John Tulloch · 12 of 27

I. Luther. · Part 7

Luther had tried scholasticism and tried monkery, and found both to be wanting. So far from bringing him near to God, they had hid God from him, and left him miserable in his weakness and sinfulness. The poor priest, thirsting for righteousness, found himself fed on “sentences.” The great human heart of Luther, full of spiritual depths and sensibilities, could not nourish itself on the writings of the schoolmen; and his frequently expressed bitterness against Scotists and Thomists is not to be regarded as mere vehemence of temper, but as the strong reaction of his intellectual and spiritual nature against the useless subtleties in which he had once sought satisfaction. Monkery had failed even more signally in his experience. He had sought spiritual peace, through its moat painful observances, with a single-hearted earnestness. Its distant heaven, whose interval was spanned by a bridge of painful and sore travel, he had spared no toil or weariness to reach. His body and soul were reduced to the last extremity by fastings and penances, and the heaven of his desires seemed as far off as ever. Cherishing the most profound faith in the supposed spiritual guardianship of the Church, he had passed within its pale an abject worshipper, craving salvation by the most humiliating submissions and earnest prayers; and yet he had not found it. “Sin was always too strong for him,” as he said; he could not expel it by the most untiring vigils or the most unrelenting mortifications. He was driven, therefore, to seek strength and comfort elsewhere; and the words of Staupitz and of the aged monk came to him as life from the dead. Gradually the words of Scripture revealed to him a new righteousness, and it became the one pervading and triumphant joy of his heart. He felt that the divine way of salvation was not as that of man. Works of the Church, works even of piety, sunk out of sight before the overmastering and glad conviction of God’s free grace to the soul—to the individual.

It is remarkable how completely Luther apprehended his new creed in this polemical form—how it shaped itself in his mind doctrinally as an opposing tenet to the “Aristotelic” principle with which he had been working,—which had expressed itself dominantly at once in his scholastic training and his ascetic discipline—the principle, viz., “that a man becomes just by doing just acts.” “We must first be just,” he said in one of his earliest vindications of his favourite doctrine, “and then we shall do just actions.” The heart must be changed—the result will follow. “Without faith in Christ men may become Fabricii. or Reguli, but can no more become holy than a crabapple can become a fig.” Righteousness, in short, is from within, not from without—a divinely implanted life of faith, and not a formal life of works. It springs directly out of the relation of the soul to God, and not out of any outward mortifications, or tentative moral habits.

This bare assertion of individualism does not indeed exhaust the doctrine of Luther. There was poor comfort to him rather—the most gloomy misery—so long as he merely felt that all his penances were worthless, and that God could alone save him. He only got peace when at length he recognised how God is in Christ a Saviour—when the forgiveness of sins became to him a divine fact, clearly and completely expressed in Christ. Then he realised that righteousness not only could not begin from without, but not even from within, in any partial or selfish sense, but from Christ within—from the union of the divine and human—from the heart apprehended by Christ, and apprehending Him as the source of all strength and salvation. And this is the full doctrine of justification by faith, when the immediate responsibilities of the soul to God are met and consummated in Christ. Then only does the bondage of sin fall away from it, and the joy of a divine righteousness becomes its portion.

It was this reality of moral freedom in Christ—this undoing of the heavy burdens that had lain on the human conscience, that, more than all else, gave impulse and triumph to the Reformation. The hearts of men were weary with seeking salvation in the way of the priests; and as the voice of the monk of Wittenberg was heard crying, “No priest can save you!—no masses or indulgences can help you! But God has saved you! He Himself, and no mediatory saints, no holy Mother of God even, but God Himself, the Divine Son, has redeemed you!”—this, which in its first and most powerful utterance was no mere dogma,—no dry formula, which it so soon became, but a living voice of “Help from Heaven”—seized the great heart of the German people, and mightily swayed it. Brushing by the faltering and unsteady steps of Humanism, this faith in a divine righteousness near to every soul made for itself a joyful way among the nations, and carried with it, wherever it went, liberty and strength. It was this, and no mere destructive zeal, nor yet polemical logic, that “shook the ancient cathedrals to their inmost shrines,” and spread a moral renovation throughout Europe.

The spiritual principle is eternally divine and powerful. It is a very different thing when we turn to contemplate the dogmatic statements of Luther. So soon as Luther began to evolve his principle, and coin its living heart once more into dogma, he showed that he had not risen above the scholastic spirit which he aimed to destroy. It was truly impossible that he could do so. Not even the massive energy of Luther could pierce through those intellectual influences which had descended as a hoary heritage of ages to the sixteenth century. Like the mists cleared away by the morning sun, they had retired before the fresh outburst of the Sun of Righteousness, as the preaching of Luther kindled by its stirring words many lowly hearts looking upwards; but when the first glow of the warming sun had spent itself, the mists, which had only retreated and not disappeared, were seen creeping backward, and although no longer obscuring, yet spreading confusion and dimness over the illumined scene. It was not enough for Luther to proclaim a free righteousness in Christ for all, but he must, as a theologian, lay down his distinctions and enter into minute and arbitrary definitions of the divine if act of righteousness. Faith is not enough, but he further inclines to the assurance of faith, with its tendency to a rapid translation into mere barren self-confidence. Undeniably there grew up in his mind a reaction against the popish tenet of works, so extreme as frequently to leave him in his doctrinal statements on the verge of Antinomianism. The harmony of spiritual truth is broken up, and one side of it—the opposite to that in which as a monk he had been educated—is seized with such force and crudeness as to turn a free salvation scarcely less into a mechanism than the old doctrine of works. It is in vain for the most ardent admirers of Luther to deny this tendency to an unmoral view of the doctrine of grace in many of his expressions, although it is easy enough for them to prove against calumnious criticism, that this was not the substance but the mere reactionary shadow of his doctrine, thrown over it by those very mists of scholasticism in which his intellectual life had been nursed.

The Reformation, in its theology, did not and could not escape the deteriorating influences of the scholastic spirit, for that spirit survived it and lived on in strength, although in a modified form, throughout the seventeenth century. In one important particular, indeed, the Scholastic and Protestant systems of theology entirely differed: the latter began their systematising from the very opposite extreme to that of the former—from the divine and not from the human side of redemption—from God, and not from man. And this is a difference on the side of truth by no means to be overlooked. Still the spirit is the same—the spirit which does not hesitate to break up the divine unity of the truth of Scripture into its own logical shreds and patches,—which tries to discriminate what in its moral essence is inscrutable, and to trace in distinct dogmatic moulds the operation of the divine and human wills in salvation,—while the very condition of all salvation is the eternal mystery of their union in an act of mutual and inexpressible love. This spirit of ultra-definition,—of essential rationalism,—was the corrupting inheritance of the new from the old theology; and it is difficult to say, all things considered, as we trace the melancholy history of Protestant dogmas, whether its fruits have been worse in the latter or in the former instance. The mists, it is true, have never again so utterly obscured the truth, but their dimness, covering a fairer light, almost inspires the religious heart with a deeper sadness.

But there is a further principle which claims our consideration in connection with the Lutheran Reformation—a principle which was by no means consistently expressed, but which still had its imperfect birth, then. It was very far from Luther’s intention, when he entered on his contest with the Church of Rome, to assert what. has been called the right of private judgment in matters of religion. Even in the end he did not fully understand or admit the validity of this principle; yet so far there was no other resting-ground for him. He was driven to claim for himself freedom of opinion in the light of Scripture as the only position on which, with any consistency, he could stand. Accordingly, when pressed to retract his views at Worms, when it was clearly made manifest that authority—Catholic and Imperial—was against him, he boldly took his ground here, in magnanimous and always memorable words. For himself, he said, “Unless I be convinced by Scripture or by reason, I can and will retract nothing; for to act against my conscience is neither safe nor honest. Here I stand.” On Scripture and on reason he based his convictions, and would recognise the right of no mere external authority to control him. Not what the Emperor said—not what the Doctors said—not what the Church said,—but only what his own conscience owned to be true in the light of Scripture, would he acknowledge to be the truth. Nothing else could move him—so help him God. It is impossible to conceive a more unqualified assertion of the right of private judgment—of the indefeasible privilege of the individual reason to know and judge the truth for itself; and the Reformation only had a rational and consistent basis in so far as it took up this position in so far as Luther, for himself at least, felt its force and conclusiveness.

It is too well known, however, that neither he nor any of his fellow-reformers recognised the full meaning and bearing of his position. They knew what their own necessities demanded,—but that was all. They raised the ensign of a free Bible in the face of Rome, but they speedily refused to allow others to fight under this banner as well as themselves. What Luther claimed for himself against Catholic authority he refused to Carlstadt, and refused to Zwingli, in favour of their more liberal doctrinal views. He failed to see that their position was exactly his own, with a difference of result,—which indeed was all the difference in the world to him. Against them he appealed not merely to Scripture, but to his own obstinate views of certain texts of Scripture; and gradually he erected a new authority, which to him, and still more to his followers, became absolute as Scripture itself. Scripture, as a witness, disappeared behind the Augsburg Confession as a standard; and so it happened more or less with all the reformers. They were consistent in displacing the Church of Rome from its position of assumed authority over the conscience, but they were equally consistent all of them in raising a dogmatic authority in its stead. In favour of their own views, they asserted the right of the private judgment to interpret and decide the meaning of Scripture, but they had nevertheless no idea of a really free interpretation of Scripture. Their orthodoxy everywhere appealed to the Bible, but it rested in reality upon an Augustinian commentary of the Bible. They displaced the medieval schoolmen, only to elevate Augustine. And having done this, they had no conception of any limits attaching to this new tribunal of heresy. Freedom of opinion, in the modern sense, was utterly unknown to them. There was not merely an absolute truth in Scripture, but they had settled by the help of Augustine what this truth was, and any variations from this standard were not to be tolerated.

The idea of a free faith associated with very different dogmatic views, and yet equally Christian—the idea, of spiritual life and goodness apart from theoretical orthodoxy—had not dawned in the sixteenth century—nor long afterwards. Heresy was not a mere divergence of intellectual apprehension, but a moral obliquity,—a statutory offence,—to be punished by the magistrate, to be expiated by death. It is a strange and saddening spectacle to contemplate the gradual process by which the human mind has emancipated itself from the delusion that intellectual error is a subject of moral offence and punishment. Freedom, of opinion has won its way but slowly; and hindrances and conflicts yet await it. Men learn with difficulty that there is a temporary narrowness in their most consecrated traditions—that even the highest expressions of the most enlightened dogmatism are in their very nature but partial representations of the Divine Will—deflected rays from a light in its perfection inaccessible and full of glory, which no man hath seen, neither indeed can see. It required the lapse of many years to make men begin to feel—and it may still require the lapse of many more to make them fully feel— that they cannot absolutely fix in their feeble symbols the truth of God,—that it is ever bursting with its own free might the old bottles in which they would contain it; and that, consequently,—according to that very law of progress by which all things live,—it is impossible to bind the conscience by any bonds but those of God’s own wisdom (Word) in Scripture—a spiritual authority addressing a spiritual subject—a teacher not of “the letter which killeth, but of the Spirit which giveth life.”