Martin Luther’s revolutionary discovery.
Martin Luther’s revolutionary discovery.
Righteousness is not a formula, it’s a gift.
This article was originally written for Mockingbird.
The name “Martin Luther” is more often than not associated with the words “law” and “gospel” since it was this distinction that he saw as “the highest art in Christendom.” This, of course, is a notion that is exhibited throughout Luther’s career, with a differentiation between the law and the gospel featuring prominently in his lectures on Paul’s letter to the Galatians first delivered in the fall of 1516 through the spring of 1517. In his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, we are afforded another glimpse into the maturation of this distinction, especially when he attests in Thesis 29: “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe in this,’ and everything is already done.” Later in his theological career, the Augustinian monk turned German reformer would explicitly avow the significance of the law-gospel paradigm in a sermon entitled, “The Distinction Between the Law and the Gospel,” dated January 1, 1532, in which he declares:
Distinguishing between the law and the gospel is the highest art in Christendom, one that every person who values the name Christian ought to recognize, know, and possess. Where this is lacking, it is not possible to tell who is a Christian and who is a pagan or Jew. That much is at stake in this distinction. (153)
Rightly discerning God’s word of law and God’s word of gospel is, indeed, a crucial discipline for any of Jesus’s followers (perhaps the most crucial of all). Confusing or muddying these two words has been the catalyst for nearly all of the tension, dissension, and schism throughout the history of the church. Be that as it may, to understand Luther’s theology and the substructure that informs his hope, we should start to associate his name with another theological term, namely, righteousness. Although the concept of “righteousness” doesn’t get as much airtime as does “grace,” “mercy,” “compassion,” “salvation,” and the like, if one were to see into the heart of the gospel itself, its core would be composed entirely of the righteousness of God. This new understanding of righteousness profoundly changed Luther — and sparked the Reformation.
Properly defined, “righteousness” hails from a Greek term that appears some ninety times throughout the New Testament, denoting everything from justice to blamelessness. To speak of the “righteousness of God” is to speak of his divine prerogative to uphold his standard of holiness. Luther was originally taught that God’s followers are duty-bound to mimic the example of Jesus, his life of equity, charity, and restraint. God, on this account, is first and foremost a heavy-handed judge. Ever the scrupulous monk, Luther believed one’s standing before a righteous God required rigorous piety and flawless execution.
This perception, though, was turned upside-down when, after constant agony and scrutiny over his religious devotion, Luther recognized that the righteousness that is demanded by God is precisely the righteousness that is given by God in the gospel of Christ. “I began to understand,” he would later write, “that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous person lives by the gift of God, namely by faith” (Works, 34:337). Consequently, God’s righteousness and one’s status before him were no longer shackled to human performance but unfurled as a divine gift in the passion and death of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:30; Rom. 8:33). In his sermon, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” likely delivered in the early days of 1519, the Augustinian friar turned reformer articulates just how seismically his relationship with God’s holiness and justice had been transformed. There is an “alien” righteousness given by God to sinners and there is a “proper” righteousness — the good works that follow. One’s righteous status before God is bestowed by means of his Word of Promise, reducing sinners to passive recipients of righteousness as a gift, which works from the inside out.
Luther’s spiritual odyssey from the legalistic shackles of performative piety to the liberating shores of grace reshaped the Christian landscape in the 16th century, the effects of which are still reverberating today. To wit, Hans J. Iwand, a 20th-century German-born Lutheran professor and theologian (whom I recently cited), similarly argues in the final chapter of his treatise, The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther that Luther was “a great sign” put in place by God himself “to point, drive, push, and circle around this one point and toward this single word: righteousness” (69). This stress on righteousness, though, does not follow our familiar conceptions of it since, as Iwand says, “The righteousness of God that is revealed in Christ includes us” (70). As opposed to the righteousness of the law, which condemns those who cannot perfectly fulfill its demands, the righteousness of the gospel is “a righteousness that creates” (Iwand, 70). Rather than merely compelling sinners to live uprightly in hopes that they can muster up enough religious gumption to do so, God’s word of grace creates and instills that which God desires — namely, a people who are reborn and redressed in his righteousness alone.
This view of the gospel reveals the heart of God who has purposed to remake the world in righteousness. The eschatological hope of the kingdom of God is solidified by his Son’s passion and death, which frames our understanding of how this divine process of remaking is supposed to occur. Instead of being achieved by way of compulsion or coercion, the gospel tells us that righteousness can only be received. As the apostle Paul makes clear in his letters to the Romans and the Galatians, there is no amount of doing we could accumulate by which we could ever accrue a righteous status before God. “The righteousness of God,” continues Iwand, “is not something that a person can save up and account for like money” (76).
The “doing” of righteousness — that is, our proper “righteous” activity — is, therefore, always preceded and pre-conditioned by an alien righteousness that is passively and freely received as a gift, in the same way that a good tree bears good fruit. The only way we can actually do any works that are even close to being righteous is if we have been declared righteous apart from any works at all. This, again, brings us back to the gospel of God, which is most clearly and succinctly expressed in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, where he writes, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). In keeping with Iwand’s original assertion regarding Luther, the keynote of this declaration is the fact those who aren’t righteous “become” righteous by way of divine imputation. “He lays our sins on his Son and gives us his Son’s righteousness,” Iwand explains. “He reckons to us what is not ours (imputatio), namely, a foreign righteousness and he does not reckon to us that which is ours, namely, our own sins (non imputatio)” (71).
Now, the contours of the gospel become increasingly euphoric since instead of counting all of the sins and transgressions against the actual perpetrators (2 Cor. 5:19), God counts them against his own Son. Christ stands in the stead of sinners as if he himself was the worst sinner of all. He subsumes the entire weight of the world’s sin and answers the law’s demand for righteousness by supplying his own, the very righteousness of God. All at once, then, humanity’s lack of righteousness and the law’s demand for righteousness are assuaged. Here’s how Iwand puts it:
The judge takes on the defense and the accused becomes the accuser. This is what God’s righteousness means! The verdict that God pronounces is valid — even valid against one’s own heart and conscience. God stands on the side of man, right next to him and in front of him, and lays his righteousness between sin and the person like a chasm. We are raised up, buried, protected, and guarded in Jesus Christ in whom we die in order to live and in whom we find ourselves created new: true, righteous, pure, free, good, and holy. (77)
Even still, as earth-bound creatures, the residue of sin still lingers on the justified, which leads to a related theme. In the introduction to Iwand’s work, Gregory A. Walter remarks that “God’s justifying promise creates future being that is simultaneous with present being. Sin and righteousness, the new and old creation, and life and death all exist together until the eschatological future” (5). It is this concept of simultaneity that imbues sinners with hope and assurance despite the way things appear. By faith, we are peccator in re, iustus in spe, that is, “sinners in reality, righteous in hope.” This expression, Iwand says, is essential to grasp since it captures the fact that “we are sinners in the reality of our existence, but righteous in the hope that we have in God” (73). Even though the human experience is accompanied by an inescapable stench of death, decay, and desperation, faith lives according to the promise sealed by the death and resurrection of God’s Son.
“Righteousness is not a physical formula,” Iwand says (75). Indeed, it’s not. It’s a gift. The righteousness of God by which one is able to enter the kingdom of heaven is not a sycophantic trinket nor is it a meritorious honor that any flesh and blood human can achieve. It is something that only a flesh and blood God can offer and he’s dying to give it to you. In fact, he already has.
Works cited:
Hans J. Iwand, The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther, edited by Virgil F. Thompson, translated by Randi H. Lundell (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008).
Martin Luther, “The Distinction Between the Law and the Gospel,” translated by Willard Burce, Concordia Journal 18 (April 1992).
Martin Luther, Works: American Edition, Vol. 34, edited by Lewis Spitz and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960).