In the Spirit: Human Subjectivity Under Law and Gospel

Chapter 1

Introduction: Rethinking the Human Subject in Martin Luther’s Theology

In 1527, plague came to Wittenberg. In a moment where one might expect pastoral care as comfort and consolation, Martin Luther approached the plague’s arrival in terms of the Christian moral life. Godliness, Luther wrote in Whether One May Flee a Deadly Plague, is to serve God. To serve God is to serve the neighbor.¹ Luther’s connection between godliness and service assumed a kind of interplay between the human soul and body. The godly soul must relate in some way to the body such that moral action in service could occur. Yet, Luther’s (in)famous 1517 intervention in the medieval penitential practice of indulgences supposedly problematized this very premise. The problem was sin, which had so corrupted human intellectual and volitional powers as to render them totally powerless in producing good works as godliness or righteousness.² How could the Christian, plagued by the effects of sin, produce godliness through service?

A few years earlier in 1520, Luther had attempted an answer. After explicating a new concept of Christian freedom through the soul’s passive reception of Christ’s righteousness in justification in The Freedom of a Christian (de libertate Christiana), Luther turned to talk about the outer person and the body. This outer person was the domain where the effects of sin on the Christian’s mind, will, and desires could be felt and seen. Nevertheless, Luther insisted that this was precisely where good works began as the Christian sought to subdue the body and the inner effects of sin it represented, bringing this outer person into moral alignment with the new righteousness of the soul. But Luther had a logic problem. If the soul’s new righteousness was Christ’s and not really its own, how could the righteous soul move the sinful body, or outer person? Luther determined that the Christian, caught in this paradox between sin and righteousness, does works out of spontaneous love.³ But how does this occur? In the context of late-medieval Scholastic moral theologies that offered highly detailed accounts of the movement between soul and body for moral action, Luther’s response was cryptic.

This study takes up this problem of human moral subjectivity after justification in Martin Luther’s theological anthropology. In philosophical and theological anthropology, human agency, or subjectivity, involves the human intellect and will working together to motivate and drive human action. Luther’s concept of justification by faith alone caused a rift in thinking about the human moral subject in the Christian West. Luther rejected later-Scholastic theologies from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries that posited a divine-human relationship on the basis of human merit.⁴ Luther agreed with the Medievals that God places a moral demand on human persons in the law. God commands love of God for God’s own sake above all else. However, Luther thought that original sin rendered the human person capable only of self-love. This incapacity negated law obedience for human merit and endangered the God-human relation. Instead, Luther established more certain grounds for justification in divine activity alone.⁵ He determined God’s command articulated in the law exposes the human person’s sin, accuses her as sinner, and drives her to Christ, who graciously fulfills the law on the human person’s behalf. The justifying God⁶ does everything in the God-human relationship. The human is purely passive.

Luther’s theological focus on divine agency appears incompatible with notions of human agency and subjectivity for another reason. By maximizing God as agent, Luther also annihilated the anthropological features that make moral action philosophically possible, namely, human reason and will. The basis for Luther’s rejection of human merit in the God-human relation was the ravaging effect of original sin on human moral powers. Sin corrupted the core of the human person. While she remains able to produce certain kinds of acts, like using reason to form judgments or the will to feel and choose certain affections, these acts are corrupted because the person producing them is corrupted. Thus, the human person under sin is unable to judge rightly using reason or to choose the good through the will.⁷ Even if reason could judge rightly, Luther thought the human will was bound to its own affections. It could only ever choose to love itself, to satisfy its own pleasures.⁸

This castigation of human moral powers created a problem for ethical action in social relationships because Luther negated the soul’s capacity to move the body in moral action. Yet, Luther perennially insisted that moral action, or good works, must result from the God-human relation established in justification. To compensate, Luther glossed over the topic of the soul’s moral powers, stating ambiguously in The Freedom of the Christian that any good works after justification resulted from Christ’s love springing spontaneously from the soul.⁹ The result was a further depletion of human moral agency. Not only was the human person totally passive in justification, she also lacked the capacity to move her own body. The body required Christ to somehow move it in good action. Therefore, it seems to be the case that Luther’s theological focus on God in Christ usurped any theological, philosophical, or ethical questions related to human agency. This conclusion was the majority scholarly consensus throughout much of the twentieth century.¹⁰

Recent scholarship on Luther’s indebtedness to the Renaissance, medieval philosophy, and mysticism has raised doubts about this previous consensus and created opportunities for locating human moral agency in Luther’s thought.¹¹ Specifically, the Antinomian Disputations from 1537–1540 reveal a Luther who is concerned with the question of the ongoing utility of the law for supporting the Christian moral life, meaning the significance of human agency after justification. This text consists of a series of theses framed according to the rules of medieval logic and academic oral debates known as disputations covering a four-year span. It has long been regarded with both curious fascination for the potential insights it contains and, simultaneously, suspicion as an anomaly in Luther’s works because his views of human subjectivity seem to contradict his earlier positions on the topic. In this study, I investigate these disputations in order to examine how Luther understood human subjectivity and moral agency in relation to his doctrine of justification.

The Antinomian Disputations reflect a Luther who was revisiting the question of law in light of a controversy with his former student Johann Agricola (1494–1566) over the question of poenitentia (penitence). Penitence refers to a human act of sorrow for sin and a good intention not to sin in the future. Not only did Luther correct Agricola’s conflation of law into gospel for justification, but he also used the opportunity to discuss Christian moral action after justification in relation to law. Thus, Luther theorized the significance of law in guiding the Christian’s moral life. Furthermore, the notion of human subjectivity that Luther utilized to build his case against Agricola involved revisiting moral and anthropological resources in medieval philosophical theologies. These earlier discussions had to do with philosophical-theological questions about human agency, specifically the notion of how the human will and reason are habituated to the moral life and to God.

Luther’s new appropriation of medieval ideas takes place in view of a new emphasis in his theology during the 1530s: the role of the Holy Spirit in stimulating the Christian’s moral action, i.e., the doctrine of sanctification.¹² Pneumatology helped Luther to carve out new space for human agency between the anthropological and moral philosophical extremes of the medieval Scholastics and the Antinomians. He thought the Scholastics gave too much moral credit to the human subject before justification, placing her salvation at risk and driving despair. The Antinomians, by contrast, gave too much moral credit to the human after justification, similarly risking salvation and despair by spurring moral complacency. By increasing the connections between his pneumatology, concept of law, and the human subject, Luther found a new foundation for talking about the temporal effects of the God-human relationship in justification in reviving the human person’s moral subjectivity. He found a way to better explain how Christ’s love springs spontaneously from the soul.

Luther’s defense of law contra Agricola hints at the importance of the Holy Spirit for the creation of human moral capacity in relation to the law. In the chapters that follow, I explore the relationship between law, the Holy Spirit, and the human person in Luther’s theology. In particular, I examine Luther’s specification of the Holy Spirit as the divine agent of both the law and of human vivification and sanctification in the Antinomian Disputations. The dual pneumatological function presented in these texts offers possibilities for drawing together law and human agency in Luther’s late theology.

This requires the investigation of three interrelated questions. First, how did Luther separate law from gospel contra Agricola while aligning the law to the Spirit and the human person? Luther was particularly interested in how the Christian relates to the law after justification. Therefore, answering this question will require that we reconstruct Luther’s understanding of the changing human relationship with and experience of law vis-à-vis the Spirit across distinct moments within Luther’s doctrine of justification. The second question moves out of Luther’s interest in the human relation to law after gospel: how did Luther conceptualize human action on the law after justification in relation to the Spirit? To answer this question, it is necessary to develop greater clarity around Luther’s understanding of human sin and righteousness, on the one hand, and how the law supports particular processes for purging sin and developing righteousness in the human person, on the other. The change from sin to righteousness suggests a notion of moral progress or improvement in the human person after justification in relation to the Spirit, i.e., a robust notion of sanctification. Therefore, the third question asks: how did Luther develop his theological anthropology to account for the Spirit’s vivifying and sanctifying effects on the human soul in support of the Christian’s changing moral status before the law? This inquiry will see us to more closely examine the soul’s moral processes in the intellect and will in relation to the indwelling Spirit after justification. By answering these questions, this study contributes to scholarly conversations in Luther research about the anthropological grounds for the moral life.

Questions and Stakes in Modern Luther Scholarship

Questions about the relation between human agency, the Spirit, and the law in Luther’s late theology are rooted in a century-long interpretive challenge introduced into scholarship at the start of the Lutherrenaissance. In a 1917 lecture at the University of Berlin commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Karl Holl used a Kantian interpretive framework and anti-Catholic polemical stance to determine Luther’s unique contribution to the history of Christianity. Holl’s lecture was noteworthy because it used newly available primary sources from Luther and the Reformation made available in the recent publication of a critical edition of Luther’s works, the Weimar Ausgabe (WA). Early volumes of the WA had only recently been released. Work began in 1883 to commemorate another 400th anniversary related to Luther, this time, of his birth.¹³ Holl applied the historical-critical method to these original sources to analyze Luther’s theological development and found that Luther established a religion of conscience (Gewissensreligion). Holl used a Kantian framework to identify the epistemological grounds of Luther’s Gewissensreligion. It was rooted in the direct experience of God in the conscience—not in reason, as Scholasticism had done.¹⁴ Holl concluded that Luther and the religious tradition he initiated were a stark break from the medieval Catholic past.

For Holl, the contrast between a religion of conscience and a religion of reason turned on the doctrine of justification. At stake was whether Luther utilized a merit-based or a grace-based logic. Reason must maintain the principle that God is pleased with one who strives for a ‘blameless’ way of life, Holl claimed, linking reason and Scholasticism pejoratively to works righteousness.¹⁵ For Holl, reason’s orientation toward works righteousness made God’s concern for the sinner incomprehensible. When Holl explicitly connected the works righteousness of a religion of reason to the theology and rituals of Roman Catholicism, he determined that Luther differed decisively in his emphasis on the transcendental concepts of personal freedom and conviction.¹⁶ In this evaluation, Holl’s anti-Catholic polemic combined with his Kantian idealism. He concluded that Luther’s psychological understanding of religion was at odds with the moral underpinnings of the medieval Catholic theology Luther had rejected.

Holl located Luther’s radical discontinuity from medieval Catholicism in his rediscovery of the absolute divine command and human incapacity to fulfill it.¹⁷ This led Luther, per Holl, to theorize ways to reestablish the God-human relationship that resolved the human incapacity to satisfy the divine command. Holl determined that Luther solved this problem by grounding the God-human relationship in God’s action toward the believer alone. In Luther’s religion of conscience, God’s commands in the law operated at a psychological level to create the psychological pre-conditions for faith. The law made the sinner aware of her sins. The resulting psychological suffering and despair could then bring the sinner to God in faith.¹⁸

On the human person’s part, Holl interpreted faith paradoxically as an extremely active passivity.¹⁹ He described active passivity in faith as a total inwardness, as absolute trust (unbedingtes Vertrauen) in divine goodness despite the appearance and experience of God’s actions as unintelligible and terrifying.²⁰ In Holl’s reading, this made Luther’s God unceasingly creative. God was working in human hearts even though divine activity was undiscernible to the senses and known only in the conscience through faith.²¹ As Graham White has shown, this interpretation had to do with a radical reorientation of Luther’s religious language. Luther’s medieval scholastic semantic theory was realist, meaning terms referred to real things. However, the idealist turn in Holl’s reading saw terms to refer to mental concepts in Luther’s religious language.²² Thus, faith came to represent the cognitive overcoming of human experiential understanding of God as terror in favor of an equally psychological trust in divine goodness the human person could not otherwise experience. By framing Luther’s theology in these cognitive-psychological terms, Holl reduced the human moral agent to a total dependence on God in the mind.

Holl’s groundbreaking introduction of a historical methodology into Luther research propelled the use of historical questions and Kantian, anti-Catholic interpretations in Luther scholarship during much of the twentieth century.²³ The methodological questions became: When did Luther make his Reformation discovery?; How do we identify it?; and How does it distinguish Protestantism from Catholicism? The impact of these questions on scholarship translated into a bias toward the interpretive authority of the early Luther over the late Luther, a de-emphasis on the embodied, empirical subject over a psychological one, and a hermeneutic of discontinuity that approaches Luther’s thought as a breakthrough.

Just prior to the start of World War II, Werner Elert took Holl’s Kantian conscience-motif to its logical conclusion in his concept of the transcendental I. Elert understood the transcendental I as the pure I, the Self that cannot be further qualified in an empirico-psychological manner.²⁴ Elert separated the transcendental self from a person’s empirical, embodied existence in the world. In fact, the gulf between the transcendental I and the empirical person was so great that Elert depicted embodiment as a threat: the empirical self could invalidate the benefits of faith in the transcendental I, which constitute its very being. In this regard, Elert claimed that

Christ’s righteousness is my righteousness because the Word pertains to me. But it pertains to me only if this righteousness remains unentangled with my empirical existence. Faith, which hears this Word, has no other function than this hearing and exists only by hearing.²⁵

By setting the transcendental self in radical antithesis to the empirical self, Elert perpetuated and escalated the separation between faith and good works in the body in Luther’s thought. The separation of the transcendent and empirical self became a key structuring principle to be found in Luther’s theology.

After the Second World War, Paul Althaus more explicitly connected the Kantian conscious subject to the interplay of faith and works.²⁶ In both his Die Theologie Martin Luthers (1962) and Die Ethik Martin Luthers (1965), Althaus took seriously a new obedience that results from faith.²⁷ After the experience of justification, Althaus claimed that the certainty of salvation leads to an inner necessity to ‘works.’²⁸ Yet, Althaus took the locus of this activity as psychological, resulting from a change in the conscious subject—in her self-understanding as justified and a resulting joyful service to God. When Althaus considered this service as a moral-ethical activity, new obedience was separate from faith, neither causing nor preserving salvation for us.²⁹ Instead, new obedience operated again at an epistemological register to confirm and validate the existence of faith in and to the conscience. While Althaus took seriously the prospect of behavioral changes in the Christian’s moral-ethical activity, he restricted these to the temporal realm as service to the neighbor across the three estates of social relations Luther identified, ecclesia-oeconomia-politia.³⁰

Like Elert and Ebeling, Althaus also denied association between new obedience and moral improvement in the Christian moral subject. The real purpose of new obedience for Althaus was self-awareness as voluntary self-annihilation. New obedience does not create an ethical high point in the Christian life. Instead, new obedience reflects the depths of the total emptying of the self. It is a total loss of trust in oneself and the total desire to drive out the sinful self. As Althaus understood it, justification does not produce moral change in the subject but rather a desire to be free of sin so strong that one is ready and willing to die.³¹ The partial opening to moral action in Althaus’s interpretation does not correspond to a biblical notion of renewal of the self in the Spirit that one might anticipate in Luther. Instead, Althaus extended the denial and destruction of the moral self in Christ. New obedience came to connote the total dependence of the conscious subject, not her moral capacity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Gerhard Ebeling’s analysis of Luther’s theological anthropology in his expansive four-volume tome, Lutherstudien, solidified the Kantian understanding of the human subject. Building on Holl’s interest in Luther’s so-called reformation breakthrough, Ebeling sought a hermeneutical framework for understanding Luther and isolated scriptural principles in Luther’s biblical exegesis in the early lectures on the Psalms (1513–1515).³² Ebeling’s discovery led him to elevate the early Luther as interpretively normative for all of Luther’s theology and perpetuated the Lutherrenaissance’s implicit anti-Catholic polemic that valued Luther’s theological insights over his philosophical ones.³³

In his most important contribution to current understandings of Luther’s anthropology, Ebeling applied Elert’s Kantian interpretation of the transcendent I to Luther’s theological and philosophical analysis of the human subject. Working from the interpretive finality of Luther’s early theological insights about the human person, Ebeling analyzed the theses for Luther’s 1536 Disputatio de homine. He determined Luther’s views in this late work were predicated upon an absolute dialectic between theology and philosophy.³⁴ In an explicitly Kantian framework, Ebeling argued that theology in Luther’s thought has to do with cognition of God.³⁵ This means that, while philosophy can speak of the temporal person and her moral action, theology takes the heavenly, eschatological person as its object.³⁶ In the way Ebeling applied Elert’s framework of the transcendent and empirical selves to theology and philosophy, he ruptured theology from human moral subjectivity altogether.

Ebeling interpreted Luther to say that theology can only speak of the human person in her temporal, empirical existence as sinner.³⁷ In fact, as Ebeling read Luther, the only thing theology can say about the temporal human person or the soul’s moral powers is to name sin and to describe incapacity. This conclusion extended methodologically to restrict Luther’s theological anthropology to a set of external relations to God and Christ as those relations were established by faith.³⁸ This put theology and philosophy fundamentally at odds in Luther’s thought. Either one spoke philosophically of the human person and thus kept the soul’s moral powers and subjectivity in view, or one spoke biblically and theologically about the human person as sinner in herself or justified in relation to God in Christ.³⁹ Thus, Ebeling presented Luther as shutting down the question of human moral subjectivity on disciplinary grounds. Reason and volition were philosophical categories and pertained only to the human person’s temporal, empirical existence in the world.

Ebeling also applied a Kantian framework to ontological questions about the effect of justification on the human subject. He was interested in clarifying the effect of the exchange of Christ’s and human natures in Luther’s doctrine of justification. Ebeling tested conventional ontology as a way of establishing the general conditions of being as the basis for movement and change.⁴⁰ But here, Ebeling’s modern reliance on Kantian notions of being as consciousness conflicted with Luther’s medieval understandings of being and change through Aristotelian categories. Ebeling denied the exchange of natures created any substantial change in the human person because he prioritized the conscious subject.⁴¹ Ebeling isolated the preposition "coram (before) as the key distinction between traditional ontologies and Luther’s ontological intention."⁴² Building on Elert’s dialectic between the transcendent and empirical self, Ebeling used this notion of coram to isolate relational categories that determined the human subject’s temporal and eschatological conscious existence.

Ebeling understood these coram relations as ontologically constitutive of human subjectivity. He determined that Luther’s usage of coram had to do with forums of intersubjective relations in human life—the person before God (coram Deo), before others (coram mundo), and before oneself (coram meipso). "The preposition coram ensures that even in ontology the human person does not evade one’s own being-in-relation and therefore does not ignore the circumstances and relationships in which he lives."⁴³ This meant the exchange of natures had to do with a change in relations coram Deo but not in Aristotelian terms as a change in the person’s substance. God came to relate to the human person as though she were righteous. The subject also underwent a change in relation to herself, coram meipso. As a conscious subject, she came to understand herself as sinner even while she remained empirically unchanged as herself.

Although Luther supposedly rejected the philosophical underpinnings of his own day, Ebeling followed Elert to locate a distinctly modern philosophical method in Luther’s relational ontology: a Kantian one. Luther’s relational ontology grounded being in intersubjective consciousness. How I look at others, how they look at me, thus impacts how I look at myself, forming a highly complex process for consciousness constitutive of being.⁴⁴ Determined a priori by scripture, Ebeling posited the human’s passive relation to God "coram Deo" as a special theological extension of ontology into the eschatological realm. Here, the relation is determined by divine pronouncements. Either the human person is sinner or is righteous.⁴⁵ In Lutherstudien, Ebeling articulated this idea in existential terms; either the person is Sein (redeemed by external relation to God) or Nichtsein (nonexistent apart from the relation to God).⁴⁶ In Ebeling’s relational ontology, neo-Kantian interest in consciousness and the eschaton won out over more medieval questions about substantial effects of the God-human relation on the human person’s moral faculties—her intellect, volition, and affections. Thus, Ebeling’s analysis sidelined the question of sanctification, or works after justification, in Luther because the only aspect of the human that mattered was the human’s eschatological relation to God as the basis for being.

On the topic of law, Werner Elert used Hegelian notions of dialectic popularized by the Tübingen School to locate a strong opposition between law and gospel in Luther’s thought. This dialectic worked alongside the neo-Kantian conscience-motif introduced through Holl’s Gewissensreligion concept. The binary view of law and gospel supplied mechanisms in the form of divine speech acts by which the conscious subject could come to know herself. Elert, responding to Karl Barth, asserted that before a person can understand the gospel, she must know about law as an operative reality permeating all of human life.⁴⁷ In this reality, she stands condemned as a sinner. This self-knowledge as condemned sinner before the law creates the preconditions necessary for a person to know and accept by faith the divine grace offered in the gospel.

Barth advocated a view of law as an act of grace, a divine self-disclosure that preempted and undercut human action in the form of openness to God. In the context of widespread acceptance of Nazism among German Lutherans, Barth took this gracious act of divine self-disclosure to reveal an order of gospel-then-law.⁴⁸ However, Elert parted ways with Barth and determined that life after the gospel is free from law as a life of spontaneity and freedom.⁴⁹

Barth’s question about the order of gospel then law spurred more debates after World War II. This time, however, the question was a more targeted debate over a third use of law, or whether there was a use of law after gospel.⁵⁰ Operating on the Hegelian dialectic and a Kantian repudiation of the empirical self, Elert refuted Barth’s positive proposal for a third use by framing the law/gospel dialectic as essential to a Pauline-Lutheran understanding.⁵¹ The Antinomian Disputations emerged as a critical text at the center of this increasingly caustic debate.⁵² At question were several sentences at the end of the second disputation in which Luther appeared to define three uses of law.⁵³ Following Holl’s historical critical method, Elert turned to text criticism. He concluded these sentences represented a textual anomaly present in only two of the nine manuscripts of the disputation. Reminiscent of the historical controversies between the Gnesio-Lutherans and the Philippists that questioned the authenticity of Melanchthon’s reformation theology, Elert declared these sentences to be a later editorial addition by one of Melanchthon’s students extracted from Melanchthon’s 1535 Loci.⁵⁴ Luther’s possible positive articulation of a role for law after gospel was deemed a forgery, aligning the topic of law more closely to the cognitive subject and her self-awareness than the empirical subject and her moral action.

In 1960, Gerhard Ebeling repeated the forgery thesis on the basis that law was restricted in Luther’s thought to divine agency. When Ebeling sought Luther’s hermeneutical principle for the concept of law, he prioritized the interpretive authority of the early Luther. He discovered a normative use of a duplex usus in Luther’s 1522 Church Postilles, a series of sample sermons Luther wrote for Protestant ministers to use in their preaching.⁵⁵ In this early Luther source, Ebeling found only two uses of law. He applied this hermeneutical principle of the young Luther to the question of a third use of law in the Antinomian Disputations and affirmed Elert’s conclusion. Like Elert, Ebeling also echoed the Gnesio-Lutheran appeal to true Lutheranism and rejected Melanchthon’s potential influence on Luther’s later thought. He used Luther’s earlier 1522 text to explain away similarities between Melanchthon’s triplex usus legis in the 1535 Loci and Luther’s new formulation of the law across five Antinomian Disputations. Ebeling did admit, however, that Luther’s distinction between the pious and impious relation to law in the Disputations warranted further research.⁵⁶

In more contemporary scholarship on Luther’s concept of law, Timothy Wengert transmitted the Elert-Ebeling Hegelian dialectic and the acerbic tenor of their debate. In his 1997 monograph Law and Gospel, Wengert repeated the forgery thesis, noting antagonistically that the modern debate over whether Luther in fact (if not in name) taught a third use of the law reflects later Lutheran controversies and historians’ inability to understand the center of his theology.⁵⁷ Whether or not historians have the intellectual capacity to understand theology (though one should suppose they do), a number of well-regarded theologians and Luther scholars have challenged the Elert-Ebeling-Wengert interpretation. Wilfried Joest and Paul Althaus both drew out elements in Luther’s theology that deconstruct the dialectical view of law/gospel.⁵⁸ Similarly, Jeffrey Silcock concluded that despite the terminological absence of tertius usus legis in Luther’s thought, the Reformer nevertheless possessed a concept of law consistent with a third use as used by Melanchthon and later the Formula of Concord.⁵⁹ Nevertheless, the Elert-Ebeling-Wengert trajectory represents the widely accepted view of law in Luther scholarship today.

The Lutherrenaissance spurred a transcendental and polemical interpretive narrative in modern Luther scholarship that perpetuates an incomplete, distorted picture of Luther’s understanding of the human moral subject. The result has been an interpretive ethos in modern scholarship that restricts Luther’s concept of law to a notion of divine accusation and its corresponding rejection of good works. In this model, faith under the rubric of gospel remains as the only viable anthropological category to speak of the human subject in theological terms.⁶⁰

Faith was always a central topic in Luther’s theology.⁶¹ Yet, Luther’s concept of faith