“If such faith without works continues to be preached much longer, the Christian religion will fall into ruins and come to a lamentable end, and the place where this faith without works is taught will become a Sodom and Gomorrha.”[1347]
4. Bugenhagen, Jonas and others
Disagreements such as these never arose to mar the relations between Luther and some of his other more intimate co-workers, for instance, his friendship with Bugenhagen and Jonas, who have been so frequently alluded to already. He was always ready to acknowledge in the warmest manner the great services they rendered him in the defence and spread of his teaching, and to support them when they stood in need of his assistance. He was never stingy in his bestowal of praise, narrow-minded or jealous, in his acknowledgement of the merits of friendly fellow-preachers, or of those writers who held Lutheran views.
Nicholas von Amsdorf, who introduced the new faith into Magdeburg in 1524 and there became Superintendent, he praises for the firmness with which he confessed the faith and for his fearless conduct generally. In Disputations he was wont to go straight to the heart of the matter like the “born theologian” he was; at Schmalkalden, when preaching before the Princes and magnates, he had not shrunk from declaring that our Evangel was intended for the weak and oppressed and for those who feel themselves sinners, though he could not discern any such in the audience.[1348]
Johann Brenz, preacher in Schwäbisch-Hall since 1522, and one of the founders of the new church system in Suabia, was greatly lauded by Luther for his exegetical abilities. “He is a learned and reliable man. Amongst all the theologians of our day there is not one who knows how to interpret and handle Holy Scripture like Brenz. When I gaze in admiration at his spirit I almost despair of my own powers. Certainly none of our people can do what he has done in his exposition of the Gospel of St. John. At times, it is true, he is carried away by his own ideas, yet he sticks to the point and speaks conformably to the simplicity of God’s Word.”[1349]
Next to Melanchthon, however, the friend whom Luther praised most highly as a “thoroughly learned and most able man,” was Johann Bugenhagen. “He has, under most trying circumstances, been of service to many of the Churches.”[1350]
In his Preface to Bugenhagen’s Latin Commentary on the Psalms—a work which, even in the opinion of Protestant theologians, “leaves much to be desired”[1351] from the “point of view of learning,” and which in reality is merely a sort of polemical work of edification, written from the standpoint of the new faith—Luther declared, that the spirit of Christ had at length unlocked the Psalter through Bugenhagen; every teacher must admit that now “the spirit was revealing secrets hidden for ages.” “I venture to assert that the first person on earth to give an explanation of the Book of Psalms is Pomeranus. Almost all earlier writers have introduced their own views into the book, but here the judgment of the spirit will teach you wondrous things.”[1352]
Yet at the very outset, in the first verse of the Psalms, instead of a learned commentary, we find Bugenhagen expounding the new belief, and attacking the alleged self-righteousness of Catholicism, termed by him the “cathedra pestilentiæ”; he even relates at length his conversion to Lutheranism, which had given scandal “to those not yet enlightened by the sun of the Evangel.”[1353] They were no longer to wait for the completion of his own Commentary on the Psalms, Luther concludes, since now—in place of poor Luther—David, Isaias, Paul, and John were themselves speaking to the reader.
“He had no clear perception of the defects of Bugenhagen’s exegetical method,” remarks O. Albrecht, the editor of the above Preface in the Weimar edition of Luther’s works.[1354] The explanation of this “uncalled-for praise,” as Albrecht terms it, is to be found in the feeling expressed by Luther in the first sentence of the Preface: At the present time God had caused His Word to shine like crystal, whereas of yore there prevailed only chill and dismal mists.