Luther rudely retorts: “You lie in your throat; God is served not by works but by faith; faith must do everything that is to be done as between God and ourselves.” That the priests and monks should vaunt their religious exercises as spiritual treasures, he brands as a “Satanic lie.” “The works of the Papists such as organ-playing, chanting, vesting, ringing, smoking [incensation], sprinkling, pilgriming and fasting, etc., are doubtless fine and many, grand and long, broad and thick works, but about them there is nothing good, useful or profitable.”
3. “Know that there are no good works but such as God has commanded.” What, apart from faith, makes a work a good one is solely God’s express command. Luther, while finding fault with the self-chosen works of the Catholics, points to the Ten Commandments as summing up every good work willed by God. “There used to be ecclesiastical precepts which were to supersede the Decalogue.” “The commandments of the Church were invented and set up by men in addition to and beyond God’s Word. Luther therefore deals with the true worship of God in the light of the Ten Commandments.”[175] As for the Evangelical Counsels so solemnly enacted in the New Testament, viz. the striving after a perfection which is not of obligation, Luther, urged on by his theory that only what is actually commanded partakes of the nature of a good work, came very near branding them as an invention of the Papists.
They have “made the Counsels twelve” in number,[176] he says, “and twist the Gospel as they please.” They have split the Gospel into two, into “Consilia et præcepta.” “Christ,” so he teaches, “gave only one Counsel in the whole of the Gospel, viz. that of chastity, which even a layman can preserve, assuming him to have the grace.” He sneers at the Pope and the Doctors because they had established not only a clerical order which should be superior to the laity, but also an order of the counsels the duty of whose members it was to portray the Evangelical perfection by the keeping of the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “By this the common Christian life and faith became like flat, sour beer; everyone rubbed his eyes, despised the commandments and ran after the counsels. And after a good while they at last discovered man-made ordinances in the shape of habits, foods, chants, lessons, tonsures, etc., and thus God’s Law went the way of faith, both being blotted out and forgotten, so that, henceforth, to be perfect and to live according to the counsels means to wear a black, white, grey or coloured cowl, to bawl in church, wear a tonsure and to abstain from eggs, meat, butter, etc.”[177]
In the heat of his excitement he even goes so far as to deny the necessity of any service in the churches, because God demands only the praise and thanks of the heart, and “this may be given ... equally well in the home, in the field, or anywhere else.” “If they should force any other service upon you, know that it is error and deception; just as hitherto the world has been crazy, with its houses, churches and monasteries set aside for the worship of God, and its vestments of gold and silk, etc. ... which expenditure had better been used to help our neighbour, if it was really meant for God.”[178]
It was of course impossible for him to vindicate in the long run so radical a standpoint concerning the churches, and, elsewhere, he allows people their own way on the question of liturgical vestments and other matters connected with worship.
4. The good works which are performed where there is no “faith” amount to sin. This strangely unethical assertion Luther is fond of repeating in so extravagant a form as can only be explained psychologically by the utter blindness of his bias in favour of the “fides specialis” by him discovered. True morality belongs solely to those who have been justified after his own fashion, and no others have the slightest right to credit themselves with anything of the sort.
When, in 1528, in his “Great Confession” he expounded his “belief bit by bit,” declaring that he had “most diligently weighed all these articles” as in the presence of death and judgment, he there wrote: “Herewith I reject and condemn as rank error every doctrine that exalts our free-will, which is directly opposed to the help and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, righteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments.”[179] Even the most pious of the Papists, he goes on to say, since they lack Christ and the “Faith,” have “merely a great semblance of holiness,” and although “there seem to be many good works” among them, “yet all is lost”; chastity, poverty and obedience as practised in the convents is nothing but “blasphemous holiness,” and “what is horrible is that thereby they refuse Christ’s help and grace.”[180]
This, his favourite idea, finds its full expression in his learned Latin Commentary on Galatians (1535): “In the man who does not believe in Christ not only are all sins mortal, but even his good works are sins”;[181] for the benefit of the people he enunciates the same in his Church-Postils. “The works performed without faith are sins ... for such works of ours are soiled and foul in God’s eyes, nay, He looks on them with horror and loathing.” As a matter of course he thinks that God looks upon concupiscence as sin, even in its permissible manifestations, e.g. in the “opus conjugalis.” Amongst the heathen even virtues such as patriotism, continence, justice and courage in which, owing to the divine impulses (“divini motus”), they may shine, are tainted by the presence in them of original sin (“in ipsis heroicis virtutibus depravata”).[182] As to whether such men were saved, Luther refuses to say anything definite; he holds fast to the text that without faith it is impossible to please God. Only those who, in the days of Noe, did not believe may, so he declares, be saved in accordance with his reading of 1 Peter iii. 19 by Christ’s preaching of salvation on the occasion of His descent into hell. He is also disposed to include among those saved by this supposed course of sermons delivered “in inferis,” such fine men of every nation as Scipio, Fabius and others of their like.[183]
In general, however, the following holds good: Before “faith and grace” are infused into the heart “by the Spirit alone,” “as the work of God which He works in us”—everything in man is the “work of the Law, of no value for justification, but unholy and opposed to God owing to the unbelief in which it is performed.”[184]