1. Not by Works of the Law

As Luther reads Gal 2.16, he notes that Paul does not present faith as an abstraction; he presents it in an antithesis: ‘a person is not justified by works of law but through faith in Jesus Christ’ (οὐ δικαιοῦται ἄνθρωπος ἐξ ἔργων νόμου ἐὰν μὴ διὰ πίστɛως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ). This antithesis, as Barry Matlock observes, reflects a Pauline pattern—a form of πíστις is set in contrast to law and/or works with δικαιόω or δικαιοσύνη as the middle term.Footnote ⁸ For Luther, this syntactical structure becomes theologically significant at Gal 2.16: justification is both ‘not by works of law’ and ‘through faith in Jesus Christ’, and therefore, as Luther puts it, Paul ‘is contrasting the righteousness of faith with the righteousness of the law’.Footnote ⁹ According to the summative argumentum to the 1531/5 lectures on Galatians, Luther regards this distinction between ‘two kinds of righteousness’ as ‘the argument of the epistle’.Footnote ¹⁰ The antithesis between ‘works of the law’ and ‘faith in Jesus Christ’ is expressed exegetically as an essential contrast between active and passive righteousness. In explicit disagreement with Jerome and Erasmus who interpret the phrase ‘works of the law’ as a restricted reference to the Ceremonial Law, Luther, based on the subsequent argument of Galatians which concerns the whole law, insists that ‘works of the law be taken in the broadest possible sense’.Footnote ¹¹ Law names the divine demand and therefore the entire Mosaic legislation. Thus, in his reading, the excluded option in Gal 2.16—justification by works of the law—is a reference to the establishment of righteousness before God on the basis of works performed in accordance with the law: it specifies a justification that is grounded in human action rather than divine giving.

While this ‘active righteousness’ has its proper place—after justification and before the world in service to one's neighbor—, it oversteps its limits if and when the topic is the righteousness that avails before God. To paraphrase Luther, justification is outside the law's jurisdiction. Nevertheless, in what he referred to as an ‘unhappy habit’, ‘reason cannot refrain from looking at active righteousness’.Footnote ¹² Human history is haunted by the serpent's words: ‘Did God really say? You will be as God’. For Luther, the unbelief evoked by the serpent's question has as its inevitable consequence the self-righteous idolatry suggested by the serpent's promise: failing to live from the word of the creator and thus outside themselves in faith toward God and love for others, human existence is characterized by the incurvation associated with attempting to play God—what Luther called the ambitio divinitatis.

Within this theological frame, ‘justification by works of the law’ specifies the fundamental human error: disbelief in the giftedness of creation and salvation and a corresponding attempt to establish and save oneself. While this may appear more like theological expansion than exegesis of Gal 2.16, Luther indicates his awareness of the particularity of Paul's polemical target and thus the distance between the first and sixteenth centuries. In his words, ‘For if according to the testimony of the apostle, no one is justified by the works of the divine law, much less will anyone be justified by the rule of Benedict or Francis?’Footnote ¹³ Put another way, if the Mosaic Law, which Luther can refer to as the ‘best of all things in the world’Footnote ¹⁴ and the ‘most salutary doctrine of life’, ‘cannot’, as he says in the Heidelberg Disputation, ‘advance humans on their way to righteousness’,Footnote ¹⁵ then, mutatis mutandis, merits and masses certainly do not justify. The issue, then, is not primarily ‘what’ people do (that is, which laws) or even ‘who’ performs works (the human or the Holy Spirit); for Luther, Paul's critique centers on ‘why’ works of the law are performed. As he puts it, ‘good works and love must also be taught; but this must be in its proper time and place… But when we are involved in a discussion of justification, there is no room for speaking about the law’.Footnote ¹⁶

The reason for this totalizing claim is that, as noted above, Luther regards the righteousness of the law, and thus justification by works of the law, as fundamentally active: human beings, bound to exist as ‘unhappy and proud gods’,Footnote ¹⁷ are tethered to their own righteousness, which as Luther notes, appears as a synonym to ‘the righteousness of the law’ in Romans 10 and Philippians 3. The negation of justification by works of the law in Gal 2.16 is therefore, according to Luther's reading, the exclusion of the human as the subject of salvation. This excluded soteriological option is essential to understanding the corresponding Pauline phrase: διὰ πίστɛως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. The coordination of these mutually interpreting assertions suggests that the negation of justification by works of the law provides a negative definition of the phrase ‘faith in Jesus Christ’. In other words, for Luther, ‘by works of the law’ is a soteriological antonym to ‘faith in Christ’ and thus, as its excluded opposite, entails and partially defines the debated phrase: not by works of the law indicates that the human is not a salvific subject; faith in Christ identifies Jesus as the savior.

It is precisely this observation—that it is Jesus rather than the believer who justifies—that motivates the translation of the genitive phrase as the faith or faithfulness of Jesus Christ. As Richard Hays remarks, ‘the Christological [that is, subjective] reading highlights the salvific efficacy of Jesus Christ's faithfulness… the anthropological [that is, objective] reading stresses the salvific efficacy of the human act of faith’.Footnote ¹⁸ If Paul's antithesis excludes the human as a co-operative saving agent—and this, as we have seen, is how Luther reads the negated reference to justification by works of the law –, and if the translation of διὰ πίστɛως Ἰησοῡ Χριστοῡ as ‘through faith in Jesus Christ’ stresses the efficacy of a human act, turning faith, as Hays says, into a ‘bizarre sort of work’,Footnote ¹⁹ then the subjective reading would appear to provide a necessary soteriological solution. Interestingly, however, the current concern to ensure the singularity of the salvific subject (solus Christus) is exactly what Luther and his Protestant heirs thought they were purifying and proclaiming with their insistence that justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone. In other words, for the reformers the sola fide was consistent with, and as we will see necessary to, the solus Christus. This requires a fresh consideration of Luther's Christocentric understanding of faith in Christ.

2. Through Faith in Jesus Christ

Whatever Luther thought faith in Jesus Christ was, he certainly did not regard it as the human contribution to salvation—as ‘a bizarre sort of work in which Christians jump through the entranceway of salvation’, to quote Hays again.Footnote ²⁰ In a series of Disputations on Rom 3.28, a parallel to Gal 2.16, Luther repeatedly critiques the thesis that faith is a work and therefore works justify. First, just as law and promise are distinct, so works and faith are distinct. Works relate to law; faith relates to promise, and it is therefore a category mistake to label faith a work. Second, faith is more properly called a divine work than a human work because it is given by the Holy Spirit in the speaking of the promise. As the 1519 Lectures on Galatians puts it, ‘Faith comes through the Word of Christ’.Footnote ²¹ In other words, for Luther, faith is not a work because it is oriented to God's promise and because God creates faith by his promise.Footnote ²² As Oswald Bayer summarizes, ‘turning toward salvation, which is what faith is, is in no way the work of the human being; it is the work of God—just as the divine promise that creates faith is solely the work of God’.Footnote ²³ Thus, in distinction to the active righteousness of the law, Luther calls the righteousness of faith passive or receptive and insists that ‘here we work nothing, render nothing to God; we only receive and permit someone else to work in us’.Footnote ²⁴ This language is reminiscent of Luther's earlier definition of faith in his 1522 preface to his published lectures on Romans: ‘Faith is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God. It kills the old Adam and makes altogether different people.’Footnote ²⁵ For Luther, then, the first thing to say about the righteousness of faith is that ‘we do not perform but receive’Footnote ²⁶ and thus he can answer his own question ‘do we do nothing and work nothing in order to obtain this righteousness?’ with an emphatic ‘I reply: nothing at all’.Footnote ²⁷

This interpretation of ‘through faith’ in Gal 2.16 is informed by a reading of Romans 4. As Paul's citation of Gen 15.6 in Rom 4.3 indicates, Abraham is the unambigious subject of the verb πιστɛύω, and yet the antithesis of Rom 4.4–5 makes it impossible to interpret this human act as a ‘work’. Precisely as the subject of πιστɛύω, Abraham is ‘the one who does not work’ (ὁ μὴ ἐργαζόμɛνος)—he is, as v. 4 says, ‘without works’ (χωρὶς ἔργων)—and his justification is therefore the act of the one who justifies the ungodly. Here, as in Luther's reading of Gal 2.16, πίστις, as an anthropological action, is an anthropological negation—it is the act of the ungodly in the absence of works and what is present as possible when works of the law are excluded.Footnote ²⁸ According to this interpretation, faith is not a human contribution or a new point of correspondence between divine saving action and the believing human subject; it is an affirmation of the contradiction between the form and object of God's activity: God justifies the ungodly, gives life to the dead and calls non-being into being (Rom 4.5, 17). Thus, in Barth's words, the ‘sola fide is the great negation’Footnote ²⁹—it is the site of ungodliness, deadness, and nothingness at which the creative and gracious God operates out of the opposite. In this sense, as Bayer puts it, ‘the human being who believes thus speaks in via negationis—not about God but about himself’.Footnote ³⁰ For Luther, the exclusion of justification by works of the law and the announcement of justification by faith in Jesus Christ means that ‘faith’ is an anthropological ‘no’—it takes God's side in his judgment against the sinner; but, to anticipate our argument, it is also a theological ‘yes’ because it is directed to the God who speaks and, as Luther would quickly add, who thereby effects (Verbum efficax), the unbelievable ‘yes’ of justification.Footnote ³¹

Luther, as was his rhetorical habit, speaks positively about faith with great diversity. Faith is the fulfillment of the first commandment; faith is the receptive posture of the creature in distinction from and dependent on the creator; faith clings to and is created by the promise; faith is a living, daring confidence in God's grace; and on the list could go. However, despite this variety, when answering the specific question why the righteousness of faith avails before God, Luther's answer is consistently christological. Commenting on Gal 2.16 Luther says, ‘faith justifies because it takes hold of and possesses this treasure, the present Christ’; and therefore ‘the true Christian righteousness’ is not the human act of believing; it is ‘the Christ who is grasped by faith…and on account of whom God counts us righteous’.Footnote ³² This recalls the marriage imagery from The Freedom of the Christian, where Luther relates faith to a wedding ring and grounds justification in the marriage union between Christ and the sinner such that the Christian can say with the Song of Solomon, ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’.Footnote ³³ The intimacy of this account is anchored in the ‘joyous exchange’, in which Christ takes the believer's sin and gives his righteousness such that justification is participation in the present Christ. In Luther's words, ‘faith takes hold of Christ in such a way that Christ is the object of faith, or rather not the object but, so to speak, the One who is present in faith itself’.Footnote ³⁴ It is therefore Christ, who is present in faith, that is ‘our righteousness’, a point Luther repeats throughout the Galatians lectures. This means that justification is, as the reformers consistently affirmed, propter Christum; it is by, in, and on the basis of Christ alone, and thus, as Luther remarks, the expression ‘faith alone’ is a shorthand for a three-part affirmation: ‘These three things are joined together: faith, Christ, and imputation. Faith takes hold of Christ and God accounts you righteous on account of Christ’.Footnote ³⁵

This christological focus continues in Luther's comments on Gal 2.19-21. As Luther notes, the terms ‘law’, ‘faith’, and ‘righteousness’ in these verses indicate that the subject matter has not shifted, but the imagery, as Gerhard Forde remarks, has moved from the courtroom to the cemetery.Footnote ³⁶ Justification, as Luther reads Gal 2.19–20, is a matter of life and death; or perhaps more accurately, of death and life. Through the law one dies to the law so that one might live to God. Luther reads these references to death and life realistically, and the result is what we might call a relational re-creation of the self. The demand of the law condemns and kills the sinner, first in the event of the cross in which Christ is crucified under the curse (cf. Gal 3.13) and also in the hearing of ‘the word of the cross’ which makes present the crucified Christ to faith. In other words, it is the event and proclamation of Christ crucified, a moment and message that is both judgment and justification, that kills the sinner in their soteriological relationship to the law and resurrects the Christian in righteous (that is, Christ-defined) relationship to God. In this sense, the life of the Christian, as Luther expresses Paul's confession ‘not me but Christ’, is an ‘alien life’ and Christian righteousness is therefore an alien righteousness (iustitia aliena).Footnote ³⁷ Because the believer is crucified with Christ and alive only as and through faith in Christ, the Christian possesses (though does not own)Footnote ³⁸ the righteousness that remains extra nos, that remains properly christological. Righteousness before God is thus ever extrinsic; imputation just is the presence of Christ in faith.Footnote ³⁹

This interpretation of justification in terms of death and life reinforces the anthropological negation and christological confession indicated by Luther's reading of the antithesis between works of the law and faith in Christ. As in Romans 4, where the justification of the ungodly is related to God's acts of raising the dead and creating out of nothing (see Rom 4.5, 17), Luther reads the recurrence of righteousness language in Gal 2.21 as indicating that the references to death and life denote and describe God's act of judging and justifying the sinner. The self that remains alive to the law, the Old Adam, is, as Luther put it in his 1526 interpretation of Jonah 1.5, able to know that there is a God, but to know who God is and that God is ‘for me’ belongs only to faith.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, for Luther, the ‘for me’ of Gal 2.20 cannot be confessed by the Old Adam; it is a confession of the one who has been crucified with Christ and who lives as and in Christ. Faith as an affirmation that Christ gave himself for me is an impossible possibility; it is a reality only on the other side of resurrection.Footnote ⁴¹

For Luther, the divine act of self-giving that is the death of Jesus is the gift that grounds justification. In other words, it is the story of Jesus, of the one who loved me and gave himself for me, that is the gift of righteousness. As Luther put it, ‘It was “the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me”. It was not I who loved the Son of God and gave myself for Him.’Footnote ⁴² In this sense, the solus Christus is the content of the sola gratia: grace is the self-giving of Christ for me (Gal 2.20; or ‘for our sins’, 1.4).Footnote ⁴³ The faith that, in one of Luther's favorite pastoral phrases, properly applies the pronoun—the faith that believes that God in Christ is for me Footnote ⁴⁴ —in no way qualifies the singularity or unconditionality of this christological gift; rather, the sola fide points to the presence of the self-giving Christ in the promise that creates and is clung to by faith.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to ‘Luther's Paul’, justification through faith in Jesus Christ is therefore not, as Richard Hays and others fear, a stressing of the salvific efficacy of the human act of faith; justification through faith in Christ is a confession of the soteriological singularity of Jesus: the sola fide is the confession of the solus Christus. And this, for Luther, is why what he calls ‘our theology’ is good news: rather than focusing on faith, justification through faith in Jesus Christ ‘snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God’.Footnote ⁴⁶