Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

The recovery of Melanchthon and Myconius for whom Luther had prayed so ardently became evident miracles. The preservation of his picture in great fires was another miracle of frequent recurrence. Splinters from a beam in his house, according to Gottfried Arnold, the Pietist, in his Church-History, were deemed an efficacious cure for toothache and other ills. Arnold calls this a subtle form of idolatry. Leonard Hutter, who became professor at Wittenberg in 1596, learnedly set forth the proofs of Luther’s “being endowed with a ‘spiritus vatidicus’ enabling him to foresee many things of importance,” though his prophetic insight is chiefly confined by Hutter and others to his peculiar divine gift for the interpretation of Holy Writ, or to his proclamation of the destruction of contemners of the Evangel.[1612] Johannes Klai (or Claius), the German grammarian and a zealous Lutheran, expressed it as his opinion in 1578 that the German used by Luther was so pure and beautiful that he could have learnt it only by the special help of the Holy Ghost.[1613] Johannes Albertus Fabricius collected, chiefly in the interests of the orthodox party, the titles of the works dealing with Luther; the bare lists of the books setting forth the services he had rendered, the honourable epithets bestowed on him, his eminent qualities, his miracles and his own prophecies and those of others, occupy many pages.[1614]

Even as late as 1872 Carl Frederick Kahnis, the Lutheran theologian and professor at Leipzig, depicted Luther in his “Deutsche Reformation” with all the olden traits. Luther’s doctrines he regarded as the true norm, though it was necessary to understand and develop them. According to Kahnis the young monk’s experience with the devil in the refectory at night and again at the Wartburg, were real assaults of the Evil One on the chosen prophet of God, visible and audible marks of the hostility of Satan to the saviour of mankind, for Luther “was no slave to fancy or excited feelings.” “Maybe,” so he says rather incautiously, “no Father of the Church since the days of the Apostles ever had to feel so keenly the power of Satan.” The prophecy of the “bare-foot monk” and the auguries of the Eisenach Franciscan become matters of history, for had not Luther himself appealed to them? Even the tale of the Elector’s dream who saw the monk’s pen stretching even to Rome and blotting out everything there, rested, according to him, on “history.” As for the fallen Church of pre-Lutheran days, against which his wonderful pen worked, it sinks into the abyss of its own errors before the rising sun of Luther’s new doctrine.[1615]

6. Luther as seen by the Pietists and Rationalists

Luther, as pictured to themselves by the Pietists, differed widely from the Luther of the orthodox. To Pietists like Spener, Luther’s actual doctrine—regarded by them as contradictory and wavering—appealed far less than certain personal mystic traits of his. To them the inward struggles of soul to which Luther ascribes his transition from despair into the peace of the Gospel, his remarks on piety and the interior life, his realisation of the universal priesthood, and the breathing of the Spirit were very dear. They were less enamoured of Luther’s views on faith, the outward Word, or the State-Government of the Church. At any rate, the Pietists wove from the material at their disposal a new Luther who was practically a counterpart of themselves. They preferred to dwell on his earlier years, when Luther, as Gottfried Arnold said in 1699 in his “Kirchenhistorie,” yet lived “in the Spirit,” and before he had ended “in the flesh” as he did later. They either said nothing of his worldlier side or else openly censured it as the fruit of his backsliding and later errors.

Arnold complains bitterly that things had gone so far after Luther’s death that he was called a “Saint” and a divine man, and that he was made out to be the Angel foretold in the Apocalypse. Still he recognises in him “in a usual way,” an “apostolic mission” in so far as he had been the recipient of “a direct inspiration, stimulus or divine gift.” “At the first” he had “indeed been mightily directed, and utilised as a divine tool”; at any rate up to the time of his breach with Carlstadt he could boast of enjoying “the strength and illumination of the Spirit which gave him on particular points and in difficult cases a rule and true certainty.” Only with such limitations will the historian of Pietism accept Luther’s epitaph at Wittenberg where mention is made of the inbreathing of God’s spirit.[1616]

Whereas the orthodox Lutherans, owing to the abiding influence of Melanchthon’s humanism, allowed the study of philosophy and of the wisdom of the ancients, the Pietists at Leipzig, Giessen, Stargard and elsewhere rejected all philosophy, appealing to Luther who had spurned it as the offspring of that fool reason which ought to be done away with; Melanchthon, they urged, had corrupted the faith by the admixture of Plato and Aristotle, and, hence, had never been regarded by Luther “as a true, staunch theologian, but rather as a cunning Aristotelian dialectician.”[1617]

When other Lutherans taunted them with their separatist tendencies so much at variance with Luther’s view of the outward government of the Church by the State, the Pietists retorted by appealing in defence of their conventicle system and so-called “collegia pietatis,” to Luther’s Church-Apart of the True Believers. They quoted those passages of the “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” (1526), where Luther lays stress on the ideal kinship of those who earnestly desire to be Christians, and characterises the services in the Church as worthless for those who “are already Christians.”[1618]

“Thus quite a struggle raged around Luther’s person.”[1619]

Books appeared on the one side with such titles as “Lutherus Antipietista” and on the other: “Luther the precursor of Spener who faithfully followed in the footsteps of the former.” Count L. von Zinzendorf, with his Pietistic leanings, claimed to be a perfect counterpart of Luther; he wished, as he said in 1749, to be “what Luther had been in part, and what, according to the logical sequence from given premises, he should and ought to have been.” “The Luther who still lives and teaches in Count von Zinzendorf,” was the title of a work by one of the latter’s followers. Things went so far that, in the controversies, it became necessary to ask: Which Luther do you mean, the earlier or the later? Nor was even this sufficient, for Consistorialrat J. A. Bengel of Württemberg (†1752) actually distinguished three Luthers: “the first and the last,” he said, “were all right, but the middle one, owing to the heat of controversy, was sometimes rather spoiled.”[1620]