On the question of the veneration of the Sacrament differences at last sprung up even between Bugenhagen and Luther; the former, usually his pliant instrument, took upon himself during Luther’s absence to abolish at Wittenberg the elevation of the elements during the celebration. Apparently this was in the second half of Jan., 1542. Luther expressed his disapproval of this action and declared he would revive the rite.[1333] In 1544, when the three Princes of Anhalt were at Wittenberg and asked him whether it would be right to abolish the Elevation, he replied: “On no account; such abrogation detracts from the dignity of the Sacrament.” There is no doubt that it was his antagonism to the Zwinglians that was here the determining factor; moreover, as he admitted Christ to be present in the Sacrament during reception in the wider sense, i.e. during the liturgical action, he had no theological grounds for doing away with the elevation and adoration of the elements. In his own justification he went so far as to say: “Christ is in the bread, why then should He not be treated with the greatest respect and also be adored?”[1334]
The Lutheran preacher Wolferinus of Eisleben was in the habit of pouring back into the barrel what remained of the consecrated Wine after communion. Luther called him sharply to account, as he found that his conduct was tainted with Zwinglianism; in order to evade the difficulty he ordered that, in future, preachers and communicants should see that nothing was left over after communion.[1335]
Luther, towards the end of his life, had to taste a good deal of that “theological ire” of which Melanchthon frequently speaks, and not only from the Swiss. We need only call to mind Johann Agricola, and his “antinomian sow-theology,” as Melanchthon termed it. His inferences from Luther’s doctrine of the inability of man to fulfil the Law he never really withdrew even when he had betaken himself to Brandenburg. In the Table-Talk dating from the latest period and published by Kroker, Luther’s frequent bitter references to Agricola show the speaker was well aware that his Berlin opponent still hated and distrusted him as much as ever. After Luther’s death it became evident that Agricola “was capable of everything,” and that Luther was not so far wrong, when, on another occasion, he declared that he was not a man to be taken seriously.[1336] Agricola finally died, loaded with worldly honours, in 1566.
A more serious critic of Luther, at any rate on the question of the Sacrament, was Martin Bucer. The latter’s friendship with the Swiss and the too independent spirit in which he planned the reformation of Cologne, caused Luther great anxiety towards the end of his life. In his plan Luther, so he says, was unable to find any clear confession of faith in the Sacrament, but merely “much idle talk of its profit, fruit and dignity,” all carefully “wrapped up that no one might know what he really thought of it, just as is the way with the fanatics.” In all this talk he could “readily discern the chatterbox Bucer.”[1337] Bucer, on his side, was dissatisfied with the progress of Luther’s work in Germany. Owing to the Interim he was no longer able to remain at Strasburg and accordingly accepted a post at the English University of Cambridge and died in England in 1551.
The Controversy on Clandestine Marriages
It was, however, annoyances and disagreements of a different sort that kept Luther to the end of his days in a state of extreme indignation against the lawyers and politicians of the Court.
A letter of Luther’s to the Elector Johann Frederick dated Jan. 18, 1545, on the controversy with the Saxon lawyers about Luther’s denunciation of clandestine marriages (those entered upon without the knowledge of the parents) as illegal, carries us into the thick of these disagreements.[1338] His sovereign, he says, had ordered him to confer with the lawyers and come to an arrangement with them; Luther, however, after summoning them before him, had declared categorically that, “I had no intention of holding a disputation with them; I had a divine command to preach the 4th commandment[1339] in these matters.” Thus, in the questions under discussion, he is determined not to submit either to the secular or the canon law but only to the Divine. “Otherwise I should have to give up the Gospel and creep back into the cowl [become a monk again] in the devil’s name, by the strength and virtue of both the spiritual and the imperial law. And, besides this, your Electoral Highness would have to cut off my head, doing likewise with all those who have wedded nuns, as the Emperor Jovian commanded more than a thousand years back.” As a result of his arguments, “the lawyers of the Consistory and Courts agreed to give up and reject altogether the clandestine espousals [i.e. marriages ‘sponsalia de præsenti’].” In these words he announces his final apparent victory in this long-drawn controversy.
In the same letter he touches on the deeper side of the quarrel.
The lawyers at the High Court have always stuck to many points of “the Pope’s laws” which “we of the clergy” don’t want. “Some, too, made out [in accordance with Canon Law then still in force] that, on our death, our wives and children could not inherit our goods and wished to adjudicate them to our friends, etc.” They had paid no attention to the writings of the new theologians; and yet the latter, “few in number and insignificant maybe, have done more good in the Churches than all the Popes and jurists in a lump.” Hence the preachers had simply disregarded the lawyers, viz. in respect of the clandestine marriages; this had brought about peace. When, however, the “Consistory had been set up” (1539), the whole business had begun anew. “The jurists fancied they had found a loophole through which to raise a disturbance in my Churches with their damnable procedure, which, to-day and to all eternity, I want to have condemned and execrated in my Churches.” “Spoon-fed jurists” thrust themselves forward; but these “merry customers” are not going to make “of my Churches, for which I have to answer before God,” “such dens of murderers.”