It is true that he laments bitterly the increase of the fear of death among the new believers. In the case of epidemics he sees to his regret that everybody is “scared and takes to flight.” Far greater than ever under Popery, so he says, “is now, under the strong light of the Evangel, men’s fear of losing their life.” For this again he has an explanation to hand. When, for instance, the plague spread to Wittenberg in 1538 he wrote: Whence comes all this fear? “Formerly, under Popery, the people were not so much afraid. The reason is this: In Popery we trusted in the merits of the monks and of others, but now each one has to trust to and depend on himself.” Elsewhere, with the same object of reassuring himself and others, he says: The Evangel with its clear light of truth causes the holiness of God to be better perceived and thus leaves more room for the sense of fear. This he here reckons as an advantage over Popery, though, as a rule, his grievance against Catholicism had been that it excited fearsomeness by the gloomy legal spirit which prevailed in it and by its ignoring of God’s mercy. — We shall not be far wrong if we regard such statements as dictated more by psychological than by theological considerations.
“It is a great thing,” says Luther, referring to his doctrine of faith alone, “to lay claim to righteousness; then man dares to say: I am a son of God; whereas the state of grace affrights him.... Without practice (‘sine practica’) no one is able to repudiate righteousness-by-works and to preach faith alone.” He bewails “that we are too blind to be able to seize upon the treasure of grace.... We refuse to call ourselves holy,” in spite of the certainty which faith brings us. Here our opponents, the Papists and the Sacramentarians, are not nearly so well off; at least they could not “quiet their conscience” as he could do by his method, because, owing to their works, they were always in doubt as to their own salvation. (At any rate, they were in no state of “pestilential security.”) “They are always in doubt and wondering: Who knows whether it is really pleasing to God?” Yet they cling to works and “say Anathema to Jesus.”
“I have to labour daily,” he says, “before I can lay hold on Christ”; he adds: “That is due to force of habit, because for so many years [in Popery] I looked upon Christ as a mere judge. It is an old, rotten tree that is rooted in me.... We have, however, now again reached the light; in my case this occurred when I was made a Doctor.... But know this, that Christ is not sent to judge and to punish, not to bite and to slay sinners as I used to fancy and as some still think.”
His extraordinary esteem for the new doctrine of the power of faith alone and the assurance of salvation, would furnish quite a riddle to one not aware of the constitution of his mind.
So greatly did he prize this doctrine, that, according to the testimony of Melanchthon, he referred to it all other articles of faith, even that of creation. “The article of the forgiveness of sins,” he says, “is the foundation on which the article of the creation of the world rests.” “If we drop this article then we may well despair. The reason why heretics and fanatics [Papists and sectarians] go astray is simply their ignorance of this doctrine. Without it it is impossible to contend with Satan and with Popery, still less to be victorious.” — Thanks to such statements as these Luther’s article of Justification came to be termed the article on which the Church stands or falls.
The “Article on which the Church Stands or Falls”: According to Modern Protestants.
Protestant scholars are far from sharing Luther’s high regard for his dogma of Justification, and what they say throws a curious light on the fashion in which he deceived himself.
Amongst the Protestant voices raised in protest against this doctrine, the following deserve to be set on record. It is clear, says K. Hase, that the Catholic doctrine is more closely related to the “Protestant view now prevailing”; he avers, that the “Protestant theologians of our day, even those who are sticklers for the purity of Lutheranism, have described saving faith as that which works by love, quite agreeably to the scholastic conception of the ‘fides formata,’ and have opposed to it a pretended Catholic dogma of Justification by good works.”
This well-known controversial writer when expressing it as his opinion that Luther’s doctrine of Justification is now practically discarded, was not even at pains to exclude the conservative theologians of his party: “Döllinger is quite right in charging the so-called ‘old believers’ amongst us with having fallen away from the Reformer’s dogma of Justification as strictly and theologically defined.”
Thus oblivion seems to be the tragic fate of Luther’s great theological discovery, which, if we are to believe what he says, was to him the light of his existence and his most powerful incentive in his whole work, and which figured so prominently in all his attacks on Rome. Was it not this doctrine which played the chief part in his belief in the utter corruption of the Church of earlier days, when, instead of prizing the grace of Christ, everything was made to depend on works, which had led to the ruin of Christendom, to the debasement of the clergy and to the transformation of the Pope into Antichrist?
The sole authority of Scripture, Luther’s other palladium, had already suffered sadly since the Revolution period, and now the doctrine of Justification seems destined to a like fate. Albert Ritschl was pronouncing a severe censure when he declared, “that, amongst the differences of opinion prevalent in the ranks of the evangelical theologians, the recognition of two propositions [the sole authority of Scripture and Justification by imputation] was the minimum that could be expected of anyone who wished to be considered Evangelical.” For the fact is that the minimum required by Ritschl, is, according to the admission of Protestant critics themselves, frequently no longer held by these theologians.
Of the Lutheran doctrine of Justification here in question, P. Genrich, a theologian, in his work on the idea of regeneration, says: “If we glance at the process of salvation as described in the evangelical theological handbooks of the 19th century, we may well be astonished at the extraordinary divergencies existing as regards both the conception of regeneration, and the place it is to occupy in the system of doctrine. There are hardly two theologians who entirely agree on the point.” — Of the practical side of the Lutheran doctrine in question the same writer states: “It is an almost universal complaint that this chief article of Evangelical faith is not of much use when it is a question of implanting and fostering piety, in the school, the church or in parish-work. Perhaps the preacher says a few words about it ... the teacher, too, feels it his duty to deal with it in his catechetical instructions.... Justification by faith is extolled in more or less eloquent words as the treasure of the Reformation, because Church history and theology have taught us so to regard it. But at heart one is glad to be finished with it and vaguely conscious that all one said was in vain, and that, to the children or congregation Justification still remains something foreign and scarcely understood.” Genrich himself lays the blame on the later formularies of Lutheranism for the mistaken notion of a righteousness coming from without; yet the formularies of Concord surely voiced Luther’s teaching better than the new exponents who are so disposed to tone it down.
Of the actual theory of Luther, de Lagarde wrote some fifty years ago: “The doctrine of Justification [Luther’s] is not the Evangel.... It was not the basic principle of the Reformation, and to-day in the Protestant Churches it is quite dead.” De Lagarde did not allow himself to be misled by the flowery language concerning personal religious experience which is all that remains of Luther’s doctrine in many modern expositions of it.
“Research in the domain of New-Testament history and in that of the Reformation,” says K. Holl, “has arrived at conclusions closely akin to de Lagarde’s.... It has been made impossible simply to set the Protestant doctrine of Justification on the same level with the Pauline and with that of the Gospel of Jesus.” Amongst the Protestant objections to the doctrine, he instances “its narrowness, which constitutes a limitation of the ethical insupportable to present-day tastes.” He attempts to explain, or rather
to amend, Luther’s theory, so as to give ethics its due and to evade Luther’s “paradox of a God,” Who, though inexorable in His moral demands, Himself procures for the offender salvation and life. As the new dogma originally stood “both its Catholic opponents and the Anabaptists were at one in contending that Luther’s doctrine of Justification could not fail to lead to moral laxity. Protestant theologians were not able to deny the weight of this objection.” In point of fact it involves an “antinomy, for which there is no logical solution.”
The same author writes elsewhere concerning the assurance of salvation which, according to Luther, accompanies justifying faith: Luther, standing as he did for predestinarianism, “clearly abolished thereby the possibility of attaining to any certainty of salvation. All his life Luther allowed this remarkable contradiction to remain, not because it escaped his notice, but because he had no wish to remove it.” Holl finds, moreover, in Luther’s opinions on Predestination “the climax of the thoughts underlying his doctrine of Justification”; “the strength of [justifying] faith has to be tested by one’s readiness to submit even to the sentence [of damnation].”
In conclusion we may cite what W. Köhler says of the unreasonableness of Luther’s denial of free-will, according to which either God or the devil sits astride man’s back.
“With the rejection of man’s pure passivity, or, as Luther says, of his being ridden by the Lord God, Luther’s theology suffers a set-back, and the Catholic polemics of the 16th century receive a tardy vindication.” Only owing to his “lucky lack of logic” did Luther steer clear of the disastrous moral consequences of such a view; “in practice” he still laid stress on good works in spite of the danger that the “feeling of security” and the idea of “sinlessness” might lead people “to sink into the mire.” His doctrine, however, in itself leads “either to his usual thought: We are sinners after all, or to extravagant praise of the Divine mercy which flings ‘black sheep’ into the ‘kingdom of grace.’”
Evangelical theologians generally are, however, full of admiration for the spirit in which Luther, thanks to his “inward experiences,” convinced both himself and others of the certainty of Justification. His “experience of God” had at any rate made him capable of an “heroic faith” and, by his “risking all for God,” he pointed out to the religion of the heart the true road to contentment for all future time. Luther’s doctrine of Justification was the “final deepening of the sense of personal religion” (K. Holl).
The objections on this point, raised against Luther in his own camp, are all the more significant seeing he made all religion to consist in the cloaking of sin and the pacifying assurance of forgiveness; his Evangel had come as a “solace for troubled consciences”; it is “nothing else but forgiveness, and is concerned only with sin, which it blots out, covers over, sweeps away and cleanses so long as we live.” Thanks to it the long-forgotten true conception of the Kingdom of God had at last been happily brought again to light.
The title of a sermon of Luther’s printed in 1525 expresses this idea as follows: “A Sermon on the Kingdom of Christ, which consists in the Forgiveness of Sins,” etc. The words of Christ to the man sick of the palsy (Mat. ix. 2) form the subject: “Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee.” “These words,” the preacher says, “indicate and sum up shortly what the Kingdom of Christ is.” Since the Kingdom of Christ must be defined in relation to the question: “How must we behave with regard to God?” it cannot and must “not be regarded otherwise” than according to these words: “Thy sins are forgiven thee”; for “this is the chief thing, viz. that which can quiet the conscience.” “Whence it follows that the Kingdom of Christ is so constituted that it contains nothing but comfort and forgiveness of sins.” The chief fault of our reason is its “inclination, everywhere manifest, to forsake this faith and knowledge and to fall back upon works.”
In Holy Scripture the object of the Kingdom of Christ is differently given. There it culminates in the glory of God. God’s glorification is the real aim of Christ’s coming, and must also be the supreme object of every believer. This does not in the least tally with that trumped-up holiness-by-works which Luther saw in Catholicism. This far higher, general, Catholic thought of God’s glory pervades the first petitions of the prayer taught by our Saviour Himself in the Our Father: “Hallowed be Thy Name,” etc.; only in the fifth petition do we hear of the forgiveness of sins for which, indeed, every human creature must implore. In the Our Father we acknowledge first of all our obligation to serve God with all our powers and strive to comply with our duty of glorifying His name. Hence Catholic religious instructions have never commenced with “the simple forgiveness of sin,” with attempts to cloak it and to induce a fancied security in the sinner; their purpose has ever been to show that man is created to serve God and to honour Him, and that he can best do so by imitation and love of Christ.
This high object, the only one worthy of man and his spiritual powers, leads us to consider the doctrine of good works.
4. Good Works in Theory and Practice
Man is naturally disposed to believe that, built as he is, he must take his share in working out his salvation, if he be in sin, by preparing himself with God’s help to enter the state of grace and then by seeking to retain it by means of good works.
The Church before Luther had taught, as she still does, and that on the strength of Holy Writ, that such co-operation on man’s part, under God’s assistance, is quite essential. Though the attaining to and the perseverance in the Divine sonship is chiefly the work of God, yet it is also man’s, carried out with the aid of grace. She assured the faithful, that, according to the order graciously established by God and warranted by Scripture, all good works have their value for temporal and eternal reward. She sought indeed to kindle religious fervour by pointing to the promises held out, yet she had no wish to see man stop short at the thought of his reward, but rather expected him to rise to a more perfect love. Generosity, so she taught, was in no way impaired by the prospect of reward, on the contrary such hopes served as stepping-stones to facilitate the ascent.
Luther, owing to his implacable, personal aversion to any good works or human co-operation, laid violent hands on this so reasonable scheme of salvation.
Nature and Origin of the New Doctrine of Works.
Luther demanded that no importance should be set on co-operation by means of works in the business of Justification, because salvation was to be looked for from on high with simple faith and blind confidence. After reconciliation, too, man must not vainly fancy that he is capable of deserving anything by good works even by the greatest penances, sacrifices or deeds of love, but the doing of good must be allowed to follow simply as the effect of the Spirit of Christ now received, in those feelings towards God which Christ produces in us and in that love of our neighbour which is indispensable to human society.
Further light may be thrown on this standpoint of Luther’s by some traits from his inward history and writings.
Here we cannot fail to notice echoes of his transition period, of his conflict with his brother-monks and those pious folk who were intent on good works and the heaping up of merits; of his subsequent remissness in his vocation and in the performance of his duties as a monk; finally of his later prejudice, largely a result of his polemics, against so many of the Church’s public and private practices, of penance, of devotion and of the love of God. He closed his eyes to the fact, that he could have found no more effectual means of increasing amongst his followers the growing contempt for moral effort, neglect of good works and the gradual decline in religious feeling.
His estrangement from what he was pleased to call “holiness-by-works” always remained Luther’s principal, ruling idea, just as it had been the starting-point of his change of mind in his monastic days.
His chief discovery, viz. the doctrine of Justification, he was fond of parading as an attack upon works. It is only necessary to observe how persistently, how eagerly and instinctively he
seizes the smallest pretext to launch in his sermons and writings a torrent of abuse on the Catholic works. It is as though some unseen hand were ever ready to open the sluice-gates, that, whether relevant or not to the matter on hand, his anger might pour forth against fasting, and the ancient works of penance, against “cowls and tonsures,” against the recitation of the Office in choir, rules, collections, pilgrimages and Jubilees, against taking the discipline, vows, veneration of the Saints and so many other religious practices. In his habitual slanders on works, found on his lips from the beginning to within a few weeks of his death, we can hardly fail to see the real link which binds together his whole activity. As against the Popish doctrine of works he is never weary of pointing out that his own doctrine of works is based on Christ; “it allows God to be our Lord God and gives Him the glory,” a thought that pleased him all the more because it concealed the error under a mantle of piety; this deceptive idea already casts its shadow over the very first letter in his correspondence which touches on the new doctrine.
Johann Eck could well answer: “Luther is doing us an injustice when he declares that we by our works exclude Christ as Mediator.... On the contrary, we teach, that, without Christ, works are nothing.... Therefore let him keep his lies to himself; the works that are done without faith, he may indeed talk of as he likes, but, as for ours, they proceed from the bottom rock of faith and are performed with the aid of Divine grace.”
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 763