Читать книгу The Work of Faith - Justin Nickel - Страница 4

As with any historical figure, our interpretations of Martin Luther’s work are ever-shifting, ever-contested. Claiming as much does not plunge one into a tyranny of relativism, in which parsing true from false interpretations is no longer an option. Some interpretations get Luther right in important ways, others falter, and most will be a mix of the two. This all may seem obvious, but some of the conclusions that follow are less so. Naming this truth forces us to consider the way our interpretations of Luther are, at root, bound up with our own questions, concerns, and goals. These questions and concerns provoke our return to Luther. The ends we seek set the agenda for our interpretations and the texts we select and highlight. It is good to start with this commonplace claim, if only to bring these issues to the fore.

This present book is no different. In it, I aim both to complicate and innovate on a prominent interpretation of Luther. This interpretation is something of a standard among certain North American Christian ethicists and Lutheran theologians.^[1] This is true even as judgments about this Luther, the texts highlighted, and the ends toward which he is put, vary. While I provide a detailed reading of this interpretation below, a brief synopsis goes like this. For Luther, the Christian life is steeped in tension and written in paradox. An encounter with God’s holy law exposes all human piety as bankrupt bids at self-righteousness. Driven by the law to Christ’s cross, we undergo our justification. This justification is not the elevation of our intellects and wills, but the apocalyptic death of the old Adam and Eve and the birth of the new person of faith.^[2] This new person of faith is gloriously free from the law. The law has found its end in Christ, and so has lost its grip over the faithful. Joined to Christ as bride to bridegroom, the new person of faith can stand down any power, principality, or life circumstance that would seek to take her inheritance from her. She is free.

At the same time, the new person of faith is the perfect servant of her neighbor, and her social life should come to reflect this reality. Placed in a particular vocation by God, she is the means through which our neighbor’s need is met.^[3] Here is one of the wholesome consequences of Luther’s teaching on justification. Because we are justified by a passively-suffered faith, there is no longer any distinction between monk and butcher, priest and mother.^[4] All may serve God through their ordinary lives and their common callings, though not all attempts at service, even in the seculum, count as Christian service. These works must have the gospel as their basic principle; they must spring forth from us in joy, love, and spontaneity and be done in faith. Just as we no longer seek God through our efforts to live by God’s law, so we no longer allow the law to bar us from our neighbor’s actual need.^[5] Rather than imposing the law’s deed on our neighbor—whether they meet actual need—we will attend to the neighbor in her concrete situation. We will give the neighbor what she needs, even and especially if it does not conform to prevailing accounts of the good and the just. An aspect of our Christian freedom is the willingness to treat each neighbor and each moment as a genuinely new occasion for service. We should neither expect nor require these moments to do more than cohere to a formal commitment to love.^[6] Such efforts would be asking for the law when we should be living from the gospel.

Just as we do not impose the law’s works on our neighbor, so neither are we the actors of our good works in any substantial sense. We are instead the instruments through which God works. To imagine ourselves as genuine agents would only be to tempt our lingering sin and to risk missing the neighbor’s real needs. For, in thinking that we are doing good, we also think that God then owes us something. In thinking of ourselves as actors, we will draw all attention to ourselves, and so will risk seeing and meeting our neighbors’ actual needs. To think of ourselves as agents of our Christian lives is just to let sin in through the conceptual back door. If we are to affirm that God is working through us, we must also deny that we are agents in any meaningful sense.

Importantly, this gospel freedom comes through a divinely specified means: the sermon, which brings about this apocalyptic change in the sinner’s standing before God and neighbor.^[7] The preacher delivers God’s justification in Christ to the sinner. This handing over of God’s justification makes the sinner perfectly passive. At last, she is brought to the end of her strivings and attempts to earn God’s mercy. Only once her agency is thus exhausted may she suffer God’s righteousness and be raised into this new life.^[8] A portion of the good news is this: the preached Word, and the Christ it communicates, delivers a sinner from her own agency. Just so, we should understand the preacher as the sermon’s speaker in the loosest possible sense. Because the preacher cannot of her own agency create faith in her hearers, the words she preaches must have no material connection to the Word. God’s Word preached must be distinct from common, human language. So, her preaching is the mere occasion through which God speaks God’s own language. There is a symmetry between preaching and the life it authors, and this symmetry picks out the competitive account of divine and human agencies that can be found at every point. Divine grace overcomes human agency in the preaching act, an act for which humans and their language are but hollow vessels. After all, Luther stresses the divinity of God’s address to the human in the preaching. It was this realization that finally set him free.^[9] It was the Word, not Martin Luther, who did everything to accomplish the Reformation. He and his friends sat around drinking beer, as the story goes.^[10] Further, God uses humans as mere instruments in the work of sustaining the creation. In all cases, human agency and divine agency cannot ever work towards the same end, be it the redemption of sinners or the love of the neighbor. The good news is that, in this competition of agents, God will finally win.

Owing to this competition, the Christian is never in a place to act as a Christian.^[11] Of course, Christians will say certain things and perform certain deeds, and they will do so from their God-given life circumstances. However, for these to be God’s deeds or words, their humanity must be overcome. In this, the Christian must act spontaneously, lest her sinful reason interferes and she begins to calculate how she, too, may benefit from this encounter. This is the main conclusion we are to draw from Luther’s frequent attack on the monasteries and his reflections on true Christian vocation. Not only does the true Christian not consider her own benefit in serving a neighbor, she does not consider much of anything. The result is a view of the Christian life in which human agency is ever instrumentalized to divine purposes that we can neither understand nor anticipate, and so the Christian life cannot be predicted or described in any substantial way. Neither can it be actively lived. God acts on us, principally through the preached Word that we may be saved. God acts through us for the sake of our neighbor. On this account, the good news of Christian preaching is that it finally frees us from our sinful need to earn God’s love or our neighbor’s approval through action. In Oswald Bayer’s paradoxical turn of phrase, the Christian life requires that we endure the bitterness of the Sabbath, so that we may realize the utter passivity of our lives of faith.^[12]

This prominent reading authorizes the following conclusions. First, Luther held an incoherent view of the Christian life, as his critics and interpreters have pointed out.^[13] As a result, he has little to offer contemporary North American discussions of Christian ethics and moral theology.^[14] Or better, he functions best as villain and foil in these discussions. His strident critiques of Aristotelian-style virtue and his paranoid concern with moral hypocrisy introduced moral chaos in Western thought. This chaos can only be reordered by returning to a view of the moral life which accents all that Luther opposed: virtue cultivated by habit or story, growth in likeness to God, and bearing with the inevitable hypocrisy that accompanies this growth. Jennifer Herdt, the early Stanley Hauerwas, and others have taught us as much.

At the same time, some of Luther’s friends take this unintelligibility to be the mark of its freedom and authenticity. Because we are justified by faith, we have given up on all human projects of morality—as distinct from good works—which were only ever our attempts to earn God’s mercy. Luther becomes a hero of gospel freedom over and against all who would soften the impact of this message by efforts to sneak the law back into the gospel.^[15] Those who read and defend Luther in this way—Steven Paulson, Mark Mattes, Timothy Wengert, and others—reason that this Luther stands in judgment against much of the Lutheranism that follows Luther, and much of what passes for Lutheran Christianity today. This is particularly true in North American forms of Lutheranism, in which the gospel is threatened and undermined by any number of foes, including Pietism, Modernity, and Liberal Protestantism (whatever the authors listed take these terms to mean). On these terms, to stand with Luther means to stand on one side in the struggle for North American Lutheranism’s soul.

This book is an effort to complicate and innovate on this standard Luther and so, too, on his contribution to our understanding of the moral life. First the complication. In what follows, I argue against this standard reading of Luther. My big claim is this: Luther preaches as though we are real, if secondary, agents of our Christian lives. He believes that a Christian life can be described, recognized, and prescribed, and he gives his listeners and readers the relevant moral tools required to live this life. These include descriptions of the sort of activities in which a Christian should engage and the conversions of our intellects and wills that make these activities pleasing. Further still, this Luther believes that we, as recipients of God’s grace, are the genuine agents of these lives, and the sort of actions that Christians undertake in the world impacts the quality of their faith. According to Luther, in justification, the Holy Spirit graces our wills and intellects such that we begin to share God’s desires, judgments, and actions. The preached Word becomes the means by which we grow in both faith and love, and the means by which our faith is converted to love. In this, I will show that Luther’s preaching does not promote or depend on a wholly competitive account of the Christian life in which human agency is always governed by sin and so always opposed to God’s agency and activity. This is a complication in that it uses many of the same terms and relies on many of the same commitments of the so-called standard story, even as I put these terms and commitments to different uses. Justification by faith through grace; the sermon as the center of theological reflection; sin’s persistence in the lives of the faithful this side of glory; spontaneous love for the neighbor; a concern that Luther’s catholic commitments are recognized and applied to the contemporary church: These are the right terms and commitments. They exercise authority over my interpretation of Luther and the Christian life. The trouble comes when certain of Luther’s interpreters use these terms in unrecognizable ways, or so I will argue.

The innovation of my argument comes by a second step. Like many Lutherans, I am committed to the authority and centrality of the preaching act. This book takes the claim seriously enough to consult Luther’s own preaching, for both its form and content. Luther’s preaching is an underused resource for Lutheran moral theology, this book a first step in correcting the error. Regarding its form, I will read Luther’s preaching as an instance of his own Christian agency. Rather than downplaying or ignoring the humanity of Luther’s preaching, I will argue that this humanity needs to be highlighted if we are to correctly describe Luther’s preaching. Assuming as much—treating Luther’s preaching as (though not solely) human activities—has the following consequences. First, I will show that his preaching has definite ends and his considerable rhetorical skill is put to service of these ends. Luther’s warmth, depth of faith, and care for his people are all used to communicate God’s gift of grace in Christ and the life God imparts. Further, Luther’s spontaneity and improvisation are not evidence of someone lacking in rhetorical skill or intention. Instead, they are evidence of a man who knew Scripture, the tradition, and his people well enough to improvise in the moment. Luther’s spontaneity was not opposed to form and intention but instead demonstrates his familiarity with, and mastery of, these things. In this, Luther’s heroic disorder, whether in preaching or the moral life, comes to mean improvisation on norms and the law. We can look to Luther’s preaching to find his graced agency.

Readers familiar with Lutheran moral theology may object even at this early point. Better, they would say, to focus solely on the law, and how Luther preaches it. Such objections betray a tendency in Lutheran moral theology wherein “the law” and Lutheran ethics are nearly synonymous terms. Why not focus on just this topic? There are two reasons. First, much admirable work has already been done on the Luther and the law. I, in fact, make ample use of this work in chapter 4. Second, debates over the law are often an ideological battleground where familiar conclusions are drawn in familiar ways. Because of that, a book devoted entirely to the topic would likely result in a predictable retreat to previously held commitments. Focusing on divine and human agency, and how their relationship bears on other topics in Lutheran moral theology, is a more promising tack. It is a more expansive way to look at Lutheran moral theology, and thus one of the virtues of my approach. The law is certainly included in the topics I cover, but others matter, too. These include: preaching/language use, virtuous and vicious preachers, how to think of faith, how to respond to God’s apparent silence, and others. My focus on divine and human agencies allows a fresh look at Luther’s moral

theology.

Even if Luther’s sermons are underused by moral theologians, the problem of selection remains open. Any reading of Luther’s sermons risks arbitrariness. Luther was, if nothing else, a preacher, with the Stadtkirche in Wittenberg serving as his primary homiletic setting.^[16] Take the years 1528 and 1529 as examples. In the former, he preached nearly 200 times,^[17] while in the latter he preached “no fewer than 121 times, on forty days twice each day.”^[18] This preaching activity included sermons on the appointed Gospel during the main Sunday service and a second sermon, on a different text, for Sunday afternoons. As a result of this constant preaching activity, Fred Meuser estimates that Luther preached around 4,000 sermons in his life. Of these 4,000 or so, we have roughly 2,000 in written form.^[19] Further, these numbers assume a genre division between Luther’s homiletic activity and the rest of his scholarly output.^[20] Even a cursory familiarity with Luther’s biblical lectures or theological treatises suggests the difficulty of this division. As Richard Lischer rightly puts it, “Everything we have from Luther ‘preaches.’”^[21] Given the sheer volume of Luther’s sermons and the homiletic nature of Luther’s work in general, an exhaustive reading is impossible, and I make no claims to that effect.

All the same, there are good reasons to focus on sections of a specific text: the Church Postil (hereafter CP). Because this is a perhaps unfamiliar genre, a brief description is required, along with a description of the CP’s textual history. A common medieval genre, a postil was simply a collection of sermons or sermon outlines.^[22] Beginning in 1544, Luther’s Summer and Winter Postils were gathered together as the Church Postil. This distinguished them from another collection of Luther’s sermons, the House Postil. The 1544 Church Postil includes the 1540 version of the Winter Postil, written and revised by Luther, and the 1544 version of the Summer Postil, whose authorship is a more complicated story. Casper Cruciger edited and revised this version of the Summer Postil from a different and previous version, edited and compiled by Stephan Roth. For the Summer Postil, Benjamin Mayes notes that the sermons “were actually preached by Luther, recorded by a stenographer, and revised by an editor to a lesser . . . or greater extent.”^[23] Roth’s version held most closely to the original stenographer’s notes. Additionally, Cruciger exercised considerable editorial freedom, often changing words while yet “communicating (Luther’s) thought faithfully.”^[24] This process raises questions about authenticity of the Summer Postil and whether we should treat it as Luther’s work, particularly given my interest in Luther’s language use.

However valid this concern, there are still ample reasons to consider the Summer Postil as Luther’s work (if not his alone). No doubt, Cruciger is an important figure for the Postil, but he worked under Luther’s aegis and with Luther’s material. Luther himself commissioned Cruciger for the editorial task, and Luther wrote a preface to the volume. Further, Mayes claims that Luther “acknowledged (Cruciger’s) work as his own,”^[25] even with Cruciger’s editorial freedom outlined above. Though Cruciger changed Luther’s language from the original sermons, he did so in a way that Luther himself approved. Presumably, this means that Cruciger did not transgress Luther’s own rhetorical habits and commitments. The texts themselves certainly bear this out. Additionally, the Summer Postil’s editorial process underscores the collaborative nature of the Reformation. Mayes quotes Robert Kolb to this effect: “’The Wittenberg Reformation certainly revolved around . . . Martin Luther, but Luther would not have been able to change the face and heart of the church in Germany and beyond without his team.’”^[26] Such comments suggest that our own standards for authentic authorship should be applied with care to other times and places. Further still, the editors and translators of the CP are to be applauded and thanked for their detailed footnoting of the sermons. In these footnotes, they track any changes in the text that would alter the theological meaning. When necessary, I will make use of these footnotes. Additionally, I will note serious discrepancies between the Roth and Cruciger versions should they arise. I draw the relevant Roth texts^[27] and the accompanying versions in WA. As will become clear, most of the passages I exegete are common to these varied translations. When minor discrepancies arise, I will follow Luther’s own judgment on this question and primarily use Cruciger’s version.^[28]

The CP, then, “includes the various homiletical writings of Luther that developed in different ways and at various times during his career.”^[29] By Luther’s time, these postils focused on the Gospel and Epistle lessons appointed for Sundays throughout the year. Historian John Frymire claims that the postils “were the most important genre for the dissemination of ideas in early modern Germany.”^[30] Accordingly, the first reason for choosing the CP concerns its influence during Luther’s life. Frymire provides the blunt assessment: Luther’s “postils . . . without question were among his most influential writings.”^[31] Mayes offers some statistics to support this claim. “From 1525–1529, some twenty-five editions of Luther’s postils were published, while in the next half decade, the number rose to more than fifty.”^[32] This popularity remained long after Luther’s death in 1546.^[33] Frymire claims that, even among clergy with modest libraries, they likely owned at least one volume of the postil, if not the whole set.^[34]

Absent an official preaching manual from Luther (which, strangely, he never wrote), the postils were also a primer in the basics of Reformation theology and preaching. So Frymire: “[w]ith Luther’s postils in hand, clerics had regular exposure to his theology of preaching, models of sermon compilation and frequent discussions regarding the roles and duties of pastors.”^[35] Luther intended that the postils serve as a model for capable sermon writers. For the less skilled, its sermons could be read verbatim from the pulpit. Just so, Luther imagined that the father of the household could use them for domestic religious services.^[36] Many of Luther’s German contemporaries would have encountered his theological program through the postils. This is a quite different situation from our own, in which Luther’s most well-known and frequently taught texts tend to be his theological treatises and biblical commentaries. We are well acquainted with the “Freedom of a Christian,” less so Luther’s “Gospel for Easter Monday” sermon from the CP. The postil’s practical importance provides a warrant to take these writings seriously. Luther appears to have trusted the postil as a key means of spreading the Reformation theology. Given this influence, it makes good sense to bring the CP into contemporary Lutheran reflection.

There are further reasons that the CP’s genre is important.^[37] Luther’s biblical lectures and theological treatises do indeed “preach,” in the sense that, in them, Luther often proclaims God’s mercy in Christ and exhorts faithful obedience to that same Christ. Nonetheless, these were delivered in the lecture hall or written to fellow academic theologians. The CP, though, has a different audience, one that is made up of Luther’s fellow preachers and the townspeople of Wittenberg. It is not important that we know the details of life details of everyone who heard Luther’s preaching. Instead, it is enough to know that his preaching is aimed toward clergy and non-professional theologians whom he nevertheless expects to hold Christian beliefs and lead Christian lives. Offering Christian wisdom to the masses, or helping a young preacher find voice and confidence in his new calling: these are different tasks than convincing fellow academics of a certain claim. As such, they require different skills and virtues. In the CP, we find a Luther beholden both to the biblical text and the non-academic theologian. Because the homiletic act is central to the Lutheran drama, we have theological warrant to take these differences seriously. We may rightly infer that Luther’s homiletic writings are as significant for his theology as any other piece of his writing, and so worthy of our time.