Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

The Indefectibility of the Church and Her Thousand-Year-Long Error

When the question arose, how the Church, in spite of Christ’s protection, could nevertheless have fallen into such monstrous errors,[1249] Luther was disposed to admit in his polemics that the true Church, i.e. the community of real believers, could not go astray. “The Church cannot teach lies and errors, not even in details.… How could it then be otherwise when God’s mouth is the mouth of the Church. As God cannot lie neither therefore can the Church.”[1250]

Such an immutable and reliable guide to erring men for their perfect peace of mind and sure salvation, the Catholics retorted, did Christ intend to leave in His visible Church, ruled by the successors of St. Peter.

An able Catholic work of 1528, already referred to above, emphasises the Church’s immutability in her dogma: “That preacher who does not preach in accordance with the Holy Catholic Church and the holy Fathers sins against the truth.… With due reverence we firmly believe all that is written in the approved Books of the Old and New Testament. We must not, however, so confine ourselves to this as to look upon what the Holy Church teaches apart from Scripture as human dross, seeing that Scripture itself commands us to keep the doctrine of the Church and the Fathers.” The author goes on to show his opponent Luther what services are rendered by the Church’s authority, how she preserves intact and vouches for the Canon of Scripture. It is only from the lips of the Church that we learn which books were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. “For where is it written that we must believe the Gospels of Matthew, John and the rest? But, if it is nowhere written, how is it you believe in these Gospels? How much at variance is your practice with your teaching?”[1251]

As to the infallibility of the Church Luther retorted: The invisible Church cannot err, but “that Church which we usually mean when we use the word, can and does err; the congregation of true believers cannot be assembled in one particular spot and is often to be found where least expected. Moreover, even this Church, i.e. the true believers and the saints, can sometimes go astray by allowing themselves to be drawn away from the Word.… Hence we must always regard the Church and the saints from two points of view, first according to the Spirit, and, then, according to the flesh, lest their piety and their Word savours of the flesh.”[1252] The Church teaches according to the Spirit when her “belief tallies with the Word of God and the belief of Christ Himself in heaven. To speak in this manner and meaning is right.”[1253] But “we must not build on her opinion or belief where she holds or believes anything outside of and beyond the Word of God.”[1254] It was according to the flesh that all those abominations of errors were taught which were termed “opinions of the Churches, though they were nothing of the kind but merely human conceits, invented outside of scripture and parading under the Church’s name.”[1255]

With this Luther’s reader is flung back once more into the most subjective of systems, for who is to decide whether this or that doctrine “savours of the flesh.” Each one for himself, solely according to the standard of Holy Scripture or, rather, each one as Luther dictates. But Luther’s decisions touched only the doctrines known to him; who is to decide on the questions yet to arise after his death?

He condemns the errors of the Middle Ages. Yet he is occasionally ready to praise the Mediæval Church. As we know he acknowledged that she had preserved Baptism. When the Church says that “Baptism washes away sin,” this, to Luther, does not savour of the flesh. “She also holds and believes that in [?] the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ are given.… Summa, in these beliefs the Church cannot err.”[1256] These, however, merely happened to be Luther’s own opinions. Infant-Baptism Luther defended against the Anabaptists without seeking help in the Bible; as for the presence of Christ in the Sacrament against the Zwinglians he indeed had the words of the Bible, yet here, too, he was only too glad to reinforce what he said by the traditions and infallible teaching office of the Church, though in so doing he was contradicting his own theory.[1257]

Luther, with characteristic disregard of logic, calls the earlier Church a “Holy place of abominations.” She was a “holy place,” for “there, even under the Pope, God maintained with might and by wonders first Holy Baptism; secondly, in the pulpits, the text of the Holy Gospel in the language of each country; thirdly, the Forgiveness of Sins and Absolution both in Confession and publicly; fourthly, the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar; … fifthly, the calling or ordination to the preaching office.… Many retained the custom of holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying and reminding them of the sufferings of Christ on which they must rely; finally, prayer, the Psalter, the Our Father, the Creed and the Ten Commandments, item many good hymns and canticles both in Latin and in German. Where such things survived there must undoubtedly have been a Church, and also Saints. Hence Christ was assuredly there with His Holy Spirit, upholding in them the Christian faith though everything was in a bad way, even as in the time of Elias, when the 7000 left were so weak that Elias fancied himself the only Christian still living.”[1258]

Nevertheless, this was the selfsame Church, which not only connived at the teaching of heretical abominations but actually herself taught all the depravities which Luther describes in the same writing, such as her peculiar doctrine of priestly ordination, of the validity of the secret Canon of the Mass, of the spiritual authority of the bishops, of justification, good works and satisfaction, of purgatory, saint-worship, etc.

That here he does not condemn the olden Church off-hand and fling her to the jaws of the dragon as he was wont to do is a casual inconsistency; his moderation here is to be explained by the necessity he was under then (after the Diet of Augsburg), of showing that he could claim a certain continuity with the Church of the past, and also by his desire to influence those Catholics who were still sitting on the fence and whom he would gladly have drawn over to his own side by seeming concessions, in accordance with his tactics at Augsburg.