Luther and the Stories of God

Biblical Narratives as a Foundation for Christian Living

Robert Kolb

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801038914
• eBook ISBN: 9781441236241
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Awarded the Hermann-Sasse-Preis by the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany

Martin Luther read and preached the biblical text as the record of God addressing real, flesh-and-blood people and their daily lives. He used stories to drive home his vision of the Christian life, a life that includes struggling against temptation, enduring suffering, praising God in worship and prayer, and serving one's neighbor in response to God's callings and commands. Leading Lutheran scholar Robert Kolb highlights Luther's use of storytelling in his preaching and teaching to show how Scripture undergirded Luther's approach to spiritual formation. With both depth and clarity, Kolb explores how Luther retold and expanded on biblical narratives in order to cultivate the daily life of faith in Christ.

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The Whole Life of a Christian as a Life of Repentance

Luther’s Metanarrative

The word metanarrative cannot be found in dictionaries even a quarter century old. The term was invented to designate the framework of the narrator’s thinking and the skeleton for the construction of the stories being told. A metanarrative constitutes a fundamental view of reality; it lays down principles of interpretation; it forms the hermeneutic that guides the composition of new stories and the manner in which old stories are re-presented. It is not only, as a literalist might interpret “meta,” after the story, although it does help the narrator summarize what has been told and indicate to the hearers what they should make of the story. It also takes place before the story: it is a perception of ultimate truth that shapes the narrator’s selection of the stories to be recited, the emphases on various elements within them, and the significance assigned to the story and its parts.

The narrator is first of all the hearer or reader of the story; as one who repeats or recasts the story, the narrator always speaks from one’s own social location. In Luther’s case that meant that he recounted his stories out of his own personal piety and out of his calling to proclaim God’s Word, a calling that came to him as a monk and was intensified by his reception of the doctorate, as a “teacher of the Bible.”[33] Thus the location from which Luther told the story embraced his concerns, as a university lecturer and preacher, to deliver the message of Scripture and to change his hearers’ and readers’ false perceptions of how to live the Christian life, to change their orientation for life into faithfulness to God and service to his creatures. Luther’s concerns certainly reflected his larger social, political, and economic environment, which shaped, limited, and defined his horizon for thinking. This location helped form his expression of what scholars today might label his metanarrative, because metanarratives are always in dialogue with the circumstances of daily life. It provided a path along which he strove to connect God’s revelation in Scripture with the daily life of his contemporaries.

God Reveals Himself and His Human Creatures in History and Stories

Viewing the Christian hermeneutic as narrative or metanarrative recognizes a key part of the biblical writers’ perceptions of reality. They all ground their truth and its expressions in the dynamic, interactive person of God. What all of them have to say relates to the unfolding course of human life, which takes place in the series of happenings labeled “history.” From Genesis’s garden of Eden to the streets of gold over which the saints will tread in the new Jerusalem, the biblical message is grounded in place and time. No biblical writer conceived of the subject matter under consideration apart from the historical unfolding of the story of who God is and what it means to be human.

So it was for Martin Luther. He had no concept of God apart from God in relationship to his human creatures. In April 1518, as he first explained his theology to his Augustinian brothers from across Germany in a meeting held in Heidelberg, he distinguished between God “hidden” and God “revealed.” This distinction formed a part of his “theology of the cross,” which teaches that coming to know God’s true nature requires the crucifixion of human reason’s attempts to fathom the Divine. It also teaches that the climax and apex of God’s revelation of his nature came on Christ’s cross.[34]

Because Luther did not know he was inventing terminology that would be used for generations as technical theological vocabulary, he was not always careful when he used these terms. Thus the “hiddenness” of God is defined in three different ways in his writings. It sometimes refers to God as he exists in human imaginations, refashioned by sinful and thus inadequate, if not rebellious, fantasies about a manageable deity who fits the sinner’s needs and demands. In its first sense, however, it refers to the aspects of God that lie beyond human grasp, in part because the sinful mind is no longer able to see God as he really is, and in part because by definition the creature simply cannot grasp the whole of the Creator. In Heidelberg (April 1518), that use of the term stands over against the “revealed” God, meaning God as he lets himself be known, and lets himself be known by his human creatures precisely through his interaction with them. However, Luther inadvertently muddied the waters by pointing out that God’s revelation of himself takes place in ways that human reason cannot understand (1 Cor. 1:18–25). Therefore the revealed God is hiding from falsely functioning human reason in (from reason’s perspective) highly unlikely places, such as “crib” and “cross.”

This revealed God reveals himself in human history, through the message of the prophets and the proclamation of the apostles and through the written record from both. Kevin Vanhoozer explains that God unfolds his own story in a drama that is composed of word and deed, a drama that actually reveals both who God is and what it means to be human.[35] In this written form, Luther was convinced, God’s people hear God’s voice.[36] Luther moved beyond what medieval theologians understood to be the Bible’s ultimate authority for the teaching of the church within the context of the church’s formal authority to interpret Scripture and set forth its only meaning. He was able to do so because he could capitalize on the rich resources he carefully mined from its mother lode as a monk, as a reluctant but dedicated student climbing the academic ladder from degree to degree, as lecturer and preacher. His command of Scripture and his multifaceted exposure to its contents in the monastery could not help but lead his mind into formulating operating summaries to guide his interpretation, and they arose out of the biblical narrative, filtered through his Ockhamist education, his sensitive spirituality, and his experiences within the church and in the society of his time. His own formulations fulfilled Alister McGrath’s prescription, “The genesis of doctrine [or metanarrative] lies in the uncritical repetition of the narrative heritage of the past,” only if it can be conceded that he did indeed receive the medieval tradition critically in his effort to return to a straightforward repetition of the biblical message.[37]

Gordon Wenham identifies a fundamental presupposition behind the stories in Genesis that helps clarify the significance of Luther’s understanding of the revealed God: the presumption that humankind is “intended to enjoy such intimacy (as described in Psalm 84:2) with God. In the garden of Eden story Adam and Eve and their creator seem to be on the friendliest terms until the serpent upsets it. The Lord worries about Adam’s loneliness. He brings the animals to him, and then having created Eve out of a rib, presents her to him as a benevolent father-in-law would. Their intimacy is perpetuated by them all walking together in the cool of the day. Expulsion from Eden ends this age of intimacy.”[38] Luther certainly shared this presupposition, and God’s efforts to restore that intimacy of Eden in creating faith in Jesus Christ did guide and direct his delivery of the biblical message.

Luther believed that the culmination of God’s revelation of himself and his re-creating, salvific restoration of humanity came in the person of Jesus Christ, truly God and at the same time truly a human being. Christ and his impact on the life of the sinner whom he transforms into God’s child form the center and framework for Luther’s reading of Scripture and communication of its message. Preparing sermons on Genesis in 1521, he comments, “The first chapters of the book of Genesis embrace the full message of the entire Scripture, . . . [which] contains the incarnation of the eternal Son, the mortification of the old nature, and the life of the one who has been resurrected, that is, the new person.”[39] God the Son, incarnate as this human being, Jesus, thoroughly historical, was born, matured, spent time with disciples, died, and—rewriting the history of his human family—rose from the dead, body and all, retaining the scars of his death and the ability to eat fish. But as God reveals himself in history, he is hiding himself from sinful reason by coming in forms that do not match the sinful imagination’s projection of what the Ultimate and Absolute, the pinnacle of reality, should act like and be like. For no one should expect to find God in a crib, on a cross, in a crypt. It is this third use of the “hiddenness” of God in Luther’s usage that sometimes confuses scholars and diverts their view from one or both of the first two. All three are vital for an understanding of Luther’s teaching regarding God.

Luther presumed that the revealed God reveals himself from the beginning—in the beginning (Gen. 1:1)—as a person who is speaking. God creates through speaking, and he begins conversation with his human creatures immediately. When they sinned, the first human creatures heard God, heard his sound as he was walking, apparently to the place where they usually met to converse (Gen. 3:8). When they were not there, he called to them, asking not what they had done but where they were (3:9). The problem was that this God of conversation and community (community almost always involves conversation) wanted to be in relationship with his human creatures, and that involves meeting as well as conversing. Luther made a great deal out of both God’s conversation with human beings and his community with them as he preached (early in his reforming career, 1523) and lectured (in the last years of his career, 1535–45) on Genesis.[40] The entire biblical record that follows rehearses conversations and communications of God with human beings. The only God whom Luther can discuss is God in relationship to his human creatures.

The Creator and His Human Creatures

Likewise, the relationship of the human being to God is at the core of Luther’s definition of what it means to be human. Relationship offers a good vantage point from which to assess how God, his human creatures, and indeed his whole creation actually function and therefore what the foundation or structure of reality is. On the basis of Luther’s exegesis of the Psalms, Brian Brock states, “All creatures, says Luther, participate in a great cosmic web of reciprocal relations. The sun does not shine for itself, water does not flow for itself, plants do not give fruits for themselves; every creature lives by the law of love, sharing freely of itself with its neighbors.”[41] The relationship between God and his human creatures is not only, but most importantly, a matter of conversation. “If God is a speaking God, then we are always in the midst of learning from him what our grammar is about. Language is not simply ‘there,’ but we are learning what it means, and thus what it is, by listening in the form of prayer” and, looking beyond the psalm text on which Brock is commenting, above all by listening to preaching or proclamation in any form. “Language is the place God has given so that he can use it to claim us”[42] and the place where we respond.

The human being is first and foremost a creature of God.[43] In the Wittenberg reformer’s basic instruction for children, they learn before all else that the first commandment of the Decalogue means that “we are to fear, love, and trust in God above all things.”[44] In his Large Catechism this first command of God for his people means that “you are to regard me alone as your God.” Like psychological theorist Erik Erikson more than four hundred years later,[45] Luther defined trust as fundamental to human personality. In contrast to Erikson, Luther applied this observation to the human creature’s relationship to God. Gods of any sort are “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; . . . it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and an idol.”[46]

The distinction between Creator and creature structured Luther’s thinking about both God and the human being. As Jewish exegete Meir Sternberg has observed about the Old Testament record, the Bible “directs much of its narrative energies” “against [a] humanizing conception of the divine order.” Instead, it “inculcates a model of reality where God exercises absolute sway over the universe (nature, culture, history) in conspicuous isolation and transcendence.”[47] But this absolute Lord of creation is, also in Sternberg’s view, a God who desires conversation and community with the people he has made. “God shapes the world plot with a view to getting his creatures to ‘know’ him. Biblical history therefore stretches as a long series of demonstrations of divine power followed by tests of memory, gratitude, inference from precept and precedent, or, in short, of ‘knowledge,’ with further demonstrations staged in reward or punishment.”[48] Luther defined the content of the demonstrations as both divine punishment and the display of God’s mercy and love; yet he also understood that the “metanarrative” guiding human history is above all God’s desire to be known by his human creatures and to enjoy a relationship of love and trust with them. Retelling stories of God’s dealings with his people repeats his promise to be their faithful God in the future, to be the same God for them tomorrow as he was yesterday for patriarchs, disciples, and all their successors among the people of God.

Luther believed that all stories in Scripture occur, as all other events in human history, in a sequence that began with creation and will end with Christ’s return to judge. He “experienced history as a movement or progress in which God was ever active” as he led his human creatures through time. History on the move, as the ever-changing chain of divine and human actions and interactions, has its ultimate purpose, John Headley argues, in bringing human beings “to a knowledge of God through His works.” Even though historical knowledge apart from God’s revelation provides only indirect and often obscure glimpses of God’s presence in the world, God, according to Luther, is present in the course of human events. Based on what Scripture reveals, his people could gather some sense of what he was about through observing these events.[49] Since history “is God’s work,” the historical accounts of Scripture reveal what God was doing in behalf of his people, alongside telling the story of human action, in sin and in trust and obedience toward God. Therefore the reformer’s treatment of such biblical accounts, in commenting on them or in reshaping them with pointed detail, reflects his convictions about both God and human creatures, at the time of the accounts and in his own day.[50] According to Headley, “faith and unbelief” constitute the history of humankind, particularly of the church. “And at the vortex is the Word, this veritable attack of God upon human history” and sinful rebellion against God. This attack creates the church and leads it into the struggle against all that opposes God.[51]

The oft-repeated judgment that “Luther was not a systematic theologian” must be qualified in the light of what has been observed here. He may not fit the twenty-first-century definition of the systematic theologian, and he certainly departed from the medieval model for constructing a theological system, a system governed by Aristotle and Peter Lombard. But Luther worked with the inner logic and coherence of a worldview that flowed from the personal claim he experienced in the Bible, the claim of the person of God upon his human creatures, expressed throughout human history and above all in the incarnation of Christ.

With this understanding of God’s revelation as embedded in history, the Wittenberg reformer fits the Yale school’s systematic theologian Hans Frei’s observation about the long succession of biblical commentators that Augustine also exemplifies: they “envisioned the real world as formed by the sequence told by the biblical stories . . . from creation to the final consummation to come.”[52] The Wittenberg reformer believed, as Frei’s colleague George Lindbeck expresses it, that the Bible is “a canonically and narrationally unified and internally glossed (that is, self-referential and self-interpreting) whole centered on Jesus Christ, and telling the story of the dealings of the Triune God with his people and his world in ways which are typologically . . . applicable to the present.”[53]

That sequence began with creation, God’s act that set the framework for all reality, including the unfolding of human history. In the beginning was God, it is stated in Genesis 1:1, and everything that constitutes reality flows from his saying, “Let there be. . . .” His speaking in Genesis 1 was sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Whole Life of a Christian as a Life of Repentance
• 2 Luther the Storyteller
• 3 Above All, Fearing, Loving, and Trusting in God
• 4 Suffering Builds Faith and Calls to Repentance
• 5 The Life of Faith in Responding to God’s Word with Prayer and Praise
• 6 The Life of Faith in Serving the Neighbor
• 7 Living Well Leads to Dying Well
• Conclusion
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Back Cover