Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The second, or Majorite controversy broke out at Wittenberg itself, and like the ones which followed was called forth by the opposition of the Lutheran zealots to any Melanchthonian modifications of Luther’s doctrines. George Major, professor at Wittenberg, and subsequently Superintendent at Eisleben, backed by Justus Menius, Superintendent at Gotha, had the courage to declare that works were necessary for salvation, and that, without works, no one could be saved. For this he and Menius were branded as “heretics” by Flacius Illyricus, Nicholas Amsdorf, Johann Wigand, Joachim Mörlin and Alexius Prætorius. It was in the midst of this passionate wrangle, which deeply agitated the ranks of the preachers and disturbed the congregations, that Amsdorf, with a determination and defiance equal to Luther’s own went to the extremes of publishing his tract entitled “That the proposition ‘good works are harmful to salvation,’ is a sound and Christian one.” Flacius brought a writing against Major to a close with the pious wish that Christ would speedily crush the head of the serpent. Major, the confidant of Luther whom he had once despatched to attend the religious Conference at Ratisbon, was now obliged to give in; he made a shameful recantation. Menius, however, was denounced to the preachers and people as a “Papist,” and, in spite of his weak compliance, was unable to maintain his position against the inquisition put into motion by the higher powers. Although he resigned his office as Visitor and submitted patiently to a reprimand from the Court, he was obliged to leave the land; he besought the sovereign in vain for protection against his theological adversaries and freedom to communicate with the “dear gentlemen” at Wittenberg. The Town Council of Gotha was forbidden to give him a testimonial to the purity of his doctrine, and he himself, in spite of his protest that he was as much heir to Luther’s doctrine as Flacius, was summoned to take his trial before a sort of religious Synod at Eisenach in 1556, which also ousted him from his Superintendency. “He died on Aug. 11, 1558, from the effects of what he had undergone.”

  In the third great controversy, the Adiaphoristic, Flacius Illyricus behaved with great violence, indeed his extreme Lutheran views were the cause of the quarrel which in itself well illustrates the pettiness and acrimony of those concerned in it. The question under dispute was whether certain “indifferent matters” (ἀδιάφορα) sanctioned in the Augsburg Interim of 1547 might be allowed in Protestant circles even though Luther during his lifetime had frowned on them. Under the Elector Maurice the theologians and Estates of the Saxon Electorate had answered in the affirmative. This answer embodied in the so-called “Leipzig Interim,” was firmly contradicted by Flacius. It is true that what was in question was not only ceremonies, images, hymns and such-like external things but also the rites of Confirmation and Extreme Unction, and, in a certain sense, the use of Penance, the celebration of a kind of Mass and the veneration of Saints. Flacius was supported by Nicholas Gallus, Johann Wigand, Nicholas Amsdorf, Joachim Westphal, Caspar Aquila, Johann Aurifaber, Anton Otto and Matthæus Judex. These poured forth a stream of angry tracts against the opposite party, the Wittenbergers, who, however, defended themselves with a will, viz. against Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, George Major, and Paul Eber, and their friends elsewhere, such as the Provost of Magdeburg and Meissen, Prince George of Anhalt, Bernard Ziegler and Johann Pfeffinger of Leipsig, Justus Menius of Gotha, etc. Even the use of lights on the altar and of surplices were to these zealots “Popish abominations” and a sign of the abandoning of all that Luther had won; they even complained, though untruly, that the Wittenberg theologians no longer declared the Pope to be Antichrist. Bugenhagen, Luther’s right hand man at Wittenberg, had to hear himself charged by Flacius, Amsdorf and Gallus with having denied and falsified Luther’s doctrines and with teaching something not far short of Popery. These Adiaphorists, wrote Amsdorf, “in the name and under the semblance of the Word of God, seek to persuade us to worship the Antichrist at Rome, the Whore of Babylon and the Beast on which she is seated (Apoc. xvii.).” Such dangerous men he brands as “belly servers” “who seek to make terms with the world.” He himself on the other hand was ready to meet the contempt of the world for the falling off in the number of Luther’s true followers, hence on the title-page of the new edition of Luther’s works, which he commenced when the quarrel was at its height (1555), he printed the consoling verses: “Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased the Father to give you a Kingdom” (Luke xii. 32), and “In the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John xvi. 33). Towards the end of the Preface he consoles those who shared his way of looking at things, and, as Luther had done before, he alludes to the near end of the world, when everything would be righted.

  At the time when the private judgment Luther had preached was thus bearing fruit we hear Melanchthon groaning: “You see how many teachers are fighting against us in our own Churches; every day new foes spring up, as it were, from the blood of the Titans; gladly would I leave these regions, nay, shake off my mortal coil, to escape the fury of such men.” Melanchthon too was accused of indirectly promoting Popery. An obstinate opponent of his was that very Johann Aurifaber who had been present at Luther’s death and who subsequently published the Table-Talk. Melanchthon included him in 1556 among the “unlearned fanatics, men filled with furious hate, lickspittles at the Court who seek to curry favour with the populace,” and with whom it was impossible to come to any understanding. Aurifaber, like many others of his party, was dismissed from his post as Court preacher at Weimar, and, subsequently, when pastor at Erfurt, was excommunicated on account of his teaching, particularly on original sin. His opponents he persisted in charging with Popery.

  Against any relapse into Popery the Lutherans were well guarded since 1555, by the Religious Peace of Augsburg and its principle: “Cuius regio, illius et religio.” This, however, produced no inward unity, rather the opposite. The war among the theologians on account of the “adiaphora” still went on in the Protestant camp. The hopes entertained of the Protestant Convention at Coswig (1556) suffered shipwreck owing to Melanchthon’s disinclination to come to terms. Nor did the Conference at Altenburg (1568) settle things. It was not until 1577-1580 that the formulas of Concord established a “modus vivendi” by leaving to each individual Church the decision about the “adiaphora.” Flacius himself was compelled to leave Wittenberg early in the controversy. He went to Magdeburg, but fell into disgrace on account of his tendency to insist on the Church’s independence and had to go into exile to Ratisbon, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Strasburg, wandering about from place to place until, at last, he, Luther’s most ardent champion, died in want and poverty at Frankfurt-on-the-Main (1575).

  With the Synergistic controversy the name of Flacius is likewise very closely linked.

  Here, however, the question on which minds were divided was a vital one. Many refused to accept Luther’s rigid doctrine that, in Justification, the Holy Ghost worked on man as on a senseless block. Johann Pfeffinger of Leipsig agreed with Melanchthon in assuming some sort of co-operation (“synergia”) of the human will. In this he had the Leipsig Interim on his side; eventually Victorinus Strigel of Jena, George Major, Paul Eber, Christian Lasius and others also embraced this view. Against them stood the zealots like Flacius and Amsdorf, the latter of whom boldly attacked Pfeffinger’s “De libertate voluntatis” and insisted on the unfreedom of the will. Certain of the theologians of Jena also distinguished themselves by their opposition to the Synergists.

  Flacius Illyricus went to great extremes in his antagonism to Synergism. He asserted that man was powerless by means of free will to effect anything in the matter of his salvation because “original sin was a ‘substance’ for otherwise holiness too would not be a ‘substance’”; the soul was by nature a mirror or image of Satan; it was itself original sin, and original sin was no mere ‘accident.’ It was impossible for Luther’s doctrine to be carried to its legitimate conclusion more ruthlessly than in this theory of Flacius. “It was utter demonism, was this doctrine of the substantial bedevilment of
human nature.” At this point, however, Luther’s true friends drew back: Johann Wigand and Tilman Hesshus, professors at Jena, withstood Flacius, arguing that he was a traitor to Lutheranism and that his teaching was Manichæan. Like some others Cyriacus Spangenberg, then Dean of Mansfeld, was accused of favouring Flacius and of teaching that Satan had created man, that sin was baptised, and that pregnant women bore within them young devils. As was usual in such controversies, the people took an active share in the quarrel.

  When the Elector August of Saxony assumed the government of the Duchy of Saxony, Hesshus and Wigand were deprived of their offices and driven from the land. Nine Superintendents and 102 preachers lost their posts at the same time. Hesshus had already tasted exile as pastor of Magdeburg, when in 1562 the Town Council expelled him from the town with his wife and child on account of his too emphatic enforcement of the strictest Lutheranism.

  Spangenberg too had to flee when the administrator of Magdeburg called in the troops against the Flacian preachers. Cruel measures were used to force the burghers to accept the doctrine professed by the governor; the bodies of relatives of the Count of Mansfeld were even exhumed and reinterred in places untainted with “substantialist error.”

  Spangenberg’s fate was that of many faithful Lutherans.

  Having made his escape to Thuringia disguised as a midwife he there accepted a position as pastor, but was again driven out in 1590 owing to the rigid views on original sin he had imbibed from Luther. From that time he lived by his pen until his death at Strasburg in 1604. He declared that he was suffering on behalf of the articles on sin and righteousness, but that he was determined to remain “a staunch old disciple of Luther’s.” The behaviour of the Wittenberg theologians was a source of great grief to Spangenberg: They have not only fallen away from Luther’s doctrine in ten or twelve articles, but also speak of him in the most unseemly manner: “They call Luther a ‘philauticus,’ i.e. a man who thinks highly of no one but himself, and whom nothing pleases but what he has himself said or done; item, a ‘philonisticus’ and ‘eristicus,’ a quarrelsome fellow who always insisted he was in the right, believing no good of anyone, yielding to no one, only seeking his own honour and unable to endure that anyone else should be highly thought of.” “His books [so they say] contain things that are very Manichæan, and others that resemble the old heresies.”

  Nor was Spangenberg doing an injustice to the Wittenberg professors when he charged them with having thrown Luther over.

  Cryptocalvinism

  At the time when Flacianism was being suppressed by force, a trend of opinion known as Cryptocalvinism had the upper hand in the Saxon Electorate where it was causing grave troubles. Such was the name given to the gradual leavening of the pure Lutheran doctrine with elements derived from Calvinism. In other Protestant districts on German soil Calvinism took root openly, and either supplanted Luther’s teaching, or prevented its springing up. This was the case in the Palatinate, where the Elector Frederick III exerted his influence in favour of Calvinism with the help of the Calvinistic professors of Heidelberg Caspar Olevian and Zacharias Ursinus. The Elector himself told his son-in-law Johann Frederick of Saxony, that though for more than forty years the “pure doctrine” of the Evangel and the holy Word of God had been proclaimed, “little amendment of life had followed,” and, in “excessive eating and drinking, gambling, avarice, immorality, envy and hatred we almost outdo the Papists.” He also said that it was not merely the lack of morality in Lutheranism that prejudiced him against it, but that he had decided to introduce Calvinism into his land because he had discovered in Luther’s writings many errors and contradictions which he must remove, particularly in his views on the “bodily presence of Christ” in the Sacrament of the Altar.

  The spirit of criticism which Luther had let loose in the Saxon Electorate grew among some of the Cryptocalvinists into scepticism, though they boasted of being great admirers of Luther. This scepticism was first directed against the mystery of mysteries. Luther’s own uncertainty regarding the Sacrament of the Altar, his halt mid-way, and his strange theory of the ubiquity of Christ, were in themselves a challenge. Around Melanchthon there grouped themselves at Wittenberg and Leipsig men, who, by a prudent introduction of the Calvinistic view of the Supper according to which Christ is only received spiritually, sought to question at the same time two of Luther’s pet dogmas, viz. the indwelling of Christ in the Bread at the moment of reception (Impanation) and the ubiquitous albeit spiritualised bodily presence of Christ. Hardly six years had elapsed since Luther’s death when the Hamburg preacher, Joachim Westphal, strove to set up a barrier against the threatening inroad of Cryptocalvinism in his “Farrago Opinionum de Cœna Domini”(1552). The Elector August, who assumed the reigns of government in the Saxon Electorate (1553-1586), for quite twenty years of his reign was entirely committed to Cryptocalvinism. Among the theologians and Court officials who were responsible for his attitude were, particularly, Melanchthon’s son-in-law, Caspar Peucer, Court physician to the Elector, the Court preacher Christian Schütz, Johann Stössel, Superintendent of Pirna and Privy Councillor Georg Craco, the most influential person in the government of the Saxon Electorate. A “Corpus doctrinæ Philippicum” was drawn up in 1560 from Melanchthon’s writings by these so-called “Philippists.” In 1571 a Catechism appeared, which, like the “Corpus” had the Elector’s approval. The doctrine it contained was endorsed by an assembly of theologians at Dresden in the same year, and it was intended to enforce it as the true faith throughout the land.

  As might have been expected, the opposition of the “Gnesiolutherans” against these doings in the Saxon Electorate, the original home of Lutheranism, was very strong.

  Protests were registered by Martin Chemnitz, the “aristarch of Brunswick” as the opposite party called him, and by the Jena theologians, as, for instance, Wigand, Hesshus, Johann Frederick Cœlestinus and Timotheus Kirchner. At Jena the new system was branded as a “fresh incursion of devilish spirit” and, in a “Warning” against the Wittenbergers, it was stated: “They want to make an end of Luther, that is to say, of his doctrine, and at the same time to appear innocent of so doing.” Similarly in the following year, 1572, a writing entitled “Von den Fallstricken” declared: “They trample Luther’s doctrine under foot, laugh at it, ridicule it and anathematise it in the most scandalous manner,” etc. The Jena divines, so they asserted, were alone in having the true unalloyed doctrine which they were anxious to keep free from all the extravagances and errors of the Pope, the Turks, blasphemers of the Sacrament, Schwenckfeldians, Servetians, Arians, Antinomians, Interimists, Adiaphorists, Synergists, Majorites, Enthusiasts, Anabaptists, Manichæans and other sects.

  The divergencies were so considerable and far-reaching, and the falling away from Luther’s doctrine so great, that Aurifaber, who boasted of having closed the eyes of his immortal master and of being soaked in his spirit, prefaced as follows the collection of the Table-Talk, which he gave to the world in 1566: “His doctrine is now so despised, and, in the German lands men have become so tired, weary and sick of it, that they no longer care to hear his name mentioned, nor do they much esteem the testimony of his books. It has come about that, if one wishes to find Dr. Martin Luther’s doctrine pure and unfalsified anywhere in the German lands, one has to put on strong spectacles and look very closely; this is a dreadful thing to learn.” Aurifaber has this sole consolation, viz. that Luther, because he had foreseen this state of things, had proved himself a “true prophet.”

  Another writer speaks in the following terms of the decay of Luther’s doctrines and the utter contempt for his person: The endless benefits Luther brought to Germany — of these the author enumerates eighteen — those who now profess the Evangel treat with the “most shocking and gruesome unthank,” doing so not merely by their “evil life” but by “scorning, decrying and condemning” both his benefits and his faith. People refuse any longer to follow the great teacher in his chief doctrines “about the Law and the true
knowledge of sin,” “true justice,” “the distinction between Law and Gospel,” and about the holy sacraments. “This worthy sendsman of God” meets with “shameful contempt,” nay, with something worse than contempt, seeing that, “to boot, he is abused, reviled and defamed by most people,” which “is all the more hard in that not only his person but also the wholesome doctrine and divine truth revealed to us by Luther the man of God, is too often contemptuously rejected by the greater number.” The author, in his concern, also fears that as people were also bent on introducing changes in the language “in a few years not much will be left of Luther’s pure German speech.”

  At the Court at Dresden, however, the opposition to the Cryptocalvinism described above gradually gathered strength. Finally the Elector August, too, was won over, partly on political, partly on theological grounds. As early as 1573 August declared: “It would not take much to make him send all the rogues to the devil,” and, on another occasion that, “for the sake of three persons he would not expose his lands to the harm wrought by the Sacramentarians.” When at last an unmistakably Calvinistic writing by Joachim Curæus on the Supper was published by a Leipzig printer, known to be well disposed to the Wittenberger party, the fury of the Elector broke loose and he declared at a meeting at Torgau “The venomous plant must now be torn up by the roots.” In his name the so-called Articles of Torgau denoting more or less a return to Luther’s doctrines were drawn up by an ecclesiastical court. All the theologians who refused to subscribe to them were to be “arrested.” On this the Leipzig theologians all signed the Articles, that they agreed in their hearts to all the things contained in Luther’s writings including his controversial writings against the Heavenly Prophets and his “Kurtz Bekentnis” on the Supper. Among the many Cryptocalvinists who submitted without any protest was Nicholas Selnecker, the editor of Luther’s Table-Talk. In matters of faith he followed the bidding of the secular authorities, and on one occasion, wrote to the Elector that “he would gladly crawl on hands and knees to Dresden only to escape the suspicion which had been cast on him.”