Concerning the inward Word or the enlightenment by the Spirit some words of Luther’s in 1531 may be given here.
In that year he preached on the Gospel of St. John. He dwelt at some length on his favourite passage: “Whoever believeth in Me hath everlasting life,” and its context. Here, speaking repeatedly of the outward and the inward Word, he insists especially on the former and particularly on the hearing of sermons with faith, though so far was he from relinquishing the inward Word that he combines it in a strange way with the outward, and finally arrives once more at his earlier pet idea: Whoever is taught inwardly by the Spirit is free to judge and decide on all things.
“The Lord Christ intends,” so he explains, “that we should hold fast and remain by the outward, spoken Word, and thereby He has put down reason from its seat,” i.e. has repudiated the objections of the fanatics who differed from him. Christ, according to Luther, exhorts us “diligently to listen to and learn the Word.”[1411] The beginning of Justification is in this, that “God proclaims to you the spoken, outward Word.”[1412] To this end God has His messengers and vicars. “When you hear a sermon from St. Paul or from me, you hear God the Father Himself; yet both of us, you and I, have one schoolmaster and doctor, viz. the Father ... only that God speaks to you through me.”[1413] Here he does not enter into the question of his mission, though he shows plainly enough that he was not going to be set aside. “God must give the spoken Word,” “otherwise it does not make its way. But if you are set on helping yourselves, why then should I preach? In that case you have no need of me.... We may be angered and stupefied over it” (viz. at the apparent divergence between the Word of God and reason), yet we must listen and weigh “the Word that is preached by the lips of Christ.”[1414]
Excellent as this exhortation may be so far as St. Paul was concerned, the speaker is at no pains to supply his hearer with any proof of his own saying, viz. “that God speaks to you through me.” He insists upon it, however, and now comes the intervention of the Spirit: God must “inspire the conviction that it is His Word”[1415] which has been heard. “Without the Word we must not do anything, but must be taught by God.”[1416] “When the heart can feel assured that God the Father Himself is speaking to us [when we listen to a sermon], then the Holy Ghost and the light enter in; then man is enlightened and becomes a happy master, and is able to decide and judge of all doctrine, for he has the light, and faith in the Divine Word, and feels certain within his breast that his doctrine is the very Word of God.”[1417] When you “feel this in your heart, then account yourself one of the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will allow Him to be Master and surrender yourself to Him. In this way will you be saved.”[1418]
The real breathing of the Spirit of God, however, confirms the utterances only of the “preaching office,” viz. Luther’s and the Lutherans’. This he proclaims in the following words: “The true breathing and inspiration of the Holy Ghost is that which is wafted through the preaching office and the outward Word.”[1419]
In what follows, for the better understanding of Luther’s attitude towards the Bible, we shall examine two consequences of his subjective ways, viz. their effect on the inspiration and the Canon of Scripture, and the exegetical disagreement which was the result of the principle of inward experience, also the means he chose to remedy it.
Inspiration and the Canon of Scripture.
In the matter of the inspiration of Scripture Luther never went so far as the fanatical enthusiasts of later Lutheranism, who, in their systems, taught an actual verbal inspiration, according to which the writers of the Bible had not merely been impelled, enlightened, and infallibly preserved from error, but had received every word from God. On the contrary, owing to his wanton handling of the Bible, he takes the inspiration of its writers so widely and vaguely that the very idea of inspiration is practically evaporated. The Bible is indeed, according to him, an outcome of the inspiration of God and is the writing and Word of the Holy Ghost (“Spiritus auctor est libri”),[1420] and may accordingly be described as “the Holy Ghost’s own especial book, writing and Word”—which he sometimes explains almost as though he had been a believer in verbal inspiration.[1421]
The fact is, however, that he sees “in the sacred writers no other form of spiritual illumination than that displayed in the verbal preaching of the Divine witnesses.”[1422] “Moreover we occasionally find him questioning whether in certain passages the Holy Ghost ... is really so unquestionably present as in other parts of Scripture.” The truth is “he never formulated any detailed theory of Scriptural inspiration. With Luther the action of the Holy Ghost, on the witnesses of both Old Testament and New, is always one and the same, whether they proclaim the Word verbally or by writing; nowhere do we meet with the thought that they were under the influence of any other inspiration when they wrote.”[1423]
The freedom he allowed himself, no less in the matter of inspiration than in the principle of the Bible only, explains the distinction he so often makes between the character and importance of the various parts of the “Word of God,” which he will have one keep in view when searching in Scripture for the truths of faith. In passages where religion is not concerned, particularly in historical statements, he believes that the tools of the Holy Ghost both could and did err.[1424] He thinks that “the predictions of the prophets concerning the Kings and secular affairs often turned out wrong.”[1425] The inspiration of the Apostles (and Evangelists) in the New-Testament writings was merely a part of their general “office,” not a “special inspiration” in the nature of a “second power added to and independent of it.” “The predominant importance of the Apostles he traces back to their general inspiration in the sense described above.”[1426]