Luther Examined and Reexamined: A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for RevaluationDau, W. H. T. (William Herman Theodore)
Religion
Luther Examined and Reexamined: A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation
Dau, W. H. T. (William Herman Theodore)
Luther, Martin, 1483-1546
belief is ineradicably written into the consciousness of all intelligent
men, even of intelligent pagans, and no philosophy of free will will
wipe it out. The wise farmer, after he has finished sowing his field,
says, "God willing, I shall reap a good crop." The wise merchant says,
"God willing, I shall be in New York to-morrow." And God approves of
this wise reservation which causes the prudent to submit their most
ordinary actions to divine revision. He says in Jas. 4, 13-16: "Go to
now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and
continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain, whereas ye know
not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a
vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For
that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or
that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil."
Let Luther's Catholic critics wrestle with these and similar texts of
Scripture, with these and similar facts of daily life. Luther has
rightly declared the sovereignty of God a mighty ax and thunderbolt that
shatters the assertion of human free will.
We have shown that Luther is no fatalist. His warning, on the one hand,
not to disregard the secret will of God, and on the other, not to seek
to find it out, is a masterpiece of wisdom. In view of the absolute
sovereignty of God and man's absolute dependence upon it, Luther urges
man to go to work in his chosen occupation in childlike reliance upon
God. He is to employ to the utmost capacity all his God-given energies
of mind and body and work as if everything depended on his industry,
strength, prudence, thrift, planning, and arranging. Having done all,
he is to say: Dear Lord, it is all subject to Thy approval. Thou art
Master; do Thou boss my business. If Thou overrulest my plans, I have
nothing to say; Thou knowest better. Not my will, but Thine, be done.
This is the whole truth in a nutshell that Luther drives home in that
part of his reply to Erasmus which treats of contingency. If ever
statements garbled from the context are unfair to the author, what the
Catholics are constantly doing in quoting Luther on the Bondage of the
Will is one of the most glaring exhibitions of unfairness on record.
This treatise of Luther deserves to be studied thoroughly and
repeatedly, and measured against the facts of the common experience of
all men. For a profitable study of this treatise there is, moreover,
required a very humble mind, a mind that knows its sin, and is sincere
in acknowledging its insufficiency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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