The Theology of Martin Luther

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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Luther and the Theology of the Cross

The Theology of Martin Luther

As Christian theologians mind the biblical text and address its concerns to the world around them, they often fail to notice that they operate within a conceptual framework, a set of presuppositions, if you will, the undergirding of their thought that often doesn’t appear explicitly but always determines the shape of the way they take the message from the biblical page and present it to the people of their own time and place.

In this lecture, and the following lecture, I want to talk a little bit about Luther’s conceptual framework. Each of the items in his conceptual framework, as we discuss them in this lecture and the next, “The Theology of the Cross” and “The Distinction of the Two Kinds of Righteousness,” respectively, each of those items did not become a separate topic as such in Lutheran theology or in the theology of Protestantism in general. And yet 20th-century theologians and historians have noted that you cannot really understand Luther’s thought without recognizing that there is a kind of warp and woof to his thinking throughout his life, not just at the beginning, that guides and shapes the way he taught specific doctrines of the Scripture in his historical context. The two sets of presuppositions, “The Theology of the Cross” and “The Two Kinds of Righteousness,” were each labeled “Our Theology” by Luther at different times of his life. Both these elements were there in that critical period in 1518 and 1519 as his theology was coming into its final form. He did not always (did not often, I think we could say) mention “theology of the cross” or talk about “two kinds of righteousness” as his career progressed, although these phrases do occur from time to time. But the basic principles, the guiding points of orientation that he laid down in the complex of ideas grouped around “The Theology of the Cross” and the “Two Kinds of Righteousness” are to be found guiding his thought until the very day he died. In this lecture, then, we consider “The Theology of the Cross,” which Luther labeled in 1518 “Our Theology.”

Luther’s religious world was a world filled with glory, and the opposite for him of the theology of the cross was the medieval theology of glory. Luther encountered the glory of Christendom, of Christian thought, in two different ways. First of all, he

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology

at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

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encountered the glory of human reason. The scholastic training which he had enjoyed and under which he had suffered at the University of Erfurt and at Wittenberg—the glory of scholasticism, the glory of human reasoning, of human logical proof—was at first for Luther simply God’s way of doing things. But then in the 1510s, he recognized that the influence of Aristotelian metaphysics in particular had misshaped the biblical message as it was conveyed by a good deal of the scholastic theology of his day. And so because he had suffered under the burden of scholasticism, as we have already mentioned, he revolted against the glory of human reason and returned to the simple faith that children have, of which the biblical writers speak, of which Jesus speaks when He says that we must become as a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3).

The second kind of glory that Luther encountered in medieval piety, the piety with which he grew up, was the glory of human effort, the glory of human works. He had encountered that kind of glorious path to God particularly in the piety of his monastic order. And again, as we have commented, the weight of his spiritual burdens caused that particular kind of glory to be smashed to smithereens. It collapsed under the weight of the burden of his conscience. Luther was really broken by both the glory of human reason and the glory of human effort or human works; neither helped him escape his burdens. And so as he drew himself ever more deeply into the biblical message, [and] as he taught the Scriptures at Wittenberg in the early and mid-1510s, he struggled with the theology of glory, which the medieval church had presented to its people.

It was a glorious church. It aimed (at least at its official levels) at a kind of glory that would match the political might and the political power of the world around it. The church wanted to be taken seriously as a human institution, which it is. And so it tried to have itself taken seriously in terms that society could understand, in terms of the glory (literally the pomp and the circumstance of the ceremonial [correct?] of the world) of the royal and princely courts around it. But it also wanted to be taken seriously as a glorious institution, which had the kind of power that princes had, for—because of the historical circumstances surrounding the collapse of the Roman Empire—the Pope had played an important, a significant, and sometimes beneficial role in the political order of Europe. Luther rejected this kind of a glorious church as well too and redefined the church, in his understanding of the Christian life, as a suffering church, a church persecuted by those who opposed the gospel because they cannot tolerate it, because they need to live in a world of power exercised in, as our Lord says in Mark 10, Gentile fashion.

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So, broken by the several glories, the various kinds of glories of the medieval church, Luther turned to his theology of the cross. He expressed this theology of the cross in succinct fashion first in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. You will remember that in 1518 the Augustinian order, meeting in its German chapter, summoned Luther at the behest of the papal authorities to come to this Heidelberg meeting and to explain himself—to explain why he was making such a fuss, why he was causing such an uproar in the church. And in a series of theses, particularly in the theological theses he presented there (he presented also philosophical theses), he presented an approach to the biblical message, which he called, “The Theology of the Cross.” The first of these theses struck directly at the glory of human efforts, the glory of human works. The law of God (which tells us what to do, which talks about human performance), “the most salutary doctrine of life,” Luther labels it, “cannot advance the human creature on his way to righteousness; instead, the law of God hinders him on his way to righteousness.” Luther meant by that that when we focus on our own performance, we will always and only fall short of the perfection which God had set for the human creature in the first place. So (thesis two) much less can human works, which are done over and over again with the aid of natural precepts (a reference to Gabriel Biel’s doing things that are naturally within us) lead to the end of righteousness. For (thesis three) human works always seem attractive and good (good works are good in their proper place). But they are nevertheless likely to be mortal sins. For, as Luther would explain, “They are done apart from faith in Jesus Christ, and thus they are done apart from the central humanity which God has given us.”

[If this is a continuation of the quote on page 4, I would run it into one paragraph.] “Although the works of God always seem unattractive and appear evil [and Luther was thinking here primarily of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, His Son], they are nevertheless really eternal merits.” And he was also thinking of the poor works of the Christian’s daily life—changing diapers, preparing meals for other people, nursing the sick as they lie dying. These are the things that seem unattractive and sometimes downright evil but really are eternally worthwhile. “For the works of God are not merits as though they were sinless,” he says, “but the works of God are rather works of God because God mediates His presence to us.” That was Luther’s understanding.

The primary point in these first six theses in Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 is to turn on its head the glory of human effort, the glory of human works. And Luther continued that theme in theses 13 to 18, as he discusses the concept of the bondage or the freedom of the human will in what is a dress rehearsal for the

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subject matter of our ninth lecture, “The Bondage or the Freedom of the Will.” “After the fall into sin,” Luther wrote in his thirteenth thesis, “free will exists in name only, as a matter of fact the freedom of the will is gone and we can choose only to do things apart from God. We may indeed choose things that are morally upright, but apart from God they are not God-pleasing, apart from faith in God they are not God-pleasing.” Luther continued, “Free will could not endure in a state of innocence, much less do good in an active capacity, but only in its passive capacity.” And so the person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing “what is in him” (Gabriel Biel’s phrase) adds sin to sin, so that he becomes doubly guilty. “He not only does an outwardly good work that is insufficient to please God because it is not perfect, but he also relies on that work and thus is guilty of idolatry, is guilty of worshiping his own works (that is, relying on his own works for salvation).” Instead, Luther said (thesis 18), “We must utterly despair of our own ability to please God, so that we may be prepared to receive the grace of Christ.” “A real theologian,” Luther says (thesis 20), “is the one who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God as seen through suffering and the cross. In the suffering, in the cross, God comes near to us to reveal Himself.”

Let us turn now to an analysis of the elements that Luther developed out of these Heidelberg Theses in the explanation to the theses that he issued already in 1518, and then in the general development of his theology throughout the coming quarter century. I’m going to discuss Luther’s “Theology of the Cross” under four topics: (1) The theology of the cross as it affects our understanding of God’s revelation of Himself; (2) the theology of the cross as it touches upon the nature of our faith and our relationship with God through faith; (3) the theology of the cross as it expresses a biblical doctrine of atonement through death to sin and resurrection; and finally, (4) the theology of the cross as the life of dying and rising under the cross in the daily living of the sanctified believer.

The first of the four points of “The Theology of the Cross” regards our teaching about God. The most important distinction here is Luther’s distinction between the hidden God (in Latin, the Deus absconditus) and the revealed God (the Deus revelatus). “The Hidden God” is God as we imagine Him to be. He is God as we wish He were. The 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach was an atheist, and he said, “God is created in the image of man.” But in a sense, Feuerbach (who was a student of Luther’s, who read a good deal of Luther also) was echoing Luther’s point here for people who try to find God apart from Jesus Christ. We do shape, create, our gods in the image of ourselves.

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“The Hidden God,” fashioned by human speculation, is the opposite of the God of the cross. The god we invent with our own minds is a god of glory; we want a god of power or god of might, especially if he is on our side. But Luther said that the true God in all His glory is hidden. He is hidden behind the cloud of His own glory, and the creature can never penetrate the heart of the Creator. And certainly the fallen creature, the sinful creature, can never even imagine (fully, at least) what must be behind the cloud of God’s glory, cannot imagine what God is really like. So for sinners, our understanding of “The Hidden God” is largely a reflection of our own feelings, our own failings, [and] our own fears. Because human creatures are so often angry at themselves for failing to meet their own expectation, the gods they fashion are usually gods of wrath. Because human creatures so often find themselves unreliable, the gods they fashion are sometimes capricious. Because human creatures want to make it on our own, because we want to feel ultimately responsible for our ultimate well-being, the gods we fashion are usually gods who demand performance and accomplishment from sinful human creatures. The “Theology of Glory” is bound and determined to create a way of salvation that includes some, if not a lot of, human contribution. So the depiction of God in what we might call “Natural Theology” is a depiction of ourselves, cast large upon the screen of the clouds of God’s glory.

In contrast to the Deus absconditus is the Deus revelatus, the revealed God is God as He presents Himself to us. As Luther liked to say “in crib” and “cross.” This revealed God is the God who speaks to us, first of all, as “the Word made flesh” (John 1:14), Jesus of Nazareth, the second person of the Holy Trinity. The revealed God is also the God who speaks to us in His inspired Scripture. This revealed God reveals Himself, as Paul says in I Corinthians 1:18–2:9, “in the foolishness and the impotence of the cross of Christ.” To quote Paul in II Corinthians 12:9, the revealed God is the God whose power “is made perfect in weakness.” And it is important for us to remember that this God’s power is made perfect in His own weakness, as He goes to the cross to reclaim us from the death that the cross visits upon all sinners. But this God reveals Himself also in our weakness, as we come as vulnerable human creatures to share the vulnerability of those poor and beleaguered souls whom God has placed around us. Indeed, God has revealed Himself in the hiddenness of the crib and the cross and the crypt in which His divine body lay. And yet this “foolishness” is the ultimate wisdom, higher than any human wisdom. This impotence in the cross of Christ, Luther preached, “that impotence is a power of God that will not quit, that reveals itself in the triumph of that dead body which rose from the tomb to have the last word.” “The last laugh,” Luther would say, as He

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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gobbled down death.

The last place human power and wisdom would look for God is in a manger in diapers or on a cross on the way to a tomb. “But precisely there,” Luther teaches, “our God reveals what He is really like, He reveals His unconditional and His absolute love for fallen sinners.” Luther’s theology then throughout presupposes that God can be found only really as the revealed God. He did not deny that we see glimpses of God in nature. He did not reject natural theology completely. But he didn’t think much of the worth of this glimpse of God. In the Scriptures, in the Word made flesh, in the human language about this Word made flesh as it is lifted from the Scriptures, as it is preached and proclaimed, in the sacramental forms of God’s Word at God’s baptismal font and at His eucharistic feast, there and there alone God becomes present to reveal Himself, Luther taught. Other descriptions of God tell us more about ourselves than about Him.

As Luther observed in the Smalcald Articles, “God does not want to deal with us except through His eternal Word and sacrament. Whatever is attributed to the Holy Spirit apart from this Word and sacrament is of the devil.” You recognize the problem. Such an understanding of God places Him outside human control. He addresses us. He calls us to come to Him. He invites us and He draws us into His family, and we can only respond. God came to ask Adam, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). He has determined our rightful place, according to Luther’s “Theology of the Cross,” according to Luther’s concept of the Deus revelatus. He has determined what constitutes our righteousness.

Some Christians have viewed this view of Luther as an excessive exaltation of God, and therefore as a threat to our humanity. But Luther believed that recognizing God’s place, if you will, “above us” as our Creator does not deny but rather ensures our humanity. The revealed God also reveals what it means to be truly human—to be free as human creatures to be the people God designed us to be. And thus Luther recognized that as he interpreted God’s Word for his people in preaching, as he conveyed God’s Word through his absolution and his discussion with his barber or with his wife and children, that he was giving his hearers access to God. “When you have said Jesus,” he might have said, “you’ve said it all.”

The second point of “The Theology of the Cross” focuses on how we know this weak and foolish God. You will recall that Paul said in I Corinthians 1 and 2 that “the Jews demand signs,” demonstration or proof, and the Greeks “wanted wisdom.” They wanted a logical explanation. Both Jews and Greeks wanted to know who God is and what He’s like on the basis of a process

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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which human creatures can control through their minds. They wanted to pin God down on their own terms. I think we modern North Americans can understand the “prove it” mentality that both Jews and Greeks had as they wanted and searched for signs—proofs that Jesus was the Messiah—as they wanted logically to understand, grasp, and therefore control what it meant that God had come in human flesh.

Now Luther is sometimes accused of trashing human reason altogether. Not so, Luther believed that God had fashioned His human creatures so that we can learn a great deal through signs and through experiments and through empirical ways of learning. Luther was a strong advocate of what he called “a ministerial,” a servant, “use of rational analysis of human logic.” But Luther also recognized that both human logic and the search for human signs, as useful as they may be in certain areas of the horizontal dimensions of human life, have no role in that vertical relationship with the Creator who simply puts a claim on us by speaking. As we shall see, Luther could be quite anthropocentric, we might almost say, in talking about the role of faith in sizing up and determining God. But that faith he always understood as a gift from God. He never failed to understand that God was in charge also of our hearing Him, hearing His Word, learning of Him. So Luther taught in his theology of the cross that neither the human eye nor the human mind controls our access to God. God controls that access. God creates that access through His Word. God speaks and the human ear listens. The human heart responds to this Word of God in faith. In his catechism, Luther wrote, “I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him. God must step out of hiding, the Deus absconditus must become the Deus revelatus at His own initiative.” And Luther taught, “He does that neither with experimental proof of signs, nor with logical proof of reason. God reveals Himself with a promise.”

By its very nature, a promise invites faith. The theology of the cross teaches that we can know God not through empirical proofs or logical reasoning but only through faith. The faith, which the revealed God creates in us, this faith which He elicits from us through His Word, relies on God’s foolish and weak approach to us in the suffering and death of His Son. So faith, as Luther understood it, is by definition not an objective and dispassionate knowledge, the kind of knowledge which the Enlightenment of the 18th century invented to assure objective, dispassionate human control of all knowledge. Rather faith is active, it is engaged with its object, it is a knowledge, which unites the one who trusts with its object. Knowledge, we might say in that euphemism, in the biblical sense, the intimate knowledge of husband and wife. That’s why Paul used and Luther repeated the use of the metaphor

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of husband and wife for the relationship of the people of God and the heavenly Bridegroom, Jesus of Nazareth. So this faith embraces its object, as the bride embraces the bridegroom, as a child clutches father or mother; for faith rests in knowledge of a word which contradicts our existential logic for hanging onto life, because it teaches that we gain life by losing, and that we lose life by trying to hang on to what we have in this earthly realm. So this kind of knowledge, this knowledge of faith, this knowledge that responds to the promise, carries us out of the realms in which we retain a sense of control over our own destinies. And faith places us at the mercy of God, but it places us at the mercy of God.

Faith (trust), modern psychologists tell us, is one of the most important words in the human language. And Luther recognized that, even if he didn’t have the benefit of modern psychological systems. We will talk more about faith in Lecture 7 when we deal with Luther’s point of departure for his theology in the first commandment and our response to it. But in this faith—that rests alone on the Word from Jesus—in this faith the focus of the believer is simply upon God, upon His Word, upon the Word made flesh, upon the Word that He gives us in the promise of the forgiveness of our sins.

So from Luther’s standpoint, he did not count signs of blessing as a particular sign of God’s presence, though it is important to note too that he wasn’t simply a glutton for punishment. He believed that Christians would suffer, but he didn’t take comfort in his suffering. He was coldly realistic about the evil of suffering in an evil world. And so, bottom line, for Luther neither signs of blessing nor signs of suffering can prove that we are in a saving relationship with God. Christians simply rely not “on their feelings” and not “on external signs” but on the promise of God. Luther saw in the Word of God, as it comes in all its various forms from the pages of Scripture, as it comes in the sermon and in the words of consolation of a fellow Christian, in the promise of baptism and the promise of the Lord’s Supper and the promise of absolution, in all these forms the Word takes, Luther sees the only assurance possible as it comes to us as individual believers, and says, “You are God’s child.” “And nothing [Luther loved to echo Saint Paul] can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:38-39).

The third point of “The Theology of the Cross” focuses on what God did on the cross. He atoned for sin. He swallowed up death, and He reclaimed life for His people. So Luther’s understanding of the atonement focuses on “the impotence” and “the foolishness” of the cross and “the success,” the triumph, that the cross brought by swallowing up death, by “beating death at its own game,” we

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might say, and by claiming life again for His people.

A good deal of scholarly attention has been paid in the 20th century to how Luther’s understanding of the work of the atonement fits into the grand debate that the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén launched as he [they?] paired off against each other—the so-called Christus Victor understanding of the atonement and the vicarious satisfaction understanding of the atonement. We will discuss that subject more in Lecture 11 as we address the work of Christ in Luther’s “Doctrine of Justification.” For now it will suffice to say that in a sense Luther comes up with his own understanding of the atonement, which combines elements of both the Christus Victor motif and the vicarious satisfaction motif in something that scholars often call his concept of “the joyous exchange.” The concept of the joyous exchange is a very simple concept: Life is restored to sinful human creatures who are dead in trespasses and sin only because God has exchanged our sinfulness for Christ’s righteousness. We live only because Christ died with our sins on His back, because Christ buried them in His own tomb. He put them in His tomb, which is the only place in the universe where our heavenly Father no longer looks. The other half of that exchange is that the Christ who has received our sin has given us the gift of righteousness and innocence and life. He shares with us the life, which He had the power to reclaim in His own resurrection. So Luther never tired of saying that “in Jesus wrong is made right, death is left behind for life” because God has His own peculiar way of doing things.

So the theology of the cross presupposes that the cross (death) is the path to life; that it all must be lost, that it all may be gained once again. The final result of this joyous exchange is that we who were buried and raised with Christ in baptism (Luther loved Romans 6 and Colossians 2), we are “joint heirs with Him” even as we suffer with Him and are looking forward “to sharing His glory,” as Paul said in Romans 8:17.

So it is clear, Luther’s “Theology of the Cross” as it relates to the atonement spells out the death of every human pretension to merit. All glory of human effort and work is gone. The theology of the cross spells death to any attempt to make human works a matter of relating to God. It leaves human works in the realm of the relationship between two human beings. Sinners do not control their own destiny. They are dead in terms of the power they have to shape their own lives, at least in any meaningful sense, in any ultimate sense.

So the theology of the cross, as Luther exposed it, announces death to sinners, but it is a death to sin; for it also announces

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our resurrection to new life in Christ. And thus it is the death of death itself. It is an announcement which liberates human creatures from the threat of death, and thus it bestows upon us genuine human freedom. And so Christians should not wallow in guilt anymore, for they have been sent [to?] the cross as guilty people. They should instead exalt in their freedom, to live out their humanity—to live that life that God made them to live in the first place—because their humanity has been restored through the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The fourth point by which we may analyze “The Theology of the Cross” is Luther’s understanding of the daily Christian life. The life of discipleship, of learning from and following after Christ, is a life “under the cross,” as Jesus says in Matthew 16. Our crosses do not save. They don’t save others, and they don’t save us ourselves. They only serve the neighbor. The crosses of daily life, the sufferings we experience in the context of being called to be neighbor to those around us, convey the love of Christ to others in a sinful world of suffering. And so as we “take up our crosses” and follow our Lord (as He called us to do in Matthew 16:24), Luther taught, we live out a life as it must be lived if the good and gracious will of our heavenly Father is to triumph over evil. Only in this fashion has God succeeded at overcoming evil. And again, as we said a few moments ago, neither our possession of blessing nor our possession of the cross determines whether we are in God’s favor. His Word determines that, as it comes to us in its various forms. But we will not be surprised when our faith does not lead us into days of peace and prosperity externally. But rather, when it gives us peace in the midst of suffering, in the midst of the battle against Satan, in the midst of relieving the suffering by bearing the suffering of the neighbor who needs the presence of Christ expressed in our loving hands and in our loving words.

This life under the cross not only suffers externally but there is a kind of internal suffering also for the sinner in us that still wants to struggle against the call of Christ to serve. “Life under the cross,” Luther taught, “crucifies the habits of hell. The strong pruning hook of the law combines with our confidence in Christ’s deadly death.” And so we find no need to defend ourselves, to secure our own lives, to set ourselves up over others as we practice hellish habits. Instead, life under the cross gives rise to the habits of heaven. Faith perceives how God succeeds; faith perceives that God has succeeded in restoring the goodness of life through His own self-sacrifice, His own self-surrender. Faith perceives that God succeeds and triumphs in His submission to human needs, in His suffering, in His freely given willing service for us.

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Christians are always tempted to want to get results from “bearing the cross.” We want to bear the cross so that we can get a quick fix for the needs of the neighbor. Sometimes we don’t even mind bearing the cross as long as we can see some kind of payoff, and see that payoff fairly quickly. But sometimes God in His wisdom permits us only to stand by, not to repair, the lives of those whose crosses we share. Christians may also be tempted to try to bear the crosses of others alone, instead of sharing them with others in the community. Sometimes that’s appropriate, sometimes not, for God has created us to live in community. And sometimes we are called to share the crosses of other brothers and sisters with still other brothers and sisters in the faith.

That was Luther’s insight, an insight that again avoided the glory of human performance either in suffering or in success, as the world counts success. Indeed, Luther understood that the Christian life is a life of continuing sacrifice under the continuing threat of Satan, but a life which triumphs as it goes about proclaiming and living out the Word and the will of God.

Luther’s insights in 1518 came directly out of his struggle toward an evangelical breakthrough. But Luther saw the insights of “The Theology of the Cross” as fundamental to his theology throughout his life. And thus, as his life progressed, as he experienced external harassment and threat (even if not actual persecution), Luther recognized that these principles were key, were critical, to a proper understanding of the whole of the biblical message, so he shaped everything he did in his exposition of the Word of God according to these principles.

I’d like to take a few moments at the end of this lecture to give one specific example of how “The Theology of the Cross” affected Luther’s focus on one aspect of the life of the church in a kind of peculiar way, peculiar at least in terms of the way most Christians have treated the subject of martyrdom. Indeed, martyrdom has been a favorite subject throughout Christian history. The ancient church used martyrs as a symbol for the willingness to sacrifice for the faith, and thus to testify to the importance of the faith for believers. And indeed throughout the Middle Ages, martyrs were hailed as important heroes of the church, and even were assigned (as we recall from our third lecture) roles in God’s economy of salvation because of the merit that the medieval Christians assigned to them.

In the year of the Reformation, a number of Christian authors turned to martyrdom again not as an avenue for pleasing God or an avenue of getting God’s ear but instead as a testimony to the truth of God. But in general, martyrdom was seen purely and

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simply as the evil of Satan, as the oppression of demonic forces. Luther saw it as that too; he made no mistake about condemning those who martyred Christians, Protestants, Lutherans, his followers for testifying in public to the gospel of Jesus Christ. But Luther also saw martyrdom as a good gift of God given to the whole church, and also to the martyr him or herself. Luther praised God for permitting his follower, the Englishman Robert Barnes, to enjoy the gift of martyrdom, and thus to share dramatically the goodness of God as he testified with the sacrifice of his own life.

Even Luther’s followers, who made much of martyrs as well, did not catch this glimpse of Luther’s “Theology of the Cross”—that God comes in impotence and in foolishness, even the impotence and foolishness of giving up one’s life for the sake of the faith, to do His work, to spread His Word, to announce His triumph over evil.

Well, we certainly could point to other examples as well. In all the nooks and crannies of Luther’s theology, this “Theology of the Cross”—of a God who shares with us Himself, but in a foolish and an impotent form, the form of a baby, the form of a corpse, the form of this body raised from the dead, that message, that theology, that proclamation of the goodness of God’s intervention into our world in Jesus Christ—fills Luther’s understanding of the gospel and is reflected throughout his life to his dying days, in the way in which he proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ for the people of his day and age, and hands that proclamation on through his writings to us today.

From time to time in the coming lectures we will stop for a moment to note how Luther’s “Theology of the Cross” is shaping one part or another of Luther’s exposition of the biblical message.