Thus when Paul put together God’s righteousness and our righteousness (iustitia dei and iustus ex fide) he did so not by law, but by faith—and thereby delivered the power of Romans 1:17.
The righteousness by faith stands (now we have our key) alone, apart from any addition or synthesis with the law. The alone is not the reduction of human contribution to the smallest particle (faith as a very small work); alone is the eschatological proviso that the new life in Christ shall be lived without any law—not a renewed law, not a revised law, not a law at all. As long as God’s righteousness was paired with the law, Luther hated it because it was cold, abstract, demanding and, in the end, disregarded works anyway and simply elected apart from the law—as if God were merely playing with us. This made God capricious, irrational, and unfaithful to his own system, ‘‘I had formerly hated the expression
‘iustitia dei’ . . .’’ Then the apocalypse: ‘‘I now began to regard it as my dearest and most comforting word, so that this expression of Paul’s became to me in very truth the gate to paradise.’’ Faith, not law, was God’s purpose and with that, everything turned around. Luther’s ‘‘goal’’ had found him. Life ceased being a pil-grimage, reaching higher, and became God’s movement to bestow his favor upon sinners without regard to the law. Lutheran theol-ogy often attempts to express itself through this sola:
Thus we must learn to distinguish all laws, even those of God, and all works from faith and from Christ, if we are to define Christ accurately. Christ is not the Law, and there-fore He is not a taskmaster for the Law and for works; but He is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). This is grasped by faith alone, not by
love, which nevertheless must follow faith as a kind of gratitude . . . . Victory over sin and death does not come by the works of the Law or by our will; therefore it comes by Jesus Christ alone. Here we are perfectly willing to have ourselves called ‘solafideists’ by our opponents, who do not understand anything of Paul’s argument.14
Modern attempts to reach agreement on justification between Lutherans and Rome have often turned on the sola, which Roman theology is pleased to put with grace, but not with faith. The reason should now be clear, since sola gratia (grace alone) is able to keep the law as God’s justice, where faith banishes law. How-ever, the sola cannot by itself secure the Lutheran teaching on justification.
The first definition of anything is negative: Faith is—not the law. But faith also has a positive description: ‘‘I began to under-stand that in this verse the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith.’’ A gift (donum, gratis) is the opposite of a command. Because God gives it, this gift is also the opposite of a sacrifice. But what is the content of the gift? It is not the transference of owned substance and pos-sessed property. The gift is God’s essence which is not there to be sought out, imitated or even participated in, but something which God bestows. God does not sit waiting to see if you will find him. God is in essence the Justifying God who does not wait for repentance or merit, but takes the bull by the horns and makes the unjust just by an authored act of forgiveness that creates out of nothing. God is creator, and the gift of God himself is to become a new creation.
Justification by faith alone replaces substance logic (who owns what) with relational and eschatological logic (how God creates out of nothing). God’s justice is not what he owns and what we must strive for, but it is whose we are, or the category of ‘‘belong-ing.’’ At this point Luther could open up the nature of the genitive in the phrase iustitita dei, and it is this grammatical discovery which he used as the marker of his breakthrough. A genitive phrase like iustitia dei can be objective (referring to what God possesses,) or subjective (referring to what he gives, called the ‘‘genitive of the author’’). Better even than the word ‘‘give,’’ this genitive is what
the author creates out of nothing. The first way of taking the genitive made God passive, a goal to reach, and humans were the active ones seeking to find this God. Instead, Luther learned to make the sacramental reversal with the authored sense. Justification’s move-ment is the opposite of Thomas Aquinas’ definition of justification as ‘‘a certain motion of man.’’ It is God’s movement to the static human, and the source of God’s movement is decidedly not desire or attraction (love). God does not pursue that which he finds lovely, but that which is unrighteous, unlovely, the direct and determined opponent of God. God loves the unlovely by bestow-ing faith where there was none.
It would be better if we translated iustitia dei, not as ‘‘the right-eousness of God,’’ but as ‘‘the rightright-eousness from God,’’ as Paul’s letter to the Philippians clearly does: ‘‘not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith’’ (Phil. 3:9).
God gives! Paul Tillich used this to say that God is a verb, not a noun. A new group of Lutherans have set their flag here in attest-ing to God’s gift of grace as the central matter in Luther theology, but a caution must immediately be added.15 The simple fact that God gives is not what made the Lutheran doctrine of justification.
As Ernst Käsemann observed, everyone agrees today that God’s justice is an authored genitive concerning what God gives, but trouble resurfaces when God’s gift is taken back into the law to say that God’s gift is love, and this love is to have one’s desires ordered properly (according to the law). God’s gift is not ordering our loves properly; it is faith. It is not the fulfillment of desire, but desire’s end. The righteousness from God creates faith where love has gone after idols.
The next step then opened for Luther. ‘‘I began to understand that this verse means the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice.’’ Augustine was right. There are two kinds of righteousness, one active and the other passive, but they do not function as the two parts of a whole (humility first, and then reaching higher to love God above all). They are antith-eses—active righteousness (which is the law requiring you to do something) and passive righteousness (God’s creation) that will never be resolved into a higher synthesis. Luther was effulgent:
Here I felt that I was altogether born anew and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scriptures showed itself to me.
Thereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory.
I also found in other terms an analogy, as the work of God—that is, what God works in us, the power of God, that which makes us powerful, the wisdom of God, that which makes us wise . . . . And I extolled my sweetest word [iustitia dei] with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word righteousness of God.
God gives, and what God gives is no less than his own self. ‘‘God’s self-giving’’ has been an important point in modern Lutheran theology. God does not operate simply as a great ‘‘Cause’’ with many little effects. The post office also gives, but what it gives is this or that letter or package, not itself. What God gives is not merely various gifts, as if these expressed some affection, or stood as signs of his care as in a birthday card. God gives not just
‘‘things,’’ or ‘‘effects,’’ but his own self. When Adam and Eve ate the good fruit from the garden, they consumed not just an object of creation, but God himself. When God gives, he gives sacramen-tally, not figuratively; he does not give signs of his affection, he gives—Him.
Who then is the ‘‘self ’’ that God gives? He is not the law—not even the glorious outpouring of love that inspires others to love—
God’s self giving is his Son, Jesus Christ, so that God’s essence is verbal, sacramental, and Christological: ‘‘God was in Christ recon-ciling the world to himself ” (2 Corinthians 5). When Christ is bestowed there is an ‘‘effect’’ in humans, but it is too much, too eschatological, to be captured by that term. This gift puts to death the passive receiver as she was, and raises a new creature from the dead. His giving effects the most drastic exchange possible so that Christ’s life becomes mine, and mine becomes his. This exchange Luther called ‘‘imputation.’’
Later I read Augustine’s The Spirit and the Letter where contrary to hope I found that he, too, interpreted God’s righteousness in a similar way, as the righteousness with
which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although this was heretofore said imperfectly and he did not explain all things concerning imputation clearly, it nevertheless was pleasing that God’s righteousness by which we are justified was taught.
Augustine showed Paul’s meaning to Luther, that God’s justice was faith, but an imperfection remained because Augustine thought Christians in themselves became righteous, and would be judged so by the law at the end. Luther would remove this last shackle of law.