Nor could he well recognise any apostolic teaching authority in the “higher orders of the Church,” seeing that a “little maid of seven years” on the side of the New Faith “knows more than the Apostles, Evangelists and Prophets” on the other side; the latter are but the “devil’s apostles, evangelists and prophets.”[1206]
How he casts aside all the authority of the Church is perhaps shown most plainly in the short Theses of 1530 in his writing “Ettlich Artickelstück, so M. L. erhalten wil wider die gantze Satans Schüle uñ alle Pforten der Hellen”: “The Christian Church has no power to issue the least order concerning good works, never has done so and never will.” “The parson or bishop [i.e. the Evangelical ministers] has not the right to assert his authority everywhere for he is not the Christian Church. Such parson or bishop may exhort his Church to sanction certain fasts, prayers, holidays, etc., on account of the present needs, to be observed for a time and then be allowed to drop.”[1207]—But what the Evangelical ministers cannot do, that the secular authorities may do, for, in another passage, Luther points out expressly the binding character of the rules which the authorities might draw up, for instance regarding fasts; should the sovereign order fast-days, everyone must obey. In the same way if the German Prince-Bishops gave such an order it was to be obeyed, but only because they were Princes, not because they were bishops.[1208] During the Diet of Augsburg he refused to admit that, in future, there should be bishops having at the same time princely powers. On the other hand, however, he himself made the princes to all intents and purposes bishops.
The contradiction in which he here involves himself has been brought out very strongly by a recent historian and theologian who as a rule is on Luther’s side: “To our mind there is a glaring contradiction between Luther’s theses on the spirituality of faith and the rights of the Christian authorities. Luther never noticed this contradiction, and, all his life, stood for both simultaneously. … From the religious standpoint he advocates the principle of unlimited freedom as inherent in the nature of faith; in the secular sphere, i.e. in the domain of the State, he is unwilling to overthrow the principle shared by all [?] in his day, viz. that the authorities have a right to assist in deciding on public worship and doctrine; in the rightful domain of the worldly authorities his controversies have no right to intervene. Hence the contradiction.”[1209] “Luther, who, where the peasants are concerned, plays the part of Evangelist, refuses to tamper anywhere with the existing [?] laws of the State where it is a question of their lords.”[1210]
Here Luther’s fundamental idea of the separation between Church and world also comes into play.
The Church of his theology must necessarily be absorbed by the State, because, being a stranger to the world, it was not conversant with the conditions and, even with the best will in the world, was unable to hold its own against the visible powers. The spiritual rule, according to him, was to be as widely sundered from the secular “as the heavens are from the earth.”[1211] Thus the Church fled into a spirit realm and left the world to the tender mercies of the secular power. She thus became herself the cause of her “alienation and isolation from real life.”[1212] It naturally, indeed necessarily, followed that the sovereign set up government departments, which called themselves spiritual, but which in reality were secular and derived all their jurisdiction from him alone. Such were the consistories.
The relations between State and Church in Lutheranism may be regarded as an indirect justification of the Catholic doctrine of the Church’s nature. According to the Catholic view Christ founded the sublime structure of the Church as a free spiritual society. He willed that the saving grace he had won by His Death should be applied to the souls of men by means of a visible and independent institution, which, inspired by Him with His own ideal and holy aims and equipped with her own peculiar rights, should work for the salvation of mankind until the end of the world. Hence, the advocates of the olden Church not only set the idea of the Church in the foreground of the struggle, but they also explored, enlarged on and illumined this idea with the help of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers. Such was the work of men like Eck, Cochlæus, Johann Fabri, Bishop of Vienna, and Catharinus, and, in the same century, of Melchior Canus, Peter Canisius, Bellarmine and Stapleton. They indeed allowed the inward side of the Church—its soul as it has been called—to come into its rights, but, at the same time, they maintained with equal firmness its thoroughly visible character, above all they insisted on the hierarchy with the successor of St. Peter at its head as the holder of the threefold spiritual power—which Luther denied—of shepherd, teacher and priest. On this point there could be no yielding.
To those adherents of Luther’s who fancied they could reach union without the Church’s help and without an entire acceptance of the Catholic doctrine, Eck addressed the following: “There is no middle course and words are of no avail; whoever wishes to make himself one in faith with the Catholic Church must submit to the Pope and the Councils and believe what the Roman Church teaches; all else is wind and vapour, though one should go on disputing for a hundred years.”[1213]
What the above Catholic polemics said may be summed up as follows:—
Because the Church, according to Christ’s plan, was to be an independent and living institution, His future “kingdom” and “heavenly vineyard,” it replaced the Jewish synagogue by an even better institution. This Church was to be indestructible and the gates of hell were not to prevail against her (Matt. xvi. 18).
As a real institution the Church was marked out by the gifts bestowed on it at the outset by the Divine Founder; out of the plenitude of the power He possessed “in heaven and on earth” He created in her a real, and no mere phantom office, comprising ghostly superiors, viz. the “ministerium ecclesiasticum”; hence a twofold society arose consisting of those whose duty it is to guide and those who are guided. The latter receive from the former, i.e. from the hierarchy of priests, bishops and Pope, viz. the successor of Peter, the doctrine handed down by Christ, and preserved intact and infallible, together with Holy Scripture and its true reading. Those who have the oversight over the rest admit the faithful into the sacred company by means of visible rites, and, thanks to the obedience they receive as God’s representatives, there results “a body” of faithful united with Christ, the One True Head.