- INASMUCH as the Reformers set about the practical and theoretical exhibition of the thought of justification by faith as their paramount task, they invariably treated everything that belongs to the objective doctrine of reconciliation merely as preparatory to the other truth. Even Calvin, who relatively raised to a position of highest distinctness the scientific exhibition of that foundation of justification, remained satisfied with the immediately religious conception implied in the expression that we are reconciled through the satisfaction of Christ. On this account not even he had any occasion carefully to separate the two references of Christ’s satisfaction, to God on the one hand and to us on the other, or to specify their mutual relation. For, in realizing the value of Christ’s work from the religious point of view, God’s reconciliation with us is just as certain as our reconciliation with God, and vice versa. The Reformers accordingly do not in this direction at all advance the task of fixing the doctrine of reconciliation; particularly, they never face the question whether God through Christ has been reconciled with the whole sinful race of mankind, or only with the community of believers. In one important respect, on the other hand, they gave to the thought of reconciliation between God and “us” an aspect that differs from the prevailing mediæval view. For they measured the two entirely correlate quantities, the value of Christ’s work and the demerit of sin, by a standard which betrays equally a greater subjective intensity of moral earnestness, and a more developed perception of the fixity of the objective moral order of the universe than belonged to the theology of the middle ages. They rejected the assumption from which the mediæval theology set out, that the moral relation between God and man has the character of a private relation, and that, therefore, sin only amounts to an insult offered to a person who, quantitatively considered, ranks higher than man; and as against this they maintained that sin is a violation of the order of public law that is upheld by God’s authority, a violation of the law that is correlate with the eternal being of God; and that thus it assumes the character of crime. Accordingly, they go beyond the Thomist and Scotist doctrines of the merely relative propriety, or of the entirely incidental character of the means adopted for doing away with sin; and, instead of this, they made it their aim to deduce the absolute unavoidable necessity of Christ’s satisfaction from that moral order of the universe, which is solidaire with the essential will of God. By means of this apparatus of ideas they also get beyond that sphere of vision within which Anselm, with inadequate means at his disposal, had followed the same tendency.1 In this exhibition of Christ’s satisfaction under the view-point of a vicarious suffering of punishment for “our” sins, the Reformers, theologically speaking, adduced nothing that was absolutely new. In the first place, the theme of their theory is not foreign to the middle ages. For it is as old as Augustine.2 To leave out of sight other schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, amongst various other appreciations of the effect of the death of Christ, adduces this also, that Christ thereby fulfilled the law, and suffered the punishment that was due for Adam’s breach thereof.3 Still the exhibition of this thought is incidental with him rather than seriously meant, and is rendered ineffectual from the first by the influence of his idea of the Divine arbitrariness. John Gerson, on the other hand, enunciates with all precision the fundamental thought of the theory current with the Reformers, that sin amounts to the crime of læsa majestas, that God’s justice is so great that He will not let sin pass unpunished, but that in pity He gives up His innocent Son to punishment, and thus maintains the harmony between His justice and His mercy, and takes away sin on condition that the sinner by faith, that is, by obedience and imitation, join himself with Christ.4 It is possible that Luther may have borrowed this train of thought from Gerson, from his acquaintance with the works of that writer; stress, however, would have to be laid on this only if a similar source could be traced for the similar view taken by Zwingli.
If in Christ’s satisfaction the punishment of man’s breach of the law is to be recognised; and if such a way of procuring forgiveness of sins is to be shown to be inevitable and necessary for God, then it must in the first instance be proved that the moral law is identical in contents with the essential will of God. This task is of course not immediately achieved by the mere assertion of that proposition; there is further necessary at once a regard to the metaphysical attribute of freedom of will taken in connexion with the exhibition of the necessary contents of the will, as also the establishment of the fundamental truth of God’s love as against the claims which the varying conduct of men seems to make upon God’s justice. No one of the Reformers has fulfilled these conditions, for their practical work prevented them from devoting themselves to that problem (which is the highest of theoretical questions), and because they had still to contend in their own minds with the mediæval conception of God’s absolute arbitrariness. The pioneering vigour of their genius is shown, however, by the fact that they actually furnished the elements for an altogether new idea of God; and their superiority over their theological successors is seen all the more clearly when it becomes apparent that the respect of the latter for their teachers was not accompanied by the ability to place in their right connexion the suggestions that these had given. With regard to Luther, certainly this task would involve a difficulty quite peculiar; for he never dedicated any systematic labour to setting forth the idea of God; but just as opportunity offered alternately brought into prominence the one or the other factor of it without taking any care for their harmony, or avoiding numerous contradictions between his various expressions. So that in order to understand Luther’s various views that affect the idea of God, it is much more important to distinguish their references than to bring them into a connexion which they never possessed in Luther’s own thinking. Quite away from the present problem, or rather completely indifferent to it, is the thought which Luther laid down in his tract De servo arbitrio, as foundation for his assertion of God’s twofold predestination, and which he also otherwise applied as conclusive against human freedom, the thought, namely, that God is exlex, that He is bound by no law, that His will is divine only because it is the highest rule for everything; that nothing is good because it previously determines God’s will, but only inasmuch as it is willed by God.5 This is the motto of Scotism and of Nominalism adopted by Luther from the latter school. It is worthy of note, however, that in the application he limited the deductions usually drawn from this principle. He applies it only to God’s special dealing with men; but carefully refrains from saying that the contents of the law that has been given to man proceed from Divine arbitrariness, and that therefore the very opposite line of conduct might have been enjoined upon men by God. Nay, when speaking of the connexion between law and gospel, and thus of the value of Christ’s atoning work, he expressly describes the law as the eternal and immutable expression of God’s will.6 Were Luther’s method thoroughly systematic, this proposition would of course be in direct contradiction with the statement that God’s will cannot include anything of a necessary character. But as he applies the two contradictory assertions at separate times to separate problems, the one proposition, to his mind, has really nothing to do with the other. This appears also when we remember that, in his tract against Erasmus, the two problems are brought into juxtaposition both of time and of place. There the secret will of God is represented as the ground (subject to no law) of the decree for the salvation of individuals; while God’s revealed gracious will towards all in Christ includes, in Luther’s mind, the view of Christ’s atoning work which regards it as regulated by the standard of the law considered as the eternal will of God. Apart, however, from the fact that Luther does not in that tract carry out the analysis of the atoning work of Christ, I have shown in the article referred to above that the course of Luther’s thought in the treatise against Erasmus (which must be regarded much more as a contribution to the Reformation than as a sample of systematic theorizing) lies partly in the line of the traditions of the Nominalistic school, which are enforced by him as against the freedom of the human will; and partly in the line of his new theology—the theology of the grace of God shown in Christ—which admittedly depends for its result upon the free choice of the human will. If, then, Christ in Luther’s view is the Mediator of God’s grace to man, and if His death is part of His mediatorial work as being a vicarious endurance of punishment which renders satisfaction to the eternal law of God, it would cause a complete perversion of the view intended were we to say that Luther still, properly speaking, has no earnest belief in the necessity of Christ’s endurance of punishment, because he denies the idea of any necessity being inherent in the will of God. For, in the actual unfolding of his thoughts, he limits the application of the latter idea to the question of the predestination of individuals to salvation, while, at the foundation of his analysis of the atoning work of Christ, he lays the opposite thought of the necessary character of the law in relation to the will of God. But hereby his doctrine of reconciliation emancipates itself from the region in which the leading theologians of the middle ages moved, for they traced Christ’s atoning work also to God’s arbitrary will.