Luther on God's Glory, Justification, and the Covenent of Works

I providentially opened one of my books, The Theology of Martin Luther, by Paul Althaus, a “standard” work often referenced by others, to the midst of Chapter 10, “God is God,” and found the following material.

Here are some excerpts, with my comments. Remember that Althaus is a secondary source. All his comments and quotations need to be verified from the readings of Luther that he notices in his footnotes.

Beginning of Quotes from Althaus

The quotes, in alternate typeface, also contain quotes from Luther in quotation marks.

The Creator Works All in All [p 105]

For Luther, being God and creating are identical.  God is God because he and only he creates.

God creates and preserves everything. Nothing is and nothing continues to be without his activity.  “All things must be God’s, since nothing can be or become, if he would not bring it into existence; and when he stops, nothing can continue to exist.”  [p 105]

…

This living omnipresent working of God is the mystery of all reality.  God who causes all things is also the only causal agent.  For the agent who really works in all things is God, and not the personal and impersonal powers of the world which we think of as causes.  God is the first or principal cause; all others are only secondary or instrumental causes.”  [p 107]

…

The knowledge that God and God alone works everything has immediate significance for faith.  The unchangeableness and the constancy of God’s purpose as well as the trustworthiness of his promises (and threats) depends on his being alone the one who works all in all.  Since he determines everything with his almighty working, I know that nothing and nobody can resist his will, change his mind, or restrict his activity.  There is therefore no doubt that God is able to achieve the eternal purposes of his love as they are made known to me in his promises. [p 110]

…

This inescapable living presence of God in all that exists is either the most blessed or the most terrible reality for a man, depending on what he knows God’s relationship to himself to be. It is never neutral but is always either saving or damning.  We are here confronted with the twofold character of God’s dealing with men in the law and the gospel.  The man who has peace with God through believing the gospel can be confident in the midst of the most terrible reality; for God is present even in such a situation and holds it in his omnipotent hand – whether it be death, hell, or hostile earthly powers. … We should therefore fear and trust only in God and most certainly believe that nothing can destroy us; for God is Lord of all the powers that threaten us.  We are in his gracious hand, no matter what happens.  This is the believer’s royal freedom and joy. Ultimately, he is always dealing with God himself and not with the creature: and he knows how he stands with God. [p 111]

Giving Love [p 115]

Viewed in relationship to men, God’s creative activity is pure giving and helping.  He thus demonstrates not only his divine ability but also that he is goodness and love, constantly engaged in giving.  Whoever wishes to describe God as God, in terms of his “nature,” cannot speak of him merely as the only and constant creator, but must also speak of him as love.  God in the depths of his being is nothing else than love; and love is divine, for it is God himself.  “It is God’s nature to do only ‘good.’”  This is his glory: not receiving, but constantly giving, freely without hope of gratitude, independently of man’s attitude toward him, that is, in a completely different way than natural men do good. Thus God’s goodness is “genuinely natural goodness.” It “gladly loses its good deed on the unthankful.”  [p 115]

…

… In addition to all these temporal gifts God gives men eternal goods, his Son, and therewith himself.  “He has poured out upon us both temporal and eternal goods and with them his own being; and he has poured himself out with everything he is and does for us who were sinners, undeserving enemies, and servants of the devil.  He can neither do any more than this for us nor give us anything else.”  Thus Christ and the fact that he is “for us” is the greatest gift of God’s love.  In this gift, God gives himself.  [p 116]

Justification Means that God is God [p 118]

…

At this point two elements of God’s creative activity are to be emphasized.  First, creating means creating out of nothing. … For Luther this is more than an assertion about the origin of the world. It is an all-inclusive characteristic of God’s creating and working. As such, it manifests itself also in the way in which God works men’s salvation.  In this too God creates everything out of nothing.  He takes the man who is nothing before Him and clothes him with the worth of the righteous man. [p 119]

As a second characteristic of God’s creative activity, Luther emphasizes that God makes what he makes under the veil or form of its opposite, and therefore also out of its opposite.  He creates life under the form of death, yes, by way of death.  When he intends to exalt a man, he first humbles him.  When he intends to give his gifts to us, he first of all destroys us and what we have and thereby creates room for his gift. … “You exalt us when you humble us. You make us righteous when you make us sinners.  You lead us to heaven when you cast us into hell. You grant us the victory when you cause us to be defeated.  You give us life, when you permit us to be killed.” … Thereby God demonstrates that he is God and shows the majesty of his creating activity which cannot be compared with any human work.  [p 119]

Luther’s doctrine of justification must be viewed in the context of these characteristics of God’s creativity. … [p 120]

Why is a man not righteous before God through his “works,” that is, through fulfilling the law of God?  The first answer to that question is certainly this: because no individual from the beginning of the world to its end, and not even a Christian, perfectly fulfills God’s law.  Man’s obedience is always imperfect and blemish.[1]

But this is not Luther’s complete and final answer, as is evident from a whole series of statements, many of which derive from the years 1531 to 1533.[2] … Even though a man had fulfilled the basic commandments of the law by fulfilling the double commandment of love, he still would not thereby be righteous before God. For God simply does not recognize the fulfilling of the law as the way to righteousness.[3]  Whether a man attempts to fulfill God’s law with his own powers or whether he achieves the righteousness of the law with the aid of God’s power is not of decisive significance.  Luther expresses this even more sharply than he did in the Galatians commentary in a conversational comment made about the same time in the fall of 1531.  Here he comes to terms with Augustine’s opinion that although man’s attempt to fulfill the law with his own natural powers would not lead to justification, fulfilling the law with the help of the Holy Spirit would.  Luther explains that what is at issue is really the validity of this latter righteousness.  Luther denies its validity. “If a man were completely and absolutely to fulfill the law through the power of the Holy Spirit, he would still have to appeal for God’s mercy; for God has determined that he will save men through Christ and not through the law.”  Whatever significance the law continues to have, it is not intended to be used as a means to justification and salvation.  This means that God wills that under no circumstances is the relationship between himself and men to be determined by the law but solely and absolutely by his free grace received through faith.  Man is not only unable to gain merit before God in fact, but he is also unable to do so in principle.  In every case, he is dependent on God’s unspeakable mercy for his salvation.

Any doctrine of grace or of the Holy Spirit therefore which sees the meaning of the grace of the Holy Spirit in the fact that it creates a supernatural capability of fulfilling the law and thus of earning merit completely misses the meaning of God’s will. For this doctrine of grace still turns man’s attention to the value of his works and ethical achievement, even though these things are carried out with the help of grace.  The fact that there is justification only through Christ, that is, freely and through faith alone, is true independently of the fact that sinful man cannot fulfill the law.  It is therefore also valid for someone who might be able to fulfill it with supernatural powers of grace, that is, for the Christian.  Fulfilling the law avails as little for justification before God as the failure to fulfill it.  God simply does not wish to deal with men in this way [underline mine, Boyd].

This will of God is rooted in his very nature and in the primal relationship which, as God, he bears to men.  God’s very deity consists in the fact that he is the creator and giver.  The desire to bring “works” as achievements before God is the equivalent of a lie that dishonors God as the giver and creator. …… Whenever man seeks to live before God on some basis other than forgiveness, no true fear of God remains.  God, however, says “I will remain God; I will be loved, honored, and feared!”  And so that he may both remain God and be feared, he forgives man and orders him to live solely by this forgiveness.  For this is what it means to fear God as God: to recognize him as the one who both gives us and wants to give us everything for nothing and who desires nothing else from us than that we allow him to do this giving.  Whoever will not accept the gifts of God’s free grace for nothing takes away the glory of God’s being God.

…

Luther’s criticism of moralism is therefore characterized by its theocentricity.  Its standard is the fact that God is really God.  Moralism is regarded as idolatry and blasphemy.  “Works righteousness is actually and essentially idolatry.” … Moralism and true fear of God thus exclude each other.  “Desire for the righteousness of the law, and having a God, cannot possibly be combined.  There is a greater contradiction between fearing or honoring God and wanting to be righteous according to the law than there is between fire and water or between Satan and God.”

…

As moralism is idolatry, so faith in God’s promise in Jesus Christ is the true worship of God.  Faith is the proper way of relating to God, not simply in the present because man necessarily breaks down along the way of works, but from the very beginning, because of what God is. … We are to believe not only because nothing else remains for sinners but because God is God and man cannot honor him as God in any other way than by believing – because faith is the fulfillment of the First Commandment.[4]  Faith is the only attitude of man which corresponds to God’s nature, God’s deity.  God’s true godliness consists in the fact that he is the creator and that he creates out of nothing and even out of its opposite.[5]  Faith corresponds exactly to this.  Faith expects something from God where nothing can be seen; it waits expectantly against all appearance.

End of Quotations from Althaus

Conclusion

It’s clear that Althaus portrays Luther as having a different doctrine of God and doctrine of Salvation than what we are used to hearing. That is, a doctrine much less “legal” than what we are used to hearing, even in our own evangelical circles. By the way, this, in no way, makes Luther less an advocate of substitutionary atonement (to meet the demands of God’s Law). It is not as if God’s Law doesn’t exist because of God’s Grace, but rather that Free Grace is not a mere instrument to restore the hegemony of the Law, and thus a relationship to God partly based in our own “legality.”  Rather, the Law is the instrument to bring death, against the background of which the grace of Christ brings a whole new life.

I believe that all this is worth investigation in the original Luther materials. The strange thing is that when I familiarize myself with the Lutheran views on things, I begin to see these things in Calvin, too, in a way that most Calvin commentators don’t.

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[1] I fully recognize here that Luther taught that Adam was created very good (not a sinner at all), and therefore don’t know what to make of Althaus’ allegation about Luther’s teaching, as it would apply to Adam. Perhaps the secondary source (Althaus, a man of the modern era) has unwittingly imported his own idea here, concerning the historicity of the Fall.

[2] This was when Luther was giving his Galatians lecture.

[3] Though Althaus is not discussing Luther’s doctrine of Eden and the Fall, if his allegation of Luther’s doctrine is correct (one should check his references to Luther’s works), then Luther would be no fan of the “Covenant of Works.”

[4] It was quite noticeable in the early part of Book 3 of Calvin’s Institutes that unbelief was clearly the prototypical sin for Calvin – the “original” sin.  You will see other commentators on Calvin say that Calvin thought pride was the original sin (the traditional view, and about the only other orthodox choice), but it seemed clear to me that Calvin (at least in the part we covered) clearly implied that unfaith was the original sin.

[5] I.e., from sinners creates saints.