Chapter XXIX

ETHICAL RESULTS OF THE NEW TEACHING

1. Preliminaries. New Foundations of Morality

Luther’s system of ethics mirrors his own character. If Luther’s personality, in all its psychological individuality, shows itself in his dogmatic theology (see vol. iv., p. 387 ff.), still more is this the case in his ethical teaching. To obtain a vivid picture of the mental character of their author and of the inner working of his mind, it will suffice to unfold his practical theories in all their blatant contradiction and to examine on what they rest and whence they spring. First and foremost we must investigate the starting-point of his moral teaching.

To begin with, it was greatly influenced by his theory that the Gospel consisted essentially in forgiveness, in the cloaking over of guilt and in the soothing of “troubled consciences.” Thanks to a lively faith to reach a feeling of confidence, is, according to him, the highest achievement of ethical effort. At the same time, however, Luther lets it be clearly understood that we can never get the better of sin. In the shape of original sin it ever remains; concupiscence is always sinful; and, even in the righteous, actual sin persists, only that its cry is drowned by the voice speaking from the Blood of Christ. Man must look upon himself as entirely under the domination of the devil, and, only in so far as Christ ousts the devil from his human stronghold, can a man be entitled to be called good. In himself he is not even free to do what is right.

To the author of such doctrines it was naturally a matter of some difficulty to formulate theoretically the injunctions of morality. Some Protestants indeed vaunt his system of ethics as the best ever known, and as based on an entirely “new groundwork.” Many others, headed by Stäudlin the theologian, have nevertheless openly admitted that “no system of Christian morality could exist,” granted Luther’s principles.[1]

Of his principles the following must be borne in mind. Man’s attitude towards things Divine is just that of the dumb, lifeless “pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was changed”; “he is not one whit better off than a clod or stone, without eyes or mouth, without any sense and without a heart.”[2] Human reason, which ought to govern moral action, becomes in matters of religion “a crazy witch and Lady Hulda,”[3] the “clever vixen on whom the heathen hung when they thought themselves cleverest.”[4] Like reason, so the will too, in fallen man, behaves quite negatively towards what is good, whether in ethics or in religion. “We remain as passive,” he says, “as the clay in the hands of the potter”; freedom there is indeed, “but it is not under our control.” In this connection he refers to Melanchthon’s “Loci communes,”[5] whence some striking statements against free-will have already been quoted in the course of this work.[6]

It is only necessary to imagine the practical application of such principles to perceive how faulty in theory Luther’s ethics must have been. Luther, however, was loath to see these principles followed out logically in practice.

Other theories of his which he applies either not at all or only to a very limited extent in ethics are, for instance, his opinions that the believer, “even though he commit sin, remains nevertheless a godly man,” and, that, owing to our trusting faith in Christ, God can descry no sin in us “even when we remain stuck in our sins,” because we “have donned the golden robe of grace furnished by Christ’s Blood.” In his Commentary on Galatians he had said: “Act as though there had never been any law or any sin but only grace and salvation in Christ”;[7] he had declared that all the damned were predestined to hell, and, in spite of their best efforts, could not escape eternal punishment. (Vol. ii., pp. 268 ff., 287 ff.)

In view of all the above we cannot help asking ourselves, whence the moral incentive in the struggle against the depravity of nature is to come; where, granted that our will is unfree and our reason blind, any real ethical answerableness is to be found; what motive for moral conduct a man can have who is irrevocably predestined to heaven or to hell; and what grounds God has for either rewarding or punishing?

To add a new difficulty to the rest, Luther is quite certain of the overwhelming power of the devil. The devil sways all men in the world to such a degree, that, although we are “lords over the devil and death,” yet “at the same time we lie under his heel ... for the world and all that belongs to it must have the devil as its master, who is far stronger than we and clings to us with all his might, for we are his guests and dwellers in a foreign hostelry.”[8] But because through faith we are masters, “my conscience, though it feels its guilt and fears and despairs on its account, yet must insist on being lord and conqueror of sin ... until sin is entirely banished and is felt no longer.”[9] Yea, since the devil is so intent on affrighting us by temptations, “we must, when tempted, banish from sight and mind the whole Decalogue with which Satan threatens and plagues us so sorely.”[10]

Such advice could, however, only too easily lead people to relinquish an unequal struggle with an unquenchable Concupiscence and an overwhelmingly powerful devil, or, to lose sight of the distinction between actual sin and our mere natural concupiscence, between sin and mere temptation; Luther failed to see that his doctrines would only too readily induce an artificial confidence, and that people would put the blame for their human frailties on their lack of freedom, their ineradicable concupiscence, or on the almighty devil.

How, all this notwithstanding, he contrived to turn his back on the necessary consequences of his own teaching, and to evolve a practical system of ethics far better than what his theories would have led us to expect, is plain from his warm recommendation of good works, of chastity, neighbourly love and other virtues.

In brief, he taught in his own way what earlier ages had also taught, viz. that sin and vice must be shunned; in his own way he exhorted all to practise virtue, particularly to perform those deeds of brotherly charity reckoned so high in the Church of yore. In what follows we shall have to see how far his principles nevertheless intervened, and how much personal colouring he thereby imparted to his system of ethics. In so doing what we must bear in mind is his own way of viewing the aims of morality and practical matters generally, for here we are concerned, not with the results at which he should logically have arrived, but with the opinions he actually held.

The difficulty of the problem is apparent not merely from the nature of certain of his theological views just stated, but particularly from what he thought concerning original sin and concupiscence, which colours most of his moral teaching.

In his teaching, as we already know, original sin remains, even after baptism, as a real sin in the guise of concupiscence; by its evil desires and self-seeking it poisons all man’s actions to the end of his life, except in so far as his deeds are transformed by the “faith” from above into works pleasing to God, or rather, are accounted as such. Owing to the enmity to God which prevails in the man who thus groans under the weight of sin even “civil justice is mere sinfulness; it cannot stand before the absolute demands of God. All that man can do is to acknowledge that things really are so and to confess his unrighteousness.”[11] Such an attitude Luther calls “humility.” Catholic moralists and ascetics have indeed ever made all other virtues to proceed from humility as from a fertile source, but there is no need to point out how great is the difference between Luther’s “humility” and that submission of the heart to God’s will of which Catholic theologians speak. Humility, as Luther understood it, was an “admission of our corruption”; according to him it is our recognition of the enduring character of original sin that leads us to God and compels us “to admit the revelation of the Grace of God bestowed on us in Christ’s work of redemption,” by means of “faith, i.e. security of salvation.” It is possible to speak “only of a gradual restraining of sin,” so strongly are we drawn to evil. We indeed receive grace by faith, but of any infused grace or blotting out of sin, Luther refuses to hear, since the inclinations which result from original sin still persist. Hence “by grace sin is not blotted out.” Rather, the grace which man receives is an imputed grace; “the real answer to the question as to how Luther arrived at his conviction that imputed grace was necessary and not to be escaped is to be found in his own inward experience that the tendencies due to original sin remain, even in the regenerate. This sin, which persists in the baptised, ... forces him, if he wishes to avoid the pitfall of despair ... to keep before his mind the consoling thought ... ‘that God does not impute to him his sin.’”[12]

2. The two Poles: the Law and the Gospel

One of the ethical questions that most frequently engaged Luther’s attention concerned the relation of Law and Gospel. In reality it touched the foundations of his moral teaching.

His having rightly determined how Law and Gospel stood seemed to him one of his greatest achievements, in fact one of the most important of the revelations made to him from on High. “Whoever is able clearly to distinguish the Law from the Gospel,” he says, “let such a one give thanks to God and know that he is indeed a theologian.”[13] Alluding to the vital importance of Luther’s theory on the Law with its demands and the Gospel with its assurance of salvation, Friedrich Loofs, the historian of dogma, declares: Here “may be perceived the fundamental difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic conception of Christianity,”[14] though he does not fear to hint broadly at the “defects” and “limitations” of Luther’s new discovery; rather he admits quite openly, that some leading aspects of the question “never even revealed themselves clearly” to Luther, but betray a “notable” lack of discernment, and that Luther’s whole conception of the Law contained “much that called for further explanation.”[15]

In order to give here a clearer picture of Luther’s doctrine on this matter than it was possible to do in the earlier passages where his view was touched upon it may be pointed out, that, when, as he so frequently does, he speaks of the Law he means not merely the Old-Testament ceremonial and judicial law, but even the moral law and commands both of the Old Covenant[16] and of the New,[17] in short everything in the nature of a precept binding on the Christian the infringement of which involves him in guilt; he means, as he himself expresses it, “everything ... that speaks to us of our sins and of God’s wrath.”[18]

By the Gospel moreover he understands, not merely the promises contained in the New Testament concerning our salvation, but also those of the Old Covenant; he finds the Gospel everywhere, even previous to Christ: “There is not a book in the Bible,” he says, “which does not contain them both [the Law and the Gospel]. God has thus placed in every instance, side by side, the Law and the promises, for, by the Law, He teaches what we are to do, and, by the promises, how we are to set about it.” In his church-postils where this passage occurs Luther explains more fully what he means by the “promise,” or Gospel, as against the Law: It is the “glad tidings whereby grace and forgiveness of sins is offered. Hence works do not belong to the Gospel, for it is no law, but faith only [is required], for it is simply a promise and an offer of Divine grace. Whoever believes it receives the grace.”[19]

As to the relationship between the Law and the Gospel: Whereas the Law does not express the relation between God and man, the Gospel does. The latter teaches us that we may, nay must, be assured of our salvation previous to any work of ours, in order, that, born anew by such faith, we may be ready to fulfil God’s Will as free, Christian men. The Law, on the other hand, reveals the Will of God, on pedagogic grounds, as the foundation of a system of merit or reward. It is indeed necessary as a negative preparation for faith, but its demands cannot be complied with by the natural man, to say nothing of the fact that it seems to make certainty of salvation, upon which everything depends in our moral life, contingent on the fulfilment of its prescriptions.[20]

From this one can see how inferior to the Gospel is the Law.

The Law speaks of “facere, operari,” of “deeds and works” as essential for salvation. “These words”—so Luther told the students in his Disputations in 1537 on the very eve of the Antinomian controversy—“I should like to see altogether banished from theology; for they imply the notions of merit and duty (“meritum et debitum”), which is beyond toleration. Hence I urge you to refrain from the use of such terms.”[21]

What he here enjoins he had himself striven to keep in view from the earliest days of his struggle against “self-righteousness” and “holiness-by-works.” These he strove to undermine, in the same measure as he exalted original sin and its consequences. Psychologically his attitude in theology towards these questions was based on the renegade monk’s aversion to works and their supposed merit. His chief bugbear is the meritoriousness of any keeping of the Law. For one reason or another he went further and denied even its binding character (“debitum”); caught in the meshes of that pseudo-mystic idealism to which he was early addicted we hear him declaring: the Christian, when he is justified by “faith,” does of his own accord and without the Law everything that is pleasing to God; what is really good is performed without any constraint out of a simple love for what is good. In this wise it was that he reached his insidious thesis, viz. that the believer stands everywhere above the Law and that the Christian knows no Law whatever.[22] In quite general terms he teaches that the Law is in opposition to the Gospel; that it does not vivify but kills; and that its real task is merely to frighten us, to show us what we are unable to do, to reveal sin and “increase it.” The preaching of the Law he here depicts, not as “good and profitable, but as actually harmful,” as “nothing but death and poison.”[23]

That such a setting aside of the specifically Mosaic Law appealed to him, we can readily understand. But does he include in his reprobation the whole “lex moralis,” the Natural Law which the Old Testament merely confirmed, and which, according to Luther himself, is written in man’s heart by nature? This Law he asserts is implicitly obeyed as soon as the heart, by its acceptance of the assurance of salvation, is cleansed and filled with the love of God.[24] And yet “in many instances he applies to this Natural Law what he says elsewhere of the Law of Moses; it too affrights us, increases sin, kills, and stands opposed to the Gospel.”[25] Desirous of destroying once and for all any idea of righteousness or merit being gained through any fulfilment of any Law, he forgets himself, in his usual way, and says strong things against the Law which scarcely agree with other statements he makes elsewhere.

Owing to polemists taking too literally what he said, he has been represented as holding opinions on the Law and the Gospel which in point of fact he does not hold; indeed, some have made him out a real Antinomian. Yet we often hear him exhorting his followers to bow with humility to the commandments, to bear the yoke of submission and thus to get the better of sin and death. Nevertheless, particularly when dealing with those whose “conscience is affrighted,” he is very apt to forget what he has just said in favour of the Law, and prefers to harp on his pet theology: “Man must pay no heed to the Law but only to Christ.” “In dealing with this aspect of the matter we cannot speak too slightingly of so contemptuous a thing [as the Law].”[26]

His changeableness and obscurity on this point is characteristic of his mode of thought.

At times he actually goes so far as to ascribe to the Law merely an outward, deterrent force and to make its sole value in ordinary life consist in the restraining of evil. Even when he is at pains to emphasise the “real, theological” use of the Law as preparatory to grace, he deliberately introduces statements concerning the Law which do not at all help to explain the matter. According to him, highly as we must esteem the Law for its sacred character, its effect upon people who are unable to keep it is nevertheless not wholesome but rather harmful, because thereby sin is multiplied, particularly the sin of unbelief, i.e. as seen in want of confidence in the certainty of salvation and in the striving after righteousness by the exact fulfilling of the Law.[27] “Whoever feels contrition on account of the Law,” he says for instance, “cannot attain to grace, on the contrary he is getting further and further away from it.”[28]

Even for the man who has already laid hold on salvation by the “fides specialis” and has clothed himself in Christ’s merits, the deadening and depraving effect of the Law has not yet ceased. It is true that he is bound to listen to the voice of the Law and does so with profit in order to learn “how to crucify the flesh by means of the spirit, and direct his steps in the concerns of this life.” Yet—and on this it is that Luther dwells—because the pious man is quite unable to fulfil the Law perfectly, he is only made sensible of his own sinfulness; against this dangerous feeling he must struggle.[29] Hence everything depends on one’s ability to set oneself with Christ above the Law and to refuse to listen to its demands; for Christ, Who has taken the whole load upon Himself, bears the sin and has fulfilled the Law for us.[30] That this, however, was difficult, nay, frequently, quite impossible, Luther discovered for himself during his inward struggles, and made no odds in admitting it. He gives a warning against engaging in any struggles with our conscience, which is the herald of the Law; such contests “often lead men to despair, to the knife and the halter.”[31] Of the manner in which he dealt with his own conscience we shall, however, speak more in detail below (XXIX, 6).

It is not necessary to point out the discrepancies and contradictions in the above train of thought. Luther was untiring in his efforts at accommodation, and, whenever he wished, had plenty to say on the matter. Here, even more plainly than elsewhere, we see both his lack of system and the irreconcilable contradictions lying in the very core of his ethics and theology. Friedrich Loofs says indulgently: “Dogmatic theories he had none; without over much theological reflection he simply gives expression to his religious convictions.”[32]

It is strange to note how the aspect of the Law changes according as it is applied to the wicked or to the just, though it was given for the instruction and salvation of all alike. In the New Testament we read: “My yoke is sweet and my burden light,” but even in the Old Testament it had been said: “Much peace have they that love thy Law.”[33] According to Luther the man who is seeking for salvation and has not yet laid hold on faith in the forgiveness of sins must let himself be “ground down [’conteri,’ cp. ‘contritio’] by the Law” until he has learnt “to live in a naked trust in God’s Mercy.”[34] The man, however, who by faith has assured himself of salvation looks at the Law and its transgressions, viz. sin, in quite a different light.

“He lives in a different world,” says Luther, “where he must know nothing either of sin or of merit; if however he feels his sin, he is to look at it as clinging, not to his own person, but to the person (Christ) on whom God has cast it, i.e. he must regard it, not as it is in itself and appears to his conscience, but rather in Christ by Whom it has been atoned for and vanquished. Thus he has a heart cleansed from all sin by the faith which affirms that sin has been conquered and overthrown by Christ.... Hence it is sacrilege to look at the sin in your heart, for it is the devil who puts it there, not God. You must say, my sins are not mine; they are not in me at all; they are the sins of another; they are Christ’s and are none of my business.”[35] Elsewhere he describes similarly the firm consolation of the righteous with regard to the Law and its accusations of sin: “This is the supreme comfort of the righteous, to vest and clothe Christ with my sins and yours and those of the whole world, and then to look upon Him as the bearer of all our sins. The man who thus regards Him will soon come to scorn the fanatical notions of the sophists concerning justification by works. They rave of a faith that works by love (‘fides formata caritate’), and assert that thereby sins are taken away and men justified. But this simply means to undress Christ, to strip Him of sin, to make Him innocent, to burden and load ourselves with our own sins and to see them, not in Christ, but in ourselves, which is the same thing as to put away Christ and say He is superfluous.”[36]

The confidence with which Luther says such things concerning the transgression of the Divine Law by the righteous is quite startling; nor does he do so in mere occasional outbursts, but his frequent statements to this effect seem measured and dispassionate, nor were they intended simply for the learned but even for common folk. It was for the latter, for instance, that in his “Sermon von dem Sacrament der Puss” he said briefly: “To him who believes, everything is profitable and nothing harmful, but, to him who believes not, everything is harmful and nothing profitable.”[37]

“Whosoever does not believe,” i.e. has failed to lay hold of the certainty of salvation, deserves to feel the relentless severity of the Law; let him learn that the “right understanding and use of the Law” is this, “that it does no more than prove” that all “who, without faith, follow its behests are slaves, stuck [in the Law] against their will and without any certainty of grace.” “They must confess that by the Law they are unable to make the slightest progress.”

“Even should you worry yourself to death with works, still your heart cannot thereby raise itself to such a faith as the Law calls for.”[38]

Thus, by the Law alone, and without the help of Luther’s “faith,” we become sheer “martyrs of the devil.”

It is this road, according to him, that the Papists tread and that he himself, so he assures us, had followed when a monk. There he had been obliged to grind himself on the Law, i.e. had been forced to fight his way in despair until at last he discovered justification in faith.[39] One thing that is certain is his early antipathy—due to the laxity of his life as a religious and to his pseudo-mysticism—for the burdens and supposed deadening effect of the Law, an antipathy to which he gave striking expression at the Heidelberg Disputation.[40]

Luther remained all his life averse to the Law.[41] In 1542, i.e. subsequent to the Antinomian controversy, he even compared the Law to the gallows. He hastens, however, to remove any bad impression he may have made, by referring to the power of the Gospel: “The Law does not punish the just; the gallows are not put up for those who do not steal but for robbers.”[42] The words occur in an answer to his friends’ questions concerning the biblical objections advanced by the Catholics. They had adduced certain passages in which everlasting life is promised to those who keep the Law (“factores legis”) and where “love of God with the whole heart” rather than faith alone is represented as the true source of righteousness and salvation. Luther solves the questions to his own content. Those who keep the Law, he admits, “are certainly just, but not by any means owing to their fulfilment of the Law, for they were already just beforehand by virtue of the Gospel; for the man who acts as related in the Bible passages quoted stands in no need of the Law.... Sin does not reign over the just, and, to the end, it will not sully them.... The Law is named merely for those who sin, for Paul thus defines the Law: ‘The Law is the knowledge of sin’ (Rom. iii. 20).”—In reality what St. Paul says is that “By the Law is the knowledge of sin,” and he only means that the Old-Testament ordinances of which he is speaking, led, according to God’s plan, to a sense of utter helplessness and therefore to a yearning for the Saviour. Luther’s very different idea, viz. that the Law was meant for the sinner and served as a gallows, is stated by W. Walther the Luther researcher, in the following milder though perfectly accurate form: “In so far as the Christian is not yet a believer he lacks true morality. Even in his case therefore the Law is not yet abrogated.”[43]

“A distinction must be made,” so Luther declares, “between the Law for the sinner and the Law for the non-sinner. The Law is not given to the righteous, i.e. it is not against them.”[44]

The olden Church had stated her conception of the Law and the Gospel both simply and logically. In her case there was no assumption of any assurance of salvation by faith alone to disturb the relations between the Law and the Gospel; one was the complement of the other; though, agreeably to the Gospel, she proclaimed the doctrine of love in its highest perfection, yet at the same time, like St. Peter, she insisted in the name of the “Law,” that, in the fear of sin and “by dint of good works” we must make sure our calling and election (2 Peter i. 10). She never ceased calling attention to the divinely appointed connection between the heavenly reward and our fidelity to the Law, vouched for both in the Old Testament (“For thou wilt render to every man according to his works,” Ps. lxi. 13) and also in the New (“The Son of Man will render to every man according to his works,” Mt. xvi. 27, and elsewhere, “For we must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ that everyone may receive the proper things of the body according as he hath done, whether it be good or evil,” 2 Cor. v. 10).

3. Encounter with the Antinomianism of Agricola

Just as the Anabaptist and fanatic movement had originally been fostered by Luther’s doctrines, so Antinomianism sprang from the seed he had scattered.

Johann Agricola, the chief spokesman of the Antinomians, merely carried certain theses of Luther’s to their logical conclusion, doing so openly and regardless of the consequences. He went much further than his master, who often had at least the prudence here and elsewhere to turn back half-way, a want of logic which Luther had to thank for his escape from many dangers in both doctrine and practice. In the same way as Luther, with the utmost tenacity and vigour, had withstood the Anabaptists and fanatics when they strove to put in full practice his own principles, so also he proclaimed war on the Antinomians’ enlargement and application of his ideas on the Law and Gospel which appeared to him fraught with the greatest danger. That the contentions of the Antinomians were largely his own, formulated anew, must be fairly evident to all.[45]

Johann Agricola, the fickle and rebellious Wittenberg professor, seized on Luther’s denunciations of the Law, more particularly subsequent to the spring of 1537, and built them up into a fantastic Antinomian system, at the same time rounding on Luther, and even more on the cautious and reticent Melanchthon, for refusing to proceed along the road on which they had ventured. In support of his views he appealed to such sayings of Luther’s, as, the Law “was not made for the just,” and, was “a gallows only meant for thieves.”

He showed that, whereas Luther had formerly refused to recognise any repentance due to fear of the menaces of the Law, he had come to hold up the terrors of the Law before the eyes of sinners. As a matter of fact Luther did, at a later date, teach that justifying faith was preceded by a contrition produced by the Law; such repentance due to fear was excited by God Almighty in the man deprived of moral freedom, as in a “materia passiva.”—The following theses were issued as Agricola’s: “1. The Law [the Decalogue] does not deserve to be called the Word of God. 2. Even should you be a prostitute, a cuckold, an adulterer or any other kind of sinner, yet, so long as you believe, you are on the road to salvation. 3. If you are sunk in the depths of sin, if only you believe, you are really in a state of grace. 4. The Decalogue belongs to the petty sessions, not to the pulpit. 11. The words of Peter: ‘That by good works you may make sure your calling and election’ [2 Peter i. 10] are all rubbish. 12. So soon as you begin to fancy that Christianity requires this or that, or that people should be good, honest, moral, holy and chaste, you have already rent asunder the Gospel [Luke, ch. vi.].”[46]

In his counter theses Luther indignantly rejected such opinions: “the deduction is not valid,” he says, for instance, “when people make out, that what is not necessary for justification, either at the outset, later, or at the end, should not to be taught” (as obligatory), e.g. the keeping of the Law, personal co-operation and good works. “Even though the Law be useless to justification, still it does not follow that it is to be made away with, or not to be taught.”[47]

Luther was the more indignant at the open opposition manifest in his own neighbourhood and at the yet worse things that were being whispered, because he feared, that, owing to the friendly understanding between Agricola, Jacob Schenk and others, the new movement might extend abroad. The doctrine, in its excesses, seemed to him as compromising as the teaching of Carlstadt and the doings of the fanatics in former days. In reality it did embody a fanatical doctrine and an extremely dangerous pseudo-theology; in Antinomianism the pseudo-mystical ideas concerning freedom and inner experience which from the very beginning had brought Luther into conflict with the “Law,” culminated in a sort of up-to-date gnosticism.

We now find Luther, in the teeth of his previous statements, declaring that “Whoever makes away with the Law, makes away with the Gospel.”[48] He says: “Agricola perverts our doctrine, which is the solace of consciences, and seeks by its means to set up the freedom of the flesh”;[49] the grace preached by Agricola was really nothing more than immoral licence.[50]

The better to counter the new movement Luther at once proceeded to modify his teaching concerning the Law. In this wise Antinomianism exercised on him a restraining influence, and was to some extent of service to his doctrine and undertaking, warning him, as the fanatic movement had done previously, of certain rocks to be avoided.

Luther now came to praise Melanchthon’s view of the Law, which hitherto had not appealed to him, and declared in his Table-Talk: If the Law is done away with in the Church, that will spell the end of all knowledge of sin.[51]

This last utterance, dating from March, 1537, is the first to forebode the controversy about to commence, which was to cause Luther so much anxiety but which at the same time affords us so good an insight into his ethics and, no less, into his character. Even more noteworthy are the two sermons in which he expounds his standpoint as against that of Agricola, whom, however, he does not name.[52]

The first step taken by Luther at the University against the Antinomian movement was the Disputation of Dec. 18, 1537. For this he drew up a list of weighty theses. When the Disputation was announced everyone was aware that it was aimed at a member of the Wittenberg Professorial staff, at one, moreover, whom Luther himself, as dean, had authorised to deliver lectures on theology at Wittenberg. When Agricola failed even to put in an appearance at the Disputation, as though it in no way concerned him, and also continued to “agitate secretly” against the Wittenberg doctrine, Luther, in a letter addressed to Agricola on Jan. 6, 1538, withdrew from him his faculty to teach, and even demanded that he should forswear theology altogether (“a theologia in totum abstinere”); if he now wished to deliver lectures he would have to ask permission “of the University” (where Luther’s influence was paramount).[53] This was a severe blow for Agricola and his family. His wife called on Luther, dropped a humble curtsey and assured him that in future her husband would do whatever he was told. This seems to have mollified Luther. Agricola himself also plucked up courage to go to him, only to be informed that he would have to appear at the second Disputation on the subject—for which Luther had drawn up a fresh set of theses—and there make a public recantation. Driven into a corner, Agricola agreed to these terms. At the second Disputation (Jan. 12, 1538) he did, as a matter of fact, give explanations deemed satisfactory by Luther, by whom he was rewarded with an assurance of confidence. He was, nevertheless, excluded from all academical office, and though the Elector of Saxony permitted him to act as preacher this sanction was not extended by Bugenhagen to any preaching at Wittenberg.[54] A third and fourth set of theses drawn up by Luther,[55] who could not do enough against the new heresy, date from the interval previous to the settlement, though no Disputation was held on them that the peace might not be broken.

Agricola nevertheless was staunch in his contention, that, in his earlier writings, Luther had expressed himself quite differently, and this was a fact which it was difficult to disprove.

On account of Agricola’s renewal of activity, Luther, on Sep. 13, 1538, held another lengthy and severe Disputation against him and his supporters, the “hotheads and avowed hypocrites.” For this occasion he produced a fifth and last set of theses. He also insisted that his opponent should publicly eat his words. This time Luther admitted that some of his own previous statements had been injudicious, though he was disposed to excuse them. In the beginning they had been preaching to people whose consciences were troubled and who stood in need of a different kind of language than those whose consciences had first to be stirred up. Agricola, finding himself in danger of losing his daily bread, yielded, and even agreed to allow Luther himself to pen the draft of his retractation, hoping thus to get off more easily.

Instead of this, and in order, as he said, to “paint him as a cowardly, proud and godless man,” Luther wrote a tract (“Against the Antinomians”) addressed to the preacher Caspar Güttel, which might take the place of the retractation agreed upon.[56] It was exceedingly rude to Agricola. It represented him as a man of “unusual arrogance and presumption,” “who presumed to have a mind of his own, but one that was really intent on self-glorification”; he was a standing proof that in the world “the devil liveth and reigneth”; by his means the devil was set on raising another storm against Luther’s Evangel, like those others raised by Carlstadt, Münzer, the Anabaptists and so forth.[57] In spite of all this the writing, according to a statement made by its author to Melanchthon, was all too mild (“tam levis fui”), particularly now that Agricola’s great “obstinacy” was becoming so patent.[58]

Luther even spoke of the excommunication which should be launched against so contumacious a man. As a penalty he caused him to be excluded from among the candidates for the office of Dean, and when Agricola complained to the Rector and to Bugenhagen of Luther’s “tyranny” both refused to listen to him.[59]

In the meantime Agricola expressed his complete submission in a printed statement, which, however, was probably not meant seriously, and thereupon, on Feb. 7, 1539, was nominated by the Elector a member of the Consistory. He at once profited by this mark of favour to present at Court a written complaint against Luther, referring particularly to the scurrilous circular letter sent to Caspar Güttel. He protested that, for wellnigh three years, he had submitted to being trodden under foot by Luther, and had slunk along at his heels like a wretched cur, though there had been no end to the insult and abuse heaped upon him. What Luther reproached him with he had never taught. The latter had accused him of many things which he “neither would, could nor might admit.”[60]

Luther in his turn, in a writing, appealed to the Elector and his supreme tribunal. In vigorous language he explained to the Court, utterly incapable though it was of deciding on so delicate a question, why he had been obliged to withstand the false opinions of his opponent which the Bible condemned. Agricola had dared to call Luther’s doctrine unclean, “a doctrine on behalf of which our beloved Prince and Lord wagered and imperilled land and subjects, life and limb, not to speak of his soul and ours.” In other words, to differ from Luther was high treason against the sovereign who agreed with him. He sneers at Agricola in a tone which shows how great licence he allowed himself in his dealings with the Elector: Agricola had drawn up a Catechism, best nicknamed a “Cackism”; Master Grickel was ridden by an angry imp, etc. So far was he from offering any excuse for his virulence against Agricola that he even expressed his regret for having been “so friendly and gentle.”[61]

To the same authority, as though to it belonged judgment in ecclesiastical matters, Melanchthon, Jonas, Bugenhagen and Amsdorf sent a joint memorandum in which they recommended a truce, “somewhat timidly pointing out to the Elector, that Luther was hardly a man who could be expected to retract.”[62]

The Court Councillors now took the whole matter into their hands and it was settled to lodge a formal suit against Agricola. The latter, however, accepted a call from Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, to act as Court preacher, and, in spite of having entered into recognisances not to quit the town, he made haste to get himself gone to his new post in Berlin (Aug., 1540). On a summons from Wittenberg, and seeing that, unless he made peace with Luther, he could do nothing at Berlin, he consented to issue a circular letter to the preachers, magistrates and congregation of Eisleben[63] “which might have satisfied even Luther’s exorbitant demands.”[64] He explained that he had in the meantime thought better of the points under discussion, and even promised “to believe and teach as the Church at Wittenberg believes and teaches.”

In 1545, when he came to Wittenberg with his wife and daughter, Luther, who still bore him a grudge, whilst allowing them to pay him a visit, refused to see Agricola himself. On another occasion it was only thanks to the friendly intervention of Catherine Bora that Luther consented to glance at a kindly letter from him, but of any reconciliation he would not hear. Regarding this last incident we have a note of Agricola’s own: “Domina Ketha, rectrix cœli et terræ, Iuno coniunx et soror Iovis, who rules her husband as she wills, has for once in a way spoken a good word on my behalf. Jonas likewise did the same.”[65]

Luther’s hostility continued to the day of his death. He found justification for his harshness and for his refusal to be reconciled in the evident inconstancy and turbulence of his opponent. For a while, too, he was disposed to credit the news that Antinomianism was on the increase in Saxony, Thuringia and elsewhere.

Not only was Agricola’s fickleness not calculated to inspire confidence, but his life also left much to be desired from the moral standpoint. Though Luther was perhaps unaware of it, we learn from Agricola’s own private Notes, that the “vices in which the young take delight” had assailed him in riper years even more strongly than in his youth. Seckendorff also implies that he did not lead a “regular life.”[66]

In 1547 Agricola, together with Julius Pflug, Bishop of Naumburg, and Helding, auxiliary of Mayence, drew up the Augsburg Interim. As General Superintendent of the Brandenburg district and at the invitation of his Elector he assisted in the following year at the religious Conferences of the Saxon theologians. He died at Berlin, Sep. 22, 1566, of a disease resulting from the plague.

Of the feeling called forth in circles friendly to Luther by Agricola’s part in the Interim we have proof in the preface which introduces in the edition of 1549 Luther’s letter of 1539 to the Saxon Court. Here we read: If the Eisleben fellow (Agricola) “was ever a dissolute sharper, who secretly promoted false doctrine and made use of the favour and applause of the pious as a cloak for his knavery,” much more has this now become apparent by his outcry concerning the Interim and the alleged good it does. The editors recall the fact, that “Our worthy father in God, Dr. Martin Luther of happy memory, shortly before his end, in the presence of Dr. Pommer, Philip, Creutziger, Major, Jonas and D. Paulus Benedictus” spoke as follows: “Eisleben (Agricola) is not merely ridden by the devil but the devil himself lodges in him.” In proof of the latter statement they add, that trustworthy persons, who had good grounds for their opinion, had declared, that “it was the simple truth that devils had visibly appeared in Eisleben’s house and study, and at times had made a great disturbance and clatter; whence it is clear that he is the devil’s own in body and soul.” “The truth,” they conclude, “is clear and manifest. God gives us warnings enough in the writings of pious and learned persons and also by signs in the sky and in the waters. Let whoever wills be admonished and warned. For to each one it is a matter of life eternal; to which may God assist us through Christ our Lord, Amen.”[67]

A writing of Melanchthon’s, dating from the last months of his life and brought to light only in 1894, gives further information concerning a later phase of the Antinomian controversy as fought out between Agricola and Melanchthon.[68]

Melanchthon, for all his supposed kindliness, here empties the vials of his wrath on Johann Agricola because the latter had vehemently assailed his thesis “Bona opera sunt necessaria.” As a matter of fact, so he writes, he bothered himself as little about Agricola’s “preaching, slander, abuse, insistence and threats” as about the “cackle of some crazy gander.” But Christian people were becoming scandalised at “this grand preacher of blasphemy” and were beginning to suspect his own (Melanchthon’s) faith. Hence he would have them know that Agricola’s component parts were an “asinine righteousness, a superstitious arrogance and an Epicurean belly-service.” To his thesis he could not but adhere to his last breath, even were he to be torn to pieces with red-hot pincers. He had refrained from adding the words “ad salutem” after “necessaria” lest the unwary should think of some merit. The “ad salutem” was an addition of Agricola’s, that “foolish man,” who had thrust it on him by means of a “shameless and barefaced lie.” He is anxious to win his spurs off the Lutherans. Yet donkeys of his ilk do understand nothing in the matter, and God will “punish these blasphemers and disturbers of the Churches.” But in order that “a final end may at length be put to the evil doing, slander, abuse and cavilling it will,” he says, “be necessary for God to send the Turk; nothing else will help in such a case.” Melanchthon compares himself to Joseph, who was sold by his brethren. If Joseph had to endure this “in the first Church,” what then “will be my fate in the extreme old age of this mad world (‘extrema mundi delira senecta’) when licence wanders abroad unrestrained to sully everything and when such unspeakably cruel hypocrites control our destinies? I can only pray to God that He will deign to come to the aid of His Church and graciously heal all the gaping wounds dealt her by her foes. Amen.”

A certain reaction against the Antinomian tendency, is, as already explained, noticeable in Luther’s latter years; at least he felt called upon to revise a little his former standpoint with regard to the Law, the motive of fear, indifference to sin and so forth, and to remove it from the danger of abuse. He was also at pains to contradict the view that his doctrine of faith involved an abrogation of the Law. “The fools do not know,” he remarked, for instance, alluding to Jacob Schenk, “all that faith has to do.”[69]

In his controversy with Agricola we can detect a tendency on his part “to revert to Melanchthon’s doctrine concerning repentance.”[70] He insisted far more strongly than before[71] on the necessity of preaching the Law in order to arouse contrition; he even went so far along Catholic lines as to assert, that “Penance is sorrow for sin with the resolve to lead a better life.”[72] He also admitted, that, at the outset, he had said things which the Antinomians now urged against the Law, though he also strove to show that he had taken pains to qualify and safeguard what he had said. Nor indeed can Luther ever have expected that all the strong things he had once hurled against the Law and its demands would ever be used to build up a new moral theology.

And yet, even at the height of the Antinomian controversy, he stood firmly by his thesis regarding the Law, fear and contrition, viz. that “Whoever seeks to be led to repentance by the Law, will never attain to it, but, on the contrary, will only turn his back on it the more”;[73] to this he was ever true.

“Luther,” says Adolf Harnack, “could never doubt that only the Christian who has been vanquished by the Gospel is capable of true repentance, and that the Law can work no real repentance.”[74] The fact however remains, that, at least if we take his words as they stand, we do find in Luther a doctrine of repentance which does not claim faith in the forgiveness of sins so exclusively as its source.[75] The fact is that his statements do not tally.[76] Other Protestant theologians will have it that no change took place in Luther’s views on penance,[77] or at least that the attempts so far made to solve the problem are not satisfactory.[78] Stress should, however, be laid on the fact, that, during his contest with Antinomianism Luther insisted that it was necessary “to drive men to penance even by the terrors of the Law,”[79] and that, alluding to his earlier statements, he admits having had much to learn: “I have been made to experience the words of St. Peter, ‘Grow in the knowledge of the Lord.’”

Of the converted, i.e. of those justified by the certainty of salvation, he says in 1538 in his Disputations against Agricola: The pious Christian as such “is dead to the Law and serves it not, but lies in the bosom of grace, secure in the righteousness imputed to him by God.... But, so far as he is still in the flesh, he serves the law of sin, repulsive as it may sound that a saint should be subject to the law of sin.”[80] If Luther finds in the saint or devout man such a double life, a free man side by side with a slave, holiness side by side with sin, this is on account of the concupiscence, or as Luther says elsewhere, original sin, which still persists, and the results of which he regarded as really sinful in God’s sight.

Elsewhere in the same Disputations he speaks of the Law as contemptuously as ever: “The Law can work in the soul nothing but wanhope; it fills us with shame; to lead us to seek God is not in the nature and might of the Law; this is the doing of another fellow,” viz. of the Gospel with its preaching of forgiveness of sins in Christ.[81] It is true he adds in a kindlier vein: “The Law ought not so greatly to terrify those who are justified (‘nec deberet ita terrere iustificatos’) for it is already much chastened by our justification in Christ. But the devil comes and makes the Law harsh and repellent to those who are justified. Thus, through the devil’s fault, many are filled with fear who have no reason to fear. But [and now follows the repudiation of the extreme theories of the Antinomians], the Law is not on that account abolished in the Church, or its preaching suppressed; for even the pious have some remnant of sin abiding in their flesh, which must be purified by the Law.... To them, however, the Law must be preached under a milder form; they should be admonished in this wise: You are now washed clean in the Blood of Christ. Yield therefore your bodies to serve justice and lay aside the lusts of the flesh that you may not become like to the world. Be zealous for the righteousness of good works.” There too he also teaches how the “Law” must be brought home to hardened sinners. In their case no “mitigation” is allowable. On the contrary, they are to be told: You will be damned, God hates you, you are full of unrighteousness, your lot is that of Cain, etc. For, “before Justification, the Law rules, and terrifies all who come in contact with it, it convicts and condemns.”[82]

Among the most instructive utterances touching the Antinomians is the following one on sin, more particularly on breach of wedlock, which may be given here as amplifying Luther’s statements on the subject recorded in our vol. iii. (pp. 245, 256 f., etc.): The Antinomians taught, so he says, that, if a man had broken wedlock, he had only to believe (“tantum ut crederet”) and he would find a Gracious God. But surely that was no Church where so horrible a doctrine (“horribilis vox”) was heard. On the contrary what was to be taught was, that, in the first place, there were adulterers and other sinners who acknowledged their sin, made good resolutions against it and possessed real faith, such as these found mercy with God. In the second place, however, there were others who neither repented of their sin nor wished to forsake it; such men had no faith, and a preacher who should discourse to them concerning faith (i.e. fiducial faith) would merely be seducing and deceiving them.

4. The Certainty of Salvation and its relation to Morality

How did Luther square his system of morality with his principal doctrine of Faith and Justification, and where did he find any ground for the performance of good works?

In the main he made everything to proceed from and rest upon a firm, personal certainty of salvation. The artificial system thus built up, so far as it is entitled to be called a system at all, requires only to be set forth in order to be appreciated as it deserves. It will be our duty to consider Luther’s various statements, and finally his own summary, made late in life, of the conclusions he had reached.

Certainty of Salvation as the cause and aim of True Morality. The Psychological Explanation

Quite early Luther had declared: “The ‘fides specialis,’ or assurance of salvation, of itself impels man to true morality.” For, “faith brings along with it love, peace, joy and hope.... In this faith all works are equal and one as good as the other, and any difference between works disappears, whether they be great or small, short or long, few or many; for works are not pleasing [to God] in themselves but on account of faith.... A Christian who lives in this faith has no need to be taught good works, but, whatever occurs to him, that he does, and everything is well done.” Such are his words in his “Sermon von den guten Wercken” to Duke Johann of Saxony in 1520.[83]

He frequently repeats, that “Faith brings love along with it,” which impels us to do good.

He enlarges on this in the festival sermons in his Church-Postils, and says: When I am made aware by faith, that, through the Son of God Who died for me, I am able to “resist and flaunt sin, death, devil, hell and every ill, then I cannot but love Him in return and be well disposed towards Him, keeping His commandments and doing lovingly and gladly everything He asks”; the heart will then show itself full “of gratitude and love. But, seeing that God stands in no need of our works and that He has not commanded us to do anything else for Him but to praise and thank Him, therefore such a man must proceed to devote himself entirely to his neighbour, to serve, help and counsel him freely and without reward.”[84]

All this, as Luther says in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” must be performed “by a free, willing, cheerful and unrequited serving of our neighbour”;[85] it must be done “cheerfully and gladly for Christ’s sake Who has done so much for us.”[86] “That same Law which once was hateful to free-will,” he says in his Commentary on Galatians, “now [i.e. after we have received the faith and assurance of salvation] becomes quite pleasant since love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Ghost.... We now are lovers of the Law.”[87] From the wondrous well-spring of the imputed merits of Christ there comes first and foremost prayer; if only we cling “trustfully to the promise of grace,” then “the heart will unceasingly beat and pulsate to such prayers as the following: O, beloved Father, may Thy Name be hallowed, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done.”[88] But all is not prayer and holy desire; even when the “soul has been cleansed by faith,” the Christian still must struggle against sin and against the body “in order to deaden its wantonness.”[89] The Christian will set himself to acquire chastity; “in this work a good, strong faith is of great help, more so here than anything else.” And why? Because whoever is assured of salvation in Christ and “enjoys the grace of God, also delights in spiritual purity.... Under such a faith the Spirit without doubt will tell him how to avoid evil thoughts and everything opposed to chastity. For as faith in the Divine mercy persists and works all good, so also it never ceases to inform us of all that is pleasing or displeasing to God.”[90]

Whence does our will derive the ability and strength to wage this struggle to the end? Only from the assurance of salvation, from its unshaken awareness that it has indeed a Gracious God. For this certainty of faith sets one free, first of all from those anxieties with regard to one’s salvation with which the righteous-by-works are plagued and thus allows one to devote time and strength to doing what is good; secondly this faith in one’s salvation teaches one how to overcome the difficulties that stand in one’s way.[91]

There was, however, an objection raised against Luther by his contemporaries and which even presented itself to his own mind: Why should a lifelong struggle and the performance of good works be requisite for a salvation of which we are already certain? It was re-formulated even by Albert Ritschl, in whose work, “Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung,” we find the words: “If one asks why God, Who makes salvation to depend on Justification by faith, prescribes good works at all, the arbitrary character of the assumption becomes quite evident.”[92] In Luther’s own writings we repeatedly hear the same stricture voiced: “If sin is forgiven me gratuitously by God’s Mercy and is blotted out in baptism, then there is nothing for me to do.” People say, “If faith is everything and suffices of itself to make us pious, why then are good works enjoined?”[93]

In order to render Luther’s meaning adequately we must emphasise his leading answer to such objections. He is determined to insist on good works, because, as he says, they are of the utmost importance to the one thing on which everything else depends, viz. to faith and the assurance of salvation.[94]

In his “Sermon von den guten Wercken,” which deserves to be taken as conclusive, he declares outright that all good works are ordained—for the sake of faith. “Such works and sufferings must be performed in faith and in firm trust in the Divine mercy, in order that, as already stated, all works may come under the first commandment and under faith, and that they may serve to exercise and strengthen faith, on account of which all the other commandments and works are demanded.”[95] Hence morality is necessary, not primarily in order to please God, to obey Him and thus to work out our salvation, but in order to strengthen our “fides specialis” in our own salvation, which then does all the needful.[96] It is necessary, as Luther says elsewhere, in order to provide a man with a reassuring token of the reality of his “fides specialis”; he may for instance be tempted to doubt whether he possesses this saving gift of God, though the very doubt already spells its destruction; hence let him look at his works; if they are good, they will tell him at the dread hour of death: Yes, you have the “faith.”[97] Strangely enough he also takes the Bible passages which deal with works performed under grace as referring to faith, e.g. “If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17) and, “By good works make your calling and election sure” (2 Peter i. 10). The latter exhortation of St. Peter signifies according to Luther’s exegesis: “Take care to strengthen your faith,” from the works “you may see whether you have the faith.”[98] According to St. Peter you are to seek in works merely “a sign and token that the faith is there”; his meaning is not that you “are to do good works in order that you may secure your election.” “We are not to fancy that thereby we can become pious.”[99]

This thought is supplemented by another frequent exhortation of Luther’s which concerns the consciousness of sin persisting even after “justification.” The sense of sin has, according to him, no other purpose than to strengthen us in our trustful clinging to Christ, for as no one’s faith is perfect we are ever called upon to fortify it, in which we are aided by this anxiety concerning sin: “Though we still feel sin within us this is merely to drive us to faith and make our faith stronger, so that despite our feeling we may accept the Word and cling with all our heart and conscience to Christ alone,” in other words, to follow Luther’s own example amidst the pangs of conscience that had plunged him into “death and hell.”[100] “Thus does faith, against all feeling and reason, lead us quietly through sin, through death and through hell.” “The more faith waxes, the more the feeling diminishes, and vice versa. Sins still persist within us, e.g. pride, avarice, anger and so on and so forth, but only in order to move us to faith.” He refrains from adducing from Holy Scripture any proof in support of so strange a theory, but proceeds to sing a pæan on faith “in order that faith may increase from day to day until man at length becomes a Christian through and through, keeps the real Sabbath, and creeps, skin, hair and all, into Christ.”[101] The Christian, by accustoming himself to trust in the pardoning grace of Christ and by fortifying himself in this faith, becomes at length “one paste with Christ.”[102]

Hence the “fides specialis” as just explained, seems to be the chief ethical aim of life.[103] This is why it is so necessary to strengthen it by works, and so essential to beat down all anxieties of conscience.

Here Luther is speaking from his own inward experience. He says: “Thus must the conscience be lulled to rest and made content, thus must all the waves and billows subside.... Our sins towered mountain-high about us and would fain have made us despair, but in the end they are calmed, and settle down, and soon are seen no longer.”[104] It was only very late in his life that Luther reached a state of comparative calm, a calm moreover best to be compared with the utter weariness of a man worn out by fatigue.[105]

Luther’s Last Sermons at Eisleben on the Great Questions of Morality

In the four sermons he preached at Eisleben—the last he ever delivered—Luther gives utterance to certain leading thoughts quite peculiar to himself regarding morality and the “fides specialis.” These utterances, under the circumstances to be regarded as the ripest fruit of his reflection, must be taken in conjunction with other statements made by him in his old age. They illustrate even more clearly than what has gone before the cardinal point of his teaching now under discussion, which, even more than any other, has had the bad luck to be so often wrongly presented by combatants on either side.

Luther’s four sermons at Eisleben, which practically constitute his Last Will and Testament of his views on faith and good works, were delivered before a great concourse of people. A note on one delivered on Feb. 2, 1546, tells us: “So great was the number of listeners collected from the surrounding neighbourhood, market-places and villages, that even Paul himself were he to come preaching could hardly expect a larger audience.”[106] For the reports of his sermons we are indebted to the pen of his pupil and companion on his journey, Johann Aurifaber.[107] From their contents we can see how much Luther was accustomed to adapt himself to his hearers and to the conditions prevailing in the district where he preached. The great indulgence then extended to the Jews in that territory of the Counts of Mansfeld; the religious scepticism shared or favoured by certain people at the Court; and, in particular, the moral licence—which, taking its cue from Luther’s teaching, argued: “Well and good, I will sin lustily since sin has been taken away and can no longer damn me,” as he himself relates in the third sermon,[108]—all this lends colour to the background of these addresses delivered at Eisleben. In particular the third sermon, on the parable of the cockle (Mt. xiii. 24-30), is well worth notice. It speaks of the weeds which infest the Church and of those which spring up in ourselves; in the latter connection Luther expatiates on the leading principles of his ethics, on faith, sin and good works, and concludes by telling the Christian how he must live and “grow in faith and the spirit.”[109] One cannot but acknowledge the force with which the preacher, who was even then suffering acutely, speaks on behalf of good works and the struggle against sin. What he says is, however, tainted by his own peculiar views.

“God forgives sin in that He does not impute it.... But from this it does not follow that you are without sin, although it is already forgiven; for in yourself you feel no hearty desire to obey God, to go to the sacrament or to hear God’s Word. Do you perhaps imagine that this is no sin, or mere child’s play?” Hence, he concludes, we must pray daily “for forgiveness and never cease to fight against ourselves and not give the rein to our sinful inclinations and lusts, nor obey them contrary to the dictates of conscience, but rather weaken and deaden sin ever more and more; for sin must not merely be forgiven but verily swept away and destroyed.”[110]

He exhorts his hearers to struggle against sin, whether original or actual sin, and does so in words which place the “fides specialis” in the first place and impose the obligation of a painful and laborious warfare which contrasts strongly with the spontaneous joy of the just in doing what is good, elsewhere taken for granted by Luther.

“Our doctrine as to how we are to deal with our own uncleanness and sin is briefly this: Believe in Jesus Christ and your sins are forgiven; then avoid and withstand sin, wage a hand-to-hand fight with it, do not allow it its way, do not hate or cheat your neighbour,” etc.[111]

Such admonitions strenuously to strive against sin involuntarily recall some very different assurances of his, viz. that the man who has once laid hold on righteousness by faith, at once and of his own accord does what is good: “Hence from faith there springs love and joy in God and a free and willing service of our neighbour out of simple love.”

Elsewhere too he says, “Good works are performed by faith and out of our heartfelt joy that we have through Christ obtained the remission of our sins.... Interiorly everything is sweet and delicious, and hence we do and suffer all things gladly.”[112] And again, just as we eat and drink naturally, so also to do what is good comes naturally to the believer; the word is fulfilled: Only believe and you will do all things of your own accord;[113] as a good tree must bring forth good fruit and cannot do otherwise, so, where there is faith, good works there must also be.[114] He speaks of this as a “necessitas immutabilitatis” and as a “necessitas gratuita,” no less necessary than that the sun must shine. In 1536 he even declared in an instruction to Melanchthon that it was not right to say that a believer should do good works, because he can’t help performing them; who thinks of ordering “the sun to shine, a good tree to bring forth good fruit, or three and seven to make ten?”[115]

Of this curious idealism, first noticed in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” we find traces in Luther till the very end of his life.[116] In later life, however, he either altered it a little or was less prone to insist on it in and out of season. This was due to his unfortunate experiences to the contrary; as a matter of fact faith failed to produce the effects expected, and only in rare instances and at its very best was it as fruitful as Luther wished. The truth is he had overrated it, obviously misled by his enthusiasm for his alleged discovery of the power of faith for justification.

He was also fond of saying—and of this assurance we find an echo in his last sermon—that a true and lively faith should govern even our feeling, and as we are so little conscious of such a feeling and impulse to what is good, it follows that we but seldom have this faith, i.e. this lively certainty of salvation.

When a Christian is lazy, starts thinking he possesses everything and refuses to grow and increase, then “neither has he earnestness nor a true faith.” Even the just are conscious of sin (i.e. original sin), but they resist it; but where there is a distaste for the beloved Word of God there can be “no real faith.” Luther, to the detriment of his ethics, was disposed to relegate faith too much to the region of feeling and personal experience; this, however, he could scarcely avoid since his was a “fides specialis” in one’s own personal salvation. True religion, in his opinion, is ever to rejoice and be glad by reason of the forgiveness of sins and cheerfully to run the way of God’s service; this idea is prominent in his third sermon at Eisleben. The right faith “is toothsome and lively; it consoles and gladdens.”[117] “It bores its way into the heart and brings comfort and cheer”; “we feel glad and ready for anything.”[118]

But because the actual facts and his experience failed to tally with his views, Luther, as already explained, had recourse to a convenient expedient; towards the close of his life we frequently hear him speaking as follows: Unfortunately we have not yet got this faith, for “we do not possess in our hearts, and cannot acquire, that joy which we would gladly feel”; thus we become conscious how the “old Adam, sin and our sinful nature, still persist within us; this it is that forces you and me to fail in our faith.”[119] “Even great saints do not always feel that joy and might, and we others, owing to our unbelief, cannot attain to this exalted consolation and strength ... and even though we would gladly believe, yet we cannot make our faith as strong as we ought.”[120] He vouchsafes no answer to the objection: But why then set up aims that cannot be reached; why make the starting-point consist in a “faith” of which man, owing to original sin, can only attain to a shadow, except perhaps in the rare instances of martyrs, or divinely endowed saints?

Luther, when insisting so strongly that good works must follow “faith,” as a moral incentive to such works also refers incidentally to our duty of gratitude and love in return for this faith bestowed on us.

Thus in the Eisleben sermons he invites the believer, the better to arouse himself to good works, to address God in this way: “Heavenly Father, there is no doubt that Thou hast given Thy Son for the forgiveness of my sins. Therefore will I thank God for this during my whole life, and praise and exalt Him, and no longer steal, practise usury or be miserly, proud or jealous.... If you rightly believe,” he continues, “that God has sent you His Son, you will, like a fruitful tree, bring forth finer and finer blossoms the older you grow.”[121] In what follows he is at pains to show that good works will depend on the constant putting into practice of the “faith”; the Justification that is won by the “fides specialis” is insufficient, in spite of all the comfort it brings; rather we must be mindful of the saying of St. Paul: “If by the spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh you shall live.” “But if your flesh won’t do it, then leave it to the Holy Ghost.”[122]

The motive for good works which Luther here advances, viz. “To thank God, to praise and extol Him,”[123] is worthy of special attention; it is the only real one he furnishes either here or elsewhere. Owing to the love of God which arises in the heart at the thought of His benefits we must rouse ourselves to serve Him. The idea is a grand one and had always appealed to the noblest spirits in the Church before Luther’s day. It is, however, a very different thing to represent this motive of perfect love as the exclusive and only true incentive to doing what is pleasing to God. Yet throughout Luther’s teaching this is depicted as the general, necessary and only motive. “From faith and the Holy Ghost necessarily comes the love of God, and together with it love of our neighbour and every good work.”[124] When I realise by faith that God has sent His Son for my sake, etc., says Luther, in his Church-Postils, “I cannot do otherwise than love Him in return, do His behests and keep His commandments.”[125] This love, however, as he expressly states, must be altogether unselfish, i.e. must be what the Old Testament calls a “whole-hearted love,” which in turn “presupposes perfect self-denial.”[126]

It is plain that we have here an echo of the mysticism which had at one time held him in thrall;[127] but his extravagant idealism was making demands which ordinary Christians either never, or only very seldom, could attain to.

The olden Church set up before the faithful a number of motives adapted to rouse them to do good works; such motives she found in the holy fear of God and His chastisements, in the hope of temporal or everlasting reward; in the need of making satisfaction for sin committed, or, finally, for those who had advanced furthest, in the love of God, whether as the most perfect Being and deserving of all our love, or on account of the benefits received from Him; she invited people to weld all these various motives into one strong bond; those whose dispositions were less exalted she strove to animate with the higher motives of love, so far as the weakness of human nature allowed. Luther, on the contrary, in the case of the righteous already assured of salvation, not only excluded every motive other than love, but also, quite unjustifiably, refused to hear of any love save that arising from gratitude for the redemption and the faith. “To love God,” in his eyes, “is nothing more than to be grateful for the benefit bestowed” (through the redemption).[128] And, again, he imputes such power to this sadly curtailed motive of love, or rather gratitude, that it is his only prescription, even for those who are so cold-hearted that the Word of God “comes in at one ear and goes out at the other,” and who hear of the death of Christ with as little devotion as though they had been told, “that the Turks had beaten the Sultan, or some other such tit-bit of news.”[129]

Some notable Omissions of Luther’s in the above Sermons on Morality

Hitherto we have been considering what Luther had to say on the question of faith and morality in his last sermons. It remains to point out what he did not say, and what, on account of his own doctrines, it was impossible for him to say; as descriptive of his ethics the latter is perhaps of even greater importance.

In the first place he says nothing of the supernatural life, which, according to the ancient teaching of the Church, begins with the infusion of sanctifying grace in the soul of the man who is justified. As we know, he would not hear of this new and vital principle in the righteous, which indeed was incompatible with his theory of the mere non-imputation of sin. Further, he also ignores the so-called “infused virtues” whence, with the help of actual grace, springs the new motive force of the man received into the Divine sonship. By his denial of the complete renewal of the inner man he placed himself in opposition to the ancient witnesses of Christendom, as Protestant historians of dogma now admit.[130]

Secondly, he dismisses in silence the so-called actual grace. Not even in answering the question as to the source whence the believer draws strength and ability to strive after what is good, does he refer to it, so hostile is his whole system to any co-operation between the natural and the supernatural in man.

Thirdly, he does not give its due to man’s freedom in co-operating in the doing of what is good; it is true he does not expressly deny it, but it was his usual practice in his addresses to the people to say as little as possible of his doctrine of the enslaved will.[131] Along with faith, however, he extols the Holy Ghost. “Leave it to the Holy Ghost!” Indeed faith itself, and the strong feeling which should accompany it, are exclusively the work of the Holy Ghost. It is the Holy Ghost alone Who believes, and feels, and works in man, according to Luther’s teaching elsewhere. This action of God alone is something different from actual grace. In the instructions he gave to Melanchthon in 1536 concerning justification and works,[132] Luther entirely ignores any action on man’s part as a free agent, and yet here we have the “clearest expression” of his doctrine of how good works follow on justification. The Protestant author of “Luthers Theologie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung” remarks of this work (and the same applies to the above sermons and other statements): “Luther is always desirous, on the one hand of depreciating man’s claim to personal worth and merit, and on the other by his testimony to God’s mercy in Christ, of furthering faith and the impulses and desires which spring from faith and the spirit; here, too, he says nothing of any choice as open to man between the Divine impulses working within him and those of his sinful nature.”[133]

Fourthly, and most important of all, Luther says nothing of the true significance of morality for the attainment of everlasting life.

The best and theologically most convincing reply to the objection of which he spoke: “Well and good, then I shall sin lustily,” etc. would have been: No, a good moral life is essential for salvation! The strongest Bible texts would have been there to back such a statement, and, to his powerful eloquence, it should have proved an attractive task to crush his frivolous opponents by so weighty an argument. Yet we find never a word concerning the necessity of good works for salvation, but merely an account of the wonders worked by faith of its own accord alone after it has laid hold on the heart. This is readily understood, if justification is purely passive and effected solely by the Spirit of God which enkindles faith and, with it, covers over sin as with a shield, then the very being of the life of faith must be mere passivity, and there can be no more question of attaining to salvation by means of good deeds performed with the aid of grace. In the instruction for Melanchthon mentioned above we find at the end this clear query: “Is this saying true: Righteousness by works is necessary for salvation?” Luther answers by a distinction: “Not as if works operate or bring about salvation,” he says, “but rather they are present together with the faith that operates righteousness; just as of necessity I must be present in order to be saved.” This distinction, however, leaves the question just where it was before. He concludes his remarks on this vital matter with a jest on the purely external and fortuitous presence of works in the man received into eternal life: “I too shall be in at the death, said the rascal when he was about to be hanged and many people were hurrying to see the scene.”[134]

All the more strongly did Luther in his usual way describe in his last sermon the natural sinfulness which persists in man owing to original sin.

The sin that still dwells within us “forces” man to prevent faith and works coming to their own.[135] For “he is not yet without sin, though he has the forgiveness of sins and is sanctified by the Holy Ghost.” In consequence of the “foulness” within him “the longer he lives the worse he gets.” “We cannot get rid of our sinful body.”[136] For this reason even the “best minds” so often are indifferent to eternal life. On account of the evil taint in our flesh we are unable to rise as high as we ought.[137] But if original sin and its workings were declared really sinful in man (for even the very motions against “heartfelt pleasure” in God’s service are, so we are told, “sins”[138]), then it is no wonder that Luther should have been confronted with the question of which he speaks: “If sin be in me, how then can I be pleasing to God?”—a question which formerly could not have been asked of those whose original sin had been washed away in baptism. The teaching of the olden Church had been, that original sin was blotted out by baptism, but that the inclination to evil persisted in man to his last breath, though without any fault on his part so long as consent was lacking.[139]

Still less to be wondered at was it, that many, unable to regard themselves as responsible or guilty on account of the involuntary motions of original sin, began to doubt whether any responsibility existed for evil actions or whether moral effort was within the bounds of possibility.

Further, according to Luther, our constant exercise of ourselves in faith and our “rubbing” ourselves against sin was finally to lead “not merely to our sins being forgiven but to their being altogether rooted up and swept away; for your shabby, smelly body could not enter heaven without first being cleansed and beautified.”[140] Taking for granted his mystic assumption that sinful concupiscence can at last be “swept away,” he insists on our continuing hopefully “to amend by faith and prayer our weakness and to fight against it until such a change takes place in our sinful body that sin no longer exists therein,”[141] though, in his opinion, this cannot entirely be until we reach heaven. Yet experience, had he but opened his eyes to it, here once again contradicted him. The “fomes peccati,” as the Catholic Church rightly teaches, cannot be extinguished so long as man is on this earth, though it may be damped, and, by the practice of what is right and the use of the means of grace, be rendered harmless to our moral life. The Church expected nothing unreasonable from man, though her moral standards were of the highest. Luther, however, by abandoning the Church’s ethics, came to teach a strange mixture of perverted, unworkable idealism and all too great indulgence towards human frailty.

Luther’s Vacillation between the Two Faiths, Old and New, in the Matter of Morality and the Assurance of Salvation

Many discordant utterances, betraying his uncertainty and his struggles, have been bequeathed to us by Luther regarding the main questions of morality and as to how we may insure salvation. First we have his statements with regard to the importance of morality in God’s sight.

In 1537 in a Disputation on June 1 he denounced the thesis, “Good works are necessary for salvation.”[142] In the same way, in a sermon of 1535, he asserted that it was by no means necessary for us to perform good works “in order to blot out sin, to overcome death and win heaven, but merely for the profit and assistance of our neighbour.” “Our works,” he there says, “can only shape what concerns our temporal life and being”; higher than this they cannot rise.[143]

Yet, when thus degrading works, he had again and again to struggle within his own heart against the faith of the ancient Church concerning the merit of good deeds. Especially was this the case when he considered the “texts which demand a good life on account of the eternal reward,”[144] for instance, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17), or “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (ib., vi. 20). With them he deals in a sermon of 1522. The eternal reward, he here says, follows the works because it is a result of the faith which itself is the cause of the works. But the believer must not “look to the reward,” or trouble about it. Why then does God promise a reward?—In order that “all may know what the natural result of a good life will be.” Yet he also admits a certain anxiety on the part of the pious Christian to be certain of his reward, and the favourable effect of such a certainty on the good man’s will.[145] Here he exhorts his listeners; “that you be content to know and be assured that this indeed will be the result,” whilst in another sermon of that same year he describes as follows the promise of eternal life as the reward of works: “It is an incentive and inducement that makes us zealous in piety and in the service and praise of God.... That God should guide us so kindly makes us esteem the more His Fatherly Will and the Mercy of Christ”—but on no account “must we be good as if for the sake of the reward.”[146] He also quotes incidentally Mt. xix. 29, where our Lord says that all who leave home, brethren, etc. for His name’s sake “shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting”; also Heb. x. 35 concerning the “great reward” that awaits those who lose not their confidence. Such statements, he refuses, however, to see referred to salvation, which will be the equal portion of all true believers, but, in his arbitrary fashion, explains them as denoting some extra ornament of glory.[147]

“Good works will be present wherever faith is.” As this supposition, a favourite one with Luther from early days, fails to verify itself in practice, and as the expedients he proposed to meet the new difficulty are scattered throughout his writings, an admirer in recent times ventured to sum up these elements into a system under the following headings: “Faulty morality is a proof of a faulty faith.” “The fact of morality being present proves the presence of faith.” “Moral indolence induces loss of faith.” “Zeal for morality causes faith to increase.”[148] The true explanation would therefore seem always to be in the assumption of a want of “faith,” i.e. of a lack of that absolute certainty of personal salvation which should regulate all religious life,[149] in other words moral failings should be held to prove the absence of this saving certainty.

Seen in this light good works are of importance, as the outward demonstration that a person possesses the “fides specialis,” and in this wise alone are they a guarantee of everlasting happiness. They prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himself that, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.”[150] Hence Luther’s certainty of salvation, however strong it may be, still requires to be tested by something else as to whether it is the true “faith” deserving of God’s compassion; for “it is quite possible for a man never to doubt God’s mercy towards him though all the while he does not really possess it”;[151] according to Luther, namely, there is such a thing as a fictitious faith.

In Luther’s opinion “faith” was a grasping of something actually there. Hence if God’s mercy was not there, then neither was there any “faith.” Accordingly, an “unwarrantable assurance of salvation” was not at all impossible, and works served as a means of detecting it. Walther, to whom we owe our summary, does not, it is true, prove the existence of such a state of “unwarrantable assurance” by any direct quotation from Luther’s writings, and, indeed, it might be difficult to find any definite statement to this effect, seeing that Luther was chary of speaking of any failure in the personal certainty of salvation, on which alone, exclusive of works, he based the whole work of justification.

And yet, as Luther himself frequently says, moods and feelings are no guarantee of true faith; what is required are the works, which, like good fruit, always spring from a good tree.—So strongly, in spite of all his predilection for faith alone, is he impelled again and again to have recourse to works. In many passages they tend to become something more than mere signs confirmatory of faith. We need not examine here how far his statements concerning faith and works are consistent, and to what extent the sane Catholic teaching continued to influence him.

What is remarkable, however, is, that, in his commendable efforts to urge the performance of works in order to curtail the pernicious results of his doctrine, Luther comes to attribute a saving action to “faith,” only on condition that, out of love of God, we “strive” against sin. In one of his last sermons at Eisleben he tells his hearers: Sins are forgiven by faith and “are not imputed so far as you set yourself to fight against them, and learn to repeat the Our Father diligently ... and to grow in strength as you grow in age; and you must be at pains to exercise your faith by resisting the sins that remain in you ... in short, you must become stronger, humbler, more patient and believe more firmly.”[152] The conditional “so far as” furnishes a key which has to be used in many other passages where works are demanded as well as faith. Faith, there, is real and wholesome “in so far as” it produces works: “For we too admit it and have always taught it, better and more forcibly than they [the Papists], that we must both preach and perform works, and that they must follow the faith, and, that, where they do not follow there the faith is not as it should be.”[153]

Nor does he merely say that works of charity must follow eventually, but that charity must be infused by the Spirit of God together with faith of which it is the fruit.

“For though faith makes us righteous and pure, yet it cannot be without love, and the Spirit must infuse love together with faith. In short, where there is true faith, there the Holy Ghost is also present, and where the Holy Ghost is, there love and all good things must also be.... Love is a consequence or fruit of the Spirit which comes to us wrapped up in the faith.”[154] “Charity is so closely bound up [with faith and hope] that it can never be parted from faith where this is true faith, and as little as there can be fire without heat and smoke, so little can faith exist without charity.”[155] From gratitude (as we have heard him state above, p. 26) the man who is assured of salvation must be “well disposed towards God and keep His commandments.” But if he be “sweetly disposed towards God” this must “show itself in all charity.”

Taking the words at their face value we might find in these and similar statements on charity something reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of a faith working through love.[156] But though this is what Luther should logically have arrived at, he was in reality always kept far from it by his idea both of faith and of imputation. It should be noted that he was fond of taking shelter behind the assertion, that his “faith” also included, or was accompanied by, charity. He was obliged to do this in self-defence against the objections of certain Evangelicals—who rushed to conclusions he would not accept—or of Catholic opponents. Indeed, in order to pacify the doubters, he even went so far as to say, that love preceded the “faith” he taught, and that “faith” itself was simply a work like any other work done for the fulfilling of the commandments.

It was in this sense that he wrote in the “Sermon von den guten Werken,” composed at the instance of his prudent friend Spalatin for the Duke of Saxony: “Such trust and faith brings with it charity and hope; indeed, if we look at the matter aright, charity comes first, or at least simultaneously with faith. For I should not care to trust God unless I believed He would be kindly and gracious to me, whereby I am well disposed towards Him, trust Him heartily and perform all that is good in His sight.” In the same connection he characterises “faith” as a “work of the first Commandment,” and as a “true keeping of that command,” and as the “first, topmost and best work from which all others flow.”[157] It might seem, though this is but apparent, that he had actually come to acknowledge the reality and merit of man’s works, in the teeth of his denial of free-will and of the possibility of meriting.

Of charity as involved in faith he wrote in a similar strain in 1519 to Johann Silvius Egranus, who at that time still belonged to his party, but was already troubled with scruples concerning the small regard shown for ethical motives and the undue stress laid on faith alone: “I do not separate justifying faith from charity,” Luther told him, “on the contrary we believe because God, in Whom we believe, pleases us and is loved by us.” To him all this was quite clear and plain, but the new-comers who had busied themselves with faith, hope and charity “understood not one of the three.”[158]

We may recall how the enquiring mind of Egranus was by no means entirely satisfied by this explanation. In 1534 he published a bitter attack on the Lutheran doctrine of works, though he never returned more than half-way from Lutheranism to the olden Church.[159]

Many, like Silvius Egranus, who at the outset had been won over to the new religion, took fright when they saw that, owing to the preference shown to faith (i.e. the purely personal assurance of salvation), the ethical principles regarding Christian perfection and man’s aim in life, received but scant consideration.

Many truly saw therein an alarming abasement of the moral standard and accordingly returned to the doctrine of their fathers. As the ideal to be aimed at throughout life the Church had set up before them progress in the love of God, encouraging them to put this love in practice by fidelity to the duties of their calling and by a humble and confident trust in God’s Fatherly promises rather than in any perilous “fides specialis.”

In previous ages Christian perfection had rightly been thought to consist in the development of the moral virtues, particularly of charity, the queen of all the others. Now, however, Luther represented “the consoling faith in the forgiveness of sins as the sum of Christian perfection.”[160] According to him the “real essence of personal Christianity lies in the confidence of the justified sinner that he shares the paternal love of the Almighty of which he has been assured by the work and person of Jesus Christ.” In this sense alone can he be said to have “rediscovered Christianity” as a religion. We are told that “the essence of Lutheran Christianity is to be found in Luther’s reduction of practical Christianity to the doctrine of salvation.”[161] He “altered the ideal of religious perfection as no other Christian before his day had ever done.” The “revulsion” in moral ideals which this necessarily involved spelt “a huge decline.”[162]