GRACE, GIFT, AND THE “AUGUSTINIAN SIMUL”
We come now to the heart of my argument in this book: in the present chapter expositing the mature Luther’s dogmatics of holiness, then in Part II exploring its roots in the young Luther’s appropriation of the old Augustine’s theology of sin, grace, and holiness. Since in chapter 1.4 I have already introduced the dogmatic subject matter to be taken up at length here, I can afford to be relatively brief in this introduction. My principal object is to set forth Luther’s creedal and evangelical theology of forgiveness and justification in Jesus Christ (gratia/Gnade) and regeneration and progressive renewal in holiness of life by the Holy Spirit (donum/Gabe); and to do so attending carefully to the kind of “sin” which
characterizes the saints of God as they live, suffer, and fight in via under the covering of Christ’s great grace and in the strength of the Spirit’s effectual gift. In process, I have three subordinate goals in mind as well: first, to drawn attention to the scriptural exegesis that informs and shapes Luther’s dogmatics; second, to highlight the robust economic trinitarianism that is virtually co-extensive with this scriptural dogmatics;
third, to bring to light the reality and nature of the renewed spiritual agency which the Holy Spirit brings about in the saints of God by his gift. A few comments on these three ancillary aims will, I think, help to elucidate my approach in this chapter.
In the first two points, I stand close to Ulrich Asendorf both in his critique of much modern historical and dogmatic theology and in his proposed alternative.
Discussing Gerhard Ebeling’s influential work on Luther’s hermeneutics, Asendorf states that as a rule, “the more abstract one’s understanding of the Word, the greater
the possibility that the interpreter is removed from Luther and his biblical fullness.”220 That strikes me as exactly right; and one concrete way to counteract this scholarly flaw is to attend with great care to the proof-texts that Luther appeals to as he argues theologically, rather than skipping on (as is the scholarly fashion) past his scriptural premises to the conclusions he reaches thereby. The better we become at listening to Luther as he listens to the Word of God, the deeper our grasp of his response to that Word—i.e., his theology—will become; and beyond the real gains to be had in
historical comprehension, this increased proximity to the Word will better position us to critically assess both the strengths and the weaknesses of Luther’s dogmatics in lumine scripturae.221
As to the second point: Asendorf speaks of the older Luther’s growing concern to integrate Scripture and Dogma, the result being a lively, dramatic, and “integral theology” that echoes the Bible’s polyphony and revolves around the cantus firmus of Gen. 3:15; and for Luther, a kind of patristic exegete born out of season, the
Protevangelium is empty and lifeless apart from the rich trinitarian christology that he finds hidden in the enigmatic promise of an eternal redemption through the mortal human Seed of Eve which only the true and living God himself could ever possibly accomplish.222 In the course of his own meditations on Luther’s exegesis of Gen. 3:15,
220 Asendorf, Lectura in Biblia, 14.
221 Cf. Luther’s 1539 Preface to the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings (WA 50.657.25-30, cf. LW 34.284): “Neither Councils, Fathers, nor we, in spite of the greatest and best success possible, will do as well as the Holy Scripture, that is, as well as God himself has done. Though we also must have the Holy Spirit, faith, divine speech and work, as that we may be blessed, so that we may let the Prophets and Apostles sit in the professor’s lectern while we, here below at their feet, hear what they say; we do not say what they must hear.”
222 Asendorf, Lectura in Biblia, 11-14. Luther’s comments on the traditioning of the promise to St.
Abraham at Gen. 12:1-3 are especially illuminating in this regard. Referring twice to John 8:56, Luther engages in bold midrashic speculation on the inferential reasoning of Abraham the
Asendorf draws on Albrecht Peters’ great Kommentar zu Luthers Katechismen to establish this point; and even if one must decline Asendorf and Peters’ suggestion that Luther’s resolute focus on the saving economy of God in Christ signals a return past die augustinisch-scholastischen Trinitätsspekulationen back to die altkirchlichen Trinitätstheologie exemplified by the Cappadocian fathers—since, on the one hand, Augustine’s and Thomas’ speculations were deeply grounded in the biblical economy of salvation, and on the other Basil, the two Gregories, and Luther were all keenly interested in speculative trinitarian theology—still, I think they are quite right to say that Luther’s relentless attention to the biblical Zentrum of the gospel led to an enriched trinitarianism as a matter of course.223 In Luther’s mature theology of God’s free bestowal of grace in Christ and renewal by his Spirit’s gift, we shall see this
reinvigoration of a scriptural, evangelical, and catholic trinitarianism on full display.224
theologian. Abraham “understood the promise beautifully” for “he reasoned (ratiocinatus est)” (WA 42.448.17-18, LW 2.261) in the following way: First, the promise clearly states that through Abraham all the nations of the earth will experience “blessing”: specifically, blessing to overcome the curse that entered upon the human race because of original sin. Thus Abraham correlates the new promise of Gen. 12:3 with the original promise of Gen. 3:15, interpreted with the help of the curse/blessing contrast elaborated by St. Paul in Gal. 3:10-14 (WA 44.448.3-5, LW 2.261). The curse of sin, death, and damnation that afflicts the entire human race is to be removed, somehow, “in”
Abraham, and replaced with the blessing of forgiveness, life, and salvation. Abraham knows this cannot possibly come to pass through his own person, for two reasons: first, he is mortal, and second, he is himself a sinner saved by sheer mercy. Therefore, the promise must refer to one of his heirs, the “Seed” (cf. Gen. 22:18) who will be such a Man as to be blessed in his own person (per se benedictus) and thus without need of the blessing of another. But in order to bring blessing to the entire world, this human offspring of Abraham must necessarily be true God at the same time. He therefore concludes his vaguely Anselmian logic: “He must necessarily be God and not a human being, although He will be a human being and will take on our flesh so that He is truly my seed”
(WA 42.447.20-29, LW 2.260). Thus Abraham reasoned, on the basis of Gen. 12:3’s promise of
“blessing” (and back of it, the first promise of Gen. 3:15), to the fully-orbed doctrine of the two natures in Christ’s person that encompasses the mysterium incarnationis filii Dei (WA 42.448.17, LW 2.261).
223 See Asendorf, 73, and Albrecht Peters, Kommentar zu Luthers Katechismen. Bd. 2: Der Glaube—
Das Apostolikum, 39-50.
224 On the depth of Luther’s creedal catholicity, see G. Kretschmar, “Die altkirchliche Tradition in der evangelischen Kirche,” in Tradition und Glaubensgerechtigkeit: Das Arnoldshainer Gespräch zwischen Vertretern der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland und der Russischen Orthodoxen Kirche
The creedal and richly trinitarian dogmatics of holiness that I read in Luther’s texts puts me at odds with some major currents in the scholarship. In the first place, for Luther the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ is unintelligible apart from the revelation of God’s just judgment and fierce wrath against sin through the law. Since
condemnation to death and hell at the hands of God’s justice is the great and
fundamental disaster facing fallen mankind, the satisfaction of God’s justice through the merciful donation of his own Son pro nobis in the cradle and on the cross—and above all, the shedding of his blood as our substitute—stands at the heart of the gospel of grace (Rom. 1:18-3:26, 8:1-4). The verbum crucis is not in vogue today,225 but
im Oktober 1959 (Witten, 1961), 21-7; Simo Peura, “Das Sich-Geben Gottes: Die Trinitätslehre als integrales Problem der Theologie Martin Luthers,” in Luther und die trinitarische Tradition:
Ökumenische und philosophische Perspektiven (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag, 1994), 131-46;
David Yeago, “The Bread of Life: Patristic Christology and Evangelical Soteriology in Martin Luther’s Sermons on John 6,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 39/3 (1995), 257-79; Simo Knuuttila and Risto Saarinen, “Innertrinitarische Theologie in der Scholastik und bei Luther,” in Oswald Bayer, Robert W. Jenson, and Simo Knuuttila, eds., Caritas Dei: Beiträge zum Verständnis Luthers und der gegenwärtige Ökumene (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola Gesellschaft, 1997), 243-64;
Christine Helmer, The Trinity and Martin Luther: A Study of the Relationship between Genre, Language, and the Trinity in Luther’s Works (1523-1546) (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1999);
Christoph Markschies, “Luther und die altkirchlichen Trinitätstheologie,” in idem and Michael Trowitzsch, eds., Luther—zwischen den Zeiten: Eine Jenaer Ringvorlesung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 37-85; Pekka Kärkkäinen, Luthers trinitarische Theologie des Heiligen Geistes (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2005); Dennis Bielfeldt, Mickey L. Mattox, and Paul R. Hinlicky, The Substance of Faith: Luther’s Doctrinal Theology for Today (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008); David J. Luy, Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014).
225 Cf. Matt. 16:21-3, Rom. 1:16-17, 9:30-10:4, 1 Cor. 1:17-2:5, Gal 5:11, 6:11-14, and Phil. 3:18. To take one important example: Oswald Bayer’s 31 Oct. 2003 lecture before the Evangelical Faculty at Tübingen, which posed the timely question “Was ist evangelisch?” and attempted to supply an answer that we could “stake our life on with utter certainty in life and death,” reflects a general tendency toward theologies of justification abstracted from the concrete reality of the flesh, blood, cross, and resurrection of the Son of God. But for Luther, these concrete realities constitute the material content of the gospel promise—viz., the doctrina evangelii—and, as such, the object sine qua non of justifying faith. Thus Luther on Gen. 15:6, WA 42.567.23-4, LW 3.26: “Every promise of God includes Christ; for if it is separated from this Mediator, God is not dealing with us at all.” See Bayer, “What is Evangelical? The Continuing Validity of the Reformation,” trans. Jeffrey G. Silcock, in LQ 25 (2011): 1-15. This inattention to the real Jesus Christ, true God and Man in one Person, nailed to the cross for our sins and raised for our justification, is, I think, a structural flaw in Bayer’s 2003 book on Martin Luther’s Theology. In e.g. cp. 10.3.2 (“Christ’s Nature is His Work—Christ’s Work is His Nature”), Bayer interweaves passages from the Large and Small Catechisms: “That now is the summa of this article, that the little word ‘Lord’ simply means the same as ‘Redeemer,’ that is, he
these dogmatic themes cannot be avoided without running the risk of a serious historical misapprehension of Luther’s mature doctrine of “grace.” No presentation of Luther’s theology of holiness that minimizes the cross of Christ and the free gift of righteousness won by it (and given freely to faith) can do real justice to the Reformer’s actual position. Rather than arguing for the reality of renewal in holiness at free justification’s expense, I follow Luther’s texts in emphasizing both; and perhaps I will find a few salty amici crucis (or even a Bluttheologe like Joachim Mörlin) amongst my readers.226
The deep trinitarianism of Luther’s dogmatics of holiness cuts against another and perhaps more surprising grain in the scholarship. There is a tendency in some
who brought us back from the devil to God, from death to life, from sin to righteousness, and keeps us there” (p. 232, LC, BSLK, 1056.18-20, BC, 434), then “who has redeemed me, a lost and
condemned person, acquired, won from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil… with his holy, precious blood and with his innocent suffering and death” (p. 233, SC, BSLK, 872.4-7, BC, 355). Well and good; but Bayer dances around the quite explicit and concrete teaching of the LC on (1) God’s wrath against sin, and the sentence of eternal damnation which fallen human beings have merited and deserved (BSLK, 1056.6-9, BC, 434), and (2) the satisfaction Christ rendered through his death: “He became man, conceived and born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin, free from all sin, so that he would be the Lord of sin; to that end he suffered, died, and was buried, so that he might make satisfaction (gnug thete) for me and pay what I had owed, not with silver or gold but with his own precious blood [1 Pet. 1:18-9]” (BSLK, 1056.24-9, BC, 434). Bayer’s omissions are telling in themselves: but in his comments on the material that he does quote from the Catechisms, he engages in rather speculative meditations on the intersection of eternity and time in the identity of God and fails to attend to the simplest and most important matters at hand, to wit, Jesus Christ and him crucified. It would seem that, in principle, Bayer’s attempt to distance the law from the God of the Gospel (“one cannot attribute the law that kills to the triune God, pure and simple,” 224) has eliminated a priori both the possibility of and the need for the satisfaction of God’s justice through the penal sufferings of the incarnate Son. Similar criticisms might be leveled against, e.g., Gerhard Ebeling, Gerhard Forde, and George Lindbeck, whose contribution to the Forde-festschrift is especially illuminating: “Justification and Atonement: An Ecumenical Trajectory,” in Joseph A.
Burgess, ed., By Faith Alone: Essays on Justification in Honor of Gerhard O. Forde (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2004), 183-219. For a critical analysis of this major problem in modern Lutheran dogmatics, see Jack D. Kilcrease, “The Self-Donation of God: Gerhard Forde and the Question of Atonement in Lutheran Tradition” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2009).
226 Olli-Pekka Vainio, Justification and Participation in Christ: The Development of the Lutheran Doctrine of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (1580) (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008), 25-6, is such a friend, as are Asendorf and Peters. Vainio (124) relates that in his polemics against Mörlin, Osiander derided him as a “blood theologian.”
Finnish theologians to read both gratia and donum in christological terms at the expense of the proper work of the Spirit, often in concert with a somewhat forced differentiation between Luther and Melanchthon in this regard.227 One of my major aims in this chapter is to accentuate the pneumatological character of the “gift” in Luther’s mature theology, and in so doing to establish the inseparability of forgiveness in Christ (gratia) and real renewal by the Spirit (donum) on the sure trinitarian footing that it in fact enjoys in the works of his maturity.
I have a hunch that this is not unrelated to the third of my ancillary aims in this chapter. At the center of Mannermaa’s groundbreaking work is the thesis that Jesus Christ himself is present in faith: in ipsa fide Christus adest. On my reading, this is in fact a vital theme for Luther in not a few of his writings, including some of his most important and well-known, e.g., the 1520 Freedom of a Christian, the 1521 Antilatomus, and in particular the great 1531/5 Lectures on Galatians upon which Mannermaa rested most of his case.228 In some of his comments on Gal. 2:20 (“Now it
227 Tuomo Mannermaa, Der im Glauben gegenwärtige Christus: Rechtfertigung und Vergottung zum ökumenischen Dialog (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1989), esp. 15, 30, 56-62, 82-3; Simo Peura, “Christus als Gunst und Gabe”; Vainio, Justification and Participation in Christ, 10-11 (on Mannermaa), 26-7, 38, but much better at 49-51 on texts from the 1530s and 40s; also cp. 3, on Melanchthon. Pace Vainio, Master Philipp’s teaching on the Spirit’s effective renewal of the believer’s psychological faculties, affections, and operations (as Vainio himself sets it forth) bears striking resemblance to Doctor Luther’s, at least in the 1535-46 period. Cf. Reinhard Flogaus,
“Luther versus Melanchthon? Zur Frage der Einheit der Wittenberger Reformation in der Rechtfertigungslehre,” ARG 91 (2000), 6-46.
228 On Gal. 2:16, WA 40/1.228.31-229.30 [Dr] (cf. LW 26.129-30): fides Christiana non est otiosa qualitas vel vacua siliqua in corde quae possit exsistere in peccato mortali, donec charitas accedat et eam vivificet, Sed si est vera fides, est quaedam certa fiducia cordis et firmus assensus quo Christus apprehenditur, Sic ut Christus sit obiectum fidei, imo non obiectum, sed, ut ita dicam, in ipsa fide Christus adest. Fides ergo est cognitio quaedam vel tenebra quae nihil videt, Et tamen in istis tenebris Christus fide apprehensus sedet, Quemadmodum Deus in Sinai et in Templo sedebat in medio tenebrarum. Est ergo formalis nostra iustitia non charitas informans fidem, sed ipsa fides et nebula cordis, hoc est, fiducia in rem quam non videmus, hoc est, in Christum qui, ut maxime non videatur, tamen praesens est. Iustificat ergo fides, quia apprehendit et possidet istum thesaurum, scilicet Christum praesentem. Sed quo modo praesens sit, non est cogitabile, quia sunt tenebrae, ut dixi. Ubi
is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”),229 Luther’s emphasis on the real presence of Christ in faith does seem to overwhelm any sense of a distinct personal agency on the believer’s part; and because of their zeal to promote the ontological reality of union with Christ, this is a point the Finns are inclined to underscore.230 If this Finnish emphasis on Christ’s agency is then combined with vague assumptions about Luther’s “monergism” (Alleinwirksamkeit) based upon impressions formed by the 1525 de servo arbitrio—assumptions which, I suspect, grow in force in inverse proportion to how closely that intricate text is actually read—the notion of Luther as a theologian of renewed human agency would seem a most unlikely hypothesis.
Yet I will argue that this is just what we find in the texts at hand: a repeated grappling with the mysterious interplay of divine and human action, carried out within a broadly Augustinian framework but now with Augustine’s gratia cooperans reworked into Luther’s donum Spiritus Sancti. To be sure, the fallen human being can only suffer the advent of grace. But once a dead son or daughter of Adam is reborn in Christ and made alive by the Spirit, the latter’s vivifying gift renews the nature vitiated
ergo vera fiducia cordis est, ibi adest Christus in ipsa nebula et fide. Eaque est formalis iustitia propter quam homo iustificatur, non propter charitatem, ut Sophistae loquuntur. Summa: Sicut Sophistae dicunt charitatem formare et imbuere fidem, Sic nos dicimus Christum formare et imbuere fidem vel formam esse fidei. Ergo fide apprehensus et in corde habitans Christus est iustitia Christiana propter quam Deus nos reputat iustos et donat vitam aeternam.
229 WA 40/1.287.24-34 [Dr] (cf. LW 26.169-70): Supra dixerat: ‘Ego mortuus sum’ etc. Hoc malevolus facile sic calumniaretur: Quid ais Paule? Mortuus es? Unde ergo loqueris et scribis? Infirmus etiam facile offenderetur: Quis tu? An non video te vivere? res gerentem? Respondet: ‘Vivo quidem, verum iam non ego, sed Christus vivit in me.’ Est igitur duplex vita: Mea naturalis vel animalis, et aliena, scilicet Christi in me. Secundum animalem meam vitam mortuus sum, iamque vivo alienam vitam.
Non vivo iam Paulus, sed Paulus mortuus est. Quis tum vivit? Christianus. Paulus ergo ut in se vivens plane per legem mortuus est, Sed ut in Christo vel potius ut Christus in eo vivens vivit aliena vita, quia Christus in eo loquitur, operatur et exercet omnes actiones. Hoc iam non est Paulinae sed Christianae vitae.
230 Mannermaa, Der im Glauben gegenwärtige Christus, 52-62; Reijo Työrinoja, “Opus theologicum:
Luther and medieval theories of action,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und
Religionsphilosophie 44/2 (2002), 119-53; Vainio, Justification and Participation in Christ, 33-4, 40-1.
in Adam and thus restores believers to the spiritual agency in which real human holiness chiefly consists: believing God’s promise, hoping in his faithfulness, loving
in Adam and thus restores believers to the spiritual agency in which real human holiness chiefly consists: believing God’s promise, hoping in his faithfulness, loving