Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  It is a relief, after such lamentable utterances which could only have been accepted by people whom prejudice in Luther’s favour had rendered blind, to recall the clear statements — so full of conviction — on the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, which occur in the very writings in which Luther attacks the Mass. Our second volume concluded with a cheering confession on the part of the Wittenberg Professor of his faith in the Trinity and Incarnation, a confession which both did him honour and expressed those consoling and incontrovertible truths which constitute the common treasure of the Christian creeds. The present volume also, after the sad pictures of dissent of which it is only too full, may charitably end with the words in which Luther voices his belief in the Sacrament of the Altar, the lasting memorial of Divine Love, in which our Lord never ceases to pray for unity amongst those bidden as guests to His table.

  “I hereby confess before God and the whole world that I believe and do not doubt, and with the help and grace of my dear Lord Jesus Christ will maintain even to that Day, that where Mass is celebrated according to Christ’s ordinance whether amongst us Lutherans or in the Papacy, or in Greece or in India (even though under one kind only — though that is wrong and an abuse), there is present under the species of the Bread, the true Body of Christ given for us on the cross, and, under the species of wine, the true Blood of Christ shed for us; nor is it a spiritual or fictitious Body and Blood, but the true natural Body and Blood taken of the holy, virginal, and really human body of Mary, without the intervention of any man but conceived of the Holy Ghost alone; which Body and Blood of Christ now sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty of God in the Divine Person, which is Christ Jesus, true, real, and eternal God, with the Father of Whom He is begotten from all eternity, etc. And that same Body and Blood of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, not only the Saints and those who are worthy, but also sinners and the unworthy truly handle and receive, bodily though invisibly, with hands, mouth, chalice, paten, corporal, or whatever else be used when it is given and received in the Mass.”

  “This is my faith, this I know, and no one shall take it from me.”

  He had always, so he insists, by his testimony upheld the “clear, plain text of the Gospel” against heresies old and new, and withstood the “devil’s malice and work in the service and for the betterment of my dear brothers and sisters, in accordance with Christian charity.”

  VOL. V. THE REFORMER (III)

  CHAPTER XXIX

  ETHICAL RESULTS OF THE NEW TEACHING

  1. Preliminaries. New Foundations of Morality

  Luther’s system of ethics mirrors his own character. If Luther’s personality, in all its psychological individuality, shows itself in his dogmatic theology (see vol. iv., ff.), still more is this the case in his ethical teaching. To obtain a vivid picture of the mental character of their author and of the inner working of his mind, it will suffice to unfold his practical theories in all their blatant contradiction and to examine on what they rest and whence they spring. First and foremost we must investigate the starting-point of his moral teaching.

  To begin with, it was greatly influenced by his theory that the Gospel consisted essentially in forgiveness, in the cloaking over of guilt and in the soothing of “troubled consciences.” Thanks to a lively faith to reach a feeling of confidence, is, according to him, the highest achievement of ethical effort. At the same time, however, Luther lets it be clearly understood that we can never get the better of sin. In the shape of original sin it ever remains; concupiscence is always sinful; and, even in the righteous, actual sin persists, only that its cry is drowned by the voice speaking from the Blood of Christ. Man must look upon himself as entirely under the domination of the devil, and, only in so far as Christ ousts the devil from his human stronghold, can a man be entitled to be called good. In himself he is not even free to do what is right.

  To the author of such doctrines it was naturally a matter of some difficulty to formulate theoretically the injunctions of morality. Some Protestants indeed vaunt his system of ethics as the best ever known, and as based on an entirely “new groundwork.” Many others, headed by Stäudlin the theologian, have nevertheless openly admitted that “no system of Christian morality could exist,” granted Luther’s principles.

  Of his principles the following must be borne in mind. Man’s attitude towards things Divine is just that of the dumb, lifeless “pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was changed”; “he is not one whit better off than a clod or stone, without eyes or mouth, without any sense and without a heart.” Human reason, which ought to govern moral action, becomes in matters of religion “a crazy witch and Lady Hulda,” the “clever vixen on whom the heathen hung when they thought themselves cleverest.” Like reason, so the will too, in fallen man, behaves quite negatively towards what is good, whether in ethics or in religion. “We remain as passive,” he says, “as the clay in the hands of the potter”; freedom there is indeed, “but it is not under our control.” In this connection he refers to Melanchthon’s “Loci communes,” whence some striking statements against free-will have already been quoted in the course of this work.

  It is only necessary to imagine the practical application of such principles to perceive how faulty in theory Luther’s ethics must have been. Luther, however, was loath to see these principles followed out logically in practice.

  Other theories of his which he applies either not at all or only to a very limited extent in ethics are, for instance, his opinions that the believer, “even though he commit sin, remains nevertheless a godly man,” and, that, owing to our trusting faith in Christ, God can descry no sin in us “even when we remain stuck in our sins,” because we “have donned the golden robe of grace furnished by Christ’s Blood.” In his Commentary on Galatians he had said: “Act as though there had never been any law or any sin but only grace and salvation in Christ”; he had declared that all the damned were predestined to hell, and, in spite of their best efforts, could not escape eternal punishment. (Vol. ii., p ff., 287 ff.)

  In view of all the above we cannot help asking ourselves, whence the moral incentive in the struggle against the depravity of nature is to come; where, granted that our will is unfree and our reason blind, any real ethical answerableness is to be found; what motive for moral conduct a man can have who is irrevocably predestined to heaven or to hell; and what grounds God has for either rewarding or punishing?

  To add a new difficulty to the rest, Luther is quite certain of the overwhelming power of the devil. The devil sways all men in the world to such a degree, that, although we are “lords over the devil and death,” yet “at the same time we lie under his heel ... for the world and all that belongs to it must have the devil as its master, who is far stronger than we and clings to us with all his might, for we are his guests and dwellers in a foreign hostelry.” But because through faith we are masters, “my conscience, though it feels its guilt and fears and despairs on its account, yet must insist on being lord and conqueror of sin ... until sin is entirely banished and is felt no longer.” Yea, since the devil is so intent on affrighting us by temptations, “we must, when tempted, banish from sight and mind the whole Decalogue with which Satan threatens and plagues us so sorely.”

  Such advice could, however, only too easily lead people to relinquish an unequal struggle with an unquenchable Concupiscence and an overwhelmingly powerful devil, or, to lose sight of the distinction between actual sin and our mere natural concupiscence, between sin and mere temptation; Luther failed to see that his doctrines would only too readily induce an artificial confidence, and that people would put the blame for their human frailties on their lack of freedom, their ineradicable concupiscence, or on the almighty devil.

  How, all this notwithstanding, he contrived to turn his back on the necessary consequences of his own teaching, and to evolve a practical system of ethics far better than what his theories would have led us to expect, is plain from his warm recommendation of good works, of chastity, neighbourly love and other
virtues.

  In brief, he taught in his own way what earlier ages had also taught, viz. that sin and vice must be shunned; in his own way he exhorted all to practise virtue, particularly to perform those deeds of brotherly charity reckoned so high in the Church of yore. In what follows we shall have to see how far his principles nevertheless intervened, and how much personal colouring he thereby imparted to his system of ethics. In so doing what we must bear in mind is his own way of viewing the aims of morality and practical matters generally, for here we are concerned, not with the results at which he should logically have arrived, but with the opinions he actually held.

  The difficulty of the problem is apparent not merely from the nature of certain of his theological views just stated, but particularly from what he thought concerning original sin and concupiscence, which colours most of his moral teaching.

  In his teaching, as we already know, original sin remains, even after baptism, as a real sin in the guise of concupiscence; by its evil desires and self-seeking it poisons all man’s actions to the end of his life, except in so far as his deeds are transformed by the “faith” from above into works pleasing to God, or rather, are accounted as such. Owing to the enmity to God which prevails in the man who thus groans under the weight of sin even “civil justice is mere sinfulness; it cannot stand before the absolute demands of God. All that man can do is to acknowledge that things really are so and to confess his unrighteousness.” Such an attitude Luther calls “humility.” Catholic moralists and ascetics have indeed ever made all other virtues to proceed from humility as from a fertile source, but there is no need to point out how great is the difference between Luther’s “humility” and that submission of the heart to God’s will of which Catholic theologians speak. Humility, as Luther understood it, was an “admission of our corruption”; according to him it is our recognition of the enduring character of original sin that leads us to God and compels us “to admit the revelation of the Grace of God bestowed on us in Christ’s work of redemption,” by means of “faith, i.e. security of salvation.” It is possible to speak “only of a gradual restraining of sin,” so strongly are we drawn to evil. We indeed receive grace by faith, but of any infused grace or blotting out of sin, Luther refuses to hear, since the inclinations which result from original sin still persist. Hence “by grace sin is not blotted out.” Rather, the grace which man receives is an imputed grace; “the real answer to the question as to how Luther arrived at his conviction that imputed grace was necessary and not to be escaped is to be found in his own inward experience that the tendencies due to original sin remain, even in the regenerate. This sin, which persists in the baptised, ... forces him, if he wishes to avoid the pitfall of despair ... to keep before his mind the consoling thought ... ‘that God does not impute to him his sin.’”

  2. The two Poles: the Law and the Gospel

  One of the ethical questions that most frequently engaged Luther’s attention concerned the relation of Law and Gospel. In reality it touched the foundations of his moral teaching.

  His having rightly determined how Law and Gospel stood seemed to him one of his greatest achievements, in fact one of the most important of the revelations made to him from on High. “Whoever is able clearly to distinguish the Law from the Gospel,” he says, “let such a one give thanks to God and know that he is indeed a theologian.” Alluding to the vital importance of Luther’s theory on the Law with its demands and the Gospel with its assurance of salvation, Friedrich Loofs, the historian of dogma, declares: Here “may be perceived the fundamental difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic conception of Christianity,” though he does not fear to hint broadly at the “defects” and “limitations” of Luther’s new discovery; rather he admits quite openly, that some leading aspects of the question “never even revealed themselves clearly” to Luther, but betray a “notable” lack of discernment, and that Luther’s whole conception of the Law contained “much that called for further explanation.”

  In order to give here a clearer picture of Luther’s doctrine on this matter than it was possible to do in the earlier passages where his view was touched upon it may be pointed out, that, when, as he so frequently does, he speaks of the Law he means not merely the Old-Testament ceremonial and judicial law, but even the moral law and commands both of the Old Covenant and of the New, in short everything in the nature of a precept binding on the Christian the infringement of which involves him in guilt; he means, as he himself expresses it, “everything ... that speaks to us of our sins and of God’s wrath.”

  By the Gospel moreover he understands, not merely the promises contained in the New Testament concerning our salvation, but also those of the Old Covenant; he finds the Gospel everywhere, even previous to Christ: “There is not a book in the Bible,” he says, “which does not contain them both [the Law and the Gospel]. God has thus placed in every instance, side by side, the Law and the promises, for, by the Law, He teaches what we are to do, and, by the promises, how we are to set about it.” In his church-postils where this passage occurs Luther explains more fully what he means by the “promise,” or Gospel, as against the Law: It is the “glad tidings whereby grace and forgiveness of sins is offered. Hence works do not belong to the Gospel, for it is no law, but faith only [is required], for it is simply a promise and an offer of Divine grace. Whoever believes it receives the grace.”

  As to the relationship between the Law and the Gospel: Whereas the Law does not express the relation between God and man, the Gospel does. The latter teaches us that we may, nay must, be assured of our salvation previous to any work of ours, in order, that, born anew by such faith, we may be ready to fulfil God’s Will as free, Christian men. The Law, on the other hand, reveals the Will of God, on pedagogic grounds, as the foundation of a system of merit or reward. It is indeed necessary as a negative preparation for faith, but its demands cannot be complied with by the natural man, to say nothing of the fact that it seems to make certainty of salvation, upon which everything depends in our moral life, contingent on the fulfilment of its prescriptions.

  From this one can see how inferior to the Gospel is the Law.

  The Law speaks of “facere, operari,” of “deeds and works” as essential for salvation. “These words” — so Luther told the students in his Disputations in 1537 on the very eve of the Antinomian controversy— “I should like to see altogether banished from theology; for they imply the notions of merit and duty (“meritum et debitum”), which is beyond toleration. Hence I urge you to refrain from the use of such terms.”

  What he here enjoins he had himself striven to keep in view from the earliest days of his struggle against “self-righteousness” and “holiness-by-works.” These he strove to undermine, in the same measure as he exalted original sin and its consequences. Psychologically his attitude in theology towards these questions was based on the renegade monk’s aversion to works and their supposed merit. His chief bugbear is the meritoriousness of any keeping of the Law. For one reason or another he went further and denied even its binding character (“debitum”); caught in the meshes of that pseudo-mystic idealism to which he was early addicted we hear him declaring: the Christian, when he is justified by “faith,” does of his own accord and without the Law everything that is pleasing to God; what is really good is performed without any constraint out of a simple love for what is good. In this wise it was that he reached his insidious thesis, viz. that the believer stands everywhere above the Law and that the Christian knows no Law whatever. In quite general terms he teaches that the Law is in opposition to the Gospel; that it does not vivify but kills; and that its real task is merely to frighten us, to show us what we are unable to do, to reveal sin and “increase it.” The preaching of the Law he here depicts, not as “good and profitable, but as actually harmful,” as “nothing but death and poison.”

  That such a setting aside of the specifically Mosaic Law appealed to him, we can readily understand. But does he include in his reprobation the whole “lex morali
s,” the Natural Law which the Old Testament merely confirmed, and which, according to Luther himself, is written in man’s heart by nature? This Law he asserts is implicitly obeyed as soon as the heart, by its acceptance of the assurance of salvation, is cleansed and filled with the love of God. And yet “in many instances he applies to this Natural Law what he says elsewhere of the Law of Moses; it too affrights us, increases sin, kills, and stands opposed to the Gospel.” Desirous of destroying once and for all any idea of righteousness or merit being gained through any fulfilment of any Law, he forgets himself, in his usual way, and says strong things against the Law which scarcely agree with other statements he makes elsewhere.

  Owing to polemists taking too literally what he said, he has been represented as holding opinions on the Law and the Gospel which in point of fact he does not hold; indeed, some have made him out a real Antinomian. Yet we often hear him exhorting his followers to bow with humility to the commandments, to bear the yoke of submission and thus to get the better of sin and death. Nevertheless, particularly when dealing with those whose “conscience is affrighted,” he is very apt to forget what he has just said in favour of the Law, and prefers to harp on his pet theology: “Man must pay no heed to the Law but only to Christ.” “In dealing with this aspect of the matter we cannot speak too slightingly of so contemptuous a thing [as the Law].”

  His changeableness and obscurity on this point is characteristic of his mode of thought.

  At times he actually goes so far as to ascribe to the Law merely an outward, deterrent force and to make its sole value in ordinary life consist in the restraining of evil. Even when he is at pains to emphasise the “real, theological” use of the Law as preparatory to grace, he deliberately introduces statements concerning the Law which do not at all help to explain the matter. According to him, highly as we must esteem the Law for its sacred character, its effect upon people who are unable to keep it is nevertheless not wholesome but rather harmful, because thereby sin is multiplied, particularly the sin of unbelief, i.e. as seen in want of confidence in the certainty of salvation and in the striving after righteousness by the exact fulfilling of the Law. “Whoever feels contrition on account of the Law,” he says for instance, “cannot attain to grace, on the contrary he is getting further and further away from it.”