We must, however, in the light of Protestant criticism, examine a little more closely Luther’s attitude towards the ancient Christian conception of faith.
Starting first of all from faith subjectively considered and examining Luther’s doctrine of the personal appropriation of the content of faith, we immediately find ourselves brought face to face with his doctrine of justification, for he has scarcely anything to say of the faith of the individual save in so far as this faith operates justification. Here all the other truths to be believed tend to disappear from his purview and one only truth remains, viz.: Through Christ I am pleasing to God. It is no wonder if many of his followers, even to the present day, see in this doctrine of the certainty of having in Christ a Gracious God, the only dogma handed down by Luther. Does he not, for instance, in one of the most widely read passages of his works, viz., in the Preface to Romans in his translation of the New Testament, concisely define faith as a “daring and lively trust in the grace of God, so strong that one would be ready to die for it a thousand times over”? “Such a trust makes a man cheerful, defiant and light-hearted in his attitude towards God and all creatures; such is the working of the Holy Ghost by faith.” “Faith is the work of God in us whereby we are transformed and born anew in God.”[1747]
Again, if we take faith objectively, i.e. as the sum-total of revelation, then again, at least according to many passages, faith must be merged in the one consoling conviction that we receive the forgiveness of sins from God in Christ.
“The Reformation,” says Harnack quite rightly, regarded all the rest of dogma as little more than “a grand testimony to God, Who has sent Jesus Christ, His Son, to liberate us from sin, to save us and set us free. Finding this testimony in dogma, every other incentive to determine it more accurately disappeared.” It is, however, important to note, that “ancient dogma was not merely the witness of the Gospel to a Gracious God, to Christ the Saviour, and to the forgiveness of sins”; it comprised a number of other profound and far-reaching doctrines also binding upon all, “above all a certain knowledge of God and of the world, and a law of belief.” According to Harnack, however, “faith and this knowledge of God and law of belief were unguardedly jumbled up.” In short, “a conservative attitude towards olden dogma is not imposed on the Reformation by its principles.”[1748]
“The orthodoxy of the Luther-zealots of the 16th century had its basis in the reformers’ retention of a series of old Catholic presuppositions and dogmas which were really in disagreement with their own fundamental ideas.”[1749] “Thus,” proceeds Harnack, “the Reformation, i.e. the conception of the Evangelical faith, spells the end of dogma unless indeed, in the stead of the old-time dogma, we put a sort of phantom dogma.” The Reformation replaced the demand for faith, which corresponds with the law, by the freedom of the children of God, who are not under the constraint of the law of belief but rejoice in the gift bestowed on them, viz. in the promise of the forgiveness of sins in Christ.[1750]
In this, again, there is much that is true, even though we may not be willing to subscribe to all the author says. Luther undoubtedly lays undue stress on those tenets of the faith which seem to him to refer to justification and spiritual freedom, and he does so to the detriment of what remains. “Hence the Gospel,” Luther says for instance, “is nothing else but the preaching of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of David, true God and Man, Who by His death and again-rising from the dead has overcome sin, death and hell for all those who believe in Him.” The Evangelists, so he says, describe the conquest of “Sin, death and hell” at great length, the others “more briefly like St. Peter and St. Paul”; at any rate the “Gospel must not be made into a code of laws or a handbook.”[1751] This was indeed to raise the standard of revolt against doctrine. Well might Adolf Hausrath, in a passage already quoted, speak of Luther as “the greatest revolutionary of the 16th century.”
The question touched upon above deserves, however, to be looked into still more closely in the light of what other more moderate Protestant theologians say.
Gustav Kawerau, speaking from such a standpoint, points out that Luther “runs the risk of confusing the Evangelical view of faith with that which sees in faith the acceptance of a string of doctrinal propositions, i.e. with that faith which is made up of so and so many articles, all of such importance that to reject one involves the dropping of the others.”[1752]