Luther, vol. 4 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

The complaints current among Luther’s friends about the bad effects of the doctrine of justification were even heard long after the tumults of the earliest religious struggles were over.

For this reason we are not justified in making out the decline which followed in the train of the new system of faith to have been merely an episode in the history of civilisation and simply the inevitable after-effect of the great upheaval in the intellectual world. It has been argued that far-reaching and disturbing changes in public life are usually accompanied by an increase of immorality among the masses, and also that the disorders dating from Catholic times bore fruit only when brought in contact with the new religion. Unfortunately in the present case we have to do with conditions which, as later witnesses show, persisted even when tranquillity had once more been restored and when the fruits of the new ideas should already have ripened. “What is here disclosed,” justly remarks Döllinger, “was the result of a system already firmly established, no mere after-effect of former conditions, but a true home produce continuing to flourish even when the thousand ties which had once linked human life and consciousness with the olden Church had long been torn and rent asunder, and when the memory of the doctrines, imagery, practices and institutions of that Church had either been completely forgotten by the people, or were known to them only through controversial references made in the pulpits and in the manuals of religious instruction.”[1670]

Andreas Hyperius, Professor at the University of Marburg and the best theological authority in Hesse († 1564), in view of the low religious and moral standards of the Protestants which he had had occasion to notice during his many journeys, declared that it was necessary, particularly in the pulpit, to be more reticent on the article of Justification by faith alone. Not indeed that he was unwilling to have this preached, yet he did not consider it advisable to continue to “declaim to the masses with such violence on faith alone,” as had hitherto been done. The state of the Church most urgently required that the people, who already troubled themselves little enough about doing good, should be spurred on to good works and, as far as possible, brought back to a faith productive of fruit.[1671] Elsewhere he describes with indignation the generally prevailing indifference towards the poor; this annoyed him all the more, as he was well aware of the loving care displayed towards them by both clergy and laity in the past.[1672]

In a document dealing with Luther’s (or rather Flacius’s) doctrine of man’s passivity in the work of conversion, the theologians of Leipzig and Wittenberg, in 1570, attributed to it the prevailing corruption. “The masses,” they said, “have been led into a wild, dissolute and godless life.... There is hardly a spot to be found in the whole world where greater modesty, honesty and virtue are not to be met with than amongst those who listen daily to God’s Word.”[1673]

Thirty years later Polycarp Leyser, the Wittenberg Professor and Superintendent, who stood for the strictest form of Lutheranism, declared: “The moral corruption to-day is so great everywhere that not only pious souls but even nature herself gives vent to uneasy groans”; as the cause of it all he mentions the delusion under which many members of the new Church laboured, viz. of fancying themselves excellent Christians so long as they boasted loudly of faith and repeated Scripture passages concerning the unspeakable mercy of God Who received sinners into His favour without any co-operation on their part, even though meanwhile they led the most shameful life.[1674]

“All these people have ever the faith in their mouths,” wrote Wolfgang Franz, the Wittenberg professor of theology, in an admonition to the Lutheran preachers (1610); “they are ever prating of faith and of nothing but faith, and yet no one can adequately describe how brimful they are of vice and sin.” For this the preachers were chiefly to blame, because they dinned Justification by faith alone into the people’s ears without further explaining it; hence many of their hearers, who did not even know the Our Father, could discourse on faith more learnedly than St. Paul; they fancied that if only they protested now and then during their lifetime that they believed in Jesus Christ, their salvation was assured; they thought that if a murderer who died after committing his crime had only time to confess Jesus with his lips he would at once soar up to heaven.[1675]

Johannes Rivius, Rector of Freiberg, and a personal friend of Luther’s, declared the very year after Luther’s death that his experience had shown him that the Lutheran peasants knew neither what they should believe nor how they ought to live, and troubled themselves little about it; the people might well be taken for Epicureans were they not perpetually boasting of their faith in Christ. He bewailed his times, distinguished as they were beyond all past ages by their immorality; corruption of morals had indeed grown so bad that ungodliness and Epicureanism had quite ousted Christianity.[1676]—Not long after, in another writing, he continued his description of the moral decay, and again and again points to the cause, viz. the false ideas of faith, law and works. “By far the greater number of people to-day take not the slightest pains to restrain the lusts of the flesh; ... they indulge in every kind of impiety, while at the same time boasting of faith and bragging of the Gospel.... When the people hear nowadays that there is no other satisfaction for sin than the death of the Redeemer, they fancy they can sin with impunity and give themselves up to luxury.... How many are there who practise real penance though making so brave a show of faith?... They say: ‘Even should you be stained with every vice, only believe and you will be saved; you need not be scared by the Law, for Christ has fulfilled it and done enough for men!’ Such words [which Luther himself had used] give great scandal to pious souls, lead men astray into a godless life and are the cause of their continuing to live hardened in vice and shame and without a thought of amendment; thus such views only serve to encourage the ungodly in vice and deprive them of every incentive to amend their lives.”[1677]

If the leaders of the innovations could speak in such a way then yet stronger charges against the doctrine of Justification and its effects may be expected from Luther’s opponents.

Johann Haner of Nuremberg, who there, in 1534, turned his back on the new faith, wrote a small book on the interpretation of Scripture which is accounted among the best and calmest of the period. The Preface shows that it was the sight of the immoral outcome of Luther’s views on faith and grace which led him to revert to Catholicism. Without mentioning Luther’s name he tells us that in his book he is going “to withstand all false, fleshly confidence,” “all freedom of the spirit which leads to destruction”; the object of his attack is that faith which is “a mere presumptuous laying claim to grace, and that Evangel which opens the door to licence of every kind,” while “telling us to trust solely in an alien righteousness, viz. the righteousness of Christ”; “these anti-Evangelicals, as they ought to be called, by their roguery and their carnal mind had turned topsy-turvy the teaching which led to true piety.”[1678]

To Wicel the convert Haner wrote a letter which was one of the causes of his expulsion from Nuremberg by the preachers and the magistrates. Here he said: “By the worthless dogma of Justification by faith alone, which is their alpha and omega, they have not merely loosed all the bonds of discipline in the Church, but also abolished all penance towards God and all unity and friendship among the brethren. Never since the earliest heresies in the Church has there been seen so poisonous and noxious a dogma, the effect of which has been none other than to make the word of the Cross foolishness to us, and to cause both charity towards the brethren and the spirit of repentance towards God to wax cold.”[1679]