Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

In what Luther wrote against the Catholics we occasionally meet some fine sayings on the unfettered authority of the Church in its relations to the secular rulers,[1225] so greatly was his versatile mind governed by the spirit of opportunism.

It was from motives of expediency that, in 1529, in his “Vom Kriege widder die Türcken” he makes out Emperors and kings to be no protectors of the Church; these worldly powers are “as a rule the worst foes of Christendom and the faith.” “The Emperor’s sword has nothing to do with the faith, but only with bodily and worldly affairs.”[1226] It must be remembered that he wrote this just before the dreaded Diet of Augsburg.—Again, in 1545, in the Theses against the “Theologists of Louvain” who had requested the State to protect the Catholic faith as heretofore, Luther says: “It is not the duty of Kings and Princes to confirm right doctrine; they have themselves to bow to it and obey it as the Word of God and God Himself.”[1227]—If the “Emperor’s sword” and the “Kings and Princes” had been on his side, then his language would have been quite different. As it was, however, whenever he thought it might prove useful, he was not unwilling to come back even later to the standpoint of his writing “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt.”[1228]

When the Catholics, for instance at the Diet of Augsburg, reproached his party with having completely secularised the Church and with prohibiting Catholic worship with the help of the Princes who favoured him, his replies were eminently characteristic both of his temper and his mode of controversy.

He knew very well, so he wrote in 1530, “that the Prince’s office and the preacher’s are not one and the same, and that the Prince as such ought not to do this [i.e. prohibit the Mass].” But in this the Prince was acting, not as a Prince, but as a Christian. It is also “a different thing whether a Prince ought to preach or whether he ought to consent to the preaching. It is not the Prince, but rather Scripture, that prohibits ‘winkle-masses’”; if a Prince chose to take the side of Scripture that was his own business.[1229]

Another answer of Luther’s was to the effect that the abominations of Catholic worship which were being abolished by the secular authorities were, after all, outward things, and that the power of the sovereign without a doubt stretched over “res externæ.”[1230]

Of these attempts at justification and of his doctrine of the Church in general, Köstlin’s observations hold good: “We cannot escape the fact that, here, there is much vacillation and that Luther stands in danger of contradicting himself.” “We must admit that he had not studied deeply enough the questions arising out of the relations of the authorities to matters ecclesiastical.”[1231] “The decision [of the sovereigns] as to what constituted right doctrine was final as regards the substance of the preaching in their lands.” “A nobleman who had received orders from his sovereign, the Duke of Saxony, to expel the Evangelical preachers, was told by Luther—though what he said was undeniably at variance with other utterances—that the sovereign had no right to do this because God’s command obliged him to rule only in secular and not in spiritual concerns.” “In fact the only answer he could give to the Popish persecutors when they alleged they were forced by their office and conscience to act as they did was: ‘What is that to me?’ for it was clear enough that they were using their authority wantonly.”[1232]

But how are we to explain his apparent readiness at the time of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 to recognise the olden Church, and the power of the bishops, and even himself to submit to them if only they would allow him and his followers freedom to preach the Evangel? The statements to this effect in his “Vermanug” of this year have been widely misunderstood through being taken apart from their setting. He does not for a moment imagine, as he has been falsely credited with doing, that it was not “his vocation to found a new Church separate from Catholicism”; neither has he any desire to remain united with his foes “in one communion under the Catholic bishops.”

Luther, as he here says, is only willing, “for the sake of peace, to allow the bishops to be princes and lords,” and this only on condition that “they help to administer the Evangel”—i.e. take his part; in that case they “would be free to appoint clerics to the parishes and pulpits.” His offer is, “that we and the preachers should teach the Evangel in your stead,” and “that you should back us by means of your episcopal powers; only your personal mode of life and your princely state would we leave to your conscience and to the judgment of God.”[1233] In the meantime, on account of the Catholic faith to which they clung, he calls them “foes of God,” speaks of their “anti-Christian bishopry,” and, because of the infringements of the law of celibacy, scourges them as the “greatest whoremongers and panders upon earth.”[1234]

In his controversies with the Catholics he often enough found himself faced by the objection, that the true Church could not be with him, because on his side all the fruits of holiness were wanting; the Church being essentially holy should needs be able to point to her good influence on morals.

Thus, for instance, a Dominican adversary had written: According to Luther the Gospel had been under the bench for the last four hundred years; but, now, surely enough, “it is under the bench even more than heretofore, for the Gospel and the whole of Scripture have never been so despised as at present owing to Luther’s teaching, who excludes all love of God and man, all concord between lords and serfs, priests and laity, men and women, rejects all good works and discipline, obscures the truth and replaces it by nothing but lies and introduces hatred and envy, unchastity, blasphemy and disobedience.”[1235]