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chapter 1

Luther’s Two Basic Ways of Thinking and Viewing Life

In Luther’s eyes, the individuality of our own life’s journey reflects the universality of the course of God’s word. He finds this connection between the individual and the universal prefigured in Holy Scripture, especially Psalm 119. Those who pray this psalm fully surrender their own destiny to the destiny of God’s word. They see their relationship to God as nothing else than a relationship to his word.

—Oswald Bayer19

To make a true historian, I think two qualities are needed, the first of which is a participation and joy in the particular in and for itself. . . . But this is not enough. It is essential that the historian also have an eye for the universal.

—Leopold von Ranke20

From the sixteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century, but increasingly less so since that time, one could usually distinguish a Lutheran from a non-Lutheran if he or she understood what you were talking about if you mentioned (1) that a Christian is both sinner and justified “at the same time,” (2) the connected prepositions in, with, and under, (3) the Small Catechism, and (4) the three articles of the Creed. A knowledge of these four notions is helpful not only for understanding the development of Lutheranism but also for the development of German education, history, literature, philosophy, and theology since the sixteenth century.

To see and to understand a distinctively Lutheran ethos and a distinctively Lutheran way of viewing life, one must begin with the life, the religious experiences, and the writings of Martin Luther. “Not since Augustine,” Jaroslav Pelikan rightly claimed, “had the spiritual odyssey of one man and the spiritual exigency of Western Christendom coincided as they did now.”21

It is common knowledge that Luther’s life and work were shaped by three religious experiences: (1) the vow he took in 1505 to become a monk when he was struck to the ground by a lightning bolt, (2) the awesome experience of his first Mass in 1507 when he became a priest, and, most of all, (3) the revolutionary experience associated with the idea called justification by faith, an experience that took place sometime after he received his doctorate of theology (October 19, 1512), and after he began lecturing on the books of the Bible at the University of Wittenberg.

At this time Luther was a late-medieval theologian who followed the via moderna, or the “modern way,” rather than the via antiqua, or the “old way.” While the representatives of the via antiqua were followers of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the representatives of the via moderna were followers of William of Occam (1300–1349).

Occam is famous in the history of philosophy for his nominalism and for the principle known as Occam’s razor. While the representatives of the via antiqua held that universal concepts were the expressions of reality itself, since they were the higher reality behind all individuality, nominalists believed that only the individual or the particular was real, and that universals were only names or labels. Because universal concepts were conceived by the mind or based on convention, they possessed no independent reality. Thus for nominalists, universals were “models,” which always required verification “by means of the sensually perceivable reality of the particular.”22 Occam’s razor suggested that the simplest solution to a problem is usually the best, because it held that “entities must not be multiplied without necessity.”23

As Heiko Oberman has emphasized in many works, nominalism is one of the most important ideas not only for understanding the Late Middle Ages, Martin Luther, and the advance of both the natural sciences and theology,24 but also for understanding the whole course of Western intellectual history.25 This contention certainly can be supported by looking at the work of Max Weber, for he was one of the greatest nominalists of the twentieth century.26

Before Luther began his studies at the University of Erfurt (1501), two professors from the arts faculty there had expressed many times the decisive principle of the via moderna that “all philosophical speculation about the world must be tested by means of experience and reality-based reason, regardless of what even the most respected authorities might say.” At Erfurt, Luther became a nominalist and was exposed to humanist ideas.27

Luther’s starting point, however, and also his chief problem—both through his theological training and his own religious struggle—was how to satisfy an all-powerful, awesome, and righteous God. In the year 1545, the year before he died, Luther wrote a moving description of the spiritual and intellectual experience that was the real starting point for and the real basis of the Protestant Reformation and of a specifically Lutheran ethos. In this account he told of his strong desire to understand St. Paul and his great difficulty with the phrase, “the righteousness of God.”

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written: ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of Scripture showed itself to me.28

Whereas he had “once hated the phrase ‘the righteousness of God,’” Luther continued, “I began to love and extol it as the sweetest of words, so that this passage in Paul became the very gate of paradise for me.”29 In the next sentence of this famous statement, Luther added: “Later I read Augustine’s The Spirit and the Letter, where contrary to hope I found that he, too, interpreted God’s righteousness in a similar way, as the righteousness with which God clothes us when he justifies us.”30

Although Luther scholars have not agreed when his “reformation breakthrough” took place, they do agree that the writings of St. Augustine were also of crucial importance for the development of Luther’s thought prior to this breakthrough. To use the words of Heiko Oberman, Luther “had to test scholasticism by the standard of St. Augustine and then to find his way from St. Augustine to St. Paul in order to acquire the key to the Scriptures.”31

As a result of the life-changing experience based on the idea called justification by faith alone, Luther also came to the conclusion that a person could understand a subject only if he or she was familiar with it from experience.32 In studying the Bible, Luther once said, “You must completely despair of your own diligence and intelligence and rely solely on the infusion of Spirit.” As Erich W. Gritsch pointed out after he cited this sentence, “Luther found this kind of approach to Bible study confirmed in the writings of the great church father Augustine rather than in the scholars of the Middle Ages. What Augustine had to say in his work On the Spirit and the Letter (De spiritu et litera), decisively shaped Luther’s early struggles with the Bible.”33

In and through this “evangelical” experience, Luther was convinced that a Christian is at the same time a justified or righteous person and a sinner: simul justus et peccator. “No other phrase,” Luther scholars agree, “is capable of expressing Luther’s theological ‘reforming discovery’ as clearly and succinctly.”34 From this experience, Luther developed an “at-the-same-time” way of thinking and viewing life, a way that Martin E. Marty has called a “simul-vision.”35

For this inquiry it is important to remember that Luther’s theology is, as Paul Althaus pointed out in his helpful study, The Theology of Martin Luther, “a way of thinking.”36 Second, as Gerhard Ebeling emphasized, the formula simul justus—simul peccator “is the fundamental and typical characteristic of Luther’s thought.”37 The clue to this, Ebeling suggested, “seems to lie in the observation that Luther’s thought always contains an antithesis, tension between strongly opposed but related polarities: theology and philosophy, the letter and the Spirit, the law and the gospel, the double use of the law, person and works, faith and love, the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of the world, man as a Christian and man in the world, freedom and bondage, God hidden and God revealed—to mention only the most important examples.”38

Now a way of thinking and a way of perceiving or viewing life can also become a methodological principle and a style of writing. By the year 1520, Luther was a master of the use of paradox, for in the beautiful and powerful essay called “The Freedom of a Christian,” he used an “at-the-same-time” way of viewing life to present a picture of what he called “the whole of Christian life in a brief form.”39 For me and for many Lutherans, this magnificent treatise is the best essay in Western literature for teaching a simul way of viewing life and for teaching paradox.

In this essay Luther explained how “the individual Christian lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love.”40 Before he developed this theme, however, he presented two strong theses that “seem to contradict each other”: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all.”41

To explain this paradox, Luther first presented his basic “at-the-same-time” way of perceiving the nature of humankind.

Man has a two-fold nature, a spiritual and a bodily one. According to the spiritual nature, which men refer to as the soul, he is called a spiritual, inner, or new man. According to the bodily nature, which men refer to as flesh, he is called carnal, outward, or old man . . . Beca­use of this diversity of nature Scriptures assert contradictory things concerning the same man, since the two men in the same flesh contradict each other, “for the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh,” according to Gal 5 [:17].42

For Luther, the Word of God and faith ruled in the soul or the inner man. “The inner man, who by faith is created in the image of God, is both joyful and happy because it is his one occupation to serve God joyfully and without the thought of gain, in love that is not constrained.”43 For Luther, “the outer man” should control his own body, serve his neighbor in love, live only for others rather than for himself, and live for all men on earth. “We conclude,” Luther said, “that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love.”44

It is difficult to overemphasize the significance of this essay for the whole development of Lutheran thought and Protestant thought in Germany since the sixteenth century, for both Lutheran thought and much of Protestant thought in Germany are based on Luther’s “at-the-same-time” image of the inner and outer man. While on the one hand Luther constantly emphasized not only that each human being was both “spirit” and “flesh” at the same time, on the other hand he constantly insisted that each person and his or her works had to be viewed as an entirety. Both these views, as Peter Meinhold emphasized, were closely connected with Luther’s basic starting place and basic idea.45

It is a well-known fact that Luther’s main starting point, the idea known as justification through grace by faith alone, and his simul-vision were derived mainly from the writings of Paul and mainly from his Epistle to the Romans. It is also a well-known fact that Luther had a hierarchy of books within the New Testament, and that he developed what Inge Lønning,46 Eric W. Gritsch,47 and others have called “a canon within the canon.” What Luther scholars have not agreed on, however, is what book Luther placed first within this hierarchy or canon.

At the beginning of his “Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans,” Luther claimed that “This epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament, and is truly the purest gospel.”48 In the last paragraph of this preface, Luther stated:

In this epistle we thus find most abundantly the things that a Christian ought to know, namely, what is law, gospel, sin, punishment, grace, faith, righteousness, Christ, God, good works, love, hope, and the cross; and also how we are to conduct ourselves toward everyone, be he righteous or sinner, strong or weak, friend or foe—and even toward our own selves. Moreover this is all ably supported with Scripture and proved by St. Paul’s own example and that of the prophets, so that one could not wish for anything more. Therefore it appears that he wanted in this one epistle to sum up briefly the whole Christian and evangelical doctrine, and to prepare an introduction to the entire Old Testament.49

Thus when one uses this preface to establish Luther’s hierarchy of New Testament books or his “canon within the canon,” one would conclude that for Luther the Epistle to the Romans came first.