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 salvation while failure to do so flirts with damnation. The proclaimed word is existentially vital. It is neither abstract nor disinterested reflection.
The word is only apprehended as such in concrete terms when the relationship is understood between what it says and what it effects, that is, when it is understood as an active and effective word and so is not separated from the situation in which it is uttered and which is changed by the word, but is regarded as one with it.58
This effective word
possesses the character of an event with the power to bring about an ultimate decision. It has the power in so far as it touches and strikes man at his most sensitive point, the very heart of his being, where the decision is made as to what his position should be ultimately, that is, in the sight of God. Luther calls this point the “conscience” . . . What he means [by conscience] is that man is ultimately a hearer, someone who is seized, claimed, and subject to judgment, and that for this reason his existential being depends upon which word reaches and touches his inmost being.59
Those who have not been freed by the gospel are in bondage as they listen to the demands of the law made upon their inmost being. But the gospel comes through the word of grace, causing one to trust solely in a righteousness that is given from above and is not one’s own. This righteousness is
not the righteousness of works, but the righteousness of faith; not active righteousness, but passive righteousness, given as a gift; not our own righteousness, but a righteousness from outside ourselves, imputed to us and because of this never becoming our own possession, even when it is given to us. It is in the strictest sense righteousness accepted by faith. Thus the Christian is in himself and on the basis of his own powers a sinner; but at the same time, outside himself, on the basis of what God does, and in the sight of God in Christ, he is one who is righteous.60
The gospel trilogy is this for Ebeling. First, we have God hidden in Christ salvifically. Second, the word alone declares and effects our wholly external righteousness. And, finally, faith clings to the promise alone, renouncing all claims to intrinsic righteousness.
Ebeling has a different appraisal of the chief concept described in The Bondage of the Will than that of our two earlier theologians. If Loewenich and Althaus approached The Bondage of the Will from the perspective of Luther’s earlier writing, Ebeling moves in the reverse order. For Ebeling The Bondage of the Will interprets and correctly unfolds the underdeveloped structure suggested or hidden in the earlier writings. Thus, in The Bondage of the Will the hiddenness of God as omnipotence is not vanquished by the hiddenness of God as concealment in suffering, but rather the two definitions are maintained in mutual tension and even hostility. The latter depends for its vitality and effectiveness upon the reality of the other.
The question remains if one can actually live within this tension without resolving it in one direction or the other. Especially dangerous to our purposes is the possibility of being left with the omnipotent God whose presence casts a long shadow over the comfort available in the God who is present, though hidden, in suffering and shame. With the loss of focus on God’s hidden presence in suffering, the poor are also lost from sight or relegated once again to the margins of the conversation. It is amazing that one so concerned about the cutting nature of the word event is so inattentive to the particular way in which that word does cut. Ebeling writes passionately about a word event that is neither abstract nor disinterested, but he does so in a historically abstract and disinterested way. His concern with judgment is merely that it happens. He is attentive only to the abstract phenomenon of judgment; he shows no attentiveness to the content of the law. Human assertion and abusive quests for power are not understood in their historical embeddedness. What Vítor Westhelle expresses in relation to Lutherans is particularly appropriate as a critique of Ebeling. Westhelle correctly observes “that Lutherans are often too quick to talk formally about simul iustus et peccator and too slow to recognize the particular content of sin itself.”61
This lack of attention to the particularity of the law’s attack is not a fair reading of Luther. He is intensely specific about the way that abusive power, especially though not exclusively that of the church, has destroyed the life and well being of the people. For Luther, God’s judgment is concrete; it challenges the way that the neighbor is abused or neglected. Yet in Ebeling, the neighbor does not appear until the end of the whole project of theology. Only in the final pages of Ebeling’s book does he raise “the last question, that of the place of our fellow-man in what is said of God.”62 Yet Luther clearly does not leave the neighbor until his final chapter. Luther is grossly misread when the neighbor is bracketed out of the process until theology, for all intents and purposes, is over. For Luther, the neighbor whose suffering we create or ignore cannot be divorced from the working of law. God’s judgment is never abstract, but confronts a person in particular ways. Moreover, when the law is stripped of content and context, so is the gospel that follows it.63
Forde
Gerhard Forde, even more than any of our other writers, has employed the nomenclature of the theology of the cross with brutal persistence throughout his writing. In both his historical and his constructive work, Forde dips into the well of Luther’s theology of the cross. The focus here will be on what would become his final book, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518.64
In the introduction to this book, Forde expresses three reasons for this book that meditates on the key document of Luther’s theologia crucis. First of all, when it comes to Luther’s theology of the cross, “there isn’t much of anything in English one can recommend enthusiastically to the ordinary reader.”65 He acknowledges the indispensable contribution of Loewenich’s work, but believes “it is heavy going” for the beginner. Secondly, Forde writes this book because much of what passes for theology of the cross is only about sentimentalized victimization.
