Even in 1517 in his unpublished Commentary on Hebrews we find a remarkable and oft-repeated admonition which bears on the subject in hand. He sees the troubled conscience “in fear and oppressed whichever way it turns”; hence it must learn to embrace faith in the power of Christ’s blood: “By faith conscience is cleansed and put to rest.” It is this faith in the blood of Christ which we must seek with all our powers to reach. It follows, “that the best of contemplating the sufferings of Christ is that it awakens in the soul this faith or believing trust.” “The oftener he dwells on the Passion, the more strongly will every man believe that the blood of Christ was shed for his own sins. This is ‘to eat and drink spiritually,’ i.e. to feed on Christ in faith and thus become one body with Him.”[1487]
On the other hand, the teaching of antiquity concerning meditation on Christ’s Passion and likewise the hints contained in the language of the Church’s liturgy, do not stop short at such an arousing of faith. Taking for granted the Christian’s faith, what they seek to awaken is a real love; meditation on the sufferings and death of our Lord was above all to stimulate the faithful to feelings of loving gratitude, holy compassion and self-sacrifice; in wholesome compunction people were wont, by dwelling on the sufferings of the innocent Lamb, to rouse themselves to a sense of shame, to a holy desire to imitate Christ by good works of self-conquest and by zeal for souls. The ancient hymn, the “Stabat Mater,” which is at the same time so profound and wonderful a prayer, says never a word of faith, precious as this grace is, but, taking it for granted as the groundwork, it teaches us to pray: “Fac ut tecum lugeam—fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum—passionis fac consortem,” etc. This is surely something higher than that mere appropriation of trusting faith in which Luther sums up all the heights and depths of our union with Christ.
Luther, in his exaggerated language, declares that it was something “almost Gentile” for a man when contemplating the Passion of Christ to “strive after anything else but faith”; this statement, however, he refutes in practice by himself occasionally introducing other good and moral reflexions on the Passion, though he is always chiefly concerned with its bearing on his own peculiar view of faith.
He was too ready to confuse the sentiment of faith with actual faith.
Religious writers before Luther’s day, when dealing with distrust and unbelief, had been careful to distinguish between the involuntary acts of man’s lower nature which do not rise above the realm of feeling, and those which have the definite consent of the will and which alone they regarded as grievous sins against faith or the virtue of hope. With Luther everything is sin; he bewails the actual distrust, and real weakness of faith springing from a fault of the will; but, according to him, the involuntary movements of our corrupt nature also deserve God’s signal anger; original sin whereby we bring this upon ourselves must daily be cloaked over by means of the faith wrought by God. But since it is God alone Who works this faith Luther might well have excused himself even had he lost the faith completely. When he is upset and begins to reproach himself as he often does on account of the weakness of his faith, he is really saying good-bye to his own teaching and again reverting to the standpoint of the olden faith, for only the assumption of man’s free-will can justify self-reproaches.
“Sin” and “the devil” are made to bear the blame for the deeds of man who lacks free-will.
“The sin which still persists in us,” says Luther, in his last sermon at Eisleben,[1488] “compels us not to believe.” “Because we have it daily before our eyes and at our door, it goes in at one ear and out at the other.” “This is what the rude, savage folk do who care nought for God and place no trust in Him; we, the best of Christians, also do the same.” “We are too prone to obey original sin, the taint of evil which yet sticks to our flesh, and although we would willingly believe, and are fond of hearing and reading God’s Word, still we cannot rise as high as we ought.”[1489] Before this he had said: “If a man were to ask you: Good fellow, do you believe that the Son of God ... died for your sins? and that it is really true? You would have to say—did you wish to answer right and truthfully and as you really feel—and confess with dismay, that you cannot after all believe it so strongly and indubitably.... You would have to say.... Alas, I see and feel that I do not ... believe as I ought.”[1490] Later he returns to this thought which evidently was much before his mind: “Although we cannot now believe so strongly as we should, still God has patience with us.”[1491] Yet “we ought to go on and believe more firmly and be angered with ourselves and say: Heavenly Father, is it true that I must believe that Thou didst send Thine only-begotten Son into the world?... And when I hear that there is no doubt, then I shall go on to say: Well, for this shall I thank God all the days of my life and praise and extol Him.”[1492]
In reality, according to him, we should “run and jump for joy” because by faith “we hear the Lord Christ speaking.” “The life of the Christian ought, by rights, to be all joy and delight, but there are few who really feel this joy.” The martyrs, with their glad, nay, even jubilant confession of faith amidst their torments, are to him an example of a sound, hardy, unshaken faith, for in them the Word was strong and the teaching of the Gospel all-powerful.[1493] But, as he had remarked in another of his Eisleben sermons, “We, owing to the weakness of our faith, feel doubts and fears, as by our very nature we cannot help doing”; yet we must “have wisdom enough again and again to run to Christ and cry aloud and awaken Him with our shouts and prayers.”[1494]