At these fundamental views regarding the appropriation of salvation, or righteousness by faith, Luther had accordingly already arrived in 1518-19 when engaged on his second exposition of the Psalms.
2. The Discovery in the Monastery Tower (1518-19)
Luther describes, in an important passage of the Preface to the Latin edition of his works in 1545, how he finally arrived at his ideas of faith and the assurance of salvation.[984] It is the only occasion on which he expatiates in so detailed and vivid a manner on his own development. In the light of this passage his other assertions must be considered.
The reader is at once struck by what Luther relates of the gloom and confusion of his mind previous to the discovery in the tower. In the preface, he says: “The passage, Romans i., ‘The Justice of God is revealed in the Gospel,’ had, till then, been an obstacle to me. For I hated the words ‘justice of God,’ which according to the use and custom of all teachers I had been taught to interpret in the philosophical sense, namely, as referring to the formal and active justice by which God is just and punishes the sinners and the unjust. Although I was a blameless monk, I felt myself as a sinner before God, suffered great trouble of conscience and was unable to look with confidence on God as propitiated by my satisfaction, therefore I did not love, but on the contrary, hated, the just God Who punishes sinners; I was angry with Him with furious murmuring, and said: The unhappy sinners and those who owing to original sin are for all eternity rejected are already sufficiently oppressed by every kind of misfortune owing to the Ten Commandments, and as though this were not enough God wills [according to Rom. i.] by means of the gospel to heap pain on pain, and threatens us with His Justice and His Anger even in the gospel.”[985]
In his Table-Talk, as reported by Heydenreich, he says in the winter of 1542-43 in a quite similar way: “These words were always in my mind. Wherever the ‘Justice of God’ occurs in Scripture I was only able to understand this to mean the justice by which He Himself is just and judges according to justice.... I stood there and knocked for someone to open to me, but no one came to undo the door; I did not know what to make of it.... Before finding the solution I shuddered with horror, I hated the Psalms and the Scripture where the justice of God occurs, which I took to mean that He was just and the Judge of sinners, but not that He was our Justification and our imputed righteousness.” “The whole of Scripture stood like a wall in front of me.”[986]
“As often as I read that the Justice of God was revealed in the Gospel,” he says in his Commentary on Genesis, “I wished that God had never revealed the Gospel, for who could love an angry God Who judges and condemns?”[987]
“This word Justice,” he says in another Commentary in 1532, “cost me much sweat (‘magno sudore mihi constitit’). To interpret this as though it meant the justice according to which God damns the wicked is not merely unfounded but very dangerous; it awakens in the heart great hatred of God and His Justice; for who can love Him Who treats the sinner according to justice? Never forget that God’s justice means that justice by which we are justified; it is the gift of the remission of sins.”[988]
That in truth it “cost him much sweat” before he was able to overcome the objections suggested by the justice of God itself, is proved by other and stronger allusions of Luther to the interior storms he underwent at this crisis. We refer to other statements in which, as above, he is speaking of Bible passages containing the expression Justice of God. Thus for instance: “The words just and Justice of God were like a lightning-flash in my conscience (‘fulmen in conscientia’); when I heard them, they at once filled me with terror. I thought God is Just and therefore He punishes.”[989] “That word iustitia,” he said in September, 1538, “was a thunder-clap to my heart. When as a papist I read: ‘Deliver me in Thy Justice’ (Ps. xxx. 2), and ‘In Thy Truth,’ etc., I immediately represented to myself the avenging Justice and the fury of an angry God. In my heart I hated Paul when I read: ‘The Justice of God is revealed in the Gospel’ ... till at last in my affliction a remedy presented itself.”[990]
Here we may mention some statements, which, though they belong to his later, fictitious portrayal of his spiritual development,[991] nevertheless contain an element of truth concerning his inner life at the time when he was still a monk, and probably during those very months when he was excitedly and confusedly brooding over the assurance of salvation. In reality they merely describe in greater detail what the above passages relate of his dread of God’s Justice, though they also falsely charge all papists and all monks with being full of servile fear for the Judge, and forming a school of despair.
“We fled from Christ,” he says in one of these remarkable passages, “as from the devil; for we were taught that everyone must appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ with his works and orders.... The Gospel tells us that Christ does not come as a Judge but as a Saviour; but the monks taught the contrary, namely, that He was to be our Judge.”[992] Now, he says, elsewhere, the word of God which has been rediscovered “depicts Christ as our Justice.” But in the monastery he, like all the others, had “fallen away from the faith,” and therefore his “heart trembled and palpitated for fear lest God should not be gracious” to him. “I often shuddered at the name of Jesus and when I looked at Him on the cross, He seemed to me like a lightning-flash.”[993]
He had often, he assures us, been forced to say: “I wish there were no God,”[994] “and none of them looked upon my unbelief as a sin.”[995]
It was “simple idolatry, for I did not believe in Christ but looked on Him as a stern and terrible Judge.”[996] “I did not know how I stood towards God,” “was unable to pray aright,”[997] indeed “no one knew anything” about prayer, “for we did not pray in faith in Christ.”[998]
It was a “great martyrdom and bondage from which the gospel set us free”;[999] I was, as it were, in a privy and in the kingdom of the devil.[1000] He felt the terrors of the Divine Judgment, he assures us (possibly on account of the inward wrestling with the iustitia Dei) so that his “hair stood on end” when he thought of it. “At the monastery I shuddered when they spoke of death or the other life.”[1001]
“I was the most wretched man on earth; day and night there was nothing but howling and despair which no one was able to put an end to for me. Thus I was bathed and baptised and properly sweated in my monkery. Thanks be to God that I did not sweat myself to death, otherwise I should