Luther's Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination

By Steven D. Paulson

In this first of three volumes addressing Luther's outlaw God, Steven D. Paulson considers the two "monsters" of theology, as Luther calls them: evil and predestination. He explores how these produce fear of God but can also become the great and only comforts of conscience when a preacher arrives.

Luther's new distinction between God as he is preached and God without any preacher absolutely frightened all of the schools of theology that preceded it, and for that matter all that followed Luther, as well. That fear coalesced in various opponents like Eck and Latomus, but in a special way in Desiderius Erasmus.

For Paulson, bad theology begins with bad preaching, and since the church is what preaching does, bad preaching hides the church under such a dark blanket that it can hardly be detected. He argues that the primary distinction of naked/clothed or unpreached/preached radiates out in all directions for Luther's theology, and shows what difference this makes for current preaching. Specifically, Paulson takes up the central question of all theology (and life): What is God's relation to the law, and the law's relation to God? Luther's answers are surprising and will change the way you preach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781506432977

Steven D. Paulson

Steven D. Paulson is Professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

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Index

Introduction

Truly thou art a God who hidest thyself (Isaiah 45:15)—no one has understood this.

This book interprets Luther’s way of dealing with the hidden God. It divorces preaching from speculation on the grounds of Luther’s evangelical distinction between God without a preacher’s word—naked—and God as a preacher’s word—clothed. God is either without his word, or God is with his word. Whether this distinction of God naked/God clothed was bequeathed to Luther from Ockham’s or Biel’s nominalisms or a German mystical experience or the Augustinian, monastic humility misses the point. Luther suffered the distinction between preached and unpreached liturgically, as the distinction happens to a sinner by direct application of absolution. This happens only through a preacher whose word is finally heard. Of course, those who have not gone through such application of the gospel do not know what God is doing by hiding, but even those who have gone through it often cannot speak clearly about it. They have but cannot say, and so they theologize badly by quickly covering over what forgiveness uncovered. But Luther proceeded to make all theology a distinction drawn in the middle of one’s life, between God naked and God clothed, all the while aware that God is absolutely and concretely one. This rendered theology as opposite the transcendence that sought a wholly other God and made it incarnate, earthly, and practical. The practice, however, at first seems strange.

As Gerhard Forde liked to say, theology is for preaching, not understanding, and especially not for self-understanding.[1] Preaching employs words authorized by Scripture that especially come from the most radical texts, which not only puzzle their readers but truly offend them. The special work of concentrating on the proper distinction between God preached/not preached shows that offense repeatedly is taken in Scripture, as in life, when the two conundrums of predestination and the cross of Christ—or human suffering—are encountered. What happened to Moses when God decided to hide him in the cleft of the rock and pass by from behind? What is Jesus saying to the Syrophoenician woman when he declares to her that he has come for the lost sheep of Israel instead of dogs? What happens to Job in his lawsuit against God? Or why does God tell Abraham to kill his promised son? With whom does Jacob fight at the Jabbok, and why all the silence? Why was Joseph elected by God and then put down in a pit? What does it mean for God to say, Jacob I loved, and Esau I hated?

But it is also necessary for any theologian preparing to preach to ask what in the world is going on between God and those who have no Scripture, no radical texts, or perhaps any texts at all. Even without Scripture, the queries and offense remain the same: What is fate? Why is there evil? What is the meaning or purpose of suffering? What could eternal possibly mean in the face of death? Why is the arc of justice so long?

Why Luther Is So Fascinating

What makes Luther so fascinating in answering such questions and interpreting the offensive texts of Scripture is that he knows where the rabbit holes are when one is devoid of the theological distinction between clothed and unclothed God. He knew how near to grace and death these questions come, and he felt how tragically different life is without a preacher than it is with one. He also learned how to become a better preacher accordingly and could even impart this skill to others. Evangelical teaching is just that, learning how to use theology to get others to preach better in what is, after all, an impossible task: to apply God’s word to the ungodly, while they are yet ungodly. Sinners do not want to hear, and indeed cannot hear. Nevertheless, we preach knowing that both the art and science of the thing depend upon how God marvelously and frighteningly ceases being unpreached and speaks to us. Now, where do we begin this enterprise?

Theology’s basic distinction is not an idea before it is a pronouncement. Before thinking can grasp something of this monster, and before any action can be taken upon its discovery, the vital difference between a naked and clothed God is first heard, then felt. Indeed, no one is born with a preached God. No one can live without suffering evil, and without fail one type of theology or another emerges from that initial experience. A theologian is in fact made by suffering, but suffering itself does not ensure the quality of one’s theology. Suffering only produces flight, and fleeing does not guarantee finding refuge. Still, we do not teach that those who suffer are so blinded by fear or anger that they must be delivered from their malady before they dare address the very God who is both the cause of flight and its destination.

The first response to such suffering is to use what is nearest to hand—the heart’s quest for happiness—as a divining rod to lead one out of suffering to peace and joy. What makes me happy? How can I pursue and find this elusive thing? Yet, we quickly learn that this guide proves untrustworthy, and the wild goose chase that ensues from such Epicureanism leads inevitably to seeking shelter in the single most glorious, beautiful, and truthful thing anyone can imagine—the holy law. It makes no difference if this sheltering law is found inside the heart or on external tablets of stone: suffering causes flight, and flight eventually seeks comfort in the law whether one is Jew or gentile, slave or free, male or female. Religions of all sorts are constructed around this search for God’s holy law, and Christianity is merely one of its primary practitioners.

Luther takes this malady and vain searching very seriously, so that suffering is not only truly felt by a theologian but God is not separated from it intellectually, morally, or in terms of truly divine feelings of wrath or pity. Yet, Luther’s treatment for this discomfort is quite the opposite of normal religion, which either seeks an end to its suffering in happiness and fulfillment within the holy order or settles for Stoic indifference to pleasure and pain by harmonizing with the one, divine law of reason above flesh despite what it does to us individually. Luther took the opposite path from Epicureans and Stoics. Rescue from suffering comes not in finding this eternal law but being freed from it.

So, Luther treats our human feelings as central, but he does not neglect doing, acts, or works, although he deals very strangely with all of these because he learned to treat them outside of the law altogether. The doing that interests him is detached from what everyone else considers to be a worthy act. Luther is interested in the doing or act of preaching, or its twin, hearing the word of God. Suffering and evil are dealt with by the act of preaching, which at first seems painfully inadequate, especially when we think of God’s wrath and predestination, which causes these maladies in the first place. Telling a dying or despairing man that he needs a preacher will not be met with joy. But Luther is intent upon addressing evil, predestination, and suffering with just such an apparently worthless act as preaching.

Neither is thinking sequestered from Luther’s treatment of God’s hiddenness. Thought plays an important role in what a preacher actually preaches. Here, the thesis of the book can be stated simply: you will either have God unpreached or preached; you will either be left with a speculation or a promise. The difference between these two makes all the difference between knowing or not knowing, patience or impatience, hell or heaven, life or death, law or gospel. Absurd as it sounds, the difference between fate and chance, predestination and damnation, joy and despair, death and life depends entirely upon a preacher. God could not be more completely hidden than that, because it means that God is not the law that everyone assumes and hopes for, and God’s freedom comes to a creature through a creature in the simplest form of a word that promises forgiveness. God is an outlaw, and so both dangerous and surprisingly free.

Speaking for God

Normally, the problem for theology appears to be transcendental: How can one so small as a creature speak of the divine Creator who is so large? How can the finite broach the infinite? How can the many participate in the One? How can God’s attributes of mercy and justice unite? In light of transcendence, human words appear bankrupt, and silence or restraint from calling on God’s name appears to be the pinnacle of holiness. The best honor I can give God is to not use God’s name, so small and unholy am I! Luther’s approach reversed this direction for theology by making what is said about God or even to God into the lesser matter compared to speaking for God. The preacher is God’s mouth. Theology routinely rules out such daring language except for those who clearly stand outside the normal order of law, like prophets or mystics who eat locusts and wild honey and care nothing for worldly power. Yet, while speaking for God is not exactly democratized by Luther, it is truly eschatologized as in Peter’s Sermon at Pentecost: And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy (Acts 2:17 and Joel 2:28), or as Paul put the same point: But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for ‘their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world’ (Rom 10:18 and Ps 19:4).

Most theology begins with the paucity of words compared to things and ends in a dribble, as in Augustine’s rumination, It is not easy, after all, to find any name that will really fit such transcendent majesty[2] (for whom the eloquence of words was great, but the eloquence of things—res—was immeasurably greater), or Wittgenstein’s Whereof we cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.[3] Luther reverses this transcendence, beginning at the end with the power of the words of a preacher. The nearness, presence, and speech of God then become the fascination—not silence. Preachers stop mumbling inadequate names for God and, rather, boldly speak for God in a verbal flood that goes to the ends of the world.

God Actively Hides

But at the same time that God’s transcendent hiddenness seems to wither and preaching comes out in full force, God’s hiddenness also seems to swell for Luther. Of course, in dealing with God, one deals with someone or something that is invisible and high, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. In life generally, and in Scripture’s bold letters, God is not only invisible as Spirit but actively hiding from us. He refuses to be found by those who seek him, as the psalmist cried: Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression (Ps 44:24)? Theologically, the mere adjective hiddenness becomes the more substantial verb hide—and the issue of what God is doing with us is joined at a much deeper level: I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured. And many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’ (Deut 31:17).

Transcendent God, who appears to be eminently discoverable (otherwise why would I bother seeking?) suddenly refuses to be found. This situation creates an insoluble offense at the moment one would expect God to be at his most appealing. Reason tells us that God must be the highest good we can humanly imagine, and that high goodness is invariably taken as God’s own law. Humans are supposed to have an innate amor iustitiae—a love of the most salutary doctrine of all life that orders and directs all things to their proper ends. One imagines such a highest good is also the most desirable and beautiful thing possible. Hemingway’s poor waiter who knows nothing and believes less nevertheless puzzles over what makes his café irreplaceable compared to the many bars of the town and concludes that in it he has a clean, well-lighted place.[4] In the middle of suffering and chaos, there is a place where order can be found—the love of justice. Even if law is no longer believed to be found in nature itself, then humans are bound to manufacture order in some little corner of the world in order to thrive—a clean, well-lighted place. But Luther found in life, as in Scripture, that at the moment we most desperately seek him, God feels oppressive and hides by saying absolutely nothing. The law is not so easy to love, and the silence in times of need transgresses every predicate we would attribute to a God—love, justice, ubiquity, power, and the like. When we need it most, neither law nor God is appealing; we have no recourse to a deep well of love for justice, and neither law nor God seem to care enough to change our situation.

Double Offense and Single Defense

The offense of God has two spear points that pierce souls and kill. One is that God not only foresees these troubles in our lives but foreordains them—otherwise he is no real God and there would be no use in pursuing him as a refuge. But that only means there is no refuge at all, since God is not the solution to our problems but their source. The tip of this spear comes when we are struck by the necessity of predestination—God chooses Jacob and not Esau—and so within our suffering we seek some sign for what God thinks of us. But the signs point only to damnation and nothingness. God doesn’t tell me what he is doing or why. He seems to be more against me than for me. My innocent suffering tells me that I am not only alone in the world but under attack by my Creator. So the mind is driven to speculate in the void of God’s silence, which speculation is not reserved for Christians or the especially religious. God owes me at least an explanation, if not relief, but neither explanation nor relief is given.

The other soul-piercing comes especially for those who have heard the story of Jesus Christ. They are not helped by this Christology, but matters are made worse. Here one must deal with what the Father did with his Son on the cross. As impudent theologians put it—it is a case of divine child abuse! Then one is led to wonder what will become of me if God has so abandoned his own, beloved Son? Even worse, the cross excites the inevitable attempt by its hardiest warriors to love the cross as a last-ditch effort to align with God’s unusual, negative, paradoxical, counterintuitive way of operating. Here hiddenness and negativity join together as a method, a queering, a path to follow that actually allows one to agree with God’s damnation or his silence as something greater than words can bring.

To address these divine offenses, the law is pressed into singular service. The offense of predestination and cross is met consistently with heroic efforts to explain why God hides according to the abstract rules of the universal, eternal, objective order of the divine law. In light of this law, one is allowed to speculate that if the law exists, as it surely does, then the possibility of doing whatever it commands must hypothetically exist as well—either in a golden time before sin or in the imaginary holy kingdom of the future. God would be irrational to give a law that cannot be kept. So God’s plan is assumed to be the law, given in the hearts of gentiles and even written on tablets of stone for his chosen Israel. Rather than be reduced to proclamation of the simple gospel, the flight from God’s wrath is treated by an explanation of suffering, evil, death, wrath, and silence that makes both history and ideas into a form of theodicy, as we find imperially in Hegel: our method is a theodicy, a justification of God . . . the recognition of the positive elements in which that negative element disappears.[5] This explanation always ends the same way: that person is pronounced free who freely, willingly, lovingly participates in the divine law—theoretically for the likes of Leibniz, or concretely in the liberal state for Hegel.

Theodicy explains evil by means of the form of the good, eternal law. In its raw form, this is taught as a doctrine of divine retribution—an eye for an eye—suffering is punishment for sin. People often apply this to themselves, but it can be done for them by priests or ministers as well, in which case God is understood to hide in order to punish wrongdoing. But in most cases, especially among Christians, this notion has been refined by a teaching of grace that says God does not punish so much as humble in order to teach us a love of God for nothing, that is a grace without fear of punishment or coveting reward.[6] The morality of rewards is shunned for the morality of the needs of the poor, or fellow sufferers, in which we surrender our own suffering to God’s greater form of love that refuses to conform to lowly human notions of justice. Here, God hides in order to gradually conform your will to his, to make his gracious, loving law into the true form of joy once the legal process has removed your own personal desires of gain and greed.

Theologians typically project these approaches upon Luther to say that he has two incompatible, but perhaps necessary, forms of divine hiddenness that mark both his failure as a systematician and his prominence as an existentialist provocateur. God hides in one way in the incarnate Christ as a strange revelation, and in another dark and brooding way outside of Christ, where God is unpredictable and apparently even unjust. Brian Gerrish notoriously called these two types Hiddenness I and Hiddenness II, which unnamed Luther’s own clear distinction between unpreached and preached.[7] Luther’s way of teaching divine hiddenness therefore becomes especially provocative at this point. He ceased explaining suffering, which was always a way of starting with God’s law and conforming the human will to that standard. He noticed that the law, with its conforming explanation, was not at all what God desired to be applied to the seeking sufferer but rather a separate and opposite gospel, or good news, who is in fact a person and not law. This gospel was to be preached to sufferers in the form of the church’s true treasure—the forgiveness of sin as the declared, present, personal promise of Christ. From an unpreached God, God became preached. From silent hiding in naked abstraction, God hid oppositely in the fulsome words of a preacher: I absolve you. Thereby God not only spoke but said precisely what the law did not: I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins (Isa 43:25). Luther called this a preached God, clothed in his word, who came not as an explanation for sin, evil, and predestination by means of the law, but by a proclamation through means of the absolution that creates out of nothing.

Luther’s Freedom

Luther actually became sick from the way theology had been done to him, as it has been done since its inception in the garden of Eden. Instead of attracting people, God offends them, who then flee from God. In this plight, priests and teachers are sought who will defend God from ignominy and bring back the offended to his fold. Indeed, that is the bulk of Christian preaching presently: God is not to blame, you are. Two perennial charges must then be answered in order to convince people to believe the gospel: that God fecklessly allows evil and predestines foolishly. Both are transgressions of the law and reason proceeds to prosecute its case accordingly—for or against God. Hiddenness is then construed as the vexation of having God at odds with his own law. To resolve this conundrum, and make God desirable again to law-abiding folks, theology works with what Luther calls much sweat and toil to excuse the goodness of God and accuse the will of man.[8]Deus absconditus is then used to say how God allows/causes evil in order to maintain his holy law, and therefore, how predestination of one over another is justified in the end according to that very divine law.

However, Luther revolted from this theology. Suddenly, God hiding was freed from the law, and so became the preaching office in which God actually elects all the wrong people, like Jacob rather than Esau. For Luther, predestination and evil are pushed forward and even done by God rather than excused. But who can stand for this? Only one whose God is not the law. In that case there is no other God than Jesus Christ, especially not a God in naked, secret majesty who won’t quite reveal his secret recipe for who gets elected. But to have only Christ as Lord is none other than to stop excusing God for evil and predestination by proving that he exists, that he is not evil, and that he does not actually choose immoral people immorally. Luther finally said, no more of that theology for me! But his new theology is beyond strange. Instead of excusing God, one actually does what God does, pushing evil and predestination forward. The preacher becomes Christ by electing God’s evil ones without using the law at all, and in blatant disregard of its statutes. So Luther concluded, I have no other God than this man Jesus. I say what he says to the undeserving people he says it to—while they hate Christ for saying it. This is a very different and offensively hidden God, whom one stops excusing and starts speaking for unconditionally, irrationally, offensively, and obliviously in the word put in particular things and applied to sinners—most insanely in baptism. This hiding of God then takes shape in life and worship as a slogan: Flee from the naked God! Flee to the clothed God!

From this follow a series of breathtaking revelations or enlightenments. God wants not speculation that exonerates him but proclamation that pushes forward his offensiveness. Faith is not coming to knowledge of oneself and God in relation to the law but is the result of a preacher applying predestination to a sinner in the present. The law’s role in salvation then becomes apparent and opposite the normal attempts to explain God’s hiddenness within the compass of law. Luther followed Paul’s point literally: For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression (Rom 4:15). The literal, or letter, kills. But where is there no law? How can such a no-thing be found? The law seems as ubiquitous as God himself. But Luther learned to make an apparently impossible distinction: one either has God with the law and no gospel, or the gospel and no law. There is no synthesis of these. Where the law is, so is God’s wrath. Where the law is not, there is no sin, and so no wrath. The trick is then to find precisely where there is no law.

It was not just God’s abstract freedom from all things (including law) that mattered to Luther, or how the will of God rules over his divine mind (thought), but how God became free in the crucifixion of Christ. Free God is not just a divinity on a lark outside his law, like an irrational tyrant or outlaw cowboy, but is God’s opposition to his own law at the crucial moment of its final judgment in his Son. There is a great, cosmic duel that is no less than God opposing himself that makes God an outlaw not only for himself but for us.

This means God’s omnipotence is not just a matter of ordering things according to the law but comes in the contrary form of omnipotence connected to his promise and our faith in that promise. There is the greatest difference between a legal omnipotence and the gospel omnipotence. Because of this gospelomnipotence, Luther was not forced into the perennial theological project of fitting a free human will secondarily into the primary acts of God’s all-working will. Suddenly, the myth of the free will was extricated from what otherwise is an endless, circular argument that humans are forced to make about God’s power in weakness that theoretically provides room for human response to God’s gift, or to the human necessity to decide to accept God’s predestination, or at least to participate in the joy of the law (rather than its threat) in the form of love of the law (amor iustitiae). Instead of this dream of free will (working side by side with God’s mercifully truncated will in the form of the law), Luther simply listened to the Holy Spirit, who assures of only one thing: when God promises, he does not lie.

In light of the gospel, God’s omnipotence ceased being deadly, tyrannical, and fearful. Luther heard God’s words as two very different kinds, the law that kills and the Spirit, or gospel, that gives life. See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand (Deut 32:39). Luther’s freedom was not simply a matter of some nominalist theologians favoring God’s will over God’s intellect but was rather much more concretely and profoundly God working death and resurrection in a sinner at a particular moment—called preaching. The difference between life and death is the difference between God not-preached and God preached. Of course, this preaching concerns human beings personally or existentially, but more importantly this concerned God as God—who he is, what he does, and especially what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit say to each other before all time, as well as to creatures in the beginning. God’s hiddenness became a real issue of the doctrine of God, not just a backdoor way of doing anthropology from the limits of human will and knowledge. Who is God, and what is he doing in the midst of evil and predestination—especially in the crucifixion of his Son?

Dangerous Luther

Luther’s new distinction between God as he is preached and God without any preacher absolutely frightened all of the schools of theology that preceded, and for that matter all that followed Luther as well. The basic matter coalesced in various opponents like Eck and Latomus, but in a special way in Desiderius Erasmus. Luther saw in Erasmus what lay at the heart of all opposition to God’s absolute mercy. Erasmus had worked himself into a tight corner by insisting that both God’s will and intellect were none other than the law. What safer assumption could a theologian make? In that case, what offended Erasmus most was that God, in sending a preacher, was electing one and not another—the old problem of predestination, but now intensified inordinately by Luther’s election in view of proclamation. God chose Jacob and hated Esau by means of his preached word, and what really stuck in the humanist’s craw was that God simply hardened Pharaoh’s heart without any regard for Pharaoh’s free will. God acted outside the law by ignoring the law’s founding assumption of human free choices of will. Did this not reduce the human to exactly nothing but an instinctual animal, and God to a thrower of dice?

For this reason, Erasmus thought Luther would have done better if he had opened wide his window of impiety and tossed out the innumerable sloths of the Christian church with their malice and incurable propensity to evils than to preach publicly and carelessly to the mob concerning truths that mortals cannot bear.[9] Indeed, the divining rod for understanding Luther and his free, open preaching is to see why he posed such danger to so many like Erasmus. That is, to consider Luther horns and all when it comes to the matter of the divine law.

Luther, it turns out, knew very little about God generally. He truly adhered to the platonic, apophatic (negative) sense that God—at the core, in his oneness—is mostly unknown, especially concerning the terms that Scholastics liked to explore. But dread over Luther’s Deus absconditus has always come in the fact that the very little Luther actually does know about God he knows too well and too confidently. It is Luther’s certainty of God’s word that bothers most theologians about Luther. In preaching the gospel with such alacrity, Erasmus thought Luther had over-stepped the wise Plato’s basic rule, that what is above us is no concern of ours. Luther’s first trial, before Cardinal Cajetan, concluded the same thing, that Luther’s unchained, bold absolution (authorized by Christ himself) would actually create a new and opposite church to that of the Vatican and the schoolmen. The papacy would be unnecessary for salvation, but even worse, so would the law! It would be bad enough to attempt to remove the pope, but certainly Luther could not be tolerated for removing the law. Everyone seemed to agree that Luther had some point to make regarding the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but then it seemed that things went too far, so that Luther posed a danger to the church and to every person’s piety with his absolutely certain faith in an outlaw God. Consequently, Luther seemed to open a window to impiety, and it appeared that many would follow him into an abyss outside the protection of the church. Even his closest friends in subsequent Protestant theology warned people away from Luther’s wild language of God’s hiddenness in order to preserve something they still found worth preserving from the Reformer.

What exactly is the danger posed by Luther to churches, states, and persons? What window to impiety did Luther open that so many rush to close the minute a fresh breeze enters? The answer can be given in our banner sentence from Luther:

God must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty, for in this regard we have nothing to do with him, nor has he willed that we should have anything to do with him. But we have something to do with him insofar as he is clothed and set forth in his Word, through which he offers himself to us and which is the beauty and glory with which the psalmist celebrates him as being clothed.[10]

How is it that we are to refuse having anything to do with God naked and speechless on the one hand, closing our eyes and fleeing, and then on the other hand, how are we to have so much to do with this same God when he is clothed in his Word? Luther found that what we need in theology is not humble silence before an inscrutable God but a reversal of God’s hiddenness that happens only when we hear Christ with the full confidence that we are seeing and hearing the Father, and thus become completely wrapped up and hidden in Him.[11] Then, predestination ceases being terror and becomes sweet (as the mystics say). Then God stops being hidden from us, and we are hidden in him. We find refuge in him, Luther learned, only by hearing Christ speak to us in the mouth of the preacher.

How is it that God can be so detestable and unknowable in one place, without any word, and then become so beloved and certain in another—with his word? Indeed, the world is so confused about how it is that God is to be feared and also loved—as Luther taught in his Small Catechism on all the commandments—that they would sooner try ignoring God or make him over into a better image of themselves than attempt such contrary faith. However, Luther learned that we are not to put fear and love together but learn how to separate them as far as the East is from the West. What heart can accomplish that? None. But this division can happen to us from the outside. We cannot change ourselves, but we can be changed—without any of the tools that we assume are necessary for such change (like a will pursuing a goal or a mind choosing between desires and precepts).

Such change depends upon getting a preacher, and so then does one’s eternal life. This preacher is the offense. To any enlightened individual who has toiled for a whole life to be autonomous, to say nothing of a good humanist who believed that the doctrine of God concerned God’s moral agency and human free will, what worse thing could one hear? Consequently, Erasmus hated the gospel. Luther recognized that Erasmus’s very kind and measured argument was actually the well-spring of all rebellion against God. Erasmus hated the thought of an illegal, violent struggle of faith that expelled any dream of joyful obedience to the law. He especially hated the thought of waiting for a preacher for his salvation. What kind of God would elect by such an immoral means?

After all, the human will is bound by one intractable desire: that God not only use the law to judge but be the law in his essence so that all death, all suffering, and all the irrational and unthinkable things God allows can be explained in one simple sentence: the law required it. Then we could say what Hegel did: I looked at history rationally, and it looked back at me rationally.[12] Form, order, sense, intellect, wisdom, love—even  God’s  own  self—used  everything  and  everyone  for  the purpose of fulfilling and perfecting this law (including his own Son’s death on the cross). The Logos was the law from the beginning, and will be at the end. What Kant called the liberal way of thinking, has to do with liking what otherwise the commands formerly taught through fear of punishment. Amor iustitiae—modern, liberal, humanist freedom is supposed to be learning how to love the law. This especially means loving the cross of our own suffering along with that of Christ, so that the law as an unchanging order lying in the nature of things, is not to be left up to even the creator’s arbitrary will to decide its consequences.[13] The law is repeatedly offered as the reason evil happens, and the reason that God’s predestination is not to be feared, since even God cannot exercise a will outside that very law’s unchanging order. All that liberal humanism, which is already operating with Erasmus, asks of its practitioners is to love the cross—and thereby love the law above all.

Power of Preaching

By objecting to this answer of evil and predestination by the law, Luther abandoned all the various Scholastic and monastic theologies. More than that, he utterly changed preaching by setting out the difference between a command and the promise of forgiveness. The keys to the kingdom, which were always there since the first sin of Adam, were unholstered and employed directly to the suffering and brokenhearted without any hesitation or mediation by the law. Then theology was set not as theodicy—an explanation of evil, sin, wrath, death, predestination—but as the thing that would actually eradicate theodicy in the spiritual kingdom by electing sinners right there and then while they were yet ungodly. Explanations come after the fact; proclamation makes the fact. With this, the power of preaching was unleashed from its Babylonian Captivity by the very church that was supposed to enable it but had instead truly become preaching’s obstacle.

Bad theology begins with bad preaching, and since the church is what preaching does, bad preaching hides the church under such a dark blanket that it can hardly be detected. It stunned Luther to think of being raised in the church himself and then taking on the greatest work the church provided in the monastery, but somehow the church failed to teach him how to use the keys to the kingdom of heaven given by Christ. Yet it happened, and so Luther refused to submit to an authority—church or state—that put itself where only the absolution belonged.

Luther’s work first had to clear the deck in the church, exposing bad preaching (and the systems and institutions that required that bad preaching) to public scorn. Then, he replaced this failure with true preaching. Bad preaching has an old, addictive habit that Luther called speculation. Speculators try penetrating God’s hidden essence in order to discover an elusive assurance that supposedly lies beyond the actual, earthly experience of the law. The law threatened and accused, but speculators assured everyone that joy in obedience was just around the corner. Those who did not feel God’s love in the law were told it was in there hiding, if they only knew where to look, and so they were to keep digging.

The trick to finding a blessed, non-accusatory law was to think of the positive laws that we have come to know on earth (and under which we suffer) as merely imperfect instances of the perfect. Then, at the proper moment we were taught how to negate them, which promised the counterintuitive effect of raising us through thought to the eternal, pleasing, non-accusatory form laws must have eternally in heaven—in the imaginary, unified, and simple mind of God. The law was taught as the church’s point of contact with God, the cataphatic (what or who God is). From this positive law’s experiential limits, the means of transcending to God outside our reach was possible—the apophatic (what or who God is not). Law reveals human sin and divine glory simultaneously, and the distance between sin and glory became the stuff of sermons—how to climb the ladder to God by first positively engaging ecclesial law, then learning how to negate that law insofar as it accused us, causing pain, suffering, and doubt. In negating in this way, one would be catapulted into the eternal rest of God’s being, or even to transcend beyond being itself to where the law mystically and freely gave life rather than demanded it.

Evangelical Affirmation and Negation

Luther once described the situation this way:

In his dialogue concerning being, Plato disputes about God and declares that God is nothing and yet is everything. Eck followed Plato, and other theologians also said that the affirmative definition is uncertain but the negative definition is absolute. Nobody has understood this.[14]

The reason no one understood negation as absolute is that they overlooked what a word from God can do, and in particular what the word of the gospel did that the law precisely could not do: the gospel word justified a sinner, or elected the non-saint, the opponent to God, unto eternal life. Theologians overlooked this word because they knew only the one sort of word of law that was subsequently found in every corner of life. In Luther’s terms, they had no preacher. They had a mentor, perhaps, or a guide who used the law for navigation. They had a school teacher, but no preacher. So God became a silent, imperious law that was deemed the greatest of all goods, but practically speaking one always felt exactly the opposite—God’s law did not seem like the greatest of goods. The promise of the law never proved itself in the end.

After all, what did Plato know but the law? It is the most salutary doctrine of life that is quite open to all—if they cared to look. Law cannot quite be known in its original unity, but that one unitary thing must somehow be ubiquitously present nevertheless.[15] The law is the presence of the always absent, the absence of