Luther's Outlaw God: Sacraments and God's Attack on the Promise

By Steven D. Paulson

In this third of three volumes addressing Luther's outlaw God, Steven D. Paulson says that readers will embark on the deepest, hardest, and most glorious of all God's ways of hiding: God hiding a third time in the preached word or sacraments. The third time is the charm, not because humans finally awaken and "get" the essence of God. God's preached word is not an act of human understanding. It is a purely passive experience of receiving God wholly and completely in the absolving word that comes through the lowliest means of a sinful preacher. Not only does this word come through a creature to a creature, but through a sinner to a sinner.

The difficulty with grasping all of this is that God works entirely outside his divine law--an outlaw God. Luther is the one who saw this more clearly than any other, because it happened to him just this way. The preacher got a preacher, and the sacraments that had once been organized by a legal scheme were set free to reveal and bestow God in the most hidden place of all. How much more hidden could God be than in water, bread, wine, and the mouth of a preacher?

Paulson's grasp of historical, theological, and hermeneutical scholarship is on full display in this volume, but always in service of proclamation of the gospel. Readers and proclaimers: prepare to be provoked, enlightened, and inspired.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781506469256

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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Introduction

Everyone knows God hides, yet why God hides is fiercely disputed. No wonder, since the answer is a matter of death and life. Humans are not neutral seekers of God’s mysteries, but are under siege and necessity from the beginning. As Augustine exclaimed in his Confessions, My heart is restless until it rests in Thee, O Lord. Life is an arduous journey—but to where and why? Does God require that we find his secret things in order to find rest? Or is the opposite true—that God hides from us precisely so he will not be found? Perhaps humans are meant to remain humans and not gods, in which case inquiry into things that are above (as Plato put it) is none of our business. Perhaps the holy and unholy should be kept separate. Perhaps the limits of our knowledge of God simply reflect a truth of nature that God is so far above humans that he does not actively hide, but is merely hidden. Then again, perhaps humans are made for glory. Could it be that human nature is designed for the supernatural, and our desires are met only when we rise up to the highest good hidden in God? Perhaps God wants us to learn, grow, and evolve into the majesty of his divinity. Philosophy and religion have consistently divided themselves into two camps on this matter: seek or flee, fulfill desires or subjugate them.

It was not as if Martin Luther never thought these thoughts about human nature, but he turned the question into the truly theological one: Where can I find a gracious God? Instead of getting lost in the question of how or why God hides, Luther asked a geographical question: Where? He already had plenty of God, and plenty of revelation from God—in fact too much. It was not that he could not find God or wondered if such a being existed. The divine law is, indeed, the astonishment of the universe. If you ever wondered about God’s existence or where God revealed himself in clear and distinct ideas, the law was the place to look—whether one were a king, priest, or scientist. The law can be investigated in its smallest microscopic details by a biologist; it can be wondered about and adored in its largest forms as a physicist, lawyer, or pope. But for humans, one consistent truth accompanies the law’s revelation: it presently accuses and ultimately kills. There is no rest in it; it has no hidden reward to bequeath. It does not free or exalt its best practitioners; it terrorizes, kills, and accuses—from the second law of thermodynamics to the last will and testament of a cancer patient. No one—pauper or king, lawyer or criminal, religious or irreligious, Christian or Muslim, monk or lay, devoted or careless—ever found where God, revealed in the law, was ever gracious. However, what led Luther to seek a gracious God outside the law was the apostle Paul’s surprising declaration: For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression (Rom 4:15). Where there is no law became Luther’s new quest.

No Escape from God

But finding such a place is not as easy as it first sounds. Paul is the one who puts this geographically: where there is . . . Isn’t Paul saying that there is in fact some place where the law is not? And that in that place accusation ceases, since there is the sole place where there is no sin. While this held out some hope, Luther was vexed by where such a place could exist, since where God is there is law, and where law is there is God—what clearer assumption could be made? Luther not only believed, but dearly hoped that while laws vary from one location to another (today called diversity or interculturality) the law at its original source and in its final goal is not only ubiquitous but also eternal. The law seemed to be everywhere God was, and was indeed no other than who God was, is, and will be. Hadn’t Jonah discovered just that truth, that no matter where he went to escape God, God preceded him? There was no way to run from God, nor is there an escape from the law. Jonah ended his search with despair: throw me overboard!

Luther knew the truth because he was so good at the law—the best ever, at least since the apostle Paul himself. Even though Luther was the best monk of all (according to the law, blameless), and so deserved its reward if ever the law relinquished one, there is only indictment. The law everywhere and always accuses its practitioners—whether they have tried to do what it asks or not. Even if you decided to sit in a chair all day and do exactly nothing, the law would have its day with you. No escape! Yet Luther began to figure that if Paul were correct, there was in reality some where or place that sin was not, wrath relented, and death was expunged. Where there is no law there is no transgression, but there is the rub. No law was assumed by everyone, from Adam to the latest microbiologist, to mean no God. In fact, the deepest desire of humans, their restless search, is to prove that God is the law, and the law is God. When God reveals himself in the law, he must be sharing his whole will, heart, mind—as reason itself. Even if God somehow does not give his whole self in the law, it would be misery and death for humans to find whatever of him remained hidden behind, above, or outside the law. Even if we find nothing but inevitable death and constant accusation by the law in this life, nevertheless humans can hope for nothing better than that God uses the law to right all wrongs in the end. God’s own predestination, organization, reasons, and ideas will finally be shown to be legal. A God outside his law is more terrifying than the law’s clear, present, and inevitable death penalty. Better to take the law’s penalty for myself than lose its order for God and the world.

Still, there was Paul, saying that he had found a strange place where the law was not, and that in this supposed where, there was no sin. That means there was no accusation of law that otherwise dins the ear. Of course, Luther had long been taught by his scholastic professors that God could theoretically operate outside the law—but God had peremptorily removed this possibility from himself by voluntarily signing a contract that promised never to step outside his actual, given, earthly order of law. Of course, even this putative contract was hypothetical. It is what humans wished for and reasoned must exist—but was nowhere uttered. Luther recognized that even if God could be inferred to have signed such a contract, it still left people in the pit he found himself in: faith must rely on the law rewarding its practitioners as the one and only form of God’s grace. The trick was not finding a gracious law but a gracious God. A gracious law merely reduces the bar to its lowest rung, and then says, Do your best, God will do the rest. In that game, Luther the monk was well aware that he was so far ahead of the other players that he was sure to receive some reward—theoretically. But the Scriptures neither promised such a thing, nor does such recognition actually arrive in a person’s life. Not only is the heart restless until it rests in God, but it is under attack. The law is not hiding anything divine, but is relentlessly shining its light on sin. Human hearts are inundated, troubled, and terrified—not because they cannot perform a good work but because God’s law never stops indicting. There is no other work or end with the law. It has no other purpose or function, and never did. Theologians told Luther he would be fine, but God never did—especially in the Holy Spirit’s effusive revelation in the Scriptures.

So it was that Luther began paying attention to the words, especially concerning what Paul was saying. It was not just the cross of Christ, but the words of the cross (1 Corinthians) that mattered then. It was not the nearness of the law but Christ himself that made the difference. Faith came not through a law and its fulfillment but through a sermon that gave an entirely different word than a command. I absolve you, was not a command; it was a promise. Further yet, this promise was not based on performance, it was given apart from any law, deed, merit, or reward. A gracious God suddenly opened a new place Luther had not known existed—the gospel, apart from the law. In the preached word a geographical space was made that had not existed before. Paul called it a new creation (Gal 6:15) just as Isaiah had (Isa 43:9). There is a place where there is no sin, because this place has no law.

Luther soon began singing all the notes of the melody—(1) if there was such a place, and (2) if it came through a preached word, and (3) if that word was pure gospel without law, then (4) the gracious God he sought was not only found, but found precisely to be no law. God was not the law! Who could have believed it? Yet one can imagine not only the consternation among Luther’s teachers and colleagues, but the downright fear this discovery has produced ever since. Too much is at stake in the old system—careers, dreams, institutions, plans, politics—to say nothing of frightened minds like Erasmus’s, who feared that this truth (and he did understand Luther’s was the truth of Scripture) was going to upset the entirety of society and church. More yet, what would this do to the single most important feature of human life: motivation to do the good? If Luther’s truth of God’s revelation and hiding was ever published, what terrible damage would it do to common persons trying to make a society good by doing the right thing? Of course, Luther understood that at the bottom, Erasmus was afraid his own faith would be wrenched away from its dream of freedom for law—a joyful obedience—which Erasmus recognized he had not yet felt but was convinced he ultimately would. So it was that Luther did what only he could do for the poor man, he preached to Erasmus by giving the straight gospel—knowing full well that the first experience of God revealing himself in the most hidden way possible, in his forgiving promise, was horror.

By the time Erasmus received his sermon, Luther had been taught by God to learn the difference between God preached and unpreached. This unlocked the difference between the law and the gospel, and so answered his question: Where can I find a gracious God? Answer: in the mouth of a preacher who has just uttered these words: I forgive you. Once this happened, the whole of theology was overturned—especially how, where, and why God hides. Luther could finally recount the fact that God is not just hidden, but hides. Further, he hides for contradictory purposes—in order not to be found, and then to be found. When God does not want to be found, he will not be found; he refuses to be found and cannot be. But when he hides in order to be found, he not only can be found but necessarily is. To do this, God hides not only once, but three times (or in three different places), insisting upon being found in his third place.  First, in the things of creation, second in his crucified Son, and third in the office of ministry by the Holy Spirit. The third volume of this book especially details how these three hiding places come to their crucial moment in the preaching office. Preaching is the last of God’s hidings, through and in the Holy Spirit, and so we will consider how one properly worships this God who gives himself in sacraments. Likewise, preaching concerns the deepest, darkest hiding in which God gives his word—and then attacks his own promise. Here are the two deepest mysteries and greatest freedoms: God arrives to sinners in sacraments and proceeds to attack his own promise. How is it that God hides, not once but three times? Who can fathom this terrible contradiction?

The Sacraments and God’s Attack

on the Promise

To summarize all our work on Luther’s hidden God we especially consider three sources: the conclusion of Luther’s address to Erasmus in The Bondage of the Will, the description of the sacraments in Luther’s Large Catechism, and Luther’s final confession against enthusiasts Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper. The bulk of stories that turn this theology into a bold proclamation comes from Luther’s last, long lectures on Genesis. These all say that God hides three times—first in majesty or absolute power and glory. There is no authority but his, and no source or goal that is not him. His will alone rules. This truth does not change because his persons are three—his will, power, authority is one; there is no one who can challenge or change that. All of this is what Christians (and any religious thinkers) understand is clear, manifest, and revealed by saying that God is almighty (all and mighty). Once we know we are dealing with God, and not some other, partial power, we are then dealing with the highest, best, and final authority. In this power, God is not obscure and leaves nothing unsaid. God almighty is the clear, unambiguous, unhidden, manifest, and revealed God whom we lowly creatures know and experience as law. But because of this majesty itself, because he is all-in-all and no one may challenge him, his very absoluteness and revelation as law unnerves us.

Our experience of majesty is not blessed. The law and its almighty authority is terrorizing. Suddenly we encounter evil and predestination like two monsters that consume us, forcing us to ask the almighty: How do you choose, and why is there evil? He never says. Or if he does, it is abhorrent to our ears: I make weal and make woe, the older will serve the younger, and I will have mercy on whom I have mercy. Our consciences are not comforted by such declarations but deeply disturbed. The almighty God revealed in his law is thus deeply hidden to us. Why? He either won’t say, or what he says is terrifying: Jacob I loved, Esau I hated, and we end up with a dose of predestination sickness.

Unexpectedly, we find that the most manifest God hides himself from his most devoted seekers. He will not be found in evil or abstract predestination, and yet it is precisely this hidden will that creatures cannot abide. They suffer from the painful awareness that he goes silent in answer to these crucial inquiries. While it is hard enough to imagine God’s will is the pure, unadulterated legal order (though Stoics try), he makes matters worse by acting outside his own will of law and concealing himself from his followers. The God we know in the regular order of things suddenly reveals himself irregularly in Moses’s bloody call or Rebekah’s guile and deceit, or tells Abraham to sacrifice his son. Suddenly, the almighty God we found in the law hides apart from this manifestation; meanwhile the hope we placed in the law is violently exorcised.

It was not always this way with God’s majesty. Things began very differently for Eve and Adam before the fall than they are now. God did not hide at all in the garden. The majestic God created copious numbers of unmajestic creatures from whom he not only did not hide, but excessively revealed himself to them. Better yet, he poured himself out to them, bestowing, giving, and presenting himself to them in full. It was not that God felt the need to hide anything in order to keep a boundary of divinity between the infinite and finite or human and divine. He had no interest in what we call types or natures or categories of being. Instead, the almighty Creator began by giving his own, absolute, majestic self to his creatures through his creatures—in a rich cornucopia of created things (including in the peach, as Luther liked to say). The Creator was thus the father of Adam, Eve, and all creatures of the earth; he not only spoke daily with them as father, but every word was a precious, life-giving thing for them. God’s living speech was summarized in the gracious words, You may eat of every tree . . . Yet, even in the single, forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the same majestic, all-working God gave himself in the threatening legal term: but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, lest you die. Those two verbal trees hardly hid God; they imparted him to his human creatures, and when he gave himself to them, it was not in part but whole. He withheld nothing from his creatures.

Nevertheless, though they were enveloped with God-in-things, Adam and Eve did not want him there. God refused to hide, but where he wanted to be found—freely, graciously, giving himself without restraint—they did not want him. Why creatures refuse their Creator’s communication is what this volume addresses. Original sin is the mystery of unfaith that believes a lie—and demands that God hide. Subsequently, what is not hidden to us is the effect this strange rebellion against manifest God has on us now. God gave himself to us in the peach, and we did not want him there. We demanded he remove himself from the garden’s trees and sit upstairs like a tyrant whom we could go seeking. God obliges, to some extent, but not forever. What is the heavenly Father, creator of heaven and earth, to do when he seeks to give himself entirely in created things, but his creatures do not want him there? Even if we cannot explain Adam to ourselves, we need to come to grips with the present truth that we ourselves do not want God in things. We even concoct derogatory names to despise him like anthropomorphism, animism, pantheism, and the like; meanwhile we demand our God be wholly other.

Whatever the origins of this plight, let us set musings aside and ask what God does when we treat him so—demanding he hide from us? He indulges sinners and does what they like. He hides in majesty where he will never be found, but he refuses to sit there interminably in some wise silence, hoping an intrepid explorer will find him up in heaven. God refuses to be what Aristotle wanted—a sleeping God. He refuses to slumber in secret majesty and so comes to us a second time in his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is better to say that God hides in one place so as not to be found, and in his Son precisely to be found. While God refuses discovery in majesty, he is determined to be found in his Son by the very creatures who first rejected him in created things. Yet, even though God surprises sinners in the word made flesh (everyone is astounded by the incarnation), he refuses to hide there. He insists on revealing, shining a light, and even bestowing himself in this flesh. The incarnation is not dark and mysterious, but God’s own going public. This time he gives himself, knowingly and willingly, not to newly created creatures, but old, gnarly sinners. He does not enter the world in his Son Jesus Christ as a sleuth and spy, but with bells on, doing what only God can do with the sinners who rejected him in the two trees. He comes as his speaking self—old logos—with loud and copious words in what he called preaching.

It has often been asked why it would be that a majestic, almighty God, when faced with fallen sinners like Adam and Eve, could not simply wave his wand and forgive sinners tout court—suddenly and exhaustively. Is he somehow restrained? Has he reached some limit of divinity? Of course, the explanation inevitably given by theologians (except for an occasional Augustine) is that God refuses such plenary forgiveness because he is preserving some room for human free will to accept, decide, or desire him. God’s limit of revelation is the human ability to respond or participate in the legal process of repentance. But none of that nonsense recognizes what actually happened over the course of the Old Testament from Adam and Eve to the last prophets. More important, it does not recognize what the incarnate Son of God actually did when he came. And what was that, after all, that the incarnate Logos proceeded to do when dwelling among fellow creatures? He forgave sin suddenly, recklessly, wholly, and absolutely. He spoke words of freedom, and the words absolved sinners right there and then—whether the law approved or not.

Consequent to Christ’s incarnation, all of theology can be summarized in a rhetorical question: Why, if he is so powerful, does God not simply forgive apart from the law? A rhetorical question like this not only assumes an answer, but it also assumes a premise: God has not in fact actually forgiven in this world wherever and whenever he wanted. The premise, however, is false. In fact, the incarnate Son did just that. He entered this world and freely forgave sinners wherever he wanted, regardless of the law: Son, your sins are forgiven (Mark 2:5). Christ forgave with authority, instantaneously, completely, and indiscreetly as with the paralytic man. He absolved absolutely. He forgave sinners while they were sinners and forgave people no one even thought were sinners in the first place. Christ’s repeated liberation from sin, death, and the devil—and notoriously the law—was not a side issue. He came precisely and only to forgive—publicly, flagrantly, like a bright light or flowing fountain in the middle of an evil age. He did not hide (even in what was mistakenly labeled the Messianic Secret: See that you say nothing to anyone; Mark 1:45). It is one thing for people like us to talk about a forgiver, but quite another to give the forgiveness as Jesus did. Just so there is a great difference between describing and giving a thing. Jesus Christ is not grasped by describing him as an object of our desire, but rather is the giver of God’s own forgiveness. In that act, speaking that single word, Jesus Christ ebulliently delivered himself to sinners and so God gave himself to us a second time. But we did not want him in this absolution.

While Christ was flagrantly revealing and bestowing himself to the sinners who did not want his Father in created things, the same sinners hated his absolution even more. Sinners sought to remain hidden to him—as if they were not clearly revealed to themselves or him in the light Christ brought. Even while standing in Christ’s bright light, people pretended they were opaque and hidden. They figured that no one, including Christ, could see them for what they were. Especially when sinners watched other sinners received Christ’s absolution, they had dozens of explanations for why Christ should stop revealing himself and them. They said his forgiveness was reckless and damaging to the glue of society. Erasmus had the same complaints about Luther’s use of the gospel. They did not want their God incarnate and forgiving sinners. What would happen to good works? What would happen to the law? What would happen to God’s justice and his hidden majesty? What about prior covenants, signs, and the integrity of Israel? Luther noted that this was not merely a historical mistake, but is the same old rejection of God’s coming to us a second time, hidden in his Son Jesus. God hid incarnate not to be left alone, but precisely that we would find him in this man—born of a woman, born under the law—and listen to him. But we would not.

So it is that God’s second self-giving—wholly and completely, withholding nothing, in pure grace—is met not with joy but anger: Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, ‘Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ (Mark 2:6–7). God’s second hiding (in order to be found) is met repeatedly with offense. The incarnate Son of God comes forgiving, and sinners want him silenced. Christ is crucified for the audacity of forgiving. He is murdered for doing God to sinners—giving himself to them as manifest God in word. The offense is so great that crucifixion is the only solution to his absolution. God hides in the cross so that one will never find him there, and yet only find him there—in the word of the cross. One never finds the hiding God in the cross as an answer to the legal questions: By what right does God forgive? Is this not the gravest danger to God’s essential nature of justice? How does one forgive without ignoring and overturning the very divine law? So it is that no one has, will, or can desire, embrace, or love the cross. The cross is the only solution (the human solution!) to Christ’s absolution, and so it must stand as righteous in our eyes; by it the Son of God must be silenced once and for all.

Yet, it is this same cross that becomes the word of the cross, by which Christ’s preachers presume to do exactly what he did—to carry on this offensive activity of forgiving sinners outside the law: For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God (1 Cor 1:18). Not the cross but the preaching of the same is what must be considered as God’s final, and successful, divine hiding. So it is that he sets out upon his third expedition to impart himself to his creatures in the hidden way they demand (and yet they reject all at once).

Creatures did not want God in the created things through which he provided everything needed for life. They did not want their Father in a tree. So, he hid from them in majesty, yet he outpoured himself a second time in his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. But we did not want him there either. He did not hide his forgiving, but published it abroad. But we preferred the opposite of God’s absolution. We preferred the law. We wanted God to be in the law, and indeed demanded it. Christ’s hidden word would not prop up the law, nor would it make the law release secret gifts and rewards. The offense at Christ’s absolution was so great that our preference for the law led to our hiding him on the cross. We crucified him to solve his absolution problem and save the eternal law. But God was not finished. In a third act, he hides more strangely still. Instead of Christ going silent, the law was silenced. Not only was the Son raised by the Father on the third day, but what Christ proceeded to do was more shocking even than incarnation or a resurrection—so shocking that even those nearest to Christ were hiding in an upper room from him. Yet, he broke in and forgave them of their unforgivable offense: peace be unto you. Then, as if absolution weren’t enough, Christ handed these same sinners the keys to his own kingdom: receive the Holy Spirit, when you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them (John 20:22–23).

Paul was the best of these preachers unleashed by the Holy Spirit and is the one who understood par excellence what it meant not only to have a crucified Christ—whom we could not love—but to have this Christ forgive sin. He had now been taught by God (Theodidact) the fundamental thing: you will have God one way or another—unpreached or preached. The difference is not between true God and an idol, it is the difference between having God with his word of forgiveness or without it. This distinction is the difference between death and life.

So in this last volume we embark on the deepest, hardest, and yet most glorious of all God’s ways of hiding: God hiding a third time in the preached word, or sacraments. The third time is the charm, not because humans finally awaken and get God in his essence. God’s preached word is not an act of human understanding. It is a purely passive experience of receiving God wholly and completely in his absolving word that comes through the lowliest means of a sinful preacher. Not only does this word come through a creature to a creature, but through a sinner to a sinner. The difficulty with grasping all of this is that God works entirely outside his law—an outlaw God. Luther is the one who saw this more clearly than any other, because it happened to him just this way. The preacher got a preacher, and the sacraments that had once been organized by a legal scheme were set free to reveal and bestow God in the most hidden place of all. How much more hidden could God be than in water, bread, wine, and the mouth of a preacher? Who wants their righteousness in a bun? What does this denigration of my best self do to my esteem and desire to reconnect with God’s glory? Why would God even bother to give a law at all, to say nothing of one that has accused me every day of my life? If salvation were to be handed to a sinner in water—without consulting the intellect or giving a single nod to my free will—what would be left of my humanity?

It is no wonder that the sacraments are always the point of attack against the gospel, especially within the church, for those seeking dutifully to stop this offensive use of forgiveness. The questions are then piled up: What is a sacrament? Who can apply one of these, and to whom may they be given? Does it require or include a response? While doctrinal bouts may end up in the lofty places of the inner Triune being, the contentions always begin below in baptism or the Lord’s Supper. It may be of some solace to know that the struggles against the sacraments are, however, the very last ones that sinners muster. Once they finish disparaging these, enthusiasts are ready to give up and die. Until then, however, the disparaging of baptism is an especially frightful thing to behold. Likewise, the resistance to a preacher giving a public absolution is harsh: the fundamental questions of who, when, where, and under what conditions a human can forgive a human are all contested. Yet we can reduce the struggles to one primary question: What happens to the law when these are applied to a sinner? Since sacraments are only for absolution, the battle that once engulfed the incarnate Christ on earth (Blasphemy! Who then will be good! Shall we sin the more that grace may abound?) now sets to destroy either the givers, receivers, or the promise itself. If we can’t crucify Christ again, sinners try to remove him from the sacraments. With the Lord’s Supper, contentions center on the presence of Christ in the elements. Fights over baptism settle on the water (Scotus and the Franciscans), or sometimes which word is put in the water (Thomas and the Dominicans), but more often they contend with whom can receive it, especially infants. If no will or mind is acting, then isn’t a baptism an illegal entity itself and so inappropriate for a just God?

But this kind of sparring only touches the surface of the fear created by this gospel-in-things, applied by a sinner to a sinner, by nothing more than a word. What really bothers people about sacraments is God’s success. Not only are they earthly things, just like the ones Adam and Eve first rejected, but they are applied by preachers who are the least likely vehicles for God one could imagine. They are entirely accidental; they arrive—or don’t. They are late or early. They are lowly and sinful and have nothing to recommend them other than this little word they utter—and often won’t even say it when they should. Then this occasional, specific, earthly preached thing is done to a perfectly passive receiver. The sacramantee is like an empty potato bag rather than the higher thought and moral aspirations of the best of humanity. God’s successful hiding is in a simple promise you shall be saved or your sins are forgiven, and followed by Jesus saying things like: Which is easier, to say to the paralytic: ‘your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your mat and go home’? (Mark 2:9–11). It is astonishing to think that where God hiding in a peach and then in his incarnate Son failed, this impoverished, preached word lands.

For this reason, we begin the illustration of God’s most controverted hiding in promises put in water, and righteousness in a bun, with the conclusion of Luther’s Bondage of the Will. There Luther discarded Erasmus’s final, flailing attempts to put free will where only a preacher belongs. In this third hiddenness we find more clearly than any before that God does not correspond with himself. When people place their hopes in the law, this is a crushing realization. God does not bring the many parts and aspects of divinity into alignment in a simple unity. In fact, God opposes God. How less simple could God get? The great cost to Christ on the cross is the final, cosmic battle that takes place first between God and his creatures, and then between God and the powers of evil, Satan, and the demons. Then comes the fiercest battle between God as he is preached and found in his word, and God who is silent, without a preacher and so without his word.

Meanwhile, theology itself is designed to deny this whole matter of God hiding three times and the distinction of God in a preacher and without one. Theology works overtime to cover what happens to creatures who never wanted God in the created things, in his Son, and especially not in his preached word. It disallows the distinction between God outside/without his word, and God published and delivered in his word in order to preserve itself. Resistance is not because this distinction sounds Manichean (two gods, evil and good), but because it is not dualistic at all. This great, cosmic struggle between God and God reveals the two things that no one wants to behold: the removal of free will, and the end of the law of God. All cooperators and uniters outside God are extinguished. What is left when these are removed from the field of battle? It appears as if nothing remains for us creatures to do, nor is anything left that is worthy of being called a God. Indeed, if Luther is correct, the absolute would contend with the absolution. What if, horror upon horrors, the absolution won? Who would this God be, and who would we then be? What world could we be said to live in? Justice in a bun appears to be no justice at all. All it publishes and advertises is merely: sin—forgiven. What kind of a world is that? All we end up with is a loser God with loser creatures, none of whom have the law to put the pieces back together again.

The Battle between God and God

No wonder the world, and especially the history of church dogma, has cheered for the enemy and accuser of Christ to win the day. Of course, an outlaw God seems by definition to be no God at all. When push comes to shove, if we were ever asked to choose between the good law, or a God/man on the cross (who had become sin itself), which would we prefer? So we take up the final battle between God and God, between unpreached and preached, between the law and sinners—even sin itself. Contemplating this cosmic battle of God would be more than enough by itself; however, Luther does not stop there. He considers not only how God puts his exalted promise of forgiveness in little, specific created things and applies them to people without merit. Luther proceeds to the most controverted of all Scripture texts, and the most dreadful moments of this cosmic battle when God, the giver of the promise, is the very one who attacks his own promise. Admittedly, that is an abstract way of saying it. In fact, attacking the promise softens the reality by taking out the names of the combatants: God, the giver of the sacramental promise, is the same God who turns and attacks it. The struggle is so fierce that one can hardly comprehend how it is that we are inevitably drawn into it. Since the promise saves and nothing else, when God attacks the promise he made, it would appear we are pawns in an unseen, higher, mythical game. How could anyone survive such a moment as sacrificing his Son, or being called a dog by Jesus? Beyond that, how could one live after such an encounter without being undone by worry that it would happen again? Scripture’s stories of these horrors are neither mere riddles to crack (like those encountered by Odysseus), nor stories of fate like Oedipus’s in Greek drama. Nor are they merely stories to keep us from being romantic Pollyannas and learn how to face the darker side of life, as in the Brothers Grimm. Instead, these words in Scripture remove free will, and put in their place a promise that is beyond all certainty—certain certainty.

The strange success of this third of God’s hidings results from the certainty of God hiding in the sacraments, through a preacher, by the Holy Spirit. These enwrapped words do not fail as the others have, because God has in fact defeated God in them. The preached word has overcome the unpreached silence of God. That means that the outlaw God beyond the law is not the law, and brings the law to an end. God does not go silent, but the law does. That cosmic battle is not merely myth, it is what history means, and is not without consequence for us and God. In this final volume we consider God’s third and final way of hiding in ten chapters.

God Silent and in Words

Luther’s great theologoumenon, his speech of God, recognized that God will be our God one way or another, either preached or unpreached, silent or in words, naked or clothed. The difference is not theoretical, but a matter of life and death. Luther unpacked this most theological of all distinctions in the middle of his address to Desiderius Erasmus on the freak free will. He learned the distinction from Paul’s alarming depiction of the final day of judgment in 2 Thessalonians, when Satan’s son of destruction and man of lawlessness will be unmasked, sitting in the seat of God’s temple—in flagrant opposition to God, declaring himself to be God (2 Thess 2:4). Luther raised this specter to Erasmus who was trying to grasp how, if God is truly ubiquitous, infallible, and almighty, anyone or anything could ever oppose God. Isn’t it logical that if some son of lawlessness were sitting in God’s seat, the origin of the madness had to be a semi-powerful free will that could resist God’s will? But Paul says something even more disturbing than this horrible end: God himself sends the delusion (2 Thess 2:11). So it is that God can clearly be resisted, contradicted, and countered, but at the same time cannot be opposed unless he himself does it. God cannot be opposed in himself, as himself, in his almighty majesty where he is utterly silent and cold as ice. But God can, and routinely is, opposed in his diminutive word where he allows and empowers a liar to question his promise. So it is that opposition begins and ends at this point, with God-in-word when someone calls this preached God a liar.

More yet, when God gives himself in his word it is not only wretched and miserable, it is abhorrent, as one from whom men hide their faces (Isa 53:3). Sinful creatures lose their primary means of finding what is hidden by searching for what they desire. They reject God who is warm, trustworthy, and robed in majesty (Psalm 93) and seek the naked, absolute, irresistible God who is naked and silent. Then, since this naked God cannot be reached, reason attempts to use its considerable facility to unite what God separates. Reason, rather than faith, figures that if the naked God is the foundation for the clothed God, the absolute can be the only ground for absolution. Reason makes a Frankenstein by uniting opposites (a synthesis of thesis and antithesis) with the hope that God without his word is the same as God in his word. Then, the law would be the ground for the gospel, divine election would necessarily be universal, and the human free will would need to cooperate with the divine to make righteousness.

Yet Luther recognized that the point of gospel is to separate naked and clothed God. Indeed, this is the indomitable work of God himself, who refuses to be found without his word. Then, while reason attempts to join the two, faith learns to run from God’s utter silence and run to God robed in his word. As Luther likes to say, faith is covered with a Christ blanket. Robing God in his word is the operation of preaching, and so entails the third, deepest of God’s hidings. The preached God is at his lowest. Not even the incarnate Son of God, lying in the manger, riding on a donkey, or hanging on the cross is so meek and mild, so humble and cowed, as the mouth of a local preacher and the lowly, loathed sacraments.

With this discovery of a third hiding, Luther dramatically reversed the normal, legal pattern of revealing and hiding. He exposed the problem in all human thought with theories of revelation—how what is not known becomes known, and how what is concealed is exposed. They all assume the paucity of words and develop a strange, counterintuitive negative theology. They cannot believe that God would speak to, to say nothing of save, his creatures by preachers and water. How is it that almighty God has fallen so far as to be easily dismissed in his little words and eschewed in things? Words seem incapable of handling such an immense task of revealing the hidden insides and truly secret life of a majestic God. There must be some other bridge to this God that elevates rather than humiliates. So it is that words are taken to refer to greater things already present—seen by the external eye, or even more so, the imaginary inner eye of the mind that can imagine what is not even present.

Michel Henry helps us understand that humans are then taken not as the receivers, but the users of this verbal instrument of speech. For that reason, revelation is taken to explain how it is that something appears to a human being as a user of words, and so we are stuck with our viewpoint or horizon. Reality (the hidden that comes to be revealed to us) is what we see and how we see it. Words point to such reality, but we can only speak of what shows itself to us in this world in the limited way it does—everything else remains hidden. We see as we use, and apply words to things thus manifested to us—through the veil of the law. If there is anything beyond this law, we will never see it, never use it, and never have it revealed—it remains totally and completely hidden. The law is what we call today our perspective, horizon, revealer, or manifester, and whatever is not law is precisely hidden, nonexistent, unusable, dark, and unattainable. However, this imaginary filter of how things must be specifically makes the gospel the only thing that is forever occult, unattainable, and fearful. In our way of seeing things, we cannot use the gospel so that whatever that may be is removed from our lives as a human impossibility.

So it is that creatures find themselves in a cold world that uses words merely to point, after the fact, to indifferent and incapable things. When the seen (used) and the seer (user) interact, they are bound by the same, eternal, nondiscriminating law. When creatures insist upon seeking God without his robe, they find (1) that the divine essence is impenetrable, (2) that the divinity doesn’t care about them, and worst of all, (3) the lens of the law implies that God is frighteningly outside the very law that binds me—but even he cannot manifest himself without that law.

Instead, Luther’s God loves revealing himself, and uses words in a way I cannot. For God, a word is not only useful to describe or point to a reality external to me, but his word breaks in, creates, and gives himself to us. This word that gives God is called gospel, and it has a new power. To show what this gospel is, a contrast is needed. Jacques Derrida gave a famous speech that attempted to answer the question, Can (must) the Jewish Holocaust of the twentieth century be forgiven? In answering, Derrida joined a long series of philosophers and theologians before him, from Dionysius to Wittgenstein, who thought that the only response to evil is not repair, but utter silence—just as God was silent at Auschwitz. However, there is a double bind in this idea. One must be silent in the face of the horror of an Auschwitz, yet one can never forget. Evil’s horrors must be met both with silence and published (revealed) to keep it from happening again.

All of this assumes that language is predicative. It is true that God is love and God is merciful, or even Christ died for the sins of the world, do not absolve anyone of anything. Since they require self-application by the hearer, such bromides always fail. Thus for Derrida preaching itself always fails. Words do not absolve. The law remains after terrible breaches in it, accusing both the offenders and the victims forever. The whole process of using negation as original silence of the divine, and the desire to return to the silence, becomes a quixotic search for a nonaccusatory law. Derrida calls this his ontological wager that seeks to unite with original silence, and there find peace—absolved not of sin but of ever hearing preachers who imagine they have a gospel to bring to survivors. His attempt to access a mystical, negative silence is the long process of Christian, apophatic, or negative theology, like that in Wittgenstein’s famous proverb: concerning that about which one cannot speak, one must remain silent.

However, before ending his own lecture in Jerusalem, Derrida turned his infamous powers of destruction on his own search for the naked God (without word, without preacher, without absolution) and asked himself, Before feeling the obligation to come and speak, did I not make a promise to do so? Is it possible that before obligation, eternal law, and the utter silence of God there is an even more original promise? If that is the case, then it is not silence but speech, not obligation but forgiveness that operates outside the law entirely.

Graspable God

But beyond this query Derrida could not go. That step has to be taken by someone like Paul who could not only contemplate forgiveness, but actually give it in what he called the folly of preaching. A preacher takes up the peculiar hiddenness of God clothed in his word, where God is most liable to opposition, and yet also overcomes that opposition not with silence but new speech. The offense of this is great. The first thing preaching does is remove the space humans seek for their greatest accomplishments: thinking, doing, and feeling. Instead, any and all distance between God and the hearer is closed in the most surprising thing about this language—it delivers not only a word about God, but God himself. Preaching does this not above or apart from earthly things, but in and through them, so that an office is made. People are then called into this office and are thus made instruments of the divine that bypass what we hold to be best about ourselves. Luther liked to call these masks of God. When such masks speak, God speaks; and when he speaks, he bestows himself to the unholy, while they are unholy. If that were not enough, this mask of God (who both hides and bestows God) delivers him to people whose wills are bound by the very utterance.

All of this is not only impossible, but offensive, and so leads to the deepest hiding by God. Luther liked to say that if it weren’t enough for God to hide under his opposite (sub contrario in sin, death, and the devil) then God preached goes to battle with silent God and hides sub contradictario. He is not just under his opposite, but opposing himself. For this reason, the cross offends greatly, but a preacher offends even more. Christ’s merits now took on a whole new aspect, and Romans 8:16 was understood actually to give predestination rather than merely contemplate it. Suddenly Luther found that preachers do not give signs by which faith ascends to God’s hidden majesty (the secret of predestination), but God hides below, in earthly things, in and through which God actually, presently, certainly, elects me. God, who in majesty precisely cannot be grasped, is suddenly graspable in a creature, through a creature, for a creature.

Meanwhile, all of this is accomplished outside the law. A new question then presented itself: How did the cross become preached? How were its benefits distributed, if not through a law? Faith needs a positive, external something to believe in. But the cross, as Luther learned, was impossible to love. Neither is one’s internal feeling of accusation/humility a thing to be grasped. What does faith hold? To answer that Luther went beyond humility, beyond negative theologies of glory, and became a preacher of the cross: Christ became a curse for us (Gal 3:13). But before Paul could say that Christ was a curse, he began at the eleventh verse of the same chapter saying that it was evident that no one is justified by the law. What was for the righteous shall live by faith? Sinners are used to a righteousness of law, but it is not obvious at all that the righteousness of faith is hidden in a mystery. While trying to be holy (law), we find ourselves not only repulsed by Christ, but opposing him (sub contradictio). God hides so deeply in Christ that we take our champion to be our foe. More yet, the distinction between law-righteousness and gospel-righteousness is made in trial and suffering (Anfechtung) in the throes of the battle/trial between law and faith.

So it is that when we encounter preaching it offends us, starting with the fact that such preaching is below while we are trying to transcend. The law tells us to climb a ladder, while Christ came down to the manger and the virgin’s breast. Just so, faith is ignorant of God’s hidden plan of election for itself, but knows only that apart from this man, Christ, there is no God. But things get sticky when the human Christ presents his body in the bread or water of sacraments. In place of the fully present God in his body, we prefer the law that promises more time for us to complete its demands. Instead of incarnate presence, we prefer divine absence. So, Luther says, we begin playing with a white devil. We start asking questions we cannot quite grasp about God’s deepest mysteries, and imagine the saving thing is that we have a God who suffers. But what this white devil cannot do is say what Paul’s letter to the Galatians does. God does not suffer, but the crucified God actually does become a sinner, indeed, sin itself. By this, Luther learned not only to contemplate the cross, but preach it: the word of the Cross.

The most amazing thing about the cross is not what it did to Jesus, or even God and Holy Spirit, but exactly what the cross did to the law. As Christ crucified makes clear, that law needed to be fulfilled; not one iota would be removed, but it was falsely assumed that we knew who would fulfill it and how—until Christ came. With Christ on the cross the preaching of the law ends suddenly, and in its place comes pure gospel without adding law at all. This creates what Luther calls the mirabile duellum (astonishing duel) where two such extremely contrary things come together in this single Person. The communication of the cross is the proper communication of attributes (communicatio idiomatum) of God and man in Christ. This communication within Christ’s person takes leave—utterly amazing!—so that it can be put in the form of a promise to us who crucified him. The communication in Christ’s person (two natures) is the very communication to us (preaching) that ends the absolute God in the absolution.

This is not only one doctrine among others in Christian teaching, it is the delivery of the gospel itself. The God who gave the law is now wrestling with the same God attacked by the law. Dreadful duel! The law is opposed to gospel, and divinity contends with divinity—preached with unpreached. God is not only hiding in the lowly, incarnate, crucified Christ under the sign of his opposite sub contrario, but has engaged in the most extreme of all contraries—sub contradictario. In the cross, God engages in a joyous duel (joyous for us, not for God), in which I finally shed the old white devil that tried to square God with his law. Suddenly Christ becomes my devil to the devil! The cross, which was a historical event, and a cause of speculation, becomes preachable by using this new, great, delicious language of Hosea 13:14, O death, I shall be your death, which is then applied by a preacher for you.

The result of Christ’s great duel on the cross is a shocking end to the law, and an entirely new creature for myself. As Luther liked to say, I am two now: one unpreached, who has died, and the other preached, who is forgiven and very much living.[1] I now become hidden to myself: For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God (Col 3:3). As Christ left his person for mine, I now leave my person for his. Luther says that the proper definition of a Christian is to be thus hid under the Christ blanket—God preached, clothed, and for me. Yet, while it is a very deep hiddenness to become hidden to ourselves, this rests upon an even greater hiddenness in God. What does God do with the sin that even I plainly see remaining on me? It is not imputed. God simply forgets your sin. God hides it from himself in the preached, clothed God, under the Christ blanket. So it is that no one comprehends the thoughts of God, except the Spirit of God (1 Cor 2:11). God hid our sins from himself; the God who knows everything became ignorant and managed to hide from himself.

Dangerous Luther: God Opposes God

Speaking of such things as an astonishing duel, a hated Christ and God hiding sin from himself makes Luther fascinating on one hand, but fearful on the other. A whole creed grew up among Protestant scholastics after Luther that was crystalized in Karl Barth centuries later: God does not oppose God, but corresponds with God—God is God. For Barth’s foremost student, Eberhard Jüngel, this became a life-and-death decision: either God is love, or one follows the dark path of Luther in saying God necessitates everything and so is also the God of evil. To such Protestants, Luther seemed willing to say that God hides himself in dark places and wills terrible things that he does not reveal in his words. The very notion that God could possibly be an unpreached God was taken as a rejection of God himself and ruined faith’s only certainty. What remained, however, was to treat faith as an act of assent to tautologies like: God is God or God is love.

The story of how Luther became dangerous to later Protestants begins with the Synod of Eisenach in 1556 and the Lutherans’ musings about what it could mean for God to give a law that we cannot do. They figured the impossibility of the law was practical, but not hypothetical, and that the law subsequently may be said to end concretely, but not abstractly. Luther was then seen as dangerous, especially when he speaks of an outlaw God. By the nineteenth century, Protestant theologians of rationalism began to imagine Luther as an old medieval (Catholic) creature who kept an embarrassing theory of an angry God operating lawlessly. Hadn’t Protestants overcome that with the abstract proofs of divine love and personal assent? So it