Cross in Tensions. Philip Ruge-Jones

Althaus sees this important link that Luther makes as central to his thought. “Luther recognizes the inner relationship and even the identity of religious intellectualism and moralism. He shows that both are in opposition to the cross. These are two of the deepest insights of his theology.”47 Over and against the scholastic or churchly quest for glory and power stand the hard cross of Christ and our crosses. Captive to this reality, we know:

God meets us in death, in the death of Christ, but only when we experience Christ’s death as our own death. The death of Christ leads us to an encounter with God only when it becomes our death. Contemplating the death of Christ necessarily becomes a dying together with him.48

In this understanding, revelation is always hidden or concealed. The confidence with which church officials point to a historical institution and claim it as the empirical church only exposes their theology of glory. The theology of the cross stands against all such claims to glory and power achieved in God’s name. Faith knows another way. “To believe means to live in constant contradiction of empirical reality and to trust one’s self to that which is hidden.”49 No single breakthrough to reality occurs, but rather a constant process of struggle between human criteria and God’s hidden revelation occurs again and again. “Faith thus stands in constant conflict; and it comes to life only when it breaks through the reality accessible to reason.”50 Then it knows what is really real.

How does Althaus look at The Bondage of the Will in terms of the theology of the cross? The relationship that an interpreter assumes toward this document often indicates structural keys to the larger picture that he or she presents of Luther. Althaus sees Luther’s concept of the hidden God as taking a decisive turn by the time of The Bondage of the Will. From the early days of the Heidelberg Disputation, “the concept has a completely different meaning.”51 Luther moves beyond the appropriate concern of the Apostle Paul that God’s freedom be respected. Althaus claims that the concern for God’s hidden will in the later Luther threatens the graciousness of the promise known in Christ:

this knowledge of the hidden God lies like a wide shadow across the picture of God’s revealed will. In comparison to the Bible, a shift in emphasis has taken place. It is one thing not to hide the sobering fact that God also hardens men’s hearts and in the fear of God, to take it seriously as the Bible does; it is, however, quite another thing to take—as Luther does—the mystery that confronts us in the history of God’s dealing with men and with peoples, a mystery which certainly conflicts with God’s will to save as we know it, and develop it into a full-blown doctrine of God’s double will, of the duality and extensive opposition between the hidden and the revealed God. . . . We must ask whether Luther’s doctrine of the hidden God as it is presented in The Bondage of the Will does not abrogate the rest of his theology as we have come to know it. . . . Is it not immeasurably dangerous, even deadly, to man’s trust in the word of promise? It actually asserts that God, according to his secret will, to a great extent disagrees with his word offering grace to all men. 52

      Yet Althaus, though concerned about the systematic implications of this doctrine, does see its usefulness as a necessary part of proclamation. The concept of the bondage of the will safeguards the sovereignty of God against all human attempts at control. The divine assurance offered is always in danger of being converted into human boasting.

Finally, we remind ourselves again that Luther declares that the hidden God and his secret activity must be discussed for the sake of the elect! In the final analysis, Luther does not establish a theoretical doctrine of double predestination as Calvin does. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, his theology is at this point completely untheoretical and pastoral. His idea of the hidden God, finally intends only to purify Christians’ faith from all secret claims and all self-security by proclaiming the freedom of God’s grace.53

      While this warning against self-security is valid, in the end one wonders if Althaus has taken the importance of history seriously enough in his proposal. The attraction of Luther’s theology of the cross to the people of his day was not merely its resourcefulness as a generic critique of human pretension. Rather, they were drawn to Luther’s particular usage of this critique against the concrete pretensions of the church of his day. Moreover, the attraction to this critical function of the theology of the cross over and against the institutional church had to do with the complicity of the church in power dynamics that transcended strictly theological and ecclesial systems. The critique aimed at the church attacked not only its religious transgressions, but also the way its pretensions were concretely embodied in political, economic and social systems that robbed the people of life.

      Proclamation Theology of the Cross

      Ebeling

      Gerhard Ebeling has not only written pervasively on the theology of the cross, but has also dominated current Luther scholarship in general to such an extent that he has set its paradigm. Within the area of Luther interpretation, Ebeling’s ruts run deep, and many interpretative vehicles have traveled in the direction that he has established.

In his important book Luther: An Introduction to his Thought54 Ebeling identifies the dynamics fundamental to Luther’s thought. Ebeling argues that Luther is a university professor responsible for an impressive linguistic innovation. He was a teacher and preacher profoundly centered on a commitment to the word of God alone. Beginning with the struggles of his own conscience, not with ecclesial abuses, Luther developed a complex theology fraught with pairs of contradictory claims that are never synthesized, but always held in tension. Tensions between law and gospel, freedom and bondage, God hidden and God revealed pervade his reflections.

In each of these pairs, the two contradictory poles depend on and feed off of each other. Each is necessary for the other. Take law and gospel. Luther’s concern is not that one swallow up the other, but that they be allowed to maintain their relationship of mutual tension and even hostility. The role of the theologian is to make proper distinctions between them so that we can understand the proper functioning of law and gospel in theology and the world. Making this proper distinction “is the touchstone of theology, the point which decides whether one has really grasped its true substance. . . .”55 Ebeling states that the law always makes demands upon us, while the gospel always is promise or gift. In the tension between the human experience of having demands made upon one’s conscience and the total graciousness of God’s gift in Christ, the Christian is justified by God. Justification is the centerpiece of Luther’s theology. It not only is the prince among other doctrines; it gives “a true significance to all other doctrines.”56 Justification occurs, when theology is properly understood, in a word-event.

Christian preaching is the process in which the distinction between the law and the gospel takes place. . . . the concern of Christian preaching is to put into practice the distinction between the law and the gospel, that is, to carry on the progress of a battle, in which time and again the distinction between the law and the gospel is newly at issue and is made in practice. . . . But if the process of preaching is what it claims to be, that is, the process of salvation, then as the distinction is made between the law and the gospel, so the event of salvation takes place. And the confusion of the two is not a misfortune of little significance, a regrettable weakness, but is evil in the strict sense, the total opposite of salvation.”57

      Notice that making this distinction brings