§ 1. The Reformation did not take its rise from a Criticism of Doctrines.
The whole of Luther’s religious history, from his entrance into the
convent at Erfurt to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows
that the movement of which he was the soul and centre did not arise from
any merely intellectual criticism of the doctrines of the mediæval church,
and that it resulted in a great deal more than a revision or
reconstruction of a system of doctrinal conceptions.(387) There is no
trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of
doctrines in Luther’s mind during the supreme crisis of his history. He
was driven out of the world of human life and hope, where he was well
fitted to do a man’s work, by the overwhelming pressure of a great
practical religious need—anxiety to save his soul. He has himself said
that the proverb that doubt makes a monk was true in his case. He doubted
whether he could save his soul in the world, and was therefore forced to
leave it and enter the convent.
He had lost whatever evangelical teaching he had learnt in childhood or in
Frau Cotta’s household at Eisenach. He had surrendered himself to the
popular belief, fostered by the whole penitential system of the mediæval
Church, that man could and must make himself fit to receive the grace of
God which procures salvation. The self-torturing cry, “Oh, when wilt thou
become holy and fit to obtain the grace of God?” (_O wenn will tu einmal
fromm werden und genug thun du einen gnädigen Gott kriegest?_), drove him
into the convent. He believed, and the almost unanimous opinion of his age
agreed with him, that there, if anywhere, he could find the peace he was
seeking with such desperation.
Inside the convent he applied himself with all the force of a strong
nature, using every means that the complicated penitential system of the
Church had provided to help him, to make himself pious and fit to be the
receptacle of the grace of God. He submitted to the orders of his
superiors with the blind obedience which the most rigorous ecclesiastical
statutes demanded; he sought the comforting consolations which confession
was declared to give; he underwent every part of the complex system of
expiations which the mediæval Church recommended; he made full use of the
sacraments, and waited in vain for the mysterious, inexplicable experience
of the grace which was said to accompany and flow from them. He persevered
in spite of the feeling of continuous failure. “If a monk ever reached
heaven by monkery,” he has said, “I would have found my way there also;
all my convent comrades will bear witness to that.”(388) He gave a still
stronger proof of his loyalty to the mediæval Church and its advice to men
in his mood of mind; he persevered in spite of the knowledge that his
comrades and his religious superiors believed him to be a young saint,
while he knew that he was far otherwise, and that he was no nearer God
than he had been before he entered the monastery, or had begun his quest
after the sense of pardon of sin. The contrast between what his brethren
thought he must be and what his own experience told him that he was, must
have added bitterness to the cup he had to drink during these terrible
months in the Erfurt convent. He says himself:
“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 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 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.
The faith which makes us throw ourselves upon God is no mood of mere
mystical abandonment. It is our very life, as Luther was never tired of
saying. It is God within us, and wells forth in all kinds of activities.
“It is a living, busy, active, powerful thing, faith; it is
impossible for it not to do us good continually. It never asks
whether good works are to be done; it has done them before there
is time to ask the question, and it is always doing them.”(394)
Christianity is therefore an interwoven tissue of promises and prayers of
faith. On the one side there is the Father, revealing Himself, sending
down to us His promises which are yea and amen in Christ Jesus; and on the
other side there are the hearts of men ascending in faith to God,
receiving, accepting, and resting on the promises of God, and on God who
always gives Himself in His promises.
This is what came to Luther and ended his long and terrible struggle. He
is unwearied in describing it. The descriptions are very varied, so far as
external form and expression go,—now texts from the Psalms, the Prophets,
or the New Testament most aptly quoted; now phrases borrowed from the
picturesque language of the mediæval mystics; now sentences of striking,
even rugged, originality; sometimes propositions taken from the mediæval
scholastic. But whatever the words, the meaning is always the same.
This conception of what is meant by Christianity is the religious soul of
the Reformation. It contains within it all the distinctively religious
principles which inspired it. It can scarcely be called a dogma. It is an
experience, and the phrases which set it forth are the descriptions of an
experience which a human soul has gone through. The thing itself is beyond
exact definition—as all deep experiences are. It must be felt and gone
through to be known. The Reformation started from this personal experience
of the believing Christian, which it declared to be the one elemental fact
in Christianity which could never be proved by argument and could never be
dissolved away by speculation. It proclaimed the great truth, which had
been universally neglected throughout the whole period of mediæval
theology by everyone except the Mystics, that in order to know God man
must be in living touch with God Himself. Therein lay its originality and
its power. Luther rediscovered religion when he declared that the truly
Christian man must cling directly and with a living faith to the God Who
speaks to him in Christ, saying, “I am thy salvation.” The earlier
Reformers never forgot this. Luther proclaimed his discovery, he never
attempted to prove it by argument; it was something self-evident—seen and
known when experienced.
This is always the way with great religious pioneers and leaders. They
have all had the prophetic gift of spiritual vision, and the magnetic
speech to proclaim what they have seen, felt, and known. They have all
had, in a far-off way, the insight and manner of Jesus.
When our Lord appeared among men claiming to be more than a wise man or a
prophet, declaring that He was the Messiah, the Son of Man and the Son of
God, when He announced that all men had need of Him, and that He alone
could save and redeem, He set forth His claims in a manner unique among
founders of religions. He made them calmly and as a matter of course. He
never explained elaborately why He assumed the titles He took. He never
reasoned about His position as the only Saviour. He simply announced it,
letting the conviction of the truth steal almost insensibly into the minds
and hearts of His followers as they saw His deeds and heard His words. He
assumed that they must interpret His death in one way only. This was
always His manner. It was not His way to explain mysteries our curiosity
would fain penetrate. He quietly took for granted many things we would
like to argue about. His sayings came from One who lived in perpetual
communion with the Unseen Father, and He uttered them quietly and
assuredly, confident that they carried with them their own self-evidencing
power.
So it was with St. Paul. His letters and sermons are full of arguments, no
doubt, full of pleadings and persuasion, but they all start from and rest
upon his vision of the living, risen Saviour. His last word is always,
“When it pleased God to reveal His Son in me”; that was the elemental fact
which he proclaimed and which summed up everything, the personal
experience from which he started on his career as an apostle. The place of
Athanasius as a great religious leader has been obscured by his position
as a theologian; but when we turn to his writings, where do we find less
of what is commonly called dogmatic theology? There is argument,
reasoning, searching for proofs and their statement; but all that belongs
to the outworks in his teaching. The central citadel is a spiritual
intuition—I _know_ that _my_ Saviour is the God Who made heaven and earth.
He took his stand firmly and unflinchingly on that personal experience,
and all else mattered little compared with the fundamental spiritual fact.
It was not his arguments, but his unflinching faith that convinced his
generation.
So it was with Augustine, Bernard,(395) Francis—so it has been with every
great religious leader of the Christian people. His strength, whether of
knowledge, or conviction, or sympathy,—his driving power, if the phrase
may be used,—has always come from direct communion with the unseen, and
rests upon the fact, felt and known by himself and communicated to others
by a mysterious sympathy, that it has pleased God to reveal Christ in him
in some way or other.
So it was with Luther and the Reformation in which he was the leader. Its
driving power was a great religious experience, old, for it has come to
the people of God in all generations, and yet new and fresh as it is the
nature of all such experiences to be. He _knew_ that his life was hid with
Christ in God in spite of all evil, in spite of sin and sense of guilt.
His old dread of God had vanished, and instead of it there had arisen in
his heart a love to God in answer to the love which came from the vision
of the Father revealing Himself. He had experienced this, and he had
proclaimed what he had gone through; and the experience and its
proclamation were the foundation on which the Reformation was built. Its
beginnings were not doctrinal but experimental.
Doctrines, indeed, are not the beginnings of things; they are, at the
best, storehouses of past and blessed experiences. This is true of most
knowledge in all departments of research. We may recognise that there is
some practical use in the rules of logic, ancient and modern, but we know
that they are but the uncouth and inadequate symbols of the ways in which
an indefinable mental tact, whose delicacy varies with the mind that uses
it, perceives divergences and affinities, and weaves its web of knowledge
in ways that are past finding out. We know that logical argument is a good
shield but a bad sword, and that while syllogisms may silence, they seldom
convince; that persuasion arises from a subtle sympathy of soul with soul,
which is as indefinable as the personalities which exhale it. There is
always at the basis of knowledge of men and things this delicate contact
of personality with personality, whether we think of the gathering, or
assorting, or exchanging the wisdom we possess. If this be true of our
knowledge of common things, it is overwhelmingly so of all knowledge of
God and of things divine. We must be in touch with God to know Him in the
true sense of knowledge. At the basis of every real advance in religion
there must be an intimate vision of God impressed upon us as a religious
experience which we know to be true because we have felt it; and what one
has, another receives by a species of spiritual contagion. The revival
under Francis of Assisi spread as it did because the fire flaming in the
heart of the preacher was also kindled in the hearts of his hearers.
Luther headed a Reformation because men felt and knew that he had, as he
said, found a gracious God by trusting in the grace of God revealed to him
in Christ Jesus. It was not the Augsburg Confession that made the
Reformation; it was the expansion of that religious experience which finds
very inadequate description in that or in any other statement of
doctrines.
§ 2. The universal Priesthood of Believers.
Luther’s religious experience, that he, a sinner, received forgiveness by
simply throwing himself on God revealed in Christ Jesus the Saviour, came
to him as an astounding revelation which was almost too great to be put
into words. He tried to express it in varying ways, all of which he felt
too utterly inadequate to describe it. We can see how he laboured at it
from 1512 to 1517. It lay hidden in his discourse to the assembly of
clergy in the episcopal palace at Ziesar (June 5th, 1512), when he
declared that all reform must begin in the hearts of individual men. We
can see it growing more and more articulate in his annotations, notes, and
heads of lectures on the Psalms, delivered in the years 1513-1516,
struggling to free itself from the phrases of the Scholastic Theology
which could not really express it. His private letters, in which he was
less hampered by the phraseology which he still believed appropriate to
theology, are full of happier expressions.(396) _Justificatio_ is
_vivificatio_, and means to redeem from sins without any merit in the
person redeemed; it takes place when sin is not imputed, but the penitents
are reputed righteous. Grace is the pity (_misericordia_) of God; it
manifests itself in the remission of sins; it is the truth of God seen in
the fulfilment of His promises in the historical work of Christ; Jesus
Christ Himself is grace, is the way, is life and salvation. Faith is trust
in the truth of God as manifested in the life and work of Jesus Christ; it
is to believe in God; it is a knowledge of the Cross of Christ; it is to
understand that the Son of God became incarnate, was crucified, and raised
again for our salvation. The three central thoughts—_justification_,
_grace_, _faith_—expressed in these inadequate phrases, are always looked
upon and used to regulate that estimate of ourselves which forms the basis
of piety. It is needless to trace the growing adequacy of the description.
Luther at last found words to say that the central thought in Christianity
is that the believer in possession of faith, which is itself the gift of
God, is able to throw himself on God in Christ Who is his salvation and
Who has mirrored Himself for us in Christ Jesus. He had trod the weary
round that Augustine had gone before him; he had tried _to help himself_
in every possible way; he had found that with all his striving he could do
nothing. Then, strange and mysterious as it was, the discovery had not
brought despair, but rejoicing and comfort; for since there was no help
whatever in man, his soul had been forced to find _all_—not part, but
all—help in God. When he was able to express his experience he could say
that the faith which throws itself on God, which is God’s own gift, is the
certainty of the forgiveness of sins. It was no adherence to doctrines
more or less clearly comprehended; it was no act of initiation to be
followed by a nearer approach to God and a larger measure of His grace; it
was the power which gives life, certainty, peace, continuous
self-surrender to God as the Father, and which transforms and renews the
whole man. It was the life of the soul; it was Christianity within the
believer—as Jesus Christ and His work is Christianity outside the
believer.
It is manifest that as soon as this experience attained articulate
statement, it was bound to discredit much that was in mediæval theology
and religious usage. Yet the striking thing about Luther was that he never
sought to employ it in this way until one great abuse forced itself upon
him and compelled him to test it by this touchstone of what true
Christianity was. This reserve not only shows that there was nothing
revolutionary in the character of Luther, nothing romantic or quixotic, it
also manifests the quiet greatness of the man. Nor was there anything in
the fundamental religious experience of Luther which necessarily
conflicted with the contents of the old ecclesiastical doctrines, or even
with the common usages of the religious life. There was a change in the
attitude towards both, and an entirely new estimate of their religious
value, but nothing which called for their immediate criticism, still less
for their destruction. Faith, which was the Christian life, could no
longer be based upon them; they were not the essential things that they
had been supposed to be; but they might have their uses if kept in their
proper places—aids to all holy living, but not that from which the life
sprang. The thought that the entire sum of religion consists in
“unwavering trust of the heart in Him Who has given Himself to us in
Christ as our Father, personal assurance of faith, because Christ with His
work undertakes our cause,” simplified religion marvellously, and made
many things which had been regarded as essential mere outside auxiliaries.
But it did not necessarily sweep them away. Though the acceptance of
certain forms of doctrine, auricular confession, the monastic life,
communion by the laity in one “kind” only in the Sacrament of the Supper,
a celibate priesthood, fasting, going on pilgrimages, not to eat meat on
Friday, had nothing to do with the essentials of the Christian life; still
it was not necessary to insist on eating meat on Friday, on abstaining
from fasting, and so on. The great matter was the spirit in which such
things were performed or left undone. What the fundamental religious
experience had done was to show the liberty of the Christian man to trust
courageously in God and count all things of little moment compared with
this which was the one thing needful.
“Out of a complex system of expiations, good deeds, and
comfortings, of strict statutes and uncertain apportionments of
grace, out of magic and blind obedience, Luther led religion forth
and gave it a strenuously concentrated form. The Christian
religion is the living assurance of the living God Who has
revealed Himself and opened His heart in Christ—nothing
more.”(397)
It was a vital part of this fundamental experience that the living God Who
had manifested Himself in Christ was accessible to every Christian. To
quote Harnack again:
“Rising above all anxieties and terrors, above all ascetic
devices, above all directions of theology, above all interventions
of hierarchy and Sacraments, Luther ventured to lay hold of God
Himself in Christ, and in this act of faith, which he recognised
as God’s work, his whole being obtained stability and firmness,
nay, even a personal joy and certainty, which no mediæval
Christian had ever possessed.”(398)
God Himself gave the believer the power to throw himself directly on God.
But this contradicted one of the most widely diffused and most strongly
held religious beliefs of the mediæval Church, and was bound to come in
collision with it whenever the two were confronted with each other. It was
the universal conception of mediæval piety that the mediation of a priest
was essential to salvation. Mediæval Christians believed with more or less
distinctness that the supernatural life of the soul was _created_,
nourished, and perfected through the sacraments, and that the priests
administering them possessed, in virtue of their ordination, miraculous
powers whereby they daily offered the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon
the altar, forgave the sins of men, and taught the truths of salvation
with divine authority. It was this universally accepted power of a
mediatorial priesthood which had enslaved Europe, and which had rendered
the liberty of a Christian man an impossible thing. Everywhere the
priesthood barred, or was supposed to be able to bar, the way to God. The
Church, which ought to have shown how God Who had revealed Himself in
Christ was accessible to every believer, had surrounded the inner shrine
of the sanctuary of His Presence with a triple wall of defence which
prevented entrance. When man or woman felt sorrow for sin, they were
instructed to go, not to God, but to a man, often of immoral life, and
confess their sins to him because he was a priest. When they wished to
hear the comforting words of pardon spoken, it was not from God, but from
a priest that the assurance was supposed to come. God’s grace, to help to
holy living and to bring comfort in dying, was given, it was said, only
through a series of sacraments which fenced man’s life round, and priests
could give or withhold these sacraments. Man was born again in baptism; he
came of age spiritually in confirmation; his marriage was cleansed from
the sin of lust in the sacrament of matrimony; penance brought back his
spiritual life slain by deadly sin; the Eucharist gave him with his voyage
victual as he journeyed through life; and deathbed grace was imparted in
extreme unction. These ceremonies were not the signs and promises of the
free grace of God, under whose wide canopy, as under that of heaven, man
lived his spiritual life. They were jealously guarded doors from out of
which grudgingly, and commonly not without fees, the priests dispensed the
free grace of God.
During the later Middle Ages a gross abuse made the evils of this
conception of a mediating priesthood emphatic. The practical evil lying in
the whole thought was not so very apparent when the matter was regarded
from the side of giving out the grace of God; but when it came to
withholding it, then it was seen what the whole conception meant. The
Bishops of Rome gave the peoples of Europe many an object lesson on this.
If a town, or a district, or a whole country had offended the Pope and the
Curia, it was placed under an _interdict_, and the priests were commanded
to refuse the sacraments to the people. They stood between the newborn
babe and the initial grace supposed to be bestowed in baptism, and to be
absolutely withheld if baptism was not administered; between the dying man
and the deathbed grace which was received in extreme unction; between
young men and women and legal marriage blessed by God; between the people
and daily worship and the bestowal of grace in the Eucharist. The God of
grace could not be approached, the blessings of pardon and strength for
holy living could not be procured, because the magistrates of a town or
the king and councillors of a nation had offended the Bishop of Rome on an
affair of worldly policy. The Church, _i.e._ the clergy, who were by the
theory enabled to refuse to communicate the grace of God, barred all
access to the God who had revealed Himself in Christ Jesus. The Pope by a
stroke of the pen could prevent a whole nation, so it was believed, from
approaching God, because he could prohibit priests from performing the
usual sacramental acts which alone brought Him near. An _interdict_ meant
spiritual death to the district on which it fell, and on the mediæval
theory it was more deadly to the spiritual life than the worst of plagues,
the Black Death itself, was to the body. An _interdict_ made the plainest
intellect see, understand, and shudder at the awful and mysterious powers
which a mediatorial priesthood was said to possess.
The fundamental religious experience of Luther had made him know that the
Father, who has revealed Himself in His Son, is accessible to every humble
penitent and faithful seeker after God. He proclaimed aloud the spiritual
priesthood of all believers. He stated it with his usual graphic emphasis
in that tract of his, which he always said contained the marrow of his
message—_Concerning Christian Liberty_. He begins by an antithesis: “A
Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none: a
Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to
everyone”; or, as St. Paul puts it, “Though I be free from all men, yet
have I made myself servant of all.” He expounds this by showing that no
outward things have any influence in producing Christian righteousness or
liberty; neither eating, drinking, nor anything of the kind, neither
hunger nor thirst have to do with the liberty or the slavery of the soul.
It does not profit the soul to wear sacred vestments or to dwell in sacred
places; nor does it harm the soul to be clothed in worldly raiment, and to
eat and drink in the ordinary fashion. The soul can do without everything
except the word of God, and this word of God is the gospel of God
concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified through the
Spirit the Sanctifier. “To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify
it, to set it free, to save it, if it believes the preaching; for faith
alone and the efficacious use of the word of God bring salvation.” It is
faith that incorporates Christ with the believer, and in this way “the
soul through faith alone, without works, is, from the word of God,
justified, sanctified, endued with truth, peace, liberty, and filled full
with every good thing, and is truly made the child of God.” For faith
brings the soul and the word together, and the soul is acted upon by the
word, as iron exposed to fire glows like fire because of its union with
the fire. Faith honours and reveres Him in Whom it trusts, and cleaves to
His promises, never doubting but that He overrules all for the best. Faith
unites the soul to Christ, so that “Christ and the soul become one flesh.”
“Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes
free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with the
eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of its husband Christ.” This
gives the liberty of the Christian man; no dangers can really harm him, no
sorrows utterly overwhelm him: for he is always accompanied by the Christ
to whom he is united by his faith.
“Here you will ask,” says Luther, “ ‘If all who are in the Church are
priests, by what character are those whom we now call priests to be
distinguished from the laity?’ I reply, By the use of these words
‘priest,’ ‘clergy,’ ‘spiritual person,’ ‘ecclesiastic,’ an injustice has
been done, since they have been transferred from the remaining body of
Christians to those few who are now, by a hurtful custom, called
ecclesiastics. For Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them,
except that those who are now boastfully called Popes, bishops, and lords,
it calls ministers, servants, and stewards, who are to serve the rest in
the ministry of the word, for teaching the faith of Christ and the liberty
of believers. For though it is true that we are all equally priests, yet
we cannot, nor ought we if we could, all to minister and teach publicly.”
The first part of the treatise shows that everything which a Christian man
has goes back in the end to his faith; if he has this he has all; if he
has it not, nothing else suffices him. In the same way the second part
shows that everything that a Christian man does must come from his faith.
It may be necessary to fast and keep the body under; it will be necessary
to make use of all the ceremonies of divine service which have been found
effectual for the spiritual education of man. The thing to remember is
that these are not good works in themselves in the sense of making a man
good; they are all rather the signs of his faith, and are to be done with
joy, because they are done to the God to whom faith unites us. So
ecclesiastical ceremonies, or what may be called the machinery of Church
life, are valuable, and indeed indispensable to the life of the soul,
provided only they are regarded in the proper way and kept in their proper
place; but they may become harmful and most destructive of the true
religious life if they are considered in any other light than that of
means to an end. “We do not condemn works,” says Luther, “nay we attach
the highest value to them. We only condemn that opinion of works which
regards them as constituting true righteousness.” They are, he explains,
like the scaffolding of a building, eminently useful so long as they
assist the builder; harmful if they obstruct; and at the best of temporary
value. They are destructive to the spiritual life when they come between
the soul and God. It follows, therefore, that if through human corruption
and neglect of the plain precepts of the word of God these ecclesiastical
usages hinder instead of aid the true growth of the soul, they ought to be
changed or done away with; and the fact that the soul of man, in the last
resort, needs absolutely nothing but the word of God dwelling within it,
gives men courage and tranquillity in demanding their reformation.
In the same way fellow-men are not to be allowed to come between God and
the human soul; and there is no need that they should. So far as spiritual
position and privileges go, the laity are on the very same level as the
clergy, for laity and clergy alike have immediate access to God through
faith, and both are obliged to do what lies in them to further the advance
of the kingdom of God among their fellow-men. All believing laymen “are
worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, to teach each other
mutually the things that are of God ... and as our heavenly Father has
freely helped us in Christ, so we ought freely to help our neighbours by
our body and our works, and each should become to the other a sort of
Christ, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may
be in all of us; that we may be truly Christians.” Luther asserted that
men and women living their lives in the family, in the workshop, in the
civic world, held their position there, not by a kind of indirect
permission wrung from God out of His compassion for human frailties, but
by as direct a vocation as called a man to what by mistake had been deemed
the only “religious life.” The difference between clergy and laity did not
consist in the supposed fact that the former were a spiritual order of a
superior rank in the religious life, while the latter belonged to a lower
condition. The clergy differed from the laity simply in this, that they
had been selected to perform certain definite duties; but the function did
not make him who performed it a holier man intrinsically. If the clergy
misused their position and did not do the work they were set apart to
perform, there was no reason why they should not be compelled by the laity
to amend their ways. Even in the celebration of the holiest rites there
was no distinction between clergy and laity save that to prevent disorder
the former presided over the rites in which all engaged. At the Eucharist
“our priest or minister stands before the altar, having been
publicly called to his priestly function; he repeats publicly and
distinctly Christ’s words of the institution; he takes the Bread
and the Wine, and distributes it according to Christ’s words; and
we all kneel beside him and around him, men and women, young and
old, master and servant, mistress and maid, all holy priests
together, sanctified by the blood of Christ. We are there in our
priestly dignity.... We do not let the priest proclaim for himself
the ordinance of Christ; but he is the mouthpiece of us all, and
we all say it with him in our hearts with true faith in the Lamb
of God Who feeds us with His Body and Blood.”
It was this principle of the Priesthood of all Believers which delivered
men from the vague fear of the clergy, and which was a spur to incite them
to undertake the reformation of the Church which was so much needed. It is
the one great religious principle which lies at the basis of the whole
Reformation movement. It was the rock on which all attempts at reunion
with an unreformed Christendom were wrecked. It is the one outstanding
difference between the followers of the reformed and the mediæval
religion.
Almost all the distinctive principles of the Reformation group themselves
round this one thought of the Priesthood of all Believers. It is
sufficient for our purpose to look at Justification by Faith, the
conceptions of the Holy Scriptures, of the Person of Christ, and of the
Church.
§ 3. Justification by Faith.
When Luther, oppressed with a sense of sin, entered the convent, he was
burdened by the ideas of traditional religion, that the penitent must
prepare himself in some way so as to render himself fit to experience that
sense of the grace of God which gives the certainty of pardon. It was not
until he had thoroughly freed himself from that weight that he experienced
the sense of pardon he sought. This practical experience of his must
always be kept in view when we try to conceive what he meant by
Justification by Faith.
As has been already said, Luther recognised that there were two kinds of
faith,—one which man himself begot and through which he was able to give
assent to doctrines of some sort; and another which Luther vehemently
asserted was the pure gift of God. The first he thought comparatively
unimportant; the latter was all in all to him. Faith is always used in the
latter sense when the Reformers speak about _Justification by Faith_; and
the sharp distinction which Luther draws between the two is a very
important element in determining what he meant when he said that we are
justified by faith alone.
This faith of the highest kind, the true faith, has its beginning by God
working on us and in us. It is continually fed and kept strong by the word
of God. The promise of God on God’s side and faith on man’s side are two
correlative things; “for where there is no promise, there is no faith.”
Luther brings out what this true faith is by contrasting it with the other
kind of faith in two very instructive and trenchant passages:
“When faith is of the kind that God awakens and creates in the
heart, then a man trusts in Christ. He is then so securely founded
on Christ that he can hurl defiance at sin, death, hell, the
devil, and all God’s enemies. He fears no ill, however hard and
cruel it may prove to be. Such is the nature of true faith, which
is utterly different from the faith of the sophists (the
Schoolmen), Jews, and Turks. Their faith, produced by their
thoughts, simply lights upon a thing, accepts it, believes that it
is this or that. God has no dealings with such delusion; it is the
work of man, and comes from nature, from the free will of man; and
men possessing it can say, repeating what others have said: I
believe that there is a God. I believe that Christ was born, died,
rose again for me. But what the real faith is, and how powerful a
thing it is, of this they know nothing.”(399)
He says again:
“Wherefore, beware of that faith which is manufactured or
imagined; for the true faith is not the work of man, and therefore
the faith which is manufactured or imagined will not avail in
death, but will be overcome and utterly overthrown by sin, by the
devil, and by the pains of hell. The true faith is the heart’s
utter trust in Christ, and God alone awakens this in us. He who
has it is blessed, he who has it not is cursed.”(400)
This faith has an outside fact to rest upon—the historical Christ. It is
neither helped nor hindered by a doctrine of the Person of Christ, nor by
a minute and elaborate knowledge of the details of our Lord’s earthly
ministry. The man who has the faith may know a great deal about the
doctrine of the Person of Christ: that will do his faith no harm but good,
provided only he does not make the mistake of thinking that doctrines
about Christ, ways by which the human understanding tries to conceive the
fact, are either the fact itself or something better than the fact. He may
know a great deal about the history of Jesus, and it is well to know as
much as possible; but the amount of knowledge scarcely affects the faith.
Wayfaring men, though fools, need not err in the pathway of faith.
The faith which is the gift of God makes us see the practical meaning in
the fact of the historic Christ—this, namely, that Jesus Christ is there
before us the manifestation of the Fatherly love of God, revealing to us
our own forgiveness, and with it the possibilities of the Kingdom of God
and of our place therein. The fact of the historic Christ is there, seen
by men in a natural way; but it is the power of God lying in the faith
which He has given us that makes us see with full certainty the meaning of
the fact of the historic Christ for us and for our salvation. Moreover,
this vision of God in the historic Christ, which is the deepest of all
personal things, always involves something social. It brings us within the
family of the faithful, within the Christian fellowship with its
confirming evidences of faith and love. The power of faith comes to us
singly, but seldom solitarily; the trust we have in God in Christ is
faintly mirrored in the faith we learn to have in the members of the
household of faith, and in their manifestations of faith and the love
which faith begets.
What has been called the doctrine of Justification by Faith is therefore
rather the description of a religious experience within the believer; and
the meaning of the experience is simply this. The believer, who because he
has faith—the faith which is the gift of God, which is our life and which
regenerates—is regenerate and a member of the Christian fellowship, and is
able to do good works and actually does them, does not find his standing
as a person justified in the sight of God, his righteousness, his
assurance of pardon and salvation, in those good works which he really can
do, but only in the mediatorial and perfectly righteous work of Christ
which he has learned to appropriate in faith. His good works, however
really good, are necessarily imperfect, and in this experience which we
call Justification by Faith the believer compares his own imperfect good
works with the perfect work of Christ, and recognises that his pardon and
salvation depends on that alone. This comparison quiets souls anxious
about their salvation, and soothes pious consciences; and the sense of
forgiveness which comes in this way is always experienced as a revelation
of wonderful love. This justification is called an act, and is contrasted
with a work; but the contrast, though true, is apt to mislead through
human analogies which will intrude. It is an act, but an act of God; and
divine acts are never done and done with, they are always continuous.
Luther rings the changes upon this. He warns us against thinking that the
act of forgiveness is all done in a single moment. The priestly absolution
was the work of a moment, and had to be done over and over again; but the
divine pronouncement of pardon is continuous simply because it is God who
makes it. He says:
“For just as the sun shines and enlightens none the less brightly
when I close my eyes, so this throne of grace, this forgiveness of
sins, is always there, even though I fall. Just as I see the sun
again when I open my eyes, so I have forgiveness and the sense of
it once more when I look up and return to Christ. We are not to
measure forgiveness as narrowly as fools dream.”(401)
In the Protestant polemic with Roman Catholic doctrine, the conception of
Justification by Faith is contrasted with that of Justification by Works;
but the contrast is somewhat misleading. For the word justification is
used in different meanings in the two phrases. The direct counterpart in
Roman Catholic usage to the Reformation thought of Justification by Faith
is the absolution pronounced by a priest; and here as always the Reformer
appeals from man to God. The two conceptions belong to separate spheres of
thought.
“The justification of which the mediæval Christian had experience
was the descending of an outward stream of forces upon him from
the supersensible world, through the Incarnation, in the channels
of ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration, sacraments,
confession, and good works; it was something which came from his
connection with a supersensible organisation which surrounded him.
The justification by faith which Luther experienced within his
soul was the personal experience of the believer standing in the
continuous line of the Christian fellowship, who receives the
assurance of the grace of God in his exercise of a personal
faith,—an experience which comes from appropriating the work of
Christ which he is able to do by that faith which is the gift of
God.”(402)
In the one case, the Protestant, justification is a personal experience
which is complete in itself, and does not depend on any external
machinery; in the other, the Mediæval, it is a prolonged action of usages,
sacraments, external machinery of all kinds, which by their combined
effect are supposed to change a sinner gradually into a saint, righteous
in the eyes of God. With the former, it is a continuous experience; with
the latter, it cannot fail to be intermittent as the external means are
actually employed or for a time laid aside.
The meaning of the Reformation doctrine of Justification by Faith may be
further brought out by contrasting it with the theory which was taught by
that later school of Scholastic theology which was all-powerful at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. The more evangelical theory of Thomas
Aquinas was largely neglected, and the Nominalist Schoolmen based their
expositions of the doctrine on the teaching of John Duns Scotus.
It must be remembered that mediæval theology never repudiated the theology
of Augustine, and admitted in theory at least that man’s salvation, and
justification as part of it, always depended in the last resort on the
prevenient grace of God; in their reverence for the teaching of Aristotle,
they believed that they had also to make room for the action of the free
will of man which they always looked on as the pure capacity of choice
between two alternatives. John Duns Scotus got rid of a certain confusion
which existed between the _gratia operans_ and _gratia co-operans_ of
Augustine by speaking of the grace of God, which lay at the basis of man’s
justification, as a _gratia habitualis_, or an operation of the grace of
God which gave to the will of man an habitual tendency to love towards God
and man. He alleged that when conduct is considered, an act of the will is
more important than any habitual tendency, for it is the act which makes
use of the habit, and apart from the act, the habit is a mere inert
passivity. Therefore, he held that the chief thing in meritorious conduct
is not so much the habit which has been created by God’s grace, as the act
of will which makes use of the habit. In this way the grace of God is
looked upon as simply the general basis of meritorious conduct, or a mere
_conditio sine qua non_, and the important thing is the act of will which
can make use of the otherwise passive habit. The process of
justification—and it is to be remembered that the Schoolmen invariably
looked upon justification as a process by which a sinner was gradually
made into a righteous man and thoroughly and substantially changed—may
therefore be described as an infusion of divine grace which creates a
habit of the will towards love to God and to man; this is laid hold on by
acts of the will, and there result positive acts of love towards God and
man which are meritorious, and which gradually change a sinner into a
righteous person. This is the theory; but the theory is changed into
practice by being exhibited in the framework of the Church provided to aid
men to appropriate the grace of God which is the basis for all. The
obvious and easiest way to obtain that initial grace which is the
starting-point is by the sacraments, which are said to infuse grace—the
grace which is needed to make the start on the process of justification.
Grace is infused to begin with in Baptism; and it is also infused from
time to tune in the Eucharist. If a man has been baptized, he has the
initial grace to start with; and he can get additions in the Eucharist.
That, according to the theory, is all that is needed to start the will on
its path of meritorious conduct. But while this exhibits the ideal process
of justification according to mediæval theology, it must be remembered
that there is mortal sin—sin which slays the new life begun in baptism—and
the sacrament which renews the life slain will be practically more
important than the sacrament which first creates it. Hence practically the
whole process of the mediæval justification is best seen in the sacrament
which renews the life slain by deadly sins. That sacrament is Penance; and
the theory and practice of justification is best exhibited in the
Sacrament of Penance. The good disposition of the will towards God is seen
in confession; this movement towards God is complete when confession
stimulated by the priest is finished; the performance of the meritorious
good works is seen in the penitent performing the “satisfactions,” or
tasks imposed by the priest, of prayer, of almsgiving, of maceration;
while the absolution announces that the process is complete, and that the
sinner has become a righteous man and is in “a state of grace.”
In opposition to all this, Luther asserted that it was possible to go
through all that process prescribed by the mediæval Church, embodying the
Scholastic theory of justification, without ever having the real sense of
pardon, or ever being comforted by the sense of the love of God. The
faith, however, which is the gift of God makes the believer see in the
Christ Who is there before him a revelation of God’s Fatherly love which
gives him the sense of pardon, and at the same time excites in him the
desire to do all manner of loving service. He is like the forgiven child
who is met with tenderness when punishment was expected, and in glad
wonder resolves never to be naughty again—so natural and simple is the
Reformation thought. That thought, however, can be put much more formally.
Chemnitz expresses it thus:
“The main point of controversy at present agitated between us and
the Papists relates to the good works or new obedience of the
_regenerate_. They hold that the regenerate are justified through
that renewal which the Holy Spirit works _in_ them, and by means
of the _good works which proceed_ from that renewal. They hold
that the good works of the regenerate are the things on which they
can trust, when the hard question comes to be answered, whether we
be children of God and have been accepted to everlasting life. We
hold, on the other hand, that in true repentance faith lays hold
on and appropriates to itself _Christ’s satisfaction_, and in so
doing has something which it can oppose to the law’s accusations
at the bar of God, and thus bring it to pass that we should be
declared righteous.... It is indeed true that believers have
actual righteousness through their renewal by the Holy Spirit, but
inasmuch as that righteousness is imperfect and still impure by
reason of the flesh, all men cannot stand in God’s judgment with
it, nor on its account does God pronounce us righteous.”(403)
Hence we may say that the difference in the two ways of looking at the
matter may be exhibited in the answer to the question, What does faith lay
hold on in true repentance? The Reformation answer is—(1) not on a
mechanically complete confession made to a priest, nor on a due
performance of what the priest enjoins by way of satisfaction; but (2)
only on what God in Christ has done for us, which is seen in the life,
death, and rising again of the Saviour.
The most striking differences between the Reformation and the mediæval
conception of justification are:
(1) The Reformation thought always looks at the comparative _imperfection_
of the works of believers, while admitting that they are good works; the
mediæval theologian, even when bidding men disregard the intrinsic value
of their good works, always looks at the relative _perfection_ of these
works.
(2) The Reformer had a much more concrete idea of God’s grace—it was
something special, particular, unique—because he invariably regarded the
really good works which men can do from their relative imperfection; the
mediæval theologian looked at the relative perfection of good works, and
so could represent them as something congruous to the grace of God which
was not sharply distinguished from them.
(3) These views led Luther and the Reformers to represent faith as not
merely the receptive organ for the reception and appropriation of
justification through Christ, but, and in addition, as the active
instrument in all Christian life and work—faith is our life; while the
mediæval theologians never attained this view of faith.
(4) The Reformer believes that the act of faith in his justification
through Christ is the basis of the believer’s assurance of his pardon and
salvation in spite of the painful and abiding sense of sin; while the
mediæval theologian held that the divine sentence of acquittal which
restored a sinner to a state of grace resulted from the joint action of
the priest and the penitent in the Sacrament of Penance, and had to be
repeated intermittently.
§ 4. Holy Scripture.
All the Reformers of the sixteenth century, whether Luther, Zwingli, or
Calvin, believed that in the Scriptures God spoke to them in the same way
as He had done in earlier days to His prophets and Apostles. They believed
that if the common people had the Scriptures in a language which they
could understand, they could hear God speaking to them directly, and could
go to Him for comfort, warning, or instruction; and their description of
what they meant by the Holy Scriptures is simply another way of saying
that all believers can have access to the very presence of God. The
Scriptures were therefore for them a personal rather than a dogmatic
revelation. They record the experience of a fellowship with God enjoyed by
His saints in past ages, which may still be shared in by the faithful. In
Bible history as the Reformers conceived it, we hear two voices—the voice
of God speaking love to man, and the voice of the renewed man answering in
faith to God. This communion is no dead thing belonging to a bygone past;
it may be shared here and now.
But the Reformation conception of Scripture is continually stated in such
a way as to deprive it of the eminently religious aspect that it had for
men of the sixteenth century. It is continually said that the Reformers
placed the Bible, an infallible Book, over-against an infallible Church;
and transferred the _same kind_ of infallibility which had been supposed
to belong to the Church to this book. In mediæval times, men accepted the
decisions of Popes and Councils as the last decisive utterance on all
matters of controversy in doctrine and morals; at the Reformation, the
Reformers, it is said, placed the Bible where these Popes and Councils had
been, and declared that the last and final appeal was to be made to its
pages. This mode of stating the question has found its most concise
expression in the saying of Chillingworth, that “the Bible and the Bible
alone is the religion of Protestants.” It is quite true that the Reformers
did set the authority of the Scriptures over against that of Popes and
Councils, and that Luther declared that “the common man,” “miller’s maid,”
or “boy of nine” with the Bible knew more about divine truth than the Pope
without the Bible; but this is not the whole truth, and is therefore
misleading. For Romanists and Protestants do not mean the same thing by
_Scripture_, nor do they mean the same thing by _Infallibility_, and their
different use of the words is a most important part of the Reformation
conception of Scripture.
This difference in the meaning of _Scripture_ is partly external and
partly internal; and the latter is the more important of the two.
The _Scriptures_ to which the Romanist appeals include the Apocryphal
Books of the Old Testament; and the _Scriptures_ which are authoritative
are not the books of the Old and New Testament in the original tongues,
but a translation into Latin known as the Vulgate of Pope Sixtus V. They
are therefore a book to a large extent different from the one to which
Protestants appeal.
However important this external difference may be, it is nothing in
comparison with the internal difference; and yet the latter is continually
forgotten by Protestants as well as by Roman Catholics in their arguments.
To understand it, one must remember that every mediæval theologian
declared that the whole doctrinal system of his Church was based upon the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The Reformers did nothing
unusual, nothing which was in opposition to the common practice of the
mediæval Church in which they had been born, educated, and lived, when
they appealed to Scripture. Luther made his appeal with the same serene
unconsciousness that anyone could gainsay him, as he did when he set the
believer’s spiritual experience of the fact that he rested on Christ alone
for salvation against the proposal to sell pardon for money. His opponents
never attempted to challenge his right to make this appeal to Scripture—at
least at first. They made the same appeal themselves; they believed that
they were able to meet Scripture with Scripture. They were confident that
the authority appealed to—Scripture—would decide against Luther. It soon
became apparent, however, that Luther had an unexpectedly firmer grasp of
Scripture than they had. This did not mean that he had a better memory for
texts. It was seen that Luther somehow was able to look at and use
Scripture as one transparent whole; while they looked on it as a
collection of fragmentary texts. This gave him and other Reformers a skill
in the use of Scripture which their opponents began to feel that they were
deficient in. They felt that if they were to meet their opponents on equal
terms they too must recognise a unity in Scripture. They did so by
creating an external and arbitrary unity by means of the dogmatic
tradition of the mediæval Church. Hence the decree of the Council of
Trent, which manufactured an artificial unity for Scripture by placing the
dogmatic tradition of the Church alongside Scripture as an equal source of
authority. The reason why the Reformers found a natural unity in the
Bible, and why the Romanists had to construct an artificial one, lay, as
we shall see, in their different conceptions of what was meant by saving
faith.
Mediæval theologians looked at the Bible as a sort of spiritual law-book,
a storehouse of divinely communicated knowledge of doctrinal truths and
rules for moral conduct—and nothing more.
The Reformers saw in it a new home for a new life within which they could
have intimate fellowship with God Himself—not merely knowledge about God,
but actual communion with Him.
There is one great difficulty attending the mediæval conception of the
Scriptures, that it does not seem applicable to a large part of them.
There is abundant material provided for the construction of doctrines and
moral rules; but that is only a portion of what is contained in the
Scriptures. The Bible contains long lists of genealogies, chapters which
contain little else than a description of temple furniture, stories of
simple human life, and details of national history. The mediæval
theologian had either to discard altogether a large part of the Bible or
to transform it somehow into doctrinal and moral teaching. The latter
alternative was chosen, and the instrument of transformation was the
thought of the various senses in Scripture which plays such a prominent
part in every mediæval statement of the nature and uses of the revelation
of God contained in the Bible.(404) No one can deny that a book, where
instruction is frequently given in parables, or by means of aphorisms and
proverbial sayings, must contain many passages which have different
senses. It may be admitted, to use Origen’s illustrations, that the grain
of mustard seed is, _literally_, an actual seed; _morally_, faith in the
individual believer; and, _allegorically_, the kingdom of God;(405) or,
though this is more doubtful, that the little foxes are, literally, cubs;
morally, sins in the individual heart; and, allegorically, heresies which
distract and spoil the Church.(406) But to say that every detail of
personal or national life in the Old Testament or New is merely dead
history, of no spiritual value until it has been transformed into a
doctrinal truth or a moral rule by the application of the theory of the
fourfold sense in Scripture, is to destroy the historical character of
revelation altogether, and, besides, to introduce complete uncertainty
about what any passage was really meant to declare. The use of a fourfold
sense—_literal_, _moral_, _allegorical_, and _anagogic_—enables the reader
to draw any meaning he pleases from any portion of Scripture.
While mediæval theologians, by their bewildering fourfold sense, made it
almost hopeless to know precisely what the Bible actually taught, another
idea of theirs made it essential to salvation that men should attain to an
absolutely correct statement of what the Scriptures did reveal about God
and man and the relation between them. They held that faith—the faith
which saves—was not trust in a person, but assent to correct propositions
about God, the universe, and the soul of man; and the saving character of
the assent depended on the correctness of the propositions assented to. It
is the submission of the intellect to certain propositional statements
which are either seen to be correct or are accepted as being so because
guaranteed in some supernatural way. Infallibility is looked upon as that
which can guarantee the perfect correctness of propositions about God and
man in their relations to each other.
_If_ it be necessary to employ the fourfold sense to confuse the plain
meaning of the greater portion of Scripture, and _if_ salvation depends on
arriving at a perfectly correct intellectual apprehension of abstract
truths contained somewhere in the Bible, then Lacordaire’s sarcastic
reference to the Protestant conception of Scripture is not out of place.
He says: “What kind of a religion is that which saves men by aid of a
book? God has given the book, but He has not guaranteed your private
interpretation of it. What guarantee have you that your thoughts do not
shove aside God’s ideas? The heathen carves himself a god out of wood or
marble; the Protestant carves his out of the Bible. If there be a true
religion on earth, it must be of the most _serene_ and unmistakable
authority.”(407) We need not wonder at John Nathin saying to his perplexed
pupil in the Erfurt Convent: “Brother Martin, let the Bible alone; read
the old teachers; reading the Bible simply breeds unrest.”(408) We can
sympathise with some of the earlier printers of the German Vulgate when
they inserted in their prefaces that readers must be careful to understand
the contents of the volume in the way declared by the Church.(409) Men who
went to the Bible might go wrong, and it was spiritual death to make any
mistake; but all who simply assented to the interpretation of the Bible
given in the Church’s theology were kept right and had the true or saving
faith. Such was the mediæval idea.
But all this made it impossible to find in the Bible a means of communion
with God. Between the God Who had revealed Himself there and man, the
mediæval theologian, perhaps unconsciously at first, had placed what he
called the “Church,” but what really was the opinions of accredited
theologians confirmed by decisions of Councils or Popes. The “Church” had
barred the way of access to the mind and heart of God in the Scriptures by
interposing its authoritative method of interpretation between the
believer and the Bible, as it had interposed the priesthood between the
sinner and the redeeming Saviour.
Just as the Reformers had opposed their personal experience of pardon won
by throwing themselves on the mercy of God revealed in Christ to the
intervention of the Church between them and God, so they controverted this
idea of the Scriptures by the personal experience of what the Bible had
been to them. They had felt and known that the personal God, Who had made
them and redeemed them, was speaking to them in this Book, and was there
making manifest familiarly His power and His willingness to save. The
speech was sometimes obscure, but they read on and lighted on other
passages which were plainer, and they made the easier explain the more
difficult. The “common” man perhaps could not understand it all, nor fit
all the sayings of Scripture into a connected whole of intellectual truth;
but all, plain men and theologians alike, could hear their Father’s voice,
learn their Redeemer’s purpose, and have faith in their Lord’s promises.
It was a good thing to put text to text and build a system of Protestant
divinity to which their intellects could assent; but it was not essential.
Saving faith was not intellectual assent at all. It was simple trust—the
trust of a child—in their Father’s promises, which were Yea and Amen in
Christ Jesus. The one essential thing was to hear and obey the personal
God speaking to them as He had spoken all down through the ages to His
people, promising His salvation now in direct words, now in pictures of
His dealings with a favoured man or a chosen people. No detail of life was
dead history; for it helped to fill the picture of communion between God
and His people. The picture was itself a promise that what had been in the
past would be renewed in their own experience of fellowship with a
gracious God, if only they had the same faith which these saints of the
Old and New Testaments enjoyed.
With these thoughts burning in their hearts, the Bible could not be to the
Reformers what it had been to the mediæval theologians. God was speaking
to them in it as a man speaks to his fellows. The simple historical sense
was the important one in the great majority of passages. The Scripture was
more than a storehouse of doctrines and moral rules. It was over and above
the record and picture of the blessed experience which God’s saints have
had in fellowship with their covenant God since the first revelation of
the Promise. So they made haste to translate the Bible into all languages
in order to place it in the hands of every man, and said that the “common
man” with the Bible in his hands (with God speaking to him) could know
more about the way of salvation than Pope or Councils without the
Scriptures.
The change of view which separated the Reformers from mediæval theologians
almost amounted to a rediscovery of Scripture; and it was effected by
their conception of faith. Saving faith was for them _personal trust_ in a
_personal Saviour_ Who had manifested in His life and work the Fatherly
mercy of God. This was not a mere theological definition; it was a
description of an experience which they knew that they had lived. It made
them see that the word of God was a personal and not a dogmatic
revelation; that the real meaning in it was that God Himself was there
behind every word of it,—not an abstract truth, but a personal Father. On
the one side, on the divine, there was God pouring out His whole heart and
revealing the inmost treasures of His righteousness and love in Christ the
Incarnate Word; on the other side, on the human, there was the believing
soul looking straight through all works and all symbols and all words to
Christ Himself, united to Him by faith in the closest personal union. Such
a blessed experience—the feeling of direct fellowship between the believer
and God Incarnate, of a communion such as exists between two loving human
souls, brought about by the twofold stream of God’s personal word coming
down, and man’s personal faith going up to God—could not fail to give an
entirely new conception of Scripture. The mediæval Church looked on the
Jesus Christ revealed in Scripture as a Teacher sent from God; and
revelation was for them above all things an imparting of speculative
truth. To the Reformers the chief function of Scripture was to bring Jesus
Christ near us; and as Jesus always fills the full sphere of God to them,
the chief end of Scripture is to bring God near _me_. It is the direct
message of God’s love to _me_,—not doctrine, but promise (for apart from
promise, as Luther said unweariedly, faith does not exist); not display of
God’s thoughts, but of God Himself as _my_ God. This manifestation of God,
which is recorded for us in the Scriptures, took place in an historical
process coming to its fullest and highest in the incarnation and
historical work of Christ, and the record of the manifestation has been
framed so as to include everything necessary to enable us to understand
the declaration of God’s will in its historical context and in its
historical manifestation. “Let no pious Christian,” says Luther, “stumble
at the simple word and story that meet him so often in Scripture.” These
are never the dead histories of the mediæval theologian,—events which have
simply taken place and concern men no more. They tell how God dealt with
His faithful people in ages past, and they are promises of how He will act
towards us now. “Abraham’s history is precious,” he says, “because it is
filled so full of God’s Word, with which all that befell him is so adorned
and so fair, and because God goes everywhere before him with His Word,
promising, commanding, comforting, warning, that we may verily see that
Abraham was God’s special trusty friend. Let us mirror ourselves, then, in
this holy father Abraham, who walks not in gold and velvet, but girded,
crowned, and clothed with divine light, that is, with God’s Word.” The
simplest Bible stories, even geographical and architectural details, may
and do give us the sidelights necessary to complete the manifestation of
God to His people.
The question now arises, Where and in what are we to recognise the
infallibility and authoritative character of Scripture? It is manifest
that the ideas attaching to these words must change with the changed
conception of the essential character of that Scripture to which they
belong. Nor can the question be discussed apart from the Reformation idea
of saving faith; for the two thoughts of Scripture and saving faith always
correspond. In mediæval theology they are always primarily intellectual
and prepositional; in Reformation thinking, they are always in the first
instance experimental and personal. In describing the authoritative
character of Scripture, the Reformers always insisted that its recognition
was awakened in believers by that operation which they called the witness
of the Holy Spirit (_Testimonium Spiritus Sancti_). Just as God Himself
makes us know and feel the sense of pardon in an inward experience by a
faith which is His own work, so they believed that by an operation of the
same Spirit, believers were enabled to recognise that God Himself is
speaking to us authoritatively in and through the words of Scripture.
Their view of what is meant by the authority and infallibility of
Scripture cannot be seen apart from what they taught about the relation
between Scripture and the word of God. They have all the same general
conception, however they may differ in details in their statement. If
Luther, as his wont was, speaks more trenchantly, and Calvin writes with a
clearer vision of the consequences which must follow from his assertions,
both have the same great thought before them.
The Reformers drew a distinction between the word of God and the Scripture
which contains or presents that word. This distinction was real and not
merely formal; it was more than the difference between the word of God and
the word of God written; and important consequences were founded upon it.
If the use of metaphor be allowed, the word of God is to the Scripture as
the soul is to the body. Luther believed that while the word of God was
presented in every part of Scripture, some portions make it much more
evident. He instances the Gospel and First Epistle of St. John, the
Epistles of St. Paul, especially those to the Romans, to the Galatians,
and to the Ephesians, and the First Epistle of St. Peter.(410) He declares
that if Christians possessed no other books besides those, the way of
salvation would be perfectly clear. He adds elsewhere that the word of God
shines forth with special clearness in the Psalms, which he called the
Bible within the Bible.
Luther says that the word of God may be described in the phrase of St.
Paul, “the Gospel of God, which He promised afore by His Prophets in the
Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of the seed of David
according to the flesh, who was declared to be the Son of God with power,
according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the
dead.”(411) Calvin calls it “the spiritual teaching, the gate, as it were,
by which we enter into His heavenly kingdom,” “a mirror in which faith
beholds God,” and “that wherein He utters unto us His mercy in Christ, and
assureth us of His love toward us.”(412) The Scots Confession calls it the
revelation of the Promise “quhilk as it was repeated and made mair clear
from time to time; so was it imbraced with joy, and maist constantlie
received of al the faithful.”(413) And Zwingli declares it to be “that our
Lord Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, has revealed to us the will of the
Heavenly Father, and, with His innocence, has redeemed us from
death.”(414) It is the sum of God’s commands, threatenings, and promises,
addressed to our faith, and above all the gospel offer of Christ to us.
This word of God need not take the form of direct exhortation; it may be
recognised in the simple histories of men or of nations recorded in the
Scripture.
This true and real distinction between the word of God and Scripture may
easily be perverted to something which all the Reformers would have
repudiated. It must not be explained by the common mystical illustration
of kernel and husk, which husk (the record) may be thrown away when the
kernel (the word) has been once reached and laid hold of. Nor can it be
used to mean that one part of the Bible is the word of God and that
another is not. The Reformers uniformly teach that the substance of _all_
Scripture is the word of God, and that what is no part of the record of
the word of God is not Scripture. Finally, the distinction between the two
need not prevent us saying that the Scripture is the word of God. Luther
is very peremptory about this. He says that he is ready to discuss
differences with any opponent who admits that the evangelical writings are
the word of God; but that if this be denied he will refuse to argue; for
where is the good of reasoning with anyone who denies first principles?
(_prima principia_)(415) Only it must be clearly understood that the
copula _is_ does not express logical identity, but some such relation as
can be more exactly rendered by _contains_, _presents_, _conveys_,
_records_,—all of which phrases are used in the writings of Reformers or
in the creeds of the Reformation Churches. The main thing to remember is
that the distinction is not to be made use of to deny to the substance of
Scripture those attributes of authority and infallibility which belong to
the word of God.
On the other hand, there is a vital religious interest in the distinction.
In the first place it indicates what is meant by the infallibility of
Scripture, and in the second it enables us to distinguish between the
divine and the human elements in the Bible.
The authoritative character and infallibility belong really and primarily
to the word of God, and only secondarily to the Scriptures,—to Scripture
only because it is the record which contains, presents, or conveys the
word of God. It is this word of God, this personal manifestation to us for
our salvation of God in His promises, which is authoritative and
infallible; and Scripture shares these attributes only in so far as it is
a vehicle of spiritual truth. It is the unanimous declaration of the
Reformers that Scripture is Scripture because it gives us that knowledge
of God and of His will which is necessary for salvation; because it
presents to the eye of faith God Himself personally manifesting Himself in
Christ. It is this presentation of God Himself and of His will for our
salvation which is infallible and authoritative. But this manifestation of
God Himself is something spiritual, and is to be apprehended by a
spiritual faculty which is faith, and the Reformers and the Confessions of
the Reformation do not recognise any infallibility or divine authority
which is otherwise apprehended than by faith. If this be so, the
infallibility is of quite another kind from that described by mediæval
theologians or modern Roman Catholics, and it is also very different from
what many modern Protestants attribute to the Scriptures when they do not
distinguish them from the word of God. With the mediæval theologian
infallibility was something which guaranteed the perfect correctness of
abstract propositions; with some modern Protestants it consists in the
conception that the record contains not even the smallest error in word or
description of fact—in its inerrancy. But neither inerrancy nor the
correctness of abstract propositions is apprehended by faith in the
Reformers’ sense of that word; they are matters of fact, to be accepted or
rejected by the ordinary faculties of man. The infallibility and authority
which need faith to perceive them are, and must be, something very
different; they produce the conviction that in the manifestation of God in
His word there lies infallible power to save. This is given, all the
Reformers say, by the Witness of the Spirit; “the true kirk alwaies heares
and obeyis the voice of her awin spouse and pastor.”(416) Calvin discusses
the authority and credibility of Scripture in his _Institutio_, and says:
“Let it be considered, then, as an undeniable truth that they who have
been inwardly taught of the Spirit feel an entire acquiescence in the
Scripture, and that it is self-authenticated, carrying with it its own
evidence, and ought not to be made the subject of demonstration and
arguments from reason; but that it obtains the credit which it deserves
with us by the testimony of the Spirit.”(417) This is a religious
conception of infallibility very different from the mediæval or the modern
Romanist.
The distinction between the word of God and Scripture also serves to
distinguish between the divine and the human elements in Scripture, and to
give each its proper place.
Infallibility and divine authority belong to the sphere of faith and of
the witness of the Spirit, and, therefore, to that personal manifestation
of God and of His will toward us which is conveyed or presented to us in
every part of Scripture. But this manifestation is given in a course of
events which are part of human history, in lives of men and peoples, in a
record which in outward form is like other human writings. If every part
of Scripture is divine, every part of it is also human. The supernatural
reality is incased in human realities. To apprehend the former, faith
illumined by the Holy Spirit is necessary; but it is sufficient to use the
ordinary methods of research to learn the credibility of the history in
Scripture. When the Reformers distinguished between the word of God and
Scripture which conveys or presents it, and when they declared that the
authority and infallibility of that word belonged to the region of faith,
they made that authority and infallibility altogether independent of
questions that might be raised about the human agencies through which the
book came into its present shape. It is not a matter belonging to the
region of faith when the books which record the word of God were written,
or by whom, or in what style, or how often they were edited or re-edited.
It is not a matter for faith whether incidents happened in one country or
in another; whether the account of Job be literal history, or a poem based
on old traditions in which the author has used the faculty of imagination
to illustrate the problems of God’s providence and man’s probation;
whether genealogical tables give the names of men or of countries and
peoples. All these and the like matters belong to the human side of the
record. No special illumination of faith is needed to apprehend and
understand them. They are matters for the ordinary faculties of man, and
subject to ordinary human investigation. Luther availed himself freely of
the liberty thus given. He never felt himself bound to accept the
traditional ideas about the extent of the canon, the authorship of the
books of the Bible, or even about the credibility of some of the things
recorded. He said, speaking about Genesis, “What though Moses never wrote
it?”(418) It was enough for him that the book was there and that he could
read it. He thought that the Books of Kings were more worthy of credit
than the Books of Chronicles;(419) and he believed that the prophets had
not always given the kings of Israel the best political advice.(420)
But while the Bible is human literature, and as such may be and must be
subjected to the same tests which are applied to ordinary literature, it
is the record of the revelation of God, and has been carefully guarded and
protected by God. This thought always enters into the conception which the
Reformers had of Scripture. They speak of the singular care and providence
of God which has preserved the Scriptures in such a way that His people
always have a full and unmistakable declaration in them of His mind and
will for their salvation. This idea for ever forbids a careless or
irreverent biblical criticism, sheltering itself under the liberty of
dealing with the records of revelation. No one can say beforehand how much
or how little of the historic record is essential to preserve the faith of
the Church; but every devout Christian desires to have it in large
abundance. No one can plead the liberty which the principles of the
Reformers secure for dealing with the record of Scripture as a
justification in taking a delight in reducing to a minimum the historical
basis of the Christian faith. Careless or irreverent handling of the text
of Holy Scripture is what all the Reformers abhorred.(421)
§ 5. The Person of Christ.
“No one can deny,” said Luther, “that we hold, believe, sing, and confess
all things in correspondence with the Apostles’ Creed, the faith of the
old Church, that we make nothing new therein nor add anything thereto, and
in this way we belong to the old Church and are one with it.” Both the
Augsburg Confession and the Schmalkald Articles begin with restating the
doctrines of the old Catholic Church as these are given in the Apostles’,
Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, the two latter being always regarded by
Luther as explanatory of the Apostles’ Creed. His criticism of theological
doctrines was always confined to the theories introduced by the Schoolmen,
and to the perversion of the old doctrines of the Church introduced in
mediæval times mainly to bring these doctrines into conformity with the
principles of the philosophy of Aristotle. He brought two charges against
the Scholastic Theology. It was, he insisted, committed to the idea of
work-righteousness; whatever occasional protest might be made against the
conception, he maintained that this thought of work-righteousness was so
interwoven with its warp and woof that the whole must be swept away ere
the old and true Christian Theology could be rediscovered. He also
declared it was sophistry; and by that he meant that it played with the
outsides of doctrine, asked and solved questions which had nothing to do
with real Christian theology, that the imposing intellectual edifice was
hollow within, that its deity was not the God and Father revealed in Jesus
Christ, but the unknown God, the God who could never be revealed by
metaphysics larded with detached texts of Scripture, the abstract entity
of pagan philosophy. With an unerring instinct he fastened on the
Scholastic devotion to Aristotle as the reason why what professed to be
Christian theology had been changed into something else. Scholastic
Philosophy or Theology (for the two are practically the same) defined
itself as the attempt to reconcile _faith_ and _reason_, and the
definition has been generally accepted. Verbally it is correct; really it
is very misleading from the meanings attached to the words faith and
reason. With the Schoolmen, faith in this contrast between faith and
reason meant the sum of patristic teaching about the verities of the
Christian religion extracted by the Fathers from the Holy Scriptures; and
reason meant the sum of philosophical principles extracted from the
writings of ancient philosophers, and especially from Aristotle. The great
Schoolmen conceived it to be their task to construct a system of Christian
Philosophy by combining patristic doctrinal conclusions with the
conclusions of human reasoning which they believed to be given in their
highest form in the writings of the ancient Grecian sages. They actually
used the conceptions of the Fathers as material to give body to the forms
of thought found ready made for them in the speculations of Aristotle and
Plato. The Christian material was moulded to fit the pagan forms, and in
consequence lost its most essentially Christian characteristics. One can
see how the most evangelical of the Schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, tries in
vain to break through the meshes of the Aristotelian net in his
discussions on merit and satisfaction in his _Summa Theologiæ_.(422) He
had to start from the thought of God as (1) the Absolute, and (2) as the
_Primum Movens_, the _Causa efficiens prima_, the _Intelligens a quo omnes
res naturales ordinantur in finem_—conceptions which can never imprison
without practically destroying the vision of the Father who has revealed
Himself in the Saviour Jesus Christ. His other starting-point, that man is
to be described as the possessor of free will in the Aristotelian sense of
the term, will never contain the Christian doctrine of man’s complete
dependence on God in his salvation. It inevitably led to
work-righteousness. This was the “sophistry” Luther protested against and
which he swept away.
He then claimed that he stood where the old Catholic Church had taken
stand, that his theology like its was rooted in the faith of God as
Trinity and in the belief in the Person of Christ, the Revealer of God.
The old theology had nothing to do with Mariolatry or saint worship; it
revered the triune God, and Jesus Christ His Son and man’s Saviour. Luther
could join hands with Athanasius across twelve centuries. He had done a
work not unlike that of the great Alexandrian. His rejection of the
Scholastic Aristotelianism may be compared with Athanasius’ refusal to
allow the Logos theology any longer to confuse the Christian doctrines of
God and the Person of Christ. Both believed that in all thinking about God
they ought to keep their eyes fixed upon His redemptive work manifested in
the historical Christ. Athanasius, like Luther, brought theology back to
religion from “sophistry,” and had for his starting-point an inward
religious experience that his Redeemer was the God who made heaven and
earth. The great leaders in the ancient Church, Luther believed, held as
he did that to have conceptions about God, to construct a real Christian
theology, it was necessary first of all to know God Himself, and that He
was only to be known through the Lord Jesus Christ. He had gone through
the same experience as they had done; he could fully sympathise with them,
and could appropriate the expressions in which they had described and
crystallised what they had felt and known, and that without paying much
attention to the niceties of technical language. These doctrines had not
been dead formulas to them, but the expression of a living faith. He could
therefore take the old dogmas and make them live again in an age in which
it seemed as if they had lost all their vitality.
“From the time of Athanasius,” says Harnack, “there had been no
theologian who had given so much living power for faith to the
doctrine of the Godhead of Christ as Luther did; since the time of
Cyril, no teacher had arisen in the Church for whom the mystery of
the union of the two natures in Christ was so full of comfort as
for Luther—‘I have a better provider than all angels are: he lies
in the cradle and hangs on the breast of a virgin, but sits,
nevertheless, at the right hand of the almighty father’; no mystic
philosopher of antiquity spoke with greater conviction and delight
of the sacred nourishment in the Eucharist. The German reformer
restored life to the formulas of Greek Christianity: he gave them
back to faith.”(423)
But if Luther accepted the old formulas describing the Nature of God and
the Person of Christ, he did so in a thoroughly characteristic way. He had
no liking for theological technical terms, though he confessed that it was
necessary to use them. He disliked the old term _homoousios_ to describe
the relation between the Persons in the Trinity, and preferred the word
“oneness”;(424) he even disliked the term Trinity, or at least its German
equivalents, Dreifaltigkeit or Dreiheit—they were not good German words,
he said;(425) he called the technical terms used in the old creeds
_vocabula mathematica_;(426) he was careful to avoid using them in his
Short and even in his Long Catechism. But Jesus Christ was for him the
mirror of the Fatherly heart of God, and therefore was God; God Himself
was the only Comforter to bring rest to the human soul, and the Holy
Spirit was God; and the old creeds confessed One God, Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, and the confession contented him whatever words were used.
Besides, he rejoiced to place himself side by side with the Christians of
ancient days, who trusted God in Christ and were free from the
“sophistries” of the Schoolmen.
Although Luther accepted, honestly and joyfully, the old theology about
God and the Person of Christ, he put a new and richer meaning into it.
Luther lets us see over and over again that he believed that the only
thing worth considering in theology was the divine work of Christ and the
experience that we have of it through faith. He did not believe that we
have any real knowledge of God outside these limits. Beyond them there is
the unknown God of philosophical paganism, the God whom Jews, Turks,
pagans, and nominal Christians ignorantly worship. In order to know God it
is necessary to know Him through the Jesus Christ of history. Hence with
Luther, Christ fills the whole sphere of God: “He that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father,” and conversely: “He that hath not seen Me hath not seen
the Father.” The historical Jesus Christ is for Luther the revealer and
the only revealer of the Father. The revelation is given in the wonderful
experience of faith in which Jesus compels us to see God in Him—the whole
of God, Who has kept nothing back which He could have given us. It is very
doubtful whether the framers of the old creeds ever grasped this thought.
The great expounder of the old theology, Augustine, certainly did not. The
failure to enter into it showed itself not merely in the doctrine of God,
but also in the theories of grace. With Luther all theology is really
Christology; he knew no other God than the God Who had manifested Himself
in the historical Christ, and made us see in the miracle of faith that He
is our salvation. This at once simplifies all Christian theology and cuts
it clearly away from that Scholastic which Luther called “sophistry.” Why
need Christians puzzle themselves over the Eternal Something which is not
the world when they have the Father? On the old theology the work of
Christ was practically limited to procuring the forgiveness of sins. There
it ended and other gracious operations of God began—operations of grace.
So there grew the complex system of expiations, and satisfactions, of
magical sacraments and saints’ intercessions. These were all at once swept
away when the whole God was seen revealed in Christ in the vision of faith
and nowhere else.
Like Athanasius, Luther found his salvation in the Deity of Christ.
“We must have a Saviour Who is more than a saint or an angel; for
if He were no more, better and greater than these, there were no
helping us. But if he be God, then the treasure is so ponderous
that it outweighs and lifts away sin and death; and not only so,
but also gives eternal life. This is our Christian faith, and
therefore we rightly confess: ‘I believe in Jesus Christ His only
Son, our Lord, Who was born of Mary, suffered and died.’ By this
faith hold fast, and though heathen and heretic are ever so wise
thou shalt be blessed.”(427)
He repeats this over and over again. If we cannot say God died for us, if
it was only a man who suffered on the cross, then we are lost, was
Luther’s firmest conviction; and the thought of the Divinity of Christ
meant more to Luther than it did to previous theologians. The old theology
had described the two Natures in the One Person of the God-man in such a
way as to suggest that the only function of the Divine was to give to the
human work of Christ the importance necessary to effect salvation. Luther
always refused to adopt this limited way of regarding the Divinity of the
Saviour. He did not refuse to adopt and use the _phraseology_ of his
predecessors. Like them, he spoke of the two Natures in the One Person of
Christ. But it is plain from his expositions of the Creed, and from his
criticisms of the current theological terminology, that he did not like
the expression. He thought that it suggested an idea that was wrong, and
that had to be guarded against. He says that we must beware of thinking as
if the deity and humanity in Christ are so externally united that we may
look at the one apart from the other.
“This is the first principle and most excellent article how Christ
is the Father: that we are not to doubt that whatsoever the man
says and does is reckoned and must be reckoned as said and done in
heaven for all angels; in the world for all rulers; in hell for
all devils; in the heart for every evil conscience and all secret
thoughts. For if we are certain of this: that what Jesus thinks,
speaks, and wills the Father also wills, then I defy all that may
fight against me. For here in Christ have I the Father’s heart and
will.”(428)
He brings the thought of the Person of Christ into the closest relation to
our personal experience. It is not simply a doctrine—an intellectual
something outside us. It is part of that blessed experience which is
called Justification by Faith. It is inseparably connected with the
recognition that we are not saved by means of the good deeds which we can
do, but solely by the work of Christ. It is what makes us cease all
work-righteousness and trust in God alone as He has revealed Himself in
Christ. When we know and feel that it is God who is working for us, then
we instinctively cease trying to think that we can work out our own
salvation.(429) Hence the Person of Christ can never be a mere doctrine
for the true Christian to be inquired about by the intellect. It is
something which we carry about with us as part of our lives.
“To know Christ in the true way means to know that He died for us,
that He piled our sins upon Himself, so that we hold all our own
affairs as nothing and let them all go, and cling only to the
faith that Christ has given Himself for us, and that His
sufferings and piety and virtues are all mine. When I know this I
must hold Him dear in return, for I must be loving to such a man.”
He insists on the human interest that the Man Jesus Christ has for us, and
declares that we must take as much interest in His whole life on earth as
in that of our closest friend.
Perhaps it ought to be added, although what has been said implies it, that
Luther always approached the Person of Christ from his mediatorial work,
and not from any previously thought out ideas of what Godhead must be, and
what manhood must be, and how they can be united. He begins with the
mediatorial and saving work of Christ as that is revealed in the blessed
experience which faith, the gift of God, creates. He rises from, the
office to the Person, and does not descend from the Person to the office.
“Christ is not called Christ because He has the two Natures. What does
that matter to me? He bears this glorious and comforting name because of
His Office and Work which He has undertaken.”(430) It is in this way that
He becomes the Saviour and the Redeemer.
It can scarcely be said that all the Reformers worked out the conception
of the Person of Christ in the same way as Luther, although almost all
these thoughts can be found in Calvin, but the overshadowing conception is
always present to their mind—Christ fills the full sphere of God. That is
the characteristic of Reformation thought and of Reformation piety, and
appears everywhere in the writings of the Reformers and in the worship and
rites of the Reformed Church. To go into the matter exhaustively would
necessitate more space than can be given; but the following instances may
be taken as indicating the universal thought.
1. The Reformers swept away every contemplation of intercessors who were
supposed to share with our Lord the procuring of pardon and salvation, and
they declared against all attempts to distinguish between various kinds of
worship which could only lead pious souls astray from the one worship due
to God in Christ. Such subtle distinctions, says Calvin, as _latria_,
_doulia_, and _hyperdoulia_ are neither known nor present to the minds of
those who prostrate themselves before images until the world has become
full of idolatry as crude and plain as that of the ancient Egyptians,
which all the prophets continuously denounced: they can only mislead, and
ought to be discarded. They actually suggest to worshippers to pass by
Jesus Christ, the only Mediator, and betake themselves to some patron who
has struck their fancy. They bring it about that the Divine Offices are
distributed among the saints as if they had been appointed colleagues to
our Lord Jesus Christ; and they are made to do His work, while He Himself
is kept in the background like some ordinary person in a crowd. They are
responsible for the fact that hymns are sung in public worship in which
the saints are lauded with every blessing just as if they were colleagues
of God.(431)
In conformity with these thoughts, the Confessions of the Reformation all
agree in reprobating prayers to the saints. The Augsburg Confession says:
“The Scripture teacheth not to invoke saints, nor to ask the help
of saints, because it propoundeth to us one Christ, the Mediator,
Propitiatory, High Priest, and Intercessor. This Christ is to be
invocated, and He hath promised that He will hear our prayers, and
liketh this worship, to wit, that He be invocated in all
afflictions. ‘If any man sin, we have an advocate with God, Jesus
Christ the righteous’ (1 John ii. 1).”(432)
The Second Helvetic Confession, in its fifth chapter, entitled, _Regarding
the adoration, worship, and invocation of God through the One Mediator,
Jesus Christ_, lays down the rule that prayer is to be through Christ
alone, and the saints and relics are not to be worshipped. And no
prayer-book or liturgy in any branch of the Reformed Church contains
prayers addressed to any of the saints or to the Blessed Virgin.
2. The Reformers insist on the necessity of Christ and of Christ alone for
all believers. Their Confessions abound in expressions which are meant to
magnify the Person and Work of Christ, and to show that He fills the whole
field of believing thought and worship. The brief Netherlands Confession
of 1566 has no less than three separate sections on _Christ the only
Mediator and Reconciler_, on _Christ the only Teacher,_ and on _Christ the
only High Priest and Sacrifice_.(433) The _Heidelberg_ or _Palatine
Catechism_ calls Christ _my faithful Saviour_, and says that we can call
ourselves Christians “because by faith we are members of Jesus Christ and
partakers of His anointing, so that we both confess His Holy Name and
present ourselves unto Him a lively offering of thanksgiving, and in this
life may with free conscience fight against sin and Satan, and afterwards
possess with Christ an everlasting kingdom over all creatures.” The Scots
Confession abounds in phrases intended to honour our Lord Jesus Christ. It
calls Him _Messiah_, _Eternal Wisdom_, _Emmanuel_, _our Head_, _Our
Brother_, _our Pastor and great Bishop of our souls_, the _Author of
Life_, the _Lamb of God_, the _Advocate and Mediator_, and the _Only High
Priest_. All the Confessions of the Churches of the Reformation contain
the same or similar expressions. The liturgies of the Churches also abound
in similar terms of adoration.
3. The Reformers declare that Christ is the _only_ Revealer of God. “We
would never recognise the Father’s grace and mercy,” says Luther in his
Large Catechism, “were it not for our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the mirror
of the Father’s heart.” “We are not affrayed to cal God our Father,” says
the Scots Confession, “not sa meikle because He has created us, quhilk we
have in common with the reprobate, as for that He has given us His onely
Son.” The instructions issued by the Synod which met at Bern in 1532 are
very emphatic upon this thought, as may be seen from the headings of the
various articles: (Art. 2) That the whole doctrine is the unique Christ
(_Das die gantze leer der eynig Christus sye_); (Art. 3) That God is
revealed to the people in Christ alone; (Art. 5) That the gracious God is
perceived through Christ alone without any mediation; (Art. 6) A Christian
sermon is entirely about and from Christ. It is said under the third
article: “His Son in Whom we see the work of God and His Fatherly heart
toward us ... which is not the case where the preacher talks much about
God in the heathen manner, and does not exhibit the same God in the face
of Christ.”(434) The Confessions also unite in declaring that the gift of
the Holy Spirit comes from Christ.
4. The conception that Christ filled the whole sphere of God, which was
for the Reformers a fundamental and experimental fact, enabled them to
construct a spiritual doctrine of the sacraments which they opposed to
that held in the mediæval Church. Of course, it was various theories about
the sacraments which caused the chief differences among the Reformers
themselves; but apart from all varying ideas—consubstantiation, ubiquity,
signs exhibiting and signs representing—the Reformers united on the
thoughts that the efficacy in the sacraments depended entirely on the
promises of Christ contained in His word, and that the virtue in the
sacraments consisted in the presence of Christ to the believing
communicant. What was received in the sacraments was not a vague,
mysterious, not to say magical, grace, but Christ Jesus Himself. He gave
Himself in the sacraments in whatever way His presence might be explained.
They all taught that the efficacy of the sacraments depends upon the
promise of Christ contained in their institution, and they insisted that
word and sacrament must always be taken together. Thus Luther points out
in the _Babylonish Captivity of the Church_ that one objection to the
Roman practice is that the recipients “never hear the words of the promise
which are secretly mumbled by the priest,” and exhorts his readers never
to lose sight of the all-important connection between the word of promise
and the sacraments; and in his Large Catechism he declares that the
sacraments include the Word. “I exhort you,” he says, “never to sunder the
Word and the water, or to separate them. For where the Word is withheld we
have only such water as the maid uses to cook with.” Non-Lutheran
Confessions are equally decided on the necessity of connecting the promise
and the words of Christ with the sacraments. The Thirty-nine Articles
declare that the sacraments are effectual because of “Christ’s institution
and promise.” The Heidelberg or Palatine Catechism (1563) says that the
sacraments “are holy and visible signs ordained of God, to the end that He
might thereby the more fully declare and seal unto us the _promise_ of the
Holy Gospel.”
Similarly the Reformers unanimously declared that the virtue in the
sacraments consisted in no mysterious grace, but in the fact that in them
believing partakers met and received Christ Himself. In the articles of
the Bern Synod (1532) we are told that the sacraments are mysteries of
God, “through which from without Christ is proffered to believers.” The
First Helvetic Confession (1536) says, concerning the Holy Supper, “we
hold that in the same the Lord truly offers His Body and His Blood, that
is, Himself, to His own.” The Second Helvetic Confession (1562) declares
that “the Body of Christ is in heaven at the right hand of the Father,”
and enjoins communicants “to lift up their hearts and not to direct them
downwards to the bread. For as the sun, though absent from us in the
heaven, is none the less efficaciously present ... so much more the Sun of
righteousness absent from us in the heavens in His Body, is present to us
not indeed corporeally, but spiritually by a life-giving activity.” The
French Confession of 1557 says that the sacraments are pledges and seals,
and adds, “Yet we hold that their substance and truth is in Jesus Christ.”
So the Scots Confession of 1560 declares that “we assuredlie beleeve that
be Baptisme we ar ingrafted in Christ Jesus to be made partakers of His
justice, be quhilk our sinnes ar covered and remitted. And alswa, that in
the Supper richtlie used, Christ Jesus is so joined with us, that Hee
becummis very nurishment and fude of our saules.” In the _Manner of the
Administration of the Lord’s Supper_ the Scottish Reformation Church
directed the minister in his exhortation to say to the people: “The end of
our coming to the Lord’s Table ... is to seek our life and perfection in
Jesus Christ, acknowledging ourselves at the same time to be children of
wrath and condemnation. Let us consider then that this sacrament is a
singular medicine for all poor sick creatures, a comfortable help to weak
souls, and that our Lord requireth no other worthiness on our part, but
that we unfeignedly acknowledge our naughtiness and imperfection.”
Everywhere in prayer, worship, and teaching the Reformers see Christ
filling the whole sphere of God. Jesus was God appearing in history and
addressing man.
§ 6. The Church.
In the Epistles of St. Paul, the Church of Christ stands forth as a
_fellowship_ which is both divine and human. On the side of the divine it
is a fellowship with Jesus, its crucified, risen, and ascended Lord; on
the human, it is a fellowship among men who stand in the same relation to
Jesus. This fellowship with Jesus and with the brethren is the secret of
the Church—what expresses it, what makes it different from all other
fellowships. Every other characteristic which belongs to it must be
coloured by this thought of a double fellowship. It is the double relation
which makes it difficult to construct a conception of the Church. It is
easy to feel it as an experience, but it has always been found hard to
express it in propositions.
It does not require much elaborate thinking to construct a theory of the
Church which will be true to all that is said about the fellowship on its
divine side; nor is it very difficult to think of a great visible and
historical organisation which in some external aspects represents the
Christian fellowship, provided the hidden union with Christ, so prominent
in St. Paul’s descriptions, be either entirely neglected or explained in
external and material ways. The difficulty arises when both the divine and
the human sides of the fellowship are persistently and earnestly kept in
view.
It is always hard to explain the unseen by the seen, the eternal by the
temporal, and the divine by the human; and the task is almost greater than
usual when the union of these two elements in the Church of Christ is the
theme of discussion. It need not surprise us, therefore, that all down
through the Middle Ages there appear, not one, but two conceptions of the
Christian Church which never harmonised. On the one side, the Church was
thought of as a fellowship of God with man, depending on the inscrutable
purpose of God, and independent of all visible outward organisation; on
the other, it was a great society which existed in the world of history,
and was held together by visible political ties like other societies.
Augustine had both conceptions, and the dialectical skill of the great
theologian of the West was unable to fuse them into one harmonious whole.
These two separate, almost mutually exclusive, ideas of what the Church of
Christ was, lived side by side during the Middle Ages in the same
unconnected fashion. The former, the spiritual Church with its real but
unseen fellowship with Christ, was the pre-eminently religious thought. It
was the ground on which the most conspicuous mediæval piety rested. It was
the garden in which bloomed the flowers of mediæval mystical devotion. The
latter was built up by the juristic dialectic of Roman canonists into the
conception that the Church was a visible hierarchical State having a
strictly monarchical constitution—its king being the Bishop of Rome, who
was the visible representative of Christ. This conception became almost
purely political. It was the active force in all ecclesiastical struggles
with princes and peoples, with Reformers, and with so-called heretics and
schismatics. It reduced the Church to the level of the State, and
contained little to stimulate to piety or to holy living.
The labours of the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century did try to
transform this political Church into what might represent the double
fellowship with Christ and with fellow-believers which is so prominent a
thought in the New Testament. They did so by attempting to show that the
great political Church was an enclosure containing certain indefinite
mysterious powers of redemption which saved men who willingly placed
themselves within the sphere of their operation. They maintained that the
core of the hierarchical constitution of the Church was the priesthood,
and that this priesthood was a species of plastic medium through which,
and through which alone, God worked in dispensing, by means of the
sacraments entrusted to the priesthood, His saving grace. It may be
questioned whether the thought of the Church as an institution, possessing
within itself certain mysterious redemptive powers which are to be found
nowhere else, was ever thoroughly harmonised with that which regarded it
as a mass of legal statutes embodied in canon law and dominated by papal
absolutism. The two conceptions remained distinct, mutually aiding each
other, but never exactly coalescing. Thus in the sixteenth century no less
than three separate ideas of the Church of Christ were present to fill the
minds and imaginations of men; but the dominant idea for the practical
religious life was certainly that which represented the Church as an
institution which, because it possessed the priesthood, was the society
within which salvation was to be found.
Luther had enjoyed to the full the benefits of this society, and had with
ardour and earnestness sought to make use of all its redemptive powers. He
had felt, simply because he was so honest with himself, that it had not
made him a real Christian, and that its mysterious powers had worked on
him in vain. His living Christian experience made him know and feel that
whatever the Church of Christ was, it was not a society within which
priests exercised their secret science of redemption. It was and must be a
fellowship of holy and Christlike people; but he felt it very difficult to
express his experience in phrases that could satisfy him. It was hard to
get rid of thoughts which he had cherished from childhood, and none of
these inherited beliefs had more power over him than the idea that the
Church, however described, was the Pope’s House in which the Bishop of
Rome ruled, and ought to rule, as house-father. It is interesting to study
by what devious paths he arrived at a clear view of what the Church of
Christ really is;(435) to notice how shreds of the old opinions which had
lain dormant in his mind every now and then start afresh into life; and
how, while he had learnt to know the uselessness of many institutions of
the mediæval Church, he could not easily divest his mind of the thought
that they naturally belonged to a Church Visible. Monastic vows, the
celibacy of the clergy, fasting, the hierarchy, the supremacy of the Pope,
the power of excommunication with all its dreaded consequences, were all
the natural accompaniments of a Visible Church according to mediæval
ideas, and Luther relinquished them with difficulty. From the first,
Augustine’s thought of the Church, which consists of the elect, helped
him; he found that Huss held the same idea, and he wrote to a friend that
“we have been all Hussites without knowing it.”(436) But while Luther and
all the Reformers held strongly by this conception of Augustine, it was
not of very much service in determining the conception of the Visible
Church which was the more important practically; and although the
definition of the Catholic Church Invisible has found its way into most
Protestant Confessions, and has been used by Protestants polemically, it
has always remained something of a background, making clearer the
conception of the Church in general, but has been of little service in
giving clear views of what the Church Visible is. From the very first,
however, Luther saw in a certain indefinite way that there was a real
connection between the conception of the Visible Church and the
proclamation of the Word of God—a thought which was destined to grow more
and more definite till it completely possessed him. As early as October
1518, he could inform Cajetan that the Pope must be under the rule of the
Word of God and not superior to it.(437) His discovery that the communion
of the saints (_communio sanctorum_) was not necessarily a hierarchy
(_ecclesia prælatorum_),(438) was made soon afterwards. After the Leipzig
Disputation his views became clearer, and by 1520 they stood revealed in
the three great Reformation treatises.
Luther’s doctrine of the Church is extremely simple. The Church is, as the
Creed defines it to be, the _Communion of the Saints_, which has come into
existence through the proclamation of the Word of God heard and received
by faith. He simplified this fundamental Christian conception in a
wonderful way. The Church rests on the sure and stable foundation of the
Word of God; and this Word of God is not a weary round of statutes issued
blasphemously by the Bishops of Rome in God’s name. It is not the
invitations of a priesthood to come and share mysterious and indefinite
powers of salvation given to them in their command over the sacraments. It
is not a lengthy doctrinal system constructed out of detached texts of
Holy Scripture by the application of a fourfold sense used under the
guidance of a dogmatic tradition or a rule of faith. It is the substance
of the Scriptures. It is the “gospel according to a pure understanding.”
It is the “promises of God”; “the testimony of Jesus, Who is the Saviour
of souls”; it is the “consolations offered in Christ.” It is, as Calvin
said, “the spiritual gate whereby we enter into God’s heavenly kingdom”;
the “mirror in which faith beholds God.” It is, according to the
Westminster Confession, the sum of God’s commands, threatenings, promises,
and, above all, the offer of Christ Jesus. All these things are
apprehended by faith. The Church comes into existence by faith responding
to the proclamation of the Word of God. This is the sure and stable thing
upon which the Church of Christ is founded.
The Church of Christ, therefore, is a body of which the Spirit of Jesus is
the soul. It is a company of Christlike men and women, whom the Holy
Spirit has called, enlightened, and sanctified through the preaching of
the word; who are encouraged to look forward to a glorious future prepared
for the people of God; and who, meanwhile, manifest their faith in all
manner of loving services done to their fellow-believers.
The Church is therefore in some sense invisible. Its secret is its hidden
fellowship with Jesus. Its roots penetrate the unseen, and draw from
thence the nourishment needed to sustain its life. But it is a visible
society, and can be seen wherever the Word of God is faithfully
proclaimed, and wherever faith is manifested in testimony and in bringing
forth the fruits of the Spirit.
This is the essential mode of describing the Church which has found place
in the Reformation creeds. Some vary in the ways in which they express the
thought; some do not sufficiently distinguish, in words at least, between
what the Church is and what it has, between what makes its being and what
is included in its well-being. But in all there are the two thoughts that
the Church is made visible by the two fundamental things—the proclamation
of the word and the manifestation of faith.
This mode of describing the Church of Christ defines it by that element
which separates it from all other forms of human association—its special
relation to the divine; and it is shown to be visible at the place where
that divine element can and does manifest itself. It defines the Church by
its most essential element, and sets aside all that is accidental. It
concerns itself with what the Church is, and does not include what the
Church has. It therefore provides room for all things which belong to the
well-being of the Church—only it relegates them to their proper
place.(439)
If the proclamation of the Word of God, and the manifestation of the faith
which answers, be the essence of the Church, all that tends to aid both is
to be included in the thought. There must be a ministry of some sort in
word and sacrament instituted within the Church of Christ in order to lead
the individual to faith. God has created this ministry, and all the
Reformed Churches were careful to declare that no one should seek entrance
into office unless he was assured that he had been called of God thereto;
and as his function is to be a minister of the Church and a servant of the
faithful, no one “should publicly teach or administer the sacraments
unless he be duly called (_nisi rite vocatus_).” Such a ministry has its
field simply in ministering the means of grace. “The Church of Christ,”
says Luther, “requires an honest ministry diligently and loyally
instructed in the holy Word of God after a pure Christian understanding,
and without the addition of any false traditions. In and through such a
ministry it will be made plain what are Christ and His Evangel, how to
attain to the forgiveness of sins, and the properties and power of the
_keys_ in the Church.”
All this is matter of administration. Some societies of believers may have
different ideas about the precise form that this ministry ought to take;
but such differences, while they may lead to separate administrations, do
not imply any separation from the one Catholic Church of Christ to which
they all belong. However outwardly they differ, all retain the essential
things—the preaching and teaching of the Word of God and the due
administration of the sacraments. Some may prefer to set forth a creed of
one kind and others may prefer another. The French, the Scottish, and the
Dutch Churches had all their own creeds, and all believed each other to be
parts of the same One Catholic Church of Christ.
“When we affirm,” says Calvin, “the pure ministry of the Word, and
our order in the celebration of the Sacraments, to be a sufficient
pledge and earnest that we may safely embrace the society in which
both these are found as a true Church, we carry the observation to
this point, that such a society should never be rejected as long
as it continues in these things, although it may be chargeable in
other respects with many errors.”(440)
Within this Christian fellowship, which is the Church of Christ, the sense
by which we see God is awakened and our faith is nourished and quickened.
The Word of God speaks to us not merely in the public worship of the
faithful, but in and through the lives of the brethren; their deeds act on
us as the simple stories of experience and providence which the Scriptures
contain. God’s Word speaks to us in a thousand ways in the lives and
sympathies of the brethren. The Christian “receives the revelation of God
in the living relationships of the Christian brotherhood, and its
essential contents are that personal life of Jesus which is visible in the
gospel and which is expounded by the lives of the redeemed.”(441)
“The Christian Church,” says Luther, “keeps all words of God in
its heart, and turns them round and round, and keeps their
connection with one another and with Scripture! Therefore, anyone
who is to find Christ must first find the Church. How could anyone
know where Christ is and faith in Him is, unless he knew where His
believers are? Whoever wishes to know something about Christ must
not trust to himself, nor by the help of his own reason build a
bridge of his own to heaven, but must go to the Church, must visit
it and make inquiry. Now the Church is not wood and stone, but the
company of people who believe in Christ. With these he must unite
and see how they believe, live, and teach, who assuredly have
Christ among them. For outside the Christian Church there is no
truth, no Christ, no blessedness.”(442)
For these reasons the Church deserves to be called, and is, the Mother of
all Christians.
INDEX.
Abbots, election of, 24.
Absolutism, papal, 14, 265.
_Acta Augustana_, 233.
_Address to the Nobility of the German Nation_, 141, 143, 242 _f._, 257.
Adelmann, Bernard, named in the first Bull against Luther, 249 and _n._
Adriatic, the, the boundary between Christian and Moslem, 19.
Æneas Sylvius, on the wealth of German burghers, 86.
Africa, North, 18; 85.
_Against the execrable Bull of Antichrist_, 249.
_Against the thieving, murdering hordes of Peasants_, 336.
Agricola, John, 390.
Agricola, Rudolph, 58.
Agricola, Stephan, 353.
Aichili, provost-marshal of the Swabian League, murders Lutheran pastors,
340.
D’Ailly, Peter, 199 _f._, 254.
Alber, Matthew, 310, 391.
Aleander, Jerome (Roman nuncio),—
on the devotion of Germany to Rome, 115;
at the Diet of Worms, 261 _ff._;
his education, 262;
his letters to Rome, 262. _ff_.;
his estimate of Charles V., 263;
his task at the Diet of Worms, 263;
his address to the Diet, 270;
drafted the Ban against Luther, 298; 259, 267 _n._, 269, 271, 275 _f._,
279, 282, 283 and _n._, 285, 288, 291 _n._, 293, 295, 386.
Alexander of Hales on Indulgences, 219, 221 _f._
Alpersbach, Petreius, 66.
Alstedt, 330.
Altenberg, 318.
Amsdorf, Nicholas, 211 _n._, 275, 317.
Anabaptists, 339, 366;
and Humanists, 156.
Andreæ, Laurentius, 422, 424.
Angelico, Fra, 49.
Anhalt, Prince of, 346, 363, 373.
Anjou, province of, 23.
Anna, Saint, “the Grandmother,” cult of, 135 _f._, 138.
Annaberg, town of, Indulgence-seller at, 213.
_Annates_, 12, 17, 24 _f._, 245, 321.
Anne of Beaujeu, 23.
Anselm of Lucca, 2.
Anthony, Duke of Lorraine, 334, 338.
Anti-Hapsburg feeling in Germany, 350, 370, 374, 376.
_Apology for the Augsburg Confession, The_, 367.
_Apostles’ Creed_, 365, 468, 484.
Apostolic Succession, 403.
Aquinas. See _Thomas_.
Aragon, 27.
Argyropoulos, John, 48, 68.
Aristotle, a forerunner of Christ, 56;
influence on mediæval thinking, 449;
disliked by the Humanists, 57;
disliked by Luther, 206, 469.
Armstrong, Edward, quoted, 264 n.
Art, German, and popular life, 62.
Arthur, Prince of Wales, 21.
_Articles_:
_the Twelve_, 331 _ff_., 336, 337;
_the Marburg_, 353, 359;
_the Swabach_, 359, 367;
_the Schmalkald_, 374, 467 _n._, 468;
_the Bern_, 478.
Artisan life, 80 _ff._; artisan capitalists in England, 21.
Artists, German, and the Reformation, 307;
belonged to the burgher class, 86.
_Artushöfe_, 86.
Asia Minor, 18.
_Ass, Feast of the_, 120.
Astrologists in the beginning of the sixteenth century, 129.
Athanasius and Luther, 433, 470, 471 and _n._, 473.
_Attrition_, the doctrine of, 201, 219, 222 _f._;
taught by John of Palz, an Augustinian Eremite theologian, 138, 199,
201.
Augsburg, city of, 234, 320, 322, 353, 391;
the Humanist circle of, 60 _f._;
the _Brethren_ in, 152.
See _Diet_.
_Augsburg Confession (Augustana)_, 147 _f._, 363, 365 _ff._, 396, 399,
403.
_Augsburg Interim_, 266, 390 ff.
_Augsburg Religious Peace,_, 395 _ff._;
international consequences of, 398 _n._
Augustine, the papal claim to universal supremacy and, 3;
influence on mediæval theology, 449;
disliked by the Humanists, 167, 185;
his influence on Luther, 203, 207, 211, 433, 436.
Augustinian Eremites, 137 _ff._, 146;
their theology not Augustine’s, 138, 199 _f._, 229;
their chapter at Heidelberg, 230;
most of them accept Luther’s teaching, 305.
Augustus, Elector of Saxony, 395.
Avignon, the Popes at, 5.
_Babylonian Captivity of the Church_, 241 _f._, 266 _n._, 282 _n._, 306.
_Ban, the_, against Luther, 297 _ff._
See _Worms, Edict of_.
Barclay, Alexander, the _Ship of Fools_, 17 _n._
Basel, city of, 310;
Council of, see _Councils_.
Baths in the Middle Ages served as a life-school for artists, 88.
_Bauernmeister_, the, 92.
Bavaria, the Dukes of, 319, 325, 370, 376.
Bebel, Heinrich, 67.
Beer, Einbecker, 277 _n._, 293.
Beggars, ecclesiastical, 142.
Begging, a Christian virtue, 142.
Beguines and Beguine-houses, 116, 142.
Beham, Hans Sebaldus, artist, 62.
Beheim, Hans, supposed to have abducted Luther, 295.
Belgrade, 19.
Bernard of Clairvaux, 125, 205, 209, 433 and _n._
Bessarion, Cardinal, 48 _f._
Bible, translations of the, into the vernacular, 149 _f._, 174, 387, 402.
See _Scripture_.
_Biblia Pauperum_, 117.
Biel, Gabriel, 55, 196, 199.
Bigamy of Philip of Hesse, 380 _ff._
Bishops, modes of electing, 8, 24.
Black Death, the, in England, 20, 440.
Boccaccio, 47.
Böhm, Hans, and the socialist revolts, 99 _ff._, 135.
Bologna, University of, 64;
a great Law School, 2;
city of, 360.
Bonaventura on Indulgences, 221, 224.
Bonzio, Cardinal, 2.