Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Duke George of Saxony unfeelingly pointed out to the innovator that his fear, that many, very many indeed, would say: “Do we not also possess the Spirit and understand Scripture as well as you?” would only too surely be realised.

  “What man on earth,” wrote the Duke in his usual downright fashion, “ever hitherto undertook a more foolish task than you in seeking to include in your sect all Christians, especially those of the German nation? Success is as likely in your case as it was in that of those who set about building a tower in Babylonia which was to reach the very heavens; in the end they had to cease from building, and the result was seventy-two new tongues. The same will befall you; you also will have to stop, and the result will be seventy-two new sects.”

  Luther’s letters speak throughout in a similar strain of the divisions already existing and the gloomy outlook for the future; in the ‘forties his lamentation over the approaching calamities becomes, however, even louder than usual in spite of the apparent progress of his cause. Much of what he says puts us vividly in mind of Duke George’s words just quoted.

  Amidst the excitement of his struggle with the fanatics he wrote as early as 1525 to the “Christians at Antwerp”: “The tiresome devil begins to rage amongst the ungodly and to belch forth many wild and mazy beliefs and doctrines. This man will have nothing of baptism, that one denies the Sacrament, a third awaits another world between this and the Last Day; some teach that Christ is not God; some say this, some that, and there are as many sects and beliefs as there are heads; no peasant is so rude but that if he dreams or fancies something, it must forsooth be the Holy Spirit which inspires him, and he himself must be a prophet.”

  After the bitter experiences of the intervening years we find in a letter of 1536 this bitter lament: “Pray for me that I too may be delivered from certain ungodly men, seeing you rejoice that God has delivered you from the Anabaptists and the sects. For new prophets are constantly arising against me one after the other, so that I almost wish to be dissolved in order not to see such evils without end, and to be set free at last from this kingdom of the devil.”

  Even in the strong pillars of the Evangel, in the Landgrave of Hesse and Bucer the theologian, he apprehended treason to his cause and complains of them as “false brethren.” At the time of the negotiations at Ratisbon, in 1541, he exclaims in a letter to Melanchthon: “They are making advances to the Emperor and to our foes, and look on our cause as a comedy to be played out among the people, though as is evident it is a tragedy between God and Satan in which Satan’s side has the upper hand and God’s comes off second best.... I say this with anger and am incensed at their games. But so it must be; the fact that we are endangered by false brethren likens us to the Apostle Paul, nay, to the whole Church, and is the sure seal that God stamps upon us.”

  In spite of this “seal of God,” he is annoyed to see how his Evangel becomes the butt of “heretical attacks” from within, and suffers from the disintegrating and destructive influence of the immorality and godlessness of many of his followers.

  This, for instance, he bewails in a letter of condolence sent in 1541 to Wenceslaus Link of Nuremberg. At Nuremberg according to Link’s account the evil seemed to be assuming a menacing shape. Not the foe without, writes Luther, but rather “our great gainsayers within, who repay us with contempt, are the danger we must fear, according to the words of the common prophecy: ‘After Antichrist has been revealed men will come who say: There is no God!’ This we see everywhere fulfilled to-day.... They think our words are but human words!”

  About this time he often contemplates with sadness the abundance of other crying disorders in his Churches, the wantonness of the great and the decadence of the people; he cries: “Hasten, O Jesus, Thy coming; the evils have come to a head and the end cannot be delayed. Amen.” “I am sick of life if this life can be called life.... Implacable hatred and strife amongst the great ... no hopes of any improvement ... the age is Satan’s own; gladly would I see myself and all my people quickly snatched from it!” The evil spirit of apostasy and fanatism which had raged so terribly at Münster, was now, according to him, particularly busy amongst the great ones, just as formerly it had laid hold on the peasants. “May God prevent him and resist him, the evil spirit, for truly he means mischief.”

  And yet he still in his own way hopes in God and clings to the idea of his call; God will soon mock at the devil: “The working of Satan is patent, but God at Whom they now laugh will mock at Satan in His own time.”

  We can understand after such expressions descriptive of his state of mind, the assurance with which, for all his confidence of victory, he frequently seems to forecast the certain downfall of his cause. In the German Table-Talk, for instance, we read: “So long as those who are now living and who teach the Word of God diligently are still with us, those who have seen and heard me, Philip, Pomeranus and other pious, faithful and honest teachers, all may be well; but when they all are gone and this age is over, there will be a falling away.” He also sees how two great and widely differing parties will arise among his followers: unbelievers on the one hand and Pietists and fanatics on the other; we have a characteristic prophecy of the sort where he says of the one party, that, like the Epicureans, they would acknowledge “no God or other life after this,” and of the other, that many people would come out of the school of enthusiasm, “following their own ideas and speculations and boasting of the Spirit”; “drunk with their own virtues and having their understanding darkened,” they would “obstinately insist on their own fancies and yield to no one.”

  And again he says sadly: “God will sweep His threshing-floor. I pray that after my death my wife and children may not long survive me; very dangerous times are at hand.” “I pray God,” he frequently said, “to take away this our generation with us, for, when once we are gone, the worst of times will follow.” The preacher, “M. Antonius Musa once said,” so he recalls: “We old preachers only vex the world, but on you young ones the world will pour out its wrath; therefore take heed to yourselves.”

  This is not the place to investigate historically the fulfilment of these predictions. We shall content ourselves with quoting, in connection with Musa, the words of another slightly later preacher. Cyriacus Spangenberg saw in Luther a prophet, for one reason because his gloomiest predictions were being fulfilled before the eyes of all. In the third sermon of his book, “Luther the Man of God,” he shows to what frightful contempt the preachers of Luther’s unadulterated doctrine were everywhere exposed, just as he himself (Spangenberg) was hated and persecuted for being over-zealous for the true faith of the “Saint” of Wittenberg. “Ah,” he says in a sermon in 1563 couched in Luther’s style, “Shame on thy heart, thy neck, thy tongue, thou filthy and accursed world. Thy blasphemy, fornication, unchastity, gluttony and drunkenness ... are not thought too much; but that such should be scolded is too much.... If this be not the devil himself, then it is something very like him and is assuredly his mother.”

  3. Provisions for the Future

  Luther failed to make the effectual and systematic efforts called for in order to stave off the fate to which he foresaw his work would be exposed. He was not the man to put matters in order, quite apart from the unsurmountable difficulties this would have involved, seeing he possessed little talent for organisation. He was very well aware that one expedient would be to surrender church government almost entirely into the hands of the secular authorities.

  A Protestant Council?

  The negotiations which preceded the Œcumenical Council of the Catholic Church, had for one result not only to impress the innovators with a sense of their own unsettled state, but to lead them to discuss the advisability of holding a great Protestant council of their own. Luther himself, however, wisely held aloof from such a plan, nay his opposition to it was one of the main obstacles which prevented its fulfilment.

  When the idea was first mooted in 1533 it was rejected by Luther and his theologians Jonas, Bugenhagen and Melanchthon in a
joint memorandum. “Because it is plain,” so they declare, “that we ourselves are not at one, and must first of all consider how we are to arrive at unity amongst ourselves. In short, though an opposition council might be good and useful it is needless to speak of such a thing just now.”

  In 1537 the Landgrave of Hesse, and more particularly the Elector of Saxony, again proposed at Schmalkalden that Luther, following the example of the Greeks and the Bohemians, should summon a council of his own, a national Evangelical council, to counteract the Papal Council. The Elector proposed that it should be assembled at Augsburg and comprise at least 250 preachers and men of the law; the Emperor might be invited to attend and a considerable army was also to be drafted to Augsburg for the protection of the assembly. At that time Luther’s serious illness saved him from an embarrassing situation.

  Bucer and Melanchthon were now the sole supporters of the plan of a council. Both were men who believed in mediation and Melanchthon may really have hoped for a while, that the “philosophy of dissimulation,” for which he stood, might, even in a council, palliate the inward differences and issue in something tolerably satisfactory. Luther himself was never again to refer to the Evangelical Council.

  It was the theologians headed by Martin Bucer, who, at the Diet of Schmalkalden in 1540 at which Luther was not present, lodged a memorandum on the advisability of holding a council. The petitioners declared it “very useful and called for, both for the saving of unity in doctrine and for the bettering of many other things, that, every one or two years, the Estates should convene a synod.” Visitors chosen there were to “silence any errors in doctrine” that they might discover. The Estates, however, did not agree to this proposal; it was easy to foresee that it would be unworkable and productive of evil. It was only necessary to call to mind the fruitlessness of the great assemblies at Cassel and Wittenberg which had brought about the so-called Wittenberg Concord and the disturbances to which the Concord gave rise.

  Bucer keenly regretted the absence of any ecclesiastical unity and cohesion amongst his friends.

  “Not even a shadow of it remains,” so he wrote to Bullinger. “Every church stands alone and every preacher for himself. Not a few shun all connection with their brethren and any discussion of the things of Christ. It is just like a body the members of which are cut off and where one cannot help the other. Yet the spirit of Christ is a spirit of harmony; Christ wills that His people should be one, as He and the Father are one, and that they love one another as He loved us.... Unless we become one in the Lord every effort at mending and reviving morals is bound to be useless. For this reason,” he continues, “it was the wish of Œcolampadius when the faith was first preached at Basle, to see the congregations represented and furthered by synods. But he was not successful even amongst us [who stood nearest to him in the faith]. I cannot say that to-day there is any more possibility of establishing this union of the Churches; but the real cause of our decline certainly lies in this inability. Possibly, later on, others may succeed where we failed. For, truly, what we have received of the knowledge of Christ and of discipline will fade away unless we, who are Christ’s, unite ourselves more closely as members of His Body.”

  He proceeds to indicate plainly that one of the main obstacles to such a union was Luther’s rude and offensive behaviour towards the Swiss theologians: Luther had undoubtedly heaped abuse on “guiltless brethren.” But with this sort of thing, inevitable in his case, it would be necessary to put up. “Will it not be better for us to let this pass than to involve so many Churches in even worse scandals? Could I, without grave damage to the Churches, do something to stop all this vituperation, then assuredly I should not fail to do so.”

  Unfortunately the peacemaker’s efforts could avail nothing against a personality so imperious and ungovernable as Luther’s.

  Bucer continued nevertheless to further the idea of a Protestant council, though, so long as Luther lived, only with bated breath. He endeavoured at least to interest the Landgrave of Hesse in his plan for holding small synods of theologians.

  It was the want of unity in the matter of doctrine and the visible decline of discipline that drove him again and again to think of this remedy. On Jan. 8, 1544, he wrote to Landgrave Philip: In so many places there is “no profession of faith, no penalties, no excommunication of those who sin publicly, nor yet any Visitation or synod. Only what the lord or burgomaster wished was done, and, in place of one Pope, many Popes have arisen and things become worse and worse from day to day.” He reminds the Prince of the proposal made at Schmalkalden; because nothing was done to put this in effect, scandals were on the increase. “We constantly find that scarcely a third or fourth part communicate with Christ. What sort of Christians will there be eventually?” — In the same way he tells him later: Because no synods are held “many things take place daily which ought really greatly to trouble all of us.” In Würtemberg and in some of the towns of Swabia the authorities were dissuaded by the groundless fear lest the preachers should once more gain too much influence; this was why the secular authorities were averse to synods and Visitations; but “on this account daily arise gruesome divisions in matters of doctrine and unchastity of life; we find some who are daily maddened with drink and who give such scandal in other matters that the enemies of Christ have a terrible excuse for blaspheming and hindering our true Gospel.... At the last Schmalkalden meeting all the preachers were anxious that synods and Visitations should be ordered and held everywhere. But who has paid any heed to this?” And yet this is the best means whereby “our holy religion might be preserved and guarded from the new Papists amongst us, i.e. those who do not accept the Word of God in its purity and entirety, but explain it away, pull it to pieces, distort and bend it as their own sensual passions and temptations move them.”

  Once the main obstacle had been removed by Luther’s death, Bucer, who was very confident of his own abilities, again mooted the idea of a great council. In the same letter to Landgrave Philip of Hesse in which he refers to the death of Luther, “the father and teacher of us all,” which had occurred shortly before, he exhorts the Landgrave more emphatically than ever to co-operate, so that “first of all a general synod may be held of our co-religionists of every estate,” to which all the sovereigns should despatch eminent preachers and councillors — i.e. be formally convened by the secular authorities — and, that, subsequently “particular synods be held in every country of the Churches situated there.” “Short of this the Churches will assuredly fare badly.”

  The Landgrave was not averse, yet the matter never got any further. The terrible quarrels amongst the theologians in the camp of the new faith after Luther’s decease put any general Protestant council out of the question.

  We can imagine what such a council would have become, if, in addition to the theologians, the lay element had been represented to the extent demanded at a certain Disputation held at Wittenberg under Luther’s presidency in 1543. From the idea of the whole congregation taking its share in the government of the Church, Luther could never entirely shake himself free. Nevertheless it is probable, that, in spite of this Disputation, he had not really changed his mind as to the impossibility of an Evangelical council.

  If, with Luther’s, we compare Melanchthon’s attitude towards the question of a Lutheran council we find that the latter’s wish for such a council and his observations about it afforded him plentiful opportunity for voicing his indignation at the religious disruption then rampant.

  “Weak consciences are troubled,” he said in 1536, “and know not which sect to follow; in their perplexity they begin to despair of religion altogether.”— “Violent sermons, which promote lawlessness and break down all barriers against the passions, are listened to greedily. Such preaching, more worthy of cynics than of Christians, it is which thunders forth the false doctrine that good works are not called for. Posterity will marvel that there should ever have been an age when such madness was received with applause.”— “Had you made the journ
ey with us,” he writes on his return from a visit to the Palatinate and Swabia, “and, like us, seen the woeful desolation of the Churches in so many places, you would doubtless long with tears and sighs that the Princes and the learned should confer together how best to come to the help of the Churches.” — Later again we read in his letters: “Behold how great is everywhere the danger to the Churches and how difficult their government; for everywhere those in the ministry quarrel amongst themselves and set up strife and division.” “We live like the nomads, no one obeys any man in anything whatsoever.”

  Two provisions suggested by Luther for the future in lieu of the impracticable synods were, the establishment of national consistories and the use of a sort of excommunication.

  Luther’s Attitude towards the Consistories introduced in 1539

  With strange resignation Luther sought to persuade himself that, even without the help of any synods and general laws, it would still be possible to re-establish order by means of a certain supervision to be exercised with the assistance of the State, backed by the penalty of exclusion. Against laws and regulations for the guidance of the Church’s life, he displayed an ever-growing prejudice, the reason for this being partly his peculiar ideas on the abrogation of all governing authority of the Church, partly the experiences with which he had met.