Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Loofs can even say that Luther proclaims the need of good works. He quotes the following utterances, for instance, from Luther’s later years: “Opera habent suam necessitatem”; “they, too, must be there”; “On account of the hypocrites we must say that good works are requisite for salvation (‘necessaria ad salutem’),” “he did not shrink from speaking in this way when giving counsel.” It is quite true, that, when preaching to the people, mindful of their faults and vices, he is fond, as Loofs shows, of recalling how Christ says “drily and clearly”: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments [Mt. xix. 17]; item, Do this and thou shalt live, etc. [Luke x. 28]. This must be taken as it stands and without debate.” Hence Luther even calls those folk “mad” who say: “‘Only believe and you will be saved.’ No, good fellow, that will not do, and you will never get to the kingdom of heaven unless you keep the Commandments.... For it is written plainly enough: ‘If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.’” And Luther supports this text by others which speak of works, of their merit and demerit, their reward and punishment.

  And yet immediately after he goes on to complain: “How are we to do what the Law perpetually urges and requires, seeing that we are unable to comply with its demands?”

  Finally he reaches his usual answer: “I will do it, says Christ, and fulfil it”; first of all He again and again obtains forgiveness for us, “seeing that we are unable to keep the Law”; Christ, however, did not wish us “to continue sinning”; on the contrary, the grace He infuses makes us keep the Law “willingly and gladly”; good works, more particularly those of charity towards our neighbour, spring up of themselves after “we have crept beneath Christ’s mantle and wing.” Where faith is present “it cannot but work unceasingly what is good. It does not ask whether there be a call to do good works, but even before the question is put it has already done them, and is ever after doing them.” Those Christians — presumably the majority — who fail to find themselves in such a state receive but poor consolation: “Whoever does not perform such works is an unbelieving man, who gropes and looks about for faith and good works but knows neither the one nor the other.”

  Luther did not see that he was endangering both faith and works and undermining their very foundations.

  For, as his opponents objected, the last category of Christians, however careless they might be in the matter of good works, and however much they might fail to keep the Commandments, could, nevertheless, for the most part, at least boast of having the faith, whether regarded in the light of a “loving confidence in God’s grace” or in the more usual and ordinary sense of an acceptance of the divine revelation as true. Their faith, it was urged, was according to Luther at the outset very closely in touch with sin, indeed they had been justified by faith without either repentance or change of heart, faith having merely spread a cloak over their evil deeds; and yet now here was Luther telling them that they had lost the faith unless they lived by it, or if they transgressed the Commandments even by a venial sin — for Luther sees no distinction between mortal sin and venial.

  Loofs is certainly not overstating things when he says that, “Luther was not clear in his own mind” as to his doctrine on the great questions of works and the Law, and that his “opinion comprised much that did not tally.”

  Loofs adds: “How far Luther himself was aware that much of what he said voiced merely his own personal opinion it would be hard to tell.... Without his wealth of ideas and his ability to insist now on one, now on another side of a subject Luther would not have been so successful as a reformer. But he was hampered by his own qualities so soon as it became a question of putting his new views in didactic form.”

  Loofs, like Harnack, spares no praise when speaking of Luther’s “qualities” and the “happy intuition” which enabled him to overthrow the olden order and to call into being a new, “religious,” Christianity.

  Luther’s Doctrine of Merit in the Eyes of Protestant Critics

  One such “happy intuition” Loofs sees in the fact, that, in the question of works and merit Luther “clearly perceived and got the better of the opinion, untenable in religion, that a scale of merit exists as between God and man.” The critic abstains from discussing the Catholic teaching on supernatural merit. Its earlier no less than its later defenders rightly emphasised, in opposition to Luther, that the olden doctrine of merit rested on the express promise of God to reward faithful service, and not, as Luther insinuated, on any absolute right of the works in themselves to such reward. The act which was to meet with such a reward must, they said, be not only good in itself but also supernaturally good, i.e. it must be performed by man’s powers aided by supernatural grace; even this, however, would not suffice were there not the gracious promise on God’s part, guaranteed by revelation, that such an act would be requited by a heavenly reward. Yet this was not to deny a certain “condignitas in actu primo” inherent in the act itself.

  Luther, it is true, laughs to scorn the Popish doctrine of merit which makes God Himself our debtor. Yet long before St. Augustine had answered the objection: “God has become our debtor, not as though He has received something from us, but because He has promised what pleased Him. It is a different thing when we say to a man: You are my debtor because I have given you something, and when we say to God: Give us what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”

  In the fragments of the ancient doctrine of religious morality which Luther saw fit to retain he put germs of disintegration owing to his failure to recognise the above truth. Because he would hear nothing of merit and everywhere scented righteousness-by-works, he built up a theory of good works which lacks a foundation. In the last resort everything is coloured by his dread of self-righteousness and of any human co-operation. “The ‘Law,’ to Luther, seemed conditioned by that ‘condicio meriti,’” says Loofs, “which belonged to the Law of Moses, and, which, owing to the craving of the natural man for self-righteousness, also becomes part of the natural law.”

  So strongly does Luther denounce merit and self-righteousness that he practically does away with his own doctrine of works.

  First, his denial of free-will and the absolute determinism of his doctrine makes an end of all spontaneous, meritorious action on man’s part. Further, he is untrue to his position, repudiating it in his sermons and popular writings as far as possible, and replacing it by one morally more defensible. In later years we find him casting over his own teaching even in his theological disputations; in his anxiety to counter the Antinomians, he goes so far as to declare works necessary for salvation.

  Even earlier the fanatics and Anabaptists had helped to some extent in the work of demolition. Their conclusions as to the dangers of Luther’s system and their protests against its evil moral consequences are really much more vigorous and damaging than might appear from Luther’s bitter rejoinders. “The unjust attitude of the reformers towards the ‘fanatics,’” says Harnack, “was disastrous to themselves and their cause. How much might they not have learnt from these despised people even though obliged to repudiate their principles.”

  The work of demolition was, moreover, being carried out under Luther’s very eye by Philip Melanchthon and his friends. Luther’s doctrine, as has already been pointed out, was not at all to the taste of the dialectician of Lutheranism. “The Philippists,” says Loofs, “were very far from holding Luther’s own views,” “as far removed as” the Antinomians. Luther himself, however, “was partly to blame for the confusion.” From the standpoint adopted by Melanchthon “it was impossible to comply” with Luther’s demand for a clear “distinction to be made between Law and Gospel”; yet, according to Luther, this was one of “the things on which theology hinges.” According to Loofs, Melanchthon’s theology was a means of spoiling some “valuable reformation truths,” nay, “the most priceless of Luther’s new ideas.” As for Melanchthon’s allegation, viz. that he had merely put Luther’s doctrine more mildly, Loofs says bluntly: “If he meant this, the
n he deceived himself.” As to the points under discussion, Luther not only thought differently from Melanchthon at an earlier date, but persisted in so doing till his very death. Luther, nevertheless, never expressed any disapproval of Melanchthon’s ideas, widely as they differed from his own.

  Luther’s teaching on the Sacraments and on the Supper according to Protestant Teaching

  In Harnack’s opinion Luther, by his teaching on the one sacrament, viz. the Word, “destroyed the olden ecclesiastical view. Yet he unconsciously retained a certain remnant ... which had fatal results on the development of his doctrine. Though here again we find truth and error side by side in Luther, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that he opened the door to errors of a grave character.”

  The principal error in his doctrine of the sacraments consisted, according to Harnack, in his having made his own a reminiscence of the Catholic view. Instead of teaching that the Holy Ghost acts by the Word alone, he came, as his statements subsequent to 1525 show, to regard this Spirit as operating by the “Word and the Sacraments.”

  “In his teaching on the sacraments he forsook the attitude he had once adopted as a reformer and accepted views which tended to confuse his own doctrine of faith and still more the theology of his followers. In his efforts to thwart the fanatics he came to embrace ... some highly questionable propositions.... This relapse in his views on the means of grace wrought untold damage to Lutheranism.” Here his desire to get the better of the fanatics played a part, and so did likewise the psychological starting-point of his whole teaching. He reverted to the means of grace, “because he wished to provide real consolation for troubled consciences, and to preserve them from the hell of uncertainty concerning that state of grace of which the fanatics appeared to make so small account.... It was, however, not merely by his rejection of certain definite acts as means of grace that Luther returned to the narrow views of the Middle Ages which he had previously forsaken — the spirit lives not (as Luther knew better than any other man), thanks to any means of grace, but thanks rather to that close union with its God on Whom it lays hold through Christ — he did so still more by seeking, first, to vindicate Infant Baptism as a means of grace in the strict sense; secondly, by accepting Penance as at least a preparation for grace, and, thirdly, by maintaining that the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Supper constitutes the essential part of this sacrament.” It is true he “never ceased to maintain that the means of grace were nothing but the Word whereby faith is awakened,” but, in spite of this, the “opus operatum” of the olden Church “had again made its appearance and weakened or obscured the strict relations between Gospel and faith.”

  Of Infant Baptism in Luther’s system Harnack rightly says: “If Luther’s Evangelical theory holds good, viz. that grace and faith are inseparably linked, then Infant Baptism is in itself no sacrament, and can be no more than an ecclesiastical rite; if it is a sacrament in the strict sense, then evidently his theory is at fault. We cannot escape the dilemma, either by appealing to the faith of the parents or god-parents [as Luther, to begin with, did] — for this is the worst kind of the ‘fides implicita’ — or by assuming that faith is given in baptism, for an unconscious faith is almost as bad as that other ‘fides implicita.’ Hence the proper thing for Luther to have done would have been either to abolish Infant Baptism ... or to admit that it was a mere rite to be completed later.... Luther, however, did neither; on the contrary, he retained Infant Baptism as the sacrament of regeneration and accepted as an efficacious act what should, given his theory, have at most been a symbol of God’s preventing grace. This was, however much he might deny it, to hark back to the ‘opus operatum’ and to dissolve the link between faith and the working of grace.”

  Again, according to Harnack, the mould in which Luther cast his doctrine of the Supper once more involved him in contradictions which rendered his position untenable.

  On the one hand, by so strenuously insisting on the belief in the Real Presence as a binding doctrinal formula he was untrue to his own theory that doctrine was not to be formulated; on the other hand, his restatement of the doctrine of the Supper emptied it of all content. It was “in part the fault of his formulating of the faith that the later Lutheran Church, with its Christology, its teaching on the Sacrament ... and the false standard by which it judged divergent doctrines and pronounced them heretical, threatened for a while to become a sort of caricature of the Catholic Church.”

  Harnack notes how Luther, the better to reach the real meaning of the words “This is My Body,” actually called tradition to his aid, in his case an extremely illogical thing to do. His consciousness that in holding fast to the Real Presence he was backed by the whole Church of yore lends his words unusual power. “Even were a hundred thousand devils and all the fanatics to fall upon it, still the doctrine must stand firm.” We may add, that, with regard to this sacrament, Luther outdid his adversaries in his attachment to tradition and antiquity, reintroducing communion under both kinds as being alone in strict accord with Scripture.

  There was also much that was personal and arbitrary in the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar as shaped anew and established by Luther. For one thing, he dwelt far too exclusively on this sacrament being the pledge of the forgiveness of sins. Again, in his desire to counter Zwingli, he put forward theories on the sacrament, which embody all sorts of disadvantages and contradictions not to be found in the teaching of the earlier Church. He, indeed, denied Transubstantiation, but the “Swiss could not for the life of them see why he did, since he admits that a stupendous miracle takes place in the Supper.”

  For the Church’s ancient doctrine of Transubstantiation he substituted Impanation, and even this he admitted only in the actual celebration and reception. “The awkward part was,” says Harnack, “that, according to Luther, the Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Supper only for the purpose of reception, though they might be partaken of even by an unbeliever or a heathen.” The concomitance (presence of both Body and Blood under either kind) taught by the olden Church, which, indeed, was a natural corollary of the Real Presence, he set aside, urged thereto by his theory that in Communion both kinds must be received; the only result was to introduce a new and uncalled-for miracle. To this must be added what Harnack calls the “crazy speculations on the ubiquity of the Body of Christ,” which furnished Melanchthon his principal reason for giving up Luther’s doctrine of the Supper, and, like Zwingli and Bucer, denying the Real Presence. According to Luther, the ubiquity of the Body of Christ rested on the supposed “real communication of the Divine ‘idiomata’ (and consequently of the Divine omnipresence) to the humanity of Christ.”

  Nor does the Real Presence, according to Luther, begin at the consecration; as to when it does, he leaves the faithful in the dark; nor does he enlighten them as to when it ceases in the remains left over after communion; in the latter regard his practice was full of contradictions. — In allowing communion to be carried to the sick in their own houses he was again unfaithful to his tenets. To any processions of the sacrament he was averse, because Christ was only present at the time of reception.

  He proposed, as the better plan, that the sacrament should not be adored save by bending the knee when receiving it, and yet his own behaviour did not tally with his proposal. It was enacted at Wittenberg, in 1542, that there should be no elevation, and yet Luther had retained this rite at an earlier date, in order to defy Carlstadt, as he says, and so as not to seem in this “indifferent matter” to sanction by his attitude Carlstadt’s attack on the sacrament. He was, to say the least, verbally illogical when he termed the Eucharist the “sacrificium eucharisticum,” meaning of course thereby that it was a “thank-offering” on the part of the faithful.

  It is not surprising that belief in the Real Presence, though so strongly defended by Luther, gradually evaporated in his Church largely owing to the inconsistencies just noticed. Eventually the Lutherans made their own the views of Zwingli and Melanchthon on the
sacrament, though they retained an affection for certain vague and elastic terms concerning the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ. Luther spoke of the attempts to introduce Zwingli’s rationalistic doctrine of the sacrament at Frankfurt-on-the-Main as “a diabolical jugglery with the words of Christ,” “whereby simple souls are shamefully duped and robbed of their sacrament.” The thing was “handled in such a way that no one was certain what was meant or what to believe.”

  Luther’s views on the Church and on Divine Worship according to Protestant Criticism

  A mass of inconsequence lies in the doctrine on the Church, which he is supposed to have retained, though, as a matter of fact, he completely altered it. Thanks to his conception of the Church as a practically invisible body his view of it was so broad as to leave far behind the old, Catholic idea; nevertheless, by and by his conception of the Church grew so narrow, that, as Harnack justly remarks, “in comparison, even the Roman view of it seems in many respects more elastic and consequently superior.... The Church threatened to become a mere school, viz. the school of ‘pure [Wittenberg] doctrine.’” In this way arose “the Christianity of the theologians and pastors.... Luther on his own side repeatedly broke away from this view.” It is quite true that many contradictions are here apparent, as we shall have occasion to see later (vol. vi., xxxviii.). “His idea of the Church became obscured. The conception of the Church (communion of faith and communion of pure doctrine) became as ambiguous as the conception of the ‘doctrina evangelii.’”

  Then, with regard to his teaching on public worship. Though, as remarked above ( f.), he had in principle abandoned the view held by the olden Church regarding the necessity of external worship, and had robbed it of its focus, viz. the Sacrifice of the Altar, yet he was very far from logically following this out in practice.