Transfiguring Luther

The Planetary Promise of Luther's Theology

Westhelle

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781532600449
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Luther's theology and practice have inspired and continue to inspire so many across confessional and even religious alignments worldwide, or else excite those for whom he displays a coveted, untamed audacity in living out convictions; it is the fabric, the texture that makes Luther a figura with the capability of being transfigured. Luther's theology--his view of language and understanding of creation, incarnation, the cross; his affirmation of freedom from ecclesial, economic, and/or political encroachments; his eschatology, and so forth--is seen in a new light in societies in which modernization does not necessarily mean secularization and the spirit is not set in dual opposition to things material. The dispute as to whether Luther is a late medieval theologian or a beacon of modernity is rendered largely superfluous when the Reformer is read and interpreted in contexts that do not share the peculiar cultural and political history of Europe, its orthodoxies, its pietisms, its enlightenments, and its secularisms. Transfiguring Luther lifts up and presents the significance of the Reformer--his figure as it is transfigured into diverse contexts, absorbing new contents instead of the traditional bastions that are remarkably in tune with the spirit of the Reformation, thus rekindling it.

Part One

The Genius of Language: Grammar and Rhetoric

1

The Quest for Language

Engaging the Head and the Heart

The time of silencing is over, the time to speak has come.

Martin Luther

The Word in Words

When the mind is at sea a new word provides a raft, wrote Goethe three hundred years after Martin Luther’s time. However, these words could not have been truer for Luther, for the limits of language set the limits of his world. Language constituted the very communicability and linguistic being of human beings.

Martin Luther is celebrated as a virtuoso in the art of translation as well as the architect of the modern German language. This is accepted without significant controversy across the theological and ideological spectrum. While his linguistic adeptness went uncontested, his theological stances, to the contrary, present a different picture. His theology is both championed by followers as well as decried by foes. Such discrepancy in the reception of the Reformer suggests an interesting query. Is the form of Luther’s thought, as rendered in his use of language, independent from the content of his theological contentions? The initial argument here sustains that this is not the case. The form implies the content and vice versa. The creative use of language for the sake of communicating the gospel is tied to Luther’s understanding of the communication of the logos with the flesh. This is best illustrated with an examination of the language Luther employed.

The Reformation movement and particularly Luther were concerned with the recreation of a language capable of giving voice to the voiceless, of turning unarticulated utterances into meaning, of constituting knowledge for empowerment, because the Word communicates in the medium of language(s), idioms. Between the divine utterance of the addressed Word of God and the language of the people we find the cultural equivalent of the distinctively Lutheran rendition of the Council of Chalcedon’s (451 CE) doctrine of communicatio idiomatum, the “communication of attributes or properties,” in all its three classical Lutheran genres in which it expresses itself (idiomaticum, apotelesmaticum, and majestaticum).16 What the communicatio idiomatum means for Christology parallels the relationship between the Word and language: the semantics of the Word are meaningful in the vernacular (genus idiomaticum); the effective deeds of the Word are performed in language (genus apotelesmaticum), and the defiled character of human languages and communication is capable of the sublime Word (genus majestaticum). It did not end there. The reverse, complementary process also was true: The broken and diffident quotidian vernacular finds itself totally present in the majestic Word of God rendering it humble and meek (genus tapeinoticum).

Luther’s understanding of language puts into practice his doctrine of the person of Christ, including the disputes over the Lord’s Supper. This is the practice of the ecclesia, this earthly order of creation that is the space for a “marvelous exchange” to take place. This celebrated christological axiom17 finds its linguistic equivalent in his argumentation during an academic disputation in 1537: “All words are made new when they are transferred from their own to another [semantic] context.”18 The new language (nova lingua) is the result of this transference. It is not an epiphany, an unambiguous manifestation of the divine. Strictly speaking, there is no epiphany in Luther’s theology; the divine manifests itself in debased conditions. And where this communication happens, there is the church. Luther’s understanding of the church as the creature of the Word (ubi verbum, ibi ecclesia) is grounded on this assumption.19 For him, the Word cannot exist without the people of God, and neither can the people of God exist without the Word of God.20 To give it a sharp focus: the question of language in Luther is ultimately about the communication of the Word, and therefore also with the body of the communicative language hosting it. Therefore, to separate the Word of God from the vernacular, or to have a theology of the Word apart from human communication with all the botches of the vernacular is a form of linguistic Nestorianism. This would sustain that the Word attaches itself to human words without becoming the very words spoken in the quotidian argot.

The vernacular with all its limitations, ambiguities, and imprecisions is the host of the Word as Mary carries God in her womb. And the Word is present in the broken vernacular not in spite, but because of its defective character. This defective character in communication theory is dubbed as “noise,” which impairs communication. Gregory Nazianzen’s maxim that “what is not assumed is not redeemed,” finds its linguistic equivalent here. If the Word is not in the “noise,” communication can never take place; Babel would prevail.

The limits of one’s language are not an impediment to the revelation of the Word just as the corruption of the flesh does not prevent it from receiving the infinite. On the contrary, the whole meaning of the Word becoming flesh lies in the very corruption of the flesh. That Christ has been made sin (2 Cor 5:21) is how Paul phrased it, and one finds in Luther the scandalous definition of Christ as maximus peccator. The attempt to make the flesh worthy before it can host the divine is comparable to the cleansing of language from its vernacular “transgressions” in order to make it worthy of the Word. It is no wonder that Luther would find in the contempt shown toward the base vernacular (including his own!) the same attitude he found in his own monastic experience of trying to become worthy of divine righteousness. It is therefore in language and its limits that we will find also Luther’s appreciation of glory dwelling in the frailty of the flesh. Any such an attempt to find a prelapsarian language that is scientifically unequivocal (wissenschaftlich) and semantically univocal (logical positivism) borders on a form of Gnosticism.

It is in the inability to use one’s language or the active suppression of the vernacular’s validity as a vehicle of the Word that Luther would find a correlation to clericalism’s purported ontological difference between those specially called (vocati) and the laity. The result is Luther’s “engaged literature,”21 which is in itself a practice of fighting for language in the very midst of itself. As Luther wrote in a letter to Spalatin early in 1519 “. . . (so it follows) in the midst of common language we have been battling.”22 And the effects of this struggle reverberate in Luther’s own text producing rippling effects of which he is quite aware. In comparing his own language to Melanchthon’s, he praises the latter’s style, logic, and clarity, which he felt exceeded his own. But then he concludes, “I have been born to take up an open fight with the mob and devils, therefore my books are much more tempestuous and belligerent [than Melanchthon’s].”23 It is in the midst of the freedom of language that Luther fights against the oppression of language, against its subjection, against the language of oppression.

It is in the axis between language and oppression that some of the most significant contributions of Luther for the Reformation movement can be located. And this finally encompasses all of his theology. In what...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Genius of Language: Grammar and Rhetoric
• Part 2: Theology Matters
• Part 3: The Planet Luther: Transfigurations
• Part 4: Economy and Politics: The Paradigms
• Conclusion
• Bibliography