Lutheran Theology

A Critical Introduction

Paul R. Hinlicky

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781498234108
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In this book Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky makes the deeply conflicted origins of Lutheran theology fruitful for the future. Exploring this intellectual and spiritual tradition of thought through its major historical chapters, Hinlicky rejects essentialist projects, exposing the debilitating binaries such programs engender and perpetuate, to establish an authentic Luther-theology or Lutheran theology. Hinlicky excavates the ways that throughout a five-hundred-year tradition the legacy of Luther texts has been appropriated, retooled, subverted, or developed. Readers of this introduction will thus be critically equipped to make intellectually honest appropriations of the Luther legacy in the plurality of contemporary contexts in which this iteration of Christian theology will continue.

1

The Theology of the Cross as Program of Reform

The controversy over the sale of indulgences that broke out after Luther posted his famous Ninety-Five Theses in October 1517 proved to be little more than an opening skirmish. It surprised many observing the five-hundredth anniversary of this event recently to learn that the theologian-monk who instigated this skirmish was actually defending a certain view of “purgatory.” The first of his theses read, “when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘do penance,’ he meant for the entire life of the Christian to be one of repentance.” In other words, purgatory is not to be deferred to some future state after death but begins here and now with baptism. The purging of sin begins already now in the new Christian life of daily and lifelong repentance.

In making this argument, Luther took sides with the view that purgatory denoted deliverance from sin, not punishment for sin. It was this latter view of purgatory as punishment, on the other hand, which stood behind the lucrative traffic in indulgences, to which the Augustinian friar pastorally objected. The objection was twofold: if outstanding punishment required by retributive justice could be satisfied with an ecclesiastically sanctioned ransom payment, the penitent is cheated of genuine repentance and thus deliverance from the grip of sin upon heart and mind and body. In the Ninety-Five Theses that punitive scheme was reduced to absurdity with the second objection. Luther wrote hypothetically that if purgatory was divine punishment for sin, and if the pope truly had rightful authority to satisfy such punishment by granting indulgences from the treasury of the surplus merits of Christ and the saints, why wouldn’t the pope out of Christian love just give a free pass to any and all suffering in painful purgatory? Opponents had a difficult time responding and the argument quickly moved beyond the initial dispute over the marketing of papal indulgences to the authority of the pope as such.

By April of the following year, Luther had had time to reflect upon the deeper issues involved in the controversy regarding authority in theology and issued several sets of theses for debate within his order of Augustinian Friars. The Disputation against Scholastic Theology7 argued that a root assumption about human powers was being made in medieval academic theology­—in Luther’s time already nearly a four-hundred-year-old institution!—namely, that human beings by virtue of their existing powers can at least will to will the love of God. The correlate of this optimistic natural anthropology was an equally optimistic natural theology: surely the good and merciful Perfect Being would in turn be obligated by its own perfection to reciprocate this minimal natural effort of his own creatures. Luther’s root argument is chiefly directed against theologians nearer in time to him like Gabriel Biel, William Occam, and Duns Scotus (proponents of the “modern way” as it was called), while Thomas Aquinas (standard-bearer of the “ancient way” in scholastic theology) was faulted chiefly for having introduced Aristotle’s assessment of natural human powers as a kind of philosophical baseline for Christian theological anthropology. Luther, by the way, knew the material well: he had been lecturing on Aristotle’s ethics in particular for a number of years.

Luther has two objections to this root assumption regarding natural human powers. First, essentially the creature is obligated to the Creator, not the Creator to the creature. Second, recalling the church father Augustine and especially his anti-Pelagian writings, which Luther had recently discovered and studied intensely, human creatures existentially, in their existing condition of fallenness, are unable even to will the love of God, rigorously considered. This becomes clear, particularly when the unique and supreme love owed to the Creator of all that is not God is taken as the Scripture’s First Commandment. One might perhaps want to love God above all but mere desire or intention is not the resolute act of will required, when God is taken seriously as God beside whom there is no other. What is revealed by this reflection is rather the impotence of human will and its captivation by a deep, obsessive, and all-pervading self-concern: “concupiscence,” or the “lust for domination,” in Augustine’s language. Thus, as Luther put it, fallen “man wants to be God and does not want God to be God.”

What we discover here in Luther’s critique of scholastic theology is a retrieval, which Luther expressly acknowledges in a number of places, of the fifth-century church father Augustine’s profound insight into human bondage as a social or corporate condition of sinfulness, as this had previously been figured by Paul the apostle in the first ancestor, Adam. For Augustine all the Christian knowledge of God is represented by this Pauline juxtaposition of existential ways of being in relation to God, whether in Adam or in Christ. Of course a definite paradox attends this Pauline-Augustinian insight and its retrieval by Luther. If one is in fact in bondage to sin and thus captive to flattering self-deception on account of it, how can anyone come to stand out of this situation of captivation sufficiently even to see the chains that in reality bind? So the question of epistemic access arises and becomes acute.

In a second set of theses, the Heidelberg Disputation,8 Luther provided a revolutionary resolution of this conundrum which he now specified, following the Apostle Paul: access to genuine knowledge of God and self-knowledge comes about by the disruption of the existing self at the intervention of the christological paradox of the cross through the folly of preaching. In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul discusses the paradox or stumbling block which is inalienably presented in the Christian message of the “gospel” of a “crucified Christ.” Luther interprets this to mean that the Christian message comes as news of an event that pertains to the self yet cannot otherwise be known or accessed: it comes to the existing self from outside of itself in order to transform. The very form of this message is likewise external to the existing self: it is the preaching or proclamation of an event.

This is “folly” because it is not wisdom that is naturally available; theology is not Socrates’s midwifery of the soul. Access to God’s saving event must rather be created by a disruptive intervention. This external word of proclamation offends against any optimistic notion that human beings should be able on the basis of their existing selves and natural powers to seek and find God, even if in reality as creatures they are naturally obligated to do so. Instead of that, the folly-form of preaching, announcing an historical event of saving and transformative significance, executes a fundamental reversal: it is God who seeks and finds, just as those who are sought and found are perforce robbed of the illusion that by their own reason or strength they can rise up to God for safety, healing, or wholeness. Furthermore, the paradoxical form of preaching reflects and reinforces the unheard-of content of the proclamation, which Paul names “Christ crucified—a folly to Greeks and a stumbling block to Jews.”

Why is that? The term Christ means Victor, like Joshua conquering Canaan or David seizing Jerusalem. When Messiah comes he comes as Victor, just as the Palm Sunday crowds greeted Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem, “Hosanna to the son of David!” So if the content of Paul’s proclamation of good news from God is “Christ crucified” that is like saying “Victor victimized,” “Joshua put to the sword,” or “David defeated by Goliath.”

One can take a contradiction in terms like this in one of two ways. Either it is taken as pure nonsense or it is taken as a striking rhetorical form that wants to communicate something for which there is no existing vocabulary-cum-concept—just because it refers to a new reality intervening in and disrupting the familiar world. The latter is Luther’s meaning in his “paradoxical” theology of the cross. The new reality, hitherto unknown, which Luther discovers in his theology of the cross is agape (the Greek word in the New Testament for divine and creative love): “the love of the cross, born of the cross, which does not seek a good to enjoy but confers a good upon a bad or needy person.” So Luther concluded the Heidelberg Disputation with its innovative interpretation of the knowledge of God.

Luther undertook this program to reform theology for the sake of a clear and salutary enunciation of this event of creative divine love actualized in the proclamation of Christ crucified on behalf of the weak and the ungodly. Its critical power was to oppose any and all the ambiguous and often toxic efforts of religious people to merit a favorable status with the divine by their own upward spiritual mobility. The theology of the cross executes a prophetic judgment, not merely on the obvious wickedness of barbaric and profane people but especially on the devious wickedness of civil and religious people. Self-justification is exposed as the devious sin of good people. Faith by contrast will be recommended as the surprising righteousness of trusting in one’s justification as the merciful deed and gift of God.

This sin of faithless self-justification is not only seen in the contemptuous attitudes of superiority typical of “insiders” over against “outsiders,” such as in Jesus’s parable of the Publican and the Pharisee. Luther sees sublime sin in humanity’s allegedly highest virtue: the naturally elicited love of God which he had attacked in the Disputation concerning Scholastic Theology. In Luther’s caustic analysis, however, this merely natural law amounts only to the religious climber’s realization that piety pays; a healthy dose of spirituality is in one’s enlightened self-interest. So he names this naturally elicited love of God “concupiscent” love, that is, selfish, greedy love that loves God not for God’s sake but for one’s own. One loves God poisonously when love seeks for itself to gain reward and avoid pain—as codified in the usual theologies of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Luther formulates his theology of the cross to target exactly such greedy love of God, because in its self-deception it confuses everything, calling good evil and evil good.

But the good of the cross, surprisingly, is that it spiritually crucifies the naturally selfish lover of God; apart from this death of the sublime sinner, the creative divine agape love cannot actually find the “bad and needy person,” hidden behind the gleam and glitter of religious works, upon which to lavish its divine new-creative flood of agape love. Note well: Luther’s polemic is not directed against “good” works but the “religious works” invented by spiritual seekers to placate or impress the deity. What is at issue, then, is what makes truly good works good. Luther’s answer will be christologically shaped: a truly good work comes about when the Christian believer loves the neighbor in the world just as Christ has come into the world and made a neighbor of the believer.

This insistence on the needed transformation of the existing self, and the harshly provocative language Luther employs to accentuate it, undoubtedly constitutes the most difficult challenge to contemporary understanding of Luther’s theology of the cross. It can sound perverse, as if the more one hates oneself, the more lovable one becomes to God. Perhaps that danger of some kind of new cross-mysticism is why Luther eventually abandoned the rhetoric, if not the substance, of his early theology of the cross. Many current social-liberationist theologies construe the theology of the cross in an exclusively horizontal fashion, however, leaving out of the picture what is of central concern for Luther: the real God who for true human good crucifies the existing self spiritually by laying the cross of Christ upon it. Luther’s focus on the transformation to theological subjectivity cannot thus but be lost from view. Correspondingly, it has become common today even when invoking Luther’s precedent in the theology of the cross, to reduce the crucifixion of Jesus either to the dastardly human act of Roman imperialism crushing a Jewish patriot or as the human act of exclusivist Judaism in cahoots with Rome against the subversively inclusive Jesus. There may be important aspects of truth in these purely horizontal interpretations of the theology of the cross, but they miss what is crucial for Luther and his reform-theology, namely, that apart from divine and radical surgery by way of the believer’s own “Gethsemane of the soul” in spiritually laying the cross of Christ upon the existing self, God’s love for the ungodly cannot reach us in the profound self-deception of sublime self-seeking.

A brief excursus in the form of a cautionary tale is appropriate here: the pro-Nazi, so-called “German Christians” of the 1930s similarly rejected Luther’s accent in the theology of the cross on the spiritual crucifixion of the self-seeking self. These Nazi sympathizers called for a “positive Christianity” with worship that would be a good-feeling “celebration” of the existing self of the Aryan nation in place of worship that would summon forth the struggling new creation of God to engage in lifelong repentance. German Christianity accordingly invoked the “heroic” spirit of Luther, meaning his iconic willingness to stand up to Pope and Emperor. Yet this was a heroism sans Luther’s “conscience bound to the Word of God” as famously confessed at the Diet of Worms. The abortive “Bethel Confession” of 1933, co-authored by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Herman Sasse (which we will discuss in some detail in chapter 4), put its finger on the root of the problem with the pro-Nazi German Christians. It again and again invoked Luther and his legacy to reject enthusiastic adulation of Adolf Hitler as a new savior sent from God on the grounds that the Holy Spirit is not given apart from the external word concerning Christ crucified. What is “spiritual,” then, is not seeking but rather being found.

By the early 1520s, Luther had come to his mature doctrine of justification by faith alone, although, as we shall shortly see, it was not without ambiguities that would haunt the future of Lutheran theology. Perhaps the essential text in this regard is Luther’s treatise On the Freedom of the Christian.9 It begins with the Pauline paradox (see Galatians 5:12–13) that the Christian is a perfectly free “lord” subject to none and yet, at the same time, this same Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant subject to all. The meaning of the paradox is that the Christian is liberated, set free, to love. In this way Luther mirrored the argument of Paul in G...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction: A Conflicted Tradition
• 1. The Theology of the Cross as Program of Reform
• 2. From Confessionalism to Orthodoxy
• 3. The Idealistic Theology of Liberal Lutheranism
• 4. Neo-Orthodoxy and the Renewal of Trinitarianism
• Conclusion: A Brief Prolegomena to Any Future Lutheran Theology
• Bibliography