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In Luther’s mind the idea of that God does all, stands side by side with the traditional view of the Church, that man must prepare himself; he has, indeed, a curious knack of remaining quite unconscious of his inconsistencies. On the one hand, according to what he says, we must seek for justification by the exertion of the fullest human effort, and this labour must be so strenuous as to render God propitious to us (“Deum sibi propitium faciunt”).[669] That is, at least, what we are told at the end of the Commentary, but at the beginning we read: “The faith which is to justify must manifest its works, works of the law are not sufficient, it must be ‘a living faith which performs its own works.’”[670] “When James and Paul say that man is justified by works, they are opposing the false opinion that faith without its works is sufficient, whereas such a faith is not faith at all.”[671] According to this, it is plain, that, at that time, the idea of man’s co-operation in the work of salvation by the use of his liberty still hovered in Luther’s mind. But any idea of this kind is elsewhere confronted and peremptorily dismissed by another chain of ideas. How are we to make efforts by our own free will when we do not possess free will for doing what is good? “As though,” he says, “we had free will at our disposal whenever we want! Such an idea of free will can only serve to lull us into a false security.” (“Securi stertimus, freti libero arbitrio quod ad manum habentes, quando volumus, possumus pie intendere.”)[672]

Here he will only admit that man has freedom to pray for the right use of his freedom. But, as a matter of fact, even this liberty which might incite us to prayer, is non-existent. For in respect of anything that is good [whether natural or supernatural, he makes no distinction] we are only like raw metal or a wooden stick. Because God’s grace is the hand which works in us for good and which performs our vital acts within us, while we ourselves are quiescent and absolutely powerless, Luther says in Romans iii.: “I have frequently insisted before upon the fact, that it is impossible for us to have of ourselves the will or the heart to fulfil the law.” Why? “Because the law is spiritual.” Meditation on man’s enslaved condition as the result of concupiscence, he declares in another passage, proves my contention, no less than the terrible truth of predestination.

“Luther felt in himself that belief in the eternal predestination by God [absolute election to grace] was the most powerful support of his experience of the complete inadequacy of human works and the efficacy of grace alone.” The Protestant theologian[673] who says this, to instance Luther’s faith in the action of grace, here quotes from the passages from the Commentary on Romans, according to which God on the one hand bestows His grace only on those He chooses, but on the other hand infallibly saves those He elects to save. “The Spirit,” Luther has it, “supports the latter by His presence in all their weaknesses, so that they prevail in circumstances where they would otherwise despair a thousand times.”[674] It is, however, remarkable that just after this explanation the cry bursts from Luther’s lips: “Where are now the good works, where the freedom of the will?” Here the irresistible “action of grace alone” appears as a direct consequence of Luther’s then views, though he refrains from expressing himself more clearly as to the nature of actual grace.

Thus in his mind are combined two widely divergent ideas, viz. that God does everything in man who is devoid of freedom—and that man must draw nigh to God by prayer and works of faith. It is a strange psychological phenomenon to see how, instead of endeavouring to solve the contradiction and examine the question in the light of calm reason, he gives free play to feeling and imagination, now passionately proving to the infamous Observants that man is absolutely unable to do anything, now insisting on the need of preparation for grace, i.e. unconsciously becoming the defender of the Church’s doctrine of free will and human co-operation. The fact is, he still, to some extent, thinks with the Church. It was no easy task for him to break away from a view, which is so natural to man and so much in accordance with faith, viz. that there must be some preparation on man’s part for justification, in which however, actual grace, which comes to the assistance of his will and becomes part of it, also has its share.

Luther’s peculiar mysticism with its preponderance of feeling was, in part, the cause of his overlooking his task, which was to propound from his professorial chair the teaching of the Church in definite and exact terms—so far as this was possible to him with his insufficient theological training. To this may be added the fact that the wealth of biblical quotations, whether to the point or not, which he is wont to adduce, tends to distract and confuse him as soon as he attempts to draw any clear inferences.

According to Denifle a certain progress is apparent in the Commentary on Romans inasmuch as the first three chapters show Luther’s new doctrines still in an inchoate form. Luther, there, is seeking for something he has not yet fully grasped, and the confusion of his language is a proof that he has not as yet made up his mind. There is, however, one point, according to Denifle, on which he is quite definite, viz. concupiscence, though he does not yet know how to combine it with his other ideas; but, by the end of chapter iii., this doubt has been set aside, he has identified concupiscence with original sin and reached other conclusions besides. Still he avoids the principal question as to how far human co-operation is necessary in the act of justification.[675]

It is difficult to determine exactly this progress owing to Luther’s want of clearness and precision of expression, and to his contradictory treatment of certain capital points. The Commentary on Romans as it proceeds hardly shows any improvement in this respect. With extraordinary elasticity of mind, if we may so speak, the author without the slightest compunction advocates concerning the most profound theological questions, especially grace, ideas which differ from and contradict each other. As at the very commencement we meet some of the most incisive new theses of Lutheranism—the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, the sinfulness of the natural man and his inability to do what is good, and likewise predestination to hell in its most outrageous form—it is natural to infer that Luther had already forsaken the Catholic doctrine on these points at the time he was preparing his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, i.e. about the summer of 1515. His misapprehension of this Epistle must have had its influence on his whole trend, and the elements already at work in his mind helped to decide him to commit to writing in his Commentary his supposed new and important doctrinal discoveries.

We might expect to find in the Commentary the most noticeable progress where he deals with preparation for grace, for this was surely the point on which he was bound to come into conflict with other doctrines. It is, however, hard to tell whether he realised the difficulty. It is true that much less stress is laid upon preparation for justification as the work proceeds, whereas at the commencement the author speaks unhesitatingly of the cultivation of the will which must be undertaken in order to bring down grace. (See above, p. 214.) This, however, might merely be accidental and due to the fact that, in the last chapters, St. Paul is dealing mainly with the virtues of the justified. Towards the end of the Epistle, in connection with what the Apostle says on charity and faith in the righteous, the nature of that “humilitas” which Luther so eulogises as a preliminary and accompaniment of the appropriation of the righteousness of Christ undergoes a change and appears more as faith with charity, or charity with faith. Luther’s manner of speaking thus varies according to the subject with which Paul is dealing.

If we take the middle of the year 1515 as the starting-point of Luther’s new theology, then many of the statements in his Commentary on the Psalms, especially in its latter part, become more significant as precursors of Luther’s errors. The favourable view we expressed above of his work on the Psalms, as regards its agreement with the theology of the Church, was only meant to convey that a Catholic interpretation of the questionable passages was possible; this, however, cannot be said of the theses in the Commentary on Romans which we have just been considering. We now understand why unwillingness to allow any ability in man to do what is good is the point in which Luther’s work on the Psalms goes furthest. There the doctrine of his “profundior theologia” is: “We must account ourselves as nothing, as sinful, liars, as dead in God’s sight; we must not trust in any merits of our own.” There, too, we find paradoxes such as the following: “God is wonderful in His saints, the most beautiful is to Him the most hideous, the most infamous the most excellent; whoever thinks himself upright, with him God is not pleased.... In the recognition of this lie the pith of the Scripture and the kernel of the heavenly grain.”[676] Such expressions are, it is true, not unlike what we sometimes hear from the Church’s theologians and saints, but in the light of the Commentary on Romans they become more important as signs of transition.

We must not forget, in view of the numerous enigmas which the boldness of the Commentary on Romans presents, that it bears merely a semi-public character and was not intended for publication. In this work, destined only for the lecture-room, Luther did not stop to weigh or fine down his words, but gave the reins to his impulse, thus offering us a so much the more interesting picture of his inmost thoughts.

Some important particulars, in which this work differs from other public utterances made by Luther about the same time, are to be explained by the familiarity with which he is speaking to his pupils.

In the sermons on the Ten Commandments, published in 1518 but preached in the two preceding years and consequently intended for general consumption, he speaks differently of concupiscence than in the Commentary. In the sermons he declares that desires so long as they are involuntary are certainly not sinful. He even says to a man who is troubled on account of his involuntary temptations against purity: “No, no, you have not lost your chastity by such thoughts; on the contrary, you have never been more chaste if you are only sure they came to you against your will.... It is a true sign of a lively sense of chastity when a man feels displeasure, and it need not even be absolute displeasure, otherwise there would be no attraction; he is in an uncertain state, now willing, now unwilling.... In the struggle for chastity the little bark is tossed hither and thither on the waters, while [according to the gospel] Christ is asleep within. Rouse Christ so that He may command the sea, i.e. the flesh, and the wind, i.e. the devil.”[677] In the public Indulgence theses of 1517, he is also careful not to express his erroneous views on grace and the nature of man. It is characteristic of him how he changes even the form of expression when repeating an assertion which is also made in the Commentary on Romans. In the Commentary he had written, that too great esteem of outward works led to a too frequent granting of Indulgences, and that the Pope and the Bishops were more cruel than cruelty itself if they did not freely grant the same, or even greater Indulgences, for God’s sake and the good of souls, seeing that they themselves had received all they had for nothing.[678] This violent utterance here appears as the expression of his own opinion. In the theses, however, he presents the same view to the public with much greater caution; he says, these and similar objections brought forward by scrupulous laymen, were caused, contrary to the wishes of the Pope, by dissolute Indulgence preachers; one might hear “such-like calumnious charges and subtle questions from seculars,” and they must “be taken into account and answered.”[679]

The ideas contained in the Commentary on Romans are also to be met with in the other lectures which followed. Of this the present writer convinced himself by glancing through the Vatican copies. The approaching publication of the copies in the “Anfänge reformatorischer Bibelauslegung,” of Johann Ficker, a work which commenced with the Commentary on Romans, will supply further details. The character of the Wittenberg Professor is, however, such that we may expect some surprising revelations. Generally speaking, a movement in the direction of the doctrine of “faith alone” is noticeable throughout his work.

In view of Ficker’s forthcoming edition it will suffice to quote a few excerpts from the Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews of 1517, according to the Vatican MS. (Pal. lat. 1825).[680] They show that the author in his exegesis of this Epistle is imbued with the same idea as in the Commentary on Romans, namely, that Paul exalts (in Luther’s sense) the redemption in Christ, and Grace, in opposition to righteousness by works. They also betray how he becomes gradually familiar with the doctrine that faith alone justifies, without any longer placing humility in the foreground as the intermediary of justification as he once had done.

On folio 46 of the MS. he says: “We should notice how Paul in this Epistle extols grace as against the pride of the law and of human righteousness (‘extollit adversus superbiam’ etc.). He proves that without Christ neither the law, nor the priesthood, nor prophecy, nor the service of angels sufficed, but that all these were established with a view to the coming Christ. It is therefore his intention to teach Christ only.”

On folio 117 Luther sets forth the difference between “purity in the New and in the Old Testament.” In the New Law the Blood of Christ brings inward purification. “As conscience cannot alter sin that has been committed and is utterly unable to escape the future wrath, it is necessarily terrified and oppressed wherever it turns. From this state of distress it can be released only by the Blood of Christ. If it looks in faith upon this Blood, it believes and knows that by the same its sins are washed away and removed. Thus it is purified by faith and at the same time quieted, so that, in joy over the remission of its sins, it no longer fears punishment. No law can assist in this purification, no works, in fact nothing but the Blood of Christ alone (‘ad hanc munditiam ... nihil nisi unicus hic sanguis Christi facere potest’), and even this cannot accomplish it unless man believes in his heart that it has been shed for the remission of sin. For it is necessary to believe the testator when He says: ‘This Blood which shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins.’”

From Paul’s words he goes on to infer that “good works done outside of grace are sins, in the sense that they may be called dead works. For if, without the Blood of Christ, conscience is morally impure, it can only perform what corresponds with its nature, namely, what is impure....” Folio 117´: “It follows that a good, pure, quiet, happy conscience can only be the result of faith in the forgiveness of sins. But this is founded only on the Word of God, which assures us that Christ’s Blood was shed unto the remission of sins.”

Folio 118: “It follows that those who contemplate the sufferings of Christ only from compassion, or from some other reason than in order to attain to faith, contemplate them to little purpose, and in a heathenish manner.... The more frequently we look upon the Blood of Christ the more firmly must we believe that it was shed for our own sins; for this is ‘to drink and eat spiritually,’ to grow strong through this faith in Christ and to become incorporated in Him.”