Lutheran Irony (no, not that kind)

There's a concept known as "Lutheran irony" which refers to the characteristically Lutheran idea that whenever we are behaving most religiously (striving to be pious) we are at our most vulnerable spiritually, because our pride weakens our dependence on Christ. That's not the topic of this post.

I noticed something else last night that involves Luther and those who have followed him spiritually and seems to me to be rather ironic. That's what I want to talk about.

I was reading David Brondos' book, Fortress Introduction to Salvation and the Cross, specifically the chapter on Luther. Brondos writes:

For years, Luther wrestled with deep-seated feelings of guilt and with his enemy the devil, convinced that he needed to overcome the powers of sin and Satan in himself in order to achieve the standard of righteousness demanded by God for salvation. Yet no matter how hard he tried and how harshly he disciplined himself, he felt that his efforts were in vain and that he remained under God's wrath. Finally, however, through his study of the Scriptures, most notably Paul's epistles, Luther encountered another God, a God who forgave sins and accepted sinners out of pure grace and mercy through his Son, Jesus Christ.

That's a fairly standard and, I believe, accurate summary of Luther's major transformation.

The thing that occurred to me as I read this was that a very large number of people who see themselves as Luther's spiritual heirs -- not only, or even primarily, Lutherans, but evangelicals in general -- seem to have a theology that assumes that the young Luther who lived in fear of God's wrath was basically right. The common evangelical theology presumes a God who, apart from the sacrifice made by Jesus Christ, would be a wrathful judge who condemned every living person for failing to meet the perfect moral standard of the Law.

What's up with that?!?

That's about as far as I got last night in Brondos' book, so I don't know what he's going to say about it.

Thinking back on my own reading of Luther, I'm not sure that the post-tower-experience Luther would have completely agreed with this idea. When he talks about looking upon God "naked" -- as opposed to clothed in Christ -- it might seem like he would agree, but he constantly tells us that we shouldn't attempt to know or understand this "naked" God. I'm not sure he would have agreed that God is "really" like that.

But regardless of what Luther thought, why would we still be carrying around that medieval image of God? Is this the image of God that Jesus offers us? I really don't think so.

Now someone will say that most mainline denominations don't employ or endorse this sort of thinking. That may be so but (a) too often they don't offer anything substantial in its place (i.e. they just don't talk about salvation), so (b) many of the people in the pews pick this up from other sources.

Beyond that, what really surprised me as I thought about this is that while I have a strong reflex reaction against it, I don't think I've completely cleared it from my own theological closet. I think I still have it in there somewhere, like a box of stuff I'm keeping in case I need it some day.

But it's wrong, isn't it?

Justification by Faith: A Case Study in Biblical Authority

In my previous post, I explored the idea of the authority of the Bible. I suggested that the authority of the Bible is more like the authority of wine than it is like the authority of a constitution. That is, its authority lies precisely in its ability to transform the reader and that for purposes of authority it should not be treated as an objective document which may be consulted and from which judgments may be derived.

I can't remember if I said that this is the authority the Bible should have or that's the authority the Bible does, in fact, have. It occurred to me last night that the latter is most certainly true, whether we pretend the Bible's authority is something else or not. It also seemed to me that a brief case study was in order.

I'd like to look at the question of justification by faith during the Reformation.

Although there are those who would rather die than admit this, there is a growing consensus that Luther was wrong about his idea of imputed righteousness. If this is indeed the case, would we then conclude that the Protestant cause in general was wrong? No.

Look at the way the story of Luther is always told: Luther was a diligent monk, struggling against a troubled conscience. In great fear over the certainty of his salvation, he wrestled over and over with the scriptures, until one glorious day while wrestling with Paul's letter to the Romans he discovered the glorious truth that it is by God's righteousness, and not our own that we are justified (insert sound of angels singing here).

Now granted that Luther was wrong, he was wrong precisely here at this most pivotal moment in the development of his Reformation insight. But consider, the above story is based entirely on how Luther himself told the story after his theology had completely gelled. Of course, the truth was more complicated than that.

I'm saying that Luther's actual discovery was more basic than what he later claimed. I'm saying that the heart of Luther's insight was that God loves sinners, not (only?) the righteous. And in this regard he was completely correct. Having received this light, Luther was totally transformed and invigorated enough to challenge the theology of his day to bring this good news to all who would listen. A movement was formed and "the Word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed" as Acts 19:20 says.

Of course, there were those who held a vested interest in the theology of his day, and they immediately set people to the task of figuring out what was wrong with Luther's reading of the Bible. Now, as these scholars were studying to prepare their opposition, they latched on to the truth that God transforms sinners, and they propagated this Biblical truth to all who would listen, and again "the Word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed" in a movement now known as the Counter Reformation (or Catholic Reformation, if you prefer).

It turns out that both of these basic insights were Biblically sound, and so both could be defended by referencing the Bible as though it were a dogmatic document, but both were cast in theologies which were not quite so Biblically sound, and so neither was unassailable from that same perspective. And so the "Bible-as-document" model of Biblical authority left us with a huge gaping wound in the Church.

However, in spite of this, because the Bible actually exercises its authority through transformed lives, both sides of this gaping wound thrived and grew and brought renewal to the Church, at least until the leaders who affiliated themselves with these movements managed to use the conflict as an occasion for deadening the faith of many.

Biblical Interpretation and Authority.

A friend recently dropped me a note in response to some thoughts I had shared with him about biblical interpretation. Like me, he's from a Protestant background but loves the Catholic tradition. He said he's basically torn between "believing that Petrine doctrine is the only way out of the theological mess" or "agreeing with Luther that individuals reading the text with the guidance of the inner light is the only way to subjectively legitimize interpretations."

Now, I'm not sure Luther really felt the need for "the guidance of inner light." As I read him, he seemed to think that the literal meaning of scripture was plain for everyone to see and anyone who didn't read it like him was clearly succumbing to the leading of the devil. Luther was easy to get along with like that. On the other hand, my friend is a scholar of comparative religions, and I know he doesn't really believe the Petrine doctrine in a literal way any more than I do.

So that had me mulling things over again. What does the Bible really mean, and who says so?

On the one hand, I'm a bit of a Luther fanboy, and I tend to agree with him on the fact that the meaning of scripture is plain enough. On the other hand, fanboy or no, I disagree with him on an awful lot of the fine points of his reading, so it's kind of silly for me to agree with him on simply reading the plain meaning. On the third hand, the backdrop to the above mentioned discussion was a comment I had made of a bit from the Foreward of Pope Benedict's book Jesus of Nazareth in which he talks about the process by which the community gathered around the sacred texts reinterprets the texts, and how this is good and reasonable because the text created the community and the community created the text and so the text was somehow open to the reinterpretation all along. So there's something there of an ecclesial authority in interpreting the text which I believe and accept.

But the more I think about it, the more I think the problem is with how we try to locate authority relative to the Bible. We say the Bible is the final authority on matters of faith and doctrine, which I hope we understand to really mean that God speaking through the Bible is the final authority on matters of faith and doctrine. But the really big problem is that our interpretation of the Bible tends to become the de facto authority which we are trying to follow.

That is, we recognize the authority of the Bible and tip our hat to it, and we try as diligently as we are able to uncover the meaning of the Bible, and then we effectively legislate our behavior on the basis of the meaning we arrive at as our best guess at the meaning. This is essentially the logical outcome of the Protestant model, and I'm going on record right now saying it's wrong.

So what's the alternative?

First, let me suggest that in try to arrive at the meaning of the Bible, we're already a bit off track. The Church has long recognized multiple meanings embedded in Scripture. Some of these have been dismissed in modern times as silly, pious imagination. Nevertheless, as modern reading has given way to post-modern reading, we've been forced to acknowledge the simple fact that words, inspired and otherwise, tend not to have a single meaning.

And so I think we do well to look back at the history of how the Church has read various passages and see what may be gleaned from it. I think we also do well to consult Jewish traditions. And we do well to try to come at the text fresh (as if such a thing were possible) and hear it with new ears and respond. In all of these ways we will find many treasures, old and new (Matthew 13:52).

Does the Bible really mean all these things? Maybe. Maybe not. I think perhaps we should look at biblical interpretation as being somehow akin to wine tasting. A person can pick up a glass of wine, take a gulp and glibly say, "It tastes like wine." But an experienced wine taster may come along side and suggest that this person look for the hint of fruitiness in the finish. And perhaps the person takes another sip and finds this fruitiness. And so on. Merely having heard the suggestion of what's there gives us the ability to discern it where perhaps we did not before.

So that's interpretation. But what about authority?

I'd like to suggest that the authority of the Bible is also more like the authority of wine than it is like the authority of a constitution. Wine exercises its authority by the mere fact of having been imbibed. Even so with the Bible. The authority of the Bible is, and should be, in the effect it has upon us, the way in which it can transform us, not as something we can point to in order to support our arguments or to justify ourselves. It may be that I have misunderstood the meaning of the Bible, but in the act of engaging it and seeking it's meaning, I am transformed. It may have more to say to me, and the same passage may have more work to do with me, but having been transformed to the extent I have, I am to act as I have been led.

And so when I apply this to a controversial issue, such as same sex relationships, it's a mistake to lay out a list of verses and say, "These are the passages which justify my position." Instead, I can simply say, "Jesus calls me to love my neighbor, and this is what that seems to me to mean," and I am more genuinely placing authority in God through Scripture than if I were to cite chapter and verse.

You and I may even arrive at different positions in this way. That's OK, I think. We're not done. As long as we're both still opening ourselves to the authority of the Scripture and the action of the Holy Spirit upon us, we'll be moving, I hope, in the right direction.

Christ, Our Righteousness

I said in a previous post, "the key insight of the Reformation was that Christ is our righteousness." Some interesting discussion followed along the lines of just how far the word "our" could be stretched here.

In the new Finnish interpretation of Luther, this idea that Christ is our righteousness is pushed to its uttermost limits. In saying that Christ is present in faith itself, the Finns are claiming that our standing with God is a result of the presence of Christ in and with (and under?) the believer. The believer is treated as righteous by God because the believer, finally, is Christ.

This is taken to have some connection to the Orthodox doctrine of theosis. Athanasius said, "God became man so that man might become God." Luther said (in his lectures on Galatians), "Faith makes a man God."

One of the big difficulties with the Finnish position is that it requires us to believe that while Luther held these pseudo-Orthodox beliefs, they immediately disappeared with nary a trace in susequent Lutheranism. But there is one trace. Tuomo Mannermaa in Christ Present in Faith points to the Osiandrian Controversy.

For those without an obbsession with 16th century Lutheran dogmatics, the Osiandrian Controversy was one of the disputes meant to be settled by the Formula of Concord. Andreas Osiander disliked the idea of imputed justification. Against this idea, Osiander taught that God actually makes a Christian just through the indwelling of Christ. He was apparently opposed in this by everyone from Phillip Melancthon to Martin Chemnitz. The controversy is addressed in Article III of the Formula of Concord.

According to Mannermaa, the Formula got it wrong and thus led to the disjunction between Luther and later Lutheranism.

But Article III of the Formula of Concord provides some interesting material for reflection, particularly with regard to my claim above that "the key insight of the Reformation was that Christ is our righteousness."

In the Epitome, the FC does state clearly that "Christ alone is our Righteousness" (Article III, paragraph 1), but it is concerned with the question of what this means. This article rejects the idea that either Christ is our righteousness only according to his divine nature (the view attriubuted to Osiander) or that Christ is our righteousness only according to his human nature. The article says that Christ is our righteousness according to both natures, but then it adds "in His obedience alone." That is, it is our righteousness consists in have Christ's obedience imputed to us. At the risk of having my Lutheran membership card taken away, I'm not sure I buy this.

The Formula claims that "our righteousness before God is [this very thing], that God ... presents and imputes to us the righteousness of Christ's obedience." This has solidified into dogma in some circles. For instance, Reformed teacher Michael Horton can be heard to propound that we are saved by works, but we are saved by Christ's works not our own, Christ having fulfilled the "covenant of works" which Adam did not. This strikes me as very non-Lutheran (which is fine for Dr. Horton), but this section of the FC would seem to support it.

On the other hand, this same article of the FC-Ep says that "faith alone is the means and instrument whereby we lay hold of Christ, and thus in Christ of that righteousness which avails before God." Now this I like, and I think it has much ressonance with the Finnish idea.

The idea that we are accounted as righteous because Christ's obedience is imputed to us strikes me as theological bookkeeping. I dare say it is a theology of glory sneaking into the Lutheran confessions and becoming dogma. Against this, I much prefer the proclamation that in faith we "lay hold of Christ."

I confess to being somewhat wary of the language of Christ being present in me. There's a problem of scale here. I know that in the Sacrament we see that the finite is capable of bearing the infinite, but there would seem to be a danger here of slipping into what Mark Allan Powell calls "the image of the Microscopic Jesus" -- the idea that I may have "a very tiny Jesus inside me (sitting on that throne in my heart)." Or, much worse, the idea lends itself to the gnostic idea of a "divine spark" within each of us.

I prefer, instead, the perspective of finding myself in Christ (Col. 3:3). But I think this amounts to the same thing as the Finnish idea. And so, I would like to say (against the Formula of Concord) that our righteousness before God is this very thing, that we are found in Christ and Christ in us.

The Invisible Things of God

Thomas Adams at Without Authority has put up some good posts recently on the subject of natural theology. Most recently he has undertaken to swim the heady waters of the debate as it flowed between Brunner, Barth and Tillich. But me, I'm Old School, so I thought I'd offer some thoughts from Luther.

Given the extended nature of my comments, it seemed best to me to chime in here and not just in the comments there (but do check out Thomas' blog for some good theological reflection).

Luther touches on a point that seems to me to be relevant to the Brunner-Barth debate in his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation (my favorite of Luther's works). In thesis 19 he says:

That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.

Other translations read "created things" in place of "those things which have actually happened." Now, on the face of it, this seems to be a direct contradiction of St. Paul in Romans 1:20 ("Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made."), but it is clear from Luther's "proof" that he is intentionally going for shock value. His proof states:

This is apparent in the example of those who were "theologians" and still were called fools by the Apostle in Rom. 1[:22]. Furthermore, the invisible things of God are virtue, godliness, wisdom, justice, goodness, and so forth. The recognition of all these things does not make one worthy or wise.

So, it would seem that Luther grants a "point of contact" in nature, such that God may be perceived in nature (or in "those things that have actually happened"), but he maintains, on the authority of the apostle, that we would be fools to seek to know God that way. When we seek to know God that way, we are seeking the "naked God", as Luther says, rather than God clothed in his promises. What we find may lead us to knowledge about God, but we will never meet God in such a way and certainly not know God.

Luther's proof above raises an interesting parallel to Abraham Heschel's thoughts on the message of the prophets. Heschel maintains that the prophets have no intention of expounding the value of abstract ideals which God happens to possess as attributes. The prophets do not wish to educate us about "virtue, godliness, wisdom, justice, goodness, and so forth." Rather, they wish to introduce us to a God whose nature is manifested in virtue, justice, goodness, and so forth. Their primary intention is that we know God, not that we know God's attributes.

And this, I think, is the sought after "point of contact." The point of contact is the God who comes down, the God who comes to us in the world. In vain do we search for God in human things. Nevertheless, in human things God comes to us. We may meet God in relationship but never in analytic inquiry.

"Do this"

In his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 Luther offers the following thesis:

The law says "Do this", and it is never done. Grace says, "believe this" and everything is already done.

I wonder where this leaves us in terms of obedience to the command of Christ. When Luther says, "everything is already done" is he referring to the finished work of Christ on the cross, or is he saying that when grace creates faith all that is necessary for obedience to Christ is done?

Elsewhere (in his preface to Romans), Luther describes faith as follows

Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn't stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever.

It is quite commonly claimed that Luther himself didn't teach the Third Use of the Law. I've argued elsewhere that the Third Use is really just a special case of the First Use. If all we're accomplishing is doing things that look right, then this is no different from maintaining civil order. Consequently, I've tended to disregard the Third Use of the Law. But now I think I've been wrong about that.

As I said in the comments on my previous entry, I think Lutheranism (and Christianity more generally) needs a fresh exposition of the Third Use of the Law. Karl Barth talks about "grace in the form of a command." I understand this as being something like, "God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light." Likewise, Christ says, "Follow me," and Matthew follows.

"The Law says, 'Do this', and it is never done." But once Christ and faith are in the picture do we not have the possibility of a scenario where Christ says "Do this" and it is done?

Luther

It occurred to me this morning, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone else has commented on this previously, that Martin Luther was the world's first blogger. It has been estimated that during his life Luther was the author of anywhere between a quarter and half of all printed material in Europe, and they say the printers began printing the first pages of his essays before he had even written the last pages. Straight from his mind to the printed page with no editing, rethinking or revising -- is this not the essence of blogging?

Spiritual Running

We must remember that a thousand years is as but a day in the eyes of the Lord.

In his Lectures on Galatians, commenting on Gal. 5:7 ("You were running well."), Luther says:

To us, of course, it sems that everything is moving ahead slowly and with great difficulty; but what seems slow to us is rapid in the sight of God, and what hardly crawls for us runs swiftly for him. Likewise what is sorrow, sin and death in our eyes is joy, righteousness and life in the eyes of God for the sake of Christ, through whom we are made perfect.

How much spiritual progress have you made in the past 10 years? In God's eyes, it was accomplished in a few minutes. What we must do, we must do quickly for our time is short, but what God is doing is done without rush. Even our failures teach us, and when the Lord builds the house, no labor is in vain.

This thought gave me some solace as I looked back at how Lent has gone as compared to how I had hoped. Perhaps it will be of some comfort to you as well.

Christ Present in Faith

I found out tonight that my church's adult education committee will, in fact, let me lead a class on anything I want. As of tonight, I'm on the schedule to lead a two week study on the new Finnish interpretation of Martin Luther's theology.

I've recently taken a hiatus from my journey through Fred Copleston's History of Philosophy in order to read Tuomo Mannermaa's Christ Present in Faith: Luther's View of Justification. It's quite a fascinating book.

The idea started when Dr. Mannermaa was asked to find a point of contact between Lutheran theology and Russian Orthodox theology. Now, it turns out that there is quite a lot of overlap to be found there, but for whatever reason, Dr. Mannermaa wanted to find contact specifically in the area of justification (probably because it is "the article on which the Church stands or falls"). And what he found was, that if you take Luther's words ontologically (for instance, when he says "in faith, Christ himself is present") you can discover throughout Luther's writings a harmony between his view of justification and the Orthodox view of theosis.

In the bit I was reading tonight Mannermaa was talking about the communicatio idiomatum (communication of attributes) that shows up frequently under various names in Luther's writings -- not the communicatio idiomatum between the two natures of Christ, but an analogous transfer of properties between Christ and Christians. This is the "happy exchange" taken to the nth degree. It's well agreed among Protestants that Christ took our sins on himself and we get his righteousness. But this isn't generally understood ontologically, which is the shift Mannermaa proposes. Christ is our righteousness!

Although Mannermaa doesn't cite this example in the book, the passage that jumped out in my mind is from Luther's later description of his "tower experience":

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: "The righteousness of God is revealed in it, as it is written: 'He who through faith is righteous shall live.'" I began to understand that in this verse the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the righteousness of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive righteousness, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: "He who through faith is righteous shall live." All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

The classical Protestant understanding of "the righteousness of God" is that of imputed righteousness, so that in the above passage we might just as well read "the righteousness of God ... that by which God declares us righteous." But notice that the rest of the passage doesn't make any sense read that way. God doesn't declare us wise, or declare us strong, or declare us to have worked.... On the other hand, if you read this as Luther talking about a kind of communicatio idiomatum, it all falls into place!