For Invincible Sins

This essay appears in the Law & Gospel issue of The Mockingbird, now available for preorder here.

I. Law

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Martin Luther regarded the Law of God with more reverence, honor, and seriousness than any other Christian theologian before or since, with the possible exception of the apostle Paul, from whom Luther stole all his best moves.

This is not what Luther is famous for. The former friar’s reputation still rests, five hundred years later, on his break from indulgences and monasticism, papal authority and church custom.^[1] Among many Christians, the popular perception of Luther is that he’s the one who pitted the Gospel against the Law in a fight to the death, and the Gospel won, leaving the Law defeated, dismembered, and dishonored.

Consider, by contrast, the following statements from Luther’s 1530s commentary on Galatians, widely regarded as the supreme expression of his teaching on justification by faith alone apart from the works of Law:

“The Law is the best of all things in the world.”
“The Law of God is greater than the entire world.”
“The best thing that the world has on this earth — the Law.”
“The best, the greatest, the loveliest among the physical blessings of the world, namely, the Law of God.”
“But what is the Law? Is it not also a commandment of love? In fact, the Law commands nothing else but love.”
“The Law is good, holy, useful, and necessary.”

These are not isolated proof-texts. They capture what Luther said about the Law of God over the course of his whole reforming career, from his early treatises “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels” (1521) and “How Christians Should Regard Moses” (1525) to his long exposition of the Ten Commandments in the Large Catechism (1529) and on through his extended exposition of the holy patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis during the last decade of his life (1535–1545).

Yet turn to any popular account of Luther’s theology, and more often than not you’ll hear that Luther took down not just accumulated human laws but God’s big-L Law, from the Ten Commandments to the Sermon on the Mount.

Sometimes this version is promulgated with exulting triumph: Luther as liberator who set all people at all times and places free from any and every extrinsic imposition on body and soul.

Other times this version is related with scorn and blame: Luther as arch-villain who disrupted the seamless-cloth beauty of the medieval synthesis, unleashed all the forces of modernity and its radical individualism, and endorsed an antinomianism that has excused every imaginable evil in God’s name.

But those who scorn Luther on this account fall short of his regard for God’s Law, every bit as much as the triumphalists do. For Luther, unlike either party, refuses to make the Law manageable. He insists on allowing the Law of God to stand in all its majesty, severity, specificity, and gravity.

“We are the offenders; God with His Law is the offended.”^[2] Our sins against God, Luther insists, are so great that God can’t simply ignore or overlook them. We can’t fix ourselves, much less make up for what we’ve already done wrong. God can’t relent on his holy demands, not without abandoning his good creation to rack and ruin, because that is exactly what the Law exists to protect.

What then? What happens when human wickedness, the Law’s just demands, and the loving God who looks with grief upon his despoiled creation collide with one another?

II. Gospel

What happens is the cross.

As Luther puts it, “… Christ has stepped into the breach as the Mediator.” In his body on the cross, Christ has reconciled “an infinite and eternal division” by taking the judgment of the Law into himself.

Matthew Hansel, Sadness And Sorrow Are Not Mixed Emotions, 2019. Oil and flashe paint on linen, 23 × 16 in.

It’s crucial to note here that Luther’s diagnosis of the Law, its effect on sinners, and its just yet crushing demands do not stem from the reformer’s own careful empirical survey of the human predicament — though one could certainly mount a very defensible case on this basis!

But to speak and understand theologically, Luther insists, we must start from the cross of Christ: from the staggering fact that God incarnate voluntarily gave up his life on the stake of pain and shame for the salvation of those who reject, disdain, and disown him. And “not for sham or counterfeit sins, nor yet for small sins, but for great and huge sins; not for one or two sins but for all sins; not for sins that have been overcome … but for invincible sins.”

Luther can’t get over the cross, can’t marvel at it enough, never ceases to allow his every thought to be taken captive and transformed by it; nor can Paul; nor should we. Any theory of God, humanity, or salvation that can manage without the cross must be disqualified. “If I, an accursed and damned sinner, could be redeemed by some other price, what need was there that the Son of God should be given for me?”

What Luther perceives in the cross is not bringing the Law down to a manageable, obeyable level, but ramping it up to its absolute maximum — and then unleashing it on Jesus the Christ.

As Luther describes it in one of his most astonishing accounts of the atonement, God “sent His Son into the world, heaped all the sins of all men upon Him, and said to Him: ‘Be Peter the denier; Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, and assaulter; David the adulterer; the sinner who ate the apple in Paradise; the thief on the cross.” God’s very own Law judges this Christ and pronounces, “I find him a sinner … I do not see any other sins than those in Him. Therefore let Him die on the cross!”

Then the Law does what it ought to do: it attacks. And kills. And Christ dies. And in this way the whole world “is set free from death and from every other evil.”

Take note: none of this works unless Jesus is truly divine, God in the flesh. To subject a mere creature to this would only prolong the problem, not to mention being an act of radical injustice on God’s part. Christ’s death is God himself taking responsibility for sin, taking it so intimately into his own being that it can be extinguished — sin, not the Law that justly condemns sin.

At the same time, this only works because Jesus Christ in his humanity is truly identified with human sinners. He not only affiliates himself with sinners, not only risks his reputation by keeping their company, but in some mysterious way becomes all estranged human creatures.

Such self-giving in the depths of sin, condemnation, and death is paired — much more happily! — on the other side of his resurrection with the ministry of the Gospel, which is the declaration of good news: the blessing and the curse have done battle, Christ has absorbed the curse into himself, and God now distributes freely the blessing won by Christ.

Yet even that is too weak a way to put it. God doesn’t distribute mere facts or information about this mighty battle; not just blessing and relief; rather, God distributes himself, in his Son and his Spirit. Faith is receiving this divine self-distribution.

The righteousness of the believer is not a legal fiction. It’s true because Christ is actually there, alive and present even in Peter the denier, Paul the persecutor, and David the adulterer. Luther thus explains “what Christian righteousness is, namely, that righteousness by which Christ lives in us, not the righteousness that is in our own person.”

And just in case sinners still want to make a name for themselves with their own accomplishments, but have shifted their goal from Law-keeping to faith-making, Luther turns them toward their baptism, which is not their work but a divine work done to them. In baptism, we get swaddled in Christ. “To put on Christ according to the Gospel, therefore, is to put on, not the Law or works but an inestimable gift, namely, the forgiveness of sins, righteousness, peace, comfort, joy in the Holy Spirit, salvation, life, and Christ himself.”

III. Law and Gospel

Let’s circle back to one of Luther’s affirmations of the Law, and this time, we’ll complete the sentence: “The Law is good, holy, useful, and necessary, so long as one uses it in a legitimate way…”

Ay, there’s the rub; ay, there’s the Reformation. The dispute is not over whether there is a divine Law, whether it is good and holy, or whether it has any place in a Christian life. The dispute is over the legitimate use of the Law. Misuse can only crush people and damn them.

Illustrations by Aubrey Swanson Dockery.

Luther puts it like this: “It is impossible for Christ and the Law to agree and to share the reign over a conscience.” That is what is at stake. Not defining what is good and what is evil: the Law is eminently well suited to do that! What is at stake is how a person can be “justified” before God.
“Justified” is a tough nut to crack these days, due to linguistic drift. Most of our connotations are morally sketchy at best and anything but transcendent in their reference: “The ends justify the means”; “I was justified in my actions under the circumstances.” The word no longer suggests being set right, least of all by God, but being excused from the consequences of a bout of selfish misbehavior.

A better way to capture Luther’s meaning nowadays that still retains some of its legal connotation is to speak of jurisdiction. “When by this faith I am crucified and die to the Law, then the Law loses all its jurisdiction over me, as it lost it over Christ.”

Or to make the same point in the opposite direction: if the Law, rather than Christ, is allowed to go on having jurisdiction over the sinner, then the result must be eternal estrangement from God.

Well, that’s the case as long as the Law of God is allowed to be itself, speak in its own voice, and actually stand as God’s holy and righteous commandments. Sinners don’t like this, of course, so we come up with ingenious strategies to dodge the Law — strategies that are anything but the Gospel, though in the church they often masquerade as such.

One such avoidance strategy is legalism. It may not be immediately apparent that this is an avoidance strategy at all. Doesn’t it cast sinners headlong into the maw of the Law? Not at all, as Luther penetratingly observed. Legalism does just the opposite: it wrangles the Law down to a reasonable set of demands — challenging, perhaps, but still reasonable — and requires obedience in order to enjoy a relationship with God at all.

A necessary correlate of the legalist approach is to ramp up human capacity. For Luther, this path was exemplified by his medieval super-villain Gabriel Biel. It is possible to do your best and so please God, said Biel; the Gospel, then, is God kindly overlooking the gap between your best and His demands. How can you know that you’ve really done your best? Luther assures you: you can’t, not ever.

Legalism has one more bad habit, namely the tendency to throw in a handful, or a heapful, of non-divine laws (“human traditions,” as Luther called them) and pretend they are divine. In the process sinners end up crashing up against a whole lot of powers, but none of them are God — neither as Law nor as Gospel.

The other principal avoidance strategy is antinomianism. This strategy thinks it has the Gospel (witness the Corinthians in Paul’s time, or the Enthusiasts in Luther’s), but only because it has dispensed with the Law. The Gospel, in this version, is not Jesus the Redeemer gaining the victory for us and for our salvation, but God the Creator dropping his demands for us and for our convenience.

It’s a good question, of course, whether even the most devout antinomian really dispenses with the Law, or at least with laws. In practice, antinomianism dispenses with the inconvenient, unfashionable, or cut-to-the-quick parts of the Law, leaving the rest intact, all the while importing a whole lot of other stuff as the new mandatory in a sort of shadow-puppet legalism.

Ultimately, the antinomian’s so-called grace cancels out the very content of good and evil so as to avoid the frightful mirror of the self. Needless to say, this doesn’t deliver the Gospel either. It only empowers the chaos of libertine self-indulgence masquerading as kindness. The truth is, most aspirational antinomians grow up to be the worst kind of legalists.

But Luther will not defang the Law. Even in the light of the Gospel, the Law retains its ability and right to name what is good and what is evil. But what the Law cannot, may not, and will not ever do again is seize jurisdiction over sinners in order to keep them far away from their righteous Savior. It is precisely in the intimate embrace of faith that the sinner’s sins are rightly and forever judged, punished, and set aside in the very body of Jesus Christ.

If there is no Law — which is to say, no standard of goodness, no better and truer ways to receive and engage with God’s creation — then there is no need for salvation, no need for grace, no need for Christ.

But if there is a holy and good divine Law, then Christ is all the more necessary. He is in fact the one thing necessary for life, blessedness, and salvation. The “end of the Law” means specifically the end of the Law’s jurisdiction and its right to mediate between God and sinners. Christ, who himself kept the Law in perfect innocence and blamelessness, is the one and only mediator now.

So both Law and Gospel are necessary, but not interchangeable. Both are divine words, but not the same word. Both belong to the Christian life, but they don’t accomplish the same thing. Which is why, Luther asserts, the proper distinction between Law and Gospel is shorthand for the entire Christian faith.

The natural religious instinct, Luther observed, is to look into one’s own conscience and ask, “What have I done? Where have I sinned? What have I deserved?” Sometimes the answer elicits pride, sometimes despair. Either answer might be true, so far as the Law goes, but neither is the Gospel.

Faith does not look inward but outward and asks, “What has Christ done? What has He deserved?” The Gospel replies, “He has redeemed you from sin, from the devil, and from eternal death.” Neither self-regard nor self-condemnation are relevant here — only Christ-regard.

This is how Luther maintains his esteem for the Law, in a way that tends to elude his fans and critics alike. “Apart from the matter of justification … we, like Paul, should think reverently of the Law. We should endow it with the highest praises and call it holy, righteous, good, spiritual, divine, etc. Apart from our conscience we should make a god of it; but in our conscience it is truly a devil.”

Luther would be the first to point out that coping with a devil in your conscience most certainly interferes with your ability to love and serve your neighbor, to say nothing of loving and serving your God. But if the Christ who dwells in you is your righteousness, then you experience a specific kind of freedom.

In this freedom, you gladly call on God, thank, preach, praise, and confess Him. From this freedom, you come to serve your neighbor delightedly instead of dutifully. “These are truly good works, which flow from this faith and joy conceived in the heart because we have the forgiveness of sins freely through Christ.”

So yes, of course believers love, obey, and do good — even, dare we say, perform good works! But they do so because Christ dwells in them by faith, and the Holy Spirit drives and inspires them. Good works are the fruits, not the roots.

The radical good news is that God has done and is doing and will do all, both for us and in us. “[T]his is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.”

Good news indeed.