Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  It is of interest and helps us to reach a right understanding of the Tower Experience, to follow the change of view regarding assurance of salvation which is apparent in Luther’s statements and writings in the latter months of 1518 and beginning of 1519.

  At the time when, in October, 1518, Luther, a prey to other anxieties, stood before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, he was already making great strides towards the new and consoling dogma of faith alone, moved thereto by indignation at the censure which one of his propositions had called forth. He says to Cardinal Cajetan in his explanation of the second of the assertions which he was required to withdraw, that it was incorrect to speak of it as “a new and false theology that no one can be justified except by faith, and that it is necessary to hold it as certain in faith that one is justified, and not in any way to doubt the obtaining of grace, because whoever doubts or is uncertain is no longer justified, but is rejecting grace.”

  He attempts to prove this first as regards Confession. The principal thing is to believe the words of Christ: “Whatsoever thou shalt loose,” etc., i.e. by applying the words to oneself; “under pain of eternal damnation and to avoid committing a sin of unbelief,” it is necessary to believe this; this faith is the only disposition for the sacrament and no work whatever serves as a preparation. No one could receive grace who doubted of its reception; but, if we believed, then we received everything in the sacrament. The belief that we receive a personal remission of sin is, according to St. Bernard, the testimony of the Holy Ghost in our heart; this, according to the same Father, is expressed in Romans iii. 28: “We hold that a man is justified by Faith without the works of the law.” Let Cardinal Cajetan, he says finally — after quoting a great number of biblical passages having no bearing on the matter in hand — show him how he is to understand in any other way all these texts from the Divine utterances.

  What is remarkable is, however, that, during his trial at Augsburg, he allows Confession and Absolution to recede further into the background than in the Resolutions; he no longer speaks of the above-mentioned magical production of the personal assurance of salvation, by the formula of absolution, as by the testimony of another; he now holds the absolute certainty of justification to be present by faith even before this, whenever a man is willing to submit himself, according to his instructions, to the Sacrament of Penance. Thus faith alone and the assurance of salvation were already present. The principal difficulty, however, as he admits below ( f.), still troubled his mind. This was the Justice of God, which haunted his conscience, though it did not hinder his going forward.

  The appeal he made to a General Council in November and his “conjecture” of December, 1518, that the Pope might be Antichrist, were momentous indications that he was cutting himself adrift from the authority of the Church. At the same time he stripped the ideas he had hitherto held on faith of everything that reminded him of the traditional teaching of the Church; he transformed the faith necessary for justification into a mere act of confidence in the merits of Christ without any reference to the Sacraments, to the other truths of faith, or to the Church, who is the guardian and mouthpiece of faith. To lay hold upon the righteousness of Christ with a sure trust is made to suffice for justification and for the fullest assurance of salvation, without any of the preliminaries and conditions on which he had formerly insisted. This act, too, God alone operates in man, who himself is devoid of all free will. Although he incidentally clothes the act of confidence with love, and even hints at the good works a man may have performed previous to this act, also requiring good resolutions for the future, yet these are only additions which are really inconsistent with his idea. Henceforward fiducial faith appears to him as really an isolated fact, an act of confidence inspired by God merely from His good pleasure and with no regard for any work. A vast change of far-reaching consequence had taken place in Luther’s conception of the appropriation of the iustitia Dei, he had now reached an interpretation of the words iustus ex fide vivit and of the whole meaning of the gospel, upon which, notwithstanding the independence of his treatment of doctrine, he had never hitherto ventured.

  We may well ask what event, what development, had led up to this.

  Salvation by faith alone and the absolute assurance of one’s state of grace, were taught by Luther quite openly in the second course of lectures on the Psalms, which he had commenced in 1518 (perhaps at the end of the year), and the beginning of which he published in 1519 with a preface addressed to the Elector Frederick, dated March 27, 1519 (see above, ). This was the “Operationes in Psalmos,” upon the publication of which he was engaged until 1521, and which was finally left unfinished.

  This work he, even at a later date, described as an entirely true exposition of his actual teaching on justification.

  Other lectures, delivered at an earlier period, received no such praise from him; on the contrary, he never took the trouble of having them printed, and does not even mention them. Although the Commentary on Romans, which we have already studied, had advanced a considerable distance along the new lines of thought, nevertheless, at a later date its tone appeared too Catholic to please him; it did not contain the new creed “Credo me esse salvum.” The same is true of the earlier course on the Psalms, of the lectures on Galatians, on Hebrews and on the Epistle to Titus. Luther, as a rule, was very ready to have his writings printed, but these, after he had entered upon the second stage of his development, he plainly looked upon as unripe and incomplete.

  Simultaneously with the printing of the new Commentary on the Psalms he commenced that of another Commentary, also consisting of lectures. This is the shorter of the two works on Galatians which he has left us in print (above, f.). This Commentary on Galatians, together with the “Operationes in Psalmos” is the earliest witness to his new and definitive conception of sola fides as an entire confidence in one’s justification.

  To these must be added the almost contemporary “Sermo de triplici iustitia” delivered towards the end of 1518, and the “Sermo de duplici iustitia” dating from the commencement of 1519.

  The righteousness of Christ, he says in the sermon on the threefold righteousness — without any reference to the Sacraments, with the exception of Baptism, or to the Church’s means of grace— “is our whole being” and “becomes by faith our righteousness, according to Romans i.: ‘The just man liveth by faith’”; “Whoever has this shall not be damned, even though he commit sin,” this being proved by two passages from the Psalms; “by this man becomes lord of all things.” There is no such thing as merit. “Every Christian must beware of ever doubting as to whether his works are pleasing to God; whoever doubts this, sins, loses all his works and labours in vain.... He is not acting from faith or in faith.” “As you believe in Christ so too you must believe that your works are well pleasing to God because they are of faith [i.e. done in a state of grace].”

  In the sermon on the twofold righteousness one of the first quotations from the Bible on which the same idea is based and yet more strongly expressed is again Romans i. 17: “The justice of God is revealed in the gospel,” etc. This passage assumes a more prominent position in his mind. He pauses in his explanation of Psalm xxx. 1: “In iustitia tua libera me”; this, he says, signifies “the righteousness of Christ which has become ours by faith, grace and the mercy of God.” He finds that this righteousness is frequently referred to in the Psalms as the “work of God, confession, power of God, mercy, truth and justice. These are all names for faith in Christ, or rather names for that righteousness which is in Christ.” It is true that “this alien righteousness which is only infused by grace is never completely infused all at once, but begins, increases and is finally completed by death.” It is displayed by works of faith, especially those for the good of others, where man, “the lord of all things,” makes himself “the servant of all” — words which Luther employs in exactly the same sense shortly afterwards as the foundation of his work: “On the freedom of a Christian man.” Faith, i.e. confidence in our own salvat
ion by Christ, works all this; it imparts a certainty so that we are able to say: “Christ’s life, work, sufferings and death are mine, just as though I had myself lived, worked, suffered and died; so great is the confidence with which you are able to glory in Christ.”

  His teaching, even then, was against the law. According to him, says Loofs, “the law, even as ‘explained’ in the New Testament, which renders assurance of salvation possible only after the fulfilment of demands impossible to the natural man, is, it is true, necessary as a negative preparation for faith, though not to be regarded as the expression of the relationship desired by God between Himself and man. It is the gospel which teaches us the position which God wishes us to occupy with regard to Himself; according to its teaching we must, before we do anything for our salvation, be certain by faith of God’s forgiving grace, in order to be born again by such a faith and become capable of fulfilling the Will of God.” The Protestant theologian who writes thus in his History of Dogma also points out that according to Luther, the law was merely revealed by God as an educational measure and as the foundation of a scale of rewards, whereas the gospel represents the justice of God in the order of grace (Rom. i. 17). “In this conception of the antagonism between the law and the gospel,” says Loofs, “and in the possibility and necessity of an assurance of salvation which it presupposes lies the fundamental difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic view of Christianity.”

  At these fundamental views regarding the appropriation of salvation, or righteousness by faith, Luther had accordingly already arrived in 1518-19 when engaged on his second exposition of the Psalms.

  2. The Discovery in the Monastery Tower (1518-19)

  Luther describes, in an important passage of the Preface to the Latin edition of his works in 1545, how he finally arrived at his ideas of faith and the assurance of salvation. It is the only occasion on which he expatiates in so detailed and vivid a manner on his own development. In the light of this passage his other assertions must be considered.

  The reader is at once struck by what Luther relates of the gloom and confusion of his mind previous to the discovery in the tower. In the preface, he says: “The passage, Romans i., ‘The Justice of God is revealed in the Gospel,’ had, till then, been an obstacle to me. For I hated the words ‘justice of God,’ which according to the use and custom of all teachers I had been taught to interpret in the philosophical sense, namely, as referring to the formal and active justice by which God is just and punishes the sinners and the unjust. Although I was a blameless monk, I felt myself as a sinner before God, suffered great trouble of conscience and was unable to look with confidence on God as propitiated by my satisfaction, therefore I did not love, but on the contrary, hated, the just God Who punishes sinners; I was angry with Him with furious murmuring, and said: The unhappy sinners and those who owing to original sin are for all eternity rejected are already sufficiently oppressed by every kind of misfortune owing to the Ten Commandments, and as though this were not enough God wills [according to Rom. i.] by means of the gospel to heap pain on pain, and threatens us with His Justice and His Anger even in the gospel.”

  In his Table-Talk, as reported by Heydenreich, he says in the winter of 1542-43 in a quite similar way: “These words were always in my mind. Wherever the ‘Justice of God’ occurs in Scripture I was only able to understand this to mean the justice by which He Himself is just and judges according to justice.... I stood there and knocked for someone to open to me, but no one came to undo the door; I did not know what to make of it.... Before finding the solution I shuddered with horror, I hated the Psalms and the Scripture where the justice of God occurs, which I took to mean that He was just and the Judge of sinners, but not that He was our Justification and our imputed righteousness.” “The whole of Scripture stood like a wall in front of me.”

  “As often as I read that the Justice of God was revealed in the Gospel,” he says in his Commentary on Genesis, “I wished that God had never revealed the Gospel, for who could love an angry God Who judges and condemns?”

  “This word Justice,” he says in another Commentary in 1532, “cost me much sweat (‘magno sudore mihi constitit’). To interpret this as though it meant the justice according to which God damns the wicked is not merely unfounded but very dangerous; it awakens in the heart great hatred of God and His Justice; for who can love Him Who treats the sinner according to justice? Never forget that God’s justice means that justice by which we are justified; it is the gift of the remission of sins.”

  That in truth it “cost him much sweat” before he was able to overcome the objections suggested by the justice of God itself, is proved by other and stronger allusions of Luther to the interior storms he underwent at this crisis. We refer to other statements in which, as above, he is speaking of Bible passages containing the expression Justice of God. Thus for instance: “The words just and Justice of God were like a lightning-flash in my conscience (‘fulmen in conscientia’); when I heard them, they at once filled me with terror. I thought God is Just and therefore He punishes.” “That word iustitia,” he said in September, 1538, “was a thunder-clap to my heart. When as a papist I read: ‘Deliver me in Thy Justice’ (Ps. xxx. 2), and ‘In Thy Truth,’ etc., I immediately represented to myself the avenging Justice and the fury of an angry God. In my heart I hated Paul when I read: ‘The Justice of God is revealed in the Gospel’ ... till at last in my affliction a remedy presented itself.”

  Here we may mention some statements, which, though they belong to his later, fictitious portrayal of his spiritual development, nevertheless contain an element of truth concerning his inner life at the time when he was still a monk, and probably during those very months when he was excitedly and confusedly brooding over the assurance of salvation. In reality they merely describe in greater detail what the above passages relate of his dread of God’s Justice, though they also falsely charge all papists and all monks with being full of servile fear for the Judge, and forming a school of despair.

  “We fled from Christ,” he says in one of these remarkable passages, “as from the devil; for we were taught that everyone must appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ with his works and orders.... The Gospel tells us that Christ does not come as a Judge but as a Saviour; but the monks taught the contrary, namely, that He was to be our Judge.” Now, he says, elsewhere, the word of God which has been rediscovered “depicts Christ as our Justice.” But in the monastery he, like all the others, had “fallen away from the faith,” and therefore his “heart trembled and palpitated for fear lest God should not be gracious” to him. “I often shuddered at the name of Jesus and when I looked at Him on the cross, He seemed to me like a lightning-flash.”

  He had often, he assures us, been forced to say: “I wish there were no God,” “and none of them looked upon my unbelief as a sin.”

  It was “simple idolatry, for I did not believe in Christ but looked on Him as a stern and terrible Judge.” “I did not know how I stood towards God,” “was unable to pray aright,” indeed “no one knew anything” about prayer, “for we did not pray in faith in Christ.”

  It was a “great martyrdom and bondage from which the gospel set us free”; I was, as it were, in a privy and in the kingdom of the devil. He felt the terrors of the Divine Judgment, he assures us (possibly on account of the inward wrestling with the iustitia Dei) so that his “hair stood on end” when he thought of it. “At the monastery I shuddered when they spoke of death or the other life.”

  “I was the most wretched man on earth; day and night there was nothing but howling and despair which no one was able to put an end to for me. Thus I was bathed and baptised and properly sweated in my monkery. Thanks be to God that I did not sweat myself to death, otherwise I should have long ago been in the depths of hell with my monkish baptism. For I knew Christ only as a stern Judge from Whom I wished to escape and was unable to do so.... Thus have they tortured many a worthy soul throughout life and at last thrown him in despair into the infernal abyss.�
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  “In this way I raged (‘Ita furebam’),” Luther continues in the Latin Preface where he speaks of his sudden discovery, “and my conscience caused me terror and confusion; I knocked imploringly at the verse of Paul (Rom. i. 17) with a burning thirst to know what it meant.” He now describes the actual inward experience.

  “At last, while brooding day and night, by the mercy of God I noticed the connection between the words: the Justice of God is revealed therein [in the gospel], as it is written, ‘The just man liveth by faith.’ Then I began to understand the Justice of God as that by which the just man lives by the gift of God, viz. by faith; [I saw that] the sense is this: ‘By the gospel, justice, i.e. the passive justice of God, is revealed by which the merciful God justifies by faith, as it is written: ‘The just man liveth by faith.’ Then I felt myself born again and fancied I had passed through the gates of Paradise. The whole of Scripture thereupon appeared to me in quite a different light. I ran rapidly through the passages in question as they lived in my memory and compared them with other expressions, such as: ‘Work of God,’ i.e. the work which God carries on in us; ‘Power of God,’ by which He makes us strong; ‘Wisdom of God,’ by which He makes us wise; likewise the ‘Strength of God,’ ‘Salvation of God,’ and ‘Honour of God.’ Then I extolled that sweetest word, Justice, with as much love as I had previously hated it, and this passage of Paul’s became to me in very truth the gate of Paradise.” He adds that the reading of Augustine had strengthened him in his interpretation, and, “provided with better weapons by means of this experience, I set about the exposition of the Psalms for the second time”; this work was, however, interrupted by the Diet of Worms.

  Luther, it is true, does not speak here of the monastery tower as the scene of his experience, but this is described quite plainly in his other statements given below. In these the privy situated above the “Hypocaustum” is mentioned as the place where the discovery took place. They at the same time complete and confirm the account given in the Preface of the antecedents of this new enlightenment, i.e. the immediately preceding terrors of God’s avenging justice, the time it happened, viz. when Luther was engaged on the Psalms, and finally, the subject-matter of the experience.