He thus leaves the anxious man “to himself” at the most awful of moments; elsewhere, too, he does the same. When he invites every man to “taste the Word of God” betimes and to “feel” how directly “the Master speaks within his heart,” this is merely a roundabout way of repeating the comfortless warning that “each one must fight for himself.” In other words, what he means is: I have no sure warrant to give in the stead of the Church’s authority; you must find out for yourself whether you have received the true Word of Christ by consulting your own feelings.
In addition to this, in the opinion of many Protestant theologians, the faith to be derived from the Bible which everyone must necessarily arrive at was very much circumscribed by Luther. “Man’s attitude towards Christ and His saving Grace” loomed so large with him, that it “decided the question whether a man was, or was not, a believer.” If, in the Protestantism of to-day, Luther’s “idea of faith” is frequently taken rather narrowly, it must be admitted that in many of his statements and demands he himself goes even further. We have here to do with that “two-sidedness in his attitude towards Scripture,” which “is apparent at every period of his life.”[1471] If we keep to the earlier and more “liberal” side of his “Evangelical conception of faith,” then indeed the trusting and confident assumption of such a relationship with Christ would certainly be “decisive in the question whether a man was a believer or not, and Luther himself frequently used this criterion, for instance, when he answers as follows the question: Who is a member of the Church and whom must one regard as a dear brother in Christ: ‘All who confess Christ as sent by God the Father in order to reconcile us by His death and to obtain grace for us’; or again elsewhere: ‘All those who cling to Christ alone and confess Him in faith,’ or, yet again: All those ‘who seek the Lord with all their heart and soul, and trust only in God’s mercy.’[1472] In such utterances we have the purely religious conception of Evangelical faith clearly summarised.” (Cp. above, vol. iii., p. 13.)
Agreeably with this conception of faith, some Protestants have contended that Luther should have been much more broad-minded with regard to doubts and to doctrines which differed from his own; his opposition to other views, notably to those of the Zwinglians, brought him, however, to another conception of faith, to one more closely related to the Catholic theory. According to Catholic doctrine, faith is a firm assent to all that God has revealed and the Church proposes for belief. It is made up of many articles, not one of which can be set aside without injury to the whole. Luther, so we are told, “owing to his controversy with Zwingli, ran the risk of exchanging his conception of faith for this one [the Catholic one], according to which faith is the acceptance of a whole series of articles of faith.”
In reality he did not merely “run the risk” of reaching such a doctrine; he had, all along, even in earlier days, been moving on these same lines, albeit in contradiction with himself. It was in fact nothing altogether new when he wrote in the Articles of Schwabach: “Such a Church is nothing else than the faithful in Christ, who believe, hold and teach the above Articles.”[1473] The faith for which he wishes to stand always comprised the contents of the oldest Creeds, and he prefers to close his eyes to the fact that they were really undermined by his other propositions. By these articles he is determined to abide. Hence it is hardly fair to appeal to him in favour of their abrogation, and any such appeal would only serve to emphasise his self-contradiction. Luther himself, when dealing with opponents, frequently speaks of the breaking of a single link as being sufficient to make the whole chain fall apart. “All or nothing” was his cry, viz. the very same as Catholics had used against his own innovations. In short, in his “two-sidedness,” he, quite generally, seeks a sure foothold against difficulties from within and from without in the principle of authority in its widest meaning, and, when trying to safeguard the Apostles’ Creed and the “œcumenical symbols,” he appeals expressly to the Catholic past. He says that by thus vindicating the Apostles’ Creed and that of Nicæa he wished to show that he “was true to the rightful, Christian Church, which had retained them till that day.”[1474] The Fathers preserved them and, as in the case of the Athanasian Creed, supplemented and enlarged the traditional formulas, the better to counter heretics; Luther is even willing to accept new terms not found in Scripture, but coined by the Church, such as “peccatum originale” or “consubstantialis” ὁμοούσιος,[1475] since they might profitably be employed against false teachers.
Protestant Objections to Luther’s so-called “Formal Principle.”
“It is not for us to tone down or conceal the contradictions which present themselves,” writes a Protestant theologian who has made Luther’s attitude towards Scripture the subject of particular study. “... Even judged by the standard of his own day Luther does not display that uniformity which we are entitled to expect.... The psychological motives in particular are very involved and spring from different sources. The very fact that throughout his life he exhibited a certain obstinacy and violence towards both himself and others, must render doubtful any attempt to trace everything back to a single source. Obstinacy always points to contradictions.” This author goes so far as to say: “We might almost give vent to the paradox, that only in these contradictions is uniformity apparent; such a proposition would, however, hold good only before the court of psychology.” “To-day it is not possible to embrace Luther’s view in its entirety.”[1476]
In an historical account of Luther’s teaching (and it is in this that most Protestant scholars are interested) we must, as we advance, ever keep in view Luther’s whole individuality with all its warring elements. The difficulty thus presented to our becoming better acquainted with his views is, however, apparent from the words already quoted from one of Luther’s biographers concerning Luther’s wealth of ideas, which also, to some extent, apply even to his statements on dogma: “Every word Luther utters plays in a hundred lights and every eye meets with a different radiance which it would gladly fix.”[1477]
In spite of the difficulties arising from this character of the Wittenberg Doctor, early orthodox Lutheranism taught that he had set up the “sola scriptura” as the “formal principle” of the new doctrine. According to eminent authorities in modern Protestantism, however, this formal principle was stillborn; it was never capable in practice of supporting an edifice of doctrine, still less of forming a community of believers. Hence the tendency has been to make it subservient to the “Evangelical” understanding of the Bible.
Thus F. Kropatscheck, the author of the learned work “Das Schriftprinzip der lutherischen Kirche” (1904), says candidly, “that the formal principle of Protestantism [Scripture only] does not suffice in itself as a foundation for the true Christian life whether of the individual or of a community.” “Where the Evangelical content is lacking, the formal principle does not rise above sterile criticism.”[1478]
Kropatscheck’s examination of the mediæval views on Scripture led him moreover to recognise, that, in theory at least, the Bible always occupied its due place of honour; its content was, however, so he fancies, not understood until Luther rediscovered it as the Gospel of the “forgiveness of sins through Christ.”[1479] So far, according to him, did esteem for Scripture as the Word of God go in the Middle Ages, that he even ventures to characterise the formula “sola scriptura” as “Catholic commonplace”;[1480] this, however, he can only have intended in the sense in which it was read and supplemented by another Protestant theologian: “In practice this did not exclude the interpretation of Scripture on the lines of tradition.”[1481] “The so-called formal principle,” the above work goes on to say, with quite remarkable fairness to the past, “was much more utilised in the Middle Ages than popular accounts would lead us to suppose. To the Reformation we owe neither the formula (‘sola scriptura’) nor the insisting on the literal sense, nor the theory of inspiration, nor scarcely anything else demanded on the score of pure scriptural teaching.”[1482] “Almost all” the qualities attributed to Holy Scripture in the early, orthodox days of Protestantism “are already to be met with in the Middle Ages.”[1483]