Martin Luther
3
MARTIN LUTHER
J. I. Packer
Luther was the Father of the Reformation in the same sense in which George Stephenson was the Father of Railways—that is, he pioneered the whole subsequent development. Without Luther, nationalist revolts against the Papacy and Empire would still have taken place; absolutism and capitalism would still have reshaped community life; the principle that the civil power determines the form of religion in its own territory (cuius regio, eius religio, the basic principle of the Religious Peace of Augsburg, 1555) would still have been established in Western Europe; the Renaissance would still have run its course, secularizing culture and challenging all forms of authoritarianism; but the gospel would not have been recovered, nor would Christian faith and life have been renewed, nor would there have been any evangelical leaven to work in the upsurging life of the new European national states. There would have been no Bucer, Tyndale, Cranmer, or Calvin, for all these were disciples of Luther. Apart from Luther, the historical Reformation is as unintelligible as Hamlet would be without the Prince.
Luther put forward the idea that whenever God means to move decisively in His Church, He raises up a wonder-man (Wundermann), a hero (vir heroicus), a great individual leader, to be His instrument. Certainly this principle was exemplified in Luther himself. By 1521 he had caught the imagination of all Europe. He was idolized as a crusader of superhuman stature, the champion of Germany, of freedom, and of truth. A Holbein cartoon of 1522 pictures him as “the German Hercules.” In the same year, Spalatin compared him with Elijah, and the description stuck: a Saxon medallion calls him “Elijah of the last time” (Elias ultimi saeculi), and Melanchthon broke the news of his passing to the Wittenberg students by adapting 2 Kings 2:12, “Alas, gone is the horseman and the chariots of Israel.” What manner of man was this, we ask, to have called forth such estimates of himself?
The first thing to say is that he was a remarkable man by nature. Though a commoner (his father ran a copper mine), with a racy, homely style of speech and what we now call the common touch, he was no boorish countryman, as is sometimes supposed. He was in fact a gifted don, a brilliant scholar, a tremendous worker, and a magnetic teacher. In 1505, having crammed a six-year course into four years, he headed the list in the M.A. examination at Erfurt. In 1512, at the age of twenty-nine, he became a Doctor of Theology and professor of biblical studies at Wittenberg. He was a star lecturer from his first term to his death. A man of great personal force—his eyes, they said, looked right through you—and also of great charm and vivacity, he would have won affection and made his mark as a leader in any context. Also, he was a man temperamentally made for battle, at his strongest in debate and polemics, as his reforming career showed. Once he had grasped the truth of sovereign grace that was locked up in the biblical phrase “the righteousness of God”—an event probably belonging to 1513, when he was thirty and preparing his first lectures on the Psalms—he became an evangelical volcano. In the University he challenged “Aristotle” (semi-Pelagian legalistic scholasticism) in the name of “Augustine” (biblically-controlled reasoning about sin, grace, and faith in Christ). On a wider stage, he challenged the theory of Indulgences in 1517, with his Ninety-five Theses, and in 1519, at the Leipzig Disputation with John Eck, he allowed his opponent to bring out the fact that he was really challenging the whole basis of Papal jurisdiction. In 1520 he defied the Pope by publicly burning the Bull which excommunicated him, and adding the Canon Law to the bonfire; a gesture which he followed up by becoming a pamphleteer and issuing his three great Reformation manifestos—The Babylonish Captivity of the Church, An Appeal to the Christian Nobility, and The Liberty of a Christian Man. In 1521, having stood firm before the Emperor at Worms, he was put under the Imperial ban. But Frederick the Wise and, later, other princes kept him safe, and he continued till his death in 1546 teaching at Wittenberg, and writing for the furtherance of reformation in the German kingdoms. It has been estimated that for many years he produced on an average a tract a fortnight. His complete works fill ninety-four volumes of about 750 pages each in the standard Weimar edition. He wrote almost twice as much as Calvin!
Naturally, so titanic a figure has been variously estimated. Four centuries of Germans have seen him primarily as a patriot. Thomas Carlyle saw him as the archetypal “free man,” defying tradition and convention to follow his inner vision—a proto-liberal, in fact! But Luther saw himself simply as a theologian and a pastor, a preacher and teacher of the Word of God. He never thought of himself even as a reformer; the Reformation, he insisted, was not his work, but the work of God through His Word in the first instance and then, under God, of the German princes obeying God’s word. His own part had merely been to let the Word loose. Thus, his approach to reformation appears as wholly theological and theocentric. Reformation in its essence was to him not a human achievement, any more than salvation was, but God’s own work of restoring His Church from a state of ruin to one of life and health through the power of His Word.
The phrase “the Word of God,” or “the Word” simply, is a key phrase in Luther’s thought. It meant to him, not just the Scriptures formally regarded as inspired (though of course he assumed their inspiration, as all churchmen did in his day), but something wider—namely, the message and content of the Scriptures, that is, the gospel concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the sum and substance of what God has to say to man. Often, indeed, Luther applies the phrase “the Word of God” to Christ Himself, and when he uses it of biblical teaching the thought of the living Word whom the written Word sets forth is never far from his mind. Only by exploring Luther’s understanding of “the Word of God” can we fully grasp his approach to reformation; to this task, therefore, we now turn.
The Theology of Luther
The theology which Luther reached through study, prayer, and inner conflict between 1512 and 1517, and which from then on he taught virtually without change, had three overall characteristics. It was exegetical, being propounded by the method of letting individual texts talk; it was evangelical, being a sustained assertion of the gospel of God’s grace to sinners; and it was polemical, firing in turn at Roman superstition, radical Protestant “enthusiasm,” and the folly and futility of the ways of this proud and sinful world. It represented essentially a rediscovery of the living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The title of P. S. Watson’s introduction to Luther’s thought, Let God Be God! 1 well focuses its ruling motivation. Luther asserts God’s active sovereignty in providence and grace with tremendous vigor. All created things, he says, are God’s “masks” (larvae Dei)—that is, behind all that happens with such seeming haphazardness in this world of sight and sense is the hidden face, the guiding hand, the ruling mind of its Maker. And in The Bondage of the Will,2 Luther’s broadside against Erasmus, he speaks of the truth of man’s absolute enslavement by nature to sin and Satan, and his consequent absolute dependence on sovereign divine grace for salvation as the “hinge” on which the whole theological conflict of the Reformation really turned.
Luther’s constant aim was to inculcate the biblical knowledge of God, and to this end he constantly rang the changes on the following five staple themes: (1) the authority of the biblical Word of God, (2) the greatness of sin, (3) the graciousness of Christ, (4) the vitality of faith, and (5) the spiritual nature of the Church.
Luther affirmed the authority of the biblical Word of God against the practice of appealing to unwritten traditions, Papal pronouncements, canon law, and the trivial sophistries of allegorical exegesis—all of which appeals, so he maintained, have the effect of gagging the Scriptures, so that their true voice cannot be heard. His account of the Scriptures was essentially as follows. The Bible is a clear, straightforward book, for “the Holy Ghost is the plainest writer and speaker in heaven and earth.” It should therefore be understood in its “literal, ordinary, natural sense,” letting one text and phrase throw light on another. (It was by this means, as it seems, that Luther’s evangelical enlightenment took place: the words “deliver me in thy righteousness” in Psalm 31:1 and 71:2 suggested to him that “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 also signified an outgoing, not of vindicatory justice, but of saving mercy.) Thus “literally” understood, Scripture proved to contain a double communication from God: a disclosure of law, to induce self-knowledge and self-despair, and a proclamation of promises, and of Christ as the sum and substance of these promises, to be the object of faith and hope. From this standpoint, the Scriptures, and those of the New Testament in particular, appear as “the swaddling-clothes in which Christ is wrapped.” Romans is the key to the Bible, “the true masterpiece of the New Testament, the purest gospel of all. . . . We find in this epistle in the most abundant fashion that which a Christian ought to know, viz. what are Law, Gospel, Sin, Punishment, Grace, Faith, Righteousness, Christ, God, Good Works, Love, Hope, the Cross. . . . It seems as if Paul wanted briefly to summarize in this epistle the whole of Christian evangelical teaching, and to provide an introduction to the whole Old Testament. . . .” This evangelical teaching is the true rule of Christian faith: we must ask that the Holy Spirit will enable us to grasp it by teaching us its application to ourselves, and that we may be enabled to cleave to it amid the distractions and errors whereby Satan seeks to wean us from it.
Luther affirmed the greatness of sin against current scholastic teaching about natural ability and the perfection (i.e., sinlessness) of a Christian’s good deeds. It was on this teaching that the contemporary doctrine of merit, a blatant assertion of salvation by works and effort, was based. Luther in effect addressed its expositors in the accents of Anselm: “You have not yet considered the weightiness of sin (quanti ponderis sit peccatum).” Claiming Augustine as his forerunner, Luther stressed the total inability of the natural man, and the guilt of the Christian, even at his best, because all his service of God is stained by sin. Like Augustine, Luther made much of Romans 7:14–25 as proving the latter point. Romans, the key book of the Bible, as we saw, was written, so Luther strikingly tells us, “to pull down, and pluck up, and destroy, all the wisdom and righteousness of the flesh, however great it may be . . . and to implant, establish, and magnify sin . . .”; for it is not till this job is done, and self-righteousness finally abolished, that we can grasp the dimensions of the divine mercy. We cannot know the greatness of grace, says Luther, till we have learned the greatness of sin.
Against the background of the popular picture of Jesus as a stern and dreadful judge, whom sinful men dare not approach directly at all, Luther stressed the point that the incarnation, lowly manhood, and patient suffering of the Son of God all prove the graciousness of Christ, whose attitude toward us is really one of overflowing love. The thought of Jesus’ voluntary identification of Himself with us in our helplessness and misery and, on the cross, in the deepest spiritual darkness and distress (anfechtung), and of His continuing sympathy with others who are tempted, was basic to Luther’s teaching on the life of faith. Also, Luther challenged all forms of the doctrine of salvation by works, whether by personal merit or by the purchase of indulgences or by the offering of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, by appealing to the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning death as a ground of full salvation for “everyone that believeth.” Luther was the first theologian to give prominence to the thought that the satisfaction to God for sin which, as Anselm had established, Christ rendered on our behalf on the cross, was penal and substitutionary in its nature. Anselm had thought of satisfaction as an alternative to the inflicting of the due penalty, a compensatory act of homage which “made up” for the damage God had suffered through our sins. “Damages,” indeed, is the precise modern equivalent for Anselm’s conception of the atonement. But Luther saw that in Scripture satisfaction to God means satisfaction of the penal claims of divine law—that is, punishment vicariously borne. The following extract from Luther’s comment on Galatians 3:13 shows how vividly he set forth this thought:
The doctrine of the gospel . . . speaketh nothing of our works, or of the works of the law, but of the inestimable mercy and love of God towards most wretched and miserable sinners; to wit, that our most merciful Father . . . sent his only Son into the world, and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying, Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer, and cruel oppressor; that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief hanged upon the cross—briefly, be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them. Now cometh the law, and saith: I find him a sinner, one that hath taken upon him the sins of all men, and I see no sins but in him: therefore let him die upon the cross; and so it setteth upon him, and killeth him. By this means the whole world is purged . . . God would see nothing else in the whole world, if it did believe, but a mere cleansing and righteousness.
This led Luther to display atonement and justification as the two complementary stages of St. Paul’s “great exchange” as set forth in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “Learn to know Christ and him crucified; learn to sing unto him, and say, Lord Jesus, thou art my righteousness, I am thy sin. Thou hast taken upon thee what was mine, and hast set upon me what was thine. Thou hast become what thou wast not, that I might become what I was not.” Luther’s answer, therefore, to ideas of salvation by works and priestly meditation was to set forth the promise of full acceptance—the imputing of righteousness and the non-imputing of sin, together with the bestowal of sonship to God and liberty from the law—for all who rest their faith directly upon Jesus Christ and His atoning blood. This was the “theology of the cross,” the saving knowledge of God received through the gospel, which Luther opposed to the futile “theology of glory,” the conventional attempts of scholastic theologians to know God by abstract speculative logic. To know God, said Luther, is to know the grace of Christ, and this knowledge comes only through humbly contemplating Calvary.
Luther challenged the current assumption that faith is essentially credence (fides), and as such a meritorious work, by insisting that faith is essentially trust (fiducia), and that, so far from being meritorious, it is trust in Christ on the basis of a clear recognition that one has no merit at all, but that all merit, first to last, is found in Him alone. Faith is thus an empty hand stretched out to receive Christ, grasping Him and holding Him fast. “Faith taketh hold of Christ, and hath him present, and holdeth him enclosed, as the ring doth the precious stone.” Faith is God’s gift, given as part of His gracious work of “calling” (effectual calling, as later generations would say). Faith, thus supernaturally given, is a vital principle, resilient and active, triumphant in conflict and endlessly energetic:
When faith is of the kind that God awakens and creates in the heart, then a man trusts in Christ. He is then so securely founded on Christ, that he can hurl defiance at sin, death, hell, the devil, and all God’s enemies. He fears no ill, however hard and cruel it may prove to be. . . .
Right faith is a thing wrought by the Holy Ghost in us, which changeth us, turneth us into a new nature. . . . Faith is a lively thing, mighty in working, valiant and strong; so that it is impossible that he who is endued therewith should not work always good works without ceasing . . . for such is his nature. . . .
Luther repudiated the conventional equation of the Church with the Roman system. Indeed, before his excommunication in 1520, he had accepted the idea, which had appeared before among medieval radicals, that the Papacy was Antichrist, and he constantly insisted that according to the New Testament the Church was not to be thought of in the first instance as a system or organization at all. Luther held that the Church is essentially, as the Creed says, a fellowship of saints (communio sanctorum), “the lambs who hear the shepherd’s voice,” as he put it in the Schmalkald Articles. Though the Church has a visible aspect, i.e. its corporate life of worship and service, it is essentially invisible, for the relationship of faith in Christ is not the sort of fact that men can see. Only the Lord knows them that are His. One can belong to a congregation (Gemeine) and yet be outside the Church as God knows it; equally, one can be expelled from organized congregations (as Luther was when the Pope excommunicated him) and still belong to the Church. The visible life by which the presence of the Church is recognized has two leading features: the ministry of the Word and Sacraments, and the exercise of the priesthood of all believers, which to Luther meant mutual service at all levels on the basis of recognized mutual responsibility. It is sometimes thought that Luther made nothing of discipline as a mark of the Church, but this is not so. In two works published in 1539 and 1540 respectively he included discipline among seven marks of the Church visible: preaching; Baptism; the Lord’s Supper; “the keys of Christian discipline and forgiveness”; an ordained ministry; public worship; and “suffering, the possession of the holy Cross.”
We have now surveyed the five themes which made up the central content of “the Word” as Luther understood it. It was in this field that all Luther’s main concerns lay. It was here, rather than in his somewhat unreflective and stubborn speculations about, for instance, baptismal regeneration through infant faith (against the Anabaptists), or the physical reception of Christ in non-transubstantiated bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper (against Rome and Zwingli), that he made his abiding contribution to theology. Here, then, we have “the Word” which under God, so Luther held, must reform the Church.
The Reformation in Germany
Luther’s connection with the ecclesiastical reorganization of Germany was purely an advisory one: he was regularly the person whom the princes consulted first when re-ordering religion in their kingdoms. Luther’s own bent was pastoral and academic rather than administrative, and in any case his advice was not always taken, so that it is no wonder that the Lutheran reformation, by contrast with, say, Calvin’s work at Geneva, appears as a series of rather ramshackle improvisations.
Luther’s advice was concerned with, on the one hand, removing hindrances to congregations becoming true fellowships of saints (such hindrances as priestcraft, superstition, the Mass, and an anti-evangelical hierarchy), and, on the other hand, instituting the appropriate means to godliness and spiritual growth (such things as regular preaching and teaching, scriptural administration of the sacraments, and evangelical forms of worship, together with the provision of sound pastors). It is clear that it never occurred to him to question the centuries-old pattern of local churches in each kingdom forming an administrative unit (the Landeskirche), nor the propriety of appealing to the princes to take the work of reform into their own hands when Rome declined to do it from the center. (This was the burden of Luther’s Appeal to the German Nobility: he based his appeal first on the princes’ position as supreme magistrates and second on the principle of the priesthood of all believers, which obliges rulers to serve the interests of their fellow-Christians in every way they can.) There was, however, one question of principle to which Luther gave careful thought: that is, the propriety of retaining ceremonies and forms (vestments, images, etc.) which Scripture did not prescribe, but which had become traditional in use during the previous centuries. In his anti-iconoclastic sermons in Wittenberg in 1522, and often afterwards, Luther argued that the Church was at liberty to retain these “things indifferent” (adiaphora), and should be chary of abolishing them, lest weak consciences be injured. His thesis here was that the New Testament, unlike the Old Testament, does not dictate a church order, but leaves churches free to determine the outward circumstances of their worship and corporate life in whatever way seems most convenient and edifying. Unlike the Anglican reformers, however, who proceeded on the same principle, Luther held no brief for an imposed uniformity of liturgy or ceremonies. “I am, I confess,” he wrote in 1545, “disinclined to all ceremonies, even necessary ones, and I am the enemy of those which are not necessary. . . . Ceremonies so easily grow into laws, and laws, once established, speedily become snares of the conscience. Ultimately pure doctrine is obscured and overthrown, and people strive more for ceremonies than for mortification of the flesh. . . .” Some of the reforming princes imposed more uniformity in their kingdoms than Luther could approve of.
The German church reforms began after the Diet of Speier in 1526, at which the princes resolved that until a general council or national assembly was called to deal with religious abuses, each of them would “so live, govern, and behave, as he hopes and trusts to answer for it to God and the emperor.” This was understood to mean that each prince who desired reformation in his territory was free to get on with the job. Saxony led the way, followed by Brandenburg, Hesse, and other lesser kingdoms. The effect of these reforms was to produce a series of state churches managed by the princes, in the ordering of which neither the clergy nor laity had any effective voice. Luther recoiled from the idea of congregational autonomy, which had at first attracted him after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, and when Philip of Hesse later proposed to give the people of Hesse some rights in ordering their churches Luther advised against it. In the light of this, Luther’s sharp distinction between the spheres of civil and ecclesiastical authority, and his insistence that, just as church rulers must not, like the Popes, grasp after civil power (the power of the sword), so civil governors must not intrude into the exercise of church power (the power of the Word), comes to look somewhat hollow.
The procedure in Saxony, worked out over a period of fifteen years, may be summarized as follows. (a) “Visitors”—several sets of them, in the event—reported on conditions to the Elector. (b) Recusant bishops were replaced, first by individual visitors on a temporary basis, then by “superintendents” (“bishops”), who were administrators directly responsible to the Elector. (Luther later ordained at least one prince, George of Anhalt, to be his own superintendent-bishop.) (c) Endowments were diverted to the Elector, to be disbursed by him directly. (d) One of Luther’s two revisions of the Mass replaced the Roman rite. (e) Ordination, administered always after 1535 by members of the Wittenberg theology faculty, was by use of non-priestly forms. (f) In 1542, a consistory court was set up at Wittenberg, staffed by two law dons and two theology dons from the University, all nominated by the Elector. Similar patterns were followed in other states.
Shortage of competent clergy was a universal problem. German rural ministers were alarmingly ignorant—some did not know the Lord’s Prayer or the Commandments—and in many cases immoral as well. In one area the clergy brewed beer all week and spent sermon-time on Sunday teaching their congregations how to go and do likewise! To meet this situation, Luther wrote two catechisms and several books of Postils (expository sermonettes for public reading by clergy who could not write sermons of their own). “Emergency preachers” (untrained laymen of some little competence) were ordained for a few years, but it was recognized that the only long-term solution was to train a new ministry from scratch, which Luther and his colleagues at Wittenberg set themselves to do.
Luther was no statesman, and the ecclesiastical reorganizations that took place under his general guidance were hardly models of what reformation should be. The principle of the Church governing itself under Christ had to wait for Calvin before it was given substance. Yet there are lessons of great value that Luther can teach us. Among them are the following:
1. The necessity of reformation when the Church’s outward form and life contradicts the gospel, whether doctrinally or practically.
2. The nature of reformation as spiritual renewal, wrought from within by the Word of God.
3. The pastoral purpose that must govern church reorganization. Good church order is not an end in itself, but must be thought of as a means to the good of souls by inducing fellowship, edification, and holiness.
4. The primacy of preaching and teaching the Word as the means to reformation. All Luther’s emphasis was laid on teaching, by catechisms, sermons, books, and schools. This emphasis on Christian instruction was itself epoch-making.
5. Piecemeal improvement is better than none, and it is better to carry out innovations in a slow and piecemeal fashion than to outstrip weak consciences and make them stumble.
6. Patience is needed by those who seek reformation; having set ourselves to teach the Word, we must wait for it to do its own God-appointed work. Only God can build up Zion, and He is not always in such a hurry as we are.