Luther, vol. 4 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

In order to strengthen, in himself first and then in others, the assurance of salvation it comprised, he amplified it by asserting the believer’s absolute certainty of salvation; this was lacking in his Commentary on Romans, though even then he was drifting towards it. It was only in 1518-1519 that he developed the doctrine of the so-called “special faith,” by which the individual assures himself of pardon and secures salvation. Thereby he transformed faith into trust, for what he termed fiducial faith partook more of the nature of a strong, artificially stimulated hope; it really amounted to an intense confidence that the merits of Christ obliterated every sin.

Of faith in this new sense he says that it is the faith. “To have the Faith is assentingly to accept the promises of God, laying hold on God’s gracious disposition towards us and trusting in it.”[1537] In spite of this he continues in the old style to define faith as the submission of reason to all the truths revealed, and even to make it the practical basis of all his religious demands: Whoever throws overboard even one single article of faith will be damned; faith being one whole, every article must be believed.[1538] We can understand how opponents within his own camp, of whom he demanded faith in the doctrines he had discovered in the Bible, when they themselves failed to find them there, ventured to remind him of his first definition of faith, viz. the fiducial, and to ask him whether a trustful appropriation of the merits of Christ did not really meet all the demands of “faith.” Recent Protestant biographers of Luther point out that Zwingli was quite justified in urging this against Luther. Attacked by Luther on account of his discordant teaching on the Lord’s Supper, and that on the score of faith, Zwingli rudely retorted: “It is a pestilential doctrine, by a perversion of the word faith which really means trust in Christ, to lower it to the level of an opinion”; with this behaviour on Luther’s part went “hand in hand a similar change in his conception of the Church founded on faith.”[1539]

Some Characteristics of the New Doctrine of Justification.

If we take Luther’s saving faith we find that, according to him, it produces justification without the help of any other work or act on man’s part, and without contrition or charity contributing anything to the appropriation of righteousness on the part of the man to be justified.

Any contrition proceeding from the love of God, or at least from that incipient love of God such as Catholicism required agreeably with both revelation and human psychology, appeared to Luther superfluous; in view of the power of man’s ingrained concupiscence it amounted almost to a contradiction; only the fear of God’s Judgments (“timor servilis”), so he declares (vol. i., p. 291), with palpable exaggeration, had ruled his own confessions made in the monastery. At any rate, he was in error when he declared that this same fear had been the motive in the case of Catholics generally. He persuaded himself that this fear must be overcome by the Evangel of the imputed merits of Christ, because otherwise man can find no peace. The part played by the law is, according to him, almost confined to threatening and reducing man to despair, just as he himself had so often verged on hopelessness through thinking of his own inevitable reprobation; the assurance of salvation by faith, however, appears to every Christian as an angel of help and consolation even minus any repudiation of sin on the part of man’s will, for, owing to the Fall, sin cannot but persist.

When he attempts to prove this by his “experiences,” we must remind the reader how uncertain his statements are, concerning his own “inward feelings” during his monastic days. It will be pointed out elsewhere (vol. vi., xxxvii.) that these “recollections,” with their polemical animus, were of comparatively late growth, though they would have been of far greater service at the outset when still quite fresh.

A more solid basis for estimating the value of his doctrine of Justification is afforded by its connection with his other theological views. As we know, he regarded original sin and the concupiscence resulting from it as actual sin, still persisting in spite of baptism; he exaggerated beyond measure man’s powerlessness to withstand the concupiscence which remains with him to the end. Owing to the unfreedom of the will, the devil, according to Luther, holds the field in man’s heart and rules over all his spiritual faculties. The Divine Omnipotence alone is able to vanquish this redoubtable master by bestowing on the unhappy soul pardon and salvation; yet sin still reigns in the depths of the heart. No act of man has any part in the work of salvation. Actual grace is no less unknown to him than sanctifying grace. Good works are of no avail for salvation and of no importance for heaven, though, accidentally, they may accompany the state of grace, God working them in the man on whom He has cast His eye by choosing him to be a recipient of faith and salvation. Such election and predestination is, however, purely God’s work which man himself can do absolutely nothing to deserve.—Thanks to these errors, the “sola fides” and assurance of salvation stand bereft of their theological support.

We must, however, revert to one point again and examine it more closely on account of its historical and psychological importance. This is Luther’s doctrine of the slavery of the will, and of God’s being the sole agent in man.

This doctrine, already expressed in his Commentary on Romans in connection with his opinion on unconditional predestination,[1540] he was afterwards to expound with increasing vehemence.[1541] He was delighted to find his rigid views expressed in the Notes of the lectures on Romans and 1 Corinthians, which Melanchthon delivered in 1521 and 1522. These Notes he caused to be printed, and sent them to the author with a preface cast in the form of a letter.[1542]