Luther, vol. 5 of 6 by Hartmann Grisar

Author:Hartmann Grisar [Grisar, Hartmann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

At other times Luther expresses wonder at the wrong-headed sectarians who can with such confidence look even death itself in the face. He refuses to apply to them what has just been said; it is no real peace that they die in, rather they are blinded by Satan’s delusions. “This new sect of the Anabaptists,” he says indignantly, “grows marvellously, they live with a great show [of the spirit] and boldly face death by fire and water.”[1399] He is thinking of the Anabaptists who were executed in 1527—“May God have mercy on these poor captives of Satan.... They cannot be coerced either by fire or by the sword; so greatly does Satan rage in this hour because it is his last.” And yet the whole thing was little more than a joke of Satan’s.

“With me, however, he certainly does not jest; I believe that I am pleasing to God and displeasing to Satan.”[1400]

He overlooks the fact that the Anabaptists, too, fancied they were pleasing Christ, nay, were passionately convinced that they were living for Christ and not for Satan; they even exposed themselves of their own accord to the worst torments of the executioner before they passed out of life, obstinately declaring that it was impossible for them to recant. The words in which Luther complains of their obstinacy are a two-edged sword.

He is fond of bewailing the stubbornness of the heretics; it was a subject of wholesome fear for all; it penetrated “like water into their inward parts and like oil into their bones”: so far do they go that they see “salvation and blessing” in their own doctrine alone; few are they who “come right again,” “the others remain under their own curse.” “Neither have I ever read,” he assures us, “of any teacher who originated a heresy being converted”; “the true Evangel which teaches the contrary of their doctrine is and always will be to them a devil’s thing.”[1401]—“No heretic,” he cries, “will let himself be talked over.... A man is soon done for when the devil thus lays hold of him.”[1402] Such a one boasts that, “he is quite certain of things”; “No Christian ever held so fast to his Christ as a Jew or a fanatic does to his pet doctrine.”[1403] He also believes his opponent to be a liar “as surely as God is God.”[1404] And yet, so Luther argues, the sectarian or fanatic can never be certain at all; not one of his gainsayers is sure of his cause; not one has “felt the struggle and been at grips with the devil” like himself.[1405]

But I, “I am certain that my word is not mine but the word of Christ,” and “every man who speaks the word of Christ is free to boast that his mouth is the mouth of Christ.”[1406]—“Had not the devil attacked us with such power and cunning during all these years,” he says in his second exposition of the 1st Epistle of Peter (published in 1539), “we should never have acquired this certainty on doctrine.

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