Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  It is true that Luther, to the admiration of his followers, confronted the old Orders founded by the Church with three new Orders, all Divinely instituted, viz. the home, the State and the Church. But, so far from “notably improving” on the “scholastic ethics” of the past, he did not even contrive to couch his thoughts on these “Orders” in language as lucid as that used long before his day by the theologians and moralists of the Church in voicing the same idea; what he says of these “Orders” also falls short of the past on the score of wealth and variety. Nevertheless the popular ways he had of depicting things as he fain would see them, proved alluring, and this gift of appealing to the people’s fancy and of charming them by the contrast of new and old, helped to build up the esteem in which he has been held ever since; his inclination, moreover, to promote the independence of the individual in the three “Orders,” and to deliver him from all hierarchical influence must from the outset have won him many friends.

  Divorce of Religion and Morals

  Glancing back at what has already been said concerning Luther’s abasement of morality and considering it in the light of his theories of the Law and Gospel, of assurance of salvation and morality, we find as a main characteristic of Luther’s ethics a far-reaching, dangerous rift between religion and morals. Morality no longer stands in its old position at the side of faith.

  Faith and the religion which springs from it are by nature closely and intimately bound up with morality. This is shown by the history of heathenism in general, of modern unbelief in particular. Heathenism or unbelief in national life always signifies a moral decline; even in private life morality reacts on the life of faith and the religious feeling, and vice versa. The harmony between religion and morality arises from the fact that the love of God proceeds from faith in His dominion and Fatherly kindness.

  Luther, in spite of his assurances concerning the stimulus of the life of faith and of love, severed the connection between faith and morality and placed the latter far below the former. His statements concerning faith working by love, had they been more than mere words, would, in themselves, have led him back to the very standpoint of the Church he hated. In reality he regards the “Law” as something utterly hostile to the “pious” soul; before the true “believer” the Law shrinks back, though, to the man not yet justified by “faith,” it serves as a taskmaster and a hangman. The “Law” thus loses the heavenly virtue with which it was stamped. In Luther’s eyes the only thing of any real value is that religion which consists in faith in the forgiveness of sins.

  “This,” he says, “is the ‘Summa Summarum’ of a truly Christian life, to know that in Christ you have a Gracious God ready to forgive you your sins and never to think of them again, and that you are now a child of everlasting happiness, reigning with Christ over heaven and earth.”

  It is true he hastens to add, that, from this saving faith, works of morality would “assuredly” flow.

  “Assuredly”? Since Albert Ritschl it has been repeated countless times that Luther did no more than “assert that faith by its very nature is productive of good works.” As a matter of fact “he is wont to speak in much too uncertain a way of the good works which follow faith”; with him “faith” is the whole man, whereas the Bible says: “Fear God and keep His commandments [i.e. religion plus morality]; this is the whole man.”

  Luther’s one-sided insistence on a confiding, trusting faith in God, at the cost of the moral work, has its root in his theory of the utter depravity of man and his entire lack of freedom, in his low esteem for the presuppositions of morality, in his conviction that nature is capable of nothing, and, owing to its want of self-determination, is unable on its own even to be moral at all. If we desire, so he says frankly, to honour God’s sublime majesty and to humble fallen creatures as they deserve, then let us recognise that God works all in all without any possibility of any resistance whatsoever on man’s part, God’s action being like to that of the potter on his clay. Just as Luther was unable to recognise justification in the sense in which it had been taught of yore, so also he entirely failed to appreciate the profounder conception of morality.

  His strictures on morality — which had ever been esteemed as the voluntary keeping of the Law by man, who by a generous obedience renders to God the freedom received — point plainly to the cause of his upheaval of the whole field of dogma. At the outset he had set himself to oppose self-righteousness, but in doing so he dealt a blow at righteousness itself; he had attacked justice by works, but justice itself had suffered; he declared war on the wholly imaginary phantom of a self-chosen morality based on man-made ordinances and thereby degraded morality, if he did not indeed undermine its very foundations.

  What Möhler says of the reformers and their tendency to set aside the commands of morality applies in particular to Luther and his passionate campaign. It is true he writes, that “the moral freedom they had destroyed came to involve the existence of a freedom from that moral law which concerns only the seen, bounded world of time, but fails to apply in the eternal world, set high above all time and space. This does not mean, however, that the reformers were conscious of what lay at the base of their system; on the contrary, had they seen it, had they perceived whither their doctrines were necessarily leading, they would have rejected them as quite unchristian.”

  The following reflection of the famous author of “Catholic Symbolism” may also be set on record, the better to safeguard against misapprehension anything that may have been said, particularly as it touches upon a matter to which we repeatedly have had occasion to allude.

  “No one can fail to see the religious element in Protestantism,” he says, “who calls to mind the idea of Divine Providence held by Luther and Melanchthon when they started the work of the Reformation.... All the phenomena of this world [according to it] are God’s own particular work and man is merely His instrument. Everything in the history of the world is God’s invisible doing which man’s agency merely makes visible. Who can fail to see in this a truly religious outlook on all things? All is referred back to God, Who is all in all.... In the same way the Redeemer also is all in all in the sense that He and His Spirit are alone active, and faith and regeneration are solely due to Him.”

  Möhler here relates how, according to Luther, Staupitz had said of the new teaching at its inception, “What most consoles me is that it has again been brought to light how all honour and praise belong to God alone, but, to man, nothing at all.” This statement is quite in keeping with the vague, mystical world of thought in which Staupitz, who was no master of theology or philosophy, lived. But it also reflects the impression of many of Luther’s contemporaries who, unaware of his misrepresentation of the subject, were attracted by the advantage to religion and morality which seemed to accrue from Luther’s effort to ascribe all things solely to God.

  Where this tendency to subordinate all to God and to exalt the merits of Christ finds more chastened expression in Luther’s writings, when, in his hearty, homely fashion, he paints the love of the Master or His virtues as the pattern of all morality, or pictures in his own peculiar realistic style the conditions of everyday life the better to lash abuses, then the reader is able to appreciate the better side of his ethics and the truly classic example he sometimes sets of moral exhortations. It would surely be inexplicable how so many earnest Protestant souls, from his day to our own, should have found and still find a stimulus in his practical works, for instance, in his Postils, did these works not really contain a substratum of truth, food for thought and a certain gift of inspiration. Even the man who studies the long list of Luther’s practical writings simply from the standpoint of the scholar and historian — though he may not always share Luther’s opinions — cannot fail to acknowledge that the warmth with which Luther speaks of those Christian truths accepted by all, leaves a deep impression and re-echoes within the soul like a voice from our common home.

  On the one hand Luther rightly retained many profoundly religious elements of the m
ediæval theology, indeed, owing to his curious way of looking at things, he actually outdid in mediævalism the Middle Ages themselves, for he merged all human freedom in the Divine action, a thing those Ages had not dared to do.

  And yet, on the other hand, to conclude our survey of his “abasement of practical Christianity,” he is so ultramodern on a capital point of his ethics as to merit being styled the precursor of modern subjectivism as applied to morals. For all his new ethical precepts and rules, beyond the Decalogue and the Natural Law, are devoid of objective obligation; they lack the sanction which alone would have rendered them capable of guiding the human conscience.

  The Lack of Obligation and Sanction

  Luther’s moral instructions differed in one weighty particular from those of the olden Church.

  As he himself insists at needless length, they were a collection of personal opinions and exhortations which appeared to him to be based on Holy Scripture or the Law of Nature — and in many instances, though not always, actually did rest on this foundation. When he issued new pronouncements of a practical character, for instance, concerning clandestine espousals, or annulled the olden order of public worship, the sacraments, or the Commandments of the Church, he was wont to say, that, it was his intention merely to advise consciences and to arouse the Evangelical consciousness. He took this line partly because he was conscious of having no personal authority, partly because he wished to act according to the principles proclaimed in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” or, again, in order to prevent the rise of dissent and the resistance he always dreaded to any attempt to lay down categorical injunctions. Thus his ethical regulations, so far as they differed from the olden ones, amounted merely to so many invitations to act according to the standard set up, whereas the character of the ethical legislation of Catholicism is essentially binding. Having destroyed the outward authority of the Church, he had nothing more to count upon than the “ministry of the Word,” and everything now depended on the minister’s being able to convince the believer, now freed from the ancient trammels.

  He himself, for instance, once declared that he would “assume no authority or right to coerce, for I neither have nor desire any such. Let him rule who will or must; I shall instruct and console consciences as far as I am able. Who can or wants to obey, let him do so; who won’t or can’t, let him leave it alone.”

  He would act “by way of counsel,” so he teaches, “as in conscience he would wish to serve good friends, and whoever likes to follow his advice must do so at his own risk.” “He gives advice agreeably to his own conscience,” writes Luthardt in “Luthers Ethik,” “leaving it to others to accept his advice or not on their own responsibility.”

  Nor can one well argue that the requisite sanction for the new moral rules was the general sanction found in the Scriptural threats of Divine chastisements to overtake transgressors. The question is whether the Law laid down in the Bible or written in man’s heart is really identical with Luther’s. Those who were unable of themselves to prove that this was the case were ultimately (so Luther implies) to believe it on his authority and conform themselves to his “Evangelical consciousness”; thus, for instance, in the matter of religious vows, held by Luther to be utterly detestable, and by the Church to be both permissible and praiseworthy.

  In but few points does the purely subjective character of the new religion and morality advocated by Luther stand out so clearly as in this absence of any objective sanction or higher authority for his new ethics. Christianity hitherto had appealed to the divine, unchangeable dignity of the Church, which, by her infallible teaching, her discipline and power to punish, insured the observance of law and order in the religious domain. But, now, according to the new teaching, man — who so sadly needs a clear and definite lead for his moral life — besides the Decalogue, “clear” Bible text and Natural Law, is left with nothing but “recommendations” devoid of any binding force; views are dinned into his ears the carrying out of which is left solely to his feelings, or, as Luther says, to his “conscience.”

  Deprived of the quieting guidance of an authority which proclaims moral obligations and sees that they are carried out, conscience and personality tend in his system to assume quite a new rôle.

  6. The part played by Conscience and Personality. Luther’s warfare with his old friend Caspar Schwenckfeld

  Protestants have confidently opined, that “Luther mastered anew the personal foundation of morality by reinstating conscience in its rights”; by insisting on feeling he came to restore to “personality the dignity” which in previous ages it had lost under the ban of a “legalism” devoid of “morality.”

  To counter such views it may be of use to give some account of the way in which Luther taught conscience to exercise her rights. The part he assigns to the voice within which judges of good and evil, scarcely bears out the contention that he really strengthened the “foundation of morality.” The vague idea of “personality” may for the while be identified with conscience, especially as in the present connection “person” stands for the medium of conscience.

  On Conscience and its Exercise in General

  To quiet the conscience, to find some inward support for one’s actions in the exercise of one’s own will, this is what Luther constantly insists on in the moral instructions he gives, at the same time pointing to his own example. What was the nature of his own example? His rebellion against the Church’s authority was to him the cause of a long, fierce struggle with himself. He sought to allay the anxiety which stirred his soul to its depths by the reassuring thought, that all doubts were from the devil from whom alone all scruples come; he sternly bade his soul rest secure and as resolutely refused to hearken to any doubts regarding the truth of his new Evangel. His new and quite subjective doctrines he defended in the most subjective way imaginable and, to those of his friends whose consciences were troubled, he recommends a similar course of action; he even on several occasions told people thus disturbed in mind whom he wished to reassure, that they must listen to his, Luther’s, voice as though it were the voice of God. This was his express advice to his pupil Schlaginhaufen and, in later days, to his friend Spalatin, who also had become a prey to melancholy. He himself claimed to have been delivered from his terrors by having simply accepted as a God-sent message the encouraging words of Bugenhagen.

  “Conscience is death’s own cruel hangman,” so he told Spalatin; from Ambrose and Augustine the latter should learn to place all his trust not in conscience but in Christ. It scarcely needs stating that here he is misapplying the fine sayings of both these Fathers. They would have repudiated with indignation the words of consolation which not long after he offered the man suffering from remorse of conscience, assuring him that he was as yet a novice in struggling against conscience, and had hitherto been “too tender a sinner”; “join yourself to us real, big, tough sinners, that you may not belittle and put down Christ, Who is the Saviour, not of small, imaginary sinners, but of great and real ones”; thus it was that he, Luther, had once been consoled in his sadness by Staupitz. Here he is applying wrongly a perfectly correct thought of his former Superior. Not perhaps quite false, but at any rate thoroughly Lutheran, is the accompanying assurance: “I stand firm [in my conscience] and maintain my attitude, that you may lean on me in your struggle against Satan and be supported by me.”

  Thus does he direct Spalatin, “who was tormented by remorse, to comfort himself against his conscience.”

  “To comfort oneself against one’s conscience,” such is the task which Luther, in many of his writings, proposes to the believer. Indeed, in his eyes the chief thing of all is to “get the better of sin, death, hell and our own conscience”; in spite of the opposition of reason to Luther’s view of Christ’s satisfaction, we must learn, “through Him [Christ] to possess nothing but grace and forgiveness,” of course, in the sense taught at Wittenberg.

  A former brother monk, Link, the apostate Augustinian of Nuremberg, Luther also encou
rages, like Spalatin the fallen priest, to kick against the prick of conscience: “These are devil’s thoughts and not from us, which make us despair,” they must be “left to the devil,” the latter always “keeps closest to those who are most pious”; to yield to such despairing thoughts “is as bad as giving in and leaving Satan supreme.”

  When praising the “sole” help and consolation of the grace of Christ he does not omit to point out, directly or otherwise, how, “when in despair of himself,” and enduring frightful inward “sufferings” of conscience, he had hacked his way through them all and had reached a firm faith in Christ minus all works, and had thus become a “theologian of the Cross.”

  Even at the commencement of the struggle, in order to encourage wavering followers, he allowed to each man’s conscience the right to defy any confessor who should forbid Luther’s writings to such of his parishioners who came to him: “Absolve me at my own risk,” they were to say to him, “I shall not give up the books, for then I should be sinning against my conscience.” He argues that, according to Rom. xiv. 1, the confessor might not “urge them against their conscience.” Was it then enough for a man to have formed himself a conscience, for the precept no longer to hold? His admonition was, however, intended merely as a counsel for “strong and courageous consciences.” If the confessor did not prove amenable, they were simply to “go without scruple to the Sacrament,” and if this, too, was refused them then they had only to send “Sacrament and Church” about their business. Should the confessor require contrition for sins committed, this, according to another of his statements, was a clear attack on conscience which does not require contrition for absolution, but merely faith in Christ; such a priest ought to have the keys taken out of his hands and be given a pitchfork instead.