§ 139.26. Attempt at Protestantizing the Eastern Church.—The opposition to the Roman papacy, which was common to them and the eastern church, led the Protestants of the West to long for and strive after a union with those who were thus far agreed with them. A young Cretan, Jacob Basilicus, whom Heraclides, prince of Samos and Paros, had adopted, on his travels through Germany, Denmark, and Sweden had come into friendly relations with Melanchthon and others of the reformed party, and attempted, after he entered upon the government of his two islands in A.D. 1561, to introduce a reformation of the local church according to evangelical principles. But he was murdered in A.D. 1563, and with him every trace of his movement passed away.—In A.D. 1559 a deacon from Constantinople, Demetrius Mysos, spent some months with Melanchthon at Wittenburg [Wittenberg], and took with him a Greek translation of the Augsburg Confession, of which, however, no result ever came. At a later period, in A.D. 1573, the Tübingen theologians, Andreä, Luc. Osiander, and others, reopened negotiations with the patriarch Jeremiah II. (§ 73, 4), through a Lutheran pastor, Stephen Gerbach, who went to Constantinople in the suite of a zealous Protestant nobleman, David of Ungnad, ambassador of Maximilian II. The Tübingen divines sent with him a Greek translation of the Augsburg Confession, composed by Mart. Crusius, with a request for his judgment upon it. The patriarch, in his reply in A.D. 1576, expressed himself candidly in regard to the errors of the book. The doctors of Tübingen wrote in vindication of their formula, and in a second answer, in A.D. 1579, the patriarch reiterated the objections stated in the first. After a third interchange of letters he declined all further discussion, and allowed a fourth epistle, in A.D. 1581, to remain unanswered.—Continuation, § 152, 2.
II. The Churches of the Reformation.
§ 140. The Distinctive Character of the Lutheran Church.[402]
In the Lutheran Church, that specifically German type of Christianity which from the days of Charlemagne was ever panting after independent expression reached its maturity and full development. The sacred treasure of true catholicity, which the church of early times had nurtured in the form of Greek-Roman culture, is taken over freed from excrescences, and enriched by those acquisitions of the Middle Ages that had stood the proof. Its vocation was to set forth the “happy mean” between the antagonistic ecclesiastical movements and struggles of the West, and to give its strength mainly to the development of sound doctrine. And if it has not exerted an equal influence in all departments, paying most attention to the worship and least to matters of constitution, it cannot, on the other hand, be denied that even in those directions an effort has been made to modify the violent contradiction of extremes (§ [142, 1], [2]).
The Mediate and Mediating Attitude of the Lutheran Church shows itself in its fundamental conception of the essence of Christianity as the union of the Divine and human, of which the prototype is found in the Person of Christ, and illustrations of it in the Scriptures, the church, the sacraments, the Christian life, etc. In the varied ways in which this union is conceived of lies the deepest and most inward ground of the divergence that exists between the three western churches. The Catholic church wishes to see the union of the Divine and human; the Lutheran, wishes to believe it; the Reformed, wishes to understand it. The tendency prevails in the Catholic church to confound these two, the Divine and the human, and that indeed in such a way that the human loses its human character, and its union with the Divine is regarded as constituting identity. The Reformed church, again, is prone to separate the two, to look upon the Divine by itself and the human by itself, and to regard the union as a placing of the one alongside of the other, as having not an objective but a merely subjective, not a real but a merely ideal, connection. But the Lutheran church, guarding itself against any confusion as well as any separation of the two elements, had sought to view the union as the most vital, rich, and inward communion, interpenetration, and reciprocity. In the view of the Catholic church the human and earthly, which is so often a very imperfect vehicle of the Divine, in which the Divine often attained to a very incomplete development, is to be regarded as in and by itself already the Divine. So is it in the idea of the church, and hence the doctrine of a merely external and visible church, which as such is only the channel of salvation. So is it in the historical development of the church, and hence the absolute authority of tradition and the reversal of the true relations between Scripture and tradition. So too is it with the doctrine of the sacraments, and hence the idea of an opus operatum and of transubstantiation. So in regard to the priesthood, hence hierarchism; so in regard to the idea of sanctification, and hence semipelagianism and the doctrine of merits. Thoroughly antagonistic to all this was the view of the Reformed church. It was inclined rather to sever completely the Divine in Christianity from its earthly, visible vehicle, and to think of the operation of the Divine upon man as merely spiritual and communicated only through subjective faith. It renounced all tradition, and thereby broke off from all historical development, whether normal or abnormal. In its doctrine of Scripture, the literal significance of the word was often exalted above the spirit; in its doctrine of the church, the significance of the visible church over that of the invisible. In its doctrine of the Person of Christ, the human nature of the glorified Saviour was excluded from a personal full share in all the attributes of His divinity. In the doctrine of the sacraments, supernatural grace and the earthly elements were separated from one another; and in the doctrine of predestination the Divine foreknowledge of man’s volitions was isolated, etc. The Lutheran church, on the other hand, had at least made the effort to steer between those two extremes, and to bind into a living unity the truth that lies at the foundation of both. In the Scripture it wishes as little to see the spirit without the word, as the word without the spirit; in history it recognises the rule and operation of the Spirit of God within the human and ecclesiastical developments; and it rejects only the false tradition which has not had its growth organically from Holy Scripture, but rather contradicts it. In its doctrine of the church it holds with equal tenacity to the importance of the visible church and that of the invisible. In its doctrine of the Person of Christ it affirms the perfect humanity and the perfect divinity in the living union and richly communicating reciprocity of the two natures. In its doctrine of the sacraments it gives full weight as well to the objective Divine fact which heavenly grace presents in earthly elements as to the subjective condition of the man, to whom the sacrament will prove saving or condemning according as he is a believer or an unbeliever. And, finally, it expresses the belief that in the Divine decree the apparent contradiction between God’s foreknowledge and man’s self-determination is solved, while it regards predestination as conditioned by the foreknowledge of God; whereas Calvinism reverses that relation.
§ 141. Doctrinal Controversies in the Lutheran Church.[403]
Even during Luther’s lifetime, but much more after his death, various doctrinal controversies broke out in the Lutheran church. They arose for the most part upon the borderlands either of Calvinism or of Catholicism, and were generally occasioned by offence taken at the attitude of the more stiff and dogged of Luther’s adherents by those of the Melanchthonian or Philippist school, who had irenical and unionistic feelings in regard to both sides. The scene of these conflicts was partly in the electorate of Albertine Saxony and in the duchy of Ernestine Saxony. Wittenberg and Leipzig were the headquarters of the Philippists, and Weimar and Jena of the strict Lutherans. There was no lack on either side of rancour and bitterness. But if the Gnesio-Lutherans went far beyond the Melanchthonians in stiffnecked irreconcilableness, slanderous denunciation, and outrageous abuse, they yet showed a most praiseworthy strength of conviction, steadfastness, and martyrlike devotion; whereas their opponents not infrequently laid themselves open to the charge, on the one hand, of a pusillanimous and mischievous pliability, and, on the other hand, of using unworthy means and covert, deceitful ways. Their controversies reached a conclusion after various alternations of victory and defeat, with often very tragic consequences to the worsted party, in the composition of a new confessional document, the so called Formula Concordiæ.
§ 141.1. The Antinomian Controversy, A.D. 1537-1541, which turned upon the place and significance of the law under the Christian dispensation, lay outside the range of the Philippist wranglings. John Agricola, for a time pastor in his native town of Eisleben, and so often called Master Eisleben, in A.D. 1527 took offence at Melanchthon for having in his visitation articles (§ [127, 1]) urged the pastors so earnestly to enjoin upon their people the observance of the law. He professed, indeed, for the time to be satisfied with Melanchthon’s answer, which had also the approval of Luther, but soon after he had, in A.D. 1536, become a colleague of both in Wittenberg, he renewed his opposition by publishing adverse theses. He did not contest the pedagogical and civil-political use of the law outside of the church, but starting from the principle that an enjoined morality could not help man, he maintained that the law has no more significance or authority for the Christian, and that the gospel, which by the power of Divine love works repentance, is alone to be preached. Melanchthon and Luther, on the contrary, held that anguish and sorrow for sin are the fruits of the law, while the saving resolution to reform is the effect of the gospel, and insisted upon a continued preaching of the law, because from the incompleteness of the believer’s sanctification in this world a daily renewing of repentance is necessary. After several years of oral and written discussion, Agricola took his departure from Wittenberg in A.D. 1540, charging Luther with having offered him a personal insult, and was made court preacher at Berlin, where, in A.D. 1541, having discovered his error, he repudiated it in a conciliatory exposition. The reputation in which he was held at the court of Brandenburg led to his being at a subsequent period made a collaborateur in drawing up the hated Augsburg Interim (§ [136, 5]). As his antinomianism every now and again cropped up afresh, the Formula Concordiæ at last settled the controversy by the statement that we must ascribe to the law, not only a usus politicus and usus elenchticus for terrorizing and arresting the sinner, but also a usus didacticus for the sanctifying of the Christian life.
§ 141.2. The Osiander Controversy, A.D. 1549-1556.—Luther had, in opposition to the Romish doctrine of merits, defined justification as purely an act of God, whose fruit can be appropriated by man only by the exercise of faith. But he distinguished from justification as an act of God for man, sanctification as the operation of God in man. The former consists in this, that Christ once for all has offered Himself up on the cross for the sins of the whole world, and that now God ascribes the merit of the sacrificial death of Christ for every individual as though it had been his own, i.e. juridically; the believer is thus declared, but not made righteous. The believer, on the ground of his having been declared righteous, is made righteous by means of a sanctifying process penetrating the whole earthly life and constantly advancing, but in this world never absolutely perfect, which is effected by the communication of the new life which Christ has created and brought to light. Andrew Osiander proposed a theory that diverged from this doctrine, and inclined toward that set forth in the Tridentine Council (§ [136, 4]), but distinguished from the Romish view by decided attachment to the Protestant principle of justification by faith alone. He had been from A.D. 1522 pastor and reformer at Nuremberg, and had proclaimed his ideas without thereby giving offence. This first happened when, after his expulsion from Nuremberg on account of the interim, he had begun to announce his peculiar doctrine in the newly founded University of Königsberg, where he had been appointed professor by Duke Albert of Prussia in A.D. 1549 (§ [126, 4]). Confounding sanctification with justification, he wished to define the latter, not as a declaring righteous but as a making righteous, not as a juridical but as a medicinal act, wrought by an infusion, i.e. a continuous influx of the righteousness of Christ. The sacrificial death of Christ is for him only the negative condition of justification, its positive condition rests upon the incarnation of Christ, the reproduction of which in the believer is justification, which is therefore to be referred not to the human but rather to the Divine nature in Christ. Along with this, he also held by the conviction that the incarnation of God in Christ would have taken place in order to complete the creation of the image of God in man even had the fall never happened. The main point of his opposition was grounded upon this: that he believed the juridical theory to have overlooked the religious subjective element, which, however, is still present in faith as the subjective condition of declaring righteous. The keen and bitter controversy over these questions spread from the university among the clergy, and thence to the citizens and families, and soon came to be carried on on both sides with great passionateness and heat. The favour publicly shown to Osiander by the duke, who set him as Bishop of Samland at the head of the Prussian clergy, increased the bitterness felt toward him by his opponents. Among these was Martin Chemnitz, a scholar of Melanchthon, and from A.D. 1548 rector of the High School at Königsberg. Also Professor Joachim Mörlin, a favourite pupil of Luther, Francis Staphylus, who afterwards went back to the Romish church (§ [137, 8]), and Francis Stancarus of Mantua, a man who bears a very bad reputation for his fomenting of quarrels, were among Osiander’s most inveterate foes. Stancarus carried his opposition to Osiander so far as to maintain that Christ has become our righteousness only in respect of His human nature. The opinions received from abroad were for the inmost part against Osiander. John Brenz, of Württemburg [Württemberg], however, clined rather to favour Osiander’s view than that of his opponents, while Melanchthon, in giving utterance to the Wittenberg opinion, endeavoured by removing misunderstandings to reconcile the opposing parties, but on the main point decided against him. Even Osiander’s death in A.D. 1552 did not put an end to the controversy. At the head of his party now appeared the court preacher, John Funck, who, standing equally high in favour with the duke, filled all positions with his own followers. In his overweening conceit he mixed himself up in political affairs, and put himself in antagonism with the nobles and men of importance in the State. A commission of investigation on the Polish sovereignty at their instigation found him guilty of high treason, and had him beheaded in A.D. 1566.The other Osiandrianists were deposed and exiled. Mörlin, from A.D. 1533 general superintendent of Brunswick, was now honourably recalled as Bishop of Samland, reorganized the Prussian church, and in conjunction with Chemnitz, who had been from A.D. 1554 preacher in Brunswick, where he died in A.D. 1586 as general superintendent, composed for Prussia a new doctrinal standard in the Corpus doctrinæ Pruthenicum of A.D. 1567.[404]