Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

Yet there is no doubt, that, in spite of all this, Luther had explained away the Church’s very essence.

It was indeed his tendency to spiritualise, and his favourite idea that true believers must be enlightened by God directly concerning His outward “Word” that helped him thus to explain away the Church. As for any outward doctrinal establishment or institutional Church having an authority of her own, no such thing existed. Thus the Church which Luther extols as so holy turns out to be something quite intangible—water that for want of a holder runs away and is lost. Even Köstlin admits this, though in guarded words: “Certain main problems which the Reformed view of the Church must necessarily face” “were only very insufficiently grasped and discussed” by Luther and his friends. Among such questions Köstlin includes some that touch the Church’s very essence: How far is purity of doctrine necessary in order to belong to the Church; how far are the old Creeds still professed by Protestantism obligatory or binding upon preachers; where, finally, does the freedom preached by Luther precisely end?[1112] But, in spite of all the lacunæ in his doctrine of the Church, Luther bitterly insists, that, outside the Church there can be no salvation.[1113] Nor did he even admit the usual Catholic limitation, viz. that those, who through no fault of their own are ignorant of the Church, may possibly be saved if their life has been otherwise good. Luther indeed, as already shown (p. 292), is of opinion that some olden Catholics may have been saved, if, in the end, they laid hold on Christ as Luther taught;[1114] he also opines that salvation had been brought to all “worthy men of every nation” who had died before the coming of Christ, through His preaching during His visit to Limbo;[1115] yet he does not believe that it was the Will of God that all men, whether within or outside the Church, should be saved.[1116]

After having in the above examined Luther’s conception of the Church, irrespective of its mode of growth, we may now turn our attention to the genesis and historical development of this conception.

Origin and Early Outbuilding of the New Idea of the Church

A curious psychological process accompanies the growth of Luther’s idea of the Church. We know that, even long after he had fallen a victim to his theory of justification by faith alone, he had still no thought of breaking away from the Church’s communion or of questioning the conception then in vogue of the Church. It was only when the olden Church refused to come over to his new doctrine and prepared to condemn it, that he decided, after great struggles within, to cut himself adrift, and it was in order to justify this step to himself and to vindicate it to the world that he gradually formed his new views on the Church. (Cp. above, vol. i., p. 321 ff.)

Characteristically enough we find a first trace of what was to come, in his sermon on the power of the Papal Ban, which he published in Latin in 1518 and in German in the following year. Here, of course, he had to deal with the question of the effects of the threatened excommunication; in so doing he reached the false proposition, censured amongst his 41 errors in the Bull Exsurge Domine of May 16, 1520: “Excommunications are merely outward penalties and do not rob a man of the Church’s common spiritual prayers.”[1117] Not long after, according to his wont, he went a step further. Among the condemned Theses we find the paradoxical one: “Christians must be taught to love excommunication rather than to fear it.”[1118]

At Dresden on July 25, 1518, when he was found fault with on account of his Wittenberg Sermon on Excommunication (which was then probably not yet known in its entirety), he seems to have shown scant respect for the supreme authority in the Church. Emser, his then opponent, writes expressly that Luther had declared he cared nothing for the Pope’s Ban.[1119]

Some weeks later, on Sep. 1, Luther himself wrote to Staupitz, his superior, that his conscience told him he was in the right and with the truth on his side; “Christ liveth and reigneth yesterday, to-day and for ever”; he also tells him, that, in his “Resolutions,” and in his replies to Prierias he had spoken freely, and in a language that would wound the Romanists, and that he was ready, nay anxious, to give the brassy Romans an even ruder German answer in the service of Christ, the Shepherd of the people. “Have no fear; I shall continue untrammelled my study of the Word of God without any fear of the citation [to Augsburg].”[1120]