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5] A History of Christian Thought Paul Tillich Theology of the Protestant Reformers

 A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism by Paul Tillich | Goodreads





A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism

by
Paul Tillich,
Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
4.17 · Rating details · 245 ratings · 14 reviews
Previously published in two separate volumes entitled 
A history of Christian thought and Perspectives on 19th and 20th century Protestant theology.

Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone 
(first published January 1st 1968)
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URL  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich

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 The Concept of Dogma xxxvi

I]The Preparation for Christianity 1
A. The Kairos 1
B. The Universalism of the Roman Empire 2
C. Hellenistic Philosophy 3
1. Skepticism 3
2. The Platonic Tradition 6
3. The Stoics 7
4. Eclecticism 9
D. The Inter-Testamental Period 9
E. The Mystery Religions 13
F. The Method of the New Testament 14

II Theological Developments in the Ancient Church 17
A. The Apostolic Fathers 17
B. The Apologetic Movement 24
1. The Christian Philosophy 27
2. God and the Logos 29
C. Gnosticism 33
D. The Anti-Gnostic Fathers 37
1. The System of Authorities 38
2. The Montanist Reaction 40
3. God the Creator 41
4. The History of Salvation 43
5. Trinity and Cliristology 46
6. The Sacrament of Baptism 48
E. Neo-Platonism 50
F. Clement and Origen of Alexandria 55
1. Christianity and Philosophy 55
2. The Allegorical Method 57
3. The Doctrine of God 59
vi Contents
4. Christology 61
5. Eschatology 63
G. Dynamic and Modalistic Monarchianism 64
1. Paul of Samosata 65
2. Sabellius 66
H. The Trinitarian Controversy 68
1. Arianism 69
2. The Council of Nicaea 71
3. Athanasius and Marcellus 73
4. The Cappadocian Theologians 76
I. The Christological Problem 79
1. The Antiochean Theology 80
2. The Alexandrian Theology 84
3. The Council of Chalcedon 86
4. Leontius of Byzantium 88
J. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 90
K. Tertullian and Cyprian 98
'L. The Life and Thought of Augustine 103
1. The Development of Augustine 104
2. Augustine's Epistemology 111
3. The Idea of God 115
4. The Doctrine of Man 119
5. Philosophy of History 121
6. The Pelagian Controversy 122
7. The Doctrine of the Church 131

III Trends in the Middle Ages 134
A. Scholasticism, Mysticism, Biblicism 135
B. The Scholastic Method 137
C. Trends in Scholasticism 140
1. Dialectics and Tradition 140
2. Augustinianism and Aristotelianism 141
3. Thomism and Sootism 141
4. Nominalism and Realism 142
5. Pantheism and Church Doctrine 144
D. The Religious Forces 145
E. The Medieval Church 149
F. The Sacraments 154
G. Anselm of Canterbury 158
H. Abelard of Paris 167
I. Bernard of Clairvaux 172
J. Joachim of Floris 175

K. The Thirteenth Century 180
L. The Doctrines of Thomas Aquinas 192
M. William of Ockham 198
N. German Mysticism 201
0. The Pre-Reformers 203

IV Roman Catholicism from Trent to the Present 210
A. The Meaning of Counter-Reformation 210
B. The Doctrine of Authorities 211
C. The Doctrine of Sin 212
D. The Doctrine of Justification 213
E. The Sacraments 215
F. Papal Infallibility 218
C. Jansenism 221
II. Probahilism 223
1 11ccent Developments 224

V Ilir Iiiiiiigy iI Ihi Protestant Reformers 227
/\ Niiiiiiii I .iitIiii 227
I. Tho Itrukt Iiroiigii 227
2. I ,iiIlii'i ( iilirisrn of the Church 234
:i. I lh ( oiilIlit vlIIi iiiis,niis 237
I. Ilk Coidlicl wit ii tile Ivangelical Radicals 239
5. liii liii N I )O(t rules 242
a. iiie iihiical Principle 242
b. Sin and Faith 245
c. The Idea of God 247
d. The Doctrine of Christ 249
e. Church and State 251
B. Huldreich Zwingli 256
C. John Calvin 262
1. The Majesty of God 262
2. Providence and Predestination 264
3. The Christian Life 270
4. Church and State 272
5. The Authority of Scripture 274

VI The Development of Protestant Theology 276
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 276
1. Reason and Revelation 278
2. The Formal and Material Principles 280
B. Pietism 283
C. The Enlightenment 287

PART II
Introduction: Problem and Method 297

I Oscillating Emphases in Orthodoxy, Pietism,
and Rationalism 305
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 305
B. The Reaction of Pietism against Orthodoxy 311
C. The Rise of Rationalism 313

II The Enlightenment and its Problems 320
A. The Nature of Enlightenment 320
1. The Kantian Definition of Autonomy 320
2. Concepts of Reason 325
a. Universal Reason 326
b. Critical Reason 327
c. Intuitive Reason 328
d. Technical Reason 329
3. The Concept of Nature 330
4. The Concept of Harmony 332
B. The Attitude of the Enlightened Man 341
1. His Bourgeois Character 341
2. His Ideal of a Reasonable Religion 342
3. His Common-sense Morality 344
4. his Subjective Feeling 348
C. Intrinsic Conflicts of Enlightenment 349
1. Cosmic Pessimism 350
2. Cultural Vices 352
3. Personal Vices 353
4. Progress Based on Immorality 355
D. The Fulfillers and Critics of Enlightenment 356
1. Rousseau, The French Revolution, and Romanticism 356
1. Hume, The History of Religion, and Positivism 357
1. Kant, Moral Religion, and Radical Evil 360

III The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the
Enlightenment 367
A. Lessing, Historical Criticism, and the Rediscovery of Spinoza 367
B. The Synthesis of Spinoza and Kant 370

C. The Nature of Romanticism 372
1. The Infinite and Finite 372
2. The Emotional and the Aesthetic Elements in Romanticism 378
3. The Turn to the Past and the Valuation of Tradition 379
4. The Quest of Unity and Authority 382
5. The Negative and the Demonic in Romanticism 383

D. The Classical Theological Synthesis: Friedrich Schleiermacher 386
1. The Background of Schleicrmacher's Thought 388
2. His Concept of Religion as Feeling 391
3. His Positivistic Definition of Theology 398
4. His Interpretation of Christianity 405

E. The Universal Synthesis: Georg W. F. Hegel 410
1. The Greatness and the Tragic Hybris of Ilegels System 411
2. The Synthesis of God and Man (Mind and Person) 414
3. The Synthesis of Religion and Culture (Thought and  Imagination) 419
1. The Synthesis of State and Church 424
Providence, History, and Theodicy 426
The Christ as Reality and Symbol 430
Eternity against Immortality 431


IV The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 432

A. The Split in the Hegelian School 432
1. The Historical Problem: Strauss and Baur 423
1. The Anthropological Problem: Ludwig Feuerbach 435

B. Schelling's Criticism of Hegel 437

C. The Religious Revival and Its Theological Consequences 448
1. The Nature of the European Revival 449
2. The Theology of Repristination 453
1. Natural Science and the Fight over Darwinism 454

D. Kierkegaard's Existential Theology 458
1. Kierkegaard's Criticism of Hegel 460
2. Ethical Existence and the Human Situation (Anxiety, Despair) 462
3. The Nature of Faith (The Leap and Existential Truth) 464
4.  Criticism of Theology and Church 472

E. Political Radicalism and its Theological Significance 476
1. The Bourgeois Radicals 477
2. Marx's Relation to Hegel and Feuerbach 478
3. Marx's View of the Human Situation (Alienation) 480
4. Marx's Doctrine of Ideology and His Attack on Religion 481
5. Marx's Political Existentialism 484
6.    The Prophetic Element in Marx 485

F. Voluntarism and the Philosophy of Life 487
1. Schopenhatier's Idea of the Will 488
2. Nietzsche's Idea of Will-To-Power 493
3. Nietzsche's Doctrine of Resentment 494
1. The "Death of God" and the New Ideal of Man 497

V New Ways of Mediation 504
A. Experience and the Biblical Message 506
1. The Erlangen School 506
2. Martin Kähler 509
B. The "Back to Kant" Movement 511
C. Adolf von Harnack 515
D. Miscellaneous Movements in Theology 520
1. The Luther-Renaissance 520
2. Biblical Realism 520
3. Radical Criticism 521
4. Rudolf Bultmann 523
5. The History-of-Religions Approach 524
6. Ernst Troeltsch 526
7. Religious Socialism 530
8. Karl Barth 535
9. Existentialism 539
Index of Names 543
Index of Subjects 547
==

CHAPTER V llze Theology of the Protestant Reformers

A. MARTIN LUTHER

THE turning point of the Reformation and of church history in general is the experience of an Augustinian monk in his monastic cell—Martin Luther. Martin Luther did not merely teach different doctrines; others had done that also, such as Wyclif. But none of the others who protested against the Roman system were able to break through it. The only man who really made a breakthrough, and whose breakthrough has transformed the surface of the earth, was Martin Luther. This is his greatness. His greatness should not be measured by comparing him with Lutheranism; that is something quite different. Lutheranism is something which historically has been associated with Protestant Orthodoxy, political movements, Prussian conservatism, and what not. But Luther is different. He is one of the few great prophets of the Christian Church, and his greatness is overwhelming, even if it was limited by some of his personal traits and his later develop­ment. He is responsible for the fact that a purilied Christianity, a Christianity of the Reformation, was able to establish itself on equal terms with the Roman tradition. From this point of view we must look at him. Therefore, when I speak of Luther, I am not speaking of the theologian who produced Lutheranism—many others contributed to this, and Melanchthon more than Luther—but of the man in whom the Roman system was broken through.

1. The Breakthrough

This was a break through three different distortions of Christian­ity which made the Roman Catholic religion what it was. The

228           A History of Christian Thought

breakthrough was the creation of another religion. What does "religion" mean here? "Religion" means nothing else than another personal relationship between man and Cod—man to Cod and Cod to man. This is why a reunion of the churches was not possible, in spite of tremendous attempts to do this during the sixteenth century and later. You can compromise about different doctrines; you cannot compromise about different religions! Either you have the Protestant relation to God or you have the Catholic, but you cannot have both; you cannot make a compromise.

The Catholic system is a system of objective, quantitative, and relative relations between Cod and man for the sake of providing eternal happiness for man. This is the basic structure: objective, not personal; quantitative, not qualitative; relative and con­ditioned, not absolute. This leads to another proposition: The Roman system is a system of divine-human management, repre­sented and actualized by ecclesiastical management.

Now first the purpose: The purpose is to give eternal blessed­ness to man and to save him from eternal punishment. The altern­atives are eternal suffering in hell or eternal pleasure in heaven. The way to accomplish the purpose is through the sacraments, in which a magical giving of grace is the one side, and moral freedom which produces merits is the other side—magical grace completed by active law, active law completed by magical grace. The quantitative character comes through also in terms of ethical commands. There are two kinds, commandments and counsels—commandments for all Christians, and counsels, the full yoke of Christ, only for the monks and partly for the priests. For instance, love toward the enemy is a counsel of perfection, but not a com­mandment for everybody. Asceticism is a counsel of perfection, but not a commandment for everybody. The divine punishments also have a quantitative character. There is eternal punishment for mortal sins, purgatory for light sins, and heaven for people in purgatory, and sometimes for saints already on earth.

Under these conditions no one ever knew whether he could be certain of his salvation, because one could never do enough; one could never receive enough grace of a magical kind, nor could one do enough in terms of merits and asceticism. The result of this was a great deal of anxiety at the end of the Middle Ages. In my book, The Courage to Be, I described the anxiety of guilt as one of the three great types of anxiety, and I related this anxiety of

The Theology of the Protestant Reformers   229

guilt historically and socially to the end of the Middle Ages. This anxiety is always present, of course, but it was predominant then and was almost like a contagious disease. People could not do enough to get a merciful God and to get rid of their bad con­science. A tremendous amount of this anxiety was expressed in the art of that period, and also expressed in the demand for more and more pilgrimages, in the collection and adoration of relics, in praying many "Our Fathers", in giving of money, in buying indulgences, self-torturing asceticism, and everything possible to get over one's guilt. It is interesting to look at this period but almost impossible for us to understand it. Luther was in the cloister with this same anxiety of guilt and condemnation. Out of this anxiety he went into the cloister and out of it he experienced that no amount of asceticism is able to give a person a real certainty of salvation in a system of relativities, quantities, and things. He was always in fear of the threatening Cod, of the punishing and destroying Cod. And he asked: How can I get a merciful God? Out of this question and the anxiety behind it, the Reformation began.

What did Luther say against the Roman quantitative, objective, and relative point of view? The relation to God is personal. It is an I-thou relationship, mediated not by anybody or anything, but only by accepting the message of acceptance, which is the content of the Bible. This is not an objective status in which one is; it is a personal relationship which Luther called "faith", not faith in something which one can believe, but acceptance of the fact that one is accepted. It is qualitative, not quantitative. Either a person is separated from God or he is not. There are no quanti­tative degrees of separation or non-separation. In a person-to-person relationship one can say there are conflicts and tensions, but as long as it is a relationship of confidence and love, it is a qualitative thing. It is not a matter of quantity. Likewise, it is un­conditional and not conditioned, as it is in the Roman system. One is not a little bit nearer to God if one does more for the church, or against one's body, but one is near to God completely and absolutely if one is united with him at all. And if not united, one is separated. The one state is unconditionally positive, the other unconditionally negative. The Reformation restated the un­conditional categories of the Bible.

It follows from this that both the magical and the lega]istb

230           A History of Christian Thought

elements in the piety disappear. The forgiveness of sins, or accep­tance, is not just an act of the past done in baptism, but it is con­tinually necessary. Repentance is an element in every relationship to God, and in every moment. The magical and the legal elements disappear, for, grace is a personal communion of God with the sinner. There is no possibility of any merit; there is only the need to accept. There can be no hidden magical power in our souls which makes us acceptable, but we are acceptable in the moment in which we accept acceptance. Therefore, the sacramental activi­ties as such are rejected. There are sacraments, but they now mean something quite different. And the ascetic practices are rejected forever, because none of them can give certainty. At this point a misunderstanding often prevails. One asks: Now is that not ego-centric—I think Jacques Maritain told me this once—if Protestants think about their own individual certainty? However, Luther did not have in mind an abstract certainty; he meant reunion with God, and this implies certainty. Everything centers around this being accepted. This is certain: If you have God, you have him. If you look at yourself, your experiences, your asceticism, and your morals, you can become certain only if you are extremely self-complacent and blind toward yourself. These are absolute cate­gories. The divine demand is absolute. It is not a relative demand which brings a more-or-less kind of blessedness. The absolute demand is: Joyfully accept the will of God. And there is only one punishment, not different degrees of ecclesiastical satisfaction and degrees of punishments in purgatory, and finally hell. The one and only punishment is the despair of being separated from Cod. Consequently, there is only one grace, reunion with God. That is All Luther reduced the Christian religion to this simplicity. Adolph von Harnack, the great historian of dogma, called Luther a genius of reduction.

Luther believed that his was a restatement of the New Testa­ment, especially of Paul. But although his message contains the truth of Paul, it is by no means the whole of what Paul said. The situation determined what he took from Paul, that is, the doctrine of justification by faith which was Paul's defense against legalism. But Luther did not take in Paul's doctrine of the Spirit. Of course, he did not deny it; there is even a lot of it in Luther, but that is not decisive. The decisive thing is that a doctrine of the Spirit, of being "in Christ", of the new being, is the weak spot in Luther's

The Theology of the Protestant Reformers   231

doctrine of justification by faith. In Paul the situation is different. Paul has three main centers in his thought, which make it a triangle, not a circle. The one is his eschatological consciousness, the certainty that in Christ eschatology is fulfilled and a new reality has started. The second is his doctrine of the Spirit, which means for him that the kingdom of God has appeared, that the new being in Christ is given to us here and now. The third point in Paul is his critical defense against legalism, justification by faith. Luther accepted all three, of course. But the eschatological point was not really understood.

Luther's breakthrough was externally occasioned by the sacra­ment of penance. There are two main sacraments in the Roman Church, the Mass, which is a part of the Lord's Supper, and the sacrament of penance, which is the subjective sacrament, dealing with the individual and having an immense educational function. This sacrament may be called the sacrament cf subjectivity in contrast to the Mass as the pre-eminent sacrament of objectivity. The religious life in the Middle Ages moved between these two. Although Luther attacked the Mass, this was not the real point of criticism; the real issue had to do with the abuses connected with the sacrament of penance. The abuses stemmed from the fact that the sacrament of penance had different parts, contrition, confession, absolution, and satisfaction. The first and last points were the most dangerous ones.

Contrition—the real repentance, the change of mind—was replaced by attrition, the fear of eternal punishment, which Luther called the repentance inspired by the imminent prospect of the gallows. So it had no religious value for him. The other dangerous point was satisfaction, which did not mean that you could earn your forgiveness of sins by works of satisfaction, but that you have to do them because the sin is still in you after it has been forgiven. The decisive thing is the humble subjection to the satisfactions demanded by the priest. The priest imposed on the communi-candus all kinds of activities, sometimes so difficult that the people wanted to get rid of them. The church yielded to this desire in terms of indulgences, which are also sacrifices. One must sacrifice some money to buy the indulgences, and these indulgences re­move the obligations to perform the works of satisfaction. The popular idea was that these satisfactions are effective in over­coming one's guilt consciousness. One can say that here a sort of

232            A History of Christian Thought

marketing of eternal life was going on. A person could buy the indulgences and in this way get rid of the punishments, not only on earth but also in purgatory. The abuses brought Luther to think about the whole meaning of the sacrament of penance. This led him to conclusions absolutely opposed to the attitude of the Roman Church. Luther's criticisms were directed not only to the abuses but to the source of them in the doctrine itself. Thus Luther placed his famous Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Witten­berg church. The first of these is a classic formulation of Refor­mation Christianity: "Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, saying 'Repent ye,' wished that the whole life of the believers be peni­tence." This means that the sacramental act is only the form in which a much more universal attitude is expressed. What is important is the relationship to Cod. It is not a new doctrine but a new relationship to Cod which the Reformers brought about. The relationship is not an objective management between God and man, but a personal relationship of penitence first, and then faith.

Perhaps the most striking and paradoxical expression is given by Luther in the following words: "Penitence is something between injustice and justice. Therefore, whenever we are repent­ing, we are sinners, but nevertheless for this reason we are also righteous, and in the process of justification, partly sinners, partly righteous—that is nothing but repenting." This means that there is always something like repentance in the relationship to Cod. Luther did not at this time attack the sacrament of penance as such. He even thought that the indulgences could be tolerated. But he attacked the center out of which all abuses came, and this was the decisive event of the Reformation.

After Luther's attack had been made, the consequences were clear. The indulgence money can only help with respect to those works which are imposed by the pope, i.e., the canonical punish­ments. The dead in purgatory cannot be released by the pope; he can only pray for them; he has no power over the dead. The forgiveness of sins is an act of God alone, and the pope—or any priest—can only declare that God has already done it. There is no treasury of the church out of which the indulgences can come, except the one treasury of the work of Christ. No saint can do superfluous works because it is man's duty to do everything he can anyhow. The power of the keys, that is, the power of the forgive..

The Theology of the Protestant Reformers   233

ness of sins, is given by God to every disciple who is with him. The only works of satisfaction are works of love; all other works are an arbitrary invention by the church. There is no time or space for them, because in our real life we must always be aware of the works of love demanded of us every moment. Confession, which is made by the priest in the sacrament of penance, is directed to Cod. One does not need to go to the priest for this. Every time we pray "Our Father", we confess our sins; this is what matters, not the sacramental confession. About satisfaction Luther said: This is a dangerous concept, because we cannot satisfy God at all. If there is satisfaction, it is done by Christ to Cod, not by us. Purgatory is a fiction and an imagination of man without biblical foundation. The other element in the sacrament of penance is absolution. Luther was psychologically alert enough to know that a solemn absolution may have psychological effects, but he denied its necessity. The message of the gospel, which is the message of forgiveness, is the absolution in every moment. This you can receive as the answer of God to your prayer for forgiveness. You do not need to go to church for this.

All of this means that the sacrament of penance is completely dissolved. Penitence is transformed into a personal relationship to God and to the neighbor, against a system of means to obtain the release of objective punishments in hell, purgatory, and on earth. All of these concepts were in reality at least undercut by Luther, if not abolished. Everything is placed on the basis of a person-to-person relationship between Cod and man. You can have this relationship even in hell. This means that hell is simply a state and not a place. The Reformation understanding of man's relationship to God abolishes the medieval view.

The pope did not accept the absolute categories in Luther's view of man's relationship to God. Thus the conflict between Luther and the church arose. Let us make clear, however, that this was not the beginning of the schism. Luther hoped to reform the church, including the pope and the priests. But the pope and the priests did not want to be reformed in any way. The last great bull defining the power of the pope said: "Therefore, we declare, pronounce and define that it is universally necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman high priest." This is the bull which defines most sharply the unlimited and absolute power of the pope.

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2. Luther's Criticism of the Church

Luther criticized the church when it did not follow his criticism of the sacrament of penance. The only ultimate criterion for Christianity is the message of the gospel. For this reason there is no infallibility of the pope. The pope may fall into error, and not only he but also the councils may err. Neither the curialistic theory that the pope is an absolute monarch nor the conciliaristic theory that the great councils of the church are absolutely in­fallible is acceptable. The pope and councils are both human, and can fall into error. The pope can be tolerated as the chief administrator of the church on the basis of human law, the law of expediency. However, the pope claims to rule by divine right, and makes of himself an absolute figure in the church. This could not be tolerated for Luther, because no human being can ever be the vicar of the divine power. The divine right of the pope is a demonic claim, actually the claim of the Antichrist. When he said this, the break with Rome was clear. There is only one head of the church, Christ himself, and the pope as he is now is the creation of the divine wrath to punish Christianity for its sins. This was meant theologically, not as name-calling. He was theologic­ally serious when he called the pope the Antichrist. He was not criticizing a particular man for his shortcomings. Many people were criticizing the behavior of the pope at that time. Luther criticized the position of the pope, and his claim to be the representative of Christ by divine right. In this way the pope destroys the souls, because he wants to have a power which belongs to Cod alone.

Luther as a monk had experienced the importance of mon­asticism in the Roman Church. A double standard of morality grew out of the monastic attitude; there were the higher counsels for those who are nearer to Cod, and then the rules which apply to everybody. The higher counsels for the monks, such as fasting, discipline, humility, celibacy, etc., made the monks ontologically higher than ordinary men. This double standard was called forth by the historical situation in which the church grew rapidly. The result was that the masses of people could not take upon them­selves, as it was said, the whole yoke of Christ, because it was too heavy for them. So a special group did it, following the

The Theology of the Protestant Reformers    235

counsels of a higher morality and piety. These were the religiosi, those who made religion their vocation.

Luther attacked the double-standard morality. The divine demand, he said, is absolute and unconditional. It refers to every‑

one. This absolute demand destroys the whole system of religion.

There is no status of perfection, such as the Catholics ascribed to the monks. Everyone has to be perfect, and no one is able to

be perfect. Man does not have the power to produce the graces

to do the right thing, and the special endeavor of the monks will not do it. What is decisive is the intention, the good will, not the

magic habit (habitus) of which the Catholic Church spoke. And

this intention, this good will, is right even if its content is wrong. The valuation of a personality is dependent on the inner intention

of a person toward the good. Luther took this seriously. For him it was not enough to will to do the good, or the will of God; you must will what Cod wills joyfully, with your voluntary participa­tion. If you fulfill the whole law, but do not do it joyfully, it is worth nothing. The obedience of the servant is not the fulfillment of Christian ethics. Only he who loves, and loves God and man joyfully, is able to fulfill the law. And this is expected of every­one.

This means that Luther turned religion and ethics around. We cannot fulfill the will of Cod without being united with him. It is impossible without the forgiveness of sins. Even the best people have within them elements of despair, aggressiveness, indifference, and self-contradiction. Only on the basis of divine forgiveness can the full yoke of Christ be imposed on everybody. This is com­pletely different from a moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The moral act is that which follows—it might or might not follow, although essentially it should do so—and the prius of it is the participation in the divine grace, in God's forgiveness and in his power of being. This makes all the difference in the world. It is most unfortunate that Protestantism is always tempted to revert to the opposite, to make the religious dimension dependent on morality. Wherever this is done, we are outside the realm of true Protestantism. If someone says: "Oh, God must love me, because I love him and do almost everything he demands"—namely, what the suburban neighbor demands!—then the religious and the ethical relationship is completely reversed. The center of the Reformation, the meaning of the famous phrase, sola fide, is rather

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put this way: "I know that I do not do anything good, that every­thing seemingly good is ambiguous, that the only thing which is good within me is God's declaration that I am good, and that if I but accept this divine declaration, then there may be a trans­formed reality from which ethical acts may follow." The religious side comes before the ethical.

The phrase sola fide is the most misunderstood and distorted phrase of the Reformation. People have taught that it means that if you do the good work of believing, especially believing in some­thing unbelievable, this will make you good before God. The phrase should not be "by faith alone" but "by grace alone, received through faith alone". Faith here means nothing more than the acceptance of grace. This was Luther's concern, because he had experienced that if it is put the other way around, you are always lost, and if you take it seriously, you fall into absolute despair, because if you know yourself, you know that you are not good. You know this as well as Paul did, and this means that ethics are the consequence and not the cause of goodness.

What did Luther have to say about the sacramental element in the Roman Church, which gave it its tremendous power? The Roman Church is essentially a sacramental church. This means that God is essentially seen as present, not as one who is distant and who only demands. A sacramental world-view is one in which the divine is seen as present in a thing, in an act, or in anything which is visible and real. Therefore, a church of the sacrament is a church of the present God. On the other hand, the Roman Church was one in which the sacraments were administered in a magic way by the hierarchy, and only by the hierarchy, so that all who do not participate in them are lost, and those who do participate, even if they are unworthy, receive the sacrament. To this Luther said that no sacrament is effective by itself without full participa­tion of the personal center, that is, without listening to the Word connected with the sacrament, and the faith which accepts it. The sacrament qua sacrament cannot help at all. The magical side of sacramental thinking is thus destroyed.

From this it followed that transubstantiation was destroyed, because this doctrine makes the bread and the wine a piece of divine reality inside the shrine and put on the altar. But such a thing does not occur. The presence of God is not a presence in the sense of an objective presence, at a special place, in a special

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form; it is a presence for the faithful alone. There are two criteria for this: if it is only for the faithful, then it is only an action. Then if you enter a church and the sacrament is spread, you do not need to do anything, because it is pure bread. It becomes more than this only in action, that is, when it is given to those who have faith. For the theory of transubstantiation, it is there all the time. When you enter an empty Roman church, you must bow down before the shrine because God himself is present there, even though no one else is present besides you and this sacrament. Luther abolished this concept of presence. He denounced the character indelebilis as a human fiction. There is no such thing as a "character" which cannot be destroyed. If you are called into the ministry, you must minister exactly as everyone else does in his profession. If you leave the ministry, and become a businessman or professor or shoemaker, you are no longer a minister and you retain no sacra­mental power at all. Any pious Christian, on the other hand, can have the power of the priest in relation to others. But this does not require ordination.

In this way the sacramental foundation of the whole hierarchical system was removed. But most important was Luther's attack on the Mass. The Mass is a sacrifice we bring to God, but in reality we have nothing to bring to God, and therefore the Mass is a blasphemy, a sacrilege. It is a blasphemy because here man gives something to God, instead of expecting the gift of God himself in Christ. And nothing more than this is needed.

3. His Conflict with Erasmus

The representative of humanism at this time was Erasmus of Rotterdam. At the beginning Luther and Erasmus were friendly toward each other, but then their attacks on each other created a break between Protestantism and humanism which has not been healed up to the present time, in spite of the fact that Zwingli tried to do it as early as the twenties of the sixteenth century. Erasmus was a humanist, but a Christian humanist; he was not antireligious at all. He believed himself to be a better Christian than any pope of his time. But as a humanist he had characteristics which distin­guished him from the prophet. Luther could not stand Erasmus' nonexistential detachment, his lack of passion toward the religious content, his detached scholarly attitude toward the contents of the

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Christian faith. He felt that in Erasmus there was a lack of concern for matters of ultimate concern.

Secondly, Erasmus was a scholarly skeptic, as every scholar has to be in regard to the traditions and the meaning of the words he has to interpret. Luther could not stand this skeptical attitude. For him absolute statements on matters of ultimate concern are needed. Thirdly, Luther was a radical, in political as well as in other respects. Erasmus seemed to be a man willing to adapt to the political situation—not for his own sake but in order to have peace on earth. Fourthly, Erasmus had a strongly educational point of view. What was decisive for him was the development of the individual in educational terms. All humanism, then and now, has had this educational drive and passion. Fifthly, Erasmus' criticism was of a rational kind, lacking in revolutionary aggressiveness.

The whole discussion between Luther and Erasmus finally focused on the doctrine of the freedom of the will. Erasmus was for human freedom; Luther against it. But this needs to be qualified. Neither Erasmus nor Luther had any doubts about man's psychological freedom. They did not think of man as a stone or an animal. They knew that man is essentially free, that he is man only because he is free. But on this basis they drew opposite conclusions. For Erasmus this freedom is valid also in coming to God. You can help Cod and cooperate with him for your salvation. For Luther this is impossible. It takes the honor away from Cod and from Christ and makes man something he is not. So Luther speaks of the "enslaved will". It is the free will which is enslaved. It is ridiculous to say that a stone has no free will. Only he who has a free will can be said to have an enslaved will, that is, enslaved by the demonic forces of reality. For Luther the only point of certainty can be justification by faith, and no contribution of ours to salvation can give us consolation. Luther said that in Erasmus the meaning of Christ is denied and finally the honor of Cod is denied.

Here we see a fundamental difference between two attitudes. The attitude of the humanist is detached analysis, and if it comes to synthesis, it is that of the moralist, not that of the prophet who sees everything in the light of God alone.

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4. His Conflict with the Evangelical Radicals

Luther's conflict with the evangelical radicals is especially important for American Protestants because the prevailing type of Christianity in America was not produced by the Reformation directly, but by the indirect effect of the Reformation through the movement of evangelical radicalism.

The evangelical radicals were all dependent on Luther. Tendencies of this kind existed long before in the Middle Ages, but Luther liberated them from the suppression to which they were condemned. Almost all of Luther's emphases were accepted by the evangelical radicals, but they went beyond him. They had the feeling that Luther stood half-way. First of all, they attacked Luther's principle of Scripture. God has not spoken only in the past, and has now become silent. He always speaks; he speaks in the hearts or depths of any man who is prepared by his own cross to hear. The Spirit is in the depths of the heart, although not of ourselves but of God. Thomas Müntzer, who was the most creative of the evangelical radicals, said that it is always possible for the Spirit to speak through individuals. But in order to receive the Spirit, a man must share the cross. Luther, he said, preaches a sweet Christ, the Christ of forgiveness. We must also preach the bitter Christ, the Christ who calls us to take his cross upon our­selves. The cross is, we could say, the boundary situation. It is internal and external. In an astonishing way Müntzer expressed this in modern existentialist categories. If a man realizes his human finiteness, it produces in him a disgust about the whole world. Then he really becomes poor in spirit. The anxiety of creaturely existence grasps him, and he finds that courage is impossible. Then it happens that God appears to him and he is transformed. When this has happened to him, he can receive special revelations. He can have personal visions, not only about theology as a whole, but about matters of daily life.

On the basis of these ideas these radicals felt that they were the real fulfillment of the Reformation, and that Luther remained half-Catholic. They felt that they were the elect. Whereas the Roman Church offered no certainty to any individual with respect to justification, and whereas Luther had the certainty of justifi­cation but not of election, and whereas Calvin had the certainty

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not only of justification but also to a great extent of election, Müntzer and his followers had the certainty of being elected within a group of the elect; they were the sectarian group.

From the point of view of the inner Spirit, all the sacraments fall down. The immediacy of the procession of the Spirit makes even what was left of the office of the minister unnecessary in the sectarian groups. Instead of that they have another impetus, which could express itself in two ways. One movement would transform society by suffering, and if society could not be changed, they could abstain from arms and oaths and public office and whatever involves people in the political order. Another group of radicals would overcome the evil society by political measures, and even by the sword.

The evangelical radicals are also referred to as enthusiasts. Their emphasis is on the presence of the divine Spirit, not on the biblical writings as such. The Spirit may be present in an indi­vidual in every moment, even giving counsels for activities in daily life. Luther had a different feeling. His was basically the feeling of the wrath of God, of Cod who is the judge. This was his central experience. Therefore, when he speaks of the presence of the Spirit, he does so in terms of repentance, or personal wrestling, which makes it impossible to have the Spirit as a possession. This seems to me the difference between the Reformers and all per­fectionist and pietistic attitudes. Luther and the other Reformers placed the main emphasis on the distance of God from man. Hence, the Neo-Reformation theology of today in people like Barth stresses continually that God is in heaven and man is on earth. This feeling of distance—or of repentance, as Kierkegaard said—is the normal relationship of man to God.

The second point in which the theology of the Reformation differs from the theology of the radical evangelical movements has to do with the meaning of the cross. For the Reformers the cross is the objective event of salvation and not the personal experience of creatureliness. Therefore, the participation in the cross in terms of human weakness or moral endeavor to take one's weakness upon oneself is not the real problem with which the Reformation deals. Of course, this is presupposed. We have these same nuances among us today, wherein some of us, following the theology of the Reformation, emphasize more the objectivity of salvation through the cross of Christ, and others more the taking of the cross

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upon oneself. These two aspects are not contradictions in any

way, but as with most problems of human existence, it is more a matter of emphasis than of exclusiveness. It is clear that those of

us who are influenced by the Reformation tradition emphasize more the objectivity of the cross of Christ, as the self-sacrifice of God in man, while others coming from the evangelical tradition, so strong in America, emphasize more taking one's own cross upon oneself, the cross of misery.

Thirdly, in Luther the revelation is always connected with the objectivity of the historical revelation in the Scriptures, and not

in the innermost center of the human soul. Luther felt that it was pride for the sectarians to believe that it is possible to have immediate revelation in the actual human situation apart from the historical revelation embodied in the Bible.

Fourthly, Luther and the whole Reformation, including Zwingli, emphasized infant baptism as the symbol of the prevenient grace

of God, which means that it is not dependent on the subjective

reaction. Luther and Calvin believed that baptism is a divine miracle. The decisive thing is that God initiates the action, and

that much can happen before the human response. The time

difference between the event of baptism and the indefinite moment of maturity does not mean anything in the sight of God. Baptism

is the divine offer of forgiveness, and a person must always return to this. Adult baptism, on the other hand, lays stress on the sub­jective participation, the ability of the mature man to decide.

Luther and the other Reformers were also concerned about the way in which the sects isolated themselves, claiming that they

were the true church and that their members were the elect. Such

a thing was unthinkable for the Reformers, and I think they were right on this. It is well known that the sects of the Reformation

were psychologically lacking in love towards those who did not

belong to their sect. Some of you probably have had similar experiences with sectarian or quasi-sectarian groups today. What

is most lacking in them is not theological insight, not even insight into their own negatives, but love, that love which identifies with the negative situation in which we all are.

A final difference had to do with eschatology. The eschatology of the Reformers caused them to negate the revolutionary criticism

of the state that we find in the sectarian movements. The Reform­ation eschatology of the coming kingdom of God moved along a

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vertical line, and had nothing to do with the horizontal line, which was, so to speak, given to the devil anyway. Luther often spoke of the beloved last day for which he longed in order to be liber­ated, not so much from the "wrath of the theologians" as with Melanchthon, but from the power play which was no nicer then than it is now. This difference in mood is visible in a comparison of the state of things in Europe and America. Under the influence of the evangelical radical movements the tendency in America is to transform reality. In Europe, especially after two World Wars, there is an eschatological feeling—the desire for and vision of the end in a realistic sense—and a resignation of Christians in the face of power plays.

5. Luther's Doctrines

(a) The Biblical Principle

Whenever you see a monument of Luther, he is represented with the Bible in hand. This is somewhat misleading, and the Catholic Church is right in saying that there was biblicism throughout the Middle Ages. We have stressed before that the biblicistic attitude was especially strong in the late Middle Ages. We saw that in Ockham, the nominalist, a radical criticism of the church was made on the basis of the Bible. Nevertheless, the biblical principle means something else in Luther. In nominalistic theology the Bible was the law of the church which could be turned against the actual church; but it was still law. In the Renais­sance the Bible is the source-book of the true religion, to be edited by good philologists such as Erasmus. These were the two prevail­ing attitudes: the legal attitude in nominalism, the doctrinal attitude in humanism. Neither of these was able to break through the fundamentals of the Catholic system. Only a new principle of biblical interpretation could break through the nominalistic and humanistic doctrines.

Luther had many of the nominalistic and humanistic elements within himself. He valued very highly Erasmus' edition of the New Testament, and he often fell back on a nominalistic legalism in his doctrine of inspiration whereby every word of the Bible has been inspired by the dictation of God. This happened in his defense of the doctrines of the Lord's Supper, when a literal interpretation of a biblical passage seemed to support his point

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of view. But beyond all this Luther had an interpretation of Scripture in unity with his new understanding of man's relation­ship to God. This can be made clear if we understand what he meant by the "Word of God". This term is used more often than any other in the Lutheran tradition and in the Neo-Reformation theology of Barth and others. Yet it is more misleading than we can perhaps realize. In Luther himself it has at least six different meanings.

Luther said—but he knew better—that the Bible is the Word of God. However, when he really wanted to express what he meant, he said that in the Bible there is the Word of God, the message of the Christ, his work of atonement, the forgiveness of sins, and the offer of salvation. He makes it very clear that it is the message of the gospel which is in the Bible, and thus the Bible contains the Word of God. He also said that the message existed before the Bible, namely, in the preaching of the apostles. As Calvin also later said, Luther stated that the writing which resulted in the books of the Bible was an emergency situation; it was necessary and it was an emergency. Therefore, only the religious content is important; the message is an object of ex­perience. "If I know what I believe, I know the content of the Scripture, since the Scripture does not contain anything except Christ." The criterion of apostolic truth is the Scripture, and the standard of what things are true in the Scripture is whether they deal with Christ and his work—oh sie Christum treiben, whether they deal with, concentrate on, or drive toward Christ. Only those books of the Bible which deal with Christ and his work contain powerfully and spiritually the Word of God.

From this point of view Luther was able to make some dis­tinctions among the books of the Bible. The books which deal with Christ most centrally are the Fourth Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, and I Peter. Luther could say very courageous things. For instance, he said that Judas and Pilate would be apostolic if they gave the message of Christ, and Paul and John would not be if they did not give the message of Christ. He even said that anyone today who had the Spirit as powerfully as the prophets and apostles could create new Decalogues and another Testament. We must drink from their fountain only because we do not have the fullness of the Spirit. This is, of course, extremely anti-nominalistic and anti-humanistic. It emphasizes the spiritual character of the Bible. The

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Bible is a creation of the divine Spirit in those who have written it, but it is not a dictation. On this basis Luther was able to proceed with a half-religious, hall-historical criticism of the biblical books.

It does not mean anything whether the five books of Moses were written by Moses or not. He knew very well that the texts of

the prophets are in great disorder. He also knew that the concrete

prophecies of the prophets often proved to be in error. The Book of Esther and the Revelation of John do not really belong to

the Scriptures. The Fourth Gospel excels the Synoptics in value and power, and the Epistle of James has no evangelical character at all.

Although Lutheran Orthodoxy was unable to preserve this great prophetic aspect of Luther, one thing was accomplished by

Luther's freedom; it was possible for Protestantism to do some‑

thing which no other religion in the whole world has been able to do, and that is to accept the historical treatment of the biblical

literature. This is often referred to by such misleading terms as

higher criticism or biblical criticism. It is simply the historical method applied to the holy books of a religion. This is something

which is impossible in Catholicism, or at least possible in a very

limited way only. It is impossible in Islam. Professor Jeffery once told the raculty that every Islamic scholar who would try to do

what he did with the text of the Koran would be in danger. Re‑

search into the original text of the Koran would imply historical criticism of the present text, and this is impossible in a legalistic

religion. Thus, if we are legalists with respect to the Bible, in terms of the dictation theory,. we fall back to the stage of religion which we find in Islam, and we share none of the Protestant freedom that we find in Luther.

Luther was able to interpret the ordinary text of the Bible in his sermons and writings without taking refuge in a special

pneumatic, spiritual, or allegorical interpretation alongside of the

philological interpretation. The ideal of 'a theological seminary is to interpret the Bible in such a way that the exact philological

method, including higher criticism, is combined with an existential application of the biblical texts to the questions we have to ask, and which are supposed to be answered in systematic theology. The division of the faculty into "experts" is a very unwholesome state of affairs, where the New Testament man tells me that I can­not discuss a certain problem because I am not an expert, or I say

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that I cannot discuss a matter because I am not an expert in Old or New Testament. Insofar as we all do this, we are sinning against the original meaning of Luther's attempt to remove the allegorical method of interpretation and to return to a philological approach which is at the same time spiritual. These are very real problems today, and students can do a great deal about them by refusing to let their professors be merely "experts" and no longer theologians. They should ask the biblical man about the exis­tential meaning of what he finds, and the systematic theologian about the biblical foundation of his statements, in the actual biblical texts as they are philologically understood.

(b) Sin and Faith

I want to emphasize Luther's doctrines of sin and faith very much because they are points in which the Reformation is far superior to what we find today in popular Christianity. For Luther sin is unbelief. "Unbelief is the real sin." "Nothing justifies except faith, and nothing makes sinful except unbelief." "Unbelief is the sin altogether." "The main justice is faith, and so the main evil is unbelief." "Therefore the word 'sin' includes what we are living and doing besides the faith in God." These statements presuppose a concept of faith which has nothing whatsoever to do with the acceptance of doctrines. With respect to the concept of sin, they mean that differences of quantity (heavy and light sins) and of relativity (sins which can be forgiven in this or that way) do not matter at all. Everything which separates us from Cod has equal weight; there is no "more or less" about it.

For Luther, life as a whole, its nature and substance, is corrupted. Here we must comment on the term "total depravity" which we often hear. This does not mean that there is nothing good in man; no Reformer or Neo-Reformation theologian ever said that. It means that there are no special parts of man which are exempt from existential distortion. The concept of total depravity would be translated by a modern psychologist in the sense that man is distorted, or in conflict with himself, in the center of his personal life. Everything in man is included in this distortion, and this is what Luther meant. If "total depravity" is taken in the absurd way, it would be impossible for a man to say that he is totally depraved. A totally depraved man would not say that he is totally depraved. Even saying that we are sinful

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presupposes something beyond sin. What we can say is that there is no section in man which is not touched by self-contradiction; this includes the intellect and all other things. The evil are evil because they do not fulfill the one command to love God. It is the lack of love toward God which is the basis of sin. Or, it is the lack of faith. Luther said both things. But faith always precedes love because it is an act in which we receive Cod, and love is the act in which we are united with God. Everybody is in this situation of sin, and nobody knew more than Luther about the structural power of evil in individuals and in groups. He did not call it com­pulsion, as we do today in terms of modern psychology. But he knew that this is what it was, a demonic power, the power of Satan, which is greater than individual decisions. These structures of the demonic are realities; Luther knew that sin cannot be under­stood merely in terms of particular acts of freedom. Sin must be understood in terms of a structure, a demonic structure which has compulsory power over everyone, and which can be counter­balanced only by a structure of grace. We are all involved in the conflict between these two structures. Sometimes we are ridden, as Luther described it, by the divine compulsion, sometimes by the demonic. However, the divine structure of grace is not possession or compulsion, because it is at the same time liberating; it liberates what we essentially are.

Luther's strong emphasis on the demonic powers comes out in his doctrine of the devil, whom he understood as an organ of the divine wrath or as the divine wrath itself. There are statements in Luther which are not clear as to whether he is speaking of the wrath of God or of the devil. Actually, they are the same for him. As we see God, so he is for us. If we see him in the demonic mask, then he is that to us, and he destroys us. If we see him in the infant Jesus, where in his lowliness he makes his love visible to us, then he has this love to us. Luther was a depth psychologist in the profoundest way, without knowing the methodological research we know today. Luther saw these things in non-moralistic depths, which were lost not only in Calvinist Christianity but to a great extent in Lutheranism as well.

Faith for Luther is receiving Cod when he gives himself to us. He distinguished this type of faith from historical faith (fides historica), which acknowledges historical facts. Faith is the accep­tance of the gift of God, the presence of the grace of God which

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grasps us. The emphasis is on the receptive character of faith—nihil facere sed tantum recipere, doing nothing but only receiving. These ideas are all concentrated in the acceptance of being accepted, in the forgiveness of sins, which brings about a quiet conscience and a spiritual vitality toward God and man. "Faith is a living and restless thing. The right living faith can by no means be lazy." The element of knowledge in faith is an existential element, and everything else follows from it. "Faith makes the person; the person makes the works, not works the person." This is confirmed by everything we know today in depth psychology. It is the ultimate meaning of life which makes a person. A split personality is not one which does not do good works. There are many people who do many good works, but who lack the ultimate center. This ultimate center is what Luther calls faith. And this makes a person. This faith is not an acceptance of doctrines, not even Christian doctrines, but the acceptance of the power itself out of which we come and to which we go, whatever the doctrines may be through which we accept it. In my book, The Courage to Be, I have called this "absolute faith", a faith which can lose every concrete content and still exist as an absolute affirmation of life as life and of being as being. Thus, the only negative thing is what Luther calls unbelief, a state of not being united with the power of being itself, with the divine reality over against the forces of separation and compulsion.

(c) The Idea of God

Luther's idea of God is one of the most powerful in the whole history of human and Christian thought. This is not a God who is a being beside others; it is a God whom we can have only through contrast. What is hidden before God is visible before the world, and what is hidden before the world is visible before God. "Which are the virtues (i.e., powers of being) of God? Infirmity, passion, cross, persecution: these are the weapons of God." "The power of man is emptied by the cross, but in the weakness of the cross the divine power is present." About the state of man Luther says: "Being man means non-being, becoming, being. It means being in privation, in possibility, in action. It means always being in sin, in justification, in justice. It means always being a sinner, a penitent, a just one." This is a paradoxical way of speaking, but it makes clear what Luther means with

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respect to God. God can be seen only through the law of contrast.

Luther denies everything which can make Cod finite, or a being beside others. "Nothing is so small, Cod is even smaller. Nothing is so large, God is even larger. He is an unspeakable being, above and outside everything we can name and think. Who knows what that is, which is called 'God'? It is beyond body, beyond spirit, beyond everything we can say, hear, and think." He makes the great statement that Cod is nearer to all creatures than they are to themselves. "Cod has found the way that his own divine essence can be completely in all creatures, and in everyone especially, deeper, more internally, more present, than the creature is to itself and at the same time nowhere and cannot be comprehended by anyone, so that he embraces all things and is within them. God is at the same time in every piece of sand totally, and nevertheless in all, above all, and out of all creatures." In these formulae the old conflict between the theistic and pantheistic tendencies in the doctrine of God is solved; they show the greatness of God, the inescapability of his presence, and at the same time, his absolute transcendence. And I would say very dogmatically that any doctrine of God which leaves out one of these elements does not really speak of God but of something less than God.

The same thing is expressed in Luther's doctrine of omni­potence. "I call the omnipotence of God not that power by which he does not do many things he could do, but the actual power by which he potently does everything in everything." That is to say, God does not sit beside the world, looking at it from the out­side, but he is acting in everything in every moment. This is what omnipotence means. The absurd idea of a Cod who calculates whether he should do what he could do is removed by this idea of God as creative power.

Luther speaks of creatures as the "masks" of God; God is hidden behind them. "All creatures are God's masks and veils in order to make them work and help him to create many things." Thus, all natural orders and institutions are filled with divine presence, and so is the historical process. In this way he deals with all our problems of the interpretation of history. The great men in history, the Hannibals, Alexanders, Napoleons—and today he would add, the Hitlers—or, the Goths, the Vandals, the Turks—and today he would add, the Nazis and the Communists—are driven by Cod

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to attack and to destroy, and in this way God is speaking to us through them. They are God's Word to us, even to the church. The heroic persons in particular break through the ordinary rules of life. They are armed by God. God calls and forces them, and gives them their hour, and I would say, their kairos. Outside of this kairos they cannot do anything; nobody can apart from the right hour. And in the right hour no one can resist those who then act. However, in spite of the fact that Cod acts in everything in history, history is nonetheless the struggle between God and Satan and their different realms. The reason Luther could make these two statements is that God works creatively even in the demonic forces. They could not have being if they were not dependent on God as the ground of being, as the creative power of being in them, in every moment. He makes it possible that Satan is the seducer; at the same time he makes it possible that Satan is conquered.

(d) The Doctrine of Christ

What is interesting in Luther's christology is first of all his method, which is quite different from that of the ancient church. I would call it a real method of correlation; it correlates what Christ is for us with what we say about him. It is an approach from the point of view of the effects Christ has upon us. Melanchthon expressed the same idea in his Loci. He says that the object of christology is to deal with the benefits of Christ, not with his person and natures apart from his benefits. In describing this method of correlation Luther says: "As somebody is in himself, so is Cod to him, as object. If a man is righteous himself, God is righteous. If a man is pure, God is pure for him. If he is evil, God is evil for him. Therefore, he will appear to the damned as the evil in eternity, but to the righteous as the righteous, according to what he is in himself." This is a correlative way of speaking about Cod. For Luther, calling Christ God means having experienced divine effects which come from Christ, especially the forgiveness of sins. If you speak about God apart from his effects, this is a wrong objectifying method. You must speak of him in terms of the effects he can have. The One whose effects are divine must himself be divine—this is the criterion.

What we say about God always has the character of participa-tion—suffering with him, being glorified with him; crucified with

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him, being resurrected with him. "Preaching the Crucified means preaching our guilt and the crucifixion of our evils." "So we go with him: first servant, therefore now King; first suffering, there­fore now in glory; first judged, therefore now Judge. . . . So you must act: first humiliation, in order to get exaltation." "Together condemned and blessed, living and dead, in pain and in joy." This is said of Christ and of us. The law of contradiction, the law of God always acting paradoxically, is fulfilled in Christ. He is the key to God's acting by contradicting the human system of valu­ation. This paradox is also valid in the church. In its visible form the church is miserable and humble, but in this humility, as in the humility of Christ, there is the glory of the church. Therefore, the glory of the church is especially visible in periods of perse­cution, suffering, and humility.

Christ is Cod for us, our God, God as he is in relationship to us. Luther also says that he is the Word of God. From this point of view Protestantism should think through its christology in existential terms, maintaining the immediate correlation of human faith and what is said about Christ. All the formulae concerning his divine and human natures, or his being the Son of God and Son of Man, make sense only if they are existentially understood.

Luther emphasizes very much the presence of Cod in Christ. In the incarnation the divine Word or Logos has become flesh. Luther's doctrine of the Word has different stages. First, there is the internal Word, which he also calls the heart of God, or the eternal Son. Only this internal Word, which is God's inner self-manifestation, is perfect. As the heart of man is hidden, so the heart of God is hidden. The internal Word of God, his inner self-manifestation, is hidden to man. But Luther says: "We hope that in the future we shall look to this Word, when God has opened his heart.. . by introducing us into his heart." The second mean­ing of the Word in Luther is Christ as the visible Word. In Christ the heart of God has become flesh, that is, historical reality. In this way we can have the hidden Word of the divine knowledge of himself, although only for faith, and never as an object among other objects. Thirdly, the Word of Cod is the spoken Word, by prophets, by Jesus, and the apostles. Thus, it becomes the biblical Word in which the internal Word is spoken forth. How­ever, the revealing being of the eternal Word in Christ is more than all the spoken words of the Bible. They witness to him, but

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they are the Word of God only in an indirect way. Luther was never so bibliolatrous as so many Christians still are today. Word for Luther was the self-manifestation of God, and this was by no means limited to the words of the Bible. The Word of God is in, with, and under the words of the Bible, but not identical with them. The fourth meaning of the Word of God is the word of preaching, but this is only number four. If somebody speaks of the "church of the Word", whereby he is thinking of the pre­dominance of preaching in the services, he is certainly not being a follower of Luther in this respect.

The special character of Luther's doctrine of the incarnation is the continual emphasis on the smallness of Cod in the incarnation. Man cannot stand the naked Absolute—God; he is driven to despair if he deals with the Absolute directly. For this reason God has given the Christ, in whom he has made himself small. "In the other works, Cod is recognized according to the greatness of his power, wisdom, and justice, and his works appear too terrible. But here (in Christ) appears his sweetness, mercy and charity." With­out knowing Christ we are not able to stand God's majesty and are driven to insanity and hatred. This is the reason for Luther's great interest in Christmas; he wrote some of the most beautiful Christ­mas hymns and poems. He liked Christmas because he emphasized the small God in Christ, and Christ is the smallest in the cradle. This paradox was for Luther the real meaning of Christmas, that the One who is in the cradle is at the same time the Almighty God. The smallest and most helpless of all beings has within him­self the center of divinity. This is Luther's way of thinking of the paradoxical nature of Cod's self-revelation. Because God acts paradoxically the weakest is the strongest.

(e) Church and State

Anyone who knows the Reformation must ask whether it is possible for a church to live on the basis of the principles of the Reformation. Does not the church have to be a community, organized and authoritarian, with fixed rules and traditions? Is not a church necessarily Catholic, and does not the Protestant principle contradict the possibility of having a church, namely, the principle that God alone is everything and man's acceptance of God is only secondary?

Now, there is no doubt that Luther's doctrine of the church is

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his weakest point. The problem of the church was the most un­solved problem which the Reformation left to future generations. The reason is that the Catholic system was not replaced and could not be replaced definitively by a Protestant system of equal power, because of the anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical form of Protestant thinking. Luther, together with Zwingli and Calvin, chose the ecclesiastical type of church in contrast to the sectarian type of the evangelical radicals. This is a distinction which comes from Ernst Troeltsch, and a very good one. The ecclesiastical type of church is the mother from which we come. It is always there and we belong to it from birth; we did not choose it. When we awaken out of the dimness of the early stages of life, we can perhaps reaffirm that we belong to it in confirmation, but we already belong to it objectively. This is quite different from the churches of the radical enthusiasts, where the individual who decides that he wants to he a member of the church is the creative power of the church. The church is made by a covenant through the decision of individuals to form a church, an assembly of God. Everything here is dependent on the independent indi­vidual, who is not born from the mother church, but who creates active church communities. These differences are most noticeable if you contrast the ecclesiastical type of church on the European continent with the sectarian type in America, which is even expressed in the main denominations here.

Luther's distinction between the visible and the invisible church is one of the most difficult things to understand. The main point we must insist on in understanding what Luther means is that they are the same church, not two churches. The invisible church is the spiritual quality of the visible church. And the visible church is the empirical and always distorted actualization of the spiritual church. This was perhaps the most important point of the Reformers against the sects. The sects wanted to identify the church according to its visible and its invisible sides. The visible church must be purified and purged—as all totalitarian groups call it today—of anyone who is not spiritually a member of the church. This presupposes that we can know who is spiritually a member of the church, that we can judge by looking into the heart. But this is something only God can do. The Reformers could not accept this because they knew there is nobody who does not belong to the "infirmary" which is the church. This infirmary is

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the visible church and is for everyone; nobody can get out of it definitely. Therefore, everybody belongs to the church essentially, even if he is spiritually far away from it.

What is this church? The church in its true essence is an object of faith. As Luther said, it is "hidden in spirit". When you see the actual working of the church, its ministers, the building, the congregation, the administration, the devotions etc., then you know that in this visible church, with all its shortcomings, the invisible church is hidden. It is an object of faith and it demands much faith to believe that in the life of ordinary congregations today, which are by no means of high standing in any respect, the spiritual church is present. This you can believe only if you believe that it is not the people who make the church, but it is the foundation—not the people but the sacramental reality—the Word, which is the Christ. Otherwise we would despair about the church. For Luther and the Reformers the church in its true nature is a spiritual matter. The words "spiritual" and "invisible" usually mean the same thing in Luther. The basis of faith in the church is exclusively the foundation of the church, who is Christ, the sacrament of the Word.

Every Christian is a priest, and thus has potentially the office of preaching the Word and administering the sacraments. They all belong to the spiritual element. For the sake of order, however, some specially fit personalities shall be called by the congregation to fill the offices of the church. The ministry is a matter of order. It is a vocation like all other vocations; it does not involve any state of perfection, superior graces, or anything like that. The lay­man is as much a priest as any priest. The official priest is the "mouthpiece" of the others, because they cannot express them­selves, and he can. Thus, only one thing makes the minister, and that is the call of the congregation. Ordination has no sacramental meaning at all. "Ordaining is not consecrating", he says. "We give in the power of the Word what we have, the authority of preaching the Word and giving the sacraments; that is ordaining." But this does not produce a higher grade in the relationship to God.

In the Lutheran countries the church government very soon became identical with the state government, and in the Calvinist countries with the civil government (trustees). The reason for this is that the hierarchy was removed by Luther. There is no

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pope, no bishops, no priests any more in the technical sense. Who then shall govern the church? First of all the ministers, but they are not adequate since they have no power. The power comes from the princes, or from free associations within society, as we have very often in Calvinism. The princes were called by Luther the highest bishops of their realms. They are not to interfere with the inner religious affairs of the church; but they have to run the administration—the ius circa sacrum, the law around the sacred. The ministers and every Christian are to take care of the sacred matters.

Such a solution was brought about by an emergency situation. There were no bishops or ecclesiastical authorities any more, and the church needed administration and government. So emergency bishops were created, and there was nobody else who could be this except the electors and princes. Out of this emergency situ­ation there began to emerge the state church in Germany. The church became more or less—and I think rather "more" than "less"--a department of the state administration, and the princes became the arbiters of the church. This was not intended, but it shows that a church needs a political backbone. In Catholicism it was the pope and the hierarchy; in Protestantism it had to be the outstanding members of the community who take over, either the princes or social groups, as in more democratic coun­tries.

Luther's doctrine of the state is not easy to deal with because many people believe that Luther's interpretation of the state is the real cause of Nazism. Now, first of all, a few hundred years mean something in history, and Luther is a little bit older than the Nazis! But this is not the decisive point. The decisive point is that the doctrine of the state was a positivistic doctrine; providence was positivistically understood. Positivism means that things are taken as they are. The positive law is decisive, and this is con­nected by Luther with the doctrine of providence. Providence brings this and that power into existence, and therefore it is impossible to revolt against these powers. You have no rational criterion by which to judge the princes. Of course, you have the right to judge them from the point of view whether they are good Christians or not. But whether they are or not, they are God-given, and so you have to be obedient to them. Histori­cal destiny has brought the tyrants, the Neros and Hiders.

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Since this is historical destiny, we have to subject ourselves to it.

This means that the Stoic doctrine of natural law, which can be used as a criticism of the positive law, has disappeared. There remains only the positive law. The natural law does not really exist for Luther. The Stoic doctrine of the equality and the freedom of the citizen in the state is not used by Luther at all. So he is non-revolutionary, theoretically as well as practically. Practically, he says, every Christian must put up with bad government because it comes from Cod providentially. The state for Luther is not reality in itself. It is always misleading to speak of the Reformers' theory of state. The word "state" is not older than the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Instead of that they had the concept of Obrigkeit, of authority, superiors. The government is the authority, not the structure called the "state". This means there is no demo­cratic implication in Luther's doctrine of the state. The situation is such that the state must be accepted as it is.

How could Luther maintain this? How could he accept the despotic power of the states of his time inasmuch as he, more than anyone else, emphasized love as the ultimate principle of morality? He had an answer to this, and this answer is very much full of spirit. He says that God does two kinds of work. The one is his own proper work; this is the work of love and mercy, the giving of grace. The other is his strange work; it is also the work of love, but a strange one. It works through punishment, threat, the com­pulsory power of the state, through all kinds of harshness, as the law demands. People who say this is against love ask the question: How can compulsory power and love be united with each other? And they derive from this a kind of anarchism which we so often find in the ideas of Christian pacifists and others. The situation formulated by Luther seems to me the true one. I believe he saw more profoundly than anybody I know, the possibility of uniting the elements of power and love in terms of this doctrine of God's "strange" and "proper" works. The power of the state, which makes it possible for us even to be here or for works of charity to be done at all, is a work of God's love. The state has to suppress the aggression of the evil man, of those who are against love; the strange work of love is to destroy what is against love. It is correct to call this a strange work, but it is nevertheless a work of love. Love would cease to be a power on earth altogether without

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destroying that which is against love. This is the deepest insight into the relationship between power and love that I know. The whole positivistic doctrine of the state makes it impossible for Lutheranism, from a theological point of view, to accept revo­lution. Revolution results in chaos; even if it tries to produce order, it first produces chaos and disorder increases. Thus, Luther was unambiguously against revolution. He accepted the positively given gift of destiny.

Nazism was possible in Germany because of this positivistic authoritarianism, because of Luther's affirmation that the given prince cannot be removed. This provided a great inhibition against any German revolution. But I do not believe that this would have been possible anyway in the modern totalitarian systems. But the negation of any revolution did serve as an additional spiritual cause. When we say that Luther is responsible for the Nazis, we are uttering a lot of nonsense. The ideology of the Nazis is almost the opposite of Luther's. Luther had no nationalistic ideology, no tribal or racial ideology. He praised the Turks for their good government. From this point of view there is no Nazism in Luther. There is a connection only from the point of view of the conserv­atism of Luther's political thinking. But this is nothing else than a consequence of his basic presupposition. The only truth in the theory which connects Luther with Nazism is that Luther broke the back of the revolutionary will in the Germans. There is no such thing as a revolutionary will in the German people; that is all we can say and nothing more.

It is equally nonsensical for people to say that it was first Luther and then Hegel who produced Nazism. It is nonsense, because even if Hegel said that the state is God on earth, he did not mean the power state. He meant the cultural unity of religion and social life organized in a state. In this sense Hegel could say there is a unity of church and state. But for him "state" is not the party movement of the Nazis, or a relapse to a tribal system. State for him is organized society, repressing sin.

B. HULDREICR ZWINCLI

Zwingli was not as original a theologian as Luther was. He was partly dependent and partly independent of Luther. It is not easy to describe the character of Zwinglian Christianity. Zwingli

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was very much influenced by the humanists. He remained his whole life a friend of Erasmus. Neither he nor Melanchthon separated themselves from Erasmus as Luther did. They were humanists as well as being Christians. They were Christian humanists. This is especially clear in a man like Zwingli. The authority of the Scriptures in Zwingli is based on the call of the Renaissance: Back to the sources! The Bible is the revelation of God. "God himself wants to be the schoolmaster." Luther could never have said such a thing. For Luther God is much more power­ful than a schoolmaster. The decisive difference is that Zwingli had a fully developed doctrine of the Spirit, which was lacking in Luther and the other Reformers. "Cod can give truth, through the Spirit, in non-Christians also." The truth is given to every individual always through the Holy Spirit, and this Spirit is present even if the word of the Bible is not present. This was in some sense a liberation from the biblical burden which Luther placed upon the people.

Luther had a dynamic form of Christian life. Zwingli, and Calvin too, had a static one; faith is psychological health. If you are psychologically healthy, then you can have faith, and vice versa. Actually, these two things are identical. Faith for Luther is a dynamic thing, reaching heights and depths. For Zwingli it is much more humanistically balanced. It is similar to the bourgeois ideal of health. "Christian faith is a thing which is felt in the soul of the faithful like health in the body." In Luther there is a continual dying and rising of the community with the personal God of wrath and love. In Zwingli the union with God is not dynamic in this way. Zwingli is progressive; Luther is paradoxical. It is difficult to speak of the paradox on Zwinglian soil. Either the paradox is dissolved or it has to be accepted as such. The basic difference, then, between Zwingli and Luther is this: The paradox of the Christian life against the rational progressivism of the Christian life.

The Swiss Reformation is a synthesis of Reformation and humanism. Calvin, whom we shall deal with later, was dependent on both Zwingli and Luther, but in spite of the fact that he turned from Zwingli back to Luther, to a certain extent, he was also humanistically educated and his writings show the classical erudition in style and content. However, whenever liberal theo­logy arose from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries,

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it developed more in line with Zwingli than with Calvin. I have already stated that Zwingli believed that the Spirit is working directly in the human soul, that his ordinary way of working is through the Word of the Bible, but that Cod can also work in an extraordinary way in people who have never had any contact with the Christian message, with people in other religions and in humanists. Zwingli's examples are taken mostly from the Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, etc.

Yesterday I read a hymn to be sung by a congregation of Southern Negroes or Midwestern peasants which included Soc­rates in it, besides Christ and Luther. I do not think it wise to bring theology into a hymn in this way. If people like Zwingli and Calvin speak of revelation and salvation in men like Socrates and Seneca, they are making a mistake. The mistake is that they choose only certain representatives of pagan piety. However, pagan piety is exactly the same as Christian piety in this respect that it is just as intensive in the common people who are really pious in their knowledge of God, and people in this class should have been mentioned just as much. But since they were good humanists, they mentioned only their own sociological class, people who were not only great men but who also belonged to the intelligentsia. If you are ministers, it is better to decide not to incorporate such things into a hymn. Although I have given you as much Socrates and Plato as I can, nevertheless, I do not sing to them.

Zwingli defines God as the universal dynamic power of being in everything that is. In this sense you can recognize some of my own theological thinking in Zwingli and Calvin, but also in Luther. However, in the humanistic form in which Zwingli conceived of Cod, it has a much more rational deterministic character. God works through the natural law. Thus, Zwingli's doctrine of pre­destination is colored by a rational determinism. The same thing is true of Calvin's doctrine, whereas in Luther there is more of Ockhamism and Scotism, and therefore a sense of the irrational acting of God in every moment, which cannot be subjected to any law.

The law plays a different role in the Lutheran and Zwinglian Reformation. In Zwingli it is not the law which makes us sinful, but the law shows that we are sinful, whereas Luther had the profound insight that we have rediscovered in modern psychology that the law produces resistance, and thus, as Paul said, it makes

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sin more sinful. This was lacking in both Zwinglian and Calvinistic thinking. The concept of law in them has a very positive conno­tation. This refers generally to natural law. And natural law means in ancient literature primarily the law of reason, the logical, ethical, and juristic law. Secondly, it is also the physical law. We should not think of physics when we read about natural law in books of antiquity. Usually it means the ethical law within us, which belongs to our being and is restated by the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. It exists by nature, by created nature, and is that which we are essentially. This kind of law is much more in the minds of Zwingli and Calvin than in Luther's. Luther detested the idea that God has established a law between him­self and his world, between himself and the finite actions and things and decisions. He wanted everything as nonrational, non­legal, as possible, not only in the process of salvation but also in the interpretation of history and nature. Zwingli and Calvin accepted nature in terms of law. Thus, when Immanuel Kant defined nature as a realm in which physical law is valid, this was much more Calvinistic and Zwinglian; in any case, it was not Lutheran. For Luther nature is the mask of God through which he acts with mankind in an irrational way—very similarly to the Book of Job. The attitude towards nature in Zwinglianism and Calvinism is much more in accordance with the demands of bourgeois industrialized society to analyze and transform nature for human purposes, while Luther's relationship to nature has much more the sense of the presence of the divine, irrationally, mystically, in everything that is. If I had not known this before, I would have learned it when I came to America.

For Zwingli the law of the gospel is law. It is not only this, of course, since he does accept Luther's doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, as did all the Reformers. At the same time he spoke, how­ever, of a new evangelical law, as the nominalists and humanists did. This law should be the basis of the law of the state. Wychf and Ockham had the same idea; this shows that at this point there is a Catholic element in Reformed thought, namely, the idea that the gospel can be interpreted as the new law. The term, "the new law", is a very old one, appearing very early in church history. For Luther this would have been an abominable term. The gospel for Luther is grace, and nothing more than grace; it can never be the new law. But for Zwingli this new law is valid not only for the

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moral situation but also for the state, the political sphere. Politic­ally the law of the gospel determines the laws of the city. If cities do not subject themselves to this law, they may be attacked by other cities which do. This law, Zwingli thought, is against Catholicism, so he started the war against the cantons in Switzer­land and died in one of the battles. But the principle remained that the law of the gospel should be the basis of the law of the state. This had a tremendous influence in world history and saved Protestantism from being overwhelmed politically by the Roman Church of the Counter-Reformation.

A deeper element of difference between Luther and Zwingli has to do with the doctrine of the sacraments. The fight between Luther and Zwingli in Marburg in 1529 contrasted two types of religious experience, the one a mystical interpretation of the sacrament, the other an intellectual interpretation. Zwingli said that the sacrament is a "sure sign or seal" which like a symbol serves as a reminder; by partaking of it we express our will to belong to the church. The divine Spirit acts beside the sacraments, not through them. Baptism is a kind of obliging sign, like a badge. It is a commanded symbol, but it has nothing to do with subjective faith and salvation, which are dependent on predestination.

In the controversy on the doctrine of the eucharist, the point at issue was on the surface a matter of translation, but in reality it was a question of a different spirit. The discussion centered on the meaning of the word "is" in the statement: "This is my body." The humanists usually interpret "is" to mean "signifies" or "means". Luther stressed that it must be taken literally; the body of Christ is literally present. For Zwingli it is present for the contemplation of faith, but not per essentiam et realiter (by essence and in reality). "The body of Christ is eaten when we believe that he is killed for us." Everything is centered on the subjective side. It is the representation of a past event, not in itself a present event. The present event is merely in the subject, in the mind of the believer. He is certainly with his Spirit present in the mind, but he is not present in nature. Mind can be fed only by mind, or spirit by spirit, and not by nature.

Zwingli maintained against Luther that the body of Christ is in heaven circurnscripte (by circumscription), that is, in a definite place. Hence, the body of Christ is a particular individual thing; it does not participate in the divine infinity. Just like a man with

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a body, Christ is finite, and the two natures are sharply separated. The Lord's Supper is a memory and a confession, but not a personal communion with someone who is really present. Luther's emphasis is on the reality of the presence, and to underscore this he invented the doctrines of the omnipresence of the body of the elevated Christ. The presence of Christ is repeated in every act of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Historical person and sacra­mental person are identical. To explain this Luther said: "Where you put God, there you must put humanity; they cannot be severed or separated; it has become one person." To say that the divine character of the bodily Christ is only said in symbolic or metaphoric terms is of the devil. Luther completely rejected the idea that the divinity of Christ is separated from his humanity in heaven. Even in heaven the divinity and the humanity of Christ belong together. He expressed this in the profound and fantastic doctrine of the ubiquity of the body of Christ, the omnipresence of the body of the ascended Christ. Christ is present in everything, in stone and fire and tree, but for us he is present only when he speaks to us. But he can speak to us through everything. This is the idea that God drives toward embodiment or corporeity, and that the omnipresence of Christ's body in the world is the form in which God's eternal power is present in the world. If this is carried through in scholastic terms, and taken literally or super­stitiously, it is an absurd doctrine, because it belongs to a body to be circumscribed. But if it is taken symbolically, it becomes a profound doctrine, because it says that God is present in anything on earth. He is always also present with his concrete historical manifestation in Christ. Luther meant this quite primitively, but his meaning is that in every natural object you can have the presence of Christ. In a Lutheran service during the Sundays in spring, you always find a tremendous amount of flowers and things of nature brought into the church, because of this symbol of the participation of the body of Christ in the world.

When the discussion on the Lord's Supper came to an end, the Reformers had reached agreement on many points. They denied the doctrine of transubstantiation; but they could not agree on the ubiquity of Christ's presence. Luther stated that there was a fundamental difference between Zwingli and himself when he said: "They have not the same spirit with us." What does this mean? First of all, it involves the matter of the relationship

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between the spiritual and the bodily existence. In Zwingli you have a humanistic intellectualism which separates the spirit from the body, a tendency which is ultimately rooted in Neo-Platonism. Hence, in Calvinism there is a lack of interest in the problem of expression. For Luther, on the other hand, spirit is present only in its expressions. The interest is incorporation. Oetinger, the mystic, said: "Corporeality is the end of the ways of God." Hence, there followed a great interest in the bodily reality of Christ, in history and in sacrament. The second spiritual difference has to do with the religious meaning of nature. In Zwinglian thought nature is controlled and calculable in terms of regular natural laws. By con­trast Luther's dynamic naturalism often goes into the demonic depths of nature, and is not interested in any laws of nature.

Two Latin phrases were used to express the difference. The Lutheran formula is finitum capax infiniti—the finite is capable of the infinite. For Zwingli this is impossible. The Reformed formula is finitum non capax injiniti—the finite is not able to have the infinite within itself. This is a fundamental difference which shows up first in christology, then is extended to the whole sacramental life and the relationship to nature.

It is perhaps well to say that in the Swiss Reformation the sociological background was codeterminative of the particular form in which these discussions took place. In Germany we have the form of surviving aristocracy. In Switzerland we have the large towns like Zurich and Geneva which were centers of trade and industry. Sociologically the Swiss Reformation drives in the direction of industrial society. In the Lutheran Reformation, especially in northern Germany, the pre-bourgeois situation is retained as much as possible. When you read Luther's Small Catechism, you will see evidences of a paternalistic culture of small farmers and some craftsmen in villages and small towns. If, in contrast to this, you read some of the writings of Zwingli and Calvin, you are with men who have a world-wide horizon, due to the trading that went on in the centers in which they lived.

C. JOHN CALVIN

1. The Majesty of God

Calvin's doctrine of God and man is the turning point of all his other doctrines. Some have said that the doctrine of predestin‑

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ation is the main point. This, however, is easily refuted by the fact that in the first edition of his Institutes, the doctrine of pre‑

destination was not even developed. Only in the later editions did it acquire a prominent place. It can also he refuted from more important angles.

The doctrine of God is always the most decisive thing in every theology. For Calvin the central doctrine of Christianity is the doctrine of the majesty of God. Calvin states more clearly than any of the other Reformers that God is known in an existential attitude. For him human misery and divine majesty are correlated. Only out of human misery can we understand the divine majesty,' and only in the light of the divine majesty can we understand human misery. Calvin applied to God a word which Rudolf Otto re-discovered—numen, numinous. God is a numen for him; he is un­approachable, horrifying, and at the same time fascinating. He speaks of God in terms of "this sacred numinous nature". He is distinguished from all idols and from the gods of polytheism. God cannot be spoken of directly because of his radical transcendence. Calvin had a very interesting theory of Christian symbolism. The symbols are significations of God's incomprehensible essence. He said that the symbols have to be momentary, disappearing, and self-negating. They are not the matter itself. I think this self-negating is the decisive characteristic of every symbol with respect to God; if they are taken literally, they produce idols. It is Calvin who said this, and not the mystical theology of a Pseudo-Diony-sius. Thus, when we speak of symbolism when referring to God, we can refer to one who is certainly beyond suspicion of being less than orthodox.

The truth of a symbol drives beyond itself. "The best contem­plation of the divine being is when the mind is transported beyond itself with admiration." The doctrine of God can never be a matter of theoretical contemplation; it must always be a matter of exis­tential participation. The famous statement of Karl Barth, derived from a biblical text (Ecclesiastes 5:2), that "God is in heaven, and you are on earth", is one that Calvin often made and explained.

The heavenly" above" is not a place to which God is bound, but an expression of his religious transcendence. This leads to the central

attitude in Calvinism of fear of idolatry. Calvin fought against idols wherever he believed he saw them. For this reason he had no interest in the history of religion, which is practically

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condemned as a whole as being idolatrous. Religion cannot avoid having an element of idolatry in it. Religion is a factory of idols all the time. Therefore, the Christian and the theologian must be on their guard and prevent idolatrous trends from overwhelming their relationship to God.

Calvin fought against having pictures in the churches, and all kinds of things which can divert the mind from the wholly tran­scendent God. This is the reason for the sacred emptiness of the Calvinist church buildings. There is always a fear of idolatry in

the depths of men who have overcome idolatry. So it was with the

prophets, so it was with the Muslims, and so it was now with the Reformers. Calvinism is an iconoclastic movement, crushing idols,

pictures of all kinds, because they deviate from God himself. This idea that the human mind is a "perpetual manufacturer of idols" is one of the most profound things which can be said about our thinking of God. Even orthodox theology is often nothing more than idolatry.

On the other side, the human situation is described in much more negative terms by Calvin than by Luther. "From our natural

proneness to hypocrisy, any vain appearance of righteousness

abundantly contents us instead of the reality", which is our sin. Man cannot stand his reality; he is unrealistic about himself. As

we say in modern times, man is ideological about himself; he

produces unreal imaginings about his being. This is a radical attack on the human situation, but it corresponds to God as the

Cod of glory. When Calvin speaks of the God of love, it is usually in the context of the elect. Among them he reveals his love. Those who are not the elect are from the very beginning excluded from love. If this is true, then is it not also true that for Calvin God is the Creator of evil? This question has to be answered in con­nection with the doctrines of providence and predestination.

2. Providence and Predestination

Calvin was well aware that his way of thinking could easily lead to a half-deistic concept which places God alongside the world. Several hundred years before the deistic movement arose in England, Calvin warned against the deistic idea of God beside the world. Instead of this he conceived of a general operation of God in preserving and governing the world, so that all movement

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depends on him. Deism is a carnal sense which wants to keep God at a distance from us. If Cod is sitting on his throne without caring about what is going on in the world, that leaves the world to us. This is exactly what the Enlightenment and industrial society needed. They could not tolerate a God who is continually involved with the world. They had to have a God who gives the world its initial movement, then sits beside it without disturbing the busi­nessman in his affairs and the creators of industry. Against this Calvin says: "Faith ought to penetrate further." God is the world's perpetual preserver, "not by a certain universal action actuating the whole machine of the world and all its respective parts, but by a particular providence sustaining, nourishing, and providing for everything which he has made." All this implies a dynamic process of Cod within the laws he has given. He knew that the doctrine of natural law could easily make God into some­thing beside reality. Therefore, according to Calvin all things have instrumental character; they are instruments through which Cod works in every moment. If you want to call this pantheism, you do not know what the word means. If you call it panentheism, that could be all right, because this means that everything is in God. Things are used as instruments of God's acting, according to his pleasure. This is very close to Luther's idea. Calvin also has a concept of omnipotence which is against the absurdity of imagin­ing a highest God sitting somewhere and deliberating with him­self what he should do, knowing that he could do many other things or anything he wanted. This would be exactly like a woman in the household who decides to do this or that. This is an un­worthy view of God, and the Reformers knew it. "Not. . . vain, idle or almost asleep, but vigilant, efficacious, operative, and engaged in continual action; not a mere general principle of con­fused motion, as if he should command a river to flow through the channels once made for it, but a power constantly exerted on every distant and particular movement. For he is accounted omnipotent, not because he is able to act but does not act, and sits down in idleness." Omnipotence is omniactivity. Providence consists in continuous divine action.

This raised the problem with which Calvin was still wrestling on his deathbed: If this is so, is God not the cause of evil? Calvin was not afraid to say that natural evil is a natural consequence of the distortion of nature. Secondly, he said it is a way to bring the elect

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to God. But then he made a third assertion: It is a way to show the holiness of God, in the punishment of those whom he has selected for damnation and in the salvation of those who are elected. This says that God has produced evil men in order to punish them and in order to save others who are evil from their evil nature. This exclusively theocentric view which centers everything around the glory of God has understandably been attacked, and Calvin was very sensitive to the charge that he made God the cause of evil.

The suffering of the world is not a real problem for Calvin. Since his first principle is the honor of God, he can show that human suffering is (1) a natural consequence of the distorted, sin-hi! world; (2) a way of bringing the elect to God; (3) a way for God to show his holiness in the punishment of a distorted world. Physical evil here is taken partly as a natural consequence, partly as an educational means, and partly as punishment for sin. But this does not solve the problem of moral evil. Calvin tries to show that the evil acts of Satan and of wicked men are determined by God's counsel. Even Pilate and Nebuchayiezzar were servants of God. God blinds the minds and hardens the hearts of men; he puts an evil spirit in their hearts. Calvin quoted Augustine: "For God, as Augustine says, fulfills his righteous will by the wicked wills of wicked men." "He (Augustine) declares that he (God) creates light and darkness, that he forms good and evil, and that no evil occurs which he has not performed." Such statements which seem to make God the cause of evil are under­standable only in the light of Calvin's idea that the world is "the theater of the divine glory". God shows his glory in the scene we call the world. In order to do this, he causes evil, even moral evil. Calvin said that to think that God permits evil because of freedom is frivolous, because God acts in everything that goes on; the evil man follows the will of Cod although he does not follow his com­mand. By following his will, evil men defy God's command, and that makes them guilty.

This means that Calvin's idea of providence is strictly God-caused; I do not say "determined", but "God-caused". And if—as Calvin realized—some people feel that we cannot say this about God, that this kind of providence is a horrible thing, he answered: "Ignorance of providence is the greatest of miseries; the know­ledge of it is attended with the highest felicity." Belief in provi‑

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dence liberates us from anxiety, dread, and care. This period, around the end of the Middle Ages, was one of catastrophes and external changes, and of profound anxiety internally. Calvin's doctrine of providence is not an abstract one; it is supposed to heal anxiety, to give moral courage, and for this reason he praises the divine providence.

Involved with his doctrine of providence is his famous doctrine of predestination. Predestination is providence with respect to the

ultimate aim of man. It is providence which leads man through

his life to his final aim. So predestination is nothing else than the logical implication and the final fulfillment of providence. What

does this doctrine of predestination mean? How does this problem

arise? Why is it that most of the great names in religion, from Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, to Luther, are adherents of pre‑

destination, whereas those who do not adhere to it are nearer to a moralistic interpretation of Christianity than to a strictly religious one? If we deny predestination, we are denying the high line of religious personalities and their theology.

The question behind this doctrine is: Why does not everybody receive the same possibility to accept or reject the truth of the

gospel? Not everyone has the same possibility historically, for

some have never known Jesus. Not all have the same possibility psychologically; their condition is such that they cannot even

understand the meaning of what is said to them. The answer to

this question is divine providence, but, as we have said, providence with respect to our eternal destiny is predestination. The moment

that Christianity emphasizes the uniqueness of Christ, it must

ask why most people have never heard of him, while others who have heard of him are so preconditioned that their hearing has

no meaning to them. In other words, all of these who teach pre­destination have observed something empirically, namely, that there is a selective and not an equalitarian principle effective in life. Life cannot be understood in terms of an equalitarian principle, but only in terms of a selective principle.

Everybody asks questions such as these. Calvin said that we should not suppress such questions out of false modesty; we must

ask them. "We shall never be clearly convinced. . . that our sal­vation flows from the fountain of God's free mercy till we are acquainted with his eternal election, which illustrates the grace of Cod by this comparison, that he adopts not all promiscuously

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to the hope of salvation but gives to some what he refuses to others." There is another side to this too. Those who ask this question are given a certainty of salvation because predestination makes salvation completely independent of the oscillations of our human being. The desire for the certainty of salvation is the second reason for the doctrine of predestination in Paul, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. They could not find a certainty by looking at themselves, because their faith was always weak and changing. They could find it only by looking beyond themselves to the action of God.

The concrete character of divine grace is visible in an election which includes me specifically and at the same time excludes others. This leads to the concept of double predestination. "We call predestination the eternal decree of God by which he has determined in himself what he would have every individual of mankind to become, for they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some and eternal damnation for others. Every man, therefore, being created for one or the other of these ends, we say is predestined either to life or to death." That is Calvin's definition. What is the cause of this election? Only God's will and nothing else. "If, therefore, we can assign no reason why he grants mercy to his people but because such is his pleasure, neither shall we find any other cause but his will for the reprobation of others." The irrational will of Cod is the cause of predestination. This introduces us to an absolute mystery. We cannot call God to any account. We must accept it purely and simply and drop our own criteria of the good and the true. If someone says this is unjust, Calvin would say that we cannot go beyond the divine will to a nature which determines God, because God's will cannot be dependent on anything else, not even in him. Here we see the full weight of the Ockhamistic-Scotistic idea that the will of God is the only cause of what God does, and nothing else.

Calvin himself f8lt the horrible aspect of this doctrine. "I inquire again how it came to pass that the fall of Adam, independent of any remedy, should involve so many nations with their infant children in eternal death, but because such was the will of God

·  it is an awful decree, I confess!" Nevertheless, when Calvin was attacked, especially in his last years—in face of his death—he answered in a slightly different way: "Their perdition depends on

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the divine predestination, in such a manner that the cause and matter of it are found in themselves." Hence, the immediate cause is man's free will. Like Luther, Calvin is thinking on two levels. The divine cause is not really a cause but a decree, something which is a mystery and for which the category of causality is only symbolically and not properly applicable. Besides this Calvin knew, as did the other Reformers and every predestinarian, that it is a man's finite freedom through which God acts when he makes his decree of predestination.

If we should criticize this, we should not say that it is a simple contradiction between God's causality and human freedom. This is too easy, because the levels are different, and there is no possible contradiction on different levels. A contradiction must occur on the same level. There is the level of divine action, which is a mys­tery because it does not fit our categories, and there is the level of human action, which is a mixture of freedom and destiny. Do not think of the Reformers, or any of the great theologians, in terms of a single level of thought. Otherwise you are faced with all sorts of impossible statements which not only contradict each other, but also result in the destruction of your minds, if by a heroic attempt you try to accept a contradiction. Instead, you can think in terms of two levels. For example, you can say: "I cannot escape the category of causality when I speak of Cod's action, and when I do so, I derive everything from God, including my eternal destiny." This sounds like a mechanical determinism. But this is not what predestination means. On the divine level causality is used symbolically to express that everything which brings us to God is derived from God.

The question this raises for the individual Calvinist is whether he is elected. What gives him the assurance of election? Thus the search for the criteria, the marks of election, begins. Calvin recognized some of them. The first and most decisive one is the inner relationship to God in the act of faith. Then there is the blessing of God and the high moral standing of a person. These are all symptoms. Psychologically this brought about a situation in which the individual could gain certainty only by producing the marks of election in terms of a moral life and an economic blessing. This means that he tried to become a good bourgeois industrial citizen. He believed that if he were this, he had the marks of predestination. Of course, theologically it was known

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that predestination could never be caused by such actions. But if they are there, the individual can have certainty. Here lurked the danger in this theology which dealt with the marks of election.

It is remarkable how little Calvin had to say about the love of God. The divine glory replaces the divine love. When he speaks of the divine love, it is love toward those who are elected. The universality of the divine love is denied, and the demonic nega­tion, the split of the world, acquires a kind of eternity in Calvin through his doctrine of double predestination. Therefore, this is a doctrine which contradicts the divine love as that which sustains everything that is, a doctrine which Dante expressed when in his Divine Comedy he wrote at the entrance of hell: "I also have been created by divine love." However, if something is created by divine love, it cannot be eternally condemned.

3. The Christian Life

I want to make only a few statements about Calvin's doctrine of the Christian life. He said: "When they explain vivification of that joy which the mind experiences after its perturbations and fears are allayed, I cannot coincide with them (i.e., with Luther), since it should rather signify an ardent desire and endeavor to live a holy and pious life, as though it were said that a man dies to himself that he may begin to live to Cod." For Luther the new life is a joyful reunion with God; for Calvin it is the attempt to fulfill the law of God in the life of the Christian. The summary of the Christian life is self-denial and not love. It is departing from ourselves. "Oh, how great a proficiency has that man made who, having been taught that he is not his own, has taken the sovereignty and government of himself from his own reason, to surrender it to God." What describes the Christian life for Calvin is not Luther's view of the ups and downs, the ecstasy and despair, in the Christian. For Calvin the Christian life is a line going up­ward, exercised in methodical stages.

There are two other elements in Calvin's view of the Christian life. The world is a place of exile. The body is a valueless prison of the soul. These words are more those of Plato than of the Old or New Testament. Yet, Calvin denied any hatred of life. His asceticism was not of the Roman type which tended to deny life itself or to deny the body by ascetic exercises. It was what Max

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Weber and Ernst Troeltsch called an inner-worldly asceticism. It has two characteristics: cleanliness, and profit through work. Cleanliness is understood in terms of sobriety, chastity, and temperance. This has had tremendous consequences in the lives of people in Calvinist countries. It has been expressed in an extreme external cleanliness and an identification of the erotic element with the unclean. This latter is against the principles of the Reformation, but it was the consequence of the Calvinist ethics. The second characteristic of this inner-worldly asceticism is activity in the world to produce tools and, by means of them, profit. This has been called the "spirit of capitalism" by Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). This has been so misunderstood that I would like to make a few com­ments on it. There are some people who think that great scholars like Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch have stated that Calvinism produced capitalism. Then these clever people answer Weber—probably the greatest scholar in the nineteenth century in the fields of sociology and the humanities—by pointing out that capitalism existed before Calvin was born, especially in the Lombardian plain in northern Italy, in the cities of northern and southern Germany, in London, etc. What Weber said is that there is something in the spirit of Calvinist ethics and some related sectarian ethics which serves the purposes of investment, an important element in the capitalist economy. In pre-capitalist economy the rich man showed his riches in glorious living, in build­ing castles or mansions or patrician houses. But Calvinism tried to show people how to use their wealth differently. It should be used partly for endowments and partly for new investments. One of the best ways of supporting the capitalist form of economy is to make the profits into investments, that is, into means for more production, instead of wasting the profits in glorious living.

That is what Max Weber wanted to say. If you do not believe he was right, I can tell you that in eastern Germany, before the catastrophes of the twentieth century happened, the cities in which the Protestants lived were the wealthy ones, and the ones in which the Catholics lived were the poor ones. Perhaps the poor were happier than the rich, but the towns and cities influenced by Calvinism produced capitalism in Germany, and not the Catholics, or the Lutherans in the East.

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4. Church and State

Calvin's doctrine of the church is like Luther's; the church is the place where preaching is carried on and the sacraments are correctly administered. However, Calvin makes a much more radical distinction between the empirical church and the invisible church. While for Luther the invisible church is only the spiritual quality of the visible church, for Calvin the invisible church is the body of those who are predestined, in all periods of history, and not always dependent on the preaching of the Word. This is connected with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Zwingli and Calvin; the Spirit works also apart from the Christian message, and is therefore universally active.

From this point of view the visible church is an emergency situation, an adaptation of God to human weakness. Thus, it is not a matter of believing in the church, but believing that there is a church. The main function of the church is educational. The church always has to bring people into the invisible church, the body of the predestined, by means of preaching and the sacra­ments. On the other hand, the emphasis on the educational work of the church is much stronger than in Lutheranism. Although the church is ultimately an emergency creation of God, it is actually the only way for most people to come to God at all. The difference between Calvin's and Luther's doctrine of the church is that instead of having two marks of the church—doctrine and sacraments—as Luther had, Calvin has three marks: doctrine, sacraments, and discipline. The element of discipline is decisive. "As some have such a hatred of discipline as to abhor the very name, they should attend to the following consideration.. . . As the saving doctrine of Christ is the soul of the church, so discipline forms the ligaments which connect the members together and keep each in its proper place." The discipline starts with private admonition; it goes through public challenge (this was ruinous socially) and finally to excommunication. But even excommuni­cation is not able to remove one from the saving power of God. Whereas someone who has been excommunicated cannot be saved while in this state, according to the Roman Church, in Protestantism a person will be saved in spite of excommunication if he is among the predestined.

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Besides these three marks of the church, there are other things by divine law. There are four offices: pastors or ministers, doctors or teachers, presbyters, and deacons. The pastors and presbyters are the most important of these four offices. All four are by divine order; they must always be there; they are derived from the Bible.

In its mixed status the church has within itself a community of active sanctification. This community is created by the church and becomes manifest in the Lord's Supper. Thus, discipline precedes the reception of the Lord's Supper. Now, I do not want to go into Calvin's doctrine of the sacraments. The main thing is that he tried to mediate between Luther and Zwingli. Against Zwingli, he did not want the Lord's Supper to be only a commemorative meal; he wanted the presence of God, but not a presence which Is superstitious and magical, as he saw in Luther's doctrine, where even unbelievers eat the body of Christ. This is magic, and I think rightly rejected by Calvin. Instead, he spoke of the spiritual presence of Christ, and this is also the presupposition for an effective reading of the Bible.

Calvin was a humanist and, therefore, gave to the state many more functions than Luther. Luther gave it practically only one function: to suppress evil and to preserve society from chaos. Calvin used the humanistic ideas of good government, of helping the people, etc. But Calvin never went so far as to say, with the sectarian movements, that the state can be the kingdom of God itself. He called this a Jewish folly. What he said—with Zwingli —is that a theocracy has to be established, the rule of God through the application of evangelical laws in the political situ­ation. Calvin worked hard for this. He demanded that the magistrates of Geneva care not only for legal problems, the problems of order in the general sense, but also for the most important content of daily life, namely, for the church. Not that they shall teach in the church or render decisions as to what shall be taught, but they shall supervise the church and punish those who are blasphemers and heretics. So Calvin with the help of the magistrates of Geneva created the kind of community in which the law of God would govern the entire life. Priests and ministers are not necessarily involved in it. Theocratic rulers are usually not priests, otherwise theocracy becomes hierocracy; rather, they are usually laymen. Calvin says that the state must punish the

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impious. They are criminals bedause they are against the law of the state which is based on God's law.

Calvinism saved Protestantism from being overwhelmed by the Counter-Reformation. Calvinism became a tremendous inter­national power through the alliances of Protestants on a world­wide scale. Another element in Calvinism is the possibility of revolution. Certainly Calvin said that all revolution is against the law of God, as Luther did. But then he made an exception which has become decisive for Western European history. He said that although no individual citizen should be allowed to start a revo­lution, the lower magistrates should be willing to do so if the natural law, to which every ruler is subject, is being contradicted. This is a possibility in a democracy such as ours in which all of us are lower magistrates; we establish the government by our voting. Under these circumstances revolution is universally permissible. The situation in Western Europe was that the kings and queens were mostly on the side of Catholicism, and Protes­tantism could be saved only by people who believed they could fight against the rulers in the name of God, rulers who suppress the true gospel, the purified gospel of the Reformation.

5. The Authority of Scripture

The doctrine of the authority of Scripture in Calvin is important because on its basis biblicism developed in all groups of Protes­tant faith. The Bible for Calvin is the law of truth. "At length, that the truth might remain in the world in a continual course of instruction to all ages, he determined that the same oracles which he had deposited with the patriarchs should be committed to public records. With this design the law was promulgated, to which the prophets were afterwards annexed as its first inter­preters." The Bible must, therefore, be obeyed above all. It con­tains a "heavenly doctrine". Although an adaptation, this was necessary because of the mutability of the human mind. This was the necessary way to preserve the doctrines of Christianity. By writing them down, God's instructions become effectual. Calvin also spoke of the Bible as the "peculiar school of the children of God".

All of this can be harmless—or quite the opposite. Much dis­cussion is taking place as to how to interpret Calvin's doctrine of

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Scripture. In any case, the answer is that this authority is absolute, but only for those to whom the divine Spirit gives the testimony that the Bible contains the absolute truth. If this happens, we can witness to the whole Bible as an authoritative book. The form of the Bible's authority is derived from the fact that the Bible was composed under the dictation of the Holy Spirit. This term, dictation of the Holy Spirit, led to the doctrine of verbal inspir­ation which surpassed anything which can be found in Calvin himself, and which contradicts the Protestant principle as such. The disciples were "pens" of Christ. Everything which came from them as human beings was superseded by the Holy Spirit who testifies that the oracles of God are contained in this book. "Between the apostles and their successors, however, there is this difference—that the apostles were the certain and authentic amanuenses of the Holy Spirit, and therefore their writings are to be received as the oracles of God." "Out of the mouth of Cod" the Bible is written—the whole Bible. Any distinction between the Old and New Testaments, largely disappears. You can find this still today in every Calvinist country.