The Theology of Martin Luther CH509

 LESSON 05 of 24

Luther and the Theology of the Cross

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.

Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

As Christian theologians mind the biblical text and address its

concerns to the world around them, they often fail to notice
that they operate within a conceptual framework, a set of
presuppositions, if you will, the undergirding of their thought
that often doesn’t appear explicitly but always determines the
shape of the way they take the message from the biblical page
and present it to the people of their own time and place.

In this lecture, and the following lecture, I want to talk a little

bit about Luther’s conceptual framework. Each of the items in
his conceptual framework, as we discuss them in this lecture and
the next, “The Theology of the Cross” and “The Distinction of the
Two Kinds of Righteousness,” respectively, each of those items
did not become a separate topic as such in Lutheran theology or
in the theology of Protestantism in general. And yet 20th-century
theologians and historians have noted that you cannot really
understand Luther’s thought without recognizing that there is a
kind of warp and woof to his thinking throughout his life, not just
at the beginning, that guides and shapes the way he taught specific
doctrines of the Scripture in his historical context. The two sets of
presuppositions, “The Theology of the Cross” and “The Two Kinds
of Righteousness,” were each labeled “Our Theology” by Luther at
different times of his life. Both these elements were there in that
critical period in 1518 and 1519 as his theology was coming into
its final form. He did not always (did not often, I think we could
say) mention “theology of the cross” or talk about “two kinds of
righteousness” as his career progressed, although these phrases
do occur from time to time. But the basic principles, the guiding
points of orientation that he laid down in the complex of ideas
grouped around “The Theology of the Cross” and the “Two Kinds
of Righteousness” are to be found guiding his thought until the
very day he died. In this lecture, then, we consider “The Theology
of the Cross,” which Luther labeled in 1518 “Our Theology.”

Luther’s religious world was a world filled with glory, and the
opposite for him of the theology of the cross was the medieval
theology of glory. Luther encountered the glory of Christendom,
of Christian thought, in two different ways. First of all, he

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

encountered the glory of human reason. The scholastic training

which he had enjoyed and under which he had suffered at the
University of Erfurt and at Wittenberg—the glory of scholasticism,
the glory of human reasoning, of human logical proof—was at first
for Luther simply God’s way of doing things. But then in the 1510s,
he recognized that the influence of Aristotelian metaphysics in
particular had misshaped the biblical message as it was conveyed
by a good deal of the scholastic theology of his day. And so
because he had suffered under the burden of scholasticism, as we
have already mentioned, he revolted against the glory of human
reason and returned to the simple faith that children have, of
which the biblical writers speak, of which Jesus speaks when He
says that we must become as a little child to enter the kingdom of
heaven (Matthew 18:3).

The second kind of glory that Luther encountered in medieval

piety, the piety with which he grew up, was the glory of human
effort, the glory of human works. He had encountered that kind of
glorious path to God particularly in the piety of his monastic order.
And again, as we have commented, the weight of his spiritual
burdens caused that particular kind of glory to be smashed to
smithereens. It collapsed under the weight of the burden of his
conscience. Luther was really broken by both the glory of human
reason and the glory of human effort or human works; neither
helped him escape his burdens. And so as he drew himself ever
more deeply into the biblical message, [and] as he taught the
Scriptures at Wittenberg in the early and mid-1510s, he struggled
with the theology of glory, which the medieval church had
presented to its people.

It was a glorious church. It aimed (at least at its official levels)

at a kind of glory that would match the political might and the
political power of the world around it. The church wanted to be
taken seriously as a human institution, which it is. And so it tried to
have itself taken seriously in terms that society could understand,
in terms of the glory (literally the pomp and the circumstance of
the ceremonial [correct?] of the world) of the royal and princely
courts around it. But it also wanted to be taken seriously as a
glorious institution, which had the kind of power that princes
had, for—because of the historical circumstances surrounding
the collapse of the Roman Empire—the Pope had played an
important, a significant, and sometimes beneficial role in the
political order of Europe. Luther rejected this kind of a glorious
church as well too and redefined the church, in his understanding
of the Christian life, as a suffering church, a church persecuted
by those who opposed the gospel because they cannot tolerate it,
because they need to live in a world of power exercised in, as our
Lord says in Mark 10, Gentile fashion.

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

So, broken by the several glories, the various kinds of glories of

the medieval church, Luther turned to his theology of the cross.
He expressed this theology of the cross in succinct fashion first
in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. You will remember that
in 1518 the Augustinian order, meeting in its German chapter,
summoned Luther at the behest of the papal authorities to come
to this Heidelberg meeting and to explain himself—to explain why
he was making such a fuss, why he was causing such an uproar in
the church. And in a series of theses, particularly in the theological
theses he presented there (he presented also philosophical
theses), he presented an approach to the biblical message, which
he called, “The Theology of the Cross.” The first of these theses
struck directly at the glory of human efforts, the glory of human
works. The law of God (which tells us what to do, which talks
about human performance), “the most salutary doctrine of life,”
Luther labels it, “cannot advance the human creature on his way
to righteousness; instead, the law of God hinders him on his way
to righteousness.” Luther meant by that that when we focus on
our own performance, we will always and only fall short of the
perfection which God had set for the human creature in the first
place. So (thesis two) much less can human works, which are done
over and over again with the aid of natural precepts (a reference
to Gabriel Biel’s doing things that are naturally within us) lead to
the end of righteousness. For (thesis three) human works always
seem attractive and good (good works are good in their proper
place). But they are nevertheless likely to be mortal sins. For, as
Luther would explain, “They are done apart from faith in Jesus
Christ, and thus they are done apart from the central humanity
which God has given us.”

[If this is a continuation of the quote on page 4, I would run it

into one paragraph.] “Although the works of God always seem
unattractive and appear evil [and Luther was thinking here
primarily of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, His Son], they are
nevertheless really eternal merits.” And he was also thinking of
the poor works of the Christian’s daily life—changing diapers,
preparing meals for other people, nursing the sick as they lie
dying. These are the things that seem unattractive and sometimes
downright evil but really are eternally worthwhile. “For the works
of God are not merits as though they were sinless,” he says, “but
the works of God are rather works of God because God mediates
His presence to us.” That was Luther’s understanding.

The primary point in these first six theses in Luther’s Heidelberg

Disputation of 1518 is to turn on its head the glory of human effort,
the glory of human works. And Luther continued that theme in
theses 13 to 18, as he discusses the concept of the bondage or
the freedom of the human will in what is a dress rehearsal for the

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

subject matter of our ninth lecture, “The Bondage or the Freedom

of the Will.” “After the fall into sin,” Luther wrote in his thirteenth
thesis, “free will exists in name only, as a matter of fact the
freedom of the will is gone and we can choose only to do things
apart from God. We may indeed choose things that are morally
upright, but apart from God they are not God-pleasing, apart from
faith in God they are not God-pleasing.” Luther continued, “Free
will could not endure in a state of innocence, much less do good
in an active capacity, but only in its passive capacity.” And so the
person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing “what is in
him” (Gabriel Biel’s phrase) adds sin to sin, so that he becomes
doubly guilty. “He not only does an outwardly good work that is
insufficient to please God because it is not perfect, but he also relies
on that work and thus is guilty of idolatry, is guilty of worshiping
his own works (that is, relying on his own works for salvation).”
Instead, Luther said (thesis 18), “We must utterly despair of our
own ability to please God, so that we may be prepared to receive
the grace of Christ.” “A real theologian,” Luther says (thesis 20),
“is the one who comprehends the visible and manifest things of
God as seen through suffering and the cross. In the suffering, in
the cross, God comes near to us to reveal Himself.”

Let us turn now to an analysis of the elements that Luther

developed out of these Heidelberg Theses in the explanation to
the theses that he issued already in 1518, and then in the general
development of his theology throughout the coming quarter
century. I’m going to discuss Luther’s “Theology of the Cross”
under four topics: (1) The theology of the cross as it affects our
understanding of God’s revelation of Himself; (2) the theology
of the cross as it touches upon the nature of our faith and our
relationship with God through faith; (3) the theology of the cross
as it expresses a biblical doctrine of atonement through death to
sin and resurrection; and finally, (4) the theology of the cross as
the life of dying and rising under the cross in the daily living of
the sanctified believer.

The first of the four points of “The Theology of the Cross” regards
our teaching about God. The most important distinction here is
Luther’s distinction between the hidden God (in Latin, the Deus
absconditus) and the revealed God (the Deus revelatus). “The
Hidden God” is God as we imagine Him to be. He is God as we
wish He were. The 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig
Feuerbach was an atheist, and he said, “God is created in the image
of man.” But in a sense, Feuerbach (who was a student of Luther’s,
who read a good deal of Luther also) was echoing Luther’s point
here for people who try to find God apart from Jesus Christ. We do
shape, create, our gods in the image of ourselves.

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

“The Hidden God,” fashioned by human speculation, is the

opposite of the God of the cross. The god we invent with our own
minds is a god of glory; we want a god of power or god of might,
especially if he is on our side. But Luther said that the true God
in all His glory is hidden. He is hidden behind the cloud of His
own glory, and the creature can never penetrate the heart of the
Creator. And certainly the fallen creature, the sinful creature,
can never even imagine (fully, at least) what must be behind the
cloud of God’s glory, cannot imagine what God is really like. So
for sinners, our understanding of “The Hidden God” is largely a
reflection of our own feelings, our own failings, [and] our own
fears. Because human creatures are so often angry at themselves
for failing to meet their own expectation, the gods they fashion
are usually gods of wrath. Because human creatures so often
find themselves unreliable, the gods they fashion are sometimes
capricious. Because human creatures want to make it on our own,
because we want to feel ultimately responsible for our ultimate
well-being, the gods we fashion are usually gods who demand
performance and accomplishment from sinful human creatures.
The “Theology of Glory” is bound and determined to create a way
of salvation that includes some, if not a lot of, human contribution.
So the depiction of God in what we might call “Natural Theology”
is a depiction of ourselves, cast large upon the screen of the clouds
of God’s glory.

In contrast to the Deus absconditus is the Deus revelatus, the

revealed God is God as He presents Himself to us. As Luther liked
to say “in crib” and “cross.” This revealed God is the God who
speaks to us, first of all, as “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14),
Jesus of Nazareth, the second person of the Holy Trinity. The
revealed God is also the God who speaks to us in His inspired
Scripture. This revealed God reveals Himself, as Paul says in I
Corinthians 1:18–2:9, “in the foolishness and the impotence
of the cross of Christ.” To quote Paul in II Corinthians 12:9,
the revealed God is the God whose power “is made perfect in
weakness.” And it is important for us to remember that this God’s
power is made perfect in His own weakness, as He goes to the
cross to reclaim us from the death that the cross visits upon all
sinners. But this God reveals Himself also in our weakness, as we
come as vulnerable human creatures to share the vulnerability of
those poor and beleaguered souls whom God has placed around
us. Indeed, God has revealed Himself in the hiddenness of the crib
and the cross and the crypt in which His divine body lay. And yet
this “foolishness” is the ultimate wisdom, higher than any human
wisdom. This impotence in the cross of Christ, Luther preached,
“that impotence is a power of God that will not quit, that reveals
itself in the triumph of that dead body which rose from the tomb
to have the last word.” “The last laugh,” Luther would say, as He

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

gobbled down death.

The last place human power and wisdom would look for God is
in a manger in diapers or on a cross on the way to a tomb. “But
precisely there,” Luther teaches, “our God reveals what He is
really like, He reveals His unconditional and His absolute love for
fallen sinners.” Luther’s theology then throughout presupposes
that God can be found only really as the revealed God. He did
not deny that we see glimpses of God in nature. He did not reject
natural theology completely. But he didn’t think much of the
worth of this glimpse of God. In the Scriptures, in the Word made
flesh, in the human language about this Word made flesh as it is
lifted from the Scriptures, as it is preached and proclaimed, in the
sacramental forms of God’s Word at God’s baptismal font and at
His eucharistic feast, there and there alone God becomes present
to reveal Himself, Luther taught. Other descriptions of God tell us
more about ourselves than about Him.

As Luther observed in the Smalcald Articles, “God does not want

to deal with us except through His eternal Word and sacrament.
Whatever is attributed to the Holy Spirit apart from this Word
and sacrament is of the devil.” You recognize the problem. Such
an understanding of God places Him outside human control. He
addresses us. He calls us to come to Him. He invites us and He
draws us into His family, and we can only respond. God came to
ask Adam, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). He has determined
our rightful place, according to Luther’s “Theology of the Cross,”
according to Luther’s concept of the Deus revelatus. He has
determined what constitutes our righteousness.

Some Christians have viewed this view of Luther as an excessive

exaltation of God, and therefore as a threat to our humanity. But
Luther believed that recognizing God’s place, if you will, “above
us” as our Creator does not deny but rather ensures our humanity.
The revealed God also reveals what it means to be truly human—
to be free as human creatures to be the people God designed us to
be. And thus Luther recognized that as he interpreted God’s Word
for his people in preaching, as he conveyed God’s Word through
his absolution and his discussion with his barber or with his wife
and children, that he was giving his hearers access to God. “When
you have said Jesus,” he might have said, “you’ve said it all.”

The second point of “The Theology of the Cross” focuses on

how we know this weak and foolish God. You will recall that
Paul said in I Corinthians 1 and 2 that “the Jews demand signs,”
demonstration or proof, and the Greeks “wanted wisdom.” They
wanted a logical explanation. Both Jews and Greeks wanted to
know who God is and what He’s like on the basis of a process

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

which human creatures can control through their minds. They

wanted to pin God down on their own terms. I think we modern
North Americans can understand the “prove it” mentality that
both Jews and Greeks had as they wanted and searched for signs—
proofs that Jesus was the Messiah—as they wanted logically to
understand, grasp, and therefore control what it meant that God
had come in human flesh.

Now Luther is sometimes accused of trashing human reason

altogether. Not so, Luther believed that God had fashioned His
human creatures so that we can learn a great deal through signs
and through experiments and through empirical ways of learning.
Luther was a strong advocate of what he called “a ministerial,”
a servant, “use of rational analysis of human logic.” But Luther
also recognized that both human logic and the search for human
signs, as useful as they may be in certain areas of the horizontal
dimensions of human life, have no role in that vertical relationship
with the Creator who simply puts a claim on us by speaking. As we
shall see, Luther could be quite anthropocentric, we might almost
say, in talking about the role of faith in sizing up and determining
God. But that faith he always understood as a gift from God. He
never failed to understand that God was in charge also of our
hearing Him, hearing His Word, learning of Him. So Luther taught
in his theology of the cross that neither the human eye nor the
human mind controls our access to God. God controls that access.
God creates that access through His Word. God speaks and the
human ear listens. The human heart responds to this Word of
God in faith. In his catechism, Luther wrote, “I cannot by my own
reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him.
God must step out of hiding, the Deus absconditus must become
the Deus revelatus at His own initiative.” And Luther taught,
“He does that neither with experimental proof of signs, nor with
logical proof of reason. God reveals Himself with a promise.”

By its very nature, a promise invites faith. The theology of the

cross teaches that we can know God not through empirical proofs
or logical reasoning but only through faith. The faith, which
the revealed God creates in us, this faith which He elicits from
us through His Word, relies on God’s foolish and weak approach
to us in the suffering and death of His Son. So faith, as Luther
understood it, is by definition not an objective and dispassionate
knowledge, the kind of knowledge which the Enlightenment of the
18th century invented to assure objective, dispassionate human
control of all knowledge. Rather faith is active, it is engaged with
its object, it is a knowledge, which unites the one who trusts
with its object. Knowledge, we might say in that euphemism, in
the biblical sense, the intimate knowledge of husband and wife.
That’s why Paul used and Luther repeated the use of the metaphor

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

of husband and wife for the relationship of the people of God

and the heavenly Bridegroom, Jesus of Nazareth. So this faith
embraces its object, as the bride embraces the bridegroom, as a
child clutches father or mother; for faith rests in knowledge of a
word which contradicts our existential logic for hanging onto life,
because it teaches that we gain life by losing, and that we lose life
by trying to hang on to what we have in this earthly realm. So this
kind of knowledge, this knowledge of faith, this knowledge that
responds to the promise, carries us out of the realms in which we
retain a sense of control over our own destinies. And faith places
us at the mercy of God, but it places us at the mercy of God.

Faith (trust), modern psychologists tell us, is one of the most

important words in the human language. And Luther recognized
that, even if he didn’t have the benefit of modern psychological
systems. We will talk more about faith in Lecture 7 when we
deal with Luther’s point of departure for his theology in the first
commandment and our response to it. But in this faith—that
rests alone on the Word from Jesus—in this faith the focus of
the believer is simply upon God, upon His Word, upon the Word
made flesh, upon the Word that He gives us in the promise of the
forgiveness of our sins.

So from Luther’s standpoint, he did not count signs of blessing

as a particular sign of God’s presence, though it is important
to note too that he wasn’t simply a glutton for punishment. He
believed that Christians would suffer, but he didn’t take comfort
in his suffering. He was coldly realistic about the evil of suffering
in an evil world. And so, bottom line, for Luther neither signs of
blessing nor signs of suffering can prove that we are in a saving
relationship with God. Christians simply rely not “on their
feelings” and not “on external signs” but on the promise of God.
Luther saw in the Word of God, as it comes in all its various forms
from the pages of Scripture, as it comes in the sermon and in
the words of consolation of a fellow Christian, in the promise of
baptism and the promise of the Lord’s Supper and the promise of
absolution, in all these forms the Word takes, Luther sees the only
assurance possible as it comes to us as individual believers, and
says, “You are God’s child.” “And nothing [Luther loved to echo
Saint Paul] can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus”
(Romans 8:38-39).

The third point of “The Theology of the Cross” focuses on what

God did on the cross. He atoned for sin. He swallowed up death,
and He reclaimed life for His people. So Luther’s understanding of
the atonement focuses on “the impotence” and “the foolishness”
of the cross and “the success,” the triumph, that the cross brought
by swallowing up death, by “beating death at its own game,” we

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

might say, and by claiming life again for His people.

A good deal of scholarly attention has been paid in the 20th century
to how Luther’s understanding of the work of the atonement
fits into the grand debate that the Swedish theologian Gustaf
Aulén launched as he [they?] paired off against each other—the
so-called Christus Victor understanding of the atonement and
the vicarious satisfaction understanding of the atonement. We
will discuss that subject more in Lecture 11 as we address the
work of Christ in Luther’s “Doctrine of Justification.” For now it
will suffice to say that in a sense Luther comes up with his own
understanding of the atonement, which combines elements of
both the Christus Victor motif and the vicarious satisfaction
motif in something that scholars often call his concept of “the
joyous exchange.” The concept of the joyous exchange is a very
simple concept: Life is restored to sinful human creatures who
are dead in trespasses and sin only because God has exchanged
our sinfulness for Christ’s righteousness. We live only because
Christ died with our sins on His back, because Christ buried them
in His own tomb. He put them in His tomb, which is the only place
in the universe where our heavenly Father no longer looks. The
other half of that exchange is that the Christ who has received
our sin has given us the gift of righteousness and innocence and
life. He shares with us the life, which He had the power to reclaim
in His own resurrection. So Luther never tired of saying that “in
Jesus wrong is made right, death is left behind for life” because
God has His own peculiar way of doing things.

So the theology of the cross presupposes that the cross (death) is

the path to life; that it all must be lost, that it all may be gained
once again. The final result of this joyous exchange is that we
who were buried and raised with Christ in baptism (Luther loved
Romans 6 and Colossians 2), we are “joint heirs with Him” even as
we suffer with Him and are looking forward “to sharing His glory,”
as Paul said in Romans 8:17.

So it is clear, Luther’s “Theology of the Cross” as it relates to the

atonement spells out the death of every human pretension to
merit. All glory of human effort and work is gone. The theology
of the cross spells death to any attempt to make human works
a matter of relating to God. It leaves human works in the realm
of the relationship between two human beings. Sinners do not
control their own destiny. They are dead in terms of the power
they have to shape their own lives, at least in any meaningful
sense, in any ultimate sense.

So the theology of the cross, as Luther exposed it, announces

death to sinners, but it is a death to sin; for it also announces

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

our resurrection to new life in Christ. And thus it is the death

of death itself. It is an announcement which liberates human
creatures from the threat of death, and thus it bestows upon us
genuine human freedom. And so Christians should not wallow in
guilt anymore, for they have been sent [to?] the cross as guilty
people. They should instead exalt in their freedom, to live out
their humanity—to live that life that God made them to live in the
first place—because their humanity has been restored through
the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The fourth point by which we may analyze “The Theology of the

Cross” is Luther’s understanding of the daily Christian life. The
life of discipleship, of learning from and following after Christ,
is a life “under the cross,” as Jesus says in Matthew 16. Our
crosses do not save. They don’t save others, and they don’t save
us ourselves. They only serve the neighbor. The crosses of daily
life, the sufferings we experience in the context of being called
to be neighbor to those around us, convey the love of Christ to
others in a sinful world of suffering. And so as we “take up our
crosses” and follow our Lord (as He called us to do in Matthew
16:24), Luther taught, we live out a life as it must be lived if the
good and gracious will of our heavenly Father is to triumph over
evil. Only in this fashion has God succeeded at overcoming evil.
And again, as we said a few moments ago, neither our possession
of blessing nor our possession of the cross determines whether
we are in God’s favor. His Word determines that, as it comes to us
in its various forms. But we will not be surprised when our faith
does not lead us into days of peace and prosperity externally. But
rather, when it gives us peace in the midst of suffering, in the
midst of the battle against Satan, in the midst of relieving the
suffering by bearing the suffering of the neighbor who needs the
presence of Christ expressed in our loving hands and in our loving
words.

This life under the cross not only suffers externally but there
is a kind of internal suffering also for the sinner in us that still
wants to struggle against the call of Christ to serve. “Life under
the cross,” Luther taught, “crucifies the habits of hell. The strong
pruning hook of the law combines with our confidence in Christ’s
deadly death.” And so we find no need to defend ourselves, to
secure our own lives, to set ourselves up over others as we practice
hellish habits. Instead, life under the cross gives rise to the habits
of heaven. Faith perceives how God succeeds; faith perceives that
God has succeeded in restoring the goodness of life through His
own self-sacrifice, His own self-surrender. Faith perceives that
God succeeds and triumphs in His submission to human needs, in
His suffering, in His freely given willing service for us.

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

Christians are always tempted to want to get results from “bearing

the cross.” We want to bear the cross so that we can get a quick
fix for the needs of the neighbor. Sometimes we don’t even mind
bearing the cross as long as we can see some kind of payoff, and
see that payoff fairly quickly. But sometimes God in His wisdom
permits us only to stand by, not to repair, the lives of those whose
crosses we share. Christians may also be tempted to try to bear
the crosses of others alone, instead of sharing them with others
in the community. Sometimes that’s appropriate, sometimes not,
for God has created us to live in community. And sometimes we
are called to share the crosses of other brothers and sisters with
still other brothers and sisters in the faith.

That was Luther’s insight, an insight that again avoided the glory of
human performance either in suffering or in success, as the world
counts success. Indeed, Luther understood that the Christian life
is a life of continuing sacrifice under the continuing threat of
Satan, but a life which triumphs as it goes about proclaiming and
living out the Word and the will of God.

Luther’s insights in 1518 came directly out of his struggle toward

an evangelical breakthrough. But Luther saw the insights of “The
Theology of the Cross” as fundamental to his theology throughout
his life. And thus, as his life progressed, as he experienced
external harassment and threat (even if not actual persecution),
Luther recognized that these principles were key, were critical, to
a proper understanding of the whole of the biblical message, so
he shaped everything he did in his exposition of the Word of God
according to these principles.

I’d like to take a few moments at the end of this lecture to give
one specific example of how “The Theology of the Cross” affected
Luther’s focus on one aspect of the life of the church in a kind of
peculiar way, peculiar at least in terms of the way most Christians
have treated the subject of martyrdom. Indeed, martyrdom has
been a favorite subject throughout Christian history. The ancient
church used martyrs as a symbol for the willingness to sacrifice
for the faith, and thus to testify to the importance of the faith for
believers. And indeed throughout the Middle Ages, martyrs were
hailed as important heroes of the church, and even were assigned
(as we recall from our third lecture) roles in God’s economy of
salvation because of the merit that the medieval Christians
assigned to them.

In the year of the Reformation, a number of Christian authors

turned to martyrdom again not as an avenue for pleasing God
or an avenue of getting God’s ear but instead as a testimony to
the truth of God. But in general, martyrdom was seen purely and

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  11 of 12

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Lesson 05 of 24 Luther and the Theology of the Cross

simply as the evil of Satan, as the oppression of demonic forces.

Luther saw it as that too; he made no mistake about condemning
those who martyred Christians, Protestants, Lutherans, his
followers for testifying in public to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
But Luther also saw martyrdom as a good gift of God given to the
whole church, and also to the martyr him or herself. Luther praised
God for permitting his follower, the Englishman Robert Barnes, to
enjoy the gift of martyrdom, and thus to share dramatically the
goodness of God as he testified with the sacrifice of his own life.

Even Luther’s followers, who made much of martyrs as well, did

not catch this glimpse of Luther’s “Theology of the Cross”—that
God comes in impotence and in foolishness, even the impotence
and foolishness of giving up one’s life for the sake of the faith, to
do His work, to spread His Word, to announce His triumph over
evil.

Well, we certainly could point to other examples as well. In all the

nooks and crannies of Luther’s theology, this “Theology of the
Cross”—of a God who shares with us Himself, but in a foolish and
an impotent form, the form of a baby, the form of a corpse, the form
of this body raised from the dead, that message, that theology,
that proclamation of the goodness of God’s intervention into our
world in Jesus Christ—fills Luther’s understanding of the gospel
and is reflected throughout his life to his dying days, in the way
in which he proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ for the people
of his day and age, and hands that proclamation on through his
writings to us today.

From time to time in the coming lectures we will stop for a

moment to note how Luther’s “Theology of the Cross” is shaping
one part or another of Luther’s exposition of the biblical message.

Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  12 of 12

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.