CHAPTER XVI
THE DIVINE MISSION AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS
1. Growth of Luther’s Idea of his Divine Mission
Whereas the most zealous of Luther’s earliest pupils and followers outvied one another in depicting their master as the messenger of God, who had come before the world equipped with revelations from on high, the tendency of later Protestantism has been, more and more, to reduce Luther, so to speak, to a merely natural level, and to represent him as a hero indeed, but as one inspired by merely human motives. An earlier generation exalted him to mystical regions, and, being nearer him in point of time and therefore knowing him better, grasped the fact that he was dominated by a certain supernaturalism. Many later and more recent writers, on the other hand, have preferred to square their conception of his personality with their own liberal views on religion. They hail Luther as the champion of free thought and therefore as the founder of modern intellectual life. What he discovered in his struggles with himself by reflection and pious meditation, that, they say, he bequeathed to posterity without insisting upon the immutability of his ideas or claiming for them any infallibility. His only permanent work, his real legacy to posterity, was a negative one, viz. the breach with Popery, which he consummated, thanks to his extraordinary powers.
This is, however, from the religious standpoint, to attenuate Luther’s figure as it appears in history, notwithstanding the tribute paid to his talents.
If he is not the “messenger of God,” whose doctrines, inspired from on high, the world was bound to accept, then he ceases to be Luther, for it was from his supernatural estimate of himself that he drew all his strength and defiance. Force him to quit the dim, mystical heights from which he fancies he exercises his sway, and his claim on the faith of mankind becomes inexplicable and he himself an enigma.
It has been pointed out above, how Luther gradually reached the conviction that he had received his doctrine by a special revelation, with the Divine mission to communicate it to the world and to reform the Church (vol. ii., p. 92 f.). The conviction, that, as he declares, “the Holy Ghost had revealed the Scriptures” to him culminated in that personal assurance of salvation which was suddenly vouchsafed to him in the Tower.[284]
It will repay us to examine more closely the nature of this idea, and its manifestations, now that we have the mature man before us.
The founder of the new Church has reached a period when he no longer scruples to speak of the “revelations” which had been made to him, and which he is compelled to proclaim. “By His Grace,” he says, “God has revealed this doctrine to me.”[285]—“I have it by revelation ... that will I not deny.”[286] Of his mission he assures us: “By God’s revelation I am called to be a sort of antipope”;[287] of his chief dogma, he will have it that “the Holy Ghost bestowed it upon me,”[288] and declares that “under pain of the curse of eternal reprobation” he had been “instructed (‘interminatum’) not to doubt of it in any way.”[289] Of this he solemnly assured the Elector Frederick in a letter written in 1522: “Concerning my cause I would say: Your Electoral Highness is aware, or, if not aware, is hereby apprised of the fact, that I received the Evangel, not from man, but from heaven alone through our Lord Jesus Christ, so that I might well subscribe myself and boast of being a minister and evangelist—as, indeed, I shall do for the future.”[290]