Tag: Sacraments

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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).

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Sex and the Sacraments

Because our bodily presence and trustworthiness are inexorably tied together in human experience, physicality represents a key manner in which humans inculcate fidelity.  Physical intimacy within marriage best exemplifies this truth and is especially relevant to our study in light of the biblical motif of YHWH/Christ as the bridegroom to the people of God (Jer. 31:32, Isa. 54:5, Hos. 2:7, Eph. 5).  Christians have always rejected pre-marital sex and adultery not only because of the destructive consequences of disease and heartache, but because giving one’s self physically over to one’s spouse is the ultimate pledge of one’s loyalty and fidelity.  To give one’s body to another is to give one’s very being.  If one gives their very physical being away haphazardly, either for the sake of a pleasant weekend or in an affair, how can ultimate fidelity ever be established?[1]  If one gives away his very enfleshed self to anyone who strikes his fancy, nothing will be left over to give to one’s spouse as an ultimate pledge.  This is why the explanation that an act of infidelity was “just sex” is never convincing to the wronged partner. 

Therefore, bodily self-gift is a necessary means of giving assurance of fidelity to the absolute promise of Christ the bridegroom of the Church.  It is not sufficient to treat the sacraments as small, symbolic tokens of love in the manner of a husband who occasionally gives trinkets to his wife.[2]  Any relationship may be poorer without gestures like these small gifts, but a marriage is not a marriage in a biblical sense without fleshly consummation and unity (Gen. 2:24, Eph. 5:31).  Through fleshly self-giving one “knows” (yada) one’s spouse, that is, they gain a real participatory knowledge of their very physical being.  In the same manner, we can be no more certain of our justification and eternal life than to physically receive the very flesh and blood that was sacrificed for humanity on the cross (1 Cor. 11:26) and raised in anticipation of the general resurrection (Jn. 6:54).  There is no ambiguity as to whether or not one is justified by the work of Christ when Christ himself is present and gives believers that same body and blood that was sacrificed for them on the cross.  Just as baptism is a proleptic realization of the last judgment, so too paschal feast of the Lord’s Supper is the proleptic realization of the final bridal feast of the Lamb at the end of time (Rev. 19:6-9).

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997-1999), 2:91-2.

[2] Carl Trueman’s analogy for the sacraments.  See: Carl Trueman, Grace Alone: Salvation as a Gift of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 213-4.

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

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Luther on the Return to Baptism and Justification

Through the perpetual return to baptism the Christian is able to enter the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection, although this event is historically distant.  Thus, a key implication of Luther and the historic Lutheran tradition’s teaching on communicatio idiomatum is that Christ’s humanity is not confined by time and therefore he can make himself available through the promise of the gospel in any era.  Herein we again encounter in Luther implicit appropriation of Scripture’s distinction between chronological time and kairological time.[1]  Even though Scripture does describe the history of salvation as an orderly development, there is a perichoresis of the ages.  God’s kairological time has manifested itself at specific points in chronological history.  Nevertheless, the Lord is not bound to the chronological order of history in manifesting his kairological salvation.  Hence, the risen Jesus who transcends time makes the eschaton present to the believer at the appointed time of his redemption in baptism in order to actualize God’s electing and justifying purposes.  Christ thereby makes it possible to incorporate the believer into eschatological redemption in the present through a return to the kairological event of his baptism, just as baptism is a return to the kairological event of his death and resurrection. 

As Oswald Bayer observes: “Luther’s apocalyptic understanding of creation and history opposes modern concepts of progress.  For Luther, the only progress is return to one’s baptism, the biographical point of rupture between the old and new worlds. Creation, Fall, redemption, and completion of the world are not sequential advance, one after the other, but perceived in an intertwining of the times.”[2]

In emphasizing the possibility of returning to one’s baptism, Luther responds to the issues that gave rise to the problem of post-baptism sin. This problem in turn generated the Latin doctrines of penance, purgatory, and indulgences which he combated in his early Reformation theology.  Like the New Testament and the ante-Nicene Church,[3] Luther saw baptism as the apocalyptic rupture between the old person and new person in Christ.[4]

[1] Elert, The Christian Ethos, 286-9; Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).

[2] Oswald Bayer, “Martin Luther,” in The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 51-2.

[3] See: Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009).

[4] Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther, 92-8.

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

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Enthusiasm and the External Word

Due to the simul of Christian existence (that is, Christians are “at the same time saint and sinner,” simul justus et peccator),[1] the temptation of returning to the self-incurvature of reflective faith is ever present.  That is to say, because even true believers now possess a sinful nature, they are subject to the temptation trusting in their own works or the quality of their faith over what the external Word tells them.  Such a temptation connects with not only the root sin of unbelief, but what Luther called “Enthusiasm.”[2]  Enthusiasm means “God withinism.”[3]  An enthusiast looks inward to his interior thoughts and feeling so as to discover God’s will for him, rather than the external Word of God.  This tendency can undermine biblical authority, but it is also the source of human doubt in the promise of the gospel. 

Because of fallen humanity’s orientation toward unbelief and enthusiasm (incurvatus in se) temptation to doubt one’s own proper reception of the word will invariably arise.  When temptation arises, faith in the Word must inevitably seek a secondary support in refocusing the believer on the objectivity of grace rather than the subjectivity of their own disposition.  Such a secondary support should inculcate the objectivity of grace to the individual believer in a tangible manner and break the focus of the believer on their own inner reception of the external word.  This secondary support for faith can be found in the sacraments of the new testament. 

Disappointingly, most forms of Protestantism have failed to maintain the focus believer on Christ and the Word because of their rejection of sacramental realism.  Indeed, most (though not all) Protestants rejected sacramental realism in favor of sacramental symbolicism or spiritualism.[4]  Since both sacramental symbolicism and spiritualism disconnect the res from the signum in the sacraments, much of the Protestant tradition has denied believers the tangible secondary assurance of God’s grace that sacramental realism provides.  Believers who reject sacramental realism therefore have had to seek secondary assurance apart from the sacraments in moral athleticism or spiritual experience, thereby exacerbating the problem of unbelief and self-incurvature.  Only if the sacraments objectively contain grace can they function as antidote to religious subjectivism.  They perform this task by shifting the focus away from the interior and spiritual reception of grace, to grace’s tangible external embodiment in a physical medium. 

[1] See: Wilhelm Christe, Gerechte Sünder: eine Untersuchung zu Martin Luthers “Simul iustus et peccator” (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2014). 

[2] SA III.8; Concordia Triglotta, 497.

[3] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hidden in the Cross, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 350.

[4] See discussion in: James F. White, The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999).

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

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Luther and the Saving Righteousness of Christ in the Objective Sacramental Word

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).