But, in such a system, what place was there left for anything more than a phantom Church? Obviously the Church had to withdraw into the region of the invisible. For her again to become visible and assume the shape to be considered below, seems almost a paradox.
In view of the elasticity and vagueness of Luther’s teaching on the Church it is not surprising that his followers, to this very day, are divided as to whether, in point of fact, Luther wanted a “Church” or not.
A well-known Lutheran theologian admits in plain language that Luther left the problem of the Church unsolved; only after the Reformer’s time did certain “important problems” arise in respect of Luther’s tentative definition of the Church.[1148] Another theologian, writing in a Protestant periodical, says that Luther left behind him no “Evangelical Church.” “The Reformation,” he says, “spelt Christendom’s deliverance from the Church.… His great anticlerical bias was never repudiated by Luther.… He committed the care of the pure Evangel to the hands of the civil authorities. It ought no longer to be disputed that Luther and the Reformers were not the founders of the Evangelical Church—and that their ideal Protestantism was one minus a Church. It is only necessary to take the idea of the Church in its strict sense—not as the congregation, or the people of God, nor yet as a body of men holding the same opinions, nor as the kingdom of Christ—but as an independent complexus of regulations ordering the religious life, as a special institution to provide for the particular needs of the religious commonwealth within traditional limits.” Hence “the fact that, in our homeland, three hundred years after Luther’s time, we find the Evangelical preacherdom firmly consolidated in a body not unlike the State, and professing to be the official representative of Protestantism is one of the most astounding paradoxes in all the history of the Church.”[1149]
There is no need to go so far, nor is it really necessary to put the words evangelical “Church” or “Churches” in inverted commas, as Protestants sometimes do in order to mark the quite unusual meaning of the word Church according to Luther’s view. It is obvious that logic had no place in Luther’s ideas and aims in respect of the Church, and his subjectivism imposed on him in this matter the utmost vagueness.
Frequently we find in Catholic works on dogma extracts from Luther’s writings dating from 1519 and 1520, which, it is alleged, show his positive conviction at that time that a Church—i.e. one in the olden Catholic sense—was to be recognised. But this is a mistake. The documents containing such utterances were of a diplomatic character, and we have no right to build upon them. They do not in any way invalidate what has been said above.
One of these is Luther’s “Unterricht auff etlich Artikell,” dating from the end of Feb., 1519, i.e. from a time when he had already discovered the Roman Antichrist;[1150] the other, his “Oblatio sive Protestatio,” dating from the summer of 1520, is a tract unmistakably intended to forestall the publication of the Roman Bull.[1151] In the first work, composed at the instance of Miltitz, it is true he says in praise of the Roman Church that, in her, “St. Peter and St. Paul, 46 Popes and many hundred thousand martyrs had shed their blood,” that she was honoured by God above all others, and that, for the sake of Christian charity and unity, it was not lawful to separate from her for all her present blemishes; he will not, however, express himself regarding the “authority and supremacy of the Roman Church,” “seeing that this does not concern the salvation of souls”; Christ, on the contrary, had founded His Church on charity, meekness and oneness, and, for the sake of this oneness, the Papal commands ought to be obeyed. By this he fancies that he has proved that he “does not wish to detract from the Roman Church.”[1152]
What he says in the other writing referred to above is even less acceptable, though here too he wishes to appear “as a submissive and obedient son of the Holy Christian Churches.”[1153] The circumstance that many shortsighted persons doubtless took him at his word at this critical time of his excommunication must have served powerfully to promote the apostasy.
As to the changes to which Luther’s mode of thought was liable, we may perhaps be permitted to make a general observation before passing from the consideration of the invisible Church to that of the Church visible.
The charge brought against him of having formerly taught differently on many points from what he did at a later date, Luther lightly swept aside with the assurance that he had gone on gradually advancing in the knowledge of the truth. His defenders seek to escape the difficulty in a like way. His changeableness and inconstancy must undoubtedly weigh heavily in the balance. We must not, however, be unfair to him or argue that the fact of his having at first defended elements of Catholic doctrine which he afterwards abandoned constituted a grave self-contradiction.