Johann Eck could well answer: “Luther is doing us an injustice when he declares that we by our works exclude Christ as Mediator.... On the contrary, we teach, that, without Christ, works are nothing.... Therefore let him keep his lies to himself; the works that are done without faith, he may indeed talk of as he likes, but, as for ours, they proceed from the bottom rock of faith and are performed with the aid of Divine grace.”[1610]
Equally deceptive was the idea, so alluring in itself, that Luther’s doctrine of works bore the stamp of true freedom, viz. the freedom of the Gospel. Here, again, we can only see a new expression of his profound alienation from works and from the sacrifice entailed by self-conquest. He is desirous, so he says, of hoisting on the shield the freedom of the man who is guided solely by God’s Spirit. But will this not serve as an excuse for weakness? Here we seem to find an after-effect of that late-mediæval pseudo-mysticism which had once been a danger to him, which went so far as to demand of the righteous complete indifference to works, and, that, in language apparently most affecting and sublime.
These two thoughts, that Christ would thus be restored to His place of honour and man secure evangelical freedom, were a great temptation to many hearers of Luther’s call to leave the Catholic Church. In all great intellectual revolutions there are always at work certain impelling ideas, either true ones which rightly prove attractive, or false ones which yet assume the appearance of truth and thus move people’s minds. Without the intervention of the two thoughts just referred to, the spread of the religious movement in the 16th century is not fully to be explained.
How many of the apostles and followers of the new preaching were really moved by these two thoughts must even then have been difficult to determine. Noble and privileged souls may not have been wanting amongst them. The masses, however, introduced so earthly an element into these better and pious ideals that the ideals only remained as a pretext, a very effective pretext indeed, to allege for their own pacification and in extenuation of their other aims. Great watchwords, once put forward, often serve as a useful cloak for other things. In this respect the demand for the freedom of the Gospel proved very popular. The age clamoured to be set free from bonds which were proving irksome, for instance, to mention but one point, from exorbitant ecclesiastical dues and spiritual penalties. Hence evangelical freedom was readily accepted as synonymous with deliverance, and, in time, ceased to be “evangelical” at all.
That Luther’s doctrine of works and of the freedom bestowed by Christ the fulfiller of the Law, embodied a great moral danger, is now recognised even by Protestants.
“How terribly dangerous,” a Protestant Church-historian says, “is that ‘To be for ever and ever secure of life in Christ’ in the sense in which Luther understands it! We Protestants are merely toning it down when we find in it simply the consciousness of being supported by God; to Luther it is much more ... it is a feeling of spiritual mastery.” The author quotes as descriptive of Luther’s attitude the characteristic watchword from his writing “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen”: “The Christian is so far exalted above everything by faith that he becomes spiritually lord over all, for there is nothing that can endanger his salvation.” To these we may append Luther’s spoken words: “This is Christian freedom ... to have no need of any work in order to attain to piety and salvation”; a Christian may say: I possess “such a Saviour that I need have no fear of death, and am certain of life for ever and ever; I can snap my fingers at the devil and his hell, and am no longer called upon to tremble before the wrath of God.”[1611] The same writer also points out, that, according to Luther, this happy believer “remains for all this inwardly (‘intrinsece’) a sinner and is righteous only outwardly (‘extrinsece’).” From such teaching as this respect for works was bound to suffer: the question of “religion and morality,” whether from the point of view of religion in the process of salvation or from the point of view of morals in social action, could not be satisfactorily solved thereby. “In both cases morality comes short. Theologically no sufficient bulwark is erected against misinterpretation.” “Luther had trouble enough, and through his own fault, in stemming the incroachments of immorality.”
More strongly, and with the frankness usual in the polemics of his day, Willibald Pirkheimer, Luther’s former friend, voices the same thought when he speaks of the “not evangelical, but rather devilish freedom” which, owing to the preaching of the new “evangelical truth,” had made itself so “shockingly” felt amongst so many apostates, both male and female, and had induced him, after long hesitation, to betake himself back to the Catholic fold.[1612]
Before quoting the opinion of other critics of the preaching against works in his own time, we may give Luther the chance to describe the extent of his opposition to the olden doctrine.
He is determined, as he says as early as 1516, “to root out utterly the stupid, fleshly affectation that trusts in such works.”[1613] “Many graces and merits,” so he taught even then, “lead man from God; we are so ready to rely on good works, more than on God Himself”; yet we should rather, “in absolute nakedness, pay homage to God’s mercy from the bottom of our heart.”[1614] “The multitude of our sins must not arouse despair, what should make us distrustful is any striving after good works”; we “ought rather to take refuge in the mercy of God.” The sense of good works is our ruin, for it induces in us “a feeling of self-righteousness.”[1615] The latter words portray his own psychological state at that time. It was these lax ideas that led to his quarrel with the Observantines amongst his brethren and with the so-called “Little Saints.” Here also we have an echo from the world of thought already described as the real starting-point of his sad development.