God and Mediation: Retrospective Appraisal of Luther the Reformer

Introduction

This work begins with the word alone and ends with the word mediation.

First, alone.  Grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone, and Christ alone, as we know, are the key principles of Lutheran theology. And Martin Luther was, if anything, a man of principle. Some of his principles and positions might not hold up nowadays,[1] but the basic one would and should: that God is the beginning and end of all things. This was his great, enduring intuition, his life’s project, his all-encompassing passion. This is what gives perennial value to his life and teachings. Pope Benedict XVI, during his 2011 visit to Erfurt, Germany, stated, What constantly exercised [Luther] was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey.[2] Before God, coram Deo, the world and all it contains—indeed the entire universe—is as nothing, according to Luther. God alone is God. And when he uses the word solus or sola (alone), that is what he is referring to: God is the sole point of reference for everything that exists, for all that happens.

Ut mecum sit, tamen Deus est Deus, he says—whatever may become of me, God is still God.[3] Being saved from sin, being cared for by God, is a life-and-death issue for Luther, not a secondary one: It is about your neck, it is about your life, he says.[4] Luther was convinced that he was being led continually by the Holy Spirit. On one occasion, facetiously perhaps, he went so far as to claim that in domestic affairs I defer to Kathy [his wife]. Otherwise I am led by the Holy Ghost.[5]

Hans-Martin Barth says, What the word of God says emerges from the fourfold ‘alone’ of the reformational approach: faith alone, resting on grace alone, as it is given solely in Jesus Christ and attested only in Sacred Scripture.[6] And as a result, Those who occupy themselves with Luther get to the center of Christian theology.[7] Luther strove to establish a theology directed always toward the glory of God and salvation of humans.[8]

Gerhard Ebeling writes that Luther’s alone (grace alone, faith alone, etc.) "takes on a fundamental theological significance, that is, that in everything that is said about God, it must be remembered that it is God who speaks . . . and whatever does not let God be God must be excluded."[9] According to Philip Watson, for Luther theology means just that: that we must always let God be God.[10] The same thrust may be found in von Löwenich’s theologia crucis, his theology of the Cross,[11] or Lennart Pinomaa’s description of Luther’s theology as the victory of faith.[12]

One of the chapter headings of Hans Barth’s recent work on the theology of Martin Luther reads, What endures?[13] The following one asks the question, What we should let go of?[14] And then, What needs to be developed?[15] Five hundred years after Luther’s ninety-five theses on the power of indulgences were posted on the door of the church of All Saints in Wittenberg, Barth asks what aspects of the Reformer’s teaching and legacy may be held on to, what should be jettisoned, and how we can derive new insights from his thought for the future. This is what we intend to consider in this book God and Mediation.  After five hundred years, what can we hold on to in Luther’s theology? What does he still have to teach us?

Paradoxically, to these questions, Luther himself would probably have responded, Nothing. For he was only concerned that we would hold on to Christ, as we come to know him through Scripture, especially in the writings of St. Paul. He found the fact that by 1522 people began to call themselves Lutherans deeply repugnant.[16] The fact is that Luther wanted more than anything to put God above, beyond, and over sinful creatures but also within them, in the depth of their hearts. With that in mind, he forcefully preached the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone apart from works, in keeping with the pure teaching of Sacred Scripture of God’s own Word, Jesus Christ.

One issue of course is the personality of Luther himself. Many things have been said on the matter—some positive, some negative. Doubtless, he was a living, fighting, passionate, engaged Christian and theologian. Luther was an ocean, Paul Althaus said.[17] People read his works avidly. His translation of the Bible changed the German language. As he said himself, experientia facit theologum: experience is what makes the theologian. Luther’s theology grows out of a faith under siege, says Hans-Martin Barth.[18] Luther’s Reformation theology was neither created by intellectual manipulation nor did it grow out of subjective hallucinations[19] but rather out of his day-by-day meditation.[20] According to Goethe, Between us, there is nothing in the whole business [of the Reformation] of any interest except Luther’s character, and that is the only thing that really makes an impression on a crowd. All the rest is confused rubbish.[21] Here is a person doing theology, writes Heinrich Bornkamm, thrown into a muddle of fears and doubts and yet in all of it knowing himself entrusted to the saving hand of his God. The early Søren Kierkegaard would very probably have understood him.[22] And Karl Barth asked, What else was Luther than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?[23]

Interestingly, the very authenticity, sincerity, and God-directed character of his thinking makes him a strangely inappropriate figure for the period we live in. His basic intuition, that the justification of sinners by God’s grace is a profoundly liberating experience, holds little sway nowadays among many Christians, who consider their believing commitment preferentially in moralistic terms. The 1999 Common Declaration on Justification signed by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church is unknown or considered irrelevant by many if not most believers.[24] The fact is that many people just do not see themselves as sinners in need of being justified. They consider themselves rather as objects of oppression, discrimination, or alienation, not as guilty subjects. In some cases they think that God has to justify himself and not us, because in all probability he may well be to blame for our many misfortunes.[25]  Yet Luther insisted on the biblical truth that sinners is precisely what all humans are, and their liberation requires them to recognize it as they open their hearts to God’s grace made present in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. His explanation of the dynamics of faith and tolerance might raise eyebrows nowadays, but it expresses a powerful truth: For love bears all, endures all. Yet faith bears nothing, and the Word endures nothing; the Word must be perfectly pure.[26] Before God, coram Deo, humans are sinners.

Another issue that concerns Luther is the Reformation itself and how it should be judged by history. After all, principles are not enough, and the much-needed reformation of Christian life Luther and many others desired and projected turned out to be a failure from many points of view. In effect, instead of renewing Christian life for one and all by bringing it back to its living source, the Gospel, the Reformation resulted in the breakup of Western Christendom. This in turn justified religious wars, hindered Christian evangelization, facilitated the privatization of faith and the secularization of society, and gave rise to an unending variety of one-sided theologies, misunderstandings, and divisions. Wolfhart Pannenberg said that the birth of a specific Lutheran church was not an indication of the success of the Protestant Reformation but rather of its failure.[27]

On the occasion of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, this book attempts to appropriate, situate, and to some degree reinterpret the most precious and enduring insights in the works of Martin Luther, or what might be called the five Protestant principles: sola gratia, sola fides, sola Scriptura, solus Christus, and ecclesia semper reformanda. In brief terms: the sola/solus/semper principles indicate that God’s being and action always come first. Creatures are or at least should be entirely subordinate to it.

And second, mediation. The priority of God’s action does not mean that the inner workings of his first grace, creation,[28] are undone or rendered irrelevant. Particular attention will be paid to explaining the anthropological outworkings of Luther’s thought in such a way that God’s good creation is fully affirmed. This will lead us in the last chapter to deal with the critical issue of the mediation of God’s grace and gifts.

Strange though it may seem, Luther’s protest did not really deal with God, salvation, the Trinity, Christology, or the workings of grace. This was and is common doctrine, as the 1999 Joint Declaration has shown and as may be seen, in Luther’s own lifetime, in the Decree on Justification promulgated by the Council of Trent (1547). Neither were there particular problems of a moral kind. Luther’s (and Calvin’s) position on fundamental moral issues (especially related to life and sexuality, but also to justice and politics) coincided substantially with Catholic teachings, though not always for the same reasons.

The contentious issues with respect to Roman Catholic theology mainly involved the conditions and outworkings of God’s grace and power impinging on the human spirit, and especially on the role of created mediations of different kinds that might direct, contain, control, and even block the flow of God’s magnanimous grace and power. Luther was concerned that God’s mercy and love for sinners might well come under the abusive sway of the sacramental order and more specifically of ecclesiastical ministrations. Thus God’s grace would be confined and constrained by sinful creatures. For this reason mediations of whatever kind should be put aside or at best relativized. This was the case especially with respect to the ordained priesthood. In the words of Gerhard Lohse, Statements concerning the universal priesthood . . . mean that no mediation is required between God and humanity. The Christian’s salvation is not dependent on mediation through a particular priest. All the baptized are priests in the New Testament sense, and thus in faith have free access to God. As priests they can promise forgiveness of sins to other Christians and thus have all the blessings of the gospel.[29]

It should be admitted, however, that the systematic setting aside of mediations in the order of faith, grace, and salvation may well have contributed to the privatizing of all three and the consequent secularization of society. It may well involve an insufficient theology of creation, of which Luther himself would have been wary,[30]  and which we would do well to avoid in the context of present-day debates on ecology.[31]

In the preparation of this book, I would like to thank many students over the years who have challenged me as I have attempted to explain the fundamental traits of the teaching of Luther and his followers.[32] I am also grateful to many friends and scholars—some of them Lutherans, some Reformed, some them Catholics, like myself—who helped me understand him more deeply: Hans-Martin Barth, Hubertus Blaumeiser, Franco Buzzi, Günther Gassmann, Matthew Levering, Lucas F. Mateo-Seco, Alister McGrath, Harding Meyer, Charles Morerod, Paul D. Murray, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jim Puglisi, Sergio Rostagno, George Tavard, and Jared Wicks. I am grateful to the staff of Fortress Press, particularly to Michael Gibson, Esther Diley, and Alicia Ehlers, for the encouragement they gave me in carrying out this project, for the many observations they made, and for the customary professionalism with which they produced this volume.[33]

 For example, the question of anti-Semitism in Luther, his