Brian Hamilton

Luther on Ethics and the Righteousness of God

Once we are freed from reductive maxims too often used to summarize Luther (‘faith not works,’ for example), we begin to see that the righteousness given by God—though never practically absolute and certainly not ‘natural’—nonetheless is a thoroughly active righteousness. Could it be otherwise? Would we render God’s grace visibly ineffectual? On the contrary, “the love of God… creates that which is pleasing to it” (HD #28); it seeks out sinners and fools and weak people and makes them righteous and wise and strong. “Good works do not make a good [person],” certainly, and this is a crucial point for Luther if we are to avoid making God’s grace a mere embellishment of our natural capacities (HD p.67). But Luther does not stop there: “Good works do not make a good [person], but a good [person] does good works” (FC 361, my emphasis; cf. HD #25, DST #40, #91). There is no question that the goodness of Christ flows into the person of faith, and from the person of faith into the whole world.

Having preserved the utter gratuity of salvation—a free gift from God in faith, an alien righteousness given to us by God rather than anything achieved—now Luther can re-capture the utter gratuity of our own works. God does not require a natural perfection; God freely gives us the only perfection we can hope for. Thus the ‘works’ we inevitably perform in response—rather: not we, but Christ who lives in us (Gal. 2:20)—become free gifts back to God and the flowing of Christ’s goodness into the lives of those around us. “Behold, from faith thus flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves one’s neighbor willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss” (FC 367). The freedom of faith begets the carefree generosity of obedience, since now, through faith, it really is Christ who works in us. Because the soul has Christ as its righteousness, it no longer needs care for itself; it is free to care only for others (TKR 300).

It is at this point, especially at the end of “Freedom of a Christian,” that Luther is at his most eloquent. When we reach the outer works of the outer person, the righteousness given us through Jesus Christ blossoms truly into our own proper righteousness. The ethical distinction between Christ and the person of faith fades into the background, leaving the very person of faith as Christ’s action and instrument (HD #25). Luther commits, for example: “I will therefore give myself as a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me” (FC 367, my emphasis). Or again, and more communally: “Surely we are named after Christ, not because he is absent from us, but because he dwells in us, that is, because we believe in him, and are Christs one to another and do to our neighbors as Christ does to us” (FC 368, my emphasis). At the peak of his moral imagination, Luther comes to speak of everyone “putting on” his or her neighbor just as Christ put on human flesh. This is the flow of Christ’s righteousness, through all the faithful into their neighbors and taking their neighbors’ sorrows and joys onto themselves. “We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love” (FC 371).

29 January 2007 |
tags: Martin Luther, Theological Ethics