Month: March 2021

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The Shape of Christian Life Part 2: Fleeing from God not Preached to God Preached

Throwback Post Part 2:

Within this situation, what is the Christian to do?  Luther tells us that the revealed God of the gospel (the God of grace) is God’s real self, despite what might be considered evidence to the contrary!  When we approach God hidden, or God under his masks of law, we can only find condemnation—something actually alien to God in his proper nature (opus alienum).  Consequently, we should flee from the God of hiddenness and wrath, to the God of grace. In other words, we must flee from God not preached to God preached.  Nevertheless, if both are God, how do we know that God preached is the more authentic of the two?  In the Galatians commentary, Luther talks about God in his hiddenness and wrath condemning and destroying Jesus who bears the sins of the world.  The law (in a sense) tries to destroy the promise by condemning Jesus who has entered into solidarity with those under the God of hiddenness and wrath.  In spite of this, Jesus atones for sin, undoes the power of the law, and reveal God’s true heart.  Jesus (the revealed God of grace) has gone up against the hidden God of wrath and law and come out the other side victorious. Therefore, those who are united with him by faith can also share in his victory and therefore have nothing to fear from God not preached. 

Faith clings to the revealed God against the hidden God, and therefore the shape of the Christian life is one of trust and flight from one to the other.  This can be observed throughout the history of salvation.  God establishes his relationship with Adam and Eve through two trees—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God attaches his promise to all the trees of the garden as means of mediating the good to Adam and Eve (“you may eat…”).  He gives them the tree of life as a sacrament of immortality.  Nonetheless, he also establish the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as an alternative to the means of his grace.  This was not a test (as John of Damascus and John Wesley have argued), or a means of earning their glorification (as Reformed Federal theology argues), but rather a manifestation of the irrationality of God not preached.  In other words, the tree is in a sense inexplicable.  Why put the possibility of becoming evil in the midst of the good creation?  It is a mystery, a manifestation of the hidden God.  Nevertheless, it was also formative of the obedience of Adam and Eve, which ultimately constituted a sacrifice of praise to God, as Luther argues.  Because Adam and Eve found God not preached in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the structure of their believing existence was the flight from God not preached (that is, the God of destructive condemnation) to God preached (that is, his manifestation in the other trees of the garden and the tree of life).  Adam and Eve only entered into sin and condemnation when they sought God not preached and ignored God as manifested to them in his Word.

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The Shape of Christian Life Part 1: God in His Masks

Throwback Post Part 1:

Before his death, Luther claimed that The Bondage of the Will (BOW) and the Catechisms were the only things that he had written that were worth reading.  What I’m interested in focusing on here is Luther’s constant refrain in the discussion of the Ten Commandments that “we should fear and love so that…”  How should we take this?  If we follow Luther’s own words as a hermeneutical key (namely that the BOW and the Catechism are his best works and therefore a definitive representation of his thinking), “fearing and loving” should be understood in terms of Luther’s own dialectic of the hidden and revealed God.

For those unfamiliar, in BOW Luther speaks of God preached and God not preached.  If we look at creation as a whole as a sphere of God’s activity, the logic of God’s action, especially during a pandemic, will appear incomprehensible to us.  Whereas God in his revelation in Word and sacrament states “I will not delight in the death of the sinner,” God insofar as he works all things certainly does work death to sinners.  Of course, he does this for good reason: All are born with original sin.  The difficulty is that through his electing will, God approaches some through Word and sacrament. He converts, justifies, and sanctifies them.  Yet he does not work faith within others (who are of course no less sinful) and actually works their destruction. 

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Sanctification and Justification

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Sanctification is then not the building up of righteous qualities inside of believers, but believers learning to live outside of themselves as a result of their justification.  Such an existence lived outside of ourselves neither destroys the simul of Christian existence, nor the full and robust reality of sanctification.  The more the Christian meditates on the divine Word, the more he or she cannot help but feel the reality of his or her inner sinfulness.  This recognition will undoubtedly be augmented by the fact that we sin every day and therefore the older we become the more we have to regret.  Nevertheless, such a recognition of our innate sinfulness draws us ever more out ourselves into Christ through faith.  In turn, faith in Christ ever increases and overflows into service to our neighbors. 

Of course, Christian love is always imperfect.  Hence, there is a genuine insight in Luther’s early theology wherein he describes the believer as “partim peccator,”[1] and “peccatores in re, iusti autem in spe.”[2] In our present life, there is a real distinction between which actions of ours are the fruits of the Spirit and which are sins.  Hence, Lutherans have developed the paradigm of “active” and “passive” righteousness, within which believers are “partim peccator” according to the former category.  At the same time, any sin within us makes us “totus peccator” before God.  One either sins, or does not, and this fact grants us a status of total sinfulness or righteousness before God.  Even the good works of believers are imperfect, and therefore judged by the absolute standard of divine law are in themselves sinful (Isa. 64:6).  Hence, we are not “partim peccator” before the eyes of God according to passive righteousness.  In the present age, we are always total sinners coram Deo and therefore beggars before the divine throne of judgment and mercy.

Believers’ sense of their sinfulness drives on their sanctification.  If believers honestly contemplate their own actions, they cannot help but feel that their sinfulness outweighs their progress in good works. Indeed, the progress of sanctification cannot be quantified, and at times, we cannot detect any moral progress in our lives at all.  Such reflections should inevitably lead us to repentance and ever-deeper faith in Christ.  This divinely wrought faith in turn leads to overflowing love for God and our neighbor.  Thus, the Christian life can be seen as a perpetual cycle of believers suffering the work of the Word of God as law and gospel, until they are definitively transformed by temporal death and resurrection.

[1] WA 56:272.

[2] WA 56:269.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Luther on the Law

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The reality of the law as a principle of legal relationship (morally charged human activity resulting in merit or demerit), as opposed to a principle of grace/promise relationship (i.e., protoevangelium, new covenant), applies across cultural and historical situations (Pharisees/Judaizers vs. Ockhamism). As a result, Luther gave expansive definitions of the law throughout his career rooted in the principles he discovered in his biblical exegesis.  Much like many in the early and medieval Church, Luther held that God’s commandments given to Israel and the Church expressed his just and holy eternal divine nature.  It logically follows that if God is eternal (as Scripture affirms) then his will (which includes the law) must also be eternal.  In his Antinomian Disputations of the 1530s, Luther affirmed that “the Decalogue is eternal.”[1]  Elsewhere Luther states the same doctrine.  The law is: “His [God’s] will and counsel,”[2] it “serves to indicate the will of God,”[3] “commands firmly and forever,”[4] and is “the eternal and immutable judgment of God.”[5]  Later Lutheran Scholasticism[6] would follow Luther and express the truth that the law is rooted in God’s eternal nature through the utilization of the Stoic concept of lex aeterna.[7]

Beyond affirming that the law was God’s eternal and immutable will for his creation, in the the Antinomian Disputation of the 1530s Luther also spoke of the law as anything in creation that expresses the condemnation of sin.  Part of this formulation was a response to the work of the early Lutheran heretic Johann Agricola.  Agricola believed that only a heartfelt love of God could inspire true repentance.  Because the gospel, and not the law, inspired fallen humanity’s love for God, it followed that preaching the promise of the gospel to the exclusion of the law should occur.  For Agricola, then, the law was good, but only for the use of the civil authority.[8] 

Luther countered Agricola’s claims by noting that God’s wrath against humanity deriving from the violation of the law extended to the whole of creation. Therefore, simply excluding certain biblical texts or the word “law” from preaching would do no good.  Death, destruction, illness, and all the vicissitudes of the fallen creation preached the law (i.e., the consequences of not following the law) to fallen humans without any explicit word of law from preacher: “Anything that exposes sin, wrath, or death exercises the office of the law . . .”[9]  Hence, the preacher achieved nothing by excluding the preaching of the law.  Indeed, since God mandates the preaching of both the law and the promise, the preacher would be guilty of dereliction of duty by not preaching the law.[10] 

[1] LW 73:112.

[2] LW 9:51

[3] LW 22:143.

[4] WA 5:560.  “inaeternum et stabiliter.”  Translation my own.

[5] LW 7:275.

[6] See: Gerhard Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate: An Interpretation of Its Historical Development (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969), 3-11.

[7] Gunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje, A History of Western Thought: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century(London: Routledge, 2001), 94.

[8] See discussion of Agricola’s early position in Timothy Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 84-9.  Also see description in F. Bente, Historical Introductions to the Book of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), 161-9. 

[9] LW 73:54.

[10] LW 47:111.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Luther on Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist

Although Luther affirmed the substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, he disliked the doctrine of transubstantiation because it contradicts 1 Corinthians 10:16 which states that the bread and wine remain in the Lord’s Supper as the medium by which one receives Christ’s substantial body and blood.[1]  Luther considers the entire idea of transubstantiation an Aristotelian rationalization of the mystery of how the body and blood of Christ can become present through the bread and the wine.[2] 

In spite of this criticism of transubstantiation, it is interesting to note that Luther does not consider belief in the doctrine to be tremendously problematic and allows that people could still affirm transubstantiation as a theologoumenon.[3]  What is most important to the Reformer is that one affirms the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper.  Although how one conceptually achieves this mysteriously physical presence is not unimportant, the main point for Luther is that one knows that Christ is substantially present in his body and blood “for you” (pro me).[4] 

This is why Luther was considerably less tolerant when it comes to the sacramental symbolicism of a figure like Zwingli.[5]  From Luther’s perspective, Zwingli ignores the divine promise that Christ’s flesh and blood will be present on essentially rationalistic grounds, namely, that physical bodies cannot be at more than one location at once.  As we have seen Luther rejects this logic and affirms that Jesus’ body remains a real body. However, it participates in God’s glory and can transcended the normal boundaries of physicality.[6]  After all, in the resurrection Jesus was able to walk through walls and appear and disappear at will.  Jesus’ body nevertheless remained a real body.  Christ could still invite Thomas to place his fingers in the nail holes of his very real hands and eat fish with the apostles.  Likewise, the mysterious supernatural quality of Christ’s body in the Lord’s Supper does not negate its real physicality or his genuine humanity. 

As we noted earlier, these differences between Luther and Zwingli on the sacrament are due in part to competing concepts of the communicatio idiomatum.[7]  Nevertheless, these differences also have implications regarding the nature of how the Word of God functions.  For Zwingli, the words of institution are signifiers that merely signify.[8]  Zwingli resolves the puzzle of how the signifiers “body and blood” can be validly applied to the signified “bread and wine” (which they do not match) through sacramental symbolicism.[9]  For Luther, divine words are not mere signifiers, but promises that effect what they speak.[10] This is the same principle that we have seen earlier in his views of confession and absolution.  Hence the words “this is my body . . . this is my blood” possess divine power to bring about the presence of Christ’s flesh and blood.[11]  Faith must simply trusts that God’s words perform what they promise.  To believe otherwise would be to trust in human reason over the God’s clearly stated promises.[12]

[1] LW 36:33-4.

[2] LW 36:34-5.

[3] LW 36:35.

[4] Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 379.

[5] Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 169-77; Sasse, This is My Body, 134-294.

[6] Thomas Davis,  This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 41-64; Sasse, This is My Body, 148-60.

[7] Sasse, This is My Body, 148-54.

[8] See discussion in: Aaron Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi: Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and Gabriel Biel on the Power of Words,” in The Medieval Luther, ed. Christine Helmer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 53-6.

[9] Ulrich Zwingli, “On the Lord’s Supper,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, 175-238.

[10] Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi,” 57-61.

[11] LW 37:180-88.

[12] LW 37:131.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).