The letter discussed the objections alleged by Brenz, the influential promoter of the innovations in Suabia, against Luther’s doctrine of Justification, particularly as formulated in the Augsburg Confession, and against Melanchthon’s appeal therein to St. Augustine; Brenz urged that some effort on man’s part certainly intervened in the work of pardon. In the reply Augustine is practically given up. Brenz is told that he is wrong in clinging to Augustine’s fancy (“hæres in Augustini imaginatione”) which puts our righteousness in the fulfilment of the Law. “Avert your eyes from such a regeneration of man and from the Law and look only to the promises and to Christ.... Augustine is not in agreement with the doctrine of Paul [read ‘of Luther’], though he comes nearer to it than do the Schoolmen. I quote Augustine as in entire agreement (prorsus ὁμόψηχος), although he does not sufficiently explain the righteousness of faith; this I do because of public opinion concerning him.” What he means is: Since Augustine is universally held in such high esteem, and has been instanced by us, for this reason I too quote him as though on this point he agreed entirely with Paul, which, as a matter of fact, is not the case.[1641]
Melanchthon next deals more closely with the new idea of righteousness. He hints that, in the Augsburg documents, he had not been able to speak as he was now doing to Brenz,[1642] although, so he persuades himself, he was really saying the same then as now. He gives Brenz what, compared with Luther’s blunt words at the end, is a very polished rendering of the Wittenberg doctrine. “Dismiss the fancy of Augustine entirely from your mind,” he concludes, “and then you will readily understand the reason [why only faith can justify]; I hope that then you will find in our ‘Apologia’ [of the Confession] some profit, though in it I was obliged to express many things with that timidity which can only be understood in struggles of conscience (‘in certaminibus conscientiarum’). It is essential to bring to the ears of the people the preaching of the Law and of penance, but the above true doctrine of the Gospel must not be lost sight of.”—To retire with his holed theology into the mystic obscurity of the “struggles of conscience” was an art that the pupil had learnt from his master.
Luther, unlike Melanchthon, was no adept on the tight-rope; in his postscript he bluntly dismisses the Law, penance and all works so far as they are intended to assist in sanctification as Brenz like the Papists thought; his cry is “Christ alone.” Not even in “love or the gifts that follow from it,” does our salvation lie; in this work nothing within ourselves plays any part, therefore “away with all reference to the Law and to works,” away too, with the thought of “Christ as Rewarder!” “In the stead of every ‘qualitas’ in myself, whether termed faith or love, I simply set Jesus Christ and say: This is my righteousness, this is my ‘qualitas’ and my ‘formalis iustitia,’ as they call it.” Thus only had he everything in himself, thus only did Christ become the “way, the truth and the life” to him, without “effecting this in me from without; in me, not, however, through me, He Himself must remain, live and speak.” Of Augustine Luther indeed says nothing in this passage, but he could not have expressed more strongly the purely mechanical conception of justification, nor have rejected more emphatically every human work, even man’s co-operation under grace.
With this decision Brenz in his letters to Luther and Melanchthon declared himself satisfied, likewise with the instruction received, “which was worthy of a place in the canon of Scripture.”
It is unfortunate, however, that Conrad Cordatus, one of Luther’s favourite pupils, when consigning to his Notes the joint declarations of Luther and Melanchthon, should have registered a protest against “Philip’s innovations.” His quarrel with Philip Melanchthon on the doctrine of Justification was one of the many phases of the dissensions called forth in the Protestant camp by the “article on which the Church stands or falls.”[1643]
Against any citation of St. Augustine the Lutheran theologians and preachers in Pomerania protested during the negotiations for the formula of Concord. By thus falsely alleging this Father, they said in their declaration at the Synod of Stettin in 1577, a formidable weapon was placed in the hands of their Catholic opponents of which they had not failed to avail themselves against the Protestants; they were also assuming the responsibility for a public lie: “Augustine’s book ‘De spiritu et littera’ teaches concerning Justification what the Papists teach to-day.” In the following year they declared against the form of the “first ‘Confessio Augustana,’ as published at Wittenberg in 1531 by Luther and our other fathers,” again on the ground that “there Augustine’s ‘consensus’ is alleged.”[1644] In Mecklenburg the strictures of the Synods of Pomerania were accepted as perfectly warranted. David Chytræus, Professor at Rostock and once a member of Melanchthon’s household, stated about that time, that Erhard Schnepf, the Würtemberg theologian, who was of the same way of thinking as Johann Brenz, had declared in 1544, i.e. during Luther’s lifetime, in a public discourse at Tübingen, that in the whole of Augustine there was not a syllable concerning the righteousness of Christ being imputed to us by faith.[1645] When Chytræus adds that Augustine “was ὁμόψηχος with the Papists,” it is very likely that he was countering the opposite use of this same word by Melanchthon in the passage mentioned above; the latter’s epistle to Brenz had then already been printed.
The real teaching of St. Augustine is best seen in his anxiety that man should co-operate with all the power furnished by the assistance of God’s grace, in the attainment of his salvation. The wholesome fear of God he reckons first, after the necessary condition of faith has been fulfilled. Of the acts of moral preparation (fear, hope, love, penance and good resolutions) for obtaining the grace of Justification from God, he regards fear as the element, without which a man “never, or hardly ever,” reaches God.[1646] To show the necessity of works and a good intention he appeals to texts in the Epistle of St. James rejected by Luther, where we read: “You see that by works a man is justified and not by faith only” (ii. 24). Here he goes so far as to suggest that James probably spoke so explicitly of works because the passages on faith in Paul’s Epistles had been misunderstood by some.[1647]
“We say,” so he teaches in opposition to Luther concerning the destruction of sin in man by baptism, “that baptism brings the remission of all sins, and not merely erases them, but actually removes them (‘auferre crimina non radere’); the roots of sin do not remain in the corrupt flesh, so that the sins have not to grow again and be again cut off like the hair of our heads.”[1648]
The righteousness which is bestowed on the sinner is, in his view, no imputed righteousness of Christ but a personal righteousness actually residing in man. Hence he explains that the “Justice of God,” referred to in Rom. iii. 21 f., is not that whereby God is just, but that with which He provides the impious man when justifying him; in the same way the “faith of Christ” mentioned there is “not a faith by which Christ believes, but the faith that is in us.” “Both are ours, but they are ascribed to God and Christ because bestowed on us by the Divine favour.”[1649] The righteousness bestowed on us is “that which Adam lost by sin”; Adam’s righteousness was a quality inherent in him, not the imputed righteousness of Christ.[1650] It is also the same grace which is infused into adults in Justification and which children receive in baptism.[1651] By sanctifying grace the soul is inwardly ennobled, “for when nature’s Creator justifies it by grace, it ceases to be an object of horror and becomes a thing of beauty.”[1652] The Holy Ghost dwells in us and “God gives us therewith no less a gift than Himself.”[1653] Thus “as the soul is the life of the body, so God is the life of the soul.”[1654]