Franz Xaver Kiefl on Luther: extract

At a later date, when and if I have time, I will post Part Two of James Swan's paper on Luther.  I found this extract/quote interesting, from a Catholic scholar who had a kinder view of Luther than earlier writers on the subject had.

Franz Xaver Kiefl (1917)

 A. Overview of F.X. Kiefl’s Attitude toward Luther

F. X. Kiefl is credited as the first Catholic scholar to put forth a new kinder approach to Luther. Kiefl was a German theologian at the University of Wurzburg. His groundbreaking article on Luther was Martin Luther’s Religious Psyche as the Root of a New Philosophical World View.[4] While Kiefl’s theological predecessors denied that Luther had any bonafide religious motives, Kiefl speaks of Luther’s “profound piety, his indomitable will, and his extraordinary literary genius.”[5] Kiefl broke with his scholarly predecessors: theological motives explain Luther.[6] Leonard Swidler explains, that Kiefl “…treated the psyche of Luther. However, as the title indicates, he treated it not as the object of depth psychology, but rather as a religious soul. He maintained that Luther’s starting point and his main interest were religious. It was from Luther’s religious psyche, as the “most profound and vital source,” that “as out of a seed everything later grew.”[7]

Kiefl was quite bold. He rejected the earlier Catholic approach of attacking Luther for his doctrine of Justification. Catholic scholar Heinrich Denifle had made popular the notion that Luther simply invented his doctrine to excuse sinful behavior, thus Denifle spent considerable time painting Luther as a gross sinner. Kiefl rejects this. He sees past Denifle’s rhetoric and distorted facts and sees that Luther never denied good works or holy living. Rather good works are the way in which faith expresses itself.[8]

Kiefl also evaluated the debate between Luther and Erasmus and found that Luther understood Christianity on a much deeper level than did Erasmus. Erasmus was a man of Renaissance learning, and Kiefl concludes by noting the negative impact of the Renaissance on Christianity and Luther’s positive impact of being God’s “powerful instrument of Providence” in the work of Church “purification”:

“Through Luther’s bringing into existence a spiritual movement which convulsed centuries, Providence has purified the Church in its inward holiness from the seductions of the culture of the Renaissance and has through this bitter physic kindled a new, fresh life in the whole organism of the Church. Luther was the powerful instrument of Providence in this work of purification, not by discovering a new source under the rubble of abuses but, with these real abuses affording him an occasion, by pushing a religious principle (to him quite justified) too far precipitating the Church into a war that shook its very foundations.”[9]

James Atkinson sums up Kiefl: “Kiefl showed a deep knowledge of Luther’s works. He appreciated Luther’s profound piety, his indomitable will, and his literary genius. True, he suggests that Luther’s spirituality was morbid, but he picks up the powerful phrase from Trent when Luther was reported as a powerful instrument chosen by Providence to reform the Church and purify it.”[10]

 

B. Criticism of Luther by Kiefl

Kiefl criticizes Luther for taking God’s “almightiness” too far. Luther’s doctrine of total depravity (leading to a denial of free will) was his error: “[Kiefl] saw Luther as mastered by God. It was his concept of a God who acted unilaterally that led Luther to deny free will, to affirm man’s total depravity, to hold a doctrine of imputed righteousness, and finally to reject a Church that claimed to mediate salvation…[11] Kiefl thinks Luther went too far and convulsed the Church in internal strife, but he does bring Luther back into the religious sphere where he belongs and where he ought always to have been.”[12]

Kiefl displays sympathy for Luther, and one will not find the deep hostile polemic that so characterized earlier Catholic German scholars. Kiefl though at one point gives a passing glance at Luther’s “abnormal” and “sick” spiritual condition. Another scholar though has pointed out, “Kiefl has merely recorded an abnormal condition without explaining it. This is sufficient to give Luther’s theology as a whole the character, not of a doctrine worked out by a normal Christian man, but of a remedy invented to relieve a sick soul.”[13]