Life of Luther

by Julius Köstlin

CHAPTER III.

ERASMUS AND HENRY VIII.—CONTROVERSY WITH ZWINGLI AND HIS FOLLOWERS, UP TO 1528.

Luther's controversy with Erasmus, the most important of the champions of Catholic Churchdom, had terminated, it will be remembered, so far as Luther was concerned, with his treatise 'On the Bondage of the Will.' To the new tract which Erasmus published against him, in two parts, in 1526 and 1527, and which, though insignificant in substance, was violent and insulting enough in tone, Luther made no reply. Erasmus, nevertheless, to the pleasure of himself and his patrons in high places, continued his virulent attacks on the Reformation, which was bringing ruin, he declared, on the noble arts and letters, and carrying anarchy into the Church, while he himself, in his own mediating manner, and in the sense and with the help of the temporal rulers, was doing his best to promote certain reforms in the Church, within the pale of the ancient system, and on its proper hierarchical basis. On what principles, however, that basis was established, and the Divine rights of the hierarchy reposed, he wisely abstained, now as he had done before, from explaining. In Luther's eyes he was merely a refined Epicurean, who had inward doubts about religion and Christianity, and treated both with disdain.

Luther's letter to Henry VIII., which we have noticed in an earlier chapter, took a long time before it reached the King, and before the latter could send an answer to it. The writing of that answer must have given his royal adversary much satisfaction; it turned out a good deal coarser than even the one from Duke George; Luther's marriage in particular afforded Henry an occasion for insulting language. Emser published it in German early in 1527, adding some vituperations and falsehoods of his own. Luther's only object in replying was to dissipate any impression that he had ever declared to Henry his readiness to recant. His reply consisted of a few but powerfully written pages. He pointed out that in his letter he had expressly excepted his doctrines from any offer of retractation; upon these doctrines he took his stand, let kings and the devil do their worst. Beyond these he had nothing which so encouraged his heart, and gave him such strength and joy. To the personal insults and imputations of sensuality and so forth, which Henry VIII., this man of unbridled passions, had poured upon him, he replied that he was well aware that, in regard to his personal life, he was a poor sinner, and that he was glad his enemies were all saints and angels. He added, however, that though he knew himself to be a sinner before God and his dear Christian brethren, he wished at the same time to be virtuous before the world, and that virtuous he was—so much so that his enemies were not worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes. With regard to his letter to Henry he acknowledged that in this, as in his letter to Duke George, and others, he had been tempted to make a foolish trial of humility. 'I am a fool, and remain a fool, for putting faith so lightly in others.'

Luther reverts in this reply to enemies of a different sort, who make his heart still heavier. These are to him his 'tender children,' his 'little brothers,' his 'golden little friends, the spirits of faction and the fanatics,' who would not have known anything worth knowing either of Christ or of the gospel, if Luther had not previously written about it. He alluded, in particular, to the new 'Sacramentarians,' and to Zwingli their leader.

Although this is the first time that Zwingli makes his appearance in the history of Luther, and was never treated by him otherwise than as a new offshoot of fanaticism, it is important, in order to understand and appreciate him aright, to bear in mind the fact that, himself only a few months younger than Luther, he had been working since 1519 among the community at Zurich as an independent and progressive Evangelical Reformer, and had extended his active influence over Switzerland, however little noticed he had been at Wittenberg.

His career hitherto had been made easier for him than was the case with Luther. The Grand Council of the city of Zurich not only afforded him their protection, but in 1520 decreed full liberty to preach the Gospels and Epistles of the Apostles in the sense he ascribed to them, and in 1523 formally declared their acceptance of his doctrines, and abolished all idolatrous practices. No Recess of a Diet was here to disturb or threaten him. The Pope, for political reasons, behaved with unwonted caution and discretion: he delayed in this case for several years the ban of excommunication which he had pronounced so readily against Luther. Even Hadrian, the man of firm character, to whom Luther was an object of abhorrence, had only gracious and insinuating words for the Zurich Reformer. The Zurich authorities, at the same time, acting in concert with Zwingli, adopted severe measures against any intrusion of fanatics and Anabaptists, nor did the entire population of the small republic contain any great number of persons so thoroughly neglected, and so difficult of influence by preachers, as was the case with the country people in Germany. Well might Zwingli press forward with a lighter heart than Luther's in his work.

[Illustration: Fig. 38.—ZWINGLI. (From an old engraving.)]

Personally, moreover, he had never passed through such severe inward struggles as Luther, nor had ever wrestled with such spiritual anguish and distress. The thought of reconciliation with God, and the comforting of conscience by the assurance of His forgiving mercy, were not with Zwingli, as with Luther, the centre and focus of his aspirations and religious interests. He knew not that fervour and intenseness which made Luther grasp at every means for bringing home God's grace to congregations of believers, or to each individual Christian according to his spiritual need. His view, from the very first, extended rather to the totality of religious truth, as revealed by God in Scripture, but sadly disfigured in the creeds of the Church by man's additions and misinterpretations; and he aimed, far more than Luther, at a reconstruction of moral, and especially of communal life, in conformity with what the Word of God appeared to demand. It was easier for him, therefore, to break with the past: critical scruples against tradition did not weigh so heavily on his conscience. His critical faculties, no doubt, were sharpened by the humanistic culture he had acquired. Compared with Luther's peculiar meditative mood, and his half-choleric, half-melancholic temperament, Zwingli evinced, in all his conduct and demeanour, a more clear and sober intelligence, and a far calmer and more easy disposition. His practical policy and conduct was allied with a tendency to judicial severity, in contrast to the free spirit which animated Luther. So rigorous and narrow-minded was his zeal against the toleration of images, that the Wittenberg theologians could not help detecting in him a spirit akin to that of Carlstadt and the other fanatics. In renouncing the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the idea of a sacrifice, Zwingli had rejected altogether the supposition of a Real Presence of Christ's Body at the Sacrament; nay, as he declared later on, he had never truly believed in it. He quoted the words of Christ, 'The flesh profiteth nothing' (St. John vi. 63). He would understand by the Sacrament simply a spiritual feeding of the faithful, who, by the Word of God and His Spirit, are enabled to enjoy in faith the salvation purchased by the death of Christ. He saw no particular necessity for offering this salvation to them by an administration of Christ's Body, which had been given for them, through the visible medium of the bread; nor did he see how by so doing their faith could be strengthened. In Luther's view the practical significance of the Real Presence lay in this, that in this special manner the Christian, who felt his need of salvation, was assured, and became a partaker, of forgiveness and communion with his Saviour. With Zwingli, such a visible communication of the Divine gift of salvation was opposed to his conception of God and the Divine Nature; just as this conception was opposed to that kind of union of the Divine and human nature in Christ Himself, by virtue of which, according to Luther, Christ was able and willing to be actually present everywhere in the Sacrament with His human, transfigured body. Inasmuch, said Zwingli, as this spiritual feeding took place in faith everywhere, and not only at the Sacrament, it was no essential part of the Sacrament; the real essence whereof consisted in this, that the faithful here confessed by that act their common belief in the commemoration of Christ's death, and, as members of His Body, pledged themselves to such belief: he called the Sacrament the symbol of a pledge. Luther himself, as we have seen, had taught from the first that the Sacrament or Communion should represent the union of Christians with the spiritual Body, or their communion of the spirit, of faith, and of love. But with him this communion was a secondary condition; it was the feeding on the Body of Christ Himself which was to promote such communion with one another and, above all, with Christ. Zwingli explained the word 'is' of our Lord, in His institution of the Sacrament, to mean 'signifies.' Oecolampadius preferred the explanation that the bread was not the Body in the proper sense of the word, but a symbol of the Body. In point of fact, this was a distinction without a difference.

Such, briefly stated, was the doctrinal controversy in which the two Reformers, the German and the Swiss, now engaged, and which had first brought them into contact.