Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The Middle Ages had been too neglectful of positive studies, particularly of history and languages, both of which are of such vast importance to theology. Since the dawn of humanism, however, a good beginning had been made, and the need of meeting the demands of the new age was recognised, as, in the domain of Biblical languages, the example of Faber Stapulensis and Jodocus Clichtoveus shows. The methods of the Protestants made further progress in this field imperative.

  In criticism and church-history, where much good work had been done by the Protestants, Peter Canisius was one of the first to suggest that it would be advisable to devote more pains to the study and examination of the history of the Papacy, since, as he wrote, our “people seem to be still quite asleep” and unaware of all that had been done in the opposite camp. He was anxious for books that should be in no way inferior to those of the other side, and of which “the style must be in keeping with the present method and trend of scholarship.” It is not as yet enough known generally what great success crowned the labours of Onuphrius Panvinius (1529-1568) the Augustinian Roman antiquarian and historian, who was spurred on by the labours of the Protestants, though even more by the humanist traditions of his native country. Better known is the Oratorian, Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607), whose “Ecclesiastical Annals” unquestionably laid the foundation of a new era in the writing of Church history.

  Good and useful work was done by some of the Protestant scholars who edited the writings of the Fathers.

  Thus Luther, for instance, encouraged Bugenhagen to edit certain works of St. Athanasius on the Trinity and himself wrote (1532) a Preface to them which is well worth reading. The Patristic labours subsequently undertaken by Catholics, even the great work of Marguérin de la Bigne, that forerunner of the French Maurists of the 17th century, had their raison d’être in the very ideas which Luther had set forth in his above-mentioned Preface to Bugenhagen’s work.

  The worksomeness of the Catholic Church showed that people were beginning to understand the new era and to mould themselves to its requirements. “How can one deny,” asks Adolf Harnack, “that Catholicism, as soon as it pulled itself together for the counter-reformation … was for over a century in far closer touch with the new era than Luther’s Protestantism? Hence the many converts from Protestantism to Catholicism, particularly among learned Protestants, down to the days of Queen Christina of Sweden and even after.”

  As for the ideas, however, which constituted the essence of the religious innovations the Catholic Church could not accept them short of being untrue to herself and betraying what had been committed to her custody. Whereas she gradually found a way to comply with all just demands for betterment and progress, she was nevertheless obliged relentlessly to close her ears to proposals for the subversion of her dogma and the alteration of her constitution.

  She steadfastly refused to make her own the new and mistaken conception of the Church, of Bible interpretation, of faith, justification and good works. In spite of the heart-rending sight of the growing apostasy around her, she kept her eyes fixed on the promises of her Founder and remained true to her olden conception of the Church as a visible society controlled by Chief Pastors who are the vicars of Christ.

  Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg in Baden, one of the greatest lawyers and humanists of the 16th century, who had for a while dallied with some of the demands of the innovators, afterwards repudiated as follows any idea of going over to their side:

  “I shall remain true to the doctrines and decisions of the Church even should all the host of heaven command me otherwise.” “Such an insult I will on no account offer to the Lord of Truth as to believe He had deceived us for so many hundreds of years” — by permitting the Church to fall into error in spite of the promise that the Spirit of truth would always remain with her.

  “For more than a thousand years the Church has taught us by the voice of her Doctors who all take their stand on Holy Scripture. But you twist the Gospel about as you please. Is Luther then to be set above all the Doctors of the past? Our forefathers, who also were authorities and all the wise men, would have called such a demand sheer madness.” “You, however, argue that the Spirit leads and guides you. But what sort of Spirit is it that teaches you to scold and calumniate as you do? In the Epistle of James I have read on the contrary that wisdom is peaceable and modest.”

  “Give me a man who renounces all earthly things, keeps all the precepts of Christ, loves his enemies from his heart and does them good, abuses none and is cheerful in adversity. Such a man I will call worthy of the Evangel. But among the ranks of such men you can scarcely reckon Luther.”

  “You are free to censure abuses, but is it right on their account to throw the whole Church into confusion? You blame the whole for the misdeeds of some of its parts; pleading the defects you attack what is good and thus unsettle everything.” He too, so he tells his opponents, was at pains to go to the sources of Faith, but he preferred the interpretation of Jerome, Augustine and Chrysostom to theirs; and, again, unable to control his indignation, he exclaims: “What incredible arrogance is this that one man should require his reading to be accounted better than that of all the Fathers of the Church, nay, of the Church herself and the whole of Christendom?”

  When passions were at their height voices such as these failed to secure a hearing. The deep chasm torn open by the wanton act of one man could no longer be bridged over; the bond of religion that had hitherto united the German nation had been rudely severed.

  5. Luther as described by the Olden “Orthodox” Lutherans

  It is a study that will well repay us to follow through the history of Protestantism the changes that Luther’s description underwent. The awakened historical sense of the present day has already led more than one critic to undertake this task, with a crop of interesting results.

  It would be a mistake to think that Luther’s memory survived anywhere among the orthodox Protestants with that freshness and distinctness which the statements of some of his old friends might lead us to expect. Of the actual personality of the man no clear picture had been transmitted. His words and deeds were commented on according to the outlook of the different schools, needless to say, always with a certain affection and admiration, but no one troubled to leave to posterity a living picture of his unique character as a whole.

  Tracing the history of the Protestant representation of Luther down to the present day three periods may be distinguished, the so-called Orthodox one, the Pietistic and Freethinking one that followed, and the last hundred years. Orthodoxy, with its rigid attachment to the formularies of Faith, with the assistance of the State was for a long while able to suppress all contrary tendencies; towards the middle of the 18th century, however, the Pietists and, at the other extreme, a free-thinking party also made their appearance on the field.

  Pietism was a reaction against the hard-and-fast doctrinal system of an earlier age, which, clinging desperately to Luther’s doctrine of works, tended to be neglectful of the Christian life and of the revival of morals. If Pietism rather exaggerated the moral side of religion, the so-called “Enlightenment” erred in another direction, setting out as it did to vindicate the rights of reason and, in so doing, making scant account of subordination to the truths of Divine revelation.

  On the whole, Orthodoxy retained a supernaturalist view of Luther, though it was apt to assume different colours according to the leanings of the several schools.

  Pietism, in its conception of his person, frankly throws over the real Luther and seeks to “vindicate his spirit against the claims of his more orthodox adherents.”

  The period of the enlightenment also presents a “sadly distorted” picture of Luther; it had “not the least comprehension of his fiery spirit” and, as was its wont, was “anxious to wipe out everything too distinctive.”

  “Misunderstood and disfigured ‘beyond recognition,’ Luther steps over the threshold of the new era. But here again misfortune awaits him: ‘Sectarians, Anabaptists, Pietists, Democrats, R
ationalists, Orthodox’ … all these set to work to improve upon the hero until they can stamp him as their own.” Finally, “the latest phase of theological development spells a revision of the whole idea and appreciation of Luther.” In the consciousness of having far outrun Luther on the road to a purely natural religion minus any faith, people are beginning to “emphasise more strongly the fact, that he was held captive in the bonds of mediæval feelings and ideas.”

  “Who really knows him?” asked Adolf Harnack in 1883, “and who can be expected to know him? People are willing enough to worship him as what they wish him to be, as the upholder of their own ideals; but in their heart of hearts, they feel that, after all, he was really quite different. His character impresses all, but his convictions are left in the background, or else are worked up into new and more serviceable coin.”

  Yet all these Protestant impressions of Luther, to be examined more in detail below, however they may differ have at least this much in common, that Luther must be acclaimed as the great opponent of the authority of the olden Church.

  Maybe we shall come nearest to a correct picture of Luther if we combine the modern view of his being a “mediævalist” with the olden orthodox claim that he was a Prophet of God. Luther stood partly for the old supernaturalist Christianity, partly for a new pseudo-supernaturalism; so far those who speak of his “mediævalism” are in the right. He himself, however, summed up his own character in that of the God-sent “Prophet of Germany,” and divinely appointed conqueror of Antichrist and the devil — a point which was rightly emphasised by his orthodox followers.

  To go back now to the various descriptions of Luther. The Orthodox derived their idea of Luther from the oldest traditions. In these there was a breath of the supernaturalism in which Luther’s own view of himself was decked out, of the inbreathing of the Spirit, of his mysterious struggles with a power unseen, and of his divinely assured victory over the Roman Babylon.

  At the present day one marvels to see how cheerfully and naïvely members of the old “orthodox” school were wont to magnify the founder of their denomination on the lines sketched out by Luther himself. All that interested them was the teacher, Luther the theologian; to them he appeared a sort of “professor of divinity of heroic dimensions.” In the century which followed his death it was the custom to exalt him “into the region of the marvellous and more-than-human.” So fond were they of “depicting his divine halo” that it became quite the usual thing to “set Luther side by side with the olden Prophets and Apostles.”

  After Elias and John the Baptist, he is “the third Elias, who makes ready the way against the return of Christ to Judgment.” He is the second Noe, the second Abraham, the second Samson, the second Samuel, the second Jeremias, above all, he is the second Moses who frees the people from their bondage; the Egyptian bondage, so some one computed had come to an end in B.C. 1517 just as the Papal bondage reached its end in 1517 A.D.

  Holy Scripture, so the orthodox declared, points to Luther not only where it speaks of the revelation and overthrow of Antichrist (2 Thes. ii. 8), not merely where it proclaims that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem (Zach. xiv. 8), but also in the Apocalypse of John where we are told of the angel having the eternal Gospel — flying through the midst of heaven to the mount on which is seated the Lamb with 144,000 who bear His name— “in order to preach it to them that sit upon the earth, to every nation and tribe, and tongue and people” (Rev. xiv. 6). That this angel was Luther is also plain from the fact that, if the letters of the verse quoted are reckoned by their position in the alphabet and then added together the number will be exactly the same as that of the words (in German): Martin Luther, Doctor of Holy Scripture, born at Eisleben, baptised on Martinmas-Day, viz. 819! In a sermon in 1676 the flight of the angel through the midst of heaven is taken to signify the marvellously rapid spread of Luther’s Evangel, and the Gospel he preaches is termed “eternal,” because Luther’s doctrine is found even in the Fathers of the Church.

  The story of Hus, the “swan,” as prophetic of the coming of Luther, was an integral part of the panegyrics even of Mathesius and Bugenhagen; it served much the same purpose as the statue of a monk with the inscription L.V.T.E.R.V.S., said to have been erected by Kaiser Frederick Barbarossa.

  The recovery of Melanchthon and Myconius for whom Luther had prayed so ardently became evident miracles. The preservation of his picture in great fires was another miracle of frequent recurrence. Splinters from a beam in his house, according to Gottfried Arnold, the Pietist, in his Church-History, were deemed an efficacious cure for toothache and other ills. Arnold calls this a subtle form of idolatry. Leonard Hutter, who became professor at Wittenberg in 1596, learnedly set forth the proofs of Luther’s “being endowed with a ‘spiritus vatidicus’ enabling him to foresee many things of importance,” though his prophetic insight is chiefly confined by Hutter and others to his peculiar divine gift for the interpretation of Holy Writ, or to his proclamation of the destruction of contemners of the Evangel. Johannes Klai (or Claius), the German grammarian and a zealous Lutheran, expressed it as his opinion in 1578 that the German used by Luther was so pure and beautiful that he could have learnt it only by the special help of the Holy Ghost. Johannes Albertus Fabricius collected, chiefly in the interests of the orthodox party, the titles of the works dealing with Luther; the bare lists of the books setting forth the services he had rendered, the honourable epithets bestowed on him, his eminent qualities, his miracles and his own prophecies and those of others, occupy many pages.

  Even as late as 1872 Carl Frederick Kahnis, the Lutheran theologian and professor at Leipzig, depicted Luther in his “Deutsche Reformation” with all the olden traits. Luther’s doctrines he regarded as the true norm, though it was necessary to understand and develop them. According to Kahnis the young monk’s experience with the devil in the refectory at night and again at the Wartburg, were real assaults of the Evil One on the chosen prophet of God, visible and audible marks of the hostility of Satan to the saviour of mankind, for Luther “was no slave to fancy or excited feelings.” “Maybe,” so he says rather incautiously, “no Father of the Church since the days of the Apostles ever had to feel so keenly the power of Satan.” The prophecy of the “bare-foot monk” and the auguries of the Eisenach Franciscan become matters of history, for had not Luther himself appealed to them? Even the tale of the Elector’s dream who saw the monk’s pen stretching even to Rome and blotting out everything there, rested, according to him, on “history.” As for the fallen Church of pre-Lutheran days, against which his wonderful pen worked, it sinks into the abyss of its own errors before the rising sun of Luther’s new doctrine.

  6. Luther as seen by the Pietists and Rationalists

  Luther, as pictured to themselves by the Pietists, differed widely from the Luther of the orthodox. To Pietists like Spener, Luther’s actual doctrine — regarded by them as contradictory and wavering — appealed far less than certain personal mystic traits of his. To them the inward struggles of soul to which Luther ascribes his transition from despair into the peace of the Gospel, his remarks on piety and the interior life, his realisation of the universal priesthood, and the breathing of the Spirit were very dear. They were less enamoured of Luther’s views on faith, the outward Word, or the State-Government of the Church. At any rate, the Pietists wove from the material at their disposal a new Luther who was practically a counterpart of themselves. They preferred to dwell on his earlier years, when Luther, as Gottfried Arnold said in 1699 in his “Kirchenhistorie,” yet lived “in the Spirit,” and before he had ended “in the flesh” as he did later. They either said nothing of his worldlier side or else openly censured it as the fruit of his backsliding and later errors.

  Arnold complains bitterly that things had gone so far after Luther’s death that he was called a “Saint” and a divine man, and that he was made out to be the Angel foretold in the Apocalypse. Still he recognises in him “in a usual way,” an “apostolic mission” in so far as h
e had been the recipient of “a direct inspiration, stimulus or divine gift.” “At the first” he had “indeed been mightily directed, and utilised as a divine tool”; at any rate up to the time of his breach with Carlstadt he could boast of enjoying “the strength and illumination of the Spirit which gave him on particular points and in difficult cases a rule and true certainty.” Only with such limitations will the historian of Pietism accept Luther’s epitaph at Wittenberg where mention is made of the inbreathing of God’s spirit.

  Whereas the orthodox Lutherans, owing to the abiding influence of Melanchthon’s humanism, allowed the study of philosophy and of the wisdom of the ancients, the Pietists at Leipzig, Giessen, Stargard and elsewhere rejected all philosophy, appealing to Luther who had spurned it as the offspring of that fool reason which ought to be done away with; Melanchthon, they urged, had corrupted the faith by the admixture of Plato and Aristotle, and, hence, had never been regarded by Luther “as a true, staunch theologian, but rather as a cunning Aristotelian dialectician.”