At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written: ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of Scripture showed itself to me.28
Whereas he had “once hated the phrase ‘the righteousness of God,’” Luther continued, “I began to love and extol it as the sweetest of words, so that this passage in Paul became the very gate of paradise for me.”29 In the next sentence of this famous statement, Luther added: “Later I read Augustine’s The Spirit and the Letter, where contrary to hope I found that he, too, interpreted God’s righteousness in a similar way, as the righteousness with which God clothes us when he justifies us.”30
Although Luther scholars have not agreed when his “reformation breakthrough” took place, they do agree that the writings of St. Augustine were also of crucial importance for the development of Luther’s thought prior to this breakthrough. To use the words of Heiko Oberman, Luther “had to test scholasticism by the standard of St. Augustine and then to find his way from St. Augustine to St. Paul in order to acquire the key to the Scriptures.”31
As a result of the life-changing experience based on the idea called justification by faith alone, Luther also came to the conclusion that a person could understand a subject only if he or she was familiar with it from experience.32 In studying the Bible, Luther once said, “You must completely despair of your own diligence and intelligence and rely solely on the infusion of Spirit.” As Erich W. Gritsch pointed out after he cited this sentence, “Luther found this kind of approach to Bible study confirmed in the writings of the great church father Augustine rather than in the scholars of the Middle Ages. What Augustine had to say in his work On the Spirit and the Letter (De spiritu et litera), decisively shaped Luther’s early struggles with the Bible.”33
In and through this “evangelical” experience, Luther was convinced that a Christian is at the same time a justified or righteous person and a sinner: simul justus et peccator. “No other phrase,” Luther scholars agree, “is capable of expressing Luther’s theological ‘reforming discovery’ as clearly and succinctly.”34 From this experience, Luther developed an “at-the-same-time” way of thinking and viewing life, a way that Martin E. Marty has called a “simul-vision.”35
For this inquiry it is important to remember that Luther’s theology is, as Paul Althaus pointed out in his helpful study, The Theology of Martin Luther, “a way of thinking.”36 Second, as Gerhard Ebeling emphasized, the formula simul justus—simul peccator “is the fundamental and typical characteristic of Luther’s thought.”37 The clue to this, Ebeling suggested, “seems to lie in the observation that Luther’s thought always contains an antithesis, tension between strongly opposed but related polarities: theology and philosophy, the letter and the Spirit, the law and the gospel, the double use of the law, person and works, faith and love, the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of the world, man as a Christian and man in the world, freedom and bondage, God hidden and God revealed—to mention only the most important examples.”38
Now a way of thinking and a way of perceiving or viewing life can also become a methodological principle and a style of writing. By the year 1520, Luther was a master of the use of paradox, for in the beautiful and powerful essay called “The Freedom of a Christian,” he used an “at-the-same-time” way of viewing life to present a picture of what he called “the whole of Christian life in a brief form.”39 For me and for many Lutherans, this magnificent treatise is the best essay in Western literature for teaching a simul way of viewing life and for teaching paradox.
In this essay Luther explained how “the individual Christian lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love.”40 Before he developed this theme, however, he presented two strong theses that “seem to contradict each other”: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all.”41
To explain this paradox, Luther first presented his basic “at-the-same-time” way of perceiving the nature of humankind.
Man has a two-fold nature, a spiritual and a bodily one. According to the spiritual nature, which men refer to as the soul, he is called a spiritual, inner, or new man. According to the bodily nature, which men refer to as flesh, he is called carnal, outward, or old man . . . Because of this diversity of nature Scriptures assert contradictory things concerning the same man, since the two men in the same flesh contradict each other, “for the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh,” according to Gal 5 [:17].42
For Luther, the Word of God and faith ruled in the soul or the inner man. “The inner man, who by faith is created in the image of God, is both joyful and happy because it is his one occupation to serve God joyfully and without the thought of gain, in love that is not constrained.”43 For Luther, “the outer man” should control his own body, serve his neighbor in love, live only for others rather than for himself, and live for all men on earth. “We conclude,” Luther said, “that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love.”44
It is difficult to overemphasize the significance of this essay for the whole development of Lutheran thought and Protestant thought in Germany since the sixteenth century, for both Lutheran thought and much of Protestant thought in Germany are based on Luther’s “at-the-same-time” image of the inner and outer man. While on the one hand Luther constantly emphasized not only that each human being was both “spirit” and “flesh” at the same time, on the other hand he constantly insisted that each person and his or her works had to be viewed as an entirety. Both these views, as Peter Meinhold emphasized, were closely connected with Luther’s basic starting place and basic idea.45
It is a well-known fact that Luther’s main starting point, the idea known as justification through grace by faith alone, and his simul-vision were derived mainly from the writings of Paul and mainly from his Epistle to the Romans. It is also a well-known fact that Luther had a hierarchy of books within the New Testament, and that he developed what Inge Lønning,46 Eric W. Gritsch,47 and others have called “a canon within the canon.” What Luther scholars have not agreed on, however, is what book Luther placed first within this hierarchy or canon.
At the beginning of his “Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans,” Luther claimed that “This epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament, and is truly the purest gospel.”48 In the last paragraph of this preface, Luther stated:
In this epistle we thus find most abundantly the things that a Christian ought to know, namely, what is law, gospel, sin, punishment, grace, faith, righteousness, Christ, God, good works, love, hope, and the cross; and also how we are to conduct ourselves toward everyone, be he righteous or sinner, strong or weak, friend or foe—and even toward our own selves. Moreover this is all ably supported with Scripture and proved by St. Paul’s own example and that of the prophets, so that one could not wish for anything more. Therefore it appears that he wanted in this one epistle to sum up briefly the whole Christian and evangelical doctrine, and to prepare an introduction to the entire Old Testament.49
Thus when one uses this preface to establish Luther’s hierarchy of New Testament books or his “canon within the canon,” one would conclude that for Luther the Epistle to the Romans came first.