A Modern Nationalist and a Medieval Theologian
Although Luther founded his theology on the literal sense of Scripture, his understanding of the Bible rested, without his knowing it, on the religious traditions of the late Middle Ages. His nationalism made him a modern man, but his theology belonged to the age of faith. His revolt was directed more against the organization and rites of the Church than against Catholic belief, and most of those beliefs stayed with him to the end of his life. Even in rebellion he followed Hus and Wycliffe more than any new path. Like them he held Scripture to be the only guide of faith and denied the role of popes, councils and church hierarchy; like them he called the pope the Antichrist; and like them he enjoyed the protection of a local ruler. The thread linking Wycliffe, Hus and Luther marks the religious development of Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. In theology it ran back to Augustine, with his belief in predestination and divine mercy, and Augustine's ideas rested on the epistles of Paul, who had never known Jesus in person.
As the Protestant movement grew, much of the legacy of pre-Christian civilization left Christianity. Its Jewish side prevailed over its Greek side; the Hebrew prophets triumphed over the Aristotle of the scholastics and the Plato of the humanists; Paul turned the fate of Jesus into atonement for the sin of Adam, which is nearer to the prophets than to the apostles; the Old Testament overshadowed the New; and the shadow of Jehovah dimmed the face of Christ.
A God of Judgment
Luther knew God as the Hebrew prophets had pictured him. Though he spoke eloquently of grace and mercy, to him the Creator was the vengeful God of the Jews and Christ the final judge. He had no doubts about the truth of the Old Testament stories and believed that the Creator had overwhelmed nearly all the world with the Flood, burned Sodom, and with a single angry breath or movement of a finger destroyed lands, nations and empires. He also held that God chose only a few for salvation and condemned most to eternal damnation. As these ideas spread, the legend of Mary's intercession to lighten man's punishment faded, and fear took its place that all sinners would be punished at the Last Judgment. Along with it went the tale that God had set wild beasts, vermin and evil women to punish sinners. At times Luther thought we know little of God except that he is all-wise. To a young and troublesome theologian who asked what God did before creating the universe, he replied that God was building hell for bold, anxious and prying people like him.
Luther believed without question in heaven and hell and expected the world to end soon. To comfort his children, who worried about the fate of their puppies in the next world, he described heaven as a happy place home to many lovely creatures, including pampered dogs with golden hair shining like precious stones. Like Aquinas, he believed in good spirits and thought them bodiless. Sometimes he saw man as standing between good and evil angels, with his final fate depending on his own conduct in that struggle, a belief that the book suggests may have come to Luther's theology from Zoroastrianism.
The Devil in Luther's World
Like medieval people, Luther saw the world as a playground of devils, demons and spirits who push mankind toward temptation, sin and misery and hell: many devils lurk in woods, in waters, in deserts and on dark roads to harm people, and some dwell in thick black clouds. Some of his words may be read as a deliberate way of frightening people with heavenly beings, but his plainness about devils leaves no doubt that he took the devil to be a real being. He said he knew the devil well and even reported the devils' conversations. Sometimes he played the flute to please the devil, and sometimes cursed the poor devil to frighten him. These fancies were so rooted in his mind that when cracking sounds in his room's walls on cold nights woke him, he would blame the devil and fall back asleep. He ascribed frightening misfortunes such as hail, thunder, war and plague to the devil, and good events to God. He knew nothing of what we call natural laws and accepted all the old Teutonic tales of tormenting spirits. He believed the devil appeared mostly as a snake or an ape. He accepted the old belief that demons can have relations with women, and he recommended drowning the children thought to be born of such unions. He also believed in magic and held that burning witches was a Christian duty. (The book's account of these opinions is stated more fully; here it is shortened and the details softened.)
Many Catholic and Protestant contemporaries held the same fancies. Belief in demons, and in their presence everywhere, was more widespread in sixteenth-century Europe than at any other time, and this preoccupation with Satan left an unfortunate mark on Protestant theology.
Human Depravity and Justification by Faith
Luther's belief that man is by nature evil and inclined to sin darkened his philosophy more than any other factor. He held that through the disobedience of Adam and Eve man had lost his likeness to God and become a slave to his instincts and desires. No one is born a Christian or pious; the world and its masses are not Christian and never will be; the wicked always outnumber the pure of heart and devout. Even the bad deeds of the godly outweigh their good ones, since, as Paul said, there is none righteous, not even one. We are all children of wrath, and our deeds and intentions, however pure and desirable, are small beside our sins. In spite of all good works we all deserve punishment.
By "good works" Luther meant the duties the Catholic Church expected of the faithful: fasting, pilgrimage, prayers to saints, masses for the dead, buying indulgences, mourning rites and gifts to the Church. Still, he had every act of man in mind, whatever its kind. Although he did not overlook the place of kindness and love in improving society, he held that even with these virtues man would not share in the Creator's eternal mercy. The Gospel, he said, does not count good works enough for salvation, and anyone who denies this is a liar. No amount of good work done by the best of men can repay their sins, which are an insult to the infinite God. Only the saving sacrifice of Christ, the suffering and death of the Son of God, can atone for man's sins; and only faith in this atonement frees us from hell, as Paul told the Romans: if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. This faith alone frees man from the penalty of his sins and opens the way to salvation.
Christ himself said that whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, and whoever does not believe will be condemned. So Luther urged Christians to strengthen their faith instead of relying on their works. What he wrote troubled many theologians, but it consoled sinners: Jesus Christ bowed down so that sinners may lay the burden of their sins on his back and so escape death. What greater comfort for the devout than that my sins and yours and the whole world's are put on him so that he carries the load of us all? When you see him bearing your sins, you will be free from sin, death and hell. Christianity is nothing other than feeling, while your hand is stained with sin, that you have been cleared of it and that its burden lies on Christ. It is enough to know that the Lamb of God has carried the sins of the world.
Luther may have written these words to console people terrified and distraught by their sins. He surely remembered days when he thought his own sins unpardonable. But the effect of such words was that many Christians took sin lightly and, like Tetzel's hearers, felt that as soon as the coin rings in the box, the sin flees. In effect Luther replaced confession to priests, absolution by the Church, gifts to the Church and the purchase of indulgences with faith. More striking still is a remark he made, in the heat of speech, about sin itself: when the devil keeps up his temptations, it is better to commit a sin or two, to keep company with merry friends, drink, play, tell coarse jokes and be cheerful, and to show the devil disgust by sinning rather than let him torment you over trifles. One who fears sin too much is lost. If only he could find a sin with which to give the devil a drubbing! (The book quotes this more fully; here the phrasing is shortened.)
These tempting and half-joking words, said in passing, led to misreadings, and some of Luther's followers came to regard grave crimes as trivial and forgivable. (The book gives a couple of grim anecdotes of followers who took the doctrine to extremes; they are omitted here.) One Lutheran professor had to tell Lutheran preachers to speak less harshly about release from sin through faith. By faith Luther meant not a merely intellectual assent to a proposition but an inner conviction in a practical, living belief; and he was sure that the grace given through Christ's saving death would so improve a believer's character that occasional bodily pleasure would not harm him and that faith would soon restore the sinner to spiritual health. He sincerely urged Christians to do good works and opposed only the idea that works suffice for salvation. Good works do not make a good man, he said, but a good man does nothing but good works; and what improves character and intention is faith in God and Christ.
Predestination and the Bondage of the Will
How does one come to such saving faith? Not by one's own worth, but through a gift the Creator gives to his chosen, regardless of merit. As Paul says, citing Pharaoh, God has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills. By eternal predestination the elect are chosen for bliss hereafter and the rest, without mercy, are condemned to the torments of hell. Belief in a God who is merciful yet saves only a few and damns the rest, wrote Luther, is the summit of our faith: faith that God is right to condemn us. He seems to take pleasure in the torture of wretched men and is more fit to be hated than loved. If he could grasp by reason how a merciful and just God could be so wrathful and unfair, there would be no need for faith.
In fighting a Church tainted by paganism and unbelief in the Renaissance, Luther went beyond Augustine and followed Tertullian, who said, "I believe because it is absurd." Luther believed in predestination because it was incredible to reason, though he thought reason and logic also bound him to this incredible belief. The theologian who once spoke so eloquently of the "freedom of a Christian" now, in 1525, argued in On the Bondage of the Will that if God is present everywhere and knows everything, he must be the source of all acts, human acts included; and if he knows each event before it happens, every event must occur as he foresaw and ordained. Like Spinoza, Luther concluded that man, like a block of wood, a stone, a clod or a pillar of salt, has no will of his own. More startling still, this foreknowledge deprived not only angels but God himself of freedom, since he too must act as he has foreseen and decreed; his foreknowledge is his fate. Some extremists drew from Luther's teaching the conclusion that man may do what he likes, and the book tells of two cases of crime blamed on God as the author of the act; they are omitted here. Luther derived most of these views, which medieval theology also contained, with unmistakable consistency from Paul and Augustine.
It is evident that Luther was willing to follow medieval theology if he could reject the doctrines of the Renaissance Church. It was easier for him to accept that God had fixed and decreed men's fates from eternity than to bow to the authority of disgraced, tax-collecting popes. He saw the Church not as an organization above its members but as a community of believers in God and the sufferings of Christ. Yet there are sentences in his writing where he agreed with the popes: that all who try to approach God by other paths than Jesus Christ (Jews, Turks, papists, false saints, heretics and the like) walk in terrible darkness and must in the end die and be buried under their sins. These words echoed at Wittenberg the voice of Pope Boniface VIII and the Roman council of 1302: outside the Church there is no salvation.
The Priesthood of All Believers and the Sacraments
The most revolutionary side of Luther's theology was the removal of the clergy from the exalted position they had won in the Church. He regarded priests neither as indispensable ministers of the sacraments nor as privileged mediators between man and God, but as servants chosen by each congregation to meet its spiritual needs. He thought that clergy, by marrying and having children, would make brighter the aura of holiness that has given the clergy their power. Among Christians, all of whom are equal, clergy should have "precedence," but any Christian is entitled and able, if need arises, to carry out the duties of the clergy and even to absolve penitents from the consequences of sin. Monks should give up selfish and indulgent seclusion and, like others, marry and live by the strength of their arms. A man at the plow and a woman in the kitchen serve God better than a monk who spends his time repeating senseless, stupefying prayers. Man should address God in prayer, not half-legendary saints. In Luther's view, honoring the saints was not a friendly, consoling tie between the living and the holy dead but in truth a return to idolatry and primitive polytheism.
He also lowered the value of the sacraments, which until then had been instruments in the hands of priests for giving grace and mercy to the faithful. For him the sacraments had no miraculous power; their effect depended on the faith of those who took part. Ordination, matrimony as a sacrament, confirmation and extreme unction had, in his view, no ground or warrant in Scripture, and the new religion should give them up. Baptism should remain, since John the Baptist had performed it. As for confession of sins, although he found no ground for it in Scripture, he held that it could stay in force. He ranked the Eucharist above the other sacraments but called the idea that the priest by his magic words turns bread into the real body of Christ baseless and blasphemous. Still, he believed Christ becomes present in the sacrament and unites his own substance with the bread and wine. In place of the priests' magic, he saw the Eucharist as a continuing miracle of God.
His views on the sacraments, on turning the mass into a communion service, and on forgiveness through faith rather than good works shook the power of the clergy in northern Germany. His opposition to church courts and canon law hastened the clergy's decline. In Lutheran Europe church courts gave way to civil courts and power passed from Church to state. The state took over the appointment of church officials and the running of church schools and the charities of the monasteries, and confiscated church property. Though in appearance state and Church were separated, in practice the Church became subordinate to the state. The Lutheran movement, which meant to make all of human life obey religious standards, unwittingly and unwillingly helped establish the supremacy of earthly law in human life that is the basis of modern life.