Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Luther also quoted the Bible passages regarding God’s will for the salvation of all men, but only in order to say of them: “such expressions are always to be understood exclusively of the elect.” It is merely “wisdom of the flesh” to attempt to find a will of God that all men be saved in the assurance of St. Paul: “God wills that all men shall be saved” (1 Tim. ii. 4), or “in the passages which say, that He gave His Son for us, that He created man for eternal life, and that everything was created for man, but man for God that he might enjoy Him eternally.”

  Other objections which Luther makes he sets aside with the same facility by a reference to the thoughts he has developed above. Thus the first: Why did God give to man free will by means of which he can merit either reward or punishment? His answer is: Where is this free will? Man has no free will for doing what is good. Then a second objection: “God damns no one without sin, and he who is forced to sin is damned unjustly.” The answer to this is new: God ordains it so that those who are to be damned are gladly, even though of necessity, in sin (“dat voluntarie velle in peccato esse et manere et diligere iniquitatem”). Finally, the last objection: “Why does God give them commandments which He does not will them to keep, yea hardens their will so much that they desire to act contrary to the law? Is not God in this case the cause of their sinning and being damned?” “Yes, that is the difficulty,” he admits, “which, as a matter of fact, has the most force; it is the weightiest of all. But to it the Apostle makes a special answer when he teaches: God so wills it, and God Who thus wills, is not evil. Everything is His, just as the clay belongs to the potter and waits on his service.” Enough, he continues, “God commands that the elect shall be saved, and that those who are destined for hell shall be entangled in evil in order that He may show forth His mercy and also His anger.”

  It makes one shudder to hear how he cuts short the sighs of the unhappy soul which sees itself a victim of God’s harshness. It complains: “It is a hard and bitter lot that God should seek His honour in my misery!” And Luther replies: “See, there we have the wisdom of the flesh! My misery; ‘my,’ ‘my,’ that is the voice of the flesh. Drop the ‘my’ and say: Be Thou honoured, O Lord.... So long as you do not do that, you are seeking your own will more than the will of God. We must judge of God in a different manner from that in which we judge of man. God owes no man anything.”

  “With this hard doctrine,” he concludes, “the knife is placed at the throat of holiness-by-works and fleshly wisdom and therefore the flesh is naturally incensed, and breaks out into blasphemies; but man must learn that his salvation does not depend upon his acts, but that it lies quite outside of him, namely, in God, Who has chosen him.”

  He attempts, however, to mingle softer tones with the voices of despair, which, he admits, these theories have let loose. This he can only do at the expense of his own teaching, or by fining it down. He says: whoever is terrified and confused, but then tries to abandon himself with indifference to the severity of God, he, let this be his comfort, is not of the number of those predestined to hell. For only those who are really to be rejected are not afraid[?], “they pay no heed to the danger and say, if I am to be damned, so be it!” On the other hand, confusion and fear are signs of the “spiritus contribulatus,” which, according to his promise, God never rejects (Ps. 1.).

  After all, then, we are forced to ask, according to this, is not man to be saved by his own act, namely, the act of heroic indifference to his eternity? For this act remains an act of man: “Whoever is filled with the fear of God, and, taking courage, throws and precipitates himself into the truth of the promises of God, he will be saved, and be one of the elect.”

  3. The Fight against “Holiness-by-Works” and the Observantines in the Commentary on Romans

  His ideas on predestination were not the direct cause of Luther’s belittling of human effort and the value of good works; the latter tendency was present in him previous to his adoption of rigid predestinarianism; nor does he ever attribute to election by grace any diminution of man’s powers or duties, whether in the case of the chosen or of the reprobate. The same commandments are given to those whom God’s terrible decree has destined for hell as to the elect; they possess the same human abilities, the same weaknesses. It was not predestination which led him in the first instance to attribute such strength to concupiscence in man, and to invest it, as he ultimately did, with an actually sinful and culpable character.

  His ideas concerning the absolute corruption of the children of Adam, even to the extinction of any liberty in the doing of what is good, had another origin, and, in their development, were influenced far more by false mysticism than by the predestinarian delusion.

  He approached the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans in the conviction that, in this Epistle, he would find the sanction of his earlier efforts against the self-righteous and “holy-by-works,” against whom his peculiar mysticism had still further prejudiced him. From the very outset he interprets the great Apostolic document on the calling of the heathen and the Jews to salvation as directed exclusively against those who, according to him, were imperilling the Church; against those who (whether in his own Order or in Christendom generally) laid stress on the importance of works, on the duty of fulfilling observances and the merit of exercises of virtue for gaining heaven, and who were unmindful of the righteousness which Christ gives us. This is not the place to point out how Paul is speaking in quite another sense, against those Jewish Christians who still adhered to the works of the Mosaic Law, of the merely relative value of works, of the liberty which Christianity imparts and of the saving power of faith.

  Luther, however, in the very first lines, tells the “holy-by-works” that the whole purpose of the Epistle to the Romans is a driving back and rooting out of the wisdom and righteousness of the flesh. Among the heathen and the Jews were to be found those who, though “devoted in their hearts to virtue,” yet had not suppressed all self-satisfaction in the same, and looked upon themselves as “righteous and good men”; in the Church, according to Paul, all self-righteousness and wisdom must be torn out of the affections, and self-complacency. God willed to save us not by our own righteousness but by an extraneous righteousness (“non per domesticam sed per extraneam iustitiam vult salvare”), viz. by the imputed righteousness of Christ, and, owing to the exterior righteousness which Christ gives (“externa quæ ex Christo in nobis est iustitia”), there can be no boasting, nor must there be “any depression on account of the sufferings and trials which come to us from Christ.”

  “Christ’s righteousness and His gifts,” he says, “shine in the true Christian.... If any man possesses natural and spiritual advantages, yet this is not considered by God as being his wisdom, righteousness and goodness (‘non ideo coram Deo talis reputatur’), rather, he must wait in humility, as though he possessed nothing, for the pure mercy of God, to see whether He will look upon him as righteous and wise. God only does this if he humbles himself deeply. We must learn to regard spiritual possessions and works of righteousness as worthless for obtaining the righteousness of Christ, we must renounce the idea that these have any value in God’s sight and merit a reward, otherwise we shall not be saved” (“opera iusta velint nihil reputare,” etc.).

  Any pretext, or even none at all, serves to bring him back again and again in the work to the “Pelagian-minded iustitiarii.” It is possible that amongst these the “Observantines” ranked first. Our thoughts revert to those of his brother monks, whose cause he had at first defended in the internal struggle within the Congregation, only to turn on them unmercifully afterwards. On one occasion he mentions by name the “Observants,” reproaching them with trying to outshine one another in their zeal for God, while at the same time they had no love of their neighbour, whereas, according to the passage he is just expounding, “the fulness of the law is love.” He would also appear to be referring to them, when, on another occasion, he rails at such monks, who by their behaviour bring their whole profession into disgrace.<
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  “They exalt themselves against other members of their profession,” he cries, “as though they were clean and had no evil odour about them,” and continues in the style of his monastic discourse on the “Little Saints” mentioned above ( f.). “And yet before, behind and within they are a pig-market and sty of sows ... they wish to withdraw from the rest, whereas they ought, were they really virtuous, to help them to conceal their faults. But in place of patient succour there is nothing in them but peevishness and a desire to be far away (‘quærunt fugam ... tediosi sunt et nolunt esse in communione aliorum’). They will not serve those who are good for nothing nor be their companions; they only desire to be the superiors and companions of the worthy, the perfect and the sound. Therefore they run from one place to another.”

  The struggle of which this is a picture continued among the German Augustinians. In the spring, 1520, a similar conflict broke out in the Cologne Province, one side having the sympathy of the Roman Conventuals. We can well understand how the General of the Order in Rome was not disposed to grant the exemptions claimed by the Observantines of the Saxon Congregation against his own Provincials.

  Luther brandishes his sharp blade against the “spiritually minded, the proud, the stiff-necked, who seek peace in works and in the flesh, the iustitiarii,” without making any sharp distinction between the actual Observantines and the “self-righteous.”

  With regard to himself, he admits that he is so antagonistic to the “iustitiarii,” that he is opposed to all scrupulous observance of “iustitia,” to all regulations and strict ordinances:

  “The very word righteousness vexes me: if anyone were to steal from me, it would hurt me less than being obliged to listen to the word righteousness. It is a word which the jurists always have on their lips, but there is no more unlearned race than these men of the law, save, perhaps, the men of good intention and superior reason (‘bonæ-intentionarii seu sublimatæ rationis’); for I have experienced both in myself and in others, that when we were righteous, God mocked at us.”

  4. Attack on Predisposition to Good and on Free Will

  The assertion of the complete corruption of human nature owing to the continuance of original sin and the inextinguishable tinder of concupiscence, arose from the above-mentioned position which Luther had taken up with regard to self-righteousness.

  Man remains, according to what Luther says in the Commentary on Romans, in spite of all his veneer of good works, so alienated from God that he “does not love but hates the law which forces him to what is good and forbids what is evil; his will, far from seeking the law, detests it. Nature persists in its evil desires contrary to the law; it is always full of evil concupiscence when it is not assisted from above.” This concupiscence, however, is sin. Everything that is good is due only to grace, and grace must bring us to acknowledge this and to “seek Christ humbly and so be saved.”

  The descriptions of human doings which the author gives us in eloquent language are not wanting in fidelity and truth to nature, though we cannot approve his inferences. He has a keen eye on others and is unmerciful in his delineation of the faults which he perceived in the pious people around him.

  He spies out many who only act from a desire for the praise of men, and who wish to appear, but not really to be, good. How ready are such, he says, to depreciate themselves with apparent humility. Others only do what is right because it gives them pleasure, i.e. from inclination and without any higher motive. Others do it from vain self-complacency; yea, selfishness is present in almost all, and mars their works. Outward routine and a business-like righteousness spoils a great deal. It is to be deplored that, like the Pharisees, they only keep what is commanded in view and long for the rewards of a busy and petty virtue.

  In such descriptions he is easily carried too far and is sometimes even obviously unjust. Thus, for instance, of evil practices he makes conscious theories, in order the more readily to gain the upper hand of his adversaries. “They teach,” he cries, “that it is only necessary to keep the law by works and not with the heart ... their efforts are not accompanied with the least inward effort, everything is wholly external.”

  In respect of the doctrine of original sin and its consequences in man, he not only magnifies enormously the strength of the concupiscence which remains after baptism, without sufficiently taking into account the spiritual means by which it can be repressed, but gives the most open expression to his belief that concupiscence is actually sin; it is the persistence of original sin, rendering every man actually culpable, even without any consent of the will. The “Non concupisces” of the Ten Commandments — which the Apostle emphasises in his Epistle to the Romans, though in another sense — Luther makes out to be such a prohibition that, by the mere existence of concupiscence, it is daily and hourly sinfully transgressed. He pays no attention to the theology of the Church, which had hitherto seen in the “Non concupisces” a prohibition of any voluntary consent to a concupiscence existing without actual sin.

  His attack on free will is very closely bound up with his ideas on concupiscence.

  “Concupiscence with weakness is against the law ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and it is deadly [a mortal sin], but the gracious God does not impute it on account of the work of salvation which has been commenced in [pardoned] man.” “Even a venial sin,” he teaches in the same passage, “is, according to its nature [owing to human nature which is entirely alienated from God], a mortal sin, but the Creator does not impute (‘imputat’) it as mortal sin to the man whom he chooses to perfect and render whole.”

  He makes various attempts to deduce from concupiscence the absolute want in the will of freedom to do what is good. There is not the slightest doubt that he does deny this freedom, though, on the other hand, he grants so much to liberty in his admonitions concerning predestination (see below, ) that he practically retracts his denial. The position he takes up with regard to grace ought to be a test of what he actually held: did he look upon grace as in every case irresistible? But on this very point he is as yet indisposed to commit himself as he will not hesitate to do later, to a positive, erroneous “yes.” In short, though he stands for a denial of liberty, he has not yet seen his way to solve all the difficulties.

  If we seek some specimens illustrating the course of his ideas regarding lack of liberty, we find, perhaps, the strongest utterance in his comments on Romans viii. 28: “Free will apart from grace possesses absolutely no power for righteousness, it is necessarily in sin. Therefore St. Augustine in his book against Julian terms it ‘rather an enslaved than a free will.’ But after the obtaining of grace it becomes really free, at least as far as salvation is concerned. The will is, it is true, free by nature, but only for what comes within its province, not for what is above it, being bound in the chain of sin and therefore unable to choose what is good in God’s sight.” Here Luther makes no distinction between natural and supernatural good, but excludes both from our choice; in fact there is no such thing as natural goodness, for what nature performs alone is only sin.

  “Where is our righteousness,” he exclaims rhetorically some pages before this, “where are our works, where is the liberty of choice, where the presupposed ‘contingens’ (see above, )? This is what must be preached, this is the way to bring the wisdom of the flesh to the dust! The Apostle does so here. In former passages he cut off its hands, its feet, its tongue; here he seizes it [the wisdom of the flesh which speaks in defence of free will] and makes an end of it. Here, like a flash of light, it is seen to possess nothing in itself, all its possession being in God.” This, then, is Luther’s conclusion: the elect are not saved by the co-operation of their free will, but by the Divine decree; not by their merits, but by the unalterable edict from above by means of which they conquer all the difficulties in the way of salvation. He is silent here as to whether the elect may not succumb to sin temporarily, either by the misuse of liberty, or from lack of compelling grace.

  Towards the end of the Commentary he asserts quite defini
tely that we are unable to formulate even a good intention with our human powers which could in any way [even in the natural order] be pleasing to God.

  He here examines certain opponents, who rightly denied this inability, “otherwise man would be forced to sin.” Further on he attributes to all theologians the teaching of the Occamists (see above, ): “therewith we receive without fail the infusion of God’s grace”; a proposition which certainly sounds Pelagian. He passes over one point which true scholastic theologians did not omit, viz. that God’s supernatural assistance “prevents” our natural will, raises the same into the order of grace, and thus enables us to merit salvation. Further, again disregarding the scholastic teaching, he foists upon all theologians the idea that, having once formed our intention, “we need have no further anxiety, or trouble ourselves to invoke God’s grace.” Such is, according to him, the position of his opponents.

  In his answer he does not assert, as regards the first proposition, that God forces us to evil; “the wicked,” he says, “do what they wish, perhaps even with good intentions, but God allows them to sin even in their good works.” Of this, according to him, his opponents must be aware and therefore ought not to act with so much assurance and certainty as though they were really performing good works. Everyone should rather say: “Who knows whether God’s grace is working this in me?” Then only does man acknowledge “that he can do nothing of himself”; only thus can we escape Pelagianism, which is the curse of the self-righteous. “But because they are persuaded that it is always within their power to do what they can, and therefore also to possess grace [here he is utilising some of the real weaknesses of Occamism], therefore they do nothing but sin all the time in their assurance.”

  Luther does not here ask himself what else man is to perform in order to possess the grace of God, beyond doing what he can, humbling himself and praying for grace, as all preceding ages had taught. He is still looking for an assurance of salvation by some other method. Only at a later date does he learn, or thinks he learns, how it is to be obtained (by faith alone). Here he merely says: “It is the greatest plague to speak of the signs of possessing grace and thereby to lull man into security.” He has not yet found the assurance of the “Gracious God,” as he is to express it later.