our faith, imputes to us the righteousness of Christ.
Salvation is, thus, a plan by which we escape from the God of justice
and wrath and have our dealings with a God who has become merciful
because our sin has been balanced off by somebody else's merit and
righteousness.

Not only did Luther continue this medieval fiction of God's nature and
character, he had also always in mind a fictitious and constructed
"man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose
personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith
itself, by which salvation is received, is not an attitude or function
of man's own will or reason. It is, like everything else connected
with salvation, something divinely given, supernaturally initiated, a
work of God, an _opus operatum_--"Mit unserer Macht ist nichts
gethan"--and therefore "faith" and "reason" belong in totally different
compartments of the human being. Nor, furthermore, when he is absorbed
with his system, is salvation ever synonymous for him with an
inwardly-transformed and spiritually-renewed self. Salvation means for
him _certainty of divine favour_. It does not inherently carry with it
and involve in its intrinsic meaning a new life, a joyous adjustment of
will to the Will of God. If man is to attain to a moral transformation
of life, he must receive an added gift of supernatural grace, that is,
the power of sanctification through the Holy Spirit. This conception
made it impossible for him to look for the coming of a divine kingdom
by slow processes now at work in the world.

Luther did not intend to make the "Word of God" synonymous with the
Scriptures, and in his great Prefaces to St. Paul's _Epistles_ he does
not identify the two. The Word of God is, as we have seen, the
revelation, the message, the gospel, of Grace through Christ Jesus,
wherever expressed, enunciated, or preached. But the pledged Word of
God found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages,
and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and
"Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone
of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old
Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority
of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the foundation for
the view of the second generation of Protestantism, that the infallible
Scripture is God's final communication to helpless man