LUTHER (Vol. 1-6). Grisar Hartmann
predestination to hell by teaching how we can escape it, does not seem to strike him. Or does he, perhaps, mean that only those who are not predestined to hell can thus overcome the fear of hell? Will such resignation be possible to him who really believes himself destined to hell, and who sees even in his resignation no means whereby he can escape it?
To such a one even the “wounds of Christ” offer no assurance and no place of refuge. They only speak to man of the God of revelation, not of the mysterious, unsearchable God. The untenable and insulting comparison between the mysterious and the revealed Supreme Being which Luther was later on to institute is here already foreshadowed.
He explains in detail how the will of man does not in the least belong to the person who wills, or the road to the runner. “All is God’s, who gives and creates the will.” We are all instruments of God, who works all in all. Our will is like the saw and the stick—examples which he repeatedly employs later in his harshest utterances concerning the slavery of the will. Sawing is the act of the hand which saws, but the saw is passive; the animal is beaten, not by the stick, but by him who holds the stick. So the will also is nothing, but God who wields it is everything.[476]
Hence he rejects most positively the theological doctrine that God foresees the final lot of man as something “contingenter futurum,” i.e. that he sees his rejection as something dependent on man and brought about by his own fault. No, according to Luther, in the election of grace everything is preordained “inflexibili et firma voluntate,” and this, His own will, is alone present in the mind of God.
Luther speaks with scorn of “our subtle theologians,” who drag in their “contingens” and build up an election by grace on “necessitas consequentiæ, sed non consequentis,” in accordance with the well-known scholastic ideas. “With God there is absolutely no ‘contingens,’ but only with us; for no leaf ever falls from the tree to the earth without the will of the Father.” Besides, the theologians—so he accuses the Scholastics without exception—“have imagined the case so, or at least have led to its being so imagined, as though salvation were obtained or lost through our own free will.”[477]
We know that here he was wrong. As a matter of fact, true Scholasticism attributed the work of salvation to grace together with free will, so that two factors, the Divine and the human, or the supernatural and the natural, are mutually engaged in the same. But Luther, when here reporting the old teaching, does not mention the factor of grace, but only “nostrum arbitrium.”
He then adds: “Thus I once understood it.” If he really ever believed salvation to be exclusively the work of free will, then he erred grievously, and merely proves how defective his study, even of Gabriel Biel, had been.
He also interpreted quite wrongly the view of contemporary and earlier scholastic theologians on the love of God, and, again, by excluding the supernatural factor. He reproaches them with having, so he says, considered the love in question as merely natural (“ex natura”) and yet as wholesome for eternal life, and he demands that all wholesome love be made to proceed “ex Spiritu Sancto,” a thing which all theologians, even the Occamists, had insisted on. He says: “they do not know in the least what love is,”[478] “nor do they know what virtue is, because they allow themselves to be instructed on this point by Aristotle, whose definition is absolutely erroneous.”[479] It makes no impression upon him—perhaps he is even ignorant of the fact—that the Scholastics consider, on good grounds, the love which loves God’s goodness as goodness towards us, and which makes personal salvation its motive, compatible with the perfect love of friendship (amicitiæ, complacentiæ).[480] According to him, this love must be extirpated (“amor exstirpandus”) because it is full of abominable self-seeking.[481] In its place he sets up a most perfect love (which will be described below), which includes resignation to, and even a desire for, hell-fire, a resignation such as Christ Himself manifested (!) in His abandonment to suffering.
Luther had now left the safe path of theological and ecclesiastical tradition to pursue his own ideas.
It is true that, notwithstanding his exhortation to be resigned to the holy will of God in every case, he looks with fear at the flood of blasphemies which must arise in the heart of one who fears his own irrevocable, undeserved damnation. Anxious to obviate this, or to arm the conscience against it, when pointing to the wounds of Christ he adds these words: “Should anyone, owing to overmastering temptation, come to blaspheme God, that would not involve his eternal damnation. For even towards the godless our God is not a God of impatience and cruelty. Such blasphemies are forced out of a man by the devil, therefore they may be more pleasing to God’s ear than any Alleluia or song of praise. The more terrible and abominable a blasphemy is, the more pleasing it is to God when the heart feels that it does not acquiesce in it, i.e. when it is involuntary.”[482]
Involuntary thoughts, to which alone he sees fit to refer, are, of course, not deserving of punishment; but are the murmurs and angry complaints against predestination to hell of which he speaks always only involuntary? The way to resignation which he mentions in the same connection is no less questionable. It consists largely in “not troubling about such thoughts.”[483] But will all be able to get so far as this?
He again repeats with great insistence that “everything happens according to God’s choice”; “he upon whom God does not have mercy, remains in the ‘massa’” [perditionis].[484] “For whom it is, it is,” he adds elsewhere in German, “whom it hits, him it hits.”[485] God permits at times even the elect to be reduced, as it were, to nothingness,[486] but only in order that His sole power may be made manifest and that it may quench all proud boasting; for man is so ready to believe that he can by the exercise of his free will rise again, and waxes presumptuous; but here he learns that grace exalts him before and above every choice of his own (“ante omne arbitrium et supra arbitrium suum”).[487]
We shall not here examine more closely his grave misapprehension of the teaching of the Apostle in the Epistle to the Romans, on which he tries to prop up his glaring theory concerning predestination. Suffice it to say that the principal passage to which he refers (Rom. ix. 11 ff.), according to the exegetist Cornely, is not now taken by any expositor to refer to predestination, i.e. to the selection by grace of each individual.[488] The passage treats of the promises made to the Jewish people (as a whole) which were given without desert and freely; but Israel, as St. Paul explains, has, by its fault, rendered itself unworthy of the same and excluded itself (as a whole) from the salvation which the heathen obtain by faith—a reward of Israel’s misdeeds, which, in itself, is incompatible with Luther’s doctrine of an undeserved predestination to hell.[489]
Luther also quotes St. Augustine, but does not interpret him correctly. He even overlooks the fact that this Father, in one of the passages alleged, says the very opposite to his new ideas on unconditional predestination to hell, and attributes in every case the fate of the damned to their own moral misdeeds. Augustine says, in his own profound, concise way, in the text quoted by Luther: “the saved may not pride himself on his merits, and the damned may only bewail his demerits.”