Luther, vol. 4 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

All honour was to be given to Christ as God; this right and praiseworthy view, which Luther was indefatigable in expressing, misled him in the matter of the veneration and invocation of Mary and the Saints. Of this he would not hear, though such had ever been the practice of the Church, and though it is hard to see how God’s glory can suffer any derogation through the honour paid to His servants. In this Luther went astray; the dogma of the adorable Divinity of Jesus Christ was, however, always to remain to him something sacred and sublime.

Statements to Luther’s advantage from various Instructions. His Language.

In his sermons Luther was so firm in upholding the Divinity of Christ, in opposition to the scepticism he thought he detected in other circles, that one cannot but be favourably impressed. He was filled with the liveliest sense of man’s duty of submitting his reason to this mystery; he even goes too far, in recommending abdication of the intellect and in his disparagement of human reason; what he is anxious to do is to make all his religious feeling culminate in a trusting faith in the words: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son for us.”

In his sermons and instructions he demands a similar yielding of reason to faith with regard to the mystery of Christ’s Presence in the Sacrament, though in this case he had not shrunk from twisting the doctrine to suit his own ideas. It would hardly be possible to maintain more victoriously against all gainsayers the need of standing by the literal sense, or at least of excluding any figurative interpretation of, the words of institution “This is My Body,” than Luther did in many of his pronouncements against the Sacramentarians.[810]

With advancing years, and in view of the dissensions and confusion prevailing in the Reformed camp, he came to insist more and more on those positive elements, which, for all his aversion for the ancient Church, he had never ceased to defend. Of this we have a monument in one of his last works, viz. the “Kurtz Bekentnis,” to which we shall return later. Embittered by the scepticism apparent in Zwinglianism and elsewhere, which, as he thought, threatened to sap all religion, he there obeys his heart’s instincts and gives the fullest expression to his faith in general and not merely to his belief in Christ’s presence in the Sacrament.[811]

Concerning the Sacrament of the Altar he gave the following noteworthy answer to a question put to him jointly, in 1544, by the three princely brothers of Anhalt, viz. whether they should do away with the Elevation of the Sacrament in the liturgy. “By no means,” he replied, “for such abrogation would tend to diminish respect for the Sacrament and cause it to be undervalued. When Dr. Pommer abolished the Elevation [at Wittenberg, in 1542] during my absence, I did not approve of it, and now I am even thinking of re-introducing it. For the Elevation is one thing, the carrying about of the Sacrament in procession quite another [at Wittenberg Luther would not allow such processions of the Sacrament]. If Christ is truly present in the Bread (‘in pane’), why should He not be treated with the utmost respect and even be adored?”—Joachim, Prince of Anhalt, added, when relating this: “We saw how Luther bowed low at the Elevation with great devotion and reverently worshipped Christ.”[812]

Certain controversialists have undoubtedly been in the wrong in making out Luther to have been sceptical about, or even opposed at heart to, many of the ancient dogmas which he never attacked, for instance, the Trinity, or the Divinity of Christ. A few vague and incautious statements occasionally let slip by him are more than counterbalanced by a wealth of others which tell in favour of his faith, and he himself would have been the last to admit the unfortunate inferences drawn more or less rightly from certain propositions emitted by him. It is a lucky thing, that, in actual life, error almost always claims the right of not being bound down too tightly in the chains of logic. When Luther, for instance, made every man judge of the meaning of the Bible, he was setting up a principle which must have dissolved all cohesion between Christians, and thus, of necessity, he was compelled to limit, somewhat illogically, the application of the principle.

In a passage frequently cited against him, where he shows himself vexed with the ancient term employed by the Church to express the Son’s being of the same substance with the Father (“homoousios”), it was not his intention to rail against the doctrine therein expressed, but merely to take exception to the word. He explicitly distinguishes between the word and the thing (“vocabulum et res”). He says that, so long as one holds fast to the doctrine (“modo rem teneam”) scripturally defined by the Nicene Council, it was no heresy to dislike the word or to refuse to employ it.[813] Hence the passage affords no ground for saying, that “Luther was rash enough to tamper with the doctrine of the Person of Christ.” On the other hand, the new doctrine of the omnipresence of the Body of Christ evolved by him during the controversy on the Sacrament, can scarcely be considered creditable.[814] His views on the “communicatio idiomatum”[815] in Christ, and particularly on the Redemption,[816] also contain contradictions not to be explained away.

Contrariwise we must dismiss the charge based on his repugnance for the word “Threefoldhood,” by which Germans designate the Trinity, as if this involved antagonism on his part to the mystery itself. He was referring merely to the term when he said: “It is not particularly good German and does not sound well, but since it cannot be improved upon, we must speak as best we can.”[817] An undeniable confession of faith in the Trinity is contained in this very passage, and in countless others too.—When abbreviating the Litany he indeed omitted the invocation “Sancta Trinitas unus Deus,” but this was not from any hostility to the doctrine but from a wish not to have “too many words.” He left in their old places the separate invocations of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and deemed this quite sufficient.

By his retention of the belief in the three Divine Persons and in the Divinity of the Redeemer, Luther was instrumental in preserving among his future followers a treasure inherited from past ages, in which not a few have found their consolation. We must not be unmindful of how he strove to defend it from the assaults of unbelief, in his time still personified in Judaism. He did not sin by debasing the Second Person of the Trinity, but rather by foisting on God Incarnate attributes which are not really His; for instance, by arguing that, owing to the intimacy of the two Natures, Divine and Human, in Christ, His Human Nature must be as omnipresent as His Divine; or, again, by teaching that mere belief in one’s redemption and sanctification suffices to destroy sin; or, again, when his too lively eschatological fancy led him to see Christ, the Almighty conqueror of the devil and his world, already on the point of coming to the Judgment. And just as Christ’s Godhead was the very fulcrum of all his teaching, so he defended likewise the other Articles of the Apostles’ Creed with such courage, force and eloquence, as, since his death, few of his followers have found themselves capable of. About the Person of the Redeemer he wove all the usual Christological doctrines, His Virgin Birth, His truly miraculous Resurrection, His descent into Hell, His Ascension and Second Advent; finally, also, the resurrection of the dead, the future Judgment, and the everlasting Heaven and everlasting Hell. From the well-spring of the ancient creed, under God’s Grace, Lutherans without number have drawn and still continue to draw motives for doing what is good, consolation amidst affliction and strength to lead pious lives.