Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  After all we have said it would be superfluous to deal in detail with the opinion expressed above () by certain Protestant judges, viz. that Luther reinstated conscience, which had fallen into the toils of “legalism,” and set it again on its “true basis,” insisting on “feeling” and on real “morality.” Nor shall we enquire whether it is seriously implied, that, before Luther’s day, people were not aware that the mere “legality” of a deed did not suffice unless first of all morality was recognised as the true guide of conduct.

  We may repeat yet once again that Luther was not the first to brand “outward holiness-by-works” in the sphere of morality. Berthold of Ratisbon, whose voice re-echoed through the whole of Germany, summing up the teaching of the mediæval moral theologians, reprobates most sternly any false confidence in outward deeds. No heaping up of external works, no matter how eager, can, according to him, prove of any profit to the soul, not even if the sinner, after unheard-of macerations, goes loaded with chains on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and there lays himself down to die within the very sepulchre of the Lord; all that, so he points out with an eloquence all his own, would be thrown away were there lacking the inward spirit of love and contrition for the sins committed.

  The doctrine on contrition of the earlier Catholic theologians and popular writers, which we have already had occasion to review, forms an excellent test when compared with Luther’s own, by which to decide the question: Which is the outward and which the inward morality? Their doctrine is based both on Scripture and on the traditions of antiquity. Similarly the Catholic teaching on moral self-adaptation to Christ, such as we find it, for instance, in St. Benedict’s Prologue to his world-famous Rule, that textbook of the mediæval ascetics, in the models and examples of the Fathers and even in the popular Catholic works of piety so widely read in Luther’s day, strikingly confutes the charge, that, by the stress it laid on certain commandments and practices, Catholicism proved it had lost sight of “the existence of a living personal morality” and that it fell to Luther once more to recall to life this ideal. The imitation of Christ in the spirit of love was undoubtedly regarded as the highest aim of morality, and this aim necessarily included “personal morality” in its most real sense, and Luther was not in the least necessity of inaugurating any new ideals of virtue.

  Luther’s Warfare with his old friend Caspar Schwenckfeld

  Caspar Schwenckfeld, a man of noble birth hailing from Ossig near Lüben in Silesia, after having studied at Cologne, Frankfurt-on-the-Oder and perhaps also at Erfurt, was, in 1519, won over by Luther’s writings to the religious innovations. Being idealistically inclined, the Wittenberg preaching against formalism in religion and on the need of returning to a truly spiritual understanding of the Bible roused him to enthusiasm. He attempted, with rather more logic than Luther, to put in practice the latter’s admonitions concerning the inward life and therefore started a movement, half pietist, half mystic, for bringing together those who had been really awakened.

  Schwenckfeld was a man of broad mind, with considerable independence of judgment and of a noble and generous disposition. His good position in the world gave him what many of the other Lutheran leaders lacked, viz. a free hand. His frank criticism did not spare the faults in their preaching. The sight of the sordid elements which attached themselves to Luther strengthened him in his resolve to establish communities — first of all in Silesia — modelled on the very lines roughly sketched by Luther, which should present a picture of the apostolic age of the Church. The Duke of Silesia and many of the nobility were induced to desert Catholicism, and a wide field was won in Silesia for the new ideals of Wittenberg.

  In spite of his high esteem for Luther, Schwenckfeld wrote, in 1523: It is evident “that little improvement can be discerned emerging from the new teaching, and that those who boast of the Evangel lead a bad and scandalous life.... This moves us not a little, indeed pierces our heart when we hear of it.” To the Duke he dedicated, in 1524, a writing entitled: “An exhortation regarding the misuse of sundry notable Articles of the Evangel, through the wrong understanding of which the common man is led into the freedom of the flesh and into error.” The book forms a valuable source of information on the religious state of the people at the time of the rise of Lutheranism. Therein he laments, with deep feeling and with an able pen, that so many Lutherans were being influenced by the most worldly of motives, and that a pernicious tendency towards freedom from social restrictions was rife amongst them.

  Though Schwenckfeld was all his life equally averse to the demagogue Anabaptist movement and to Zwinglianism with its rationalistic tendency, yet his fate led him into ways very much like theirs. Together with his associate Valentine Krautwald, a former precentor, he attacked the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, giving, however, a new interpretation of the words of Institution., different from that of Zwingli and Œcolampadius. To the fanaticism of the Anabaptists he approximated by his opposition to any organised Church, to the sacraments as means of grace, and to all that appeared to him to deviate from the spirit of the Apostolic Church.

  He besought Luther in a personal interview at Wittenberg, on Dec. 1, 1525, to agree to his doctrine of the Sacrament, explaining to him at the same time its affinity with his supposedly profounder conception of the atonement, the sacraments and the life of Christ as followed in his communities; he also invited him in fiery words to throw over the popular churches in which all the people received the Supper and rather to establish congregations of awakened Christians. Luther, though in no unfriendly manner, put him off; throughout the interview he addressed him as “Dear Caspar,” but he flatly refused to give any opinion. According to Schwenckfeld’s own account he even allowed that his doctrine of the Sacrament was “plausible” ... if only it could be proved, and, on parting, whispered in his ear: “Keep quiet for a while.”

  When, however, the Sacramentarian movement began to assume alarming dimensions, and the Swiss started quoting Schwenckfeld in favour of their view of the Sacrament, Luther was exasperated and began to assail his Silesian fellow-worker. His indignation was increased by certain charges against the nobleman which reached him from outside sources. He replied on April 14, 1526, to certain writings sent him by Schwenckfeld and Krautwald by an unconditional refusal to agree, though he did so briefly and with reserve. On Jan. 4, of the same year, referring to Zwingli, Œcolampadius and Schwenckfeld in a writing to the “Christians of Reutlingen” directed against the Sacramentarians he said: “Just behold and comprehend the devil and his coarseness”; in it he had included Schwenckfeld, though without naming him, as a “spirit and head” among the three who were attacking the Sacrament.

  From that time onward the Silesian appeared to him one of the most dangerous of heretics. He no longer admitted in his case the rights of conscience and private judgment which Luther claimed so loudly for himself and defended in the case of his friends, and to which Schwenckfeld now appealed. It was nothing to him that on many occasions, and even till his death, Schwenckfeld expressed the highest esteem for Luther and gratitude for his services in opening up a better way of theology.

  “Dr. Martin,” Schwenckfeld wrote in 1528, “I would most gladly have spared, if only my conscience had allowed it, for I know, praise be to God, what I owe to him.”

  It was his purpose to pursue the paths along which Luther had at first striven to reach a new world. “A new world is being born and the old is dying,” so he wrote in 1528. This new world he sought within man, but with the same mistaken enthusiasm with which he taught the new resurrection to life. The Divine powers there at work he fancied were the Holy Ghost, the Word of God and the Blood of the all-powerful Jesus. The latter he wished to reinstate in person as the sole ruler of the Church; in raising up to life and in supporting it, Jesus was ministering personally. According to him Christ’s manhood was not the same as a creature’s; he deified it to such an extent as to dissolve it, thus laying himself open to the charge of Eutychianism. Regeneration in baptism to h
im seemed nothing, compared with Christ’s raising up of the adult to life.

  He would have it that he himself had passed, in 1527, through an overwhelming spiritual experience, the chief crisis of his life, when God, as he says, made him “partaker of the heavenly calling, received him into His favour, and bestowed upon him a good and joyful conscience and knowledge.” On his “conscience and knowledge” he insisted from that time with blinded prejudice, and taught his followers, likewise with a joyful conscience to embrace the illumination from on high. He adhered with greater consistency than Luther to the thesis that everyone who has been enlightened has the right to judge of doctrine; no “outward office or preaching” might stand in the way of such a one. To each there comes some upheaval of his earthly destiny; it is then that we receive the infusion of the knowledge of salvation given by the Spirit, and of faith in the presence of Christ the God-man; it is a spiritual revelation which fortifies the conscience by the absolute certainty of salvation and guides a man in the freedom of the Spirit through all the scruples of conscience he meets in his moral life. His system also comprises a theory of practically complete immunity from sin.

  No other mind has given such bold expression as Schwenckfeld to the individualism or subjectivism which Luther originally taught; no one has ever attempted to calm consciences and fortify them against the arbitrariness of religious feeling in words more sympathetic and moving.

  Carl Ecke, his most recent biographer, who is full of admiration for him, says quite truly of the close connection between Schwenckfeld and the earlier Luther, that the chief leaders of the incipient Protestant Church, estimable men though some of them were, nevertheless misunderstood and repulsed one of the most promising Christians of the Reformation age. When he charged them with want of logic in their reforming efforts they regarded it as the fanaticism of an ignoramus.... In Schwenckfeld 16th-century Protestantism nipped in the bud the Christian individualism of the early ages rediscovered by Luther, in which lay the hope of a higher unity.

  In 1529, two years after his great interior experience, Schwenckfeld left his home, and, on a hint from the Duke of Silesia, severed his connection with him, being unwilling to expose him to the risk of persecution. Thereafter he led a wandering existence for thirty years; until his seventy-second year he lived with strangers at Strasburg, Esslingen, Augsburg, Spires, Ulm and elsewhere. After 1540, when the Lutheran theologians at Schmalkalden published an admonition against him, his history was more that of a “fugitive” than a mere “wanderer.”

  Still, he was untiringly active in furthering his cause by means of lectures and circular letters, as well as by an extensive private correspondence. He scattered the seeds of his peculiar doctrines amongst the nobility in particular and their dependents in country parts. Many people of standing either belonged or were well-disposed to his school, as Duke Christopher of Würtemberg wrote in 1564; according to him there were many at Augsburg and Nuremberg, in the Tyrol, in Allgäu, Silesia and one part of the Mark. “The well-known intolerance of the Reformation and of its preachers,” remarks the Protestant historian of Schwenckfeld, “could not endure in their body a man who had his own views on the Sacraments and refused for conscience sake to take part in the practices of their Church.... He wandered, like a hunted deer, without hearth or home, through the cities and forests of South Germany, pursued by Luther and the preachers.” As late as 1558 Melanchthon incited the authorities against him, declaring that “such sophistry as his requires to be severely dealt with by the princes.”

  Not long after Schwenckfeld departed this life at Ulm in 1561. His numerous following in Silesia migrated, first to Saxony, then to Holland and England, and finally to Pennsylvania, where they still exist to this day.

  Luther’s indignation against Schwenckfeld knew no bounds. In conversation he spoke of him as Swinesfield, and, in his addresses and writings, still more commonly as Stinkfield, a name which was also repeatedly applied by his followers to the man they so disliked.

  In his Table-Talk Luther refers to that “rascal Schwenckfeld,” who was the instigator of numerous errors and deceives many people with his “honeyed words.” He, like the fanatics, so Luther complains, despises “the spoken word,” and yet God willed “to deal with and work in us by such means.”

  In 1540 he told his friends that Schwenckfeld was unworthy of being refuted by him, no less unworthy than Sebastian Frank, another gifted and independent critic of Luther and Lutheranism.

  In 1543, when Schwenckfeld attempted to make advances to Luther and sent him a tract together with a letter, Luther sent down to the messenger a card on which he acknowledged the receipt of the book, but declared that “the senseless fool, beset as he is by the devil, understands nothing and does not even know what he is talking about.” He had better leave him, Luther, alone and not worry him with his “booklets, which the devil himself discharges through him.” In the last lines he invokes a sort of curse on Schwenckfeld, and all “Sacramentarians and Eutychians” of whom it had been said in the Bible (Jer. xxiii. 21): “I did not send prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesy.”

  When giving vent to his grudge against Schwenckfeld in his Table-Talk shortly after this, he declared: “He is a poor creature, with neither talent nor an enlightened spirit.... He bespirts the people with the grand name of Christ.... The dreamer has stolen a few phrases from my book, ‘De ultimis verbis Davidis’ [of 1543], and with these the poor wretch seeks to make a great show.” It was on this occasion that Catherine Bora took exception to a word used by her husband, declaring that it was “too coarse.”

  In his “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament” (1545) Luther again gives vigorous expression to his aversion to the “Fanatics and foes of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, Zwingli, Œcolampadius and ‘Stinkfield’”; they were heretics “whom he had warned sufficiently” and who were to be avoided. He had refused to listen to or to answer that “slanderer Schwenckfeld” because everything was wasted on him. “This you may well tell those among whom, no doubt, Stinkfield makes my name to stink. I like being abused by such slanderers.” If by their attacks upon the Sacrament they call the “Master of the house Beelzebub, how should they not abuse His household?”

  7. Self-Improvement and the Reformation of the Church

  Self-betterment, by the leading of a Christian life and, particularly, by striving after Christian perfection, had in Catholic times been inculcated by many writers and even by first-rank theologians. In this field it was usual to take for granted, both in popular manuals and in learned treatises, as the general conviction, that religion teaches people to strive after what is highest, whether in each one’s ordinary duties of daily life, or in the ecclesiastical or religious state. The power of the moral teaching was to stand revealed in the struggle after the ideal thus set forth.

  Did Luther Found a School of True Christian Life?

  Luther, of set purpose, refused to make any attempt to found, in the strict sense of the term, a spiritual school of Christian life or perfection. He ever found it a difficult matter even to give any methodical instructions to this end.

  Though he dealt fully and attractively with many details of life, not only in his sermons and commentaries, but also in special writings which still serve as inspirations to practical Christianity, yet he would never consent to draft anything in the shape of a system for reaching virtue, still less for attaining perfection. On one occasion he even deliberately refused his friend Bugenhagen’s request that he would sketch out a rule of Christian life, appealing to his well-known thesis that “the true Christian has no need of rules for his conduct, for the spirit of faith guides him to do all that God requires and that brotherly love demands of him.”

  It may indeed be urged that his failure to bequeath to posterity any regular guide to the spiritual life was due to lack of time, that his active and unremitting struggle with his opponents left him no leisure, and, in point of fact, it is quite true that his controversy did deprive him
of the requisite freedom and peace of mind. It may also be allowed that no one man can do everything and that Luther had not the methodical mind needed for such a task, which, in his case, was rendered doubly hard by his revolution in doctrine. The main ground, however, is that there were too many divergent elements in his moral teaching which it was impossible to harmonize; so much in it was false and awry that no logical combination of the whole was possible. Hence his readiness to invoke the theory, which really sprung from the very depths of his ethics, viz. that the true Christian has no need of rules because everything he has to do is the natural outcome of faith.

  In his “Sermon von den guten Wercken” (1520), he expressed this in a way that could not fail to find a following, though it could hardly be described as in the interests of moral effort. Each one must take as his first rule of conduct, not on any account to bind himself, but to keep himself free from all troublesome laws. The very title of the tract in question, so frequently reprinted during Luther’s lifetime, would have led people to expect to find in it his practical views on ethics. Characteristically enough, instead of attempting to define the exact nature and value of moral effort, Luther penned what, in reality, was merely an appendix to his new doctrine on faith. He himself, in his dedication of it to Duke Johann of Saxony, admits this of the first and principal part: “Here I have striven to show how we must exercise and make use of faith in all our good works and consider it as the chiefest of works. If God allows me I shall at some other time deal with faith itself, how we must each day pray and speak it.”

  As, however, no other of Luther’s writings contains so many elements of moral teaching drawn from his theology, some further remarks on it may here be in place, especially as he himself set such store on the sermon, that, while engaged on it, referring evidently to the first part, he wrote to Spalatin, that, in his opinion it “would be the best thing he had yet published.” Köstlin felt justified in saying: “The whole sermon may be termed the Reformer’s first exposition and vindication of the Evangelical teaching on morals.”