Finally he reaches his usual answer: “I will do it, says Christ, and fulfil it”; first of all He again and again obtains forgiveness for us, “seeing that we are unable to keep the Law”; Christ, however, did not wish us “to continue sinning”; on the contrary, the grace He infuses makes us keep the Law “willingly and gladly”; good works, more particularly those of charity towards our neighbour, spring up of themselves after “we have crept beneath Christ’s mantle and wing.”[1808] Where faith is present “it cannot but work unceasingly what is good. It does not ask whether there be a call to do good works, but even before the question is put it has already done them, and is ever after doing them.”[1809] Those Christians—presumably the majority—who fail to find themselves in such a state receive but poor consolation: “Whoever does not perform such works is an unbelieving man, who gropes and looks about for faith and good works but knows neither the one nor the other.”[1810]
Luther did not see that he was endangering both faith and works and undermining their very foundations.
For, as his opponents objected, the last category of Christians, however careless they might be in the matter of good works, and however much they might fail to keep the Commandments, could, nevertheless, for the most part, at least boast of having the faith, whether regarded in the light of a “loving confidence in God’s grace” or in the more usual and ordinary sense of an acceptance of the divine revelation as true. Their faith, it was urged, was according to Luther at the outset very closely in touch with sin, indeed they had been justified by faith without either repentance or change of heart, faith having merely spread a cloak over their evil deeds; and yet now here was Luther telling them that they had lost the faith unless they lived by it, or if they transgressed the Commandments even by a venial sin—for Luther sees no distinction between mortal sin and venial.
Loofs is certainly not overstating things when he says that, “Luther was not clear in his own mind”[1811] as to his doctrine on the great questions of works and the Law, and that his “opinion comprised much that did not tally.”[1812]
Loofs adds: “How far Luther himself was aware that much of what he said voiced merely his own personal opinion it would be hard to tell.... Without his wealth of ideas and his ability to insist now on one, now on another side of a subject Luther would not have been so successful as a reformer. But he was hampered by his own qualities so soon as it became a question of putting his new views in didactic form.”[1813]
Loofs, like Harnack, spares no praise when speaking of Luther’s “qualities” and the “happy intuition” which enabled him to overthrow the olden order and to call into being a new, “religious,” Christianity.
Luther’s Doctrine of Merit in the Eyes of Protestant Critics
One such “happy intuition” Loofs sees in the fact, that, in the question of works and merit Luther “clearly perceived and got the better of the opinion, untenable in religion, that a scale of merit exists as between God and man.”[1814] The critic abstains from discussing the Catholic teaching on supernatural merit. Its earlier no less than its later defenders rightly emphasised, in opposition to Luther, that the olden doctrine of merit rested on the express promise of God to reward faithful service, and not, as Luther insinuated, on any absolute right of the works in themselves to such reward. The act which was to meet with such a reward must, they said, be not only good in itself but also supernaturally good, i.e. it must be performed by man’s powers aided by supernatural grace; even this, however, would not suffice were there not the gracious promise on God’s part, guaranteed by revelation, that such an act would be requited by a heavenly reward. Yet this was not to deny a certain “condignitas in actu primo” inherent in the act itself.
Luther, it is true, laughs to scorn the Popish doctrine of merit which makes God Himself our debtor. Yet long before St. Augustine had answered the objection: “God has become our debtor, not as though He has received something from us, but because He has promised what pleased Him. It is a different thing when we say to a man: You are my debtor because I have given you something, and when we say to God: Give us what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.”[1815]