The final section of the Disputation turns to the righteousness of faith. We have now had our attachment to the law, good works and the claims of the will stripped away. We have been turned to Christ crucified. This brings us to the end of the Disputation and to the creative love of God. In the cross we come to know that God loves the unlovely and thus makes them lovely. We have been crucified now to be raised. When the old Adam or Eve dies and is raised, we spontaneously turn to the neighbor in works of love. Knowing that God has done everything necessary, we move out in freedom. We see the “bad, poor, needy, and lowly” whom the theologian of glory cannot see. “They don’t even show up on the scale of values and are not regarded.”90 But theologians of the cross know that they are sinners and know their own poverty, yet they trust that the love of God creates precisely out of nothing. Finally, “The presupposition of the entire Disputation is laid bare. It is the hope of the resurrection. God brings life out of death.”91
Forde treats the Heidelberg Disputation as much more than a theological treatise; he understands it as an actual proclamation of the gospel and therefore an actual doing of the gospel. This is its excellence. It does not simply describe the cross or God, it—to use the necessarily awkward phrasing—crosses or does God to the reader. Theology at its best must serve this purpose; “theology is for proclamation.”92 Proclamation is the final move, the logical, ultimate step of comprehending the things of God. When the shape of God’s love is truly understood, we freely and spontaneously have to share the good news. To proclaim God’s love is to end—as both telos and finis—the argument. Forde says:
Theologians of the cross therefore come to understand that the only move left is to the proclamation that issues from the story. The final task is to do the story to the hearers in such a way that they are incorporated into the story itself, killed and made alive by the hearing of it.93
Proclamation, as for Ebeling, is what ultimately matters in the theology of the cross.
Through the preaching of the cross in the living present, not through theological explanations, we are defended from the terror of the divine majesty. Precisely against the threat of supposed divine timelessness and immutability we are claimed in the concrete word of the cross in the living present; through baptism and Supper we are washed and fed. We feel and taste the truth in the here and now. To believe means precisely to be claimed by the cross and its word, to cling to that and find one’s assurance there. The “solution” to the problem of God, that is, is not in the classroom but in church.94
The concerns raised at the end of the section on Ebeling are equally fitting in response to Forde. If anything, Forde’s approach is even less historical. Forde’s reading of Luther has God standing over and against all of humanity in an undifferentiated way. All alike are prone to the same temptations of glory and power. This is Forde’s appraisal of how the theology of the cross functioned in Luther’s day, but Forde carries it forward to today. Luther speaks across centuries of history directly to us. Time and time again, generic humanity is gathered up into the homogeneous “we.”
Once again the neighbors in need do not enter until the last pages of the book. Even then, they are quickly dismissed. Having noted that “the theologians of glory try to see through the needy, the poor, the lowly, and the ‘nonexistent,’”95 Forde makes a glorious move himself, subsuming the needy, the poor, the lowly and the nonexistent into the category of “sinner.” Through the quick move to generic categories, Forde renders the poor once again invisible. They get lost in a crowd of undifferentiated humanity. The theologian of the cross becomes another theologian of glory.
Sacramental Theology of the Cross
Peura
Out of the dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Church, Scandinavian Luther scholars have come to a new understanding of Luther’s theology including his theology of the cross. They have focused on his early years so as to emphasize certain aspects of his theology that most clearly lie in continuity with medieval theology. The Finnish scholar Simo Peura’s book Mehr als ein Mensch?96 is a contemporary example of this approach. His understanding of the theology of the cross will be dramatically shaped by his work on Luther’s very earlier material.
To begin to understand Luther, Peura looks at his Psalm commentaries from 1513 to 1516. From this period, Peura articulates Luther’s understanding of the deification of the Christian. Here Luther’s dependence on late scholastic theology comes to the fore. Next, Peura looks at how this theme is upheld in relation to the themes of justification and God’s love as they are articulate by Luther in his 1515 and 1516 commentaries on Romans. Finally, Peura comes to our theme, considering the theology of the cross in light of deification. His basis for that study are texts from 1517 and 1519. While the third part of his study will be of most interest to us, we will need to retrace the steps his steps through deification since that dramatically shapes his own understanding of the theology of the cross. Without this background, it is difficult to comprehend how he could end up at such a different place than Forde and Ebeling.
In the early studies on the Psalms, Luther presents his understanding of deification. In the act of becoming flesh, God in Christ deifies the Christian. God bestows on the believing Christian his divinity understood as his “truth, wisdom and goodness.”97 Alternatively, God’s divinity can also be understood as “his name” which is Christ himself.
The above-mentioned determination of spiritual goods and of the name of God contains also an aspect that aims at the deification of the person (deificatio hominis). God is the whole blessedness of his saints; the name of God gives the Christian the goodness of God, that is, God himself. The spiritual goods are gifts of God (donum Dei) in the Christian. The attributes do not remain, therefore, simply in God; rather they actually are given to the Christian.98
This means that there is a three-fold coming of Christ the word to the believer. First and foremost, in the incarnation God becomes human. Next, the word comes as grace (Gnade) heard and clung to. Finally, the word takes form within the person as the gift (Gabe) of Godself. “In each of these, the arrival of Christ—though differently in each case—has the result of the deification of the person,” argues Peura.99 The thrust of his claim is that God in Christ offers two benefits: grace (the merciful declaration that makes the sinner just) and gift (the ontological presence of God in the believer.) The first benefit has been the exclusive emphasis of Ebeling and Forde; the second is the reframing of God’s benefits offered by the Finnish Luther interpreters. When God gives the sinner God’s own name, God really and truly offers God’s essence to them.
Luther also uses other terminology traditionally related to deification to make similar points. He speaks of participation in God, union with God, and the transformation of the person. “Through them all, however, the same point is legitimately made, that is, the actual-ontological character of the salvation realized by God in the person.”100