It is hard to deny that a certain amount of truth lurks in the contention of a certain modern school of Protestant thought which insists that Luther practically made an end of “the old, dogmatic Christianity.”[1705] Luther did not, of course, look so far ahead, nor were the consequences of his own action at all clear to him, and when Catholics took pains to point them out he was not slow to repel them with the utmost indignation. Still, logic is inexorable in demanding its rights.[1706]
Here we are happily able to state the case almost entirely in the words of Protestant theologians of the modern school, such as, for instance, Adolf Harnack.
“The acknowledged authorities on dogma,” says Harnack, speaking of Luther’s attitude towards the pillars of the Church’s teaching, “have been torn down, and thereby dogma itself, qua dogma, i.e. the unfailing teaching institution ordained by the Holy Ghost, has been done away with.... The revision has been extended even beyond the second century of the Church’s history and up to its very beginnings, and has everywhere been carried out radically. An end has been made of that history of dogma which started in the age of the apologists, nay, of the Apostolic Fathers.”[1707] Harnack therefore, in his detailed work on the history of dogma, refrained from dealing with any theologians later than Luther, instead of following the usual course among Protestant authors, and giving an account of the development of doctrine in later Protestantism and among Luther’s followers. He pertinently asked: “How can there be in Protestantism any history of dogma after Luther’s Prefaces to the New Testament and his great reformation writings?”[1708]
Addressing the representatives of Lutheran “dogmatic theology,” Harnack says: “Luther’s reformation created a new point of departure for the development of the Christian belief in the Word of God”; “it set aside every form of infallibility that might have offered an outward assurance for one’s belief, the Church’s infallible organisation and infallible tradition and the infallible code of Scripture. Thus an end was made of the conception of Christianity from which dogma had sprung, viz. the Christian faith, the sure knowledge of the final causes of all things and thus of the whole Divine scheme of salvation. Christian faith has now become merely a firm assurance of receiving forgiveness of sins from God, as the Father of Jesus Christ, and of living under Him in His kingdom. This at the same time spells the ruin of any infallible dogma; for how can any dogma be unchangeable and authentic, thought out and formulated as it was by finite men, living in sin, and devoid of every outward guarantee?” If, nevertheless, Luther accepted and maintained certain aspects of ancient dogma, he did so, not as establishing “side by side with faith a law of faith based on particular outward promises,” but rather “from his unshaken conviction that much of this dogma corresponded exactly with the Gospel or Word of God, and that this correspondence was self-evident”; “as dogma, it did not constitute a rule.”[1709]
In some respects, for instance in this very matter, what Harnack says stands in need of correction. He is at times too fond of making out his own Christianity without dogma to have been also that of Luther. We just heard him say that the remnant of olden dogma which Luther preserved, “as dogma, did not constitute a rule.” He would, however, have been nearer the truth in saying that, logically, as dogma, it ought not to have constituted a rule. There can be no doubt that Luther—as will be shown below—insists, though in contradiction with other “basic ideas and with the spirit of his reformation,” that the Christian verities which he leaves standing must be embraced as revealed articles of the Christian belief and indubitable truths of faith. Even where he does not insist upon this he still takes it for granted that faith in the whole of revelation (“fides historica”) precedes that faith which consists in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. Even Harnack has to admit, that, with Luther, “dogma qua dogma, remains to some extent in force” owing “to the logic of things.”[1710]
Luther, according to another passage in Harnack, “under the pressure of circumstances” and the storms raised against him by the fanatics and the Anabaptists, was drawn into a dogmatising current of which the issue was the Augsburg Confession. To the question: Did Luther’s reformation do away with the ancient dogma? we must reply, that, at least, it “demolished its foundation—as indeed our Catholic opponents rightly object against us—that it was a mighty principle rather than a new doctrine, and that its subsequent history through the age of Orthodoxy, Pietism and Rationalism down to the present day is less a falling away than a natural development.”[1711]
Even before Harnack’s day this was virtually the standpoint of some of the best Protestant judges. It had been perceived long before that the purely Evangelical theory led much further from the ancient dogmas than Protestant orthodoxy was disposed to admit. Even according to so conservative a theologian as Johann August Neander, “the spirit of the Reformation did not at once attain to a clear consciousness of itself”; Luther indeed, even here, “had reached the consciousness of the pure Evangelical belief, thanks to the principle of a faith which is a free outgrowth of the Divine power within; yet, owing to the controversies on the Supper and to the Peasant War, this clear consciousness again became eclipsed.”[1712] Neander finds the best statement of Luther’s new ideas in those works which are most radically opposed to the traditional teaching of the Church of old. Albert Ritschl, the well-known leader of the free Protestant school, likewise declared: “The Lutheran theory of life has not remained true to itself; it has been hemmed in and dulled by the stress laid on objective dogma. The pure doctrine as taught in the schools is in reality merely a passing, not the final, form of Protestantism.”[1713]
All these critics, Harnack in particular, though blaming Luther for not drawing the right conclusions, are nevertheless at one in their outspoken admiration of the powerful thinker and brave spokesman of the new belief, and particularly of those theses of his which approach most closely their own ideal of an unfettered theology. In their opinion Luther is to remain the hero of yore, though his garb and attitude will no longer be the same as those to which Protestantism had previously been accustomed. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention this because otherwise the strong things some of the critics say might, taken together, give the impression that their main aim and endeavour was to decry Luther. Probably enough Harnack and his friends failed to foresee how unfavourable a view their censures, taken in the lump, might produce of Luther’s person and work. Harnack, however, in one passage, pays a strange tribute to Luther’s conservatism, one, no doubt, which would appeal to the Reformer’s more old-fashioned friends. He points out, that, “we owe it to him, that, even to the present day, these formularies [the olden creeds] are still in Protestantism a living power”; nay, such is his ignorance of the state of things in Catholicism, that he is convinced that it is only in Protestantism that these creeds still “live,” whereas, “in the Roman Church, they are but a dead and obsolete heirloom”; Luther, according to one bold dictum of Harnack’s, was really “the restorer of ancient dogma.”[1714]