Luther Examined and Reexamined / A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation

by W. H. T. Dau

This is Bible-doctrine. "The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ," says John (chap. 1, 17). Here the two fundamental teachings of the Scriptures are strictly set apart the one from the other. They have much in common: they have the same holy Author, God; their contents are holy; they serve holy ends. But they are differently related to sinful man: the Law tells man what he must do, the Gospel, what Christ has done for him; the Law issues demands, the Gospel, gratuitous offers; the Law holds out rewards for merits or severe penalties, the Gospel, free and unconditioned gifts; the Law terrifies, the Gospel cheers the sinner; the Law turns the sinner against God by proving to him his incapacity to practise it, the Gospel draws the sinner to God and makes him a willing servant of God.

Paul demands of the Christian minister that he "rightly divide the Word of Truth" (2 Tim. 2, 15). To preach the Bible-doctrine of salvation aright and with salutary effect, the Law and the Gospel must be kept apart as far as East is from the West. The Law is truth, but, it is not the truth that saves, because it knows of no grace for the breakers of the Law. The Gospel teaches holiness and righteousness, however, not such as the sinner achieves by his own effort, but such as has been achieved for the sinner by his Substitute, Jesus Christ. The Gospel is not for men who imagine that they can do the commandments of God; Jesus Christ says: "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance" (Matt. 9, 13). On the other hand, the Law is not for sinners who know themselves saved. "The Law is not made for a righteous man" (1 Tim. 1, 9). Christians employ the Law for the regulation of their lives, as a pattern and index of holy works which are pleasing to God and as a deterrent from evil works, but they do not seek their salvation, neither wholly nor in part, in the Law, nor do they look to the Law for strength to do the will of God. Moreover Christians, while they are still in the flesh, apply the Law to the old Adam in themselves; they bruise the flesh with its deceitful lusts with the scourge of Moses, and thus they are in a sense under the Law, and can never be without the Law while they live. But in another sense they are not under the Law: all their life is determined by divine grace; their faith, their hope, their charity, is entirely from the Gospel, and the new man in them acknowledges no master except Jesus Christ, who is all in all to them (Eph. 1, 23).

When Luther directed men for their salvation away from the Law, he did what Christ Himself had done when He called to the multitudes: "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11, 28). The people to whom these words were addressed had the Law of Moses and wearied themselves with its fulfilment, such as it was under the direction of teachers and guides who had misinterpreted and were misapplying that Law continually. Even in that false view of the Law which they had been taught, and which did not at all exhaust its meaning, there was no ease of conscience, no assurance of divine favor, no rest for their souls. Christ with His gracious summons told them, in effect: You must forget the Law and the ordinances of your elders and your miserable works of legal service. You must turn your back upon Moses. In Me, only in Me, is your help.

Moses himself never conceived his mission to be what the Catholics declare it to be by their doctrine of salvation by faith plus works. Moses directed his people to the greater Prophet who was to come in the future, and told them: "Unto Him shall ye hearken" (Deut. 18, 15). Jesus was pointed out to the world as that Prophet of whom Moses had spoken, when the Father at the baptism and the transfiguration of Christ repeated from heaven the warning cry of Israel's greatest teacher under the old dispensation (Matt. 3, 17; 17, 5).

But was it necessary, in speaking of the inability of the Law to save men, to use such strong and contemptuous terms as Luther has used? Yes. The Catholics do not seen to know in what strong terms the Bible has rejected the Law as a means of salvation. Paul denounces the Galatians again and again as "foolish," "bewitched," and bastards of a bondwoman, because they think they will be saved by their works done according to the Law (chap. 3, 1. 3; 4, 21 ff.). He calls them godless infidels, slaves, silly children still in their nonage, because they imagine that they become acceptable to God by their own righteousness (chap. 4, 9; 3, 23 ff.). Yea, he reprobates their legal service when he says: "As many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse" (chap. 3, 10). How contemptuous does it not sound to hear him call the legal ordinances which the Galatians were observing "beggarly elements" (chap. 4, 9), and the law a "schoolmaster" (chap. 3, 24), that is, a tutor fit only for little abecedarians who cannot be treated as full-grown persons that are able to make a right use of their privileges as children and heirs of God. Why do not the Catholics turn up their nose at Paul, as they do at Luther, when Paul calls all his legal righteousness "dung" (Phil. 2, 8), or when he speaks slightingly of the observance on which the Colossians prided themselves as "rudiments of the world" (Col. 2, 20)? Why does he call the Law "the handwriting of ordinances that has been blotted out" (Col. 2, 14) but to declare to the Colossians that they are to fear the Law as little as a debtor fears a canceled note that had been drawn against him? What was it that Paul rebuked Peter for when he told him that he was building again the things which they both had destroyed (Gal. 2, 18)? Mark you, he says, "destroyed." Why, it was this very thing for which Luther is faulted by Rome, the Law as an instrument for obtaining righteousness before God. Could a person renounce the Law in more determined, one might almost say, ruthless fashion, than by saying: "I am dead to the Law, that I might live unto God"? Paul is the person who thus speaks of the Law (Gal. 2, 19). The Catholics have again taken hold of the wrong man when they assail Luther for repudiating the Law of God; they must start higher up; they will find the real culprit whom they are trying to prosecute among the holy apostles. Yea, even the apostles will decline the honor of being the original criminals, they will pass the charges preferred against them higher up still; for what contemptuous terms were used by them in speaking of the Law were inspired terms which they received from God the Holy Ghost. That contempt for the Law which Luther voices under very particular circumstances Luther has learned from his Bible and under the guidance of the Holy Ghost.

That contempt is a mark of every evangelical preacher to-day. If ministers of the Gospel to-day do not denounce the Law when falsely applied, they betray a sacred trust and become traitors to Christ and the Church. For every one who teaches men to seek their salvation in any manner and to any degree in their own works serves not Christ, but Antichrist. This is such a fearful calamity that no terms should be regarded as too scathing in which to rebuke legalistic tendencies. These tendencies are the bane and blight of Christianity; if they are not rooted out, Christianity will perish from off the face of the earth. Workmongers are missionaries of the father of lies and the murderer from the beginning: so far as in them lies, they slay the souls of men by their false teaching of the Law.

However, Luther reveals another attitude toward the Law. At three distinct times in his public career he had to do with people who had assumed a hostile attitude to the Law of God. If the contention of Luther's Catholic critics were true, Luther ought to have hailed these occasions with delight and made common cause with the repudiators of the Law. While he was at the Wartburg, a disturbance broke out at Wittenberg. Under the leadership of Carlstadt, a professor at the University, men broke into the churches and smashed images. Church ordinances of age-long standing were to be abrogated, the cloisters were to be thrown open, and a new order of things was to be inaugurated by violence. Against the will of the Elector of Saxony, who had afforded Luther an asylum in his castle, Luther, at the risk of his life, came out of his seclusion, boldly went to Wittenberg, and preached a series of sermons by which he quelled the riotous uprising. Even before his return to Wittenberg he had published a treatise in which he warned Christians to avoid tumult and violent proceedings. The eight sermons which he preached to the excited people of Wittenberg are an invaluable evidence that Luther meant to proceed in the way of order. The mass and the confessional would have been abolished at that time, had it not been for Luther's interference. He made some lifelong enemies by insisting that the reformatory movement must be conservative. He held that before men's consciences had been liberated by the teaching of Christ, they were not qualified for exercising true Christian liberty, and their violent proceedings were nothing but carnal license. Everybody knows how deeply Luther himself was interested in the abolition of the idolatrous Mass and the spiritual peonage which Rome had created for men by means of the confessional. Only a person who puts principles above policies could have acted as Luther did in those turbulent days. He wanted for his followers, not wanton rebels and frenzied enthusiasts, but men who respect the Word of Cod, discreet and gentle men whose weapons of warfare were not carnal. A man who is so cautious as not to approve the putting down of acknowledged evils because he is convinced that the attempt is premature and exceeds the limits of propriety, will not lend his hand to abolishing the divine norm of right, the holy commandments of God.

The second occasion on which Luther in a most impressive manner showed his profound regard for the maintenance of human and divine laws was during the bloody uprising of the peasants. While thoroughly in sympathy with the rebellious peasants in their righteous grievances against their secular and spiritual oppressors, the barons and the bishops, and pleading the peasants' cause in its just demands before their lords, he unflinchingly rebuked their extreme demands and their still extremer actions. If by his preaching of the Gospel Luther had been the instigator of the peasants' uprising, what a brazen hypocrite he must have been in denouncing acts which he must have acknowledged to be fruits of his teaching! Among the noblemen of Germany Luther counted not a few frank admirers and staunch supporters of his reformatory work. Their influence was of the highest value to him in those critical days when his own life was not safe. Yet he rebuked the sins of the high and mighty, their avarice and insolence, which had brought on this terrible disturbance. In his writings dealing with this sad conflict Luther impresses one like one of the ancient prophets who stand like a rock amid the raging billows of popular passions and with even-handed justice deliver the oracles of God to high and low, calling upon all to bow before the supreme will of the righteous Lawgiver. Would the great lords of the land have meekly taken Luther's rebuke if they had been able to charge Luther with being an accessory to the peasants' crimes?

The third occasion on which Luther's innocence of the charges of Romanists that he was an instigator of lawlessness was most effectually vindicated was the Antinomian controversy. This episode, more than any other, embittered the life of the aging Reformer. The Antinomians drew from the evangelical teachings those disastrous consequences which the Catholics impute to Luther: they claimed that the Law is not in any way applicable to Christians. They insisted that the Ten Commandments must not be preached to Christians at all. Christians, they claimed, determine in the exercise of their sovereign liberty what they may or may not do. Being under grace, they are superior to the Law and a law unto themselves. At first Luther had been inclined to treat this error mildly, because it seemed incredible to him that enlightened children of God could so fatally misread the teaching of God's Word. He thought the Antinomians were either misunderstood by people who had no conception of the Gospel and of evangelical liberty, or they were grossly slandered by persons ill-disposed to them because of their successful preaching of the Gospel. When their error had been established beyond a doubt, he did not hesitate a moment to attack it. In sermons and public disputations, before the common people of Wittenberg and the learned doctors and the students of the University, he defended the holy Law of God as the norm of right conduct and the mirror showing up the sinfulness of man also for Christians, and he insisted that those who had fallen into this error must publicly recant. It was due to Luther's unrelenting opposition that Agricola, one of the leaders of the Antinomians and at one time a dear friend of Luther, withdrew his false teaching and offered apologies in a published discourse. To his guests Luther in those days remarked at the table: "Satan, like a furious harlot, rages in the Antinomians, as Melanchthon writes from Frankfort. The devil will do much harm through them and cause infinite and vexatious evils. If they carry their lawless principles into the State as well as the Church, the magistrate will say: I am a Christian, therefore the law does not pertain to me. Even a Christian hangman would repudiate the law. If they teach only free grace, infinite license will follow, and all discipline will be at an end." (Preserved Smith, p. 283.) Luther held that forbidding the preaching of the Law meant to prohibit preaching God's truth (20, 1635), and to abrogate the Law he regarded as tantamount to abrogating the Gospel (22, 1029).

Far from repudiating the Ten Commandments, then, Luther, by insisting on a distinction between Law and Gospel, and assigning to each a separate sphere of operation in the lives of Christians, has done more than any other teacher in the Church since the days of Paul to impress men with a sincere respect of the Law, and to honor it by obedience to its precepts.