The Work of Faith. Justin Nickel
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.