A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism
by
Paul Tillich,
Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
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Previously published in two separate volumes entitled
Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone
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URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich
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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.
234 A History of Christian
Thought
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
236 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 237
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
238 A History
of Christian Thought
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.
The Theology of the Protestant Reformers 239
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
240 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 241
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
242 A History
of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 243
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
244 A History
of Christian
Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 245
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
246 A History
of. Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 247
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
248 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 249
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
250 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 251
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
252 A History
of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 253
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
254 A History of Christian Thought
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.
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 255
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
256 A History
of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 257
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,
258 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 259
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
260 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 261
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
262 A History of Christian Thought
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‑
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 263
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
264 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 265
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
266 A History of Christian Thought
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‑
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 267
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
268 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 269
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
270 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 271
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.
272 A History of Christian Thought
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.
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 278
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
274 A History of Christian Thought
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
The Theology of the Protestant
Reformers 275
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.
