Luther, vol. 5 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

Nevertheless several theses, undoubtedly Luther’s own, are here glossed over or quietly bettered. If, for instance, according to Luther everything takes place of absolute necessity (a fact to which the Formula of Concord draws attention), if man, even in the natural acts of the mind, is bound by what is fore-ordained,[201] then even the listening to a sermon and the dwelling on it cannot be matters of real freedom. Moreover the man troubled with fears on predestination, is comforted by the well-known Bible texts, which teach that it is the Will of God that all should be saved; whilst nothing is said of Luther’s doctrine that it is only the revealed God who speaks thus, whereas the hidden God acts quite otherwise, plans and carries out the very opposite, “damns even those who have not deserved it—and, yet, does not thereby become unjust.”[202] Reference is made to Adam’s Fall, whereby nature has been depraved; but nothing is said of Luther’s view that Adam himself simply could not avoid falling because God did not then “bestow on him the spirit of obedience.”[203] But, though these things are passed over in silence, due prominence is given to those ideas of Luther’s of which the result is the destruction of all moral order, natural as well as supernatural. According to the Formula of Concord the natural order was shattered by Adam’s Fall; as for the supernatural order it is replaced by the alien, mechanical order of imputation.

Christianity merely Inward. The Church Sundered from the World

Among the things which Luther did to the detriment of the moral principle must be numbered his merciless tearing asunder of spiritual and temporal, of Christian and secular life.

The olden Church sought to permeate the world with the religious spirit. Luther’s trend was in a great measure towards making the secular state and its office altogether independent; this, indeed, the more up-to-date sort of ethics is disposed to reckon among his greatest achievements. Luther even went so far as to seek to erect into a regular system this inward, necessary opposition of world and Church. Of this we have a plain example in certain of his instructions to the authorities.[204] Whereas the Church had exhorted people in power to temper with Christianity their administration of civil justice and their use of physical force—urging that the sovereign was a Christian not merely in his private but also in his official capacity,—Luther tells the ruler: The Kingdom of Christ wholly belongs to the order of grace, but the kingdom of the world and worldly life belong to the order of the Law; the two kingdoms are of a different species and belong to different worlds. To the one you belong as a Christian, to the other as a man and a ruler. Christ has nothing to do with the regulations of worldly life, but leaves them to the world; earthly life stands in no need of being outwardly hallowed by the Church.[205] Certain statements to a different effect will be considered elsewhere.

“A great distinction,” Luther said in 1523, “must be made between a worldling and a Christian, i.e. between a Christian and a worldly man. For a Christian is neither man nor woman ... must know nothing and possess nothing in the world.... A prince may indeed be a Christian, but he must not rule as a Christian, and when he rules he does so not as a Christian but as a prince. As an individual he is indeed a Christian, but his office or princedom is no business of his Christianity.” This seems to him proved by his mystical theory that a Christian “must not harm or punish anyone or revenge himself, but forgive everyone and endure patiently all injustice or evil that befalls him.” The theory, needless to say, is based on his misapprehension of the Evangelical Counsels which he makes into commands.[206] On such principles as these, he concludes, it was impossible for any prince to rule, hence “his being a Christian had nothing to do with land and subjects.”[207]

For the same reason he holds that “every man on this earth” comprises two “practically antagonistic personalities,” for “each one has at the same time to suffer, and not to suffer, everything.”[208] The dualism which Luther here creates is due to his extravagant over-statement of the Christian law. The Counsels of Perfection given by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, with which Luther is here dealing (not to resist evil, not to go to law, etc., Mt. v. 19 ff.), are not an invitation addressed to all Christians, and if higher considerations or some duty stands in the way it would certainly denote no perfection to follow them. Luther’s misinterpretation necessarily led him to make a cleavage between Christian life and life in the world.

The dualism, however, in so far as it concerned the authorities had, however, yet another source. For polemical reasons Luther was determined to make an end of the great influence that the olden Church had acquired over public life. Hence he absolves the secular power from all dependence as the latter had itself sought to do even before his time. He refused to see that, in spite of all the abuses which had followed on the Church’s interference in politics during the Middle Ages, mankind had gained hugely by the guidance of religion. To swallow up the secular power in the spiritual had never been part of the Church’s teaching, nor was it ever the ideal of her enlightened representatives; but, for the morality of the great, for the observance of maxims of justice and for the improvement of the nations the principle that religion must not be separated from the life of the State and from the office of those in authority, but must permeate and spiritualise them was, as history proved, truly vital. Subsequent to Luther’s day the tendency to separate the two undoubtedly made unchecked progress. He himself, however, was not consistent in his attitude. On the contrary, he came more and more to desiderate the establishment of the closest possible bond between the civil authorities and religion—provided only that the ruler’s faith was the same as Luther’s. Nevertheless, generally speaking, the separation he had advocated of secular from spiritual became the rule in the Protestant fold.

“Lutheranism,” as Friedrich Paulsen said on the strength of his own observations in regions partly Catholic and partly Protestant, “which is commonly said to have introduced religion into the world and to have reconciled public worship with life and the duties of each one’s calling has, as a matter of fact, led to the complete alienation and isolation of the Church from real life; on the contrary, the older Church, despite all her ‘over-worldliness,’ has contrived to make herself quite at home in the world, and has spun a thousand threads in and around the fabric of its life.” He thinks himself justified in stating: “Protestantism is a religion of the individual, Catholicism is the religion of the people; the former seeks seclusion, the latter publicity. In the one even public worship bears a private character and appears as foreign to the world as the pulpit rhetoric of a Lutheran preacher of the old school; the [Protestant] Church stands outside the bustle of the workaday world in a world of her own.”[209]

We may pass over the fact, that, Luther, by discarding the so-called Counsels reduced morality to a dead level. In the case of all the faithful he abased it to the standard of the Law, doing away with that generous, voluntary service of God which the Church had ever approved and blessed. We have already shown this elsewhere, more particularly in connection with the status of the Evangelical Counsels and the striving after Christian perfection in the monastic life. According to him there are practically no Counsels for those who wish to pass beyond the letter of the Law; there is but one uniform moral Law, and, on the true Christian, even the so-called Counsels are strictly binding.[210]