Trusting the Word and Nothing Else at All

Luther's Design for Evangelical Preaching

Perry Toso

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532660788
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Preaching is as dangerous and as exhilarating as careening down some class IV rapids. It is dangerous because in the Old Testament, God prescribed the death penalty for preaching one's own opinion when called to speak God's Word. The pulpit is no casual or safe place! But preaching is also exhilarating because God places his creative, life-giving word right into your mouth. And though you don't know what will happen next, something that God appointed will definitely happen when you, the preacher, say what God authorizes you to say.This book is the result of over thirty years of wrestling with God's word. It expresses some of my astonishment over how faithfully God acts through preaching that word.Preaching is God's business. Mostly the preacher needs to get out of the way and let God do the talking. When that is the case, your hearers will tell you about it, and you will be less likely to miscarry in some of the myriad ways listed in this book.Hopefully, Luther's design for the way preachers bring that life-giving word of promise will encourage and promote and, once again, bring the same world-changing power that was let loose in the Reformation.

chapter one

Two Worlds Collide

Dr. Martin Luther testified twenty years after the fact, “I, Doctor Martin, was called and forced to become a doctor, against my will, from pure obedience, and had to accept a doctor’s teaching post, and promise and vow on my beloved holy scriptures to preach and teach them faithfully and sincerely.”2 “In the course of this teaching, the papacy slipped away from me.”3 Not only did his whole world fall apart, but two worlds had collided, and he was the ground of their collision. The collision resulted in almost unbearable terrors and anguish for him, the combination of which he called his “Anfechtungen.” (his terrors, his temptations, his spiritual anxieties)

There was a rupture of the times going on with Luther, says Oswald Bayer. It was a rupture located by the cross of Jesus Christ, whose cross called the old age to a absolute end, while ushering in the new. But when the new age is proclaimed, the old age rears its ugly head most violently. “Therefore, we learn from the gospel to know the devil rightly.” Says Luther4 “Luther’s understanding of evil provided him with the lens to perceive the world realistically. This realistic perspective distinguishes Luther sharply from the harmlessness of modern theologians of love . . . Luther’s life and work, contrary to what modern theologians of love think, is determined throughout by the trials and temptations (Anfechtungen) suffered and the hands of these enemies and by the fight against them.”5

The direct positive result of the way in which he had had his vocation forced upon him, as lecturer of the Bible and preacher of the scripture, was the decisive certainty that it created in his utterance. First, he felt that the command of his superior in the Augustinian order to become a lecturer of divine scripture was God’s own calling, and that call required of him the duty to speak clearly and boldly what he himself found in scripture—even if it was against his monastic vows, or against the hierarchy of the church, or, in the most extreme case, against the received tradition of Church Councils. Second, his arduous labors to speak the word truthfully brought him to trust the warrant of that Word, alone. He was convinced that he had no other calling than to give proper utterance to the Word, as truthfully and candidly as he could. These two convictions shaped the very way he spoke. The decisive certainty with which he spoke was unprecedented, immediately felt, and powerful. This utterance brought upon him the accusation of immense hubris (who did he think he was, the only one in the history of the church who had received revelation?)6 and the undying enmity of the most awesome power of his day including the threat of death.

What brought him to this juncture, to this collision with received tradition? It all began with his original spiritual terror/crisis/temptation—what he called his Anfechtungen. He experienced a direct confrontation with imminent death and judgment in a frightening thunderstorm, during a trip home from school through open country. This led him to cry out to God (actually to Saint Anne) in terror, that if he were spared, he would become a monk. He summed it up later, “I wanted to escape hell by becoming a monk.”7 This vow he proceeded to fulfill with sober determination, against all the objections of both father and friends.

During his early years at the monastery he became familiar with the texts of scripture, memorizing virtually the entire psalm book. Additionally, he read most of Augustine’s work, and became familiar with mystical devotional literature. However, years of work on these things did nothing toward achieving his original goal of either peace of conscience or certainty of faith. The holier his way of life was in outward appearance, the more he despaired within himself. Instead of finding any certainty of salvation through increased personal and moral rigor, the reverse was happening. Now, he was not only tormented by uncertainty, but also by a growing anger toward God. And that exponentially compounded the guilt of his situation. He found no reason in himself not to despair at the thought of judgment.

The cause for this lay in the received teaching of the whole thought world of scholasticism, in which he had been led to trust. This received scholastic teaching included at least three axioms: that the Fall had left some parts of human heart still operative and unaffected including the will; that grace was a supposed possession imparted to the believer; and that the infusion of this grace was supposed to engender renewed human righteousness. Crucially, however, the relation of this righteousness to God’s final judgment upon a person was not open to our knowledge. Further, it was impious to inquire about it. A century earlier, the faculty of Paris had tried to trap Joan of Arc into answering the question about her certainty of salvation in the affirmative. But she gave the doctrinally correct answer to them, that one did not know these things. One simply was required to live in darkness about God’s judgment concerning it, trusting in the mercy of God. Mounting evidence, from Luther’s conscience, was bearing witness in him that the judgment was not going to be in his favor.

More than thirty years later, shortly before his death, Luther describes the in-breaking of a whole new world of belief and thought, which contested all the axioms just listed, and which originated from a rigorous examination of the scriptural warrant.

“A strange burning desire had seized me to understand Paul in the Epistle to the Romans; it was not coldness of heart which had stood in my way until then, but a single phrase in chapter 1: ‘For in it the righteousness of God is revealed.’ (Romans 1:17) For I hated this phrase, “the righteousness of God”, which I had been taught to understand philosophically, from its normal usage by all who teach doctrine, as referring to the so-called formal or active righteousness, by means of which God is righteous and punishes sinners and the unrighteous. But I, who, however blamelessly I lived as a monk, felt myself to be a sinner before God, with a deeply troubled conscience, and could not rely on being reconciled through the satisfaction I could carry out myself. I did not love—no, I hated—the just God who punishes sinners; and I silently rebelled against God, if not with blasphemy, at least with dreadful murmuring: Was it not enough that poor sinners, eternally lost as the result of original sin, should be cast down in pure wickedness through the Law of the Decalogue, but that God would add one torment to another through the Gospel, and even through the Gospel should threaten us with his righteousness and his anger? So I raved on with a wild and confused conscience; and yet I returned time and again to the very passage in Paul, burning with thirst to know what St. Paul meant. Finally, thanks to the mercy of God, and thinking ceaselessly of this matter, one night, I recalled the context in which the words occur, namely: “In it the righteousness of God is revealed . . . as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” Then I began to understand the righteousness of God as that through which by God’s gift, the righteous lives, that is by faith, and that this is the meaning of the passage: through the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed, that is, passive righteousness, through which the merciful God makes us righteous through faith, as it is written: “The righteous shall live by faith.” Then I had the feeling that straight away I was born again, and had entered through open doors in paradise itself. The whole scripture revealed a different countenance to me. I then went through the whole scripture in my memory and compared analogies in other expressions: for example, the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, through which he makes us powerful, the wisdom of God, through which he make us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. As I had hated the phrase “the righteousness of God” before, I now valued it with equal love, as the word which was sweetest to me. Thus in truth this passage of Paul was the gate of paradise for me . . . 8

Several things should be noted here. First, the release from his accusing conscience, which Luther had finally received after all these years of searching, had come from the word of Biblical revelation alone. In fact, it had come in spite of, and in direct opposition to the whole received scholastic world of theological interpretation. This would necessarily almost immediately lead to a direct and fundamental challenge to the current method of biblical hermeneutics. By itself, this would be a momentous collision. I will argue later, that what we now call the Law-Gospel hermeneutic, new with Luther, constitutes the most fundamental Reformation discovery.

A second significance arises from how Luther chose to narrate to us how the collision played out, alerting us to pay close attention to his use of the term “conscience”. Though our current usage has reduced the term “conscience” to a discredited and hopelessly subjective psychological phenomenon (commonly discarded as some Freudian psycho-babble), it was for Luther a non-negotiable, critical expression to denote a huge theological reality. For him, conscience described the venue of our human awareness that, whether we deny it or not, we live “in the presence of God,” before His face, “coram deo.” This entails the affirmation that the verdict over our lives rests not with us, but with another. But that verdict has already been revealed for those who believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was for them. And so, the experience which Luther described here, of receiving the verdict “righteous” from God’s own lips, declared in His Word, became for Luther the central description of the pastoral office which he felt himself called to perform. Preaching delivers the verdict anew to each hearer of the Gospel. Preaching gives the gift. That is, it became his duty, and the duty of all preachers of the Gospel to utter clearly and distinctly this news which delivers our conscience.

The introduction to the 1535 Galatians commentary is as succinct as Luther gets regarding his under...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Two Worlds Collide
• Chapter 2: The Word of God as Event
• Chapter 3: A Very Abbreviated History of the Concept “Free Will”
• Chapter 4: The Objective of Christian Preaching: Certainty of Faith
• Chapter 5: The Reformation Discovery
• Chapter 6: Preaching as the Prosecution of God’s Election
• Chapter 7: Preaching the “Non-Asterisk Absolution”
• Chapter 8: Luther’s Preaching Model—Conscience as “Man Addressed”
• Chapter 9: Toward a “Proper Confidence”
• Chapter 10: Distinguishing Law and Gospel
• Chapter 11: On the Work of the Holy Spirit
• Epilogue: Bearing Witness
• Bibliography