Praise for The Work of Faith
“It has always seemed odd that the Luther charged with breaking the church is also the Luther charged with encouraging passivity in the face of injustice. Perhaps we could make better sense of the great reformer if we listened to the way most in his day heard him: through his sermons. Justin Nickel rightly argues that expanding what we read of Luther expands how we understand Luther. Though he has been widely criticized for a passive conception of graced human agency, his preaching contradicts this misreading. The Work of Faith shows us Luther himself as an agent, a master of rhetoric who reaches out to minister to his congregants. Nickel shows that Luther calls Christians to intentional agency, even returning to the law in a manner transformed by love. Perhaps, he suggests, our problem with Luther is us: we tend to think of freedom as autonomy, but Luther thinks grace and freedom are not competitive, but compatible. ” —Jesse Couenhoven, Villanova University
The Work of Faith
The Work of Faith
Divine Grace and Human Agency in Martin Luther's Preaching
Justin Nickel
LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Luther's Works Vol. 76, 25 pages © 2014 Concordia Publishing House. Used with permission. www.cph.org.
Luther's Works Vol. 77, 31 pages © 2014 Alfonso Espinosa, published by Concordia Publishing House. Used with permission. www.cph.org.
Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LCCN 2020904299
ISBN 978-1-9787-0963-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-9787-0964-5 (electronic)
Soli Deo gloria
Acknowledgments
I owe a great many people my gratitude for their help and support on this book. John Bowlin offered detailed comments on two different manuscript drafts. Lois Malcolm, Stacy Johnson, and Kenneth Appold commented on the first manuscript and pushed it forward in helpful directions. Jeffrey Skaff, Cambria Kaltwasser, and Daniel Pedersen commented on specific chapters. Anthony Bateza mentored and encouraged this work. My mother, Mary Nickel, copy-edited the whole manuscript. My editor, Neil Elliott, has been incredibly supportive throughout the publishing process. Robert and Blanche Jenson, the former now of blessed memory, supported me with weekly conversation, to say nothing of the coffee and cookies. I was able to test out some of this and related material in the Christian Spirituality section of the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Christian Ethics, and the New Jersey Synod of the ELCA. Thanks to all for your reception of these ideas. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me sharpen my argument. There were many friends whose love and kindness help me along the way, Luke Zerra and Stephanie Mota-Thurston in particular: thank you. Finally, my most heartfelt gratitude to my wife, Mary, and my son, Max. Mary is my toughest critic and fiercest advocate. Max is my heart. Their love makes it worth it.
I have quoted numerous passages from volumes 76 and 77 of Luther’s Works, both volumes copyright 2014 Concordia Publishing House, with kind permission of the press.
Introduction
As with any historical figure, our interpretations of Martin Luther’s work are ever-shifting, ever-contested. Claiming as much does not plunge one into a tyranny of relativism, in which parsing true from false interpretations is no longer an option. Some interpretations get Luther right in important ways, others falter, and most will be a mix of the two. This all may seem obvious, but some of the conclusions that follow are less so. Naming this truth forces us to consider the way our interpretations of Luther are, at root, bound up with our own questions, concerns, and goals. These questions and concerns provoke our return to Luther. The ends we seek set the agenda for our interpretations and the texts we select and highlight. It is good to start with this commonplace claim, if only to bring these issues to the fore.
This present book is no different. In it, I aim both to complicate and innovate on a prominent interpretation of Luther. This interpretation is something of a standard among certain North American Christian ethicists and Lutheran theologians.[1] This is true even as judgments about this Luther, the texts highlighted, and the ends toward which he is put, vary. While I provide a detailed reading of this interpretation below, a brief synopsis goes like this. For Luther, the Christian life is steeped in tension and written in paradox. An encounter with God’s holy law exposes all human piety as bankrupt bids at self-righteousness. Driven by the law to Christ’s cross, we undergo our justification. This justification is not the elevation of our intellects and wills, but the apocalyptic death of the old Adam and Eve and the birth of the new person of faith.[2] This new person of faith is gloriously free from the law. The law has found its end in Christ, and so has lost its grip over the faithful. Joined to Christ as bride to bridegroom, the new person of faith can stand down any power, principality, or life circumstance that would seek to take her inheritance from her. She is free.
At the same time, the new person of faith is the perfect servant of her neighbor, and her social life should come to reflect this reality. Placed in a particular vocation by God, she is the means through which our neighbor’s need is met.[3] Here is one of the wholesome consequences of Luther’s teaching on justification. Because we are justified by a passively-suffered faith, there is no longer any distinction between monk and butcher, priest and mother.[4] All may serve God through their ordinary lives and their common callings, though not all attempts at service, even in the seculum, count as Christian service. These works must have the gospel as their basic principle; they must spring forth from us in joy, love, and spontaneity and be done in faith. Just as we no longer seek God through our efforts to live by God’s law, so we no longer allow the law to bar us from our neighbor’s actual need.[5] Rather than imposing the law’s deed on our neighbor—whether they meet actual need—we will attend to the neighbor in her concrete situation. We will give the neighbor what she needs, even and especially if it does not conform to prevailing accounts of the good and the just. An aspect of our Christian freedom is the willingness to treat each neighbor and each moment as a genuinely new occasion for service. We should neither expect nor require these moments to do more than cohere to a formal commitment to love.[6] Such efforts would be asking for the law when we should be living from the gospel.
Just as we do not impose the law’s works on our neighbor, so neither are we the actors of our good works in any substantial sense. We are instead the instruments through which God works. To imagine ourselves as genuine agents would only be to tempt our lingering sin and to risk missing the neighbor’s real needs. For, in thinking that we are doing