Luther and Liberation

A Latin American Perspective

Walter Altmann, Walter Altmann, Thia Cooper, Thia Cooper, Thia Cooper

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781451482683
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506408033
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

With the approach of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's inauguration of the Protestant Reformation and the burgeoning dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans opened under Pope Francis, this new edition of Walter Altmann's Luther and Liberation is timely and relevant. Luther and Liberation recovers the liberating and revolutionary impact of Luther's theology, read afresh from the perspective of the Latin American context. Altmann provides a much-needed reassessment of Luther's significance today through a direct engagement of Luther's historical situation with an eye keenly situated on the deeply contextual situation of the contemporary reader, giving a localized reading from the author's own experience in Latin America. The work examines with fresh vigor Luther's central theological commitments, such as his doctrine of God, Christology, justification, hermeneutics, and ecclesiology, and his forays into economics, politics, education, violence, and war. This new edition greatly expands the original text with fresh scholarship and updated sources, footnotes, and bibliography, and contains several additional new chapters on Luther's doctrine of God, theology of the sacraments, his controversial perspective on the Jews, and a new comparative account with the Latin American liberation theology tradition.

2

Theology with a New Interpretive Key

2

The God of Life Against All Falsehood of the Idols of Death

The question of God is raised differently, according to various cultural, socio-economic, and political contexts. In developed and affluent capitalist countries the question of God is largely raised in the context of the expansion of atheism. It is not always a well-elaborated theoretical atheism, but rather a widespread practical atheism.

First, society itself is organized without taking into account God’s existence, or at least, God’s interference. This is largely the result of modernity and its rationalism, including most notably its achievements in the scientific, industrial, and technological fields, which seem to suggest that God is a totally disposable entity or, at least, absent for all practical purposes. The God hypothesis was replaced in an ever-greater number of realms of human life.^[1] There is no need for God anymore.

So when someone gets sick, they may count on an impressive battery of devices, medicine, and medical capabilities, which can be done without recourse to God. Of course, it can be argued that given the final outcome and inevitable end, death, all scientific resources fail ultimately. However, this does not alter the fact that, when we are not dead, humans have the ability—ostensibly, we would say in faith—to dispense with God.

Conversely, modern scientific rationality could argue that the God hypothesis cannot annul the inevitability of death either. Death, then, should be combated when possible with all the resources available to human capacity and, when unavoidable, should be simply assumed as the natural and dignified end of a life.

In this context, it might be interesting to take a look back at this question in the socialist world of orthodox Marxist extraction. There, too, it was supposed that technological advancement—and even more, the alleged suppression of social contradictions—would make the God hypothesis superfluous. We could even add the alleged theoretical progress. For “God” had been unmasked as an ideological instrument^[2] of a type of society characterized by relations of production, which was being left behind. That is, in the relations of exploitation of labor by capital, “God” functioned as a corresponding ideological element, justifying the vile reality as an unquestionable fact, giving the exploiters a good conscience and anesthetizing the conscience of the exploited. With the change in the relations of production, to collectively owned means of production, there would be no more reason to have a “God,” so God would therefore disappear.^[3]

In fact, theoretical and especially practical atheism is, meanwhile, spreading in developed countries and also in the countries emerging from socialism in Eastern Europe. In many of these countries, one could even say that in a tacit or practical way, though not in a militated or declared form, atheism covers the majority of the population. The result, however, is somewhat ironic. While the socialist world denounced at length the existence of God as a reflection of the structure of exploitation characteristic of the capitalist relations of production, in the capitalist developed world God is more and more, in fact, effectively set aside as superfluous.

It is obvious that you can find these developments in the peripheral countries of the Two-Thirds World insofar as they have been more and more inserted into a globalized system of economic relations. “Atheism” will then be more evident the more “modern” these countries or segments of their populations are, stronger in large urban, industrial, and scientific settings and among the intelligentsia, which tend to reproduce the developments of the developed world or at least aspire to them. Strictly speaking, this trend can be observed both within the privileged strata and among those committed to social change in developing countries, which still establish forms of practical cooperation with popular segments with religious practices and beliefs, such as the base communities.

I. The Question of God in Latin American Reality

However, the question of atheism, strictly speaking, is not taken seriously in the reality of Latin America. Significantly, it was the developed world, especially in the USA, which advanced “a theology of the death of God,”^[4] a theology that also fleetingly aroused the curiosity of Latin Americans in the 1960s, among the intelligentsia or secularized Christians. It was in fact, a fleeting episode, since it did not have, strictly speaking, greater resonance with reality as experienced by the majority of people on this continent.

For Latin Americans the question of God arises in the context of life and death. Which forces in their reality are represented by God: those that foster and preserve life or those that produce death? The answer, without doubt, is not simple. On one hand, it is undeniable that the process of the Christianization of the continent took place in alliance with a project of colonization and conquest in which “God” functioned as an instrument of death.^[5] Nevertheless, the peoples of Latin America preserve also, in faith and the praxis of piety, a consciousness that God has been wrongly tied to these historical projects and that, on the contrary, God is, in truth, a God of life against death and, in the final analysis, its ultimate victor.

Therefore, in the Latin American context the question is not one of the existence or non-existence of God. The question is rather, whom do we name when we talk of “God”: the God of life or one of the many gods of death? That is to say: the question is not about the existence of God, but about God’s justice. Thus, in Latin America the question has been placed again in the context of the long historical tradition of the true God over against the false gods, or of God over against the idols.^[6]

With these observations in mind we turn to Luther.

II. Luther’s Doctrine of God

When Luther spoke about God, it was not a theoretical question for him, but above all practical, insofar as he reflected from a concrete personal relationship between the believer and his God. This relation of human beings with their “god” is fundamentally characterized by trust and the dedication of their lives.

1. The Revealed God

In the explanation of the First Commandment, in the Large Catechism, Luther shows the essential characteristics of his concept of God:

A ‘god’ is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. As I have often said, it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true one. Conversely, where your trust is false and wrong, there you do not have the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.

The intention of this commandment, therefore, is to require true faith and confidence of the heart, which fly straight to the one true God and cling to him alone. What this means is: “See to it that you let me alone be your God, and never search for another.” In other words: “Whatever good thing you lack, look to me for it and seek it from me, and whenever you suffer misfortune and distress, crawl to me and cling to me. I, I myself, will give you what you need and help you out of every danger. Only do not let your heart cling to or rest in anyone else.”^[7]

We must first highlight in this “definition” that it is not in any way a theoretical, doctrinal concept of God, which then would have to be grasped and accepted intellectually. What we find is rather the description of a vital relationship between human beings and “their god.” Luther starts, then, from the existential idea that every person has in her concrete way of living some fundamental value to guide her, some aim to pursue, some desire to nurture.^[8]

But not only do human beings have a relation with their “god.” Equally—and this is even more fundamental and decisive—God establishes a relation with human beings. According to Luther, in the eyes of the human beings God shows two sides. On the one hand there is the powerful and majestic God, of whom strictly speaking we know little about and is a threat to human beings.

On the other hand, there is the revealed God who is defined in the weakness of Christ, so that by God’s grace God cries, wails, and groans with human beings, specifically with sinners and the powerless—with those who are poor and marginalized, we would add.

The background of this duality is unveiled with the question of where and how we can find the true God, in whom we can trust in life and death. Where, then, do we find concretely that God who establishes a true and trusting faith? According to Luther, the true God is only truly found where and when God reveals Godself. And there, where and when God reveals Godself, faith becomes certain, and no longer needs guarantees given deceptively by reason, sentiment, social condition, or human deeds.

This was precisely the controversial question between Luther and Erasmus, in which the Reformer made a distinction between the Deus absconditus (the hidden God) and the Deus revelatus (the revealed God). “He [God] is present everywhere, but he does not wish that you grope for him everywhere.”^[9] There is one identifiable place where God has defined Godself, where God made use of God’s freedom to act decisively and utter a definite word.

The divine nature is too high and incomprehensible for us; therefore he placed himself in that nature which is best known to us, namely, our [own. . .]. There he awaits us, there he wants to be found, and nowhere else. Whoever shouts at him here, will be heard immediately, for here is the throne of grace, from where nobody is excluded whenever he comes here.^[10]

The place of God’s revelation is therefore christologically determined. In the First Commandment we already find a reference to God’s salvific action. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exod. 20:2). The believers in the new covenant refer to the salvific action, which occurred and was established in Jesus Christ. This is the ultimate reason for th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Overview of Luther’s Theology and Work
• Theology with a New Interpretive Key
• Exercises on Luther’s Ethical Positioning
• Luther’s Legacy and Liberation Theology
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical Passages
• Index of Luther's Writings
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects