“How it comes to pass,” says Luther, “that Christ thus enters the heart you cannot tell; but your heart feels plainly, by the experience of faith, that He is there indeed.”[1388] “When the Holy Ghost performs His office then it proceeds.”[1389] “No one can rightly understand God or the Word of God unless he receives it directly from the Holy Ghost.”
When his friend Carlstadt, together with whom Luther had at first insisted on Scripture only, later struck out a path of his own in doctrine and ecclesiastical practice while continuing to appeal to Scripture and to his own enlightenment, even the controversy with him and the “fanatics” failed to make Luther relinquish in theory his standpoint concerning the Bible and the Spirit as the one source and rule of faith. He became, however, more cautious in formulating it and endeavoured at least to leave a back door open. He was less insistent in his assertion that the Spirit instructed, by the inward Word, each one who read the Scriptures; so much the more did he emphasise the supposed “clearness of the outward Word,” viz. the Bible, and deprecate any wanton treatment of it (by anyone save himself); at the same time he began to lay stress on the outward side of the Church, on the preaching office and the administration of the Sacraments.[1390] The fanatics he reproves for “merely gaping at the Spirit in their hearts,” whereas the outward articles must necessarily precede this.[1391] At times what he says almost looks like a repudiation of his earlier theory of enlightenment through the Spirit; for instance, when he describes how the fanatics wait “till the heavenly voice comes and God speaks to them.”[1392] Now, the outward Word of the Gospel, proclaimed by men truly “called,” is to be the guiding star amidst the mischief wrought by the sectarians; this outward Word, so he now fancies, will surely avail to decide every issue, seeing that it is so clear; only by dint of juggling could the sense of the Bible, as manifest in the outward Word, be distorted; looked at fairly it at once settled every question—needless to say in Luther’s favour; to understand it, all that was needed was the “natural language,” the “Lady Empress who far excels all subtle inventions.”[1393]
As to the alleged clearness of the word of Scripture it is sufficient to recall that he himself indirectly challenged it by accusing the whole Church of having misunderstood the Bible, and to consider the abyss that separated his interpretation, even of the most vital texts, from that of the scholars of the past. “Though we had the Bible and read it,” he says, “yet we understood nothing of it.”[1394]—Nevertheless he fancied he could save his theory by appealing to the clearness of the text and the assistance rendered by a knowledge of languages. “St. Paul wills” (1 Cor. xiv. 29), so Luther says, in a writing on the schools, “that Christians should judge all doctrine, though for this we must needs be acquainted with the language. For the preacher or teacher may indeed read the Bible through and through as much as he chooses, but he will sometimes be right and sometimes wrong, if there be no one there to judge whether he is doing it well or ill. Thus in order to judge there must be skill or a knowledge of tongues, otherwise it is all to no purpose.”[1395]
But above all, as he impresses on the reader in the same tract, he himself had thrown light on the Bible by his knowledge of languages; his interpretation, thanks to the “light” of the languages, had effected “such great things that all the world marvels and must confess that now we have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it, that it is restored to its pristine purity, and is even more undefiled than at the time of St. Jerome or Augustine.”[1396] His willingness, expressed from time to time, to submit himself or any other teacher to the judgment of anyone possessed of greater learning and a more profound spiritual sense, attracted many enlightened minds to his party.[1397]
Luther’s self-contradiction in speaking, first, of the great clearness of the Bible, and then of its great obscurity, cannot fail to strike one.
“Whoever now wants to become a theologian,” he says, for instance, “enjoys a great advantage. For, first, he has the Bible which is now so clear that he can read it without any difficulty.” “Should anyone say that it is necessary to have the interpretation of the Fathers and that Scripture is obscure, you must reply, that that is untrue. There is no book on earth more plainly written than Holy Scripture; in comparison with all other books it is as the sun to any other light.”[1398] Elsewhere he says: “The ungodly sophists [the Schoolmen] have asserted, that in Holy Scripture there is much that is obscure and not yet clearly explained,” but according to him they were not able to bring forward one vestige of proof; “if the words are obscure in one passage, they are clear in another,” and a comparison makes everything plain, particularly to one who is learned in languages.[1399]—Thus the Bible, according to a further statement, is “clearer, easier and more certain than any other writing.”[1400] “It is in itself quite certain, quite easy and quite plain; it is its own explanation; it is the universal argument, judge and enlightener, and makes all clear to all.”[1401]
Later, however, the idea that Holy Scripture was obscure preponderated with him. Two days before his death Luther wrote in Latin on a piece of paper, which was subsequently found on his table, his thoughts on the difficulty of understanding Scripture: “No one can understand the Bucolics of Virgil who has not been a herdsman for five years; nor his Georgics unless he has laboured five years in the fields. In order to understand aright the epistles of Cicero a man must have been full twenty years in the public service of a great State. No one need fancy he has tasted Holy Scripture who has not ruled Churches for a hundred years with prophets like Elias and Eliseus, with John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1402] In all likelihood his experiences with the sectarians in his own camp led him towards the end of his life to lay more stress on the difficulty of understanding the Bible.
Even with the “plain, arid Scripture” and a clear brain it may easily happen, as he says, to a man to fall into danger through the Bible, by looking at it from “his own conceit,” as “through a painted glass,” and “seeing no other colour than that of the glass.”[1403] Such people cannot then be set right, but become “masters of heresy.”[1404] All heresy seems to him to come from Scripture and to be based on it. There is no heretic, he says in a sermon in 1528, who does not appeal to Scripture; hence it came about that people called the Bible a heresy-book.[1405] The “heresy-book” was a favourite topic with him. Two years earlier he had used the expression twice on one day,[1406] and in 1525, when complaining in a sermon that the fanatics decked themselves out with Scripture, he said: “Thus it is true what people say, viz. that Holy Scripture is a heresy-book, i.e. a book that the heretics claim for themselves; there is no other book that they misuse so much as this book, and there has never been a heresy so bad or so gross that it has not sheltered itself behind Scripture.”[1407] These preachers from among the fanatics, he says, boast of the voice of God and of the Spirit, but they were never sent; let them prove by miracles their Divine mission![1408]
Thus he had retracted nothing of his strange doctrine concerning private enlightenment; on the contrary, when not actually dealing with the sectarians, he still declared with that persistence of which he was such a master and which shrank from no self-contradictions, that the Spirit alone taught man how to understand the Scriptures, now that man, owing to original sin, was quite unable to grasp even the plainest passages. “In it [the Bible] not one word is of so small account as to allow of our understanding it by reason.”[1409] Only by virtue of the higher light by which he understood Scripture could a man “impartially prove and judge the different spirits and their doctrines.” This he wrote in his “De servo arbitrio” at a time when he had already engaged upon the struggle with the “Heavenly Prophets.”[1410] And to these principles he remained faithful till death without, however, as a Protestant scholar repeatedly points out of the several sides of Luther’s theology, “explaining more clearly” their relation to the difficulties involved.