“Luther was antagonistic to all these authorities,” says the same scholar, “to the infallibility of Church, Pope, and Councils, to every constitutional right of the Church to pronounce on the truth and, on principle, to all the doctrinal formularies of the past.”[1725] His later writing: “Von den Conciliis,” etc. (1539) proves this.
Nor have we yet exhausted the list of grievances against Luther. Not only did he forsake the ancient teaching on justification, merit and works, but he even declared war on human free will, though belief in its existence is a truth of natural philosophy and though the Church had ever held it in the highest esteem. He put aside in its primitive form the basic dogma of original sin. The doctrine of actual sin and its distinction into mortal and venial found no favour with him,[1726] nor did the related doctrine of the existence of a purgatory. He completely destroyed the teaching of antiquity on Grace by his new discovery of the law of absolute necessity which rules all things, not excluding even the actions of the human mind and heart; according to Luther “Grace is the fatherly disposition of God towards us, Who for Christ’s sake calls sinful man to Him, accepts him and wins his confidence through faith in the Christus passus.”[1727] This fatherly disposition of God no man can ever in the least resist if destined by the Divine Omnipotence to receive the faith; those, however, who are not numbered among the elect, know not any such invitation, or rather constraint, for the secret Will of God unfailingly dooms them to damnation.[1728]
After giving the above definition of Grace, Harnack asks, “What room then is there for a Sacrament?” For Catholics the Sacraments were pillars of the Church’s life and of her teaching. With them Luther was perfectly willing to dispense.
“He not only strove,” says Harnack, “to break away completely from the ancient or mediaeval conception, but he actually brought it to nought by his doctrine of the one sacrament, which is the Word.”[1729] The Sacraments being to him a “peculiar form of the saving Word of God, viz. of the realisation of the ‘promissio Dei,’ he reduces them to two (three), or, indeed, to one, viz. the Word of God. He showed that even the most enlightened Fathers had had but a dim notion of this so important matter.... Having practically laid the whole system in ruins, he rests again on the one, simple grand act, which is constantly being repeated in every Christian’s life, viz. the awakening of faith thanks to the ‘gratia.’”[1730]
Luther turned his back not only on the ancient teaching concerning the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also on the whole outward worship of the Church.
“His attitude towards Divine Worship in the Church was a radical one. Here too he destroyed not only the mediaeval tradition, but even that of the ancient Church such as we may trace it back right into the 2nd century. The public worship of the Church, to him, is nothing more than the worship of individuals united in time and place.... The priest and the sacrifice in the usual sense of the terms are done away with, and all worth is denied to those specific ecclesiastical actions which were formerly held to be both wholesome and necessary.” “The ‘divine service,’ particularly that of the Word, in which he nevertheless wished the congregation to take part,” “can have no other motive ... than to promote individual worship, for God deals with us only through the Word which is not tied up with any particular persons.”[1731] Hence public worship does no more than “edify faith through the preaching of the Divine Word and the common offering of prayer and praise.”[1732]
Of vast importance in this change and even more far-reaching in its consequences was Luther’s abrogation of the ancient conception of the Church. As bound up with it, he also harshly set aside the invocation of Saints, that vital element of the olden worship.
The ancient teaching on perfection had to make room for new theories, for it seemed to him to lay too much stress on man’s own works.[1733] And yet “we cannot but admit,” says Harnack, “that Luther’s efforts to create a new ideal of life were not characterised by any clear discrimination.” The reason may be “that the times were not yet ripe for it.” In those days of public stress “religion’s chief business was to bring consolation amidst the miseries of life. To heal the soul oppressed with sorrow for sin and to alleviate the evils in the world,” this was what was mainly aimed at.[1734] This, however, was scarcely to do justice to religion and to its sublime tasks.
According to Luther the Church had, even from the outset, given to human reason a larger sphere than was due to it. Even at the cradle of the Church Christian philosophy had taken her stand, and, with her torch of reason, had pointed out the road to faith. Luther, however, conceived “a distrust of reason itself not to be explained simply by his distrust of it as the main prop of self-righteousness. He grew hardened in his bold defiance of reason, surrendering himself to that suspicious Catholic [!] way of looking at things, which reveres the wisdom of God and sees the stamp of the divine truth in paradox and in the contradictio in adiecto.... No one, however, can despise reason and learning with impunity, and Luther himself was punished by the darkening of his own views on faith.”[1735] “That is a dangerous kind of theologism which fancies that the knowledge which comes from worldly education may simply be ignored. The reformers were too ready to cut themselves adrift from worldly culture where the latter seemed to trench on the domain of faith.... The Reformation buried beneath a mass of hatred and injustice much of the valuable learning the age possessed and thereby made itself responsible for the later crises of Protestantism.”[1736]
“Luther,” says Loofs, “by laying stress on that antithesis between human reason and the divine ‘foolishness,’ which was so intimately bound up with his own deepest and most fundamental views (and who ever thundered more loudly against the ‘Frau Hulda’ of natural reason, that ‘devil’s whore’ and ‘arch enemy of the faith’ than did Luther?), imposed on his following the old Catholic idea (which he himself had overthrown) of the verbal inspiration of the Canon, and did so so thoroughly that after-ages were unable to shake themselves free of it. Nay, by rightly proscribing any allegorical exegesis, he made the burden of this old Catholic heritage even more oppressive in Protestantism than it had ever been before.”[1737]