Despite the entreaties of wife and elector he resolved to do what he could to end some trifling dispute about inheritance which threatened the peace of the House of Mansfeld. He left Wittenberg in bitterly cold weather on the 23rd of January 1546, and the journey was tedious and hazardous. He was accepted as arbiter and his decision brought an end to the strife. He preached in Eisleben (February 14) with all his old fervour; but suddenly said quietly: “This and much more is to be said about the Gospel; but I am too weak and we will close here.” These were his last words in the pulpit. On the 16th and 17th the deeds of reconciliation were signed and Luther’s work was done. The end came swiftly. He was very ill on the evening of the 17th; he died on the early morning of the 18th of February 1546 in his sixty-third year.
The elector of Saxony and Luther’s family resolved that he must be buried at Wittenberg, and on the 20th the funeral procession began its long march. The counts of Mansfeld, the magistrates of the city and all the burghers of Eisleben accompanied the coffin to the gates of their town. A company of fifty light-armed troops commanded by the young counts of Mansfeld headed the procession and went with it all the way to Wittenberg. The following was temporarily swelled as it passed through villages and towns. Delegates from the elector of Saxony met it as it crossed the boundaries of the principality. Luther was laid to rest in the Castle church on whose door he had nailed the theses which had kindled the great conflagration.
Bibliography.—(a) For Luther’s life as a whole: Melanchthon, “Historia de vita et actis Lutheri” (Wittenberg, 1545), in the Corpus Reformatorum, vi.; Mathesius, Historien von . . . Martini Lutheri, Anfang, Lehre, Leben und Sterben (Prague, 1896); Myconius, Historia Reformationis 1517–1542 (Leipzig, 1718); Ratzeberger, Geschichte über Luther und seine Zeit (Jena, 1850); Wrampelmeyer, Tagebuch über Dr Martin Luther geführt von Dr Conrad Cordatus, 1537 (Halle, 1885); Förstemann, Neues Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der evangelischen Kirchenreformation (Hamburg, 1842); Kolde, Analecta Lutherana (Gotha, 1883); G. Lösche, Analecta Lutherana et Melanchthoniana (Gotha, 1892); G. Lösche, Vollständige Reformations-Acta und Documenta (Leipzig, 1720–1729); Enders, Dr Martin Luther’s Briefwechsel (5 vols., Frankfurt, 1884–1893); J. Cochlaeus (Rom. Cath.), Commentarius de actis et scriptis M. Lutheri, &c. (St Victor prope Moguntium). See also J. Köstlin, Martin Luther, sein Leben und seine Schriften (2 vols., Berlin, 1889); Th. Kolde, Martin Luther, Eine Biographie (2 vols., Gotha, 1884–1893); A. Hausrath, Luther’s Leben (2 vols., Berlin, 1904); Lindsay, Luther and the German Reformation (Edinburgh, 1900); Cambridge Modern History, ii. (Cambridge, 1903); History of the Reformation, i. (Edinburgh, 1906).
(b) For special incidents: The Theses and their publication: W. Köhler, Luthers 95 Theses sammt seinen Resolutionen, den Gegenschriften von Wimpina-Tetzel, Eck und Prierias, und den Antworten Luthers darauf (Leipzig, 1903); Emil Reich, Select Documents illustrating Medieval and Modern History (London, 1905); The Leipzig Disputation: Seidemann, Die Leipziger Disputation im Jahre 1519 (Dresden, 1843); Luther before the Diet of Worms: Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V. (Gotha, 1893–1901), ii.; The Marburg Colloquy; Schirrmacher, Briefe und Acten zu der Geschichte des Religionsgespräches zu Marburg, 1529, und des Reichstages zu Augsburg 1530 (Gotha, 1876); Hospinian, Historia Sacramentaria, ii. 123b-126b; Ehrard, Das Dogma vom heiligen Abendmahl und seine Geschichte, ii. (Frankfurt a M., 1846); The Augsburg Confession: Schaff, The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches (London, 1877), History of the Creeds of Christendom (London, 1877). (T. M. L.)
LUTHERANS, the general title given to those Christians who have adopted the principles of Martin Luther in his opposition to the Roman Church, to the followers of Calvin, and to the sectaries of the times of the Reformation. Their distinctive name is the Evangelical, as opposed to the Reformed church. Their dogmatic symbols are usually said to include nine separate creeds which together form the Book of Concord (Liber Concordiae). Three belong to the Early Christian church—the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed (in its Western form, i.e. with the filioque), and the so-called Athanasian Creed; six come from the 16th century—the Augsburg Confession, the Apology for the Augsburg Confession, the Schmalkald Articles, Luther’s two Catechisms, and the Form of Concord. But only the three early creeds and the Augsburg Confession are recognized by all Lutherans. Luther’s Catechisms, especially the shorter of the two, have been almost universally accepted, but the Form of Concord was and is expressly rejected by many Lutheran churches. The Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Short Catechism may therefore be said to contain the distinctive principles which all Lutherans are bound to maintain, but, as the principal controversies of the Lutheran church all arose after the publication of the Augsburg Confession and among those who had accepted it, it does not contain all that is distinctively Lutheran. Its universal acceptance is perhaps due to the fact that it exists in two forms (the variata and the invariata) which vary slightly in the way in which they state the doctrine of the sacrament of the Supper. The variata edition was signed by Calvin, in the meaning, he said, of its author Melanchthon.
After Luther’s death the more rigid Lutherans declared it to be their duty to preserve the status religionis in Germania per Lutherum instauratus, and to watch over the depositum Jesu Christi which he had committed to their charge. As Luther was a much greater preacher than a systematic thinker, it was not easy to say exactly what this deposit was, and controversies resulted among the Lutheran theologians of the 16th century. The Antinomian controversy was the earliest (1537–1560). It arose from differences about the precise meaning of the word “law” in Luther’s distinction between law and gospel. Luther limited the meaning of the word to mean a definite command accompanied by threats, which counts on terror to produce obedience. He declared that Christ was not under the dominion of the law in this sense of the word, and that believers enter the Christian life only when they transcend a rule of life which counts on selfish motives for obedience. But law may mean ethical rule, and the Antinomians so understood it, and interpreted Luther’s declaration to mean that believers are not under the dominion of the moral law. The controversy disturbed the Lutheran church for more than twenty years.
The Arminian controversy in the Reformed church, the Jansenist controversy in the Roman Catholic church, had their parallel in three separate disputes among the Lutherans lasting from 1550 to 1580. (1) George Major, discussing the relation of good works to conversion, declared that such works were both useful and necessary to holiness. He was attacked by Flacius and Amsdorf, and after a long controversy, full of ambiguities and lacking in the exhibition of guiding principles, he was condemned because his statement savoured of Pelagianism. (2) The same problem took a new form in the Synergist controversy, which discussed the first impulse in conversion. One party taught that while the first impulse must come from the Holy Spirit the work might be compared to reviving a man apparently dead. It was answered that the sinner was really dead, and that the work of the Spirit was to give an actually new life. The latter assertion was generally approved of. (3) Then a fresh controversy was started by the assertion that sin was part of the substance of man in his fallen condition. It was answered that sin had not totally destroyed man’s ethical nature, and that grace changed what was morally insensitive into what was morally sensitive, so that there could be a co-operation between God’s grace and man’s will.
The controversy raised by Andrew Osiander was more important. He felt that Luther had omitted to make adequate answer to an important practical question, how Christ’s death on the cross could be brought into such actual connexion with every individual believer as to be the ground of his actual justification. The medieval church had spanned the centuries by supposing that Christ’s death was continuous down through the age in the sacrifice of the Mass; Protestant theology had nothing equivalent. He proposed to supply the lack by the theory that justification is a real work done in the individual by the same Christ who died so many centuries ago. Redemption, he said, was the result of the historical work of Christ; but justification was the work of the living risen Christ, dwelling within the believer and daily influencing him. Osiander’s theory did not win much support, but it was the starting-point of two separate doctrines. In the Lutheran church, Striegel taught that the principal effect of Christ’s work on the cross was to change the attitude of God towards the whole human
