Chapter Outline and Brief Comments on Genre
To make this argument, this book takes the following form. Chapter 1 introduces and exegetes a prominent picture of Luther and the moral life, including its claims, sources, and the ends toward which it is put. Next, I will show that, their best intentions notwithstanding, other Lutherans like Gustaf Wingren fail to give a coherent view of the moral life.
Chapter 2 begins with this hunch: The failure to think about the moral life in Lutheran terms has its roots in how we think about preaching. Because preaching is the act by which God justifies sinful human beings, the way we understand preaching has profound consequences for our consideration of the moral life. In this chapter, I analyze descriptions of Luther as a preacher and the sort of language preaching is thought to be. Oswald Bayer, Steven Paulson, and Fred Meuser are key interlocutors. I show how these descriptions generate a competition between Luther’s and God’s agencies in the preaching act. I then turn to Luther’s own descriptions of preaching and preaching’s language as a way to complicate these descriptions. I will also introduce recent work on Luther’s rhetoric, principally Birgit Stolt’s, as a way to think about Luther’s intention and agency as a preacher.
Having provided the necessary theological and practical contexts, chapters 3 and 4 will be largely exegetical. In these chapters, I focus on both the form and content of Luther’s preaching, as I take Luther’s preaching to be an instance of his own Christian agency. By attending to Luther’s language use, I am able to show Luther’s intentions in preaching and the various ways he attempts to achieve these intentions. How he preaches is just as important as what he preaches. Further, this chapter focuses on how Luther thinks about our conversion to the Christian life and the sorts of tasks and responsibilities that make up this life.
In chapter 4, I focus on the way that Luther preaches about Christian agency and the law, even as the rhetorical analysis carries over from chapter 3. For this Luther, justification results in the Christian having real agency in her Christian life, both with respect to resisting her own sin and in serving her neighbor. Further, this agency is formed and directed by the law. While this analysis favors a reading of Luther as a proponent of the so-called third use of the law, my primary intention lies elsewhere. The law’s enduring role in the Christian life is an occasion to consider how Luther thinks we, as agents of our Christian lives, are to resist sin and love our neighbors.
Chapter 5 will gather the insights gained from the previous chapters. Specifically, I will detail the relationship between human and divine action in uniquely Christian activities (the preaching of Christ, prayer, resistance to sin), the sort of action that follows from faith, and how Christians use their justification in daily life to delight in the law and serve their neighbors. I will also explore the ontological and moral commitments that make these statements possible, including the relationship between the law and gospel, and a more precise reading of how God works apart from us in the preaching act. In this way, familiar Lutheran terms will not be abandoned but reinscribed in light of the homiletic practices of which they are part.
This book ends with an epilogue, in which I reflect on the methodological and material implications of my analysis and my hope for the ways this work will impact Luther studies in the future.
Before proceeding, one brief comment regarding genre needs to be made to help set reader expectations. This is book is a work of moral theology, not Reformation History. It uses Luther’s homiletic activity as an occasion to pose and answer normative questions about the Christian life. As such, I’m primarily interested in what Luther imagined the Christian life to entail, and the ways that these descriptions do and do not hold for us, his contemporary readers and ecclesiastical heirs. In this, I join my voice to recent work on Luther, most especially Mary Gaebler’s The Courage of Faith and Michael Laffin’s The Promise of Martin Luther’ Political Theology.[38]
To do so, my analysis hews closely to Luther’s words, how he uses them, how this usage innovates on prior usages, the inferences we can draw from this use, and similar matters. Certainly, some historical contextualization is necessary for this work. I have already offered historical grounding for the CP and have noted some of the ways in which the occasion of the sermon differs from the academic debate or lecture hall. But readers should not expect an exercise in Reformation history. They should expect a work of moral theology that makes use of moral theory, rhetorical analysis, and philosophy of language.
Notes
1.
See the authors listed in notes 2, 3, and 13.
2.
For instance: Oswald Bayer, Jeffrey G. Silcock, and Mark C. Mattes, Theology the Lutheran Way, English ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2007); Mark C. Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2004); Gerhard O. Forde, Mark C. Mattes, and Steven D. Paulson, A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub Co., 2004); Steven D. Paulson, Lutheran Theology (New York: T & T Clark International, 2011).
3.
Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 184–189; Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros vol. II, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), pp. 726–737; Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl C. Rasmussen (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), pp. 171–184.
4.
Hence Tranvik’s recent commendation of Luther on vocation. See: Mark D. Tranvik, Martin Luther and the Called Life (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2016).
5.
Paulson, Lutheran Theology, p. 229.
6.
James M. Childs, Faith, Formation, and Decision: Ethics in the Community of Promise (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), pp. 75–90.
7.
Virgil Thompson, Oswald Bayer, and Gerhard O. Forde, eds., Justification Is for Preaching: Essays by Oswald Bayer, Gerhard O. Forde, and Others (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012).
8.
See Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2008), pp. 42–44.
9.
For a moving description of this event, see Paulson, pp. 50–53.
10.
As an example of the way this story gets drawn into larger considerations of human agency, see: Charles P. Arand, James Arne Nestingen, and Robert Kolb, The Lutheran Confessions: History and Theology of The Book of Concord (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012), pp. 62–63.
11.
Herdt, p. 188.
12.
Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, p. 92.
13.
Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches v. II, trans. Olive Wyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 515–544. Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1985), pp. 3–10; H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ & Culture