” admits: “The various attempts made to solve the matter have so far yielded no satisfactory result.”[1778]And yet for ten years Lipsius, Herrmann and others had been carefully exploring this central point of Luther’s practical theology. Galley’s own efforts, kindly disposed as he is to Luther, and in spite of his mastery of the texts, have not as yet rallied other theologians to his opinion.Luther’s original doctrine of Penance, to which frequent allusion has already been made, started, according to Loofs, (1906) with the assumption that contrition is produced solely by the “love of righteousness,” and that true penance “does not come from the Law,” because the latter does nothing but “kill, curse, render guilty and pronounce judgment”; penance produced by the Law led only to hypocrisy. “Thus, before one has faith, to think of sin and of the Law is harmful.” Luther, however, gradually acquiesced in the modifications introduced by Melanchthon in favour of the Law and of that sorrow which arises from the thought of the penalties. That “Luther to a certain extent adopted Melanchthon’s ideas on penance is still more apparent in the Antinomian controversy [1537-1540],” yet the ideas of his opponent, Agricola, bore some “resemblance” to “Luther’s earlier ideas” on Christian penance.[1779]As for Harnack, he emphasises the confusion which arose in the Lutheran theology owing to Luther’s illogical attitude towards so eminently practical a question as the doctrine of penance; even during Luther’s lifetime the doctrine of penance had been a real “labyrinth.” “Here too,” says Harnack, “Luther himself took the lead, and then quietly winked at what was contrary to his own early principles, which, moreover, he had never retracted. That the mediaeval Catholic view had its after effect on him ought not to be denied.” “He was convinced that faith works penance, the ‘dying daily,’ which indeed is but the negative side of faith,” and that “only such penance as comes from faith [from the Gospel] is of value in God’s sight.... This is certainly a view which may easily grow into its dreadful opposite,viz. the comfortable presuming on salvation.... If people are told that they must always be performing penance, and that particular acts of penance are of no avail, few will ever have recourse to penance at all.”[1780]Hence, according to Harnack, Luther made a change in the doctrine of penance and more importance was given to the Law; “for each separate act of sin on the part of the baptised” satisfaction must be made, and “Christ must intervene anew with His fulfilment of the Law.”[1781]By this means, by the creative action of God, “faith” is constantly revived in the man who has fallen, and God, as Luther now assumes, works by means of the Law. In this wise, faith, however, becomes, says Harnack, “a meritorious work,” seeing that it is the seal of our reconciliation; moreover “personal responsibility and personal action must play some part.”[1782]But how is man to do this, devoid as he is of any freedom of the will?Again, for all his alteration of his doctrine of penance Luther failed to “attain the object he was after, viz. to check laxity and frivolity. On the contrary, the new doctrine tended, in its later developments, to promote and foster them.”[1783]Nor was much gained, when, in order to promote penance and greater earnestness of life the Law was “placed before the Gospel. This Melanchthon did with Luther’s consent in the ‘Instructions for the Visitors.’[1784]Occasion was taken at the same time to insist strongly on the use of the confessional in order to check at least the worst sins.” “The intervention of the clergyman, which was undoubtedly needed by the ‘common people,’” constituted merely “a Lutheran counterpart of the Catholic sacrament of penance,” though, adds Harnack, “minus its burdensome Romish additions.”[1785]Luther’s Doctrine of Justification and Good Works, as seen by Protestant CriticsAccording to Harnack, “the idea of justification,” the central point of Luther’s teaching, “shrinks into a merely outward act of God’s designed to quieten consciences. Here again the superiority of the Catholic doctrine could not fail to appear; for to be content with the ‘fides sola’ could not but involve a very questionable laxity. It would, from this point of view, have been far better to have represented the‘fides caritate formata’ as alone of any value in God’s sight.”[1786]In his doctrine of justification by faith alone, Luther never got over the weak point, viz. his exclusion of charity, at least a commencement of which, together with faith, hope and repentance, had been required by the olden Church as a preparation for justification. Some return to the Catholic requirements was called for. “Hence it is not in the least surprising, ... that Melanchthon at a later date abandoned the ‘sola fides’ and came to advocate a modified form of synergism. The Luther-zealots were thrown into hopeless confusion by the necessity in which they found themselves, of harmonizing the older Evangelical theory with the doctrine of penance whilst avoiding the pitfall of Melanchthon’s synergism.” They found themselves, so Harnack says, face to face with two “iustificationes,” that by faith alone, and that by law and penance, not to speak of a third, the “iustificatio” of infants by the act of baptism. “These contradictions become still further accentuated when the ‘regeneratio’ was taken into account,” etc.[1787]It is not worth while to pursue any further Harnack’s criticism which at times tends to become carping.As regards the doctrine of good works, Protestant theology of late has been disposed to take offence at Luther’s undue extension of freedom, which seems to endanger good works and the zealous keeping of the Law.It is the Christian’s art, so Loofs sums up Luther’s teaching, to allow no thought of the Law to trouble his conscience, but simply to regard Christ as the bearer of his sins. “Here the one-sided view of the ‘Law,’ seen only from the standpoint of the need of acquiring merit by works, has a disturbing effect”; such is Loofs’s opinion. According to Luther such contempt for the Law is often impossible, hence he determined to conquer the “dualism of the old-new man” of which we like St. Paul (Gal. ii. 20) are conscious: I live, and yet I do not; I am dead, and yet I am not; a sinner, and yet no sinner; I have the Law and yet I have it not. We ought, according to Luther, to say to ourselves: There is a time to die and a time to live, a Law to be obeyed and a Law to be despised. “Even during the Antinomian controversy,” concludes Loofs, “Luther did not abandon such thoughts.”[1788]Luther’s want of discrimination is most apparent, he says, in the fact, that, owing to his “peculiar interest in the preaching ofthe grace of God,” he depreciated works and the Law as the very fount of self-righteousness.[1789]Loofs rightly refers to a sermon in the Church-postils where Luther inveighs against the “Papists, Anabaptists and other sects” who scream against us: “What is the use of your preaching so much of faith and Christ? What good does it do the people?”[1790]Luther could not in fact “sufficiently decry the Law or urge too strongly that it was useless to Christians.”[1791]In the passage quoted Luther says of the exhortations to works and the preaching of the Commandments: “This preaching does nothing else but kill, i.e. far from being good or useful it is only harmful ... rank poison and death.”And he goes on: “All our works, however precious they may be, are nothing but poison and death.... People may indeed boast loudly and say: ‘If you live in this way, take pains to keep the Law and perform many good works, you will be saved.’ But that these are only vain words, nay, a harmful doctrine, will soon be apparent.”[1792]It is not in man’s power to keep the Commandments by the performance of the right and necessary works, hence he becomes troubled and at last despairs if he strives after works. “The human race is so depraved that no one can be found who does not transgress all God’s commandments even though the wrath of God and his eternal damnation be held up before him and preached to him daily; indeed if this is impressed upon a man over much he only begins to rage against it more horribly.”[1793]It is merely “reason with its human ideas” which “cannot get beyond this, viz. that God is gracious to all who live in this manner and do what the Ten Commandments require; for reason knows nothing of the misery of our depraved nature, nor does it know that no one is able to keep God’s command.” For this cause Luther had at last brought to light and taught “that other doctrine in which grace and reconciliation are proclaimed” to us according to the “spirit and letter of St. Paul, whereas even the old doctors, Origen, Jerome and others, had not grasped St. Paul’s meaning.”[1794]In Popery “Scripture and St. Paul’s Epistles” were pushed under the bench, and, instead, we wallowed in human foolishness like the swine in their sties.[1795]“Of what use is it to us that Moses and the Law say: This shalt thou do, this would God have of thee? Yes, good Moses, I know this well and it is indeed quite true. But do you tell me how it is that, unfortunately, I neither keep it nor am able to keep it? It is no easy thing to spend money with an empty purse or to drink out of an empty can; if I am to pay my debtsand to quench my thirst, then please tell me how I may come by a full purse and a brimming can. To this the babblers have no answer,” etc.[1796]And yet the Catholic writers whom he dubs babblers, Erasmus and Eck for instance, had demonstrated from Scripture and tradition that first, man is by no means so helpless and depraved as Luther assumes, and, secondly, that the grace of God is at his disposal every moment in order, by supernatural assistance, to enable his natural powers to keep the Law. While pointing this out they appeal at the same time to those passages of Scripture which spur us on to good works, and even make our heavenly reward dependent on them.Of these latter passages Loofs also asks: “In reality are not those alone saved who, besides their faith, can point to good works or at least to their fulfilment of the first Commandment? Does not Scripture over and over again speak of our being judged according to our works, and of the eternalreward?” Luther, however, so he remarks, got over the difficulty “by assuming, that, in such passages, faith is meant even when they speak of good works”; Luther actually finds a parallel in the “rule of the ‘communicatio idiomatum’” which deals with the Divine attributes of Christ made man.[1797]Another attempt to evade the difficulty, so Loofs declares, is found in Luther’s statement regarding the reward promised in the Bible to the just for their works. He argued that there must be some difference between the saved in their “degree of brightness and glory,” and thus, “accidentaliter,” he makes some account of the reward.[1798]Loofs, however, also draws attention to the fact that in the same sermons on Matthew, when touching cursorily on this, Luther “pokes fun at the idea of God setting some ‘particular Saint’ in a topmost place in heaven, and inveighs against the traditional idea of the ‘præmium accidentale.’”[1799]This is quite true, for Luther’s statements do not agree even here. In the passage quoted he is explaining his doctrine according to which, in this world, all the justified are equal in sanctity, the sinner who has just been converted being as pleasing to God as the Apostles. “For were St. Peter a better Christian than I am, he would have to have a better Christ, a better Gospel and a better baptism. But, seeing that the heritage we enjoy is one and the same, we must all be equal in this.”[1800]There are few sayings of Luther’s where the wholly mechanical nature of the forgiveness and sanctification taught by him, stands out more clearly.That, in spite of all this, he does not exclude works, is sufficiently remarkable. In the very passage where Luther brings forward the objection of the Papists and Anabaptists: It must bedone, i.e. good works, must be performed, he hastens to reply: “We have the Ten Commandments which we teach and keep as well as they”;[1801]the only difference was, that, he by his Evangelical preaching taught how the Commandments were really to be honoured.Loofs can even say that Luther proclaims the need of good works. He quotes the following utterances, for instance, from Luther’s later years: “Opera habent suam necessitatem”; “they, too, must be there”; “On account of the hypocrites we must say that good works are requisite for salvation (‘necessaria ad salutem’),”[1802]“he did not shrink from speaking in this way when giving counsel.”[1803]It is quite true, that, when preaching to the people, mindful of their faults and vices, he is fond, as Loofs shows, of recalling how Christ says “drily and clearly”: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments [Mt. xix. 17]; item, Do this and thou shalt live, etc. [Luke x. 28]. This must be taken as it stands and without debate.”[1804]Hence Luther even calls those folk “mad” who say: “‘Only believe and you will be saved.’ No, good fellow, that will not do, and you will never get to the kingdom of heaven unless you keep the Commandments.... For it is written plainly enough: ‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.’”[1805]And Luther supports this text by others which speak of works, of their merit and demerit, their reward and punishment.[1806]And yet immediately after he goes on to complain: “How are we to do what the Law perpetually urges and requires, seeing that we are unable to comply with its demands?”[1807]Finally he reaches his usual answer: “I will do it, says Christ, and fulfil it”; first of all He again and again obtains forgiveness for us, “seeing that we are unable to keep the Law”; Christ, however, did not wish us “to continue sinning”; on the contrary, the grace He infuses makes us keep the Law “willingly and gladly”; good works, more particularly those of charity towards our neighbour, spring up of themselves after “we have crept beneath Christ’s mantle and wing.”[1808]Where faith is present “it cannot but work unceasingly what is good. It does not ask whether there be a call to do good works, but even before the question is put it has already done them, and is ever after doingthem.”[1809]Those Christians—presumably the majority—who fail to find themselves in such a state receive but poor consolation: “Whoever does not perform such works is an unbelieving man, who gropes and looks about for faith and good works but knows neither the one nor the other.”[1810]Luther did not see that he was endangering both faith and works and undermining their very foundations.For, as his opponents objected, the last category of Christians, however careless they might be in the matter of good works, and however much they might fail to keep the Commandments, could, nevertheless, for the most part, at least boast of having the faith, whether regarded in the light of a “loving confidence in God’s grace” or in the more usual and ordinary sense of an acceptance of the divine revelation as true. Their faith, it was urged, was according to Luther at the outset very closely in touch with sin, indeed they had been justified by faith without either repentance or change of heart, faith having merely spread a cloak over their evil deeds; and yet now here was Luther telling them that they had lost the faith unless they lived by it, or if they transgressed the Commandments even by a venial sin—for Luther sees no distinction between mortal sin and venial.Loofs is certainly not overstating things when he says that, “Luther was not clear in his own mind”[1811]as to his doctrine on the great questions of works and the Law, and that his “opinion comprised much that did not tally.”[1812]Loofs adds: “How far Luther himself was aware that much of what he said voiced merely his own personal opinion it would be hard to tell.... Without his wealth of ideas and his ability to insist now on one, now on another side of a subject Luther would not have been so successful as a reformer. But he was hampered by his own qualities so soon as it became a question of putting his new views in didactic form.”[1813]Loofs, like Harnack, spares no praise when speaking of Luther’s “qualities” and the “happy intuition” which enabled him to overthrow the olden order and to call into being a new, “religious,” Christianity.Luther’s Doctrine of Merit in the Eyes of Protestant CriticsOne such “happy intuition” Loofs sees in the fact, that, in the question of works and merit Luther “clearly perceived and got the better of the opinion, untenable in religion, that a scale of merit exists as between God and man.”[1814]The critic abstains from discussing the Catholic teaching on supernatural merit. Its earlier no less than its later defenders rightly emphasised, in opposition to Luther, that the olden doctrine of merit rested on the express promise of God to reward faithful service, and not, as Luther insinuated, on any absolute right of the works in themselves to such reward. The act which was to meet with such a reward must, they said, be not only good in itself but also supernaturally good, i.e. it must be performed by man’s powers aided by supernatural grace; even this, however, would not suffice were there not the gracious promise on God’s part, guaranteed by revelation, that such an act would be requited by a heavenly reward. Yet this was not to deny a certain “condignitas in actu primo” inherent in the act itself.Luther, it is true, laughs to scorn the Popish doctrine of merit which makes God Himself our debtor. Yet long before St. Augustine had answered the objection: “God has become our debtor, not as though He has received something from us, but because He has promised what pleased Him. It is a different thing when we say to a man: You are my debtor because I have given you something, and when we say to God: Give us what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1815]In the fragments of the ancient doctrine of religious morality which Luther saw fit to retain he put germs of disintegration owing to his failure to recognise the above truth. Because he would hear nothing of merit and everywhere scented righteousness-by-works, he built up a theory of good works which lacks a foundation. In the last resort everything is coloured by his dread of self-righteousness and of any human co-operation. “The ‘Law,’ to Luther, seemed conditioned by that ‘condicio meriti,’” says Loofs, “which belonged to the Law of Moses, and, which, owingto the craving of the natural man for self-righteousness, also becomes part of the natural law.”[1816]So strongly does Luther denounce merit and self-righteousness that he practically does away with his own doctrine of works.First, his denial of free-will and the absolute determinism of his doctrine makes an end of all spontaneous, meritorious action on man’s part. Further, he is untrue to his position, repudiating it in his sermons and popular writings as far as possible, and replacing it by one morally more defensible. In later years we find him casting over his own teaching even in his theological disputations; in his anxiety to counter the Antinomians, he goes so far as to declare works necessary for salvation.Even earlier the fanatics and Anabaptists had helped to some extent in the work of demolition. Their conclusions as to the dangers of Luther’s system and their protests against its evil moral consequences are really much more vigorous and damaging than might appear from Luther’s bitter rejoinders. “The unjust attitude of the reformers towards the ‘fanatics,’” says Harnack, “was disastrous to themselves and their cause. How much might they not have learnt from these despised people even though obliged to repudiate their principles.”[1817]The work of demolition was, moreover, being carried out under Luther’s very eye by Philip Melanchthon and his friends. Luther’s doctrine, as has already been pointed out, was not at all to the taste of the dialectician of Lutheranism. “The Philippists,” says Loofs, “were very far from holding Luther’s own views,” “as far removed as” the Antinomians. Luther himself, however, “was partly to blame for the confusion.” From the standpoint adopted by Melanchthon “it was impossible to comply” with Luther’s demand for a clear “distinction to be made between Law and Gospel”;[1818]yet, according to Luther, this was one of “the things on which theology hinges.”[1819]According to Loofs, Melanchthon’s theology was a means of spoiling some “valuable reformation truths,” nay, “the most priceless of Luther’s new ideas.”[1820]As for Melanchthon’s allegation, viz. that he hadmerely put Luther’s doctrine more mildly, Loofs says bluntly: “If he meant this, then he deceived himself.”[1821]As to the points under discussion, Luther not only thought differently from Melanchthon at an earlier date, but persisted in so doing till his very death. Luther, nevertheless, never expressed any disapproval of Melanchthon’s ideas, widely as they differed from his own.Luther’s teaching on the Sacraments and on the Supper according to Protestant TeachingIn Harnack’s opinion Luther, by his teaching on the one sacrament, viz. the Word, “destroyed the olden ecclesiastical view. Yet he unconsciously retained a certain remnant ... which had fatal results on the development of his doctrine. Though here again we find truth and error side by side in Luther, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that he opened the door to errors of a grave character.”[1822]The principal error in his doctrine of the sacraments consisted, according to Harnack, in his having made his own a reminiscence of the Catholic view. Instead of teaching that the Holy Ghost acts by the Word alone, he came, as his statements subsequent to 1525 show, to regard this Spirit as operating by the “Wordandthe Sacraments.”[1823]“In his teaching on the sacraments he forsook the attitude he had once adopted as a reformer and accepted views which tended to confuse his own doctrine of faith and still more the theology of his followers. In his efforts to thwart the fanatics he came to embrace ... some highly questionable propositions.... This relapse in his views on the means of grace wrought untold damage to Lutheranism.”[1824]Here his desire to get the better of the fanatics played a part, and so did likewise the psychological starting-point of his whole teaching. He reverted to the means of grace, “because he wished to provide real consolation for troubled consciences, and to preserve them from the hell of uncertainty concerning that state of grace of which the fanatics appeared to make so small account.... It was, however, not merely by his rejection of certain definite acts asmeans of grace that Luther returned to the narrow views of the Middle Ages which he had previously forsaken—the spirit lives not (as Luther knew better than any other man), thanks to any means of grace, but thanks rather to that close union with its God on Whom it lays hold through Christ—he did so still more by seeking, first, to vindicate Infant Baptism as a means of grace in the strict sense; secondly, by accepting Penance as at least a preparation for grace, and, thirdly, by maintaining that the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Supper constitutes the essential part of this sacrament.”[1825]It is true he “never ceased to maintain that the means of grace were nothing but the Word whereby faith is awakened,” but, in spite of this, the “opus operatum” of the olden Church “had again made its appearance and weakened or obscured the strict relations between Gospel and faith.”[1826]Of Infant Baptism in Luther’s system Harnack rightly says: “If Luther’s Evangelical theory holds good, viz. that grace and faith are inseparably linked,[1827]then Infant Baptism is in itself no sacrament, and can be no more than an ecclesiastical rite; if it is a sacrament in the strict sense, then evidently his theory is at fault. We cannot escape the dilemma, either by appealing to the faith of the parents or god-parents [as Luther, to begin with, did]—for this is the worst kind of the ‘fides implicita’—or by assuming that faith is given in baptism,[1828]for an unconscious faith is almost as bad as that other ‘fides implicita.’ Hence the proper thing for Luther to have done would have been either to abolish Infant Baptism ... or to admit that it was a mere rite to be completed later.... Luther, however, did neither; on the contrary, he retained Infant Baptism as the sacrament of regeneration and accepted as an efficacious act what should, given his theory, have at most been a symbol of God’s preventing grace. This was, however much he might deny it, to hark back to the ‘opus operatum’ and to dissolve the link between faith and the working of grace.”[1829]Again, according to Harnack, the mould in which Luther cast his doctrine of the Supper once more involved him in contradictions which rendered his position untenable.On the one hand, by so strenuously insisting on the belief in the Real Presence as a binding doctrinal formula he was untrue to his own theory that doctrine was not to be formulated; on the other hand, his restatement of the doctrine of the Supper emptied it of all content. It was “in part the fault of hisformulating of the faith that the later Lutheran Church, with its Christology, its teaching on the Sacrament ... and the false standard by which it judged divergent doctrines and pronounced them heretical, threatened for a while to become a sort of caricature of the Catholic Church.”[1830]Harnack notes how Luther, the better to reach the real meaning of the words “This is My Body,” actually called tradition to his aid, in his case an extremely illogical thing to do. His consciousness that in holding fast to the Real Presence he was backed by the whole Church of yore lends his words unusual power. “Even were a hundred thousand devils and all the fanatics to fall upon it, still the doctrine must stand firm.”[1831]We may add, that, with regard to this sacrament, Luther outdid his adversaries in his attachment to tradition and antiquity, reintroducing communion under both kinds as being alone in strict accord with Scripture.There was also much that was personal and arbitrary in the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar as shaped anew and established by Luther. For one thing, he dwelt far too exclusively on this sacrament being the pledge of the forgiveness of sins. Again, in his desire to counter Zwingli, he put forward theories on the sacrament, which embody all sorts of disadvantages and contradictions not to be found in the teaching of the earlier Church. He, indeed, denied Transubstantiation, but the “Swiss could not for the life of them see why he did, since he admits that a stupendous miracle takes place in the Supper.”[1832]For the Church’s ancient doctrine of Transubstantiation he substituted Impanation, and even this he admitted only in the actual celebration and reception.[1833]“The awkward part was,” says Harnack, “that, according to Luther, the Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Supper only for the purpose of reception, though they might be partaken of even by an unbeliever or a heathen.”[1834]The concomitance (presence of both Body and Blood under either kind) taught by the olden Church, which, indeed, was a natural corollary of the Real Presence, he set aside, urged thereto by his theory that in Communion both kinds must be received; the only result was to introduce a new and uncalled-for miracle. To this must be added what Harnack calls the “crazy speculations on the ubiquity of the Body of Christ,”[1835]which furnished Melanchthon his principal reason forgiving up Luther’s doctrine of the Supper, and, like Zwingli and Bucer, denying the Real Presence. According to Luther, the ubiquity of the Body of Christ rested on the supposed “real communication of the Divine ‘idiomata’ (and consequently of the Divine omnipresence) to the humanity of Christ.”[1836]Nor does the Real Presence, according to Luther, begin at the consecration; as to when it does, he leaves the faithful in the dark; nor does he enlighten them as to when it ceases in the remains left over after communion; in the latter regard his practice was full of contradictions.—In allowing communion to be carried to the sick in their own houses he was again unfaithful to his tenets.[1837]To any processions of the sacrament he was averse, because Christ was only present at the time of reception.He proposed, as the better plan, that the sacrament should not be adored save by bending the knee when receiving it, and yet his own behaviour did not tally with his proposal.[1838]It was enacted at Wittenberg, in 1542, that there should be no elevation, and yet Luther had retained this rite at an earlier date, in order to defy Carlstadt, as he says, and so as not to seem in this “indifferent matter” to sanction by his attitude Carlstadt’s attack on the sacrament.[1839]He was, to say the least, verbally illogical when he termed the Eucharist the “sacrificium eucharisticum,” meaning of course thereby that it was a “thank-offering” on the part of the faithful.It is not surprising that belief in the Real Presence, though so strongly defended by Luther, gradually evaporated in his Church largely owing to the inconsistencies just noticed. Eventually the Lutherans made their own the views of Zwingli and Melanchthon on the sacrament, though they retained an affection for certain vague and elastic terms concerning the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ.[1840]Luther spoke of the attempts to introduce Zwingli’s rationalistic doctrine of the sacrament at Frankfurt-on-the-Main as “a diabolical jugglery with the words of Christ,” “whereby simple souls are shamefully duped and robbed of their sacrament.” The thing was “handled in such a way that no one was certain what was meant or what to believe.”[1841]Luther’s views on the Church and on Divine Worship according to Protestant CriticismA mass of inconsequence lies in the doctrine on the Church, which he is supposed to have retained, though, as a matter of fact, he completely altered it. Thanks to his conception of the Church as a practically invisible body his view of it was so broad as to leave far behind the old, Catholic idea; nevertheless, by and by his conception of the Church grew so narrow, that, as Harnack justly remarks, “in comparison, even the Roman view of it seems in many respects more elastic and consequently superior.... The Church threatened to become a mere school, viz. the school of ‘pure [Wittenberg] doctrine.’” In this way arose “the Christianity of the theologians and pastors.... Luther on his own side repeatedly broke away from this view.”[1842]It is quite true that many contradictions are here apparent, as we shall have occasion to see later (vol. vi., xxxviii.). “His idea of the Church became obscured. The conception of the Church (communion of faith and communionof pure doctrine) became as ambiguous as the conception of the ‘doctrina evangelii.’”Then, with regard to his teaching on public worship. Though, as remarked above (p. 147 f.), he had in principle abandoned the view held by the olden Church regarding the necessity of external worship, and had robbed it of its focus, viz. the Sacrifice of the Altar, yet he was very far from logically following this out in practice.
Of this all-important groundwork of his anthropology the theologian Taube says: “It is not surprising that Luther fails to remain faithful to the attitude he has assumed. It is as impossible to him, as to any other thinking mind, to fail to find freedom presupposed in every corner, in his personal Christianity, and in his own work as pastor, preacher or reformer. Facts are stronger than theories anda priorireasonings.... Either thedataof experience must be held to be mere illusion, or absolute determinism must be thrown over. We cannot answer the same question both in the negative and in the affirmative and then declare it to be a mystery; it would be no mystery but simply a contradiction.”[1772]Still, Luther found it easier than Taube thinks to proclaim things to be mysteries which palpably were nothing but contradictions. A glance at Köstlin’s “Luthers Theologie” shows how often Luther attempts to distract the reader from the difficulties he himself enumerates with the consoling words: This we must not seek to pry into.—Taube too is optimistic with regard to the fate of the doctrine of unfreedom in modern Protestant theology; appealing to the above contradictions, he writes: “It is not surprising that the Lutheran theology, closely as it keeps to Luther’s views in many other matters, has never ventured to follow him on this all-important point, and, in fact, has departed ever further from him.”[1773]The truth is that the period of withdrawal inaugurated by Melanchthon in 1527 has been succeeded in our own day by one of closer approximation. (Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 292, n. 4.)Apart from the theory of man’s absolute depravity and lack of free-will there are other things which are damaging to Luther’s doctrine of original sin, particularly his opinion that original sin persists after baptism.“The doctrine of original sin as taught by the olden Church,” says Harnack, “was amended by Luther and made to agree with his own principles,” but it was against his principles “to make of such things articles of faith. His own sense of sin and the need he felt of pacifying his conscience occupied in it so large a place that he transformed what was in reality a piece of Christian self-judgment into an historical fact of universal appliance concerning the beginnings of the human race.” At any rate Luther’s exaggeration of the impotence of fallen man served “as a ground of excuse for our own guilt.”[1774]
Of this all-important groundwork of his anthropology the theologian Taube says: “It is not surprising that Luther fails to remain faithful to the attitude he has assumed. It is as impossible to him, as to any other thinking mind, to fail to find freedom presupposed in every corner, in his personal Christianity, and in his own work as pastor, preacher or reformer. Facts are stronger than theories anda priorireasonings.... Either thedataof experience must be held to be mere illusion, or absolute determinism must be thrown over. We cannot answer the same question both in the negative and in the affirmative and then declare it to be a mystery; it would be no mystery but simply a contradiction.”[1772]
Still, Luther found it easier than Taube thinks to proclaim things to be mysteries which palpably were nothing but contradictions. A glance at Köstlin’s “Luthers Theologie” shows how often Luther attempts to distract the reader from the difficulties he himself enumerates with the consoling words: This we must not seek to pry into.—Taube too is optimistic with regard to the fate of the doctrine of unfreedom in modern Protestant theology; appealing to the above contradictions, he writes: “It is not surprising that the Lutheran theology, closely as it keeps to Luther’s views in many other matters, has never ventured to follow him on this all-important point, and, in fact, has departed ever further from him.”[1773]The truth is that the period of withdrawal inaugurated by Melanchthon in 1527 has been succeeded in our own day by one of closer approximation. (Cp. above, vol. ii., p. 292, n. 4.)
Apart from the theory of man’s absolute depravity and lack of free-will there are other things which are damaging to Luther’s doctrine of original sin, particularly his opinion that original sin persists after baptism.
“The doctrine of original sin as taught by the olden Church,” says Harnack, “was amended by Luther and made to agree with his own principles,” but it was against his principles “to make of such things articles of faith. His own sense of sin and the need he felt of pacifying his conscience occupied in it so large a place that he transformed what was in reality a piece of Christian self-judgment into an historical fact of universal appliance concerning the beginnings of the human race.” At any rate Luther’s exaggeration of the impotence of fallen man served “as a ground of excuse for our own guilt.”[1774]
As regards his doctrine of the Law and the Gospel; Luther hoped, by contrasting it with the Gospel, to bring the Law into prominence. By the Law he understood the sum-total of what was commanded not merely in the Old but also in the New Testament; the teaching of the Gospel, on the other hand, contained only consoling thoughts on the fulfilment of the Law by Christ and the appropriation of Christ’s merits by faith.[1775]
“Plain as it is,” says Harnack, “what Luther really desired by his distinction between the Law and the Gospel, still, coming to details, we find that the Reformer’s statements do not always agree. Thus it is partly left to our own private judgment to select those utterances which we consider more important; Luther himself nevertheless gives the preference to certain ideas whichin perpetuuminvest the Law with a peculiar independent significance. Is it not, however, our duty to depict the Reformer in accordance with his most original ideas?”[1776]Such an “original” idea is that of the abrogation of the Law for the Christian who is really redeemed and who voluntarily and without compulsion leaves faith to express itself in action. “Certainty of the abrogation of the Law constitutes a certain demand which can be met only in one way.” Luther carries the paradox so far as to say: The Law is given to be broken. And yet ... Luther ever cherishes the “assumption that the Law is the expression of God’s immutable will, and, in this sense, has its own enduring sphere of action side by side with the Gospel, as though the Will of God were not implicitly contained in the latter. But this admission involved a place being found for the Law even in Christianity.” Of this difficulty Luther was perfectly conscious, but he was deft enough in circumventing it. “The Lawqua lexis undoubtedly abrogated for the Christian; whoevertries to act up to the Law must needs go to hell; but in God’s sight it still holds good, i.e. God’s Will remains expressed therein and He must watch over its fulfilment.” If the law is not fulfilled God must demand penance.[1777]
“Plain as it is,” says Harnack, “what Luther really desired by his distinction between the Law and the Gospel, still, coming to details, we find that the Reformer’s statements do not always agree. Thus it is partly left to our own private judgment to select those utterances which we consider more important; Luther himself nevertheless gives the preference to certain ideas whichin perpetuuminvest the Law with a peculiar independent significance. Is it not, however, our duty to depict the Reformer in accordance with his most original ideas?”[1776]
Such an “original” idea is that of the abrogation of the Law for the Christian who is really redeemed and who voluntarily and without compulsion leaves faith to express itself in action. “Certainty of the abrogation of the Law constitutes a certain demand which can be met only in one way.” Luther carries the paradox so far as to say: The Law is given to be broken. And yet ... Luther ever cherishes the “assumption that the Law is the expression of God’s immutable will, and, in this sense, has its own enduring sphere of action side by side with the Gospel, as though the Will of God were not implicitly contained in the latter. But this admission involved a place being found for the Law even in Christianity.” Of this difficulty Luther was perfectly conscious, but he was deft enough in circumventing it. “The Lawqua lexis undoubtedly abrogated for the Christian; whoevertries to act up to the Law must needs go to hell; but in God’s sight it still holds good, i.e. God’s Will remains expressed therein and He must watch over its fulfilment.” If the law is not fulfilled God must demand penance.[1777]
In the question of penance we again see Luther assume an attitude which is, as a matter of fact, subversive of his own doctrine. His ideas on this point are so contradictory that Protestant writers on dogma have not been able to agree in their accounts, and needless to say, still less in their judgments.
Alfred Galley, one of the most recent writers on “Luther’s doctrine of penance,” admits: “The various attempts made to solve the matter have so far yielded no satisfactory result.”[1778]And yet for ten years Lipsius, Herrmann and others had been carefully exploring this central point of Luther’s practical theology. Galley’s own efforts, kindly disposed as he is to Luther, and in spite of his mastery of the texts, have not as yet rallied other theologians to his opinion.Luther’s original doctrine of Penance, to which frequent allusion has already been made, started, according to Loofs, (1906) with the assumption that contrition is produced solely by the “love of righteousness,” and that true penance “does not come from the Law,” because the latter does nothing but “kill, curse, render guilty and pronounce judgment”; penance produced by the Law led only to hypocrisy. “Thus, before one has faith, to think of sin and of the Law is harmful.” Luther, however, gradually acquiesced in the modifications introduced by Melanchthon in favour of the Law and of that sorrow which arises from the thought of the penalties. That “Luther to a certain extent adopted Melanchthon’s ideas on penance is still more apparent in the Antinomian controversy [1537-1540],” yet the ideas of his opponent, Agricola, bore some “resemblance” to “Luther’s earlier ideas” on Christian penance.[1779]As for Harnack, he emphasises the confusion which arose in the Lutheran theology owing to Luther’s illogical attitude towards so eminently practical a question as the doctrine of penance; even during Luther’s lifetime the doctrine of penance had been a real “labyrinth.” “Here too,” says Harnack, “Luther himself took the lead, and then quietly winked at what was contrary to his own early principles, which, moreover, he had never retracted. That the mediaeval Catholic view had its after effect on him ought not to be denied.” “He was convinced that faith works penance, the ‘dying daily,’ which indeed is but the negative side of faith,” and that “only such penance as comes from faith [from the Gospel] is of value in God’s sight.... This is certainly a view which may easily grow into its dreadful opposite,viz. the comfortable presuming on salvation.... If people are told that they must always be performing penance, and that particular acts of penance are of no avail, few will ever have recourse to penance at all.”[1780]Hence, according to Harnack, Luther made a change in the doctrine of penance and more importance was given to the Law; “for each separate act of sin on the part of the baptised” satisfaction must be made, and “Christ must intervene anew with His fulfilment of the Law.”[1781]By this means, by the creative action of God, “faith” is constantly revived in the man who has fallen, and God, as Luther now assumes, works by means of the Law. In this wise, faith, however, becomes, says Harnack, “a meritorious work,” seeing that it is the seal of our reconciliation; moreover “personal responsibility and personal action must play some part.”[1782]But how is man to do this, devoid as he is of any freedom of the will?Again, for all his alteration of his doctrine of penance Luther failed to “attain the object he was after, viz. to check laxity and frivolity. On the contrary, the new doctrine tended, in its later developments, to promote and foster them.”[1783]Nor was much gained, when, in order to promote penance and greater earnestness of life the Law was “placed before the Gospel. This Melanchthon did with Luther’s consent in the ‘Instructions for the Visitors.’[1784]Occasion was taken at the same time to insist strongly on the use of the confessional in order to check at least the worst sins.” “The intervention of the clergyman, which was undoubtedly needed by the ‘common people,’” constituted merely “a Lutheran counterpart of the Catholic sacrament of penance,” though, adds Harnack, “minus its burdensome Romish additions.”[1785]
Alfred Galley, one of the most recent writers on “Luther’s doctrine of penance,” admits: “The various attempts made to solve the matter have so far yielded no satisfactory result.”[1778]And yet for ten years Lipsius, Herrmann and others had been carefully exploring this central point of Luther’s practical theology. Galley’s own efforts, kindly disposed as he is to Luther, and in spite of his mastery of the texts, have not as yet rallied other theologians to his opinion.
Luther’s original doctrine of Penance, to which frequent allusion has already been made, started, according to Loofs, (1906) with the assumption that contrition is produced solely by the “love of righteousness,” and that true penance “does not come from the Law,” because the latter does nothing but “kill, curse, render guilty and pronounce judgment”; penance produced by the Law led only to hypocrisy. “Thus, before one has faith, to think of sin and of the Law is harmful.” Luther, however, gradually acquiesced in the modifications introduced by Melanchthon in favour of the Law and of that sorrow which arises from the thought of the penalties. That “Luther to a certain extent adopted Melanchthon’s ideas on penance is still more apparent in the Antinomian controversy [1537-1540],” yet the ideas of his opponent, Agricola, bore some “resemblance” to “Luther’s earlier ideas” on Christian penance.[1779]
As for Harnack, he emphasises the confusion which arose in the Lutheran theology owing to Luther’s illogical attitude towards so eminently practical a question as the doctrine of penance; even during Luther’s lifetime the doctrine of penance had been a real “labyrinth.” “Here too,” says Harnack, “Luther himself took the lead, and then quietly winked at what was contrary to his own early principles, which, moreover, he had never retracted. That the mediaeval Catholic view had its after effect on him ought not to be denied.” “He was convinced that faith works penance, the ‘dying daily,’ which indeed is but the negative side of faith,” and that “only such penance as comes from faith [from the Gospel] is of value in God’s sight.... This is certainly a view which may easily grow into its dreadful opposite,viz. the comfortable presuming on salvation.... If people are told that they must always be performing penance, and that particular acts of penance are of no avail, few will ever have recourse to penance at all.”[1780]
Hence, according to Harnack, Luther made a change in the doctrine of penance and more importance was given to the Law; “for each separate act of sin on the part of the baptised” satisfaction must be made, and “Christ must intervene anew with His fulfilment of the Law.”[1781]By this means, by the creative action of God, “faith” is constantly revived in the man who has fallen, and God, as Luther now assumes, works by means of the Law. In this wise, faith, however, becomes, says Harnack, “a meritorious work,” seeing that it is the seal of our reconciliation; moreover “personal responsibility and personal action must play some part.”[1782]But how is man to do this, devoid as he is of any freedom of the will?
Again, for all his alteration of his doctrine of penance Luther failed to “attain the object he was after, viz. to check laxity and frivolity. On the contrary, the new doctrine tended, in its later developments, to promote and foster them.”[1783]Nor was much gained, when, in order to promote penance and greater earnestness of life the Law was “placed before the Gospel. This Melanchthon did with Luther’s consent in the ‘Instructions for the Visitors.’[1784]Occasion was taken at the same time to insist strongly on the use of the confessional in order to check at least the worst sins.” “The intervention of the clergyman, which was undoubtedly needed by the ‘common people,’” constituted merely “a Lutheran counterpart of the Catholic sacrament of penance,” though, adds Harnack, “minus its burdensome Romish additions.”[1785]
According to Harnack, “the idea of justification,” the central point of Luther’s teaching, “shrinks into a merely outward act of God’s designed to quieten consciences. Here again the superiority of the Catholic doctrine could not fail to appear; for to be content with the ‘fides sola’ could not but involve a very questionable laxity. It would, from this point of view, have been far better to have represented the‘fides caritate formata’ as alone of any value in God’s sight.”[1786]In his doctrine of justification by faith alone, Luther never got over the weak point, viz. his exclusion of charity, at least a commencement of which, together with faith, hope and repentance, had been required by the olden Church as a preparation for justification. Some return to the Catholic requirements was called for. “Hence it is not in the least surprising, ... that Melanchthon at a later date abandoned the ‘sola fides’ and came to advocate a modified form of synergism. The Luther-zealots were thrown into hopeless confusion by the necessity in which they found themselves, of harmonizing the older Evangelical theory with the doctrine of penance whilst avoiding the pitfall of Melanchthon’s synergism.” They found themselves, so Harnack says, face to face with two “iustificationes,” that by faith alone, and that by law and penance, not to speak of a third, the “iustificatio” of infants by the act of baptism. “These contradictions become still further accentuated when the ‘regeneratio’ was taken into account,” etc.[1787]It is not worth while to pursue any further Harnack’s criticism which at times tends to become carping.
As regards the doctrine of good works, Protestant theology of late has been disposed to take offence at Luther’s undue extension of freedom, which seems to endanger good works and the zealous keeping of the Law.
It is the Christian’s art, so Loofs sums up Luther’s teaching, to allow no thought of the Law to trouble his conscience, but simply to regard Christ as the bearer of his sins. “Here the one-sided view of the ‘Law,’ seen only from the standpoint of the need of acquiring merit by works, has a disturbing effect”; such is Loofs’s opinion. According to Luther such contempt for the Law is often impossible, hence he determined to conquer the “dualism of the old-new man” of which we like St. Paul (Gal. ii. 20) are conscious: I live, and yet I do not; I am dead, and yet I am not; a sinner, and yet no sinner; I have the Law and yet I have it not. We ought, according to Luther, to say to ourselves: There is a time to die and a time to live, a Law to be obeyed and a Law to be despised. “Even during the Antinomian controversy,” concludes Loofs, “Luther did not abandon such thoughts.”[1788]Luther’s want of discrimination is most apparent, he says, in the fact, that, owing to his “peculiar interest in the preaching ofthe grace of God,” he depreciated works and the Law as the very fount of self-righteousness.[1789]Loofs rightly refers to a sermon in the Church-postils where Luther inveighs against the “Papists, Anabaptists and other sects” who scream against us: “What is the use of your preaching so much of faith and Christ? What good does it do the people?”[1790]Luther could not in fact “sufficiently decry the Law or urge too strongly that it was useless to Christians.”[1791]In the passage quoted Luther says of the exhortations to works and the preaching of the Commandments: “This preaching does nothing else but kill, i.e. far from being good or useful it is only harmful ... rank poison and death.”And he goes on: “All our works, however precious they may be, are nothing but poison and death.... People may indeed boast loudly and say: ‘If you live in this way, take pains to keep the Law and perform many good works, you will be saved.’ But that these are only vain words, nay, a harmful doctrine, will soon be apparent.”[1792]It is not in man’s power to keep the Commandments by the performance of the right and necessary works, hence he becomes troubled and at last despairs if he strives after works. “The human race is so depraved that no one can be found who does not transgress all God’s commandments even though the wrath of God and his eternal damnation be held up before him and preached to him daily; indeed if this is impressed upon a man over much he only begins to rage against it more horribly.”[1793]It is merely “reason with its human ideas” which “cannot get beyond this, viz. that God is gracious to all who live in this manner and do what the Ten Commandments require; for reason knows nothing of the misery of our depraved nature, nor does it know that no one is able to keep God’s command.” For this cause Luther had at last brought to light and taught “that other doctrine in which grace and reconciliation are proclaimed” to us according to the “spirit and letter of St. Paul, whereas even the old doctors, Origen, Jerome and others, had not grasped St. Paul’s meaning.”[1794]In Popery “Scripture and St. Paul’s Epistles” were pushed under the bench, and, instead, we wallowed in human foolishness like the swine in their sties.[1795]“Of what use is it to us that Moses and the Law say: This shalt thou do, this would God have of thee? Yes, good Moses, I know this well and it is indeed quite true. But do you tell me how it is that, unfortunately, I neither keep it nor am able to keep it? It is no easy thing to spend money with an empty purse or to drink out of an empty can; if I am to pay my debtsand to quench my thirst, then please tell me how I may come by a full purse and a brimming can. To this the babblers have no answer,” etc.[1796]And yet the Catholic writers whom he dubs babblers, Erasmus and Eck for instance, had demonstrated from Scripture and tradition that first, man is by no means so helpless and depraved as Luther assumes, and, secondly, that the grace of God is at his disposal every moment in order, by supernatural assistance, to enable his natural powers to keep the Law. While pointing this out they appeal at the same time to those passages of Scripture which spur us on to good works, and even make our heavenly reward dependent on them.Of these latter passages Loofs also asks: “In reality are not those alone saved who, besides their faith, can point to good works or at least to their fulfilment of the first Commandment? Does not Scripture over and over again speak of our being judged according to our works, and of the eternalreward?” Luther, however, so he remarks, got over the difficulty “by assuming, that, in such passages, faith is meant even when they speak of good works”; Luther actually finds a parallel in the “rule of the ‘communicatio idiomatum’” which deals with the Divine attributes of Christ made man.[1797]Another attempt to evade the difficulty, so Loofs declares, is found in Luther’s statement regarding the reward promised in the Bible to the just for their works. He argued that there must be some difference between the saved in their “degree of brightness and glory,” and thus, “accidentaliter,” he makes some account of the reward.[1798]Loofs, however, also draws attention to the fact that in the same sermons on Matthew, when touching cursorily on this, Luther “pokes fun at the idea of God setting some ‘particular Saint’ in a topmost place in heaven, and inveighs against the traditional idea of the ‘præmium accidentale.’”[1799]This is quite true, for Luther’s statements do not agree even here. In the passage quoted he is explaining his doctrine according to which, in this world, all the justified are equal in sanctity, the sinner who has just been converted being as pleasing to God as the Apostles. “For were St. Peter a better Christian than I am, he would have to have a better Christ, a better Gospel and a better baptism. But, seeing that the heritage we enjoy is one and the same, we must all be equal in this.”[1800]There are few sayings of Luther’s where the wholly mechanical nature of the forgiveness and sanctification taught by him, stands out more clearly.That, in spite of all this, he does not exclude works, is sufficiently remarkable. In the very passage where Luther brings forward the objection of the Papists and Anabaptists: It must bedone, i.e. good works, must be performed, he hastens to reply: “We have the Ten Commandments which we teach and keep as well as they”;[1801]the only difference was, that, he by his Evangelical preaching taught how the Commandments were really to be honoured.Loofs can even say that Luther proclaims the need of good works. He quotes the following utterances, for instance, from Luther’s later years: “Opera habent suam necessitatem”; “they, too, must be there”; “On account of the hypocrites we must say that good works are requisite for salvation (‘necessaria ad salutem’),”[1802]“he did not shrink from speaking in this way when giving counsel.”[1803]It is quite true, that, when preaching to the people, mindful of their faults and vices, he is fond, as Loofs shows, of recalling how Christ says “drily and clearly”: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments [Mt. xix. 17]; item, Do this and thou shalt live, etc. [Luke x. 28]. This must be taken as it stands and without debate.”[1804]Hence Luther even calls those folk “mad” who say: “‘Only believe and you will be saved.’ No, good fellow, that will not do, and you will never get to the kingdom of heaven unless you keep the Commandments.... For it is written plainly enough: ‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.’”[1805]And Luther supports this text by others which speak of works, of their merit and demerit, their reward and punishment.[1806]And yet immediately after he goes on to complain: “How are we to do what the Law perpetually urges and requires, seeing that we are unable to comply with its demands?”[1807]Finally he reaches his usual answer: “I will do it, says Christ, and fulfil it”; first of all He again and again obtains forgiveness for us, “seeing that we are unable to keep the Law”; Christ, however, did not wish us “to continue sinning”; on the contrary, the grace He infuses makes us keep the Law “willingly and gladly”; good works, more particularly those of charity towards our neighbour, spring up of themselves after “we have crept beneath Christ’s mantle and wing.”[1808]Where faith is present “it cannot but work unceasingly what is good. It does not ask whether there be a call to do good works, but even before the question is put it has already done them, and is ever after doingthem.”[1809]Those Christians—presumably the majority—who fail to find themselves in such a state receive but poor consolation: “Whoever does not perform such works is an unbelieving man, who gropes and looks about for faith and good works but knows neither the one nor the other.”[1810]Luther did not see that he was endangering both faith and works and undermining their very foundations.For, as his opponents objected, the last category of Christians, however careless they might be in the matter of good works, and however much they might fail to keep the Commandments, could, nevertheless, for the most part, at least boast of having the faith, whether regarded in the light of a “loving confidence in God’s grace” or in the more usual and ordinary sense of an acceptance of the divine revelation as true. Their faith, it was urged, was according to Luther at the outset very closely in touch with sin, indeed they had been justified by faith without either repentance or change of heart, faith having merely spread a cloak over their evil deeds; and yet now here was Luther telling them that they had lost the faith unless they lived by it, or if they transgressed the Commandments even by a venial sin—for Luther sees no distinction between mortal sin and venial.
It is the Christian’s art, so Loofs sums up Luther’s teaching, to allow no thought of the Law to trouble his conscience, but simply to regard Christ as the bearer of his sins. “Here the one-sided view of the ‘Law,’ seen only from the standpoint of the need of acquiring merit by works, has a disturbing effect”; such is Loofs’s opinion. According to Luther such contempt for the Law is often impossible, hence he determined to conquer the “dualism of the old-new man” of which we like St. Paul (Gal. ii. 20) are conscious: I live, and yet I do not; I am dead, and yet I am not; a sinner, and yet no sinner; I have the Law and yet I have it not. We ought, according to Luther, to say to ourselves: There is a time to die and a time to live, a Law to be obeyed and a Law to be despised. “Even during the Antinomian controversy,” concludes Loofs, “Luther did not abandon such thoughts.”[1788]
Luther’s want of discrimination is most apparent, he says, in the fact, that, owing to his “peculiar interest in the preaching ofthe grace of God,” he depreciated works and the Law as the very fount of self-righteousness.[1789]
Loofs rightly refers to a sermon in the Church-postils where Luther inveighs against the “Papists, Anabaptists and other sects” who scream against us: “What is the use of your preaching so much of faith and Christ? What good does it do the people?”[1790]Luther could not in fact “sufficiently decry the Law or urge too strongly that it was useless to Christians.”[1791]
In the passage quoted Luther says of the exhortations to works and the preaching of the Commandments: “This preaching does nothing else but kill, i.e. far from being good or useful it is only harmful ... rank poison and death.”
And he goes on: “All our works, however precious they may be, are nothing but poison and death.... People may indeed boast loudly and say: ‘If you live in this way, take pains to keep the Law and perform many good works, you will be saved.’ But that these are only vain words, nay, a harmful doctrine, will soon be apparent.”[1792]It is not in man’s power to keep the Commandments by the performance of the right and necessary works, hence he becomes troubled and at last despairs if he strives after works. “The human race is so depraved that no one can be found who does not transgress all God’s commandments even though the wrath of God and his eternal damnation be held up before him and preached to him daily; indeed if this is impressed upon a man over much he only begins to rage against it more horribly.”[1793]It is merely “reason with its human ideas” which “cannot get beyond this, viz. that God is gracious to all who live in this manner and do what the Ten Commandments require; for reason knows nothing of the misery of our depraved nature, nor does it know that no one is able to keep God’s command.” For this cause Luther had at last brought to light and taught “that other doctrine in which grace and reconciliation are proclaimed” to us according to the “spirit and letter of St. Paul, whereas even the old doctors, Origen, Jerome and others, had not grasped St. Paul’s meaning.”[1794]
In Popery “Scripture and St. Paul’s Epistles” were pushed under the bench, and, instead, we wallowed in human foolishness like the swine in their sties.[1795]
“Of what use is it to us that Moses and the Law say: This shalt thou do, this would God have of thee? Yes, good Moses, I know this well and it is indeed quite true. But do you tell me how it is that, unfortunately, I neither keep it nor am able to keep it? It is no easy thing to spend money with an empty purse or to drink out of an empty can; if I am to pay my debtsand to quench my thirst, then please tell me how I may come by a full purse and a brimming can. To this the babblers have no answer,” etc.[1796]
And yet the Catholic writers whom he dubs babblers, Erasmus and Eck for instance, had demonstrated from Scripture and tradition that first, man is by no means so helpless and depraved as Luther assumes, and, secondly, that the grace of God is at his disposal every moment in order, by supernatural assistance, to enable his natural powers to keep the Law. While pointing this out they appeal at the same time to those passages of Scripture which spur us on to good works, and even make our heavenly reward dependent on them.
Of these latter passages Loofs also asks: “In reality are not those alone saved who, besides their faith, can point to good works or at least to their fulfilment of the first Commandment? Does not Scripture over and over again speak of our being judged according to our works, and of the eternalreward?” Luther, however, so he remarks, got over the difficulty “by assuming, that, in such passages, faith is meant even when they speak of good works”; Luther actually finds a parallel in the “rule of the ‘communicatio idiomatum’” which deals with the Divine attributes of Christ made man.[1797]
Another attempt to evade the difficulty, so Loofs declares, is found in Luther’s statement regarding the reward promised in the Bible to the just for their works. He argued that there must be some difference between the saved in their “degree of brightness and glory,” and thus, “accidentaliter,” he makes some account of the reward.[1798]Loofs, however, also draws attention to the fact that in the same sermons on Matthew, when touching cursorily on this, Luther “pokes fun at the idea of God setting some ‘particular Saint’ in a topmost place in heaven, and inveighs against the traditional idea of the ‘præmium accidentale.’”[1799]This is quite true, for Luther’s statements do not agree even here. In the passage quoted he is explaining his doctrine according to which, in this world, all the justified are equal in sanctity, the sinner who has just been converted being as pleasing to God as the Apostles. “For were St. Peter a better Christian than I am, he would have to have a better Christ, a better Gospel and a better baptism. But, seeing that the heritage we enjoy is one and the same, we must all be equal in this.”[1800]
There are few sayings of Luther’s where the wholly mechanical nature of the forgiveness and sanctification taught by him, stands out more clearly.
That, in spite of all this, he does not exclude works, is sufficiently remarkable. In the very passage where Luther brings forward the objection of the Papists and Anabaptists: It must bedone, i.e. good works, must be performed, he hastens to reply: “We have the Ten Commandments which we teach and keep as well as they”;[1801]the only difference was, that, he by his Evangelical preaching taught how the Commandments were really to be honoured.
Loofs can even say that Luther proclaims the need of good works. He quotes the following utterances, for instance, from Luther’s later years: “Opera habent suam necessitatem”; “they, too, must be there”; “On account of the hypocrites we must say that good works are requisite for salvation (‘necessaria ad salutem’),”[1802]“he did not shrink from speaking in this way when giving counsel.”[1803]It is quite true, that, when preaching to the people, mindful of their faults and vices, he is fond, as Loofs shows, of recalling how Christ says “drily and clearly”: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments [Mt. xix. 17]; item, Do this and thou shalt live, etc. [Luke x. 28]. This must be taken as it stands and without debate.”[1804]Hence Luther even calls those folk “mad” who say: “‘Only believe and you will be saved.’ No, good fellow, that will not do, and you will never get to the kingdom of heaven unless you keep the Commandments.... For it is written plainly enough: ‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.’”[1805]And Luther supports this text by others which speak of works, of their merit and demerit, their reward and punishment.[1806]
And yet immediately after he goes on to complain: “How are we to do what the Law perpetually urges and requires, seeing that we are unable to comply with its demands?”[1807]
Finally he reaches his usual answer: “I will do it, says Christ, and fulfil it”; first of all He again and again obtains forgiveness for us, “seeing that we are unable to keep the Law”; Christ, however, did not wish us “to continue sinning”; on the contrary, the grace He infuses makes us keep the Law “willingly and gladly”; good works, more particularly those of charity towards our neighbour, spring up of themselves after “we have crept beneath Christ’s mantle and wing.”[1808]Where faith is present “it cannot but work unceasingly what is good. It does not ask whether there be a call to do good works, but even before the question is put it has already done them, and is ever after doingthem.”[1809]Those Christians—presumably the majority—who fail to find themselves in such a state receive but poor consolation: “Whoever does not perform such works is an unbelieving man, who gropes and looks about for faith and good works but knows neither the one nor the other.”[1810]
Luther did not see that he was endangering both faith and works and undermining their very foundations.
For, as his opponents objected, the last category of Christians, however careless they might be in the matter of good works, and however much they might fail to keep the Commandments, could, nevertheless, for the most part, at least boast of having the faith, whether regarded in the light of a “loving confidence in God’s grace” or in the more usual and ordinary sense of an acceptance of the divine revelation as true. Their faith, it was urged, was according to Luther at the outset very closely in touch with sin, indeed they had been justified by faith without either repentance or change of heart, faith having merely spread a cloak over their evil deeds; and yet now here was Luther telling them that they had lost the faith unless they lived by it, or if they transgressed the Commandments even by a venial sin—for Luther sees no distinction between mortal sin and venial.
Loofs is certainly not overstating things when he says that, “Luther was not clear in his own mind”[1811]as to his doctrine on the great questions of works and the Law, and that his “opinion comprised much that did not tally.”[1812]
Loofs adds: “How far Luther himself was aware that much of what he said voiced merely his own personal opinion it would be hard to tell.... Without his wealth of ideas and his ability to insist now on one, now on another side of a subject Luther would not have been so successful as a reformer. But he was hampered by his own qualities so soon as it became a question of putting his new views in didactic form.”[1813]
Loofs, like Harnack, spares no praise when speaking of Luther’s “qualities” and the “happy intuition” which enabled him to overthrow the olden order and to call into being a new, “religious,” Christianity.
One such “happy intuition” Loofs sees in the fact, that, in the question of works and merit Luther “clearly perceived and got the better of the opinion, untenable in religion, that a scale of merit exists as between God and man.”[1814]The critic abstains from discussing the Catholic teaching on supernatural merit. Its earlier no less than its later defenders rightly emphasised, in opposition to Luther, that the olden doctrine of merit rested on the express promise of God to reward faithful service, and not, as Luther insinuated, on any absolute right of the works in themselves to such reward. The act which was to meet with such a reward must, they said, be not only good in itself but also supernaturally good, i.e. it must be performed by man’s powers aided by supernatural grace; even this, however, would not suffice were there not the gracious promise on God’s part, guaranteed by revelation, that such an act would be requited by a heavenly reward. Yet this was not to deny a certain “condignitas in actu primo” inherent in the act itself.
Luther, it is true, laughs to scorn the Popish doctrine of merit which makes God Himself our debtor. Yet long before St. Augustine had answered the objection: “God has become our debtor, not as though He has received something from us, but because He has promised what pleased Him. It is a different thing when we say to a man: You are my debtor because I have given you something, and when we say to God: Give us what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1815]
In the fragments of the ancient doctrine of religious morality which Luther saw fit to retain he put germs of disintegration owing to his failure to recognise the above truth. Because he would hear nothing of merit and everywhere scented righteousness-by-works, he built up a theory of good works which lacks a foundation. In the last resort everything is coloured by his dread of self-righteousness and of any human co-operation. “The ‘Law,’ to Luther, seemed conditioned by that ‘condicio meriti,’” says Loofs, “which belonged to the Law of Moses, and, which, owingto the craving of the natural man for self-righteousness, also becomes part of the natural law.”[1816]
So strongly does Luther denounce merit and self-righteousness that he practically does away with his own doctrine of works.
First, his denial of free-will and the absolute determinism of his doctrine makes an end of all spontaneous, meritorious action on man’s part. Further, he is untrue to his position, repudiating it in his sermons and popular writings as far as possible, and replacing it by one morally more defensible. In later years we find him casting over his own teaching even in his theological disputations; in his anxiety to counter the Antinomians, he goes so far as to declare works necessary for salvation.
Even earlier the fanatics and Anabaptists had helped to some extent in the work of demolition. Their conclusions as to the dangers of Luther’s system and their protests against its evil moral consequences are really much more vigorous and damaging than might appear from Luther’s bitter rejoinders. “The unjust attitude of the reformers towards the ‘fanatics,’” says Harnack, “was disastrous to themselves and their cause. How much might they not have learnt from these despised people even though obliged to repudiate their principles.”[1817]
The work of demolition was, moreover, being carried out under Luther’s very eye by Philip Melanchthon and his friends. Luther’s doctrine, as has already been pointed out, was not at all to the taste of the dialectician of Lutheranism. “The Philippists,” says Loofs, “were very far from holding Luther’s own views,” “as far removed as” the Antinomians. Luther himself, however, “was partly to blame for the confusion.” From the standpoint adopted by Melanchthon “it was impossible to comply” with Luther’s demand for a clear “distinction to be made between Law and Gospel”;[1818]yet, according to Luther, this was one of “the things on which theology hinges.”[1819]According to Loofs, Melanchthon’s theology was a means of spoiling some “valuable reformation truths,” nay, “the most priceless of Luther’s new ideas.”[1820]As for Melanchthon’s allegation, viz. that he hadmerely put Luther’s doctrine more mildly, Loofs says bluntly: “If he meant this, then he deceived himself.”[1821]As to the points under discussion, Luther not only thought differently from Melanchthon at an earlier date, but persisted in so doing till his very death. Luther, nevertheless, never expressed any disapproval of Melanchthon’s ideas, widely as they differed from his own.
In Harnack’s opinion Luther, by his teaching on the one sacrament, viz. the Word, “destroyed the olden ecclesiastical view. Yet he unconsciously retained a certain remnant ... which had fatal results on the development of his doctrine. Though here again we find truth and error side by side in Luther, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that he opened the door to errors of a grave character.”[1822]
The principal error in his doctrine of the sacraments consisted, according to Harnack, in his having made his own a reminiscence of the Catholic view. Instead of teaching that the Holy Ghost acts by the Word alone, he came, as his statements subsequent to 1525 show, to regard this Spirit as operating by the “Wordandthe Sacraments.”[1823]“In his teaching on the sacraments he forsook the attitude he had once adopted as a reformer and accepted views which tended to confuse his own doctrine of faith and still more the theology of his followers. In his efforts to thwart the fanatics he came to embrace ... some highly questionable propositions.... This relapse in his views on the means of grace wrought untold damage to Lutheranism.”[1824]Here his desire to get the better of the fanatics played a part, and so did likewise the psychological starting-point of his whole teaching. He reverted to the means of grace, “because he wished to provide real consolation for troubled consciences, and to preserve them from the hell of uncertainty concerning that state of grace of which the fanatics appeared to make so small account.... It was, however, not merely by his rejection of certain definite acts asmeans of grace that Luther returned to the narrow views of the Middle Ages which he had previously forsaken—the spirit lives not (as Luther knew better than any other man), thanks to any means of grace, but thanks rather to that close union with its God on Whom it lays hold through Christ—he did so still more by seeking, first, to vindicate Infant Baptism as a means of grace in the strict sense; secondly, by accepting Penance as at least a preparation for grace, and, thirdly, by maintaining that the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Supper constitutes the essential part of this sacrament.”[1825]It is true he “never ceased to maintain that the means of grace were nothing but the Word whereby faith is awakened,” but, in spite of this, the “opus operatum” of the olden Church “had again made its appearance and weakened or obscured the strict relations between Gospel and faith.”[1826]Of Infant Baptism in Luther’s system Harnack rightly says: “If Luther’s Evangelical theory holds good, viz. that grace and faith are inseparably linked,[1827]then Infant Baptism is in itself no sacrament, and can be no more than an ecclesiastical rite; if it is a sacrament in the strict sense, then evidently his theory is at fault. We cannot escape the dilemma, either by appealing to the faith of the parents or god-parents [as Luther, to begin with, did]—for this is the worst kind of the ‘fides implicita’—or by assuming that faith is given in baptism,[1828]for an unconscious faith is almost as bad as that other ‘fides implicita.’ Hence the proper thing for Luther to have done would have been either to abolish Infant Baptism ... or to admit that it was a mere rite to be completed later.... Luther, however, did neither; on the contrary, he retained Infant Baptism as the sacrament of regeneration and accepted as an efficacious act what should, given his theory, have at most been a symbol of God’s preventing grace. This was, however much he might deny it, to hark back to the ‘opus operatum’ and to dissolve the link between faith and the working of grace.”[1829]Again, according to Harnack, the mould in which Luther cast his doctrine of the Supper once more involved him in contradictions which rendered his position untenable.On the one hand, by so strenuously insisting on the belief in the Real Presence as a binding doctrinal formula he was untrue to his own theory that doctrine was not to be formulated; on the other hand, his restatement of the doctrine of the Supper emptied it of all content. It was “in part the fault of hisformulating of the faith that the later Lutheran Church, with its Christology, its teaching on the Sacrament ... and the false standard by which it judged divergent doctrines and pronounced them heretical, threatened for a while to become a sort of caricature of the Catholic Church.”[1830]Harnack notes how Luther, the better to reach the real meaning of the words “This is My Body,” actually called tradition to his aid, in his case an extremely illogical thing to do. His consciousness that in holding fast to the Real Presence he was backed by the whole Church of yore lends his words unusual power. “Even were a hundred thousand devils and all the fanatics to fall upon it, still the doctrine must stand firm.”[1831]We may add, that, with regard to this sacrament, Luther outdid his adversaries in his attachment to tradition and antiquity, reintroducing communion under both kinds as being alone in strict accord with Scripture.There was also much that was personal and arbitrary in the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar as shaped anew and established by Luther. For one thing, he dwelt far too exclusively on this sacrament being the pledge of the forgiveness of sins. Again, in his desire to counter Zwingli, he put forward theories on the sacrament, which embody all sorts of disadvantages and contradictions not to be found in the teaching of the earlier Church. He, indeed, denied Transubstantiation, but the “Swiss could not for the life of them see why he did, since he admits that a stupendous miracle takes place in the Supper.”[1832]For the Church’s ancient doctrine of Transubstantiation he substituted Impanation, and even this he admitted only in the actual celebration and reception.[1833]“The awkward part was,” says Harnack, “that, according to Luther, the Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Supper only for the purpose of reception, though they might be partaken of even by an unbeliever or a heathen.”[1834]The concomitance (presence of both Body and Blood under either kind) taught by the olden Church, which, indeed, was a natural corollary of the Real Presence, he set aside, urged thereto by his theory that in Communion both kinds must be received; the only result was to introduce a new and uncalled-for miracle. To this must be added what Harnack calls the “crazy speculations on the ubiquity of the Body of Christ,”[1835]which furnished Melanchthon his principal reason forgiving up Luther’s doctrine of the Supper, and, like Zwingli and Bucer, denying the Real Presence. According to Luther, the ubiquity of the Body of Christ rested on the supposed “real communication of the Divine ‘idiomata’ (and consequently of the Divine omnipresence) to the humanity of Christ.”[1836]Nor does the Real Presence, according to Luther, begin at the consecration; as to when it does, he leaves the faithful in the dark; nor does he enlighten them as to when it ceases in the remains left over after communion; in the latter regard his practice was full of contradictions.—In allowing communion to be carried to the sick in their own houses he was again unfaithful to his tenets.[1837]To any processions of the sacrament he was averse, because Christ was only present at the time of reception.He proposed, as the better plan, that the sacrament should not be adored save by bending the knee when receiving it, and yet his own behaviour did not tally with his proposal.[1838]It was enacted at Wittenberg, in 1542, that there should be no elevation, and yet Luther had retained this rite at an earlier date, in order to defy Carlstadt, as he says, and so as not to seem in this “indifferent matter” to sanction by his attitude Carlstadt’s attack on the sacrament.[1839]He was, to say the least, verbally illogical when he termed the Eucharist the “sacrificium eucharisticum,” meaning of course thereby that it was a “thank-offering” on the part of the faithful.It is not surprising that belief in the Real Presence, though so strongly defended by Luther, gradually evaporated in his Church largely owing to the inconsistencies just noticed. Eventually the Lutherans made their own the views of Zwingli and Melanchthon on the sacrament, though they retained an affection for certain vague and elastic terms concerning the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ.[1840]Luther spoke of the attempts to introduce Zwingli’s rationalistic doctrine of the sacrament at Frankfurt-on-the-Main as “a diabolical jugglery with the words of Christ,” “whereby simple souls are shamefully duped and robbed of their sacrament.” The thing was “handled in such a way that no one was certain what was meant or what to believe.”[1841]
The principal error in his doctrine of the sacraments consisted, according to Harnack, in his having made his own a reminiscence of the Catholic view. Instead of teaching that the Holy Ghost acts by the Word alone, he came, as his statements subsequent to 1525 show, to regard this Spirit as operating by the “Wordandthe Sacraments.”[1823]
“In his teaching on the sacraments he forsook the attitude he had once adopted as a reformer and accepted views which tended to confuse his own doctrine of faith and still more the theology of his followers. In his efforts to thwart the fanatics he came to embrace ... some highly questionable propositions.... This relapse in his views on the means of grace wrought untold damage to Lutheranism.”[1824]Here his desire to get the better of the fanatics played a part, and so did likewise the psychological starting-point of his whole teaching. He reverted to the means of grace, “because he wished to provide real consolation for troubled consciences, and to preserve them from the hell of uncertainty concerning that state of grace of which the fanatics appeared to make so small account.... It was, however, not merely by his rejection of certain definite acts asmeans of grace that Luther returned to the narrow views of the Middle Ages which he had previously forsaken—the spirit lives not (as Luther knew better than any other man), thanks to any means of grace, but thanks rather to that close union with its God on Whom it lays hold through Christ—he did so still more by seeking, first, to vindicate Infant Baptism as a means of grace in the strict sense; secondly, by accepting Penance as at least a preparation for grace, and, thirdly, by maintaining that the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Supper constitutes the essential part of this sacrament.”[1825]It is true he “never ceased to maintain that the means of grace were nothing but the Word whereby faith is awakened,” but, in spite of this, the “opus operatum” of the olden Church “had again made its appearance and weakened or obscured the strict relations between Gospel and faith.”[1826]
Of Infant Baptism in Luther’s system Harnack rightly says: “If Luther’s Evangelical theory holds good, viz. that grace and faith are inseparably linked,[1827]then Infant Baptism is in itself no sacrament, and can be no more than an ecclesiastical rite; if it is a sacrament in the strict sense, then evidently his theory is at fault. We cannot escape the dilemma, either by appealing to the faith of the parents or god-parents [as Luther, to begin with, did]—for this is the worst kind of the ‘fides implicita’—or by assuming that faith is given in baptism,[1828]for an unconscious faith is almost as bad as that other ‘fides implicita.’ Hence the proper thing for Luther to have done would have been either to abolish Infant Baptism ... or to admit that it was a mere rite to be completed later.... Luther, however, did neither; on the contrary, he retained Infant Baptism as the sacrament of regeneration and accepted as an efficacious act what should, given his theory, have at most been a symbol of God’s preventing grace. This was, however much he might deny it, to hark back to the ‘opus operatum’ and to dissolve the link between faith and the working of grace.”[1829]
Again, according to Harnack, the mould in which Luther cast his doctrine of the Supper once more involved him in contradictions which rendered his position untenable.
On the one hand, by so strenuously insisting on the belief in the Real Presence as a binding doctrinal formula he was untrue to his own theory that doctrine was not to be formulated; on the other hand, his restatement of the doctrine of the Supper emptied it of all content. It was “in part the fault of hisformulating of the faith that the later Lutheran Church, with its Christology, its teaching on the Sacrament ... and the false standard by which it judged divergent doctrines and pronounced them heretical, threatened for a while to become a sort of caricature of the Catholic Church.”[1830]
Harnack notes how Luther, the better to reach the real meaning of the words “This is My Body,” actually called tradition to his aid, in his case an extremely illogical thing to do. His consciousness that in holding fast to the Real Presence he was backed by the whole Church of yore lends his words unusual power. “Even were a hundred thousand devils and all the fanatics to fall upon it, still the doctrine must stand firm.”[1831]We may add, that, with regard to this sacrament, Luther outdid his adversaries in his attachment to tradition and antiquity, reintroducing communion under both kinds as being alone in strict accord with Scripture.
There was also much that was personal and arbitrary in the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar as shaped anew and established by Luther. For one thing, he dwelt far too exclusively on this sacrament being the pledge of the forgiveness of sins. Again, in his desire to counter Zwingli, he put forward theories on the sacrament, which embody all sorts of disadvantages and contradictions not to be found in the teaching of the earlier Church. He, indeed, denied Transubstantiation, but the “Swiss could not for the life of them see why he did, since he admits that a stupendous miracle takes place in the Supper.”[1832]
For the Church’s ancient doctrine of Transubstantiation he substituted Impanation, and even this he admitted only in the actual celebration and reception.[1833]“The awkward part was,” says Harnack, “that, according to Luther, the Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Supper only for the purpose of reception, though they might be partaken of even by an unbeliever or a heathen.”[1834]The concomitance (presence of both Body and Blood under either kind) taught by the olden Church, which, indeed, was a natural corollary of the Real Presence, he set aside, urged thereto by his theory that in Communion both kinds must be received; the only result was to introduce a new and uncalled-for miracle. To this must be added what Harnack calls the “crazy speculations on the ubiquity of the Body of Christ,”[1835]which furnished Melanchthon his principal reason forgiving up Luther’s doctrine of the Supper, and, like Zwingli and Bucer, denying the Real Presence. According to Luther, the ubiquity of the Body of Christ rested on the supposed “real communication of the Divine ‘idiomata’ (and consequently of the Divine omnipresence) to the humanity of Christ.”[1836]
Nor does the Real Presence, according to Luther, begin at the consecration; as to when it does, he leaves the faithful in the dark; nor does he enlighten them as to when it ceases in the remains left over after communion; in the latter regard his practice was full of contradictions.—In allowing communion to be carried to the sick in their own houses he was again unfaithful to his tenets.[1837]To any processions of the sacrament he was averse, because Christ was only present at the time of reception.
He proposed, as the better plan, that the sacrament should not be adored save by bending the knee when receiving it, and yet his own behaviour did not tally with his proposal.[1838]It was enacted at Wittenberg, in 1542, that there should be no elevation, and yet Luther had retained this rite at an earlier date, in order to defy Carlstadt, as he says, and so as not to seem in this “indifferent matter” to sanction by his attitude Carlstadt’s attack on the sacrament.[1839]He was, to say the least, verbally illogical when he termed the Eucharist the “sacrificium eucharisticum,” meaning of course thereby that it was a “thank-offering” on the part of the faithful.
It is not surprising that belief in the Real Presence, though so strongly defended by Luther, gradually evaporated in his Church largely owing to the inconsistencies just noticed. Eventually the Lutherans made their own the views of Zwingli and Melanchthon on the sacrament, though they retained an affection for certain vague and elastic terms concerning the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ.[1840]Luther spoke of the attempts to introduce Zwingli’s rationalistic doctrine of the sacrament at Frankfurt-on-the-Main as “a diabolical jugglery with the words of Christ,” “whereby simple souls are shamefully duped and robbed of their sacrament.” The thing was “handled in such a way that no one was certain what was meant or what to believe.”[1841]
A mass of inconsequence lies in the doctrine on the Church, which he is supposed to have retained, though, as a matter of fact, he completely altered it. Thanks to his conception of the Church as a practically invisible body his view of it was so broad as to leave far behind the old, Catholic idea; nevertheless, by and by his conception of the Church grew so narrow, that, as Harnack justly remarks, “in comparison, even the Roman view of it seems in many respects more elastic and consequently superior.... The Church threatened to become a mere school, viz. the school of ‘pure [Wittenberg] doctrine.’” In this way arose “the Christianity of the theologians and pastors.... Luther on his own side repeatedly broke away from this view.”[1842]It is quite true that many contradictions are here apparent, as we shall have occasion to see later (vol. vi., xxxviii.). “His idea of the Church became obscured. The conception of the Church (communion of faith and communionof pure doctrine) became as ambiguous as the conception of the ‘doctrina evangelii.’”
Then, with regard to his teaching on public worship. Though, as remarked above (p. 147 f.), he had in principle abandoned the view held by the olden Church regarding the necessity of external worship, and had robbed it of its focus, viz. the Sacrifice of the Altar, yet he was very far from logically following this out in practice.