Luther on the wheat and the tares

My recent fixation on ecclesiology, authority and Protestantism comes about partly because of the post-liberal and Radical Orthodox turns to ecclesiology. Time for some words from Luther to add to my Calvin posts!

Luther was able to point to the corruption of the papacy as a counter-testimony to its own assertion of its holiness. It was a proud and not a humble curia. It failed to see the church as a repenting church, as the listening as well as the preaching church, as the waiting as well as the declaring church. We must quickly add of course that the church of Clement VII was not the only compromised ecclesia in history. Luther’s sermon on the parable of the wheat and the tares (Mt 13:24-30) is his riposte: the visible church on earth is not the eschatologically purified church; rather there it is taught by even Christ himself that true and false will be side by side in it:

…we are not to think that only true Christians and the pure doctrine of God are to dwell upon the earth; but that there must be also false Christians and heretics in order that the true Christians may be approved.

Ecclesiastical triumphalism ought always to be curtailed by the impurity of the visible church; and by recognition that the eschatological identity of the church is as yet still greatly concealed. Must the church then ignore untruth? Luther preaches strongly against the use of judicial violence against false teachers and heretics. The only right means by which the church may be cleansed is by the power of the Word:

We have to do here with God's Word alone; for in this matter he who errs today may find the truth tomorrow. Who knows when the Word of God may touch his heart? But if he be burned at the stake, or otherwise destroyed, it is thereby assured that he can never find the truth; and thus the Word of God is snatched from him, and he must be lost, who otherwise might have been saved.

It is not a matter of restraint, but of conviction: the possibility of the turning of the heretic under the power of the Word of God is always maintained, in contrast to the rather final method of the Inquisitor.