5. Luther’s Tactics in Questions concerning the Church
Both for Luther’s views on doctrine and for his psychology his tactics in his controversy about the nature of the Church offer matter for consideration.
Controversy, as we know, tended to accentuate his peculiarities. His talents, his gift of swift perception, his skill for vivid description, his art of exploiting every advantage to the delight of the masses were all of value to him. What he wrote when not under the stress of controversy lacked these advantages, advantages, moreover, which, for the most part, were merely superficial, and sometimes, when he was in the wrong, display a very unpleasing side.
The Erfurt Preachers in a Tight Place
In 1536 Luther took a hand in a controversy which had arisen at Erfurt as to whether the “true Church was there,” and whether his preachers, who represented the Church and were being persecuted by some of the Town Council, should leave the town.[1217]
As early as 1527 he had had occasion to complain of the Erfurt Councillors; they had not the courage “to go to the root of the matter”; they tolerated the “dissensions” in the town arising from the divergent preaching of the “Evangelicals” and the “Papists,” instead of “making all the preachers dispute together and silencing those who could not make good their cause.”[1218] Since the Convention of Hamelburg in 1530[1219] both forms of worship had been tolerated in the town. To the great vexation of Johann Lang and the other preachers the quick-witted Franciscan, Conrad Kling, an Erfurt Doctor of Theology (above, vol. v., p. 341), delivered in the Spitalkirche sermons which were so well attended that the audience overflowed even into the churchyard. Catholic citizens of standing in the town and possessed of influence over the Council, spread the report that the Lutheran preachers were intruders who had no legitimate mission or call, and had not even been validly appointed by the Council. In consequence of this, Luther, with Melanchthon and Jonas, addressed a circular letter in 1533 to his old friend Lang and the latter’s colleagues, in which he encourages them to stand firm and not to quit the town; he points out that their call, in spite of all that was alleged, had been “with the knowledge of the magistracy,” and not the result of “intrigue.”[1220] It is plain from this letter that the tables had to some extent been turned on Lang and his followers who had once behaved in so high-handed a manner at Erfurt,[1221] and that they were now tasting “want and misery” as well as contempt. In vain did the preachers attempt to shake off the authority of the Council by claiming to hold their commission from God.
Some while after, owing to the further efforts of Kling and his friends, the situation of the Lutherans became even worse; it was then that Frederick Myconius, Superintendent at Gotha, took their side and persuaded Luther to write the above memorandum of Aug. 22(?), 1536, on the True Church of Christ at Erfurt. This was signed by Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Myconius, and may have been the latter’s work. The document is highly characteristic of Luther’s tactics in the shifty character of the proofs adduced to prove the call of the Erfurt pastors. It did not succeed in inducing the Council to grant the preachers independence or to abrogate the restrictions of which they complained, although, as Enders remarks, “it exalted the spiritual power as supreme over the secular.”[1222]
There can be no doubt, so Luther argues, that, among his followers in the town of Erfurt, there was indeed the true “Holy Catholic Church, the Bride of Christ,” for they possessed the true Word and the true Sacraments. God had indeed “sent down on the people of Erfurt the Holy Ghost, Who worked in some of them a knowledge of tongues, discernment of spirits,” etc. (1 Cor. xii. 10), in the same way He had given them Evangelists, teachers, interpreters and everything necessary for the upbringing of His Body (Eph. iv. 11 f.). He urges that the ministers of the Word were rightly appointed, though here he does not appeal as much as usual, to the supposed validity of the call by the Town Council, as the whole trouble had its source in the town magistracy. The appointment of the preachers, so he now says, was the duty of the Church rather than of the magistrates; the Town Council had given them the call only in its capacity as a “member of the Church,” for which reason their dismissal or persecution was quite unjustifiable. He also brings forward other personal, mystic grounds for the validity of their call: they were “very learned men and full of all grace”; the appointment, which they had received not only from the “people and the Church, but also from the supreme authority,” had taken place under the breath of the Spirit (“impetu quodam spiritus”) Who had sent them as reapers into the harvest; they are recognised by all the Churches abroad, even the most important, and no less do their sheep hear their voice. Hence, if some of the magistrates now refuse to recognise them, they must simply appeal to their calling “by the Holy Ghost and the Church”; the efficient cause here is, and remains, Christ, Who gives the Church her authority. Hence at all costs they must stick to their post.
The whole of the extremely involved explanation points to the reaction now taking place in his mind owing to his bitter experiences with the authorities in the question of Church government.
In this frame of mind he often makes the call depend solely on the Church, nay, on Christ Himself. If the Courts are to rule as they please, so he wrote in the midst of one of these conflicts with the authorities, the last state of things will be worse than the first. They ought to leave the Churches to the care of those to whom they have been committed and who will have to render an account to God. Hence Luther urges that the two callings be kept separate.[1223]
What is also noteworthy in the memorandum for the people of Erfurt is that, in order to defend the legal standing of the preachers, he insists on the fact of their having been recognised by their congregation, who are willing to listen to them as their shepherds. Here we have the revival of an old idea of his, viz. that the soul-herd was really appointed by the people and in their name. In his later years he tended to revert to this view, though, in reality, the people never had a say in the matter. After having, in 1542, consecrated Amsdorf as “Bishop” of Naumburg, in the ensuing controversies he referred to the will of the “Church,” i.e. of the Naumburg Lutherans. “All depends,” so he wrote, “whether the Church and the Bishop are at one, and whether the Church will listen to the Bishop and the Bishop will teach the Church. This is exemplified here.”[1224]
Controversies with the Catholics on the Question of the Church
In what Luther wrote against the Catholics we occasionally meet some fine sayings on the unfettered authority of the Church in its relations to the secular rulers,[1225] so greatly was his versatile mind governed by the spirit of opportunism.
It was from motives of expediency that, in 1529, in his “Vom Kriege widder die Türcken” he makes out Emperors and kings to be no protectors of the Church; these worldly powers are “as a rule the worst foes of Christendom and the faith.” “The Emperor’s sword has nothing to do with the faith, but only with bodily and worldly affairs.”[1226] It must be remembered that he wrote this just before the dreaded Diet of Augsburg.—Again, in 1545, in the Theses against the “Theologists of Louvain” who had requested the State to protect the Catholic faith as heretofore, Luther says: “It is not the duty of Kings and Princes to confirm right doctrine; they have themselves to bow to it and obey it as the Word of God and God Himself.”[1227]—If the “Emperor’s sword” and the “Kings and Princes” had been on his side, then his language would have been quite different. As it was, however, whenever he thought it might prove useful, he was not unwilling to come back even later to the standpoint of his writing “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt.”[1228]
When the Catholics, for instance at the Diet of Augsburg, reproached his party with having completely secularised the Church and with prohibiting Catholic worship with the help of the Princes who favoured him, his replies were eminently characteristic both of his temper and his mode of controversy.
He knew very well, so he wrote in 1530, “that the Prince’s office and the preacher’s are not one and the same, and that the Prince as such ought not to do this [i.e. prohibit the Mass].” But in this the Prince was acting, not as a Prince, but as a Christian. It is also “a different thing whether a Prince ought to preach or whether he ought to consent to the preaching. It is not the Prince, but rather Scripture, that prohibits ‘winkle-masses’”; if a Prince chose to take the side of Scripture that was his own business.[1229]
Another answer of Luther’s was to the effect that the abominations of Catholic worship which were being abolished by the secular authorities were, after all, outward things, and that the power of the sovereign without a doubt stretched over “res externæ.”[1230]
Of these attempts at justification and of his doctrine of the Church in general, Köstlin’s observations hold good: “We cannot escape the fact that, here, there is much vacillation and that Luther stands in danger of contradicting himself.” “We must admit that he had not studied deeply enough the questions arising out of the relations of the authorities to matters ecclesiastical.”[1231] “The decision [of the sovereigns] as to what constituted right doctrine was final as regards the substance of the preaching in their lands.” “A nobleman who had received orders from his sovereign, the Duke of Saxony, to expel the Evangelical preachers, was told by Luther—though what he said was undeniably at variance with other utterances—that the sovereign had no right to do this because God’s command obliged him to rule only in secular and not in spiritual concerns.” “In fact the only answer he could give to the Popish persecutors when they alleged they were forced by their office and conscience to act as they did was: ‘What is that to me?’ for it was clear enough that they were using their authority wantonly.”[1232]
But how are we to explain his apparent readiness at the time of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 to recognise the olden Church, and the power of the bishops, and even himself to submit to them if only they would allow him and his followers freedom to preach the Evangel? The statements to this effect in his “Vermanug” of this year have been widely misunderstood through being taken apart from their setting. He does not for a moment imagine, as he has been falsely credited with doing, that it was not “his vocation to found a new Church separate from Catholicism”; neither has he any desire to remain united with his foes “in one communion under the Catholic bishops.”
Luther, as he here says, is only willing, “for the sake of peace, to allow the bishops to be princes and lords,” and this only on condition that “they help to administer the Evangel”—i.e. take his part; in that case they “would be free to appoint clerics to the parishes and pulpits.” His offer is, “that we and the preachers should teach the Evangel in your stead,” and “that you should back us by means of your episcopal powers; only your personal mode of life and your princely state would we leave to your conscience and to the judgment of God.”[1233] In the meantime, on account of the Catholic faith to which they clung, he calls them “foes of God,” speaks of their “anti-Christian bishopry,” and, because of the infringements of the law of celibacy, scourges them as the “greatest whoremongers and panders upon earth.”[1234]
In his controversies with the Catholics he often enough found himself faced by the objection, that the true Church could not be with him, because on his side all the fruits of holiness were wanting; the Church being essentially holy should needs be able to point to her good influence on morals.
Thus, for instance, a Dominican adversary had written: According to Luther the Gospel had been under the bench for the last four hundred years; but, now, surely enough, “it is under the bench even more than heretofore, for the Gospel and the whole of Scripture have never been so despised as at present owing to Luther’s teaching, who excludes all love of God and man, all concord between lords and serfs, priests and laity, men and women, rejects all good works and discipline, obscures the truth and replaces it by nothing but lies and introduces hatred and envy, unchastity, blasphemy and disobedience.”[1235]
In his replies to such arguments against the truth of his Church Luther was loath to attempt the difficult task of proving the existence of holiness in the domain of the Evangel. On the contrary, with surprising candour, he usually meets his opponents half-way as regards the facts. Thus, in his “Wider Hans Worst,” in 1541, he admits that things are just as bad as they had been in Jerusalem in the days of the prophets, “with us too there is flesh and blood, nay, the devil among the sons of Job. The peasants are savage, the burghers avaricious and the nobles grasping. We shout and storm our best, helped by the Word of God, and resist as far as we can.… Willingly we confess and frankly that we are not as holy as we should be.”[1236]
Such admissions are followed by astonishing attempts to evade the force of the objection and by coarse attacks on the immorality of the Papacy which he exaggerates beyond all measure.
The few, he declares, who are good and virtuous suffice to prove the Church’s holiness. “Some do more than their part; that they are few in number does not matter. God can help a whole nation for the sake of one man as he did by Naaman, the Syrian (4 Kings v.). In short, one’s life cannot be made a subject of debate.”—On another occasion he replies shrewdly that the mark of holiness was not nearly so safe as other marks, for distinguishing the true Church; for pious works were also practised at times by the heathen.… As regards its importance as a mark, holiness must be subordinated to the true preaching of the Word and to pure doctrine, which in the end will always bring amendment of life; whereas corrupt doctrine poisoned the whole mass, a scandalous life was damaging chiefly to the man who lived it; but corruption of doctrine had penetrated Popery through and through.[1237] “We do not laugh when wickedness is committed amongst us as they [the Papists] do in their Churches; as Solomon says (Prov. ii. 14): ‘Who are glad when they have done evil and rejoice in most wicked things,’ and also seek to defend them by fire and sword.”[1238]
We have here an instance of the tactics by which he turns on his adversaries and abuses them. In his anxiety to turn the reproach of his foes against themselves he selects by preference the celibacy of the clergy and the religious vows; nor does he attack merely the blemishes which the Church herself bewailed and countered, but the very institution itself.
In his “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen” he exclaims: “The Pope condemns the married life of the bishops and priests, this is plain enough now”; “if a man has been married twice he is declared by the Papists incapable of being promoted to the higher Orders.[1239] But if he has soiled himself by abominable behaviour he is nevertheless tolerated in these offices.”[1240] “Why,” he asks, most unjustly misrepresenting the Catholic view of the sacrament of marriage, “why do they look upon it as the lowest of the sacraments, nay, as an impure thing and a sin in which it is impossible to serve God?”[1241]
To what monstrous and repulsive images he can have recourse when painting the “whore Church” of the Papacy, the following from “Wider Hans Worst” will serve to show: You are, so he there writes in 1541 of the Catholics, “the runaway, apostate, strumpet-Church as the prophets term it”; “you whoremongers preach in your own brothels and devil’s Churches”; it is with you as though the bride of a loving bridegroom “were to allow every man to abuse her at his will. This whore—once a pure virgin and beloved bride—is now an apostate, vagrant whore, a house-whore,” etc. “You become the diligent pupils and whorelings of the Lenæ, the arch-whores, as the comedies say, till you old whores bear in your turn young whores, and so increase and multiply the Pope’s Church, which is the devil’s own, and make many of Christ’s chaste virgins who were born by baptism, arch-whores like yourselves. This, I take it, is to talk plain German, understandable to you and everybody else.”[1242]
Without following him through all he says we shall merely draw the reader’s attention to a proverb and a picture Luther here uses. The proverb runs: “The sow has been washed in the pond and now wallows again in the filth. Such are you, and such was I once.”[1243] In the picture “the Pope’s Church,” i.e. hell, is represented as a “great dragon’s head” with gaping jaws, as it is depicted in the old paintings of the Last Judgment; “there, in the midst of the flames, are the Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, emperors, kings, princes and men and women of all sorts (but no children). Verily I know not how one could better paint and describe the Church of the Pope,”[1244] etc.
After such rude abuse he comes back in the same writing to his usual apology. There was, he says, no object in alluding to the moral evils in the Lutheran Churches because of the Church being of its very nature invisible.[1245] Everything depends on the doctrine “which must be pure and undefiled, i.e. the one, dear, saving, holy Word of God without anything thrown in. But the life that ought to be ruled, cleansed and hallowed daily by such teaching is not yet altogether pure and holy because our carrion of flesh and blood still lives.” Yet “for the sake of the Word whereby he is healed and cleansed all this is overlooked, pardoned and forgiven him, and he must be termed clean.”[1246]
The Papists have a beam in their own eye, i.e. their false doctrine, but they see the mote in the eye of others “as regards the life.”[1247] If it is a question with whom the true Church is to be found he assures us: “We who teach God’s Word with such certainty are indeed weak, and, by reason of our great humility, so foolish that we do not like to boast of being God’s Churches, witnesses, ministers and preachers or that God speaks through us, though this we certainly are because without a doubt we have His Word and teach it”; it is only the Papists “who venture boldly to proclaim out of their great holiness: Here is God and we are God’s Church.”[1248]
It was not, however, bold presumption and lack of humility that led Luther’s literary opponents among the Catholics to appeal to the promises Christ had made to His Church; rather it was their conviction that these solemn assurances excluded the possibility of the Church’s having ever erred in the way Luther maintained that she had done.
The Indefectibility of the Church and Her Thousand-Year-Long Error
When the question arose, how the Church, in spite of Christ’s protection, could nevertheless have fallen into such monstrous errors,[1249] Luther was disposed to admit in his polemics that the true Church, i.e. the community of real believers, could not go astray. “The Church cannot teach lies and errors, not even in details.… How could it then be otherwise when God’s mouth is the mouth of the Church. As God cannot lie neither therefore can the Church.”[1250]
Such an immutable and reliable guide to erring men for their perfect peace of mind and sure salvation, the Catholics retorted, did Christ intend to leave in His visible Church, ruled by the successors of St. Peter.
An able Catholic work of 1528, already referred to above, emphasises the Church’s immutability in her dogma: “That preacher who does not preach in accordance with the Holy Catholic Church and the holy Fathers sins against the truth.… With due reverence we firmly believe all that is written in the approved Books of the Old and New Testament. We must not, however, so confine ourselves to this as to look upon what the Holy Church teaches apart from Scripture as human dross, seeing that Scripture itself commands us to keep the doctrine of the Church and the Fathers.” The author goes on to show his opponent Luther what services are rendered by the Church’s authority, how she preserves intact and vouches for the Canon of Scripture. It is only from the lips of the Church that we learn which books were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. “For where is it written that we must believe the Gospels of Matthew, John and the rest? But, if it is nowhere written, how is it you believe in these Gospels? How much at variance is your practice with your teaching?”[1251]
As to the infallibility of the Church Luther retorted: The invisible Church cannot err, but “that Church which we usually mean when we use the word, can and does err; the congregation of true believers cannot be assembled in one particular spot and is often to be found where least expected. Moreover, even this Church, i.e. the true believers and the saints, can sometimes go astray by allowing themselves to be drawn away from the Word.… Hence we must always regard the Church and the saints from two points of view, first according to the Spirit, and, then, according to the flesh, lest their piety and their Word savours of the flesh.”[1252] The Church teaches according to the Spirit when her “belief tallies with the Word of God and the belief of Christ Himself in heaven. To speak in this manner and meaning is right.”[1253] But “we must not build on her opinion or belief where she holds or believes anything outside of and beyond the Word of God.”[1254] It was according to the flesh that all those abominations of errors were taught which were termed “opinions of the Churches, though they were nothing of the kind but merely human conceits, invented outside of scripture and parading under the Church’s name.”[1255]
With this Luther’s reader is flung back once more into the most subjective of systems, for who is to decide whether this or that doctrine “savours of the flesh.” Each one for himself, solely according to the standard of Holy Scripture or, rather, each one as Luther dictates. But Luther’s decisions touched only the doctrines known to him; who is to decide on the questions yet to arise after his death?
He condemns the errors of the Middle Ages. Yet he is occasionally ready to praise the Mediæval Church. As we know he acknowledged that she had preserved Baptism. When the Church says that “Baptism washes away sin,” this, to Luther, does not savour of the flesh. “She also holds and believes that in [?] the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ are given.… Summa, in these beliefs the Church cannot err.”[1256] These, however, merely happened to be Luther’s own opinions. Infant-Baptism Luther defended against the Anabaptists without seeking help in the Bible; as for the presence of Christ in the Sacrament against the Zwinglians he indeed had the words of the Bible, yet here, too, he was only too glad to reinforce what he said by the traditions and infallible teaching office of the Church, though in so doing he was contradicting his own theory.[1257]
Luther, with characteristic disregard of logic, calls the earlier Church a “Holy place of abominations.” She was a “holy place,” for “there, even under the Pope, God maintained with might and by wonders first Holy Baptism; secondly, in the pulpits, the text of the Holy Gospel in the language of each country; thirdly, the Forgiveness of Sins and Absolution both in Confession and publicly; fourthly, the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar; … fifthly, the calling or ordination to the preaching office.… Many retained the custom of holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying and reminding them of the sufferings of Christ on which they must rely; finally, prayer, the Psalter, the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments, item many good hymns and canticles both in Latin and in German. Where such things survived there must undoubtedly have been a Church, and also Saints. Hence Christ was assuredly there with His Holy Spirit, upholding in them the Christian faith though everything was in a bad way, even as in the time of Elias, when the 7000 left were so weak that Elias fancied himself the only Christian still living.”[1258]
Nevertheless, this was the selfsame Church, which not only connived at the teaching of heretical abominations but actually herself taught all the depravities which Luther describes in the same writing, such as her peculiar doctrine of priestly ordination, of the validity of the secret Canon of the Mass, of the spiritual authority of the bishops, of justification, good works and satisfaction, of purgatory, saint-worship, etc.
That here he does not condemn the olden Church off-hand and fling her to the jaws of the dragon as he was wont to do is a casual inconsistency; his moderation here is to be explained by the necessity he was under then (after the Diet of Augsburg), of showing that he could claim a certain continuity with the Church of the past, and also by his desire to influence those Catholics who were still sitting on the fence and whom he would gladly have drawn over to his own side by seeming concessions, in accordance with his tactics at Augsburg.
Yet, in spite of the above concessions, the Mediæval Church remains in his eyes a “place of abominations”; her members, though validly baptised, are not members of the Church; they might indeed sit in the Church, but only as Antichrist sits in the Temple of God (2 Thess. ii. 4); her children would be saved if they died before coming to a full knowledge of the Popish Church, but if they grew up and followed her lying preaching then they would become devil’s whores;[1259] even as I myself “was stuck fast in the behind of the devil’s whore, i.e. of the Pope’s new Churches, so that it is a grief to us to have spent so much time and pains in that shameful hole. But praise and thanks be to God Who has delivered us from the Scarlet Woman!”[1260]
So low is his esteem for the authority of the tradition of the “Holy Place of abominations,” that he includes among the doubtful and fallible statements of that Doctor of the Church the famous saying of St. Augustine, that he would not believe the Gospel were it not for the Church.[1261] He urges that Augustine himself had declared, that his doctrines were to be examined, and only those to be accepted which were found correct. He prefers to harp on another passage where St. Augustine says: “The Church is begotten, fed, brought up and strengthened by the Word of God,”[1262] as though St. Augustine in speaking thus of the soul of the Church was denying her external organisation, her spiritual supremacy, and her teaching office. Luther, however, treated tradition just as he pleased; theologians had always distinguished between those traditions of the olden Doctors that had been guaranteed by the Church and those views which were merely personal to them; the latter no theologian regarded as binding, whereas the former were accepted by them with the respect befitting the witnesses. Here, once more, we see Luther’s subjective principle at work, which excludes all authoritative doctrine that comes to man from without, leaves him exposed to doubt and negation, and quite overlooks the fact that all revelation in last resort comes to the individual from without with an irresistible and authoritative claim to respect. Just as the Divine revelation vindicates its claim to acceptance by the faithful by means of proofs, so too, the teaching authority of the Church—as Luther’s Catholic opponents were not slow to point out—could show proofs that what was presented to the faithful as an article of belief might reasonably be accepted without any need of previously testing it to see whether it agreed with Holy Scripture—an examination, which, as a matter of fact, most people were not capable of undertaking.
As the polemic we quoted above argues, Protestants held Holy Scripture to be so clear that everyone could understand it without outside help. “But, if the heretics think Scripture to be so plain and clear, why do they write so many books in order to explain it? If Scripture is so clear, plain and easy to understand how is it that they are so much at variance concerning that one text: ‘This is My Body?’”[1263]
Luther now fell back on the Holy Spirit. “Without the Holy Ghost,” he says, “it is impossible to discern the abominations from the Holy Place.” But, so he was justly asked, who is to vouch for it that a man has truly the Holy Spirit? And, if, as Luther opines, the Holy Ghost points to the fruits as the means whereby He may be recognised, everything again depends on the fruits being judged according to Luther’s own moral standard. In short, in these controversies, Luther revolves in a vicious circle.
In his Table-Talk Luther’s habit of shielding himself from objections behind the strangest misrepresentations is again apparent. Such misrepresentations, occurring in his most intimate conversations, show that he was very far from merely using them in public or from motives of policy; rather they influence his whole mode of thought and feeling and were a second nature with him. We have only to turn to his conversations on the subject of the “Church,” collected in 1538 by his friend and companion Anton Lauterbach.[1264]
Here we meet with the revolting assertion that, in the Papistical Church, the Pope claimed to be the only one who had a right to interpret Scripture, and that he did this “out of his own brain”; this Church, so Luther goes on, had set up a mass of human regulations and vain observances which stifled all freedom and true religion; “the name Church was a pretext for the most abominable errors.” Further, “the true Church [i.e. mine] teaches the free forgiveness of sins, secondly, she teaches us to believe firmly, and, thirdly, to bear the cross with patience. But the false Church [the Pope’s] ascribes the forgiveness of sins to our own merits, teaches men to waver, and, finally does not carry the cross but rather persecutes others.” Besides, how can the Papists have the true Church, seeing that they are “some of them Epicureans, some of them idolaters?”—Fancy talking about the authority of the Church! Is it with this that the fanatical Anabaptists are to be vanquished? “Moreover, we know that: The true Church never at any time bore the name or title that the godless so boldly claim; she was ever nameless and is therefore believed rather than seen; for the most part she lies downtrodden and neglected; weakness, crosses and scandals are her portion. Only look at the Church under the tyranny of the Pope; the Papal Decretals are the ne plus ultra of ungodliness.”
“I am astonished,” so he ends, speaking of the Roman Primacy, “at the great blindness with which men worshipped the Pope’s lies and his boundless and utterly shameless audacity, as though Holy Scripture depended on the authority of the Roman Church whose head he claimed to be, basing his claim on the words of Christ (Matt. xvi. 18) ‘Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build My Church.’”
Luther’s Tactics in the Interpretation of the Bible
The text just quoted leads us to glance at his Biblical arguments; to conclude this chapter we shall therefore give as a sample of his exegesis on the Church a more detailed account of his exposition of the chief argument for the papal primacy, viz. Christ’s promise to Peter, using for this purpose his last book against Popery.[1265]
He would fain, so he says, “point out the Christian sense of this text” as against that read into it by the hierarchical Church; nevertheless, at his first effort he cannot rise above a coarse witticism. “For very fear,” on approaching this text “Thou art Peter,” etc., something “might easily have happened had I not had my breeches on; and I might have done something that people do not like to smell, so anxious and affrighted was I.” Why did not the Pope appeal rather to the text: “In the beginning Cod created the heavens—that is the Pope—and the earth, that is the Christian Church,” etc. This is the first answer.
The second is a perversion of the Catholic view; he accuses the Pope of deducing from the text under discussion, that he has “all power in heaven as well as on earth” and authority “over all the Churches and the Emperor to boot.” This parody of the truth Luther proceeds triumphantly to demolish as “blasphemous idolatry.”—There follows thirdly an appeal to the “Emperor, Kings, Princes and nobles” to seize upon the Papal States which the Pope has stolen by dint of “lying and trickery” and to slay as blasphemers him and his Cardinals.
He goes on to explain the Bible passage in question by proving, fourthly, against the “wicked, shameless, stiff-necked” Papists from Eph. iv. 15, and from Augustine and Cyprian, “that the whole of Christendom throughout the world has no other head set over it save only Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The true sense of Eph. iv. 15 and the real teaching of both the Fathers in question are too well known for us to need to waste words on them here.—Fifthly, he brings forward John vi. 63: “My words are Spirit and life” and argues: “According to this the words Matt. xvi. 18 [concerning Peter and the rock] must also be Spirit and life.… The upbuilding must here mean a spiritual and living upbuilding; the rock must be a living and spiritual rock; the Church a living and spiritual assembly, nay, something that lives for all eternity.”—These facts, however, had always been admitted by Catholic commentators without causing them any apprehension as to the primacy or the visible Church.—Sixthly, he seeks to demonstrate that the Church can only be built on the rock indicated by Christ “by faith”; this, however, excludes the primacy of Peter, for “whoever believes is built upon this rock.”—Seventhly: “It is thus that St. Peter himself interprets it, 1 Peter ii. 3 ff.,”—though this is a fact only credible to one who is already of Luther’s opinion.—Eighthly, he will have it that, in the famous passage, Christ meant to say no more than: “Thou art Peter, that is a rock, for thou hast perceived and named the Right Man, viz. Christ, Who is the true Rock, as Scripture terms Him. On this rock, i.e. on Me, Christ, I will build the whole of My Christendom.”
This reading would certainly cut away the ground from under the argument of the Catholics.[1266] Nevertheless Protestant scholars have repeatedly shown themselves willing to apply Christ’s promise to the person of Peter, as ecclesiastical tradition has ever done, and to defend this as the true sense of the words. Thus the Berlin exegetist, Bernhard Weiss, writes: “By using ταύτῃ for the name (Peter), signifying a rock, any application of the words either to Jesus or to the faith or confession of Peter is shut out.… It can only be understood of his person,” etc.[1267] By Holtzmann, the Strasburg exegetist, the opposite interpretation was uncharitably described as a fruit of the “school of Protestant ex parte exegesis.”[1268]
We must, however, allow that, both here and in his treatment of the promise of the keys (Matt. xvi. 19), Luther shows himself an adept in the use of language. “To speak plain German we may say this,” so he begins one of his commentaries, and indeed he knows how to speak well and in a manner calculated to impress his hearers. Of the matter, however, we may judge from the following: “To thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” this means that, should anyone refuse to believe the apostles, on him they should pass sentence and condemn him; their “office” still remains in the Church, there always being “retaining of sins for the impenitent and unbelieving, and forgiveness for the penitent and the believing”; but, quite apart from this “office,” believers have absolute power “where two or three are gathered together in the name of Christ (Matt. xviii. 20).”[1269] Here again we have Christ’s promise misconstrued, which does not refer to spiritual authority but solely to the effect of the prayer in common of two or more of the faithful.[1270]
“Hence, let the Pope and his Peter be gone,” so he concludes … even though there were a hundred thousand St. Peters, even though all the world were nothing but Popes, and even though an angel from heaven stood beside him; for we have here [Matt. xviii. 18, where the power of binding and loosing is bestowed on all the apostles] the Lord Himself, above all angels and creatures, Who says they are all to have equal power, keys and office, even where only two simple Christians are gathered together in His name. This Lord we shall not allow the Pope and all the devils to make into a fool, liar or drunkard; but we will tread the Pope under foot and tell him that he is a desperate blasphemer and idolatrous devil, who, in St. Peter’s name, has snatched the keys for himself alone which Christ gave to them all in common. “It is the Lord Himself Who says this [John xx. 21 ff.]; therefore we care nothing for the ravings of the Pope-Ass in his filthy decretals.”[1271]