Luther, vol. 1 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

2. Gloomy Views regarding God and Predestination

The tendency to a dismal conception of God plays, in combination with his ideas on predestination, an incisive part in Luther’s Commentary on Romans, which, so far, has received too little attention. The tendency is noticeable throughout his early mental history. He was never able to overcome his former temptations to sadness and despair on account of the possibility of his irrevocable predestination to hell, sufficiently to attain to the joy of the children of God and to the trustful recognition of God’s general and certain will for our salvation. The advice which Staupitz, among others, gave him was assuredly correct, viz. to take refuge in the wounds of Christ, and Luther probably tried to follow it. But we do not learn that he paid diligent heed to the further admonitions of the ancient ascetics, to exert oneself in the practice of good works, as though one’s predestination depended entirely on the works one performs with the grace of God. On the contrary, of set purpose, he avoided any effort on his own part and preferred the misleading mystical views of Quietism.

The melancholy idea of predestination again peeps out unabashed in the passage in his Commentary on the Psalms, where he says, that Christ “drank the cup of pain for His elect, but not for all.”[454]

If he set out to explain the Epistle to the Romans with a gloomy conception of God, in which we recognise the old temptations regarding predestination, owing to his misapprehension of certain passages of the Epistle concerning God’s liberty and inscrutability in the bestowal of grace, his ideas, as he advances, become progressively more stern and dismal. The editor of the Commentary remarks, not without reason, on the forcible way in which Luther, “even in chapter i., emphasises the sovereignty of the Will of God.”[455] It is true of many, Luther says there, that God gives them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness (cp. Rom. i. 24), nor is this merely a permission, but an appointment and command (“non tantum permissio, sed commissio et iussio”).[456] In such a case God commands the devil or the flesh to tempt a man and conquer him. It is true that when God chooses to act graciously He prevents the evil; but He also wills to be severe and to punish, and “then He makes the wicked to sin more abundantly (‘facit abundantius peccare’)”; then “He forsakes a man so that he may not be able to resist the devil, who carries out the order and the Will of God in bringing about his fall.”

The youthful University Professor believes that he is here teaching a “more profound theology.” No one was to come to him, he says, with the shallow and hackneyed assertion that, on the above hypothesis, man’s free will was destroyed; only narrow minds (“rudiores”) take exception at this “profundior theologia.”[457] The teaching of this new theology was the following:

“This man may do what he pleases, it is God’s will that he should be overcome by sin.” “It is true that God does not desire the sin, although He wills that it shall take place (‘non sequitur quod Deus peccatum velit, licet ipsum velit fieri’); for He only wills that it shall happen, in order to manifest in man the greatness of His anger and His severity by punishing in him the sin which He hates.” “It is therefore on account of the punishment that God wills that the sin shall be committed.... God alone may will such a thing” (“Hoc autem soli Deo licitum est velle”),[458] and he repeats fearlessly: “in order that all misery and shame may be heaped upon the man, God wills he should commit this sin.”[459] He fancies he is communicating to his pupils “the highest secrets of theology,” meant only for the perfect, when he assures them that both statements are right: God wills to oblige me and all men [to do what is good] and yet He does not give His grace to all, but only to whom He will, reserving to Himself the choice. Some it does not please Him to justify because He manifests so much the more through them His honour in the elect; in the same way He also wills sin, though only indirectly, viz. “that He may be glorified in the elect.” Hence we must not make it a mere matter of permission, for “how would God permit it unless it were His will?” “Senseless chatter,” thus he describes the unanimous contrary teaching of theologians, “such is the objection they raise that man would thus be damned without any fault on his part, because he could not fulfil the law and was expected to do what was impossible.”—We can only ask how his own method is to be described when he contents himself with this solution: “If that objection had any weight it would follow that it was not necessary to preach, to pray, to exhort, and Christ’s death would also not be necessary. Yet by means of all this God has chosen to save His elect.”[460]

Luther, as this somewhat lengthy passage shows, had, at any rate at that time, no bright, kindly idea of God’s Nature, Goodness and inexhaustible Mercy, which wills to make every creature here on earth happy and to save them in eternity; his mind was imprisoned within the narrow limits to which he had before this accustomed himself; a false conception of God’s essence—perhaps a remainder of his Occamist training—was already poisoning the very vitals of his theology.

His melancholy conception of God comes to light not only in the various passages where he speaks of predestination, but also in the dark pictures, which, in his morbid frame of mind, he paints of the wickedness and sin of man pitting his unquenchable concupiscence against God, the All Holy.[461] In order to adore this stern and cruel God in his own way he had already built up on his false mysticism a practical theory of resignation and self-surrender to whatever might be the Divine Will, even should it destine him to damnation. In the first pages of the Commentary on Romans his idea of God enables him to proclaim loudly and boldly, and with full knowledge of what he is doing, his opposition to the religious practice of his many zealous contemporaries, whether clerics or laymen.

Many have, according to him, an idea of God different from his: “Oh, how many there are to-day who do not worship God as He is, but as they imagine Him to be. Look at their singularities and their superstitious rites, full of delusions. They give up what they ought to practise, they choose out the works by which they will honour Him, they fancy that God is such that He looks down upon them and their works.” “There is spread abroad to-day a sort of idolatry by which God is not served as He is. The love of their own ideas and their own righteousness entirely blinds mankind, and they call it ‘good intention.’ They imagine that God is thereby graciously disposed to them, whereas it is not so: and so they worship their phantom God rather than the true God.”[462]

Neither do they understand how to pray, because they do not know the awfulness of God. Does not the Scripture say; he asks them: “Serve ye the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with trembling” (Ps. ii. 11), and “with fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. ii. 12)? Not wanting to look at their own works as “bad and suspicious” in the eyes of this God, “they do not assiduously call upon His grace.” They assume that their good intention arises out of themselves, whereas it is a gift of God, and desire to prepare themselves for the infusion of grace.[463] “Pelagian notions are at the bottom of all this. No one acknowledges himself now to be a Pelagian, but many are so unconsciously, with their principle that free will must set to work to obtain grace.”[464]