Abstract
This article examines a thread that runs through Martin Luther’s biblical and catechetical writings: his appropriation of a Messianic logic in light of a creedal interpretation of the whole of Scripture. Situating my case in relation to recent philosophical scholarship on the apostle Paul, I contend that this biblical hermeneutic may well be Luther’s signal ethical contribution for our age. Drawing on the solae (sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura, and solus Christus) and relating them to three themes central to his biblical hermeneutics—the Word of God, Scripture, and the Creeds—I discuss how he develops (1) a Messianic ethics that intrinsically links faith and love in relation to (2) the biblical motifs of command and promise and (3) the Christological themes of cross and incarnation. I conclude by discussing the relevance of Luther’s biblical hermeneutics for a post-secular age.
Luther, Paul, and a Post-Secular Age
Some philosophers (e.g., Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek)—many of them atheist and Marxist—have become interested in the letters of Paul. 1 These philosophers could be described as being acutely aware of a crisis in the present moment. In a world where global capitalism increasingly affects political processes, there is the danger not only that the vulnerable will be exploited, as they have been in the past, but ‘that now, more seriously, human sociality may be alienated from itself’ as traditional ways of life are increasingly destabilized by those same developments. Indeed, as L.L. Welborn notes, ‘the supreme danger’ may be ‘that the residue of the other, the neighbor, upon whose alien reality my own humanity depends, may be fully metabolized by the perpetual motion of capital, which homogenizes all identities’. 2 What these philosophers and Welborn (a New Testament scholar) have glimpsed in ‘Paul’s messianic faith’ is ‘a spark of hope’—an eschatological Kairos—that may have the power to liberate people so that they mutually obligate themselves to love their neighbors. 3 This article examines whether Luther’s biblical hermeneutics can be used as a resource for inspiring a messianic faith that empowers people to love their neighbors. 4
That Luther could be used as such a resource counters common interpretations of his work. Biblical scholars have criticized Luther’s reading of Paul’s letters, arguing that he reads into Paul what Krister Stendahl has called ‘the introspective conscience of the West’. 5 In a similar vein, theologians, ethicists, and political philosophers have criticized Luther for, in Jean Bethke Elshtain’s words, turning the individual inward, to finding God within ‘the anchor of the Self’. Standing before the naked word of God, she notes, the individual keeps a distance from ‘institutional forms of rule’, seeing the sphere of politics, governed solely by force and coercion, as having nothing to do with Christian faith. 6 Indeed, German Lutheran theologians writing during the period between the two World Wars have been criticized for promulgating a two kingdoms doctrine that separated an internal experience of faith from a conception of the state that ‘was morally subject neither to God’s will in creation nor Christ’s gospel in redemption’—a separation that many have argued was instrumental in the rise of National Socialism. 7
Largely in response to the tragedy of the Second World War, Lutheran theologians have brought to the fore themes in Luther’s work that would counter such a separation (e.g., creation, the three estates, vocation, etc.). 8 But as Vítor Westhelle has asked, how does one integrate his thoughts concerning the coram deo—such as justification, the solae (sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura, and solus Christus), and the evangelical criterion of what conveys Christ (was Christum treibet)—on the one hand, and his thoughts concerning the coram mundo relation, where matters of justice and the proper of reason for equitable ends prevail—such as the three estates—on the other? 9 Is there a way to understand his distinction between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘earthly’ so as to distinguish them but still relate God’s creative and redemptive work to both domains? And, if so, what relevance does his work have anyway for a time in need of an eschatological faith and hope that can empower mutuality and love of neighbor?
To address these questions, I take, as a cue for reading Luther, Welborn’s insight into the link in Paul’s letters between eschatological faith in the Messiah and the biblical command to love the neighbor. In a discussion of themes in Luther’s writings, I will trace how he appropriates what Jacob Taubes describes as the ‘inner logic of the messianic’ 10 in Paul’s letters by way of a creedal appropriation of Old Testament motifs, and argue that what results is a complex biblical hermeneutic for interpreting and responding to God’s presence and work in our lives and the world around us that may, indeed, still be relevant for us today.
My argument is informed by Jaroslav Pelikan’s observation that ‘in his exegesis—as in his doctrine, piety, and ethic—the Reformer represented himself as a son of the church and a witness to the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ and documented in the Sacred Scriptures’. 11 Further, I will use the three basic principles governing Luther’s biblical interpretation that William Lazareth highlights, drawing on Pelikan, as a way to structure my discussion of Luther’s texts: (1) ‘the authority of the Word of God in the Bible’ (cf. sola fide and gratia); (2) ‘the Bible as the history of the people of God’ (cf. sola Scriptura); and (3) ‘the organic relationship of Scripture to the church’s dogmatic tradition’ (cf. sola Christus). 12 What I hope to show is that Luther not only appropriates Paul’s Messianic logic—which intrinsically links faith in Christ to love of neighbor—but that he maps that logic onto a broader tapestry of biblical motifs and Christological themes in ways that achieve neither synthesis nor diastases, yet simultaneously hold both. 13 I conclude by discussing the relevance of Luther’s biblical hermeneutics for our own time, suggesting that it provides us with a way to interpret and respond to God’s presence and activity in space, time, and community.
Sola Fide, Sola Gratia
Influenced by Taube’s discussion of the ‘inner logic of the messianic’ in Paul’s letters, Welborn maintains that the basis for neighbor love in Paul’s letters is rooted in the divine kenōsis in Romans 5: the death of the Messiah for the weak, the ungodly and enemies. The experience of the Messianic klēsis (calling) through the love God commends in the Messiah’s death is at the same time the calling to love one’s neighbor as oneself—‘that is, to love the nearest embodiment of the ones for whom the Messiah died, following the kenotic movement of divine love’. 14
Luther’s well-known treatise on ‘The Freedom of a Christian’ also sketches this Pauline movement from the Messiah’s death and resurrection to neighbor-love in a meditation on two of Paul’s paradoxical statements: that we are to be free from all yet servant of all (1 Cor. 9:19) and that we are to owe no one anything but love (Rom. 13:8). 15
He first shows that being free from all, yet servant of all is rooted in participation in the Messiah’s life. On the one hand, no external thing or work can produce true righteousness or freedom within us. Only God’s Word can do this: the Gospel of God concerning Jesus the Messiah. And the only ‘saving and efficacious use’ of God’s Word is to proclaim the Messiah, that the soul may be fed, made righteous, set free, and saved as it trusts in the Word. 16 We proclaim the Messiah not as a historical fact or external law but so that he may not only be ‘the Messiah’ but also ‘the Messiah for you and me’—that ‘what is said of him and is denoted in his name may be effectual in us’. 17
Three things happen when we trust this Word of God. First, the Word imparts its qualities to the soul. We become so ‘united’ and ‘absorbed’ by them that we not only ‘share in all their power’ but are ‘saturated and intoxicated by them’. Second, God is honored. When we trust that God alone is unconditionally true, just, and wise, and will provide all good things, we turn away from all other gods and keep the first commandment, which for Luther is at the center of the Decalogue. Third, we are united with the Messiah who takes upon himself our ‘sins, death, and pains of hell’ and, engaging in a ‘mighty duel’ with them, ‘swallows them up’ in order to bestow on us his unconquerable ‘righteousness, life, and salvation’. 18
Through faith we receive grace: the Messiah’s own birthright as God’s first-born. We receive his kingship, which is not a worldly power to control others, but a ‘power made perfect in weakness’, which rules with goodness and truth in the midst of oppression (2 Cor. 12:9). And we receive his priesthood, which consists of praying and interceding for others and teaching them through the Spirit’s living instruction (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:17). 19
But the works begin with our outer life—our embodied relationships with others. Here we are to crucify our self-interest and selfish desires through the Spirit (Gal. 5:17). Now faith becomes active in love (Gal. 5:6). 20 In all this, the Messiah is our example (Phil. 2:1-11). Although filled with the form of God, he did not use it to lord it over others, but gave himself freely to serve us. Likewise, made rich by faith in the Messiah we too now can, out of our surplus, empty ourselves, spending ourselves freely for others without obligating them, expecting gratitude, or distinguishing between friends and enemies. As good things flow to us, so they now can flow through us to others and become ‘common’ to all. Moreover, as the Messiah ‘put on’ our sin and suffering, so we too now can put on our neighbors’ sin and suffering, assuming it as our own even as we use our faith and righteousness to ‘cover’ for them as the Messiah used his to cover for us. 21 In sum, we are to be ‘Messiahs to one another’ so that ‘the Messiah may be the same in all’. 22 Not living solely for and in ourselves, we now live in the Messiah through faith and in our neighbors in love—in other words, we are simultaneously in both Christ and the neighbor even as we are a third who is neither. And in all this, we remain in God and in God’s love. 23
Sola Scriptura
We have traced how Luther sketches a Messianic logic that leads from faith in the Messiah to love for the neighbor. We turn now to see how Luther maps that Messianic logic onto the time of Scripture—a time of command and promise. But Luther has often been read in a Marcionite fashion, that is, in a way that severs his discussion of faith and love from the Old Testament’s witness to God’s work in creation and in the history of the people of Israel. 24 Indeed, Luther’s treatment of the law or God’s command is often construed as being limited to two uses: the ‘theological use’, associated with divine judgment, and the ‘political or civil use’, associated only with the coercive force that maintains order in society. In turn, the ‘gospel’ is often solely associated with an inner experience of faith’s redemptive encounter with the Word. Such a construal of law and gospel (which is also often equated with Luther’s distinction between ‘earthly’ and ‘spiritual’ kingdoms) elides the much richer ways that Luther depicts God’s creative and redemptive work, as exemplified for example in the Large Catechism. 25
This catechism has three main parts that explain the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s Creed, and practices for enacting the Christian life (the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, Holy Communion, and confession). The Commandments tell us what God expects of us and the Creed tells us what we can expect to receive from God: that we do indeed have this ‘one God and one faith’ not as an effort or work on our part but because of God’s own self-giving in ‘three persons’—in creation, in redemption, and in sanctification. 26 Not only does Luther explicitly connect the three persons with the ‘one God’ but he also makes clear that the Commandments are from this same God. Indeed, by describing the relationship of Commandments and Creed in terms of a set of mutual (albeit asymmetrical) expectations, Luther explicitly sets command and promise within a relational context. The very juxtaposition of the Commandments with the work of the three persons makes clear that ‘law’ (as defined by the Commandments) is not merely a negative judgement or a coercive human institution but the very form that God’s creative, redemptive, and sanctifying work takes as it is worked out in our daily lives by faith. As Luther himself states in the initial preface to the catechism, ‘This much is certain: those who know the Ten Commandments perfectly know the entire Scriptures and in all affairs and circumstances are able to counsel, help, comfort, judge, and make decisions in both spiritual and temporal matters’. 27
This link between the Commandments and God’s work in our lives is especially clear in Luther’s explanation of the first commandment—‘You are to have no other gods’—which for him is the most important of all the commandments. He maintains that ‘faith and God’ belong together since whatever your heart depends on is really your God; the heart’s trust and faith alone ‘make both God and an idol’. 28 In contrast to trusting in all the other ‘gods’ we might have—‘money and property’ (‘mammon’) and ‘great learning, wisdom, power, prestige, family, and honor’—we are to trust God for all we need: ‘body, life, food, drink, nourishment, health, protection, peace, and all necessary temporal and eternal blessings’. In so doing, we are to ‘recognize that although much that is good comes to us from human beings’ (that is, ‘everyone who is a neighbor’) these blessings come ultimately from God through them. Creatures are the very ‘hands, channels, and means’ through which God bestows all blessings. 29
If our experience of the Commandments is mediated by creatures, then so is our experience of redemption through Christ, which is mediated to us through humble words and signs. The Third Article on the Holy Spirit (in the Creed) serves as the bridge—the middle time—connecting not only the Decalogue and the Creed, but also the First Article on creation and the Second Article on redemption. It describes how the Holy Spirit works through the proclamation of the Word to create, call, and gather the church, ‘the mother’s lap’ in which the Spirit works through the Word to create and increase holiness in us. The church’s primary task is to proclaim the forgiveness of sins—both that ‘God forgives us’ and that ‘we forgive, bear with, and aid one another’—and this takes place through the sacraments (Baptism and Holy Communion), confession and absolution, as well as through ‘all the comforting words of the entire gospel’. 30 It is in this way that we grow daily in holiness as ‘the Holy Spirit works in us through the Word, granting us daily forgiveness’, empowering us to live in expectation of the resurrection of our bodies. 31 But it is important to connect the Spirit’s work to the last part of the Large Catechism, which deals with the very practices of Christian faith discussed in that Article. These are the means through which the Holy Spirit links command and promise in our lives (through forgiveness and resurrection hope). In other words, it is the Third Article in connection with the practices that follow that provide us with a means for enacting the linkage between the Decalogue and the Creed.
Luther’s treatment of command and promise in the Large Catechism has some interesting parallels with the way Jon Levenson depicts how two major foci of ancient Jewish religion—law (Torah) and Temple—have shaped two central motifs or traditions in the Hebrew Bible: that of Sinai (associated with Moses) and Zion (associated with David). The Mosaic covenant sealed at Sinai focuses on history and morality: ‘God there formalizes a longstanding relationship of love and benevolence (on his part, at least) through which Israel might come to reflect back to God some of the grace she has known’. 32 In turn, the David covenant is not focused on history and morality but ‘the constant beneath—or perhaps I should say, above—the flux of history’. God’s commitment to the Davidic dynasty is the suprahistorical context for this tradition: ‘it shall always rule’. With a focus on God’s constancy and not humanity’s changeability, the Davidic covenant discloses what is ‘secure and inviolable, whereas the Sinaitic texts tend to emphasize the precariousness of life and the consequent need for a continuously reinvigorated obedience’. 33 According to Levenson, what these two traditions bring to the fore is that Jews are called ‘to live in a simultaneous and indissoluble awareness of commandment and promise’. 34 Although Luther has often been interpreted as teaching that the coming of the Messiah, which fulfills the Davidic promise, means that the law as a positive divine force shaping human life has expired, his own juxtaposition of the Commandments and Creeds in the Large Catechism suggests that he holds command and promise in a much closer relationship, one more resonant perhaps with the way they are held together in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.
Sola Christus: Cross
Much of Luther’s writing addresses that middle space between command and promise, where we claim the promises of God in the midst of life’s vicissitudes and our failure to be who God would have us be. Luther’s conception of how Spirit works through the Word (and the practices that enact it) has much in common with the way the Hebrew Bible depicts how ‘liturgy in the broad sense of the word … mediates between the chaotic present and the ordered past and future’. 35 In Creation and the Persistence of Evil, Levenson observes that much of the liturgy in the Hebrew Bible not only ‘realizes and extends creation’ through our response to God’s commands, but that it also does so as we call on God—‘through such things as genuine repentance, the cries and taunts of the lament, or the offering of sweet-smelling sacrifices’—to awake from slumber and bring order out of chaos, justice amidst oppression, and vitality and longevity where there is disease and death. 36
Luther’s description of what makes a preacher and a theologian (in the preface to the publication of his German texts from 1539) has resonances with this depiction of biblical liturgy. Instead of following the usual steps for meditating on Scripture in the middle ages, which moved from lectio (reading) to oratio (prayer), and then contemplatio (contemplation), Luther starts with oratio, then moves to meditatio (meditation, which includes lectio), and lastly substitutes tentatio or Anfechtung (suffering) for contemplatio. This third step, according to Luther, is ‘touchstone that teaches you not only to know and understand, but also to experience how right, how true, how sweet, how lovely, how mighty, how comforting God’s Word is, wisdom beyond all wisdom’. 37 One cannot do theology, or even live the life of faith, without testing God’s commands and promises within all that we experience in life, both good and bad.
Tentatio is the middle space where we experience both our sin and suffering, and Christ hidden in the midst of it creating something new. In his early commentaries on the Psalms, which Luther interprets both christologically and tropologically, Luther portrays how through faith in Christ (fides Christi), God’s judging and saving Word reveals God hidden in the incarnate Christ—amid our own sin and suffering—as God’s righteousness for us and in us. It is Christ now—the living truth of revelation—who cries out in our humility (humilitas), giving us hope (spes) because through him the Holy Spirit pours the love (caritas) of God into our hearts. 38
This experience of tentatio is at the heart of why Luther finally parted ways with Augustine, even though he was greatly influenced by him. True self-love cannot lead to the love of God because our natural proclivity—the ‘wisdom of the flesh’—is to see our own interest. Only the ‘wisdom of the Spirit’ sees the common good, rejecting personal good in order to love all things, including God in God and for God’s sake. Thus only the Spirit who ‘sighs and groans’ through our weakness can enable us to no longer fear and hate God for demanding the impossible (Rom. 8:26; Gal. 4:6). Only the Spirit can impregnate us with Christ’s life so that we can yield to God’s will in a suffering (passio) that endures the Spirit’s creative work within us. 39
In a similar vein, the Heidelberg Disputation, the locus classicus for the theology of the cross, provides an ironic scholastic argument for why the specific revelation that emerges from tentatio, rather than a general revelation drawn from philosophical premises, ought to be the starting point for all theological reflection. At the heart of Luther’s well-known distinction between the theologia gloriae (theology of glory) and the theologia crucis (theology of the cross) is the distinction between mere human love and divine love: human love only comes into being through what it desires. By contrast, God’s love ‘does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it’. 40
For Luther, Christ’s suffering for all of humanity and our own personal suffering and sin are not only conjoined in the same pathos, but it is there that God, ‘as deus absconditus, ubiquitously meets us’, making something out of nothing (our sin and suffering), and also nothing out of something (our idolatry and oppression). 41 It is there that Christ is both for us (as sacrament) and in us (as example) as we offer to our neighbors what he offers to us. But Luther also distinguishes between the cross of Christ as God’s solidarity with humanity—divine revelation under its opposite (sub contrarie specie)—and the human suffering that the Word does not decode or explain (revelation hidden behind the cross). As Westhelle observes, ‘the difference between the two encompasses the spectrum of the passion narrative of Mark’s Gospel and the book of Job’. 42 And here, Luther expands on themes nascent in Paul’s ‘messianic logic’ by incorporating what could be described as ‘theogonic’ and ‘tragic’ strains in the biblical tradition into his depiction of the cross. 43 There are some forms of suffering and evil we cannot explain, but simply have to endure as we call on God to fulfill God’s promises in the midst of that suffering. And since our suffering both discloses and hides God’s presence, we can be deceived, perceiving God to be the demon causing our suffering, which is why so much of Luther’s work centers on how the ‘preached Word’ battles and silences demonic forces. 44
Sola Christus: Incarnation
A theology of the cross was pivotal for Luther’s break with both Augustine’s use of Neoplatonism and the scholastic use of Aristotle as a tertium quid for grounding theology in some human mode of reasoning other than the tentatio that cried out to God to create something out of nothing. However, Luther faced a different problem with the ‘radicals’—Zwingli and others. In his mind, the radicals’ distrust of outward rites—what he saw as their attempt to flee from the visible in search of a pure unmediated Word—was merely another form of a theology of glory. If his Catholic opponents took the visible as a means to reach the invisible, then the radicals sought God’s naked majesty outside of the Deus incarnates (the incarnate God), ‘not realizing that the invisible—encompassed in the visible—is the very transparency of the visible’. 45
In the Confession Concerning the Lord’s Supper (1528), which addresses his debates with radicals over the ‘real presence’ of Christ in Holy Communion, Luther distinguishes ‘three modes of [Christ] being at any given place’ according to his human nature: (1) his corporeal mode of presence (as the historical Jesus of Nazareth); (2) his ‘incomprehensible spiritual mode of presence’ (exemplified by Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, in, with, and under the bread and cup); and (3) his presence ‘according to which all created things are indeed much more permeable and present to him than they are according to the second mode’. This last mode of presence, according to Luther, is to be placed, on the one hand, ‘far, far beyond things created, as far as God transcends them’, and on the other hand, ‘as deep in and near to all created things as God is in them’, including the dead in whom Christ can be present according to his human nature. 46
Central for Luther is the fact that all of creation involves God’s masked presence; the Word and creation are continuously interrelated. 47 What distinguishes the sacramental or mysterious presence of God’s presence in creation from the proper sacraments is simply its use (usus) in the ritual Christ instituted—where he promises: ‘Here you find me!’ 48 Because of his omnipresence, Christ can, in fact, be physically present in the humble signs and words just as he was physically present in his earthly humanity. 49
Given his emphasis with the radicals on the fact that Christ’s mediated presence—whether in his earthly humanity, in the sacraments, or in all creation—is found in creaturely ‘masks’, it is not surprising to find that Luther discusses ‘holiness’ in the Confession of 1528, not under the article of the Holy Spirit (as he did in the Large Catechism) but in relation to the second article on Christ. Here Luther speaks about how the Word of God provides three ‘estates’ (or ‘institutions’ in contemporary language): the church, the household (which includes the economy), and civil government (or politics). The first one belongs to the first table of the Ten Commandments and the latter two to the second table. Although marred by sin, these estates are the locations where God’s creative Word (through law and gospel) brings about holiness within us.
Luther distinguishes ‘being holy’ from ‘being saved’ (or ‘blessed’—selig). 50 He links only the latter with faith in Christ; all people can be holy and indeed many without faith in Christ may exhibit better holiness than Christian believers. But Luther makes clear that God wishes for Christians to strive for holiness. Moreover, he urges them to the ‘common order of love’, which flows from faith, where we serve not only these orders but ‘every needy person in general—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, forgiving enemies, prayer for all, suffering all kinds of evil, etc’. 51 This ‘common order’, this bearing of the cross for the sake of the neighbor, not only yields holiness, but is the means by which ‘the Holy Spirit not only sanctifies his people, but also blesses them’. 52 Yet another related point: for Luther, the church exists wherever Christ ‘rules’, which is everywhere. On the one hand, it is dispersed physically throughout the world—even ‘among the pope, Turks, Persians, Tartars’—but, on the other hand, it is only revealed spiritually through the Spirit’s eschatological work through the words and signs of the Gospel (see Ps. 2:8; 19:4). 53
We should note that the Creed Luther chooses to interpret in this Confession directed at the radicals is not the Apostle’s Creed (as it was in the Large Catechism), but the Nicene Creed. As Oskar Skarsaune has pointed out, earlier versions of this creed echo biblical Wisdom texts—from the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament—to make the case that the ‘Lord Jesus Christ’ is ‘of one substance with the Father’. 54 Skarsaune notes that within Second Temple Judaism the biblical figure of Wisdom was identified with God’s Word (in Philo) and the Torah (in Sirach 24), resulting in a transformation in the concept of Torah. It now was thought to be preexistent before creation and thus a tool with which, or the plan according to which, the world was created. He goes on to maintain that the Christology of the Nicene Creed spells out a Jewish Wisdom Christology: as the Torah was equated with Wisdom, so Jesus as Messiah was portrayed as God’s Wisdom with which God created the world, incarnate in a human being, the Wisdom/Word made flesh. 55
Luther intensifies this creedal understanding of Christ’s incarnation, just as he intensified early church understandings of Christ’s work on the cross, that it was truly God in him who died, suffered, and ‘became curse for us’ (Gal. 3:13; 2 Cor. 5:21). Like the German mystics before him, he appreciated how nature, and indeed all of creation, is the place God creates to manifest God’s glory and thus is a ‘place of divine mystery’. 56 The ‘majesty of matter’ (maiestate materiae) clothes God and protects us from the Deus nudus (the naked God), the irresistible abyss of being. 57 Creation is God’s envelope, the wrapping or mask (involucrum or larva) of a God we cannot see face to face but is disclosed only in its opposite: the creature.
Relevant here as well is the distinctively Lutheran understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of attributes or identities between the divine and the created, which was developed more fully in later Lutheran orthodoxy. The Lutheran interpretation of Chalcedon upheld that the communication between the natures and the person of Christ was fundamentally about a true ‘communication’ between the two natures in the one person. In ensuing confessional debates, a distinction would be made between the genus majestaticum (according to divine majesty) and the genus tapeinoticum (according to human humility). What these distinctions highlight are the mutual sides of the same communication between the natures, the double move from the majestic to the humble and vice versa. In this communication, divine attributes are ascribed to created reality (finitum capax infiniti, the finite bears the infinite) as much as the attributes of creation can be ascribed to divine reality (infinitus ferat finem, the infinite bears the finite)—with the Spirit as the energy working the communio et unio (communion and union) between the two. The result is that wherever God is present, there Christ is according to his human nature. Thus, Christ’s being seated at the right hand of God means Christ is everywhere (ubiquity), or in Luther’s words: ‘Thus, it is right and truthfully said that God is born, appeased or breast-fed, lays in a crib, feels cold, walks, stays, falls, wanders, awakes, eats, drinks, suffers, dies, etc.’ 58
Westhelle provides a way of relating the themes of the cross and Christ’s incarnate presence in Luther’s work, which can also help us understand how Luther relates ‘earthly’ and ‘spiritual’ regimes—two modes of the one God’s work and presence in the world. Westhelle observes that throughout his writings, Luther uses distinctions between inner and outer, Creator and creature, what the senses register and reason draws together and what grace reveals to the heart. Instead of understanding the relationship between these pairs as one of the relationship between the First and Second Articles of the Creed—making it a dogmatic problem—he suggests viewing their relationship in epistemological, and more specifically eschatological terms, thus identifying ‘revelation’ as the correct locus for this discussion. 59 On the one hand, the relationship between creation and redemption is ‘paradoxical’: ‘one (the visible) points to the other (the Word) but is in it simultaneously negated and contradicted’—a pattern that could be described as deeply cruciform (and in terms of biblical motifs, apocalyptic). On the other hand, their relationship is ‘asymmetrical’: ‘what appears to be the case in one set of categories is not simply reflected in the other, but is shaped in the other in unexpected ways’—a pattern that could be described as deeply incarnational, especially given Luther’s understanding of the communicatio idiomatum (or in terms of biblical motifs, sapiential). In the former, Luther appears to reject analogical reasoning and in the latter he keeps searching for correspondences. As Westhelle discerns: ‘His theology is neither synthesis nor diastasis, yet simultaneously both. It is irony breaking into the tranquil realm of analogy. What the mask reveals is the very Word hidden in the cracks, to keep Luther’s metaphor of the mask.’ 60
In his analysis of kabbalistic texts, Elliot Wolfson describes how they combine an ‘apophatic panentheism’, on the one hand, and an ‘acosmic naturalism’, on the other, in ways that may perhaps parallel these paradoxical and asymmetrical patterns in Luther’s work. 61 In a related vein, Susan A. Handelman speaks of how the God of the Hebrew Bible shatters all metaphysics and idolatrous attempts to literalize ‘the fundamental metaphoricity of things’. She quotes Hans Jonas as saying, ‘the Biblical doctrine pitted contingency against necessity, particularity against universality, will against intellect. It secured a place for the contingent within philosophy, against the latter’s original bias’. 62 On the other hand, she also describes the Rabbinic concept of the divinity of the biblical text. Not merely a material thing located in space and time, ‘The Torah preceded the world’ (Shab. 88b) and thus is a ‘blueprint for creation’ since there is ‘a direct correlation between the world and Torah’. 63 But precisely because the Torah is enclothed in a material text, it also opens a space for communities of interpreters to uncover ‘the network of relations, a part of the continuous revelation of the text itself’. 64 This description of the God who creates ex nihilo yet also is revealed in the text of Torah has parallels with the way Luther depicts God’s work through Christ in the cross and incarnation. The extent to which Luther’s breakthroughs were influenced by rabbinic and kabbalistic methods of interpretation needs further exploration, 65 but we can observe based on this discussion that the solae are not merely slogans—or fundamentalist shibboleths—but rather ways of grasping how Jesus the Messiah speaks to us and through us to and with our neighbors, through Scripture, and in the communicatio idiomatum of his encounter with us—‘wherever pain and death are at stake and the resurrection is a promise’ and ‘a new creation happens by the incision of the word’ in the ‘yet time (jtzt zeyt), which is not even time or hour but an eternal moment (ewiger Augenblick)’. 66
Conclusion
What relevance might Luther’s biblical hermeneutics have for a post-secular age? I suggest that its capacity for ‘hybridity’ 67 in relation to the ways we experience space, time, and community may be its signal contribution for an age in need of a Messiah who can liberate us so that we can mutually obligate ourselves to love our neighbors. 68
First, with regard to the space of our lives, his depictions of the cross and incarnation (communicatio idiomatum) place us in a space in which ‘the Word creates’ and yet is ‘simultaneously also the Word in flesh, the third that is both and neither’. 69 For Luther, ‘the cross alone is our theology’. And if the cross of Christ is identified with the cross we carry, then this not only has direct relevance to our personal lives, but it has profound social and ecological significance as well. And yet, Luther also emphasizes the ‘third mode of Christ’s presence’, which according to Westhelle makes possible a theology in ‘planetary perspective’. Christ is everywhere, and anywhere, embodied. For Luther, this is the crux of the matter: ‘God is present in the very stuff of the world, in the living and nonliving, in the animate and the inanimate, wherever pain and death are at stake and resurrection is a promise, a new creation’. 70
Second, with regard to the time of our lives, Luther’s depiction of command and promise—especially when seen in light of the biblical motifs of Sinai and Zion—places us in a time that is ‘outside time’ and yet also simultaneously ‘within time’. In his Genesis commentaries, Luther understood the Church to be the time of Sabbath, that sacred time when God rested from creation and allows us to rest as well. The church’s task is to enact this time through its proclamation of the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, who forgives sins and raises the dead. In this time of forgiveness and grace, we can be completely passive and receive. 71 But this time also brings with it an awakening to what truly matters, and since faith can never be separated from love, it follows that this time leads us to the ‘common order of love’, which as Luther discussed in the Confession Concerning the Lord’s Supper (1528), entails feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, forgiving enemies, praying for all, and so on. When Sabbath time—that eternal constant both beneath and above the flux of history—breaks into our time we are given hope in God’s promises, even in the face of evidence that contradicts them. Such hope frees us, in the midst of our precarious lives, to be fully present to what truly matters: the neighbors who need justice and care.
Third, with regard to the communities around us, Luther’s focus on the proclamation of the gospel of the Messiah who frees us from self-interest so that we can be united with his life and thus can attend to neighbors in our midst—without regard for whether they are enemies or friends or whether we might receive reward—is very much needed in our time. Through this gospel of God, we are simultaneously ‘in the Messiah by faith’ and also ‘in the neighbor in love’, yet as a third that is both and neither.
Moreover, if we are ‘saved’ (selig, blessed) by faith in Christ alone, then we become ‘holy’ both through this faith and through the divinely designed ‘estates’ in which our everyday lives function (i.e., the church, the economy, and politics). 72 If we relate this to Luther’s third mode of presence, Christ’s presence in all things, then blessedness and salvation can be everywhere, because Christ may, according to his humanity, be there. Christ’s third mode of presence embraces ‘the entire planet’. However, sanctification, being holy, is the ‘labor of love in the instituted spheres that everyone is called to serve in’. 73
In our time, the estate of the economy, which traditionally (as oeconomia) included the family and household, is increasingly being narrowly construed as consisting solely of the ‘perpetual motion of capital’. 74 In turn, politics is becoming increasingly polarized. There is a need for a ‘third’ (which itself is also simultaneously both and neither an economic or political institution) to be an open, infinite space that resists both fusion and separation between oikos and polis, friends and enemies, and so on. 75 Luther’s insight into the way eschatological faith, rooted in the distinctive proclamation of Jesus the Messiah, can create a space for both the ‘blessed’ and the ‘holy’ to participate alongside each other in the work of sustaining our common life as neighbors may indeed be his signal contribution for our time. 76
Footnotes
1.
For discussions of philosophical scholarship on Paul, see Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries (eds), Paul and the Philosophers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); John D. Caputo and Linda Alcoff (eds), St. Paul among the Philosophers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); and Douglas Harink (ed.), Paul, Philosophy, and the Theological Political Vision: Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Žižek, and Others (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010).
2.
L.L. Welborn, Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening (New York: Columbia University Press), p. xii.
3.
Welborn, Paul’s Summons, p. xiii.
4.
For a discussion of the relevance of recent philosophical scholarship on Paul for Christian ethics, see P. Travis Kroeker, ‘Whither Messianic Ethics? Paul as Political Theorist’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 24.2 (Fall–Winter 2005), pp. 37–58.
5.
See Krister Stendahl’s classic essay, ‘The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West’, Harvard Theological Review 56.3 (July 1963), pp. 199–215.
6.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman in Social and Political Thought (Oxford: Robertson, 1981), p. 81. Quoted in Michael Richard Laffin, The Promise of Martin Luther’s Political Theology: Freedom Luther from the Modern Political Narrative (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 6–7.
7.
For a discussion of German Lutheran theologians writing during the period between the two World Wars, see William H. Lazareth, Christians in Society: Luther, the Bible, and Social Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001), p. 33.
8.
For a discussion of this literature, see Lazareth, Christians in Society, pp. 2–30. See also Laffin, The Promise of Martin Luther’s Political Theology.
9.
Vítor Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther: The Planetary Promise of Luther’s Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016), p. 8.
10.
Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 10.
11.
Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther the Expositor: Introduction to the Reformer’s Exegetical Writings (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1959), p. 260.
12.
Lazareth, Christians in Society, p. 33.
13.
My argument here is influenced by Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 270: ‘[Luther’s] theology is neither synthesis nor a diastasis, yet simultaneously both’.
14.
Welborn, Paul’s Summons, p. 2.
15.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muehlenberg and Fortress; St. Louis, CO: Concordia, 1955–86). I have taken the liberty to use ‘Messiah’ instead of ‘Christ’ in discussing the ‘Freedom of a Christian’, even though the English translation uses ‘Christ’. My analysis of ‘The Freedom of a Christian’ draws on my essay, ‘Martin Luther and the Holy Spirit’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
16.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, p. 346.
17.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, p. 357. My emphasis.
18.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, pp. 349–52.
19.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, pp. 354–55.
20.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, pp. 358–60.
21.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, pp. 365–67.
22.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, p. 368.
23.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, p. 371.
24.
Adolf von Harnack is probably the best exemplar of one who appropriated Luther’s concept of faith in a Marcionite direction; see his Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. J.E. Steely and L.D. Bierma (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1990). For a discussion of a Marcionite tendency in some of the recent philosophical scholarship on Paul, see Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 195–202.
25.
For an analysis of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Large Catechism, see my ‘Martin Luther and the Holy Spirit’.
26.
Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000), p. 432.
27.
The Book of Concord, p. 382. My emphasis.
28.
The Book of Concord, pp. 386–87.
29.
The Book of Concord, p. 389.
30.
The Book of Concord, p. 438.
31.
The Book of Concord, p. 438.
32.
Jon Levenson, Sinai and Zion (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 1987), p. 100.
33.
Levenson, Sinai and Zion, p. 101.
34.
Levenson, Sinai and Zion, p. 217.
35.
Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. xvi.
36.
Levenson, Creation, pp. xxi and xxvi.
37.
Luther’s Works, vol. 34, p. 287.
38.
Berndt Hamm, The Reformation Context of Faith in the Context of Medieval Theology and Piety (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 167–77.
39.
Regin Prenter, Spiritus Creator, trans. John M. Jensen (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Pres, 1952), pp. 18, 185.
40.
Luther’s Works, vol. 31, p. 40.
41.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 121.
42.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 121.
43.
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1986), p. 175.
44.
On this, see Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, pp. 155–66.
45.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 162.
46.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 106.
47.
Book of Concord, pp. 609–11.
48.
Luther’s Works, vol. 37, pp. 3–150.
49.
Luther’s Works, vol. 37, pp. 3–150.
50.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 154.
51.
Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p. 79.
52.
Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p. 365.
53.
Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p. 367.
54.
Oskar Skarsaune, ‘From the Jewish Messiah to the Creeds of the Church’, Evangelical Review of Theology (2008), pp. 224–37.
55.
Skarsuane, ‘From the Jewish Messiah’, pp. 224–37.
56.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 143.
57.
Weimar Ausgabe 31/I, 250, 24f.: ‘der Tuefjel wird und ist kein Teufjel, er sey den zuvor Gott gewest’. Quoted in Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 127.
58.
Weimar Ausgabe Tischenrede 6, 68, 37–40. Quoted in Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 101
59.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 126.
60.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, pp. 119–20, 170.
61.
Elliot Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revolution of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia, 2009), pp. 87–103.
62.
Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Engelwood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), p. 28.
63.
Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 37–38.
64.
Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, p. 39.
65.
Stephen G. Burnett, ‘Martin Luther and Christian Hebraism’, Oxford Encyclopedia, Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
66.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 158.
67.
In Transfiguring Luther, pp. 95–110, Westhelle suggests that the notion of a ‘hybrid’ identity helps us to understand Luther’s interpretation of Chalcedon and the question of the two natures, and that such a ‘reading’ of Chalcedon has relevance for a range of discussions from biology to post-colonial studies.
68.
My use of the categories of space, time, and community is drawn from Edith Wychogrod’s discussion of how Christians might read the Hebrew Bible in ways that think ‘otherwise than itself: to think the other and to become an identity-in-difference’. Drawing on Franz Rosenzweig’s categories of creation, revelation, and redemption, she conceives of a ‘cruciform theology’ that ‘passes through a six-pointed star of redemption’ by considering liminality in terms of ‘space as the limen of exile, time as the limen of Sabbath, and peoples as the limen of ingathering’; see her ‘Cross-Over Dreams’, Journal of the Academy of Religion 54.3 (Fall 1986), pp. 523–57 and Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). In turn, I also draw on Westhelle’s proposal of the following three themes for understanding Luther’s relevance for our contemporary ‘planet’: (1) ‘cross and Christ’s presence’; (2) ‘ecclesiology’, which he relates to the Sabbath; and (3) the church (ecclesia) as a ‘third space’ between economy (oeconomia) and politics (politia); see Transfiguring Luther, especially pp. 241–54, but also pp. 83–94.
69.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 110.
70.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 247.
71.
For a discussion of justification as the gift of complete passivity that brings together the beginning and the end, both the Sabbath at creation and Good Friday, see Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, pp. 83–88.
72.
Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p. 365.
73.
Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther, p. 251.
74.
Welborn, Paul’s Summon’s, p. xii.
75.
For a related discussion from a post-secular perspective, see Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries into Political Theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See esp. pp. 74–75.
76.
For a Mennonite perspective on the church in relation to oikos and polis, see P. Travis Kroeker, Empire Erotic and Messianic Economies of Desire (Winnipeg: CMU Press, 2017). For a Lutheran perspective, see Gary M. Simpson, ‘Missional Congregations as Public Companions with God in Global Civil Society: Vocational Imagination and Spiritual Presence’, Dialog 54.2 (Summer 2015), pp. 135–50.