Book 2 — Chapter VIII. The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.386

Chapter VIII. The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.386

§ 1. The Reformation did not take its rise from a Criticism of Doctrines.

The whole of Luther's religious history, from his entrance into the convent at Erfurt to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows that the movement of which he was the soul and centre did not arise from any merely intellectual criticism of the doctrines of the mediæval church, and that it resulted in a great deal more than a revision or reconstruction of a system of doctrinal conceptions.387 There is no trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of doctrines in Luther's mind during the supreme crisis of his history. He was driven out of the world of human life and hope, where he was well fitted to do a man's work, by the overwhelming pressure of a great practical religious need—anxiety to save his soul. He has himself said that the proverb that doubt makes a monk was true in his case. He doubted [pg 427] whether he could save his soul in the world, and was therefore forced to leave it and enter the convent.

He had lost whatever evangelical teaching he had learnt in childhood or in Frau Cotta's household at Eisenach. He had surrendered himself to the popular belief, fostered by the whole penitential system of the mediæval Church, that man could and must make himself fit to receive the grace of God which procures salvation. The self-torturing cry, “Oh, when wilt thou become holy and fit to obtain the grace of God?” (O wenn will tu einmal fromm werden und genug thun du einen gnädigen Gott kriegest?), drove him into the convent. He believed, and the almost unanimous opinion of his age agreed with him, that there, if anywhere, he could find the peace he was seeking with such desperation.

Inside the convent he applied himself with all the force of a strong nature, using every means that the complicated penitential system of the Church had provided to help him, to make himself pious and fit to be the receptacle of the grace of God. He submitted to the orders of his superiors with the blind obedience which the most rigorous ecclesiastical statutes demanded; he sought the comforting consolations which confession was declared to give; he underwent every part of the complex system of expiations which the mediæval Church recommended; he made full use of the sacraments, and waited in vain for the mysterious, inexplicable experience of the grace which was said to accompany and flow from them. He persevered in spite of the feeling of continuous failure. “If a monk ever reached heaven by monkery,” he has said, “I would have found my way there also; all my convent comrades will bear witness to that.”388 He gave a still stronger proof of his loyalty to the mediæval Church and its advice to men in his mood of mind; he persevered in spite of the knowledge that his comrades and his religious superiors believed him to be a young saint, while he knew that he was far otherwise, [pg 428] and that he was no nearer God than he had been before he entered the monastery, or had begun his quest after the sense of pardon of sin. The contrast between what his brethren thought he must be and what his own experience told him that he was, must have added bitterness to the cup he had to drink during these terrible months in the Erfurt convent. He says himself:

“After I had made the profession, I was congratulated by the prior, the convent, and the father-confessor, because I was now an innocent child coming pure from baptism. Assuredly, I would willingly have delighted in the glorious fact that I was such a good man, who by his own deeds and without the merits of Christ's blood had made himself so fair and holy, and so easily too, and in so short a time. But although I listened readily to the sweet praise and glowing language about myself and my doings, and allowed myself to be described as a wonder-worker, who could make himself holy in such an easy way, and could swallow up death, and the devil also, yet there was no power in it all to maintain me. When even a small temptation came from sin or death I fell at once, and found that neither baptism nor monkery could assist me; I felt that I had long lost Christ and His baptism. I was the most miserable man on earth; day and night there was only wailing and despair, and no one could restrain me.”389

He adds that all he knew of Christ at this time was that He was “a stern judge from whom I would fain have fled and yet could not escape.”

During these two years of anguish, Luther believed that he was battling with himself and with his sin; he was really struggling with the religion of his times and Church. He was probing it, testing it, examining all its depths, wrestling with all its means of grace, and finding that what were meant to be sources of comfort and consolation were simply additional springs of terror. He was too clear-sighted, his spiritual senses were too acute, he was too much in deadly earnest, not to see that none of these aids were leading him to a solid ground of certainty on [pg 429] which he could base his hopes for time and for eternity; and he was too honest with himself to be persuaded that he was otherwise than his despair told him.390

At length, guided in very faltering fashion by the Scriptures, especially by the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans, by the Apostles' Creed, and by fellow monks, he (to use his own words) came to see that the righteousness of God (Rom. i. 17) is not the righteousness by which a righteous God punishes the unrighteous and sinners, but that by which a merciful God justifies us through faith (not justitia, qua dens justus est et peccatores injustosque punit, but that qua nos deus misericors justificat per fidem).391 By faith, he says. What, then, did he mean by “faith”?

He replies:

“There are two kinds of believing: first, a believing about God which means that I believe that what is said of God is true. This faith is rather a form of knowledge than a faith. There is, secondly, a believing in God which means that I put my trust in Him, give myself up to thinking that I can have dealings with Him, and believe without any doubt that He will be and do to me according to the things said of Him. Such faith, which throws itself upon God, whether in life or in death, alone makes a Christian man.”392

The faith which he prized is that religious faculty which “throws itself upon God”; and from the first Luther recognised that faith of this kind was a direct gift from God. Having it we have everything; without it we have nothing. Here we find something entirely new, or at least hitherto unexpressed, so far as mediæval theology was concerned. Mediæval theologians had recognised faith in the sense of what Luther called frigida opinio, and it is difficult to conceive that they did not also indirectly [pg 430] acknowledge that there must be something like trust or fiducia; but faith with them was simply one among many human efforts all equally necessary in order to see and know God. Luther recognised that there was this kind of faith, which a man begets and brings to pass in himself by assent to doctrines of some sort. But he did not think much of it. He calls it worthless because it gives us nothing.

“They think that faith is a thing which they may have or not have at will, like any other natural human thing; so when they arrive at a conclusion and say, ‘Truly the doctrine is correct, and therefore I believe it,’ then they think that this is faith. Now, when they see and feel that no change has been wrought in themselves and in others, and that works do not follow, and they remain as before in the old nature, then they think that the faith is not good enough, but that there must be something more and greater.”393

The real faith, the faith which is trust, the divine gift which impels us to throw ourselves upon God, gives us the living assurance of a living God, who has revealed Himself, made us see His loving Fatherly heart in Christ Jesus; and that is the Christian religion in its very core and centre. The sum of Christianity is—(1) God manifest in Christ, the God of grace, accessible by every Christian man and woman; and (2) unwavering trust in Him who has given Himself to us in Christ Jesus,—unwavering, because Christ with His work has undertaken our cause and made it His.

The God we have access to and Whom we can trust because we have thrown ourselves upon Him and have found that He sustains us, is no philosophical abstraction, to be described in definitions and argued about in syllogisms. He is seen and known, because we see and know Christ Jesus. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” For with Luther and all the Reformers, Christ fills the whole sphere of God; and they do not recognise any theology which is not a Christology.

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The faith which makes us throw ourselves upon God is no mood of mere mystical abandonment. It is our very life, as Luther was never tired of saying. It is God within us, and wells forth in all kinds of activities.

“It is a living, busy, active, powerful thing, faith; it is impossible for it not to do us good continually. It never asks whether good works are to be done; it has done them before there is time to ask the question, and it is always doing them.”394

Christianity is therefore an interwoven tissue of promises and prayers of faith. On the one side there is the Father, revealing Himself, sending down to us His promises which are yea and amen in Christ Jesus; and on the other side there are the hearts of men ascending in faith to God, receiving, accepting, and resting on the promises of God, and on God who always gives Himself in His promises.

This is what came to Luther and ended his long and terrible struggle. He is unwearied in describing it. The descriptions are very varied, so far as external form and expression go,—now texts from the Psalms, the Prophets, or the New Testament most aptly quoted; now phrases borrowed from the picturesque language of the mediæval mystics; now sentences of striking, even rugged, originality; sometimes propositions taken from the mediæval scholastic. But whatever the words, the meaning is always the same.

This conception of what is meant by Christianity is the religious soul of the Reformation. It contains within it all the distinctively religious principles which inspired it. It can scarcely be called a dogma. It is an experience, and the phrases which set it forth are the descriptions of an experience which a human soul has gone through. The thing itself is beyond exact definition—as all deep experiences are. It must be felt and gone through to be known. The Reformation started from this personal [pg 432] experience of the believing Christian, which it declared to be the one elemental fact in Christianity which could never be proved by argument and could never be dissolved away by speculation. It proclaimed the great truth, which had been universally neglected throughout the whole period of mediæval theology by everyone except the Mystics, that in order to know God man must be in living touch with God Himself. Therein lay its originality and its power. Luther rediscovered religion when he declared that the truly Christian man must cling directly and with a living faith to the God Who speaks to him in Christ, saying, “I am thy salvation.” The earlier Reformers never forgot this. Luther proclaimed his discovery, he never attempted to prove it by argument; it was something self-evident—seen and known when experienced.

This is always the way with great religious pioneers and leaders. They have all had the prophetic gift of spiritual vision, and the magnetic speech to proclaim what they have seen, felt, and known. They have all had, in a far-off way, the insight and manner of Jesus.

When our Lord appeared among men claiming to be more than a wise man or a prophet, declaring that He was the Messiah, the Son of Man and the Son of God, when He announced that all men had need of Him, and that He alone could save and redeem, He set forth His claims in a manner unique among founders of religions. He made them calmly and as a matter of course. He never explained elaborately why He assumed the titles He took. He never reasoned about His position as the only Saviour. He simply announced it, letting the conviction of the truth steal almost insensibly into the minds and hearts of His followers as they saw His deeds and heard His words. He assumed that they must interpret His death in one way only. This was always His manner. It was not His way to explain mysteries our curiosity would fain penetrate. He quietly took for granted many things we would like to argue about. His sayings came from One who lived in perpetual communion with the Unseen Father, and He uttered them [pg 433] quietly and assuredly, confident that they carried with them their own self-evidencing power.

So it was with St. Paul. His letters and sermons are full of arguments, no doubt, full of pleadings and persuasion, but they all start from and rest upon his vision of the living, risen Saviour. His last word is always, “When it pleased God to reveal His Son in me”; that was the elemental fact which he proclaimed and which summed up everything, the personal experience from which he started on his career as an apostle. The place of Athanasius as a great religious leader has been obscured by his position as a theologian; but when we turn to his writings, where do we find less of what is commonly called dogmatic theology? There is argument, reasoning, searching for proofs and their statement; but all that belongs to the outworks in his teaching. The central citadel is a spiritual intuition—I know that my Saviour is the God Who made heaven and earth. He took his stand firmly and unflinchingly on that personal experience, and all else mattered little compared with the fundamental spiritual fact. It was not his arguments, but his unflinching faith that convinced his generation.

So it was with Augustine, Bernard,395 Francis—so it has been with every great religious leader of the Christian people. His strength, whether of knowledge, or conviction, or sympathy,—his driving power, if the phrase may be used,—has always come from direct communion with the unseen, and rests upon the fact, felt and known by himself and communicated to others by a mysterious sympathy, that it has pleased God to reveal Christ in him in some way or other.

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So it was with Luther and the Reformation in which he was the leader. Its driving power was a great religious experience, old, for it has come to the people of God in all generations, and yet new and fresh as it is the nature of all such experiences to be. He knew that his life was hid with Christ in God in spite of all evil, in spite of sin and sense of guilt. His old dread of God had vanished, and instead of it there had arisen in his heart a love to God in answer to the love which came from the vision of the Father revealing Himself. He had experienced this, and he had proclaimed what he had gone through; and the experience and its proclamation were the foundation on which the Reformation was built. Its beginnings were not doctrinal but experimental.

Doctrines, indeed, are not the beginnings of things; they are, at the best, storehouses of past and blessed experiences. This is true of most knowledge in all departments of research. We may recognise that there is some practical use in the rules of logic, ancient and modern, but we know that they are but the uncouth and inadequate symbols of the ways in which an indefinable mental tact, whose delicacy varies with the mind that uses it, perceives divergences and affinities, and weaves its web of knowledge in ways that are past finding out. We know that logical argument is a good shield but a bad sword, and that while syllogisms may silence, they seldom convince; that persuasion arises from a subtle sympathy of soul with soul, which is as indefinable as the personalities which exhale it. There is always at the basis of knowledge of men and things this delicate contact of personality with personality, whether we think of the gathering, or assorting, or exchanging the wisdom we possess. If this be true of our knowledge of common things, it is overwhelmingly so of all knowledge of God and of things divine. We must be in touch with God to know Him in the true sense of knowledge. At the basis of every real advance in religion there must be an intimate vision of God impressed upon us as a religious experience which we know to be true because we have felt [pg 435] it; and what one has, another receives by a species of spiritual contagion. The revival under Francis of Assisi spread as it did because the fire flaming in the heart of the preacher was also kindled in the hearts of his hearers. Luther headed a Reformation because men felt and knew that he had, as he said, found a gracious God by trusting in the grace of God revealed to him in Christ Jesus. It was not the Augsburg Confession that made the Reformation; it was the expansion of that religious experience which finds very inadequate description in that or in any other statement of doctrines.

§ 2. The universal Priesthood of Believers.

Luther's religious experience, that he, a sinner, received forgiveness by simply throwing himself on God revealed in Christ Jesus the Saviour, came to him as an astounding revelation which was almost too great to be put into words. He tried to express it in varying ways, all of which he felt too utterly inadequate to describe it. We can see how he laboured at it from 1512 to 1517. It lay hidden in his discourse to the assembly of clergy in the episcopal palace at Ziesar (June 5th, 1512), when he declared that all reform must begin in the hearts of individual men. We can see it growing more and more articulate in his annotations, notes, and heads of lectures on the Psalms, delivered in the years 1513-1516, struggling to free itself from the phrases of the Scholastic Theology which could not really express it. His private letters, in which he was less hampered by the phraseology which he still believed appropriate to theology, are full of happier expressions.396 Justificatio is vivificatio, and means to redeem from sins without any merit in the person redeemed; it takes place when sin is not imputed, but the penitents are reputed [pg 436] righteous. Grace is the pity (misericordia) of God; it manifests itself in the remission of sins; it is the truth of God seen in the fulfilment of His promises in the historical work of Christ; Jesus Christ Himself is grace, is the way, is life and salvation. Faith is trust in the truth of God as manifested in the life and work of Jesus Christ; it is to believe in God; it is a knowledge of the Cross of Christ; it is to understand that the Son of God became incarnate, was crucified, and raised again for our salvation. The three central thoughts—justification, grace, faith—expressed in these inadequate phrases, are always looked upon and used to regulate that estimate of ourselves which forms the basis of piety. It is needless to trace the growing adequacy of the description. Luther at last found words to say that the central thought in Christianity is that the believer in possession of faith, which is itself the gift of God, is able to throw himself on God in Christ Who is his salvation and Who has mirrored Himself for us in Christ Jesus. He had trod the weary round that Augustine had gone before him; he had tried to help himself in every possible way; he had found that with all his striving he could do nothing. Then, strange and mysterious as it was, the discovery had not brought despair, but rejoicing and comfort; for since there was no help whatever in man, his soul had been forced to find all—not part, but all—help in God. When he was able to express his experience he could say that the faith which throws itself on God, which is God's own gift, is the certainty of the forgiveness of sins. It was no adherence to doctrines more or less clearly comprehended; it was no act of initiation to be followed by a nearer approach to God and a larger measure of His grace; it was the power which gives life, certainty, peace, continuous self-surrender to God as the Father, and which transforms and renews the whole man. It was the life of the soul; it was Christianity within the believer—as Jesus Christ and His work is Christianity outside the believer.

It is manifest that as soon as this experience attained [pg 437] articulate statement, it was bound to discredit much that was in mediæval theology and religious usage. Yet the striking thing about Luther was that he never sought to employ it in this way until one great abuse forced itself upon him and compelled him to test it by this touchstone of what true Christianity was. This reserve not only shows that there was nothing revolutionary in the character of Luther, nothing romantic or quixotic, it also manifests the quiet greatness of the man. Nor was there anything in the fundamental religious experience of Luther which necessarily conflicted with the contents of the old ecclesiastical doctrines, or even with the common usages of the religious life. There was a change in the attitude towards both, and an entirely new estimate of their religious value, but nothing which called for their immediate criticism, still less for their destruction. Faith, which was the Christian life, could no longer be based upon them; they were not the essential things that they had been supposed to be; but they might have their uses if kept in their proper places—aids to all holy living, but not that from which the life sprang. The thought that the entire sum of religion consists in “unwavering trust of the heart in Him Who has given Himself to us in Christ as our Father, personal assurance of faith, because Christ with His work undertakes our cause,” simplified religion marvellously, and made many things which had been regarded as essential mere outside auxiliaries. But it did not necessarily sweep them away. Though the acceptance of certain forms of doctrine, auricular confession, the monastic life, communion by the laity in one “kind” only in the Sacrament of the Supper, a celibate priesthood, fasting, going on pilgrimages, not to eat meat on Friday, had nothing to do with the essentials of the Christian life; still it was not necessary to insist on eating meat on Friday, on abstaining from fasting, and so on. The great matter was the spirit in which such things were performed or left undone. What the fundamental religious experience had done was to show the liberty of the Christian man to trust courageously in [pg 438] God and count all things of little moment compared with this which was the one thing needful.

“Out of a complex system of expiations, good deeds, and comfortings, of strict statutes and uncertain apportionments of grace, out of magic and blind obedience, Luther led religion forth and gave it a strenuously concentrated form. The Christian religion is the living assurance of the living God Who has revealed Himself and opened His heart in Christ—nothing more.”397

It was a vital part of this fundamental experience that the living God Who had manifested Himself in Christ was accessible to every Christian. To quote Harnack again:

“Rising above all anxieties and terrors, above all ascetic devices, above all directions of theology, above all interventions of hierarchy and Sacraments, Luther ventured to lay hold of God Himself in Christ, and in this act of faith, which he recognised as God's work, his whole being obtained stability and firmness, nay, even a personal joy and certainty, which no mediæval Christian had ever possessed.”398

God Himself gave the believer the power to throw himself directly on God. But this contradicted one of the most widely diffused and most strongly held religious beliefs of the mediæval Church, and was bound to come in collision with it whenever the two were confronted with each other. It was the universal conception of mediæval piety that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation. Mediæval Christians believed with more or less distinctness that the supernatural life of the soul was created, nourished, and perfected through the sacraments, and that the priests administering them possessed, in virtue of their ordination, miraculous powers whereby they daily offered the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the altar, forgave the sins of men, and taught the truths of salvation with divine authority. It was this universally accepted power of a mediatorial priesthood which had enslaved Europe, and which had rendered the liberty of a Christian [pg 439] man an impossible thing. Everywhere the priesthood barred, or was supposed to be able to bar, the way to God. The Church, which ought to have shown how God Who had revealed Himself in Christ was accessible to every believer, had surrounded the inner shrine of the sanctuary of His Presence with a triple wall of defence which prevented entrance. When man or woman felt sorrow for sin, they were instructed to go, not to God, but to a man, often of immoral life, and confess their sins to him because he was a priest. When they wished to hear the comforting words of pardon spoken, it was not from God, but from a priest that the assurance was supposed to come. God's grace, to help to holy living and to bring comfort in dying, was given, it was said, only through a series of sacraments which fenced man's life round, and priests could give or withhold these sacraments. Man was born again in baptism; he came of age spiritually in confirmation; his marriage was cleansed from the sin of lust in the sacrament of matrimony; penance brought back his spiritual life slain by deadly sin; the Eucharist gave him with his voyage victual as he journeyed through life; and deathbed grace was imparted in extreme unction. These ceremonies were not the signs and promises of the free grace of God, under whose wide canopy, as under that of heaven, man lived his spiritual life. They were jealously guarded doors from out of which grudgingly, and commonly not without fees, the priests dispensed the free grace of God.

During the later Middle Ages a gross abuse made the evils of this conception of a mediating priesthood emphatic. The practical evil lying in the whole thought was not so very apparent when the matter was regarded from the side of giving out the grace of God; but when it came to withholding it, then it was seen what the whole conception meant. The Bishops of Rome gave the peoples of Europe many an object lesson on this. If a town, or a district, or a whole country had offended the Pope and the Curia, it was placed under an interdict, and the priests were commanded to refuse the sacraments to the people. They [pg 440] stood between the newborn babe and the initial grace supposed to be bestowed in baptism, and to be absolutely withheld if baptism was not administered; between the dying man and the deathbed grace which was received in extreme unction; between young men and women and legal marriage blessed by God; between the people and daily worship and the bestowal of grace in the Eucharist. The God of grace could not be approached, the blessings of pardon and strength for holy living could not be procured, because the magistrates of a town or the king and councillors of a nation had offended the Bishop of Rome on an affair of worldly policy. The Church, i.e. the clergy, who were by the theory enabled to refuse to communicate the grace of God, barred all access to the God who had revealed Himself in Christ Jesus. The Pope by a stroke of the pen could prevent a whole nation, so it was believed, from approaching God, because he could prohibit priests from performing the usual sacramental acts which alone brought Him near. An interdict meant spiritual death to the district on which it fell, and on the mediæval theory it was more deadly to the spiritual life than the worst of plagues, the Black Death itself, was to the body. An interdict made the plainest intellect see, understand, and shudder at the awful and mysterious powers which a mediatorial priesthood was said to possess.

The fundamental religious experience of Luther had made him know that the Father, who has revealed Himself in His Son, is accessible to every humble penitent and faithful seeker after God. He proclaimed aloud the spiritual priesthood of all believers. He stated it with his usual graphic emphasis in that tract of his, which he always said contained the marrow of his message—Concerning Christian Liberty. He begins by an antithesis: “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none: a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone”; or, as St. Paul puts it, “Though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant of all.” He expounds this by showing that no [pg 441] outward things have any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty; neither eating, drinking, nor anything of the kind, neither hunger nor thirst have to do with the liberty or the slavery of the soul. It does not profit the soul to wear sacred vestments or to dwell in sacred places; nor does it harm the soul to be clothed in worldly raiment, and to eat and drink in the ordinary fashion. The soul can do without everything except the word of God, and this word of God is the gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified through the Spirit the Sanctifier. “To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, to save it, if it believes the preaching; for faith alone and the efficacious use of the word of God bring salvation.” It is faith that incorporates Christ with the believer, and in this way “the soul through faith alone, without works, is, from the word of God, justified, sanctified, endued with truth, peace, liberty, and filled full with every good thing, and is truly made the child of God.” For faith brings the soul and the word together, and the soul is acted upon by the word, as iron exposed to fire glows like fire because of its union with the fire. Faith honours and reveres Him in Whom it trusts, and cleaves to His promises, never doubting but that He overrules all for the best. Faith unites the soul to Christ, so that “Christ and the soul become one flesh.” “Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of its husband Christ.” This gives the liberty of the Christian man; no dangers can really harm him, no sorrows utterly overwhelm him: for he is always accompanied by the Christ to whom he is united by his faith.

“Here you will ask,” says Luther, “ ‘If all who are in the Church are priests, by what character are those whom we now call priests to be distinguished from the laity?’ I reply, By the use of these words ‘priest,’ ‘clergy,’ ‘spiritual person,’ ‘ecclesiastic,’ an injustice has been done, since they have been transferred from the remaining body [pg 442] of Christians to those few who are now, by a hurtful custom, called ecclesiastics. For Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them, except that those who are now boastfully called Popes, bishops, and lords, it calls ministers, servants, and stewards, who are to serve the rest in the ministry of the word, for teaching the faith of Christ and the liberty of believers. For though it is true that we are all equally priests, yet we cannot, nor ought we if we could, all to minister and teach publicly.”

The first part of the treatise shows that everything which a Christian man has goes back in the end to his faith; if he has this he has all; if he has it not, nothing else suffices him. In the same way the second part shows that everything that a Christian man does must come from his faith. It may be necessary to fast and keep the body under; it will be necessary to make use of all the ceremonies of divine service which have been found effectual for the spiritual education of man. The thing to remember is that these are not good works in themselves in the sense of making a man good; they are all rather the signs of his faith, and are to be done with joy, because they are done to the God to whom faith unites us. So ecclesiastical ceremonies, or what may be called the machinery of Church life, are valuable, and indeed indispensable to the life of the soul, provided only they are regarded in the proper way and kept in their proper place; but they may become harmful and most destructive of the true religious life if they are considered in any other light than that of means to an end. “We do not condemn works,” says Luther, “nay we attach the highest value to them. We only condemn that opinion of works which regards them as constituting true righteousness.” They are, he explains, like the scaffolding of a building, eminently useful so long as they assist the builder; harmful if they obstruct; and at the best of temporary value. They are destructive to the spiritual life when they come between the soul and God. It follows, therefore, that if through human corruption and neglect of the plain precepts [pg 443] of the word of God these ecclesiastical usages hinder instead of aid the true growth of the soul, they ought to be changed or done away with; and the fact that the soul of man, in the last resort, needs absolutely nothing but the word of God dwelling within it, gives men courage and tranquillity in demanding their reformation.

In the same way fellow-men are not to be allowed to come between God and the human soul; and there is no need that they should. So far as spiritual position and privileges go, the laity are on the very same level as the clergy, for laity and clergy alike have immediate access to God through faith, and both are obliged to do what lies in them to further the advance of the kingdom of God among their fellow-men. All believing laymen “are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, to teach each other mutually the things that are of God ... and as our heavenly Father has freely helped us in Christ, so we ought freely to help our neighbours by our body and our works, and each should become to the other a sort of Christ, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may be in all of us; that we may be truly Christians.” Luther asserted that men and women living their lives in the family, in the workshop, in the civic world, held their position there, not by a kind of indirect permission wrung from God out of His compassion for human frailties, but by as direct a vocation as called a man to what by mistake had been deemed the only “religious life.” The difference between clergy and laity did not consist in the supposed fact that the former were a spiritual order of a superior rank in the religious life, while the latter belonged to a lower condition. The clergy differed from the laity simply in this, that they had been selected to perform certain definite duties; but the function did not make him who performed it a holier man intrinsically. If the clergy misused their position and did not do the work they were set apart to perform, there was no reason why they should not be compelled by the laity to amend their ways. Even in the celebration of the [pg 444] holiest rites there was no distinction between clergy and laity save that to prevent disorder the former presided over the rites in which all engaged. At the Eucharist

“our priest or minister stands before the altar, having been publicly called to his priestly function; he repeats publicly and distinctly Christ's words of the institution; he takes the Bread and the Wine, and distributes it according to Christ's words; and we all kneel beside him and around him, men and women, young and old, master and servant, mistress and maid, all holy priests together, sanctified by the blood of Christ. We are there in our priestly dignity.... We do not let the priest proclaim for himself the ordinance of Christ; but he is the mouthpiece of us all, and we all say it with him in our hearts with true faith in the Lamb of God Who feeds us with His Body and Blood.”

It was this principle of the Priesthood of all Believers which delivered men from the vague fear of the clergy, and which was a spur to incite them to undertake the reformation of the Church which was so much needed. It is the one great religious principle which lies at the basis of the whole Reformation movement. It was the rock on which all attempts at reunion with an unreformed Christendom were wrecked. It is the one outstanding difference between the followers of the reformed and the mediæval religion.

Almost all the distinctive principles of the Reformation group themselves round this one thought of the Priesthood of all Believers. It is sufficient for our purpose to look at Justification by Faith, the conceptions of the Holy Scriptures, of the Person of Christ, and of the Church.

§ 3. Justification by Faith.

When Luther, oppressed with a sense of sin, entered the convent, he was burdened by the ideas of traditional religion, that the penitent must prepare himself in some way so as to render himself fit to experience that sense of the grace of God which gives the certainty of pardon. It was not until he had thoroughly freed himself from [pg 445] that weight that he experienced the sense of pardon he sought. This practical experience of his must always be kept in view when we try to conceive what he meant by Justification by Faith.

As has been already said, Luther recognised that there were two kinds of faith,—one which man himself begot and through which he was able to give assent to doctrines of some sort; and another which Luther vehemently asserted was the pure gift of God. The first he thought comparatively unimportant; the latter was all in all to him. Faith is always used in the latter sense when the Reformers speak about Justification by Faith; and the sharp distinction which Luther draws between the two is a very important element in determining what he meant when he said that we are justified by faith alone.

This faith of the highest kind, the true faith, has its beginning by God working on us and in us. It is continually fed and kept strong by the word of God. The promise of God on God's side and faith on man's side are two correlative things; “for where there is no promise, there is no faith.” Luther brings out what this true faith is by contrasting it with the other kind of faith in two very instructive and trenchant passages:

“When faith is of the kind that God awakens and creates in the heart, then a man trusts in Christ. He is then so securely founded on Christ that he can hurl defiance at sin, death, hell, the devil, and all God's enemies. He fears no ill, however hard and cruel it may prove to be. Such is the nature of true faith, which is utterly different from the faith of the sophists (the Schoolmen), Jews, and Turks. Their faith, produced by their thoughts, simply lights upon a thing, accepts it, believes that it is this or that. God has no dealings with such delusion; it is the work of man, and comes from nature, from the free will of man; and men possessing it can say, repeating what others have said: I believe that there is a God. I believe that Christ was born, died, rose again for me. But what the real faith is, and how powerful a thing it is, of this they know nothing.”399

[pg 446]

He says again:

“Wherefore, beware of that faith which is manufactured or imagined; for the true faith is not the work of man, and therefore the faith which is manufactured or imagined will not avail in death, but will be overcome and utterly overthrown by sin, by the devil, and by the pains of hell. The true faith is the heart's utter trust in Christ, and God alone awakens this in us. He who has it is blessed, he who has it not is cursed.”400

This faith has an outside fact to rest upon—the historical Christ. It is neither helped nor hindered by a doctrine of the Person of Christ, nor by a minute and elaborate knowledge of the details of our Lord's earthly ministry. The man who has the faith may know a great deal about the doctrine of the Person of Christ: that will do his faith no harm but good, provided only he does not make the mistake of thinking that doctrines about Christ, ways by which the human understanding tries to conceive the fact, are either the fact itself or something better than the fact. He may know a great deal about the history of Jesus, and it is well to know as much as possible; but the amount of knowledge scarcely affects the faith. Wayfaring men, though fools, need not err in the pathway of faith.

The faith which is the gift of God makes us see the practical meaning in the fact of the historic Christ—this, namely, that Jesus Christ is there before us the manifestation of the Fatherly love of God, revealing to us our own forgiveness, and with it the possibilities of the Kingdom of God and of our place therein. The fact of the historic Christ is there, seen by men in a natural way; but it is the power of God lying in the faith which He has given us that makes us see with full certainty the meaning of the fact of the historic Christ for us and for our salvation. Moreover, this vision of God in the historic Christ, which is the deepest of all personal things, always involves something social. It brings us within the family of the faithful, within the Christian fellowship [pg 447] with its confirming evidences of faith and love. The power of faith comes to us singly, but seldom solitarily; the trust we have in God in Christ is faintly mirrored in the faith we learn to have in the members of the household of faith, and in their manifestations of faith and the love which faith begets.

What has been called the doctrine of Justification by Faith is therefore rather the description of a religious experience within the believer; and the meaning of the experience is simply this. The believer, who because he has faith—the faith which is the gift of God, which is our life and which regenerates—is regenerate and a member of the Christian fellowship, and is able to do good works and actually does them, does not find his standing as a person justified in the sight of God, his righteousness, his assurance of pardon and salvation, in those good works which he really can do, but only in the mediatorial and perfectly righteous work of Christ which he has learned to appropriate in faith. His good works, however really good, are necessarily imperfect, and in this experience which we call Justification by Faith the believer compares his own imperfect good works with the perfect work of Christ, and recognises that his pardon and salvation depends on that alone. This comparison quiets souls anxious about their salvation, and soothes pious consciences; and the sense of forgiveness which comes in this way is always experienced as a revelation of wonderful love. This justification is called an act, and is contrasted with a work; but the contrast, though true, is apt to mislead through human analogies which will intrude. It is an act, but an act of God; and divine acts are never done and done with, they are always continuous. Luther rings the changes upon this. He warns us against thinking that the act of forgiveness is all done in a single moment. The priestly absolution was the work of a moment, and had to be done over and over again; but the divine pronouncement of pardon is continuous simply because it is God who makes it. He says:

[pg 448]

“For just as the sun shines and enlightens none the less brightly when I close my eyes, so this throne of grace, this forgiveness of sins, is always there, even though I fall. Just as I see the sun again when I open my eyes, so I have forgiveness and the sense of it once more when I look up and return to Christ. We are not to measure forgiveness as narrowly as fools dream.”401

In the Protestant polemic with Roman Catholic doctrine, the conception of Justification by Faith is contrasted with that of Justification by Works; but the contrast is somewhat misleading. For the word justification is used in different meanings in the two phrases. The direct counterpart in Roman Catholic usage to the Reformation thought of Justification by Faith is the absolution pronounced by a priest; and here as always the Reformer appeals from man to God. The two conceptions belong to separate spheres of thought.

“The justification of which the mediæval Christian had experience was the descending of an outward stream of forces upon him from the supersensible world, through the Incarnation, in the channels of ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration, sacraments, confession, and good works; it was something which came from his connection with a supersensible organisation which surrounded him. The justification by faith which Luther experienced within his soul was the personal experience of the believer standing in the continuous line of the Christian fellowship, who receives the assurance of the grace of God in his exercise of a personal faith,—an experience which comes from appropriating the work of Christ which he is able to do by that faith which is the gift of God.”402

In the one case, the Protestant, justification is a personal experience which is complete in itself, and does not depend on any external machinery; in the other, the Mediæval, it is a prolonged action of usages, sacraments, external machinery of all kinds, which by their combined effect are supposed to change a sinner gradually into a saint, [pg 449] righteous in the eyes of God. With the former, it is a continuous experience; with the latter, it cannot fail to be intermittent as the external means are actually employed or for a time laid aside.

The meaning of the Reformation doctrine of Justification by Faith may be further brought out by contrasting it with the theory which was taught by that later school of Scholastic theology which was all-powerful at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The more evangelical theory of Thomas Aquinas was largely neglected, and the Nominalist Schoolmen based their expositions of the doctrine on the teaching of John Duns Scotus.

It must be remembered that mediæval theology never repudiated the theology of Augustine, and admitted in theory at least that man's salvation, and justification as part of it, always depended in the last resort on the prevenient grace of God; in their reverence for the teaching of Aristotle, they believed that they had also to make room for the action of the free will of man which they always looked on as the pure capacity of choice between two alternatives. John Duns Scotus got rid of a certain confusion which existed between the gratia operans and gratia co-operans of Augustine by speaking of the grace of God, which lay at the basis of man's justification, as a gratia habitualis, or an operation of the grace of God which gave to the will of man an habitual tendency to love towards God and man. He alleged that when conduct is considered, an act of the will is more important than any habitual tendency, for it is the act which makes use of the habit, and apart from the act, the habit is a mere inert passivity. Therefore, he held that the chief thing in meritorious conduct is not so much the habit which has been created by God's grace, as the act of will which makes use of the habit. In this way the grace of God is looked upon as simply the general basis of meritorious conduct, or a mere conditio sine qua non, and the important thing is the act of will which can make use of the otherwise passive habit. The process of justification—and [pg 450] it is to be remembered that the Schoolmen invariably looked upon justification as a process by which a sinner was gradually made into a righteous man and thoroughly and substantially changed—may therefore be described as an infusion of divine grace which creates a habit of the will towards love to God and to man; this is laid hold on by acts of the will, and there result positive acts of love towards God and man which are meritorious, and which gradually change a sinner into a righteous person. This is the theory; but the theory is changed into practice by being exhibited in the framework of the Church provided to aid men to appropriate the grace of God which is the basis for all. The obvious and easiest way to obtain that initial grace which is the starting-point is by the sacraments, which are said to infuse grace—the grace which is needed to make the start on the process of justification. Grace is infused to begin with in Baptism; and it is also infused from time to tune in the Eucharist. If a man has been baptized, he has the initial grace to start with; and he can get additions in the Eucharist. That, according to the theory, is all that is needed to start the will on its path of meritorious conduct. But while this exhibits the ideal process of justification according to mediæval theology, it must be remembered that there is mortal sin—sin which slays the new life begun in baptism—and the sacrament which renews the life slain will be practically more important than the sacrament which first creates it. Hence practically the whole process of the mediæval justification is best seen in the sacrament which renews the life slain by deadly sins. That sacrament is Penance; and the theory and practice of justification is best exhibited in the Sacrament of Penance. The good disposition of the will towards God is seen in confession; this movement towards God is complete when confession stimulated by the priest is finished; the performance of the meritorious good works is seen in the penitent performing the “satisfactions,” or tasks imposed by the priest, of prayer, of almsgiving, of maceration; while the absolution [pg 451] announces that the process is complete, and that the sinner has become a righteous man and is in “a state of grace.”

In opposition to all this, Luther asserted that it was possible to go through all that process prescribed by the mediæval Church, embodying the Scholastic theory of justification, without ever having the real sense of pardon, or ever being comforted by the sense of the love of God. The faith, however, which is the gift of God makes the believer see in the Christ Who is there before him a revelation of God's Fatherly love which gives him the sense of pardon, and at the same time excites in him the desire to do all manner of loving service. He is like the forgiven child who is met with tenderness when punishment was expected, and in glad wonder resolves never to be naughty again—so natural and simple is the Reformation thought. That thought, however, can be put much more formally. Chemnitz expresses it thus:

“The main point of controversy at present agitated between us and the Papists relates to the good works or new obedience of the regenerate. They hold that the regenerate are justified through that renewal which the Holy Spirit works in them, and by means of the good works which proceedfrom that renewal. They hold that the good works of the regenerate are the things on which they can trust, when the hard question comes to be answered, whether we be children of God and have been accepted to everlasting life. We hold, on the other hand, that in true repentance faith lays hold on and appropriates to itself Christ's satisfaction, and in so doing has something which it can oppose to the law's accusations at the bar of God, and thus bring it to pass that we should be declared righteous.... It is indeed true that believers have actual righteousness through their renewal by the Holy Spirit, but inasmuch as that righteousness is imperfect and still impure by reason of the flesh, all men cannot stand in God's judgment with it, nor on its account does God pronounce us righteous.”403

Hence we may say that the difference in the two ways of looking at the matter may be exhibited in the answer to the [pg 452] question, What does faith lay hold on in true repentance? The Reformation answer is—(1) not on a mechanically complete confession made to a priest, nor on a due performance of what the priest enjoins by way of satisfaction; but (2) only on what God in Christ has done for us, which is seen in the life, death, and rising again of the Saviour.

The most striking differences between the Reformation and the mediæval conception of justification are:

(1) The Reformation thought always looks at the comparative imperfection of the works of believers, while admitting that they are good works; the mediæval theologian, even when bidding men disregard the intrinsic value of their good works, always looks at the relative perfection of these works.

(2) The Reformer had a much more concrete idea of God's grace—it was something special, particular, unique—because he invariably regarded the really good works which men can do from their relative imperfection; the mediæval theologian looked at the relative perfection of good works, and so could represent them as something congruous to the grace of God which was not sharply distinguished from them.

(3) These views led Luther and the Reformers to represent faith as not merely the receptive organ for the reception and appropriation of justification through Christ, but, and in addition, as the active instrument in all Christian life and work—faith is our life; while the mediæval theologians never attained this view of faith.

(4) The Reformer believes that the act of faith in his justification through Christ is the basis of the believer's assurance of his pardon and salvation in spite of the painful and abiding sense of sin; while the mediæval theologian held that the divine sentence of acquittal which restored a sinner to a state of grace resulted from the joint action of the priest and the penitent in the Sacrament of Penance, and had to be repeated intermittently.

[pg 453]

§ 4. Holy Scripture.

All the Reformers of the sixteenth century, whether Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin, believed that in the Scriptures God spoke to them in the same way as He had done in earlier days to His prophets and Apostles. They believed that if the common people had the Scriptures in a language which they could understand, they could hear God speaking to them directly, and could go to Him for comfort, warning, or instruction; and their description of what they meant by the Holy Scriptures is simply another way of saying that all believers can have access to the very presence of God. The Scriptures were therefore for them a personal rather than a dogmatic revelation. They record the experience of a fellowship with God enjoyed by His saints in past ages, which may still be shared in by the faithful. In Bible history as the Reformers conceived it, we hear two voices—the voice of God speaking love to man, and the voice of the renewed man answering in faith to God. This communion is no dead thing belonging to a bygone past; it may be shared here and now.

But the Reformation conception of Scripture is continually stated in such a way as to deprive it of the eminently religious aspect that it had for men of the sixteenth century. It is continually said that the Reformers placed the Bible, an infallible Book, over-against an infallible Church; and transferred the same kind of infallibility which had been supposed to belong to the Church to this book. In mediæval times, men accepted the decisions of Popes and Councils as the last decisive utterance on all matters of controversy in doctrine and morals; at the Reformation, the Reformers, it is said, placed the Bible where these Popes and Councils had been, and declared that the last and final appeal was to be made to its pages. This mode of stating the question has found its most concise expression in the saying of Chillingworth, that “the Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants.” It is quite true that the Reformers did set the authority of the Scriptures over [pg 454] against that of Popes and Councils, and that Luther declared that “the common man,” “miller's maid,” or “boy of nine” with the Bible knew more about divine truth than the Pope without the Bible; but this is not the whole truth, and is therefore misleading. For Romanists and Protestants do not mean the same thing by Scripture, nor do they mean the same thing by Infallibility, and their different use of the words is a most important part of the Reformation conception of Scripture.

This difference in the meaning of Scripture is partly external and partly internal; and the latter is the more important of the two.

The Scriptures to which the Romanist appeals include the Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament; and the Scriptures which are authoritative are not the books of the Old and New Testament in the original tongues, but a translation into Latin known as the Vulgate of Pope Sixtus v. They are therefore a book to a large extent different from the one to which Protestants appeal.

However important this external difference may be, it is nothing in comparison with the internal difference; and yet the latter is continually forgotten by Protestants as well as by Roman Catholics in their arguments.

To understand it, one must remember that every mediæval theologian declared that the whole doctrinal system of his Church was based upon the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The Reformers did nothing unusual, nothing which was in opposition to the common practice of the mediæval Church in which they had been born, educated, and lived, when they appealed to Scripture. Luther made his appeal with the same serene unconsciousness that anyone could gainsay him, as he did when he set the believer's spiritual experience of the fact that he rested on Christ alone for salvation against the proposal to sell pardon for money. His opponents never attempted to challenge his right to make this appeal to Scripture—at least at first. They made the same appeal themselves; they believed that they were able to meet Scripture with [pg 455] Scripture. They were confident that the authority appealed to—Scripture—would decide against Luther. It soon became apparent, however, that Luther had an unexpectedly firmer grasp of Scripture than they had. This did not mean that he had a better memory for texts. It was seen that Luther somehow was able to look at and use Scripture as one transparent whole; while they looked on it as a collection of fragmentary texts. This gave him and other Reformers a skill in the use of Scripture which their opponents began to feel that they were deficient in. They felt that if they were to meet their opponents on equal terms they too must recognise a unity in Scripture. They did so by creating an external and arbitrary unity by means of the dogmatic tradition of the mediæval Church. Hence the decree of the Council of Trent, which manufactured an artificial unity for Scripture by placing the dogmatic tradition of the Church alongside Scripture as an equal source of authority. The reason why the Reformers found a natural unity in the Bible, and why the Romanists had to construct an artificial one, lay, as we shall see, in their different conceptions of what was meant by saving faith.

Mediæval theologians looked at the Bible as a sort of spiritual law-book, a storehouse of divinely communicated knowledge of doctrinal truths and rules for moral conduct—and nothing more.

The Reformers saw in it a new home for a new life within which they could have intimate fellowship with God Himself—not merely knowledge about God, but actual communion with Him.

There is one great difficulty attending the mediæval conception of the Scriptures, that it does not seem applicable to a large part of them. There is abundant material provided for the construction of doctrines and moral rules; but that is only a portion of what is contained in the Scriptures. The Bible contains long lists of genealogies, chapters which contain little else than a description of temple furniture, stories of simple human [pg 456] life, and details of national history. The mediæval theologian had either to discard altogether a large part of the Bible or to transform it somehow into doctrinal and moral teaching. The latter alternative was chosen, and the instrument of transformation was the thought of the various senses in Scripture which plays such a prominent part in every mediæval statement of the nature and uses of the revelation of God contained in the Bible.404 No one can deny that a book, where instruction is frequently given in parables, or by means of aphorisms and proverbial sayings, must contain many passages which have different senses. It may be admitted, to use Origen's illustrations, that the grain of mustard seed is, literally, an actual seed; morally, faith in the individual believer; and, allegorically, the kingdom of God;405 or, though this is more doubtful, that the little foxes are, literally, cubs; morally, sins in the individual heart; and, allegorically, heresies which distract and spoil the Church.406 But to say that every detail of personal or national life in the Old Testament or New is merely dead history, of no spiritual value until it has been transformed into a doctrinal truth or a moral rule by the application of the theory of the fourfold sense in Scripture, is to destroy the historical character of revelation altogether, and, besides, to introduce complete uncertainty about what any passage was really meant to declare. The use of a fourfold sense—literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogic—enables the reader to draw any meaning he pleases from any portion of Scripture.

While mediæval theologians, by their bewildering fourfold sense, made it almost hopeless to know precisely what the Bible actually taught, another idea of theirs made it essential to salvation that men should attain to an absolutely [pg 457] correct statement of what the Scriptures did reveal about God and man and the relation between them. They held that faith—the faith which saves—was not trust in a person, but assent to correct propositions about God, the universe, and the soul of man; and the saving character of the assent depended on the correctness of the propositions assented to. It is the submission of the intellect to certain propositional statements which are either seen to be correct or are accepted as being so because guaranteed in some supernatural way. Infallibility is looked upon as that which can guarantee the perfect correctness of propositions about God and man in their relations to each other.

If it be necessary to employ the fourfold sense to confuse the plain meaning of the greater portion of Scripture, and if salvation depends on arriving at a perfectly correct intellectual apprehension of abstract truths contained somewhere in the Bible, then Lacordaire's sarcastic reference to the Protestant conception of Scripture is not out of place. He says: “What kind of a religion is that which saves men by aid of a book? God has given the book, but He has not guaranteed your private interpretation of it. What guarantee have you that your thoughts do not shove aside God's ideas? The heathen carves himself a god out of wood or marble; the Protestant carves his out of the Bible. If there be a true religion on earth, it must be of the most serene and unmistakable authority.”407 We need not wonder at John Nathin saying to his perplexed pupil in the Erfurt Convent: “Brother Martin, let the Bible alone; read the old teachers; reading the Bible simply breeds unrest.”408 We can sympathise with some of the earlier printers of the German Vulgate when they inserted in their prefaces that readers must be careful to understand the contents of the volume in the way declared by the Church.409 Men who went to the Bible might go wrong, and it was spiritual death to make any mistake; but all who simply assented to the interpretation of the Bible given in the [pg 458] Church's theology were kept right and had the true or saving faith. Such was the mediæval idea.

But all this made it impossible to find in the Bible a means of communion with God. Between the God Who had revealed Himself there and man, the mediæval theologian, perhaps unconsciously at first, had placed what he called the “Church,” but what really was the opinions of accredited theologians confirmed by decisions of Councils or Popes. The “Church” had barred the way of access to the mind and heart of God in the Scriptures by interposing its authoritative method of interpretation between the believer and the Bible, as it had interposed the priesthood between the sinner and the redeeming Saviour.

Just as the Reformers had opposed their personal experience of pardon won by throwing themselves on the mercy of God revealed in Christ to the intervention of the Church between them and God, so they controverted this idea of the Scriptures by the personal experience of what the Bible had been to them. They had felt and known that the personal God, Who had made them and redeemed them, was speaking to them in this Book, and was there making manifest familiarly His power and His willingness to save. The speech was sometimes obscure, but they read on and lighted on other passages which were plainer, and they made the easier explain the more difficult. The “common” man perhaps could not understand it all, nor fit all the sayings of Scripture into a connected whole of intellectual truth; but all, plain men and theologians alike, could hear their Father's voice, learn their Redeemer's purpose, and have faith in their Lord's promises. It was a good thing to put text to text and build a system of Protestant divinity to which their intellects could assent; but it was not essential. Saving faith was not intellectual assent at all. It was simple trust—the trust of a child—in their Father's promises, which were Yea and Amen in Christ Jesus. The one essential thing was to hear and obey the personal God speaking to them as He had spoken all down through the ages to His people, promising His salvation now in [pg 459] direct words, now in pictures of His dealings with a favoured man or a chosen people. No detail of life was dead history; for it helped to fill the picture of communion between God and His people. The picture was itself a promise that what had been in the past would be renewed in their own experience of fellowship with a gracious God, if only they had the same faith which these saints of the Old and New Testaments enjoyed.

With these thoughts burning in their hearts, the Bible could not be to the Reformers what it had been to the mediæval theologians. God was speaking to them in it as a man speaks to his fellows. The simple historical sense was the important one in the great majority of passages. The Scripture was more than a storehouse of doctrines and moral rules. It was over and above the record and picture of the blessed experience which God's saints have had in fellowship with their covenant God since the first revelation of the Promise. So they made haste to translate the Bible into all languages in order to place it in the hands of every man, and said that the “common man” with the Bible in his hands (with God speaking to him) could know more about the way of salvation than Pope or Councils without the Scriptures.

The change of view which separated the Reformers from mediæval theologians almost amounted to a rediscovery of Scripture; and it was effected by their conception of faith. Saving faith was for them personal trust in a personal Saviour Who had manifested in His life and work the Fatherly mercy of God. This was not a mere theological definition; it was a description of an experience which they knew that they had lived. It made them see that the word of God was a personal and not a dogmatic revelation; that the real meaning in it was that God Himself was there behind every word of it,—not an abstract truth, but a personal Father. On the one side, on the divine, there was God pouring out His whole heart and revealing the inmost treasures of His righteousness and love in Christ the Incarnate Word; on the other side, on the human, there was the [pg 460] believing soul looking straight through all works and all symbols and all words to Christ Himself, united to Him by faith in the closest personal union. Such a blessed experience—the feeling of direct fellowship between the believer and God Incarnate, of a communion such as exists between two loving human souls, brought about by the twofold stream of God's personal word coming down, and man's personal faith going up to God—could not fail to give an entirely new conception of Scripture. The mediæval Church looked on the Jesus Christ revealed in Scripture as a Teacher sent from God; and revelation was for them above all things an imparting of speculative truth. To the Reformers the chief function of Scripture was to bring Jesus Christ near us; and as Jesus always fills the full sphere of God to them, the chief end of Scripture is to bring God near me. It is the direct message of God's love to me,—not doctrine, but promise (for apart from promise, as Luther said unweariedly, faith does not exist); not display of God's thoughts, but of God Himself as my God. This manifestation of God, which is recorded for us in the Scriptures, took place in an historical process coming to its fullest and highest in the incarnation and historical work of Christ, and the record of the manifestation has been framed so as to include everything necessary to enable us to understand the declaration of God's will in its historical context and in its historical manifestation. “Let no pious Christian,” says Luther, “stumble at the simple word and story that meet him so often in Scripture.” These are never the dead histories of the mediæval theologian,—events which have simply taken place and concern men no more. They tell how God dealt with His faithful people in ages past, and they are promises of how He will act towards us now. “Abraham's history is precious,” he says, “because it is filled so full of God's Word, with which all that befell him is so adorned and so fair, and because God goes everywhere before him with His Word, promising, commanding, comforting, warning, that we may verily see that Abraham was God's special trusty friend. Let us mirror ourselves, then, in this holy father Abraham, [pg 461] who walks not in gold and velvet, but girded, crowned, and clothed with divine light, that is, with God's Word.” The simplest Bible stories, even geographical and architectural details, may and do give us the sidelights necessary to complete the manifestation of God to His people.

The question now arises, Where and in what are we to recognise the infallibility and authoritative character of Scripture? It is manifest that the ideas attaching to these words must change with the changed conception of the essential character of that Scripture to which they belong. Nor can the question be discussed apart from the Reformation idea of saving faith; for the two thoughts of Scripture and saving faith always correspond. In mediæval theology they are always primarily intellectual and prepositional; in Reformation thinking, they are always in the first instance experimental and personal. In describing the authoritative character of Scripture, the Reformers always insisted that its recognition was awakened in believers by that operation which they called the witness of the Holy Spirit (Testimonium Spiritus Sancti). Just as God Himself makes us know and feel the sense of pardon in an inward experience by a faith which is His own work, so they believed that by an operation of the same Spirit, believers were enabled to recognise that God Himself is speaking to us authoritatively in and through the words of Scripture.

Their view of what is meant by the authority and infallibility of Scripture cannot be seen apart from what they taught about the relation between Scripture and the word of God. They have all the same general conception, however they may differ in details in their statement. If Luther, as his wont was, speaks more trenchantly, and Calvin writes with a clearer vision of the consequences which must follow from his assertions, both have the same great thought before them.

The Reformers drew a distinction between the word of God and the Scripture which contains or presents that word. This distinction was real and not merely formal; it was more than the difference between the word of God [pg 462] and the word of God written; and important consequences were founded upon it. If the use of metaphor be allowed, the word of God is to the Scripture as the soul is to the body. Luther believed that while the word of God was presented in every part of Scripture, some portions make it much more evident. He instances the Gospel and First Epistle of St. John, the Epistles of St. Paul, especially those to the Romans, to the Galatians, and to the Ephesians, and the First Epistle of St. Peter.410 He declares that if Christians possessed no other books besides those, the way of salvation would be perfectly clear. He adds elsewhere that the word of God shines forth with special clearness in the Psalms, which he called the Bible within the Bible.

Luther says that the word of God may be described in the phrase of St. Paul, “the Gospel of God, which He promised afore by His Prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.”411 Calvin calls it “the spiritual teaching, the gate, as it were, by which we enter into His heavenly kingdom,” “a mirror in which faith beholds God,” and “that wherein He utters unto us His mercy in Christ, and assureth us of His love toward us.”412 The Scots Confession calls it the revelation of the Promise “quhilk [pg 463] as it was repeated and made mair clear from time to time; so was it imbraced with joy, and maist constantlie received of al the faithful.”413 And Zwingli declares it to be “that our Lord Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, has revealed to us the will of the Heavenly Father, and, with His innocence, has redeemed us from death.”414 It is the sum of God's commands, threatenings, and promises, addressed to our faith, and above all the gospel offer of Christ to us. This word of God need not take the form of direct exhortation; it may be recognised in the simple histories of men or of nations recorded in the Scripture.

This true and real distinction between the word of God and Scripture may easily be perverted to something which all the Reformers would have repudiated. It must not be explained by the common mystical illustration of kernel and husk, which husk (the record) may be thrown away when the kernel (the word) has been once reached and laid hold of. Nor can it be used to mean that one part of the Bible is the word of God and that another is not. The Reformers uniformly teach that the substance of all Scripture is the word of God, and that what is no part of the record of the word of God is not Scripture. Finally, the distinction between the two need not prevent us saying that the Scripture is the word of God. Luther is very peremptory about this. He says that he is ready to discuss differences with any opponent who admits that the evangelical writings are the word of God; but that if this be denied he will refuse to argue; for where is the good of reasoning with anyone who denies first principles? (prima principia)415 Only it must be clearly understood that the copula is does not express logical identity, but some such relation as can be more exactly rendered by contains, presents, conveys, records,—all of which phrases are used in the writings of Reformers or in the creeds of the Reformation Churches. The main thing to [pg 464] remember is that the distinction is not to be made use of to deny to the substance of Scripture those attributes of authority and infallibility which belong to the word of God.

On the other hand, there is a vital religious interest in the distinction. In the first place it indicates what is meant by the infallibility of Scripture, and in the second it enables us to distinguish between the divine and the human elements in the Bible.

The authoritative character and infallibility belong really and primarily to the word of God, and only secondarily to the Scriptures,—to Scripture only because it is the record which contains, presents, or conveys the word of God. It is this word of God, this personal manifestation to us for our salvation of God in His promises, which is authoritative and infallible; and Scripture shares these attributes only in so far as it is a vehicle of spiritual truth. It is the unanimous declaration of the Reformers that Scripture is Scripture because it gives us that knowledge of God and of His will which is necessary for salvation; because it presents to the eye of faith God Himself personally manifesting Himself in Christ. It is this presentation of God Himself and of His will for our salvation which is infallible and authoritative. But this manifestation of God Himself is something spiritual, and is to be apprehended by a spiritual faculty which is faith, and the Reformers and the Confessions of the Reformation do not recognise any infallibility or divine authority which is otherwise apprehended than by faith. If this be so, the infallibility is of quite another kind from that described by mediæval theologians or modern Roman Catholics, and it is also very different from what many modern Protestants attribute to the Scriptures when they do not distinguish them from the word of God. With the mediæval theologian infallibility was something which guaranteed the perfect correctness of abstract propositions; with some modern Protestants it consists in the conception that the record contains not even the smallest error in word or description of fact—in [pg 465] its inerrancy. But neither inerrancy nor the correctness of abstract propositions is apprehended by faith in the Reformers' sense of that word; they are matters of fact, to be accepted or rejected by the ordinary faculties of man. The infallibility and authority which need faith to perceive them are, and must be, something very different; they produce the conviction that in the manifestation of God in His word there lies infallible power to save. This is given, all the Reformers say, by the Witness of the Spirit; “the true kirk alwaies heares and obeyis the voice of her awin spouse and pastor.”416 Calvin discusses the authority and credibility of Scripture in his Institutio, and says: “Let it be considered, then, as an undeniable truth that they who have been inwardly taught of the Spirit feel an entire acquiescence in the Scripture, and that it is self-authenticated, carrying with it its own evidence, and ought not to be made the subject of demonstration and arguments from reason; but that it obtains the credit which it deserves with us by the testimony of the Spirit.”417 This is a religious conception of infallibility very different from the mediæval or the modern Romanist.

The distinction between the word of God and Scripture also serves to distinguish between the divine and the human elements in Scripture, and to give each its proper place.

Infallibility and divine authority belong to the sphere of faith and of the witness of the Spirit, and, therefore, to that personal manifestation of God and of His will toward us which is conveyed or presented to us in every part of Scripture. But this manifestation is given in a course of events which are part of human history, in lives of men and peoples, in a record which in outward form is like other human writings. If every part of Scripture is divine, every part of it is also human. The supernatural reality is incased in human realities. To apprehend the former, faith illumined by the Holy Spirit is necessary; [pg 466] but it is sufficient to use the ordinary methods of research to learn the credibility of the history in Scripture. When the Reformers distinguished between the word of God and Scripture which conveys or presents it, and when they declared that the authority and infallibility of that word belonged to the region of faith, they made that authority and infallibility altogether independent of questions that might be raised about the human agencies through which the book came into its present shape. It is not a matter belonging to the region of faith when the books which record the word of God were written, or by whom, or in what style, or how often they were edited or re-edited. It is not a matter for faith whether incidents happened in one country or in another; whether the account of Job be literal history, or a poem based on old traditions in which the author has used the faculty of imagination to illustrate the problems of God's providence and man's probation; whether genealogical tables give the names of men or of countries and peoples. All these and the like matters belong to the human side of the record. No special illumination of faith is needed to apprehend and understand them. They are matters for the ordinary faculties of man, and subject to ordinary human investigation. Luther availed himself freely of the liberty thus given. He never felt himself bound to accept the traditional ideas about the extent of the canon, the authorship of the books of the Bible, or even about the credibility of some of the things recorded. He said, speaking about Genesis, “What though Moses never wrote it?”418 It was enough for him that the book was there and that he could read it. He thought that the Books of Kings were more worthy of credit than the Books of Chronicles;419 and he believed that the prophets had not always given the kings of Israel the best political advice.420

But while the Bible is human literature, and as such may be and must be subjected to the same tests which are [pg 467] applied to ordinary literature, it is the record of the revelation of God, and has been carefully guarded and protected by God. This thought always enters into the conception which the Reformers had of Scripture. They speak of the singular care and providence of God which has preserved the Scriptures in such a way that His people always have a full and unmistakable declaration in them of His mind and will for their salvation. This idea for ever forbids a careless or irreverent biblical criticism, sheltering itself under the liberty of dealing with the records of revelation. No one can say beforehand how much or how little of the historic record is essential to preserve the faith of the Church; but every devout Christian desires to have it in large abundance. No one can plead the liberty which the principles of the Reformers secure for dealing with the record of Scripture as a justification in taking a delight in reducing to a minimum the historical basis of the Christian faith. Careless or irreverent handling of the text of Holy Scripture is what all the Reformers abhorred.421

[pg 468]

§ 5. The Person of Christ.

“No one can deny,” said Luther, “that we hold, believe, sing, and confess all things in correspondence with the Apostles' Creed, the faith of the old Church, that we make nothing new therein nor add anything thereto, and in this way we belong to the old Church and are one with it.” Both the Augsburg Confession and the Schmalkald Articles begin with restating the doctrines of the old Catholic Church as these are given in the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, the two latter being always regarded by Luther as explanatory of the Apostles' Creed. His criticism of theological doctrines was always confined to the theories introduced by the Schoolmen, and to the perversion of the old doctrines of the Church introduced in mediæval times mainly to bring these doctrines into conformity with the principles of the philosophy of Aristotle. He brought two charges against the Scholastic Theology. [pg 469] It was, he insisted, committed to the idea of work-righteousness; whatever occasional protest might be made against the conception, he maintained that this thought of work-righteousness was so interwoven with its warp and woof that the whole must be swept away ere the old and true Christian Theology could be rediscovered. He also declared it was sophistry; and by that he meant that it played with the outsides of doctrine, asked and solved questions which had nothing to do with real Christian theology, that the imposing intellectual edifice was hollow within, that its deity was not the God and Father revealed in Jesus Christ, but the unknown God, the God who could never be revealed by metaphysics larded with detached texts of Scripture, the abstract entity of pagan philosophy. With an unerring instinct he fastened on the Scholastic devotion to Aristotle as the reason why what professed to be Christian theology had been changed into something else. Scholastic Philosophy or Theology (for the two are practically the same) defined itself as the attempt to reconcile faith and reason, and the definition has been generally accepted. Verbally it is correct; really it is very misleading from the meanings attached to the words faith and reason. With the Schoolmen, faith in this contrast between faith and reason meant the sum of patristic teaching about the verities of the Christian religion extracted by the Fathers from the Holy Scriptures; and reason meant the sum of philosophical principles extracted from the writings of ancient philosophers, and especially from Aristotle. The great Schoolmen conceived it to be their task to construct a system of Christian Philosophy by combining patristic doctrinal conclusions with the conclusions of human reasoning which they believed to be given in their highest form in the writings of the ancient Grecian sages. They actually used the conceptions of the Fathers as material to give body to the forms of thought found ready made for them in the speculations of Aristotle and Plato. The Christian material was moulded to fit the pagan forms, and in consequence lost its most [pg 470] essentially Christian characteristics. One can see how the most evangelical of the Schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, tries in vain to break through the meshes of the Aristotelian net in his discussions on merit and satisfaction in his Summa Theologiæ.422 He had to start from the thought of God as (1) the Absolute, and (2) as the Primum Movens, the Causa efficiens prima, the Intelligens a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur in finem—conceptions which can never imprison without practically destroying the vision of the Father who has revealed Himself in the Saviour Jesus Christ. His other starting-point, that man is to be described as the possessor of free will in the Aristotelian sense of the term, will never contain the Christian doctrine of man's complete dependence on God in his salvation. It inevitably led to work-righteousness. This was the “sophistry” Luther protested against and which he swept away.

He then claimed that he stood where the old Catholic Church had taken stand, that his theology like its was rooted in the faith of God as Trinity and in the belief in the Person of Christ, the Revealer of God. The old theology had nothing to do with Mariolatry or saint worship; it revered the triune God, and Jesus Christ His Son and man's Saviour. Luther could join hands with Athanasius across twelve centuries. He had done a work not unlike that of the great Alexandrian. His rejection of the Scholastic Aristotelianism may be compared with Athanasius' refusal to allow the Logos theology any longer to confuse the Christian doctrines of God and the Person of Christ. Both believed that in all thinking about God they ought to keep their eyes fixed upon His redemptive work manifested in the historical Christ. Athanasius, like Luther, brought theology back to religion from “sophistry,” and had for his starting-point an inward religious experience that his Redeemer was the God who made heaven and earth. The great leaders in the ancient Church, Luther [pg 471] believed, held as he did that to have conceptions about God, to construct a real Christian theology, it was necessary first of all to know God Himself, and that He was only to be known through the Lord Jesus Christ. He had gone through the same experience as they had done; he could fully sympathise with them, and could appropriate the expressions in which they had described and crystallised what they had felt and known, and that without paying much attention to the niceties of technical language. These doctrines had not been dead formulas to them, but the expression of a living faith. He could therefore take the old dogmas and make them live again in an age in which it seemed as if they had lost all their vitality.

“From the time of Athanasius,” says Harnack, “there had been no theologian who had given so much living power for faith to the doctrine of the Godhead of Christ as Luther did; since the time of Cyril, no teacher had arisen in the Church for whom the mystery of the union of the two natures in Christ was so full of comfort as for Luther—‘I have a better provider than all angels are: he lies in the cradle and hangs on the breast of a virgin, but sits, nevertheless, at the right hand of the almighty father’; no mystic philosopher of antiquity spoke with greater conviction and delight of the sacred nourishment in the Eucharist. The German reformer restored life to the formulas of Greek Christianity: he gave them back to faith.”423

But if Luther accepted the old formulas describing the Nature of God and the Person of Christ, he did so in a thoroughly characteristic way. He had no liking for theological technical terms, though he confessed that it was necessary to use them. He disliked the old term homoousios to describe the relation between the Persons in the Trinity, and preferred the word “oneness”;424 he even disliked the term Trinity, or at least its German equivalents, Dreifaltigkeit [pg 472] or Dreiheit—they were not good German words, he said;425 he called the technical terms used in the old creeds vocabula mathematica;426 he was careful to avoid using them in his Short and even in his Long Catechism. But Jesus Christ was for him the mirror of the Fatherly heart of God, and therefore was God; God Himself was the only Comforter to bring rest to the human soul, and the Holy Spirit was God; and the old creeds confessed One God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the confession contented him whatever words were used. Besides, he rejoiced to place himself side by side with the Christians of ancient days, who trusted God in Christ and were free from the “sophistries” of the Schoolmen.

Although Luther accepted, honestly and joyfully, the old theology about God and the Person of Christ, he put a new and richer meaning into it. Luther lets us see over and over again that he believed that the only thing worth considering in theology was the divine work of Christ and the experience that we have of it through faith. He did not believe that we have any real knowledge of God outside these limits. Beyond them there is the unknown God of philosophical paganism, the God whom Jews, Turks, pagans, and nominal Christians ignorantly worship. In order to know God it is necessary to know Him through the Jesus Christ of history. Hence with Luther, Christ fills the whole sphere of God: “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,” and conversely: “He that hath not seen Me hath not seen the Father.” The historical Jesus Christ is for Luther the revealer and the only revealer of the Father. The revelation is given in the wonderful experience of faith in which Jesus compels us to see God in Him—the whole of God, Who has kept nothing back which He could have given us. It is very doubtful whether the [pg 473] framers of the old creeds ever grasped this thought. The great expounder of the old theology, Augustine, certainly did not. The failure to enter into it showed itself not merely in the doctrine of God, but also in the theories of grace. With Luther all theology is really Christology; he knew no other God than the God Who had manifested Himself in the historical Christ, and made us see in the miracle of faith that He is our salvation. This at once simplifies all Christian theology and cuts it clearly away from that Scholastic which Luther called “sophistry.” Why need Christians puzzle themselves over the Eternal Something which is not the world when they have the Father? On the old theology the work of Christ was practically limited to procuring the forgiveness of sins. There it ended and other gracious operations of God began—operations of grace. So there grew the complex system of expiations, and satisfactions, of magical sacraments and saints' intercessions. These were all at once swept away when the whole God was seen revealed in Christ in the vision of faith and nowhere else.