Problema

We begin by pointing out two interesting facts about Luther’s the-ological development. First, he was not a systematic theologian, as

such. Oswald Bayer notes that Martin Luther did not write any sys-tematic theological work like Philipp Melanchthon’s Loci communes or Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae (The Summa of Theology). Sys-tematic thinking was alien (fremd) to him.⁶Second, his theology arose out of a deep engagement with scripture, especially with the Old Tes-tament. In fact, Luther began his teaching career by lecturing on the Psalms.⁷A biblical scholar, he translated the Bible into German in a mere eleven weeks while he was confined in Wartburg Castle. The pri-mary rhythms of Luther’s life as an Augustinian monk were provided by spiritual practices, especially daily prayers using the Psalms. Con-sequently, he paid scholarly attention to the Psalms in a special way;

it was only natural that his first lecture course was on the Psalms, and this marked the beginning of his lifelong fascination with the Old Testa-ment. These proclivities provide an important clue to the unique char-acter of his theology, which linked closely the pulpit of the church and the academic lectern of a university lecture hall. He preached as both a monk and a professor till the end of his life, whenever opportunities were offered, especially in the castle church of Wittenberg.

According to Christine Helmer, biblical engagement shaped Luther’s theological contribution, most importantly for our purposes “his discov-ery of the Old Testament for trinitarian theology.”⁸As Kendall Soulen points out, Christian trinitarian theology tends to pass over God’s iden-tity as the God of Israel in order to emphasize the trinitarian God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the Old Testament, with its doctrine of the dynamic presence of YHWH as “speaker,” has profound implications for trinitarian theology. Where there is a speaker, there emerge triadic relations: the speaker, the hearer, and the message. Helmer reminds us of the important fact that Luther was greatly influenced by the Hebraic approach to discourse on God, not only as it appears in the Old Tes-tament narratives but also as it is manifested in the Hebrew language itself.

The exclusive principle of sola scriptura led Luther to reject as unbiblical the medieval doctrine of the sacraments, and to deny any authority to the pope and the councils. But, as shown in his tract Von den Conciliis und Kirchen(On the Councils and Churches, 1539) and the three symbols (creeds) of 1538, Luther’s attitude toward the ancient dogmas was a positive one. He acknowledged and frequently reiterated Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian Christology. He regarded them with great respect, especially the Apostles’ creed, which, he declared, contains all the principal articles of faith. At first, Luther objected to the word “Trinity,” declaring that it “sounds cold” and was

“discovered and invented” by human beings.⁹Luther’s position was that dogmas are true only insofar as they agree with the holy scriptures; oth-erwise they have no authority. His insistence on the exclusive principle of sola scriptura may have contributed to him making his hermeneutics of the creeds dependent upon scripture, rather than acknowledging that creeds do help us frame and understand scripture.

The last academic disputation of which Luther was in charge took place on July 3, 1545. Luther prepared the theses for this event. Theses 1 to 17 are about the doctrine of the Trinity,¹⁰and they show that Luther retains much of the medieval theological heritage. The theme of these theses is Christ as “the Wisdom of the Father.” The question of the nature of the Son as sapientia patris was often discussed in medieval theology, because Augustine had found it problematic and dealt with it in detail in De Trinitate (On the Trinity), vi.1–7 and vii.1–6.¹¹ The issue at hand here has to do with whether this is an essential predication or an indicative of a relational expression between the Father and the Son. According to thesis 16, “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” are relative concepts, from which the presence of a real “other” can be inferred.

They are terms that signify a relation of two different members. The Father is Father because he generates; he does not generate because he is Father. The distinct things indicate the relations between them (thesis 14).

What are the sources for Luther’s theses? Of course, Luther knew Augustine’s On the Trinity, the Sententiae in IV libris distinctae (com-monly known as the Sentences) of Peter Lombard, and Gabriel Biel’s commentary on the Sentences.¹²And as noted above, he accepted the three symbols of the Christian faith: the Apostles’ creed, the creed of St.

Athanasius, and “the Nicene Symbol.”¹³In questions of trinitarian the-ology, Biel closely followed William of Ockham’s commentary on the Sentences, in which Aquinas and Henry of Ghent were frequently crit-icized. Thus Luther knew the trinitarian theologies of Ockham, Henry of Ghent, and Aquinas, at least by way of Biel. It is likely that he had also studied Ockham and Aquinas at first hand. As a professor of theol-ogy, he must also have been acquainted with the trinitarian teachings of important synods and councils.¹⁴

Luther’s De servo arbitrio (The Bondage of the Will, 1525) is significant.¹⁵It was this book, along with the 1535 Galatervorlesungen (Lectures on Galatians), that Luther himself treasured most highly.

More important, this work most clearly exemplifies Luther’s approach to God in terms of relational power. At the outset (prologue), Luther associates the concept of power with that of freedom. Erasmus uses this

association to argue that if man has no effective freedom, that is, no power to do good before God, then God’s will must be in part evil, since sin exists in the world. Luther’s response contains a subtle nuance: man is not free to contribute to his salvation. It is God who has the power, that is, freedom to act with complete effectiveness in this world, and it is man’s will that is evil, that is unfree and in bondage to sinful human nature. God’s power is to be understood not as a speculated quality in God Godself, but as an active relation to the human, as understood in Hebrew thought.

Luther’s functional understanding of God indicates that God is in himself what God does in us. In this sense God is active power. Luther understood the divine essence in terms of God’s active presence.¹⁶We see this most clearly in Luther’s works on the Lord’s Supper (1527–28), in which he identifies God’s essence with power. God’s omnipotence is identified with God’s active omnipresence. It is on the basis of God’s active omnipresence (that is, omnipotence) that, in Christ, God can be essentially present and powerfully active in the Lord’s Supper.¹⁷In his various writings, the systematic assumption of God as act – as free pres-ence and power – seems to dominate Luther’s thinking. For Luther, the power and presence of God are manifest in and through the Son and the Spirit, although in different ways. The Son represents the “formal” or

“wisdom” dimension, while the Spirit represents the “love” or “good-ness” dimension of the Trinity. It is the Christ who is our teacher (the formal or wisdom function), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the new energy living in us (the love or goodness function). The Son represents wisdom, and the Spirit love.

Thus in Luther the functions of Christ and the Spirit become rather sharply differentiated. Luther insists that Jesus Christ is the only means of access to the knowledge of God and that Christ is “the only God there is” (“for us,” to be precise). A comparable attribution occurs with regard to the work of the Holy Spirit. Luther normally holds that the Spirit instills the love of Christ in our hearts (Rom 5:5). But against

“spiritual” opponents, Luther also stresses the work of the Holy Spirit in terms of order. He says that the true function of the Holy Spirit is to stir up an internal conflict between the corrupt peace of the “old man”

and the true peace which is the indwelling Christ. The true function of the Holy Spirit is to bring God’s kingdom, God’s peace and order, out of humanity’s disorder.¹⁸In his commentary on Galatians 3 Luther says that the Holy Spirit is given only through the hearing of the Word or gospel. The Holy Spirit is the gift brought by means of the preached and heard Word of God. The Holy Spirit is what the Word brings. It

brings with it certain knowledge of God and of oneself, which entails the forgiveness of sins.¹⁹Forgiveness of sins means that the proper order between the human being and God is restored. It means that the disor-dered, false relation to God in terms of works-righteousness is replaced by God’s order: overcoming the desires of the flesh by the Spirit.²⁰For example, commenting on Galatians 5:10, Luther picks up the theme of the Holy Spirit as the love of God, but develops it in terms of the Christian love of neighbor.²¹ The basic theme in Luther is that the Holy Spirit, operating wholly in and through the preached Word, certi-fies forgiveness of sins – the love of God – in our hearts, and in so doing insures the ordered harmony of God’s love among the community of her people.

Luther repeatedly affirms that God is present for us, and that God’s nature and will are made known only in Christ the Word. He is so deeply taken up with this notion that he unguardedly overstates: “Apart from Christ, there is no God” – even “no Godhead.”²² Knowledge of the Triune God is thus possible not just through the “second Person,”

the form, wisdom, or logos of the Trinity, but through the incarnate Christ. For Luther, Christ is not just the disembodied Word, the second person of the Trinity, but the incarnate, suffering Christ of Galilee.

It is because this Christ is both hidden and revealed, both physical and spiritual, that Luther is able to speak of God in similar fashion.

Because of their consubstantiality, what is true of Christ is true of God.

Thanks to this concentration on the incarnate Christ, Luther’s theology is inclined toward fusing the transcendence of God and the natural (immanent) world without abrogating the boundary line between them.

This results in de-emphasizing the metaphysical distinctions of God from the world. It is the unity of the God–world relationship, as seen in Christ’s incarnation, that provides a basic clue to understanding Luther’s theological epistemology, doxology, and soteriology.

This perspective on consubstantiality most clearly appears in Luther’s discussion of the Lord’s Supper and the gift or application to us of Christ’s atoning work. He understands the nature of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit in terms of activity. It is in Christ’s body broken for us that God personally reveals Godself. The God revealed there is the Triune God. Thus for Luther, human beings are connected to God in Christ only through the mediating work of the Holy Spirit, that is, through the reception of faith, the hearing of the Word, and participation in the sacraments. Not only is Christ the only “place”

where the transcendent Triune God is immanently present for us, but God is present for us only where and when there exists the community

of faith, formed by Christ’s Word and ordered by the Holy Spirit to receive God in the church.

A special characteristic of Luther’s theology is the distinction he makes between “a theology of glory” and “a theology of the cross.”²³ The thesis of the theology of the cross is that “God can be found only in suffering and the cross,” so that “he who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering.”²⁴Luther’s theology of the cross is a polemic against a theology of glory as well as against the prevalent theological method of scholasticism, which is accused of treating the truths of the Christian faith as objects of intellectual curiosity, without reference to the cross and benefits of Christ. Specifically, for Luther, the dogmas of the Trinity and the person of Christ are not exercises in logical inquiry or metaphysical speculation. In the same vein, Melanchthon declares, “to know Christ is to know his benefits.”²⁵ For Luther, God the Redeemer is clearly and definitively manifested in Christ the Word.

God has no other form in which to be found than the form of God’s Word, that is, Christ, who thus reveals the justice, the righteousness, and the glory of God. But the glory of God is anything but obvious;

Christ is the emptied form of God, now taking the form of a slave or servant, without losing his divine connaturality with God the Father and God the Spirit.

Divine glory is unlike human glory. It appears hidden under its oppo-site. Christ’s divinity manifests itself in his self-differentiation from, not withstanding his union with, God the Father, who begets him in love.

God is power and freedom, yet acts through weakness and bondage, so that we human beings can experience his redemptive power and liber-ating grace (forgiveness) in faith, even while we are still enmeshed in suffering, guilt, and bondage to sin. God is always pro nobis and, hence, pro me. This “I” is an old “I.” The old “I” is sinful, curved in upon itself, existing in a hellish, distanceless self-conversation – entirely incommu-nicative. In the being of Jesus Christ, God gives Godself entirely to us.

God gives Godself with everything that God is and does, what God has, and what lies in God’s power, without condition and reservation. In union with the being of Christ who eternally communicates with the other persons of the Trinity in a perichoretic relationship, the new “I”

becomes and lives as an entirely communicative being. We are incorpo-rated into God’s community through God’s self-gift to us.²⁶

For Luther, God’s very being is self-giving. This self-giving is not an automatic expression of the divine nature, but rather an atten-tive “response” of God’s hearing of the wretched human condition.

God’s hearing means salvation, which takes place historically in the

incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The doctrine of the Trin-ity contains nothing other than the gospel. The gospel is the event of salvation and liberation. It is the freedom that Christ has won for us and has brought to us. Christ continues to promise and to communicate this freedom to us by his presence as God’s Word in the Holy Spirit.

Here is an important challenge of Luther’s teaching. As Oswald Bayer puts it: “It is absolutely important to distinguish between the doc-trine of the Trinity and a ‘general’ docdoc-trine of God linked to anthropol-ogy. The two distinct doctrines cannot be collapsed into each other.”²⁷ In concluding his interpretation of the Christian faith in the Grosser Kat-echismus(Large Catechism), Luther makes this distinction: “Although the whole world has sought painstakingly to learn what God is and what he thinks and does, yet it has never succeeded in the least . . . even though [monotheists] believe in and worship only the one, true God, neverthe-less, [they] do not know what his attitude is toward them. They cannot be confident of his love and blessing.” Even the Ten Commandments, Luther goes on to say,

do not by themselves make us Christians. . . . But here, you have everything in richest measure. In these three articles God him-self has revealed and opened to us the most profound depths of his fatherly heart, his sheer, unutterable love. He created us for this very purpose, to redeem and sanctify us. Moreover, having bestowed upon us everything in heaven and on earth, he has given us his Son and his Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to himself. As we explained before, we could never come to recognize the Father’s favor and grace were it not for the Lord Christ, who is a mirror of the Father’s heart. Apart from him we see nothing but an angry and terrible Judge. But neither could we know anything of Christ, had it not been revealed by the Holy Spirit.²⁸

Luther adds: “Apart from him [Christ] we see nothing but an angry and terrible Judge.” This is the God outside the Triune God who is entirely love. “To look for God outside of Jesus is to encounter the devil.”²⁹The general doctrine of God, distinguished from the doctrine of the Trinity, thematizes the human being prior to encountering Christ. The general doctrine of God is linked to the experience of the Law that accuses and kills. It finally reaches beyond the accusing Law to the experience of the incomprehensible, terrible hiddenness of God. Luther’s challenge to contemporary theologians is how not to turn the doctrine of the Trinity into a general doctrine of God derived from anthropology.

Although self-consciously stringent in applying his exclusive princi-ple of sola scriptura to his theological and ecclesial agenda of reforming the church, Luther reached back into the theological and spiritual trea-sures of the church’s teaching as he formulated his view of the Trinity.

He embraced “continuity” of theological wisdom even in his reforma-tive “discontinuity.”