Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  In the questions bearing on the rights of the State and the Church, his temperament, which was so susceptible to sudden changes, needed only some strong impulse from without in order to bring to light one or other of these opposing trends. One powerful stimulus of the sort was afforded by the attractive outlook of bettering the frightful condition of the Lutheran congregations in Saxony, making his disputed cause victorious, and at the same time getting rid of the remaining Papists. By this alluring prospect he was taken captive. It would seem to have led him to shut his eyes to the iron fetters which State supremacy in Church matters would forge about his Church system not merely in Saxony but far beyond its borders. When, afterwards, he would willingly have retraced his steps, it was already too late. He was condemned to make statements extolling freedom in spiritual matters, the futility of which was plain to himself, and which, therefore, Protestants should not take so seriously as some of them do.

  It is not sufficiently realised how such opposing tendencies run side by side from the very outset of his career.

  Even in his “An den christlichen Adel,” in spite of the violence with which he incites the nobility against the Church’s administration we can see that he wishes to set his new allies more against the alleged “robberies and exactions” of the Church and the abuses which he supposed to be beyond remedy, than against the Church as such. It is true, that, by his universal priesthood, he breaks down the walls which mark the field of her sway; God can speak “through the mouth of any pious man against the Pope”; “in principle every Christian has the right to summon a Council”; but, should the secular powers gather together the Council he desired, they would, according to him, do so simply at the will and command of the Christian congregation which he also takes into account and which he admits possesses a certain spiritual “sword” which exists side by side with the secular sword, though only for the benefit of souls. Thus the spiritual power still exists as a dream. Only a Christian ruler, a “brother Christian, brother priest and sharer in the same spirit-world” may demand that violent reformation for which Luther yearns. — Thus, even in this stormy work, the two contrary drifts are to some extent discernible.

  With the same desire to retain intact some sort of spiritual order distinct from the secular, Luther here and elsewhere seeks to reserve to the Christian congregation the right of choosing their pastors; circumstances were, however, to prove too strong for him.

  “Throughout Christendom things should be so ordered that every town chooses from amongst its congregation a learned and pious burgher, commits to him the office of pastor and sees that he is given enough for his upkeep.” The congregation is also to have the right to depose him should his preaching not turn out in accordance with the Word of God. What Luther has in mind is united action on the part of all the true believers. But here, again, he has perforce to lean rather on the authorities. For, in the congregation, we have first of all the Town-Council, which, even when only a minority of the burghers is in favour of the religious reform, receives from Luther a power which does not belong to it, viz. of seeing that the people it rules are supplied with the right preachers. Above the Council, moreover, stands the supreme authority, viz. the sovereign. The latter must naturally assist the Council in choosing good Evangelical preachers and must himself take steps when dissensions cause the Council to refuse to move. Luther, again, will do nothing in opposition to the Court; for instance, he will not allow any pastor to enter upon his office who is not a “persona grata” at the Court, even though he should have been duly called by the congregation. Every parish is indeed independent by divine right, but the prince also acts by divine right when, as protector and defender, he intervenes, regardless of the traditional rights of patron and warden, etc.

  In Saxony, where the ruler was favourable to Lutheranism, his authority was indispensable for the establishment of the Church. On the other hand, where the conditions were less favourable to Luther, there, according to his “De instituendis ministris,” the principal work must devolve on the town councillors and the patrons as well as on the preachers appointed by them to the congregations; to these it falls to elect bishops, so that everything may be put on independent ecclesiastical lines. — Thus Luther was not so averse to changing both methods and principles.

  The change in Luther’s views comes out most clearly in the leave he gives to the highest secular power to annul the choice made by the congregation. The instructions for the Visitation prescribed that, on the bare authority of the prince and regardless of the rights of the congregation, those pastors who taught what was erroneous or who had proved otherwise unsatisfactory were to be deposed and replaced by others. This held even of those who were strongly backed by their congregation. “In point of fact,” says Carl Müller, “this was practically to shift the responsibility from the congregation and its authorities to the sovereign. It is also clear, that, where there was a divergency of opinion concerning the orthodoxy of a preacher, the sovereign naturally had his own way.” But, even before this, Luther had refused to sanction the demand of the Erfurt burghers, viz. that the parishes should themselves appoint their pastors even against the wishes of the Town-Council; it was “seditious,” so he wrote in 1525, “that the parishes should seek to choose or dismiss their pastors regardless of the Council.” Here the Council happened to be on his side; where this was not the case, Luther was just as ready to set aside its rights in favour of those of the ruler.

  In this wise the right of the congregation to elect its pastor, a right which he had once praised so highly, even in his own day was so whittled away as to become quite meaningless. Of the two tendencies which had been apparent in him from the first, one inclining towards the authorities and the other towards freedom of election, the former had won the day.

  We already know that Luther inclined for a long while to the establishment of a Church-Apart or assembly of true believers. Yet, at the same time, he was working for a National Church, albeit he was convinced that such a Church would for the most part be composed of non-Christians. Eventually the latter was to hold the field owing to the force of outward circumstances.

  He was in favour of a Church which should be entirely free, and at the same time of a confessional Church with binding dogmas. So strongly did he stand for freedom in all ecclesiastical matters that he not only refused to recognise the existence of any spiritual “authority” among his followers, but also declared no Pope, no angel, no man had the power to rob the faithful of this freedom or to impose anything on him. At the same time, however, he was in favour of that strict disciplinary government which finds its expression in the regulations for the Visitation.

  According to Luther there is no real Canon Law. He refuses to recognise State and Church as two bodies which exist side by side. And yet he complains of the way in which the rights of the Church, i.e. of his Church, were being thwarted by the lawyers.

  He wished a distinction to be drawn between the Prince and the Christian, and declared: “His princely authority has nothing to do with his Christianity”; and yet he himself united the spiritual and the secular power in the prince’s hands so closely that they were never afterwards to be wrenched apart. As Carl Müller truly remarks, we must not “press too much the term ‘emergency bishop for the time being’ which Luther applies to the secular ruler.”

  True to one of his ruling tendencies, he based on the Bible the rights and duties of the authorities in every department of the spiritual sphere. “If the authorities do not wish it, then neither must you.” Nevertheless, almost in the same breath, he scoffs at the claims of the authorities when they did not happen to fall in with his wishes, or when they proved an obstacle to the expulsion of Popery: “Why pay attention to him [the Elector]? He has no right to command except in worldly things.”

  He stood for the Consistories and promoted their establishment in spite of Spalatin’s objections; and yet, on the other hand, he opposed them, saying, that the Courts were after ruling the Churches as they pleased
, and that Satan was bent on introducing the secular power into the Church. Hence, from about 1540, he attempted to set up Protestant bishops as in the case of Nicholas Amsdorf. The Consistories displeased him and made life unbearable. Still, because the ecclesiastical edifice he had erected could not do without them, he bridled his tongue; very different is the picture of Luther from that of the champions of the Church’s independence in the early days of Christianity, for instance, Ambrose or Chrysostom, who, regardless of self, staked all they had in the struggle against the oppressors of the Church. His habit of making the naughty lawyers of the Court the butt of his complaints is significant enough, for the really responsible party was the Court itself and the Elector in person, who used his newly acquired power to rule more autocratically in Church matters than any Pope had ever done.

  Conclusion

  The prince did not rule as a member of a religious commonwealth which also had rights of its own, but rather as one holding the highest powers of the episcopate; he nominated the pastors and provided for their support; he watched over the lives and behaviour of the clergy, and, at Luther’s instance, took proceedings against the false teachers and the remnants of Popery; he alone controlled the consistory which acted in his name; matrimonial cases were already being dealt with by his lawyers and the disposal and management of the property which had formerly belonged to the Church depended entirely on the Court. The right of the congregations “to appoint and dismiss preachers and to pronounce on doctrine” seemed now forgotten. If a layman dared to call a preacher to task the authorities were bound to take proceedings against him for disturbance of the public peace and order.

  Not that Luther hesitated to complain or express his displeasure with the State-Church system whenever he found it in his way, or when he saw Catholic princes make use of his principles, or when he thought the cause of the new religion compromised. On such occasions we hear him bewailing: “The worldly rulers, the princes, kings and nobles throughout the land, not to speak of the magistrates in the villages, want to wield the sword of the Word and teach the pastors how and what they are to preach and how they must govern their Churches. But do you boldly say to such: You fool, you brainless dolt, look to your own calling and don’t try to preach; leave that to your pastor.” He declares in the same way: “The secular government does not extend over the conscience, though there are many crazy princes who seek to raise their power and influence over the welkin itself and even to rule consciences, also to settle what is to be believed or not; yet, the worldly power has only to do with that which reason grasps.”

  He considered that the interests of his new Church were endangered when, in 1533, the Hessian theologians advocated the enforcement of the greater excommunication by the sovereign; he saw in this a real peril in the then state of things; he wrote: “I would not have the temporal authorities meddle in this office; they should let it be, in order that the real distinction between the two powers be upheld (‘ut staret vera et certa distinctio utriusque potestatis’).”

  But where in the domain of Protestantism at that time, was there to be found any real ecclesiastical ruler who could act with “power”?

  The only factor that kept his anger from breaking forth was his consciousness that he owed everything he had achieved to the ruler of the land. But “at heart he saw only too well,” remarks a Protestant Church-historian whom we have repeatedly quoted, “that the Princes, under the cloak of the Christian name which they did not deserve to bear, were solely intent on their own aggrandisement when they laid their hands on ecclesiastical authority. He also saw that he himself, in his ‘Unterricht,’ was to blame for this.” Hence it is all the stranger to hear Luther declaring when at odds with the officials, that they must never tire of “insisting, impressing, urging and driving home the distinction between the secular and the spiritual rule ... for the troublesome devil will not cease cooking and brewing up the two kingdoms together.” And yet we have heard him say that the two should form “one cake.”

  Concerning his attitude towards the authorities some recent theologians of his own camp have expressed themselves very differently from what might have been expected:

  “Thus, with Luther, the end tallies with the beginning,” they write; “everything has been thought out clearly and is in perfect agreement.”

  And similarly: “The principles which guided him [in his scheme and arrangement of the Visitation] are precisely the same as appear in his earlier writings.” “It is evident that Luther’s opinions, though ever in a state of growth, were yet in their fundamental lines always the same.”

  The opinion expressed by another Protestant theologian comes closer to the truth; he declares openly: The want of logic in Luther’s mode of thought is perhaps “nowhere more apparent than in his views on the authorities and their duty towards religion.... It will never be possible to get away from the contradictions in his theory and between his theory and his practice.”

  It only remains to add, that, of the diverging currents, that one is always the strongest which seems most likely to promote his work, the diffusion of his doctrine and the growth of his Church. A glance at the weathercock of expediency will tell us which tendency we may expect to find predominant, for, as a rule, it is the prospect of success that decides him. At the same time it must be admitted, that, in his zeal for his cause, he is at times hardly aware of the extent to which he is proving untrue to his original plans.

  The present-day observer of such vacillation even in matters so far-reaching and fundamental will naturally ask himself how it was that Luther’s fickleness failed to discourage his followers. The answer is, however, not far to seek. He himself, as a general rule, concealed the actual state of the case under the veil of his eloquence, and his partisans were either not aware of how things really stood or else followed him with a blind enthusiasm for the common aims and the common struggle which all his changes and contradictions could not avail to quench. This was the origin of the picture which so many German Protestants cherish of Luther. To them he was a champion of the Church and the State, faithful to his principles to the last. Such a portrait differs widely from that which the historian draws from an impartial study of Luther’s writings and correspondence.

  A Protestant Church-historian, H. Hermelink, recently attempted to place Luther side by side with the “greatest politicians” of our nation. Although worldly diplomacy and organisation were not Luther’s strong point, still there is much truth in this idea. All that we have said tends to confirm this, though possibly not quite in the sense intended by Hermelink. At the same time what Carl Müller says is also not without its justification: “Luther lacked an insight into the character of the secular government, which, once it has been pushed in a given direction, cannot be expected to stand still at the point which he fixes as the limit of its powers. Thus the longer he lived the more reason he had to complain of the lawyers, and, when he was dead, the process went on even further.”

  VOL. VI. SURVEY OF LUTHER’S WORK. HIS AILMENTS. HIS DEATH

  CHAPTER XXXV (Continued) LUTHER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY AND EDUCATION

  3. Elementary Schools and Higher Education

  Luther’s Appeals on Behalf of the Schools

  In a pamphlet of 1524, on the need of establishing schools, Luther spoke some emphatic and impressive words.

  There could be nothing worse, he declared, than to abuse and neglect the precious souls of the little ones; even a hundred florins was not too much to pay to make a good Christian of a boy; it was the duty of the magistrates and authorities to whom the welfare of the town was confided to see to this, the parents being so often either not pious or worthy enough to perform this office, or else too unlearned or too much hampered by their business or the cares of their household. The well-being of a town was not to be gauged by its fine buildings, but rather by the learning, good sense, and honourable behaviour of the burghers; given this the other sort of prosperity would never be lacking. Luther dwells on the urgent need of
studying languages and sees an act of Providence in the dispersion of the Greeks whose presence in the West had been the means of giving a fresh stimulus to the study of Greek, and even to the cultivation of other languages. Without schools and learning no men would be found qualified to rule in the ecclesiastical or even in the secular sphere; even the management of the home and the duties of women to their families and households called for some sort of instruction.

  Owing to their innate leaning to savagery the German people, above all others, could ill afford to dispense with the discipline of the school. All the world calls us “German beasts”; too long have we been German beasts, let us therefore now learn to use our reason.

  He speaks of the educational value not only of languages but of history, mathematics and the other arts, but above all of religion, which, now that the true Evangel is preached, must take root in the hearts of the young, but which could not be maintained unless care was taken to ensure a supply of future preachers.

  He gives an excellent answer to the objection: “What is the good of going to school unless we are thinking of becoming parsons?” The wholesale secularisation of ecclesiastical benefices had resulted in a great falling off in the number of scholars, the parents often thinking too much of the worldly prospects of their children. Luther, however, points out that even the secular offices deserve to be filled with men of education. “How useful and called for it is, and how pleasing to God, that the man destined to govern, whether as Prince, lord, councillor or otherwise, should be learned and capable of performing his duty as becomes a Christian.”