Yet, in spite of the above concessions, the Mediæval Church remains in his eyes a “place of abominations”; her members, though validly baptised, are not members of the Church; they might indeed sit in the Church, but only as Antichrist sits in the Temple of God (2 Thess. ii. 4); her children would be saved if they died before coming to a full knowledge of the Popish Church, but if they grew up and followed her lying preaching then they would become devil’s whores;[1259] even as I myself “was stuck fast in the behind of the devil’s whore, i.e. of the Pope’s new Churches, so that it is a grief to us to have spent so much time and pains in that shameful hole. But praise and thanks be to God Who has delivered us from the Scarlet Woman!”[1260]
So low is his esteem for the authority of the tradition of the “Holy Place of abominations,” that he includes among the doubtful and fallible statements of that Doctor of the Church the famous saying of St. Augustine, that he would not believe the Gospel were it not for the Church.[1261] He urges that Augustine himself had declared, that his doctrines were to be examined, and only those to be accepted which were found correct. He prefers to harp on another passage where St. Augustine says: “The Church is begotten, fed, brought up and strengthened by the Word of God,”[1262] as though St. Augustine in speaking thus of the soul of the Church was denying her external organisation, her spiritual supremacy, and her teaching office. Luther, however, treated tradition just as he pleased; theologians had always distinguished between those traditions of the olden Doctors that had been guaranteed by the Church and those views which were merely personal to them; the latter no theologian regarded as binding, whereas the former were accepted by them with the respect befitting the witnesses. Here, once more, we see Luther’s subjective principle at work, which excludes all authoritative doctrine that comes to man from without, leaves him exposed to doubt and negation, and quite overlooks the fact that all revelation in last resort comes to the individual from without with an irresistible and authoritative claim to respect. Just as the Divine revelation vindicates its claim to acceptance by the faithful by means of proofs, so too, the teaching authority of the Church—as Luther’s Catholic opponents were not slow to point out—could show proofs that what was presented to the faithful as an article of belief might reasonably be accepted without any need of previously testing it to see whether it agreed with Holy Scripture—an examination, which, as a matter of fact, most people were not capable of undertaking.
As the polemic we quoted above argues, Protestants held Holy Scripture to be so clear that everyone could understand it without outside help. “But, if the heretics think Scripture to be so plain and clear, why do they write so many books in order to explain it? If Scripture is so clear, plain and easy to understand how is it that they are so much at variance concerning that one text: ‘This is My Body?’”[1263]
Luther now fell back on the Holy Spirit. “Without the Holy Ghost,” he says, “it is impossible to discern the abominations from the Holy Place.” But, so he was justly asked, who is to vouch for it that a man has truly the Holy Spirit? And, if, as Luther opines, the Holy Ghost points to the fruits as the means whereby He may be recognised, everything again depends on the fruits being judged according to Luther’s own moral standard. In short, in these controversies, Luther revolves in a vicious circle.
In his Table-Talk Luther’s habit of shielding himself from objections behind the strangest misrepresentations is again apparent. Such misrepresentations, occurring in his most intimate conversations, show that he was very far from merely using them in public or from motives of policy; rather they influence his whole mode of thought and feeling and were a second nature with him. We have only to turn to his conversations on the subject of the “Church,” collected in 1538 by his friend and companion Anton Lauterbach.[1264]
Here we meet with the revolting assertion that, in the Papistical Church, the Pope claimed to be the only one who had a right to interpret Scripture, and that he did this “out of his own brain”; this Church, so Luther goes on, had set up a mass of human regulations and vain observances which stifled all freedom and true religion; “the name Church was a pretext for the most abominable errors.” Further, “the true Church [i.e. mine] teaches the free forgiveness of sins, secondly, she teaches us to believe firmly, and, thirdly, to bear the cross with patience. But the false Church [the Pope’s] ascribes the forgiveness of sins to our own merits, teaches men to waver, and, finally does not carry the cross but rather persecutes others.” Besides, how can the Papists have the true Church, seeing that they are “some of them Epicureans, some of them idolaters?”—Fancy talking about the authority of the Church! Is it with this that the fanatical Anabaptists are to be vanquished? “Moreover, we know that: The true Church never at any time bore the name or title that the godless so boldly claim; she was ever nameless and is therefore believed rather than seen; for the most part she lies downtrodden and neglected; weakness, crosses and scandals are her portion. Only look at the Church under the tyranny of the Pope; the Papal Decretals are the ne plus ultra of ungodliness.”
“I am astonished,” so he ends, speaking of the Roman Primacy, “at the great blindness with which men worshipped the Pope’s lies and his boundless and utterly shameless audacity, as though Holy Scripture depended on the authority of the Roman Church whose head he claimed to be, basing his claim on the words of Christ (Matt. xvi. 18) ‘Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build My Church.’”
Luther’s Tactics in the Interpretation of the Bible
The text just quoted leads us to glance at his Biblical arguments; to conclude this chapter we shall therefore give as a sample of his exegesis on the Church a more detailed account of his exposition of the chief argument for the papal primacy, viz. Christ’s promise to Peter, using for this purpose his last book against Popery.[1265]