Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  (b) The Melting away of Luther’s Dogmas viewed in the Light of Protestant Criticism

  We have already put on record those doctrines of the olden Church, which, inclusive of the idea of faith itself, Luther threw overboard; we now come to the doctrines which he retained, which deserve to be considered in connection with the strictures of modern Protestant theologians, particularly of Harnack. At least these strictures bring out very clearly their contradictory and illogical character. Evidently Harnack is not altogether wrong when he uses as a page-heading the words “Exit dogma in Protestantism,” and elsewhere: “Embarrassments and problems in Luther’s heritage.”

  Luther, to quote Harnack, “frequently hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.” But “if ‘the whole Luther’ is to be set up as the law of faith for the Evangelical Church, then, where it is a question of matters of history, such consequences cannot be simply ignored.” “The Lutheran Reformation,” writes Fr. Loofs, “would have ended otherwise as regards the history of dogma, had Luther braved tradition and followed up his theories to their logical conclusion. The shreds of the old which remained hampered the growth of the new ideas, even in Luther’s own case.”

  Original Sin and Unfreedom; Law and Gospel; Penance

  Luther took over from the olden Church the doctrine of the existence of original sin, but he so changed it, particularly by affirming that it resulted in the destruction of free-will, that the doctrine itself becomes untenable.

  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 and a priori reasonings.... Either the data of 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.”

  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.” 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., , 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.”

  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.

  “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 which in perpetuum invest the Law with a peculiar independent significance. Is it not, however, our duty to depict the Reformer in accordance with his most original ideas?”

  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 Law qua lex is undoubtedly abrogated for the Christian; whoever tries 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.

  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.” 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.

  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 in
to 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.”

  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.” 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.” 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.” 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.’ 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.”

  Luther’s Doctrine of Justification and Good Works, as seen by Protestant Critics

  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.” 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. 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.”

  Luther’s want of discrimination is most apparent, he says, in the fact, that, owing to his “peculiar interest in the preaching of the grace of God,” he depreciated works and the Law as the very fount of self-righteousness.

  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?” Luther could not in fact “sufficiently decry the Law or urge too strongly that it was useless to Christians.”

  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.” 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.” 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.”

  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.

  “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 debts and 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.

  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 eternal reward?” 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 mad
e man.

  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. 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.’” 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.”

  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 be done, 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”; the only difference was, that, he by his Evangelical preaching taught how the Commandments were really to be honoured.