Living By Faith

Justification and Sanctification

Oswald Bayer

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506427133
• eBook ISBN: 9781506427140
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

"Living by faith" is much more than a general Christian precept; it is the fundamental posture of believers in a world rife with suffering and injustice. In this penetrating reflection on the meaning of "justification, " Oswald Bayer shows how this key religious term provides a comprehensive horizon for discussing every aspect of Christian theology, from creation to the end times.

Inspired by and interacting with Martin Luther, the great Christian thinker who grappled most intensely with the concept of justification, Bayer explores anew the full range of traditional dogmatics (sin, redemption, eschatology, and others), placing otherwise complex theological terms squarely within their proper milieu -- everyday life. In the course of his discussion, Bayer touches on such deep questions as the hidden nature of God, the hope for universal justice, the problem of evil, and -- one of the book's most engaging motifs -- Job's daring lawsuit with God.

Chapter Three

The Passive Righteousness of Faith

Death of the Old Adam; Life of the New Human

As a result of the “journey around the world,” the experience of human cultural achievement, Kleist has no firm hope but can only cautiously conjecture that “perhaps the back door to paradise is open.” Martin Luther, on the contrary, tells of a return to paradise that has already happened: “I felt then that I had been born anew and had entered paradise itself through opened gates.”^[1] This new birth and second naïveté were not the outcome of a gracefulness and charm achieved by us. Grace can only be freely granted. It is experienced only as a gift. This justification and righteousness which cannot be attained and won by us is the righteousness of faith. It is neither a justifying thinking nor justifying acting, neither contemplative nor active righteousness. It is a passive righteousness.

The righteousness of faith is passive^[2] in the sense “that we let God alone work in us and that in all our powers we do nothing of our own.”^[3]

“Faith, however, is a divine work within us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God, John 1[:12-13]. It kills the old Adam and makes us altogether different men, in heart, spirit and mind and powers.”^[4] Faith is wholly and entirely God’s work. It is not our own decision, interpretive activity, or construction of meaning.^[5] This is the first and most important thing that we have to say about faith. In its significance for people of modernity we cannot rate it too highly. In this regard the Enlightenment is opposed to the Reformation. Reaching a climax in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment claimed that with the faculties of pure recollection and pure construction it could evaluate even the faith. Or there is at least the claim to discover faith in the self, for example as the feeling of absolute dependence. We humans want to make things by ourselves, including faith, or at least we want to assure ourselves of faith. For Luther, however, faith is solely the work of God. Faith encounters us by coming to us.^[6] We experience it in that we suffer it.

The experience of faith is painful. When Luther spoke about the death of the old Adam, this was no mere metaphor.

He who has not been brought low, reduced to nothing through the cross and suffering, takes credit for works and wisdom and does not give credit to God. . . . He, however, who has emptied himself [cf. Phil. 2:7] through suffering no longer does works but knows that God works and does all things in him. . . . It is this that Christ says in John 3[:7], “You must be born anew.” To be born anew, one must consequently first die.^[7]

The passive righteousness of faith takes place when justifying thinking (metaphysics) and justifying doing (morality), together with the unity of both that some seek, are all radically destroyed. In other words, both metaphysics and morality with their claim to justify our being are brought to nothing by the work of God. God slays, but he does so only to make alive. “The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.”^[8]

We now need to grasp more closely what the death of the old Adam, the “descent into the hell of self-knowledge,”^[9] involves. We then need to ask about the constitution of the life that is given anew. We will once again differentiate thinking from action, metaphysics from morality. Looking at the two components of faith, death on the one side, life on the other, we will first consider the angle of action.

Doing — Morality — Praxis

The need that lies deeply within each of us to prove our right to exist — not simply to be there, but to gain recognition by what we can afford and accomplish — is put to death. This will to achieve and thus to secure recognition by being active and productive has become part of our nature, our second and evil nature. This nature “is very unwilling to die and to suffer, and it is a bitter holy day for nature to cease from its own work and be dead.”^[10]

The reverse side of this death of the old Adam is a supreme springing to life. This is no paradox. When I am nailed down to what I have done and do, and let myself be nailed down by others, I am then profoundly not free. But when I am freed from this lack of freedom, then distance and sense of proportion come with the freedom I am granted, and thus comes the room that is needed for action. Luther can thus extol the supreme vitality that faith brings, the work of God within that slays the old Adam: “What a vital, busy, active, and mighty thing is faith, the faith that makes it impossible not to be always doing good works. It never asks whether good works are to be done, but before one asks it has done and still does them.”^[11] The righteousness of faith that God effects and we can only suffer is a supremely active thing, precisely because of the suffering experience of the divine work. This righteousness is never without works. “Therefore I wish to have the words ‘without works’ understood in the following manner: Not that the righteous person does nothing, but that his works do not make him righteous, rather that his [granted] righteousness creates works.”^[12]

Thinking — Metaphysics — Theory

What must be said about the action of the passively justified has also to be said about their thinking, their theoretical perception of God, the world, and themselves. The justifying thinking that tries to settle the conflict of justifications and to fashion a concept of the “unity” of reality is put to death. This metaphysical approach and conclusion is in league with justifying action and morality. Justifying thinking seeks to mediate and reconcile all things. Its driving compulsion is to prove that everything individual and particular has the general as its basis. This is how it links up with justifying action. In so doing, it becomes ideological, blind to reality. It “calls evil good and good evil.” It misunderstands and perverts the truth of things and relations.

The ideological thinking of justifying metaphysics, allied as it is to morality as justifying action, is put to death in the passive righteousness of faith. Those who through suffering and the cross are born anew as Christians and theologians, the “theologians of the cross,” call things by their right names. “A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.”^[13] A theologian of the cross perceives and says what the real issue is, for the view of God which one seeks with one’s own powers, in which everything would be rounded off under the concept of the one, the true, and the good, has now been shattered in a painful disillusionment. The death of the old nature lies last but not least in the fact that the illusion of a totality of meaning, even if only hypothetical and anticipatory, has been overthrown. Theologians of the cross find in the deeply seated need for justifying thinking the radically evil “imaginations and thoughts of the human heart.”^[14] The human heart as cor fingens,^[15] a fabricating heart, constantly produces and projects in its justifying thinking images of meaning: idols to which the heart attaches itself, stars, models, the goals of good fortune and success. We all have aims of this kind. Our heart attaches itself to them after having fabricated them. That is why Calvin, in accordance with Luther, described the human heart as “a perpetual factory of idols,” a fabrica idolorum.^[16] Concepts of metaphysics can also become idolatrous. Even the teaching of the church and theology can produce idolatrous images out of the divine attributes if we ignore the cross of Christ when speaking about such attributes as power, wisdom, goodness, and righteousness. In Luther’s exposition of the twentieth thesis of the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation we read that “none of us can talk adequately or profitably about God’s glory and majesty unless we see God also in the lowliness and humiliation of the cross.”^[17] Christian theology does not begin in the heights as other religions do; it begins in the depths,^[18] in the womb of Mary and the death of Jesus on the cross. “The glory of our God is precisely that for our sakes he comes down to the very depths, into human flesh, into the bread, into our mouth, our heart, our bosom.”^[19] “Philosophy and the worldly wise are unwilling to begin here and therefore they are fools. We have to begin in the depths and rise up from them.”^[20]

On the other hand, we must not make the cross into a principle, as has happened even within the thinking of theology and the preaching of the church from the time of Hegel’s philosophy. It is still the danger of our age to turn the cross of Jesus Christ into a principle evident to everyone, so that a “natural” theology of the cross emerges. The task in church proclamation and theological reflection is to steer between the Scylla of a natural theology of glory, unmasked by Luther in the Heidelberg Disputation, and the presently much closer Charybdis of a natural theology of the cross. A natural theology of glory and a natural theology of the cross are both forms of natural theology, and they are both perversions of the passive righteousness of faith.

The heart, profoundly evil in its distortion, composes with both religious fantasy and metaphysical concepts “a human notion that some people call faith;”^[21] it speculates. The illusion that arises out of the need for religious and metaphysical justification is so strong that not even the gospel is safe against it. This is as true today as it was in Luther’s time. “By their own powers [they] create an idea in their heart which says, ‘I believe’; they take this then to be a true faith. But [. . .] it is a human figment and idea that never reaches the depths of the heart.” It is an act of consciousness that never reaches into the depths of human existence to save. “Nothing comes of it . . . and no improvement follows.”^[22]

Neither Theory nor Praxis

Luther was perspicacious enough to see that the gospel will not let itself be pressed into a schema of theory and praxis. He perceived that those for whom the gospel is a theory, “a human figment and idea,” are forced to demand that it also be fulfilled in praxis. With the schema of theory and praxis “they fall into the error of saying, ‘Faith is not enough; one must do works.’”^[23] In other words, they think that sanctification must be added to justification.

Faith is neither a theory nor a praxis of self-fulfillment. It is a passive righteousness, namely, the work of God in us that we experience wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the First German Edition (1984)
• Preface to the English Edition
• In the Dispute of “Justifications”
• The Lawsuit about God before the Court of Human Reason
• The Passive Righteousness of Faith
• Faith Comes by Hearing
• Faith and Sanctification
• Faith within the Lawsuit about God — Before God
• Appendix
• Index of Names
• Index of Biblical References