necessary to bring the theologian “to a real existential crisis.”82 Forde emphasizes that the Disputation speaks here not of “theologies” but of “theologians.” The question in play is the existential state of the theologian in the presence of God.
These central theses pick up the mention of Christ from the earlier thesis and ask what Christ and him crucified reveal to us about God. Theologians of glory “see” the “invisible things” of God. Forde observes that “seeing” the “invisible” is an oxymoron.83 They claim to see “through” creation or divine action to a “sea of abstract universals.”84 But they will find only the threatening presence of God there and no consolations for their troubled consciences. This threat, as we have seen, is real and should be terrifying. The only way this voice of accusation can be silenced is by the cross. Looking through the cross into the beyond will not help; one must look at the cross itself where Christ hangs dying for us. True, salvific knowledge of God is there on the cross. Through this theo-logy, this word of cross, God saves us from the terror. “The cross therefore is actually intended to destroy the sight of the theologian of glory. In the cross God actively hides himself. God simply refuses to be known in any other way.”85 By suffering and the cross, the sinner comes to know God. And “the suffering Luther has in mind first and foremost is the result of God’s operation on the sinner.”86 In what Luther called Anfechtungen, the “terrors of temptation” and “the pangs of conscience” God is finally known.87 When this God is clung to in faith, we finally “suffer this unilateral action of God.”88 All theorizing, then, can finally stop. “Knowledge of God comes when God happens to us, when God does himself to us. We are crucified with Christ (Gal 2:19).”89 We are, in this process, totally passive, while God alone is acting upon us. In Christ, God sets aside the law, silencing it. It can no longer bully us about. The law’s jurisdiction ends where Christ’s begins.
The final section of the Disputation turns to the righteousness of faith. We have now had our attachment to the law, good works and the claims of the will stripped away. We have been turned to Christ crucified. This brings us to the end of the Disputation and to the creative love of God. In the cross we come to know that God loves the unlovely and thus makes them lovely. We have been crucified now to be raised. When the old Adam or Eve dies and is raised, we spontaneously turn to the neighbor in works of love. Knowing that God has done everything necessary, we move out in freedom. We see the “bad, poor, needy, and lowly” whom the theologian of glory cannot see. “They don’t even show up on the scale of values and are not regarded.”90 But theologians of the cross know that they are sinners and know their own poverty, yet they trust that the love of God creates precisely out of nothing. Finally, “The presupposition of the entire Disputation is laid bare. It is the hope of the resurrection. God brings life out of death.”91
Forde treats the Heidelberg Disputation as much more than a theological treatise; he understands it as an actual proclamation of the gospel and therefore an actual doing of the gospel. This is its excellence. It does not simply describe the cross or God, it—to use the necessarily awkward phrasing—crosses or does God to the reader. Theology at its best must serve this purpose; “theology is for proclamation.”92 Proclamation is the final move, the logical, ultimate step of comprehending the things of God. When the shape of God’s love is truly understood, we freely and spontaneously have to share the good news. To proclaim God’s love is to end—as both telos and finis—the argument. Forde says:
Theologians of the cross therefore come to understand that the only move left is to the proclamation that issues from the story. The final task is to do the story to the hearers in such a way that they are incorporated into the story itself, killed and made alive by the hearing of it.93
Proclamation, as for Ebeling, is what ultimately matters in the theology of the cross.
Through the preaching of the cross in the living present, not through theological explanations, we are defended from the terror of the divine majesty. Precisely against the threat of supposed divine timelessness and immutability we are claimed in the concrete word of the cross in the living present; through baptism and Supper we are washed and fed. We feel and taste the truth in the here and now. To believe means precisely to be claimed by the cross and its word, to cling to that and find one’s assurance there. The “solution” to the problem of God, that is, is not in the classroom but in church.94
The concerns raised at the end of the section on Ebeling are equally fitting in response to Forde. If anything, Forde’s approach is even less historical. Forde’s reading of Luther has God standing over and against all of humanity in an undifferentiated way. All alike are prone to the same temptations of glory and power. This is Forde’s appraisal of how the theology of the cross functioned in Luther’s day, but Forde carries it forward to today. Luther speaks across centuries of history directly to us. Time and time again, generic humanity is gathered up into the homogeneous “we.”
Once again the neighbors in need do not enter until the last pages of the book. Even then, they are quickly dismissed. Having noted that “the theologians of glory try to see through the needy, the poor, the lowly, and the ‘nonexistent,’”95 Forde makes a glorious move himself, subsuming the needy, the poor, the lowly and the nonexistent into the category of “sinner.” Through the quick move to generic categories, Forde renders the poor once again invisible. They get lost in a crowd of undifferentiated humanity. The theologian of the cross becomes another theologian of glory.
Sacramental Theology of the Cross
Peura
Out of the dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Church, Scandinavian Luther scholars have come to a new understanding of Luther’s theology including his theology of the cross. They have focused on his early years so as to emphasize certain aspects of his theology that most clearly lie in continuity with medieval theology. The Finnish scholar Simo Peura’s book Mehr als ein Mensch?96 is a contemporary example of this approach. His understanding of the theology of the cross will be dramatically shaped by his work on Luther’s very earlier material.
To begin to understand Luther, Peura looks at his Psalm commentaries from 1513 to 1516. From this period, Peura articulates Luther’s understanding of the deification of the Christian. Here Luther’s dependence on late scholastic theology comes to the fore. Next, Peura looks at how this theme is upheld in relation to the themes of justification and God’s love as they are articulate by Luther in his 1515 and 1516 commentaries on Romans. Finally, Peura comes to our theme, considering the theology of the cross in light of deification. His basis for that study are texts from 1517 and 1519. While the third part of his study will be of most interest to us, we will need to retrace the steps his steps through deification since that dramatically shapes his own understanding of the theology of the cross. Without this background, it is difficult to comprehend how he could end up at such a different place than Forde and Ebeling.
In the early studies on the Psalms, Luther presents his understanding of deification. In the act of becoming
