Chapter VIII: The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.(386) (1)

§ 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: