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Luther’s words, quoted above, where he says that Christ fulfilled the law for us, He made His righteousness ours and our sins His (see above, p. 95 f.), show that he applied in the fullest manner the theory of imputation to justification. Man remains a sinner, but the sin is not imputed to him, he is accounted righteous by the imputing to him of what is quite alien to him, viz. the righteousness of Christ. Thus he is at one and the same time the friend and the enemy of God.[539]

The verb “to justify” as used in Holy Scripture the author of the Commentary on Romans simply takes to mean “to account as righteous,” or “to declare righteous.” Thus he says: “The doers of the law (according to Rom. ii. 13) are justified, i.e. they are accounted righteous. In Psalm cxlii. we read: ‘In Thy sight no man living shall be justified,’ i.e. be accounted righteous.... The Pharisee in the Temple wished to ‘justify himself’ (Luke x. 29), i.e. to declare his justification.”[540]

“Whoever seeks peace in his righteousness, seeks it in the flesh.” “Christ only is righteousness and truth, and in Him all is given us in order that by Him we may be righteous and true and escape eternal damnation.”[541] “This justification takes place (according to Paul) outside of works of the law, i.e. without works which are outside of faith and grace, that is, which come from the law, which forces by fear and attracts by temporal promises. The Apostle calls those only works of faith which proceed from the spirit of freedom through the love of God, and these can only be done by the man who is justified by faith. The works of the law however do not help towards justification, but are rather a hindrance because they prevent a man from looking upon himself as unrighteous and in need of justification.”[542]

“Christ, according to the Apostle, has become our righteousness (1 Cor. i. 30), i.e. all the good that we possess is exterior, it is Christ’s. It is only in us by faith and hope in Him.” “Our fulness and our righteousness is outside of us, within we are empty and poor.... The pious know that sin alone dwells in them, but that this is covered over and not imputed on account of Christ.... The beauty of Christ conceals our hideousness.”[543]

“There is in this system,” says Denifle, in his description of it, “no question of the expulsion of sin. The sinner ... casts himself in his sinful condition on Christ without any means of his own, he hides himself under the wings of the hen and comforts himself with the idea: Christ has done everything in place of me, all my works would be merely sin ... Luther did not perceive what a grievous wrong he was doing to God by this theory. It entirely suppresses the inward grace of God which raises a man up again, penetrates to the depths of his soul and purifies and fills it with supernatural strength. The organic process of justification thus shrinks into a purely mechanical shifting of the scenery.” To this Denifle opposes the statement of Holy Scripture: “That man by a living faith is implanted in Christ as the sapling is grafted on to the olive tree, or the branch on the vine, so that there must be an interior change, an ennobling, and thus a new life.”[544]

Luther says, “we are outwardly righteous because we are justified, not by our works, but only by the reputation of God; but His reputation is not inwardly within us, and is not within our power.” “Solum Deo reputante sumus iusti, ergo non nobis viventibus vel operantibus; quare intrinsece et ex nobis impii semper.”[545]

The connection between “reputation” as above and Occam’s theory of acceptation is unmistakable.

The nominalistic views of God and of His arbitrary acceptation were the form in which Luther’s ideas were moulded. The general structure of his thoughts was derived from what he had retained of the Nominalism of Occam.[546] On the principal point, however, Luther diverges from the theology of the school of Occam by not admitting in any way the saving grace which the latter teaches. There is with him no such thing as an infused virtue of righteousness.[547] Luther in his doctrine on virtue and vice had already suppressed them as “qualities,” i.e. as objective realities; still more so does he deny that the grace which makes us righteous is in any sense a real “qualitas,” or “habitus”; in fact, he leaves no actual justifying grace whatever actually inherent in man, but merely sees in God a gracious willingness not to regard us as sinners, and to lend us His all-powerful assistance for the struggle against sin (concupiscence and actual sin).

Thus the outlines of the strongest assertions which he makes later as to the imputing of the righteousness of Christ are already apparent in his interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans. Christ alone has assumed the place of what the Catholic calls saving grace. He already teaches what he was to sum up later in the short formula: “Christ Himself is my quality and my formal righteousness,” or, again, what he was to say to Melanchthon in 1536: “Born of God and at the same time a sinner; this is a contradiction; but in the things of God we must not hearken to reason.”[548] His Commentary on Romans prepares us for his later assertions: “The gospel is a teaching having no connection whatever with reason, whereas the teaching of the law can be understood by reason ... reason cannot grasp an extraneous righteousness and, even in the saints, this belief is not sufficiently strong.”[549] “The enduring sin is admitted by God as non-existent; one and the same act may be accepted before God and not accepted, be good and not good.” “Whoever terms this mere cavilling (‘cavillatio’) is desirous of measuring the Divine by purblind human reason and understands nothing of Holy Scripture.”[550]

How then are we to obtain from God the imputation of the righteousness of Christ? There is surely some condition to be supplied by man which may allow it to be conferred, for it cannot rule blindly and unconsciously. Or are we never certain of this imputation? Luther’s answer is very pessimistic: Man never knows that it has been bestowed upon him. He can only hope, by sinking himself in his own nothingness (“humilitas”), to placate God and obtain this imputation.

Thus the author of the Commentary on Romans is still very far from that absolute assurance of salvation by faith which he was subsequently to advocate.[551]

He insists so much on the uncertainty of salvation that he blames Catholic theologians severely for the assurance and confidence which their teaching induces in man, and refuses to admit any of the customary signs which moralists and ascetics look upon as conclusive testimony of a soul being in a state of grace.

The advantage he perceives in his new ideas is precisely that they keep man ever in a state of fear (“semper pavidus”).[552] That, as Luther expressly says, “we can never know whether we are justified and whether we believe, is owing to the fact that it is hidden from us whether we live in every word of God.”[553] When dealing with a passage, which he makes use of later in quite a different sense (Rom. iii. 22, “the justice of God by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all”), he says: “We must fear and tremble (‘timent et pavent’) lest we please not God; we must be in fear and despair (‘pavor et desperatio’), for such is God’s own work in us; if this fear does not take the place of the customary signs, then there is no hope possible; and, in so far, fear alone is a good sign.”[554] “Our life is in death [here speaks the mystic], our salvation in destruction, our kingdom in banishment, our heaven in hell.”[555] “Away with all trust in righteousness.” Arise and “destroy all presumption in wholesome despair.”

On this road of painful despair Luther fancies he discovers the only really “good sign” of salvation, so far as any sign at all can be said to exist: “On account of the confession of their sins God accounts the saints as righteous.”[556]

“Whoever renounces everything, even himself, is ready to become nothing (volens it in nihilum), to go to death and to damnation, whoever voluntarily confesses and is persuaded that he deserves nothing good, such a one has done enough in God’s sight and is righteous. We must, believing in the word of the cross, die to ourselves and to everything; then we shall live for God alone.” “The saints have their sins ever before them, they beg for righteousness through the mercy of God and, for that very reason, they are always accounted righteous by God; in truth they are sinners, though righteous by imputation; unconsciously righteous and consciously unrighteous, sinners in deed but righteous in hope.” “God’s anger is great and wonderful; He accounts them at the same time righteous and unrighteous, removing sin and not removing it.”[557] Here he exclaims pathetically: “God is wonderful in His saints (Ps. lxvii. 36), who are at the same time righteous and unrighteous.” Of the “self-righteous” he immediately adds ironically: Wonderful is God in the hypocrites, “who are at the same time unrighteous and righteous!” Without any suspicion of paradox, he concludes: “It is certain that God’s elect will be saved, but no one is certain that he is chosen.”

Luther repeatedly represents the feeling of despair (under the name of “humilitas”) as not merely a means of recognising the imputation of God and therewith one’s salvation, but even as in itself the only means which can lead to salvation. He praises “humility” in mystical language as something man must struggle to attain and as the ideal of the devout. It occupies almost the same place in his mind as the “sola fides” at a later date.

That “humility” is to him the actual factor which obtains the imputation of the merits of Christ and thus makes the soul righteous and wins for it eternal salvation, is apparent not only from the above, but also from the following utterances: “When we are convinced that we are unrighteous and without the fear of God, when, thus humbled, we acknowledge ourselves to be godless and foolish, then we deserve to be justified by Him.”[558] The fear of God works humility, but humility makes us fit for all [salvation]; we must merely resign ourselves to the admission that “there is nothing so righteous that it is not unrighteous, nothing so true that it is not a lie, nothing so pure that it is not filthy and profane before God.”[559] “Let us be sinners in humility and only desire to be justified by the mercy of God.” He alone who acknowledges his entire unrighteousness, who fears and beseeches, he alone, “as an abiding sinner,” opens for himself the door to salvation.[560]

We must believe everything that is of Christ, he says, and only he does this who humbly bewails his own utter unrighteousness.[561] The mystic star of “humility” which has arisen to him he even describes as the “vera fides,” and makes the following inference: “As this is so, we must humble ourselves beyond bounds.” “When we have humbled ourselves wholly before God, then we have fulfilled righteousness, wholly and entirely (‘totam perfectamque iustitiam’); for what else does all Scripture teach but humility?”[562]

Luther ascribes to “humility” all that he later ascribes to faith; “all Scripture,” which now teaches humility, will later teach that faith is the only power which saves. In that very Epistle to the Romans, which at a later date was to be the bulwark of his “sola fides,” he can as yet, in 1515 and 1516, find only “sola humilitas.” His frequent exhortations to self-annihilation and despair of one’s own efforts, exhortations taking the form of fulsome praise of one particular kind of humility, must be traced back to mystical influence and to his irritation against the “proud self-righteous.”

It is true that Luther had, from the very beginning of his exposition, as the editor of the Commentary justly points out, “taken his stand against the scholastic [rather the Church’s] doctrine of salvation; it is apparent at the very outset of the lectures that the separation has already taken place.” It could not be otherwise, as at the commencement of the Commentary he already denies the power of man to do what is good. Ficker also says with truth: “Luther again and again comes back to his oldest and deepest torment, viz. the struggle against free will and man’s individual powers”;[563] his study of St. Paul confirms his views, which now take clearer shape, until finally “he incontinently identifies his opponents with the Pelagians.”[564]

With regard to Luther’s tenets on faith in the matter of salvation he has so far not departed in any essential from the accepted olden doctrine that faith is the commencement, root and foundation of salvation.