Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  We have here an instance of the tactics by which he turns on his adversaries and abuses them. In his anxiety to turn the reproach of his foes against themselves he selects by preference the celibacy of the clergy and the religious vows; nor does he attack merely the blemishes which the Church herself bewailed and countered, but the very institution itself.

  In his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” he exclaims: “The Pope condemns the married life of the bishops and priests, this is plain enough now”; “if a man has been married twice he is declared by the Papists incapable of being promoted to the higher Orders. But if he has soiled himself by abominable behaviour he is nevertheless tolerated in these offices.” “Why,” he asks, most unjustly misrepresenting the Catholic view of the sacrament of marriage, “why do they look upon it as the lowest of the sacraments, nay, as an impure thing and a sin in which it is impossible to serve God?”

  To what monstrous and repulsive images he can have recourse when painting the “whore Church” of the Papacy, the following from “Wider Hans Worst” will serve to show: You are, so he there writes in 1541 of the Catholics, “the runaway, apostate, strumpet-Church as the prophets term it”; “you whoremongers preach in your own brothels and devil’s Churches”; it is with you as though the bride of a loving bridegroom “were to allow every man to abuse her at his will. This whore — once a pure virgin and beloved bride — is now an apostate, vagrant whore, a house-whore,” etc. “You become the diligent pupils and whorelings of the Lenæ, the arch-whores, as the comedies say, till you old whores bear in your turn young whores, and so increase and multiply the Pope’s Church, which is the devil’s own, and make many of Christ’s chaste virgins who were born by baptism, arch-whores like yourselves. This, I take it, is to talk plain German, understandable to you and everybody else.”

  Without following him through all he says we shall merely draw the reader’s attention to a proverb and a picture Luther here uses. The proverb runs: “The sow has been washed in the pond and now wallows again in the filth. Such are you, and such was I once.” In the picture “the Pope’s Church,” i.e. hell, is represented as a “great dragon’s head” with gaping jaws, as it is depicted in the old paintings of the Last Judgment; “there, in the midst of the flames, are the Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, emperors, kings, princes and men and women of all sorts (but no children). Verily I know not how one could better paint and describe the Church of the Pope,” etc.

  After such rude abuse he comes back in the same writing to his usual apology. There was, he says, no object in alluding to the moral evils in the Lutheran Churches because of the Church being of its very nature invisible. Everything depends on the doctrine “which must be pure and undefiled, i.e. the one, dear, saving, holy Word of God without anything thrown in. But the life that ought to be ruled, cleansed and hallowed daily by such teaching is not yet altogether pure and holy because our carrion of flesh and blood still lives.” Yet “for the sake of the Word whereby he is healed and cleansed all this is overlooked, pardoned and forgiven him, and he must be termed clean.”

  The Papists have a beam in their own eye, i.e. their false doctrine, but they see the mote in the eye of others “as regards the life.” If it is a question with whom the true Church is to be found he assures us: “We who teach God’s Word with such certainty are indeed weak, and, by reason of our great humility, so foolish that we do not like to boast of being God’s Churches, witnesses, ministers and preachers or that God speaks through us, though this we certainly are because without a doubt we have His Word and teach it”; it is only the Papists “who venture boldly to proclaim out of their great holiness: Here is God and we are God’s Church.”

  It was not, however, bold presumption and lack of humility that led Luther’s literary opponents among the Catholics to appeal to the promises Christ had made to His Church; rather it was their conviction that these solemn assurances excluded the possibility of the Church’s having ever erred in the way Luther maintained that she had done.

  The Indefectibility of the Church and Her Thousand-Year-Long Error

  When the question arose, how the Church, in spite of Christ’s protection, could nevertheless have fallen into such monstrous errors, Luther was disposed to admit in his polemics that the true Church, i.e. the community of real believers, could not go astray. “The Church cannot teach lies and errors, not even in details.… How could it then be otherwise when God’s mouth is the mouth of the Church. As God cannot lie neither therefore can the Church.”

  Such an immutable and reliable guide to erring men for their perfect peace of mind and sure salvation, the Catholics retorted, did Christ intend to leave in His visible Church, ruled by the successors of St. Peter.

  An able Catholic work of 1528, already referred to above, emphasises the Church’s immutability in her dogma: “That preacher who does not preach in accordance with the Holy Catholic Church and the holy Fathers sins against the truth.… With due reverence we firmly believe all that is written in the approved Books of the Old and New Testament. We must not, however, so confine ourselves to this as to look upon what the Holy Church teaches apart from Scripture as human dross, seeing that Scripture itself commands us to keep the doctrine of the Church and the Fathers.” The author goes on to show his opponent Luther what services are rendered by the Church’s authority, how she preserves intact and vouches for the Canon of Scripture. It is only from the lips of the Church that we learn which books were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. “For where is it written that we must believe the Gospels of Matthew, John and the rest? But, if it is nowhere written, how is it you believe in these Gospels? How much at variance is your practice with your teaching?”

  As to the infallibility of the Church Luther retorted: The invisible Church cannot err, but “that Church which we usually mean when we use the word, can and does err; the congregation of true believers cannot be assembled in one particular spot and is often to be found where least expected. Moreover, even this Church, i.e. the true believers and the saints, can sometimes go astray by allowing themselves to be drawn away from the Word.… Hence we must always regard the Church and the saints from two points of view, first according to the Spirit, and, then, according to the flesh, lest their piety and their Word savours of the flesh.” The Church teaches according to the Spirit when her “belief tallies with the Word of God and the belief of Christ Himself in heaven. To speak in this manner and meaning is right.” But “we must not build on her opinion or belief where she holds or believes anything outside of and beyond the Word of God.” It was according to the flesh that all those abominations of errors were taught which were termed “opinions of the Churches, though they were nothing of the kind but merely human conceits, invented outside of scripture and parading under the Church’s name.”

  With this Luther’s reader is flung back once more into the most subjective of systems, for who is to decide whether this or that doctrine “savours of the flesh.” Each one for himself, solely according to the standard of Holy Scripture or, rather, each one as Luther dictates. But Luther’s decisions touched only the doctrines known to him; who is to decide on the questions yet to arise after his death?

  He condemns the errors of the Middle Ages. Yet he is occasionally ready to praise the Mediæval Church. As we know he acknowledged that she had preserved Baptism. When the Church says that “Baptism washes away sin,” this, to Luther, does not savour of the flesh. “She also holds and believes that in [?] the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ are given.… Summa, in these beliefs the Church cannot err.” These, however, merely happened to be Luther’s own opinions. Infant-Baptism Luther defended against the Anabaptists without seeking help in the Bible; as for the presence of Christ in the Sacrament against the Zwinglians he indeed had the words of the Bible, yet here, too, he was only too glad to reinforce what he said by the traditions and infallible teaching office of the Church, though in so doing he was contradicting his own theory.

  Luther
, with characteristic disregard of logic, calls the earlier Church a “Holy place of abominations.” She was a “holy place,” for “there, even under the Pope, God maintained with might and by wonders first Holy Baptism; secondly, in the pulpits, the text of the Holy Gospel in the language of each country; thirdly, the Forgiveness of Sins and Absolution both in Confession and publicly; fourthly, the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar; … fifthly, the calling or ordination to the preaching office.… Many retained the custom of holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying and reminding them of the sufferings of Christ on which they must rely; finally, prayer, the Psalter, the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments, item many good hymns and canticles both in Latin and in German. Where such things survived there must undoubtedly have been a Church, and also Saints. Hence Christ was assuredly there with His Holy Spirit, upholding in them the Christian faith though everything was in a bad way, even as in the time of Elias, when the 7000 left were so weak that Elias fancied himself the only Christian still living.”

  Nevertheless, this was the selfsame Church, which not only connived at the teaching of heretical abominations but actually herself taught all the depravities which Luther describes in the same writing, such as her peculiar doctrine of priestly ordination, of the validity of the secret Canon of the Mass, of the spiritual authority of the bishops, of justification, good works and satisfaction, of purgatory, saint-worship, etc.

  That here he does not condemn the olden Church off-hand and fling her to the jaws of the dragon as he was wont to do is a casual inconsistency; his moderation here is to be explained by the necessity he was under then (after the Diet of Augsburg), of showing that he could claim a certain continuity with the Church of the past, and also by his desire to influence those Catholics who were still sitting on the fence and whom he would gladly have drawn over to his own side by seeming concessions, in accordance with his tactics at Augsburg.

  Yet, in spite of the above concessions, the Mediæval Church remains in his eyes a “place of abominations”; her members, though validly baptised, are not members of the Church; they might indeed sit in the Church, but only as Antichrist sits in the Temple of God (2 Thess. ii. 4); her children would be saved if they died before coming to a full knowledge of the Popish Church, but if they grew up and followed her lying preaching then they would become devil’s whores; even as I myself “was stuck fast in the behind of the devil’s whore, i.e. of the Pope’s new Churches, so that it is a grief to us to have spent so much time and pains in that shameful hole. But praise and thanks be to God Who has delivered us from the Scarlet Woman!”

  So low is his esteem for the authority of the tradition of the “Holy Place of abominations,” that he includes among the doubtful and fallible statements of that Doctor of the Church the famous saying of St. Augustine, that he would not believe the Gospel were it not for the Church. He urges that Augustine himself had declared, that his doctrines were to be examined, and only those to be accepted which were found correct. He prefers to harp on another passage where St. Augustine says: “The Church is begotten, fed, brought up and strengthened by the Word of God,” as though St. Augustine in speaking thus of the soul of the Church was denying her external organisation, her spiritual supremacy, and her teaching office. Luther, however, treated tradition just as he pleased; theologians had always distinguished between those traditions of the olden Doctors that had been guaranteed by the Church and those views which were merely personal to them; the latter no theologian regarded as binding, whereas the former were accepted by them with the respect befitting the witnesses. Here, once more, we see Luther’s subjective principle at work, which excludes all authoritative doctrine that comes to man from without, leaves him exposed to doubt and negation, and quite overlooks the fact that all revelation in last resort comes to the individual from without with an irresistible and authoritative claim to respect. Just as the Divine revelation vindicates its claim to acceptance by the faithful by means of proofs, so too, the teaching authority of the Church — as Luther’s Catholic opponents were not slow to point out — could show proofs that what was presented to the faithful as an article of belief might reasonably be accepted without any need of previously testing it to see whether it agreed with Holy Scripture — an examination, which, as a matter of fact, most people were not capable of undertaking.

  As the polemic we quoted above argues, Protestants held Holy Scripture to be so clear that everyone could understand it without outside help. “But, if the heretics think Scripture to be so plain and clear, why do they write so many books in order to explain it? If Scripture is so clear, plain and easy to understand how is it that they are so much at variance concerning that one text: ‘This is My Body?’”

  Luther now fell back on the Holy Spirit. “Without the Holy Ghost,” he says, “it is impossible to discern the abominations from the Holy Place.” But, so he was justly asked, who is to vouch for it that a man has truly the Holy Spirit? And, if, as Luther opines, the Holy Ghost points to the fruits as the means whereby He may be recognised, everything again depends on the fruits being judged according to Luther’s own moral standard. In short, in these controversies, Luther revolves in a vicious circle.

  In his Table-Talk Luther’s habit of shielding himself from objections behind the strangest misrepresentations is again apparent. Such misrepresentations, occurring in his most intimate conversations, show that he was very far from merely using them in public or from motives of policy; rather they influence his whole mode of thought and feeling and were a second nature with him. We have only to turn to his conversations on the subject of the “Church,” collected in 1538 by his friend and companion Anton Lauterbach.

  Here we meet with the revolting assertion that, in the Papistical Church, the Pope claimed to be the only one who had a right to interpret Scripture, and that he did this “out of his own brain”; this Church, so Luther goes on, had set up a mass of human regulations and vain observances which stifled all freedom and true religion; “the name Church was a pretext for the most abominable errors.” Further, “the true Church [i.e. mine] teaches the free forgiveness of sins, secondly, she teaches us to believe firmly, and, thirdly, to bear the cross with patience. But the false Church [the Pope’s] ascribes the forgiveness of sins to our own merits, teaches men to waver, and, finally does not carry the cross but rather persecutes others.” Besides, how can the Papists have the true Church, seeing that they are “some of them Epicureans, some of them idolaters?” — Fancy talking about the authority of the Church! Is it with this that the fanatical Anabaptists are to be vanquished? “Moreover, we know that: The true Church never at any time bore the name or title that the godless so boldly claim; she was ever nameless and is therefore believed rather than seen; for the most part she lies downtrodden and neglected; weakness, crosses and scandals are her portion. Only look at the Church under the tyranny of the Pope; the Papal Decretals are the ne plus ultra of ungodliness.”

  “I am astonished,” so he ends, speaking of the Roman Primacy, “at the great blindness with which men worshipped the Pope’s lies and his boundless and utterly shameless audacity, as though Holy Scripture depended on the authority of the Roman Church whose head he claimed to be, basing his claim on the words of Christ (Matt. xvi. 18) ‘Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build My Church.’”

  Luther’s Tactics in the Interpretation of the Bible

  The text just quoted leads us to glance at his Biblical arguments; to conclude this chapter we shall therefore give as a sample of his exegesis on the Church a more detailed account of his exposition of the chief argument for the papal primacy, viz. Christ’s promise to Peter, using for this purpose his last book against Popery.

  He would fain, so he says, “point out the Christian sense of this text” as against that read into it by the hierarchical Church; nevertheless, at his first effort he cannot rise above a coarse witticism. “For very fear,” on approaching this text “Thou art Peter,” etc., something “might easily have h
appened had I not had my breeches on; and I might have done something that people do not like to smell, so anxious and affrighted was I.” Why did not the Pope appeal rather to the text: “In the beginning Cod created the heavens — that is the Pope — and the earth, that is the Christian Church,” etc. This is the first answer.

  The second is a perversion of the Catholic view; he accuses the Pope of deducing from the text under discussion, that he has “all power in heaven as well as on earth” and authority “over all the Churches and the Emperor to boot.” This parody of the truth Luther proceeds triumphantly to demolish as “blasphemous idolatry.” — There follows thirdly an appeal to the “Emperor, Kings, Princes and nobles” to seize upon the Papal States which the Pope has stolen by dint of “lying and trickery” and to slay as blasphemers him and his Cardinals.

  He goes on to explain the Bible passage in question by proving, fourthly, against the “wicked, shameless, stiff-necked” Papists from Eph. iv. 15, and from Augustine and Cyprian, “that the whole of Christendom throughout the world has no other head set over it save only Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The true sense of Eph. iv. 15 and the real teaching of both the Fathers in question are too well known for us to need to waste words on them here. — Fifthly, he brings forward John vi. 63: “My words are Spirit and life” and argues: “According to this the words Matt. xvi. 18 [concerning Peter and the rock] must also be Spirit and life.… The upbuilding must here mean a spiritual and living upbuilding; the rock must be a living and spiritual rock; the Church a living and spiritual assembly, nay, something that lives for all eternity.” — These facts, however, had always been admitted by Catholic commentators without causing them any apprehension as to the primacy or the visible Church. — Sixthly, he seeks to demonstrate that the Church can only be built on the rock indicated by Christ “by faith”; this, however, excludes the primacy of Peter, for “whoever believes is built upon this rock.” — Seventhly: “It is thus that St. Peter himself interprets it, 1 Peter ii. 3 ff.,” — though this is a fact only credible to one who is already of Luther’s opinion. — Eighthly, he will have it that, in the famous passage, Christ meant to say no more than: “Thou art Peter, that is a rock, for thou hast perceived and named the Right Man, viz. Christ, Who is the true Rock, as Scripture terms Him. On this rock, i.e. on Me, Christ, I will build the whole of My Christendom.”