RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Melanohthon, Fhilipp
of Christ and God himself. For that reason, I am merely a spectator. If we fall, Christ will likewise fall; and if he fall, I would rather fall with Christ than stand with the emperor." Another trait of his character was his love of peace. He had an innate aversion to quarrels and discord; yet, often he was very irritable. His irenical character often led him to adapt himself to the views of others, as may be seen from his correspondence with Erasmus and from his public attitude from the Diet of Augsburg to the Interim. It was, however, not merely a personal desire for peace, but his conservative religious nature, that guided him in his acts of conciliation. He never could forget that his father on his death-bed had besought his family " never to leave the Church." He stood toward the past history of the Church in an attitude of piety and reverence that made it much more difficult for him than for Luther to be content with the thought of the impossibility of a reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church. He laid stress upon the authority of the Fathers, not only of Augustine, but also of the Greeks. His attitude in matters of worship was conservative, in the Leipsic Interim even too conservative, though not a Crypto- Catholic, as Cordatus and Schenk said. He never strove for a reconciliation with Roman Catholicism at the price of pure doctrine. He attributed more value to the external appearance and organization of the Church than Luther did, as can be seen from his whole treatment of the " doctrine of the Church." The ideal conception of the Church, which the Reformers opposed to the organization of the Roman Church, which was expressed in his Loci of 1535, lost for him after 1537 its former prominence, when he began to emphasize the conception of the true visible Church as it may be found among the Evangelicals. The relation of the Church to God he found in the divinely ordered office, the ministry of the Gospel. The universal priesthood was for Melanchthon as for Luther no principle of an ecclesiastical constitution, but a purely religious principle. In accordance with this idea Melanchthon tried to keep the traditional church constitution and government, including the bishops. He did not want, however, a church altogether independent of the State, but rather, in agreement with Luther, he believed it the duty of the secular authorities to protect religion and the Church. He looked upon the consistories as ecclesiastical courts which therefore should be composed of spiritual and secular judges, for to him the official authority of the Church did not lie in a special class of priests, but rather in the whole congregation, to be represented therefore not only by ecclesiastics, but also by laymen. Melanchthon in advocating church union did not overlook differences in doctrine for the sake of common practical tasks. The older he grew, the less he distinguished between the Gospel as the announcement of the will of God, and right doctrine as the human knowledge of it. Therefore he took pains to safeguard unity in doctrine by theological formulas of union, but these were made as broad as possible and were restricted to the needs of practical religion. As a scholar Melanchthon embodied the entire
spiritual culture of his age. At the same time he
found the simplest, clearest, and most suitable
form for his knowledge; therefore his manuals,
even if they were not always original,
3. As were quickly introduced into schools Scholar, and kept their place for more than
a century. Knowledge had for him no purpose of its own; it existed only for the service of moral and religious education, and so the teacher of Germany prepared the way for the religious thoughts of the Reformation. He is the father of Christian Humanism, which has exerted a lasting influence upon scientific life in Germany. His works were not always new and original, but they were clear, intelligible, and answered their purpose. His style is natural and plain, better, however, in Latin and Greek than in German. He was not without natural eloquence, although his voice was weak.
As a theologian, Melanchthon did not show so
much creative ability as a genius for collecting and
systematizing the ideas of others, especially of
Luther, for the purpose of instruction. He kept to
the practical, and cared little for
4. As a connection of the parts, so his Loci Theologian, were in the form of isolated paragraphs.
The fundamental difference between Luther and Melanchthon lies not so much in the latter's ethical conception, as in his humanistic mode of thought which formed the basis of his theology and made him ready not only to acknowledge moral and religious truths outside of Christianity, but also to bring Christian truth into closer contact with them, and thus to mediate between Christian revelation and ancient philosophy. Melanchthon's views differed from Luther's only in some modifications of ideas. Melanchthon looked upon the law as not only the correlate of the Gospel, by which its effect of salvation is prepared, but as the unchangeable order of the spiritual world which has its basis in God himself. He furthermore reduced Luther's much richer view of redemption to that of legal satisfaction. He did not draw from the vein of mysticism running through Luther's theology, but emphasized the ethical and intellectual elements. After giving up determinism and absolute predestination and ascribing to man a certain moral freedom, he tried to ascertain the share of free will in conversion, naming three causes as concurring in the work of conversion, — the Word, the Spirit, and the human will, not passive, but resisting its own weakness. Since 1548 he used the definition of freedom formulated by Erasmus, " the capability of applying oneself to grace." He was certainly right in thinking it impossible to change one's character without surrender of the will; but by correlating the divine and the human will he lost sight of the fundamental religious experience that the desire and realization of good actions is a gift of divine grace. His definition of faith lacks the mystical depth of Luther. In dividing faith into knowledge, assent, and trust, he made the participation of the heart subsequent to that of the intellect, and so gave rise to the view of the later orthodoxy that the establishment and acceptation of pure doctrine should precede the personal
Melanchthon, Philipp