“After I had made the profession, I was congratulated by the prior, the convent, and the father-confessor, because I was now an innocent child coming pure from baptism. Assuredly, I would willingly have delighted in the glorious fact that I was such a good man, who by his own deeds and without the merits of Christ's blood had made himself so fair and holy, and so easily too, and in so short a time. But although I listened readily to the sweet praise and glowing language about myself and my doings, and allowed myself to be described as a wonder-worker, who could make himself holy in such an easy way, and could swallow up death, and the devil also, yet there was no power in it all to maintain me. When even a small temptation came from sin or death I fell at once, and found that neither baptism nor monkery could assist me; I felt that I had long lost Christ and His baptism. I was the most miserable man on earth; day and night there was only wailing and despair, and no one could restrain me.”[389]
He adds that all he knew of Christ at this time was that He was “a stern judge from whom I would fain have fled and yet could not escape.”
During these two years of anguish, Luther believed that he was battling with himself and with his sin; he was really struggling with the religion of his times and Church. He was probing it, testing it, examining all its depths, wrestling with all its means of grace, and finding that what were meant to be sources of comfort and consolation were simply additional springs of terror. He was too clear-sighted, his spiritual senses were too acute, he was too much in deadly earnest, not to see that none of these aids were leading him to a solid ground of certainty on [pg 429] which he could base his hopes for time and for eternity; and he was too honest with himself to be persuaded that he was otherwise than his despair told him.[390]
At length, guided in very faltering fashion by the Scriptures, especially by the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans, by the Apostles' Creed, and by fellow monks, he (to use his own words) came to see that the righteousness of God (Rom. i. 17) is not the righteousness by which a righteous God punishes the unrighteous and sinners, but that by which a merciful God justifies us through faith (not justitia, qua dens justus est et peccatores injustosque punit, but that qua nos deus misericors justificat per fidem).[391] By faith, he says. What, then, did he mean by “faith”?
He replies:
“There are two kinds of believing: first, a believing about God which means that I believe that what is said of God is true. This faith is rather a form of knowledge than a faith. There is, secondly, a believing in God which means that I put my trust in Him, give myself up to thinking that I can have dealings with Him, and believe without any doubt that He will be and do to me according to the things said of Him. Such faith, which throws itself upon God, whether in life or in death, alone makes a Christian man.”[392]
The faith which he prized is that religious faculty which “throws itself upon God”; and from the first Luther recognised that faith of this kind was a direct gift from God. Having it we have everything; without it we have nothing. Here we find something entirely new, or at least hitherto unexpressed, so far as mediæval theology was concerned. Mediæval theologians had recognised faith in the sense of what Luther called frigida opinio, and it is difficult to conceive that they did not also indirectly [pg 430] acknowledge that there must be something like trust or fiducia; but faith with them was simply one among many human efforts all equally necessary in order to see and know God. Luther recognised that there was this kind of faith, which a man begets and brings to pass in himself by assent to doctrines of some sort. But he did not think much of it. He calls it worthless because it gives us nothing.
“They think that faith is a thing which they may have or not have at will, like any other natural human thing; so when they arrive at a conclusion and say, ‘Truly the doctrine is correct, and therefore I believe it,’ then they think that this is faith. Now, when they see and feel that no change has been wrought in themselves and in others, and that works do not follow, and they remain as before in the old nature, then they think that the faith is not good enough, but that there must be something more and greater.”[393]
The real faith, the faith which is trust, the divine gift which impels us to throw ourselves upon God, gives us the living assurance of a living God, who has revealed Himself, made us see His loving Fatherly heart in Christ Jesus; and that is the Christian religion in its very core and centre. The sum of Christianity is—(1) God manifest in Christ, the God of grace, accessible by every Christian man and woman; and (2) unwavering trust in Him who has given Himself to us in Christ Jesus,—unwavering, because Christ with His work has undertaken our cause and made it His.
The God we have access to and Whom we can trust because we have thrown ourselves upon Him and have found that He sustains us, is no philosophical abstraction, to be described in definitions and argued about in syllogisms. He is seen and known, because we see and know Christ Jesus. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” For with Luther and all the Reformers, Christ fills the whole sphere of God; and they do not recognise any theology which is not a Christology.