The period of the enlightenment also presents a “sadly distorted” picture of Luther; it had “not the least comprehension of his fiery spirit” and, as was its wont, was “anxious to wipe out everything too distinctive.”[1604]
“Misunderstood and disfigured ‘beyond recognition,’ Luther steps over the threshold of the new era. But here again misfortune awaits him: ‘Sectarians, Anabaptists, Pietists, Democrats, Rationalists, Orthodox’ … all these set to work to improve upon the hero until they can stamp him as their own.”[1605] Finally, “the latest phase of theological development spells a revision of the whole idea and appreciation of Luther.” In the consciousness of having far outrun Luther on the road to a purely natural religion minus any faith, people are beginning to “emphasise more strongly the fact, that he was held captive in the bonds of mediæval feelings and ideas.”[1606]
“Who really knows him?” asked Adolf Harnack in 1883, “and who can be expected to know him? People are willing enough to worship him as what they wish him to be, as the upholder of their own ideals; but in their heart of hearts, they feel that, after all, he was really quite different. His character impresses all, but his convictions are left in the background, or else are worked up into new and more serviceable coin.”[1607]
Yet all these Protestant impressions of Luther, to be examined more in detail below, however they may differ have at least this much in common, that Luther must be acclaimed as the great opponent of the authority of the olden Church.
Maybe we shall come nearest to a correct picture of Luther if we combine the modern view of his being a “mediævalist” with the olden orthodox claim that he was a Prophet of God. Luther stood partly for the old supernaturalist Christianity, partly for a new pseudo-supernaturalism; so far those who speak of his “mediævalism” are in the right. He himself, however, summed up his own character in that of the God-sent “Prophet of Germany,” and divinely appointed conqueror of Antichrist and the devil—a point which was rightly emphasised by his orthodox followers.
To go back now to the various descriptions of Luther. The Orthodox derived their idea of Luther from the oldest traditions. In these there was a breath of the supernaturalism in which Luther’s own view of himself was decked out, of the inbreathing of the Spirit, of his mysterious struggles with a power unseen, and of his divinely assured victory over the Roman Babylon.
At the present day one marvels to see how cheerfully and naïvely members of the old “orthodox” school were wont to magnify the founder of their denomination on the lines sketched out by Luther himself. All that interested them was the teacher, Luther the theologian; to them he appeared a sort of “professor of divinity of heroic dimensions.” In the century which followed his death it was the custom to exalt him “into the region of the marvellous and more-than-human.” So fond were they of “depicting his divine halo” that it became quite the usual thing to “set Luther side by side with the olden Prophets and Apostles.”
After Elias and John the Baptist, he is “the third Elias, who makes ready the way against the return of Christ to Judgment.” He is the second Noe, the second Abraham, the second Samson, the second Samuel, the second Jeremias, above all, he is the second Moses who frees the people from their bondage; the Egyptian bondage, so some one computed had come to an end in B.C. 1517 just as the Papal bondage reached its end in 1517 A.D.[1608]
Holy Scripture, so the orthodox declared, points to Luther not only where it speaks of the revelation and overthrow of Antichrist (2 Thes. ii. 8), not merely where it proclaims that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem (Zach. xiv. 8), but also in the Apocalypse of John where we are told of the angel having the eternal Gospel—flying through the midst of heaven to the mount on which is seated the Lamb with 144,000 who bear His name—“in order to preach it to them that sit upon the earth, to every nation and tribe, and tongue and people” (Rev. xiv. 6). That this angel was Luther is also plain from the fact that, if the letters of the verse quoted are reckoned by their position in the alphabet and then added together the number will be exactly the same as that of the words (in German): Martin Luther, Doctor of Holy Scripture, born at Eisleben, baptised on Martinmas-Day, viz. 819![1609] In a sermon in 1676 the flight of the angel through the midst of heaven is taken to signify the marvellously rapid spread of Luther’s Evangel, and the Gospel he preaches is termed “eternal,” because Luther’s doctrine is found even in the Fathers of the Church.[1610]
The story of Hus, the “swan,” as prophetic of the coming of Luther, was an integral part of the panegyrics even of Mathesius and Bugenhagen; it served much the same purpose as the statue of a monk with the inscription L.V.T.E.R.V.S., said to have been erected by Kaiser Frederick Barbarossa.[1611]