Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Expressing similar sentiments, the so-called “Bull of Reformation,” comprised in the last-mentioned tract, has it that “all who assist in any way, or venture life or limb, goods or honour in the enterprise of destroying bishoprics and exterminating episcopal rule, are dear children of God and true Christians.... On the other hand all who hold with the rule of the bishops ... are the devil’s own servants.” Such is the teaching of “Ecclesiastes, by the Grace of God,” as Luther calls himself here and frequently elsewhere. They must listen to him; the bishops, for the sake of their idol the Pope, abused, condemned and consigned to the flames him and his noble cause, refusing either to listen to or to answer him, but now he will, so he says, “put on his horns and risk his head for his master,” in defiance of the “idolatrous, licentious, shameless, accursed seducers and wolves.”

  As a demolisher Luther proved himself great and strong. Was he an equally good builder?

  The decisive question of how to proceed to the construction of a new ecclesiastical system seems to have been scarcely considered at all by Luther, either at the Wartburg, or even for some time after his return. His mind was full of one idea, viz. how best to fight the Church of Antichrist. He had no real conception of the Church which might have assisted him in an attempt to plan out a new system; his notion of the Church was altogether too dim and indefinite to serve as the basis of a new organisation. Even to-day Protestant theologians and historians are unable to tell us with any sort of unanimity how his ideas of the Church are to be understood; this holds good of him throughout life, but most of all during the earliest days of Protestantism, when the first attempts were made to consolidate it.

  One of the most recent explorers in the field of the history of theology in those years, H. Hermelink, concludes a paper on the subject with the words: “Let us hope that we Protestant theologians may gradually reach some agreement concerning Luther’s idea of the Church and concerning the Reformer’s plans for the reorganisation of the Church.”

  K. Rieker, K. Sohm, W. Köhler, Karl Müller, P. Drews, Fr. Loofs and many others who have recently devoted themselves to these studies which have aroused so much interest in our day, all differ more or less from each other in their views on the subject.

  The fact must not be forgotten that the Apocalyptic tendency of Luther’s mind at that time prevented his dwelling on matters of practical organisation. The reign of Antichrist at Rome seemed to him to portend the end of the world. Apocalyptic influences oppressed him, particularly in the years 1522 and 1523, and we find their traces at intervals even afterwards, for instance, in the years following 1527 and just before his death; in each case they were due to outward and interior “trials.” In the first crisis, at the commencement of the third decade of the sixteenth century, his false eschatology, based on an erroneous understanding of the Bible, led him, for instance, to anticipate the coming of the Last Day in 1524, in consequence of a remarkable conjunction of the planets which was confidently expected to bring about a deluge. His sermon on the 2nd Sunday in Advent fixes the year 1524 as the latest on which this event could occur.

  In his work “To the Nobility on the Improving of the Christian State,” Luther still took it for granted that the Emperor, Princes and influential laity would forcibly rescue Christendom from the state of corruption in which it was sunk, and that after Christendom had accepted the evangel, the pre-existing order of things would continue very much as before under a reformed episcopate; should the bishops refuse to come over to the Gospel, plenty “idle parsons” would be found to take their place. As a matter of fact, he had no clear idea in his mind regarding the future shaping of affairs.

  At the Diet of Worms it became evident that his fantastic dreams were not to be realised, for the Empire, instead of welcoming him, proclaimed him an outlaw. Luther, accordingly, trusting to his mystical ideas, now persuaded himself that his cause and the reorganisation of Christendom would be undertaken by Christ alone.

  In the Wartburg Luther received the fullest and most definite assurance that the temporal powers who were opposed to him at Worms would submit themselves in these latter days to the Word which he preached, and that the weakening of the Church’s authority which had been begun had not proceeded nearly far enough. It was revealed to him that his work was yet at its beginning and that there yet remained to be established new communities of Christians sharing his views. Hence we find him writing to Frederick, his Elector, on March 7, 1522: “The spiritual tyranny has been weakened, to do which has been the sole aim of my writings; now I perceive that God wills to carry it still further as He did with Jerusalem and its twofold government. I have recently learnt that not only the spiritual but also the temporal power must give way to the Evangel, willingly or unwillingly; this is plainly shown in all the Bible narratives.” With the Bible in his hand he seeks to prove, from the passages relating to the end of the world, and the reign of Antichrist, that, before the end of all, Christ will overthrow the anti-Christian powers by the “breath of His mouth.”

  “It is the mouth of Christ which must do this.” “Now may I and everyone who speaks the word of Christ freely boast that his mouth is the mouth of Christ.” “Another man, one whom the Papists cannot see, is driving the wheel, and therefore they attribute it all to us, but they shall yet be convinced of it.”

  Meanwhile some practical action was necessary, for, as yet, the Evangelicals formed only small groups and unorganised congregations which might at any time drift apart, whilst elsewhere they were scattered among the masses, almost unnoticed and utterly powerless. The mere attacking of Popery was not sufficient to consolidate them. The “meetings” of those who had been touched by the “Word,” Gospel-preaching and a new liturgy, did not suffice. The further growth and permanent organisation of the congregations Luther hoped to see effected by the help of the authorities, by the Town-councillors, who were to play so great a part later, and, better still, by the Princes whom he expected to win over to the new teaching as he had already done in the case of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. It is true he would have preferred the setting up of churches to have been the work of the newly converted Faithful, i.e. to have taken place from below upwards. Those who had been converted by the Gospel, “the troubled consciences” as he calls them, who were united in faith and charity, were ever to form the nucleus around which he would fain have seen everywhere the congregations growing, without the intervention of the worldly power. The force of circumstances, however, even from the commencement, compelled him to fall back on the authorities.

  In short, the ideas he advanced concerning organisation were, not only various, but frequently contradictory. His favourite idea, to which we shall return later, of a community of perfect Christians was utterly incapable of realisation. “To maintain within the Congregation a more select company forming a corporation apart was hardly feasible in the long run.” At the back of his various plans was always the persuasion that the power of the Gospel would in the end do its own work and reveal the right way for the building up of a new organisation, just as of its own power it had shattered the edifice of Antichrist. Instead of searching for the link connecting his discordant utterances, as Protestant theologians have been at pains to do, it will be more practical and more in accordance with history to present them here in disconnected groups. For any lack of clearness which may be the result Luther must be held responsible.

  In one and the same work, shortly after his visit to Wittenberg from the Wartburg, the destruction of the Papacy is depicted first as the result of the action of the governments (who accordingly are bound to provide a new, even if only temporary, organisation), then as taking place through no human agency and without a single blow being struck. In writing thus, he was the plaything of those “states of excitement” which constitute a marked feature of his “religious psychology.” Luther was then aware of the threatening movement at Wittenberg and elsewhere, and attempted to stem it with the assurance that the kingdom of Antichrist was already crumbling to
pieces; he does not, however, omit to point to the governments as the real agents of which Christ was to make use to achieve the victory: “Hearken to the government; so long as it does not interfere and give the command, keep your hands, your mouth and your heart quiet and say and do nothing. But if you are in a position to move the authorities to intervene and to give the order, you may do so.”

  It would seem from all this as though he expected the help necessary for the change of faith to come solely from those in authority, an opinion which he had expressed in his pamphlet to the nobility, the Princes and the gentry; the secular power after making its “submission” to the Evangel was to do all that was required in the interests of the Evangel; it was its duty to see that uniformity prevailed in the “true worship” throughout its dominions, to watch over the public services and exclude false worship. But whether the “Kingdom of God was to be introduced by the Princes, or to rise up spontaneously from the Christian Congregation, he does not clearly state.” From 1522 to 1525 he frequently speaks as though it were to proceed solely from the congregation, which by reason of the common priesthood of its members was possessed of the necessary qualifications.

  In any case, we may gather the following regarding Church organisation: no outward government, no power or legislative authority exists in the Church itself; on earth there is but one outward authority, viz. the secular; the Church lives only by the Word of God and supports and governs itself by this alone.

  If legislation and external authority were called for in the Church, then this would have to be borrowed from the State, or, as Rudolf Sohm expresses it: “If legislation and judicial authority were needed in the Church of Christ, then, according to Luther’s principles, the government of the Church would have to be set up by the ruler of the land.” For, according to Luther, the authority of the Church is intended merely to foster piety, and a spiritual governing authority would result in compulsion and simply make people “impious.” “The ecclesiastical authority to rule of the parson, i.e. his teaching office, is not a legal power.” In his treatise on canon law, Sohm is one of the principal supporters of this principle. To judge from the praise bestowed upon him by Hermelink, he had “penetrated deeply into Luther’s thought,” and “on the whole saw things in a right light,” although he was possibly too fond of simplifying them in the interests of a system. It is perfectly true that in Sohm and other Protestant Canonists, the contradictions in Luther’s opinions are left in the background; Luther’s views of the formation of congregations having their own rights and their own authority, which appear side by side with his other schemes, receive, as a rule, little attention.

  In any case, Luther at that time made use of “every artifice to prove that it was the right of each individual Christian to judge of the preaching of the Gospel and of the avoiding of false prophets.”

  In those early days Luther was so full of the ideal of the congregation that, in order to support it, he even appeals to the natural law. In order to save souls every congregation, government or individual has by nature the right to make every effort to drive away the wolves, i.e. the clergy of Antichrist; no apathy can be permitted where it is a question of eternal salvation; the alleged rights and the handed-down possessions of the foes, on which they base their corruptive influence, must not be spared: “We must not fall upon and seize the temporal possessions of others, above all not of our superiors — except where it is a question of doctrine and the salvation of souls; but if the Gospel is not preached, the spiritual authorities have no right to the revenues.” “According to Luther,” says Hermelink, “the authorities of Altenburg had a perfect right to drive away the Provost and his people from Altenburg as ravening wolves”; they were only to wait “a little” to see whether the monks would hold their tongues or perhaps even preach the pure Gospel. When thereupon Luther cries: “Their authority is at an end, abrogated by God Himself, if it be in conflict with the Gospel,” Hermelink admits the presence of a certain “antagonism between the right of each individual Christian and the common law of society.”

  Luther, however, generally prefers to give expression to other less violent thoughts anent the building up of the congregations to be formed from the Church of Antichrist.

  The holy Brotherhood of the Spirit, he says in his idealistic way, was to arise, knowing no constraint but only charity, and having a ministry (“ministerium”), but no “power.” “The freedom of the Spirit which must reign, makes things which are merely corporal and earthly, indifferent and not necessary.” “All things are indifferent and free (‘omnia sunt indifferentia et libera’).” “Paul demands the preservation of unity, but this is unity of the spirit, not of place, of persons, of things or of bodies.” We here again note the advent of that mysticism which had formerly dragged him down to the depths of a passive indifference. How these pseudo-mystical ideas were to further the building up of the new ecclesiastical system it is hard to understand.

  The Brotherhood, however, is not intended to introduce an altogether new ecclesiastical system. We are simply “Christians,” the true Christians, members of the Churches which have always existed, but purified from a thousand years of deformation. “To create sects is stupid and useless”; according to Luther, it is not even necessary for the task of uniting under the Christian name, before the end of the world, all the faithful and the pious consciences elected from the Kingdom of Antichrist.

  At that time he wished all his followers to be known simply as “Christians”; and in the first days of the Protestant Churches he very frequently makes use of this term. Even at a later date he was loath to hear them called after himself, in spite of his practical action to the contrary, because they “share with the rest the common teaching of Christ.” The term “Evangelicals” does not appear to have been much in use in Luther’s immediate surroundings. As “Christians” and “Evangelicals” they had not left the “Church,” indeed, Luther always insists on the fact that it was they who really constituted and represented the “Church.” According to the Augsburg Confession in 1530 they belonged to the Catholic Church; they wished to define their position rather as that of a party within the Church, fighting for its existence, a party which accepted the Church’s recognised articles of belief, sheltered itself under the testimony of recognised Catholic authorities, and which had merely introduced certain innovations for the removal of the abuses which had crept in.

  Although, according to Luther, the inward organisation of the Brotherhood referred to above was a matter of indifference, and the approaching end of the world admonished him to suffer and wait to see what Christ willed to do with it, yet we read in other passages of his writings that it is necessary to work and to make great efforts to provide every city with a bishop or elder to preach the Gospel; “every Christian” is bound to help towards this end, both by personal exertion and with his goods, and more particularly the secular power, the authorities, whose duty it is to protect the pious. Those who are now already parsons may, indeed must, at once “withdraw from their obedience, seeing that they promised obedience to the devil and not to God.”

  This is certainly “something more than passive suffering and waiting for the end.”

  The apostasy of the clergy, which had begun, made the question of definite, external organisation a pressing one, for the new preachers and the clergy who were coming over had, after all, to be responsible to someone and had also to be maintained; it was also necessary that they and their followers should receive external recognition for their Churches and extricate themselves from the numerous ties which united so closely the spiritual with the secular in Catholic life. The appointment of pastors and the representation of the faithful by them was one of the factors which called for further organisation of the Churches: another factor, as we may notice in the case of Wittenberg, was the manner of celebrating the Supper. It was, as a matter of fact, the trouble at Wittenberg under Carlstadt which impelled Luther to take into serious consideration the establishment of an independent ec
clesiastical organisation in that town, and which called for a definite system of appointing the Lutheran pastors even elsewhere, so as to prevent Carlstadt’s followers from getting the upper hand throughout the country.

  After Luther had set aside Carlstadt’s innovations at Wittenberg, with the approval of the Elector who had forbidden them, he appointed the celebration of the Supper for those of the new faith at Wittenberg on the lines previously followed by Melanchthon; the communion became the principal part of the ceremony, the offertory was omitted and the words of consecration were spoken aloud either with or without certain of the prayers of the Mass. Thus the abuses introduced by Carlstadt were, in his opinion, removed, and the swarms of worldly minded and fanatical nominal Christians, “Christian in name but almost heathen at heart,” were no longer brought in contact with the true Evangelicals; the employment of force towards those weak in the faith, whose convictions Luther did not consider ripe for the purely congregational ritual of Carlstadt, was also put an end to. All the external forms which had been introduced, and to which, Luther feared, the people would have clung in an unevangelical fashion as had formerly been the case in Popery, were removed.

  In order more particularly to avoid any compromising abuse of the Sacrament of the Altar, Luther sought to establish a Christian congregation in which confession should exist, though not as a compulsory practice, and in which a certain supervision was exercised.