The Theology of Martin Luther CH509

 LESSON 19 of 24

Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.

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

The life that is produced within the context of the church by

God’s Word was for Luther a life that was dependent on that Word
and that was lived out according to the structures which God had
written into human nature in the garden of Eden. Fundamental
to Luther’s understanding of the whole of the Christian life is
his understanding that God calls Christians to exercise human
responsibilities in what he saw as the three fundamental situations
of human life.

We have already noted, as we have discussed his doctrine of

justification through faith, that daily Christian living for Luther
was an outgrowth of faith, an outgrowth of faith that expressed
itself in that structure, that design, which God laid down as He
shaped the human creature, as He drew us from the dust and
breathed into us the gift of life. Already in that very fundamental
tract The Freedom of the Christian, which Luther wrote in 1520, he
talked about that two-sidedness of the Christian life. In our core
identity in the vertical relationship with God, we are freed from
the law, from its curse, from death, from sin, and we are free then
to live out our lives in accordance with God’s will, bound to the
neighbor’s need. Although in fact the person who is both sinner
and saint at the same time may be moved by bad motivations as
well as good, there was for Luther really only one suitable, proper
God-pleasing motivation for doing good works, and that was the
motivation of faith. We love, as John wrote in his first epistle,
because God first loved us. We love the neighbor because we are
thankful to God. Luther emphasized gratitude as being part and
parcel, being basic to the nature of the human creature, and he
believed that ingratitude toward God was among the worst of sins.
It was one of those sins of attitude that revealed the deep doubt
of God’s Word and the rejection of God as Lord. So ingratitude
dishonored God and at the same time it deprived the neighbor of
the service which God had designed every human creature to give
to the other human creatures around him.

Luther recognized that faith has confidence in God, and so

faith frees the believer up to risk. We have no need to take care
of ourselves since we are confident that God takes care of us.

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  1 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

Luther’s understanding of providence played a strong role in

his understanding of the way in which faith can motivate the
Christian life. We are freed, Luther taught, to take care of others.
We are freed to do the will of God, which we sometimes resisted in
the past because we saw it as a threat, a threat to our own lordship
over life. We know now in faith that God is Lord of life, and we
trust His wisdom and His judgment completely. So we accept His
will, we accept that structure for life that we see in His commands,
and we also are free to accept life under the cross as simply the
way it is in a sinful world for those who trust in Jesus.

Luther understood then both the motivation which the gospel

provides and the structure which the law provides for Christian
living within the context of his presupposition that there are two
kinds of righteousness—the righteousness of our identity that
God bestows upon us freely without any action or performance
of ours, and then the righteousness of the care of the neighbor,
the righteousness of loving other human creatures and all the
rest of God’s creation in the horizontal realm. When we discussed
the two kinds of righteousness, we mentioned that there are
two corollaries for this fundamental presupposition in Luther’s
thought. There is the presupposition that God’s Word comes to us
as law and as gospel, and there is also the corollary which teaches
that human life is lived out in these two relationships, these two
realms.

Scholars have often talked about the two realms with the
terminology, the two kingdoms. And I suppose that what we
are going to talk about today has in the past, in the literature of
the past, been most often called simply the two kingdoms. But
scholars are getting away from using the two kingdoms for the
temporal and eternal dimensions of human life because Luther
used the term two kingdoms for two different sets of concepts.
Indeed, he did call the vertical relationship the “eternal kingdom”
or the “heavenly kingdom,” and the horizontal relationships the
“temporal kingdom.” But he also spoke of the kingdom of God at
war with the kingdom of Satan. These two kingdoms also were
important in Luther’s thought. So I will in this lecture reserve the
term two kingdoms for the actions of the two kings, God and Satan,
who battle each other to the death, to the death of Satan’s way of
living for human creatures. And instead I will call the relationship
with God and the relationships with other creatures of God, the
“two realms,” these two dimensions of human life.

God governs the vertical relationship, that relationship with

him which forms the core of proper human identity, through the
gospel. He creates the identity of the believer as His child through
the means of grace. Because we have fallen into sin, God creates

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  2 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

or recreates this identity through the forgiveness of sin. The

aim of the vertical relationship, the heavenly realm, is that final
eschatological blessing which ends in heaven, is completed in
heaven, but which begins already in this life as God’s Word claims
fallen sinners as His children.

The second realm—the horizontal set of relationships—God

structures through the law. Indeed, Christians acting in that
relationship are motivated by God’s good news of salvation in
Jesus Christ, by God’s identifying them as children of God who
want to serve Him in service to the neighbor, but the righteousness
of the horizontal realm, of these horizontal relationships, is
measurable. It is measured in human performance according to
the plan and will of God. The aim of this realm is not the ultimate
eschatological blessing but, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s term, it
is penultimate; it is concerned with very important things that
God wills for all people—outward temporal peace, a tolerable
life, a successful life, a life that enjoys as much of humanity as
possible. But in the horizontal realm in a fallen world, because
of our sinfulness, the law rather than the gospel often provides
the motivation. And the law motivates not by focusing on our
identity as the children of God who freely and lovingly produce
good works, instead the law has to work through coercion and
through cajoling. It coerces with its negative threats, it cajoles
with its positive promises of a better life rather than a worse life
if we only perform the deeds of God. So in this realm, in a fallen
world, we aim for a better life, for a good life, but not the good life,
since in a fallen world, in the horizontal realm, we will never reach
perfection. That gift of complete life awaits the eschatological
completion of God’s blessing of the new life that He gives, Luther
taught, already in baptism.

Now, these two realms, the heavenly realm and the temporal
realm, are battlefields in a fallen world. The two kingdoms, God’s
kingdom and Satan’s kingdom, God’s power and Satan’s power, go
head to head in each of these realms. Satan invades the vertical
realm wanting to destroy or to pervert faith. He wants to turn that
faith completely to a false god, or he wants to so blur and obscure
the truth of Christ that even those who claim to be Christians
don’t rely on God but rely, for instance, on their own works of
one kind or another. So Satan is always trying to battle that word
of God that calls us to trust him. Satan is always trying (to use
Luther’s term) to curve us in upon ourselves, to make us idolaters
of one form or another.

At the same time, Satan is always battling against God in the

horizontal realm. Sometimes he battles there by giving blessing
or by using the blessings God gives to make us love those

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  3 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

blessings more than God, bringing the horizontal realm and its
performance into the vertical realm. But often Satan tries to drive
us to despair in the vertical realm by simply oppressing us in the
horizontal realm, Luther taught. He does that with all sorts of
illness and misfortune; he does that with doubts about God; he
does that by heightening our sense of defensiveness so that we
have to strike out against the neighbor rather than embracing the
neighbor as God designed. Satan works in the horizontal realm,
but he is always working in the horizontal realm to have an effect
in the vertical realm. The effect he desires is separating us from
God. But the very structure of our humanity drives even sinners
to seek a better life rather than a worse life in the horizontal
realm, according to Luther’s understanding of what we call civic
righteousness, what he called civic righteousness; and at the
same time he motivates Christians to indeed bring the fuller love
of Christ to bear on the setting of the horizontal realm.

Luther rejected the medieval understanding of how God works

in the intersection of these two realms. The medieval church
distinguished what modern anthropologists call the sacred and
the profane realms of human life in much the way that most
religions do. The medieval church saw sacred activities (that is,
religious activities) as more godly than profane or everyday kinds
of activities. The profane or everyday activities of human life
(cooking a meal, farming, making shoes, serving as a physician),
those things were not ungodly, but they were less godly. They did
not please God, they did not secure the medieval Christian’s place
in God’s sight (according to the prevalent belief of the time) in
the same way that sacred activities could. Going on a pilgrimage,
for instance, or depriving the body through extreme fasting or
the practice of monasticism, entering the priesthood. All those
sacred activities were looked upon by medieval theologians (and
in medieval popular belief) as making one more holy, bringing
one closer to God, making it just a little bit surer that the believer
would go to heaven.

Luther upset this whole traditional natural distinction between

the sacred and the profane for three reasons. His critique, first of
all, stated that many of the sacred works of medieval theology were
downright ungodly. They were not directed at God at all; they were
done for the sake of the self. One went into a monastic order not
so much to praise God but to please Him so that the monk or the
nun could be saved. Secondly, he said these sacred works were not
always but often based simply on human commands, not divine
commands at all. But they pretended to be the very commands of
God, which would secure the sinner’s place in the presence of God.
In addition, Luther had severe reservations about many of these
religious or sacred works because they distracted people from

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  4 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

genuine service to others. He believed that nothing was higher

than service to the family; but the whole monastic system, the
whole understanding of the celibate priesthood, disrupted that
core of family life which God had placed at the center of His design
for human life. Going on a pilgrimage, especially a year-long
pilgrimage to some romantic place (like Santiago de Compostela
in Spain or even halfway across Germany to venerate the bones
of the three wise men at Cologne) would take the peasant, let us
say, away from his village; and his fellow villagers would have to
assume his work in order to find enough food for the winter for
the people of the village. So Luther said that the sacred works of
medieval piety were downright ungodly in many cases, but the
profane works of day-to-day life, they were good if they were
done in faith. Everything that does not proceed from faith is sin,
Paul said; and Luther taught the converse, that all those things
that God has woven into the warp and woof of daily life are good
if they are done by the person of faith. He compared the peasant
who went about his farming duties with the preacher, and said
that neither one was holier. Yes, indeed the work of the preacher
had an eternal dimension to it that raising crops and livestock did
not. But in the sight of God both peasant and preacher were holy
because of their faith, because of the gift of faith from the Holy
Spirit, and their works were simply meant to serve the neighbor;
they had no heavenly role at all. So the peasant with faith and
the preacher with faith were equally precious in God’s sight, even
though they performed different functions, different kinds of
services for their fellow human creatures.

Luther understood the structure of human life and, therefore, of

Christian life in terms of medieval social theory, in terms of the
structure which the people of the European West had recognized
for several centuries. That social theory rested upon the
presumption that God had fashioned three, what Luther called (in
our normal translation), estates. We might call them situations.
In German, he followed the medieval usage, which named them
the Nahrstand, the Wehrstand, and the Lehrstand. The Nahrstand
means, literally, the situation in human life in which we are
nourished. That included both family life and occupational life.
Since the industrial revolution, we have broken family life and
occupation apart from each other, but in the Middle Ages the
family worked together and lived together. And probably only in
American agriculture do we find a situation that’s at all similar
today, and then often not even in the family of a farm couple,
one of whom may be full-time on the farm and the other works
in town. The second estate or situation, the Wehrstand, the
situation in which society is protected, is that part of human life
that we comprehend in the term political, though in many ways it
involves for us today more than just governmental authority, but

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  5 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

a whole host of voluntary associations that make life work on a

daily basis in our communities. The third situation, the Lehrstand,
the situation of teaching (teaching was probably chosen rather
than preaching to make the rhyme of Nahrstand, Wehrstand,
and Lehrstand work), was that of the church. The reference here
is to the doctrine of the church, to the proclamation of biblical
doctrine rather than to the teaching of the schools.

Luther taught that God had made all people to live in these three
situations of human life, and in each of these situations God’s
law creates the necessity of institutions, of social organizations.
In each of these, human beings have been given by God some
freedom to design a variety of institutions, a variety of institutional
workings. But these institutions all work by demanding certain
kinds of human performance. These institutions are not a matter
of the vertical relationship; they are a matter of the horizontal
relationship, and they work with the law. That means also the
church, in the Lehrstand, is an institution with human rules and
regulations. Its life is dedicated to the proclamation of the gospel,
but this life is lived out within rules and regulations for certain
kinds of performance, expressing certain kinds of expectation,
dealing with merely temporal activities (putting a roof on the
church, paying the pastor), as well as the heart of its work, its
primary task: proclaiming the gospel and establishing that
vertical identity as children of God for God’s chosen people.

The family activities are also placed to rest by God within that
horizontal sphere of life in which there are rules and regulations.
One of the activities to which the family is called by God is
teaching the faith to the children, and mutual admonition among
spouses and children. But much of family life, most of family
life, is simply a matter of performing the things that have to be
performed to make life work in the family. Luther was very proud
that he had recognized secular government and marriage in the
family as established by God, equal with the church in terms of
their importance as human institutions, even though the church’s
message of salvation has an eternal importance which much of
family life and all of the obligations of secular government did
not have. Indeed, Luther said if there is one of these situations
more important than another, it is the family. For family life is
foundational for occupation, for politics, even for the life of the
church. Luther said if the family does not work well, then nothing
else will work well. And that is why he’s paid so much attention to
problems of raising children and of choosing spouses, which was
a major social problem in the late Middle Ages.

The second part of Luther’s understanding of the way God had

structured human life then moves within each of the situations to

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  6 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

the level of what he called offices (the German word amt). These
offices we might better translate as “response-abilities.” (I like to
misspell responsibilities to catch the flavor of what Luther and
other Protestant reformers understood by the offices of human
life. I like to spell it response-abilities.) For God has so structured
human life that we are able to respond to the needs of other human
creatures. And although Luther did not develop his theory more
explicitly in this direction, we can recognize that he treated under
“office,” under “response-ability,” both (what we might call) role
and functions of role—the role of spouse or of child or parent,
the role of employer or employee, the role in the 16th century
of ruler or subject, or in our day the role of citizen and neighbor,
and within the congregation then the role of pastor, the role of
witness in all situations of human life, the role of worshiper, the
role of Sunday school teacher, the role of usher or elder or whatnot.
And each of those roles has a series of functions that need to be
carried out because the responsibility is given to human creatures
as a means whereby God provides and preserves human creation
(and all the rest of creation, for that matter). So parents are given
the function within their role as parent of changing diapers, of
reading stories to children, and of bringing them up in the fear
and admonition of the Lord.

These responsibilities are written into our human nature. They

are imposed upon us by our nature, as God created it, for the good
of others. It was not good for Adam to be alone, God recognized
immediately, so he created this network of human community.
The responsibility, each of these responsibilities, functions as
law. It imposes a burden on us; it structures our life; it curbs
and shapes our life. But we exercise these offices, we hold these
offices at God’s behest and God’s command, but in front of our
neighbor, not in the sight of God in any sense that would suggest
that the performance of these responsibilities is meritorious,
is worthy before God. The works of our offices are indeed God
pleasing. Indeed, God sees us as we represent Him in loving
the neighbor, but these responsibilities are gifts of God to our
neighbor; we are gifts of God to the neighbor in the exercise of
these responsibilities.

Again, it is important to recognize that these responsibilities are

exercised by all people. They may be exercised poorly, but they
may be exercised very well, very effectively, also by unbelievers.
The unbeliever will not be motivated by the love of God, but the
phenomenon that Luther called civic righteousness is real and it is
very important in the way God continues to preserve His creation.

But vital to Luther’s understanding of the living out of the

Christian life was a third step. We live in situations, and in

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  7 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

those situations we carry out the roles and the functions of our
offices or responsibilities. That’s true of all human creatures. But
Christians recognize something different; they experience these
responsibilities as much more than just a duty imposed by the
nature, by the warp and woof of human life. Christians experience
their responsibilities as callings. Luther’s use of the Latin term
vocatio, of the German term beruf, was very important for his
understanding of all of Western society, for his understanding of
Christian discipleship. The Christian recognizes that we are called
by God; we are placed in our situations as parents or as subjects
or as worshipers or as shoemakers to be what Luther called the
larva Dei (the masks of God). God Himself hides Himself in the
lowliness of daily work, in the most mundane of the things that
are necessary for the preservation of this body in life. God is there
when parents care for sick children. God is there when bakers
bake bread for their communities. God is there when the police
preserve public order and execute justice on the streets of the
city. God is there as His people carry out their responsibilities
according to His calling. Yes, even the hangman, even the police
were forms in which God comes through His left hand, Luther
would say, through a kind of alien work, a work that he would
rather not do. But he hides himself also in the form of the tough
love given by soldiers and police to preserve order in society.

Luther’s understanding of the Christian’s calling of God-created

situations and responsibilities only provides the structure for
human life. The content of guidance, the information for guiding
what we do in these situations, must be filled in. As faith becomes
active in love, it motivates the good, but the curbing force of the
law still has to help us understand precisely what the good might
be. That curbing force of the law also motivates us, but it also
provides us information. The Christian ought to be free—insofar
as we focus on Christ we are free from that motivation of the
law—but because our reason is not restored to its full perfection
in this life, we still need to look to the law for our understanding
of what to do in specific situations.

Luther believed that both through natural and through biblical

revelation, God’s will for daily life becomes evident. He taught that
the law of God in nature is the norm. As a matter of fact, he said,
Moses wasn’t really necessary for Germans. They had the Saxon
Mirror (a medieval law code), which taught what Moses taught in
the setting of German medieval life. And so Moses—who was very
valuable for the Jews and who is still valuable for the Christians in
terms of a glimpse of that law written into human hearts, which
underlies both Moses and the Mirror of the Saxons—Moses did not
have a hold on German life, God had a hold on German life, Luther
taught. His understanding of natural law focuses, first of all, upon

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  8 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

the golden rule and uses biblical commands as a matter of fact

to fill in the details. Luther was probably more optimistic about
natural knowledge of the structure of human life than I think
you and I may be able to be at the end of the 20th century. For
Luther lived in a society in which the biblical morality informed
things like the Mirror of the Saxons and informed a good deal of
public opinion. So Luther really believed that people would more
naturally see what God’s will is than seems to be the case at the
end of the 20th century in Western society. In any case, Luther was
certain that God’s law provides information as it curbs and cajoles
the sinners and also the righteous, although they no longer pay
attention to its curbing and cajoling insofar as they trust in Christ
because they are motivated simply by the love of Christ.

Luther, for all his attacks on reason’s false role in theology,

depended on reason, on that gift of thinking through the
implication of human actions, for judgments in moral matters.

His standard was not, interestingly enough, the “imitation of

Christ.” From the Brethren of the Common Life, he knew a good
deal about the ideal of the imitation of Christ. And even more,
he remembered the ideal of the imitation of Christ being held
up for him in his monastic orders. For medieval monasticism,
the imitation of Christ meant to be like Christ in as many ways
as possible. Christ was celibate; therefore the ideal human life
is celibate. Christ did not have a home (no hole such as foxes),
and so the monastic way of life, a more or less homeless way of
life separated from family and home, was the ideal. Luther said,
no, Christ had His calling and He exercised his calling, but we
have our callings. And instead of imitating Christ in that way, we
simply follow Christ; we take the principles for human life that
we see revealed in the life of Christ, and we carry out God-given
responsibilities as best we can in the places we are.

Luther had more flexibility than many Christians did in determining

what was precisely the proper course for the Christian in specific
situations. He spoke of the “little hour,” which God calls each of
us to; it is the place of our service, and it is not the place of other
people’s service. So the Christian may have to perform certain
kinds of acts of love, always determined by biblical standards for
those acts of love, in some situations that other Christians are
not called upon to perform in other situations. Again, we might
go back to the activities of the policeman. Not everyone loves the
neighbor by carrying a firearm in the holster, but the moment of
the policeman, the calling of the policeman or the responsibility
of the policeman, the calling of the Christian policeman, is such
that that kind of tough love in this case is necessary.

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  9 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

The law, the will of God, is firm and fixed, but it is not always
easy to determine how the law of God suggests and dictates
our actions in this place. For, in a fallen world particularly, but
also in the complexity of human life as God created it good, the
neighbor’s need shifts and changes. Luther was not a proponent
in any way, shape, or form of something like modern situation
ethics, which lets the individual define what love is. For Luther,
love was never what I want it to be, it is what God set it up to
be in terms of the needs of human creatures. And Luther also
recognized that in trying to seek information from the Scriptures
and from our reason and from the information which our culture
gives, as we try to gain that information from God’s plan and His
will for human life, we will not only gain information but we will
always stand in danger also of being confronted by the accusing
and crushing and condemning power of that structure. For in its
exercise of that good function of giving us information for daily
Christian living, the law will also remind us that we don’t come
up to its standards, that we don’t fulfill its purposes perfectly, and
so it will crush.

Christians’ calling in daily life, Luther recognized as the setting

in which the cross also comes to believers. Indeed, Luther could
define the term cross in a number of ways, and when in On the
Councils and the Church he talked about the cross as a mark of
the church, he recognized that misfortune and illness are often
labeled crosses in the Christian life, and he labeled them so.
The results of sin that happens to us are indeed also marks of
suffering in the fallen world. But Luther particularly emphasized
the nature of the cross in the context of our daily callings in
this life, not as misfortune and illness and certainly also not as
sufferings we impose upon ourselves to make ourselves look good
in God’s sight, but instead he saw crosses coming to us, above
all, in Christian service, as we lay down our lives for the bodily
and temporal welfare of the neighbor, as we serve in ways we just
don’t want to serve, as we are twisted out of our comfortable rest
and placed on the firing line, as we bear up with the neighbor
under whatever suffering sin has imposed upon him or her. These
crosses mortify the flesh; our desires go to the stake for the needs
of the neighbor.

The crosses of daily Christian life that we take up by following

Christ force our concentration upon the needs of the neighbor and
not upon us ourselves. And it is possible to take up these crosses,
Luther taught, only because we know that Christ has borne the
cross of our own identity and has reestablished our own identity
as children of God. And, therefore, we don’t need to worry about
ourselves. We rely simply on God and His grace alone to know
that we are worthwhile, that things will go well ultimately for

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  10 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.
Lesson 19 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: The Christian’s Calling

us. And so we then feel quite free to step into the breach and be
the presence of God, be that mask of God, that larva Dei through
whom God provides for the needs of the neighbor.

So the cross kills us in the horizontal, as people who are self-

centered and self-seeking. That baptismal identity that Paul talks
about in Romans 6, that is worked out in the vertical realm with
his word of justification, then continues to be worked out in the
horizontal realm through the life of daily repentance. We who are
already dead to sin in God’s sight die slowly but surely to sin in
the sight of the neighbor as we become less selfish, as we reduce
our seeming felt need to take care of ourselves and freely bind
ourselves to the neighbor’s need.

If we might then summarize Luther’s understanding of the daily

life of the Christian called by God, we will indeed note that this
daily life is a battlefield between the two kings who dispute over
the allegiance of the believer and the unbeliever too in the vertical
realm and in the horizontal realm. And so the Christian life is
one which always reflects this sound of battle, it is always a life
of repentance (that is, of dying to the practices of sin and rising
up to the challenges, to the invitations of the neighbor’s need in
the horizontal realm). The Christian life is motivated by faith.
We proceed gladly and boldly into a sinful world to serve God
and to make His presence, His providing presence, felt, because
faith moves us. Faith gives us gratitude. Faith gives us a sense of
freedom to serve God no matter what, because we know that we
are secure and safe in His hand.

So we move into those structures that shape the life of all

human creatures, whether unbelievers or believers, and we
accept the responsibilities that God gives us in our homes and
in our occupations and in our society and in our congregations.
We accept these responsibilities with joy, for we recognize that
these responsibilities are not merely duties but they are callings
by God, callings to serve Him by serving the neighbor within
the structures He had made for human society. And thus the
Christian goes joyfully into the work of the day, as Luther says in
his catechism, and rests peacefully at night, secure in the hands
of a God who has called us to be His own children in the vertical
realm and to be servants to the neighbor’s need in every situation
of the horizontal realm. For Luther that was, and is, the Christian
life.

Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  11 of 11

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.