Fourthly, and most important of all, Luther says nothing of the true significance of morality for the attainment of everlasting life.
The best and theologically most convincing reply to the objection of which he spoke: “Well and good, then I shall sin lustily,” etc. would have been: No, a good moral life is essential for salvation! The strongest Bible texts would have been there to back such a statement, and, to his powerful eloquence, it should have proved an attractive task to crush his frivolous opponents by so weighty an argument. Yet we find never a word concerning the necessity of good works for salvation, but merely an account of the wonders worked by faith of its own accord alone after it has laid hold on the heart. This is readily understood, if justification is purely passive and effected solely by the Spirit of God which enkindles faith and, with it, covers over sin as with a shield, then the very being of the life of faith must be mere passivity, and there can be no more question of attaining to salvation by means of good deeds performed with the aid of grace. In the instruction for Melanchthon mentioned above we find at the end this clear query: “Is this saying true: Righteousness by works is necessary for salvation?” Luther answers by a distinction: “Not as if works operate or bring about salvation,” he says, “but rather they are present together with the faith that operates righteousness; just as of necessity I must be present in order to be saved.” This distinction, however, leaves the question just where it was before. He concludes his remarks on this vital matter with a jest on the purely external and fortuitous presence of works in the man received into eternal life: “I too shall be in at the death, said the rascal when he was about to be hanged and many people were hurrying to see the scene.”
All the more strongly did Luther in his usual way describe in his last sermon the natural sinfulness which persists in man owing to original sin.
The sin that still dwells within us “forces” man to prevent faith and works coming to their own. For “he is not yet without sin, though he has the forgiveness of sins and is sanctified by the Holy Ghost.” In consequence of the “foulness” within him “the longer he lives the worse he gets.” “We cannot get rid of our sinful body.” For this reason even the “best minds” so often are indifferent to eternal life. On account of the evil taint in our flesh we are unable to rise as high as we ought. But if original sin and its workings were declared really sinful in man (for even the very motions against “heartfelt pleasure” in God’s service are, so we are told, “sins”), then it is no wonder that Luther should have been confronted with the question of which he speaks: “If sin be in me, how then can I be pleasing to God?” — a question which formerly could not have been asked of those whose original sin had been washed away in baptism. The teaching of the olden Church had been, that original sin was blotted out by baptism, but that the inclination to evil persisted in man to his last breath, though without any fault on his part so long as consent was lacking.
Still less to be wondered at was it, that many, unable to regard themselves as responsible or guilty on account of the involuntary motions of original sin, began to doubt whether any responsibility existed for evil actions or whether moral effort was within the bounds of possibility.
Further, according to Luther, our constant exercise of ourselves in faith and our “rubbing” ourselves against sin was finally to lead “not merely to our sins being forgiven but to their being altogether rooted up and swept away; for your shabby, smelly body could not enter heaven without first being cleansed and beautified.” Taking for granted his mystic assumption that sinful concupiscence can at last be “swept away,” he insists on our continuing hopefully “to amend by faith and prayer our weakness and to fight against it until such a change takes place in our sinful body that sin no longer exists therein,” though, in his opinion, this cannot entirely be until we reach heaven. Yet experience, had he but opened his eyes to it, here once again contradicted him. The “fomes peccati,” as the Catholic Church rightly teaches, cannot be extinguished so long as man is on this earth, though it may be damped, and, by the practice of what is right and the use of the means of grace, be rendered harmless to our moral life. The Church expected nothing unreasonable from man, though her moral standards were of the highest. Luther, however, by abandoning the Church’s ethics, came to teach a strange mixture of perverted, unworkable idealism and all too great indulgence towards human frailty.
Luther’s Vacillation between the Two Faiths, Old and New, in the Matter of Morality and the Assurance of Salvation
Many discordant utterances, betraying his uncertainty and his struggles, have been bequeathed to us by Luther regarding the main questions of morality and as to how we may insure salvation. First we have his statements with regard to the importance of morality in God’s sight.
In 1537 in a Disputation on June 1 he denounced the thesis, “Good works are necessary for salvation.” In the same way, in a sermon of 1535, he asserted that it was by no means necessary for us to perform good works “in order to blot out sin, to overcome death and win heaven, but merely for the profit and assistance of our neighbour.” “Our works,” he there says, “can only shape what concerns our temporal life and being”; higher than this they cannot rise.
Yet, when thus degrading works, he had again and again to struggle within his own heart against the faith of the ancient Church concerning the merit of good deeds. Especially was this the case when he considered the “texts which demand a good life on account of the eternal reward,” for instance, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17), or “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (ib., vi. 20). With them he deals in a sermon of 1522. The eternal reward, he here says, follows the works because it is a result of the faith which itself is the cause of the works. But the believer must not “look to the reward,” or trouble about it. Why then does God promise a reward? — In order that “all may know what the natural result of a good life will be.” Yet he also admits a certain anxiety on the part of the pious Christian to be certain of his reward, and the favourable effect of such a certainty on the good man’s will. Here he exhorts his listeners; “that you be content to know and be assured that this indeed will be the result,” whilst in another sermon of that same year he describes as follows the promise of eternal life as the reward of works: “It is an incentive and inducement that makes us zealous in piety and in the service and praise of God.... That God should guide us so kindly makes us esteem the more His Fatherly Will and the Mercy of Christ” — but on no account “must we be good as if for the sake of the reward.” He also quotes incidentally Mt. xix. 29, where our Lord says that all who leave home, brethren, etc. for His name’s sake “shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting”; also Heb. x. 35 concerning the “great reward” that awaits those who lose not their confidence. Such statements, he refuses, however, to see referred to salvation, which will be the equal portion of all true believers, but, in his arbitrary fashion, explains them as denoting some extra ornament of glory.
“Good works will be present wherever faith is.” As this supposition, a favourite one with Luther from early days, fails to verify itself in practice, and as the expedients he proposed to meet the new difficulty are scattered throughout his writings, an admirer in recent times ventured to sum up these elements into a system under the following headings: “Faulty morality is a proof of a faulty faith.” “The fact of morality being present proves the presence of faith.” “Moral indolence induces loss of faith.” “Zeal for morality causes faith to increase.” The true explanation would therefore seem always to be in the assumption of a want of “faith,” i.e. of a lack of that absolute certainty of personal salvation which should regulate all religious life, in other words moral failings should be held to prove the absence of this saving certainty.
Seen in this light good works are of importance, as the outward demonstration that a person possesses the “fides specialis,” and in this wise alone are they a guarantee of everlasting happiness. They
prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himself that, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.” Hence Luther’s certainty of salvation, however strong it may be, still requires to be tested by something else as to whether it is the true “faith” deserving of God’s compassion; for “it is quite possible for a man never to doubt God’s mercy towards him though all the while he does not really possess it”; according to Luther, namely, there is such a thing as a fictitious faith.
In Luther’s opinion “faith” was a grasping of something actually there. Hence if God’s mercy was not there, then neither was there any “faith.” Accordingly, an “unwarrantable assurance of salvation” was not at all impossible, and works served as a means of detecting it. Walther, to whom we owe our summary, does not, it is true, prove the existence of such a state of “unwarrantable assurance” by any direct quotation from Luther’s writings, and, indeed, it might be difficult to find any definite statement to this effect, seeing that Luther was chary of speaking of any failure in the personal certainty of salvation, on which alone, exclusive of works, he based the whole work of justification.
And yet, as Luther himself frequently says, moods and feelings are no guarantee of true faith; what is required are the works, which, like good fruit, always spring from a good tree. — So strongly, in spite of all his predilection for faith alone, is he impelled again and again to have recourse to works. In many passages they tend to become something more than mere signs confirmatory of faith. We need not examine here how far his statements concerning faith and works are consistent, and to what extent the sane Catholic teaching continued to influence him.
What is remarkable, however, is, that, in his commendable efforts to urge the performance of works in order to curtail the pernicious results of his doctrine, Luther comes to attribute a saving action to “faith,” only on condition that, out of love of God, we “strive” against sin. In one of his last sermons at Eisleben he tells his hearers: Sins are forgiven by faith and “are not imputed so far as you set yourself to fight against them, and learn to repeat the Our Father diligently ... and to grow in strength as you grow in age; and you must be at pains to exercise your faith by resisting the sins that remain in you ... in short, you must become stronger, humbler, more patient and believe more firmly.” The conditional “so far as” furnishes a key which has to be used in many other passages where works are demanded as well as faith. Faith, there, is real and wholesome “in so far as” it produces works: “For we too admit it and have always taught it, better and more forcibly than they [the Papists], that we must both preach and perform works, and that they must follow the faith, and, that, where they do not follow there the faith is not as it should be.”
Nor does he merely say that works of charity must follow eventually, but that charity must be infused by the Spirit of God together with faith of which it is the fruit.
“For though faith makes us righteous and pure, yet it cannot be without love, and the Spirit must infuse love together with faith. In short, where there is true faith, there the Holy Ghost is also present, and where the Holy Ghost is, there love and all good things must also be.... Love is a consequence or fruit of the Spirit which comes to us wrapped up in the faith.” “Charity is so closely bound up [with faith and hope] that it can never be parted from faith where this is true faith, and as little as there can be fire without heat and smoke, so little can faith exist without charity.” From gratitude (as we have heard him state above, ) the man who is assured of salvation must be “well disposed towards God and keep His commandments.” But if he be “sweetly disposed towards God” this must “show itself in all charity.”
Taking the words at their face value we might find in these and similar statements on charity something reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of a faith working through love. But though this is what Luther should logically have arrived at, he was in reality always kept far from it by his idea both of faith and of imputation. It should be noted that he was fond of taking shelter behind the assertion, that his “faith” also included, or was accompanied by, charity. He was obliged to do this in self-defence against the objections of certain Evangelicals — who rushed to conclusions he would not accept — or of Catholic opponents. Indeed, in order to pacify the doubters, he even went so far as to say, that love preceded the “faith” he taught, and that “faith” itself was simply a work like any other work done for the fulfilling of the commandments.
It was in this sense that he wrote in the “Sermon von den guten Werken,” composed at the instance of his prudent friend Spalatin for the Duke of Saxony: “Such trust and faith brings with it charity and hope; indeed, if we look at the matter aright, charity comes first, or at least simultaneously with faith. For I should not care to trust God unless I believed He would be kindly and gracious to me, whereby I am well disposed towards Him, trust Him heartily and perform all that is good in His sight.” In the same connection he characterises “faith” as a “work of the first Commandment,” and as a “true keeping of that command,” and as the “first, topmost and best work from which all others flow.” It might seem, though this is but apparent, that he had actually come to acknowledge the reality and merit of man’s works, in the teeth of his denial of free-will and of the possibility of meriting.
Of charity as involved in faith he wrote in a similar strain in 1519 to Johann Silvius Egranus, who at that time still belonged to his party, but was already troubled with scruples concerning the small regard shown for ethical motives and the undue stress laid on faith alone: “I do not separate justifying faith from charity,” Luther told him, “on the contrary we believe because God, in Whom we believe, pleases us and is loved by us.” To him all this was quite clear and plain, but the new-comers who had busied themselves with faith, hope and charity “understood not one of the three.”
We may recall how the enquiring mind of Egranus was by no means entirely satisfied by this explanation. In 1534 he published a bitter attack on the Lutheran doctrine of works, though he never returned more than half-way from Lutheranism to the olden Church.
Many, like Silvius Egranus, who at the outset had been won over to the new religion, took fright when they saw that, owing to the preference shown to faith (i.e. the purely personal assurance of salvation), the ethical principles regarding Christian perfection and man’s aim in life, received but scant consideration.
Many truly saw therein an alarming abasement of the moral standard and accordingly returned to the doctrine of their fathers. As the ideal to be aimed at throughout life the Church had set up before them progress in the love of God, encouraging them to put this love in practice by fidelity to the duties of their calling and by a humble and confident trust in God’s Fatherly promises rather than in any perilous “fides specialis.”
In previous ages Christian perfection had rightly been thought to consist in the development of the moral virtues, particularly of charity, the queen of all the others. Now, however, Luther represented “the consoling faith in the forgiveness of sins as the sum of Christian perfection.” According to him the “real essence of personal Christianity lies in the confidence of the justified sinner that he shares the paternal love of the Almighty of which he has been assured by the work and person of Jesus Christ.” In this sense alone can he be said to have “rediscovered Christianity” as a religion. We are told that “the essence of Lutheran Christianity is to be found in Luther’s reduction of practical Christianity to the doctrine of salvation.” He “altered the ideal of religious perfection as no other Christian before his day had ever done.” The “re
vulsion” in moral ideals which this necessarily involved spelt “a huge decline.”
George Wicel, who, after having long been an adherent of Lutheranism, broke away from it in consequence of the moral results referred to, wrote, in 1533, with much bitterness in the defence he addressed to Justus Jonas: “Amongst you one hears of nothing but of remitting and forgiving; you don’t seem to see that your seductions sow more sins than ever you can take away. Your people, it is true, are so constituted that they will only hear of the forgiving and never of the retaining of sin (John xx. 23); evidently they stand more in need of being loosed than of being bound. Ah, you comfortable theologians! You are indeed sharp-sighted enough in all this business, for were you to bind as often as you loose, you, the ringleaders of the party, would soon find yourselves all alone with your faith, and might then withdraw into some hole to weep for the loss of your authority and congregation.” “Ah, you rascals, what a fine Evangelical mode of life have you wrought with your preachment on grace.”
5. Abasement of Practical Christianity
To follow up the above statement emanating from a Protestant source, concerning the “huge decline” in moral ideals and practical Christianity involved in Luther’s work, we shall go on to consider how greatly he did in point of fact narrow and restrict ethical effort in comparison with what was required by the ethics of earlier days. In so doing he was following the psychological impulse discernible even in the first beginnings of his dislike for the austerity of his Order and the precepts of the Church.
Lower Moral Standards
1. The only works of obligation in the service of God are faith, praise and thanksgiving. God, he says, demands only our faith, our praise and our gratitude. Of our works He has no need. He restricts our “deeds towards God” to the praise-offering or thank-offering for the good received, and to the prayer-offering “or Our Father, against the evil and badness we would wish to be rid of.” This service is the duty of each individual Christian and is practised in common in Divine worship. The latter is fixed and controlled with the tacit consent of the congregation by the ministers who represent the people; in this we find the trace of Luther’s innate aversion to any law or obligation which leads him to avoid anything savouring of legislative action.
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 777