In what follows Luther’s other testimonies to the same effect as that contained in the Preface, will be duly brought forward and their peculiarities noted.
The first testimony is to be found in Johann Schlaginhaufen’s notes and speaks of the fears which the thought of God’s avenging justice habitually caused Luther and from which the discovery delivered him.[1004] This pupil of Luther’s relates, in an abbreviated Latin form, the following communication which he received from Luther between June and September, 1532, i.e. thirteen years before the Preface: “The words just and Justice were like a flash of lightning in my conscience. When I heard them I was filled with terror [and thought]: Is He just? Then He will punish; ‘The just man liveth by faith,’ ‘the Justice of God is made manifest without the law’ (cp. Rom. iii. 21); our life therefore comes of faith; God’s Justice must be the salvation of everyone who believes. Then my conscience at once comforted itself: Surely it is the Justice of God which justifies us and saves us; and this word (iustitia) became more pleasing to me.” “This art,” Schlaginhaufen proceeds in Luther’s own German, “the Spiritus sanctus infused into me in this Cl.” (see p. 396).
The fear of the Divine Justice also appears in the foreground in the account of the incident in Luther’s Table-Talk in September, 1540, as preserved by Johann Mathesius.[1005] “At the outset when I read and sang in the Psalm [every evening at Compline] the words: ‘In iustitia tua libera me,’ I was afraid and hated the words: ‘iustitia Dei,’ ‘iudicium Dei,’ ‘opus Dei.’ For I thought nothing less than that ‘iustitia Dei’ meant His strict Judgment. And if He was to save me according to His strict Judgment I should be lost for ever. But ‘misericordiam Dei,’ ‘adiutorium Dei,’ those words pleased me better.” But it was only after the light of a true understanding of God’s Justice had risen upon me that “I began to relish the Psalter.”
The notes on Luther’s Table-Talk made by his friend Master Caspar Heydenreich, dating from the winter 1542-43, and edited by Kroker in 1903 from the collection of Mathesius, must also be considered.[1006]
Mathesius records them under the descriptive title: “Evangelii occasio renascentis per Doctorem.” He plainly thought, agreeably with Luther’s own opinion and that of his pupils, that the enlightenment he had received on the text “The just man liveth by faith” was the most important, or at least one of the most important causes of “the new birth of the Gospel through the Doctor”—Luther. And, as a matter of fact, Luther’s conviction, which was shared by his pupils, that this saving interpretation had been infused by the Holy Spirit, sufficiently explains why so much stress should be laid on this incident, and also why the recipient of the said illumination so frequently recurs to it.
Under the above title we find Heydenreich’s lengthy account, taken from Luther’s own lips, which agrees entirely with the statements of the Preface and, in particular, dwells on Luther’s ecstasy of joy at the discovery (“Cum hoc invenissem, ita delectabar, in tanta lætitia, ut nihil supra”).
In several of the accounts the Psalms are represented as the primary cause of the struggles that went on in Luther’s soul, and the correct comprehension of them as one of the first fruits of his new discernment. Then “I first relished the Psalter,” Luther says in Mathesius’s account, and in Heydenreich’s notes he declares: “Whereas I formerly hated the Psalms and the Scripture where mention was made of the Justice of God, the way was now clear to me when I read in the Psalms: ‘Deliver me in Thy Justice’ and ‘Deliver me in Thy mercy,’” for God’s mercy, by which He justifies us with His grace, had, from that time onward, come to mean the same to him as “the righteousness of God.”
In Anton Lauterbach’s Diary of 1538 two passages from the Psalms are likewise quoted as the cause of Luther’s trouble of conscience,[1007] and in the Halle MS. of the “Colloquia” which Bindseil edited, and which is based on Lauterbach’s collection, a similar uneasiness is said to have been induced by the Psalms in priests generally: “When, in Popery, we read the verses [in question] we immediately thought of the avenging Justice ... but when I took into consideration what follows ... I became joyful,” the right interpretation of the passage concerning the just man who lives by faith “supplied a remedy for all who were afflicted” (“afflictis remedium contigit”).[1008]
Another passage in the Psalms which caused him trouble is quoted by Luther when referring to the event in his Commentary on Psalm l. (li.), which he wrote in 1532: “Exsultabit lingua mea iustitiam tuam” (verse 16); as the biblical view of Justice had been obscured in his mind and in that of all, he had been unable to understand how it was possible to praise the avenging Justice in the Psalms.[1009]