Given his insistence on the dual temporal and spiritual spheres in which Christians live in the tension of freedom and service to others, Martin Luther's theological ethic of service to the neighbor is a seeming paradox.Footnote 1 By paradox we mean that for Luther the nature of a life lived as a Christian in the world proves at times to be replete with purportedly irresolvable contingency. On the one hand, for instance, by his interpretation of Matthew 5:38–42, Luther insists Christians not seek personal vengeance against enemies for civic wrongs. On the other hand, however, he suggests believers support their neighbor who seeks punitive justice for being so wronged. If a Christian is physically threatened in isolation, Luther instructs that person to accept death without struggle; but if the person is threatened while being tasked with the care and protection of another, a Christian is to defend one's own life and the neighbor's life from harm.Footnote 2 How then do we make sense of Luther's intention for Christian freedom in everyday service to our neighbors?
The first part of this article traces the seemingly paradoxical nature as it arises in Luther's theological ethic, namely, in both his understanding of faith as the Christian's freedom in Christ for service to the neighbor (1520), as well in his two kingdoms doctrine (1523).Footnote 3 By faith Christians are free, Luther maintains, but not unburdened. Luther has difficulty explaining how one might live as a Christian in relation,Footnote 4 as one who serves the neighbor's needs in temporal society, and also as a citizen of God's kingdom, who forgives and loves enemies.Footnote 5 This leads to a number of ethical difficulties regarding justice and social order.
The difficulty pertaining to Luther's seemingly paradoxical theological ethic is to articulate the relation of individual faith to secular social-political responsibility.Footnote 6 One should not be surprised at this tension. Luther often resorts to paradox (simul justus et peccator) to describe the nature of faith lived between the realities of sin and righteousness.Footnote 7 This tension is also expressed between the “forensic and effective aspects of justification” that pertain, respectively, to God's merciful disposition toward humankind, and to the transformative effect of grace on humankind.Footnote 8 However, this tension has not been satisfactorily resolved by the traditional interpretation of Luther's doctrine of justification, which posits a forensic model of righteousness that prioritizes grace as the declarative-imputational aspect of faith. The effective aspects, like regeneration, are taken as subordinate features of justification.Footnote 9 This interpretation entails an overly passive Christian relation to the greater world.
In the second part, it is argued that Luther's theological ethic of Christian freedom in service to the neighbor can be elucidated if we consider it in light of the articulation of justification as theosis identified by the New Finnish School.Footnote 10 As a program, the Finnish reading of Luther on justification posits faith in terms of the human soul, simul justus et peccator, united to Christ as an ontic reality.Footnote 11 To be sure, this is a mysterious union.Footnote 12 But there is still sense to be made of the relation of faith to the world. This sense obtains in the Finnish interpretation of grace (favor) and gift (donum) as co-constitutive moments of faith.Footnote 13 Christ present in faith entails for Luther not only that by God's grace is forgiveness imputed to the believer, but also that a Christian participates in the divine life and is conformed to Christ by regeneration and renewal.Footnote 14
The third and final part considers this interpretation as a potential theological ethical imperative. Luther's seemingly paradoxical ethic of Christian freedom entails both that we should forgive wrongdoing and that we should demand temporal justice for our neighbor.Footnote 15
The Finnish interpretation of justification allows one to posit Christians in relation as cooperators with God in this vein.Footnote 16 Christ present in faith means that we are not merely beneficiaries of grace, but that we bear the gifts of God by participation in Christ. Though we as the world persist in sin, we truly become a Christ to our neighbors by his indwelling. Christians do not transcend the exigencies of secular contingency, but we might transform them even as we are transformed.
Part I: Luther's Social Ethic and the Christian-in-Relation Paradox
I.1—The Freedom of a Christian and the Two Natures
In perhaps his most well-known work, The Freedom of a Christian, Martin Luther enjoins believers to an ethical paradigm that has liberation at its center. But for Luther the freedom of a Christian is not merely divinely endowed autonomy. It entails a seeming paradox.Footnote 17 Freedom describes the state of the Christian who by God's grace, through faith, has been justified and set free from sin, death, and false righteousness. However, freedom for Luther also describes the Christian's willing and bounded service to the neighbor.Footnote 18 To be freed from sin by Christ is simultaneously to be freed for the other as Christ was. “It is in the nature of love to be attentive to others and to serve the one who is loved,” Luther interprets Romans 13:8, for “[so] it is with the case of Christ … he was at the same time a free man and servant, ‘in the form of God’ and in the ‘form of a slave’ (Phil 2:6–7).”Footnote 19 Christian freedom is necessarily analogous to the life of love Jesus lived, as well as to the sacrificial death he died. Christians are called to enjoy in Christ an “un/freedom.” Disjunction therefore besets Luther's position at the outset.Footnote 20
Luther accounts for this tension as a difference of natures. Each of us is composed of both an inner and an outer or a spiritual and a bodily nature, he claims.Footnote 21 The inner nature will be the subject of the following analysis, but we consider it here to place it in proximity to the outer nature. The life of Christian freedom is wrought through an inward “transformation” by which we are enabled to live a life of “righteousness, and freedom” through hearing the “word of God, the gospel of Christ.”Footnote 22 That through faith we hear the Word and believe it is indicative of the grace demonstrated by God to sinners. “For faith alone is the saving and efficacious use of the word of God,” faith alone in the good news of Christ that justifies an unrighteous sinner.Footnote 23 In this familiar Reformation sola, Luther beats back the tide of “all pieties of achievement” by which Christians unduly committed themselves to innumerable spiritual labors thought to augment faith and put one in right relationship with God.Footnote 24 Luther's sola fide is a response to this accounting of righteousness that put Christians perpetually in God's debt.Footnote 25 Faith for Luther is the inspired belief and acceptance of the sufficiency of Christ's justifying work declared to unbelievers in the gospel. However, faith in Christ does not give one license for apathy. Quite the opposite is true.
It is for what we are freed that concerns the outward and bodily nature. How are we to live in response to freedom granted by believing the Word of God in Christ? The life of faith is one lived out of boundless and active love for our neighbor, Luther argues. This brings us first to a significant point regarding Luther's theological ethic: he did not repudiate good works.Footnote 26 To those who would say “Let us take our ease and do no works and be content with faith,” Luther answers “such a wicked person with an emphatic ‘No!’”Footnote 27 The inward transformation wrought by God through the hearing and believing of the gospel of Christ is the ground of salvation. But it is also the beginning of a new life. “Insofar as a Christian is free, no works are necessary,” Luther affirms, but “Insofar as a Christian is a servant, all kinds of works are done.”Footnote 28 The assumption for the Reformer was that, freed from the anxiety of trying to escape from sin through self-righteous acts of piety, Christians enjoy the freedom of knowing that by grace our faith in Christ justifies us without qualification.Footnote 29 But this does not excuse us from good works; it revalues them appropriately as loving responses to the freedom in Christ we now enjoy as faith.
Good works are characterized by Luther as faith acting in love for the other indicative of Christ's love for us as sinners.Footnote 30 This is the significance of the inward life for the outward life: in faith “Christ and the soul become one flesh,” as he takes on “sins, death, and damnation,” and we receive from him “grace, life, and salvation.”Footnote 31 By this marital union the outward nature is freed for radically unbounded service to the neighbor. A Christian's righteousness is Christ's own, Luther reminds us, and it “saves and makes one acceptable,” but importantly it also “gives the Christian all things that Christ has.”Footnote 32 By his grace through faith Christ enables believers to consider the needs of their neighbor above all else. One should think:
Although I am an unworthy and condemned person, my God has given me in Christ all the riches of righteousness and salvation without any merit on my part … I will therefore give myself as a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me. I will do nothing in this life except what is profitable, necessary, and life-giving for my neighbor, since through faith I have an abundance of all good things in Christ.Footnote 33
Further, the freedom of faith means to be Christ to the neighbor precisely as Christ is for us, loving without any regard for prior merit or demerit, but with abandon.Footnote 34
From love there proceeds a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves the neighbor and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, praise or blame, gain or loss. We do not serve others with an eye toward making them obligated to us. Nor do we distinguish between friends and enemies or anticipate their thankfulness or gratitude. Rather, we freely and willingly spend ourselves and all that we have, whether we squander it on the ungrateful or give it to the deserving.Footnote 35
This point is significant for what comes next. Luther's radical theological ethical paradigm of service to the neighbor as faith acting in love is both liberating and demanding. He makes no distinction between neighbors. We are to bear with all so that our righteousness in Christ might “cover and intercede for the sins of [a] neighbor.”Footnote 36 But, how do Christians serve the needs of all at once? How can we be Christ to all in a sinful and broken world? What must we do?
I.2—The Two Kingdoms and the Christian in Relation
Reform for Luther meant a holistic transformation of church and society. This required, he believed, the intervention of the state and its powers in new and significant roles.Footnote 37 Already in his To the Christian Nobility (1520), Luther makes the case to Charles V that, given the failures of “the Roman church … the secular authorities had to step in” if meaningful reform were to take place.Footnote 38 Luther's intent was to delineate theological grounds for the investment of secular authorities, specifically, the nobility, with power to reform Christendom. However, the peasantry was not always willing to work for reform within the confines of secular “law and order” and, becoming more agitated, Luther noted their tendency to “Aufruhr (uproar, rioting)” with increasing disdain.Footnote 39 A further 1522 treatise marked his attempts to stanch the surge of growing discontent and outbreaks of violence among Christian peasants. Luther admonished these poor believers, though sympathetic to their plight, imploring them to be obedient to secular authorities for the good of reformation.Footnote 40 What is at stake for Luther is to at once defend Christian freedom while protecting the cause of reform by investing power in secular authorities. The question is still: how to be a Christian in relation in the tension between faith and the world.
The freedom of the Christian entails that by faith we are servants to all, regardless of whether they are friend or enemy. But Christians do not live in isolation. On the one hand, believers are bound to God by grace through faith. On the other hand, the freedom of the Christian means that we are also bound to one another in the world. In Temporal Authority—To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), Luther makes his case in this regard for two intersecting kingdoms between which Christians find themselves living and serving others: the temporal and the spiritual.Footnote 41 The “two kingdoms” is a theological model he conceives in order to practically address the tension between the ethic of Christian freedom he develops and the divinely ordained temporal administration of social order.Footnote 42 Luther is pressed specifically to interpret two scriptural passages that seem to put Christian freedom at odds with the demands of social-political life. In Matthew 5 Christ commands that one should not resist evil (v. 33), but further (v. 44) “love [their] enemies,” and in Romans 12 Paul restricts vengeance to God alone.Footnote 43 Luther must address these passages as they prompt two questions for his notion of Christian freedom: What is the extent of a temporal ruler's authority, that is, does it command civically and spiritually with equal authority? And, more importantly, how should Christian citizens exercise freedom as dual citizens, as both temporal subjects and believers?
Luther answers the first question swiftly. Temporal authority is precisely that. Whether it is the emperor or his princes, temporal rulers command only that which they have been given by God to command, namely, the earthly sphere. Luther thus denounces rulers who overstep their bounds, “who actually think they can do—and order their subjects to do—whatever they please,” with the result that “the subjects make the mistake of believing that they, in turn, are bound to obey their rulers in everything.”Footnote 44 It is one thing for a ruler to command obedience to the law and claim secular authority over subjects. It is quite another thing for an emperor or prince to command the obedience of one's faith or conscience.Footnote 45 Nevertheless, Luther does not dispose with temporal authority altogether. The law, and the sword, symbolizing the law's punitive exercise, have been ordained by God and must be upheld by temporal authorities for social order.Footnote 46 Otherwise, evil would go unrestrained, and the wicked likewise would not recognize their need for grace in order to be made righteous by faith in Christ.Footnote 47
Granting that temporal authorities serve this divinely appointed role, however, the question nevertheless remains: Does the freedom of the Christian require submission to the temporal authority that resists and restrains evildoers, which recourse Christ not only prohibits, but counterbalances with an admonition to forbearance and radical toleration of wrongdoing (Matt 5:38, 44)? Yes and no, Luther says, for we must also account for the “two classes” of inhabitants.Footnote 48 As one class of inhabitants, Christians occupy the second sphere, the spiritual kingdom governed by God according to the grace of Christ, which produces faith and obtains in righteous believers.Footnote 49 “[T]hese people need no temporal law or sword” to restrain them from evildoing or admonish them toward a righteousness they already possess inwardly by grace through faith in Christ.Footnote 50 They can abide by Jesus’ ethic in Matthew 5. The law and the sword are necessary for that other class, namely, who are not inhabitants of the spiritual kingdom, and therefore are not ruled by the spirit of Christ.Footnote 51 This constitutes the “no” of Luther's answer.
However, Christians are subject to the temporal authorities, and do need the law, insofar as they live with and, most importantly, for others. Christians form a unique class of inhabitants who simultaneously reside in and are subjects of the spiritual sphere, governed by God, and the temporal sphere, governed by secular authorities. Christians must therefore find ways of living together among all of their neighbors between the kingdoms.Footnote 52 This describes the tensive reality of what Luther later would name the “Christian in relation,” his admonition that believers must learn to “be a secular person of some sort” in the temporal sphere.Footnote 53 This constitutes the “yes” of Luther's answer. And, importantly, this accords with his ethic of service to the neighbor that accompanies the freedom of faith in Christ bestowed by the grace of God. To live in service to our neighbor in a sinful world where “the wicked always outnumber the good” means, on the one hand, that believers already made righteous in Christ are able and encouraged on an individual level to suffer any number of injustices and wrongs without recourse to vengeance.Footnote 54 On the other hand, believers freely consider the needs of their neighbors, and in this vein “tolerate no injustice,”Footnote 55 and by faith cover the neighbor with the righteousness of Christ against enemies.Footnote 56
This puts Christians in a precarious position. So far as they are personally concerned, as inhabitants of the spiritual kingdom, Christians relinquish recourse to the law or to the sword and choose instead to love their enemies.Footnote 57 If they are wronged, they seek neither to resist the evildoer nor vengeance against them, whether in the matter of stolen property or even murder.Footnote 58 But insofar as they exercise their freedom in Christ as a service to the needs of their neighbor in the temporal kingdom, Christians are obligated to defend others against injustice and wrong:
Although you do not need to have your enemy punished, your afflicted neighbor does … You suffer evil and injustice, and yet at the same time you punish evil and injustice; you do not resist evil, and yet at the same time, you do resist it. In the one case, you consider yourself and what is yours; in the other, you consider your neighbor and what is his.Footnote 59
Luther clearly recognizes the believer's paradox. But by positing Christians as inhabitants of both spiritual and temporal kingdoms, the Reformer believed he had provided a theological rationale. We must both turn the other cheek to our enemies and we must defend our neighbors against the injustice and violence of a sinful world. A believer must learn to inhabit the world in this tensive manner. “Just learn the difference between the two persons that a Christian must carry simultaneously on earth,” Luther blithely suggests elsewhere.Footnote 60 But is it really this simple?
Part II: Justification, the Finnish School of Interpretation, and Theosis
We have been discussing the tension of Luther's theological-ethical paradigm of Christian freedom as faith acting in love in service to the neighbor. Although his clarifications regarding the inner and outer natures, and the two kingdoms and the classes of their inhabitants, prove elucidating, one is nevertheless left in the tension of life between the kingdoms as a Christian in relation. One question, specifically, lingers in the wake of this rationale. How can Christians, as inhabitants of both spiritual and temporal kingdoms, abide by Luther's radical definition of service to the neighbor as an unconditioned class of persons? Differently, how do we love our enemies, as Christ demands, and love our neighbors who seek justice?
In order to address this impasse, it is necessary to return to the inner nature in Luther's thought, a point we passed through earlier in his Freedom of a Christian without extensive critical comment. Here we consider more carefully the doctrine of justification in terms of grace and gift and what bearing these concepts have for Luther on the inward transformation wrought by Christ in faith. Specifically, by incorporating the work of the New Finnish School of interpretation on Luther's doctrine of justification, we might further clarify his theological ethic and make more sense of the seeming paradox of the Christian in relation. In this evaluation and application of the Finnish reading of Luther, this section will consider traditional readings of this doctrine to which these scholars respond, as well as critiques of their positions.
The New Finnish School of interpretation, spearheaded by Tuomo Mannermaa, is responsible for a renascence of interest in Luther's contemporary significance, as well as for revolutionary interpretations of the Reformer's most entrenched doctrines.Footnote 61 Chief among these is the forensic model of Luther's doctrine of justification. For many Luther scholars following the Formula of Concord (FC), justification was “understood in a one-sidedly forensic manner, that is, only as a reception of the forgiveness that is ‘imputed’ to Christians for the sake of the obedience of Christ.”Footnote 62 This emphasis is not a malicious attempt at obscuring the authentic Luther that the Finnish School later claims to retrieve.Footnote 63 On the contrary, the formulation of the doctrine of justification in terms of forensic declaration of forgiveness and the imputation of righteousness arose from historical need.Footnote 64 In this case, the need of many confessions, including the Formula of Concord, was to clarify the reformed position on justification, in this case against that of Andreas Osiander. Osiander identified the righteousness of justification, which he believes we receive and participate in, with the righteousness of Christ's divine nature.Footnote 65 This smacked not only of christological heresy, but also of “affinity with the scholastic definition of grace as an infused quality in man rather than as the favor of God.”Footnote 66 In order to avoid arrogating to humankind what belongs to God, the emphasis of justification remained with righteousness as a quality of God and not of human nature. Traditional interpretations of this doctrine (FC) therefore maintained a hermeneutical priority of grace, though with the addition of faith with Christ as its object, while subordinating the inward effects of Christ's righteousness on sinners.Footnote 67
According to Mannermaa, however, this is not a faithful interpretation of Luther's doctrine of justification taken comprehensively.Footnote 68 His primary disagreement is that the forensic model promulgates a sequential distinction between the declaration of righteousness and the inhabitatio Dei, where divine indwelling is “not the same phenomenon as the ‘righteousness of faith,’” but was “logically subsequent to justification.”Footnote 69 Mannermaa argues that no such sequential distinction existed for Luther, who believed in ipsa fide Christus adest—in faith Christ is actually present.Footnote 70 By faith, justification constitutes simultaneously the union of the soul with Christ (unio personalis) and the righteousness imputed to the believer. “[Luther] does not separate the person (persona) of Christ and his work (officium) from each other,” but instead “Christ himself, both his person and his work, is the Christian righteousness, that is, the ‘righteousness of faith.’”Footnote 71 For Luther, justification does not merely entail a forensic declaration, but an intimate communion of subjects.Footnote 72 “Christ and the soul become one flesh,” he observes in Freedom of a Christian, and “[given] this marriage, it follows that they hold everything in common.”Footnote 73 Christians do not merely receive righteousness passively in faith. By grace we are united with Christ who is really present in us. But, in this case at least, it is not by grace alone.
The significance of the unio personalis is demonstrated by the Finnish School through attention to the Reformer's prioritization of both grace and gift as the two moments of his doctrine of justification.Footnote 74 Luther did not understand faith as mere intellectual assent.Footnote 75 As Simo Peura notes, on the one hand, faith entailed for Luther that in hearing and believing the Word, “Christ himself is the grace that covers a sinner” by which one is declared righteous.Footnote 76 On the other hand, faith meant also that “Christ himself is the gift that renews the sinner internally and makes him righteous” in unio personalis.Footnote 77 This is evident in Luther's 1521 work, Against Latomus, in which he argues that, granted the union with Christ effected in baptism, the sin that remains in the believer truly is sin.Footnote 78 Sins are forgiven by God in baptism, which “removes all [sins] … but not their substance…. Day by day the substance is removed so that it may be utterly destroyed.”Footnote 79 It is the day-by-day that concerns the effective righteousness of faith.Footnote 80
A righteous and faithful man [sic] doubtless has both grace and the gift. Grace makes him wholly pleasing so that his person is wholly accepted, and there is no place for wrath in him anymore, but the gift heals him from sin and from all his corruption of body and soul…. Everything is forgiven through grace, but as yet not everything is healed through the gift. The gift has been infused, the leaven has been added to the mixture. It works so as to purge away the sin for which a person has already been forgiven.Footnote 81
Faith understood in terms of union with Christ is not only a declaration of forgiveness, but also the transformative process in which, by Christ's righteousness, we are healed.Footnote 82 This is the tensive reality of simul justus et peccator, forgiven sinners clinging to Christ. Faith is what “makes you a chick, and Christ a hen, so that you have hope under his wings … faith is the gift of God, which the grace of God obtains for us, and which purging away sin, makes us saved and certain.”Footnote 83 United by soul to Christ in faith, we are forgiven, and become righteous, day by day.
The result of the Finnish School's scholarship in this vein is a revaluation of justification as theosis in Luther's theology.Footnote 84 Luther did not, as we saw, maintain a singularly forensic doctrine of justification by grace. Against Latomus evinced the effective transformation of our inner nature through the purging of sin, wrought in unio personalis by participation in Christ as gift. “The idea of unio personalis makes it obvious once again that Luther regards the ontological nature of the presence of Christ as absolutely real,” Mannermaa suggests, so that in “the believer's real participation in Christ” there is no distinction between “justification and the divine indwelling of the believer.”Footnote 85 Further, in fact, Luther articulates this “real-ontic,” participatory union of persons by grace and gift in terms of divinization.Footnote 86 He reflects in his Summer Postil (1544) on evidence in support of Christ's promise in John 14 to abide with the spiritually impoverished faithful. “This is, certainly, a sublime, beautiful promise,” Luther notes:
And, as St. Peter (2 Pet 1, 4) says, one of the precious and exceeding great promises granted unto us poor, miserable sinners, that we through them should become partakers of the divine nature, and should also be so highly honored not only to be loved of God through Christ Jesus and to enjoy his favor and grace—as the highest, the most precious and sacred thing—but should even have the Lord himself dwelling completely in us.Footnote 87
Importantly, Mannermaa notes, there is for Luther no change of substance in this unio personalis or confusion of natures by Christ's indwelling.Footnote 88 The significance of identifying theosis in Luther is that, for him, faith does not mean merely receiving what Christ has but, in that Christ is really present in faith, participating in who Christ is, in the divine nature.Footnote 89
Some critics argue, however, that this position does not strictly qualify as deification. Carl Trueman perhaps most forcefully rejects this strain of thought the New Finnish School identifies in Luther. “To describe the presence of Christ using ontological language is perhaps not incorrect,” he concedes, “since Christ really is present for Luther.”Footnote 90 But this is confusing, Trueman thinks, because “ontological presence is understood in terms of its effects with reference to imputation and declaration, not first and foremost of deification.”Footnote 91 As the Summer Postil showed, however, Luther indeed links divine indwelling to participation in the divine nature. The claim to confusion, given that this is not the “first and foremost” frame of reference Luther uses, while verifiable given his infrequent discussion of participation in divine nature, is nevertheless no barrier to identifying or demonstrating its significance. Otherwise, themes as well accepted as the theologia crucis, Olli-Pekka Vainio argues, could be discounted on the same grounds.Footnote 92
This alludes to Trueman's major point of contention: the purportedly ahistorical method of the Helsinki circle. Their penchant for reading the “pre-Reformation” Luther, he claims, does a disservice to the mature Reformer's theology.Footnote 93 But Oberman warns against obeisance to a definite Turmerlebnis (tower experience) by which Luther might be interpreted.Footnote 94 We could nevertheless note, abiding by Trueman's logic, the Summer Postil is a late text (1544), as are the Lectures on Genesis (1535–1545), where Luther argues the first two humans, created in the image and likeness of God, were “suited to be a partaker[s] of divinity,” a hope for immortality cast aside in the Fall, but not cast off, “a hope through Christ we also have.”Footnote 95
Whether language regarding the real-ontic presence of Christ in faith is related first and foremost explicitly to deification in Luther's entire or even mature corpus is certainly no reason to treat it as adiaphorous.Footnote 96 Luther claims a real transformation by participation of the believer in unio personalis “into a likeness of Christ,” a process that “creates in the Christian the same form (forma) as Christ.”Footnote 97 Theosis is therefore arguably a natural way to describe what Luther means by justification through grace and gift. For Luther, righteousness means that the believer participates in the divine nature insofar as Christ is present in them by faith. This constitutes the effective divinization of the human united to Christ. This communion of persons is the ground of our inward transformation.Footnote 98 Faith means not only that Christ forensically declares us righteous before God by grace, but also that we are effectively righteous as we participate in the life of God by the gifts bestowed in Christ. The soul united to God in this way is transformed, indeed even deified. As Luther claims in his 1525 Church Postil, “[God] fills us in order that everything that He is and everything He can do might be in us in all its fullness, and work powerfully, so that we might be divinized throughout.”Footnote 99 Divinization obtains by God's will for participation through faith in a divine and human communion by the grace and gift of Christ.Footnote 100
Part III: Theosis and the Christian in Relation
We may now return to the relation of the inner and outer natures, and thereby also to Luther's seemingly paradoxical theological-ethical paradigm of freedom as faith acting in love in service to the neighbor and love of enemies as a Christian in relation. On the reading of the Finnish School, we will reinterpret Luther's theological ethic as being grounded in justification as theosis. What implications does this hold for the question of the Christian in relation, living in the tension between the kingdoms in service to all, friend and enemy alike? What are the temporal consequences of a soul united to Christ?
Let us first briefly restate the paradox that seemingly obtains in Luther's theological ethic. As we saw, Luther clearly understands the tension in which a believer must live as a Christian in relation. They are at once bound by Christ's command in Matthew 5 as citizens of the spiritual kingdom to love their enemies. Yet, while also living in the temporal kingdom, they must “learn to be secular people of some sort,” in loving service to all our neighbors.Footnote 101 This is complicated when service to our neighbor asks us to demand justice against enemies. This not only seems to contradict the spirit of what he forbids to believers, but it also would seem to abandon his radically open category of neighbor, if we are obliged to distinguish between afflicted-neighbor as friend and perpetrator-neighbor as enemy on behalf of the former. How can we be Christ to all in a sinful and broken world full of injustice? This has been our persistent question regarding this seeming paradox of the Christian in relation.
However, if we accept with the Finnish School that for Luther Christ truly indwells believers, then we might better understand his radical notion of Christian freedom. Let us begin reinterpreting his theological-ethical paradigm first in terms of the inward nature and the soul's union with Christ. On the Finnish School's reading of justification as theosis, faith means for Luther that Christians not only believe they have by grace what the gospel promises. That is, righteousness is more than, as Rudolf Hermann suggested, right relationship with God by declaration of forgiveness.Footnote 102 Faith as participation in Christ means Christians effectively become, through healing and renewal, what is promised. Righteous sinners, Luther reminds, should “draw near from day to day so that we may be fully transformed into Christ.”Footnote 103 As participation in the divine nature, deification means the Christian, being purged from sin, is being renewed, transformed in likeness to Christ. Where the work of Christ in unio personalis is not separated from his person, this means believers are, in a limited sense, becoming Christs.Footnote 104
What does this reinterpretation of the inward nature mean for the outward nature? First and foremost, as it were, justification as theosis brings fresh meaning to Luther's insistence that we become Christ to others. In service to our neighbors as Christians in relation, believers are enabled to bear with others as Christ commands to the extent that Christ indwells us and that we participate in him.Footnote 105 Antti Raunio further fleshes out the implications of deification for the outward nature.Footnote 106 He argues that when “Christ unites himself with a Christian through [their] faith, he acts towards [them] just as if Christ himself were that person” by taking “the burden of [their] sin onto himself, he gives his own power, righteousness, and wisdom in return,” so that Christians become participants in the divine nature, “the love that gives itself to the other.”Footnote 107 We may now read Luther in a new light in The Freedom of a Christian. When he says “It is necessary to live fully among people, conversing and dealing with them as Christ did,” he is not asking Christians to imagine how Christ might have dealt with sinners and to do our best imitation.Footnote 108 By union with and participation in Christ, faith means that we are able truly to be Christ to others. Luther can therefore say “I will therefore give myself to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me,” for participation in him is to participate in self-giving love, and from “love there proceeds a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves the neighbor … [so each] of us should become a Christ to the other.Footnote 109 Faith acting in love as service to the neighbor is, for Luther, constituted by the union of the believer to Christ. By faith Christians are quite literally Christ to others because by Christ's indwelling we both have what Christ has and become what Christ is for others: a loving servant to the needs of all.
This nuanced understanding of the inward nature in terms of becoming a Christ to others also allows us to more deftly navigate the tension of life lived between the kingdoms. It is the nature of this becoming, in unio personalis with Christ, while living as Christians in relation, that might help ease the paradox of neighbor love as it arises in Luther's theological ethics. It is true Luther shows a generally negative opinion regarding recourse to temporal justice for Christians who have been wronged.Footnote 110 But insofar as a Christian “has to be a secular person of some sort,” believers are obligated to live simultaneously by Christ's commands to love neighbors and enemies without distinction, and by the laws of temporal society.Footnote 111 The freedom of a Christian is freedom as one who must be Christ to all while also being a neighbor among them.Footnote 112 Christians, simul justus et peccator, however, cannot live purely as though their union with Christ is perfected. Yes grace abounds, but sin remains a persistent and pernicious reality that we inhabit, though in us its substance is being ground away. Hence Luther's admonition that we draw near to Christ day by day to be healed and protected in him who “draws us into himself, and transforms us, and places us as if in hiding.”Footnote 113 But we cannot remain in hiding as though we live in isolation. “Giving oneself to God and to the neighbor is a process,” Raunio suggests.Footnote 114 The purging of sin indicative of our transformation in likeness to Christ means above all that we learn, day by day, to put ourselves in the place of our neighbor. This is what it means to become Christ to them, after all.
Concerning one's being a Christian in relation, insofar as believers are united in soul to Christ by God's grace and gift, faith acting in love means Christians become a Christ for neighbors as cooperators with God.Footnote 115 To not merely have what Christ has as he imputes righteousness to us, but to become by participation in the divine nature who Christ is for others, is a liberating model for faith. Righteousness does not simply describe the reconciliation of the human-divine relationship by God in Christ. Righteousness describes the Christian who in faith incarnates reconciliation in a sinful world. Is this not what Paul means when he writes “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” by the work of God “who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation,” in that, “[for] our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:17–18, 21)?Footnote 116 While Christians remain in relation, with feet both in the temporal and the spiritual kingdoms, we bear the burden of being transformed through the cleansing of sin and loving our neighbors. “In cooperation with Christ's justice,” Raunio argues, “we follow the example of Christ and become conformed to his image,” and we participate “through faith in everything Christ is and that he has.”Footnote 117 We are enabled to bear the tension of cooperation through participation in Christ, through a communion of souls in unio personalis for the work of reconciliation and righteousness so that all things will be made new, transformed by God.
Conclusion
The tension identified at the outset, the persistent contingency believers experience as Christians in relation, is in one sense indeed insurmountable. Christians inhabit a broken, sinful world alongside broken, sinful people. Luther's example of the Christian on her own who is wronged is not unthinkable: perhaps she really can choose to be defrauded, or killed, if she is able to abide by Christ's commands in Matthew 5. But we almost never live in true isolation. We are freed by Christ in regard to all things, and yet we are servants to all because we are almost assuredly always Christians in relation. We live in community: we are members of Christ's body, the community of believers; but we also live within and among the greater world community. The tension comes down to how Christians, whose souls are united to God by the indwelling of Christ, are to live in and among and as sinners in a sinful world.Footnote 118
It is nevertheless the hope of this article that we might learn to think with Luther in a way that makes more sense of this tension. Justification as theosis, the transformation of the sinner united to and participating in Christ, provides a liberating model for how one might really become Christ to others. We have seen how we are enabled as cooperators, by the grace and gift of God through faith, to assume the position of the neighbor and to serve their needs. Reconciliation, then, is not merely something that happened to us in order to right a wronged relationship, though it is also assuredly that. Reconciliation is something we are to others insofar as Christ indwells us and we “put him on” day by day. Indeed, though we are hidden in Christ to whom we cling for hope and by whom we are healed, we are nevertheless burdened to carry the same hope and the same healing to the world we inhabit.
How in this regard are we loving the one made subject to temporal authority? How do we love the enemy of our neighbor? Presumably, insofar as temporal justice models, albeit imperfectly, the love of God. “The letter of the law,” for Luther, “is the demand of divine love, though it cannot guarantee the fulfillment of the law.”Footnote 119 Justice in the world should evince commitments at once pursuant to reconciliation, social equality, peace, hope, and love. So often, and so blatantly, it does not. These are not failures merely of omission. They have real, daily, human costs. Nevertheless, it should be our aim “that we might become the righteousness of God,” not merely to imitate in isolation, but to incarnate justice between the kingdoms. As cooperators with God, Christians are given the ministry of reconciliation. This is the holy work of transforming our sinful world and making all things new even as we are transformed, namely, by purging sin in clinging to, and hoping and healing and hiding in Christ together, by being Christ for one another as Christ was and is and will be for us. This constitutes an imperative for Christian life in relation. We offer, albeit in imperfect form, what Christ offers. We in fact become a Christ to others in a broken world because we are in faith becoming more and more of Christ by participating in him.Footnote 120
