Luther, vol. 4 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

The “Article on which the Church Stands or Falls”: According to Modern Protestants.

Protestant scholars are far from sharing Luther’s high regard for his dogma of Justification, and what they say throws a curious light on the fashion in which he deceived himself.

Amongst the Protestant voices raised in protest against this doctrine, the following deserve to be set on record. It is clear, says K. Hase, that the Catholic doctrine is more closely related to the “Protestant view now prevailing”; he avers, that the “Protestant theologians of our day, even those who are sticklers for the purity of Lutheranism, have described saving faith as that which works by love, quite agreeably to the scholastic conception of the ‘fides formata,’ and have opposed to it a pretended Catholic dogma of Justification by good works.”[1593]

This well-known controversial writer when expressing it as his opinion that Luther’s doctrine of Justification is now practically discarded, was not even at pains to exclude the conservative theologians of his party: “Döllinger[1594] is quite right in charging the so-called ‘old believers’ amongst us with having fallen away from the Reformer’s dogma of Justification as strictly and theologically defined.”[1595]

Thus oblivion seems to be the tragic fate of Luther’s great theological discovery, which, if we are to believe what he says, was to him the light of his existence and his most powerful incentive in his whole work, and which figured so prominently in all his attacks on Rome. Was it not this doctrine which played the chief part in his belief in the utter corruption of the Church of earlier days, when, instead of prizing the grace of Christ, everything was made to depend on works, which had led to the ruin of Christendom, to the debasement of the clergy and to the transformation of the Pope into Antichrist?

The sole authority of Scripture, Luther’s other palladium, had already suffered sadly since the Revolution period, and now the doctrine of Justification seems destined to a like fate. Albert Ritschl was pronouncing a severe censure when he declared, “that, amongst the differences of opinion prevalent in the ranks of the evangelical theologians, the recognition of two propositions [the sole authority of Scripture and Justification by imputation] was the minimum that could be expected of anyone who wished to be considered Evangelical.”[1596] For the fact is that the minimum required by Ritschl, is, according to the admission of Protestant critics themselves, frequently no longer held by these theologians.

Of the Lutheran doctrine of Justification here in question, P. Genrich, a theologian, in his work on the idea of regeneration, says: “If we glance at the process of salvation as described in the evangelical theological handbooks of the 19th century, we may well be astonished at the extraordinary divergencies existing as regards both the conception of regeneration, and the place it is to occupy in the system of doctrine. There are hardly two theologians who entirely agree on the point.”[1597]—Of the practical side of the Lutheran doctrine in question the same writer states: “It is an almost universal complaint that this chief article of Evangelical faith is not of much use when it is a question of implanting and fostering piety, in the school, the church or in parish-work. Perhaps the preacher says a few words about it ... the teacher, too, feels it his duty to deal with it in his catechetical instructions.... Justification by faith is extolled in more or less eloquent words as the treasure of the Reformation, because Church history and theology have taught us so to regard it. But at heart one is glad to be finished with it and vaguely conscious that all one said was in vain, and that, to the children or congregation Justification still remains something foreign and scarcely understood.”[1598] Genrich himself lays the blame on the later formularies of Lutheranism for the mistaken notion of a righteousness coming from without; yet the formularies of Concord surely voiced Luther’s teaching better than the new exponents who are so disposed to tone it down.[1599]

Of the actual theory of Luther, de Lagarde wrote some fifty years ago: “The doctrine of Justification [Luther’s] is not the Evangel.... It was not the basic principle of the Reformation, and to-day in the Protestant Churches it is quite dead.” De Lagarde did not allow himself to be misled by the flowery language concerning personal religious experience which is all that remains of Luther’s doctrine in many modern expositions of it.[1600]

“Research in the domain of New-Testament history and in that of the Reformation,” says K. Holl, “has arrived at conclusions closely akin to de Lagarde’s.... It has been made impossible simply to set the Protestant doctrine of Justification on the same level with the Pauline and with that of the Gospel of Jesus.” Amongst the Protestant objections to the doctrine, he instances “its narrowness, which constitutes a limitation of the ethical insupportable to present-day tastes.” He attempts to explain, or rather to amend, Luther’s theory, so as to give ethics its due and to evade Luther’s “paradox of a God,” Who, though inexorable in His moral demands, Himself procures for the offender salvation and life. As the new dogma originally stood “both its Catholic opponents and the Anabaptists were at one in contending that Luther’s doctrine of Justification could not fail to lead to moral laxity. Protestant theologians were not able to deny the weight of this objection.” In point of fact it involves an “antinomy, for which there is no logical solution.”[1601]