undergirds its role in the “conflict of conscience” or spiritual trial, in which the contradictory vectors of the law attain their highest intensity. “It is the devil’s habit” in this conflict, Luther says, “to frighten us with the Law and to set against us the consciousness of sin, our wicked past, the wrath and judgment of God, hell and eternal death, so that thus he may drive us into despair.” As the product of its increasing boundlessness, the law’s tendency to annul its apparent offer of justification loomed over Luther’s consciousness in moments of angst, so that when he considered the law he immediately perceived its terror. At these times it seems “that the devil is roaring at us terribly, that heaven is bellowing, that the earth is quaking, that everything is about to collapse . . . that hell is opening up in order to swallow us,” in other words, that perdition is sure because nature has no available means to secure grace against its sin. Nature endures its “reduction to nothing” under a merciless law, experiencing its wrath as a “true taste of death.” This anxiety under the law presupposes the promise of justification via obedience toward whose annulment the law itself tends; the law’s ability to terrify depends upon its apparent validity as the way to salvation, a way that the believer endures as the limitless revelation of anguish.
The law’s limitlessness in application to a finite creature means likewise its limitlessness in the realm of being, an infinity achieved by the eradication of its limit in nature’s freedom of will. The law’s commands everywhere convincing man that he is under the curse, allowing no respite from their assaults and convicting him of multiple sins for each single act of righteousness, condemn nature before it acts. This ubiquitous and inescapable condemnation renders human freedom meaningless; it is the law as a tyrannical infinite victimizing the finite will that would hold its boundary. It is also the experiential source of Luther’s dictum that the will is powerless with respect to justification, which is to say that the will suffers the curse no matter what it has done or will do. The insufficient righteousness that the will might claim for itself dwindles into no righteousness at all, just as the individual in the midst of spiritual trial endures the law’s infinity as the roaring of hell and the devil. As the law progressively expands, squeezing its limit into insignificance, it simultaneously abdicates its form, casting off its definition in the believer’s experience as the loss of mercy. The law as a direction toward righteousness given for nature’s benefit transforms into something cold and cruel, a terror to the conscience.
Grace as “the righteousness of God” shatters this process by announcing a way of righteousness completely apart from works and by faith alone, with Luther turning to the righteousness of Christ given freely and received in total passivity. This new way of justification rescued Luther from the torment of the infinite law because it successfully negated that law’s presupposition, that he should take it up as the way of redemption. In the wake of justification grasped by faith alone, the law has lost all power to frighten because it has lost all power to tempt, with its validity as a path to heaven decisively denied. Faith accomplishes what the law’s expansion to infinity could not, overcoming the apparent acquisition of righteousness via the law by the realization of the total lack of righteousness, and thus the utter insufficiency for justification, of nature as well as the law. But in another sense justification by faith alone fulfills the law’s movement of self-annulment, completing the nullification of the law as a way to justification with a power greater than its own unbounded expansion. The total annulment of the law, and therefore the quieting of its terrors, is the passive righteousness that struck Luther as though he had entered “through open gates into paradise itself.” He construed this experience as the sigh of faith in the midst of spiritual trial: “In every temptation and weakness, therefore, just cling to Christ and sigh! He gives you the Holy Spirit, who cries ‘Abba! Father!’ Then the Father says: ‘I do not hear anything in the whole world,’ neither the terrors of the devil nor the threats of hell, ‘except this single sigh’” that is the Christian’s acknowledgment that justification belongs to Christ alone, and that nature and the law play no part.
The final deforming of the law, in which it loses all authority for justification at the same time that it relinquishes all limits, occurs at the hands of grace as a new and different power. Only through this new path of assurance, this justification grounded solely in the work of Christ, does the sabotage of the law’s authority begun in its infinite expansion find its explosive consummation. The law gives up all authority as a way of justification in the believer’s acknowledgment of Christ’s grace “for you and me,” the sigh of “Abba! Father!” that expressed Luther’s turn exclusively to Christ in abdication of the righteousness of the law and nature. In that moment, the law’s movement to infinity gains an equal footing with its temptation as a supposed means to heal and enrich, annulling the temptation and negating the law’s claim to compel. The growth into a tyrannical infinity that is the law’s annulment as merciful concludes in the annulment of the law per se.
In this latter annulment the limit that gave the law definition as law succeeds in its withdrawal at the same time that the law’s authority is abolished. Nature’s turn to Christ by faith alone entails the proclamation that the will is utterly powerless and thereby utterly bound, reducing its freedom as well as its supposed righteousness to nothingness. The free will squeezed by the law’s advance to infinity becomes the limit abolished by the individual’s own abdication of it. This abdication destroys the law’s object in the will, and the destruction of the will means the destruction of the law. The latter no longer has a limit because it has no will to limit it, just as it has no authority because it meets no will to receive its commands. The law no longer makes sense as law, both as uncontained and lawless in its boundlessness and as inchoate in its lack of strength to command. In this vein Luther writes of Christ’s grace as “the death of death”: “Thus in my flesh I find a death that afflicts and kills me”—the law and its punishment for sin—“but I also have a contrary death, which is the death of my death and which crucifies and devours my death,” that is, the death of Christ, appropriated by Luther through faith, that vanquishes the law’s terrors. “Thus the law that once bound me and held me captive is now bound and held captive by grace or liberty, which is now my law.”
The undoing of the law means the liberation of nature, which finding the accusing law accused and the condemning law condemned, grasps its existence under “the law of liberty.” And yet, because the law put to death by grace is also the natural law that gives nature its form, nature suffers a parallel devolution. Because the death of the law negates the principle by which nature possesses definition, one cannot distinguish nature’s liberty from law from its life apart from definition. The liberty realized through faith alone, the righteousness of God through Christ experienced as the gates of paradise thrown open, drives home the fiat in which the law melts into mist so that nature might follow it there. The same grace that proclaims “the death of death” for the law as the giver of nature’s definition announces “the law of liberty” for nature as deprived of form.
This is the work of the Christ-Idol, that man should scale the summit of a draconian demand and at its peak lay hold of a power thought to liberate him from darkness, breaking the bonds of his taskmaster and bursting his limit as if the sun’s light had permeated his flesh. But in his freedom from the law, in his indifference to its commands and his rejection of it as a way of righteousness, standing over it by the blessing of the Christ-Idol, man proclaims for himself a freedom in which he relinquishes his definition. Whereas man cannot absorb the infinite-unto-dissolution by his own power, crying out under the burden it impresses upon his conscience, the Christ-Idol delivers that power and dissolves the law at the same time that nature crumbles into the scattering. Justified by a righteousness acquired through faith alone, man arrogates universality as a curse concealed as blessing, a death concealed as new birth, a de-formation paraded as Reformation. Docetism unmakes his nature into the contradiction that believes in its conscience that it resides above the law when it cannot help but break the law, and indeed has nullified the law.
The Christ-Idol erupted from the dialectical innovation implicit both in Luther’s experience and in the doctrine of justification that he built upon it. The medieval age had developed dialectical reasoning as a juxtaposition of contrary legal cases meant to close the gaps between
