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Luther’s Theology of
the Cross by Carl R. Trueman
No one could have expected
that the Reformation would be launched by Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses
against Indulgences in October 1517. The document itself simply proposed the
framework for a university debate. Luther was arguing only for a revision of
the practice of indulgences, not its abolition. He was certainly not offering
an agenda for widespread theological and ecclesiastical reform.
Indeed, he had already said
much more controversial things in his Disputation against Scholastic Theology
of September 4, 1517, in which he critiqued the whole way in which medieval
theology had been done for centuries. That disputation, however, passed without
a murmur. Indeed, humanly speaking, it was only the unique combination of
external factors—social, economic, and political—that made the
later disputation the spark that lit the Reformation fuse.
The
Once the fuse had been lit,
however, the church made a fatal error: she allowed the Augustinian Order, to
which Luther belonged, to deal with the problem as if it were a minor local
difficulty. There was to be a meeting of the Order in
The Heidelberg Disputation
is significant for two things. First, there was at least one other future
Reformation giant present. This was Martin Bucer, the Reformer of Strasbourg,
who would end his days as professor of divinity at
The Theology of the Cross
Toward the end of the
disputation, Luther offered some theses which seem (in typical Luther fashion)
nonsensical, or at least obscure:
19. That person does not
deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as
though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually
happened [Rom. 1:20].
20. He deserves to be called
a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God
seen through suffering and the cross.
21. A theologian of glory calls
evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it
actually is.
22. That wisdom which sees
the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man is completely puffed
up, blinded, and hardened.
These statements actually
encapsulate the heart of Luther's theology, and a good grasp of what he means
by the obscure terms and phrases they contain sheds light not just on the
doctrinal content of his theology, but also on the very way that he believed theologians
should think. Indeed, he is taking Paul's explosive argument from 1 Corinthians
and developing it into a full theological agenda.
At the heart of his argument
is his notion that human beings should not speculate about who God is or how he
acts in advance of actually seeing whom he has revealed himself to be. Thus,
Luther sees God's revelation of himself as axiomatic to all theology. Now,
there probably is not a heretic in history who would not agree with that,
because all theology presupposes the revelation of God, whether in nature,
human reason, culture, or whatever.
Luther, however, had a
dramatically restrictive view of revelation. God revealed himself as merciful
to humanity in the Incarnation, when he manifested himself in human flesh, and
the supreme moment of that revelation was on the cross at
The "theologians of
glory," therefore, are those who build their theology in the light of what
they expect God to be like—and, surprise, surprise, they make God to look
something like themselves. The "theologians of the cross," however,
are those who build their theology in the light of God's own revelation of
himself in Christ hanging on the cross.
Implications
The implications of this
position are revolutionary. For a start, Luther is demanding that the entire
theological vocabulary be revised in light of the cross. Take for example the
word power. When theologians of glory read about divine power in the Bible, or
use the term in their own theology, they assume that it is analogous to human
power. They suppose that they can arrive at an understanding of divine power by
magnifying to an infinite degree the most powerful thing of which they can
think. In light of the cross, however, this understanding of divine power is
the very opposite of what divine power is all about. Divine power is revealed
in the weakness of the cross, for it is in his apparent defeat at the hands of
evil powers and corrupt earthly authorities that Jesus shows his divine power
in the conquest of death and of all the powers of evil. So when a Christian
talks about divine power, or even about church or Christian power, it is to be
conceived of in terms of the cross—power hidden in the form of weakness.
For Luther, the same
procedure must be applied to other theological terms. For example, God's wisdom
is demonstrated in the foolishness of the cross. Who would have thought up the
foolish idea of God taking human flesh in order to die a horrendous death on
behalf of sinners who had deliberately defied him, or God making sinners pure
by himself becoming sin for them, or God himself raising up a people to newness
of life by himself submitting to death? We could go on, looking at such terms
as life, blessing, holiness, and righteousness. Every single one must be
reconceived in the light of the cross. All are important theological concepts;
all are susceptible to human beings casting them in their own image; and all
must be recast in the light of the cross.
This insight is one of the
factors in Luther's thinking that gives his theology an inner logic and
coherence. Take, for example, his understanding of justification, whereby God
declares the believer to be righteous in his sight, not by virtue of any
intrinsic righteousness (anything that the believer has done or acquired), but
on the basis of an alien righteousness, the righteousness of Christ that
remains external to the believer. Is this not typical of the strange but
wonderful logic of the God of the cross? The person who is really unrighteous,
really mired in sin, is actually declared by God to be pure and righteous! Such
a truth is incomprehensible to human logic, but makes perfect sense in light of
the logic of the cross.
And what of the idea of a
God who comes down and loves the unlovely and the unrighteous before the
objects of his love have any inclination to love him or do good? Such is
incomprehensible to the theologians of glory, who assume that God is like them,
like other human beings, and thus only responds to those who are intrinsically
attractive or good, or who first earn his favor in some way. But the cross
shows that God is not like that: against every assumption that human beings
might make about who God is and how he acts, he requires no prior loveliness in
the objects of his love; rather, his prior love creates that loveliness without
laying down preconditions. Such a God is revealed with amazing and unexpected
tenderness and beauty in the ugly and violent drama of the cross.
The Key to Christian Ethics
and Experience
Luther does not restrict the
theology of the cross to an objective revelation of God. He also sees it as the
key to understanding Christian ethics and experience. Foundational to both is
the role of faith: to the eyes of unbelief, the cross is nonsense; it is what
it seems to be—the crushing, filthy death of a man cursed by God. That is
how the unbelieving mind interprets the cross—foolishness to Greeks and
an offence to Jews, depending on whether your chosen sin is intellectual
arrogance or moral self-righteousness. To the eyes opened by faith, however,
the cross is seen as it really is. God is revealed in the hiddenness of the
external form. And faith is understood to be a gift of God, not a power
inherent in the human mind itself.
This principle of faith then
allows the believer to understand how he or she is to behave. United to Christ,
the great king and priest, the believer too is both a king and a priest. But
these offices are not excuses for lording it over others. In fact, kingship and
priesthood are to be enacted in the believer as they are in
Christ—through suffering and self-sacrifice in the service of others. The
believer is king of everything by being a servant of everyone; the believer is
completely free by being subject to all. As Christ demonstrated his kingship
and power by death on the cross, so the believer does so by giving himself or
herself unconditionally to the aid of others. We are to be, as Luther puts it,
little Christs to our neighbors, for in so doing we find our true identity as
children of God.
This argument is explosive,
giving a whole new understanding of Christian authority. Elders, for example,
are not to be those renowned for throwing their weight around, for badgering
others, and for using their position or wealth or credentials to enforce their
own opinions. No, the truly Christian elder is the one who devotes his whole
life to the painful, inconvenient, and humiliating service of others, for in so
doing he demonstrates Christlike authority, the kind of authority that Christ
himself demonstrated throughout his incarnate life and supremely on the cross
at
Great Blessings through
Great Suffering
The implications of the
theology of the cross for the believer do not stop there. The cross is
paradigmatic for how God will deal with believers who are united to Christ by
faith. In short, great blessing will come through great suffering.
This point is hard for those
of us in the affluent West to swallow. For example, some years ago I lectured
at a church gathering on this topic and pointed out that the cross was not
simply an atonement, but a revelation of how God deals with those whom he
loves. I was challenged afterwards by an individual who said that Luther's
theology of the cross did not give enough weight to the fact that the cross and
resurrection marked the start of the reversal of the curse, and that great
blessings should thus be expected; to focus on suffering and weakness was
therefore to miss the eschatological significance of Christ's ministry.
Of course, this individual
had failed to apply Luther's theology of the cross as thoroughly as he should
have done. All that he said was true, but he failed to understand what he was
saying in light of the cross. Yes, Luther would agree, the curse is being
rolled back, but that rollback is demonstrated by the fact that, thanks to the
cross, evil is now utterly subverted in the cause of good. If the cross of
Christ, the most evil act in human history, can be in line with God's will and
be the source of the decisive defeat of the very evil that caused it, then any
other evil can also be subverted to the cause of good.
More than that, if the death
of Christ is mysteriously a blessing, then any evil that the believer
experiences can be a blessing too. Yes, the curse is reversed; yes, blessings
will flow; but who declared that these blessings have to be in accordance with
the aspirations and expectations of affluent
This casts the problem of
evil in a somewhat different light for Luther than, say, for Harold Kushner,
the rabbi who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. They happen, Luther
would say, because that is how God blesses them. God accomplishes his work in
the believer by doing his alien work (the opposite of what we expect); he
really blesses by apparently cursing.
Indeed, when it is grasped
that the death of Christ, the greatest crime in history, was itself willed in a
deep and mysterious way by the triune God, yet without involving God in any
kind of moral guilt, we see the solution to the age-old problem of absolving an
all-powerful God of responsibility for evil. The answer to the problem of evil
does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not
revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil
is utterly subverted for good. Romans 8:28 is true because of the cross of
Christ: if God can take the greatest of evils and turn it to the greatest of
goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human
history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to
his good purpose as well.
Luther's theology of the
cross is too rich to be covered adequately in a single article, but I hope that
my brief sketch above will indicate the rich vein of theological reflection
which can be mined by those who reflect upon 1 Corinthians 1 and upon the
dramatic antitheses between appearance and reality that are scattered
throughout Scripture and marshaled with such force by Martin Luther. An
antidote to sentimentality, prosperity doctrine, and an excessively worldly
eschatology, this is theological gold dust. The cross is not simply the point
at which God atones for sin; it is also a profound revelation of who God is and
how he acts toward his creation.
The author is professor of church history and
historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in
The Rev. Christopher Hershman, MA, STM, DMin
Licensed Psychologist, LMFT, LPC, CAS, CGP, CFLE
The Marriage & Family Institute
610-366-7880 (Fax) 610-366-1960
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