The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead works through the Word and Sacrament ministry of the Church to share the universal and objective “not guilty” verdict of the Father. This verdict comes through the message of the death and resurrection of the Messiah. Those who receive the proclamation of justification by faith secure the very presence of the risen Jesus in the power of the Spirit. As the great cosmic judge, the Son of Man, Jesus now mediates the same verdict and presence he proleptically shared with the eschatological Israel in his earthly ministry through the Church.
The Church is defined by the means of grace to which Jesus has attached his Name, that is, his presence. Therefore, to be in contact with the means of grace is to both be in contact with the risen Jesus, and his body/bride the Church. The Church and the Divine Service (Gottesdienst) is the replacement for the Temple (Eph. 2:19-22) and its service. This is because the Church and its Divine Service are now the body of Jesus, the true eschatological Temple in the flesh (Jn. 1:14). As the Son of Man, Jesus proleptically elected and worked justification in the midst of the outcastes of Israel. He told his hearers beforehand what verdict he would render on them in light of their belief or unbelief in his words of judgment and grace.1
Christ’s regal and sacerdotal activity find their ultimate fulfillment in his prophetic office. Christ’s prophetic office does not merely encompass his teachings prior to his crucifixion, but is finally and most supremely fulfilled in his actualization of the testament of the gospel. The saving testament of the gospel is the message of his salvific cross and empty tomb. The cross and the empty tomb are the supreme act of revelation of the Triune God. St. Paul tells us that the omega-point of God’s revelatory activity, and the center of all proper Christian teaching, is the death and resurrection of Christ: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Martin Luther echoed this in his slogan: “The cross alone is our theology” (crux sola est nostra theologia).1 In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle summarized the content of the revelation of the cross as: “[Christ] was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).
Although the message of the cross’s ultimate telos is salvation, in Scripture salvation never comes apart from a corresponding act of judgment. Hence, the cross is not only a revelation of grace, but it is the means by which “[God] will destroy the wisdom of the wise [and] the intelligence of the intelligent” (1 Cor. 1:19). Jesus is “The stone that the builders rejected [that] has become the cornerstone” (Matt. 21:42). Hence, the crucifixion and empty tomb not only reveal the hidden plan of redemption, but also expose the true depths of human sin. The New Testament emphasizes that the exposure of the true depths of human sin in the cross occurs on two horizons: coram Deo (i.e., the divine-human relationship) and coram mundo (i.e., the human-human relationship).
In other words, for Luther, the Eucharist (and by implication Baptism as well), confirms for the individual what the word universally proclaims. The word of the gospel is addressed to everyone in the congregation, and therefore it is possible to worry that this promise may not apply to you as an individual, or you have not genuinely received it by faith. Nevertheless, the Lord’s Supper contains within it the same promise and presence of the risen Jesus as the sermon. For Luther, words are sacraments and sacraments are a kind of word. The difference between the sermon and the sacrament is that the latter is applied to the individual who directly receives it. When reflective faith invariably worries about whether or not one has individually received Jesus and his promise of forgiveness, the believer may rely on the sacraments to give them assurance. There can be here no doubt that you have personally received the promise in the form of the sacrament since it was you as an individual who heard the promise and consumed the elements. By receiving the Eucharistic elements, the promise and presence of Jesus are given to you as an in tangible and physical way that draws you out of your subjectivity and enthusiasm (Did I truly believe? Did I truly receive the promise?) to the objectivity of the gospel.
The gospel is a unilateral divine self-donation, in that an unconditional promise means a gift of the promiser himself in order to fulfill the terms of the promise. Therefore, Christians who receive the unilateral promise of the gospel are heirs to Christ’s very sacrificed person as a guarantee that he is at their disposal to fulfill his promise. This means that through the promise of the gospel we inherit Christ and everything that he possesses. Indeed, as Paul states, all true believers in union with Christ are “fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17). This reality is manifest in the Lord’s Supper wherein Christ wills his very physical being (body and blood) through which he brought salvation to believers. Therefore, to paraphrase Luther, in dying Jesus gives the inheritance of his body and blood to believers in order that they might receive the forgiveness of sins and eternal life through his promise attached to them.1
Returning to On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther’s second major difficulty with the medieval conception of the Eucharist is the doctrine of transubstantiation.2 The doctrine of transubstantiation teaches that the bread and the wine in the Lord’s Supper are transformed by the words of institution into the body and blood of Christ, although the outward appearance and qualities of bread and wine (Aristotelian “accidents”) remain intact.3 Although Luther affirmed the substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, he disliked the doctrine of transubstantiation the 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.4 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.5
According to [Phillip] Cary, this unreflective faith is possible for Luther because of his belief in the sacramentality of the word.1 Here Cary echoes the work of the German Luther scholar Oswald Bayer, who claims that it was in fact the sacramentality of the word, and not justification by faith, that was central to the so-called Reformation breakthrough.2 The word of justification is objectified in both in preaching and the sacraments in such a way as to shift the focus from authentic appropriation of God’s grace to the question of the surety of God’s promise. Since the risen Jesus is genuinely present in the means of grace, he is capable of mediating a direct assurance of his justifying grace for sinners who look for him there. The tendency of believers to reflect upon and worry about the authenticity of their faith is seen by Luther as a sinful resistance to Jesus’s promise that they have already been accepted. Therefore, instead of “justification through faith” it might be appropriate to characterize Luther’s position as “justification by the word.”
In this book, we will endeavor to show that, although it has been neglected and misunderstood by Protestants and Catholics alike, Luther’s “justification by the word” is a better model for understanding salvation in Christ. It will be argued that this is not only the case because it is more faithful to the teachings of the Scriptures, but also because it is the only doctrine of salvation that fully succeeds in de-centering the self and overcoming the self-incurvature of sin (incurvatus in se). As Luther himself observes in his Galatians commentary of 1531: “This is the reason why our theology is certain, it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.”3
[1] Phillip Cary, “Why Luther is Not Quite Protestant: The Logic of Faith in a Sacramental Promise,” ProEcclesia 14, no. 4 (2005): 447–486. Also see similar argument in Phillip Cary, The Meaning of Protestant Theology:Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 258–62.
[2] Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 52–53; and Bayer, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 240–41.
[3] LW 26:38
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word: Restoring Sola Fide (Lexham Press, 2022).
