Infallibility and divine authority belong to the sphere of faith and of the witness of the Spirit, and, therefore, to that personal manifestation of G.o.d and of His will toward us which is conveyed or presented to us in every part of Scripture. But this manifestation is given in a course of events which are part of human history, in lives of men and peoples, in a record which in outward form is like other human writings. If every part of Scripture is divine, every part of it is also human. The supernatural reality is incased in human realities. To apprehend the former, faith illumined by the Holy Spirit is necessary; but it is sufficient to use the ordinary methods of research to learn the credibility of the history in Scripture. When the Reformers distinguished between the word of G.o.d and Scripture which conveys or presents it, and when they declared that the authority and infallibility of that word belonged to the region of faith, they made that authority and infallibility altogether independent of questions that might be raised about the human agencies through which the book came into its present shape. It is not a matter belonging to the region of faith when the books which record the word of G.o.d were written, or by whom, or in what style, or how often they were edited or re-edited.
It is not a matter for faith whether incidents happened in one country or in another; whether the account of Job be literal history, or a poem based on old traditions in which the author has used the faculty of imagination to ill.u.s.trate the problems of G.o.d"s providence and man"s probation; whether genealogical tables give the names of men or of countries and peoples. All these and the like matters belong to the human side of the record. No special illumination of faith is needed to apprehend and understand them. They are matters for the ordinary faculties of man, and subject to ordinary human investigation. Luther availed himself freely of the liberty thus given. He never felt himself bound to accept the traditional ideas about the extent of the canon, the authorship of the books of the Bible, or even about the credibility of some of the things recorded. He said, speaking about Genesis, "What though Moses never wrote it?"(418) It was enough for him that the book was there and that he could read it. He thought that the Books of Kings were more worthy of credit than the Books of Chronicles;(419) and he believed that the prophets had not always given the kings of Israel the best political advice.(420)
But while the Bible is human literature, and as such may be and must be subjected to the same tests which are applied to ordinary literature, it is the record of the revelation of G.o.d, and has been carefully guarded and protected by G.o.d. This thought always enters into the conception which the Reformers had of Scripture. They speak of the singular care and providence of G.o.d which has preserved the Scriptures in such a way that His people always have a full and unmistakable declaration in them of His mind and will for their salvation. This idea for ever forbids a careless or irreverent biblical criticism, sheltering itself under the liberty of dealing with the records of revelation. No one can say beforehand how much or how little of the historic record is essential to preserve the faith of the Church; but every devout Christian desires to have it in large abundance. No one can plead the liberty which the principles of the Reformers secure for dealing with the record of Scripture as a justification in taking a delight in reducing to a minimum the historical basis of the Christian faith. Careless or irreverent handling of the text of Holy Scripture is what all the Reformers abhorred.(421)
-- 5. The Person of Christ.
"No one can deny," said Luther, "that we hold, believe, sing, and confess all things in correspondence with the Apostles" Creed, the faith of the old Church, that we make nothing new therein nor add anything thereto, and in this way we belong to the old Church and are one with it." Both the Augsburg Confession and the Schmalkald Articles begin with restating the doctrines of the old Catholic Church as these are given in the Apostles", Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, the two latter being always regarded by Luther as explanatory of the Apostles" Creed. His criticism of theological doctrines was always confined to the theories introduced by the Schoolmen, and to the perversion of the old doctrines of the Church introduced in mediaeval times mainly to bring these doctrines into conformity with the principles of the philosophy of Aristotle. He brought two charges against the Scholastic Theology. It was, he insisted, committed to the idea of work-righteousness; whatever occasional protest might be made against the conception, he maintained that this thought of work-righteousness was so interwoven with its warp and woof that the whole must be swept away ere the old and true Christian Theology could be rediscovered. He also declared it was sophistry; and by that he meant that it played with the outsides of doctrine, asked and solved questions which had nothing to do with real Christian theology, that the imposing intellectual edifice was hollow within, that its deity was not the G.o.d and Father revealed in Jesus Christ, but the unknown G.o.d, the G.o.d who could never be revealed by metaphysics larded with detached texts of Scripture, the abstract ent.i.ty of pagan philosophy. With an unerring instinct he fastened on the Scholastic devotion to Aristotle as the reason why what professed to be Christian theology had been changed into something else. Scholastic Philosophy or Theology (for the two are practically the same) defined itself as the attempt to reconcile _faith_ and _reason_, and the definition has been generally accepted. Verbally it is correct; really it is very misleading from the meanings attached to the words faith and reason. With the Schoolmen, faith in this contrast between faith and reason meant the sum of patristic teaching about the verities of the Christian religion extracted by the Fathers from the Holy Scriptures; and reason meant the sum of philosophical principles extracted from the writings of ancient philosophers, and especially from Aristotle. The great Schoolmen conceived it to be their task to construct a system of Christian Philosophy by combining patristic doctrinal conclusions with the conclusions of human reasoning which they believed to be given in their highest form in the writings of the ancient Grecian sages. They actually used the conceptions of the Fathers as material to give body to the forms of thought found ready made for them in the speculations of Aristotle and Plato. The Christian material was moulded to fit the pagan forms, and in consequence lost its most essentially Christian characteristics. One can see how the most evangelical of the Schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, tries in vain to break through the meshes of the Aristotelian net in his discussions on merit and satisfaction in his _Summa Theologiae_.(422) He had to start from the thought of G.o.d as (1) the Absolute, and (2) as the _Primum Movens_, the _Causa efficiens prima_, the _Intelligens a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur in finem_-conceptions which can never imprison without practically destroying the vision of the Father who has revealed Himself in the Saviour Jesus Christ. His other starting-point, that man is to be described as the possessor of free will in the Aristotelian sense of the term, will never contain the Christian doctrine of man"s complete dependence on G.o.d in his salvation. It inevitably led to work-righteousness. This was the "sophistry" Luther protested against and which he swept away.
He then claimed that he stood where the old Catholic Church had taken stand, that his theology like its was rooted in the faith of G.o.d as Trinity and in the belief in the Person of Christ, the Revealer of G.o.d.
The old theology had nothing to do with Mariolatry or saint worship; it revered the triune G.o.d, and Jesus Christ His Son and man"s Saviour. Luther could join hands with Athanasius across twelve centuries. He had done a work not unlike that of the great Alexandrian. His rejection of the Scholastic Aristotelianism may be compared with Athanasius" refusal to allow the Logos theology any longer to confuse the Christian doctrines of G.o.d and the Person of Christ. Both believed that in all thinking about G.o.d they ought to keep their eyes fixed upon His redemptive work manifested in the historical Christ. Athanasius, like Luther, brought theology back to religion from "sophistry," and had for his starting-point an inward religious experience that his Redeemer was the G.o.d who made heaven and earth. The great leaders in the ancient Church, Luther believed, held as he did that to have conceptions about G.o.d, to construct a real Christian theology, it was necessary first of all to know G.o.d Himself, and that He was only to be known through the Lord Jesus Christ. He had gone through the same experience as they had done; he could fully sympathise with them, and could appropriate the expressions in which they had described and crystallised what they had felt and known, and that without paying much attention to the niceties of technical language. These doctrines had not been dead formulas to them, but the expression of a living faith. He could therefore take the old dogmas and make them live again in an age in which it seemed as if they had lost all their vitality.
"From the time of Athanasius," says Harnack, "there had been no theologian who had given so much living power for faith to the doctrine of the G.o.dhead of Christ as Luther did; since the time of Cyril, no teacher had arisen in the Church for whom the mystery of the union of the two natures in Christ was so full of comfort as for Luther-"I have a better provider than all angels are: he lies in the cradle and hangs on the breast of a virgin, but sits, nevertheless, at the right hand of the almighty father"; no mystic philosopher of antiquity spoke with greater conviction and delight of the sacred nourishment in the Eucharist. The German reformer restored life to the formulas of Greek Christianity: he gave them back to faith."(423)
But if Luther accepted the old formulas describing the Nature of G.o.d and the Person of Christ, he did so in a thoroughly characteristic way. He had no liking for theological technical terms, though he confessed that it was necessary to use them. He disliked the old term _h.o.m.oousios_ to describe the relation between the Persons in the Trinity, and preferred the word "oneness";(424) he even disliked the term Trinity, or at least its German equivalents, Dreifaltigkeit or Dreiheit-they were not good German words, he said;(425) he called the technical terms used in the old creeds _vocabula mathematica_;(426) he was careful to avoid using them in his Short and even in his Long Catechism. But Jesus Christ was for him the mirror of the Fatherly heart of G.o.d, and therefore was G.o.d; G.o.d Himself was the only Comforter to bring rest to the human soul, and the Holy Spirit was G.o.d; and the old creeds confessed One G.o.d, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the confession contented him whatever words were used.
Besides, he rejoiced to place himself side by side with the Christians of ancient days, who trusted G.o.d in Christ and were free from the "sophistries" of the Schoolmen.
Although Luther accepted, honestly and joyfully, the old theology about G.o.d and the Person of Christ, he put a new and richer meaning into it.
Luther lets us see over and over again that he believed that the only thing worth considering in theology was the divine work of Christ and the experience that we have of it through faith. He did not believe that we have any real knowledge of G.o.d outside these limits. Beyond them there is the unknown G.o.d of philosophical paganism, the G.o.d whom Jews, Turks, pagans, and nominal Christians ignorantly worship. In order to know G.o.d it is necessary to know Him through the Jesus Christ of history. Hence with Luther, Christ fills the whole sphere of G.o.d: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," and conversely: "He that hath not seen Me hath not seen the Father." The historical Jesus Christ is for Luther the revealer and the only revealer of the Father. The revelation is given in the wonderful experience of faith in which Jesus compels us to see G.o.d in Him-the whole of G.o.d, Who has kept nothing back which He could have given us. It is very doubtful whether the framers of the old creeds ever grasped this thought.
The great expounder of the old theology, Augustine, certainly did not. The failure to enter into it showed itself not merely in the doctrine of G.o.d, but also in the theories of grace. With Luther all theology is really Christology; he knew no other G.o.d than the G.o.d Who had manifested Himself in the historical Christ, and made us see in the miracle of faith that He is our salvation. This at once simplifies all Christian theology and cuts it clearly away from that Scholastic which Luther called "sophistry." Why need Christians puzzle themselves over the Eternal Something which is not the world when they have the Father? On the old theology the work of Christ was practically limited to procuring the forgiveness of sins. There it ended and other gracious operations of G.o.d began-operations of grace.
So there grew the complex system of expiations, and satisfactions, of magical sacraments and saints" intercessions. These were all at once swept away when the whole G.o.d was seen revealed in Christ in the vision of faith and nowhere else.
Like Athanasius, Luther found his salvation in the Deity of Christ.
"We must have a Saviour Who is more than a saint or an angel; for if He were no more, better and greater than these, there were no helping us. But if he be G.o.d, then the treasure is so ponderous that it outweighs and lifts away sin and death; and not only so, but also gives eternal life. This is our Christian faith, and therefore we rightly confess: "I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord, Who was born of Mary, suffered and died." By this faith hold fast, and though heathen and heretic are ever so wise thou shalt be blessed."(427)
He repeats this over and over again. If we cannot say G.o.d died for us, if it was only a man who suffered on the cross, then we are lost, was Luther"s firmest conviction; and the thought of the Divinity of Christ meant more to Luther than it did to previous theologians. The old theology had described the two Natures in the One Person of the G.o.d-man in such a way as to suggest that the only function of the Divine was to give to the human work of Christ the importance necessary to effect salvation. Luther always refused to adopt this limited way of regarding the Divinity of the Saviour. He did not refuse to adopt and use the _phraseology_ of his predecessors. Like them, he spoke of the two Natures in the One Person of Christ. But it is plain from his expositions of the Creed, and from his criticisms of the current theological terminology, that he did not like the expression. He thought that it suggested an idea that was wrong, and that had to be guarded against. He says that we must beware of thinking as if the deity and humanity in Christ are so externally united that we may look at the one apart from the other.
"This is the first principle and most excellent article how Christ is the Father: that we are not to doubt that whatsoever the man says and does is reckoned and must be reckoned as said and done in heaven for all angels; in the world for all rulers; in h.e.l.l for all devils; in the heart for every evil conscience and all secret thoughts. For if we are certain of this: that what Jesus thinks, speaks, and wills the Father also wills, then I defy all that may fight against me. For here in Christ have I the Father"s heart and will."(428)
He brings the thought of the Person of Christ into the closest relation to our personal experience. It is not simply a doctrine-an intellectual something outside us. It is part of that blessed experience which is called Justification by Faith. It is inseparably connected with the recognition that we are not saved by means of the good deeds which we can do, but solely by the work of Christ. It is what makes us cease all work-righteousness and trust in G.o.d alone as He has revealed Himself in Christ. When we know and feel that it is G.o.d who is working for us, then we instinctively cease trying to think that we can work out our own salvation.(429) Hence the Person of Christ can never be a mere doctrine for the true Christian to be inquired about by the intellect. It is something which we carry about with us as part of our lives.
"To know Christ in the true way means to know that He died for us, that He piled our sins upon Himself, so that we hold all our own affairs as nothing and let them all go, and cling only to the faith that Christ has given Himself for us, and that His sufferings and piety and virtues are all mine. When I know this I must hold Him dear in return, for I must be loving to such a man."
He insists on the human interest that the Man Jesus Christ has for us, and declares that we must take as much interest in His whole life on earth as in that of our closest friend.
Perhaps it ought to be added, although what has been said implies it, that Luther always approached the Person of Christ from his mediatorial work, and not from any previously thought out ideas of what G.o.dhead must be, and what manhood must be, and how they can be united. He begins with the mediatorial and saving work of Christ as that is revealed in the blessed experience which faith, the gift of G.o.d, creates. He rises from, the office to the Person, and does not descend from the Person to the office.
"Christ is not called Christ because He has the two Natures. What does that matter to me? He bears this glorious and comforting name because of His Office and Work which He has undertaken."(430) It is in this way that He becomes the Saviour and the Redeemer.
It can scarcely be said that all the Reformers worked out the conception of the Person of Christ in the same way as Luther, although almost all these thoughts can be found in Calvin, but the overshadowing conception is always present to their mind-Christ fills the full sphere of G.o.d. That is the characteristic of Reformation thought and of Reformation piety, and appears everywhere in the writings of the Reformers and in the worship and rites of the Reformed Church. To go into the matter exhaustively would necessitate more s.p.a.ce than can be given; but the following instances may be taken as indicating the universal thought.
1. The Reformers swept away every contemplation of intercessors who were supposed to share with our Lord the procuring of pardon and salvation, and they declared against all attempts to distinguish between various kinds of worship which could only lead pious souls astray from the one worship due to G.o.d in Christ. Such subtle distinctions, says Calvin, as _latria_, _doulia_, and _hyperdoulia_ are neither known nor present to the minds of those who prostrate themselves before images until the world has become full of idolatry as crude and plain as that of the ancient Egyptians, which all the prophets continuously denounced: they can only mislead, and ought to be discarded. They actually suggest to worshippers to pa.s.s by Jesus Christ, the only Mediator, and betake themselves to some patron who has struck their fancy. They bring it about that the Divine Offices are distributed among the saints as if they had been appointed colleagues to our Lord Jesus Christ; and they are made to do His work, while He Himself is kept in the background like some ordinary person in a crowd. They are responsible for the fact that hymns are sung in public worship in which the saints are lauded with every blessing just as if they were colleagues of G.o.d.(431)
In conformity with these thoughts, the Confessions of the Reformation all agree in reprobating prayers to the saints. The Augsburg Confession says:
"The Scripture teacheth not to invoke saints, nor to ask the help of saints, because it propoundeth to us one Christ, the Mediator, Propitiatory, High Priest, and Intercessor. This Christ is to be invocated, and He hath promised that He will hear our prayers, and liketh this worship, to wit, that He be invocated in all afflictions. "If any man sin, we have an advocate with G.o.d, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John ii. 1)."(432)
The Second Helvetic Confession, in its fifth chapter, ent.i.tled, _Regarding the adoration, worship, and invocation of G.o.d through the One Mediator, Jesus Christ_, lays down the rule that prayer is to be through Christ alone, and the saints and relics are not to be worshipped. And no prayer-book or liturgy in any branch of the Reformed Church contains prayers addressed to any of the saints or to the Blessed Virgin.
2. The Reformers insist on the necessity of Christ and of Christ alone for all believers. Their Confessions abound in expressions which are meant to magnify the Person and Work of Christ, and to show that He fills the whole field of believing thought and worship. The brief Netherlands Confession of 1566 has no less than three separate sections on _Christ the only Mediator and Reconciler_, on _Christ the only Teacher,_ and on _Christ the only High Priest and Sacrifice_.(433) The _Heidelberg_ or _Palatine Catechism_ calls Christ _my faithful Saviour_, and says that we can call ourselves Christians "because by faith we are members of Jesus Christ and partakers of His anointing, so that we both confess His Holy Name and present ourselves unto Him a lively offering of thanksgiving, and in this life may with free conscience fight against sin and Satan, and afterwards possess with Christ an everlasting kingdom over all creatures." The Scots Confession abounds in phrases intended to honour our Lord Jesus Christ. It calls Him _Messiah_, _Eternal Wisdom_, _Emmanuel_, _our Head_, _Our Brother_, _our Pastor and great Bishop of our souls_, the _Author of Life_, the _Lamb of G.o.d_, the _Advocate and Mediator_, and the _Only High Priest_. All the Confessions of the Churches of the Reformation contain the same or similar expressions. The liturgies of the Churches also abound in similar terms of adoration.
3. The Reformers declare that Christ is the _only_ Revealer of G.o.d. "We would never recognise the Father"s grace and mercy," says Luther in his Large Catechism, "were it not for our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the mirror of the Father"s heart." "We are not affrayed to cal G.o.d our Father," says the Scots Confession, "not sa meikle because He has created us, quhilk we have in common with the reprobate, as for that He has given us His onely Son." The instructions issued by the Synod which met at Bern in 1532 are very emphatic upon this thought, as may be seen from the headings of the various articles: (Art. 2) That the whole doctrine is the unique Christ (_Das die gantze leer der eynig Christus sye_); (Art. 3) That G.o.d is revealed to the people in Christ alone; (Art. 5) That the gracious G.o.d is perceived through Christ alone without any mediation; (Art. 6) A Christian sermon is entirely about and from Christ. It is said under the third article: "His Son in Whom we see the work of G.o.d and His Fatherly heart toward us ... which is not the case where the preacher talks much about G.o.d in the heathen manner, and does not exhibit the same G.o.d in the face of Christ."(434) The Confessions also unite in declaring that the gift of the Holy Spirit comes from Christ.
4. The conception that Christ filled the whole sphere of G.o.d, which was for the Reformers a fundamental and experimental fact, enabled them to construct a spiritual doctrine of the sacraments which they opposed to that held in the mediaeval Church. Of course, it was various theories about the sacraments which caused the chief differences among the Reformers themselves; but apart from all varying ideas-consubstantiation, ubiquity, signs exhibiting and signs representing-the Reformers united on the thoughts that the efficacy in the sacraments depended entirely on the promises of Christ contained in His word, and that the virtue in the sacraments consisted in the presence of Christ to the believing communicant. What was received in the sacraments was not a vague, mysterious, not to say magical, grace, but Christ Jesus Himself. He gave Himself in the sacraments in whatever way His presence might be explained.
They all taught that the efficacy of the sacraments depends upon the promise of Christ contained in their inst.i.tution, and they insisted that word and sacrament must always be taken together. Thus Luther points out in the _Babylonish Captivity of the Church_ that one objection to the Roman practice is that the recipients "never hear the words of the promise which are secretly mumbled by the priest," and exhorts his readers never to lose sight of the all-important connection between the word of promise and the sacraments; and in his Large Catechism he declares that the sacraments include the Word. "I exhort you," he says, "never to sunder the Word and the water, or to separate them. For where the Word is withheld we have only such water as the maid uses to cook with." Non-Lutheran Confessions are equally decided on the necessity of connecting the promise and the words of Christ with the sacraments. The Thirty-nine Articles declare that the sacraments are effectual because of "Christ"s inst.i.tution and promise." The Heidelberg or Palatine Catechism (1563) says that the sacraments "are holy and visible signs ordained of G.o.d, to the end that He might thereby the more fully declare and seal unto us the _promise_ of the Holy Gospel."
Similarly the Reformers unanimously declared that the virtue in the sacraments consisted in no mysterious grace, but in the fact that in them believing partakers met and received Christ Himself. In the articles of the Bern Synod (1532) we are told that the sacraments are mysteries of G.o.d, "through which from without Christ is proffered to believers." The First Helvetic Confession (1536) says, concerning the Holy Supper, "we hold that in the same the Lord truly offers His Body and His Blood, that is, Himself, to His own." The Second Helvetic Confession (1562) declares that "the Body of Christ is in heaven at the right hand of the Father,"
and enjoins communicants "to lift up their hearts and not to direct them downwards to the bread. For as the sun, though absent from us in the heaven, is none the less efficaciously present ... so much more the Sun of righteousness absent from us in the heavens in His Body, is present to us not indeed corporeally, but spiritually by a life-giving activity." The French Confession of 1557 says that the sacraments are pledges and seals, and adds, "Yet we hold that their substance and truth is in Jesus Christ."
So the Scots Confession of 1560 declares that "we a.s.suredlie beleeve that be Baptisme we ar ingrafted in Christ Jesus to be made partakers of His justice, be quhilk our sinnes ar covered and remitted. And alswa, that in the Supper richtlie used, Christ Jesus is so joined with us, that Hee bec.u.mmis very nurishment and fude of our saules." In the _Manner of the Administration of the Lord"s Supper_ the Scottish Reformation Church directed the minister in his exhortation to say to the people: "The end of our coming to the Lord"s Table ... is to seek our life and perfection in Jesus Christ, acknowledging ourselves at the same time to be children of wrath and condemnation. Let us consider then that this sacrament is a singular medicine for all poor sick creatures, a comfortable help to weak souls, and that our Lord requireth no other worthiness on our part, but that we unfeignedly acknowledge our naughtiness and imperfection."
Everywhere in prayer, worship, and teaching the Reformers see Christ filling the whole sphere of G.o.d. Jesus was G.o.d appearing in history and addressing man.
-- 6. The Church.
In the Epistles of St. Paul, the Church of Christ stands forth as a _fellowship_ which is both divine and human. On the side of the divine it is a fellowship with Jesus, its crucified, risen, and ascended Lord; on the human, it is a fellowship among men who stand in the same relation to Jesus. This fellowship with Jesus and with the brethren is the secret of the Church-what expresses it, what makes it different from all other fellowships. Every other characteristic which belongs to it must be coloured by this thought of a double fellowship. It is the double relation which makes it difficult to construct a conception of the Church. It is easy to feel it as an experience, but it has always been found hard to express it in propositions.
It does not require much elaborate thinking to construct a theory of the Church which will be true to all that is said about the fellowship on its divine side; nor is it very difficult to think of a great visible and historical organisation which in some external aspects represents the Christian fellowship, provided the hidden union with Christ, so prominent in St. Paul"s descriptions, be either entirely neglected or explained in external and material ways. The difficulty arises when both the divine and the human sides of the fellowship are persistently and earnestly kept in view.
It is always hard to explain the unseen by the seen, the eternal by the temporal, and the divine by the human; and the task is almost greater than usual when the union of these two elements in the Church of Christ is the theme of discussion. It need not surprise us, therefore, that all down through the Middle Ages there appear, not one, but two conceptions of the Christian Church which never harmonised. On the one side, the Church was thought of as a fellowship of G.o.d with man, depending on the inscrutable purpose of G.o.d, and independent of all visible outward organisation; on the other, it was a great society which existed in the world of history, and was held together by visible political ties like other societies.
Augustine had both conceptions, and the dialectical skill of the great theologian of the West was unable to fuse them into one harmonious whole.
These two separate, almost mutually exclusive, ideas of what the Church of Christ was, lived side by side during the Middle Ages in the same unconnected fashion. The former, the spiritual Church with its real but unseen fellowship with Christ, was the pre-eminently religious thought. It was the ground on which the most conspicuous mediaeval piety rested. It was the garden in which bloomed the flowers of mediaeval mystical devotion. The latter was built up by the juristic dialectic of Roman canonists into the conception that the Church was a visible hierarchical State having a strictly monarchical const.i.tution-its king being the Bishop of Rome, who was the visible representative of Christ. This conception became almost purely political. It was the active force in all ecclesiastical struggles with princes and peoples, with Reformers, and with so-called heretics and schismatics. It reduced the Church to the level of the State, and contained little to stimulate to piety or to holy living.
The labours of the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century did try to transform this political Church into what might represent the double fellowship with Christ and with fellow-believers which is so prominent a thought in the New Testament. They did so by attempting to show that the great political Church was an enclosure containing certain indefinite mysterious powers of redemption which saved men who willingly placed themselves within the sphere of their operation. They maintained that the core of the hierarchical const.i.tution of the Church was the priesthood, and that this priesthood was a species of plastic medium through which, and through which alone, G.o.d worked in dispensing, by means of the sacraments entrusted to the priesthood, His saving grace. It may be questioned whether the thought of the Church as an inst.i.tution, possessing within itself certain mysterious redemptive powers which are to be found nowhere else, was ever thoroughly harmonised with that which regarded it as a ma.s.s of legal statutes embodied in canon law and dominated by papal absolutism. The two conceptions remained distinct, mutually aiding each other, but never exactly coalescing. Thus in the sixteenth century no less than three separate ideas of the Church of Christ were present to fill the minds and imaginations of men; but the dominant idea for the practical religious life was certainly that which represented the Church as an inst.i.tution which, because it possessed the priesthood, was the society within which salvation was to be found.
Luther had enjoyed to the full the benefits of this society, and had with ardour and earnestness sought to make use of all its redemptive powers. He had felt, simply because he was so honest with himself, that it had not made him a real Christian, and that its mysterious powers had worked on him in vain. His living Christian experience made him know and feel that whatever the Church of Christ was, it was not a society within which priests exercised their secret science of redemption. It was and must be a fellowship of holy and Christlike people; but he felt it very difficult to express his experience in phrases that could satisfy him. It was hard to get rid of thoughts which he had cherished from childhood, and none of these inherited beliefs had more power over him than the idea that the Church, however described, was the Pope"s House in which the Bishop of Rome ruled, and ought to rule, as house-father. It is interesting to study by what devious paths he arrived at a clear view of what the Church of Christ really is;(435) to notice how shreds of the old opinions which had lain dormant in his mind every now and then start afresh into life; and how, while he had learnt to know the uselessness of many inst.i.tutions of the mediaeval Church, he could not easily divest his mind of the thought that they naturally belonged to a Church Visible. Monastic vows, the celibacy of the clergy, fasting, the hierarchy, the supremacy of the Pope, the power of excommunication with all its dreaded consequences, were all the natural accompaniments of a Visible Church according to mediaeval ideas, and Luther relinquished them with difficulty. From the first, Augustine"s thought of the Church, which consists of the elect, helped him; he found that Huss held the same idea, and he wrote to a friend that "we have been all Hussites without knowing it."(436) But while Luther and all the Reformers held strongly by this conception of Augustine, it was not of very much service in determining the conception of the Visible Church which was the more important practically; and although the definition of the Catholic Church Invisible has found its way into most Protestant Confessions, and has been used by Protestants polemically, it has always remained something of a background, making clearer the conception of the Church in general, but has been of little service in giving clear views of what the Church Visible is. From the very first, however, Luther saw in a certain indefinite way that there was a real connection between the conception of the Visible Church and the proclamation of the Word of G.o.d-a thought which was destined to grow more and more definite till it completely possessed him. As early as October 1518, he could inform Cajetan that the Pope must be under the rule of the Word of G.o.d and not superior to it.(437) His discovery that the communion of the saints (_communio sanctorum_) was not necessarily a hierarchy (_ecclesia praelatorum_),(438) was made soon afterwards. After the Leipzig Disputation his views became clearer, and by 1520 they stood revealed in the three great Reformation treatises.
Luther"s doctrine of the Church is extremely simple. The Church is, as the Creed defines it to be, the _Communion of the Saints_, which has come into existence through the proclamation of the Word of G.o.d heard and received by faith. He simplified this fundamental Christian conception in a wonderful way. The Church rests on the sure and stable foundation of the Word of G.o.d; and this Word of G.o.d is not a weary round of statutes issued blasphemously by the Bishops of Rome in G.o.d"s name. It is not the invitations of a priesthood to come and share mysterious and indefinite powers of salvation given to them in their command over the sacraments. It is not a lengthy doctrinal system constructed out of detached texts of Holy Scripture by the application of a fourfold sense used under the guidance of a dogmatic tradition or a rule of faith. It is the substance of the Scriptures. It is the "gospel according to a pure understanding."
It is the "promises of G.o.d"; "the testimony of Jesus, Who is the Saviour of souls"; it is the "consolations offered in Christ." It is, as Calvin said, "the spiritual gate whereby we enter into G.o.d"s heavenly kingdom"; the "mirror in which faith beholds G.o.d." It is, according to the Westminster Confession, the sum of G.o.d"s commands, threatenings, promises, and, above all, the offer of Christ Jesus. All these things are apprehended by faith. The Church comes into existence by faith responding to the proclamation of the Word of G.o.d. This is the sure and stable thing upon which the Church of Christ is founded.
The Church of Christ, therefore, is a body of which the Spirit of Jesus is the soul. It is a company of Christlike men and women, whom the Holy Spirit has called, enlightened, and sanctified through the preaching of the word; who are encouraged to look forward to a glorious future prepared for the people of G.o.d; and who, meanwhile, manifest their faith in all manner of loving services done to their fellow-believers.
The Church is therefore in some sense invisible. Its secret is its hidden fellowship with Jesus. Its roots penetrate the unseen, and draw from thence the nourishment needed to sustain its life. But it is a visible society, and can be seen wherever the Word of G.o.d is faithfully proclaimed, and wherever faith is manifested in testimony and in bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit.