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Two elements were still wanting to Luther’s teaching—the very two which, at a later date and till the end of his life, he regarded as the corner-stone of the truth which he had discovered—viz. Faith alone as the means of justification, and the assurance of Divine favour, which was its outcome. Both these elements are most closely connected, and go to make up the Lutheran doctrine of the appropriation of salvation, or personal certainty of faith. In accordance therewith justifying faith includes not only a belief in Christ as the Saviour; I must not merely believe that He will save and sanctify me if I turn to Him with humility and confidence—this the Church had ever taught—but I must also have entire faith in my justification, and rest assured, that without any work whatsoever on my part and solely by means of such a faith, all the demands made upon me are fulfilled, the merits of Christ appropriated, and my remaining sins not imputed to me; such is personal assurance of salvation by faith alone.

The teaching of the Catholic Church, we may remind our readers, never recognised in its exhortation to faith and confidence in God, the existence of this “faith alone” which justifies without further ado, nor did it require that of necessity there must be a special faith in one’s state of salvation. In place of faith alone the Church taught what the Council of Trent thus sums up: “We are said to be justified by faith because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification, without which it is impossible to please God and reach the blessed company of His children.”[956]

And instead of setting up a special faith in our own state of salvation, her teaching, as expressed by the same Council, had ever been that “no devout person may doubt the mercy of God, the merit of Christ and the power and efficacy of the sacraments,” though, on the other hand, “no one may boast with certainty of the remission of his sins”; “nor may it be said that those who are truly justified must convince themselves beyond all doubt that they are justified and that no one is absolved from sin and justified unless he believe with certainty that he has been so absolved and justified, as though absolution and justification were accomplished by this faith alone”; “but rather everyone, bearing in mind his own weakness and indisposition, may well be anxious and afraid for his salvation, as no one can know, with the certainty of faith which excludes all error, that he has attained to the grace of God.”[957]

Such was the doctrine which Luther had learnt in his early days as a monk; it animated his youthful zeal for the religious life and did not interfere with his contented and happy frame of mind, as expressed in the letter of invitation to his first Mass and his conversations with Usingen.[958] The writings of St. Bernard had taught him, that in the religious life this happiness is the portion of all those who seek God. Luther knew that thousands like himself rejoiced from their hearts in the “anointed cross” of the service of God, as Bernard calls it. On the by-path he chose to follow he lost, however, his happiness and increased his doubts and inward unrest.

Luther, after forsaking the Catholic standpoint, had hitherto been tormented by anxiety as to how we can be assured of the Grace of God. Having left the secure footing of the Church’s views on nature, grace and predestination, he was now in search of a certainty even more absolute. His Commentary on Romans had concluded with the anxious question: “Who will give me the assurance that I am pleasing God by my works?” As yet he can give no other answer than that, “we must call upon God’s grace with fear and trembling and seek to render Him gracious to us by humility and self-annihilation, because all depends upon His arbitrary Will (above, p. 217 ff.). In these lectures, in the course of his gloomy and abstruse treatment of predestination, he had instructed his hearers how they must be resigned to this uncertainty concerning eternity (p. 236 ff.).

In the act of resignation he perceived various signs of predestination. He says in the Commentary on Romans: “There are three degrees in the signs of predestination. Some are content with God’s Will, but are confident they are among the elect and do not wish to be damned. Others, who stand on a higher level, are resigned and contented with God’s Will, or at least wish to be so, even though God should not choose to save them but to place them amongst the lost. The third, i.e. the last and highest degree, is to be resigned in very deed to hell if such be the Will of God, which is perhaps the case with many at the hour of death. In this way we become altogether purified from self-will and the wisdom of the flesh.”[959]

“Terrible pride prevails among the hypocrites and men of the law, who, because they believe in Christ, think themselves already saved and sufficiently righteous,” these claim to attain to grace and the Divine Sonship “by faith alone” (“ex fide tantum”), “as though we were saved by Christ without the performance of any works or acts of our own” (“sic ut ipsi nihil operentur, nihil exhibeant de fide”). Such men possess too much faith, or rather none at all.[960]

While he was thus wavering between reminiscences of the Catholic teaching and his own pseudo-mystical ideas on justification and imputation, his mind must indeed have been in a state of incessant agitation, so that uneasiness and fear became his natural element. “As we are unable to keep God’s commandments and are therefore always unrighteous, there remains nothing for us but to be in constant fear of the Judgment (‘ut iudicium semper timeamus’), and to pray for pardon, or rather for the non-imputing of our unrighteousness.” “We are to rejoice, according to the Psalmist (ii. 11), before God on account of His Mercy, but with trembling on account of the sin which deserves His Judgment.”[961]

In 1525 he wrote: To leave man no free will for what is good and to make him altogether dependent on God’s predestination “seems, it is true, cruel and intolerable; countless of the greatest minds of previous ages have taken offence at this. And who, indeed, is there whom the idea does not offend? I myself have more than once been greatly scandalised at it and plunged into an abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. But then I learned how wholesome despair is and how close it lies to grace.”[962]

This he “learned,” or thought he learned, through his doctrine of assurance of salvation through faith.

“The forgiveness offered us by God in His Word” (if we may here anticipate his later teaching), became for him a definite object of sanctifying and saving faith, to the extent that faith came to be identical in his eyes with fiducia.

Faith is, as he says, “a real heartfelt confidence in Christ.”[963] “He strongly emphasises at the same time the relation between what is here proposed for belief and the individual believer; I believe that God is gracious to me and forgives me. That, says Luther [later], makes the Article of the Forgiveness of Sins particularly difficult, for though the other Articles of Faith may be more difficult if once we begin to speak of them and try to understand them, yet in the Article of the Forgiveness of Sins what presents the greatest difficulty is, that ‘each one must accept this for himself in particular.’ This was hard to a man because he must stand greatly in awe of the anger of God and His Judgment; but when the Article of the Forgiveness of Sins comes home to us and we really experience its meaning, then the other Articles concerning God, the Creator, the Son of God, etc., ‘also come home to us and enter into our experience.’ And, according to Luther, true faith consists in this, that I believe and am assured that God is my God because He speaks to me and forgives my sins.”[964] While taking the acceptance of the whole of revelation for granted, he magnifies fiducial faith to such an extent, that many Protestant theologians have come to consider a trusting faith in Christ to be his only essential requirement, in fact to imagine that in this alone faith consists; claiming to be merely following Luther, they deny that the acceptance of individual points of faith, i.e. Articles of Faith, can be a necessary condition for salvation.

Fiducial faith, with its assurance of salvation was the way which Luther discovered out of all his troubles about two years after the termination of his Commentary on Romans, in 1518, or the beginning of 1519. This discovery is a remarkable event, which stands alone, and with which we must concern ourselves after first examining what led up to it. From the place where it was made, viz. the tower belonging to the monastery, it might be styled the Tower Experience.

The incident remained imbedded in Luther’s mind till his old age; he frequently alludes to it, and though in some of its details his memory did not serve him aright and his apprehension of it may have been somewhat modified by party prejudice, yet the main elements of the story appear to be historically quite credible. He fixes not merely the place, but also the time of the incident, namely, the commencement of his second course of lectures on the Psalms (1518-19), i.e. two matters which ever serve as the most reliable framework for the picture of an event long past. From what he relates between 1532 and 1545, one thing is directly certain regarding this purely spiritual, and for that reason rather less tangible incident, viz. that it was an experience arrived at only after the acutest mental anguish and which Luther ever after regarded as a special illumination vouchsafed to him by God. It is connected with Romans i. 17: “For the justice of God is revealed therein [in the Gospel] from faith unto faith as it is written [Hab. ii. 4]: ‘The just man liveth by faith.’”

What is indirectly no less certain, from the unanimity of the testimonies, and from the course of his development as vouched for by his writings, is that the discovery in question was really that of the assurance of salvation.

The various opinions which have been expressed on the account of the event given by Luther (see below, p. 388 ff.) in 1545, and the numerous attempts which have been made to fix a date for the same, render it necessary to trace chronologically the development of the doctrine of faith and salvation in Luther’s mind till the year 1519. We shall see that his statement as to the time when the event took place (1518-19) not only presents no difficulty, but that such a termination to his experiences was naturally to be expected.

Prior to 1518-19 the absolute assurance of salvation which appears afterwards is nowhere distinctly expressed in Luther’s doctrine on faith and salvation.

Passages to the contrary, which have been quoted from the imprinted lectures on Hebrews delivered previous to the autumn of 1517, need not be interpreted in the sense of fiducial faith and assurance of salvation. They refer rather indistinctly to the effects of faith without the works which Luther had now come to detest, and attack “self-righteousness,” as in the Commentary on Romans (“sola fides ... quæ non nititur operibus illis [orationibus et præparatoriis”]). They only hint vaguely at the road he will follow later.[965]

Again, in the Indulgence theses of October 31, 1517, directed against Tetzel, the assurance of salvation is not expressed, and we find a recommendation “to trust rather to enter heaven by much tribulation than by security and peace.” In place of pax, pax! he, as a mystic, would prefer to exhort the people with the cry: crux, crux! (thesis 93).

Neither do the theses of the Heidelberg Disputation in April, 1518, contain the assurance of salvation, although theses 25-8 touch upon justification and, as against the law, extol the great effects of the faith which Christ works in us.[966]

On the other hand, the Resolutions to the Indulgence theses which appeared shortly after (1518) treat to a certain extent of the subject and attempt to give a solution.[967] There we read: “In the confusion [in the mind of the man who is perturbed by thoughts of sin and rejection] God works a strange work in order to accomplish His work”; grace is infused (“infunditur gratia”), while man still fancies he “is about to be damned.” In order to rid himself of his “despair,” he goes to Confession “so that the priest may declare him absolved and give peace to his conscience.” “The man who is to be absolved must take great care lest he doubt the remission of his sins.” Faith in Christ’s words to Peter: “Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth,” etc., does all. The whole passage, which describes justification in the fanciful and paradoxical language of the mystic, is worth quoting: “When God begins to justify a man, He first damns him; He is about to build, but first He pulls down, to heal but first He deals wounds, to vivify but first He condemns to death. He crushes a man, humbles him by the knowledge of himself and his sins and makes him tremble, so that, under a sense of his misery, he cries out [with Holy Scripture] ‘there is no peace for my bones because of my sins, there is no health in my flesh because of Thy wrath. For the mountains melt away before the face of God, He sends out His arrows, He troubles us with His anger and with the breath of His wrath. The sinner sinks down into hell and shame covers his face. David frequently experienced this confusion and tribulation and describes it with sighs in several of the Psalms. Salvation has its origin in this confusion, because ‘the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.’” The ways of God are in a tempest and a whirlwind, according to Nahum (i. 3); man’s destruction is to Him “the most pleasing sacrifice,” the animal sacrificed is torn in pieces, the hide is stripped off, and it is slaughtered. Luther in three passages from the Prophets, describes the “infusion of grace,” which man is apt to mistake for the outpouring of the Divine wrath upon him.

Because the man who is justified is still “without peace and consolation,” not trusting his own judgment, he begs the priest for comfort in Confession. “He is led to cling to the judgment of another not because he is a spiritual superior, or because he possesses any power, but on account of the words of Christ Who cannot lie: ‘Whatsoever thou shalt loose,’ etc. Faith in these words has worked peace of conscience while the priest looses by virtue of the same.”[968] “Christ is our peace. Without faith in His word, no one will ever be at peace even after more than a thousand absolutions from the Pope. Thanks be to God for this sweet power of the priest.”

Such words of gratitude do not disguise the fact, that the sacrament of penance is stripped of its meaning by the assurance, that “the remission of guilt takes place by the infusion of grace before the priest has given absolution.”

Above all it is plain we have not yet here that assurance of salvation, as Luther held it at a later date:

“Whoever seeks peace in another way [than through the absolution of the priest],” he says in the same passage, “say, by his own inward experience, appears to be tempting God, and not seeking peace by faith.” With this denial of the validity of personal inward experience (“experientia intus”) he brushes aside an element which, scarcely a year later, he represents as essential. He says still more definitely: “The remission of guilt is not assured to us, as a general rule, except by the sentence of the priest, and not even by him unless we believe Christ’s promise with regard to loosing. But so long as we are not certain of the remission it is no remission.” “As the infusion of grace is hidden under the appearance of anger, man is still more uncertain of grace when it is present than when it is absent.”[969]

That Luther could rest satisfied with so shadowy and insufficient a conception can only be attributed to his state of mind at the time.

He lays great stress on absolution in the Disputation of the year 1518 “For the calming of troubled consciences” (above, p. 319).[970] Here it is expressly stated, that the strongest assurance regarding the state of grace is to be derived from the priest’s absolution and the accompanying faith of the penitent Christian: “Whoever is absolved by the power of the keys must rather die and renounce all creatures than doubt of his absolution” (thesis 16). “Those who declare the remission of sins to be doubtful on account of the uncertainty of contrition, err to the point of denying the faith” (13), for “the forgiveness of sins is based much more upon faith in the word of Christ: ‘Whatsoever thou shalt loose,’ etc.” (9). “The power of the keys operates a sure and infallible work by the word and the command of Christ, when used in earnest.” (24). The concluding words of the Disputation already quoted elsewhere accordingly exhort to boundless confidence, while at the same time alluding significantly to the text which has risen on Luther’s horizon, though as yet he understands it only imperfectly: “The just man liveth by faith.”

His state of uncertainty with regard to the appropriation of salvation caused Luther great disquietude. Other circumstances, particularly his feverish excitement at the outset of his public struggle, also contributed towards his inward unrest. The morbid fear of which he had never rid himself was also powerfully stirred.

The supreme degree of this painful torment of soul may be gathered from the description he gives in the Resolutions.

In this work, which appeared in August, 1518, in dealing with the 15th Indulgence thesis, he tries to prove that the punishment of Purgatory may be made up merely by fear and terror. Many of those living even now, he says, had experienced how high the flood of such interior sufferings can rise and how close they bring a man to despair. He would not quarrel with any who did not believe this, but those who had been through such trials were in a position to speak of them. Tauler treated of such pains in his German sermons and brought forward some examples; of course, to the Scholastics Tauler was unknown; they did not appreciate him, but he had found more real theology in this theologian who wrote in German than “among the whole of the Scholastics of all the universities.” He then proceeds, beginning with the very formula with which Paul introduces the account of his raptures: “I know a man” (Novi hominem), to describe the mystical interior sufferings which he had “frequently” experienced; though they had never persisted long, they were so “hellish,” that whoever had not undergone them himself was quite unable to speak of them. Had this consuming fire lasted only for the tenth part of an hour all a man’s bones were reduced to ashes.

“God then appears to be horribly angered and with Him all creation. There is no possibility of flight, no comfort whether within or without, only a hollow accusing voice. The soul laments, according to the words of Scripture: ‘Lord I am cast away from Thy face,’ she dares not even say: ‘Chastise me not in Thy wrath.’ At this moment—inexplicable as it is—the soul is unable even to believe in its possible liberation, but only feels that the punishment is not at an end. It appears everlasting and unceasing. The soul finds nothing in its whole being but a bare longing for help, nothing but terrible sighing, though it knows not whence to implore assistance. Thus the soul, like Christ, is completely extenuated, all its bones are numbered, there is not a tissue in it which is not penetrated with the excruciating bitterness, with flight, with mournful anxiety and pain, and all for ever and ever. When a ball passes over a board every point of the line along which it travels bears the whole weight of the ball, though it does not receive the ball into itself. So, too, the eternal flood of pain passes over the soul and causes it to taste the whole endless weight of eternal pain in every part, but the pain is not permanently received into the soul, it does not last, but passes.”[971]

The above so strange and fantastic description incorporated in a Latin work written for the learned, in the interests of Luther’s psychology, calls for further consideration.

Particular stress must here be laid on the false mysticism in which Luther was then entangled, and his free use of the fanciful language of certain of the mystics. Luther’s states had, however, nothing in common with those described in somewhat similar words by the healthier mystics, viz. the sore trial of the Mount of Olives through which the soul passes owing to the complete withdrawal of consolation. He, however, imagines he sees himself portrayed not only in such descriptions of the mystics, but also in mystical passages in the Psalms over which, at this time of change, he was fond of brooding. David’s cries ring in his ears; his experience of the hell in which the soul must dwell, of the life which draws nigh to hell, of the bones which are banished to the gate of hell, of the sinking into a dark sea, into the bowels of the earth under the heaped-up weight of endless misery.

It must also be borne in mind that the Monk, with his pseudo-mystical ideas, cherished a gloomy conception of God, and held the terrible doctrine of the absolute predestination of the damned. Having wandered away from the Catholic teaching, with his views on man’s lack of free will, and the theory of arbitrary imputation by God, he found no answer in his troubled conscience to the question which weighed him down, namely, how to arrive at the assurance of a Gracious God. Confusion and interior pangs of conscience for a while gained the upper hand.

Lastly, his peculiar morbid tendency to fear must also be taken into account, for it afforded an opportunity to the Tempter to add to his confusion by raising difficulties regarding the deficiencies of his new, self-chosen theology.

Adolph Hausrath in his Life of Luther even speaks of periodical mental disturbances from which he suffered during the time he was a monk; the disturbing power inherent in the monastic practices, so he says, took possession of his sensitive nature with its strong feelings; Luther only escaped the danger of going mad by bravely bursting the fetters of the monastic Rule and the Popish Faith. In the strong inward combats which Luther endured at a later date Hausrath recognises a return of this affliction. In his second edition he has toned down this view of Luther’s periodical attacks of mental illness out of regard for the objections which had, not without reason, been urged against his statement. In Luther’s case, however, there is no reason for assuming any “monkish mental disease,” nor can he be proved to have suffered from any disturbance whatever of his mental functions at any time of his life.[972] But if we take it that the night of the soul which he passed through, whether in the monastery or during his later struggle, had at its basis a peculiar physico-psychic disposition revealing a want of normal inward stability, then we can perhaps easily explain some other strange and at first blush inexplicable phenomena which his case presents.

At any rate, the fundamental new dogma of the assurance of salvation was not the product of a clear, quiet, calm atmosphere of soul. It was born amidst unbearable inward mental confusion, and was a frantic attempt at self-pacification on the part of the Wittenberg Doctor whose active but unstable mind had already left the true course.

It is of interest and helps us to reach a right understanding of the Tower Experience, to follow the change of view regarding assurance of salvation which is apparent in Luther’s statements and writings in the latter months of 1518 and beginning of 1519.

At the time when, in October, 1518, Luther, a prey to other anxieties, stood before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, he was already making great strides towards the new and consoling dogma of faith alone, moved thereto by indignation at the censure which one of his propositions had called forth. He says to Cardinal Cajetan in his explanation of the second of the assertions which he was required to withdraw, that it was incorrect to speak of it as “a new and false theology that no one can be justified except by faith, and that it is necessary to hold it as certain in faith that one is justified, and not in any way to doubt the obtaining of grace, because whoever doubts or is uncertain is no longer justified, but is rejecting grace.”[973]

He attempts to prove this first as regards Confession. The principal thing is to believe the words of Christ: “Whatsoever thou shalt loose,” etc., i.e. by applying the words to oneself; “under pain of eternal damnation and to avoid committing a sin of unbelief,” it is necessary to believe this; this faith is the only disposition for the sacrament and no work whatever serves as a preparation.[974] No one could receive grace who doubted of its reception; but, if we believed, then we received everything in the sacrament. The belief that we receive a personal remission of sin is, according to St. Bernard, the testimony of the Holy Ghost in our heart; this, according to the same Father, is expressed in Romans iii. 28: “We hold that a man is justified by Faith without the works of the law.” Let Cardinal Cajetan, he says finally—after quoting a great number of biblical passages having no bearing on the matter in hand—show him how he is to understand in any other way all these texts from the Divine utterances.

What is remarkable is, however, that, during his trial at Augsburg, he allows Confession and Absolution to recede further into the background than in the Resolutions; he no longer speaks of the above-mentioned magical production of the personal assurance of salvation, by the formula of absolution, as by the testimony of another; he now holds the absolute certainty of justification to be present by faith even before this, whenever a man is willing to submit himself, according to his instructions, to the Sacrament of Penance.[975] Thus faith alone and the assurance of salvation were already present. The principal difficulty, however, as he admits below (p. 389 f.), still troubled his mind. This was the Justice of God, which haunted his conscience, though it did not hinder his going forward.

The appeal he made to a General Council in November and his “conjecture” of December, 1518, that the Pope might be Antichrist,[976] were momentous indications that he was cutting himself adrift from the authority of the Church. At the same time he stripped the ideas he had hitherto held on faith of everything that reminded him of the traditional teaching of the Church; he transformed the faith necessary for justification into a mere act of confidence in the merits of Christ without any reference to the Sacraments, to the other truths of faith, or to the Church, who is the guardian and mouthpiece of faith. To lay hold upon the righteousness of Christ with a sure trust is made to suffice for justification and for the fullest assurance of salvation, without any of the preliminaries and conditions on which he had formerly insisted. This act, too, God alone operates in man, who himself is devoid of all free will. Although he incidentally clothes the act of confidence with love, and even hints at the good works a man may have performed previous to this act, also requiring good resolutions for the future, yet these are only additions which are really inconsistent with his idea. Henceforward fiducial faith appears to him as really an isolated fact, an act of confidence inspired by God merely from His good pleasure and with no regard for any work. A vast change of far-reaching consequence had taken place in Luther’s conception of the appropriation of the iustitia Dei, he had now reached an interpretation of the words iustus ex fide vivit and of the whole meaning of the gospel, upon which, notwithstanding the independence of his treatment of doctrine, he had never hitherto ventured.

We may well ask what event, what development, had led up to this.

Salvation by faith alone and the absolute assurance of one’s state of grace, were taught by Luther quite openly in the second course of lectures on the Psalms, which he had commenced in 1518 (perhaps at the end of the year), and the beginning of which he published in 1519 with a preface addressed to the Elector Frederick, dated March 27, 1519 (see above, p. 285). This was the “Operationes in Psalmos,” upon the publication of which he was engaged until 1521, and which was finally left unfinished.

This work he, even at a later date, described as an entirely true exposition of his actual teaching on justification.[977]

Other lectures, delivered at an earlier period, received no such praise from him; on the contrary, he never took the trouble of having them printed, and does not even mention them. Although the Commentary on Romans, which we have already studied, had advanced a considerable distance along the new lines of thought, nevertheless, at a later date its tone appeared too Catholic to please him; it did not contain the new creed “Credo me esse salvum.” The same is true of the earlier course on the Psalms, of the lectures on Galatians, on Hebrews and on the Epistle to Titus. Luther, as a rule, was very ready to have his writings printed, but these, after he had entered upon the second stage of his development, he plainly looked upon as unripe and incomplete.

Simultaneously with the printing of the new Commentary on the Psalms he commenced that of another Commentary, also consisting of lectures. This is the shorter of the two works on Galatians which he has left us in print (above, p. 306 f.). This Commentary on Galatians, together with the “Operationes in Psalmos” is the earliest witness to his new and definitive conception of sola fides as an entire confidence in one’s justification.

To these must be added the almost contemporary “Sermo de triplici iustitia” delivered towards the end of 1518, and the “Sermo de duplici iustitia” dating from the commencement of 1519.

The righteousness of Christ, he says in the sermon on the threefold righteousness[978]—without any reference to the Sacraments, with the exception of Baptism, or to the Church’s means of grace—“is our whole being” and “becomes by faith our righteousness, according to Romans i.: ‘The just man liveth by faith’”; “Whoever has this shall not be damned, even though he commit sin,”[979] this being proved by two passages from the Psalms; “by this man becomes lord of all things.” There is no such thing as merit. “Every Christian must beware of ever doubting as to whether his works are pleasing to God; whoever doubts this, sins, loses all his works and labours in vain.... He is not acting from faith or in faith.” “As you believe in Christ so too you must believe that your works are well pleasing to God because they are of faith [i.e. done in a state of grace].”

In the sermon on the twofold righteousness one of the first quotations from the Bible on which the same idea is based and yet more strongly expressed is again Romans i. 17: “The justice of God is revealed in the gospel,” etc.[980] This passage assumes a more prominent position in his mind. He pauses in his explanation of Psalm xxx. 1: “In iustitia tua libera me”; this, he says, signifies “the righteousness of Christ which has become ours by faith, grace and the mercy of God.” He finds that this righteousness is frequently referred to in the Psalms as the “work of God, confession, power of God, mercy, truth and justice. These are all names for faith in Christ, or rather names for that righteousness which is in Christ.” It is true that “this alien righteousness which is only infused by grace is never completely infused all at once, but begins, increases and is finally completed by death.” It is displayed by works of faith, especially those for the good of others, where man, “the lord of all things,” makes himself “the servant of all”—words which Luther employs in exactly the same sense shortly afterwards as the foundation of his work: “On the freedom of a Christian man.” Faith, i.e. confidence in our own salvation by Christ, works all this; it imparts a certainty so that we are able to say: “Christ’s life, work, sufferings and death are mine, just as though I had myself lived, worked, suffered and died; so great is the confidence with which you are able to glory in Christ.”[981]

His teaching, even then, was against the law. According to him, says Loofs, “the law, even as ‘explained’ in the New Testament, which renders assurance of salvation possible only after the fulfilment of demands impossible to the natural man, is, it is true, necessary as a negative preparation for faith, though not to be regarded as the expression of the relationship desired by God between Himself and man. It is the gospel which teaches us the position which God wishes us to occupy with regard to Himself; according to its teaching we must, before we do anything for our salvation, be certain by faith of God’s forgiving grace, in order to be born again by such a faith and become capable of fulfilling the Will of God.”[982] The Protestant theologian who writes thus in his History of Dogma also points out that according to Luther, the law was merely revealed by God as an educational measure and as the foundation of a scale of rewards, whereas the gospel represents the justice of God in the order of grace (Rom. i. 17). “In this conception of the antagonism between the law and the gospel,” says Loofs, “and in the possibility and necessity of an assurance of salvation which it presupposes lies the fundamental difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic view of Christianity.”[983]

At these fundamental views regarding the appropriation of salvation, or righteousness by faith, Luther had accordingly already arrived in 1518-19 when engaged on his second exposition of the Psalms.