Timely Reformation Scholarship and Theology versus the Grand Historical Narratives: A Review Essay

Michael Richard Laffin, The Promise of Martin Luther’s Political Theology: Freeing Luther from the Modern Political Narrative, T&T Clark Enquiries in Theological Ethics (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016). xiii + 213 pp. £95.00. ISBN 978-0-5676-6989-6 (hbk)

This apologia for Luther’s political theology stands squarely within the contemporary approach to interpreting Luther’s theological, moral and political thought associated with the published work of Oswald Bayer, Hans Ulrich, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Brian Brock and Reinhard Hütter, whose writings are regularly cited and quoted by the author. Equipped with the fresh insights of these mentors into the ‘deeper structures’ or ‘grammar’ of Luther’s theology, Michael Laffin undertakes to extricate Luther’s political reflection from (what he regards as) the inadequate interpretations and ill-judged historical narratives of modernity critics from the 1960s onward, from Eric Voegelin, Quentin Skinner and Sheldon Wolin to John Milbank and Jennifer Herdt. Misconstruing Luther’s theological orientation as nominalistic, voluntaristic, individualistic, inward-focused and, consequently, apolitical or anti-political, such critics regard his work as a key episode in the historical advent of secular liberal democracy and a key source of its lamentable defects. In the wake of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s reform celebrated last year, we may welcome Laffin’s venture of corrective interpretation, not only as a contribution to Lutheran theological scholarship, but as a timely antidote to the inevitably superficial and unbalanced scholarship of grand historical narratives.

Among modernity critics, the primary interlocutors in Laffin’s corrective interpretation of Luther are John Milbank and Jennifer Herdt, whose writings present assaults on Luther’s political theology and constructive visions for Christian ethical and political thought which, while significantly diverging, converge in their dependence on philosophical concepts and their ambition to combine the Augustinian and Thomist political legacies. As a capable apologist, Laffin endeavours to explicate Luther’s political theology so as not merely to rebut the criticisms of Milbank and Herdt, but to expose the theological weaknesses in their critical and constructive work, and to indicate how Luther’s theological resources more adequately accomplish those writers’ critical and constructive aims.

Most generally, Laffin identifies the common weakness of Milbank and Herdt to be their use of immanent anthropological conceptions inadequate to conveying the primacy of divine agency and action in their complex and fluid relationship with human agency and action, and, consequently, inadequate to fulfilling the critical and constructive potential for political theology of the Augustinian ‘two kingdoms’ legacy. He argues that this weakness is overcome by Luther’s ‘theology of the living Word’, comprehending his accounts of faith and love, justification and sanctification, revelation and reason, word and sacrament, creation and eschatology. Laffin intends to show that Luther’s accounts give ‘insight into the grammar that enables a creaturely form of political life, the shape of its contours’, while also providing ‘a heuristic for recognizing and criticizing the many forms of antipolitics’ (p. 26).

Central to Luther’s achievement are his concepts of ‘the three estates’ and ‘the two ecclesiae’. Laffin sees scholarly disregarding and underplaying of these concepts as key to critical imbalance in interpreting Luther’s political theology, because they crucially situate his much-traversed concept of ‘the two regiments’ within his broader theological unfolding of creation and eschatology. Properly situated, Luther’s ‘two regiments’ concept avoids polarising the world into secular and sacred spheres, and equally avoids ‘collapsing the church into the world or the world into the church’, more successfully than the conceptual approaches of Herdt or Milbank (p. 27). In his more ‘Aristotelian’ teaching of the three estates (ecclesia, oeconomia, politia), Luther conveys the goodness of politics as a place for humans concretely to ‘encounter God’s promises and provision’, while demonstrating greater ‘critical sensitivity’ to ‘false or demonic anti-institutions’ than Herdt demonstrates (p. 27). Likewise, in his more ‘Augustinian’ teaching of the two churches, ‘the ecclesia and polis can confront one another in critical interaction’, without degrading politics to ‘little more than tragic response to the Fall’, as Milbank tends to do (p. 27). Luther’s fruitful balancing of these teachings, Laffin argues, depends on the prior centrality of the ‘vita passiva’ of faith: of expecting and hearing God’s Word speaking, recognising and trusting in God’s reconciliation already given, and in his promise of governing and providing for human life. Unlike Milbank and Herdt, Luther envisages a renewal of contemporary politics issuing from divine initiative rather than from human initiative in pursuit of emancipating theory or practice.

Laffin develops his interpretation of Luther over five chapters, engaging with Milbank’s criticisms in the first three, before proceeding to Herdt’s (and eventually Barth’s) in his fourth and fifth chapters. He begins with Milbank’s account of Luther’s historical role in the shift in western thought from the realist, analogical, ‘participatory ontology’ of Thomas Aquinas to the univocal, nominalist, non-participatory ontology of modern western political and social science. At issue is the contribution of Luther’s Christology and soteriology to the early-modern theoretical trajectory of privatising, spiritualising and transcendentalising the sacred, and reconstructing human nature, action and society as an arena of autonomous, formal power. Milbank’s criticism of Luther’s Christology is that his nominalist predication of being solely to individuals produces an univocalist, monophysite understanding of the hypostatic union as a fusion of God and man that does not adequately allow for the kenotic possession by human nature of the divine attributes. The soteriological implication is, according to Milbank, that the believer’s participation in Christ is not a sharing, but closer to identity and subsumption, in the mode of a sufficient and complete ‘imputation’ which undermines sanctification.

Countering Milbank, Laffin follows contemporary Finnish scholars in taking Luther’s understanding of the believer’s union with Christ as the key to understanding the passivity and activity of faith, the exteriority and interiority of Christ to the believer, the distinction and the unity of justification and sanctification. But, perceiving concern with the ontology of human deification to be superfluous to Luther’s understanding of this union, Laffin approaches Luther’s understanding from the ‘grammar’ of relating faith and love underlying it.

Laffin explicates Luther’s account of ‘faith active in love’ as his correction of the prevailing scholastic account of justification in terms of ‘faith formed by love’ (fides caritate formata), having in his sights Eric Voegelin’s historical contention that Luther helped to destroy the primacy of the love of God in pre-modern Christian spiritual and moral culture by reducing faith to mere certainty of salvation and the love of God to the mere motivation for worldly good works. Ironically turning the tables, Laffin argues that it is Luther who repudiates the scholastic reduction of faith, within justification, to the passive, unformed cognitive reception of externally revealed divine truth, incapable of works meriting eternal life until informed by the active love of God, expressing a divinely-infused grace inhering in the believer’s will. Luther, by contrast, conceives faith as an ‘effective’, ‘active’, ‘substantial form’ (p. 49)—a renovation of the human mind, will and senses, being the very presence of Christ in and to the believer. In Luther’s thought, faith forms love, because the Christian’s love of God and neighbour is his/her sharing in the spiritual goods of Christ present in faith. Rather than relating faith and love within the prevailing ‘moral-philosophic grammar’ of a contingent causal sequence of divine grace and human merit (p. 55), Luther relates them within a ‘theological grammar’ that highlights the pure receptivity of faith as a gift outside human capacity, while preserving the unity of divine and human love that guards against love’s reduction to worldly immanence.

Turning in chapter 2 to Milbank’s criticism of the Lutheran/Protestant concentration on the individual’s direct experience of God abstracted from linguistic, social and cultural mediation, Laffin explores Luther’s understanding of Christ’s presence as God’s Word in Scripture and in the church. He explicates Luther’s conception of God’s Word as God’s address and self-giving: as living, creative, effective communicative action, as command and promise that establishes the concrete, historical community in which finite human beings can respond in obedient worship to their existence as God’s free gift. According to Laffin, the audible and visible encounter of the worshipping church with this Word which, as personal presence, is constitutive of creation and history and alone gives access to reality, is confirmation for Luther of the trustfulness of embodied, shared forms of human life, of social and political institutions. This is in opposition to the idealism, transcendentalism, and the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ to which contemporary thinkers are prone.

On Laffin’s reading of Luther, God’s Word of redemption, the historical Jesus of Nazareth, is inseparably present in the written form of Scripture and in the community gathered in worship; for the living voice of God’s promise, God’s immediate address through the words of Scripture, is communicated (given and received), with transformative effect, in the church’s faithful public preaching and sacramental celebration. At the same time, the church is also for Luther the fallible and hidden ‘creature of God’s Word’ (creatura Verbi), subject to a voice and a promise not its own, so that its ‘particular signs’ do not ‘point beyond themselves’ or leave the church ‘at its own disposal’, to bear ultimate responsibility for itself (p. 75). Consequently, Laffin argues, its mission cannot be, as in Milbank, to enact or embody its true being conceived as ‘peaceful ontology’ or the image of ‘paradisal community’. Finally, considering the eucharistic communication of God’s Word in Luther’s thought, Laffin defends its logic of gift-giving against criticism of its excision of the corporate return of Christ’s sacrificial offering. Against this objection, Laffin argues that the faithful communicants both receive Christ and offer themselves in Christ to God, and to others of the fellowship, their mutual giving being mediated by Christ, God’s once-and-for-all sacrifice for sin, to whom and in whom believers are ecstatically united.

In chapter 3, Laffin explicates Luther’s positive conception of political society as generated by God’s creative Word and encompassed within his promise of saving transformation, in opposition to Milbank’s negative, Augustinian conception of political society as generated by human self-love (pride) and embodying ‘an ontology of violence’ (p. 90). Identifying the rule of both prelapsarian society and its final heavenly embodiment with the institutional church, Milbank portrays the salvific process in time as the gradual assimilation of political to ecclesial rule, reducing (without eliminating) the defensive, coercive, dominative social relationships of postlapsarian political society. Countering Milbank, Laffin, on the one hand, presents the worshipping church in Luther as paradigmatic political society—appealing to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the polis as an organisation of people for common speaking and acting, with the intrinsic purpose of creating new social relations and realities. On the other hand, he presents the polis in Luther as a distinct, structured realising of the common good in creation, which only contingently becomes the ‘false church’ in conflict with ‘the true church’ of faithful worship through human beings turning away from God’s Word of command and promise to pride and lust for domination.

Thus, Laffin argues, unlike Milbank’s Augustinian ‘two cities’, Luther’s concept of ‘the two churches’ (the ‘two kingdoms’ of his early writing) allows both for a ‘coincidence of good’ between the true church and political undertakings that ‘further human life’ (p. 102), and for the stark opposition of true worship to false worship, whether appearing in the ecclesiastical or secular spheres. Correspondingly, the divinely ordained ‘regiments’ of church and secular polity are neither autonomously separate nor opposed in Luther’s corpus: the ‘godly officers’ of either regiment are capable of acting directly to make critical and constructive contributions to the other estate’s welfare within God’s unitary governance of the world. Laffin does concede, however, that Luther regards the civil regiment postlapsum as serving the ‘merely negative’ providential purpose of maintaining peace by ‘punishing the wicked and protecting the upright’ (p. 109).

Laffin opens his discussion of Herdt’s Erasmian ‘virtue ethics’ in chapter 4 by presenting her understanding of Erasmus’s achievement within the western Christianised Aristotelian tradition of acquiring virtue through mimetic habituation. Herdt’s Erasmus follows Augustine in conceiving habituation into virtue as imitation of Christ with the end of conforming to Christ, and follows Aquinas in conceiving divine grace as ‘enabling’ human agency, so that human imitation of Christ is ‘participation in divine agency’ (p. 121). However, he moves beyond Augustine’s dismissal of pagan virtue as mere ‘semblance’ (disguising pride) and even beyond Aquinas’s more positive assessment of it grounded in the acquired/infused (natural/supernatural) distinction, to envision a single continuum of acquiring virtue on which pagans, through imitating exemplars of moral beauty, are already being transformed by Christ’s beauty, although not yet by consciously embracing their dependence on Christ and his Spirit’s redemptive work.

Herdt’s historical narrative portrays Luther’s ‘“hyper-Augustinian’” posture as a total assault on the elements of the Erasmian synthesis (p. 115). As the result of Luther’s nominalist placing of divine and human freedom in a competitive, univocal relationship, the sanctification of sinners rests on their denying any role to their own agency in their union with Christ through faith which justifies and makes righteous. Since the sinner’s juridical right-standing before God (coram Deo) issues from a complete displacement of human agency by Christ’s agency, human agency in Luther is confined to temporal, social, civic relationships (coram hominibus). Only in the ‘outer’ rather than the ‘inner’ person/sphere does something like an habituation to virtue take place, which, however, allows no temporal progress through the imitation of Christ, being always infected by human pride. In the political realm, contends Herdt, Luther’s rejection of a theology of mimetic virtue acquisition inclusive of pagans produces a culture of church/world antagonism, suspicion, and fear of disorder in which Christians passively accept the coercive inculcation of false (hypocritical) virtue by authoritarian rule and state religion.

Addressing Herdt’s political charges first, Laffin argues that Luther affirms God’s gracious working outside the church, while safeguarding his distinctive working in the church. For Luther, the church’s distinctiveness lies not in its members’ character or conduct, but in God’s Word of address, to which the church ‘attends and witnesses’ (p. 131), which is also spoken and heard among the heathen in ‘the call of the needs of one’s neighbour’ (p. 131). In Christ’s undivided rule over and in his fallen human creation, Luther grants that pagans too perform the good works toward the neighbour commanded in the Second Table, including works of political virtue, law and wisdom; but as these do not issue from true faith in and knowledge of God, they do not belong to God’s work of salvation. Moreover, only the church’s faithful witness to the Giver of these good gifts efficaciously opposes the Satanic self-idolising of arrogant rulers.

To Herdt’s criticism of the univocal, competitive relationship of human and divine agency in Luther’s thought, Laffin argues that Luther’s theology of the Word entails a portrayal of God’s transcendence to, and immanence in, his creation which neither renders the creation ‘a discrete entity’ alongside him, nor undermines the ‘absolute division’ of creature and creator. Rather, Luther’s conception of reality as ‘God’s address to creatures through creatures’ (p. 136) enlists a non-ontological, polysemous, metaphorical ‘grammar’ for conveying the mysterious interplay of divine and human freedom. Moreover, his theological/metaphorical modes of holding together divine initiative, human passivity and activity depend on whether the context is God’s work in creation and preservation or in justification and sanctification. In both contexts, Laffin argues, Luther protects both divine initiative and free human response: God’s working in us and our cooperation with him.

Finally, Laffin criticises Herdt’s Erasmian version of virtue acquisition for collapsing God’s works of creation/preservation and redemption into a continuous process in which ‘“realities already present, though as yet unknown and unacknowledged, are gradually rendered explicit”’ (p. 141, quoting Herdt). By contrast, Luther’s conception of human participation in the divine drama of judgment and grace as a life-long experience of death and resurrection, fraught with ‘rupture and discontinuity’ (p. 140), captures the disruptive relationship of God’s two addresses to his creatures without losing the unity of the one Word. Convinced that Satan and sin cannot be conceptually harmonised with God’s unity, Luther presents the continuity of the self as the object of faith, and not as an immanent form (‘character’) consciously grasped or possessed by the individual. Crucial is Luther’s understanding of Christian love as the active presence in believers of the Spirit of the creating Father and redeeming Son, communicating their gifts, the giver and the gift being undivided; as opposed to understanding love as a ‘created habit’ or ‘infused grace’ produced by the Spirit’s gift of a supernatural nature, the giver and the gift being divided as transcendent cause and immanent effect. God’s active presence liberates believers for self-forgetful attending to his Word of command and promise given in Scripture and in the church’s worship; and, in attending to the external, inimitable works of Christ, believers are being re-formed to him and re-focused on the needs of the neighbour.

Laffin devotes his last chapter to expounding Luther’s understanding of the three estates as the created social spheres of sanctification, wherein faith is active in love. His interpretation aims at refuting Barth’s critique of Luther’s created estates as autonomous human spheres of immanent moral rationality (law) divorced from God’s saving Word, capable of justifying either idolatrous obedience to human command or inwardness unaffected by it. Accordingly, Laffin defends the witness of Luther’s created estates to Christ’s universal lordship, and against humankind’s self-justifying presumption and lawless unrighteousness. Far from dividing the commanding Word of God the Creator and God the Reconciler and Redeemer, Luther’s estates display the continuity of God’s Word, enabling humans to embody their communion with God in concrete social ways. In concretising God’s promise to establish and provide for forms of creaturely human life, the institutions are for Luther invitations to explore God’s will for created/recreated society in ways not discernible by natural human instinct and reason (speculative or practical), but only from Scriptural revelation and contrite faith in the power of the living God alone to realise human good and right. Thus are the institutions ‘creaturely, material and elemental’ means of grace and of God’s self-giving (p. 171), the ordained spaces or places of sanctification and Christian vocation, without being means of justification.

Luther’s fundamental estate, ecclesia, is God’s concrete provision for the worshipful response of human creatures to their Creator’s address, giving their response a definite place and form. As worshipping God is the ‘common vocation’ of humanity, Luther admits a general, believing worship of ‘a good and gracious God’ (p. 179) which, however, lacks the unique confidence in God’s goodness pro me issuing from faith’s possession of Christ and the Spirit’s gifts. Only within the Christian worshipping community is the ‘grammar’ of cooperating with God and living under the Spirit’s rule, paradigmatically communicated.

On this foundation, Luther’s second estate, oeconomia or household (including marriage and family, business and work), is God’s provision of a definite place and form for human labour and sustenance which is responsive to God’s ‘blessing and support’, and so freed from anxiety, covetousness and exploitation of human and non-human creatures.

Luther’s third estate, politia, provides for human response to God’s sovereign rule, the response taking different forms depending on whether the community of God’s rule is viewed as created, fallen or reconciled in Christ. Laffin takes as evidence of the prelapsarian reality of this estate in Luther’s thought, his recognition that human relations of authority and dependence are intrinsic to the created dynamic of human speaking, hearing and responding, and to the gender, generational and economic relations within and among households as created. As well as viewing political communities—comprehending (in Luther’s own words) ‘principalities, dominions, and kingdoms’—as simply ‘many households combined’, Luther interprets the fourth commandment as enjoining honour, obedience and service to all ‘temporal’ and ‘spiritual’ authorities, as well as to biological parents, on the ground that all authorities have the pedagogical duty of parents to orient those under their care to the other nine commandments (p. 185). Whereas, in fallen society, coercion becomes for Luther ‘a tragic part of politics’, just as God’s law assumes ‘a restraining and accusing function’, in the truly reconciled polity of those whose hearts are transformed by the Spirit’s rule, Luther sees obedient response to God’s address as needing no coercion, and indeed, no command (p. 186).

Laffin concludes by stressing the critical and heuristic role of the institutions in Luther’s political theology. As a ‘hermeneutic of attentiveness’, in their persisting plurality, they ‘direct believers to the places of hearing the Word always anew in the midst of the various opposing words’, casting light on ‘social formations grounded in false faith’ and characterised by defensive, dominating, manipulative, excluding, self-justifying and idolatrous actions and relations; and calling believers back to the social formations of freedom, love, and holiness that God ‘brings about’ by faith in Christ (pp. 190–91).

The foregoing lengthy summary of Laffin’s apologetic project is itself a measure of my appreciation of his adroit and discerning drawing on the theological strengths (principally) of the ‘Erlangen school’ of Luther interpretation to present afresh critical and constructive resources in Luther’s political theology, extricating them from the inadequate, negative interpretations of Milbank, Herdt and other influential contributors to contemporary modernity criticism. Laffin manages to convey the wealth of penetrating theological imagination among the Erlangen thinkers, inspired by Luther’s own towering theological imagination, while keeping his argumentation focused on the corrective agenda of replying to Luther’s critics. Coming to Laffin’s project with a somewhat similar apologetic agenda on behalf of English Reformation public theology, and having only a modest acquaintance with Luther’s works and Lutheran theological scholarship, and even less with the writings of Milbank and Herdt, I find much that is interpretatively credible and theologically compelling in his presentation of Luther on faith and love, justification and sanctification, revelation and reason, and Scripture and the worshipping church. This said, the format of sequential replying to criticisms occasionally detracts from the coherence, and, perhaps, completeness, of his presentation. Likewise, Laffin’s critical treatment of the philosophical orientations and arguments of Milbank and Herdt from his reading of Luther strike me as, for the most part, theologically sound and well-targeted, assuming his accurate reporting of their thought.

However, I do find some grounds for hermeneutical and theological unease with Laffin’s, as with his mentors’, interpretative and apologetic project. While admirably directing attention to the apparently downplayed or neglected concepts of the three estates and two churches in Luther’s political theology, Laffin and his mentors possibly exaggerate their consistent role in Luther’s thought—as, indeed, emphasis on the ‘deep grammar’ of Luther’s thought may tend to exaggerate its consistency across his corpus (while other diverse uses of the term ‘grammar’ invite confusion and raise the spectre of linguistic foundationalism). Not denying the places in Luther’s corpus where his portrayal of the created estates witnesses to the continuity of God’s commanding and promising Word in creation and redemption, there are other places (e.g., The Sermon on the Mount, 1532, on Mt. 5:5) where, to my mind, Luther’s portrayal justifies Barth’s harsh criticism.

More broadly, I do not see that a theologically convincing case can be made for Luther’s inclusion of politia as a structured realising of the created common good independent of the ecclesia. Here I concur with Milbank, and perhaps, with Luther’s own best insight. Luther’s depiction of household relations of authority and dependence, pedagogy and discipline, as the political grounding in created society of coercive political authority under the conditions of sin presents the lamentable coalescence of epistemological/pedagogical and coercive juridical authority in the secular ruler that invariably undermines the divinely revealed tensions between the ecclesial witness and the secular political witness to God’s undivided rule. Luther’s political thought would have benefited from closer adherence to Augustine’s portrayal of secular rule as ordered by God’s providence to protecting created relationships without formally resembling them, being always grounded (despite its sinful deficiencies) in God’s judgment against human sin and for created human good.

In any case, we are indebted to Laffin’s apology for demonstrating the subtlety, complexity and penetration in interpreting Luther characteristic of his mentors’work. These qualities make it worthy of scholarly and theological attention from both critics and admirers of the reformer.