Luther, Martin (1483–1546)
The diverse symbolic roles which Martin Luther has played in subsequent religious and cultural history have ensured continuing controversy over the development, structure, content and significance of his theological teaching. Modern Protestant and Catholic interpretations have, for different purposes, tended to stress the novelty of his theology over against the previous doctrinal, spiritual and theological traditions of the church. While this vein of interpretation has by no means been exhausted, contemporary research is also bringing into focus the rich and subtle ways in which Luther’s thought is embedded in wider traditions of Christian thought and practice.
Approach to theology. Luther’s early thought (c. 1514–18) is marked by his struggle for a new form of theological discourse, centred in a close reading of Scripture and oriented towards the preaching and pastoral life of the church. Luther thus brought the concerns of medieval monastic theology (e.g. *Bernard of Clairvaux) and vernacular theology (e.g. Tauler and the Theologia Germanica) into the university context. Like Bernard, Luther criticized scholastic tendencies to treat the conceptual elaboration of Christian belief as an end in itself; the aim of theology is rather to bring the apostolic word to bear transformatively on human life, to rebuke and console the conscience, as well to reform and build up the church. Theology so conceived is the attempt to identify and learn to practise the modus loquendi apostolicus, the ‘apostolic mode of discourse’, the distinctive logic and grammar of gospel proclamation.
These concerns brought Luther into conversation with humanism, whose hermeneutical organon he substantially appropriated. Yet despite his scorching attacks on the scholastic ‘sophists’, in some ways he remained more closely bound to the scholastic tradition than many of his contemporaries. While he collaborated with *Philip Melanchthon in the humanist reorganization of studies at Wittenberg, he never ceased to make creative use of the sophisticated analytical techniques acquired in his *Ockhamist schooling, putting the logical tools of *Scholasticism in service to the rhetorical and pastoral goals of the monastic and vernacular traditions. This continuing bond with Scholasticism bore fruit in his efforts to revitalize the custom of public theological disputation at the University of Wittenberg in the 1530s and 1540s.
Early developments. Along with these concerns, Luther’s early thought is characterized by a protracted engagement with the *Augustinian theology of grace, in the course of which he became alienated from the Ockhamist theology in which he had been formed. As Luther understood it, this teaching betrayed the Augustinian tradition at two crucial points. Though technically non-Pelagian, it made of grace only a qualification of good works which we can achieve by our own strength. Thus Ockhamist theology underestimated both the corruption of fallen humanity and the disruptively transforming effect of divine grace. Grace, Luther came to believe, is no mere qualification of the religious and moral achievement possible for human beings dominated by sin and the devil; it means the death of the ‘old Adam’ and the painful birth of a new humanity.
These were the concerns that Luther took into the struggle over indulgences, which exploded unexpectedly in the wake of his famous theses of 31 October 1517. Luther regarded indulgences chiefly as a cheap substitute for the pain of authentic transformation, and he saw deep connections between their popularity and the nominalist soteriology he had rejected in his academic work.
However, in the course of the conflict, Luther was forced to attend seriously to sacramental theology, perhaps for the first time, and to consider the role of the sacraments in the working of grace. While Luther’s development remains a focus of debate, many scholars believe that his thought achieved its mature configuration only after the indulgence controversy was underway, as the outcome of this new consideration of the sacraments. Key to the new dimension in his thought, on this view, is the doctrine of the outward word of the gospel, and the associated account of faith as confident trust in God’s promise.
Justification by faith alone. At the centre of Luther’s mature thought is the doctrine of justification sola fide, ‘by faith alone’, which Luther describes as the ‘chief article’, the criterion of authentic Christian teaching and practice. Yet ‘justification by faith alone’ turns out to summarize a teaching of considerable complexity, not so much a single doctrine as a way of understanding the coherence of Christian doctrine as a whole. Luther’s theology of justification juxtaposes two bodies of teaching in particular: teaching about Jesus Christ and teaching about the verbum externum, the ‘external’ or ‘bodily’ word, Luther’s code-phrases for the public ecclesial practices of preaching and sacrament. It is the specific interrelation of these themes that constitutes the distinctiveness of Luther’s doctrine of justification.
Luther teaches that we are saved by an alien justitia, often translated ‘alien righteousness’ but literally meaning ‘the righteousness of another person’. Luther insists very strongly that Christ himself, in the unity of his divine-human person, is the righteousness by which human beings are saved. This is connected with his central understanding of Christ as the one who is utterly pro nobis, ‘for us’. The Son of God has assumed mortal flesh and become the ally of sinners, not for his own sake, but for ours. His whole incarnate existence is thus sheer gift, sheer benefit to the needy. On the cross, Christ endured and overcame in his own person all that threatens sinful humankind—sin, death, God’s wrath and curse—and triumphed over them in the resurrection. ‘And so all who adhere to that flesh are blessed and freed from the curse’ (WA 40/1:451).
Luther therefore defines the faith by which we are saved as fides apprehensiva Christi, ‘a faith which takes hold of Christ’. Salvation involves an intimate union of the believer with Christ, not only a mental connection but a joining in ‘one body and flesh … so that his flesh is in us and our flesh is in him’ (WA 33:232). This union brings both free forgiveness and acceptance by God: ‘Faith justifies because it grasps and possesses this treasure, the present Christ … Therefore the Christ who is grasped by faith and dwells in the heart is the Christian righteousness on account of which God reckons us righteous and gives us eternal life’ (WA 40/1:229). Those who take hold of Christ by faith are received with him into the Father’s favour, their sins forgiven for Christ’s sake. At the same time, Christ’s presence does not leave believers unchanged; he lives and acts in them by the Spirit and grants them new life.
This all takes place by means of the ‘external word’, the preached and sacramentally enacted gospel of Christ. For Luther, the gospel is defined primarily by its Christological content; it is ‘a chronicle, history, or tale about Christ, who he is, what he has done, said, and suffered … a discourse about Christ, that he is God’s Son and became a human being for us, suffered and rose again, and has been appointed a lord over all things’(WA 10/I/1:9). But just because Christ is the one who is unreservedly ‘for us’, pro nobis, the telling of this tale is at the same time the conferral of a blessing, the presentation of a gift. Or as Luther likes to put it: this story constitutes a promise on God’s part which cannot be received by any answering achievement on our part but only acknowledged in thankful trust and confidence.
The preaching of the gospel and its enactment in the sacraments are the instruments of the Spirit by which he ‘brings us to the Lord Christ to receive the treasure’ (Large Catechism, Third Article of the Creed). Luther’s insistence on the work of the Spirit is the background for his denial of the ‘free choice of the will’ (liberum arbitrium), most uncompromisingly stated in The Bondage of the Will (1525). The freedom to respond to God in faith is not an abstract property of the individual, like the power to lift heavy objects; it is a freedom granted by the Spirit’s concrete intervention in a human life through the bodily word of the gospel.
Hearing and trusting this word of Christ, moreover, the believer encounters Christ himself and is joined to him. Without this concrete presence, Luther believed that the redemptive work of Christ in the flesh would lose its graciousness. We would be trapped in a new legalism, with the salvation won by Christ as the elusive prize that we must seek anxiously to appropriate by good works and devotion. To forestall this, the Spirit brings us the treasure of salvation, which is inseparable from Christ himself, and ‘lays it in our laps’ (Large Catechism, Third Article of the Creed) through the word and the sacraments. In this way faith is freed to be pure receptive acknowledgement of God’s mercy in the particularity of its bestowal.
Conflicts and controversy. The doctrine of justification thus construed is for Luther not so much a ‘systematic principle’ from which other teachings are derived as a constant critical reference point with which all other teaching and practice in the church must be co-ordinated. In his efforts to carry out the testing and sifting this implies, Luther entered into a series of conflicts in which various aspects of his thought underwent further development.
Luther initially came into conflict with the Roman See against his own expectations and intentions. Nevertheless, as the conflict escalated Luther accused the Roman Church not only of teaching a false doctrine of justification, but also of making false ecclesiological claims. Luther believed that the papacy claimed absolute authority to prescribe the doctrine and practice of the whole church, in such a way that whatever wastaught by the Roman See had authoritative force simply because it was taught by the Roman See. By contrast, Luther came to hold that formal authority in the church—authority inhering in a person, office or institution by virtue of its position within the Christian community—could only acquire legitimacy from its substantive faithfulness to the apostolic gospel, which all church authority is appointed to serve.
At the same time, Luther also rejected any absolute division of the church into rulers and ruled. Christ established the church not by endowing a special clerical group with power to form and govern a community in his name, but by entrusting the message of salvation to his apostles. The whole church has received the gospel, and with it the anointing of the Holy Spirit, from the apostolic company; the distinction between pastors and people, which Luther by no means wanted to erase, must be placed within the context of this common reception of salvation. This is Luther’s doctrine of the universal priesthood of the faithful; its theme is not so much the rights of the individual as rather the shared reality of salvation in Christ, Which is the foundation of the church. Authority in the church must be exercised in such a way as to acknowledge this shared relationship of all members of the body to Christ their head. Authentic church governance therefore seeks the ‘Amen’ of the Spirit-anointed people of God by its intelligible appeal to Holy Scripture as the authoritative word entrusted to the whole church.
By the mid-1520s, Luther was engaged in a whole series of new controversies on very different fronts. Most vehement was the conflict with a range of opponents, most prominently the Zurich Reformer *Ulrich Zwingli, who denied the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and who more broadly called into question the relation of faith to ‘external things’, such as preached words and sacramental signs. Luther believed that the gospel was just as much at stake in this conflict as in the conflict with Rome; without the concrete bestowal of Christ’s presence in public, bodily acts, faith is once again condemned to anxious insecurity. Or, as he wrote of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, an erstwhile faculty colleague who denied the Eucharistic presence: ‘he mocks us and brings us no further than to show us the holy thing in a glass or container. We can see it and smell it until we are full, indeed we may dream of it, but he does not give it to us, he doesn’t open it up, he doesn’t allow it to be our own’ (WA 18:203).
Luther was also alarmed in these years by the emergence of anti-Trinitarian groups, and he devoted much attention from the close of the 1520s until the end of his life to working out the interrelations of the theology of justification and the ecumenical Trinitarian and Christological doctrines. This concern can be seen especially in his extended expositions of Johannine texts from those years, but it is also visibly present in the great Commentary on Galatians of 1535.
Mention should be made also of Luther’s involvement with the Saxon Church Visitation of 1528, an official inspection of the parishes of Electoral Saxony. The ignorance and disorder brought to light thereby brought home to Luther in a powerful way that legalistic works-righteousness was not the only enemy with which an evangelical theology had to contend. This experience was an important motivation for the writing of the two Catechisms of 1529, undoubtedly the writings by which Luther has exercised the widest influence in subsequent history. It is remarkable that the Small Catechism, intended to be taught to the lay faithful, never speaks explicitly about justification by faith; the point of the doctrine is communicated indirectly in an exposition of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments.
Moreover, the emphasis on repentance and the Decalogue to which the Church Visitation brought Luther and the other Wittenberg theologians provoked a bitter controversy years later (in 1539) with Johannes Agricola of Eisleben, originally a close adherent of Luther’s. Agricola taught that divine law had no place in the proclamation of the church. God in Christ meets sinners with no demand but only with the sheer mercy embodied in the crucified. Luther argued in response that the good news of God’s mercy in Christ was only intelligible in the context of the condemnation of sinners under the law. Therefore the law must be proclaimed precisely for the sake of the gospel. Furthermore, Christ by his death on the cross has not only merited forgiveness of sins for us; he has also gained for us the gift of the Spirit so that we might begin to obey the law. Thus the gospel of Christ makes it possible for us to love the commandments of God, despite our sin; Christ’s office, Luther says, is not to abolish the law but to ‘render the law pleasing and undefiled’ (WA 39/1:372–3).
A legacy of tensions. Luther’s greatest influence has undoubtedly been exercised through the Catechisms, in the nurture of faith and the formation of life far beyond the academic sphere. For theology, however, Luther’s legacy has been controversial from the first; both by its own internal complexity, and through its involvement with epochal historical shifts, it has often seemed a legacy chiefly of acute tensions, a few of which should be noted.
The doctrine of justification notoriously gives rise to critiques of church teaching and church practice: do they promote trust in Christ alone or do they deflect trust from Christ to human achievement or indeed to the church’s own institutions and officers? Yet this critique does not lead Luther, as it has some Protestants, to disengage salvation from church, so that ‘faith alone’ becomes synonymous with ‘private experience alone’. For Luther, salvation remains tied to public ecclesial practice, to preaching and sacramental rites. The result is a tension between critique and affirmation of the visible ecclesial community that is by no means easy to negotiate.
A related tension is that between continuity and discontinuity in Christian history. Luther’s critical posture towards the existing western church took extreme and apocalyptic shape in his belief that the papacy as an institution was the antichrist prophesied in Scripture. Yet, for Luther, salvation itself depended on the continuous integrity of core ecclesial practice, on the ongoing presence of the true gospel and the sacraments in the church through time. Therefore Luther found himself arguing that the Roman Church was both the dominion of antichrist and the vehicle through which the gospel had been brought into his own day. He thus came into conflict with both the traditionalism of his Roman opponents and the radicalism of those for whom the Roman provenance of a practice was already reason to reject it.
On another front, Luther’s thought generates tension concerning the relationship between faith and renewal of life. We never have confidence in God on the basis of any achievements or qualifications of our own; Christ alone remains our righteousness. Our good works in themselves are never more than Isaiah’s ‘filthy rags’ (Is. 64:6). Yet the faith that grasps Christ as its righteousness can never leave the believer unchanged; believers are joined to Christ by faith and Christ is neither weak nor idle. The believer is therefore both ‘a sinner and righteous at the same time’ (simul peccator et iustus), which means both ‘still defiled inwardly but accepted by God for Christ’s sake’, and ‘truly transformed but no less utterly dependent on the undeserved mercy of God in Christ’.
Finally, there is the tension in Luther’s thought between law and gospel. The gospel is the word which presents Christ as God’s gift of righteousness. Law, by contrast, makes known the will of God without providing for its accomplishment. If heard accurately, it is a death sentence on sinful humanity; if distorted, it motivates the doomed quest for self-justification. Yet, as we have seen, Luther does not draw the conclusion that the church should proclaim gospel and renounce law. Both modes of discourse are necessary in a complex interplay that responds equally to the inner dynamics of Scripture and the diverse modes of human confusion and misery. The resulting tension between critique and affirmation of the discourse of law has been another of Luther’s enduring legacies.
David S. Yeago
FURTHER READING: Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (ed.), Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids, 1998), the most challenging recent departure in Luther-interpretation; Martin Brecht, Martin Luther (3 vols.; Philadelphia, 1985—), standard and extensive biography; Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis, 1999), will now be the standard overview; Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (New Haven, 1989), lively study emphasizing Luther’s apocalypticism; Otto Hermann Pesch, Hinführung zu Luther (Mainz, 1983), ecumenically-oriented study by an important Roman Catholic interpreter; Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, 1959), still the best study in English of this controversy—important corrective to interpretations of Luther which focus too exclusively on the controversy with Rome; Jared Wicks, Luther’s Reform: Studies on Conversion and the Church (Mainz, 1992), lucid essays by one of the most important Roman Catholic interpreters of Luther.
WA Weimarer Ausgabe. D. Martin Luthers Warke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar