Not only was Agricola’s fickleness not calculated to inspire confidence, but his life also left much to be desired from the moral standpoint. Though Luther was perhaps unaware of it, we learn from Agricola’s own private Notes, that the “vices in which the young take delight” had assailed him in riper years even more strongly than in his youth. Seckendorff also implies that he did not lead a “regular life.”[66]
In 1547 Agricola, together with Julius Pflug, Bishop of Naumburg, and Helding, auxiliary of Mayence, drew up the Augsburg Interim. As General Superintendent of the Brandenburg district and at the invitation of his Elector he assisted in the following year at the religious Conferences of the Saxon theologians. He died at Berlin, Sep. 22, 1566, of a disease resulting from the plague.
Of the feeling called forth in circles friendly to Luther by Agricola’s part in the Interim we have proof in the preface which introduces in the edition of 1549 Luther’s letter of 1539 to the Saxon Court. Here we read: If the Eisleben fellow (Agricola) “was ever a dissolute sharper, who secretly promoted false doctrine and made use of the favour and applause of the pious as a cloak for his knavery,” much more has this now become apparent by his outcry concerning the Interim and the alleged good it does. The editors recall the fact, that “Our worthy father in God, Dr. Martin Luther of happy memory, shortly before his end, in the presence of Dr. Pommer, Philip, Creutziger, Major, Jonas and D. Paulus Benedictus” spoke as follows: “Eisleben (Agricola) is not merely ridden by the devil but the devil himself lodges in him.” In proof of the latter statement they add, that trustworthy persons, who had good grounds for their opinion, had declared, that “it was the simple truth that devils had visibly appeared in Eisleben’s house and study, and at times had made a great disturbance and clatter; whence it is clear that he is the devil’s own in body and soul.” “The truth,” they conclude, “is clear and manifest. God gives us warnings enough in the writings of pious and learned persons and also by signs in the sky and in the waters. Let whoever wills be admonished and warned. For to each one it is a matter of life eternal; to which may God assist us through Christ our Lord, Amen.”[67]
A writing of Melanchthon’s, dating from the last months of his life and brought to light only in 1894, gives further information concerning a later phase of the Antinomian controversy as fought out between Agricola and Melanchthon.[68]
Melanchthon, for all his supposed kindliness, here empties the vials of his wrath on Johann Agricola because the latter had vehemently assailed his thesis “Bona opera sunt necessaria.” As a matter of fact, so he writes, he bothered himself as little about Agricola’s “preaching, slander, abuse, insistence and threats” as about the “cackle of some crazy gander.” But Christian people were becoming scandalised at “this grand preacher of blasphemy” and were beginning to suspect his own (Melanchthon’s) faith. Hence he would have them know that Agricola’s component parts were an “asinine righteousness, a superstitious arrogance and an Epicurean belly-service.” To his thesis he could not but adhere to his last breath, even were he to be torn to pieces with red-hot pincers. He had refrained from adding the words “ad salutem” after “necessaria” lest the unwary should think of some merit. The “ad salutem” was an addition of Agricola’s, that “foolish man,” who had thrust it on him by means of a “shameless and barefaced lie.” He is anxious to win his spurs off the Lutherans. Yet donkeys of his ilk do understand nothing in the matter, and God will “punish these blasphemers and disturbers of the Churches.” But in order that “a final end may at length be put to the evil doing, slander, abuse and cavilling it will,” he says, “be necessary for God to send the Turk; nothing else will help in such a case.” Melanchthon compares himself to Joseph, who was sold by his brethren. If Joseph had to endure this “in the first Church,” what then “will be my fate in the extreme old age of this mad world (‘extrema mundi delira senecta’) when licence wanders abroad unrestrained to sully everything and when such unspeakably cruel hypocrites control our destinies? I can only pray to God that He will deign to come to the aid of His Church and graciously heal all the gaping wounds dealt her by her foes. Amen.”
A certain reaction against the Antinomian tendency, is, as already explained, noticeable in Luther’s latter years; at least he felt called upon to revise a little his former standpoint with regard to the Law, the motive of fear, indifference to sin and so forth, and to remove it from the danger of abuse. He was also at pains to contradict the view that his doctrine of faith involved an abrogation of the Law. “The fools do not know,” he remarked, for instance, alluding to Jacob Schenk, “all that faith has to do.”[69]
In his controversy with Agricola we can detect a tendency on his part “to revert to Melanchthon’s doctrine concerning repentance.”[70] He insisted far more strongly than before[71] on the necessity of preaching the Law in order to arouse contrition; he even went so far along Catholic lines as to assert, that “Penance is sorrow for sin with the resolve to lead a better life.”[72] He also admitted, that, at the outset, he had said things which the Antinomians now urged against the Law, though he also strove to show that he had taken pains to qualify and safeguard what he had said. Nor indeed can Luther ever have expected that all the strong things he had once hurled against the Law and its demands would ever be used to build up a new moral theology.
And yet, even at the height of the Antinomian controversy, he stood firmly by his thesis regarding the Law, fear and contrition, viz. that “Whoever seeks to be led to repentance by the Law, will never attain to it, but, on the contrary, will only turn his back on it the more”;[73] to this he was ever true.
“Luther,” says Adolf Harnack, “could never doubt that only the Christian who has been vanquished by the Gospel is capable of true repentance, and that the Law can work no real repentance.”[74] The fact however remains, that, at least if we take his words as they stand, we do find in Luther a doctrine of repentance which does not claim faith in the forgiveness of sins so exclusively as its source.[75] The fact is that his statements do not tally.[76] Other Protestant theologians will have it that no change took place in Luther’s views on penance,[77] or at least that the attempts so far made to solve the problem are not satisfactory.[78] Stress should, however, be laid on the fact, that, during his contest with Antinomianism Luther insisted that it was necessary “to drive men to penance even by the terrors of the Law,”[79] and that, alluding to his earlier statements, he admits having had much to learn: “I have been made to experience the words of St. Peter, ‘Grow in the knowledge of the Lord.’”
Of the converted, i.e. of those justified by the certainty of salvation, he says in 1538 in his Disputations against Agricola: The pious Christian as such “is dead to the Law and serves it not, but lies in the bosom of grace, secure in the righteousness imputed to him by God.... But, so far as he is still in the flesh, he serves the law of sin, repulsive as it may sound that a saint should be subject to the law of sin.”[80] If Luther finds in the saint or devout man such a double life, a free man side by side with a slave, holiness side by side with sin, this is on account of the concupiscence, or as Luther says elsewhere, original sin, which still persists, and the results of which he regarded as really sinful in God’s sight.