LUTHER (Vol. 1-6). Grisar Hartmann
time when he began to advocate his favourite doctrine as being the time of the “revelation of the evangel.”[1024] In answer to the fanatics who disputed his right to the first place in the new teaching, he defends himself by saying that it was he who “not without the revelation of the Holy Ghost had again brought forward the gospel.” The words contained in his letter to the Elector on his return from the Wartburg express a consciousness of a higher illumination, where he declares that he had received the “evangel, not from men, but solely from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ.”[1025]
“Such self-reliance almost fills us with anxiety,” says Adolf Harnack, of the latter and other writings. “... We seek in vain in the whole history of the Church for examples of men who could write such letters as that to the Elector, and the writings which Luther composed on the Wartburg. I can quite understand how Catholic critics see in these letters a ‘delirious pride.’ There is no choice except to judge Luther thus or to recognise that his place was an entirely peculiar one in the history of the Christian religion.”[1026] Harnack goes on to quote another extremely self-confident passage from Luther: “It pleased God well to reveal His Son through me,” and then expresses his own opinion on the subject: “Luther’s merit consisted in the circumstance that he was able to express what he had experienced, namely, the equation of the assurance of salvation, and faith”;[1027] his self-reliance, Harnack adds, was the “true expression of a religious freedom such as Clement of Alexandria had painted as the disposition of a true Christian, and such as the mystics of all ages had in their way sought to attain to.”[1028]
Luther’s claim to special illumination must, as hinted before, be restricted to the domain of the aforesaid doctrine of assurance of salvation; the whole of his doctrine did not come to him from God, or at least only by way of the inspiration of the Spirit, which, according to his own statements to be afterwards considered, is common to all well-disposed Christians who make use of Holy Scripture. Döllinger, also, says: This doctrine was the “only one which he really believed he had received by a special revelation of the Holy Ghost.”[1029]
Here again we perceive the fundamental importance attaching to the assurance of salvation as the corner-stone of his development. Unconsciously he had been driven forward to this extremity. Protestants quite rightly have often pointed out that the decisive question for him was: “How can I, a mere single individual, be assured of the forgiveness of sins and thereby of the mercy of God?” “He ventured,” so it has been said, “to throw overboard all doubts as to the doctrine of assurance of salvation and to declare frankly and freely: it is impossible to trust God without being fully assured of redemption and salvation.” “One thing only was still wanting (in his Commentary on Romans), namely, the clear perception of the fact, that the believer not only may be certain of his redemption, but that he must be so.” The mystics helped him finally to arrive at the “joyous sense of trust in God” after he had been through “the hell of a troubled conscience”; thus he was set “free from the last scruples and doubts, and reached the consciousness that he might, nay, must, rest assured of his God.”[1030]
The fact cannot be concealed, that in the above passages concerning the discovery on the tower, which for the most part date from a later period of Luther’s life, there is some obscurity and confusion as to the subject. He says first: the Justice of God, by which God (Christ) is Just, is taught in the New Law and is also indicated in the Psalms, and this Justice of God is reckoned to us as our Justice. Secondly, we lay hold upon it only by faith, and thus our life comes from faith (fiducial faith with assurance of salvation), of which fact we must be joyfully confident. Thirdly: The difficulty caused by the idea of God’s avenging Justice, which weighs down the soul, must therefore be fought against with determination. Of the first of these three elements Luther had made personal experience long before this time; its earliest expression is at the commencement of the Commentary on Romans, also in the well-known letter to Spenlein of April 7, 1516. He had therefore no right to speak of it as forming the subject of his newly acquired knowledge. The second element on the other hand was really new, and gave him the answer to the anxious question: How is the imputed Justice of God to become mine? Not by self-annihilation, not by humilitas, not by yearning prayer and other works which hitherto he had proposed as the means, but by faith only which had assured him of “regeneration,” of heavenly revelations, etc. Concerning the third element no more need be said here, however greedily he may have seized the semblance of comfort which the discovery afforded him, passing from the storms of his crisis into what he took to be a safe haven of peace.
The illusory talisman of absolute assurance of salvation was the result of the second stage of his development.
3. Legends. Storm Signals
On looking back in later years upon the course of his spiritual progress in the monastery, Luther was unable to distinguish clearly between the various stages of his development. The incident in the tower, which had left the strongest impression on his memory, drew the first stage more and more into the foreground in his imagination, so that in his accounts he assigns to it an undue prominence to the disadvantage of the two others. Hence the want of clearness noticeable in his statements with regard to the same.
We find not merely obscurity, but actual error, particularly in his account of the traditional interpretation and that which he had himself begun to advocate of the Iustitia Dei (Rom. i. 17). Luther is, in this matter, the originator of the great legend still current even in our own day, which represents him as a Columbus discovering therein the central truth set forth by Paul; no one had been able to find the key to the passage before his glance penetrated to the truth. All the learned men of earlier times had said that iustitia there meant the avenging Justice of an angry God. As a matter of fact, in Luther’s lectures on Genesis in 1540-41,[1031] it is asserted that all the doctors of the Church, with the exception of Augustine, had misunderstood the verses Romans i. 16 f.; Luther’s Preface to his Latin works to some extent presupposes the same, for he says that he had, “according to the custom and use of all doctors” (“usu et consuetudine omnium doctorum doctus”), understood the passage as meaning that justice “by which God is Just and punishes sin,” and only Augustine, with whom he had made common cause, had found the right interpretation (“iustitiam Dei interpretatur, qua nos Deus induit”), although even the latter did not teach imputation clearly (see above, p. 392).[1032]
“As a matter of fact, however, the exact opposite is the case: all the mediæval doctors whom he studied as a monk, Peter Lombard, Lyra and Paul of Burgos, gave, as can be proved, the same interpretation as Augustine. Thus Luther was completely at sea as to the handling of this, to him most important, passage.”[1033] Luther in his Preface says that contrary to all expectation (“praeter spem”) he had, after his own discovery, found in St. Augustine’s “De spiritu et littera” an interpretation which agreed with his own, and that this caused him fresh joy, although Augustine expresses himself imperfectly with regard to the same. Denifle, on the other hand, proves by the testimony of more than sixty interpreters of antiquity, that all are unanimous in taking the iustitia Dei in St. Paul in the same sense as St. Augustine, viz. as the Justice by which God renders men just.[1034] The demonstration is conducted with “commendable accuracy and fulness.”