I started to show the development of the Roman church from the period of the Reformation to the present, and discussed the meaning of the term Counter-Reformation and its consequences. This was confirmed by the definite establishment of the authorities, to which I referred yesterday. Then we started discussing something of the doctrines, first, the doctrine of sin which was formulated and included another interpretation of human sin than that of the Reformers. Now I come to the central discussion between the Reformers and the Catholic church: the doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone (sola fide), the formula given by the Reformers for polemic purposes, and which was the main point, of all the controversies in the Reformation period.

In the doctrine of justification, the Roman church in the Council of Trent repeats the Thomistic tradition, but with a diplomatic tendency. The Catholic church knew that this was, as the Reformers called it, the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesia , the article with which the church stands or falls. And since this was the main point of the Reformation opposition, it was a point where the Roman church felt it had to be as conciliatory as possible. It avoided some of the distortions of this doctrine in nominalism, and attacked by the Reformers in this form. But it remained clear – and had to be, of course, from the point of view of the Roman church – in the main statement, namely, that the remissio peccatorum , the forgiveness of sins, is not sola gratia, by grace alone. It adds other elements, It speaks of the preparation for the Divine act of justification whereby a gratia preveniens, a prevenient grace, is effective in man, but so that this prevenient grace can be rejected or accepted, whatever the man decides. So here is the first point, where man must cooperate with God in the prevenient grace. After justification is received by man, it is given to him in the degree of his cooperation. The more man cooperates with God in the prevenient grace, the higher is the grace of justification given to him.

Justification as a gift of God contains two things: faith on the one hand, and hope and love on the other hand. Faith alone is not sufficient. And according to the Council's decision, it is even possible that justification may be lost by a Christian through a mortal sin, but that faith remains. Now the Reformers would say: if you are in faith, you never can lose your justification. But the Roman church understood faith in its old tradition, namely. somehow an intellectual and a moral act. Of course, if faith is an intellectual act and a moral act it can be lost, and nevertheless justification can be there; but faith according to the Reformers is the act of accepting justification; and this cannot be lost if there shall be justification.

.Nothing has been more misunderstood in Protestant theology than the term sola fide – by faith alone – because this has been understood not only by the Romans but also by Protestants themselves as an intellectual act of man called "faith," which forces God to give His forgiveness. But sola fide means that in the moment in which our sins are forgiven, we can do nothing else than receive this forgiveness, and that is what sola fide means. Anything else would destroy the activity of God, His exclusive grace.

Now this central position of the Reformers, the doctrine of grace received only – and therefore by faith alone – was first misunderstood and then rejected. This means that from this moment on, the split of the Church was final. There was no reconciliation possible between these two forms of religion – the one in which the act of our turning to God and receiving His grace is unambiguously a receptive act, in which God gives something to us and we don't do anything; and the Catholic doctrine that we must act and prepare for it, that we must cooperate with God, and that faith is an intellectual acknowledgment, which may or may not be there. All the anathemas given by the Council of Trent in this point are based on this misunderstanding of sola fide. The central position of the Reformers was rejected and condemned, in the Council of Trent.

The next point is the sacraments. While in the doctrine of justification, the fathers of Trent tried to have at least some approximation to the Protestant position, they didn't try that at all in the realm of the sacraments. Here caution was unnecessary because every caution would have undercut the very essence of the Roman church, namely, to be a church of the sacrament. So the Council of Trent says: "All true justice starts, and if it has started, is augmented, and if it has been lost, is restituted, by the sacraments." This is the function of the sacraments, i.e., it is the religious function altogether.

They didn't say much about the way in which the sacraments are effective; they didn't say very much about the personal side of him who receives the sacrament; but they formulated it in the following way: the sacraments are effective ex opere operato non ponentibus obigem , i. e., by their very operation for those who do not resist. -- If you do not put before the effectiveness of the sacraments in yourselves an impediment (obicem ), something which prevents them from being effective, then they are effective, however you may be subjectively, ex opere operato – by their mere performance, by their very operation. Now this was another central point for the Reformers, that there cannot be a relationship to God except in the person-to-person relationship, in the actual encounter-with Him – I. e. faith. And this is much more than non-resistance; it is an active turning towards God. Without this, the sacraments are not effective for Protestants. For Catholics they are.

With respect to the number of the sacraments, which was reduced by Luther and Calvin to two sacraments, all seven sacraments are instituted by Christ. And this is de fide, I. e, a matter of Catholic faith, which means no historical doubt as to whether they are really instituted by Christ or not is allowed any more If you read in a Catholic book the formulation of a dogma and then under this formulation the two words "de fide," then this means it is a matter of dogmatic statement of the Roman church which you cannot deny or doubt, except by risk of being cut off from the Roman church.

There is no salvation without sacraments. The sacraments are saving powers, and not only strengthening powers, as in Protestantism. They have a hidden force of their own and to all those who do not resist grace they give this force. Baptism, confirmation, and ordination are of indelible character – this is against the Reformers, again. During your whole life you are baptised – and this had great practical consequences in the Middle Ages, namely, you fall under the law against heresy. If you were not baptised, you would fall under the law which limits strange religions as that of the Jews and the Islamic people and other people, and you wouldn't be persecuted. But if you are baptised, you are a Christian and you can be persecuted by the law of heresy. Now here you see what such "indelible character" means. It is a life-and-death problem in the practice of the Roman church of that time. The same is true of the "indelible character" of ordination. It means that the excommunicated criminal priest, if he happens to marry somebody in prison – which

happened often at that time – then they are married: the sacramental power in him overcomes his criminal situation and even his being excommunicated as an individual. If he marries you in prison, though excommunicated he still has the indelible sacramental power, which is always there and never can be taken from him. Here again you have a strong practical consequence of this doctrine of the "indelible character."

Now this, of course, stands against the Protestant doctrine of the universal priesthood. Not every Christian has the power to preach and to administer the sacraments, but only those who are ordained, and being ordained means having received sacramental power.

This sacramental power is even embodied in the ritual form of the sacraments. If there is a given ritual formula, no priest, no bishop, can transform it, can omit something from it, can change it, without sinning. The sacramental power is communicated from its origin in the actuality of the Church to the forms which are used – there is no arbitrariness possible.

Baptism is only valid in infant baptism... . . . The water of baptism washes away the contamination of original sin... But to have faith later during one's life, as Luther demanded, in the power of baptism as the Divine act which initiates all Christian being, is not sufficient for the forgiveness of sins, and this means baptism loses, religiously speaking, its actual power for the later life. It does mean anything any more except for the fact of the "character indelibilis. It is not a point to which one religiously returns"

The doctrine of transubstantiation is preserved, and where it is preserved you always find a clear test of it, namely, the demand to adore it besides its use. For Protestants, the bread is not the body of Christ, except in the act of performance. For Catholics the bread and wine are the body and the blood of Christ after they have been consecrated. So when you come into an empty Catholic church – which you always do when you travel in European countries, because they are the greatest objects of interest in most of the small and big cities – then you come into a sacred atmosphere, not into a house which is used on Sundays, and sometimes even on weekdays, but you come into a house in which always, for 24 hours, God Himself is present in the holiest of the holy, on the altar, in the shrine. And this transforms the whole mood which prevails in such a church. There are always lights and always people who go around; there is always God Himself in a defined, circumscript way present on the altar. I believe this is the reason why the attempt of some great Protestant churches, also in this city, to be open for prayer and meditation during the whole day, has a very limited effect, because nothing happens. But if you go into a Roman church, something has happened, the effects of which are still completely there – namely, the presence of God Himself, of the body of Christ, on the altar.

On this basis, of course, the Roman church also preserved the Mass against the criticism of the Reformers, and not only the Mass for those who attend, not only the Mass for those who are living, but the Mass, I. e., the sacrifice of the body of Christ, also for those who are dead and in Purgatory. In all these respects, the Council of Trent gave practically no reform at all, nor did it give a better theological foundation. It simply consecrated and confirmed the tradition.

A little different was the attitude towards the sacrament of penance, /which another of the main attacks of Protestantism was directed. But the sacrament was, generally speaking, maintained as a sacrament, and even the weakest point of this sacrament, the doctrine of attrition – or as Luther called it ironically, the repentance evoked by the gallows -- even this kind of repentance by fear was accepted as a necessary preparation. Contrition, the real repentance, the real metanoia in the New Testament sense, is not sufficient. It is fulfilled only in connection with the sacrament and with the word of absolution. And this word does not just declare that God has forgiven, but it itself gives the forgiveness – not that the priest gives the forgiveness, but through the priest, and only through the priest, does God give forgiveness. And Christians need not only the word of the ministers, the word of absolution, but they also need satisfactions, because the punishment is not removed with the guilt, and therefore so me punishments must be imposed on the people even after they have taken the sacrament – these are the satisfactions, e.g., praying the "Our Father," a hundred times, or giving money, or making a pilgrimage, etc. And this was the point where the Reformers disagreed the most.

Marriage is maintained as a sacrament, although in contradiction to this preservation of virginity is valuated higher than marriage. And this is still the situation in the Roman church. In all this, something is fixed which before the Reformation still was in some kind of flux. Now it is fixed against the Reformation, and now the Roman church has lost its dynamic creativity; and you can feel this if you read systematic theologies in Catholic thinking, they deal with very secondary problems, because all the fundamental problems are solved.

The basic doctrine of all of them is the doctrine of ordination, because here the point is given in which all the others are united. The priest does what makes the Roman church Roman church: he exercises the sacramental power. Preaching is very secondary and often omitted. Sacrifice and priesthood are by Divine ordination – sacrifice in the sense of sacrificing the body of Christ in the Mass. Both are implied in every ecclesiastical law. Both are presupposed, and this church of the sacramental sacrifice is the hierarchical church; and the hierarchical church is the church of the sacramental sacrifice. This is Rome. This is Catholicism, in the Roman sense.

Now these decisions decided about the split of Christianity/ Rome actually had accepted nothing, only external remedies against abuses. But many problems were left. The first was the problem of Pope against Councils. And it is the development between Trent and the Council of the Vatican in 1870 to which we must now go.

In Trent two opinions were fighting with each other. The first was that the Pope is the universal bishop, the Vicar of Christ – universal bishop meaning that every episcopal power is derived from the power of the Pope, so that every bishop participates in the Pope and the Pope participates in him, because he is the Vicar of Christ. The other opinion was that the Pope is the first among equals, representing the unity and the order of the Church. This is the Conciliaristic point of view – the Councils finally have the ultimate decision – while the former is the Curialistic point of view: the Curia, the court of the Pope, is the central deciding power. This was the question. How was it decided? Not at all at Trent. It took a few more centuries. One of the presuppositions for this decision was that the historical development more and more destroyed those groups which were most dangerous for the Pope within the Roman church, namely the national churches. One of them was France, and the movement for an independent

French church – called Gallicanism – was a real threat to Rome. We have similar developments in Germany, in Austria, and in other places, where the national churches under the leadership of their bishops resisted many papal aspirations. The rulers had an alliance with the national bishops against the Pope. But this did not hold. It was undermined by the development itself. It could be destroyed, because the rulers, e. g., the leaders of the French revolution Napoleon, the German princes, used the Pope against their own ecclesiastical forces. Diplomacy always uses the one against the other and the other against the one. The national princes used their own bishops against the encroachments by the Pope, but they used the Pope against the power of their own bishops, if necessary.

Now the result of these oscillations was that finally the Pope prevailed by far. The result was the Vatican decision of 1870, the statement of the infallibility of the Pope.

This decision has many presuppositions. First it was necessary to give to the term "tradition" a definite sense. One now distinguished between ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition. The apostolic tradition is the old traditions which came into the Church through ways which are not given in the Bible. But the ecclesiastical tradition is the tradition about which the Pope has to decide, whenever it appears in Church history. This was the situation; the ecclesiastical tradition, which was the only living tradition, was identical with the papal decisions. This is the positive statement.

And now its negative side: The Jesuits more and more undercut all other authorities. In contrast to Thomas Aquinas they undercut conscience and made themselves the leaders of the consciences of the princes, and of the other people too, But their important role was that in this period of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, where the Jesuit order was born in Spain, most of the deciding political personalities had Jesuitic advisors around themselves who were leaders of their consciences. Now if you guide, the conscience of a prince, you can apply this guidance to all political decisions because in all of them some moral elements are included. And that is what the Jesuits did. They turned the consciences of the Catholic princes towards all the cruelties of the Counter-Reformation. So the conscience was no authority any more.

Also the authority of the bishops was undercut by the Jesuits. The episcopalian primacy in the Councils was undercut by Jesuitic interpretation. The Councils themselves and their decisions have to be confirmed by the Pope. This was the complete victory of the :Rope over the Councils. This was done in Trent. The Pope was accepted by the majority of the bishops in Trent as he who has to confirm the Council of Trent. This means that no council can have validity ever since, which is not confirmed by the Pope. Therefore the Pope is beyond criticism.

Even the Church Fathers are undercut by the Jesuits. The Jesuits were especially anti-Augustinian. There is only one Father of the Church, namely the living Pope. All earlier Church Fathers are full of heretic statements, of errors, even of falsifications. The Jesuits, as you see from this, were very modern people. They knew about the historical problems and used them in order to undermine the authority of the Church Fathers. The Protestant historiography did the same thing, in order to make possible the prophetic authority of the Reformers. So the criticism was made by both: by the Jesuits in order to give absolute power by the Pope; and by the Protestants in order to liberalize the authority of the Bible.

The constitution of 1870: "Pastor Eternus" If you read a papal bull, you will always find two or three words at the beginning which serve also as the title of the bull – e. g. , "Una Sancta," etc. This means the first words of the text are put into the title. Pastor eternus has a very full sound – the eternal shepherd – and immediately implies the feeling for the eternal function of the earthly shepherd. First pp the Pope is declared as the universal power of jurisdiction over every power of the Church. There is no legal body which is not subjected to the Pope. Secondly he is declared universal bishop. This means, practically, that he has power over every Catholic of New York, through the bishop of New York; but if this doesn't work, he can have episcopal power directly and can revolutionize the subjects of the other bishops against their bishops, if he likes to. Thirdly, the Pope is infallible if he speaks ex cathedra. This of course is the most conspicuous decision of the Vatican Council and a decision which has even separated some of the Catholics who, as they called themselves, became "Old Catholics," but they remained a very small group in Western Germany, and never took over the Roman church. On the contrary. Your generation has experienced, in the year 1950, the first cathedra decision since 1870, and therefore a decision which is de fide, namely, a decision about the bodily ascension of the Virgin Mary. Now here you see how things go – the Pope has asked most of the bishops before he made this decision. The majority was on his side; a minority was not. The Pope asked about the tradition - the tradition is more than a thousand years old; we have pictures in many periods of Church history about Mary elevated to Heaven and crowned by Christ, or received by God. But now the question was: Is this a pious opinion in the Church which is tolerated, and even further? or is it a matter de fide? As long as it is a pious opinion, every Catholic can disagree with it, without losing the salvation of his soul. In the moment in which it is declared de fide, as it was done in the year 1950 by the Pope, in this moment every Catholic is bound to accept it as truth, and nothing can relieve him from this necessity. Many Catholics were deeply shaken about this, but they subjected themselves.

So infallibility does not mean that there exists a man who in whatever he talks is infallible; since the decision 80 years ago, no pope did anything which is infallible, in the strict sense; but then he did something. And as I heard yesterday, when President Shuster of Hunter College (who is a Catholic) spoke at our faculty luncheon, he was (recently) the governor of Bavaria, the most Catholic part of Germany, and he was also in connection with Rhineland Catholicism. He said there was a very hopeful development of cooperation between Protestants and Catholics. But in the moment in which this doctrine was proclaimed, cooperation almost ceased. Now he hopes that it will return again, but this showed to the Protestant and to the secular world – to all of us – that these dogmas about the infallibility of the Pope are taken absolutely seriously, without restriction. We should have known this always. Now we are reminded of it again. And this means there is no approach, from a Protestant or humanist point of view, to this doctrine and its implications.

This was finally confirmed in the fourth important point: The Pope is irreformable, by any action of the church. You must compare this with the impeachment procedures ,which in America is possible against any president; they are very rare, but they have happened and can happen again. They happened, of course, against the pope in the Middle Ages, and some popes were dispossessed, removed, and others put in their place. All this came to an end in 1870, because there is no power which can remove a pope. The pope is in this sense absolute and irremovable. No impeachment is possible. In this way, implicitly every dogma formulated by the pope is valid. This means that, for instance, one doctrine which was formulated before 1870 – the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary the Virgin, in the birth of Christ, which the Franciscans wanted to have all the time was now de fide, while before that the Dominicans, who were against it, still could say that it is not a valid dogma. Now it is a valid dogma because of the implication that the pope has accepted it ex cathedra.

There was a last strong movement in the Roman church back to the original Augustinianism of the church. This movement is called according to a man named Jansen, Jansenism. The Jesuit Molina wrote against the Thomistic Dominicans who teach, as you remember, the doctrine of predestination. The Jesuits were against this doctrine and they fought for human freedom. The doctrine of predestination, although it is a strong Augustinian doctrine, was revoked. But now Jansen and the Jansenists – he most important of them is Pascal – arose and fought against the Jesuits. But the Jesuits prevailed, The popes followed them. The Jesuit was the modern man, in the Roman church – disciplined; very similar to totalitarian forms of subjection as we experience them today; completely devoted to the power of the church; and at the same time nourished with much intellectual education and modern ideas, deciding for freedom and reason.

I started yesterday to speak about one movement which, in opposition to the Counter-Reformation Catholicism, tries to return to the genuine Augustinian tradition of the Catholic past. It is the Jansenist movement, a movement opposed and finally destroyed by the Jesuits, but in such a way that the Jesuits themselves lost a lot of standing in the public valuation, and that in the 18th century they were thrown out of many Catholic countries. There was one interesting point in the discussion, namely that if the sentences of Cornelius Jansen are condemned, then it isn't only a matter of content which is condemned but also a question de fait (a question of fact) that he has really said that Now this seems very foolish, but there was a very important point behind it, namely, that if the Pope interprets the text of somebody whom he inquires into, and perhaps rejects or condemns, then the Pope is right not only in rejecting his ideas but also in stating that these ideas are really in the text. That is, the Pope is the interpreter of every text, and philological defense is not possible if the Pope says that this is what the text means. Here you have the natural extension of the totalitarian and authoritarian principle even to historical facts. The Pope decides what is a fact, not only what is true in theological terms.

Jansenism produced other writings. There was one man, Quesnel, who tried to introduce Augustinian principles again and to defend them against the Jesuits. But again the Pope took the side of the Jesuits and Augustine was removed, to a large extent, from Counter-Reformation Catholicism. In the bull, "Unigenitus," the Pope drives out the best of the Roman tradition. He drives out Augustine's doctrine of grace, of faith, and of love. For instance, it is anathema if somebody says, with Augustine, "In vain, Lord, Thou commandest if Thou dost not give what Thou orderest." This means that the commandments of God can be fulfilled only if God gives what He commands – that's Augustinianism. If somebody says this in the Roman church, after the Jansenistic struggle – he is condemned – and that means, implicitly, that Augustine is condemned.

If you have to deal with modern progressive Catholics – there are more of them in Europe than in this country, where Catholicism is completely polytheized , and has almost lost (with a few exceptions: some of our neighbors here around) the Spiritual power – then you find that these people always fall back to Augustine and always are at the edge of being thrown out, being excommunicated or forbidden or cut off or reduced in their power of self-expression. I happened to discuss problems several times with Catholic groups, in my last trips to Germany – especially impressive was last summer, with the Rhineland – and it's astonishing how near we were with each other! But these people all have the expression of persecuted people They feel that if they agree with me in Augustinian principles, they are in danger. And they are!. Now this is a tragedy because in the moment in which – no, it is not only the discussion itself; it is also their whole activities which come out in such discussions – they are in danger of being cut off. And this means that the condemnation of Augustinianism in the Jansenistic struggle is like a sword over every form of spiritualized Catholicism that is a threat against changes going on there.

Now the last problem I want to mention is Probabilism – that which is probable. Probable are opinions, given by authorities in the Roman church, about ethical questions. The Jesuits said: If an opinion is probable, then one is allowed to follow it even if the opposite is more probable! Now this means that in ethical respects, you have no autonomy – of course not; that's something the church would deny radically. You always have to follow the guidance of the Roman priest, of the confessor especially. But the confessor himself has many possibilities. Since he himself has not to talk to you in the power of his spirit, but has to talk to you on the basis of authorities, of the Fathers, these authorities always contradict each other, or at least are different. So he can advise you something which is probably right, in an ethical act, but it may be more probable that other things are right. But if he can find an acknowledged authority of the Church which has said something about a problem – even if it is not very safe, even if other things probably seem to be better – you can follow it Now the result of this doctrine was a tremendous ethical relativism and laxity, chaos, and this of course was very advantageous in the 18th century, in which the church followed the new morals of bourgeois society, which was in the development, by making the ethical demands relativistic. Of course this was so abused that finally a reaction arose in the Roman church.

Alphonse Liguori – a name which you will often read – reacted against it, but he himself really didn't overcome, because he also says that it is not I who can decide, but my confessor must decide. And how can the confessor decide? Finally the principle of the probable triumphs.

Another development connected with this was that now every sin becomes a venial sin. And here again Jesuitism and the bourgeoisie – the greatest enemies – went together in taking out the radical seriousness which the Jansenists and the early Protestants maintained.

This is the situation. Much more can be said about present-day Catholicism. I said a few things about it yesterday, about the way in which the last decisions of the Pope have continued this line. Let me refer to one decision which is not known so much as the decision about the bodily ascension of the Holy Virgin. This was a previous encyclical of the Pope in which he said things which went even beyond what was said in the Vaticanum about the infallibility of the Pope. In the Vaticanum the infallibility referred only to statements ex cathedra, I. e., if the Pope officially, as Pope, makes a statement of dogma or ethics. But in this encyclical of 1950, he made statements about philosophies, and sharply directed his statements against existentialism. In these statements he said that if after many considerations the Pope has decided that a philosophy is unsound, then no faithful Catholic can work in the line of this philosophy any more.

Now this goes far beyond everything which the Pope has said before. And then of course he puts Thomas Aquinas again into the role of the Catholic philosopher. That meant that some of the French existentialists, Lubac and others, and others – had to give up their teaching positions because philosophically they were existentialists – although they answered the existentialist questions in religious terms. So you see one line which goes on even against all probability.

1 remember when in March 1950, the Holy Year of the Roman church – 1 asked Dr. Niebuhr, "What do you think: will the Pope make this declaration ex cathedra, about the ascension of the Holy Virgin?" Then he answered: 1 don't think so; he is too clever for that; it is a slap in the face to the whole modern world and it is only dangerous for the Roman church to do that today. And a few months later it was done! Now this means even such a keen observer as Reinhold Niebuhr couldn't imagine – and I was of course convinced by him, even more than he himself probably!! – I was convinced that he was right because none of us could imagine that the Pope would dare to do this today. But he did it. And what does that mean? This means two things, that an authoritarian system, in order to fix itself, has to become narrower and narrower. It has to do what the other totalitarian systems do: they exclude, step by step, one danger after the other, threatening them by the presence of other traditions. In the Middle Ages, before the Crusades, there was no other tradition than the tradition of the ancient Church, which was the great educator of the barbaric nations. This was a simple situation. The problem already became actual when since Frederick.Il, ca. 1250 – the same year in which there was the 4th Lateran Council – in this moment the danger started and the Church reacted with anti-heretic laws and crusades. The same thing is in the development of the Roman church and in the development of all other totalitarian systems: they must try to prevent their subjects from meeting other traditions. Of course, the Roman church did this consistently for many, many years, in terms of the Index Librorum Vetitorum, the index of forbidden books, which are forbidden not for the scholars, of course, but for the populace; the general people is not allowed to read any of the books which are on the Index, and students must have a general or special permission, for instance, to read theological books of Paul Tillich, and others – which they sometimes do; and then they are very clever about them. 1 just got an article about my systematic theology from a Catholic; he gave me the manuscript, and it is an excellent analysis. They can do it very well, but they must have special permission for that. The ordinary man is not allowed to read such !"dangerous" things, which means other traditions are not allowed to hit the souls of those who shall be well preserved. Now that is one of the reasons for the so-called "iron curtain." This is why Hitler completely cut off Germany from any intellectual influence, year by year a little more. And this is an inescapable development of all authoritarian systems, and this is why this encylical in the year 1950 was so interesting, with the declaration of the dogma.

But it has another connotation: that the liberal world has become so weak that the Pope doesn't need to be afraid of it any more. This was our error – Dr. Niebuhr's and myself – that we thought he would respect the Protestants and the humanists - -perhaps even the Communists all over the world, and not put himself in a position that almost everybody would speak of the superstitious attitude of the Roman church, in making such a dogma. But he was not afraid – and probably he was right, because the very weak Protestant resistance against this and similar things cannot hurt the Catholic church any more. And the humanist opposition is almost non-existent because humanism itself is in a process of self-disintegration. And the greatness of the existentialists is that they describe this disintegration, but they themselves are in the midst of it.

Now this is the situation, and in this situation an understanding of the Roman church is more needed by all of you, in your actual ministry, than it was in the last hundred years We are threatened by all forms of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Now 1 distinguish between totalitarianism and authoritarianism: Rome is not totalitarian – only a state can be; but Rome is authoritarian, and exercises many functions which otherwise totalitarian states have exercised. So the question which the existence of Catholicism puts before us is the question whether, with the end of the liberal era, liberalism at all will come to an end. This leads me to the question, which is very near to my heart, whether with the end of the Protestant era, the Protestant principle will also come to an end. This leads us to the problem of the Reformation.

Now I will deal with this large problem in a very short survey, after having agreed with Professor Handy that in view of the fact that you come from Protestant traditions and are nourished, so to speak, with Protestant ideas, you do not need this as much as you need a knowledge of the ancient and medieval Church. I am not so sure that you don't need it and for the very reason that the kind of Protestantism which developed in this country is not very much an expression of the Reformation, but has much more to do with the so-called Evangelical Radicals, and their influence on the forms of Protestantism as they have developed in this country. On the other hand, there are the Lutheran and Calvinistic groups, and they are strong; but they have adapted themselves to an astonishing degree to the climate of American Protestantism; and this climate is not made by them but by the sectarian movements. Therefore when I came here 20 years ago, the Reformation theology was almost unknown in Union Theological Seminary, because of the different traditions and the reduction of the Protestant tradition more to the non-Reformation traditions.

So I hope that when next fall Professor Pauck comes and gives his treatment of the Reformation, in the one and one-half year course on Church history – which will replace this one lecture I gave to you – then you will have much more occasion and better guidance for a full study of the Reformation. In any case, today I will put the Reformation into the broad sweep of Church-historical development.

Now the turning point of the Reformation and of Church history as a whole is the experience of an Augustinian monk in his monastic cell – Martin Luther. Martin Luther didn't teach other doctrines – that, he also did; but this was not important, there were many others also who did; cf. Wyclif. But none of those who protested against the Roman system were able to break through it. The only man who really broke through, and whose! breakthrough has transformed the surface of the earth, was Martin Luther. That is his greatness. Don't measure his greatness by comparing him with Lutheranism; that's something quite different, and is something which has gone through the period of' Lutheran Orthodoxy and many other things – political movements, Prussian conservatism, and what not. But Luther is something different. Luther is one of the few great prophets of the Christian Church, and even if his greatness was limited by some characteristics he had, and by his later development, his greatness is overwhelming. He is responsible – and he

alone – for the fact that a purified Christianity, a Christianity of the Reformation, was able to establish itself on equal terms with the Roman tradition. And from this point of view we must look at him. Therefore when I speak of Luther, I don 't speak of the theologian who has produced Lutheranism – there are many others who have done this, and Melanchthon much more than Luther – but I speak of the man in whom the breakthrough occurred, the break through the Roman system; and that is he, and nobody else.

This breakthrough was a break through three distortions of Christianity which make the Roman Catholic religion what it is. The breakthrough was the creation of another religion. What does :religion" mean here? "Religion" means nothing else than another personal relationship between man and God – man to God and God to man: that is what the difference is. And this is why it was not possible, in spite of tremendous attempts during the 16th century and sometimes later on, to produce a reunion of the churches. You can compromise about different doctrines; you cannot compromise about different religions! Either you have the Protestant relation to God or you have the Catholic, but you cannot have both; you can 't make a compromise.

The Catholic system is a system of objective, quantitative and relative relations between God and man for the sake of providing eternal happiness for man. I repeat:

The Catholic religion is a system of objective, quantitative, and relative relations between God and man for the sake of providing eternal happiness for man. They are quantitative relations, which must come together – here a piece and there a piece; they are relative: none is absolute, each is relative; and they are objective, in the sense of being things and not personal relationship.

Now this is the basic structure – objective, not personal; quantitative, not qualitative, and conditioned, not absolute.

And this leads me to another sentence, namely, that the Roman system is a system of divine-human management, represented and actualized by ecclesiastical management.. It is a system of Divine-human management represented and mediated by ecclesiastical management.

Now first the purpose: The purpose is to give eternal blessedness to man and to save him from eternal punishment. The alternative is eternal suffering in Hell or eternal pleasure in Heaven. This is the purpose of the whole thing. Now the way to do is the way which we have described when we discussed the Catholic sacraments, in which a magic giving of grace is the one side, and moral freedom which produces merits is the other side – magic grace completed by active law; active law completed by magic grace.

The quantitative character comes through also in terms of the ethical commands. There are two groups: commandments and counsels -- commandments for every Christian; counsels, the full yoke of Christ, only for the monks and partly for the priests. For instance, love toward the enemy is a counsel of perfection but not a commandment for everybody. Asceticism is a counsel of perfection but not a, commandment. for everybody.

There is a difference between two types of degrees, moral demands. There is also a quantitative character in the Divine punishments There is eternal punishments for mortal sins; there is Purgatory for light sins; there is Heaven for fully purged people in Purgatory, and sometimes, as saints, already on earth. All these are quantitative and relative elements. Under these conditions nobody ever knew whether 'he could be certain of his salvation, because you never could do enough, you never could receive enough grace of a magical character, nor could you ever do enough in terms of merits and asceticism. The result of this was a tremendous amount of anxiety at the end of the Middle Ages. In my "Courage to Be" I have

described, as one of the three great types of anxiety, the anxiety of guilt, and I have related this anxiety of guilt socially and historically to the end of the Middle Ages, It is always present, of course, but at that time it was predominant and almost like a contagious sickness. People couldn't do enough in order to get a merciful God, in order to get over their bad conscience. There was a tremendous amount of anxiety expressed in the art of that time, expressed in the demand for ever and ever more pilgrimages, in the collection and adoration of relics, in prayers of "Our Fathers," in giving of money, buying indulgences, self-torturing asceticism – and doing everything possible in order to get over one's guilt Now it is interesting to look into this time. We are almost unable to understand it. Now with the same anxiety of guilt and condemnation, Luther was in the cloister. Out of it he went into it, and out of it he experienced what he experienced, namely, that no amount of asceticism is ever able to give us, in the system of relativities, quantities, and things, a real certainty of salvation. He always was in fear of the threatening God, of the punishing and destroying God. And he asked: how can I get a merciful God? Out of this question and the anxiety behind this question, the Reformation arose.

Now what does Luther say against the Roman quantitative, objective, and relative point of view?:

The relation to God is personal. It is an ego-thou relationship, not mediated by anybody or anything – only by accepting the message of acceptance, which is the content of the Bible. This is not an objective status in which you are, but this is a personal relationship, which he called "faith"; but not faith in something which one can believe, but acceptance that you are accepted: this is what he meant.

It is qualitative, not quantitative. Either you are separated or you are not separated from God. There are no quantities of separation or non-separation. In a person-to-person relationship you can say: there are conflicts, there are tensions, but as long as the relationship is a relationship of confidence and love, it is a quality. And if it is separated, it is something else. But it is not a matter of quantity. And in the same way, it is unconditional and not conditioned, as it is in the Roman system. You are not a little bit nearer to God if you do a little bit more for the church, or against your body, but you are near to God completely, absolutely, if you are united with Him; and you are separated if you are not The one is unconditionally negative; the other is unconditionally positive. The Reformation restates the unconditional categories of the Bible.

From this follows that the magic element as well as the legal element in the piety disappear. The forgiveness of sins, or acceptance, is not an act of the past done in baptism, but it is continuously necessary. Repentance is an element in every relationship to God, in every moment. It never can stop. The magic as well as the legal element disappear, for grace is personal communion with the sinner. There is no possibility of any merit; there is only the necessity of accepting. And there is no hidden magic power in our souls which make us acceptable, but we are acceptable in the moment in which we accept acceptance. Therefore the sacramental activities as such are rejected. There are sacraments, but they mean something quite different. And the ascetic activities are eternally rejected because none of them can give certainty. But here again a misunderstanding often prevails. One says: Now isn't that egocentric:; l think Maritain told me that once – if the Protestants think about their own individual certainty? – Now it is not an abstract certainty, that Luther meant; it is reunion with God – this implies certainty. But everything centers around this being accepted. And this of course is certain; if you have God, you have Him. But if you look at yourself, at your experiences, your asceticism, and your morals, then you can be certain only if you are extremely self-complacent and blind toward yourselves; otherwise you cannot. And these, are absolute categories. The Divine demand is absolute. They are not relative demands, which bring more or less blessedness, but they are the absolute demand: joyfully accept the will of God. And there is only one punishment – not the different degrees between the ecclesiastical satisfactions, between the punishment in purgatory, and its many degrees, and finally Hell. There is nothing like this. There is only one punishment, namely the despair of being separated from God. And consequently there is only one grace, namely, reunion with God. That's all. And to this, Luther – whom Adolf Harnack, the great historian of the dogma, has called a genius of reduction – to this simplicity, Luther has reduced the Christian religion. This is another religion.

Now Luther believed that this was a restatement of the New Testament, especially of Paul. But although his message has the truth of Paul, it's by no means the full Paul; it is not everything which Paul is. The situation determined what he took from Paul, namely Paul's conception of defense against legalism – the doctrine of justification by faith. But he did not take in Paul's doctrine of the Spirit. Of course he did not deny it; there is a lot of it; but that is not decisive. The decisive thing is that a doctrine of the Spirit, of being "in Christ," of the New Being, is the weak spot in Luther's doctrine of justification by faith.

In Paul the situation is different. Paul has three main centers in his thinking, which make it not a circle but a triangle. The one is his eschatological consciousness, the certainty that in Christ eschatology is fulfilled and a New Reality has started. The second is the doctrine of the Spirit, which means for him that the Kingdom of God has appeared, that it is here, and there; that the New Being, in which we are, is given to us in Christ. The third point in Paul is the critical defense against legalism: justification by faith.

Luther took all three, of course. But the eschatological point was not really understood. He, in his weariness of the theological fights – you cannot become more tired of anything in the world than of theological controversies, if you always are living it; and even Melanchthon, when he came to death, one of his last words was: "God save me now from the rabies theologorum – from the wrath of the theologians! This is an expression you will understand if you will read the conflicts of the centuries. I just read with great pain, day and night, the doctor's dissertation of a former pupil, Mr. Thompson, Dr. McNeill's former assistant, an excellent work in which he describes in more than 300 narrow and large pages the struggle between Melanchthonism and Lutheranism. And if you read that and then see how simple the fundamental statement of Luther was, and how the rabies theologorum produced an almost unimaginable amount of theological disputations on points of which even half-learned theologians as myself would say that they are intolerable, they don't mean anything any more – then you can see the difference between the prophetic mind and the fanatical theological mind.

Today I come to the point where Luther's breakthrough was externally occasioned. It is the sacrament of penance. You remember that I said there are two main sacraments in the Roman church, the Mass, which is a part of the Lord's Supper; and the subjective sacrament which had an immense educational function, namely the dealing with the individual in the sacrament of penance.

This sacrament can be called the sacrament of subjectivity, in contrast to the Mass which was the complete sacrament of objectivity. Between these two, the medieval situation goes on. But it was not the Mass – although it was tremendously attacked by Luther – which was the real point of criticism; but it was the subjective sacrament and the abuses connected with it. The abuses came from the fact that the sacrament of penance had different parts: contrition, confession, absolution, and satisfaction. The first and the last points were the most dangerous ones.

Contrition – the real repentance, the change of the mind – was replaced by attrition, the fear of eternal punishment, which Luther called the repentance inspired by the imminent prospect of the gallows. So it has no religious value for him. The other dangerous point was satisfaction, which did not mean that you can earn your forgiveness of sins by works of satisfaction, but that you have to do them because the sin is still in you after it is forgiven, and that the humble subjection to the satisfactions demanded by the minister is the decisive thing.

Now this means that the priest imposed on the communicandus all kinds of activities and sometimes such difficult ones that the people wanted to get rid of them. And that was accepted by the Church in terms of the indulgences, which are also sacrifices – you must sacrifice some money, in order to buy them, and then you could get rid of the satisfactions. The popular idea was that these satisfactions are effective for overcoming one's guilt consciousness. This was a point where one can say that a kind of market with eternal life was going on: you could buy the indulgences and in doing so you could get rid of the punishments, not only on earth but also in Purgatory. The abuses brought Luther to a thinking about the whole meaning of the sacrament of penance. In doing so he came to conclusions which were absolutely in opposition to the attitude of the Roman church, and not only to the abuses: the criticism went to the source of the abuses, namely the doctrine itself. And so Luther put on the door of the Wittenberg church the famous 95 Theses, the first of which is the classical formulation of everything which is Reformed Christianity: "Our Lord and teacher, Jesus Christ, saying ‘Repent ye,' wished that the whole life of the believers be penitence." Now this means the sacramental act is only something in which a much more universal attitude comes to a sacramental form; it is not the sacramental which is important but the relationship to God. It is not a new theological doctrine but a new relationship to God which the Reformers brought about, and this comes out in this one sentence – the relationship is not an objective management between God and man, but it is a personal relationship of penitence, first of all, and then faith.

Perhaps the most striking and paradoxical expression is given by Luther in the following words: "Penitence is something between injustice and justice. Therefore, whenever we are repenting we are sinners, but nevertheless for this reason we are also righteous, and in the process of justification, partly sinners, partly righteous – that is nothing but repenting.," This means that there is always something like repentance in the relationship to God.

Luther at that time did not attack the sacrament of penance as such. He even thinks the indulgences can be tolerated. But he attacked the center, out of which all the abuses came, and this was the decisive event of the Reformation.

But after this attack had been made, the consequences were clear. The money of indulgence can only help against those works which are given by the Pope, I. e , the canonic punishments. The dead in Purgatory cannot be released by the Pope; he can only pray for them; he does not have power over the dead. The forgiveness of sins is an act of God alone, and the Pope can only declare – and "Pope" also means every priest – that God has done it already. There is no treasury of the Church out of which the indulgences can come, except the one treasury, namely the work of Christ. No saint can do superfluous works because it is our duty to do everything we can anyhow; how can something be superfluous? The power of the keys, namely of forgiving sins, is given by God to every disciple who is with Him. The works of satisfaction are only the works of love; all other works are an arbitrary invention by the Church. Arid there is no time and space for them, because in our real life we must always be aware of the works of love which are demanded from us in every moment. Confession, which is made by the priest in the sacrament of penance, is directed towards God. You don't need to go to the priest for this. In every "our Father" we confess our sins, and that is what matters and not the sacramental confession. Arid about satisfaction he said: this is a completely dangerous concept because we cannot satisfy God at all; if there is satisfaction, it is done by Christ to God, but is not done by us. So this concept has to disappear. Purgatory is a fiction and an imagination of man, with no biblical foundation. The only thing which remains is absolution. And of course Luther was psychologically educated enough to know that a solemn absolution may have psychological effects, but he denied that it is necessary. The message of the Gospel, which is the message of forgiveness, is the absolution in every moment, and you can get it as the answer of God to your prayer for forgiveness; you don't need to go to church for this.

This means the sacrament of penance is completely dissolved. :Penitence is transformed into a personal relationship to God and to the neighbor, against a system of means to obtain the release of objective punishments in Hell, Purgatory, and life, which the Roman system demanded.. In reality, all these concepts are undercut at least, if not abolished. Everything is put on the basis of a person-to-person relationship between God and man. You can have this relationship even in Hell. That means Hell is simply a place, but it is not a state. And that is abolished by the kind of Reformation idea of relationship to God.

Now of course this was a danger and a difficulty, that in this way many educational degrees have been abolished by Luther and only the absolute categories of the relationship between God and man: are left. The Pope did not accept this, of course, and so the conflict between Luther and the Church arose. Now let's make clear beforehand that this was not the beginning of the Reformation. Luther hoped to reform the Church, including the Pope and the priests. But the Pope and the priests didn't want to be reformed in any way. The last great bull defining the power of the Pope says: "Therefore we declare, pronounce and define that it is universally necessary for salvation that every human creature is subject to the Roman high priest." This is the bull which defines most sharply the unlimited and absolute power of the Pope.

Now Luther criticized the Church when the Church did not follow his criticism of the sacrament of penance. There is only one ultimate criterion for Christianity, namely the message of the Gospel. Therefore there is no infallibility of the Pope. The Pope may fall into error. -- Then his Catholic enemies showed him that it is not only the Pope but also some of the Councils which deserved to be attacked now. Then he didn't retire, but said: Then also the Councils may fall into error. -- And this was actually the break, because this meant even if you go from the curialistic theory that the Pope in Rome alone is the monarch who decides... ; if you go then to the conciliaristic theory that the great Councils of the Church are absolutely infallible, even then Luther said: No, they are human, they may fall into error. The Pope could be tolerated, he says, if he were only by human law, by the law of expediency, as the chief administrator of the Church. But that is not what the Pope claims. He claims to be by Divine right, and that means he is an absolute figure in the Church. And here Luther said this cannot be stood, because no human being can ever be the vicar of the Divine power; the Divine right of the Pope is a demonic claim and actually the claim of the Antichrist. Of course, when he said this the break was clear. There is only one head of the Church, namely Christ, and the Pope as he is now is the creation of the Divine wrath to punish Christianity for its sins. This was meant theologically, and not as name-calling; he meant it very seriously, theologically, when he called the Pope the Antichrist. It was not directed against a special man and his shortcomings – everybody criticized the behavior of the Pope at that time – but he criticized the position of the Pope, namely that the Pope is by Divine right the representative of Christ. In this way the Pope destroys the souls, because he wants to have a power which God alone can have.

This was Luther's criticism of the Church, and this was the basis for the break with the Church. The basis for this break was not that he taught another theology, but the break was that the Pope did not admit criticism because he claimed to be of Divine right in everything he does and thinks, officially.

One of the main things which Luther himself experienced was the importance of monasticism in the Roman church – he himself was a monk. Out of the monastic attitude of the Roman church a double morals followed, the morals of counsels, advices for higher goodness, greater nearness to God, namely the monastic attitude; and then the rules which are valid for everybody and which everybody has to fulfill. The higher counsels for the monks, such as fasting, discipline, humility, celibacy, etc., make the monks something ontologically higher than the ordinary man. He has higher substantial graces, whatever he may be personally.

Now this was demanded by the historical situation when the Church became larger and larger and the masses of the people couldn't take upon themselves, as it was said, the whole yoke of Christ; they couldn't because it was too heavy for them. So a special group did it, and this group follows the special advices for higher morality and piety. They were the religiosi, those who are religious in their whole attitude, who are not religious as everybody has to be, but who make religion, so to speak, their "vocation."

Now the double morals are the main point of Luther's attack. The Divine demand is absolute and unconditional. It refers to everybody. This absolute demand destroys the whole system of religion. There is no status of perfection, as the Catholics ascribed to the monks. Everybody has to be perfect and nobody is able to be perfect. Not man's power is able to give one the graces to do the right thing; but not a special endeavor, as the monks have it. Decisive in all cases is the intention: the good will, not the magic habit of which the Catholic Church spoke. And this intention, this good will, is right even if its content is wrong. But the valuation of a personality is dependent on the inner intention of a person towards the good. Luther took this very seriously. For him it is not enough if you will to do the good, the will of God, but you must will what God wills joyfully, with your voluntary participation. And if you fulfill the whole law but you don't do it joyfully – because you are allowed to do it, because you are a child and the image of God – then it is worth nothing. The obedience of the servant is not the fulfillment of Christian ethics. Only he who loves, and joyfully loves, God and man is able to fulfill the law. But this is what is expected from everybody.

This means Luther turns religion and ethics around. We cannot fulfill the will of God without being united with Him. And this is impossible without forgiveness of sins. Even the best people have elements of despair, and aggressiveness and indifference and self-contradiction. Only on the basis of Divine forgiveness can the full yoke of Christ be imposed on everybody. This is completely different from a moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The moral is that which follows – it might or might not follow; it should follow, essentially; sometimes it does not – but the prius of it is the participation in the Divine grace in His forgiveness and in His power of being.

This makes all the difference in the world, and it is one of the most unfortunate happenings that Protestantism always is in the temptation to turn around the thing into its opposite, namely, to make the religious dimension dependent on morality. Wherever this is done, we are outside the realm of true Protestantism. You should never forget this in your congregations and everywhere: if somebody says, "Oh, God must love me, and I love Him because I do almost everything He demands." – namely, what the suburban neighbor demands! – then the religious and ethical situation is completely turned into its opposite. But if somebody says: "I know that I don't do anything good, or so little seemingly good, so ambiguous that the only thing which is good in me is that God declares that I am good and that I am able to accept this Divine declaration, and if I accept it, then it may happen that there may be a transformed reality; but the other side is the first." And that is one of the centers of the whole Reformation. Therefore the famous phrase, "by faith alone," (sola fide.)

This phrase is the most misunderstood and distorted, phrase of the Reformation. People have taught it means that if you do the good work of believing, having faith in something – something unbelievable, especially – then you do that good work which makes you good before God. The phrase should be not "by faith alone" but "by grace alone, which is received through faith." So if you want to be correct, don't translate sola fide by the English phrase "by faith alone," but "by grace alone, through faith," whereby "faith" means nothing than the acceptance of grace. That is what Luther was concerned about, because he had experienced that if you do it the other way around, then you are always lost, and if you take it seriously you are in absolute despair, because if you know yourselves, you know that you are not good; you know it as well as Paul did; and that means that ethics are the consequence and not the cause of goodness.

Now I come to that element in the Roman Catholic Church which gave it its tremendous power; the sacramental element/ The Roman church Is essentially a sacramental church. This means that God is essentially seen as present, and not as somebody who is distant and only has to demand. A sacramental world-view is a world-view in which the Divine is seen as visible and real. Therefore a church of the sacrament is a church of the present God. But on the other hand the Roman church was a church in which this sacrament was administered as a magic means by the hierarchy, and only by the hierarchy, so that everybody who does not participate in it is lost, and he who participates in it, even if he is unworthy, gets the sacrament. And as you know, there were 7 sacraments. I discussed this fully before.

What does Luther do? He said: "No sacrament is effective by itself without full participation of the personal center, I. e., without the listening to the word connected with the sacrament, and the faith which accepts it. The sacrament qua sacrament cannot help at all. The magic side of sacramental thinking is destroyed.

From this follows that transubstantiation is destroyed because this doctrine makes the bread and wine a piece of Divine reality put on the altar. But such a thing does not exist. The presence of God is not a presence in terms of objective presence, on a special place, in a special form; but it is a presence for the faithful alone. There are two criteria for this: it is only for the faithfu1, then it is only an action: Then if you come to a church and there is no sacrament spread; you don't need to do anything about it because it is pure bread,.. It: becomes more .than this only in action, only in the moment in which it is given to those who have faith. For the Roman theory it is there all the time.. If you come into an empty Roman church, you must bow down before the shrine because there God Himself is present., even if there is nobody else present except you and this sacrament. "Present" means transformation, transubstantiation. This Luther abolished. He denounced the character indelibilis as a human fiction – the character which you get in baptism, confirmation, and in ordination, that whenever you have it you are always a Christian, and for instance, under the heresy laws and an object of persecution, which the Pagans and Jews are not; or if you are confirmed, you are always a soldier of Christ and have, so to speak, the invisible uniform of the Church. Or if you are ordained, you always have the power of the sacraments, so that even it you are thrown out of the Church, you can perform sacramentally valid marriages, and other things.

All this, Luther denied, calling it a human fiction. There is no such thing as a character which cannot be destroyed. If you are called to the ministry, you must minister exactly as everybody does who is called to some profession. If you go away rom it, if you become a businessman or professor or shoemaker, than you are this and no longer a minister at all, and you have no sacramental power at all. You can have priestly power, if you are a pious Christian towards everybody else. But this is going on all the time, and doesn't need ordination.

Now this took away the sacramental foundation of the whole hierarchical system. But most important was his attack on the Mass. The Mass is a sacrifice we bring to God, but we have nothing to bring to God, and therefore it is a blasphemy, a sacrilege. And in most Protestant countries in the period of the Reformation, the state government, prohibited – as still in many countries today there are laws against printed or spoken, blasphemy – the Mass, which was supposed to be such a blasphemy, and therefore it was persecuted and it a blasphemy because here man gives something to God, instead of expecting that God has given everything He has to give, namely Himself in Christ, and that nothing more than this was needed. This was perhaps the most profound attack on the Roman system, which is a sacramental system completely, and which was dissolved just by this criticism.

Now this is the conflict of Luther with the Roman church – some of the main points in it. I now come to the other conflicts, the conflict with the humanists and the conflict with the Evangelical Radicals.

The representative of humanism at that time was Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the beginning they had friendly feelings for each other, but then the attacks on both sides created a break between Protestantism and humanism, and this break has not been healed up to today, in spite of the fact that Zwingli tried to heal it as early as in the 20's of the 16th century. Erasmus was a humanist, but he was a Christian humanist; he was not anti-religious at all. He believed himself to be a better Christian than any Pope of his time, and he agreed in this in unity with Luther. But he was a humanist, and that means he had special characteristics distinguishing him from the prophet. You have Dr. Richardson's article on the prophet and the scholar, and the confrontation of Luther and Erasmus in these terms. What Luther couldn't stand in Erasmus, he has expressed very clearly. He couldn't stand his unexistential detachment, the detachment from the religious content without passion, as he says; the scholarly attitude towards the contents of the Christian faith. He felt that in Erasmus there is some unconcern, while the problems are matters of ultimate concern.

The second is that as every scholar has to be skeptical about the traditions and the meaning of the words and everything else which he shall interpret, Erasmus was a scholarly skeptic. Luther couldn't stand this. For him absolute statements in matters of ultimate concern are needed.

Third, Luther was a radical, in political and every other respect; but Erasmus seemed to be to him a man of adaptation to the political situation – not for his own sake but in order to have peace on earth.

Fourthly, Erasmus has a strongly educational point of view. The development of the individual in educational terms is decisive for him. And all humanism, up to today, has this educational drive and passion.

Fifth, Erasmus' criticism is rational criticism. It is lacking in revolutionary aggressiveness.

Now all this Luther sees in Erasmus. But the whole discussion finally focused around the doctrine of the freedom of the will. Erasmus was for human freedom; Luther against. But now please don't write that down without writing down everything I have to add now!: Neither Erasmus nor Luther doubted about man's psychological freedom. They didn't think man is a stone or animal. And even Karl Barth says: I know well that man is not a turtle – But he doesn't know it well! because he doesn't see that this means that man has freedom, freedom of deliberation and decision, freedom of contradicting himself, and that in this freedom which is his rational structure his image of God is implied.

Erasmus as well as Luther knew that man is essentially free, that he is man only because he is free. But now on this basis they drew opposite consequences. For Erasmus this freedom is also valid if you try to come to God. You can help God. You can cooperate with God, for your salvation. For Luther this is absolutely impossible. It takes the honor from God and from Christ and makes man into something which he is not. So he speaks of "the enslaved will.". . . but it is the free will which is enslaved. It is ridiculous to speak of a stone that it has no free will. Only he who has free will can be said to have an enslaved will, namely enslaved by the demonic forces of reality.

Luther attacks the Anselmian point of view by saying that justification by faith is the only point of certainty, and that it is not our contribution to salvation that can give us quiet consolation. He says that in Erasmus the meaning of Christ is denied and finally that the honor of God is denied.

I think that here we have a very fundamental difference between the two attitudes. The attitude of the humanist is that of detached analysis. And if it comes to synthesis, it is that of the moralist, in contrast to the prophet, who sees everything in the light of God alone

Luther's conflict with the Evangelical Radicals: This is especially important for you because the prevailing type in this country is not produced by the Reformation directly, but by the indirect effect of the Reformation through the movements of Evangelical Radicalism. What is the meaning of this concept?

First of all we must agree that they all are dependent on Luther. They have a long history in the Middle Ages, but only Luther liberated the tendencies which were alive in the Middle Ages from the suppression to which they were condemned. Luther's emphasis on almost all points was accepted by the Evangelical Radicals, but then they went beyond him. They had the feeling that he stood half-way. First of all his principle of the Bible – to which we come tomorrow – is something which they attacked. God has not spoken but once, in the past, and then has become silent; but He always speaks, He speaks in the heart or depths of every man, if this man is prepared by his own cross to hear. The Spirit is in the depths of the heart, although not by ourselves but from God. From this point of view, he says that it is always possible that the Spirit speaks through individuals.

Now I speak mostly of Thomas Muenzer, who is the most creative of the Evangelical Radicals. But in order to receive this Spirit, man must participate in the cross. Luther, he said, preaches a sweet Christ – the Christ of forgiveness. But we must, he said, also preach the bitter Christ, namely the Christ who says that we must take His cross upon ourselves. The cross is, so we can say, the extreme, the boundary situation. It is internal and external. And Muenzer, in an astonishing way, expresses that in modern existentialist categories. It is the human finiteness which, if he realizes it, produces in him a disgust about the whole world. Then he really becomes poor in spirit. Then the anxiety of creaturely existence grasps him. Then he finds that courage is possible. But then it happens that God appears to him and that he is transformed. And if this has happened to him, then he can have very special revelations. He can have individual visions, not only about theology as a whole, but also about matter of the daily life.

These groups felt on this basis that they are the real fulfillment of the Reformation, that Luther remained half-Catholic, that they are elected; while the Roman church has no certainty for any individual with respect to justification; while Luther has the certainty of justification but not of election; while Calvin had the certainty not only of justification but at least to a great extent also of being elected – Muenzer and his followers had the certainty of being elected within a group of elected, namely the sectarian group.

From this point of view of the inner Spirit, all sacraments fall down. And the immediacy of the procession of the Spirit makes even what is left of the office of the minister unnecessary in the sectarian groups. Instead of that, they have another impetus, namely the transformation of society either by suffering, if they cannot change it, and abstinence from arms and oaths and public office and all those things involving you in state existence; or if they are radical, then by political measures, by the sword overcoming the evil society in which one lives; and then one becomes a religious socialist. These two movements we have in that period, and these movements and the whole attitude have influenced this country very much.