Martin Luther: is he still relevant?

Luther was a servant of Princes, a man who hated Jews and oppressed women. He has given people guilt complexes with his constant talk about sin; he made our lives boring; he made us into workaholics. He made it a virtue to have a bad conscience, and we are not supposed to have fun. We have to shun good food and a glass of wine. This is all Luther's fault!

It sounds like a joke, but such comments are rather common in the Lutheran country of Sweden, sometimes in newspaper and magazine articles but more often in advertisements or letters to the editor in daily papers. "Fight Luther within You" is perhaps the message, so that you may enjoy a nice flight with this or that airline without working yourself to death or relax with a good meal in some restaurant. Luther sits on your shoulder and whispers negative and bad things in your ear. And the common message is: Put him down! Get rid of him!

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This attitude is, of course, very superficial and ignorant. It is simply not true--most of it. But it needs at least to be looked at from several perspectives.

The controversial Luther

Many examples of the controversial Luther were found in papers and books in 1983 when the 500th birthday of Luther was celebrated all over the world. Of course, such an anniversary was also the occasion for many serious and well-grounded writings among scholars and historians, as well as theologians. A big Congress for Luther Research was held in Erfurt in the German Democratic Republic (at the time), the place of his birth, where it all began. This anniversary was celebrated on five continents, particularly in minority locations, as well as in the big Lutheran majority churches like those in the Nordic countries and in Europe. It was celebrated in Santiago, Kuala Lumpur, Bukoba, and Madras as well as in Wittenberg, Lund, Helsinki, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. It was a worldwide phenomenon. Already that is interesting.

Celebrations are not altogether reliable sources for anyone who wants the truth. Many themes circled exactly around the question of the relevance of Luther. Is he forgotten, abused, debated, up to date, or what? It is a simple matter of fact that the real Luther is to some extent forgotten, and often misused, misinterpreted, or locked up in a kind of Lutheran prison of a traditional and rather narrow understanding. The picture of Luther today is quite a long way from that vivid, dynamic, unpredictable man from the early sixteenth century. I sometimes think of him as being like the good Samaritan who fell into the hands of robbers and was stripped and beaten (Luke 10:30). Today in the hands of the media Luther is maltreated and misrepresented--indeed, he has fallen in the hands of robbers. But at least this shows that Luther is still interesting to many and that he is actually relevant and important to discuss, though very controversial!

To some extent this is true also among those with a more serious approach, among Luther's most eager and devoted followers, particularly those who want to maintain a clear Lutheran label over and against all kinds of non-Lutherans or worse (whatever that could be). Some of his admirers have turned out to be robbers as well. Thus has Luther become the champion of a rather conservative, more or less apolitical, understanding of the world and human society due to a basically misinterpreted doctrine of the two kingdoms. It is, however, easy to show in Luther's writings how radical he could be in political issues and how active he was many times in his involvements and his preaching on the burning social problems of his time.

Another abuse of Luther is that he has been taken to be the spokesman for a consistent state-church system by many who have wanted to defend that system in the Nordic countries. But he himself fought decidedly and at times vehemently for the freedom of the church, both from despotic princes and from the authoritarian Roman Catholic Church of his time. He wanted to take the church out of "Babylonian Captivity," as he wrote already in 1520.

He also has been charged with being quite fundamentalistic in his view of the Bible, even though the contrary is true, especially in the way he applied the biblical texts in an almost modern historical critical manner. Furthermore, he was accused of representing a very pessimistic understanding of what it means to be a human being, born in sin and full of damnation, as if this sad expression of the human predicament were the only thing to be said in his anthropology, in spite of all his sermons on God's beautiful creation and our calling to serve each other in love in our daily lives.

And he certainly did not want to be called a "Lutheran"! He wanted to reform the Roman Catholic Church, and he actually had a much more basic ecumenical view of the church. He was far from wanting to start a new church, worst of all named Lutheran. He found that both senseless and ridiculous.

The worst abuses of Luther are probably to be found among his successors and most devoted friends. Often they interpreted Luther's ideas in a very limited or narrow-minded way, though they no doubt meant well and wanted to preserve their great Reformer at his very best. But, as the saying goes, with friends like that, who needs enemies?

Luther today

What then does Luther mean today in the struggle for liberation in Third World countries, in the struggle for yet another liberation in the materialistic West, in an old well-established (too established) nationwide church such as the one in Sweden? How is Luther used, applied, exploited, put forth as an excuse, an accusation, a support? Quoted he is, and used he is! Can a closer study of Luther give us any guidance as to how Luther ought to be read and quoted and applied, or is that an altogether subjective question? Do we have to leave Luther and his many sermons and writings in the historical shadows of the sixteenth century?

From a methodological point of view, this is quite a problematic issue. In many camps it is a controversial and even ridiculed question. It is romantic and anachronistic to ask, for example, What would Luther say, had he lived today? It is suggestive and misleading and can easily serve as a cover-up for one's own favorite ideas. It is the same when we sometimes ask, What would Jesus say and do today? It can be helpful but also wrong and dangerous as a method of doing theology.

In the case of Luther, there are circumstances that differ from most other subjects of study, and this is to me a decisive point. Luther is not only a man of history, who can be studied in certain written sources, confined to a certain time of history; he is also one of the few men of history who is still, in a sense, "alive"--read and referred to in daily life in the present day. Luther's voice is still heard from thousands of pulpits all over the world. His ideas and viewpoints are part of many different faiths and life-views. You can study Homer or Plato or Dante or Shakespeare or Voltaire, and that can be most rewarding, interesting, and stimulating, but there are no churches or people's movements that carry over their names to our times. You can form literary and cultural societies, learned circles, etc., around any of these great figures and many others, but nobody would seriously ask what Plato or Voltaire would say today--even if we still might have things to learn from them.

But "Luther Today" is a possible topic. In the world today there are about 60 million people who are called Lutherans. Many of them ask what Luther's thinking means in many of today's issues--creation, resources, environment, attitudes toward oppressive governments, liberation movements, and people of different races, religions and cultures, attitudes toward different confessions of faith and ecumenical theology. Others are curious about Luther. Roman Catholics, Reformed, Methodists, and others are busy studying Luther, and they do it most seriously and with great ambition. And what is the typical and decisive point? They do it precisely because Luther is "alive" today, because his theology seems to be of great significance far beyond Lutheran churches, and because there are Lutheran churches with which one can establish ecumenical relations, not simply because he is an important historical figure. What did Luther actually mean when he criticized the Roman Catholic Church in his time? How does Lutheran theology differ from Reformed-Calvinistic theology? These and other currents of history flow together in our time, and Luther is unusually "alive" in the midst of all of this. Today in theology and church life Luther is an inevitable factor. It is essential to know what he in fact taught.

This rather pragmatic reason for scientific Luther research today has another implication. The fact that Luther is what I have called "alive" has invited many good Lutherans to become more "Lutheran" than Luther himself. They quote Luther in season and out of season, any and every theological position is supported by the so-called Lutheran tradition, and consequently Luther is very much abused. There are many examples of this in the confessional, conservative Lutheranism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Today it is necessary also to ask the questions, What is Lutheran in comparison with other traditions? What can we learn from each other? Where are the limits and weaknesses of Lutheran theology? These questions are not only theological but also sociological and psychological. The Lutheran World Federation, for instance, has conducted studies several times during the last decades on themes like "The Identity of the Church," which is, in our context, also a question for the genuinely Lutheran understanding of the church and its theology. What is now left, so to speak, is a "trademark," criteria and signs of what Luther, in his context, was fighting for as the essence of Christianity. Can studies on Luther be a means of focusing and defining these distinctive features?

Many of these questions are systematic-theological questions, possible to raise only on the basis of historical critical Luther research. It is necessary to work with the given sources to try to determine where the decisive theological points of Luther's theology are to be found, and only then make the attempt to give an outline or a sketch of a Lutheran theology today, doing justice to those decisive points. This, in my opinion, is the way from the historical Luther to the Luther of today and to a contemporary theology.

In 1947, Bishop Anders Nygren spoke a watchword in Lund at the opening of the Lutheran World Federation: "Forward to Luther!" We need to find Luther anew, behind all Lutheranism, beyond all confessional obstacles. That means a new methodological and theological venture. Luther is well and alive--liberated, open, ecumenical.

Ecclesia semper reformanda: The church has to be continuously reformed. Why not also aim at continuous reform of theology and theological methods? It is, as a matter of fact, first during the last one hundred years or so, through the rise of modern Luther research, that this methodological approach has become possible at all, although it is still difficult. Another factor is just as important: Luther is now liberated not only from the static doctrinal ties of orthodox Lutheranism but also from most state-church authoritarian governing and monopolized interpretation. We still have confessional churches, but we do not find what is "Lutheran" in splendid isolation within them alone. On the contrary.

At the heart of Luther

Today we find Luther literally all over the place--not only as the founder of the Lutheran Confession, which he was always very much against, but also as a theologian, preacher, and especially an interpreter of biblical texts. In these respects he is again alive and active. As Philip Melanchthon, Luther's close friend and colleague, said after the death of Luther in 1546, in an obituary testimony: Et mortuus, vivit--He is dead, but he lives.

Luther is, in other words, no longer confined to a certain authorized or even monopolized interpretation within the framework of a strictly confessional theology, having Luther "on contract," as it were, and defending him over and against other confessional theologies. Neither is he any longer locked up in Lutheran state churches, where he often would not have felt very much at home, were he physically alive in our midst. But for the past four hundred years that is where he has been held and protected. He was taken care of, used and imprisoned by princes, kings, political structures, scholarly institutions, churches, and bishops. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, a liberation process has begun, a liberation of Luther. This implies even a possible development of a "Lutheran" kind of "liberation theology" as well.

In the Wittenberg of 1520 there were as yet no Lutherans. There was a lot of reading of the Bible, a lot of people who prayed and struggled with their faith, but no Lutherans. There was a Christian plurality. But before long the split was there, the division, the consolidation, isolation, and stabilization of Lutheranism. The main concern of Lutheran orthodoxy and the national Lutheran churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not, as it had been for Luther, to confess the Christian faith or to present the whole of the gospel but to confess Lutheran faith in defense over and against others, often by oppressing and persecuting these others. For this very reason many fled the Nordic countries to form free churches in a new country, the United States! (Of course, no Lutheran theologian I know would admit that his particular Luther interpretation would not coincide with what was Christian in general and Lutheran in particular.)

Today a new situation is developing rapidly. Luther is gradually freed; he appears in the most different camps, and one can now agree with what he says without being labeled "Lutheran." Now we have a new pluralism, on a global level, more or less, similar to Wittenberg of 1520. Gone is compulsory unity and enforced attachment. Gone is the legal authority of Luther. Now he speaks only. He speaks in Rome. He speaks in Geneva as well as in Wittenberg, just as he once spoke, lectured, preached, and argued, but then only in Wittenberg. He is the exegete, the interpreter, the Bible reader. And so he speaks in conversations and dialogues with the Roman Catholic Church, with Baptists, Reformed, and so on. He speaks in churches that by no means are Lutheran or have any Lutheran confessions. At the same time, Lutheranism as a state-protected, more or less civil institution is dissolving more and more.

I suggest that this creates a new situation for our own understanding of Luther. It is not, and should not, be possible to do theology in a vacuum. Such an enterprise is first of all contrary to Luther himself, however much we might quote from his writings. This is not only due to historical circumstances but also because it is contrary to the very basis of his theology. Luther gave us a compass. Later Lutheran orthodoxy tried to draw a full map. He gave us the key, not the whole door! To illustrate, think of the differences between a painting that is full of life and sunshine and rain, and the dry, scientifically complete weather report, words that plainly just report about the daily rain. Luther never did theology in a vacuum; he always stood with both his feet on the ground, and there, in daily life, on the streets of Wittenberg, in marriage and family life, in struggling with the Pope, with the Schwarmertum, the spiritualists, enthusiasts, and so on, with princes and peasants--there, concretely and down to earth, was the place for his theology. That is also the reason why he always criticized those learned doctors who climbed the ladder to heavenly speculations and abstract philosophizing.

Particularly significant and important for today's theology is Luther's theology of creation. Currently a great deal of theology hovers above, floats in the air, without that existential anchor in the world of creation, without being down to earth, contextual in the real sense of the word. The point of a theology of creation is immediately and indissolubly connected with Luther's theology of incarnation. The Word became flesh, and this must also be true of the word of theology. To Luther this was always the most definite part and piece of his theology and the entire foundation for his total theology throughout the years. The Word becomes flesh--in church life, in preaching, in sacrament, in society, and in theology. Nothing else is possible for Luther. The gospel resounds here, on earth, in human life. That is where theology belongs, and where it has to start and end. This is essential to Luther's theology--its basis and heart, the point of departure on the road to all the following points.

Luther's understanding of creation as a continuous creation has a parallel in his concept of the church as being in a constant process of reformation, semper reformanda. So also his theology. All the time we are called upon to try to understand what that means today, Luther's theology is never a tight, finished, cut-and-dried system with certain doctrines always given, such and such. There are always open windows, so to speak, allowing for new winds of the Spirit, new contexts, new interpretations. Luther is still alive!

This means that we can never use Luther as some fundamentalists use the Bible. The theological point he wanted to make once in a certain context might very well look quite different in another context. It is tempting to refer to Luther only in a formal sense, imitating him. But then, one might do something totally different. Yes, it could happen that you might seem to be unfaithful to Luther just when you are most genuinely with him. This is contextual theology at its best. It is Lutheran theology at its best.

Ten relevant points

Following are ten basic points in Luther's theology that I see as most relevant and significant today.

1. God and me. When Luther describes human life, he always starts with creation, in the existential conditions of everyone. Adam is the man now, and I am Adam. Luther confesses his creed in his Catechism and talks about me: God has created me, provides and protects me; Jesus is my Lord, who has redeemed me; the Holy Spirit has called me, and so on. Luther's use of pronouns is characteristic of his theology, in all three articles of the Apostles' Creed. We are contemporary, here and now, with Adam, with creation and fall, with Jesus, with the first Easter and the first Pentecost. I am with it all and part of it all. This is contemporary theology. And it is Luther's theology.

2. Law and gospel. Luther is always down to earth. In many variations this is his contribution to contemporary theology. He talks about the law, what is God's will from the beginning of creation, and in doing so he also talks about daily work and struggle, frustrations and tensions, coercions and anxieties. All of this is very human and very common. Luther says that this is how God is active with his left hand--in creation, through the laws. He also works with his right hand through the gospel, in the kingdom to the right, the spiritual realm. This is why there is a church: so that the gospel may be sounded. Both of God's activities are divine, and each is just as divine as the other in society, in professional work and daily occupation out there in the world, in marriage, in business, in school, and in church life, in preaching and sacraments. God is active in his Word in all, to the left and the right. But all is done in this world, down to earth, through simple things and common circumstances, where not even the word "God" seems to belong or is very seldom used. Yet it is divine activity. I think this is a good starting point for doing relevant, existentially meaningful theology.

3. Luther's down-to-earth perspective continues as he takes a low, very human point of view in describing the negative sides of life, the destructive factors, the tyrants, that threaten to destroy God's good creation. God is always at work, because to create is always to make something new (creare est semper novum facere), and creation is to Luther always creatio continua, a continuously ongoing creation. But the same is true about the constantly active devil, whom Luther saw everywhere, active, right here in daily human life. This antagonistic point of view with its constant struggle between God and Satan goes on in Luther simultaneously with his faith in the living Lord, the Creator and Sustainer. Luther finds both everywhere, in all human relations, in family life, in the state as well as in the church. This is another realistic view of human life that has great significance today, when we see what is going on in the world. It is quite possible to find interesting parallels, for example in modern drama or in the field of psychology.

4. What is Luther's understanding of God? There is a basic dualism in his concept of God that comes to the fore in the antagonistic battle between God and Satan. But it is also a dualism of God's love and God's wrath, a dualism in God's own essence and will, which has to do with Luther's way of understanding the "hiddenness" of God, the polarity, the connection between Deus absconditus, the hidden God, and Deus revelatus, the revealed God. Among those "tyrants" which God in Christ had to fight in a decisive way--sin, death, hell, etc.--there is sometimes also God's will, wrath, law, and judgments.

But the God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God of love. This is God in his essence, in his fatherly heart. In Christ God has, as it were, stepped out of his own secret existence and entered our world. But it is the same God, the only God. Any other God than that is a dangerous one, like one of the "tyrants." The naked God, Deus nudus, is different from the incarnate God in Christ, Deus incarnatus, the one with human clothes. There the terrible and angry God disappears. That one is a metaphysical and abstract God, whom we never can get to know but who still can destroy us. That God is horrifying to the sinner and his conscience. We have to run away from that God to the God in flesh, for only there is a merciful God to be found. This is the God of the gospel and the only way to salvation. This is, then, the deeply significant incarnational theology of Luther: The divine is not another world, a transcendent world--and if he is, he is not the God "for us." The God for us, pro nobis, is to be found in faith just in this world, in our kind of life on earth, in flesh, in Jesus Christ.

5. This point concerns the theology of the Word. In this world of creation and fall, the Word is resounding, both as law and as gospel, against all evil forces, against the abuse of God's world and creation and against sin, despair, and judgment. It is all the activity of God in and through his Word, in several meanings. God is not confined to church activities, not locked up in the church, not active only through apparently holy or divine means. Here Luther is very contemporary. His whole theology points to a desacralization and demythologization of the exclusively divine, the holy, defined in terms of a "high" church theology. God in the really human: That means a kind of secularization, an emphasis on humanness, wordliness, on earth itself, flesh and common life, which is a very liberating factor in Luther's theology. God is freed from theological and spiritual confinements. God is not first of all religious, he is human, he has a body of the incarnate Word. Therefore this Word is a "living word," a viva vox, which you can hear in the churches, first of all, because faith comes from hearing, ex auditu, as Paul says (Rom 10:17). The Bible is part of the incarnation as well. The Word has become words, in a historical context, in human things and circumstances, in terms of creation here on earth.

6. This brings us to Christ and his church. Here we find in Luther that same low point of view: the refugee-child from Bethlehem, the tormented man on the cross, lonely and abandoned. Now he is apparent, visible, tangible in the church in simple water and bread and wine, and in the words of forgiveness spoken by sinful human beings. But the church has always tried to make the simple humanity of Christ divine, too divine, to lift him up, to give to his human nature a divine hypostasis (or something similar), a divine magnificence and polish, which in the final analysis takes away the flesh and blood from this man Jesus of Nazareth.

Luther saw this more clearly, I would say, than anybody else in the history of the church. Again and again he admonishes his listeners to start from below, "von unten," and to stay there--because there, and nowhere else, is God. The church has the unique mission "to paint Christ" as the man Jesus of Nazareth, not as the terrible judge sitting on the rainbow, as Luther could put it. The church is now the communicator and the distributor of the humanity of God. Here is forgiveness of sin; here is life and salvation, as Luther says in the Small Catechism. But when the church denies or obscures this incarnational lowness and human reality of God in this world, this man-made God in Christ seems to appear all the more outside of the church, in the world, in the smallest of brethren!

7. Here we focus on the Christian life and sanctification. It is in such a world that Christians are called to live, in their baptism and their vocation, and with all these small brothers and sisters. All of it is again very low and dry, very human and insignificant, without divine splendor. On the contrary, life in the daily calling, in the common occupations, is "without name" (hat keinen Namen), without great labels or headlines, and yet this is where God has put us as his "co-creators," his collaborators in his continuous creation. This is the theme of Luther's interpretation of Mary in the Magnificat. She is a nice, diligent woman who does her simple things and is right then and there the one who carries God in her womb. God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, in the most trivial round of life. And so it is also love, hidden in relationships between human beings. It is even a "lost love"--"eine verlorene Liebe"--the love for the neighbor. We may be tempted to do something particular, something well regarded and appreciated, something holy and spiritual, some newly invented church activity perhaps, something highly moral or religious, in other words something with names--on the front page of a magazine or on Oprah's sofa. Instead, we are called to do what is "at hand"--without names, down to earth, when it is needed, just in its plain human context. This expresses the incarnational process.

8. This view of the human daily life on earth is important because it is immediately connected with Luther's understanding of justification. It is also the other side of the desacralization of the world. No particular sacredness or holiness has to be claimed for different things and actions in this world; they are already divine and holy because they originate in God's creation! When human works and deeds are liberated from their divine holiness and splendor, justification through faith without works can correspondingly appear as God's work, clean of human achievements, by God's grace alone. This implies that human works and good deeds are given back their rightful place, in creation, in daily life, in the world; they are also liberated and "clean." There is nothing religious about them, since they are ruled by reason and civil law--and love. There is no room for a premeditated works-righteousness.

So, when Luther is critical of justification through works, he is at the same time--and this is necessarily so--critical of the flight away from the low, common everyday life of work and human responsibilities in family and society. The monastic life is, in principle, wrong. It tries to gain advantages before God and obtain righteousness through a supposedly better life with more divine occupations and more heavenly thoughts. On the contrary, says Luther, this is all of the devil, self-chosen things and deeds, and not at all divine, because such efforts are against the word of God and the will of God. Instead I can rest in God's grace through Jesus Christ and the word of the gospel, rely on him, and then go ahead in my daily work and life together with my neighbor, without strain and frustration. This is why Luther can lift up the servant girl he sometimes talks about: the maid who in faith sweeps the floor is easily more holy than the holiest monk. Faith is active and incarnate in love, in the smallest and most insignificant things in everyday life. I think this is a liberating message to many people today who live under a lot of pressures of various kinds.

9. So we arrive at a decisive point, the twofold extra nos perspective. There is in Luther's theology a relaxed and self-evident confidence, down to earth, based on the fact that I do not have to construct and build up my own righteousness. I can simply dare to be human. My works are done for my neighbor, without particular "Christian" motivation or in order to gain any credits or special favors. This very relaxed and uncomplicated lifestyle is obtained only by finding a home base, as it were, outside of myself. This perspective is very characteristic of Luther's theology. The emphasis is on extra nos, "outside of ourselves." That implies both an assurance of God's grace and salvation, and an unconstrained relation to my neighbor in love. Extra nos has two directions: one to God, when I rest in faith in the word of God's righteousness, the other to my neighbor, when I live in love and in my vocation, the daily calling in this world. This distinction was always very important to Luther: what is true before God, coram Deo, and what is true before people, coram hominibus. Both of these perspectives, these kinds of outwardness, are human--the external word, the worldly life, the neighbor with flesh and blood. This is all baptismal life, good human life, good Christian life. And here Luther is again a challenge to our lifestyle today.

10. This then is the continuing significance of Luther today in his total interpretation of Christian faith and life: the lowliness and outwardness, the creational and incarnational perspective on all points and parts of his theology, his affirmation of the world, the body, and the humanness--which is at the same time an acknowledgment of the kingdom of God in this world and God's saving and life-giving presence. To be a Christian is to live in the humanity of Christ, in the Word, and in the neighbor. It is in the world that this life is lived and developed; there are both the cross and the joy of Christ, both his death and his resurrection, concealed and yet at the same time revealed in his humanity.

This feature--the humanness of God--is what gives Luther's theology its significant character, a character of dynamic reality, of flexibility, of vivacity and change, while on the same solid stable foundation, outside of ourselves, in God alone and his grace and his Word. This extra has to be acknowledged, according to Luther, and yet we find it only intra, that is, in ourselves, in this world, in incarnational categories. This accounts also for the features of paradox and mystery in his whole theology, which in this respect is a "modern," even "postmodern," characteristic of doing theology, never fully completed, always open to new horizons and new possibilities. Luther is still relevant in his theological method and foundation.

We need to find ways to express and communicate this character of Luther's theology with regard to today's issues in church and society, while still retaining the genuine historical Luther as the Reformer, who himself wanted to do a theology which is semper reformanda. This way of doing theology has a liberating power. It frees us from unnecessary philosophical and emotional garbage and makes us concentrate on real life in the real world. In this basic and decisive respect there is still a lot to learn from Luther. So, to use Nygren's expression, maybe we should once more move forward to Luther.

Kjell Ove Nilsson

Universities of Lund and Goteborg, Sweden

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