In Luther's correspondence with Weller there occurs a remark to the
effect that Weller must put the Decalog out of his mind. Similar
statements occur in great number throughout Luther's writings. In some
of these statements Luther speaks in terms of deep scorn and contempt of
the Law, and considers it the greatest affront that can be offered
Christians to place them under the Law of Moses. He declares that Moses
must be regarded by Christians as if he were a heretic, excommunicated
by the Church, and assigns him to the gallows. Some of the strongest
invectives of this kind are found in his exposition of the Epistle to
the Galatians. These stern utterances of Luther against the Law serve
the Catholics as the basis for their charge that Luther is the most
destructive spirit that has arisen within the Church. He is said to have
destroyed the only perfect norm of right and wrong by his violent
onslaughts on Moses. Once the commandments of God are abrogated, the
feeling of duty and responsibility, they argue, is plucked from the
hearts of men, and license and vice rush in upon the world with the
force of a springtide.
The reader will remember what has been said in a previous chapter about
Luther's labors to expound and apply the divine Law, also about the
intimate and loving relation which he maintained to the Ten Commandments
to the end of his life. Luther has spoken of Moses as a teacher of true
holiness in terms of unbounded admiration and praise. Ho declares the
writings of Moses the principal part of our Bible, because all the
prophets and apostles have drawn their teaching from Moses and
have expanded the teaching of Moses. Christ Himself has appealed to
Moses as an authority in matters of religion. The greatest distinction
of Moses in Luther's view is that he has prophesied concerning Christ,
and by revealing the people's sin through the teaching of the Law has
made them see and feel the necessity of a redemption through the
Mediator. However, also the laws of Moses are exceedingly fine, Luther
thinks. The Ten Commandments are essentially the natural moral law
implanted in the hearts of man. But also his forensic laws, his civil
statutes, his ecclesiastical ordinances, his regulations regarding the
hygiene, and the public order that must be maintained in a great
commonwealth, are wise and salutary. The Catholics are forced to admit
that alongside of the open contempt which Luther occasionally voices for
Moses and the Mosaic righteousness inculcated by the Law there runs a
cordial esteem of the great prophet. Luther regards the Law of Moses as
divine; it is to him just as much the Word of God as any other portion
of the Scriptures. To save their faces in a debate they must concede
this point, but they charge Luther with being a most disorderly
reasoner, driven about in his public utterances by momentary impulses:
He will set up a rule to-day which he knocks down to-morrow. He will
cite the same Principle for or against a matter. He is so erratic that
he can be adduced as authority by both sides to a controversy. The
Catholic may succeed with certain people in getting rid of Luther on the
claim that his is a confused mind, and that in weighty affairs he adopts
the policy of the opportunist. Most men will demand a better explanation
of the seeming self-contradiction in Luther's attitude toward the divine
Law.
There is only one connection in which Luther speaks disparagingly of the
Law, and we shall show that what he says is no real disparagement, but
the correct Scriptural valuation of the Law. Luther holds that the Ten
Commandments do not save any person nor contribute the least part to his
salvation. They must be entirely left out of account when such questions
are to be answered as these: How do I obtain a gracious God? How is my
sin to be forgiven? How do I obtain a good conscience? How can I come to
I live righteously? How can I hope to die calmly, in the confidence that
I am going to heaven? On such occasions Luther says: Turn your eyes away
from Moses and his Law; he cannot help you; you apply at the wrong
office when you come to him for rest for your soul here and hereafter.
He gives you no comfort, and he cannot, because it is not his function
to do so. It is Another's business to do that. Him you grossly dishonor
and traduce when you refuse to come to Him for what He alone can give,
and when you go to some one who does not give you what you need, though
you pretend that you get it from this other. A proper relation to God is
established for us only by Jesus Christ. He is the exclusive Mediator
appointed by God for His dealing with man and for man in his dealings
with God. There is salvation in none other; nor can our hope of heaven
be placed on any other foundation than that which God laid when He
appointed Christ our Redeemer (Acts 4, 12; 1 Cor. 3, 11).
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.