This tendency was, I say, easy and irresistible just because Luther did not normally and naturally think of God as being inherently and essentially loving, gracious, tender, and forgiving, that is to say, fundamentally a Father and in his deepest nature like the self-giving Christ. For him, as for so many other theologians, God becomes forgiving and gracious on account of Christ's merit and righteousness and thus no longer imputes sin to us. Because of what Christ did, God now beholds us with an attitude of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and, on condition of our faith, imputes to us the righteousness of Christ. Salvation is, thus, a plan by which we escape from the God of justice and wrath and have our dealings with a God who has become merciful because our sin has been balanced off by somebody else's merit and righteousness.
Not only did Luther continue this medieval fiction of God's nature and character, he had also always in mind a fictitious and constructed "man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith itself, by which salvation is received, is not an attitude or function of man's own will or reason. It is, like everything else connected with salvation, something divinely given, supernaturally initiated, a work of God, an opus operatum—"Mit unserer Macht ist nichts gethan"—and therefore "faith" and "reason" belong in totally different compartments of the human being. Nor, furthermore, when he is absorbed with his system, is salvation ever synonymous for him with an inwardly-transformed and spiritually-renewed self. Salvation means for him certainty of divine favour. It does not inherently carry with it and involve in its intrinsic meaning a new life, a joyous adjustment of will to the Will of God. If man is to attain to a moral transformation of life, he must receive an added gift of supernatural grace, that is, the power of sanctification through the Holy Spirit. This conception made it impossible for him to look for the coming of a divine kingdom by slow processes now at work in the world.
Luther did not intend to make the "Word of God" synonymous with the Scriptures, and in his great Prefaces to St. Paul's Epistles he does not identify the two. The Word of God is, as we have seen, the revelation, the message, the gospel, of Grace through Christ Jesus, wherever expressed, enunciated, or preached. But the pledged Word of God found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages, and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and "Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the foundation for the view of the second generation of Protestantism, that the infallible Scripture is God's final communication to helpless man, and is the ultimate and only basis of authority in religion.
His conception of the sacraments in like manner, {13} because of his crude supernaturalism and his inadequate intellectual and spiritual penetration, drifted to a semi-medieval view. He intended to transform these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of God." In his primary intention they were to be no longer objective works of grace, but were to have a subjective value only, a faith-significance. They were to be conceived as pictorial, symbolic ways of learning the one important truth of salvation—God's grace and forgiveness; for God deigns, he said, to speak to his immature creatures by signs and pictures. But the imperial sway of the past powerfully moved him; his own conservative disposition carried him along paths which an enlightened reason would not have taken, and the heat of the controversy often blinded him to some of the precious truths that had seemed clear to him in the creative period of Faith. In the bitter controversy with the "spiritual prophets" on the question of sacraments, he wrote words which seem strangely out of harmony with his earlier views and with his own experience: "External things in religion must precede internal experiences which come through [i.e. are mediated by] external things, for God has resolved to give nobody the internal gifts except through the external things. He will give nobody the Spirit and Faith without the use of external word and sign."[15] Without meaning to surrender the precious jewel of a religion spiritually grounded, he once more introduced "the awful mystery" of the sacraments, and opened the door for the conception of the rite as an opus operatum—a grace of God objectively real. He retained infant baptism as an efficacious act, and, obsessed as he was by the literal words, Hoc est corpus—"this is my body"—he went back into the abandoned path of scholasticism,[16] and restored the mysterious and miraculous real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.[17] It is true, as Loofs has said, that {14} "Luther re-discovered Christianity as religion," but it is also unfortunately true as well that he lacked the insight, faith, and boldness of spirit to trust the people of his age and of the future with "Christianity as religion," and instead gave them a Christianity theologically constructed, deeply marred with residual superstitions and mysteries, and heavily laden with the inheritances of dark and medieval ages.
III
There are two types of religious genius, both of which play great roles in history. There is first the genius who, inspired by the ideal of some earlier prophet, or made wise because he has himself discovered the trend of celestial currents, sees through the complex and tangle of his time, and forecasts a truth which all men in a happier coming age will recognize. When he has once seen it, this vision transforms all his ideas and aims, and spoils forever for him all meaner gains, all half truths, all goods which must be won through surrender of a possible better. He will be obedient to that vision regardless of all cost. He will bear witness to the full light which he has seen even though he can compel nobody else in the heedless world of his generation to see it. He may only cry in the wilderness, but at all events he will cry, and he will cry of that highest thing his heart knows.
There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb multitudes about him; he anticipates in his thought what the rest are incipiently thinking—he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. He is contented to keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely, than the genius who insists upon an immediate march straight across country to Canaan the moment he glimpses it from his Pisgah.
Luther was a reformer of this second type. He was beset by very real limitations. Dr. McGiffert does not overstate the facts when he says: "He cared little for clearness and consistency of thought. A satisfactory and adequate world-view was not of his concern. Of intellectual curiosity he had scarcely any; of interest in truth for truth's sake none at all. . . . He remained entirely without intellectual difficulties, finding no trouble with the most extreme supernaturalism."[18] In many respects, as Harnack has insisted, his Christianity was a "medieval phenomenon."[19] Only in one thing was he supremely the master of his age and the hero of a new time—in his discovery of a way of Faith which makes a man "intrepid" even in the wreck of worlds and "in a thousand deaths." On the lower levels of life, where most of his work was done, he was strangely under the sway of the past, a distruster of reason, a restorer of ancient doctrine, a conservative in thought and action, a friend of rulers, a guardian, as far as he could be, of the status quo—a leader who anathematized radicals and enthusiasts and who staved off and postponed for nearly four hundred years the truly liberating and thoroughly {16} adequate reformation. He was determined to be the repairer of the "Old Church," not the builder of a "New Church," and he was resolved not to travel farther nor faster than the substantial men of his time considered safe and wise.
But less was perhaps more. There will at least always be those who think that the sinuous way of progress is the most certain way of advance. The slow incline, the gradual spiral, each wind of the curve "ever not quite" the old level—that is the most approved method of leaving an outworn past and of moving forward into a new stage of history. It may be so. It certainly is true that through Luther's insight new reliance upon God came to men, new energy of faith was won, and by his work of repair, conservative and cautious though it was, in the long sweep of time a liberated Christianity has come, a vital social gospel has become effective, and great vistas of progress are opening out before the Church of Christ. But it is impossible to forget that other group—those men of the other type—who even in Luther's day saw the way straight across into Canaan, the men who saw their vision fade away unrealized, and who failed to behold the fruit of their spiritual travail largely because Luther misunderstood them, refused to give them aid and comfort, and finally helped to marshal the forces which submerged them and postponed their victory. We may not blame him, but it is not fair to these heroic souls that they should longer lie submerged in the oblivion of their defeat. I shall try in these pages to bring up into the light the principles and ideas which they proclaimed to Europe, perhaps ahead of their time.
[1] In the South the movement showed a tendency to drift back into a refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of Humanists of this latter type.