THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
" doctrine of the law " and " promise of grace." The law is God's exacting will, the Gospel his helping will. Since Adam s fall, and because of original sin, man's power is so weakened that he can not fulfil the most external requirements of the law, to say nothing of actually pleasing God. Accordingly, the effect of the law is to terrify and produce contrition. The Gospel then reveals God's grace (i.e., his mercy), which is founded in Christ as the mediator and propitiator, and makes justification known as a free favor for Christ's sake, consisting in the remission of sins and assuring of reconciliation or acceptance to life eternal. The Gospel, however, does not abrogate the law, and therefore it requires not only faith, but also conversion. God works through the Holy Spirit, perfecting faith and helping to fulfil the law. The Gospel leads to regeneration, or the restoration of original righteousness, which will be perfected in heaven. Precise definition is highly characteristic of Melanchthon and sometimes leads him to set rather artificial limits to various concepts. He shows an inclination to retain as many of the old institutions as possible, and tries to prove that the Protestant interpretation of the Bible is in harmony with the teaching of the Church Catholic. He presents Luther's doctrine of penance or repentance, though without the force of personal experience which animated it in Luther, and for him conversion lasts practically throughout life. Baptism is the sacrament, or sign, which marks entrance into the Christian life and the state of grace, the transition from the dispensation of law to that of the Gospel. Its efficacy endures for the whole life.
Having devised the formula of the Church as a school, Melanchthon proceeded to bring the Evangelical faith into connection with Humanism. He started with the old familiar idea of 4. Luther- natural law (q.v.), declaring that it is anism and not only approved by the reason, but Scholarship, is also found in the Bible, being in the background of revealed law. God has provided that men shall know his providence from nature and has given them understanding to distinguish between good and evil. By the fall man lost the clear knowledge of the natural law which he had originally possessed. The Gospel brought something wholly new, not indicated in the natural law, namely, redemption through Christ and justification by faith, and this now leads back to the original condition. Certitude is restored by the spiritual law imparted by revelation in the Bible. If, now, as Christian, and by supernatural means, man is again certain about God, the study of the natural knowledge of God has interest and value for him and for the Church. Faith attains to somewhat of the character of rationality by virtue of the natural law, though even this law is supernaturally conditioned as based on the creative activity of God. By means of this concept of natural law Melanchthon succeeded in finding an ideal foundation for the knowledge of the Church in the knowledge of reason no less than scholasticism had done. His theory was, however, only superficial here, for he really had in mind two realms of knowledge: a higher, that of Biblical revelation, and a lower, that
of human reason; and he felt that one must first learn of the former to understand the latter. He refrained from high speculations about God, the law, the doctrines of the Trinity, and the two natures of Christ, contenting himself with the belief that all divine secrets would be revealed in heaven. It is significant that he thought of heaven too as a school. He did not appropriate Luther's ethical conception of blessedness. That justice is in itself blessedness, that love is the essence of life everlasting he did not understand. God desires, he held, to be known and honored; and blessedness is the eternal reward of those in heaven to hold converse concerning God and the divine essence, now at last completely known. Herein is the most considerable reduction of Luther's teaching as formulated by Melanchthon. In the interest of the new faith Melanchthon undertook the reorganization of the entire system of higher education, and rendered no slight service to the entire field of science and letters. 5. Church His Loci became the theological textand State, book of the generations which followed him, and his manuals of philosophy, which he prepared as propaedeutic, were no less noteworthy. In this undertaking, however, he needed the help of the secular authorities, and it was he who laid down the rules for the relations between the Lutheran Church and the State. He believed that the magistracy was sanctioned by reason, and also that it was, on unmistakable Biblical authority, positively ordained by God, the secular officials being called to be guardians of the entire law, i.e., the natural law and the decalogue. Revelation defines the sphere of their duties. They must open the way to the pure doctrine of the Bible and regulate the higher institutions of learning; but it is not for them to interpret the Bible or to formulate the faith. Their place in the Church is among those who hear, not those who teach. The preachers, as ministers of the word, are independent, and as authoritative for secular officials as for all other laymen, though in purely civil affairs the clergy are subject to civil authority.
Lutheran orthodoxy may be treated briefly after depicting Melanchthon's system. It lived and moved in the understanding of the Gospel to which Melanchthon gave words and form, notwithstanding the controversies of Gnesiolutherans and Philippists, and the preference shown for the 6. Lutheran former when the princes were compelled Orthodoxy, to take sides (see Philippists). For it the Bible was the only actual authority of faith, even the creeds adopted serving merely to settle points of controversy, and the task of theology was to interpret, systematize, and defend in pedagogic fashion what the Bible contained. The classic theologian of the period, Johann Gerhard (q.v.), gave little space to the confessions in his Loci (9 vols., Jena, 1610-22) and treated them only incidentally. It is not meant that Gerhard, or any one, was indifferent to the confessions, but he was so fully convinced that they accorded with the Bible and bound to nothing except what was in the Bible that he could give them a very secondary place. It was far more important to show that Lutheranism and the early Church were in harmony,