LUTHER’S is one of the great names on the Church’s roll. By grace given to him from heaven he delivered one of the most tremendous blows ever inflicted on error; under the impact of that blow the Church of Rome reeled and staggered and was finally broken. Naturally, he was a man of extraordinary energy, an electrified human being, and the Spirit of God made use of this energy in turning it into channels where its efforts would not be dissipated in merely beating the air. As a man he touched humanity at more points than the great Reformed theologian, Calvin. There was a warmth of feeling in Luther that brought him into closer touch with men, and less of the aloofness of the French Reformer which, while it won respect from men, did not call forth their affections to the same degree. Luther, on the other hand, had not the strength of Calvin’s clear judgment, and was too ready on occasions to be swayed by his strong, impulsive, overmastering feelings which drove everything before them, sometimes to his own sorrow and to the confusion of the cause he was advocating. As a thinker and theologian, Calvin far excelled him. There was a precision in Calvin’s logic that was the despair of his opponents. His evenly-balanced judgment was not only marvellously correct in its decisions, but remarkably comprehensive. And in his case also the Spirit of God made use of these noble powers of mind
* Luther and the Reformation, by James Mackinnon, Ph.D., D.D., Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Edinburgh. Vol. I., Early Life and Religious Development to 1517. Longmans, Green, and Co., 39 Paternoster Row, London, E.C. 4. Price 16s net.
and employed them for the purpose of building up a system of theology which was accepted by the Reformed Churches throughout the world. To each of these great men a work was allotted by God. Calvin could not have done what Luther did—he lacked the fire and energy that awakened the dull, slow-moving German mind from its long slumbers. Luther on the other hand could not have done Calvin’s work. Had he thundered among the lively French as he did in Germany he might have awakened forces which neither he nor others could have held in check.
While recognising the greatness of Luther’s work as a Reformer we are not blind to very serious defects in that work both from the standpoint of doctrine and church polity, but it is not our intention to dwell on these defects but to make some reference to the extraordinary and fiery struggles through which he passed ere he came into the clear light of the Gospel and found peace of conscience through the blood of Christ. In a recently published book—”Luther and the Reformation,” by Dr James Mackinnon, Edinburgh—we have decidedly one of the ablest, if not the ablest, and most thorough accounts of Luther’s early struggles that has yet appeared in English. Dr Mackinnon, of whose work only the first volume has yet appeared, traces up the history of Luther from his earliest years to the momentous year 1517. He has also been at special pains in presenting the theological opinions of the Fathers and Schoolmen who may be said to have most influenced Luther’s theological views. Dr Mackinnon must have given considerable study to this part of his subject, and his studies will be of special use to future historians of the Reformation and biographers of Luther. At the same time we feel it necessary to say that Dr Mackinnon is very far from satisfactory when he deals with the great Pauline doctrines of predestination and total depravity. As a professor in the faculty of divinity he must have subscribed the Westminster Confession of Faith, and he would be well advised to compare its statements on these matters with those of his own in dealing with the Pauline and Augustinian doctrines which had such a prominent place in the teaching of the early Reformers—Luther included. The introduction of a biographer’s own views in the life of a great man are not always advisable, and Dr Mackinnon’s treatment of these doctrines would have been more satisfactory if he had not made it so clear what his own theological position is.
With this brief criticism we now proceed to deal with Luther’s early spiritual struggles, taking Dr Mackinnon’s book as our guide. Luther sprang from peasant stock. His parents, both father and mother, were good disciples of Solomon and made use of the rod, at times too drastically. But though he had a Spartan training, Luther admitted afterwards that his parents were seeking his welfare, and he cherished a deep affection for his father and mother. It has been commonly said that Luther was the son of a poor miner, but as Dr Mackinnon points out, while it was true that his father was poor at Luther’s birth, yet in 1491, when Luther was only 8 years old, his father had so succeeded by his industry that he was the lessee of several pits and furnaces.
Luther, having passed through his school and university courses with distinction, and having received his Master’s degree, was destined, according to his father’s wish, for the Law. As, in the case of Calvin, Luther yielded to his father’s wish rather than to any inclination he himself had for the study of law. He had no sooner, however, begun the study of law than a remarkable change took place in his views, and in July 1505, he entered the monastery of the Augustinian Eremites at Erfurt. Luther himself gives the explanation of this sudden change in his career. On the 2nd of July, while returning from Mansfeld to Erfurt, he was overtaken by a tremendous thunderstorm, and a flash of lightning prostrated him to the ground. In terror of death, he called on St Anna for help, and vowed to be a monk. In his work on “Monastic Vows,” in the dedication to his father, he says:—”I was called to this vocation by the terrors of heaven, for neither willingly, nor by my own desire, did I become a monk, but, surrounded by the terror and agony of sudden death, I vowed a forced and unavoidable vow.” His father was strongly opposed to the monks, and when his own son entered a monastery he set it down to an illusion, but Luther, though he afterwards repented of his vow, kept it in spite of the entreaties of his father and friends. This, then, was the first step leading up to that long, sore struggle on which he entered in the hope that he would work out salvation for his own soul. In 1507 he was ordained as a priest, and up to this date there is not much indication of the struggle except that he performed the duties of the monastery with more than ordinary diligence. “I kept vigil night by night,” he says, “fasted, prayed, chastised and mortified my body, kept obedience and lived chastely.” All this was done, he
tells us, “with the idea of attaining to righteousness by my works.” It was no exaggeration for him to say, “I venture to say that if ever a monk could have gained heaven through monkery, I should certainly have got there. This all my fellow-monks who have known me will attest.” Again he writes—”I was so deeply plunged in monkery even to delirium and insanity. If righteousness was to be got by the law, I should certainly have attained it.” God’s righteousness was a terrible stumbling block to him. “Just” and “justice” he says were like a thunderbolt in his conscience. As yet he knew not Eternal Wisdom’s way for the guilty sinner—”Jehovah Tsidkenu” was nothing to him. Not only so, but he himself declares—”We fled from Christ as from the devil, and ran to the Virgin Mary and St Barbara, for we were taught that every one must appear before the judgment seat of Christ with his works and his order.” “Often,” he further adds, “was I horrified at the name of Jesus, and when I regarded Him on the Cross, it was as if I had been struck by lightning, and when I heard His name mentioned, I would rather have heard the name of the devil, for I laboured under the belief that I must seek by my good works to make Christ my gracious friend and thereby reconcile an angry God.” The text that troubled him most of all was the one that was afterwards to be of the greatest comfort, viz., Rom. i. 17. “This passage,” he says, “always stuck in my mind. For I was unable to understand otherwise the word righteousness, wherever it might occur in Scripture, than in the sense that God was righteous and would judge righteously.” The account of how deliverance came to his troubled conscience and storm-tossed heart will be told in another issue.