God seen as hostile by Martin Luther

IT is true that Luther’s own religious experience was both genuine and profound, but it was not the positive intuition of the contemplative; it was a dark and tormented sense of man’s utter helplessness and of the otherness of the Divine Power. For his discarding of the intellectual element in religion had brought his mind back, as it were, to the religious attitude of primitive man who sees the Divine as an unknown and hostile power from which it recoils in terror, “Yea,” he writes,

“God is more terrible and frightful than the Devil, for he dealeth with us and bringeth to ruin with power, smiteth and hammereth us and payeth no heed to us. ‘In His majesty He is a consuming fire,’ For therefrom can no man refrain; if he thinketh on God aright his heart in his body is stricken with terror. . . . Yea, as soon as he heareth God named he is filled with trepidation and fear.

“For He assaileth a man and has such a delight therein that He is of His Jealousy and Wrath impelled to consume the wicked.”

But Luther’s personal attitude is decidedly abnormal and nonrepresentative; the normal Protestant religious experience is of the milder and more emotional type represented by pietism and revivalism. Here faith is no longer conceived as a super-rational knowledge founded on the Divine Reason, but as a subjective conviction of one’s own conversion and justification, and in place of the personal ecstasy of the mystic, who realizes his own nothingness, we have the self-conscious attitude of the pietist, who is intensely preoccupied with his own feelings and with the moral state of his neighbor. And this substitution if the ideal of pietism for those of asceticism and mysticism eventually led to the weakening and discrediting of the ethical ideals of Christianity, just as sectarianism undermined its social authority. however unjust may be the popular caricature of the pietist as a snuffling hypocrite of the type of Tribulation Wholesome or Zeal-of-the Land Busy or Mr. Chadband, there can be no doubt that Puritan and Evangelical pietism succeeded in making religion supremely unattractive in a way that medieval asceticism had never done.

~Christopher Dawson: Christianity and the New Age, Chap. III.

Portrait of Martin Luther, by Lucas the Elder Cranach.

1543, panel; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.