Standing on the shoulders of Augustine and his first reformation of the doctrine of grace, Martin Luther sought to bring the Church of the sixteenth century back to the biblical doctrine of justification. Central to Luther’s Reformation theology was his resolution of the Augustinian Dilemma through the concept of the sacramentality of the word. In this regard, our thesis stands contrary to popular belief that Luther’s central project was the doctrine of justification by faith. Faith is of course of central importance to Luther, but faith is only meaningful insofar as it relies on a word from God that sacramentally gives the reality that faith receives. For this reason, the emphasis in Luther is less on the subjective act of belief and more on the reality of God’s saving righteousness in Christ. Christ’s righteousness creates and bestows the objective reality of which it speaks through the word and sacrament ministry of the Church. Luther’s belief in justification by the word transcends the Augustinian conception of the word as merely a form of signification, a concept which drives most Catholic and Protestant theologies of justification down to the present.
On the surface Luther’s belief that faith in the promise is central to the efficacy of the sacrament might appear subjectivistic. It might be argued that this confines the work of God to the human choice to believe. This is a charge that has been frequently made against Luther by Roman Catholic apologists.[1] Nevertheless, such an interpretation would be incorrect. As we will see below, Luther holds that because the risen Jesus himself speaks through the means grace in the power of the Holy Spirit, the sacrament carriers within itself the ability to create and sustain the faith that receives it. For this reason, it would be more proper to say that Jesus’ historically objective word and its divine power constitute both the validity and efficacy of the sacrament.[2] As will later be observed, it is Jesus’ word of promise that trumps all things, including subjective human psychological states, or the discernment of contrition by a priest.
Absolution is a divine efficacious word (Thettel-Wort) and is not a mere piece of information (Heissel-Wort).[3] The word that the priest speaks is a sacramental instrument wherein God is present and communicates his grace: “This is why it [confession and absolution] is called a sacrament, a holy sign, because in it one hears the words externally that signify spiritual gifts within, gifts by which the heart is comforted and set at peace.”[4] Since the heart is only set at peace by the divine grace present in the objective word, it follows that the word is itself the divine instrument that creates faith in the heart. As suggested earlier, the logical implication of this is that validity of the sacrament and the efficacy are all contained in the Word of God itself.[5]
As a result of this understanding of absolution, Augustine’s concept of res and signum in a sacrament is significantly modified. Although there is still a distinction between the visible sign and the invisible grace, the signum (the word of absolution) does not somehow point beyond itself to the invisible res (the work of the Holy Spirit). Rather, the res is present and communicated through the outward signum (i.e., word). When faith appropriates the word, it appropriates divine grace and forgiveness itself. As Bayer observes:
“That the signum itself is already the res, that the linguistic sign is already the matter itself – that was Luther’s great hermeneutical discovery, his reformational discovery in the strictest sense. . . Since the sign is itself already the thing it declares, this means, with reference to absolution, that the statement “I absolve you of your sins!” is not a judgement, which merely establishes that something is true already . . . Instead, in this instance, a speech act actually constitutes a reality.”[6]
The faith that appropriates the promise is not an autonomous action of the human person, but rather a product of divine grace. Faith is not an independent factor that transmutes absolution as a possibility into an actuality. Rather, the absolution is an objective and fully actualized reality that faith can receive: “Christ, your God, will not lie to you, nor will he waver; neither will the devil overturn his words for him. If you build upon them with a firm faith, you will be standing on the rock against which the gates and all the powers of hell cannot prevail.”[7] In other words, faith does not make the word a reality any more than a house that is built on a rock is secure because of the act of building. The house built on a rock is foundationally secure because of what it is built on (Mt. 7:24-7).
Luther’s emphasis on the objectivity of the Word of God can be especially seen in how he deals with the reality of unbelief: “By such disbelief [in the word of grace] you make God to be a liar when, through his priest, he says to you, “You are loosed from your sins,” and you retort, ‘I don’t believe it,’ or, ‘I doubt it.”[8] If the absolution became true by believing it, then Luther would not accuse the unbeliever of making God a liar. If the believer makes absolution occur by his faith, then unbelief would prevent the word of absolution from becoming a true word. As a consequence, God would not be insulted as a liar, since without faith no absolution would take place. What Luther claims instead is that although unbelief blocks divine grace and forgiveness from being received, faith does not actualize absolution as a reality. To borrow a term from Gerhard Ebeling,[9] the “word-event” (Wortgeschehen) of the giving of absolution exists prior to faith and determines its reality. Grace and forgiveness are already actualized in the word-event of absolution, faith merely receives and participates in them.
[1] See Paul Hacker, Das Ich im Glauben bei Martin Luther (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1966).
[2] Robert Kolb and Charles Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 135-43.
[3] LW 37:180-88. See David Steinmetz, “Luther and the Two Kingdoms,” in Luther in Context (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 115.
[4] LW 35:11.
[5] Kolb and Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology, 176-88.
[6] Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 52-3.
[7] LW 35:12.
[8] LW 35:13-4. Emphasis added.
[9] Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 325-32.
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).