Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  But, in such a system, what place was there left for anything more than a phantom Church? Obviously the Church had to withdraw into the region of the invisible. For her again to become visible and assume the shape to be considered below, seems almost a paradox.

  In view of the elasticity and vagueness of Luther’s teaching on the Church it is not surprising that his followers, to this very day, are divided as to whether, in point of fact, Luther wanted a “Church” or not.

  A well-known Lutheran theologian admits in plain language that Luther left the problem of the Church unsolved; only after the Reformer’s time did certain “important problems” arise in respect of Luther’s tentative definition of the Church. Another theologian, writing in a Protestant periodical, says that Luther left behind him no “Evangelical Church.” “The Reformation,” he says, “spelt Christendom’s deliverance from the Church.… His great anticlerical bias was never repudiated by Luther.… He committed the care of the pure Evangel to the hands of the civil authorities. It ought no longer to be disputed that Luther and the Reformers were not the founders of the Evangelical Church — and that their ideal Protestantism was one minus a Church. It is only necessary to take the idea of the Church in its strict sense — not as the congregation, or the people of God, nor yet as a body of men holding the same opinions, nor as the kingdom of Christ — but as an independent complexus of regulations ordering the religious life, as a special institution to provide for the particular needs of the religious commonwealth within traditional limits.” Hence “the fact that, in our homeland, three hundred years after Luther’s time, we find the Evangelical preacherdom firmly consolidated in a body not unlike the State, and professing to be the official representative of Protestantism is one of the most astounding paradoxes in all the history of the Church.”

  There is no need to go so far, nor is it really necessary to put the words evangelical “Church” or “Churches” in inverted commas, as Protestants sometimes do in order to mark the quite unusual meaning of the word Church according to Luther’s view. It is obvious that logic had no place in Luther’s ideas and aims in respect of the Church, and his subjectivism imposed on him in this matter the utmost vagueness.

  Frequently we find in Catholic works on dogma extracts from Luther’s writings dating from 1519 and 1520, which, it is alleged, show his positive conviction at that time that a Church — i.e. one in the olden Catholic sense — was to be recognised. But this is a mistake. The documents containing such utterances were of a diplomatic character, and we have no right to build upon them. They do not in any way invalidate what has been said above.

  One of these is Luther’s “Unterricht auff etlich Artikell,” dating from the end of Feb., 1519, i.e. from a time when he had already discovered the Roman Antichrist; the other, his “Oblatio sive Protestatio,” dating from the summer of 1520, is a tract unmistakably intended to forestall the publication of the Roman Bull. In the first work, composed at the instance of Miltitz, it is true he says in praise of the Roman Church that, in her, “St. Peter and St. Paul, 46 Popes and many hundred thousand martyrs had shed their blood,” that she was honoured by God above all others, and that, for the sake of Christian charity and unity, it was not lawful to separate from her for all her present blemishes; he will not, however, express himself regarding the “authority and supremacy of the Roman Church,” “seeing that this does not concern the salvation of souls”; Christ, on the contrary, had founded His Church on charity, meekness and oneness, and, for the sake of this oneness, the Papal commands ought to be obeyed. By this he fancies that he has proved that he “does not wish to detract from the Roman Church.”

  What he says in the other writing referred to above is even less acceptable, though here too he wishes to appear “as a submissive and obedient son of the Holy Christian Churches.” The circumstance that many shortsighted persons doubtless took him at his word at this critical time of his excommunication must have served powerfully to promote the apostasy.

  As to the changes to which Luther’s mode of thought was liable, we may perhaps be permitted to make a general observation before passing from the consideration of the invisible Church to that of the Church visible.

  The charge brought against him of having formerly taught differently on many points from what he did at a later date, Luther lightly swept aside with the assurance that he had gone on gradually advancing in the knowledge of the truth. His defenders seek to escape the difficulty in a like way. His changeableness and inconstancy must undoubtedly weigh heavily in the balance. We must not, however, be unfair to him or argue that the fact of his having at first defended elements of Catholic doctrine which he afterwards abandoned constituted a grave self-contradiction.

  Luther openly admits that it was only gradually that he came to attack the Church so bitterly.

  When King Henry VIII reproached him with the contradictions apparent between his earlier and later teaching on the Papacy and the Church, Luther boldly appealed in 1522 in his “Contra Henricum regem Angliæ” to his having only gradually learnt the whole truth: “I did not yet know that the Papacy was contrary to Scripture.… God had then given me a cheerful spirit that suffered itself to be despised [by his opponents].… By dint of so doing they forced me on, so that the further I went the more lies I discovered … until it became plain from Scripture, thanks to God’s Grace, that the Papacy, episcopacy, foundations, cloisters, universities, together with all the monkery, nunnery, Masses, services were nothing but damnable sects of the devil.… Hence it came about that I had to write other books in condemnation and retractation of my earlier ones.” He will also, so he adds ironically, retract what he had previously said in his “De captivitate Babylonica,” viz. that the Papacy was the prey of a strong Nimrod, as this had scandalised the lying King of England, who was himself the robber of his country. This, in his own style, he now proposes to amend as follows: “I should have said: The Papacy is the arch-devil’s most poisonous abomination hitherto seen on earth.”

  If it was a difficult matter to give an account of Luther’s invisible Church, owing to the changes which took place in his own views, even more difficult is the task of tracing the further growth of his teaching. His invisible Church becomes more and more clearly a visible Church; yet all the while it protests, that, in its nature, it is invisible.

  4. The Church becomes visible. Its organisation

  What was Luther’s view of the Church’s character when the time came to set up new congregations within the circle of the “Evangel”?

  Theologically the question is answered in the authentic publicly accepted explanations he gave of his doctrine on the Church. Of these the oldest is comprised in the Schwabach Articles of 1529, where we read in Article XII:

  There is “no doubt that there is and ever will be on earth a holy Christian Church until the end of the world, as Christ says in Matt, xxviii. 20.… This Church is nothing else than the believers in Christ, who hold, believe and teach the above-mentioned articles and provisions [of the Schwabach Confession], and who, on this account, are persecuted and tormented in the world. For where the Gospel is preached and the sacraments rightly used, there is the holy Christian Church, bound by no laws and outward pomp to place or time, persons or ceremonies.”— “Thus did the Evangelical idea of the Church,” so we read in Köstlin-Kawerau, “find expression once and for all in the fundamental confessions of Protestantism, faith in Christ being identified with faith in the said ‘articles and provisions.’”

  In the “Augsburg Confession” of 1530— “which Confession,” according to Luther, “was to last till the end of the world and the Last Judgment” — we read: “The Church is the mateship of the saints (‘congregatio sanctorum’) in which the Evangel is rightly taught and the sacraments rightly dispensed.” The “Apologia” to this Confession contains the following: “The Church is not merely a commonwealth of outward things and rites like other institutions, but it is rather a society of hearts in faith and the Holy Ghost. She has
, however, outward signs by which she may be known, viz. the pure doctrine of the Gospel and a dispensing of the sacraments in accordance with Christ’s Gospel.” Of “Church government” the Confession of Augsburg states: “Concerning the government of the Church we hold that no one may teach publicly or dispense the sacraments without being duly called”; this is further explained in the “Apologia”: “The Church has the command of God to appoint preachers.”

  Regarding the same matter the Schmalkalden Articles of 1537-1538, which also form a part of the “Symbolic Books,” have the following: “The Churches must have power to call, choose and ordain the ministers of the Church, and such power is in fact bestowed on the Church by God … just as, in case of necessity, even a layman can absolve another and become his pastor.… The words of Peter: ‘You are a kingly priesthood’ refer only to the true Church, which, since she alone has the priesthood, must also have the power to choose and ordain ministers. To this the general usage of the Churches also bears witness.”

  When the above was penned, indeed, even when Melanchthon wrote the “Confessio Augustana,” the new Church, though theoretically invisible, had long since received an established outward form. Yet its invisibility is emphasised in the Schwabach Articles which reject such outward laws as are inconsistent with the Church’s character; the Confession and Apologia also refer to the (ghostly) union of hearts in the faith, and to the assembly of the (unknown) saints.

  Nevertheless the visibility, so strongly insisted on in the Schmalkalden Articles, was practically indispensable, and was also a logical result of the whole work undertaken by Luther.

  First of all it was called for by the very nature of this “ministry” of those who were to preach and to dispense the sacraments in the name of the congregation; according to Luther’s teaching, the dispensing of the sacraments went hand in hand with preaching, the sacraments being efficacious only through the faith of the recipient, and the dispenser’s duty being confined to making the recipient more worthy of the inpouring of grace through the word of faith which accompanies the visible sign of the sacrament. The ministerial “office” was not conferred by a sacrament as was the case in the priestly ordination of the olden Church, but, as Luther teaches, “ordination, if understood aright, is no more than being called or ‘ordered’ to the office of parson or preacher.” Among the Papists “Baptism and Christ had been weakened and darkened” by the ordinations. “We are born priests and as such we want to be known.” “By Holy Baptism we have become the true priests of Christendom as St. Peter says: ‘You are a royal priesthood.’” Ministers (i.e. servants) of the Word was the proper title for those who performed all their functions in the name of the common priesthood of the whole people.

  As soon, however, as it became a question of appointing preachers a visible Church at once appeared on the scene, though one without either Pope or hierarchy.

  It may be recalled that Luther’s plan was originally to leave it to each congregation to appoint a preacher either from its own body or an outsider, who was then to act in their name and with their authority. There seemed no better way of securing control over the preacher’s doctrine. As for the ecclesiastical penalties, Luther, even in his “Deudsche Messe,” left their use to the congregation as a whole. At a later date he still clung to the idea of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the congregation. Even to absolve from sin belonged, in his opinion, — and to this he adhered to the end, — to all believers, and such absolution was as valid as had it been pronounced by God Himself (always assuming that faith had already been awakened in the penitent). On the authority of the congregation was to rest, not only the lower ministry, but also the quasi-episcopate. The scheme he sketched in 1523 in the Latin work he addressed to the Bohemians, “De instituendis ministris ecclesiæ,” has already been described.

  The many abuses which arose, and indeed were bound to arise, from the independence of the congregations soon compelled him to cast about for a more reliable framework. The phantom of a community of believers united in spirit, of a “brotherhood” minus any social or constitutional cohesion and devoid of any vigorous direction, proved incapable of realisation.

  Help was to be looked for only from the State.

  By clinging to its solid structure the religious innovations would have a chance of avoiding the conventicle system and the danger of its congregations falling asunder. The tendency to drift towards the State was also promoted by the opposition of the fanatical Anabaptists, for this sect was a menace to order in the congregations owing to its excesses and also to the pertinacity with which, following out Luther’s own teaching, it insisted on individualism and repudiated the “office” of the ministry. Not only did Luther, after the rise of the Anabaptists, emphasise the outward rather than the inward Word, but, for the same reason, he also laid much greater stress than formerly on the “office” and on the external representation of the Church’s members — invisibly united by the faith — by duly called officials.

  Thus, the Church, whose invisibility and spirituality Luther had been so fond of emphasising, became, in course of time, more and more a visible and concrete body, though remaining closely bound up with the State. Yet, even in Luther’s earlier views on the Church, certain indications pointed to the visible Church yet to come; indeed the ideas he retained from Catholic days were to prove stronger than he then anticipated.

  Of a statement contained in “De servo arbitrio” (1525), a book written after the rise of the Anabaptist subjectivism, Möhler justly remarks: “This passage views the clergy as the representatives of the Church which is thus quite visible; professing the faith of the invisible Church and expressing its mind, this Church has a definite doctrinal standpoint which she advocates through her clergy, and, which, as the dictum of the Saints, she regards as true and infallible. Hence the visible Church appears as the expression and facsimile of the invisible Church.”

  Already in his books against Alveld and Catharinus Luther was at pains to insist that the Church which he taught was a real community living on earth in the flesh, though not tied down to any definite place or persons. Wavering and confusion, here as elsewhere, characterise Luther’s teaching.

  We can understand how his Catholic opponents, for instance Staphylus, make much of the change from the visible to the invisible Church. Staphylus dubs those who persisted in advocating her invisibility, the “Invisibiles,” such being the followers of Flacius, Schwenckfeld and Osiander, and also the Anabaptists.

  It is a fact that Melanchthon, particularly in his later years, insists on the Church as an institution and on her visible nature more than Luther does. The centuriators defined the Church as “cœtus visibilis” and, after Chemnitz’s day (†1586), the Church of the Lutheran theologians is something quite visible, and is spoken of as an institution for the preservation and promotion of pure doctrine and of the means of grace which work by faith.

  Nor can the Wittenberg view of the Church be taken otherwise when we see how the theologians of that town in Luther’s own time proceeded in appointing ministers and controlling and supervising their office. The preachers and pastors, after their doctrine had been found consonant with that of Wittenberg, were “entrusted with the ministry” though it is not apparent whether the authorisation came from the congregations who applied for them, or from the theological examiners, or from the sovereign and his mixed consistory. The formulas used are by no means clear, save on one point, viz. that they expressly claim for the Wittenbergers the character of a true “Catholic Church,” or at least their harmony with such a Church.

  In the ordination-certificate of Heinrich Bock (above, ), who received a call as pastor and Superintendent to Reval, the quondam city of the Teutonic Order in Esthland, and who had been “ordained” on April 25, 1540, by Bugenhagen, the pastor of Wittenberg, we find it stated: “His doctrine tallies with the consensus of the Catholic Church which our Church also holds, and he is free from every kind of fanaticism condemned by the Catholic Church of Christ.
” Hence they claimed to be one with the universal Church throughout the world and not to form an isolated community apart; this, as we know, was Melanchthon’s favourite view. The olden hierarchy was, however, replaced by that of Wittenberg, as we read in the same certificate: “We” — the signatories, Luther, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Melanchthon— “have entrusted him with the ministry of the Church, that he may teach the Gospel and dispense the sacraments instituted by Christ,” “iuxta vocationem,” i.e. in accordance with the call of the authorities at Reval who had summoned the ordinand to govern their Church (“ad gubernationem ecclesiæ suæ”). The testimonial was the work of Melanchthon.

  Other testimonials of this kind are similarly worded.

  The certificate of Johann Fischer who went from Wittenberg to Rudolstadt in 1540 (above, ) sets forth that “he had been called to the ministry of the Gospel by the people there, who had also borne witness to his good moral character”; they had asked that “his call might be reinforced by public ordination”; this had been conferred on him when it had been shown that he held “the pure, Catholic doctrine of the Gospel which our Church also teaches and professes,” and that he rejected all the fanatical opinions which the Catholic Church of Christ rejects. The statement embodied in the testimonial, giving the grounds on which the signatories, the pastor of Wittenberg and other “ministers of the Gospel,” undertook such an ordination is noteworthy: “We may not refuse to do our duty to the neighbouring Churches for the Nicene Council made the godly rule that ordination should be requested of the neighbouring Churches.” Of the objections that theology and Canon Law might have raised those who drafted the document seem to have no inkling.