There can be no doubt that this is a defect in a teacher who comes forward as the founder of a denomination and as the restorer of Christian doctrine, and who, in his quality of “Prophet of the Germans,” declares: “Before me people knew nothing.” After all, precision and coherence of doctrines form a test of their truth.
In reality the facts of the case are only indicated in a veiled way in the Protestant admissions just recorded. The truth is, as the reader has already had many an occasion to see, that, with Luther, one assertion frequently invalidates the other. Even in the field of moral teaching we find him at utter variance with himself, and his contradictions become particularly glaring as soon as he passes from theory to practice. Here it is easy to seize the “consummate contradictions of his theology,” of which a present-day Protestant theologian ventures boldly to speak; we may also subscribe to what this same writer says, viz. that Luther hardened his heart against certain consequences of his own religious principles.[1707] (Cp. p. 415, 447; vol. ii., p. 312, etc.)
The Regula Fidei.
Such a denial of the consequences of the principles of his doctrine lies first and foremost in the fact that Luther summed up in a Rule of Faith the various dogmas to which it was his intention to remain true. The “regula fidei,” such as he wished to bequeath to posterity, he saw expressed in the Confession of Augsburg, and in the oldest Œcumenical Creeds of the Church.
It has already been seen that the radicalism involved in his religious attitude should by rights have issued in a freedom, nay, licence, which would have rendered impossible any binding formularies of faith.
It is also the opinion of most modern Protestant theologians that the definition of doctrine which began with the Confession of Augsburg, or in fact with the Articles of Marburg, really constituted an unjustifiable encroachment on the freedom of religious thought inaugurated by Luther. Luther indeed invested these doctrinal formularies with all the weight of his authority, yet, according to these theologians, they represented a “narrowing” of the Evangelical ideas advocated by him; nor can it be gainsaid that the revolutionary ideas for which Luther stood from about 1520 to 1523 justify such strictures.[1708]
“This promising spring,” writes Adolf Harnack, a representative of theological freedom, “was followed by no real summer. In those years Luther was lifted above himself and seemed to have overcome the limitations of his peculiar temperament.”... But Luther unfortunately reverted to his limitations. Nor were they “merely a light vesture, or as some would fain have us believe, due simply to lack of comprehension on the part of Melanchthon and other henchmen, for Luther himself saw in them the very foundation of his strength and made the fullest use of them as such.”[1709]
In other words, his contradiction with his own original principles became to him, so to speak, a second nature. He was in deadly earnest with the dogmas which he retained, and which were comprised in the official Articles of faith. In so far, therefore, he may be said to have turned away from the consequences of his own action and to have striven to slam the door which he had opened to unbelief and private judgment.
Of the Confession of Augsburg, the most important of these declarations of faith, Harnack says: “That the Gospel of the Reformation found masterly expression in the ‘Augustana,’ that I cannot admit. The ‘Augustana’ founded a teaching Church; on it must be laid the blame for the narrowing of the movement of reform. Could such a thing have been written previous to 1526, or even previous to 1529?”
After admitting elsewhere the advantages of the Confession of Augsburg, Harnack proceeds: “It is possible by retracing our steps to arrive through it at the broader Evangelical ideas without which there would never have been a Reformation or an ‘Augustana.’ With regard to their author, however, it is no use blinking the fact, that here Melanchthon undertook, or rather was forced to undertake, a task to which his gifts and his character were not equal.”[1710] “In the theology of Melanchthon the moralist, who stands at the side of Luther the Evangelist, we discern attempts to amend Luther’s theology.... Melanchthon, however, felt himself cramped by having to act as the guardian of Lutheranism. We cannot take it ill if Lutherans prefer to err with Luther their hero, rather than submit to be put in Melanchthon’s leading-strings.”[1711]