Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The outward Word, according to other passages where Luther is rather more reticent concerning the “revelation” he had received, was that plain and unassailable Bible teaching on which all “Spirits” must agree without any danger of divergency. This Word he now identifies with preaching. Preaching, however, is part of the office, and both office and preaching were controlled by Luther; indeed the office had been instituted chiefly by him and his sovereign. Hence, in effect, the outward Word is still Luther’s word.

  “Faith,” we read of the outward Word, seemingly contradicting the freedom Luther had formerly proclaimed, “comes of hearing, i.e. from preaching, or from the outward Word. This is the order established by God and He will not derogate from it. Hence contempt for the outward Word and for Scripture is rank blasphemy, which the secular authorities are bound to punish, according to the second Commandment which enjoins the punishment of blasphemy.” This occurs in the booklet officially circulated in 1536 among the pastors of the Saxon Electorate. A Protestant researcher who has recently made a special study of the “Inquisition” in the Saxon Electorate has the following remark concerning this statement, which is by no means without a parallel in Luther’s works: “Thus even contempt for Scripture — here meaning contempt for Luther’s interpretation of the Bible text — was already regarded as ‘rank blasphemy’ which it was the duty of the authorities to punish. To such a pass had Evangelical freedom already come.”

  In order to uphold his own reading of the Bible against others which differed from his, Luther incidentally appealed with the utmost vigour, as the above examples show, to the Church, to tradition and to the Fathers, whose authority he had nevertheless solemnly renounced.

  This was the case especially in the controversies on the Zwinglian doctrine of the Supper. In defending the Real Presence and the literal sense of the words of consecration, Luther was in the right. He could not resist the temptation to adduce the convincing testimony of tradition, the voice of the “Church” from the earliest ages, which spoke so loudly in defence of the truth. It was then that he wrote the oft-quoted words to Albert of Brandenburg, in order to retain him on his side and to preserve him from Zwinglian contamination: “That Christ is present in the Sacrament is proved by the books and writings, both Greek and Latin, of the dear Fathers, also by the daily usage and our experience till this very hour; which testimony of all the holy Christian Churches, even had we no other, should suffice to make us remain by this article.” It is true that elsewhere we find him saying of the tradition of the Fathers: “When the Word of God comes down to us through the Fathers it seems to me like milk strained through a coal-sack, when the milk must needs be black and nasty.” This meant, he says, “that the Word of God was in itself pure and true, bright and clear, but by the teaching of the Fathers, by their books and their writings, it was much darkened and corrupted.” “And even if the Fathers agreed with you,” he says elsewhere, “that is not enough. I want Holy Writ, because I too am fighting you in writing.”

  In his controversy with Zwingli, Luther even came to plead the cause of the Catholic principle of authority. In his tract of 1527, “Das diese Wort Christi, ‘Das ist mein Leib’ noch fest stehen,” he declared that Zwingli’s interpretation of the Bible had already given rise to “many opinions, many factions and much dissension.” Such arbitrary exegesis neither can nor may go any further. “And if the world is to last much longer, we shall on account of such dissensions again be obliged, like the ancients, to seek for human contrivances and to set up new laws and ordinances in order to preserve the people in the unity of the faith. This will succeed as it succeeded before. In fine, the devil is too clever and powerful for us. He hinders us and stops the way everywhere. If we wish to study Scripture he raises up so much strife and dissension that we tire of it.... He is, and is called, Satan, i.e. an adversary.” He here attributes to the devil the defects of his own Scriptural system, and puts away as something wrong even the very thought that it contained faults, another trait to his psychological picture: “The devil is a conjurer.” “Unless God assists us, our work and counsel is of no avail. We may think of it as we like, he still remains the Prince of this world. Whoever does not believe this, let him simply try and see. Of this I have experienced something. But let no one believe me until he has himself experienced it.” There is no doubt, that, in 1527, Luther did have to go through some severe struggles of conscience.

  The Swiss held fast to “Scripture” and to their own “Spirit.”

  H. Bullinger, the leader of the Zwinglians, proved more logical than Luther in his interpretation of the new principle of Scripture. In his book on the difference between the Evangelical and Roman doctrines (Zürich, 1551) he deliberately rejected quite a number of traditional, Catholic practices which Luther had spared; for instance, the use of religious pictures in the churches, ceremonies, the liturgical chants, confession, etc. With this same weapon he attacked not only Catholicism, but also Luther’s doctrine of the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament and the whole Church system as introduced by the Wittenbergers.

  Luther, for his part, in order to retain the Bible on his side, used a very arbitrary method of Scripture interpretation both against the Swiss theologians and against Catholicism and its defenders. In many cases it was only his peculiar exegesis (to be considered below, xxviii., 2) that furnished him with the Scriptural arguments he needed.

  Thus, in his attitude towards Scripture, the Wittenberg Professor wavers between tradition, to which he frequently appeals almost against his will, and that principle of independent study of the Bible under enlightenment from on high, which is ever obtruding itself on him. The latter principle he never denied, in spite of his sad experiences with the doctrine that everyone who is taught by the Holy Ghost can draw from Scripture his own belief, and, according to St. Paul, with the help of this light, test the teaching and opinions of all. Yet — strange as it may seem on the part of an assailant of authority — the last word on matters of faith belongs, according to him, to authority. This is his opinion for practical reasons, because not everyone can be expected, and but few are able, to undertake the task of finding their belief for themselves in the Bible. Moreover, what one may possibly have learnt from Scripture at the cost of toil and with the help of inspiration, cannot so readily become the common property of all. On the other hand, according to Luther, the “exterius iudicium” which is supported by the “externa claritas” of Scripture, as interpreted by himself and proclaimed with authority by the preachers, was intended for all.

  The Way of Settling Doubts Concerning Faith. Assurance of Salvation and Belief in Dogma.

  When we come to examine Luther’s teaching on the nature of the faith which is based on the Bible and to enquire how doubts regarding this Bible teaching were to be quieted, we are again faced by the utmost waywardness.

  In his “Von beider Gestallt des Sacramentes” (1522), Luther says of belief in the truths of revelation generally: “And it is not enough for you to say: Luther, Peter or Paul has said it, but you must feel Christ Himself in your own conscience and be assured beyond all doubt that it is really the Word of God, even though all the world should be against it. So long as you have not this feeling it is certain that you have not tasted the Word of God, but are still hanging by your ears on the lips or the pen of man and not clinging with all your heart to the Word.” Since Christ is the one and only teacher it is plain “what horrid murderers of souls those are [viz. the Papists] who preach to souls the doctrines of men.”

  The whole passage is of the utmost practical importance, because in it Luther seeks to solve the question anxiously asked by so many: Who will assure us that all that we are now told that we must believe if we do not wish to lose our souls, is really the teaching of Christ? To this he here gives an answer which is intended to satisfy even one in danger of death and to instruct him fully on the matter of his salvation.

  The olden Church had given her faithful a clear answer which set every doubt at rest:
The warrant for our belief is the authority of the Church instituted by Christ and endowed by God with infallibility. In effect the voice of the General Councils, the decisions of an unbroken line of vicars of Christ on the Papal throne, the teaching of the hierarchy everywhere and at every time, the consensus of the faithful, in brief, the outward testimony of Christ’s whole Church, aroused in all hearts the happy certainty that the faith offered was indeed the revelation of God; people, indeed, believed in God and in His Word, but what they believed was what the Church proposed for belief. The Church also declared, though not in the same sense as Luther, “Fides non ullorum auctoritate sed Spiritu solo Dei oritur in corde.” The Church taught, what the Council of Trent emphasised anew, viz. that, by the action of the Holy Ghost alone, i.e. by the supernatural Grace of God which exalts the powers of man, faith attains to what is requisite for salvation.

  Luther, who overthrew the authority of the Church’s teaching office, was unable to provide the soul in its struggle after faith with any guarantee beyond his own authority to take the Church’s place. In his “Von beider Gestallt des Sacramentes” he refers to Christ Himself the man oppressed by doubt and fear, viz. to a court of appeal inaccessible to the seeker, and this he did at a time when he himself had started all kinds of discussions on the sense of the Gospel, and when Christ was being claimed in support of the most widely divergent views. He refers the enquirer to Christ, because here he deems it better not to say plainly “hold fast to me,” though elsewhere such an admonition was not too bold a one for him to give. “Think rather for yourself,” such is his advice, “you have death or persecution in front of you, and I cannot be with you then nor you with me. Each one must fight for himself and overcome the devil, death and the world. Were you at such a time to be looking round to see where I was, or I to see where you were, or were you disturbed because I or anyone else on earth asserted differently, you would be lost already and have let the Word slip from your heart, for you would be clinging, not to the Word, but to me or to some other; in that case there is no help.”

  He thus leaves the anxious man “to himself” at the most awful of moments; elsewhere, too, he does the same. When he invites every man to “taste the Word of God” betimes and to “feel” how directly “the Master speaks within his heart,” this is merely a roundabout way of repeating the comfortless warning that “each one must fight for himself.” In other words, what he means is: I have no sure warrant to give in the stead of the Church’s authority; you must find out for yourself whether you have received the true Word of Christ by consulting your own feelings.

  In addition to this, in the opinion of many Protestant theologians, the faith to be derived from the Bible which everyone must necessarily arrive at was very much circumscribed by Luther. “Man’s attitude towards Christ and His saving Grace” loomed so large with him, that it “decided the question whether a man was, or was not, a believer.” If, in the Protestantism of to-day, Luther’s “idea of faith” is frequently taken rather narrowly, it must be admitted that in many of his statements and demands he himself goes even further. We have here to do with that “two-sidedness in his attitude towards Scripture,” which “is apparent at every period of his life.” If we keep to the earlier and more “liberal” side of his “Evangelical conception of faith,” then indeed the trusting and confident assumption of such a relationship with Christ would certainly be “decisive in the question whether a man was a believer or not, and Luther himself frequently used this criterion, for instance, when he answers as follows the question: Who is a member of the Church and whom must one regard as a dear brother in Christ: ‘All who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us by His death and to obtain grace for us’; or again elsewhere: ‘All those who cling to Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or, yet again: All those ‘who seek the Lord with all their heart and soul, and trust only in God’s mercy.’ In such utterances we have the purely religious conception of Evangelical faith clearly summarised.” (Cp. above, vol. iii., .)

  Agreeably with this conception of faith, some Protestants have contended that Luther should have been much more broad-minded with regard to doubts and to doctrines which differed from his own; his opposition to other views, notably to those of the Zwinglians, brought him, however, to another conception of faith, to one more closely related to the Catholic theory. According to Catholic doctrine, faith is a firm assent to all that God has revealed and the Church proposes for belief. It is made up of many articles, not one of which can be set aside without injury to the whole. Luther, so we are told, “owing to his controversy with Zwingli, ran the risk of exchanging his conception of faith for this one [the Catholic one], according to which faith is the acceptance of a whole series of articles of faith.”

  In reality he did not merely “run the risk” of reaching such a doctrine; he had, all along, even in earlier days, been moving on these same lines, albeit in contradiction with himself. It was in fact nothing altogether new when he wrote in the Articles of Schwabach: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful in Christ, who believe, hold and teach the above Articles.” The faith for which he wishes to stand always comprised the contents of the oldest Creeds, and he prefers to close his eyes to the fact that they were really undermined by his other propositions. By these articles he is determined to abide. Hence it is hardly fair to appeal to him in favour of their abrogation, and any such appeal would only serve to emphasise his self-contradiction. Luther himself, when dealing with opponents, frequently speaks of the breaking of a single link as being sufficient to make the whole chain fall apart. “All or nothing” was his cry, viz. the very same as Catholics had used against his own innovations. In short, in his “two-sidedness,” he, quite generally, seeks a sure foothold against difficulties from within and from without in the principle of authority in its widest meaning, and, when trying to safeguard the Apostles’ Creed and the “œcumenical symbols,” he appeals expressly to the Catholic past. He says that by thus vindicating the Apostles’ Creed and that of Nicæa he wished to show that he “was true to the rightful, Christian Church, which had retained them till that day.” The Fathers preserved them and, as in the case of the Athanasian Creed, supplemented and enlarged the traditional formulas, the better to counter heretics; Luther is even willing to accept new terms not found in Scripture, but coined by the Church, such as “peccatum originale” or “consubstantialis” ὁμοούσιος, since they might profitably be employed against false teachers.

  Protestant Objections to Luther’s so-called “Formal Principle.”

  “It is not for us to tone down or conceal the contradictions which present themselves,” writes a Protestant theologian who has made Luther’s attitude towards Scripture the subject of particular study. “... Even judged by the standard of his own day Luther does not display that uniformity which we are entitled to expect.... The psychological motives in particular are very involved and spring from different sources. The very fact that throughout his life he exhibited a certain obstinacy and violence towards both himself and others, must render doubtful any attempt to trace everything back to a single source. Obstinacy always points to contradictions.” This author goes so far as to say: “We might almost give vent to the paradox, that only in these contradictions is uniformity apparent; such a proposition would, however, hold good only before the court of psychology.” “To-day it is not possible to embrace Luther’s view in its entirety.”

  In an historical account of Luther’s teaching (and it is in this that most Protestant scholars are interested) we must, as we advance, ever keep in view Luther’s whole individuality with all its warring elements. The difficulty thus presented to our becoming better acquainted with his views is, however, apparent from the words already quoted from one of Luther’s biographers concerning Luther’s wealth of ideas, which also, to some extent, apply even to his statements on dogma: “Every word Luther utters plays in a hundred lights and every eye meets with a different radiance which it woul
d gladly fix.”

  In spite of the difficulties arising from this character of the Wittenberg Doctor, early orthodox Lutheranism taught that he had set up the “sola scriptura” as the “formal principle” of the new doctrine. According to eminent authorities in modern Protestantism, however, this formal principle was stillborn; it was never capable in practice of supporting an edifice of doctrine, still less of forming a community of believers. Hence the tendency has been to make it subservient to the “Evangelical” understanding of the Bible.

  Thus F. Kropatscheck, the author of the learned work “Das Schriftprinzip der lutherischen Kirche” (1904), says candidly, “that the formal principle of Protestantism [Scripture only] does not suffice in itself as a foundation for the true Christian life whether of the individual or of a community.” “Where the Evangelical content is lacking, the formal principle does not rise above sterile criticism.”

  Kropatscheck’s examination of the mediæval views on Scripture led him moreover to recognise, that, in theory at least, the Bible always occupied its due place of honour; its content was, however, so he fancies, not understood until Luther rediscovered it as the Gospel of the “forgiveness of sins through Christ.” So far, according to him, did esteem for Scripture as the Word of God go in the Middle Ages, that he even ventures to characterise the formula “sola scriptura” as “Catholic commonplace”; this, however, he can only have intended in the sense in which it was read and supplemented by another Protestant theologian: “In practice this did not exclude the interpretation of Scripture on the lines of tradition.” “The so-called formal principle,” the above work goes on to say, with quite remarkable fairness to the past, “was much more utilised in the Middle Ages than popular accounts would lead us to suppose. To the Reformation we owe neither the formula (‘sola scriptura’) nor the insisting on the literal sense, nor the theory of inspiration, nor scarcely anything else demanded on the score of pure scriptural teaching.” “Almost all” the qualities attributed to Holy Scripture in the early, orthodox days of Protestantism “are already to be met with in the Middle Ages.”