Dominus Mortis

Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of God in Christ

David J. Luy

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451482706
• eBook ISBN: 9781451489590
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Modern interpreters typically attach revolutionary significance to Luther's Christology on account of its unprecedented endorsement of God's ontological vulnerability. This passibilist reading of Luther's theology has sourced a long channel of speculative theology and philosophy, from Hegel to Moltmann, which regards Luther as an ally against antique, philosophical assumptions, which are supposed to occlude the genuine immanence of God to history and experience. David J. Luy challenges this history of reception and rejects the interpretation of Luther's Christology upon which it is founded. Dominus Mortis creates the conditions necessary for an alternative appropriation of Luther's Christological legacy. By re-specifying certain key aspects of Luther's Christological commitments, Luy provides a careful reassessment of how Luther's theology can make a contribution within ongoing attempts to adequately conceptualize divine immanence. Luther is demonstrated as a theologian who creatively appropriates the patristic and medieval theological tradition and whose constructive enterprise is significant for the ways that it disrupts widely held assumptions about the doctrine of divine impassibility, the transcendence of God, dogmatic development, and the relationship of God to suffering.

3

The Suffering of God in Christ

A Sixteenth-Century Breakthrough?

We now turn our focus to the second stage of the divergence thesis’s first tier of analysis. The issue directly in question throughout is Martin Luther’s conception of God’s participation in the sufferings of Christ. A specific appraisal of this conception is crucially important to the divergence thesis as a whole. The core of this appraisal is an emphasis upon the uniqueness of Luther’s treatment of the communication of idioms. Unlike the preceding theological tradition, Luther is alleged to insist upon a “reciprocal exchange” between Christ’s natures. This means that there is a direct participation of humanity in divine properties and a direct participation of the divine nature in human limitations such as suffering. It is this second aspect that is deemed especially important. What may seem initially to be only a small and therefore inconsequential conceptual adjustment turns out to be, as it were, the modern camel poking its nose into the medieval theological tent. For once the predicational asymmetry characteristic of a classical understanding of the communicatio idiomatum is destabilized, an entire constellation of theological assumptions appears ripe for reformulation.

First to go, obviously, is the doctrine of divine impassibility itself, since an impassibilist doctrine of God could not accommodate reciprocal, communicative exchange. This preliminary course correction, however, is but one small part of a much more profound recalibration, which theoretically recasts the nature of God’s relationship to the world. This “recalibration” is precisely the doctrinal dividend advocates of the divergence reception generally understand Luther’s christological adjustment to enable. Because of this christological adjustment, Luther is supposed to clear away space for a more adequate conceptualization of God’s immanent involvement within the created order. The legitimacy of this “reception” depends rather directly upon the interpretive judgment that Luther’s doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum includes a participation of the divine nature in the sufferings of Christ’s humanity.

But does Luther predicate “suffering” of the divine nature of Christ, as divergence advocates are so wont to insist? This is the critical question posed here. At the outset, we must acknowledge that Luther’s understanding of the communication of attributes differs in at least one important respect from many patristic and medieval antecedents.^[1] For Scholastic thinkers of the medieval period, the communicatio idiomatum refers primarily, if not exclusively, to the predication of divine and human attributes to the single person of Christ. Luther often describes the communication of idioms along these traditional lines, but there are also instances where he introduces a second sort of application. In these contexts, the communicatio idiomatum describes the participation of Christ’s human nature in predicates that belong properly to his divine nature. An obvious example of this appears in Luther’s defense of Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper on the grounds that the humanity of Christ could share in the attribute of divine omnipresence.^[2]

The question this chapter addresses is not whether Luther occasionally interprets the communication of idioms as a sharing between Christ’s two natures, but whether this sharing is presented by him as “bidirectional.” Is there, along with the human nature’s participation in the divine majesty also a real participation of Christ’s divinity in the suffering vulnerability of his humanity? Theologically speaking, a great deal hinges upon the arbitration of this question. In terms of Luther’s relation to his context, one may note the fact that, although his endorsement of a divine-to-human communication of attributes is admittedly somewhat “unique” against the backdrop of medieval christological opinion, this view by itself need not destabilize traditional accounts of the doctrine of God. There is nothing outrageously controversial about Luther’s assumption that the human nature of Christ is both passible and mutable. In this sense, the idea that Christ’s humanity could be “altered” or “elevated” in some respects through the hypostatic union does not fall prey to the same theological and philosophical restrictions that apply in the case of the divine nature. To speak of an ontologically conditioning participation of the humanity in the majesty of God initiates no essential contradictions so far as longstanding conceptions of “human nature” are concerned.^[3]

To speak of an ontologically conditioning participation of divinity in the death and suffering of humanity, however, fundamentally contradicts longstanding conceptions of divinity. That is, a two-way rendering of the communication of idioms entails severing a number of conceptual moorings intrinsic to the classically developed doctrine of God, a point outlined earlier. The salient question here is whether Luther endorses, in addition to his ordinary analysis of the communicatio idiomatum as a reference to the mutual application of predicates to the single person of Christ, a one-way or two-way doctrine of communicative sharing between Christ’s humanity and divinity. In what follows, I will argue that Luther clearly endorses a “one-way” communication of attributes, a position that he makes clear by his unwavering proviso that the divine nature does not and, indeed, cannot suffer.^[4]

Passibilist Semantics

Luther often affirms some version of the statement that, in Christ, “God suffers.” For some scholars, this fact alone establishes the emergence of something irreducibly novel within the reformer’s theology. Paul Althaus, for instance, points to a text from Luther’s 1540 “Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity of Christ,” which states: “What Christ has suffered should also be attributed to God for they are one.”^[5] According to Althaus’s assessment, this text conveys a clear commitment on Luther’s part to dei-passionism, and thus entails a departure from the traditional doctrine of divine impassibility.^[6] Althaus is not at all unique in drawing such a conclusion.^[7] The initial plausibility of his interpretation melts away, however, under the heat of closer scrutiny.

A “dei-passionist interpretation” of texts like the one Althaus cites is misleading because it presupposes a degree of novelty that does not exist. The mere application of human attributes to “God” does not represent anything qualitatively new for patristic and medieval modes of discourse. Perhaps most conspicuous in this regard is the well-known Chalcedonian endorsement of the Marian term Θεοτόκος (“bearer of God”), a designation that unambiguously stipulates the application of human predicates not just to “Christ,” but to “God” as well.^[8] This same pattern of predication appears in the more blatant claim of canon 10 of Constantinople II (553) which insists that one of the Trinity has suffered for us.^[9] Those patristic thinkers who endorse statements of this kind, it bears clarifying, intend no implicit rejection of divine impassibility. Theologians such as Cyril of Alexandria may insist, for instance, that God is “wrapped in swaddling bands,” or that “God bleeds” and “dies,” without budging on the underlying presupposition of divine impassibility.^[10]

Medieval authors continue these modes of christological predication. Scholars who emphasize the obvious centrality of the communicatio idiomatum in Luther’s theology have sometimes failed to reflect adequately upon the extent to which this centrality is itself likely a product of the late medieval environment in which the reformer was educated, rather than an innovation of his own fabrication. Fourteenth-century theological discussion, in particular, is rife with interest and rigorous debate over the theory and practice of christological predication.^[11] Insufficient emphasis upon, or awareness of, the intellectual milieu, stretching especially between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, has sometimes led scholars to assign an inordinate degree of novelty to aspects of Luther’s christological discourse that are, in fact, rather prosaic once situated in the framework of a late medieval setting.

Robert Kolb, for instance, avers that Luther’s affirmation of christological doctrine introduces “dramatically non-traditional expressions,” such as: “‘Mary makes broth for God,’ Mary suckles God with her breasts, bathes God, rocks and carries God, and Pilate and Herod crucified and killed God, ‘the infant Christ, lying in the cradle, suckled by the Virgin Mary, created heaven and earth.’”^[12] How exactly the “nontraditional” character of such statements ought to be situated is not something Kolb neatly specifies for his reader. In the context of his main argument, the emphasis seems to fall upon the fact that Luther appropriates a broadly traditional (that is, patristic) Christology, but does so through creative and nontraditional vocabulary.^[13] Thus, Kolb emphasizes the conceptual continuity Luther’s statements have with the Council of Ephesus’s much earlier affirmation that God lay in Mary’s womb.^[14] A few pages later, however, Kolb argues that, for Luther, the divine nature shares in attributes of the human nature, thus registering his ostensible assent to a two-way understanding of the communicatio idiomatum.^[15] The overall thrust in Kolb seems to be upon Luther’s unique emphasis upon the radical union between God and man in Christ.^[16] The dramatic novelty he attributes to Luther’s speech, though, could certainly be taken to suggest the introduction of a foreign element in Luther’s appropriation of the tradition.

Such an implication is pursued less ambiguously, for instance, in the recent work of Johann Anselm Steiger. Steiger calls attention to similar statements in Luther’s writings, gleaned, in his case, from the reformer’s 1539 treatise “On the Councils and the Church” and also from a sermon preached in December of 1525. Of these texts, Steiger remarks: “Since, on the basis of the communicatio idiomatum, all things that apply to the human nature of Christ are also applied to the divine nature, Luther can preach that the Creator was born (nascitur creator) and that the Word of God lay in a manger.”^[17] The operative assumption that funds this analysis is a key semantic equation. Steiger assumes that attributing human predicates to God is more or less identical with attributing those predicates to the divine nature per se. It is this “semantic equation” which leads Steiger to conclude that Luther departs from an axiomatic commitment to divine impassibility.^[18] The inference, however, is logically premature and altogether unlikely once the linguistic complexities of late medieval discourse are taken into account.^[19]

A few examples of late medieval discourse demonstrate rather easily the prevalence with which blatantly human predicates are assigned to God because of the hypostatic union. Petrus of Palude (c. 1275–1342), for instance, affirms that, in Chr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Road Oft-Taken
• Detractor or Debtor?
• The Suffering of God in Christ
• Only the Impassible God Can Help
• Deathless Might in the Form of Mortal Weakness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects