Luther, vol. 5 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

Many discordant utterances, betraying his uncertainty and his struggles, have been bequeathed to us by Luther regarding the main questions of morality and as to how we may insure salvation. First we have his statements with regard to the importance of morality in God’s sight.

In 1537 in a Disputation on June 1 he denounced the thesis, “Good works are necessary for salvation.”[142] In the same way, in a sermon of 1535, he asserted that it was by no means necessary for us to perform good works “in order to blot out sin, to overcome death and win heaven, but merely for the profit and assistance of our neighbour.” “Our works,” he there says, “can only shape what concerns our temporal life and being”; higher than this they cannot rise.[143]

Yet, when thus degrading works, he had again and again to struggle within his own heart against the faith of the ancient Church concerning the merit of good deeds. Especially was this the case when he considered the “texts which demand a good life on account of the eternal reward,”[144] for instance, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments” (Mt. xix. 17), or “Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven” (ib., vi. 20). With them he deals in a sermon of 1522. The eternal reward, he here says, follows the works because it is a result of the faith which itself is the cause of the works. But the believer must not “look to the reward,” or trouble about it. Why then does God promise a reward?—In order that “all may know what the natural result of a good life will be.” Yet he also admits a certain anxiety on the part of the pious Christian to be certain of his reward, and the favourable effect of such a certainty on the good man’s will.[145] Here he exhorts his listeners; “that you be content to know and be assured that this indeed will be the result,” whilst in another sermon of that same year he describes as follows the promise of eternal life as the reward of works: “It is an incentive and inducement that makes us zealous in piety and in the service and praise of God.... That God should guide us so kindly makes us esteem the more His Fatherly Will and the Mercy of Christ”—but on no account “must we be good as if for the sake of the reward.”[146] He also quotes incidentally Mt. xix. 29, where our Lord says that all who leave home, brethren, etc. for His name’s sake “shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting”; also Heb. x. 35 concerning the “great reward” that awaits those who lose not their confidence. Such statements, he refuses, however, to see referred to salvation, which will be the equal portion of all true believers, but, in his arbitrary fashion, explains them as denoting some extra ornament of glory.[147]

“Good works will be present wherever faith is.” As this supposition, a favourite one with Luther from early days, fails to verify itself in practice, and as the expedients he proposed to meet the new difficulty are scattered throughout his writings, an admirer in recent times ventured to sum up these elements into a system under the following headings: “Faulty morality is a proof of a faulty faith.” “The fact of morality being present proves the presence of faith.” “Moral indolence induces loss of faith.” “Zeal for morality causes faith to increase.”[148] The true explanation would therefore seem always to be in the assumption of a want of “faith,” i.e. of a lack of that absolute certainty of personal salvation which should regulate all religious life,[149] in other words moral failings should be held to prove the absence of this saving certainty.

Seen in this light good works are of importance, as the outward demonstration that a person possesses the “fides specialis,” and in this wise alone are they a guarantee of everlasting happiness. They prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himself that, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.”[150] Hence Luther’s certainty of salvation, however strong it may be, still requires to be tested by something else as to whether it is the true “faith” deserving of God’s compassion; for “it is quite possible for a man never to doubt God’s mercy towards him though all the while he does not really possess it”;[151] according to Luther, namely, there is such a thing as a fictitious faith.

In Luther’s opinion “faith” was a grasping of something actually there. Hence if God’s mercy was not there, then neither was there any “faith.” Accordingly, an “unwarrantable assurance of salvation” was not at all impossible, and works served as a means of detecting it. Walther, to whom we owe our summary, does not, it is true, prove the existence of such a state of “unwarrantable assurance” by any direct quotation from Luther’s writings, and, indeed, it might be difficult to find any definite statement to this effect, seeing that Luther was chary of speaking of any failure in the personal certainty of salvation, on which alone, exclusive of works, he based the whole work of justification.

And yet, as Luther himself frequently says, moods and feelings are no guarantee of true faith; what is required are the works, which, like good fruit, always spring from a good tree.—So strongly, in spite of all his predilection for faith alone, is he impelled again and again to have recourse to works. In many passages they tend to become something more than mere signs confirmatory of faith. We need not examine here how far his statements concerning faith and works are consistent, and to what extent the sane Catholic teaching continued to influence him.

What is remarkable, however, is, that, in his commendable efforts to urge the performance of works in order to curtail the pernicious results of his doctrine, Luther comes to attribute a saving action to “faith,” only on condition that, out of love of God, we “strive” against sin. In one of his last sermons at Eisleben he tells his hearers: Sins are forgiven by faith and “are not imputed so far as you set yourself to fight against them, and learn to repeat the Our Father diligently ... and to grow in strength as you grow in age; and you must be at pains to exercise your faith by resisting the sins that remain in you ... in short, you must become stronger, humbler, more patient and believe more firmly.”[152] The conditional “so far as” furnishes a key which has to be used in many other passages where works are demanded as well as faith. Faith, there, is real and wholesome “in so far as” it produces works: “For we too admit it and have always taught it, better and more forcibly than they [the Papists], that we must both preach and perform works, and that they must follow the faith, and, that, where they do not follow there the faith is not as it should be.”[153]

Nor does he merely say that works of charity must follow eventually, but that charity must be infused by the Spirit of God together with faith of which it is the fruit.