Luther, however, generally prefers to give expression to other less
violent thoughts anent the building up of the congregations to be
formed from the Church of Antichrist.
The holy Brotherhood of the Spirit, he says in his idealistic way,
was to arise, knowing no constraint but only charity, and having a
ministry (“_ministerium_”), but no “power.”[267] “The freedom of the
Spirit which must reign, makes things which are merely corporal and
earthly, indifferent and not necessary.” “All things are indifferent
and free (‘_omnia sunt indifferentia et libera_’).” “Paul demands the
preservation of unity, but this is unity of the spirit, not of place,
of persons, of things or of bodies.”[268] We here again note the advent
of that mysticism which had formerly dragged him down to the depths
of a passive indifference. How these pseudo-mystical ideas were to
further the building up of the new ecclesiastical system it is hard to
understand.
The Brotherhood, however, is not intended to introduce an altogether
new ecclesiastical system. We are simply “Christians,” the true
Christians, members of the Churches which have always existed, but
purified from a thousand years of deformation. “To create sects is
stupid and useless”;[269] according to Luther, it is not even necessary
for the task of uniting under the Christian name, before the end of
the world, all the faithful and the pious consciences elected from the
Kingdom of Antichrist.
At that time he wished all his followers to be known simply as
“Christians”; and in the first days of the Protestant Churches he very
frequently makes use of this term.[270] Even at a later date he was
loath to hear them called after himself, in spite of his practical
action to the contrary, because they “share with the rest the common
teaching of Christ.”[271] The term “Evangelicals” does not appear
to have been much in use in Luther’s immediate surroundings.[272]
As “Christians” and “Evangelicals” they had not left the “Church,”
indeed, Luther always insists on the fact that it was they who really
constituted and represented the “Church.” According to the Augsburg
Confession in 1530 they belonged to the Catholic Church; they wished
to define their position rather as that of a party within the Church,
fighting for its existence, a party which accepted the Church’s
recognised articles of belief, sheltered itself under the testimony
of recognised Catholic authorities, and which had merely introduced
certain innovations for the removal of the abuses which had crept
in.[273]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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