Let God Be God - An Interpretation Of The Theology Of Martin Luther

Philip S. Watson

• Publisher: Mcgiffert Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781528763400
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Part One

The General Character of Luther’s Theology

CHAPTER ONE

LUTHER AS A THEOLOGIAN

1. THE TASK OF THE INTERPRETER

A DISTINGUISHED Lutheran Church historian has written of Methodism that it can be described as ‘the Anglican translation of the Evangelical-Lutheran doctrine of salvation’.¹ If that is so, the People called Methodists may well be expected to show sympathy and understanding for the genius of Martin Luther, and it is not inappropriate that a Methodist lecture should be devoted to an interpretation of his theology.

The Founders of Methodism were profoundly, if in the main indirectly, influenced by Luther’s doctrine. It was with his accents that Spangenberg spoke in Georgia and Peter Böhler in Oxford; and it was his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians and his Preface to the Epistle to the Romans that proved decisive in the historic month of May 1738. There is, moreover, a permanent Lutheran contribution to Methodist piety in John Wesley’s translations of German hymns, and to Methodist theology in his standard Notes on the New Testament, of which he derived the major portion from the Gnomon Novi Testamenti of Bengel, ‘that great light of the Christian world’, as he calls him. John and Charles Wesley did not, of course, become Lutherans, nor yet Moravians; and Methodism both had and has its own peculiar ethos. Yet deeper than all differences is the essential spirit, in which the Wesleys are more nearly akin to Luther than to any other great exponent of the Christian faith and life. There is an extraordinary similarity between the spiritual evolution of the sixteenth-century monk into the Reformer and that of the eighteenth-century Oxford Anglicans into leaders of the Evangelical Revival; and the Revival itself is aptly named, for it was fundamentally a renewal and extension of the work of Luther’s Reformation.

It is true that John Wesley, who spoke of the Reformer as a much greater man than himself,² was also sharply critical of him on certain points. We shall have occasion to notice and to criticize his criticisms in due course; but it is only fair to say here that he had some excuse for making them. He possessed little or no first-hand knowledge of Luther’s teaching, and he was misled by the errors of men whom he imagined, as they imagined themselves, to be faithful exponents of Luther. More important than these matters, however, is the fact that Wesley stands together with Luther on the same solid ground of the doctrine of salvation by faith, about which the two men often speak in almost identical terms. Writing in 1740, Wesley describes this doctrine as ‘the old way, of salvation by faith only’, and opposes it to ‘the new path, of salvation by faith and works’.³ Two hundred years earlier, Luther was urging the defence of ‘the old faith against new articles of faith’ and—which is the same thing—of ‘the old good works against the new good works’.⁴ In the first of the Standard Sermons, where Wesley presses the need for preaching it, he asserts that it was

this doctrine, which our Church justly calls the strong rock and foundation of the Christian religion, that first drove Popery out of these kingdoms; and it is this alone can keep it out.

In the same way, Luther declares that

the doctrine of faith and justification, or how we become righteous before God . . . drives out all false gods and idolatry; and when that is driven out, the foundation of the Papacy falls, whereon it is built.⁵

There are scores of passages in John Wesley’s writings that could thus be. paralleled with quotations from Luther; and the same can be said of his brother’s hymns. Indeed, anyone who is but familiar with Charles Wesley’s hymns has already a fair acquaintance with Luther’s theology, albeit in its Anglican translation. With the translation, however, we are not here proposing to deal, but with the original, to which we must now turn.

We have spoken of interpreting the theology of Luther; but the question may perhaps be raised, whether any such thing exists. There is a very common opinion that it does not; and in some quarters it is almost proverbial that Luther was ‘no theologian’. Even a friendly critic thinks it scarcely too much to say, that to speak of the ‘Theology of Luther’ is to use a phrase without a meaning.⁶

Luther’s contribution, we are told, was to religion, not to theology. He was a ‘religious genius’, a man of profound experience and vivid intuitions, who expressed what he felt and saw in paradoxical speech which defies systematization. His religion, it is alleged, is simple, not to say naive, and can be easily understood by anyone who will read his Primary Treatises and Catechisms; but his ‘theology’ evades description. He introduced no new doctrines, and his revival of a number of old ones scarcely enhances his claim to theological distinction. His writings contain, not a theology, but statements of doctrine, which cannot be reduced to an ordered and coherent system. If his work has been of vital and lasting importance for religion, he has left for theology only problems to solve, not solutions of problems.

Such an estimate of Luther would no doubt be widely accepted; and the grounds for it are apparent. Yet it cannot be said to reveal more than a very slender acquaintance with Luther himself and an unnecessarily narrow conception of what we are to understand by theology.

If the essential art of a theologian is to elaborate a comprehensive and logically ordered system of doctrine, then Luther is certainly ‘no theologian’—nor, we may add, is Saint Augustine or many another of the Fathers of the Church. His work is far from systematic in that sense of the term. He wrote largely as occasion demanded, in fulfilment of his duties as professor, preacher, and pastor, or in defence of his position against its assailants. He made no attempt to construct a Lutheran Summa or Institutes; and the Loci communes, although his work was their inspiration, are not his own, nor do they adequately represent his outlook.⁷ But that is no sufficient reason for saying that Luther presents us only with a number of disconnected statements of doctrine. He is, in fact, never concerned merely with particular points of doctrine in isolation from each other or from the Christian Faith as a whole. In his own view, at any rate, every single doctrine is inseparably bound up with all the rest, so that ‘no one article of faith is believed without all the other articles’;⁸ and he believes that, just as ‘in philosophy a small fault in the beginning is a great and foul fault in the end, so in divinity one little error overthroweth the whole doctrine’.⁹

When Luther selects some particular doctrine for special emphasis, he does so primarily because it crystallizes the fundamental controversy between Himself and his opponents. But just for that reason he cannot regard it as an isolated issue, but believes that upon a true understanding of it the whole of Christianity depends. It is in this sense he claims that the distinction between the Law and the Gospel ‘contains the sum of all Christian doctrine’,¹⁰ or describes the doctrine of justification as ‘master and prince, lord, ruler, and judge over all kinds of doctrine, which preserves and governs all ecclesiastical doctrines’.¹¹ These were points at which the vital difference between Luther’s understanding of Christianity and that of the medieval theologians inevitably emerged in open conflict. Elsewhere it often remained latent, though it was no less real. There was, for instance, as it is expressly stated in the Articles of Schmalkald, no controversy about ‘the supreme articles concerning the Divine Majesty’; but it cannot be said that these were viewed in the same light by both parties. Luther and his followers had no quarrel with the great Christological and Trinitarian formulations of the traditional Creeds; indeed, they regarded them as beyond dispute and valued them highly as evidence of their own continuity with the ancient Church. Yet it would be idle to assert that the significance of Christ was precisely the same for Luther as for his contemporary opponents, or that they held the same conception of the nature and the ways of God as he. In his reforming work, Luther was not seeking simply to correct an error here and there, but his task was such, in his own view, as to ‘alter the whole religion of the Papacy’.¹² The Christian Faith is a unity, and if ‘one little error’ corrupts the whole, then the correction of error in any part cannot leave the rest unaffected.

Now since the unity and wholeness of the Christian Faith are something of which Luther himself is convinced, we have good reason to expect some coherence and consistency in his own presentation of it, despite the absence of an orderly account of it from his pen. Yet it must be admitted that, at first sight, his thought appears to be as unsystematic as his writings, and it is not easy to see how it can be presented as a homogeneous whole. Even at the most central points of Christian doctrine, he expresses his convictions with what seems to be a complete indifference to formal consistency. On the Work of Christ, for instance, some of his statements appear to imply an Anselmian theory; others reproduce the dramatic imagery, often in its most fantastic forms, of the Patristic view; while others are reminiscent of mystical ideas. Again, his doctrine of God itself contains seemingly contradictory elements. For how is it possible to reconcile the monistic conception of a Divine omnipotence that moves even the devil and wicked men, with the dualistic idea of a conflict between God and the devil, in which the latter is vanquished through Christ? Or how can the thought of a ‘hidden God’, who predestines both the elect and the damned, be harmonized with that of the Divine love and grace revealed in Christ?¹³ In view of such problems, which quite overshadow the deliberately paradoxical theses for which Luther is notorious, it is hardly surprising that we should be advised to abandon discussion of his ‘indescribable’ theology in favour of the alleged simplicity of his religion.

But it is highly questionable whether Luther’s theology—his thought and speech about God—can be quite as readily divorced from his religion—his faith in God and experience of communion with Him—as has been suggested. Theological precision and religious insight do not always go hand in hand, it is true, but if Luther’s religion is easily comprehensible, it would be strange if his own understanding of it were so slight as to render his theological expression of it entirely inharmonious. Presumably he did not mean to contradict himself, and we may assume that he was not aware of any fundamental incongruity in his various statements, especially with regard to the most central doctrines of the Faith. From his own point of view, at any rate, there was no inconsistency; and the question arises, whether it is not simply the failure to grasp his point of view that has led to the criticisms we have described. It is possible that if they were rightly understood, both his religion would prove less naive and his theology less indescribable than has been supposed.

We may perhaps allow Luther himself to remind us of an elementary principle of interpretation. Recalling a passage in Saint Hilary’s De Trinitate, he says:

He who will understand what is said must see why or for what reasons it is said.¹⁴

Thus [he comments] there are many sayings in the Scriptures which, if taken literally, are contradictory, but if the causes are shown, everything is right.

And the same is true, he believes, of books on medicine and jurisprudence—and of his own writings also; for he complains of people who collect his ‘contradictions’ without attempting to understand the reasons for them.¹⁵

Already in his own lifetime, Luther’s works were the happy hunting ground of Antilogistae, as he calls them, who sought to bring him into contempt by exposing inconsistencies, real or apparent, in his views. But even the presence of actual contradictions in Luther’s voluminous writings does not necessarily discredit his powers of thought; and he himself was not greatly disturbed by these critics, but rather treated them with ironical amusement. After a lapse of some years, during which his thought had materially altered at certain points, he could re-issue an earlier work without revision, in o...