Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  From that time forward Luther gives the most varied expression to the principle of the free interpretation of Scripture: He declares, that the Bible may be interpreted by everyone, even by the “humble miller’s maid, nay, by a child of nine if it has the faith.” “The sheep must judge whether the pastors teach in Christ’s own tone.” “Christ alone, and none other than the Crucified, do we acknowledge as our Master. Paul will not have us believe him or an angel (Gal. i. 8, 12) unless Christ lives and speaks in him.” He is at pains to inform “the senseless Sophists, the unlearned bishops, monks and priests, the Pope and all his Gomorrahs” that we were baptised, not in the name of any Father of the Church, “but in the name of Jesus Christ.”

  “That a Christian assembly or congregation has the right and the power to judge of doctrine and to appoint and dismiss preachers” is the title of one of Luther’s writings of 1523. Later we meet the downright declaration: “Neither Church, nor Fathers, nor Apostles, nor angels are to be listened to except so far as they teach the pure Word of God (‘nisi afferant et doceant purum verbum Dei’).”

  In his bias against his foes he does not pause to consider that the very point at issue is to discern what the “pure Word of God” is, for, where it exists, any opposition on the part of “Church, Fathers and Apostles” is surely inconceivable. It is merely an echo of his early mystic theories when, in a dreamy sort of way, he hints, that the pure Word manifests itself to each believer and reveals itself to the world without the intervention of any outward authority. It was clearly mere prejudice in his own favour which led him to be ruled by the one idea that the “pure Word of God” was to be found nowhere but in his own reading of the Bible.

  How greatly he allowed himself to be deceived by such fancies is already apparent in Luther’s earliest known statements on Scripture at the very beginning of the public controversy. His devotion to Biblical study from his youth, and the academic laurels he had won in this branch of learning, led him, consciously or not, to find in himself an embodiment of Holy Scripture. Only in this way can we explain his strange language concerning the Bible in his “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons” against Tetzel. Here, at the very commencement, instead of setting quietly about his task, which was to defend his new interpretation against the tradition, objected by his opponent, he sings a pæan in praise of the unassailable Divine Word. “All who blaspheme Scripture with their false glosses,” he writes, “shall perish by their own sword, like Goliath (1 Kings xvii. 51).... Christ’s doctrine is His Divine Word. Whence it is forbidden, not only to this blasphemer [Tetzel], but to any angel in heaven, to change one letter of it. For it is written: ‘God does not deny what He has once said,’ Job xiii. [xiv.], and in the Psalter [cxviii. 89]: ‘For ever, O Lord, Thy word standeth firm.’ Not a jot or tittle of the most insignificant letter of the law of God shall pass; everything must be fulfilled.” Here Tetzel becomes a rude ass, “who brays at Luther,” reminding the latter of a “sow” that defiles the venerable Scripture.

  How uncalled for his emphatic words quoted above on the value of the Bible really were can be more readily perceived now from a distance; for his opponents’ esteem and that of the Church generally for the Word of God was certainly not behind his, whilst the Church provided a safeguard for Holy Scripture which Luther was unwilling to admit. But in those days, in the midst of the struggle, such praises showered by Luther on Holy Writ served to make people think — not at all to his disadvantage — that he was the herald and champion of the Bible, which the Popish Church did not reckon at its true worth, whereas, all the while, he should have been striving to show that his contentions really had the support of Scripture. Even later his misleading cry was ever: Back to the sacred stronghold of the Bible! Back to the “true, pure and undefiled Word of God!”

  “Thy Word is the Truth” was his habitual battle-shout, though about this there had never been the least dispute.

  “Against all the sayings of the Fathers,” he says in 1522 in his reply to King Henry VIII, “against all the arts and words of angels, men and devils I set the Scriptures and the Gospel.... Here I stand and here I defy them.... The Word of God I count above all else and the Divine Majesty supports me; hence I should not turn a hair were a thousand Augustines against me, and am certain that the true Church adheres with me to God’s Word.” “Here Harry of England must hold his tongue.” Harry would see how Luther “stood upon his rock” and that he, Harry, “twaddled” like a “silly fool.”

  Experience given by the Spirit.

  The “rock” on which Luther’s interpretation of the Bible rests is a certain inward feeling and perception by the individual of the Bible’s teaching.

  In the last resort it is on an inward experience of having been taught by the Spirit the truth and meaning of the Divine words that the Christian must firmly take his stand. Just as Luther believed himself to have passed through such an experience, so, according to him, all others must first reach it and then make it their starting-point.

  This is the Spirit from on High that co-operates with the Word of Scripture.

  “Each man must believe solely because it is the Word of God and because he feels within that it is true, even though an angel from heaven and all the world should preach against it.” We must not regard the “opinion of all Christendom” but “each one for himself alone” must believe the Scriptures. “The Word itself must content the heart and embrace and seize a man and, as it were, hold him captive till he feels how true and right it is.”

  “Hence every Christian can learn the truth from Scripture,” so a present-day Protestant theologian describes Luther’s then teaching; “he is bound by no human school of interpretation, but the plain sense of Scripture and the experience of his heart suffice.” He adds: “This might of course draw down upon Luther the charge of subjectivism.” “What Luther said of the ‘whisper’ of the word of forgiveness is well known. Thus [according to Luther] God can, when necessary, work without the use of any means.” Thanks to the “whisper” the Bible becomes a sure guide, “for [according to him] the Holy Ghost always works in the heart the selfsame truth.” “From the peculiar religious standpoint of his own experience of salvation,” Luther, so the same theologian admits, determined his “attitude towards Scripture.” In this we have one of the results of his “personal experience.”

  “How it comes to pass,” says Luther, “that Christ thus enters the heart you cannot tell; but your heart feels plainly, by the experience of faith, that He is there indeed.” “When the Holy Ghost performs His office then it proceeds.” “No one can rightly understand God or the Word of God unless he receives it directly from the Holy Ghost.”

  When his friend Carlstadt, together with whom Luther had at first insisted on Scripture only, later struck out a path of his own in doctrine and ecclesiastical practice while continuing to appeal to Scripture and to his own enlightenment, even the controversy with him and the “fanatics” failed to make Luther relinquish in theory his standpoint concerning the Bible and the Spirit as the one source and rule of faith. He became, however, more cautious in formulating it and endeavoured at least to leave a back door open. He was less insistent in his assertion that the Spirit instructed, by the inward Word, each one who read the Scriptures; so much the more did he emphasise the supposed “clearness of the outward Word,” viz. the Bible, and deprecate any wanton treatment of it (by anyone save himself); at the same time he began to lay stress on the outward side of the Church, on the preaching office and the administration of the Sacraments. The fanatics he reproves for “merely gaping at the Spirit in their hearts,” whereas the outward articles must necessarily precede this. At times what he says almost looks like a repudiation of his earlier theory of enlightenment through the Spirit; for instance, when he describes how the fanatics wait “till the heavenly voice comes and God speaks to them.” Now, the outward Word of the Gospel, proclaimed by men truly “called,” is to be the guiding star amidst the mischief wrought by the sectarians; this outward Word, so
he now fancies, will surely avail to decide every issue, seeing that it is so clear; only by dint of juggling could the sense of the Bible, as manifest in the outward Word, be distorted; looked at fairly it at once settled every question — needless to say in Luther’s favour; to understand it, all that was needed was the “natural language,” the “Lady Empress who far excels all subtle inventions.”

  As to the alleged clearness of the word of Scripture it is sufficient to recall that he himself indirectly challenged it by accusing the whole Church of having misunderstood the Bible, and to consider the abyss that separated his interpretation, even of the most vital texts, from that of the scholars of the past. “Though we had the Bible and read it,” he says, “yet we understood nothing of it.” — Nevertheless he fancied he could save his theory by appealing to the clearness of the text and the assistance rendered by a knowledge of languages. “St. Paul wills” (1 Cor. xiv. 29), so Luther says, in a writing on the schools, “that Christians should judge all doctrine, though for this we must needs be acquainted with the language. For the preacher or teacher may indeed read the Bible through and through as much as he chooses, but he will sometimes be right and sometimes wrong, if there be no one there to judge whether he is doing it well or ill. Thus in order to judge there must be skill or a knowledge of tongues, otherwise it is all to no purpose.”

  But above all, as he impresses on the reader in the same tract, he himself had thrown light on the Bible by his knowledge of languages; his interpretation, thanks to the “light” of the languages, had effected “such great things that all the world marvels and must confess that now we have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it, that it is restored to its pristine purity, and is even more undefiled than at the time of St. Jerome or Augustine.” His willingness, expressed from time to time, to submit himself or any other teacher to the judgment of anyone possessed of greater learning and a more profound spiritual sense, attracted many enlightened minds to his party.

  Luther’s self-contradiction in speaking, first, of the great clearness of the Bible, and then of its great obscurity, cannot fail to strike one.

  “Whoever now wants to become a theologian,” he says, for instance, “enjoys a great advantage. For, first, he has the Bible which is now so clear that he can read it without any difficulty.” “Should anyone say that it is necessary to have the interpretation of the Fathers and that Scripture is obscure, you must reply, that that is untrue. There is no book on earth more plainly written than Holy Scripture; in comparison with all other books it is as the sun to any other light.” Elsewhere he says: “The ungodly sophists [the Schoolmen] have asserted, that in Holy Scripture there is much that is obscure and not yet clearly explained,” but according to him they were not able to bring forward one vestige of proof; “if the words are obscure in one passage, they are clear in another,” and a comparison makes everything plain, particularly to one who is learned in languages. — Thus the Bible, according to a further statement, is “clearer, easier and more certain than any other writing.” “It is in itself quite certain, quite easy and quite plain; it is its own explanation; it is the universal argument, judge and enlightener, and makes all clear to all.”

  Later, however, the idea that Holy Scripture was obscure preponderated with him. Two days before his death Luther wrote in Latin on a piece of paper, which was subsequently found on his table, his thoughts on the difficulty of understanding Scripture: “No one can understand the Bucolics of Virgil who has not been a herdsman for five years; nor his Georgics unless he has laboured five years in the fields. In order to understand aright the epistles of Cicero a man must have been full twenty years in the public service of a great State. No one need fancy he has tasted Holy Scripture who has not ruled Churches for a hundred years with prophets like Elias and Eliseus, with John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.” In all likelihood his experiences with the sectarians in his own camp led him towards the end of his life to lay more stress on the difficulty of understanding the Bible.

  Even with the “plain, arid Scripture” and a clear brain it may easily happen, as he says, to a man to fall into danger through the Bible, by looking at it from “his own conceit,” as “through a painted glass,” and “seeing no other colour than that of the glass.” Such people cannot then be set right, but become “masters of heresy.” All heresy seems to him to come from Scripture and to be based on it. There is no heretic, he says in a sermon in 1528, who does not appeal to Scripture; hence it came about that people called the Bible a heresy-book. The “heresy-book” was a favourite topic with him. Two years earlier he had used the expression twice on one day, and in 1525, when complaining in a sermon that the fanatics decked themselves out with Scripture, he said: “Thus it is true what people say, viz. that Holy Scripture is a heresy-book, i.e. a book that the heretics claim for themselves; there is no other book that they misuse so much as this book, and there has never been a heresy so bad or so gross that it has not sheltered itself behind Scripture.” These preachers from among the fanatics, he says, boast of the voice of God and of the Spirit, but they were never sent; let them prove by miracles their Divine mission!

  Thus he had retracted nothing of his strange doctrine concerning private enlightenment; on the contrary, when not actually dealing with the sectarians, he still declared with that persistence of which he was such a master and which shrank from no self-contradictions, that the Spirit alone taught man how to understand the Scriptures, now that man, owing to original sin, was quite unable to grasp even the plainest passages. “In it [the Bible] not one word is of so small account as to allow of our understanding it by reason.” Only by virtue of the higher light by which he understood Scripture could a man “impartially prove and judge the different spirits and their doctrines.” This he wrote in his “De servo arbitrio” at a time when he had already engaged upon the struggle with the “Heavenly Prophets.” And to these principles he remained faithful till death without, however, as a Protestant scholar repeatedly points out of the several sides of Luther’s theology, “explaining more clearly” their relation to the difficulties involved.

  Concerning the inward Word or the enlightenment by the Spirit some words of Luther’s in 1531 may be given here.

  In that year he preached on the Gospel of St. John. He dwelt at some length on his favourite passage: “Whoever believeth in Me hath everlasting life,” and its context. Here, speaking repeatedly of the outward and the inward Word, he insists especially on the former and particularly on the hearing of sermons with faith, though so far was he from relinquishing the inward Word that he combines it in a strange way with the outward, and finally arrives once more at his earlier pet idea: Whoever is taught inwardly by the Spirit is free to judge and decide on all things.

  “The Lord Christ intends,” so he explains, “that we should hold fast and remain by the outward, spoken Word, and thereby He has put down reason from its seat,” i.e. has repudiated the objections of the fanatics who differed from him. Christ, according to Luther, exhorts us “diligently to listen to and learn the Word.” The beginning of Justification is in this, that “God proclaims to you the spoken, outward Word.” To this end God has His messengers and vicars. “When you hear a sermon from St. Paul or from me, you hear God the Father Himself; yet both of us, you and I, have one schoolmaster and doctor, viz. the Father ... only that God speaks to you through me.” Here he does not enter into the question of his mission, though he shows plainly enough that he was not going to be set aside. “God must give the spoken Word,” “otherwise it does not make its way. But if you are set on helping yourselves, why then should I preach? In that case you have no need of me.... We may be angered and stupefied over it” (viz. at the apparent divergence between the Word of God and reason), yet we must listen and weigh “the Word that is preached by the lips of Christ.”

  Excellent as this exhortation may be so far as St. Paul was concerned, the speaker is at no pains to supply his hearer with any proof of his own sayin
g, viz. “that God speaks to you through me.” He insists upon it, however, and now comes the intervention of the Spirit: God must “inspire the conviction that it is His Word” which has been heard. “Without the Word we must not do anything, but must be taught by God.” “When the heart can feel assured that God the Father Himself is speaking to us [when we listen to a sermon], then the Holy Ghost and the light enter in; then man is enlightened and becomes a happy master, and is able to decide and judge of all doctrine, for he has the light, and faith in the Divine Word, and feels certain within his breast that his doctrine is the very Word of God.” When you “feel this in your heart, then account yourself one of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will allow Him to be Master and surrender yourself to Him. In this way will you be saved.”

  The real breathing of the Spirit of God, however, confirms the utterances only of the “preaching office,” viz. Luther’s and the Lutherans’. This he proclaims in the following words: “The true breathing and inspiration of the Holy Ghost is that which is wafted through the preaching office and the outward Word.”

  In what follows, for the better understanding of Luther’s attitude towards the Bible, we shall examine two consequences of his subjective ways, viz. their effect on the inspiration and the Canon of Scripture, and the exegetical disagreement which was the result of the principle of inward experience, also the means he chose to remedy it.

  Inspiration and the Canon of Scripture.