“Theology’s true object is ‘the guilty and condemned person and the justifying or redeeming God…whatever is sought outside that area or inquiry or object is totally in error and idle in theology.’” Jungel
Fundamental to Luther’s main insight is the practice of making distinctions. The most basic and important distinction for Luther is the distinction between God and humanity. Humans are nothing but sinners who stand guilty and condemned, God alone is the redeemer. Only God can and does act for our redemption, all humans can do is hear and believe. The only thing humans bring to the table is sin, God alone brings love and redemption. And both parties, for Luther, are mysteriously found in the person of Christ. When we see Christ, who is the enfleshed God, we see the condemned and guilty human and the loving, redeeming God.
Once Luther had his fundamental insight, he quickly developed a series of conclusions about the church and its practices. Luther first took aim at indulgences and the practice of penance. He did not reject them all at once, but over time grew more and more dissatisfied with them, eventually viewing them as completely worthless. At the outset, Luther wanted simply to correct the errors he saw in how the church went about selling indulgences and requiring penance. His famous 95 theses are not an outright rejection of the Catholic church’s practices—in fact, throughout, he assumes that the pope is on his side—but an attempt to correct what he saw as an over extension of the church’s authority. He saw that the church was stepping out of the bounds given to it by Christ, speaking where it was not permitted to speak. The results, according to Luther, were damaging on all sides. Both the Law and the Gospel were obscured. Regarding the Law, believers were permitted to take God for granted; all they had to worry themselves with were those things the church told them to do. When believers did their penance or paid their indulgence, they thought it was enough, that they had performed their Christian duty. The living, commanding person of Christ, however, had dropped out of view, according to Luther. Here are the first 2 theses from Luther’s 95. “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Matt. 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.”
Luther’s point here is that repentance is not a one-time activity, or even an ‘activity’ at all. It is not something that we choose to do sometimes and choose not to do other times, like penance. Repentance, rather, is something we are ushered into irrespective of our personal choice, something that is true about us whether or not we actually perform an action that could be called repentance. Repentance is the air we breathe; it is what our whole life is to be about, whether we know it or not. Repentance, for Luther, is turning away from self, from selfish desires and self-seeking, to God and to our neighbor. It is not a general feeling of sorrow that we can conjure up, or simply asking for forgiveness as an afterthought. Repentance is possible (and so necessary) only because of the Gospel.
Therefore, it is not something we can do at our leisure; it is the only conceivable possibility for our lives given that the world we live in is one where the Gospel is a reality. The only thing that makes sense in this world where the living Christ speaks is to turn away from ourselves to God and neighbor, to repent. The penitential system of the church was therefore unable to teach believers about the true nature of repentance. It made it seem like we have certain ‘religious’ obligations that are separate from everything else. It made repentance a thing we do, instead of a whole way of life made possible by God in Christ. It turned the Law into a thing we control for our own benefit; it did not recognize the Law as a signpost pointing to the Gospel.
Allow me to make an aside here. In my first lesson, I spoke about why we still need to hear Luther today. I think we need to hear him on this. Here is one area where the rubber needs to meet the road. Do we generally view repentance and the Christian life like this? As all-encompassing and far-reaching as this? As something that we are not in control of, but as purely a gift? I know I don’t. I tend to think that I am largely in control of my Christian life. I decide when to pray or not, when to go to church or not, when to read the Bible or not, when to help my neighbor or not. Christ often functions simply as an idea for me, a wonderful idea, to be sure, but an idea nonetheless. And an idea I can control, for the most part. I can choose to think about it or not. But do I really believe that the Gospel is true, that the man Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of God Almighty was handed over to death for my sins and raised to life for my justification, and reigns as Lord? Do I really believe that a life of repentance, turning away from my selfishness to love God and my neighbor, is really the only conceivable option? Or are these just ideas for me? Much of the time, I must confess, these are only ideas. Really believing them, I am afraid, would commit me to too much. I can do no better than the father in Mark 9, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”
Theologian Robert Jensen has an essay simply but profoundly titled, “What If It Were True?” After laying out some reasons why Christian claims no don’t carry much weight for people, including Christians, he writes:
Yet I think there is another reason for our skittishness with the gospel’s truth claims, that is probably more important and is moreover perennial. As soon as we pose the question, “What indeed if it were true?” about any ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences begin to show themselves that go beyond anything we dare to believe, that upset our whole basket of assured convictions, and we are frightened of that. The most Sunday-school-platitudinous of Christian claims—say, “Jesus loves me”—contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds; it commits us to what has been called revisionary metaphysics, and on a massive scale. That, I think, is the main reason we prefer not to start, and have preferred it especially in the period of modernity. For Western modernity’s defining passion has been for the use of knowledge to control, and that is the very point where the knowledge of faith threatens us. Robert Jenson “What If It Were True?”
The Gospel, he writes, “contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds.” Luther understood this perhaps more than most, and more than most Luther allowed the Gospel to blow his mind. And also, Luther saw more clearly than most the many and subtle ways in which people hide themselves from the Gospel, even in the name of Christianity and God. We fear the Gospel because, in the end, it really does commit us to a radical existence in this world. And so we turn repentance into something we do only on Sunday mornings, or perhaps a couple times a week. We turn church into a social club, we turn prayer into a chore. We need to hear Luther. Like John the Baptist, he can be for us a voice crying out in the wilderness. And ultimately, like John the Baptist, Luther points us to Christ, who is our salvation.
and important. It gives us the illusion of being happy; having a lot of it enables us to jump from one fleeting pleasure to another. So what could cause us to forget about it? The trumpet child will banquet here / Until the lost are truly found. Being found, truly found, is a security that gold can never give us. Only God in Christ can and does do that. Money, by its very nature, is restless. It represents potential—what we could be, what we could become, what we could have. Money can never give us rest. It demands to be spent, to be used, and so passes away. It is not a good in and of itself. God’s kingdom, however, does give us rest. Augustine’s famous words sum it all up and need no improvement: Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee. 
stunning picture that is incredibly theologically rich. It can be spun a couple of ways. Taken at face value, it is a wonderful picture of the eschatological shalom that the trumpet child will effect. The natural world will be at harmony with itself, and even sinful humans will be taken up into the re-creation of all things. Humans will finally live at peace with the whole created order. Yet this verse, I think, is most powerfully read when done so christologically. I have no idea if Karin and Linford meant it this way, but here goes.
Another feature of Luther’s context was the presence of monasteries. He would have come into contact with them very early on in his life. And in Luther’s day, living in a monastery was considered a better or more intense form of the Christian life than the everyday callings of ordinary people, such as being a parent, or doctor, or lawyer, or whatever. If you were a monk, you could somehow be more holy and possess better prospects for eternal life; you could really focuses on doing your best, and you could be surer that God would do the rest. Luther did not originally set out to be a monk, though. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, and so he started out going to law school. And he did very well. But at some point in the middle of law school, Luther changed his mind about his vocation. The famous story is told that while walking back to school after visiting his parents Luther was caught in a lightning storm (1505). Being extremely frightened, Luther vowed to St. Anne that he would become a monk if he got out of the storm alive. He got out alive, entered an Augustinian monastery, and became a beggar. Now I don’t know if the lighting storm was the only reason he became a monk. I suspect not. I think Luther was just wired a certain way and would have ended up in some form of religious vocation one way or another. The lightning storm may have just been the perfect excuse.
gs changed for Luther. His post at the university had him primarily teaching the Bible. Luther was able to immerse himself in the Scriptures, and slowly something began to emerge for him. He discovered that the Scriptures spoke of the Gospel as something distinct from the Law. Previously, Luther had thought that the Christian life was all about Law and that the Gospel is what you get once you obey the Law. Do you best, God will do the rest, the Gospel is what I get for doing my best. The Gospel and Law are on the same continuum. But Luther found that this is not what the Bible teaches. The Law is what we are commanded to do, whether the command comes through the church or through the Bible, but the Gospel is something that God does, for us, apart from the Law. The purpose of the Law, he found, was not to lead us into eternal life, but to lead us into an awareness of our sin. And once we have encountered our sin through the Law, the Gospel comes to us as the good news that God justifies us apart from the Law through faith in Christ.
