Chapter VIII: The Religious Principles Inspiring The Reformation.(386) (2)

“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.