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GRACE ALONE:
LUTHER AND
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
The muscles on the preacher’s face tightened as his gaze turned directly toward me. He carefully enunciated some such words as these: “Without this, thousands will perish in hell. It is imperative that you make your donation.” I was watching television, steeling myself mentally against the intimidating, spiritually blackmailing logic of a contemporary televangelist as he urged me to donate to his ministry lest the lost be damned—and part of the guilt rest on my conscience. I suspected there might be not a few lonely listeners who were taking note of the toll-free number to call with their pledge, many of them donating from their meager incomes. Words attributed to a sixteenth-century Dominican friar echoed down the corridors of the intervening five hundred years:
Wenn die Münze im Kästlein klingt,die Seele in den Himmel springt As soon as the coin in the coffers rings The soul from purgatory springs
A little knowledge of Scripture and of the history of the church protects us from such gospel-offending tactics. But in the early sixteenth century, few people had much knowledge of either. And so, when the skilled preacher and sometime inquisitor Johann Tetzel (1464–1519) came to town offering indulgences, many found his preaching as irresistible as that of his modern counterparts. He seemed to know his Bible. And the weight on one’s conscience of failing to relieve loved ones of the pangs of purgatory was an overwhelming motivation for obtaining an indulgence, whatever the financial cost. Thus, Tetzel urged his hearers:
“Seek ye the Lord while he may be found… while he is near” (Isa. 55.6); work, as John says, “while it is day,” for “the night cometh when no man can work (John 9:4).—Do you not hear the voices of your dead parents and other people, screaming and saying: “‘Have pity on me, have pity on me… for the hand of God hath touched me’ (Job 19.21)?
We are suffering severe punishments and pain, from which you could rescue us with a few alms, if only you would.” Open your ears, because the father is calling to the son and the mother to the daughter.
Indulgence?
The Roman Catholic Church has always, officially, carefully guarded the theology and wording surrounding the granting of an indulgence. It is “a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has 2 In effect, an indulgence reduces, or even eliminates, the already been forgiven.” time a soul spends in purgatory. Unsurprisingly, the only scriptural reference in the two-plus-page exposition of indulgences in The Catechism of the CatholicChurch is a general encouragement to put off the old man and put on the new. Even given their unscriptural nature or substantiation, Johann Tetzel was certainly pushing the envelope.
But indulgences were simply the tip of the iceberg of late-medieval Roman Catholic theology and practice. They were, however, the straw that broke the camel’s back where Luther was concerned (although he must have been surprised by the eventual consequences of his reaction). The financial fleecing of his flock, not to mention the spiritual danger indulgences posed, stimulated the thirty-three-year-old monk/scholar/pastor to nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
Originally, of course, the theses were intended for academic debate. They were, after all, written in Latin. One thing that is immediately striking about them, however, is that to a degree beyond his Reformation forerunners, Luther saw that the root problem with the church was not merely life but doctrine. Doctrine, he understood, shapes life and practice. He commented in later life (if with a little Luther-like exaggeration):
Doctrine and life must be distinguished. Life is bad among us, as it is among the papists, but we don’t fight about life and condemn the papists on that account. Wycliffe and Huss didn’t know this and attacked [the papacy] for its life. I don’t scold myself into becoming good, but I fight over the Word and whether our adversaries teach it in its purity. That doctrine should be attacked—this has never before happened. This is my calling. Others have censured only life, but to treat doctrine is to strike at the most sensitive point.
For this reason, the theses were the beginning of his progressive public dismantling of the entire late-medieval sacramental system of salvation.
For almost a decade, Luther was a work in progress. October 31, 1517, was roughly the halfway point in his pilgrimage from seeking a gospel that would assure him of salvation, to the full-grown attack on the church’s theology expressed in 1520 in his On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and On theFreedom of a Christian. By January 1523, he was openly saying (as he noted in a sermon on Luke 2:41–52), that if Mary, the mother of our Lord, could be mistaken about Jesus, then the church could be too.
This dismantling was already hinted at in the opening statement of the Ninety-Five Theses:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said “Repent,” he intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.
Here Luther, set free from the Vulgate’s mistranslation of the Greek verb metanoeō(repent) by the Latin poenitentiam agite(do penance) was, in effect 7 It is only undermining the whole late-medieval ordo salutis(way of salvation). within this context that we can fully appreciate how Luther viewed the biblical teaching on becoming and living as a Christian by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
A Medieval Order
The “way of salvation” with which Luther and his contemporaries were familiar had the following taxonomy: The power of baptism lay in the way in which initial grace was infused into the recipient.
The rest of life, governed by the sacraments of the church, essentially involved a progress in this grace or a return to it. Penance was the way in which the backslidden individual was restored, providing the so-called second plank—an opportunity to begin again to cooperate with God’s grace in developing a personal righteousness consummated if and when faith was fully formed by perfect love for God. It was widely held that it was almost always if and not when.
Two features marked this progress. One was that the individual was 8 that is, to do what lay within his powers to responsible facere quod in se est, cooperate with sacramentally given grace in progressing toward actual 9 The problem was, of course, as Luther was acutely aware, that righteousness. 10 This man is by nature hopelessly incurvatus in se(turned in on himself). pattern simply turned him in even further to find the grounds for justification. The real need was to be turned out of oneself to discover salvation in Jesus Christ.
Two, the goal in view in the individual’s progress through this ordo salutis was for unformed faith (fides informis) to develop progressively toward a more perfect righteousness manifested in a faith fully formed by love (fides caritateformata). When faith was thus suffused with perfect love for God, the individual was in fact righteous (iustus). Therefore, God could righteously justify him since he was in fact justifiable and had become so by grace. Against this background, the Reformation doctrine of the justification of the ungodly was, it was claimed, a legal fiction and not a reality.
Justification by Faith—but Not Alone?
The problem here was subtle: the church taught justification by grace. Medieval theology was replete with discussions of grace and how one receives it.
The Reformers, however, detected more than one fatal misstep. For one thing, grace was regarded as more or less a substance infused into the individual, not the disposition of God toward the individual. For another, when Luther in essence asked, “Spell out what you mean by ‘grace,’” he realized that (to use 12 For, in the biblical usage, there is Paul’s language) “grace is no more grace.” no room for contribution or cooperation in God’s justifying grace. It is free and unconditional, not in any sense earned or congruent with anything in us. It is precisely the justification of the ungodly, and it is not based on anything God’s grace has accomplished in us. Rather, justification is grounded in what God has done in Christ outside of us.
Luther’s Discovery
Luther had himself embodied as well as observed the implications of the medieval view. When it came to facere quod in se est, few had done more than the young Augustinian monk to progress toward righteousness: I almost fasted myself to death, for again and again I went for three days without taking a drop of water or a morsel of food. I was very serious about it…. I chose twenty-one saints and prayed to three every day when I celebrated mass; thus I completed the number every week. I prayed especially to the Blessed Virgin, who with her womanly heart would compassionately appease her Son.
Luther provides his own commentary on this:
“The most pious monk is the worst scoundrel” because “he denies that Christ is the mediator and high priest and turns him into a judge.”
Inevitably, Luther found himself confronted with the question: “How can I be sure that I have done enough? How can I know that the love I feel for God has so suffused my being that he is able to say ‘Justus es—you are justified’?” The truth was, as he later wrote, addressing Erasmus:
If I lived and worked to all eternity, my conscience would never reach comfortable certainty as to how much it must do to satisfy God.
Whatever work I had done, there would still be a nagging doubt [scrupulus] as to whether it pleased God, or whether He required something more.
For this reason, he hated the expression “the righteousness of God.”
That expression “righteousness of God” was like a thunderbolt in my heart. When under the papacy I read, “In thy righteousness deliver me” (Ps. 31:1) and “in thy truth,” I thought at once that this righteousness was an avenging anger, namely the wrath of God. I hated Paul with all my heart when I read that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel (Rom. 1:16, 17). Only afterward, when I saw the words that follow—namely that it’s written that the righteous shall live through faith (Rom. 1:17)—and in addition consulted Augustine, was I cheered.
When I learned that the righteousness of God is his mercy, and that he makes us righteous through it, a remedy was offered to me in my affliction.
In fact, within the church’s articulation of the ordo salutis, it was beyond the realm of the possible for an ordinary individual to enjoy the assurance of faith. And this, in turn, meant that it was impossible to “enjoy” God Himself.
Luther owed a great deal to the vicar general of his order in Germany (the Observant Augustinians), who—although he did not follow Luther in his breach with Rome—pointed him to the heart of the gospel:
My good Staupitz said, “One must keep one’s eyes fixed on that man who is called Christ.” Staupitz is the one who started the teaching [of the gospel in our time].
Luther’s eventual breakthrough led to a fresh understanding of what it meant to be a Christian, sovereignly and graciously justified, counted righteous through faith alone, brought into union with Christ.
A Sovereign God
Salvation is therefore, for Luther, first and foremost the work of a sovereign God. Divine sovereignty is more frequently associated with Calvin than with Luther. But this is partly due to the systematic character of Calvin’s writing and to the fact that later Lutheranism tended to play down this aspect of its founder’s teaching. But in some places, the German Reformer’s writing tempts one to ask, “Is Luther also among the Calvinists?” For, contrary to the facerequod in se est of medievalism, Luther was profoundly conscious that by nature we are totally depraved and therefore totally disabled spiritually. Neither biblical commands nor our moral obligations to live for God’s glory should be misread as assuming or implying our ability to fulfill them. Homo incurvatus in se is incapable of converting himself to God.
This is, in effect, one of the main themes of what is often regarded as Luther’s finest and most careful piece of theological writing, On the Bondage ofthe Will, an eloquent response to and polemic against Erasmus’The Freedom ofthe Will. Here, Luther argues that since even the best of men who fulfill all the rites and requirements of their church—specifically, men like the Pharisee Nicodemus—are blind to and incapable of entering the kingdom of God, our only hope is for God Himself to move toward us in electing grace:
What in the way of effort and endeavour does he [Nicodemus] leave undone? He confesses Christ to be true, and to have come from God, he refers to his signs, he comes by night to hear and discuss further. Does he not seem to have sought by the power of “free-will” all that pertains to godliness and salvation? But see what shipwreck he makes.
Over against Erasmus, therefore, Luther vigorously contends that such passages as Romans 9:15ff. refer to the absolute sovereignty of God in distinguishing election and salvation. He will not allow Paul’s use of Malachi 1:2–3 (“I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated”) to be reduced merely to different roles in the service of God: “It is not only an external lordship and servitude that is there being treated of, but everything that belongs to the people of God—that is, the blessing, word, Spirit and promise of Christ and the eternal kingdom.”
At every exegetical crux in Romans 9—including the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh and the imagery of the potter and the clay—Luther and Calvin occupy a similar perspective. Indeed, Luther’s language outdoes that of his younger contemporary in vigor and the manner in which he excoriates his opponents. Why such vigor? Because for Luther, the only hope for human depravity and inability lies in a radical divine sovereignty.
Grace Alone Availeth
Salvation is therefore by grace and not by merit. In one sense, this second point simply amplifies the first. But for Luther, it has a special significance.
When Luther introduced his lectures on Romans (given in 1515–16, but remarkably never published until the twentieth century), he saw the function of the letter through the lenses of God’s call to Jeremiah:
The sum and substance of this letter is to pull down, to pluck up, and to destroy all wisdom and righteousness of the flesh (i.e., of whatever importance they may be in the sight of men and even in our own eyes), no matter how heartily and sincerely they may be practised, and to implant, establish, and make large the reality of sin (however unconscious we may be of its existence).
This included destroying the subtle theological distinction between congruent merit (meritum de congruo) and condign merit (meritum decondigno). In the first, as we cooperate with God, we are fitted for God’s further gift of grace. Strictly speaking, God is not obliged to give us this, but since, as the popular saying goes, “heaven helps those who help themselves,” such grace could be anticipated. This grace further enables the individual to do such works that God in justice would reward with eternal life (i.e., condign merit).
This theology, which escapes the crassest forms of Pelagianism, nevertheless devolves into a more subtle form of semi-Pelagianism. But the more subtle the theology, the greater the danger. The insistence that the individual acts to cooperate with grace—with the implication that he becomes a person to whom it is appropriate to show grace—in effect destroys all that grace really means.
What Luther clearly grasped was a vital biblical principle: The moment I ground grace in anything in myself, present in any measure through myself, no matter by what means produced, grace has forfeited the right to be called grace. Luther grasped the Pauline principle that it is not because of anything in an individual that he becomes the object of God’s saving grace or is distinguished 23 Rather, as Luther would write tersely on his deathbed, “We are from another. beggars,” or more fully in his great paraphrase of Psalm 130:
Thy love and grace alone avail To blot out my transgression; The best and holiest deeds must fail To break sin’s dread oppression.
Before thee none can boasting stand, But all must fear thy strict demand And live alone by mercy.
Therefore my hope is in the Lord And not in mine own merit; It rests upon His faithful Word To them of contrite spirit That he is merciful and just; This is my comfort and my trust.
His help I wait with patience.
Luther was, after all, an Augustinian monk.
Faith Alone
Salvation, which is of God alone, by grace alone, is also ours through faith alone. Herein lay the heart of the matter for Luther. Salvation in the fullest sense is ours finally in the resurrection. But our present justification guarantees this final consummation. Justification itself is not ours as the hoped-for goal of the elongated experience of a sacramental ordo salutis producing in us an imperfect righteousness that leaves us still in need of the fires of purgatory to complete the work. Rather, amazingly, wonderfully, graciously, we are justified in Christ the moment we come to Him. The judgment of the last day has been brought forward in Christ to the present day. At the cross, Christ took our place as condemned; in the tomb, Christ rose again, free from the judgment and condemnation He bore in our place. He thus became the guarantee both of our 25 Christ—justification in the present day and our resurrection in the last day. with all the blessings of justification—is the believer’s “the hour I first believed.”
Intriguingly, in the modern theological context, over against both Erasmus and Jerome long before him, Luther simply will not allow that the works—without which we are justified—are merely the ceremonial works of the law.
That we are justified apart from works does not mean that works have no place in the Christian life. The very reverse is the case. The Ninety-Five Theses had already stressed that loving actions toward neighbors are far more important 28 Indeed, on one occasion, Luther uttered the bon than purchasing indulgences. mot“I should be called Doctor Bonorum Operum—Doctor of Good Works.” For rather than denying their importance, the way of faith guarantees them. The tree that has now become good will bear good fruit. As Paul notes in Galatians 5:6, love is the fruit of faith, for “faith work[s] by love.”
Luther writes pointedly in this connection:
They [the scholastic theologians] read this place of Paul through coloured glass (as the saying is), and pervert the text after their own dreams. For Paul saith not: Faith which justifieth by love, or: Faith 30 Such a text they do invent and which maketh acceptable by love. forcibly thrust it into this place…. Paul… saith that works are done by faith through love, and not that a man is justified by love…. He saith not: Charity is efficacious, but: Faith is efficacious, and not: Charity worketh, but: Faith worketh.
In Christ Alone
Salvation that is of God alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, is ours only in Christ alone. In On the Freedom of a Christian, Luther underscored the “incomparable benefit” of faith in Christ, namely, union with Him: Faith unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom… it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as his own. Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits. Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things that are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?… Who can understand the riches of the glory of this grace?
At last, in Christ, there is freedom from the guilt and power of sin. But, as Luther famously notes on the opening page of On the Freedom of a Christian, this is double-sided:
A Christian is a perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
These paradoxical statements find their proper harmonization in Christ. The Master of all became the servant of all. And we are united to Him. Now we share in His conquest of all the powers that have ensnared us and held us in bondage. As baptized Christians, we are delivered from the dominion of sin. We have been baptized into union with Christ, in whose death sin’s reign was broken and its dominion ended. It is true, we are not yet delivered from its presence, and therefore the Christian is engaged in a daily and lifelong battle against it. But we battle in the resources of our union with Christ.
Commenting on Galatians 2:20—“I am crucified with Christ”—Luther draws out the implications:
Even as Christ himself was crucified to the law, sin, death and the devil, so that they have no further power over him; even so, I through faith being now crucified with Christ in spirit, am crucified and dead to the law, sin, death and the devil, so that they have no further power over me, but are now crucified and dead unto me. Paul speaketh not here of crucifying by imitation or example…. But he speaketh here of that high crucifying, whereby sin, the devil and death are crucified in Christ, and not in me. Here Christ doth all himself alone. But I believing in Christ, am by faith crucified also with Christ, so that all these things are crucified and dead also unto me.
If by “all these things” Luther includes “are crucified and dead also unto me,” as certainly some of his followers did, then he is less careful with his language here than Paul’s words require. It is perhaps understandable that conclusions he himself repudiated were drawn from his words, as for example in his pupil and friend Johannes Agricola’s conclusion that believers are not only dead to the law, but the law is dead to them.
But Luther’s main point here is biblical. Union with Christ sets the believer free from the dominion of powers that enslaved him before he came to Christ. Now he is empowered to live as Christ’s free man—in obedience to His Word as His servant, no longer under the reign of sin but under the reign of Christ, no longer condemned by the law but finding increasingly that through the Spirit the 36 Yes, the believer dies, but the sting of law’s directives are fulfilled in our lives. death has been drawn, and the believer through it enters into eternal life.
Satan Defeated
The Christian has also been set free from bondage to Satan. Attention has sometimes been given to Christ’s victory over Satan as a central aspect in 37 but his emphasis on the Christian’s Luther’s understanding of the atonement, 38 But for Luther himself, freedom from Satan’s power has been largely ignored. this was vital. The disregard of this emphasis is all the more striking because in Luther, it is unavoidable. It is no accident that Christ’s conquest of the evil one, and ours through Christ, is the central motif of his “Ein’ feste Burg ist unserGott”:
A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing…
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe; His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate, On earth is not his equal.
Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing; Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing: Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He; Lord Sabaoth, His Name, from age to age the same, And He must win the battle.
And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us: The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him; His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure, One little word shall fell him.
We should heed Luther’s word about Satan’s “craft.” Luther’s life story conveys a profound awareness of this as a reality in the Christian life, and his writings display a keen sense of Satan’s subtlety and deceptiveness. Thus, in his exposition of Genesis 3, he notes: But if, as is proper, we consider these matters a little more carefully, we shall find that this was the greatest and severest of all temptations; forthe serpent directs its attack at God’s good will and makes it hisbusiness to prove from the prohibition that God’s will towards man isnot good.
Therefore Satan here attacks Adam and Eve in this way to deprive them of the Word and to make them believe his lie after they have lost the Word and their trust in God.
This distortion of the character of God (the attack on His good will) and 41) were for deprivation of the truth about God (exchanging the truth for a lie Luther a central insight into the controversies of his own time. It was not because he was medieval that he pictured a “world all devils o’er” but because 42 He thus he believed that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. detected Satan’s malignant influence in distorting the Word of God and depriving the church of the gospel, not only in Eden but in sixteenth-century Europe.
While it is true that “this slyness and villainy of Satan is imitated by all the 43 Luther saw that he had a yet more subtle work among God’s people: heretics,” turning the gospel into another law. Here is one fascinating comment:
In a conflict with the devil it isn’t enough to say, “This is the Word of God,” for it is the devil’s greatest [trick] to take away one’s weapon when fear suddenly strikes…. He is hostile to us. We don’t know a hundredth part of what he knows…. It is the supreme art of the devil that he can make the law out of the gospel…. The devil turns the Word upside down.
People hear the good news of forgiveness in the gospel. Forgiveness is not based on any prequalification. But Satan is a “sour soul.” The result? People respond by saying they will live better lives, try harder, and endeavor to be better. The Word has indeed been turned upside down. To overcome the devil, therefore, the believer must rest in all the blessings that are freely given to him in Christ and rejoice in them. Thus, at the end of the day, the gospel turns the devil upside down.
Implications
What, then, do the sovereignty of God, salvation by grace, justification by faith, and new life in union with Christ mean for the living of the Christian life? For Luther, they carry four implications: The first implication is the knowledge that the Christian believer is simul 45 at one and the same time justified and yet a sinner. This iustus et peccator, principle, to which Luther may have been stimulated by John Tauler’s TheologiaGermanica, was a hugely stabilizing principle: in and of myself, all I see is a sinner; but when I see myself in Christ, I see a man counted righteous with His perfect righteousness. Such a man is therefore able to stand before God as righteous as Jesus Christ—because he is righteous only in the righteousness that is Christ’s. Here we stand secure.
The second implication is the discovery that God has become our Father in Christ. We are accepted. One of the most beautiful accounts found in Luther’s Table Talk was, perhaps significantly, recorded by the somewhat melancholic, yet much loved, John Schlaginhaufen:
God must be much friendlier to me and speak to me in friendlier fashion than my Katy to little Martin. Neither Katy nor I could intentionally gouge out the eye or tear off the head of our child. Nor could God. God must have patience with us. He has given evidence of it, and therefore he sent his Son into our flesh in order that we may look to him for the best.
Third, Luther emphasizes that life in Christ is necessarily life under the 47 If we are united to Christ, our lives will be patterned after His. The way cross. for both the true church and the true Christian is not via the theology of glory (theologia gloriae) but via the theology of the cross (theologia crucis). This impacts us inwardly as we die to self and outwardly as we share in the sufferings of the church. The medieval theology of glory must be overcome by the theology of the cross. For all their differences in understanding the precise nature of the sacraments, Luther and Calvin are at one here. If we are united with Christ in His death and resurrection, and marked out thus by our baptism (as Paul teaches in Rom. 6:1–14), then the whole of the Christian life will be a cross-bearing:
The Cross of Christ doth not signify that piece of wood which Christ did bear upon his shoulders, and to the which he was afterwards nailed, but generally it signifieth all the afflictions of the faithful, whose sufferings are Christ’s sufferings, 2 Cor. i.5: “The sufferings of Christ abound in us”; again: “Now rejoice I in my sufferings for you, and fulfil the rest of the afflictions of Christin my flesh, for his body’s sake, which is the Church” &c. (Col. i.24). The Cross of Christ therefore generally signifieth all the afflictions of the Church which it suffereth for Christ.
The believer’s union with Christ in His death and resurrection and its outworking in daily experience thus became, for Luther, the spectacle lenses through which the Christian learns to view every experience in life. This—the theologia crucis—is what brings everything into sharper focus and enables us to make sense of the ups and downs of the Christian life:
It is profitable for us to know these things, lest we should be swallowed up with sorrow or fall to despair when we see that our adversaries do cruelly persecute, excommunicate and kill us. But let us think with ourselves, after the example of Paul that we must glory in the cross which we bear, not for our sins, but for Christ’s sake. If we consider only in ourselves the sufferings which we endure, they are not only grievous but intolerable; but when we may say: “Thy sufferings (O Christ) abound in us”; or, as it is said in Psalm xliv: “For thy sake we are killed all the day,” then these sufferings are not only easy, but also sweet, according to this saying: “My burden is easy, and my yoke is sweet” (Matt. xi.30).
Fourth, the Christian life is marked by assurance and joy. This was one of the hallmarks of the Reformation, and understandably so. The Reformation’s rediscovery regarding justification—that, instead of working toward a hoped-for arrival at it, the Christian life actually begins with it—brought stunning deliverance, filling mind, will, and affections with joy. It meant that one could now begin to live in the light of a settled future in glory. Inevitably, that light reflected back into the present life, bringing intense relief and release.
Standing on Your Head
For Luther, the Christian life is a gospel-grounded, gospel-built, gospel magnifying life that exhibits the free and sovereign grace of God and is lived out in gratitude to the Savior who died for us, yoked to Him in cross-bearing until death is swallowed up in victory and faith becomes sight.
Perhaps, in 1522, as they sat listening to Luther preaching one Sunday in the church at Borna, some of his congregation wondered what lay at the heart of this gospel that had so excited, not to say transformed, Brother Martin. Could it possibly be for them too? Luther had read their minds. He had come into the pulpit well prepared to answer their question:
But what is the Gospel? It is this, that God has sent his Son into the world to save sinners, Jn. 3, 16, and to crush hell, overcome death, take away sin and satisfy the law. But what must you do? Nothing but accept this and look up to your Redeemer and firmly believe that he has done all this for your good and freely gives you all as your own, so that in the terrors of death, sin and hell, you can confidently say and boldly depend upon it, and say: Although I do not fulfil the law, although sin is still present and I fear death and hell, nevertheless from the Gospel I know that Christ has bestowed on me all his works. I am sure he will not lie, his promise he will surely fulfil. And as a sign of this I have received baptism….
Upon this I anchor my confidence. For I know that my Lord Christ has overcome death, sin, hell and the devil for my good. For he was innocent, as Peter says: “Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.” 1 Pet. 2, 22. Therefore sin and death were not able to slay him, hell could not hold him, and he has become their Lord, and has granted this to all who accept and believe it. All this is effected not by my works or merits; but by pure grace, goodness and mercy.
Luther once said, “If I could believe that God was not angry at me, I would 51 Perhaps that very day some of those who heard him stand on my head for joy.” preach responded and experienced the “confidence” of which he spoke. Who knows but some of the younger hearers later wrote to their friends in turn and told them that they had gone home and stood on their heads for joy?
Notes
Notes
1. Quoted in Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, 188.
2. The Catechism of the Catholic Church(San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 370.
3. Eph. 4:22, 24.
4. LW, 54:110.
5. The Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, ed. John N. Lenker , trans. S.E. Ochsenford (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000), 2:25.
6. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, 47.
7. Paradoxically, given his later conflict with Erasmus (1469–1536), this was possible only because of the latter’s publication of his edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516.
8. The phrase is especially associated with Gabriel Biel (1420–95).
9. Luther has a “purple passage” on this phrase in his discussion of Galatians 2:20. See Martin Luther, Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, trans. Philip S. Watson, (London: James Clark, 1953), 174. The phrase is probably the forerunner of the still-used “Heaven helps those who help themselves.”
10. See Luther’s comments in Luther: Lectures on Romans, ed. and trans. Wilhelm Pauck, Library of Christian Classics (London: S.C.M., 1961), XV:159, 225.
11. It is probably in view of this criticism that in his mature Institutes, Calvin expounds sanctification and the Christian life before treating justification. Both are united in Christ and are therefore inextricably linked with and inseparable from one another. Thus justification by grace through faithalone could not be accused of antinomianism. See Calvin, Institutes, book 3.
12. Rom. 11:6.
13. LW, 54:339–40.
14. Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston, (London: James Clarke, 1957), 313–14.
15. LW, 54:308–9.
16. Contrast Paul’s teaching on the inner logic of the gospel in relationship to the assurance it provides, Rom. 5:1–11.
17. LW, 54:97.
18. Doubtless also his treatise On the Eternal Predestination of God.
19. This helps to explain why Luther tended to categorize the law, alongside sin, Satan, and death, as our enemy. He saw that it cannot effect what it commands and therefore only condemns us. In this sense, when he used the law in responding to the question of the lawyer (Luke 10:27–37), Jesus Himself becomes an “unfriendly, ungracious man.” This is counterbalanced for Luther by the fact that “the Samaritan of course is our Lord Jesus Christ himself.”Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, 3.1, 3, 27.
20. Luther, Bondage of the Will, 305–6.
21. Ibid., 225.
22. Luther: Lectures on Romans, XV:3.
23. Luther’s comments on the extent of the atonement are in keeping with this (“Christ did not die absolutely for all.” See Luther: Lectures on Romans, XV:252.
24. “From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee,” trans. Catherine Winkworth, 1863.
25. Rom. 4:24–25.
26. The words are from John Newton’s hymn “Amazing Grace,” verse 2.
27. It may be worth noting here that the view often associated with the New Perspective on Paul, that “the works of the law” in Paul refer to the Jewish “boundary markers” of the ceremonial law, is by no means a novel perspective. Luther was conscious of its pedigree in his day stretching back beyond his immediate protagonist Erasmus to Jerome. This is a sure indication to us that in adopting the view that Paul refers to “the works of the law” in their totality (i.e. inclusive of, not exclusive of, the “moral” law of the Ten Commandments) Luther was not doing so as a poorly equipped sixteenth-century exegete unfamiliar with alternatives. Rather, he specifically rejects the view that has gained considerable currency in some contemporary scholarship. See, e.g. The Bondage of the Will, 284: “It is not true that Paul is speaking here only of ceremonial works.”
28. See especially theses 43–46.
29. See Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, 77. Luther is probably referring here to the fact that those who had been named as “Doctors of the Church” all acquired what amounted to Latin nicknames, thus Aquinas was known as Doctor Angelicus(the angelic doctor), Alexander of Hales as Doctor Irrefragibilis(the irrefutable doctor), etc.
30. The allusion being clearly to the idea of fides caritate formata, so that the person is essentially justified on the basis of the perfect love for God (= righteousness) which has been wrought in them.
31. Luther, Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians,, 465.
32. “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Three Treatises, trans. W.A. Lambert, rev. J.J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 286–87.
33. Ibid., 277.
34. Luther, Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 166–67.
35. In Rom. 7:1–4, Paul uses the analogy of a husband’s dying with the consequence that his wife is “released from the law” (v. 3) and is thus free to marry another and is not condemned by the law as an adulteress. In his application of the analogy to the believer, however, Luther underlines that it is the believer, not the law, who has died.
36. For Luther, the law always had love in view: “When we examine the laws of Moses, we find they all treat of love.”Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, 3.1, 21.
37. Most notably in Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor(London: S.P.C.K., 1931).
38. A point well made in Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, 104: “Luther’s world of thought it wholly distorted and apologetically misconstrued if his conception of the Devil is dismissed as a medieval phenomenon and only his faith in Christ retained as relevant or as the only decisive factor. Christ and the Devil were equally real to him…. There is no way to grasp Luther’s milieu of experience and faith unless one has an acute sense of his view of Christian existence between God and the Devil: without a recognition of Satan’s power, belief in Christ is reduced to an idea about Christ—and Luther’s faith becomes a confused delusion in keeping with the tenor of his time.”
39. J.A. Alexander’s translation.
40. LW, 1:148, emphasis mine.
41. Rom. 1:25.
42. 1 John 5:19.
43. LW, 1:148.
44. LW, 54:105. Recorded by Viet Dietrich, who as a student had boarded with Luther, acted as his amanuensis, and also accompanied him to both the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 and to the Diet of Augsburg the following year.
45. A recurring note in Luther, e.g., Luther: Lectures on Romans, 127, 208, 322.
46. LW, 54:127.
47. For copious references to this principle in Luther, see Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theologyof the Cross, trans. Herbert J.A. Bouman (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976), 112–43.
48. Luther, Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 558.
49. Ibid., 559.
50. Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, 1.2, 373.
51. WA, 176.6f, cited by Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, 315.