Thus he writes: “If by God’s grace I see the great common herd and the poor folk on both sides, as they really are, then I must fain admit, that, under the Papacy and in spite of all its errors, there are more pious, godfearing men than in Lutheranism. I also believe that they might more easily be improved than some of our Evangelicals who are now trying to hide themselves and their sinful life behind Holy Scripture, nay, behind a fictitious faith and Christ’s satisfaction, and in whom no fear of God is left.”[550]
Many of Schwenckfeld’s more specific complaints are supported by other witnesses. We may compare what Luther himself and his friends report of the conditions at Wittenberg[551] with what Schwenckfeld says a little later: “It is credibly asserted concerning their Church at Wittenberg, that there such a mad, dissolute life prevails as is woeful to see; there is no discipline whatever, no fear of God, and the people are wild, impudent and unmannerly, particularly Philip’s students, so that even Dr. Major not long since (1556) is himself said to have complained of it there in a sermon, saying: Our Wittenberg is so widely talked of that strangers fancy there are only angels here; when, however, they come they find only devils incarnate. If Philip, who sends out his disciples as Apostles ‘in omnem terram’ does not found any better Churches than these, he has but little to boast of before God.”[552]
“What harm and damage to consciences such Lutheran teaching has brought into Christendom it is easier to bewail with many tears than to describe.” Though Luther’s “Evangel and office has discovered and made an end of much false worship and a great apostasy, for which we give thanks to God the Lord,” yet “it has but little of the power of grace, of the Holy Spirit, or of blessing, for bringing sinners to repentance and true conversion.”[553]
“Thus we have Schwenckfeld’s witness that he had seen nothing of any real awakening or revival among the people generally. Whole classes, the merchant class, for instance, remained inwardly untouched by the glad tidings; even where the ‘Word’ was preached, there the bad sermons, of which Schwenckfeld had complained as early as 1524, often produced evil fruits.” Thus writes Ecke.[554] Schwenckfeld, however, does not lay all the blame on the preachers, but rather directly on the ethical principles resulting from Luther’s doctrines, which had filled the utterances of the new preachers with so much that was dangerous and misleading. “Oh, how many of our nobles have I heard say: ‘I cannot help it,’ ‘it is God’s Will,’ ‘God does all, even my sin, and I am not answerable’; ‘if He has predestined me I shall be saved.’” “How many have I heard, who all appealed to the Wittenberg writings, and, who, alas, to-day, are ten times worse than before the Evangel began to be preached.”[555]
Whenever he exhorted his Lutheran co-religionists to conversion and holiness of life, so he declares in 1543, he always received some reply such as the following: “We are poor sinners and can do nothing good.” “Faith alone without works saves us.” “We cannot keep God’s law”; “have no free-will.” “Amendment is not in our power.” “Christ has done enough for us; He has overthrown sin, death, hell and the devil; that is what we have to believe.”[556] When he preached sanctification he was dubbed a “Papist.” “That the Lutherans accuse me of being more a Papist than a Lutheran is due mainly to good works and the stress I lay on them.”[557]
Even in 1524 he had published an essay on practical ethics entitled, “An Exhortation regarding the misuse of sundry Articles of the Evangel, etc.” (Above, 79 f.) In 1547 he found it necessary to publish another work on the “Misuse of the Evangel.” To this misuse he attributes most of the above excuses of his “Lutheran co-religionists.” Luther himself, so he declares here, was much to blame for the confusion that prevailed. He quotes many passages from Luther’s Church-postils, from the edition printed at Wittenberg in 1526 with prefaces by Luther and Stephen Roth. He also makes use of the same work in another book, “On Holy Scripture,” which he also wrote in 1547.[558] Many of the incriminated passages were “wickedly omitted” in the next editions of the Church-postils.[559]
Further Complaints of Schwenckfeld’s. The Ethical Doctrines
Schwenckfeld, in his strictures on Luther’s preaching and its results, deals with the ethical side of the new teaching concerning the Law and the Gospel.
Luther had said, that, with the law, God “wished to do no more than make us feel our helplessness, our weakness and our sickness.”[560] The critic asks: “Why not also to make us eschew evil and do good, 1 Peter iii.?” On the other hand, Luther will have it that the “Law makes all of us sinners so that not even the smallest tittle of these commandments can be kept even by the most holy.” “Such is in short Luther’s doctrine concerning the Law and the Commandments of God. There he lets it rest, as though the ground and contents of the Law and God’s intention therein—which was centred on Christ—were nothing.... Of this doctrine, particularly, the common people can make nothing save that God has given us His commandments, not in order that we may keep them by means of His Grace, but only that we may thereby come to the knowledge of sin.”[561]
“Why should we hate our life in this world ... and follow Christ? Nay, why take pains at all to enter in at the narrow gate and to seek the strait way to life everlasting (Mt. vii.) if it is possible to reach heaven along the broad way on which so many walk who are called Lutherans, and to enter in through the wide gate which they make for themselves!”[562]