The Reformed Church had a large number of leaders, as Zwingli, OEcolampadius, Bullinger, Calvin, Beza, Cranmer, Knox, but not one of them, not even Calvin, could impress his name or his theological system upon her. She is independent of men, and allows full freedom for national and sectional modifications and adaptations of the principles of the Reformation.
3. The Lutheran Confession starts from the wants of sinful man and the personal experience of justification by faith alone, and finds, in this 'article of the standing and falling Church,' comfort and peace of conscience, and the strongest stimulus to a godly life. The Reformed Churches (especially the Calvinistic sections) start from the absolute sovereignty of God and the supreme authority of his holy Word, and endeavor to reconstruct the whole Church on this basis. The one proceeds from anthropology to theology; the other, from theology to anthropology. The one puts the subjective or material principle of the Reformation first, the objective or formal next; the other reverses the order; yet both maintain, in inseparable unity, the subjective and objective principles of the Reformation.
The Augsburg Confession, which is the first and the most important Lutheran symbol, does not mention the Bible principle at all, although it is based upon it throughout; [392] the Articles of Smalcald mention it incidentally; [393] and the Form of Concord more formally. [394] But the Reformed Confessions have a separate article de Scriptura Sacra, as the only rule of faith and discipline, and put it at the head, sometimes with a full list of the canonical books. [395]
4. The Lutheran Church has an idealistic and contemplative, the Reformed Church a realistic and practical, spirit and tendency. The former aims to harmonize Church and State, theology and philosophy, worship and art; the latter draws a sharper line of distinction between the Word of God and the traditions of men, the Church and the world, the Church of communicants and the congregation of hearers, the regenerate and the unregenerate, the divine and the human. The one is exposed to the danger of pantheism, which shuts God up within the world; the other to the opposite extreme of deism, which abstractly separates him from the world. Hence the leaning of the Lutheran Christology to Eutychianism, the leaning of the Reformed to Nestorianism.
The most characteristic exponent of this difference between the two confessions is found in their antagonistic doctrines of the Lord's Supper; and hence their controversies clustered around this article, as the Nicene and post-Nicene controversies clustered around the person of Christ. Luther teaches the real presence of Christ's body and blood in, with, and under the elements, the oral manducation by unworthy as well as worthy communicants, and the ubiquity of Christ's body; while Zwingli and Calvin, carefully distinguishing the sacramental sign from the sacramental grace, teach--the one only a symbolical, the other a spiritual real, presence and fruition for believers alone. The Romish doctrine of transubstantiation is equally characteristic of the magical supernaturalism and asceticism of Romanism, which realizes the divine only by a miraculous annihilation of the natural elements. Lutheranism sees the supernatural in the natural, Calvinism above the natural, Romanism without the natural.
5. Viewed in their relations to the mediæval Church, Lutheranism is more conservative and historical, the Reformed Church more progressive and radical, and departs much further from the traditionalism, sacerdotalism, and ceremonialism of Rome. The former proceeded on the principle to retain what was not forbidden by the Bible; the latter, on the principle to abolish what was not commanded.
The Anglican Church, however, though moderately Calvinistic in her Thirty-nine Articles, especially in the doctrine on the Scriptures and the Sacraments, makes an exception from the other Reformed communions, since it retained the body of the episcopal hierarchy and the Catholic worship, though purged of popery. Hence Lutherans like to call it a 'Lutheranizing Church;' but the conservatism of the Church of England was of native growth, and owing to the controlling influence of the English monarchs and bishops in the Reformation period.
6. The Lutheran Confession, moreover, attacked mainly the Judaism of Rome, the Reformed Church its heathenism. 'Away with legal bondage and work righteousness!' was the war-cry of Luther; 'Away with idolatry and moral corruption!' was the motto of Zwingli, Farel, Calvin, and Knox.
7. Luther and Melanchthon were chiefly bent upon the purification of doctrine, and established State churches controlled by princes, theologians, and pastors. Calvin and Knox carried the reform into the sphere of government, discipline, and worship, and labored to found a pure and free church of believers. Lutheran congregations in the old world are almost passive, and most of them enjoy not even the right of electing their pastor; while well-organized Reformed congregations have elders and deacons chosen from the people, and a much larger amount of lay agency, especially in the Sunday-school work. Luther first proclaimed the principle of the general priesthood, but in practice it was confined to the civil rulers, and carried out in a wrong way by making them the supreme bishops of the Church, and reducing the Church to a degrading dependence on the State.
8. Luther and his followers carefully abstained from politics, and intrusted the secular princes friendly to the Reformation with the episcopal rights; Calvin and Knox upheld the sole headship of Christ, and endeavored to renovate the civil state on a theocratic basis. This led to serious conflicts and wars, but they resulted in a great advance of civil and religious liberty in Holland, England, and the United States. The essence of Calvinism is the sense of the absolute sovereignty of God and the absolute dependence of man; and this is the best school of moral self-government, which is true freedom. Those who feel most their dependence on God are most independent of men. [396]
9. The strength and beauty of the Lutheran Church lies in its profound theology, rich hymnology, simple, childlike, trustful piety; the strength and beauty of the Reformed Churches, in aggressive energy and enterprise, power of self-government, strict discipline, missionary zeal, liberal sacrifice, and faithful devotion, even to martyrdom, for the same divine Lord. From the former have proceeded Pietism and Moravianism, a minutely developed scholastic orthodoxy, speculative systems and critical researches in all departments of sacred learning, but also antinomian tendencies, and various forms of mysticism, rationalism, and hypercriticism. The latter has produced Puritanism, Congregationalism, Methodism, Evangelicalism (in the Church of England), the largest Bible, tract, and missionary societies, has built most churches and benevolent institutions, but is ever in danger of multiplying sectarian divisions, overruling the principle of authority by private judgment, and disregarding the lessons of history.
10. Both churches have accomplished, and are still accomplishing, a great and noble work. Let them wish each other God's speed, and stimulate each other to greater zeal. A noble rivalry is far better than sectarian envy and jealousy. There have been in both churches, at all times, men of love and peace as well as men of war, with corresponding efforts to unite Lutheran and Reformed Christians, from the days of Melanchthon and Bucer, Calixtus and Baxter, down to the Prussian Evangelical Union, the German Church Diet, and the Evangelical Alliance. Even the exclusive Church of England has entered into a sort of alliance with the Evangelical Church of Prussia in jointly founding and maintaining the Bishopric of St. James in Jerusalem. [397]
The time for ecclesiastical amalgamation, or organic union, has not yet come, but Christian recognition and union in essentials is quite consistent with denominational distinctions in non-essentials, and should be cultivated by all who love our common Lord and Saviour, and desire the triumph of his kingdom.
[384] As used in all Continental works on Church history and symbolics. It means originally the Catholic Church reformed of abuses, or regenerated by the Word of God.
[385] The fifteenth and last of the Marburg articles treats of the Lord's Supper, and after stating the points of agreement, concludes thus: 'And although at present we can not agree whether the true body and the true blood of Christ be corporeally present in the bread and wine (ob der wahre Leib und das wahre Blut Christi leiblich im Brode und Weine gegenwärtig sei), yet each party is to show to the other Christian love, as far as conscience permits (so weit es das Gewissen jedem gestattet), and both parties should fervently pray to Almighty God that by his Spirit he may strengthen us in the true understanding. Amen.'
[386] ' Ihr habt einen andern Geist, ' said Luther to Zwingli.
[387] The feuds between monastic orders and theological schools in the Roman and Greek Churches, and the quarrels even in the oecumenical Councils, from the Nicene down to the Vatican, are fully equal in violence and bitterness to the Protestant controversies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and are less excusable on account of the boasted doctrinal unity of those churches.
[388] This is the case with the great majority of Anglicized and Americanized Lutherans, who adopt Reformed views on the Sacraments, the observance of Sunday, Church discipline, and other points.
[389] Luther can only be fully understood by a German, while a Frenchman or an Englishman (with some exceptions, as Coleridge, Hare, Carlyle) is likely to be repelled by some of his writings, e.g., his coarse book against Henry VIII. Hence the unfavorable judgments of such scholars as Hallam, Sir William Hamilton, Pusey; while, on the other hand, even liberal Catholics among German scholars can not but admire him as Germans. Dr. Döllinger, long before his secession from Rome, said (in his book Kirche und Kirchen): 'Luther ist der gewaltigste Volksmann, der populärste Charakter, den Deutschland je besessen. In dem Geiste dieses Mannes, des grössten unter den Deutschen seines Zeitalters, ist die protestantische Doctrin entsprungen. Vor der Ueberlegenheit und schöpferischen Energie dieses Geistes bog damals der aufstrebende, thatkräftige Theil der Nation demuthsvoll und gläubig die Kniee.' The towering greatness of Luther is to the Lutherans a constant temptation to hero-worship, as Napoleon's brilliant military genius is a misfortune and temptation to France. Lessing expressed his satisfaction at the discovery of some defects in Luther's character, since he was, as he says, 'in imminent danger of making him an object of idolatrous veneration. The proofs that in some things he was like other men are to me as precious as the most dazzling of his virtues.' There are not a few Lutherans who have more liking for Luther's faults than for his virtues, and admire his conduct at Marburg as much, if not more, than his conduct at Worms. A very respectable Lutheran professor of theology resolved the difference between Luther and Calvin into this: that the one was human, the other inhuman! Calvin once nobly said, 'Though Luther should call me a devil, I would still revere and love him as an eminent servant of God.' If he was cruel, according to our modern notions, in his treatment of Servetus, he acted in the spirit of his age, and was approved even by the gentle Melanchthon. His followers need fear no comparison with any other Christians as to humanity and liberality.
[390] He irreverently called the Epistle of St. James an 'epistle of straw,' and had objections to the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apocalypse, and the Book of Esther. He was as thoroughly convinced of the inspiration and authority of the Word of God as the most orthodox divine can be, but he had free views on the mode of inspiration and the extent of the traditional canon.
[391] Luther, in his work De servo arbitrio, against Erasmus, written in 1525, teaches the slavery of the human will, the dualism in the divine will (secret and revealed), and unconditional predestination to salvation and damnation, in language stronger than even Calvin ever used, who liked the views of that book, but objected to some of its hyperbolical expressions (Opera, Tom. VII. p. 142). Melanchthon, who originally held the same Augustinian theory (like all the Reformers), gradually changed it (openly since 1535) in favor of a synergistic theory. But Luther never recalled his tract against Erasmus; on the contrary, he counted it among his best, and among the few of his books which he would not be willing 'to swallow, like Saturn his own children.' He never made this a point of difference from the Swiss. In the Articles of Smalcald, 1537 (III. i. p. 318, ed. Hase), he again denied the freedom of the will, as a scholastic error; and in his commentary on Genesis (Ch. vi. 6, 18; xxvi), one of his last works, he taught the same view of the secret will of God as in 1525. Comp. J. Müller: Lutheri de prædestinatione et libero arbitrio doctrina, 1832, and his Dogmat. Abhandlungen, 1870, pp. 187sqq.; Lütkens: Luther's Prædestinationslehre im Zusammenhang mit seiner Lehre vom freien Willen, 1858; Köstlin: Luther's Theologie in ihrer geschichtl. Entwicklung, 1863, Vol. II. pp. 32-55, 300-331; Schweizer: Die protest. Centraldogmen, 1854, Vol. I. pp. 57 sqq.; Dorner: Geschichte der protest. Theologie, 1867, Vol. I. pp. 194 sqq.