Whence does our will derive the ability and strength to wage this struggle to the end? Only from the assurance of salvation, from its unshaken awareness that it has indeed a Gracious God. For this certainty of faith sets one free, first of all from those anxieties with regard to one’s salvation with which the righteous-by-works are plagued and thus allows one to devote time and strength to doing what is good; secondly this faith in one’s salvation teaches one how to overcome the difficulties that stand in one’s way.[91]
There was, however, an objection raised against Luther by his contemporaries and which even presented itself to his own mind: Why should a lifelong struggle and the performance of good works be requisite for a salvation of which we are already certain? It was re-formulated even by Albert Ritschl, in whose work, “Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung,” we find the words: “If one asks why God, Who makes salvation to depend on Justification by faith, prescribes good works at all, the arbitrary character of the assumption becomes quite evident.”[92] In Luther’s own writings we repeatedly hear the same stricture voiced: “If sin is forgiven me gratuitously by God’s Mercy and is blotted out in baptism, then there is nothing for me to do.” People say, “If faith is everything and suffices of itself to make us pious, why then are good works enjoined?”[93]
In order to render Luther’s meaning adequately we must emphasise his leading answer to such objections. He is determined to insist on good works, because, as he says, they are of the utmost importance to the one thing on which everything else depends, viz. to faith and the assurance of salvation.[94]
In his “Sermon von den guten Wercken,” which deserves to be taken as conclusive, he declares outright that all good works are ordained—for the sake of faith. “Such works and sufferings must be performed in faith and in firm trust in the Divine mercy, in order that, as already stated, all works may come under the first commandment and under faith, and that they may serve to exercise and strengthen faith, on account of which all the other commandments and works are demanded.”[95] Hence morality is necessary, not primarily in order to please God, to obey Him and thus to work out our salvation, but in order to strengthen our “fides specialis” in our own salvation, which then does all the needful.[96] It is necessary, as Luther says elsewhere, in order to provide a man with a reassuring token of the reality of his “fides specialis”; he may for instance be tempted to doubt whether he possesses this saving gift of God, though the very doubt already spells its destruction; hence let him look at his works; if they are good, they will tell him at the dread hour of death: Yes, you have the “faith.”[97] Strangely enough he also takes the Bible passages which deal with works performed under grace as referring to faith, e.g. “If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17) and, “By good works make your calling and election sure” (2 Peter i. 10). The latter exhortation of St. Peter signifies according to Luther’s exegesis: “Take care to strengthen your faith,” from the works “you may see whether you have the faith.”[98] According to St. Peter you are to seek in works merely “a sign and token that the faith is there”; his meaning is not that you “are to do good works in order that you may secure your election.” “We are not to fancy that thereby we can become pious.”[99]
This thought is supplemented by another frequent exhortation of Luther’s which concerns the consciousness of sin persisting even after “justification.” The sense of sin has, according to him, no other purpose than to strengthen us in our trustful clinging to Christ, for as no one’s faith is perfect we are ever called upon to fortify it, in which we are aided by this anxiety concerning sin: “Though we still feel sin within us this is merely to drive us to faith and make our faith stronger, so that despite our feeling we may accept the Word and cling with all our heart and conscience to Christ alone,” in other words, to follow Luther’s own example amidst the pangs of conscience that had plunged him into “death and hell.”[100] “Thus does faith, against all feeling and reason, lead us quietly through sin, through death and through hell.” “The more faith waxes, the more the feeling diminishes, and vice versa. Sins still persist within us, e.g. pride, avarice, anger and so on and so forth, but only in order to move us to faith.” He refrains from adducing from Holy Scripture any proof in support of so strange a theory, but proceeds to sing a pæan on faith “in order that faith may increase from day to day until man at length becomes a Christian through and through, keeps the real Sabbath, and creeps, skin, hair and all, into Christ.”[101] The Christian, by accustoming himself to trust in the pardoning grace of Christ and by fortifying himself in this faith, becomes at length “one paste with Christ.”[102]
Hence the “fides specialis” as just explained, seems to be the chief ethical aim of life.[103] This is why it is so necessary to strengthen it by works, and so essential to beat down all anxieties of conscience.
Here Luther is speaking from his own inward experience. He says: “Thus must the conscience be lulled to rest and made content, thus must all the waves and billows subside.... Our sins towered mountain-high about us and would fain have made us despair, but in the end they are calmed, and settle down, and soon are seen no longer.”[104] It was only very late in his life that Luther reached a state of comparative calm, a calm moreover best to be compared with the utter weariness of a man worn out by fatigue.[105]
Luther’s Last Sermons at Eisleben on the Great Questions of Morality
In the four sermons he preached at Eisleben—the last he ever delivered—Luther gives utterance to certain leading thoughts quite peculiar to himself regarding morality and the “fides specialis.” These utterances, under the circumstances to be regarded as the ripest fruit of his reflection, must be taken in conjunction with other statements made by him in his old age. They illustrate even more clearly than what has gone before the cardinal point of his teaching now under discussion, which, even more than any other, has had the bad luck to be so often wrongly presented by combatants on either side.