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Talking about God with Luther

Pierre-Olivier Lechot

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

Can we still read Luther? Nearly five centuries after he posted the 95 theses, the question deserves to be asked.  After all, Luther believed in the devil, in hell, in angels and demons and he adhered to a worldview much closer to that of the writers of the ancient world than it is to our own.  We could, as a result, arrive at the conclusion that his thought no longer has anything much to say to the men and women of today – that would, however, be to get ahead of ourselves.  I do believe that Luther laid down a number of theological principles which continue to leave their mark on us, without our really being aware if it, and which mean that his thinking can (and must!) continue to inspire us. Certainly we cannot take over unchanged his affirmations about God, the human being or Christ – at all events not in their mythological dimension. But we can on the other hand interpret them in order to try to get hold of what motivated his thought and his action while seeking our inspiration from them.  That is what I would like to try to do in these pages.

« Whatever you believe in … That is your God! »

Let us begin with a quotation from the Great Catechism of 1529.  Just as he is explaining to his readers what faith is the Reformer takes the highly original step of not offering the authority of the Bible as the absolute reference-point in religious matters.  Instead he wonders first of all what it is to believe in God. And his reply is disconcerting: « That to which you attach your heart and to which you entrust yourself is actually your God. » There has been a great deal of speculation about the meaning of this passage in order to underline, with Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) for example, the instrumental character of religion. Fundamentally, faith consists in projecting onto God everything of which I am not capable as a human being: I am not capable of loving truly, therefore God is absolute love; I am not eternal, therefore God is eternal, etc.

I do not believe that this interpretation is securely based. What Luther offers in evidence here is rather a reality of human existence, knowing that while there is the question of God, it is not primarily a question of knowing, of a recognition which allows us to deal with all our questions about life, death, or the gender of the angels. It is, on the contrary, a question of faith, not in the sense of « believing that » (believing in the Trinity, believing that Jesus is true God and true man), but really in the sense of confidence in something which goes beyond us and which forms us. In other words: while it is a question of human trust, it is assuredly a question of God; while humans being have confidence, while they believe in something that they regards as ultimate, they have confidence in God, or rather: they put their trust in something that they consider as the foundation of their life. The task of theology therefore consists in knowing which God is in question; in knowing what it is in which we place our trust if we listen to the Gospel.

This approach underlines a point of essential rupture with the previous theological tradition. With Luther, theology no longer speaks of God in a metaphysical « essentialising » sense, but in a sense that is relational, or even existential: God is that which I regard as ultimate from the point of view of my existence. To speak of God therefore is to speak of human existence confronted by what is ultimate and to do theology is to reflect on life and on its questionings from the point of view of the Divine rather than to interest oneself in the essence of this Divine, in the natures of Christ, or in the order of the decrees of predestination. Luther’s disciple Melanchthon (1497-1560) underlines this clearly elsewhere in his « Common Places in Theology » of 1521: « For it is to know Christ rather than to know his benefits, and not, as the scholastics teach, to consider his natures, the modes of his incarnation. If you do not know to what end Christ put on flesh and was nailed to the cross, what use will it be to you to know his story? Is it truly enough for a doctor to know the shapes, colours and outlines of herbs and not to care about knowing their curative properties?  In the same way, it matters that we know Christ, who has been given to us as a remedy and, to use a phrase from Scripture, ‘for our salvation’, in another way from the one which the Scholastics show us. »  What Melanchthon and Luther are rejecting in this way is a theological reading which turns God into an object, with no link to human existence. For them to hold a discussion « about » God would be to make of God a thing without life, at the very point where we are asked to think of him as the living God and to encounter him as God of the living. Now, it is precisely in this « reification » of God that Luther, and Calvin and Zwingli, locate the root of that idolatry which they regularly denounced.

In this way, we understand better Luther’s willingness always to place God beyond human reason’s capacity to understand. Not in order to humiliate human reason, but in order to avoid its aiming at the wrong goal. As Paul Tillich (1886-1965) aptly wrote in relation to the Reformer: « if God is beyond all human possibilities, the result is that his manner of acting must transcend everything that is human, all human expectation. »  God is accessible to us only paradoxically – in “the absolute contrast », as Luther regularly explained it.  It is this thought which is at the root of the Lutheran « theology of the cross », which we always have difficulty in grasping. If God cannot be approached except « by contrast », then all the images of God that we can make have to be turned upside down: God’s power is revealed in his weakness, his victory in his defeat, just as the intelligence of faith is located precisely in the folly of faith in a crucified and humiliated God. In short, God can be understood only in the obscurity and emptiness which are simply the expression of his light and plenitude.

Conscience and the emergence of the divine

Now these affirmations about God are also valid for the human being: it is actually impossible to know oneself in a direct and transparent way. True self-knowledge is a paradoxical knowledge: human beings certainly want to know themselves, to understand themselves as a coherent whole, but cannot get there on their own, without help from outside. They need to be revealed to themselves in order to grasp what is their ultimate basis, the principle of their identity. To be reunified, reassembled, they need to be that under the gaze of another and can only be that truly « facing God » – coram Dei – to pick up Luther’s words.

The work of the theologian, therefore, consists in replacing the human being as a totality at the centre of his reflection and in renouncing for this reason every form of discussion in relation to humanity which makes that in its turn an object.  From now on, theology must not deal with concepts, even those that are revealed, apart from all connection with life. It must, on the contrary, scrutinize human existence, get its hands dirty and set out from human experience itself, with its contradictions, its defects and its paradoxes. This is the reason why, for Luther, theology can in the final analysis define itself only as a practical reflection by contrast with the speculative thought of the Middle Ages: « true theology is practical, and its foundation is Christ, whose death is grasped by faith… Speculative theology belongs to the Devil in Hell! »

From then on, it would not be possible to have any real knowledge of the human being and of God without thinking about what Luther called the conscience. Here we need to be quick to clarify that the Reformer does not confer any moral connotation on this concept, by contrast with the mediaeval theologians: the conscience is not for him the conscience which I have of doing good or evil.  It is rather that place in the human soul where the divine reveals itself, the most intimate place of the individual in which the latter is revealed to himself « before God ». For Luther, indeed what is able to touch the conscience, to concern the human being as a totality, is by nature theological. When it is a question of the conscience, it is a question of the person conceived as a whole in relationship – in relationship with oneself, with others, but also and above all with  God,

It is worth noting here that for Luther the word « conscience » can also be understood as « feeling » in the sense in which Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) speaks of piety as a « feeling of absolute dependence ». So, for example, the Reformer writes: « You must feel Christ himself in your self and feel that it is the word of God, even if the whole world says the contrary. As long as you do not have the feeling, you have not tasted the Word of God. » What gives confidence is not the knowledge, the understanding, of a revealed truth, an attractive, well-constructed system of dogmas, but something which, in Luther’s words, touches the heart and by which the conscience is gripped, something that, to use this time the language of Schleiermacher, awakens the feeling of absolute dependence in relation to the divine.

Let us note, however, that for Luther, as for Schleiermacher elsewhere, that does not in any way lead to a subjective vision of religion: faith does not consist simply in contemplating one’s navel, in resting withdrawn on one’s own feelings, without any relationship with anything that is external to the self. What Luther and Schleiermacher want to underline is, on the contrary, that if the centre of theological reflection consists in starting from human beings and their existential questionings, one must immediately understand human beings as open to a call which  can question and redefine them; the call of the divine for Schleiermacher, the call of God’s word for Luther.

This questioning, this sudden emergence of the divine in the heart of being can obviously happen at any time and in any place and Luther is not stingy when it is a question of describing these « masks » of God which faith can perceive in daily life. Because it is strictly speaking the language of faith, for him, to know how to detect, behind the mask of the ordinary, behind a mother’s kiss or a child’s smile, the presence of God himself.  God in this way becomes this power of life which acts in everything that there is and « it follows that God is closer to all his creatures than they are to themselves”. It is this, for the Reformer, that makes a prayer of each everyday gesture carried out in faith: « that a believer fears and honours God in his work and keeps in mind his commandments so that they do not hurt or rob anyone […] Out of such thoughts and such a faith they make, without any doubt, a prayer of their work and, what is more, a sacrifice of thanksgiving. »

Law and Gospel as aids to understanding our lives

The fact remains that, for the Reformer, this reality shows itself most purely in the penetration of the human being by the Divine Word which he understands by means of the dialectic between the Law and the Gospel:

« It is also necessary to realise that the whole of Scripture divides into two sorts of word, which are, on the one side, the commandment or the Law of God and, on the other, his promise or his undertakings. The commandments instruct us and prescribe to us all sorts of good works, but these are not thereby carried out. They provide, to be sure, directions, but no help; they teach what must be done, but they give no strength to do it. That is why they have no other goal than to lead humanity to see there its incapacity to do good and to teach it to despair of itself. […] From the very moment when the commandments taught humankind its powerlessness and when, in anguish, the question is asked how to satisfy the commandment – for either the commandment will be carried out or humanity will be condemned – the human being is truly humiliated and reduced to nothing in his own eyes, and he can find nothing in himself which can make him just. That is when the other word comes in: the promise and the undertaking of God. That says: if you want to fulfil all the commandments, to be delivered from your evil covetousness and from your sin, as the commandments demand absolutely, then look at and believe in Christ, in whom I promise you all grace, all righteousness, all peace and all freedom. If you believe, you have it; if you do not believe, you don’t. In fact, what you are incapable of attaining by the works of the commandments – necessarily numerous but stripped of usefulness – you attain easily and quickly by faith. I have therefore gathered and brought together everything in faith; the one who possesses that will assuredly possess everything and will be saved; the one who does not possess it will have nothing. In this way the promises of God give what the commandments demand and they fulfil what the commandments ordain, in such a way that everything belongs to God, the commandment and the fulfilment.  God alone ordains and alone, too, God fulfils. »

If this fundamental tension between the Law and the Gospel finds a certain parallelism in the distinction between Old and New Testaments, it nevertheless cannot be reduced to that. What is envisaged here is much rather a tension which runs across both parts of the Bible. Luther says so explicitly: there is promise in the Old Testament and Law in the New Testament.

But this tension is also the thing that, for Luther, structures the whole life of the Christian, to the extent that this places him always between realities which have an attraction to the Law and others which refer to the Gospel or, as the Reformer says here, “the Promise ».  What he is expressing here is therefore much more fundamental than a physical or historical distinction linked to the Biblical text. Again it is a question of a distinction of an existential nature: my existence places me always before realities about which I feel that I must carry them out, but about which it is clear, if I bother to think about it, that I cannot really carry them out. I feel that I must love without imposing conditions on my love, but can I really do that? Nothing is less certain: I am always waiting for the other to fulfil a certain number of criteria in order to feel that I am called to love them fully. Now, this assumption can become the source of a personal crisis, since at the same time as I feel that I must love unconditionally, I realise that I am in not position to do this. If we think about it for a moment, no affirmation is more ridiculous than this: « I must love unconditionally. »  However that does not mean that such injunctions ought not to be taken seriously: for Luther, they are indeed manifestations of God intended to bring about the collapse of the confidence which we place in ourselves and which, at the same time, are opposed to our self-satisfaction. What they allow is the denunciation of this « human will oriented towards itself » of which Luther speaks readily in relation to sin. What the Reformer, then, expects from Christians is, at bottom, that they are realists and give up the idea that a simple appearance of justice might be enough to balance their life before God because it is precisely in this appearance that, according to him, the root of sin is found.

Of course, this assumption would be appalling, especially to our modern eyes, if there were not, at the same time, attached to it the idea of a promise concerning our existence, good news which helps us and liberates us from despair: the promise of the gratuity of God’s love. Yes, I must love unconditionally and I cannot. But life can also teach me, at the turn of an encounter, that gratuitous love exists and that it is always within reach, and that it is not my part to make it happen but rather to let it happen.  Now, for Luther, the encounter above all is that of the believer and God within faith in Jesus Christ. That, properly speaking, is what grace is and that is the aim of the Gospel: knowing how to accept the gift of God manifested in Christ rather than seeking to obtain it by ourselves.

However, let us be clear: Luther does not say that we are asked to choose the Gospel to the detriment of the Law. Should we wish to do that, we could not succeed. The Reformer does not proclaim the definitive victory of the Gospel over the Law nor the synthesis of the two, but rather suggests that the two poles, in their opposition, in their joint attraction and repulsion, are constitutive of the life of the Christian. Christians are not called to abandon the Law for the Gospel; they must, rather, understand that their whole existence must be read in relation to these two realities. Life, for Luther, sets us always between the pole of neediness and that of grace and, a fortiori, in the light of the Bible. The joint proclamation of Law and Gospel aims therefore at enlightening the conscience, blinded as it is by its self-sufficiency, and liberating it by summoning it to faith, in other words, to the acceptance of existence as the place in which God’s love can be revealed. Now, faith is precisely what liberates human beings from their bad conscience to the extent that it accepts and receives the God who gives himself and makes himself present.

‘ »If faith is not there, God loses his glory in us »

This fundamental theological redefinition opens out into a totally new understanding of God and of his presence in the world which is, to my mind, too often glossed over when we talk about Luther. It is worth the trouble of quoting here this extract from the « Treatise on the Liberty of the Christian » setting out what is customarily called « the joyous exchange »:

« Faith does not only cause the soul, like the divine Word, to be full of all the graces, free and happy, but it unites the soul to Christ as a wife to her husband. From this marriage it follows, as St Paul says [Eph. 5:30], that Christ and the soul make only a single flesh: then the goods of the two, happiness and misfortune, all things are common to them: what belongs to Christ comes to the believing soul, what belongs to the soul comes to Christ.  So Christ possesses all good and all blessedness, and these come to the soul; in the same way the soul has on itself all the vices and the sins, and these come to Christ. Then there begins a quarrel and a joyous exchange.  Christ being God and at the same time a man who has never yet sinned, his righteousness being invincible, eternal and almighty, if, thanks to the ring of the bride, in other words thanks to faith, he makes the sins of the believing soul his own and acts as if he had committed them himself, then the sins must be swallowed up and drowned in him. For his invincible righteousness is too strong for all the sins, and the soul then finds itself, thanks to its only gift, its faith, relieved, liberated of all its sins and gifted with the eternal justice of its spouse, Christ. Is not that a happy household, when a rich, noble and righteous spouse like the Christ marries a wretched little whore, evil and despised, rids her of all her ills and adorns her with all his goods? »

Of course, and we must not get this wrong, this text still rests broadly on an understanding of salvation as forgiveness of sins and as expiation by Jesus Christ of the sins of humanity – which underlines that Luther remains tied to a mythological conception of things; but this would be to misunderstand rather than to maintain this aspect of Luther’s theology.

It is vital to see that if Luther is here picking up a theme which became a classic of late Mediaeval thought (that of the « commerce » between Christ and the believer which exchanges their righteousness and their sins), he does so in a very different way from his predecessors. In the first place, Luther here employs a vocabulary which is shocking, even for his own age, when he speaks of the soul as « a little whore ». In doing so, he is no longer talking the language of academic theologians, but that of the common people. Next, the Reformer insists on the fact that this union comes about only « thanks to the bride’s ring, in other words thanks to faith » in the bridegroom’s promise. This point implies some important consequences from the theological point of view.

First of all, in underlining the importance of faith for salvation, Luther insists on what he will call « apprehensive » faith, in other words faith as believing appropriation. Without individual appropriation of what is at issue, it is impossible to have the reality of salvation; without recognising that what is said concerns me, there is no salvation.  Christ does not die to redeem the world in a kind of cosmic combat from which we are absent; for Luther, on the contrary, we are parties to this combat and we are so by faith. To put it another way: without the believer’s faith, Christ has died for nothing.

God can only really be known as God in Jesus Christ, in other words in the story of the life and death of a human being, but only if this knowing is realised in each one of us and, so to speak, the divine happens in us. Indeed Luther here becomes the spokesman of a real creative dynamic of encounter which leads from the « joyous exchange » to which we have referred to the definition of faith as « creating divinity »: « Faith consumes divinity, and it is, so to speak, creative of divinity, not in God, substantially, but in us. For if faith is not there, God loses in us his glory, his wisdom, his righteousness, his truth, his mercy, etc. All in all, if faith is not there, nothing is left to God of his majesty and of his divinity. »

Here again the formulation is paradoxical: how can the creative divinity be created and, moreover, created by human faith?  Obviously Luther does not say that we are called to create God. He puts it well: faith is creative of « divinity » and not « of God » and it does not thus create divinity « substantially » but « in us ». What he means is much rather that the divine happens in the world only in and through faith, that it is only because men and women believe that the reality of God becomes concrete, understandable, that it can be spoken and lived. There is therefore no existence of God apart from my faith, provided that I recognise in God a God who constantly encourages me to come out of myself and my reassuring prisons in order to make me discover the liberating character of faith.

That means that it is not possible to demand from me, as a believer, that I give my assent to this or that affirmation, which is believed to be true because it is revealed, without my feeling its truth for me – Luther’s famous pro me.  It is necessary, in other words, that what is said in the Gospel has to do with me and liberates me. We return here to the idea that theology does not exist in order to put forward a body of doctrines to which it is a question of adhering, but in order to speak about the lived reality of faith. And this also explains, I believe, the profound attachment to the free examination of Scripture which Protestantism was to develop, even if it is not spelled out in Luther’s statements: if I am not in a position to understand the thing of which the reality of God speaks to me, if I am not capable, therefore, of feeling myself affected by his word, the life and death of Christ will have no more consequence for me than knowing that Julius Caesar lived from 100-44 BCE. And it is precisely that which allows us to interpret the thought of Luther for today.  I would even go so far as to say that this is what makes us try to give a reading of his thought which takes account of the context in which we find ourselves today, rather than content ourselves with reproducing it slavishly – which would result in choosing what Tillich calls « the orthodox solution » and which I tend to think of as the easy way out.

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