Were Protestants to bestow more attention on the religious literature of the Later Middle Ages, such statements would be simply impossible. One of those best acquainted with this literature writes: “During the last few months the present writer has gone carefully, pen in hand, through more than one hundred printed and manuscript religious works, written in German and belonging to the end of the Middle Ages: catechetical handbooks, general works of piety, confession manuals, postils, prayer-books, booklets on preparation for death and German sermonaries. In this way he has learnt from the most reliable sources not only how in those days people were guided to devout intercourse with God, but also with what fervent piety the faithful were accustomed to converse with their Saviour.” Let Protestants, he adds, at least attempt to vindicate their pet assertions “scientifically, i.e. from trustworthy sources.”[386]
The relations between the individual and God were by no means suppressed because the priesthood stood as an intermediary between the faithful and God, or because ecclesiastical superiors watched over and directed public worship and the lines along which the life of faith was to move. If the union of the individual with God was endangered by such interference on the part of the clergy, then it was endangered just as much by Luther, who insists so strongly on the preachers being listened to, and on the ministers taking the lead in things pertaining to God.
He teaches, for instance: “It is an unsufferable blasphemy to reject the public ministry or to say that people can become holy without sermons and Church. This involves a destruction of the Church and rebellion against ecclesiastical order; such upheavals must be warded off and punished like all other revolts.”[387]
The fact is, the ecclesiastical order of things to which Luther attached himself more and more strongly amounted to this, as he declares in various passages of his Table-Talk. Through the ministers and preachers, as through His servants, God speaks to man; through them God baptises, instructs and absolves; what the ministers of the Gospel say and do, that God Himself does through and in us as His instruments. Whoever does not believe this, Luther looks on as damned. In a sermon of 1528, speaking of the spiritual authority which intervenes between God and man, he exclaims: “God requires for His Kingdom pious Bishops and pastors, through them he governs His subjects [the Emperor, on the other hand, so he had said, had not even to be a Christian since the secular power was all outward and merely served to restrain evil-doers].[388] If you will not hearken to these Bishops and pastors, then you will have to listen to Master Hans [the hangman] and get no thanks either.”[389]
He uses similar language in his sermons on Matthew: “God, by means of Prophets and Apostles, ministers and preachers, baptises, gives the sacraments, preaches and consoles; without preachers and holy persons, He does nothing, just as He does not govern land and people without the secular power.”[390]
Hence Luther shows himself very anxious to establish a kind of hierarchy. If then he charges the priesthood of the past with putting itself between God and man, it is hard to see how he is to avoid a similar charge being brought forward against himself. Moreover, at the bottom of his efforts, memories of his Catholic days were at work, and the feeling that an organised ministry was called for if the religious sentiment was not to die out completely among the people. His practical judgment of the conditions even appears here in a favourable light, for instance, in those passages where he insists on the authority of rightly appointed persons to act as intermediaries between God and man, and as vicars and representatives of Christ. The word Christ spoke on earth and the word of the preacher, are, he says, one and the same “re et effectu,” because Christ said: “He that heareth you heareth me” (Luke x. 16); “God deals with us through these instruments, through them He works everything and offers us all His treasures.”[391] Indeed, “it is our greatest privilege that we have such a ministry and that God is so near to us; for he that hears Christ hears God Himself; and he that hears St. Peter or a preacher, hears Christ and God Himself speaking to us.”[392]
“We must always esteem the spoken Word very highly, for those who despise it become heretics at once. The Pope despises this ministry”[393] [!]. God, however, “has ordained that no one should have faith, except thanks to the preacher’s office,” and, “without the Word, He does no work whatever in the Church.”[394]
Thus we find Luther, on the one hand insisting upon an authority, and, on the other, demanding freedom for the interpretation of Scripture. How he sought to harmonise the two is reserved for later examination. At any rate, it is to misapprehend both the Catholic Church and Luther’s own theological attitude, to say that “independent study of religious questions” had been forbidden in the Middle Ages and was “reintroduced” only by Luther, that he removed the “blinkers” which the Church had placed over people’s eyes and that henceforward “the representatives of the Church had no more call to assume the place of the Living God in man’s regard.”
Luther also laid claim to having revived respect for the secular authorities, who, during the Middle Ages, had been despised owing to the one-sided regard shown to the monks and clergy. He declares that he had again brought people to esteem the earthly calling, family life and all worldly employments as being a true serving of God. Boldly he asserts, that, before my time, “the authorities did not know they were serving God”; “before my time nobody knew ... what the secular power, what matrimony, parents, children, master, servant, wife or maid really signified.” On the strength of his assertions it has been stated, that he revived the “ideal of life” by discovering the “true meaning of vocation,” which then became the “common property of the civilised world”; on this account he was “the creator of those theories which form the foundation upon which the modern State and modern civilisation rest.”
The fact is, however, the Church of past ages fully recognised the value of the secular state and spheres of activity, saw in them a Divine institution, and respected and cherished them accordingly.