Hence, according to Harnack, Luther made a change in the doctrine of penance and more importance was given to the Law; “for each separate act of sin on the part of the baptised” satisfaction must be made, and “Christ must intervene anew with His fulfilment of the Law.”[1781] By this means, by the creative action of God, “faith” is constantly revived in the man who has fallen, and God, as Luther now assumes, works by means of the Law. In this wise, faith, however, becomes, says Harnack, “a meritorious work,” seeing that it is the seal of our reconciliation; moreover “personal responsibility and personal action must play some part.”[1782] But how is man to do this, devoid as he is of any freedom of the will?
Again, for all his alteration of his doctrine of penance Luther failed to “attain the object he was after, viz. to check laxity and frivolity. On the contrary, the new doctrine tended, in its later developments, to promote and foster them.”[1783] Nor was much gained, when, in order to promote penance and greater earnestness of life the Law was “placed before the Gospel. This Melanchthon did with Luther’s consent in the ‘Instructions for the Visitors.’[1784] Occasion was taken at the same time to insist strongly on the use of the confessional in order to check at least the worst sins.” “The intervention of the clergyman, which was undoubtedly needed by the ‘common people,’” constituted merely “a Lutheran counterpart of the Catholic sacrament of penance,” though, adds Harnack, “minus its burdensome Romish additions.”[1785]
Luther’s Doctrine of Justification and Good Works, as seen by Protestant Critics
According to Harnack, “the idea of justification,” the central point of Luther’s teaching, “shrinks into a merely outward act of God’s designed to quieten consciences. Here again the superiority of the Catholic doctrine could not fail to appear; for to be content with the ‘fides sola’ could not but involve a very questionable laxity. It would, from this point of view, have been far better to have represented the ‘fides caritate formata’ as alone of any value in God’s sight.”[1786] In his doctrine of justification by faith alone, Luther never got over the weak point, viz. his exclusion of charity, at least a commencement of which, together with faith, hope and repentance, had been required by the olden Church as a preparation for justification. Some return to the Catholic requirements was called for. “Hence it is not in the least surprising, ... that Melanchthon at a later date abandoned the ‘sola fides’ and came to advocate a modified form of synergism. The Luther-zealots were thrown into hopeless confusion by the necessity in which they found themselves, of harmonizing the older Evangelical theory with the doctrine of penance whilst avoiding the pitfall of Melanchthon’s synergism.” They found themselves, so Harnack says, face to face with two “iustificationes,” that by faith alone, and that by law and penance, not to speak of a third, the “iustificatio” of infants by the act of baptism. “These contradictions become still further accentuated when the ‘regeneratio’ was taken into account,” etc.[1787] It is not worth while to pursue any further Harnack’s criticism which at times tends to become carping.
As regards the doctrine of good works, Protestant theology of late has been disposed to take offence at Luther’s undue extension of freedom, which seems to endanger good works and the zealous keeping of the Law.
It is the Christian’s art, so Loofs sums up Luther’s teaching, to allow no thought of the Law to trouble his conscience, but simply to regard Christ as the bearer of his sins. “Here the one-sided view of the ‘Law,’ seen only from the standpoint of the need of acquiring merit by works, has a disturbing effect”; such is Loofs’s opinion. According to Luther such contempt for the Law is often impossible, hence he determined to conquer the “dualism of the old-new man” of which we like St. Paul (Gal. ii. 20) are conscious: I live, and yet I do not; I am dead, and yet I am not; a sinner, and yet no sinner; I have the Law and yet I have it not. We ought, according to Luther, to say to ourselves: There is a time to die and a time to live, a Law to be obeyed and a Law to be despised. “Even during the Antinomian controversy,” concludes Loofs, “Luther did not abandon such thoughts.”[1788]
Luther’s want of discrimination is most apparent, he says, in the fact, that, owing to his “peculiar interest in the preaching of the grace of God,” he depreciated works and the Law as the very fount of self-righteousness.[1789]
Loofs rightly refers to a sermon in the Church-postils where Luther inveighs against the “Papists, Anabaptists and other sects” who scream against us: “What is the use of your preaching so much of faith and Christ? What good does it do the people?”[1790] Luther could not in fact “sufficiently decry the Law or urge too strongly that it was useless to Christians.”[1791]
In the passage quoted Luther says of the exhortations to works and the preaching of the Commandments: “This preaching does nothing else but kill, i.e. far from being good or useful it is only harmful ... rank poison and death.”
And he goes on: “All our works, however precious they may be, are nothing but poison and death.... People may indeed boast loudly and say: ‘If you live in this way, take pains to keep the Law and perform many good works, you will be saved.’ But that these are only vain words, nay, a harmful doctrine, will soon be apparent.”[1792] It is not in man’s power to keep the Commandments by the performance of the right and necessary works, hence he becomes troubled and at last despairs if he strives after works. “The human race is so depraved that no one can be found who does not transgress all God’s commandments even though the wrath of God and his eternal damnation be held up before him and preached to him daily; indeed if this is impressed upon a man over much he only begins to rage against it more horribly.”[1793] It is merely “reason with its human ideas” which “cannot get beyond this, viz. that God is gracious to all who live in this manner and do what the Ten Commandments require; for reason knows nothing of the misery of our depraved nature, nor does it know that no one is able to keep God’s command.” For this cause Luther had at last brought to light and taught “that other doctrine in which grace and reconciliation are proclaimed” to us according to the “spirit and letter of St. Paul, whereas even the old doctors, Origen, Jerome and others, had not grasped St. Paul’s meaning.”[1794]