Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  In the preface to his instructions to the Visitors in 1528 he declares, for instance, that the rules laid down were not meant to “found new Papal Decretals”; they were rather to be taken as a “history of and witness to our faith” and not as “strict commands.” This well expresses his antipathy to the visible Catholic Church, her hierarchy and her so-called man-made ordinances for public worship.

  Since, to his mind, it is impossible to offer God anything but love, thanksgiving and prayer, it follows that, firstly, the Eucharistic Sacrifice falls, and, with it, all the sacrifices made to the greater glory of God by self-denial and abnegation, obedience or bodily penances, together with all those works — practised in imitation of Christ by noble souls — done over and above the bounden duties of each one’s calling. He held that it was wrong to say of such sacrifices, made by contrite and loving hearts, that they were both to God’s glory and to our own advantage, or to endeavour to justify them by arguing that: Whoever does not do great things for God must expect small recompense. Among the things which fell before him were: vows, processions, pilgrimages, veneration of relics and of the Saints, ecclesiastical blessings and sacramentals, not to speak of holy days and prescribed fasts. With good reason can one speak of a “huge decline.”

  He justifies as follows his radical opposition to the Catholic forms of Divine worship: “The only good we can do in God’s service is to praise and thank Him, in which in fact the only true worship of God consists.... If any other worship of God be proposed to you, know that it is error and deception.” “It is a rank scandal that the Papists should encourage people to toil for God with works so as thereby to expiate their sins and secure grace.... If you wish to believe aright and really to lay hold on Christ, you must discard all works whereby you may think you labour for God; all such are nothing but scandals leading you away from Christ and from God; in God’s sight no work is of any value except Christ’s own; this you must leave to toil for you in God’s sight; you yourself must perform no other work for Him than to believe that Christ does His work for you.”

  In the same passage he attempts to vindicate this species of Quietism with the help of some recollections from his own earlier career, viz. by the mystic principle which had at one time ruled him: “You must be blind and lame, deaf and dead, poor and leprous, or else you will be scandalised in Christ. This is what it means to know Christ aright and to accept Him; this is to believe as befits a true Christian.”

  2. “All other works, apart from faith, must be directed towards our neighbour.” As we know, besides that faith, gratitude and love which are God’s due, Luther admits no good works but those of charity towards our neighbour. By our faith we give to God all that He asks of us. “After this, think only of doing for your neighbour what Christ has done for you, and let all your works and all your life go to the service of your neighbour.” — God, he says elsewhere, asks only for our thank-offering; “look upon Me as a Gracious God and I am content”; “thereafter serve your neighbour, freely and for nothing.” Good works in his eyes are only “good when they are profitable to others and not to yourself.” Indeed he goes so far as to assert: “If you find yourself performing a work for God, or for His Saints, or for yourself and not alone for your neighbour, know that the work is not good.” The only explanation of such sentences, as already hinted, is to be found in his passionate polemics against the worship and the pious exercises of the Catholics. It is true that such practices were sullied at that time by certain blemishes, owing to the abuses rampant in the Church; yet the Catholic could confidently answer in self-defence in the words Luther proceeds to put on his lips: Such “works are spiritual and profitable to the soul of our neighbour, and God thereby is served and propitiated and His Grace obtained.”

  Luther rudely retorts: “You lie in your throat; God is served not by works but by faith; faith must do everything that is to be done as between God and ourselves.” That the priests and monks should vaunt their religious exercises as spiritual treasures, he brands as a “Satanic lie.” “The works of the Papists such as organ-playing, chanting, vesting, ringing, smoking [incensation], sprinkling, pilgriming and fasting, etc., are doubtless fine and many, grand and long, broad and thick works, but about them there is nothing good, useful or profitable.”

  3. “Know that there are no good works but such as God has commanded.” What, apart from faith, makes a work a good one is solely God’s express command. Luther, while finding fault with the self-chosen works of the Catholics, points to the Ten Commandments as summing up every good work willed by God. “There used to be ecclesiastical precepts which were to supersede the Decalogue.” “The commandments of the Church were invented and set up by men in addition to and beyond God’s Word. Luther therefore deals with the true worship of God in the light of the Ten Commandments.” As for the Evangelical Counsels so solemnly enacted in the New Testament, viz. the striving after a perfection which is not of obligation, Luther, urged on by his theory that only what is actually commanded partakes of the nature of a good work, came very near branding them as an invention of the Papists.

  They have “made the Counsels twelve” in number, he says, “and twist the Gospel as they please.” They have split the Gospel into two, into “Consilia et præcepta.” “Christ,” so he teaches, “gave only one Counsel in the whole of the Gospel, viz. that of chastity, which even a layman can preserve, assuming him to have the grace.” He sneers at the Pope and the Doctors because they had established not only a clerical order which should be superior to the laity, but also an order of the counsels the duty of whose members it was to portray the Evangelical perfection by the keeping of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “By this the common Christian life and faith became like flat, sour beer; everyone rubbed his eyes, despised the commandments and ran after the counsels. And after a good while they at last discovered man-made ordinances in the shape of habits, foods, chants, lessons, tonsures, etc., and thus God’s Law went the way of faith, both being blotted out and forgotten, so that, henceforth, to be perfect and to live according to the counsels means to wear a black, white, grey or coloured cowl, to bawl in church, wear a tonsure and to abstain from eggs, meat, butter, etc.”

  In the heat of his excitement he even goes so far as to deny the necessity of any service in the churches, because God demands only the praise and thanks of the heart, and “this may be given ... equally well in the home, in the field, or anywhere else.” “If they should force any other service upon you, know that it is error and deception; just as hitherto the world has been crazy, with its houses, churches and monasteries set aside for the worship of God, and its vestments of gold and silk, etc. ... which expenditure had better been used to help our neighbour, if it was really meant for God.”

  It was of course impossible for him to vindicate in the long run so radical a standpoint concerning the churches, and, elsewhere, he allows people their own way on the question of liturgical vestments and other matters connected with worship.

  4. The good works which are performed where there is no “faith” amount to sin. This strangely unethical assertion Luther is fond of repeating in so extravagant a form as can only be explained psychologically by the utter blindness of his bias in favour of the “fides specialis” by him discovered. True morality belongs solely to those who have been justified after his own fashion, and no others have the slightest right to credit themselves with anything of the sort.

  When, in 1528, in his “Great Confession” he expounded his “belief bit by bit,” declaring that he had “most diligently weighed all these articles” as in the presence of death and judgment, he there wrote: “Herewith I reject and condemn as rank error every doctrine that exalts our free-will, which is directly opposed to the help and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, rig
hteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments.” Even the most pious of the Papists, he goes on to say, since they lack Christ and the “Faith,” have “merely a great semblance of holiness,” and although “there seem to be many good works” among them, “yet all is lost”; chastity, poverty and obedience as practised in the convents is nothing but “blasphemous holiness,” and “what is horrible is that thereby they refuse Christ’s help and grace.”

  This, his favourite idea, finds its full expression in his learned Latin Commentary on Galatians (1535): “In the man who does not believe in Christ not only are all sins mortal, but even his good works are sins”; for the benefit of the people he enunciates the same in his Church-Postils. “The works performed without faith are sins ... for such works of ours are soiled and foul in God’s eyes, nay, He looks on them with horror and loathing.” As a matter of course he thinks that God looks upon concupiscence as sin, even in its permissible manifestations, e.g. in the “opus conjugalis.” Amongst the heathen even virtues such as patriotism, continence, justice and courage in which, owing to the divine impulses (“divini motus”), they may shine, are tainted by the presence in them of original sin (“in ipsis heroicis virtutibus depravata”). As to whether such men were saved, Luther refuses to say anything definite; he holds fast to the text that without faith it is impossible to please God. Only those who, in the days of Noe, did not believe may, so he declares, be saved in accordance with his reading of 1 Peter iii. 19 by Christ’s preaching of salvation on the occasion of His descent into hell. He is also disposed to include among those saved by this supposed course of sermons delivered “in inferis,” such fine men of every nation as Scipio, Fabius and others of their like.

  In general, however, the following holds good: Before “faith and grace” are infused into the heart “by the Spirit alone,” “as the work of God which He works in us” — everything in man is the “work of the Law, of no value for justification, but unholy and opposed to God owing to the unbelief in which it is performed.”

  Annulment of the Supernatural and Abasement of the Natural Order

  From the above statements it is clear that Luther, in doing away with the distinction between the natural and supernatural order, also did away with the olden doctrine of virtue, and without setting up anything positive in its place. He admits no naturally good action different from that performed “by faith and grace”; no such thing exists as a natural, moral virtue of justice. This opinion is closely bound up with his whole warfare on man’s natural character and endowments in respect of what is good. Moreover, what he terms the state of grace is not the supernatural state the Church had always understood, but an outward imputation by God; it is indeed God’s goodness towards man, but no new vital principle thanks to which we act justly.

  Not only does he deny the distinction between natural and supernatural goodness, essential as it is for forming an ethical estimate of man, but he practically destroys both the natural and supernatural order. Even in other points of Luther’s doctrine we can notice the abrogation of the fundamental difference between the two orders; for instance in his view of Adam’s original state, which, according to him, was a natural not a supernatural one, “no gift,” as he says, “apart from man’s nature, and bestowed on him from without, but a natural righteousness so that it came natural to him to love God [as he did], to believe in Him and to acknowledge Him.” It is, however, in the moral domain that this peculiarity of his new theology comes out most glaringly. Owing to his way of proceeding and the heat of his polemics he seems never to have become fully conscious of how far-reaching the consequences were of his destruction of all distinction between the natural and the supernatural order.

  Natural morality, viz. that to which man attains by means of his unaided powers, appears to him simply an invention of the pagan Aristotle. He rounds on all the theologians of his day for having swallowed so dangerous an error in their Aristotelian schools to the manifest detriment of the divine teaching. This he does, for instance, at the commencement of his recently published Commentary on Romans. He calls it a “righteousness of the philosophers and lawyers” in itself utterly worthless. A year later, in his manuscript Commentary on Hebrews, he has already reached the opinion, that, “the virtues of all the philosophers, nay, of all men, whether they be lawyers or theologians, have only a semblance of virtue, but in reality are vices (‘vitia’).”

  But what would be quite incomprehensible, had he actually read the scholastic theologians whose “civil, Aristotelian doctrine of justice” he was so constantly attacking, is, that he charges them with having stopped short at this natural justice and with not having taught anything higher; this higher justice was what he himself had brought to light, this was the “Scriptural justice which depended more on the Divine imputation than on the nature of things,” and was not acquired by deeds but bestowed by God. The fact is, however, that the Schoolmen did not rest content merely with natural justice, but insist that true justice is something higher, supernatural and only to be attained to with the help of grace; it is only in some few later theologians with whom Luther may possibly have been acquainted, that this truth fails to find clear expression. Thomas of Aquin, for instance, distinguishes between the civil virtue of justice and the justice infused in the act of justification. He says expressly: “A man may be termed just in two ways, on account of civil [natural] justice and on account of infused justice. Civil justice is attained to without the grace which comes to the assistance of the natural powers, but infused justice is the work of grace. Neither the one nor the other, however, consists in the mere doing of what is good, for not everyone who does what is good is just, but only he who does it as do the just.”

  With regard to supernatural (infused) justice, the Church’s representatives, quite differently from Luther, had taught that man by his natural powers could only attain to God as the Author of nature but not to God as He is in Himself, i.e. to God as He has revealed and will communicate Himself in heaven; it is infused, sanctifying grace alone that places us in a higher order than that of nature and raises us to the status of being children of God; in it we love God, by virtue of the “habit” of love bestowed upon us, as He is in Himself, i.e. as He wills to be loved; sanctifying grace it is that brings us into a true relation with our supernatural and final end, viz. the vision of God in heaven, in which sense it may be called a vital principle infused into the soul.

  This language Luther either did not or would not understand. On this point particularly he had to suffer for his ignorance of the better class of theologians. He first embraced Occam’s hypothesis of the possibility of an imputation of justice, and then, going further along the wrong road, he changed this possibility into a reality; soon, owing to his belief in the entire corruption of the natural man, imputed justice became, to him, the only justice. In this way he deprived theology of supernatural as well as of natural justice; for imputed justice is really no justice at all, but merely an alien one. “With Luther we have the end of the supernatural. His basic view, of justifying faith as the work of God in us performed without our co-operation, bears indeed a semblance of the supernatural.... But the supernatural is ever something alien.”

  What he had in his mind was always a foreign righteousness produced, not by man’s own works and acts performed under the help of grace, but only by the work of another; this we are told by Luther in so many words: “True and real piety which is of worth in God’s sight consists in alien works and not in our own.” “If we wish to work for God we must not approach Him with our own works but with foreign ones.” “These are the works of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” “All that He has is ours.... I may attribute to myself all His works as though I had actually done them, if only I believe in Christ.... Our works will not suffice, all our powers together are too weak to resist even the smallest sin.... Hence when the Law comes and accuses you of not havin
g kept it, send it to Christ and say: There is the Man who has fulfilled it, to Him I cling, He has fulfilled it for me and bestowed His fulfilment of it upon me; then the Law will have to hold its tongue.”

  The Book of Concord on the Curtailment of Free-Will.

  When orthodox Lutheranism gained a local and temporary victory in 1580 with the so-called Book of Concord, the authors of the book deplored the inferences drawn from Luther’s moral teaching, particularly from his denial of free-will, the dangers of which had already long been apparent.

  “It is not unknown to us,” they say, “that this holy doctrine of the malice and impotence of free-will, the doctrine whereby our conversion and regeneration is ascribed solely to God and in no way to our own powers, has been godlessly, shamelessly and hatefully abused.... Many are becoming immoral and savage and neglectful of all pious exercises; they say: ‘Since we cannot turn to God of our own natural powers, let us remain hostile to God or wait until He converts us by force and against our will.’” “It is true that they possess no power to act in spiritual things, and that the whole business of conversion is merely the work of the Holy Ghost. And thus they refuse to listen to the Word of God, or to study it, or to receive the Sacraments; they prefer to wait until God infuses His gifts into them directly from above, and until they feel and are certain by inward experience that they have been converted by God.”