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Martin Luther: A ‘Mighty Fortress’

MARTIN LUTHER:  A ‘MIGHTY FORTRESS’

 

I: — It is March 1545.  Luther has eleven months to live.  He isn’t terminally ill.  He has, however, been convicted of high treason, a capital offence.  Anyone assisting him will also be deemed treasonous and, if caught, executed.  Condemned by the pope as a heretic since 1520, he has been an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire since 1521.  Anyone who assassinates him will be rewarded. He can never forget that life is short and death is sure.  Now he is reviewing his vast written output, fine-tuning theological expositions that have convulsed Europe, infuriated church authorities, provoked academic debate, and above all comforted millions as they found themselves newly assured that the arms of the crucified Saviour held them securely in a grip on them that would always be stronger than their grip on him.

At this time – March 1545 – Luther is revisiting the complete edition of his Latin writings.  While his Latin writings span decades, the preface to them is new, and one of the last items he will pen.  Listen to him as he takes us back to an earlier moment in his life and theological career:

I had indeed been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans….a single word in chapter 1 [:17], ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed’ …had stood in my way.  For I hated that word ‘righteousness of God,’ which, according to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes sinners…. I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly…I was angry with God, … the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath…..Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words,… ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’   There I began to understand that the righteousness of God,… that by which the righteous lives, is a gift of God, namely faith…. Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.  There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me…. Thereupon … I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise….[1]

 

What had been Luther’s experience prior to this moment when the righteousness of God, so far from being that gift of God, owned in faith, which renders sinners rightly related to him, had instead been unrelieved condemnation that God, righteous in himself, visited upon hopelessly guilty sinners forever unrighteous in themselves?

 

II: — Luther’s experience, circumstantially his alone, inwardly appeared no different from the experience of humankind.  For instance, death looms for everyone.  One hundred-and-fifty years before Luther’s era, the Black Death (bubonic plague) had carried off 40%-45% of Europe.  Three of Luther’s friends had recently succumbed to a fresh outbreak.  Only days ago one of his best friends died suddenly.  Hunting one day with a companion, Luther accidentally fell on his dagger, severing an artery.  He pressed his hand in his groin to stem the haemorrhage while his companion procured help, aware that he had come within a hair’s breadth of death.

Later, when Luther was walking near the town of Stotternheim, a thunderstorm overtook him.  A lightning-bolt’s near-miss found him exclaiming, “St. Anne (she was the patron saint of miners, and Luther’s father was a mine-owner), help me.  I will become a monk.”

In July 1505 Luther entered the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt.  Monastic life appeared to agree with him, at least initially.  Looking back, twenty years later, on this period of his life, Luther smiled at the spiritual self-confidence he and others enjoyed at that time: “The greatest holiness one could imagine drew us into the cloister…we considered ourselves holy from head to toe.”[2]  Soon he found himself immersed in the study of Scripture and church doctrine.  Assigned to probe the academic question, ‘How does one find a gracious God?’, the exercise quickly became a personal preoccupation whose anxiety no mediaeval discussion could relieve.

Ordained to the priesthood in 1507, Luther continued his work in Scripture.  (Gordon Rupp, Cambridge University historian and a Methodist scholar of Luther, maintains that if Luther were a candidate at a university today he would be hired as Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature.)  As a Hebraist Luther quarried in the book of Psalms, initially; unlike many contemporary Christians, he found the gospel on every page.  Listen to him as he exulted as early as 1515 in Psalm 119, whose 147th verse exclaims, “I came before the dawn and I cried, because I very much hoped in your words.”  Now lit up by this passage Luther enthused, “Indeed I come before the dawn…because you, God, promised to forgive me…. I come early and cry because I have hoped in your words.  Your mercy, the mercy of a God who promises, has made me bold to pray out of season, as it were, before I have any merits.”[3]

At the same time, Luther’s schooling in Renaissance Humanism at Erfurt University (the pre-eminent locus of humanist scholarship in Germany), contributed to his nascent theological formation and remained a major ingredient in his theological understanding (although less widely recognized than the humanist contribution of other Reformers such as Zwingli and Melanchthon and Calvin).  “I am convinced”, wrote Luther as early 1523, “that without humanist studies untainted theology cannot exist, and that has proved true…. There has never been a great revolution of God’s word unless God has first prepared the way by the rise and flourishing of languages and learning.”[4]  In addition, his exposure to humanism heightened his distaste for theological speculation and rendered him averse to any theological articulation that assumed an Aristotelian underlay.  For Luther was convinced that Aristotle, the dominant philosopher the mediaeval church had co-opted; Aristotle had obscured and denatured the gospel for centuries.

In 1510 the Augustinian order sent Luther to Rome.  He walked (1500 kms.), every step heightening his anticipation of the glories that awaited him in the city.  Arriving in Rome, he was disillusioned by the ingloriousness that met him everywhere: the shabbiness of the environs, the poverty of the people, and not least, the throngs of prostitutes.  Still, he managed to ascend the Scala Sancta, the sacred staircase, repeating the Lord’s Prayer on each step.  Told that such an undertaking would earn heavenly bliss for anyone the religious devotee named, he whiffed superstition.  He walked home, having completed the only trip outside Germany he was to make.

Notwithstanding the theological misgivings his trip to Rome had aroused, Luther remained fixed in a theological meritocracy; namely, God accepts those whose goodness merits their acceptance; or at least God accepts those whose confession of sin is equal to the nature, depth and scope of their sin.  Luther, profounder than most, knew he could confess only the sin he was aware of, and even then, would never grasp sin’s enormity to God.  He was inconsolable not because he was psychologically bizarre but because he was spiritually perceptive.

Then how did Luther escape the cyclical trap of sin, misery, and condemnation before God?

 

III: — The way out, as mentioned earlier, was delivered to him through his study of the Psalms.  He began lecturing on the Psalter in 1513.  He would steep himself in it for the rest of his life.  In it he found the gospel everywhere.  Seeds were sown in his Psalms-studies that would bear fruit abundantly ever after.  In no time Luther heard and rejoiced in the throb of that bass note which reverberates throughout the Bible and establishes the rhythm of the Christian life; namely, the truth and reality (not the mere idea) that what God declares, God effects.  God’s utterance brings forth the reality it announces, the all-determining truth and reality of the believer’s life, as undeniable to the kingdom-sighted as it is incomprehensible to the kingdom-blind.  To say the same thing in more biblical vocabulary, when God declares us to be rightly-related to him not on the basis of what we do but on the basis of what he has done on our behalf in his Son – namely he has borne our sin and borne it away – then we are rightly-related to him.  There is nothing we should do or can do to ingratiate ourselves with him.  We are as much a child of God right now (‘rightly’ now) as we can ever be.  By faith we are bound so closely to that Son with whom the Father is pleased that when the Father looks upon the Son he sees us included in the Son and therefore pleased with us as well.  At once Luther’s tormented questions, “What must I do?  Have I done enough?  Is my doing good enough?  And how would I ever know?”; these questions evaporated.

Years later Luther was to write a tract, Two Kinds of Righteousness.  The two kinds are ‘alien righteousness’ and ‘proper righteousness.’  Alien righteousness is alien only in the sense, but crucially in the sense that it comes from outside us, comes from Christ, is always his gift and never our achievement.  Proper righteousness, on the other hand, is the Christian, already rendered such by having ‘clothed’ herself in Christ’s alien righteousness; proper righteousness is the Christian now repudiating the arrears of sin that still cling to her.

Let me say it again.  Alien righteousness, the Son’s right-standing with the Father, is a gift we own in faith.  Once rightly-related to God, we rightly repudiate, properly repudiate non-anxiously, the old man or woman of sin in us, which old man or woman, says Luther, was slain at the cross but won’t die quietly.  Paradoxically Luther exclaims that Christ’s alien righteousness “swallows up all sins in a moment”, even as by our proper righteousness we aspire to distance ourselves from Adam.  Put simply, because Christ’s righteousness is ours we are forgiven by God and know it; because our old man/woman has already been slain at the cross, we may and must now put him to death.  At all times, we must remember, the foundation and stable basis of the Christian life is what Christ has accomplished for us and forever vouchsafes to us: a new standing before God wherein we come before him as the son or daughter accepted by him and at home on his knee.

This lattermost point requires amplification.  Justification by faith hadn’t been taught by any theologian Luther had read, especially by Gabriel Biel, or by anyone Luther had read about in Biel.  Biel, the representative spokesperson for late Mediaeval nominalist theology, had maintained that moral aspiration is in truth a seeking after God that God recognizes and rewards.  At life’s end, sinners can hope that their aspiration, ‘topped up’, as it were, by God’s grace, will suffice for their acquittal before God, their justification.

Reading Scripture attentively, Luther saw that sinners, whose moral achievement is indisputable, wield their achievement as a bargaining point before God wherein they insist that their right-conduct in terms of a code is tantamount to that right-relatedness to God-in-person of which Scripture speaks.  Sinners, Luther insisted, were dead coram Deo; not ill, not deficient, not defective, not lame, but dead.  As such they achieve nothing and can claim nothing with respect to their predicament coram Deo.  They need a new standing before God that a corpse cannot acquire.  Therefore, justification has to be utterly gratuitous, sheer gift of God.  In addition, such justification is the sure foundation and stable basis of the Christian life now, not an unsure, wished-for, wait-and-see outcome at life’s end.

Two hundred years later, Charles Wesley (who himself came to faith in 1738 upon reading Luther’s commentary on Galatians) exclaimed, “No condemnation now I dread” just because Wesley first knew himself “Clothed in righteousness divine.”

It was Luther’s experience first. ‘Justification by faith’ (shorthand for ‘justification by grace through faith on account of Christ) became and remained the foundation of the Reformation. In his commentary on the Psalms Luther extolled, “If this article stands, the church stands; if it falls, the church falls.”[5]  Reinforcing his point, Luther later added, “Without this article the world is nothing but death and darkness.”[6]  It was upheld thereafter as the bedrock and stable basis of the Christian life.  Luther’s position as a Reformer was established.  From this position, he would think and write and preach for the next four years, all of it coming to a head when the pope summoned him to a hearing in the city of Worms.  As he came upon the city (he had travelled from eastern to western Germany) he wrote a friend, “All the way from Eisenach to here I have been sick.  I am still sick…. But Christ lives, and we shall enter Worms in spite of all the gates of hell and the powers in the air.”  Days later he would find himself saying, with unparalleled courage in the face of the mightiest institution in Europe, “Here I stand.  I can’t do anything else.  God help me.”

Courage?  We ought never underestimate the courage Luther’s stand would require.  Erasmus, possessing Luther’s horror at abuses in the church yet lacking Luther’s apprehension of the gospel; Erasmus, always ready to ridicule but forever reluctant to reform; Erasmus knew what courage was required, and knew just as surely that he didn’t have it.  In his feeble self-extenuation he wrote, “…mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth….Popes and emperors when they make right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly, I tolerate them, which is safe.”[7]  Erasmus, Luther knew by 1530, “was not concerned for the cross but for peace.”[8]  Years later, saddened and annoyed at Erasmus’ cowardice and shallowness, Luther would conclude, “Everything is a laughing matter for him.”[9]

 

IV: — Constrained by the living Word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, Luther was aware that much needed reforming, not least the matter of indulgences.  Upset initially by the traffic surrounding indulgences, and soon offended by the logic of them, Luther penned his Ninety-Five Theses and hung them from the door of the church in Wittenberg.  Hallowe’en – All Hallows’ Eve – would never be the same after 1517.   What was the indulgence traffic in Luther’s day?  Whom did it profit?  Why was Luther vehement?

At this time the pope needed to finance the remodelling of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  He issued an indulgence, a certificate authorizing the remission of the temporal punishment of sin in return for payment.  In Wittenberg the master-hawker was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar famed for his salesmanship.  A slogan was said to accompany his sales pitch: “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.”  In case poetry was ineffective in having hearers part with their coin, Tetzel supplemented his rhetoric with grisly pictures of deceased persons alive and writhing in purgatory, crying out to relatives to purchase their release.  And if neither poetry nor terror moved them, Tetzel was aware that fervent devotion might.  In this regard Tetzel announced that when indulgences are offered and cross-plus-papal-coat-of-arms are displayed, the cumulative effect is equal to the cross of Christ.  Such a steroidal indulgence, Tetzel insisted, would pardon even someone who had violated the Virgin Mary.[10]

Luther was appalled.  He assumed that the new archbishop of his territory, Albrecht of Mainz, would surely want to be informed of religious abuses occurring within his territory.  Luther was aware of the immense power Albrecht wielded.  Albrecht was, after all, not only archbishop and cardinal; he was also archchancellor of Germany and the most powerful political figure after Emperor Charles V[11].  Not least, Albrecht was one of only seven men charged with electing the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  Luther sent a copy of his protest to Albrecht of Mainz, together with a covering letter.  The covering letter was unambiguous.  “Once they acquire indulgence letters, the poor souls believe they can be sure of their salvation,” Luther pressed; “Good God! Souls that are being instructed under your care are being sent to their death, and it will be harder and harder for you to account for all this.  Therefore I could keep quiet no longer.”[12]  Four years later, when he was sequestered at the Wartburg, Luther would write to Philip Melanchthon, “I curse the hardness of heart that prevents me from drowning in the tears I should weep for the slain of my poor people.”[13]  Again, Luther’s courage here is noteworthy.  Years earlier Dr Dietrich Morung, a priest in Wurzburg, had preached from the city-church pulpit a sermon that questioned the entire indulgence mentality.  Cardinal Raimudi Peraudi, papal commissioner for indulgences and papal legate to Germany, had had Morung excommunicated and then incarcerated for ten years.  Luther knew what he was risking.[14]

And then Luther attached a second copy of his Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.[15]  (He didn’t nail it, we might note in passing, since in the sixteenth century papers were affixed to doors with wax.)[16]  It was customary in university towns to post topics inviting debate on public bulletin boards, since academic debate, in those days was a civic event.  All Luther had in mind was a public discussion of the theology underlying the indulgence practice and the finances floating it.

In Luther’s era, when a major church position opened up, it was sold to the highest bidder.  (This practice was called ‘simony.’)  Few clergy, however, were wealthy enough to bid on the position.  Therefore, the church, seeking to maximize pecuniary gain, opened up the bidding to wealthy lay persons whose wealth ensured the topmost bid.  Once the lay person had gained a church office meant only for clergy, he recovered his bidding-war costs through ecclesiastical taxation and monies otherwise pertaining to the office.  Then and only then was the officeholder consecrated.

Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz had done exactly this.  When Albrecht had indicated his interest in the position, officials in Rome set him up with the Fuggers, a major banking enterprise in Europe.  Now there was a three-party constellation: Albrecht, the papacy, and the Fuggers.  Each party anticipated benefiting hugely.  Tetzel was recruited to raise the money.

What theological understanding attended indulgences?  Indulgences never purported to alter eternal punishment for sin.  (Only God could.)  They merely affected temporal punishment, which temporal punishment the church could rescind, since the church had imposed it in the first place.

Here is how indulgences worked.  We sin, repent before God, and are forgiven.  Still, we need to make reparation and receive temporal punishment for our sin; whereupon the church, through its clergy, assigns penance.  It is possible, in this economy, for one to arrive at life’s end and have temporal punishment still owing, insufficient penance having been assigned.  The punishment owing is a debt that is ‘paid’ (paid off) by means of ‘doing time’ painfully in purgatory following one’s death.  A papally-authored indulgence, acquired through a cash payment, remits the debt and releases someone from purgatory.

In the popular understanding, however, some of the aforementioned subtleties were unknown.  While according to Canon Law indulgences remitted sin’s temporal punishment but didn’t forgive sin’s guilt, Archbishop Albrecht’s book Instructio Summaria left the matter ambiguous, with the result that the public understandably read ‘indulgence’ as ‘forgiveness of all sins’.  Luther knew that when people purchased indulgences they did so believing that they thereby ensured their salvation.[17]

Luther objected to the practice on several grounds.  First there was the crass materialism of it all, the ‘thingification’ of the Christian life.  Whereas the Christian life, Luther insisted, was the most intimate, personal relation between believers and their Lord, now it was a business or banking or institutional transaction.  In his tract Two Kinds of Righteousness Luther was to insist that when we are rightly related to God through faith in Jesus Christ, such faith, so far from an abstract, cold, one-sidedly forensic transaction; such faith, rather, is an encounter in which Christ (the bridegroom) is heard saying, “I am yours”, and the believer, (the bride) is constrained to say at the same moment, “And I am yours.”  Justification isn’t a hollow declaration; it is an effective word from the Lord who is present, in person, in his utterance; justification, then, is a mutual embrace and mutual pledge of utmost warmth and intimacy as Christ and his disciple encounter each other and embrace each other and are fused to each other.  Indulgences, on the other hand, were utterly sub-personal and could only depersonalise participants.

In the second place, Luther opposed the church’s usurping God’s prerogative.  The church of his era understood the ‘power of the keys’ (Matt. 16:19) to reside in institutional authority vested in it by Christ, enabling the church (i.e., the clergy) to remit temporal punishment or retain it.  Luther, and all the Reformers following him, upheld the ‘power of the keys’ as the efficacy of the gospel preached.  The church proclaims the gospel, which gospel is nothing less than Jesus Christ in his presence and power.  As the church attests the gospel, the Lord whose gospel it is, the Lord who ever remains Lord and judge of his body, the church, so as not to inhere it; this Lord acts in the power of the Spirit and forgives penitent believers.  Plainly there is the most intimate relation between Christ and his people, head and body.  Luther liked to speak of the totus Christus, the whole Christ.  To have Christ at all is to have Christ entire, head and body.  Nonetheless, the head is never buried in the body.  Never does the Lord of the church collapse himself into the church or transfer his authority to it.

In the third place Luther objected to the confusion between the penalty for sin and the consequences of sin.  The penalty for sin is alienation from God arising from God’s judgement.  The consequences of sin are the ‘after-shocks’ reverberating through perpetrators’ lives and the lives of those they touch.  The penalty for sin is cancelled as penitent sinners own God’s mercy.  The consequences of sin – dismemberment or death, for instance, following the impaired driver’s collision – remain as long as life lasts, spreading relentlessly like ripples from a stone dropped once into water.

In the fourth place Luther deplored the flagrant commercialisation of it all.  Make no mistake: the indulgence traffic was hugely rich.  Between 1486 and 1503 Cardinal Peraudi, a masterful indulgence-pusher, had raised over 500,000 guilders through the popular vehicle.[18]  In the village of Vorau, an Austrian municipality so very small that by 2009 its population numbered only 1496, Peraudi was reputed to have sold 50,000 letters of indulgence.[19]  Not only was the invention of the printing press to enter into its glory in the dissemination of Reformation tracts, treatises, tomes and translations of the Bible; the invention of the printing press, double-edged like every human invention in a fallen world, had already inked hundreds of thousands indulgence certificates.  While Luther opposed indulgences for theological reasons (one of which was affording financial protection to exploited people), the indulgence traffic made millionaires out of printers as surely as it did church bureaucrats.  Different persons from diverse spheres now fused their fury concerning Luther, as surely as Pilate and Herod became friends the day Jesus Christ was condemned.

In the letter to Albrecht that accompanied the Ninety-Five Theses, Luther underlined his conviction that “indulgences confer upon souls nothing of benefit for salvation or holiness”.  And then in the same letter he tersely reminded Albrecht, “…it is the first and sole office of bishops that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ.”[20]

Luther followed up both the Theses (Latin) and the Letter (Latin) with his vastly more popular sermon in German, A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace.[21]  It was the sermon in German, reprinted at least twenty-four times between 1518 and 1520, rather than the Theses in Latin, that made Luther a household name overnight.

Tetzel, apoplectic at Luther’s renown, riposted six months later (April 1518) with one hundred and six theses denouncing Luther’s ‘errors’.[22]  Tetzel’s retort was never reprinted.

Pope Leo X (the last non-priest to be made pope) supported Tetzel and Albrecht.  Leo labelled Luther “a wild boar in the Lord’s vineyard;” i.e., purely destructive.  Leo had become a cardinal at age 13 and pope at 37.  He allegedly remarked, “God has given us the papacy; now let us enjoy it.”  He spent colossal sums of money, and relished parading around Rome on Hanno, his albino elephant.  (The elephant, admittedly, cost him little, since it was a gift of King Manuel I of Portugal.)[23]  Leo pronounced Luther a heretic and excommunicated him.

What about Protestant theology today?  Are indulgences peculiar to late-mediaeval churchmanship, a matter we can put behind us forever?  As the year 2000 approached and the new millennium loomed, Pope John Paul II issued a Jubilee Indulgence.  The Jubilee Indulgence was much less onerous than many of its predecessors, for it maintained it was necessary to visit one church once only.  And if visiting a designated church was too much, the indulgence could be gained by foregoing tobacco or alcohol for one day, or for making any donation on behalf of the poor.

 

V: — The Ninety-Five Theses were posted in 1517.  Much thereafter poured from Luther’s pen.  And in 1520 there appeared three more unforgettable tracts: Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of the Christian.  The lattermost remains the most widely read item in all of Luther’s writings.

Not only is this tract moving on account of its understanding and expression; it is also comprehensive in its discussion as few other tracts are.  Luther himself wrote of it, “Unless I am mistaken… it contains the whole of the Christian life in a brief form.”

Before we probe Luther’s tract we must be sure we understand ‘freedom’ in conformity to Scripture.  In popular parlance, freedom is the capacity to choose among alternatives.  A child at an ice-cream counter is said to be free to choose vanilla or strawberry or pistachio.  Such ‘freedom’ (so-called) is nothing more than indeterminism; that is, the child hasn’t been coerced, outwardly or inwardly, to choose one flavour over another.

Yet when Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal.5:1), he cannot mean that Christ has set us free so that we may choose to obey Christ or disobey him.  (Such freedom, so-called, is nothing less than the bondage of sin.)  The apostle can only mean that Christ has set us free to obey him – and this only.  In other words, freedom is having Jesus Christ remove all impediments to our obeying him; to say the same thing differently, freedom is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord – and only in accord – with one’s true nature.

Imagine a derailing switch placed upon railway tracks.  The train is impeded from travelling along the rails.  When the switch is removed, the train is said to be free to run along the rails.  If someone asks, “But is the train free to float like a boat?”, the proper reply can only be, “But it isn’t a train’s nature to float like a boat; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.”

Christ has freed his people to act in accordance with their true nature; namely, a child of God.  In other words, Christ simultaneously frees us from all claims upon our faith and obedience that contradict our nature as child of God and frees us for everything that reflects our nature as child of God.  It is our nature as child of God to love God and neighbour in utter self-abandonment.

Luther succinctly sets out the theme of the tract:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

 

Expanding on this statement Luther writes,

We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour.  Otherwise he is not a Christian.  He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love.  By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God.  By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour.

 

Christians, freed by Christ for their true nature – bound to Christ by faith and bound to the neighbour by love – live henceforth in radical self-forgetfulness.  Taken out of themselves, their self-absorption shrivels and their anxiety evaporates.  The gospel effects this, and can effect it just because the gospel, as all the Reformers after Luther insisted, isn’t chiefly idea but rather power.  The Reformers everywhere reflected Paul’s conviction that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).

Luther goes on to say that there is only one way of living in Christ by faith.  There are, however, three ways of living in the neighbour by love.

[1] We live in the neighbour by love as we share our neighbour’s material scarcity, and do so out of our material abundance, even material superfluity.  Luther admits this costs us little.  If I have five shirts, giving one to a shirtless neighbour exacts little from me.  Luther notes too that when we do this we also gain social recognition (today, we’d say an income tax receipt for ‘gift in kind’).

[2] We live in the neighbour by love, in the second place, as we share the neighbour’s suffering.  Luther maintains this is costlier in that proximity to suffering in others engenders suffering in us.  Painful though it is, however, we feel good about it; and if we do it well, we are rewarded for it (the Order of Canada or the Lions’ Club Humanitarian Award accorded Mother Teresa).

[3] Finally, says Luther not in his Christian Freedom tract but in a later one, we live in the neighbour as we share the neighbour’s disgrace, the neighbour’s shame.  This is by far the costliest way of living in the neighbour.  Here there is no reward; here there is no social recognition.  Here, on the other hand, there is nothing but social contempt and ostracism.  Here we profoundly know what it is to be ‘numbered among the transgressors’, for was not our Lord before us publicly labelled with a disgrace he didn’t deserve?  In concluding his discussion of this matter Luther insists that our service “takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss…. [the Christian] most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” – including his reputation.

 

VI: — One more mediaeval tradition Luther overturned was clergy celibacy.  His rejection of clergy celibacy was one instance of his rejection of sacerdotalism.  Sacerdotalism is the notion that the clergy have spiritual powers invested in them by virtue of their ordination.  The notion that the sacraments can be administered effectively only by clergy, for instance, is one aspect of sacerdotalism.  Another notion is that the pronouncement of absolution following confession will leave the penitent forgiven by God only if absolution is pronounced by a clergyperson.

Luther insisted that Jesus Christ, our ‘great high priest’, has fulfilled the priestly line of the Older Testament.  For this reason, there isn’t, and there can’t be, a priestly class in the church.  All Christians are priests before God.  To be sure, Luther maintained, for the sake of order at Sunday worship, only someone whom the congregation has recognized and authorized is to preach and administer the sacraments, lest chaos overtake the congregation.  Nevertheless, the distinction between clergy and laity with respect to spiritual powers has been eliminated.

Luther reinforced his understanding here by having congregants receive Holy Communion in both kinds, bread and wine, whereas lay people, to this point, had been given bread only (wine, along with bread, being consumed by the clergy only).  While giving wine to lay people may seem a small point to us, in Luther’s day it was huge: from now on the church was to be defined not in terms of a clergy hierarchy (priest, bishop, pope) who had unique powers; the church was to be defined as the people of God, a ‘kingdom of priests’, a ‘holy nation’, in the words of the apostle Peter (2nd Peter 2:9).  Luther eliminated the clergy/laity distinction.

Marriage among the Reformation clergy was another sign of its disappearance.  The mediaeval church had forbidden the clergy to marry (beginning in the tenth century) inasmuch as marriage was inferior to celibacy.  In Luther’s day marriage was thought to be vitiated by the depravity of women.  Women, it was said, had been the downfall of Adam, Samson, David and Solomon.  In the Aristotelian mindset that underlay much of the mediaeval church, women were said to be botched males; if copulation were error-free, a male would result every time.[24]

In addition, Luther faulted the church fathers, in particular Jerome, Cyprian, Gregory and Augustine.  Hadn’t Cyprian, a giant in the Patristic era, written, “If you hear a woman speak, flee from her as if she were a hissing snake”?[25]  The mediaeval church had expatiated on the various ways in which marriage was fraught with sin, the last way being marital sex undertaken for the sheer pleasure of it.

Luther and his followers inverted the late mediaeval understanding by transferring the praise of monastic life to marriage.  In no sense was marriage second-best.  In the fourth century, Jerome had assigned numerical values to marriage and celibacy.  On a scale of 0 to 100, Jerome assigned 100 to virginity, 60 to widowhood, and 30 to marriage.  Marriage was last in this scheme because it was a concession to inferior persons who would derail spiritually and psychologically without the institution.  Inverting all such calculations, Johann Bugenhagen, Luther’s friend and pastor of the city church in Wittenberg, exclaimed, “It is faith, and not virginity, that fills paradise.”  (In this regard it is worth noting that while Pope John Paul II had canonised or beatified almost 300 people as of 1997, he had elevated no woman who wasn’t a virgin.)[26]

Luther was not naïve in this matter.  Always looking to Scripture, he knew Jesus to have said (Matt. 19) that some men are born eunuchs; some become eunuchs for the kingdom of God, and some become eunuchs thanks to the violence of other men.  Roughly, then, there are people who, for many different reasons (not least psychological difficulties) are incapable of sustaining a lifelong union; in addition, there are those who forgo marriage because of a vocation to celibacy; and there are those who, through sheer misfortune, are denied the opportunity to marry.  None of this, however, undoes God’s mandate to marry following God’s pronouncement that it isn’t good to be alone.  And needless to say, Luther, as Hebraist, was aware that marriage is the commonest metaphor everywhere in Scripture for God’s covenant relationship with his people.  This fact alone guarantees that marriage ought never be slighted.

Luther exemplified his high view of marriage in his love for his wife, Katharina von Bora.  She had been assigned to a convent at age six.  Having appropriated Luther’s understanding of the gospel as she matured, she had somehow conveyed word to Leonhard Koppe, a fish merchant, that she and others wanted to embrace the Reformation understanding of faith and life.  In 1523 Koppe extricated twelve nuns from the convent in herring barrels. (This feat too required enormous courage.  In Catholic Saxony, one year later, a man was beheaded for helping a nun escape.)[27]  In 1525 Luther married Katharina.  Together they had six children, and until he died he loved her in exemplary fashion.  Listen to Luther extol his beloved Katie in his 1531 sermon On the Estate of Marriage:

God’s word is actually inscribed on one’s spouse.  When a man looks at his wife as if she were the only woman on earth, and when a woman looks at her husband as if he were the only man on earth; yes, if…not even the sun itself sparkles any more brightly and lights up your eyes more than your own husband or wife, then right there you are face to face with God speaking.[28]

 

Luther delighted in his Katie as he delighted in nothing and no one else.  He regarded husband and wife as God’s gift to each other.  And because the clergy and laity alike were God’s people without spiritual distinction, the clergy should cherish the same gift – marriage – and thank God for it.

 

Brother Martin had no idea, in 1517, that his Ninety-Five Theses would precipitate an earthquake.  His reading of Scripture, however, reminded him that when God spoke at Sinai, God’s voice shook the earth (Heb.12:28).  And his reading of Scripture confirmed every day his conviction that when the gospel is announced, Jesus Christ acts and speaks, once more shaking the earth – and all of this for the sake of that kingdom, Luther grasped with iron fast certainty, which cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28).

 

 

Luther’s favourite Psalm was 118.  “Although the entire psalter and all of holy scripture are dear to me as my only comfort and source of life,” revelled Luther, “I fell in love especially with this psalm.  Therefore I call it my own….Here you see how the right hand of God mightily lifts the heart and comforts it in the midst of death….Is not this astounding?  The dying live; the suffering rejoice; the fallen rise; the disgraced are honored.”[29]   It was crucial that the disgraced be honoured, for whereas Luther the brash monk had earlier boasted “We considered ourselves holy from head to toe,” the older Luther, only eighteen months from death, wrote his friend, Georg Spalatin, “Now join with us prodigious and hardened sinners lest you diminish Christ for us….You can be a bogus sinner and have Christ for a fictitious savior.  Instead, get used to the fact that Christ is a genuine savior and that you are a real sinner.”[30]

While Luther maintained Psalm 118 to be his favourite, his most frequently cited was Psalm 50:15: “Call upon me in the day of trouble” (says the Lord); “I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”  Luther, in trouble from the moment he was pronounced an outlaw (1521) until he died 25 years later, had called upon God relentlessly. Was he delivered?  Certainly he believed he was.  Did he glorify God?  His theological legacy – 450 treatises, 3000 printed sermons, 2600 extant letters – is largely a paean of praise to God.

Two weeks before his death (18th February 1546) Luther, now in Eisleben, learned that his wife Katharina, minding children in Wittenberg, was anxious concerning his illness.  He wrote her telling her that her anxieties for him were groundless: “I have a caretaker who is better than you and all the angels; he lies in the cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, and yet, nevertheless, he sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty.  Therefore, be at peace.”[31]

 

You have a caretaker, and I have a caretaker, who lies in a cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom even as he sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty.  Therefore you and I may, and must, be at peace.

The Reverend Dr Victor A. Shepherd

[1] LW 34: 337.

[2] WA 17:1, 309.  Quoted in Hendrix, 27.

[3] LW 11: 51.  Hendrix 70. Emphasis added.

[4] LW 4: 34.  Hendrix 169.

[5] WA 40: III, 352-353.

[6] WA 39: I, 205.  Sine hoc articulo mundus est plane mors et tenebrae.

[7] R.A. Mynors, et al., eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus. 12 Vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-2003.  EP 218   quoted in Pettegree, Brand Luther, 231.

[8] WABr II: 387-9.  In Pettegree  231.

[9] LW 54: 81.  In Hendrix 171.

[10] Hendrix, 58.

[11] Hendrix, 136.

[12] LW 48:46.  Hendrix 55.

[13] LW 48:  215.  Hendrix 113.

[14] Pettegree, Brand Luther, 61.

[15] In addition to sending a copy of the Ninety-Five Theses and an accompanying letter, Letter of Martin Luther to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz (LW 48:43-49) Luther also subsequently preached and published in German his sermon, A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace (WA 1:239-46.

[16] See Timothy J. Wengert, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, ix.

[17] Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 101.

[18] Hendrix, 57.

[19] Pettegree, Brand Luther, 61.

[20] LW 48: 44.

[21] WA 1:239-46.

[22] For an English version, see Johann Tetzel’s Rebuttal against Luther’s Sermon Indulgences and Grace, trans. Dewey Weiss Kramer (Atlanta: Pitts Theology Library, 2012).

[23] Hendrix, 67.

[24] For an amplification of this matter see Victor Shepherd, Interpreting Martin Luther: An Introduction to his Life and Thought, 301; and Steven Ozment, Protestants, 152-3.

[25] LW 54: 357.

[26] John Kent, Wesley and the Wesleyans, 106-7.

[27] Hendrix, 136.

[28] LW 51:17-42.

[29] LW 14: 45; 14, 86.

[30] WABr 10: 639.

[31] Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church – 1532-1546, 373.

Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday

                A

[1] Who is the best English hymnwriter? Surely everyone is going to shout, “Charles Wesley”. Who is the best liturgist? Anglicans and non-Anglicans agree it’s Thomas Cranmer. The most perceptive Bible translator? – William Tyndale. The most able catechists in English Christendom are the Westminster divines, while the finest preacher is deemed to be Hugh Latimer.

Imagine all these gifted people, gifted with diverse talents, gathered up and concentrated in one individual. What it took a dozen Englishmen two hundred years to accomplish, Martin Luther did in twenty. Luther is prodigious.

Did it all begin on Nov. 9, 1483 when Luther was born? Not exactly. It began thirty years later when Luther, tormented by uncertainty concerning his standing as unholy sinner before holy God, ransacked Scripture yet again but this time found lighting up for him the life-giving theme of the righteousness of God.

Up to this point Luther had always understood the righteousness of God as a quality in God that merely highlights the unrighteousness of the sinner. In other words, the righteousness of God, a righteousness that God possesses in himself, can only be bad news: God’s righteousness exposes and condemns the sinner’s unrighteousness.

Now, however, Luther saw with Spirit-given Kingdom-sightedness that the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people rightly related to him; that is, the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God turns capsized relationships right-side up. In the same way, the power of God isn’t a quality that God possesses so as to render human capacity insignificant. The power of God, rather, is that act of God whereby God empowers his people. The wisdom of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people wise.

Up to this point Luther had looked upon human righteousness as active; it was a righteousness we were supposed to achieve or acquire by extraordinary feats of so-called sanctity, religious observances, pilgrimages, fasts and flagellations; supposed to achieve or acquire, that is, but weren’t able to.

Now, however, Luther discerned and ever after spoke not of an active righteousness whereby we come to merit our standing with God; instead he now spoke characteristically of a passive righteousness that was passive only in the sense that our righted relationship with God is God’s gift, a gift that we can never fashion or forge or achieve, yet may and must receive. This gift has already been fashioned for us by the One whose cross has borne our sin and borne it away. The believer’s righteousness is passive in the sense (only in the sense) that the hymnwriter captured centuries later, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.”

In his fresh appropriation of Scripture Luther grasped that what he could never achieve had been given him; the acquittal a guilty person could never earn, someone else had won for him; the pardon a condemned rebel would never deserve, the sin-bearing Lord had pronounced upon him. In short, a clemency that remained out of reach was his, thanks to crucified arms that embraced him so as never to let him go.

Luther gloried in the truth and reality of the greatest gift imaginable; namely a righted relationship with God. He gloried in it and glowed with it every time he spoke of it.

[2] Listen to Luther himself as he traces for us the path whereby he came to glow:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction….Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul…most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, ‘In it [i.e., the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live’. There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous [person] lives by a gift of God, namely, by faith….There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me….And I extolled my sweetest word [‘the righteousness of God’] with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word ‘righteousness of God.’ Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.”

[3] The “place in Paul” was Romans 1:17. For the rest of his life Luther would return to the epistles, chiefly Romans and Galatians, whenever he needed to revisit the gospel of right-relatedness with God by faith, the good news that God, thanks to his cross-wrought mercy, puts in the right with himself those who through their disobedience and defiance are currently in the wrong before him.

Specifically, Luther found Paul’s epistle to the Galatians the clearest, ‘impossible-to-miss’ declaration of the gospel. Luther wrote a commentary on Galatians in 1519, and another one, much expanded, in 1535. He used to refer to Galatians as his ‘Katie von Bora’. Katarina von Bora, everyone knows, was Luther’s wife (with whom he remained ardently in love); by naming Galatians as ‘my Katie’ he meant that whenever he needed invigoration, comfort, consolation, encouragement, not least correction, he knew where to go.

Luther relished Romans and Galatians inasmuch as there he found the epicentre of the gospel stated clearly and compellingly. For this reason, these two Pauline epistles would correct aberrant readings of Scripture elsewhere.

Luther couldn’t have known, of course, that the gospel of Romans would give rise to 80 commentaries on Romans alone, written by scores of thinkers, in the 16th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird the Evangelical Awakening in the 18th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird Karl Barth’s theological bombshell in the 20th century. But he wouldn’t have been surprised to see it happen. And he would have known why.

While Luther would extol the gospel of God’s grace for the rest of his life, a gospel unmistakeably delineated in Romans and Galatians, he didn’t come upon it there for the first time. He came upon it first in the Older Testament. To be sure, the Older testament doesn’t use the vocabulary of Romans/Galatians, but certainly the Older Testament speaks of the God whose mercy visits mercy upon those whose predicament before him is otherwise hopeless, and who thereby gives them a standing and a recognition – ‘you are my daughter, my son, with whom I am now pleased’ – they could never merit or achieve. Luther found the gospel throughout the Older Testament, but especially in Deuteronomy, the second half of Isaiah, and the Psalms.

[4] Plainly Luther exulted in the good news of God’s righting sinners with himself through faith in the crucified; plainly Luther exulted in this inasmuch as he was preoccupied with being in the right with God. Why was he preoccupied? Was he neurotically anxious over an insignificant matter? Was he obsessing over something inconsequential?

Luther was oceans deeper than this. He was aware that God is not to be trifled with. He knew that the sinner’s predicament before God is perilous. When I was on my way to my doctorate (University of Toronto) I had to appear before Prof. Jakob Jocz, Wycliffe College, for an oral examination. When the examination had concluded, Prof. Jocz, a Christian from eastern Europe who had witnessed unspeakable suffering and who was as deep as a well; Jocz said to me, “Mr. Shepherd, your grasp of the gospel is remarkable. Always remember that people never get the gospel; they never get the gospel until they understand that God is properly angry with the sinner.”

Luther knew as much. Luther knew that our defiant disobedience principally does three things to God: it breaks God’s heart, it provokes God’s anger, and it arouses God’s disgust.

Scripture, particularly the Older Testament, speaks again and again of God’s heartbreak at the recalcitrance of his people. (All we need do here is read the book of the prophet Hosea.) As for God’s anger, it too is found on every page of Scripture, not least in the gospel accounts of the public ministry of Jesus, where Jesus ‘boils over’ every day, it appears. As for God’s disgust, Scripture reminds us that we are repulsive to God; we are a stench in the nostrils of God. Over and over Scripture uses the language of ‘defile’ and ‘defilement’. Sinners are defiled people whose defilement God finds obnoxious.

How obnoxious? What’s the most repulsive thing you can imagine? (Don’t tell me!) Luther, whose imagination never lacked vividness, lived in an era that hadn’t yet seen a flush-toilet. Luther’s vocabulary with respect to repulsiveness – I think I should say no more lest I empty this room and spoil your lunch.)

[5] Let’s shift gears and think about Christmas. Every year in the Christmas season Luther capered and cavorted, laughed and leapt like children so very excited on Christmas Eve that they are beside themselves. Why was Luther near-delirious with joy over Christmas? He was ‘over the moon’ because he couldn’t thank God enough for the Christmas gift. The gift, of course, is Christ Jesus our Lord, given to us as the Saviour we need as we need nothing else.

Luther knew that when God looks out over the entire human creation, God can’t find one human being, not one, who renders him the glad and grateful, cheerful obedience God expects from the people he has created. Whereupon God says to himself, “If I’m going to find even one human being who renders me such cheerful obedience, I shall have to provide that human being myself in the person of my Son”. And so we have Christmas, where God in his mercy provides the human covenant-partner of God who remains rightly related to his Father in life and in death.

Luther knew that because Jesus of Nazareth is the one whose entire life and death are unbroken obedience, then insofar as we cling to the Nazarene in faith we are bound so closely to him that when the Father sees the Son with whom he is ever pleased he sees you and me included in the Son: we too, clinging to this one in faith, are declared – effectually declared – to be rightly related to the Father.

Luther knew, in the second place, that when sinners provoke God’s just judgement upon them, God’s judgement is just and there is nothing sinners can do to relieve themselves of it. Yet the breathtaking news of Christmas is that in the Son whom God has brought forth in our midst: in him, on Good Friday, the just judge visits his judgement on the Son who has identified himself with sinners, even as the just judge, the Father, one with his Son, absorbs his judgement in himself. If the just judge has exercised his judgement upon us only to absorb it in himself, what is left you and me? – mercy, pardon, acquittal, acceptance.

Luther knew, in the third place, that when sinners arouse God’s disgust (God finds sinners loathsome), the good news of Christmas is that the one crucified between two terrorists at the city garbage dump has soaked up the stench we are with the result that those who cling to him in faith are now rendered the fragrance, the perfume, of Christ (as the apostle Paul speaks of Christians in 2nd Corinthians).

Luther ‘lit up’ over Christmas just because he knew that in the Bethlehem gift the obedience we are expected to render but don’t; in this one such obedience has been rendered on our behalf. The anger we have provoked has been borne for us and borne away. The disgust we arouse has been soaked up by the one who leaves us smelling like roses. (Don’t we speak, at Christmas, of the ‘rose of Sharon’?)

All Luther wants to do is thank God for this gift and cling so very tightly to this gift in faith so as to be identified with him forever.

For Luther, then, the Christmas child is our salvation. In him we enjoy the same relationship with our Father that he, the Son, enjoys with his Father; namely, we, now rightly related to God, are that child of God with whom the Father is ever pleased.

At this point Luther knew himself a free man; a free man because freed by God’s gospel.

B

Yet Luther knew that those who have been freed for God have been freed not only for the praise of God but freed also for the service of the neighbour.

In 1520 Luther published a tract that has turned out to be the best-known of all his writings. The tract is labelled Christian Freedom.

Not only is this tract moving on account of its understanding and expression; it is also comprehensive in its discussion as few other tracts are. Luther himself wrote of it, “Unless I am mistaken… it contains the whole of the Christian life in a brief form.”

Before we probe Luther’s tract we must be sure we understand ‘freedom’ in conformity to Scripture. In popular parlance, freedom is the capacity to choose among alternatives. A child at an ice-cream counter is said to be free to choose vanilla or strawberry or pistachio. Such ‘freedom’ (so-called) is nothing more than indeterminism; that is, the child hasn’t been coerced, outwardly or inwardly, to choose one flavour over another.

Yet when Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal.5:1), he cannot mean that Christ has set us free so that we may choose to obey Christ or disobey him. (Such freedom, so-called, is nothing less than the bondage of sin.) The apostle can only mean that Christ has set us free to obey him – and this only. In other words, freedom is having Jesus Christ remove all impediments to our obeying him; to say the same thing differently, freedom is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord – and only in accord – with one’s true nature.

Imagine a derailing switch placed upon railway tracks. The train is impeded from travelling along the rails. When the switch is removed, the train is said to be free to run along the rails. If someone asks, “But is the train free to float like a boat?”, the proper reply can only be, “But it isn’t a train’s nature to float like a boat; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.”

Christ has freed his people to act in accordance with their true nature; namely, a child of God. In other words, Christ simultaneously frees us from all claims upon our faith and obedience that contradict our nature as child of God and frees us for everything that reflects our nature as child of God. It is our nature as child of God to love God and love the neighbour in utter self-abandonment.

Luther succinctly sets out the theme of the tract:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

Expanding on this statement Luther writes,

We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour.

Christians, freed by Christ for their true nature – bound to Christ by faith and bound to the neighbour by love – live henceforth in radical self-forgetfulness. Taken out of themselves, their self-absorption shrivels and their anxiety evaporates. The gospel effects this, and can effect it just because the gospel, as all the Reformers after Luther insisted, isn’t chiefly idea but rather power. The Reformers everywhere reflected Paul’s conviction that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).

Luther goes on to say that there is only one way of living in Christ by faith. There are, however, three ways of living in the neighbour by love.

[1] We live in the neighbour by love as we share our neighbour’s material scarcity, and do so out of our material abundance, even material superfluity. Luther admits this costs us little. If I have five shirts, giving one to a shirtless neighbour exacts little from me. Luther notes too that when we do this we also gain social recognition (today, we’d say an income tax receipt for ‘gift in kind’).

[2] We live in the neighbour by love, in the second place, as we share the neighbour’s suffering. Luther maintains this is costlier in that proximity to suffering in others engenders suffering in us. Painful though it is, however, we feel good about it; and if we do it well, we are rewarded for it (the Order of Canada or the Lions’ Club Humanitarian Award accorded Mother Teresa).

[3] Finally, says Luther, we live in the neighbour as we share the neighbour’s disgrace, the neighbour’s shame. This is by far the costliest way of living in the neighbour. Here there is no reward; here there is no social recognition. Here, on the other hand, there is nothing but social contempt and ostracism. Here we profoundly know what it is to be ‘numbered among the transgressors’, for was not our Lord before us publicly labelled with a disgrace he didn’t deserve? In concluding his discussion of this matter Luther insists that our service “takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss…. [the Christian] most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” – including his reputation.

Conclusion

Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday: the man from Wittenberg launched a revolution that altered the course of history. Today we have probed only one area of his work, but it’s an area foundational for everything else.

Luther recovered the freedom of the gospel: the freedom that gives penitent sinners the gift of free right-relatedness to God thanks to the crucified Son; and the freedom whereby otherwise self-preoccupied people can forget themselves by abandoning themselves and their fussiness as they live henceforth to assist the neighbour whose need is undeniable and whose suffering is relentless.

Martin Luther happens to be a giant.

Victor Shepherd          October 2017

Syllabus

Theology of Luther

Department of Theology
Tyndale Seminary
Winter 2006
Thursday at 1:00 p.m.
Instructor: V. Shepherd
Office Hours as posted
Tel. 416 226 6380 ext. 6726 (office)
905 821 0587 (home)
email: victor.shepherd@sympatico.ca 

Objective:
This course is meant to assist students in probing Luther’s theology both extensively and intensively

Aims: The aims of the course are
[1] to familiarize students with the vocabulary and logic of the Magisterial Reformation’s first major thinker;
[2] to understand Luther’s against its immediate philosophical, theological and humanistic background;
[3] to situate Luther’s singular theological expression amidst those of other Reformers and Roman Catholics;
[4] to investigate Luther’s oneness with and departure from the Renaissance;
[5] to appreciate the Magisterial Reformation as part of a movement that included Radical, Elizabethan, Catholic and Counter Reformations;
[6] to appreciate the significance of Luther’s theology for contemporary ecumenism.

Prerequisites:
THEO 05331 and THEO 0532 or THEO 0530

Text:
Timothy Lull, ed., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings

Assignments:
Essay: Each student is to submit one 3000-word essay on a topic selected from the appended list of essay topics, or on any topic approved by the instructor.  The deadline is not negotiable.  An extension will not be granted (apart from medically documented illness or family emergencies such as death.) 
The penalty assigned for late submission will be one-third of a grade for each day late.
Examination: each student is to sit the in-class examination at the conclusion of the semester.

Evaluation:
The essay and the examination are each worth 50%.

Schedule:

Jan. 12 Introductions
Class assignments
The Religious Background to Luther
Jan Huss
Jan. 19 Renaissance Humanism
Erasmus
Jan. 26 Gabriel Biel and Late Mediaeval Scholasticism
Feb. 2 The early Luther
“Disputation Against Scholastic Theology”
“The Ninety-Five Theses”
   “Preface to the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings”
Feb. 16 The Righteousness of God
“Two Kinds of Righteousness”
   “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion”
Feb. 16 Freedom in Christ
   “The Freedom of a Christian”
Feb. 23 The Lord’s Supper (comparisons with Rome, Zwingli and Calvin)
   “The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ — Against the Fanatics”
March 2 The Bondage of the Will
   “The Bondage of the Will — Introduction, Part VI, and Conclusion”
March 9 Law and Gospel
“A Brief Instruction on what to Look for and Expect in the Gospels”
   “Preface to the New Testament”
“Preface to the Old Testament”
March 16 (Reading Week)
March 23 The Church
   “On The Council and the Church — Part III”
March 30 Church and State
   “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed”
April 6 Marriage and Domestic Life
   “A Sermon on the Estate of Marriage”
April 13 Antisemitism
   “Concerning the Jewish People: Was Luther A Son of Paul?”
    (paper by Victor Shepherd)
April 20 Examination

Essay Topics

What aspects of Renaissance Humanism most immediately affected the Reformation?

Was Erasmus a Christian? How did his work assist or contradict the Reformation?

What did mediaeval scholasticism mean by “justification”?

How does Luther understand the eucharist?

What would any two (or three) of the following have said to each other concerning the Lord’s Supper: Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, the Anabaptists, Rome?

What is Melanchthon’s theological contribution to the Lutheran Reformation?

Compare Melanchthon and Luther on the Law of God.

Write a “Review Article” on the debate between Erasmus and Luther on the bondage of the will.

What does Luther mean by the “Righteousness of God”?

Expound Luther’s understanding of freedom. Contrast it with popular contemporary notions.

How do Luther and Calvin understand the relation of law to gospel?

What is Luther’s Ecclesiology?

What does Luther mean by “Two Kingdoms”?

Discuss the theology of Luther and Eck at the Diet of Worms.

What significance is attached to the following cities during Luther’s lifetime: Worms, Eisenach (the Wartburg), Leipzig, Augsburg, Marburg?

What is the image of the Jew in the late mediaeval and early Reformation eras, and how did this image affect the treatment accorded Jewish people?

How does Luther understand faith? (fides qua creditur)

What is God’s mandate for the state, and how does Luther’s understanding here influence his advice during and subsequent to the peasant revolt?

(any topic approved by the instructor)

 

 

LUTHER BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Althaus, P.; The Ethics of Martin Luther

The Theology of Martin Luther

Atkinson, J.; The Great Light: Luther and the Reformation

Martin Luther and the Birth of Protestantism

Martin Luther: A Prophet to the Church Catholic

Rome and Reformation: How Luther Speaks to the New Situation

d’Aubgine, J.; The Life and Times of Martin Luther

Bainton, R.; Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther

Blackman, H.; Luther, Translator of Paul: Studies in Romans and Galatians

Bornkamm, H.; Luther and the Old Testament

Luther in Mid-Career: 1521-1530

Luther’s World of Thought

Boyle, M.; Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus’ Civil Dispute with Luther

Bratten, C.E., and Jenson, R.W.; Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther

Brecht, M.; Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation, 1483-1521

Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation,1521-1532

Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church1532-1546

Brendler, G.; Martin Luther: Theology and Revolution

Crossley, R.; Luther and the Peasants’ War

Dickens, A.; The German Nation and Martin Luther

Martin Luther and the Reformation

Ebeling, G.; Luther: And Introduction to his Thought

Edwards, M.; Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics

Green, L.; How Melanchthon Helped Luther Discover the Gospel

Green, V.; Luther and the Reformation

Grisar, H.; Martin Luther: His Life and Work

Gritsch, E.; Martin Luther — God’s Court Jester

Gritsch, E., and Jenson, R.W.; Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and its Confessional Writings

Haendler, G.; Luther on Ministerial Office and Congregational Function

Haile, H.; Luther, An Experiment in Biography

Harran, H.; Luther on Conversion: The Early Years

Headley, J.; Luther’s View of Church History

Hendrix, S.; Luther and the Papacy: Stages in a Reformation Conflict

Hoffman, B.; Der Franckforter: The Theologica Germanica of Martin Luther

                    Luther and the Mystics

Hordern, W.; Experience and Faith: The Significance of Luther

For Understanding Today’s Experiential Religion

Jensen, D.; Confrontation at Worms: Martin Luther and the Diet of Worms

Jungel, E.; The Freedom of A Christian: Luther’s Significance for Contemporary Theology

Kittelson, J.; Luther the Reformer: The Study of the Man and his Career

Koeningsberger, H. (ed); Luther: A Profile

Kooiman, W.; Luther and the Bible

Leaver, R.; Luther on Justification

Lienhard, M.; Luther, Witness to Jesus Christ: Stages and Themes of the Reformer’s Christology

Lindsay, T.; Luther and the German Reformation

Loewen, H.; Luther and the Radicals

Loewenich, W.; Luther’s Theology of the Cross

Martin Luther: The Man and his Work

Lohse, B.; Martin Luther: And Introduction to his Life and Work

Mackinnon, J.; Luther and the Reformation

Marius, R.; Luther

McDonough, T.; The Law and the Gospel in Luther

McGoldrick, J.; Luther’s English Connection: The Religious Thought of Robert Barnes and William Tyndale

McGrath, A.; Luther’s Theology of the Cross: The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation

McSorley, H.; Luther: Right or Wrong?

Oberman, H.; The Dawn of the Reformation

The Impact of the Reformation

Martin Luther: Man Between God and the Devil

The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications

Olin, J., Smart, J., McNally, R.; Luther, Erasmus and the Reformation

Olivier, D.; The Trial of Luther

Pascal, R.; The Social Basis of the German Reformation

Pelikan, J.; Spirit Versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church

Pinomaa, L.; Faith Victorious: An Introduction to Luther’s Theology

Ritter, G.; Luther: His Life and Work

Rupp, E.; Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms

The Righteousness of God

Russell, W.R.; The Schmalkald Articles: Luther’s TheologicalTestament

Sasse, H.; This is My Body

Sessions, K. (ed); Reformation and Authority:

The Meaning of the Peasants’ Revolt

Sider, R. (ed); Karlstadt’s Battle with Luther

Siemen-Netto, U.; The Fabricated Luther: The Rise and Fall of the Shirer Myth.

Steinmetz, D.; Luther and Staupitz: An Essay in the Intellectual Origins of the Protestant Reformation

Luther in Context

Swihart, A.; Luther and the Lutheran Church

Tavard, G.; Justification: An Intellectual Study

Todd, J.; Luther, A Life

Martin Luther, A Biographical Study

Volkmar, L.; Luther’s Response to Violence

Watson, P.; Let God Be God!

Wood, A.; Captive to the Word

Zachman, R.; The Assurance of Faith

Background to the Reformation

Background to the Reformation

I

Did Luther tear apart a united Christendom?
Were the Reformers impatient? immoderate? unfaithful? simply wrong?

There were many tensions and crises on many fronts:
princes akin to warlords;
towns in tension with rural dwellers;
the Holy Roman Emperor in tension with kings and princes;
tension within the church between
(1) conciliarists and papalists,
(2) scholastics and humanists,
(3) those who sought
 greater spiritual depth and those contented with
e.g., masses for the dead and
 indulgences.
     a shift from agricultural economy to an urban entrepreneurial economy.

II

Features of the turbulence:
[A] Religious upheaval:
Hussite movement
Waldensians
Late mediaevalists who sought simpler expression of the Christian faith
devoid of pomp and
 perversity

[B] Objections to Papal Power:
Erastianism
The question of Rome’s primacy
The precedent of France and England
Germany’s objection despite its political fragmentation

[C] Renaissance Humanism (see next week)

[D] Ecclesiastical corruption and public perception of it

 

III

The nature of the clergy
a: higher clergy
b: lower clergy
c: public perception

 

IV

The religious life of the common people
a: the prevalence of fear
b: the propensity for “revelations”
c: the place and proliferation of relics
d: the traffic in indulgences
e: the primacy of Jesus the Judge
f: the godliness of, e.g., the Brethren of the Common Life
g: mysticism
h: the nature of, e.g., the Devotio Moderna

 

V

The religious consequences of urbanization

VI

The influence of Occam
The authority of the church
The Council of Constance

 

 

 

VII

Other Forces:
[A] economic
[B] social unrest
[C] printing press
a: theological tomes
b: tracts and treatises, “occasional” writings
c: pamphlets
[D] new universities

 

Reverend V. Shepherd

 

A Note on Humanism

A Note on Humanism

I

The Renaissance was a transition from the mediaeval to the modern world, and this transition entailed a startlingly new “world-view.”

E.g., the rise of modern science as the “old science” was freed from the restrictions of philosophy that had attempted to deduce what had to happen in the naturalworld instead of having observers draw conclusions from what did.

E.g, the era of geographic exploration, presupposing a mindset of risk-taking, cutting loose from the safe/conventional, eagerness to be rid of what one regarded as inhibiting (i.e., the exploration and self-insertion into what was thought to entail greater human significance.)

E.g., a new impetus w.r.t. trade and commerce, entailing cultural and intellectual cross-fertilization.

E.g., the appreciation of and rewarding of individual effort as the guild system (a collectivity of sorts) dissolved. (Collectivism never produces outstanding culture; culture atrophied under Stalin and Hitler.)

II

The Renaissance involved political concentration. Even though in Germany and Italy the pope and emperor were strong enough to prevent a melding of nation-states (there were 300 fiefdoms in Germany alone, each governed by a prince), national forces were rising everywhere in Europe. Everywhere princes, newly confident, were attempting to free themselves from papal control, one consequence of which was the jettisoning of an ecclesiastical mindset. Underlying this was the “right” of the individual to revolt against tyranny or against anything that suppressed the full flowering of one’s humanity.

III

The Renaissance was enormously abetted by paper and printing. The massive emphasis on the literature of antiquity, not to mention the production of vernacular scriptures, as well as the huge tomes of the Reformers was possible only with paper and press. (Erasmus handled a book reverently.)

IV

The Renaissance, recovering antiquity, provided new raw materials for thought and new vistas and visions for self-making. What it meant to be a human being was to be forged in light of what was now regarded as the human good. Here the move was away from heteronomy and towards autonomy.

Religion was a part of this movement: a shift from submission to an extraneous authority that cramped self-enrichment, a shift towards a more autonomous, classically informed human self-expression and self-projection.

 

V

Ancient learning and art were crucial here. Latin had never perished during the middle ages (it was the language of every educated person), nor had all familiarity with Greek literature. Now, however, there was a new zeal for the language and literature of antiquity. Whereas, for instance, Latin had always been the language of the church, government (diplomacy) and law, Latin was now recognized to facilitate an authentically human wealth. (Knowledge of a language — any language — always admits the knower to a world.) A study of the classics was deemed necessary not merely to gain access to content but also to appreciate (and reproduce) the beauty of literary form.

It was felt that classical thought was both more rational (i.e., freed from mediaeval superstition and thought-forms) and more life-affirming. Greater scope was admitted for intellect (i.e., beyond philosophy and theology), affect, aesthetics, as well as an affirmation of sensuousness: the sheer exuberance of impassioned living. At first the church saw nothing inimical here, looking upon early humanism as a fresh appreciation of the manifold riches of the creation. Soon, however, an attempt was made to reconcile Christian thought with ancient philosophy. (Since humanism was chiefly a literary rather than a phil’l movement, it didn’t develop its own phil’l thought.) The “partner” with whom reconciliation was effected was Platonism. The Xn Platonists (whose greatest representative was likely Pico della Mirandola) shaped the Xn outlook in the direction of Platonism’s intellectual presuppositions, ethics, and human self-exaltation. These Xn Platonists insisted that not only is Israel the progenitor of Christ, so is Hellenism. (NB humanism’s undervaluation of the OT and its wicked antisemitism.)

 

VI

At first the papacy supported the humanist resurgence. The biggest ecclesiastical boost came from Pope Nicholas V (1447-55). A great lover of books, he founded the Vatican library and gathered around himself both scholars and artisans. (Humanists were always concerned with beauty.) Julius II (1503-13) stated that the head of the church was also to demonstrate leadership in intellectual and cultural developments. He instructed Michelangelo to represent him as Moses: Julius II saw himself as the leader who brings the church out of intellectual/cultural oppression, through a wilderness, and into a promised land. This was not a concern with mereaesthetics; aesthetics were regarded as facilitating union with God, enjoyment of God.

As humanism spread north from Italy, its birthplace, it found the German universities resistant: the scholasticism not of Aquinas but of Occam and Biel had a firm hold. The ghost of Aristotle remained, however, and it was deemed necessary to rid the university of Aristotle if humanist learning was to thrive. Anyone assisting the overthrow was deemed an ally –like Luther. (Soon the humanists saw that Luther was setting aside Ar., as well as Occam and Biel, for a very different reason. At this point the Renaissance and the Reformation parted.)

When the new learning did penetrate Germany it did so chiefly through people who had been trained in the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life. They regarded the new learning not so much as cultural enhancement to be appropriated immediately (as happened outside Germany) but rather as a tool of educational reform, and thence a tool to reform the church and improve social life. (Later humanists didn’t care about reforming the church.)

 

VII

At the same time humanism was spreading among the middle class people of the cities, especially Strassburg, Augsburg and Nuernburg. (NB how largely the first two will figure in the Reformation.) Among these urban humanists were German poets and teachers who didn’t magnify ancient paganism but rather insisted that all of life could be elevated and be found to have profounder significance as the mediaeval distinction between sacred and profane was collapsed.

Erfurt was the centre of German university humanism. Rufus Mutianus was its most prominent representative. Note his convictions, and note how they differed from the use that people from the BCL schools had wanted to make of humanism:
-Xy began a long time before the advent of Christ.
-the true Christ is not the God-man but the discarnate wisdom of God. (The true Christ can’t
 be seized by human hands.) this discarnate wisdom is the true son of God, and it alights equally on Jews, Greeks and Germans.
-the natural law is written on our hearts and makes us partakers of heaven.
-scripture is “fabulous”=full of fables (like Aesop), and teaches moral truths.
-“There is but one god and goddess; but there are man forms and many names: Jupiter, Sol,
 Apollo, Moses, Luna, Proserpina, Mary.” Humanists are aware of this; the ill-educated aren’t, and therefore should continue to be told the fables.
-Mutianus denounced the veneration of relics, fasts, auricular confession, masses for the dead.
-he wanted to be rid of intellectual strait-jackets, but didn’t want to break decisively with the
 church (like Erasmus); he (like most humanists) had no interest in the question that preoccupied the Reformers, righteousness=right-relatedness to God.

 

VIII

Ulrich von Hutten, intellectually precocious, wanted above all a united Germany under a “reformed” emperor. While he didn’t specify what such a person was to exemplify, no doubt it would be something other than what Luther had in mind. Hutten would support anyone who curbed the power of the papacy and ended papal siphoning of money out of Germany. Regarding himself Luther’s ally after the Leipzig debate, in fact he was poles removed from L’s theological and spiritual depth. Finally he could only express amazement at L’s passion for the gospel, which gospel L. knew to be qualitatively distinct from anything the humanists offered.

A most glorious exception to the above was Philip Melanchthon. He was a superbly trained humanist as well as the first systematic theologian of the Reformation. (After the death of Erasmus [1531] P.M. was the finest Greek scholar in all of Europe.)

 

IX

In each of the major countries of the north there were three generations of humanists.
[1] “pioneers” — they acquired classical learning and absorbed a classical mindset.
[2] “consolidators” — they integrated and developed the rich materials the pioneers unearthed,
 creating the high point of humanist learning
[3] “doers” — they were a younger generation who cherished humanism not so much for its
 intellectual excellence as for its providing tools for social change.

Between 1510 and 1520 many of these third generation humanists gathered around L., eager to do something about abuses in church and society. These people were the “runners” who disseminated L’s Ninety-Five Theses throughout Germany.

Luther profited from a humanist environment but was not especially humanist trained (despite having attended Erfurt U.) and was never interested in humanism as such. Yet there were discernible affinities between Luther and the humanists.

[1] rejection of scholasticism:
H: scholastic theology is unnecessarily complex, obscure, unintelligible; a more elegant
 theological formulation is needed.
L: scholastic theology is intelligible — and therefore should be recognized readily as anti-gospel.

[2] desire to return to patristics:
H: Patristics is a simple, understandable statement of Christian faith, devoid of fruitless
 speculation and incomprehensible scholastic Latin.
L: Patristics is closer to the NT era than is the mediaeval period, less distorted, less
 warped by a non-biblical logic.
Note: since the humanists esteemed antiquity, no one father was to be elevated (exception: Erasmus
 and Jerome.) For the Wittenberg theologians, Augustine was pre-eminent.

[3] desire to return to scripture:
H: sola scriptura = “not without scripture”
L: sola scriptura = “scripture as unnormed norm” (singularly used by the Spirit
 to acquaint us with the living Lord Jesus Christ.)

[4] interest in rhetoric:
H: an interest in eloquence as a cultural excellence.
L: an interest in preaching the gospel.

 

X

After 1520 the Reformation stood out in starker contrast with humanism. Humanists finally realized that their purposes and the Reformation’s were not the same.

But note: non-humanistically trained pastors were the foot soldiers of the Reformation, dutiful church functionaries. Yet they never provided intellectual or organizational leadership for the Reformation. Subsequently they became the most rigidly scholastic Protestants, re-introducing an utterly scholastic mindset only with a Protestant vocabulary.

Humanist education remains important in the formation of Christians and clergy!

 

Reverend V. Shepherd

 

Gabriel Biel

GABRIEL BIEL

? – 1495

was born at Speyer during the 1st quarter of the 15th century.

– is little-known w.r.t. his childhood, youth, or early adulthood.

was ordained to the priesthood in 1432 and entered Heidelberg University.

distinguished himself academically and became an instructor in the faculty of arts.

did further study in 1442-1443 at the U. of Erfurt (where Luther was later to study. Erfurt was the centre of German Humanism, and both Biel and Luther absorbed little of it.)

enrolled in 1453 in the faculty of theology at U. of Cologne (21 years after his ordination.)

immersed himself (Cologne) in the Nominalist thought of Occam (as contrasted with the “older” thought of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.)

was engaged in mid-life chiefly in day-to-day matters of church life.

was cathedral preacher in Mainz, and at this time associated himself with and thereafter remained a member of the Brethren of the Common Life (BCL: a group that pursued devotional depth — what today we call “spirituality” — and ethical rigour in a communal setting, but found nothing at all disagreeable about the church’s theology.)

was appointed in 1484 (Luther was born in 1483) professor of theology at the U. of Tuebingen.

was appointed in 1489 rector of U. of Tueb. (Likely he was 75 years old now.)

died in 1495, having spent his last years exclusively among the BCL.

Note: one of his theological “grandsons”, Johann Eck, was Luther’s principal opponent and formidable opponent in disputations at Leipzig (1519), Worms (1521) and Augsburg (1530.)

 

BIEL ON JUSTIFICATION

 

Presuppositions: (i) the Nominalist understanding of God: chiefly in terms of will or power.

(ii) the Nominalist understanding of grace: God is able to do anything that is not simply contradictory; e.g., God cannot make a square circle. (This is not “something” that God can’t do; rather, it is by definition a “no-thing”, nonsense. In the same way God cannot annihilate himself, since God exists necessarily.)

Note: (i) the Nom’t und’g of grace begins with philosophical speculation.

(ii) the ” ” of grace is characterized by power.

The Prot. Reformers will have much to say on both points.

 

God is the source of all power, concerning which there are two kinds:

potentia absoluta: metaphysical freedom to do anything at all that isn’t self-conradictory.

potentia ordinata: a limited capacity, power, or freedom which God has because of God’s

self-limitation.

By PA God has willed to create. (He was under no necessity to create.) But once he has created a finite world, then God is bound (PO) by his self-imposed order. If he were to violate this order he would be inconsistent.

E.g., God has willed that pain follow injury (PO). There is no metaphysical reason for this; of his own unconstrained will he has willed it. God could have (PA) created the world in any way he wanted, but in fact has created it as we have it. (Note here the Nominalist stress on the “freedom” of God.)

By PO God has imposed upon himself a way or pattern of dealing with us his finite creatures, and (more tellingly) with us his sinful creatures. Therefore it is of utmost importance that we recognize his way of dealing with us and conform ourselves to it.

A question that theology has always asked is, “How do sinners get right with the all-holy God?” I.e., how do people who are wrongly related to God come to be rightly related? How are sinners “justified”, set in the right with God?

 

An Overview of Biel’s Understanding of Justification

Biel casts his answer in terms of the respective roles that God and humans play in justification and final glorification.

Our role has to do chiefly with the nature of the human act.

Any human act can be evaluated w.r.t. its bonitas or goodness. (Here “goodness” is a moral category not a theological category. The Reformers will dispute this and insist that “goodness” is the good, the Kingdom of God.)

Upon such an act of bonitas God freely, gratuitously confers dignitas or reward.

God doesn’t have to (PA), but he has willed himself (PO) to reward bonitas.

The good act, now elevated to dignitas by grace (of Christ), gives the human agent a claim on salvation.

In other words, a morally good act merits grace by “congruent merit” (PO), an instance of God’s mercy. Bonitas, now elevated to dignitas by grace, merits eternal salvation by “condign merit” (PA), an instance of metaphysical necessity.

As already noted, the elevation of bonitas is not strict justice on God’s part, but is rather an instance of God’s generosity.

Once bonitas has been graced and therein elevated to dignitas, however, strict justice applies: God must grant eternal salvation to dignitas (PA) or God contradicts himself, God denies himself — and this is inherently impossible.

 

The Presuppositions of Biel’s Understanding

 

In a state of nature (i.e., outside the state of grace) humans, trying their utmost, can love God more than anything else. In other words, people can will themselves to love God above all else.

In a state of nature humans have the capacity to choose both good and evil, without which capacity we should cease to be human.

The will (will is this capacity for choice together with the act of choosing) is blind and has to be guided by reason.

Reason is not impaired in the way that will is.

Reason presents the will alternatives for moral action: reason informs the will and advises the will. The will, acting on this information and advice, produces spontaneously (i.e., the will is not moved by anything else) a morally good act (bonitas.)

Yet bonitas, however good, is never good enough to meet the requirements of the holy God.

God gratuitously (PO) infuses the act by grace. Grace doesn’t infuse any act, only the morally good act; i.e., grace as seed has to be planted in fertile rather than stony ground. Bonitas alone is such fertile ground.

Plainly, for Biel sin has not made it impossible for humans to act “rightly” without the aid of grace; i.e., the will is not devastated in this regard.

When we fail to act rightly, we fail because of improper cognition (i.e., ignorance): reason did not bring forward the proper object of the will’s willing.

The defect lies not in the will but in reason. Conversely, not the good will but reason (knowledge) is the foundation and root of all virtues. * Therefore the primary task of the church is not to be the herald and “custodian” of God’s grace (God will always add grace to bonitas), but rather to provide people with the proper information about God and the human good, information that assists people in moral improvement. I.e., this information apprises people as to which acts genuinely are bonitas.

How is such information acquired?

partly by a natural knowledge of God and his will;

partly by a revealed knowledge of God and his will, accepted on the authority of the church or on the authority of a particular preacher.

These two kinds of knowledge together constitute “acquired faith”, acquired faith being the source of all virtue.

Still, as mentioned earlier, these virtues do not meet the requirements of God. For this reason there is always needed grace, the middle term that elevates bon. todign., at which point the requirements of God are met.

Iustitia (“justice”) is the metaphysical necessity of God’s granting eternal salvation to dignitas. (PA)

It should be noted in Biel’s scheme that God graces not only the morally good act but also all aspirations; anyone who tries to be “God’s friend” (a mediaeval term) will find God gracing that effort.

For this notion Biel adduces the following scriptural support:

Zechariah 1:3 — “Return to me, says the Lord of hosts, and I will return to you.”

James 4:8: — “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”

Revelation 3:20 — “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens

the door, I will come in to him and eat with him and he with me.”

(Biel reads all such texts as supporting human initiative w.r.t. our salvation.)

For Biel, the essence of biblical Christianity is the congruent elevation of moral act or aspiration. God elevates such not from any constraint grounded in his being but from his overflowing kindness (i.e., his will.)

“Doing one’s best” (even if that “best” is highly deficient or defective) is at the same a “begging for mercy”; such importunity the gracious, merciful God never spurns.

Then for Biel justification is [A] by grace alone, since God alone supplies that grace which elevates bonitas to dignitas; [B] by works alone, since we must “do our best.”

The emphasis, of course, always falls on [B]. [A] is the rational, outer structure whose inner content is [B].

The church preaches and teaches [B], leaving God to supply [A]

Humankind’s motivation for moral act/aspiration is twofold: (i) fear of judgement

(ii) hope of salvation.

 

Biel explicitly rejects justification sola fide (by faith alone) as “an error of carnal and idle men.” To believe that we can be saved sola gratia (by grace alone)is to “scorn God’s justice.” Since genuine love for God is within everyone’s reach even after the fall and in the wake of the fall’s damage to us, it is our responsibility toinitiate the process of justification by making that effort which God will then honour and render worthy (meritum de condigno) of eternal salvation.

Despite Biel’s reference to grace, grace merely forms the outer structure whose inner content is human achievement; i.e., grace lends our achievement/aspiration salvific force. Put differently, grace makes it possible for us to save ourselves.

Plainly Biel’s notion of justification is essentially Pelagian.

 

The 16th Century Reformers’ Disagreements

 

1] Outside the state of grace humankind cannot love God at all (never mind love God above all.)

Humans can certainly be religious, but religiosity as such is simply idolatry, a barrier

behind which people flee God in the guise of seeking God.

In the wake of the fall our will is in se curvatus. We are afflicted with “concupiscence”,

rendering ourselves the centre of ourselves and the measure of everyone (-thing) else.

2] Instead of reason guiding the will, the will (the human “heart”) warps reason.

With respect to God, reason is perverted and largely of the order of rationalization.

We can never reason our way to God’s truth or God’s way with us: the cross.

3] While morally good act/aspiration is always possible (even actual), it is neither a sign of grace nor a step toward grace.

Morality is not the vestibule to the kingdom. The harlots and the tax-collectors enter the

kingdom ahead of the morally upright.

In the light of the kingdom (grace), morality has the same significance as religion: an

abomination to God.

4] The entire discussion of condign versus congruent merit contradicts the logic of scripture.

The only “merit” is that of Jesus Christ. His obedience to his Father is imputed to

(reckoned to) those who cling to him in faith.

5] We do not fail to act rightly merely because of improper information/cognition.

The root human problem is not ignorance but perverseness. Humankind wills to

make itself its own lord.

God’s giving us what we want (this is also his curse) — “You shall be as gods, knowing good

and evil” (Genesis 3:5) — means that we extend ourselves into areas of life that God has

marked “off limits”, and so marked for our blessing. No amount of information can overturn

the human predicament. (This is not to denigrate the informational content of the gospel. It is,

however, to deny that even the gospel as information can rectify us.)

People ultimately need not information but deliverance.

Our root problem is not that we are deprived (lacking something) but rather depraved

(perverse.)

 

6] The primary task of the church is NOT to provide people with proper moral information about
God and goodness (so as left-handedly to foster concupiscence) but

to attest Jesus Christ in the totality of his reality as attested by prophet and apostle,

to embody his truth and reality amidst the world’s life.

Plainly there is a truth-claim to the gospel and therefore a truth-content as well. However, in

articulating the truth of the gospel the Reformers do not provide that vehicle in terms of which

we achieve something meritorious before God. The truth/reality of the gospel isn’t naturally

intelligible, and therefore not the information on the basis of which we initiate the process

of salvation.

7] The grace of Jesus Christ does not pertain (only) to bonitas, thereby elevating it, while the grace of God is that which fashions the overall scheme of salvation.

There is no distinction between the grace of Christ and the grace of God and God himself;

i.e., grace is God himself in his presence and efficacy. Put differently, grace is the effectual

presence of God.

8] Iustitia (justice) is NOT (i) that by which we are measured, an abstract standard or code,

(ii) the metaphysical necessity of God’s rewarding dignitas.

Justice is the same as justification: God’s putting us in the right with himself, and thereby

vindicating himself and his people, relieving the oppressed, clearing the slander of

opprobrium heaped on those deemed “beyond the pale.” (I.e., all that HITZDIQ — the

hiphel of ZADAQ — and DIKAIOUN entail in Isaiah, the psalms, and the NT)

9] “Doing one’s best” is not synonymous with begging for mercy, but is rather disdaining and spurning the mercy that God has wrought in the Son (the cross) and visits upon his people through the Spirit.

The greater the sincerity in moral effort, the stronger the bastion that our pride has built

and to which we point in defiance of Jesus Christ.

10] Fallen humankind does not (because cannot) “unlock the door” to God. Any unlocking is possible only by grace.

The Reformed tradition will invoke here a doctrine of election.

The Wesleyan tradition will invoke here a doctrine of prevenient (pre=before;

venire=to come) grace.

11] In the wake of the fall no one seeks God. We flee God. When we think we are seeking him we are in fact fleeing him. God is “sought” in faith, not in unbelief.

The gospel is the declaration that the God (who never was lost or difficult to locate) has of his

mercy found us. God seeks a rebellious race; that race does not seek him.

12] There is no natural knowledge of God. We pervert the “revelation” found in the creation (e.g., Romans 1) as fast as it is “beamed” upon us. The apprehension of God available through the creation serves only to condemn us.

13] There is no natural knowledge of sin. Since knowledge of sin is a predicate of knowledge of God, and since God is known only in Jesus Christ (this is bedrock for the Reformers), the existence and nature of sin have to be revealed to us.

Only in the presence of Jesus Christ (the cure for sin) is the ailment seen for what it is.

When the psalmist cries, “Against Thee only have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4) he isn’t denying

that sin violates others besides God. He is acknowledging, however, that sin is defined

to be such by reference to God and revealed to be such by God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ.

In other words, the revelation of God entails revelation of the nature and disgrace of

humankind. Until we know God (where such knowledge is always participation — by faith — in God’s own life), we can’t know the fact or nature of a defective relationship with God.

For the Reformers, knowledge of sin is always a predicate of grace (knowledge of Christ.)

Where this fact is not recognized, sin will always be misunderstood as immorality or vice

or the violation of taboo. Jesus dies for the ungodly, not for the immoral.

14] “Acquired Faith”, a compend of natural knowledge and revealed knowledge, is wholly wide of the mark.

faith is not knowledge in the sense of information (see #5), even as there is always a cognitive content to faith.

faith, rather, is fellowship with Jesus Christ. He embraces us by grace, and in the power of his embrace we find ourselves both able to embrace him and eager to embrace him. Faith is always the grace-facilitated response to the action of the person of Christ.

faith is never acquired in any case but is rather always a gift (exercised.)

15] To affirm that salvation is sola fide is not to scorn God’s justice (i.e., his judgement), but rather to submit to that judgement and receive/affirm the provision of righteousness that the judging/rightwising God has made.

God’s justifying us always includes his judging us. God’s judgement is the converse of his mercy (he bothers to judge us only because he longs to save us) and aims at our restoration. God’s justifying us presupposes his judging us. Then sola fide, an acknowledgement that we can only receive what God has fashioned for us in our need, endorses God’s judgement rather than scorning it.

16] The will is not free to choose but rather is bound.

It isn’t denied that we can choose among creaturely goods; e.g., to eat hotdogs rather than hamburgers, or to study rather than watch TV. But as fallen creatures we can’t “choose” Jesus Christ; i.e., we can’t will ourselves into the righteousness of God. What we most sorely need has to be wrought for us and pressed upon us; it isn’t something that we can choose to effect in ourselves. We can choose (“embrace”) JC only as a result of his having “embraced” us.

17] The distinction between an outer structure of grace and an inner content of (meritorious) work is unbiblical and therefore impermissible.

18] To embrace Jesus Christ in faith and therein become a beneficiary of his righteousness is at the same time to be the beneficiary of God’s; i.e., JUSTIFICATION IN THE PRESENT FORMS THE STABLE BASIS AND NOT THE UNCERTAIN GOAL OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.

Rev. Victor Shepherd

 

The Nominalism of Gabriel Biel

The Nominalism of Gabriel Biel

Aquinas is a “realist”, preoccupied with being (being itself), following Aristotle.

God is understood chiefly in terms of being or existence: that which is (necessarily),

the one whose essence is his existence.

 

Occam is a “nominalist”, preoccupied with willing or power. Less concerned than Aquinas

with metaphysics, he is less concerned with reasoning towards God. Therefore faith isn’t

built on what reason “demonstrates” to be a metaphysical foundation, but rather on what

God has willed.

Result: the scholastic method of relating theology to philosophy (grace perfects nature), is
undercut. Natural theology is devalued.

God’s will determines our faith, not God’s being or our reason.

The command of God is grounded only in the will of God, not in the nature of God

 

 

 

Luther will agree with nominalism’s

denial of natural theology

denial of the scholastic method of theology

affirmation of a God whom philosophy can’t control.

Luther will disagree with nominalism’s

(i) insistence that God is to be understood chiefly in terms of power

(ii) insistence that God’s command is rooted only in God’s will.

(The latter notion inevitably causes God(‘s will) to appear arbitrary. Unless God’s will is God’s nature, God’s will has nothing to do with his being; God’s will is the capricious exertion of sheer power.)

 

 

Reverend V. Shepherd

 

Luther and “Mystical” Experience

Luther and “Mystical” Experience

I

In his note on Rom. 5 Luther wrote, “Once I was carried away to the third heaven.”

Yet L. never based his theological authority on special revelations or mystical experiences.

Still, he knew that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit meant that God draws us into God’s own life, thus giving rise to our experience.

L. distanced himself from the mediaeval mystics with their “ladder:” purgatio, illuminatio, unio.

L. insists we encounter God but are never absorbed into God so as to blur the distinction between creature and Creator.

 

 

 

II

Three kinds of mysticism have been identified:

Dionysian. It sidesteps the incarnation and speculates about God.

Latin. It emphasizes the earthly Christ and mysticism as experience rather than as doctrine. However it sidesteps spiritual Anfechtung and deploys an erotic vocabulary while upholding an ecstatic union with the uncreated world.

German. It maintains that the true purgatory is self-despair, and such despair is an experience, a genuine foretaste, of hell.

Luther: (a) Dionysian mysticism is rejected.

(b) Latin mysticism is accepted with qualifications: its emphasis on the earthly Christ, plus

its recognition that Christ is known ultimately in experience rather than merely as

doctrine.

Its denial of the place of Anfechtung, its erotic vocabulary/conceptuality, and its

ecstatic union with the uncreated world are all rejected.

(c) German mysticism is accepted without qualification. (A proper understanding of the

Law drives us to self-despair.)

Luther repudiates all speculation, insisting that it belongs inherently to a theology of glory rather than to a theology of the cross.

At the same time Luther never denies the validity of an experience of God so deep and vivid that no words can do justice to it. Just as Paul, in 2nd Cor. 12, speaks of his ecstatic experience (plainly it’s important to him) yet never proclaims it instead of the “Word of the cross”, so Luther insists that “proper theology should precede mystical theology.”

L.’s point is that accessus has priority over raptus; i.e., we are granted access to God through justifying faith-clinging grasp of the crucified; only Christ-crucified (and faith’s seizing him) gives us access to God, not mystical rapture. I.e., faith is our accessus to the raptus.

L. always repudiated the notion that our love for God (or Jesus Christ) is the bond that unites us to him. Those mystics who said it is also spoke of Christ’s “sweet” embrace and of the delights of all this. L. insists that Christ’s embrace isn’t merely sweet but also deadly: to be embraced by Christ is to be embraced by one who knows most profoundly God-forsakenness, the feeling of which (but not, of course, the actuality) will torment the Christian many times over in his or her life. The Christian, identified with the crucified, is henceforth immersed in the turbulent, treacherous world and never flees it for “sweetness.”

L. disagrees with the radical reformers on the grounds that they aren’t radical enough: they separate faith in the heart from Christ in heaven, when these can never be separated. The believer’s identification with Christ is “not an imagined but a real matter,” never a metaphorical but a real way of speaking.

 

 

 

III

For L. the venue of our profoundest experience of God is conflict, tribulation, Anfechtung. (Shepherd: The risen one is the crucified one: Jesus is raised wounded. The resurrection is the triumph and efficacy of the still-bleeding Christ, not the transcending of his crucifiedness.)

Just as Christ moves history towards its fulfillment by means of the cross, so he moves Christians toward theirs by means of their suffering.

The “groaning” as in Rom. 8 describes the complete identification with Christ. Then just as simul (totus) iustus et peccator describes the Christian, so does simul gemitus et raptus.

 

Reverend Victor Shepherd

 

Freedom of a Christian

Martin Luther
1483 – 1546
(Married Katarina von Bora, 1525: six children)

I: Introduction

II: Background and youth

elementary schooling at Breslau, Magdeburg and Eisenach.

began university studies at Erfurt, 1501.

III: The Monk

joined Augustinian (Reformed) order, 1505.

ordained to priesthood, 1507.

lectured at Wittenberg, 1508.

visited Rome, 1510.

IV: The Professor

appointed to chair of theology, 1510.

lectured on Psalms, 1513-15.

lectured on Romans, 1515-16.

lectured on Galatians, 1516-17 9 (and again in 1541.)

lectured on Hebrews, 1517-18.

V: The Indulgence Controversy

the Ninety-Five Theses, 1517.

VI: The Disputant

disputed with Johann Eck at Leipzig, 1519.

wrote three great tracts, 1520.

An Address to the Nobility of the German Nation for the Improvement of the

Christian Estate

On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church

On the Freedom of the Christian

disputed with Johann Eck at Worms, 1521. (From this moment until he died there was a

price on Luther’s head.)

completed translation of NT into German, 1522.

 

VII: The Social Conservative

supported the peasants’ grief but not their methods in the Peasant War, 1524.

VIII: The Victor

Diet of Speyer, 1526

Second Diet of Speyer, 1529

The Colloquy of Marburg, 1529. (Does est mean “is” or “signifies”?)

Diet of Augsburg, 1530. (Luther remained nearby in Cobourg. The Lutheran cause was

represented by Philip Melanchthon, since the emperor feared Luther’s physical presence

would provoke a riot.)

IX: The Shamed?

Luther and the Jewish people.

 

THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN

1520

Luther: “To make the way smoother for the unlearned — for only them do I serve — I shall set down

the following two propositions concerning the freedom and bondage of the spirit:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

 

 

 

The first power of faith:

The Word (=Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit) confers righteousness upon believers

as the “happy exchange” (2 Cor. 5) occurs:

my shame for his glory,

my condemnation for his acceptance with the Father,

my sin for his righteousness.

 

The second power of faith:

Believers honour God by vesting all their trust in God. To honour God and trust him in this

way is to obey him. God can be obeyed only in faith.

Note Luther’s understanding here of the kind of obedience the Decalogue enjoins: not conformity to a moral code but rather eager, glad, grateful self-abandonment to the “character” God wills for me. My gratitude is born of the fact that God has redeemed me at measureless cost to himself.

E.g., the commandment, “Thou shalt not steal” is violated if I merely refrain from stealing.

God wants not external conformity from me but rather a living relationship (faith) with him wherein I cheerfully embrace the shape he ordains for my life. He ordains this shape for my good

(i.e., as blessing.) I gladly endorse it out of gratitude for what he has already done for me and

promises yet to do for me. My not-stealing is my faith-quickened abandonment of my selfist self

as I “put on” the “new man (woman)” he wills for my good.

In other words, the Decalogue never encourages moralism but always faith and the Christ-shaped

“new creature” that faith glories in.

 

The third power of faith:

We are united with Christ. (Actually the third is logically prior to and the ground of the first

two.)

 

Since faith “puts on” Christ, believers are free from sin, death, the world and the devil as Christ was free from the domination of sin, death, world and devil.

Since faith “puts on” Christ, believers are bound to the needy as Christ bound himself to them.

When Luther’s opponents told him that his elevation of faith underserved the neighbour, Luther replied that faith always serves the neighbour in love. Such love is love only if it disregards the neighbour’s ingratitude and one’s own loss.

Finally Luther insists that faith is the (only) cure for anxiety. Anxiety is a form of self-preoccupation. The Christian doesn’t live in herself but in another: in Christ through faith, in the neighbour through love.

Paradoxically, she finds herself, discovers her identity, to the extent that she doesn’t seek it but rather forgets herself through her immersion in Christ (faith) and neighbour (love.)

“Word of God” in the Thought of Martin Luther

“Word of God” in the Thought of Martin Luther

Its Sevenfold Sense

1] the essential content of the gospel, where “gospel” is “the promise of God fulfilled in our midst (i.e., in Jesus Christ.)

L’s five-word summary: “Christus Gottesohn ist unser Heiland. (Cf. the early church’s acrostic, Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter.)

“Promise” for L always implies “fulfilled in Christ.” E.g., “The promise is the content of the Lord’s Supper” or “We cling to the promise in dark moments.”

 

 

 

2] the medium or vehicle of revelation: Christ’s redeeming work benefits us only as it is communicated to us. E.g., “The Word conveys, pours out, proffers and gives to me the forgiveness won on the cross.” The Word “administers” what Christ has wrought for us.

 

 

 

3] that which makes past and present contemporaneous Here L has in mind the force of “remember” in Hebrew. The Word renders a past event the determinant of my existence now.

 

 

 

4] that alone which can be received by faith, even as faith is that which the Word, in its intrinsic militancy and efficacy, forges in cold and stony hearts.

 

 

 

5] that which quickens a faith which is inherently personal and individual yet also necessarily social The scope of the word is not merely a renewed heart but also a renewed cosmos.

1519 — L’s first published sermon on the sacrament contains “brotherhood” in the title

1521 — L writes on the cancellation of private masses

1526 — L speaks of the Lord’s Supper as rendering fellow-believers ein Kuechen , a cake whose ingredients interpenetrate each other

In short, the Word fosters that faith which anticipates the Messianic banquet.

 

 

 

 

 

6] that which witnesses to the “absurdity” of Christian truth, pre-eminently in L’s theologia crucis.

The truth is neither a species of rationalism nor philosophical speculation nor a superstructure added to an Aristotelian foundation.

What besides absurdity is a crucified Messiah? a dying conqueror of death? The Word never dovetails with human categories but rather forges the categories in terms of which alone the Word can be understood. Luther relished all the paradoxes and seeming contradictions of the gospel. These paradoxes paradoxically bring us the reality, blessing, miracle, solidity and efficacy of our redemption and renewal in Christ, while non-absurd rationalism brings nihilitudo, a neo-logism L coined to express rationalism’s ultimate nothingness.

 

 

7] Scripture (L never wrote a treatise on the authority of Scripture.)

 

Note the contrast between Luther and later Lutheran Orthodoxy:

L the canon of Scripture is to be found within Scripture.

LLO the canon is equated with the text.

 

L the authority of Scripture derives from the authority of the gospel (i.e., of Christ.)

LLO the authority of Scripture derives from its having been “verbally

dictated.”

 

L Scripture is revelatory in that it is the unique, normative witness to

him who is the revelation of God, Jesus Christ.

LLO Scripture itself is revealed. There is no distinction between “Word

of God” and “Scripture.”

For L there is a distinction but never separation or confusion.

 

 

 

Note Luther’s insistence: Since the gospel is the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17), “We will not long preserve the gospel without the languages [i.e., Hebrew and Greek]. The languages are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained.”

 

 

Reverend Victor Shepherd

Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and Anabaptists On The Lord’s Supper

Luther (1483 – 1546), Calvin (1509 – 1564) and Zwingli (1484 – 1531) and Anabaptists

On The Lord’s Supper

LUTHER

The conceptual “tools” in his toolbox were those of mediaeval Aristotelianism: substance and accident.

Substance: a thing’s definition, its “whatness”; e.g., that which renders bread bread.

Accident: a thing’s appearance; e.g, bread’s colour, taste, smell, texture.

Luther objected to Rome’s notion of transubstantiation (promulgated at the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215). It presupposed

priestly powers vested in a man by virtue of ordination at the hands of an institution defined by its hierarchical order of priest, bishop, cardinal, pope;

the sacrifice of the mass.

Luther maintained

the mass is not a sacrifice;

ordination (by church of Rome) does not confer power to effect transubstantiation.

the clergy do not constitute the church;

all Christians are “priests”, ordained through baptism;

there is no distinction before God between clergy and laity; therefore the cup should be given to the laity (and clergy should be allowed to marry);

Christ is “really” present in the sacrament. “Before I drink mere wine with the Swiss I shall drink blood with the pope”;

the manner of Christ’s presence is consubstantiation, since the substance of Christ’s body and bloody (i.e, Christ himself) is present with the substance of bread and wine;

while Christ’s ubiquity means he is present everywhere, he is received “sacramentally” on account of the promise attending the institution;

Since Christ is “in” the elements, all communicants receive him; believers to their blessing, unbelievers to their destruction.

CALVIN

Superbly trained as a humanist (like Zwingli) Calvin’s toolbox contained the tools of Renaissance humanism rather than mediaeval philosophy. (The Renaissance wrote much literature, very little philosophy.)

Calvin objected to Luther’s consubstantiation, finding it no improvement on transubstantiation, and regarding it as cannibalism in any case.

Calvin maintained

Jesus Christ is not ubiquitous throughout the universe but rather is “located” in heaven;

by the strength, power (vis, vires [plural], Latin) of the Holy Spirit, believers are drawn up to heaven whereby they receive Christ to their blessing; (this position, following the Latin, is sometimes called “virtualism”. However, “virtualism” has nothing to do with modern notions of “virtual”, “as if”);

faith alone receives Christ (everywhere in Calvin, because everywhere in scripture); unbelievers do not receive him, since the Saviour cannot be received to anyone’s destruction;

communicants receive Christ in the totality of his reality: body and blood; i.e., they do not receive something “spiritual” in the sense of a disembodied spectre. At the same time, they do not “chew his flesh” (Luther). Concerning this viewpoint Calvin said, “Every time Luther mentions the Lord’s Supper he has in mind something that a butcher handles”;

the primary purpose of the sacrament is to strengthen weak faith (i.e., strengthen in Christ those who remain sinners in themselves); the secondary purpose is to pledge publicly our loyalty to our Lord.

 

ZWINGLI

Zwingli, following the Latin meaning of sacramentum (the oath whereby a Roman soldier pledged his loyalty to his commanding officer), puts first what Calvin put second.

Zwingli is everywhere falsely accused of “bare memorialism”– e.g., “For Calvin the elements exhibit a Saviour who is present; for Zwingli they recall one who is absent.”

Zwingli, the most woodenly literal of the Reformers in his reading of scripture, yet the least literal on the Lord’s Supper, maintained

in Hoc est meum corpus the word est means not “is” but “signifies” (as in “I am the door” — i.e., Jesus isn’t telling us he is rectangular and made of wood);

in the Supper believers do receive Christ, but they don’t eat him; i.e., Jesus is the diner but not the dinner. (Three months before his death Z. wrote, “Jesus Christ is received in conjunction with the elements”);

Calvin was wrong in accusing him of proffering an empty sacrament (“naked and empty signs”);

Calvin was correct in points (i) through (v) above;

Calvin was deficient in not recognizing the sacrament to bind believers to one another in the congregation as well as to their Lord. {NB}

ANABAPTISTS

There were many Anabaptist spokespersons, the best-known of whom is Menno Simons. In general they maintained

a “thing-holiness” is indefensible ; holiness does not pertain to things (books, bread, wine, vestments, candles, bells) but rather to relationships. Here the Magisterial Reformers are no better than Rome — both are wrong — in discussing the Lord’s Supper in terms of a holiness that attends elements. (Shepherd: I think it can be asked fairly if the Magisterial Reformers ever upheld what the Anabaptists imputed to them.)

they are unjustly accused of promoting “bare memorialism”; Christ is “really” present not to inert elements but rather to the congregation. In other words, the fellowship of believers rather than the elements is the vehicle of Christ’s continual self-bestowal. (I.e., they too do not believe in the “real absence”);

the church consists of Christians who are sinless by definition [here the Magisterial Reformers disagree totally: sinless people would have no need of the supper]; the supper maintains them in their sinlessness;

the supper pledges believers in the Anabaptist congregation/community to give up their lives for each other as Christ gave up his for them. {NB}

 

 

Note: Everything said above with respect to the Lord’s Supper could be said of preaching; namely, how is a creaturely item (a sermon delivered by a human being and a sinner as well) become the vehicle of Christ’s self-utterance and self-bestowal?

(It is assumed that no one will admit to believing in the transubstantiation of the sermon, the unqualified identification of the words of the preacher with the self-utterance of God.)

 

An Overview of Luther’s Understanding Of The Bondage of the Will

An Overview of Luther’s Understanding
Of
The Bondage of the Will

Systemic Sinnership (not merely actual sins committed) is the primal predicament of humankind before God. ThisSin is unbelief. Unbelief isn’t cerebral agnosticism but rather the ungrateful, contemptuous denial of God’s goodness and repudiation of his command (gift). “Unbelief is not one of the grosser passions, but sits and holds sway at the summit — the citadel of the will and reason, just like its opposite, faith.” (214)

The human predicament is universal: there are no exceptions to it or modifications of it or alternatives to it.

While the structure of reason survives the Fall (otherwise fallen humans would no longer be human), the integrity of reason does not (otherwise fallen humans could reason themselves out of their predicament.)

To assert “free choice” (i.e., the freedom or non-bondage of the will) is insist that we can will ourselves out of our predicament, and therefore to affirm self-justification.

Perforce the righteousness we need but cannot furnish for ourselves has to be gift.

The gift of righteousness isn’t the gift of something but is rather the self-bestowal of Jesus Christ, the Righteous One himself.

This gift has to be revealed to us, since humankind cannot anticipate the nature of its depravity or the nature of righteousness or the means by which it is wrought for us (the cross) or the nature of our coming to possess it. I.e., because Sin not only corrupts us but also blinds us we cannot foresee the nature of our predicament, the nature of its cure, or the nature of the application of the cure.

Since the gift is gift, it can only be owned in faith, faith being, amidst much else, the admission that “Nothing in our hands we bring.”

Since we live in sin, and therein come to apprehend that sin lives in us, we can live in Christ (and live out of Christ, live from Christ) only as Christ lives in us.

To say we contribute, however slightly, to our justification is to claim a residual capacity, however slight, for reason or will with respect to our “rightwising” before God.

In sum, the affirmation of “free choice” eliminates every aspect of the gospel: “the purpose of grace, the promise of God, the meaning of the law, original sin, divine election.” (203)

 

 

 

Reverend V. Shepherd

Luther and Marriage

Outline of Lecture on

Luther and Marriage

Reformation conviction supported justification by faith, communion in both kinds, and clerical marriage.

 

The Protestant understanding of marriage contradicted late mediaeval estimations:

marriage is an unhappy estate

marriage is vitiated by the depravity of women.

Luther was the 16th century’s chief critic of Aristotle concerning marriage

women are botched males

if copulation and conception were error-free, a male would result every time.(Aristotle regarded a woman as halfway between an animal and a man.)

 

 

L faulted the church having written nothing good about marriage (e.g., Jerome, Cyprian, Augustine, Gregory.)

A 1494 vernacular catechism maintained that laity “sin in the marital duty” (i.e., commit the 3rd deadly sin) by [1] unnatural positions for intercourse (any position that maximizes pleasure while

minimizing the likelihood of conception), contraception or masturbation,

[2] fantasizing about a non-spouse while performing with spouse,

[3] fantasizing about a non-spouse while not performing with spouse,

[4] withholding sex for no acceptable reason, thus precipitating one’s spouse to

adultery,

[5] having sex during forbidden seasons (any season of Penance), menstruation, final

weeks of pregnancy, while one’s wife was lactating,

[6] by continuing to have sex with one’s spouse when (s)he was known to be

adulterous,

[7] having sex for sheer pleasure of it.

 

L transferred the mediaeval praise of monastic life to marriage. (Contrast Jerome’s scale [0-100]: 100 for virginity, 60 for widowhood, 30 for marriage.)

 

Modern feminists criticize the Reformers for regarding women chiefly in their roles as wife and mother. Feminists argue that women had far more autonomy in the cloister and the bordello. Still, the Reformers implicitly recognized women as persons in insisting that there was no self-respect for women in a bordello, and many women had been placed in cloisters against their will, and could there be easily bullied by superiors.

 

L encouraged families to removed daughters from convents and encouraged the publication of testimonies of escaped nuns.

L opposed the “dishonest” arrangements that the mediaeval church had encouraged:

e.g., secret marriages,

e.g., forbidding marriage for exaggerated rules of consanguinity and “spiritual affinity”

(between candidate for marriage and siblings of godparents)

e.g., forbidding marriage for defective eyesight or speech

e.g., forbidding marriage between Christian and non-Christian.

Note: marriage is a “creation mandate”, an order of

creation and a commandment of God. It is not a sacrament,

since (i) it doesn’t have dominical institution, (ii) a

means of grace shouldn’t be accessible to married people

only.

 

L preferred that parental permission be secured, but didn’t require it.

L extolled marriage, and endlessly praised his wife, Katarina von Bora.

L broke new ground in “estate planning” by willing everything to his wife.

L insisted that physical attraction might initiate a relationship, but it would never bet he ground of it. The “cement” in marriage is the persistent willingness to make sacrifices.

“It’s when the spouse is sick that one learns the meaning of marriage.”

 

L permitted the re-marriage of divorced people, and permitted secret bigamy to divorce/re-marriage in cases involving impotence.

 

L opposed harsh penalties for adultery lest the estranged couple be driven further apart.

 

L loved his six children (Hans, Elizabeth, Magdalene, Marta, Paul, Margaretha), and was disconsolate at the deaths of Elizabeth (18 months) and Magdalene (13 years.)