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                Some Theses on Luther’s Theology

Peter Krey 3/23/2000

√ According to Luther, Sadoleto shows his complete ignorance of theology by thinking Psalm 51 is referring to an actual or particular sin. The issue is not sins, but sin. “This is really to be looking at sin, not this or that misdeed, but our whole nature and our universal sin, with all our powers, with all our righteousness and wisdom of the flesh.” LW 12:335. Thus Luther insists that at my very best, I am sinful. It is
under the presumption of righteousness that sin is concealed.

√ Scholastic theology cannot comprehend what Luther is pointing out, because it needs to be grasped by experience. In The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Oberman points out that scholasticism at this time maintained a divorce between faith and daily experience, and represented a fearful clinging to the authority of the church. (P.11)

√Scott Hendrix in Luther and the Papacy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981) argues convincingly about Luther’s pastoral theology, but he does not notice that Luther is speaking not only to clergy but consciously to the laity. Thus his theology should be characterized as experiential.

√It is not logic driven like scholasticism, but based, surprisingly!, on experience.

√ Reality is what a person goes through, not just what they know. A corollary: a relationship is much more than an analysis of it.

√ One must go through an experience, it requires going through the moments of time, and in the process, a person cannot stay in control. Knowing tries to maintain the illusion of staying in control. Marriage is an apt analogy: one can never know how it will come out. One cannot participate in reality without experience.

√ Oberman argues that Nominalism was the source of Luther’s emphasis on experience.

1. Contingency emphasis
2. Our world is not a mere reflection and shadow of higher levels of being. Nominalists insisted on the full reality of our experienced world.
3. Ockham slashes away the hierarchy of being, of ideas and concepts, which sheer speculation invented.
4. Nominalism emphasized coordination, not subordination.

√ Luther’s Word of God Theology needs to be understood in a new sense. In a Marxist sense words cannot be equated with reality, because materialism requires a separation of word and referent. But for Luther’s creative language, the spirit and the word are one, much like Hegel’s concept of the concrete spirit. The Word of God is the source of all creation, like, mystically speaking, creatures arising out of an abyss. All creation has its source in the Word of God, as the Second Person of the Trinity, but also in the sense of the living voice, the speech of God. In LW Vol I, Luther speaks of God saying “birds” and behold they fly up out of nothing. (See LW Vol. I:21 “[God] does not speak grammatical words; he speaks true and existent realities….we are all words of God….p.22: Thus the words of God are realities and not bare words.”) Luther maintains that God speaks creation into existence: Here men have differentiated between the uncreated Word and the created word. The created word is brought into being by the uncreated Word. What else is the entire creation than the Word of God uttered by God, or extended to the outside? But the uncreated Word is a   divine thought, an inner command which abides in God, the same as God and yet a distinct Person. Thus God reveals Himself to us as the Speaker who has with him the uncreated Word, through whom He created the world and all things with the greatest ease, namely, by speaking.

These citations help to explain Luther’s passages at the end of his commentary on Psalm 51, LW12:408-410. “The sacrificed ox is a witness of grace, or, so to speak, a “working voice” of gratitude, or a manual gratitude, through which the hand pours out gratitude as through words of action (realibus vocaulis).

√ In that style of the sociology of religion which uses the cultural linguistic method, Luther would be considered to be thinking in unitive language. (See Robert Bellah’s notes.)

√ Luther makes a distinction between the Word of God and human words and teachings, to my way of thinking, very hard to follow.
Again LW I: 143, he delimits the circumscribed competence of human reason in the mundane realm. Human beings who refuse to recognize these limits make false ultimates of themselves. In this sense our reason, wisdom, and holiness becomes confusion and darkness. If the human being accepts the affliction and humiliation of these limits, then there is a realm outside of us. That realm is extra nos. Pannenberg pointed out in his lecture on Luther’s spirituality at PLTS, that the great paragraph from “The Freedom of the Christian Person” – the person is lifted above herself (to use our language) by faith into God, and descends below herself through love into the neighbor. And thus the person is outside herself, in the faith and love that comes from the Spirit of God from outside the circumscribed human sphere. When reason, wisdom, and holiness is not made a false ultimate, but recognizes only grace can make it participate in creation, while as a false ultimate it distorts and destroys God’s continuous creation, then the justification by faith has overcome alienation.

√ “Then we shall praise the sacrifices which we earlier condemned, and they will please Thee.” (LW 12:408) Afflicted and humiliated by having been demoted into the human sphere, and not at all justified or worthy except by looking up and receiving the marvelous grace of God from the Spirit, extra nos, in the Word of God, the Church has undergone reform, so to speak. Remember, according to Luther, at its very best, humanity is sinful, when it usurps God’s place, and asserts itself as a false ultimate. Thus what is as sinful as the Holy Church which identifies itself as the Kingdom of God on earth. It may well be the crown of creation. It may well be that canon law far surpassed the civil law in quality, but as an ultimate, it becomes the most subtle and severe distortion of God’s creation, and will leave it twisted and evil.

Returning to the Subject: ANOTHER AFTERWORD

(Luther’s exposition of the Joseph narratives can be found in his Commentary on Genesis, Luther’s Works, volumes VI, VII, and VIII.)

This study on Luther’s Theology of the Cross, Word and Language of God, written under the spell of Prof. Robert Goeser, dates back to the Spring of 1993. Now six years later, I have gained more perspective on the subject. (I will write this brief Afterword because I do not have the time for the basic revision this study requires.)

For example, now I understand the Theology of the Cross as represented in Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation more clearly. Joseph needed to despair at his own ability (or strength) before he was prepared to receive the grace of God. (Thesis 18) When Joseph was reduced to nothing by God, he could be recreated ex nihilo: out of nothing. When he reached his end, God made a new beginning – and Joseph’s evening and morning became another day – of God’s continuous creation.

Paradoxically when there is still human hope, it is against divine hope: hope against hope. During Joseph’s suffering and despair, he learned to hope in God. Luther’s disputation continues:

And that person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks on the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened (Romans 1:20). (19) [S/he] deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. (20) A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. (21)²⁴³

The theologian of glory is fooled by surface appearances. S/he does not see the hope that is against hope, for example. The theologian of the cross knows that the experience of suffering and the cross make visible and manifest the things of God. The human reversal of good and evil, the human distortion of God’s creation, is itself reversed by suffering and the cross of Christ. Not only does the theologian of the cross tell it like it is, but also catches a glimpse of God’s miraculous creation. Because the Joseph narrative is all about suffering and the cross, things of the heart become articulated, and the things of God begin to become revealed.

Back in 1993 I had not yet studied the Philosophy of Language under John Searle. He had the uncanny ability to get inside performatives, as complex as they are, and explain what makes them tick. Luther’s language is, therefore, rightly described as performative, because he subsumed the law and gospel categories into command and promise speech-acts, which are among the very first performatives J.L. Austin discovered. And because Luther uses direct speech, the dramatic present, and language of address, he does not merely talk about promises, he  makes them. Theologically, then, that conclusion makes it possible to speak of divine performatives in the Word and Language of God.

1. Performative Language

John Searle jokingly refers to the speaker and the hearer as the characters in the little drama of the speech-act. In the promise, the accent or onus or obligation is on the speaker. In a directive, like a command, it falls on the hearer. This supplies some explanation for Luther’s insistence on the passivity of the hearer when promised divine grace. Because God is the speaker making the promise, the hearer is stirred by a divine encounter, and struggles to believe that God will keep it. The saving acts of God flow out of this divine speech, continuous creation, and people and all manner of things that are not, are called into being, into existence, into things that are. Faithfulness to God’s promises is of the essence, because, maddeningly, the promises may first be kept in the form of their opposites, as the Joseph story fully illustrates.

2. Luther’s theology and the depth theology of  Heschel

Luther’s Theology of the Cross in his Joseph Commentary has not only changed from discursive to narrative theology, but in expanding the story itself, it has become a dramatic achievement in and of itself. Heschel wished for such a depth theology that did not separate the acts of religious existence from the statements about it. When Prof. Robert Goeser recasts Luther’s law and gospel doctrines into drama of life and journey of life, then in the same vein, the Theology of the Cross can also be recognized as a drama whose acts and events are orchestrated by God. Luther leaves abstract conceptual theology behind, and brings a concrete, experiential theology to the fore. Much of the experience comes in terms of suffering and the cross, providing more theological vision into the providence of God, as well as into the human condition. Luther’s theology thus may be said to plummet below the surface, to reach and move the heart. True to his purpose, Luther goes to the meat of the nut, the marrow of the bone, through the shell to the kernel of the grain. In sentences discovered throughout his writing, Luther articulates matters of the heart of the human condition so lucidly, he “obtrudes the substratum.”

Again I find myself trying to explore these thoughts further instead of just reporting the new perspective I have won. It seems that the complexity derives from a global approach, which all wants to be presented at once, and which is very difficult to present in a lineal fashion. It seems to involve the world inside language, which seems to have space and time, and history, and then a narrative, a drama within it, which can explore life in a more powerful fashion. Goeser’s reinterpretation of law and gospel from doctrine to drama and life-journey show that kind of a promise; the Theology of the Cross seen as a drama of life, or as a genre of “history” in the Language of God, that powerful language of “sending” Luther refers to so often, may promise fresh understanding of the fundamental issues in life. What does it mean to move from the discursive to the narrative, from the logic of the conceptual to the plot lived by characters? In Prof. Goeser’s seminar on advanced readings in Martin Luther we are also reading Joseph Conrad interspersed with our Luther readings, and each work of this novelist seems to explore the world and life in it with characters rather than concepts, and in doing so it reveals much more than a discursive method is capable of doing. Perhaps more accurately, the way poetry is the mother of prose, the discursive is the abstract distillation of narrative. The heart of the matter seems to remain in the narrative, however.

If we remain with an abstract, propositional veneer, then all the other elements which enter into consideration because of concretion need not be dealt with. J. L. Austins speaks not of abstract sentences, but of utterances within the total speech act. That concretion in language brings the formation of a world within. That is what makes it have internal space and time. That is what makes language three dimensional. And three dimensional characters come alive in it.

In this study we noted Gerhard Ebeling’s observation: Luther’s theology is one of paradox that “points to a struggle fraught with conflict and full of temptation, which cannot take place in theory, but only in life itself, by the maintenance of the extreme contradiction it implies.”²⁴⁴ Luther’s dialectic does not remain abstract and theoretical, to use Ebeling’s language, it opens up and issues into life.

Thus Luther argues that some matters cannot be understood by reason, but only by experience, and he means the experience of suffering and the cross. He is not speaking with an exclusive focus on logical contradiction, but the contradictions between speaker and spoken, affect and words, and ultimately between life and death. He thinks in the clash of opposites. In so doing he seems to be trying to open up the human mind, to tear open the world of human language, in order to catch a glimpse of the language of God, and the heaven in which God resides. God always comes in terms of contraries, may mean that the contradiction in our world has to be faced courageously so that the truth of God can overcome it, displace, and reorient it, to use Ricoeur’s dialectic.

This kind of language is difficult to grasp. Robert Preus illustrated the human attributes Luther gave to words, e.g., veiled, naked, embodied, etc. Thus a Christology of the Word, seemed to emerge deriving from their embodied and incarnational nature. Christ is the Word of God. Persons, like little christs, can be little words. Words are persons, persons are words. It is a small step to argue that persons can act like larger concepts exploring life in narrative plots designed to make larger inroads into understanding the human condition before God.

Another thought relates to the concept of a Christology of words. Dead languages do not only refer to the unspoken ones of yesteryear. Our language can be dead or it can be a language that comes alive and gives life. Christ can be dead and buried in language or raised up in power therein: perhaps that is the import of the creedal assertion: “was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures.” Through the Language of God Christ rose from the dead, and continues to raise us.

Luther’s Joseph commentary is, therefore, not just a story, but a story that issues into life, a story that comes to life, and swirls readers into its vortex. The Language of Address makes the reader become part of it. The reader participates.

The reader is drawn into its world. In its narrrative nature, logic becomes replaced by plot. The reader is among the characters and experiencing them. When addressed, when the language strikes home, the reader cannot be detached. The essence is relationship, involvement, and commitment in this peculiarly religious language world. Luther, somewhat like a novelist, articulates the Theology of the Cross by means of a dramatic plot. Meanwhile his multifarious, concrete imagery becomes like thick description of the Theology of the Cross. His images become primary, embodying reality. Here it is evident that the resymbolization of his language is taking place, as the drama of life unfolds in the Theology of the Cross, a drama of promises, a life-journey under the promise of God, seemingly unfulfilled for an eternity, but still trusted in the hope against hope.

Robert Goeser speaks of this drama of life as “history.” God left eternity and entered human history. It is history as in medias res. He never tires of explaining that we do not know how it will end, can’t know the outcome in advance, don’t know where it will take us. Becoming vulnerable, we participate in human existence, learn to say, ‘I’, which means to finally take responsibility for ourselves, and stop saying, “They…,” and join the human race. For Goeser, history becomes a genre that issues into life, and affirms the creation, rather than distorting it, by isolating ourselves, and trying to be one of a species, and considering ourselves to be better than others. Robert Goeser never tires of rehearsing these insights, giving them ample illustrations from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Measure for Measure, and other literary achievements.

3. Luther’s language

Luther has a three dimensional perspective on language and its use. The new Word Perfect 8 word processor has developed its text art further. Now it does not only allow shadows for the letters, but they can be three dimensional, with every letter having height, width, and depth and maneuvered and rotated in spatial perspective. Luther is so concrete, he sees the speech-act in the concrete and total speech-act utterance, and often focuses on the use to which such language is put. Thus he can flip language around and see it wholly from another antithetical perspective. An example in Luther’s writing brought the term performative contradiction to mind, here the contradiction between the speakers and the spoken.

Thus sin is always true to its own nature; it wants to be pure, chaste, beautiful, and holy.²⁴⁵

Now these wonderful attributes are all attached to sin. But Luther is saying this statement in the context of the brothers of Joseph, blaming their father for a hidden sin. They injure him with impunity, because they have been hiding their own crime against Joseph from their father for 22 years.

Luther is depicting their sin in the appearance they give it, and he is also focusing on the reversal they falsely try to give reality to cover up the lie of their own existence. That reversal is like flipping a 3-D text art image around. It shows that Luther was aware of the use of language in a concrete relational situation.

It would be easy to be fooled by the cover up these brothers have mastered so well over the years. Luther penetrates below the surface. “Being true to its own nature, pure, chaste, beautiful, and holy,” Luther obtrudes the substratum, to use the language of Alter and Heschel, to the underlying layer of sin, deceit, and crime beneath the holiness they are using as their cover-up.

4. Language event and Language world

Luther seemed to do more than merely understand the Word in Scripture. He seemed to experience it as well. When Luther struggled with Romans 1:17 and suddenly understood divine righteousness as making the sinner righteous, he experienced that as a language event. When Preus tells of his reaction to Psalm 115:10: “I have believed, therefore I have spoken.” Preus seems to describe Luther experiencing a language event. It is as if Luther empathetically entered the world of Scripture, encountered Paul, the Psalmist, or the Word, and experienced a fundamental reorientation because of it. This seems to be like entering the Kingdom of the Word, the Kingdom of Language. As if the Roman civilization had been absorbed into Latin, and its world was accessible inside the language, or the Hellenist civilization, inside Greek, or the peculiar Jewish moral and religious sensibilities inside Hebrew; and heaven itself, inside the Language of God. In this world of language, the participant becomes acted upon, refashioned by its environment, hammered into its characteristic mind-set and ways.

A. C. Thiselton noted that experiencing a language event gave the participant a new command of the language. A speaker like Luther attained a command of language that transcended thought and communicated life as well. The language of life catches a glimpse of the Language of God that Luther depicts as divine sending. The language of God contains the drama of the Theology of the Cross, the acts of which are those of God fashioning people for his purpose. Perhaps these considerations will make some sentences from this study more comprehensible: The people of promise are the vocabulary of the language of salvation. They are the living words of God spoken by the Word, the Christ of God. They are the poets of promise.

May 18, 1999

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²⁴³Timothy Lull, ed., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 31.

²⁴⁴Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought, (London: Collins, 1970), p.171.

²⁴⁵In Luther’s Works, vol. VII, p. 282-283.

When reading this conclusion, you are like a graduate student, who reads the conclusion of a book in order to capture the main insights the author brought to bear on a subject. A more complete comprehension of some of these insights necessitates some reading of what thoughts worked up to them. The many references necessary are also not included here, while they are in the body of the book.

Correlating Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game with Martin Luther’s Theology

October 31, 2009 by Dr. Peter D.S. Krey

Since writing the post, “Time Slows Down in the Zone” on July 26^th 2008, I have wanted to deal with W. Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis[1] again, because many of his insights can be correlated with Luther’s theology. I will present those insights and Luther’s correlations, which are also basically features of the Christian faith, the way it is experienced and lived. Then it will be important to answer the question, why do all these correlations exist?

In my dissertation, Sword of the Spirit, Sword of Iron, I argue that Martin Luther (1486-1546) championed spontaneity. Medieval times were characterized by mediation, that priests mediated the faith to the other estates, the princes, peasants, and burghers, for example. Luther championed immediacy. All, everyone was part of the Christian estate and they were the priesthood of all believers, who had immediate access to God and a specialized priestly estate was not necessary to mediate their relationship with the sacred.

My emphasis on spontaneity in my dissertation is well placed. Timothy Gallwey speaks of a deeper sense of confidence, while Luther emphasizes a deeper intensity of faith, which he also refers to as trust and confidence. For Luther faith is an overarching confidence in God, while Gallwey places trust in a second self. From Luther’s point of view, which is basically the Christian one, Gallwey’s Self 1 and Self 2 can be considered the old and new self in Christ. In the fourth article on Baptism in Luther’s “Small Catechism,” he writes

that the old Adam in us, together with all sins and evil lusts should be drowned by daily sorrow and repentance and be put to death, and that a new man should come forth daily and rise up, cleansed and righteous, to live forever in God’s presence.

Gallwey focuses on getting to Self 2 for the sake of peak performance at a game, but his disparagement of Self 1 is much like the Christian conception of an old self as opposed to the new self in Christ.

Gallwey’s ego-mind or Self 1 corresponds with Luther’s old self that lives out of a righteousness of works and the law. Gallwey writes of the judgmental Self 1 that interferes with Self 2, which from Luther’s theological point of view, is the self sustained by grace, already saved. Getting into this self is, however, very difficult to sustain. In Gallwey’s words, “Grab for it, and it will squirt away like a slippery bar of soap” (page 100).

In Luther’s words:

Justification is hard to hold (lubrica est, that is, it is slippery), not indeed in itself – for in itself it is sure and certain – but [in] so far as our relation to it is concerned. I often experience this myself, for I know the hours of darkness in which I sometimes wrestle. I know how often I lose the roots of the Gospel and grace, as if it were suddenly hidden from me by dense clouds. I know how slippery is the footing of even those who are experienced in this matter and can step out most firmly….[2]

Gallwey writes much the same way about getting into and slipping out of Self 2. Listen to Luther again:

Dear brother, do not be proud, or sure and certain that you know Christ well. You now hear me confessing and professing what the devil was able to do against this man Luther, who, after all, was a doctor in this art. He has preached, thought, written, spoken, sung, and read so much about this matter and yet must remain a pupil in it and at times is neither a pupil nor master. Therefore be advised, and do not shout hurrah. Now you are standing, but see to it that you do not fall[3]

For Gallwey’s suspension of judgment, we can correlate the Christian tenet that when the self has already died in baptism, judgment is irrelevant. There is no more earthly jurisdiction. Gallwey’s inner game makes the other-worldly produce the this-worldly or conversely, it makes the this-worldly reflect the other-worldly tenets of justification through faith by grace.

It is easy to change a few words of some of Gallwey statements and you have Luther’s sense of the spontaneous new life come to the fore. For example,

The first skill to learn is the art of letting go of the human inclination to judge ourselves and our performance as either good or bad. Letting go of the judging process is a basic key to the Inner Game, when we unlearn how to be judgmental, it is possible to (and here I substitute my words) “live the spontaneous, focused, Christian life” (page 17).

Thus Luther threw the canon law into the fire on December 10^th 1520, shocking the Church. Justification by faith meant no judgment. It is law-free unless you slip back into the old self. In his work, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther claims that to call the Christ of the new life a law-giver like Moses, is blasphemy. The Reformation gave the jurisdiction of the law to civil courts and closed the Archdeaconal and Episcopal church courts. (This is roughly speaking, because Protestant churches still had to deal with marriage and divorce.)

The legal dimension stands at the edge of personal relationships and in the courts is where social forces intersect and impact personal relations. We have individual freedom, but when we transgress a law, then we are prosecuted by the society in court, where we have to accept penalties that range from small fines even to capital punishment. Our society erases our ideology of individualism in the court of law.

Gallwey says, “It is interesting how the judgmental mind extends itself” (19). It can contaminate the whole personal individual self and also extend into a social self, where laws can interfere with a spontaneous creative life that has internalized the law, even the inner purpose of the law, also even the love of the law to its positive reaches, where a point comes that the law fails, becomes it has come into a place where it does not belong. In Luther’s terms, the freedom of the Gospel leaves the law behind.

Gallwey uses words like “fluidity” (21), “flowing like a river,” that “our actions flow,” for spontaneity. Gallwey says that the art of letting go of Self 1 control, gives Self 2 the chance to play spontaneously (82). Spontaneity is obstructed by self-judging, thinking too much, trying too hard — all forms of overcontrol (82).

Gallwey argues that observations must be made clearly in terms of doing something correctly or in error, without making a judgment about it. Just make the observation. An error is a learning experience.

He calls Self 1 the ego-mind and Self 2 the body. Perhaps he should call it the body-mind. He discovers the fact that we can not take credit for the accomplishments of the second self. That correlates with our not being saved by works, but only by grace, that is, by the merit of Christ – in whom we are our second self, which is a pure and unearned gift, and not our merit or deserving. Here Gallwey’s insight and Luther’s, which is of course derived from the Pauline Letters, correlate rather well.

Gallwey says that Self 2 has an inner intelligence which is staggering. Here Luther’s respect for creation and the body correlate well. Luther does not relegate sin to the body and superiority and sinlessness to the intellect, the reasoning mind. Gallwey’s ego-mind is like Luther’s Dame Reason and for Luther reason in the pejorative sense interferes with our relationship to God as much as the ego-mind interferes with Self 2, when it should be trusted to play spontaneously, far exceeding the capacity of Self One’s ego-mind.

Luther’s awareness also observes the inner and outer person, in his “Freedom of the Christian.” He also concentrates on the Inner Game, because his first 19 points concern the inner person, the next 6, the outer person, and the last four, concern their social and economic relations.[4]

Trying too hard is like Luther’s works-righteousness. The old self steps in and interferes with the new self, instead of trusting the new self. That is the meaning of “Trust Thyself!” (36) It is like a parent doing something for a child instead of allowing the child to learn it.

Then Gallwey starts emphasizing that we have to let it happen, rather than Self 1 doing it. Let it happen correlates with Luther’s, “Let God be God!” The emphasis is on trust rather than control and the constant control that Self 1 wants. Allow the natural learning process to take place and forget about stroke by stroke instructions. A Luther correlate would be sin versus sins. Forget about each thing you do wrong and concentrate, focus on your trust in God. When your trusting relationship with God breaks, which is sin, then all your sins take place. Thus your sins are merely symptoms of your sin, which is a breakdown of your trust in God.

Gallwey says it is watching, getting the feel, and then letting the body do it…effortlessly. It has to happen without effort and control. Luther states in the Small Catechism’s explanation of the Third Article of the Creed: “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in the true faith.”

Thus the new life in Christ is also effortless. The spontaneity entails Christ working through you. Gallwey says that you have to become passive the way Luther emphasizes passive righteousness in justification. “Letting it happen,” according to Gallwey, “does not mean that you go limp, but it means letting Self 2 [takes over]” (79). It is interesting how Gallwey argues that for trusting and respecting the body, we need a change of attitude (41). Becoming a new self in Christ requires a metanoia, a change of mind, for the transformation to take place. A critical attitude and wanting control are symptoms of mistrust (41).

Gallwey touches the problem of dogmatism (53):

When the verbal instruction is passed on to another person who does not have in his bank of experience the action being described in memory, it lives in the mind totally disconnected from experience. The chances are now even greater that there will be a split between memory of theory and memory of action (53).

Putting this in my words: Verbal instruction or teaching passed on to someone who does not have a bank of experience of the life being described in memory, can live in a world totally disconnected from that experience. Another helpful Gallwey insight: They are relying on formula rather than the feel (56). Perhaps these instructions all come from the ego-mind of a dogmatic person. Thus a Christian life can not at all be there in experience, but merely in dogmatic instructions. A person can have the feel for a Christian life or have lost the feel for it, the way a person may not have the feel for a language. Gallwey cites a dictum: “No teacher is greater than one’s own experience” (54). Perhaps Schleiermacher had good reason for connecting our theology with experience. What do we make of a theology that is adverse to experience? A dogmatic theology that does not shape a life lived alien to Christian experience is worthless. But a theology can also be performative, bringing the experience it espouses into existence.

I wonder if the word “experience” was distilled from the word “suffering,” like the word “thanksgiving” was from the word “praise”? I am very interested in the historical career of words. Reading the Bible and other old texts, I often feel that the word suffering also includes the concept of experience, before that word became coined.

Gallwey continues that valid instruction from experience can help me if it guides me in my own experiential discovery. He also emphasizes remembering the inner feel. Gallwey is, of course, instructing tennis players. He says it is necessary to have a clear picture of a right stroke of the racket and the inner feel of it. With both, one can have natural learning. For Gallwey relying on formula rather than the feel is a mistake (56). Again that reminds me of a dogmatic person. We need theology from good experience to help others learn from experience and the inner feel [the Holy Spirit] in the experience. “Natural learning is from the inside out.” according to Gallwey (68).

In my seminary days, Granger Westberg made a point about learning from the outside in. He suggested that we should behave our way into a new state of mind, rather than going from a new state of mind into new ways of acting or a change of behavior.

There are probably many missing components involved in these complex relations of the inner states and outward actions. Gallwey also emphasizes how a clear visual picture of a result needs to be complemented by the inner feel of that action. The “doing” of Westberg might relate to the external observance of an action, while Gallwey relates to the inner feel and the internal authority of one’s own experience in learning a game. The idea is learning how to learn and then discovering what is worth learning (71). Gallwey notes that the child is the greatest learner. “Learning does not mean the collection of information, but the realization of something that actually changes one’s behavior, such as a tennis stroke, [or taking regular exercise or changing one’s diet] or internal behavior, such as a pattern of thought” (72). Trying to break a habit strengthens it. Use the strategy of starting a new habit. Starting a new pattern is easy when done with childlike disregard for the difficulties (76).

Gallwey’s emphasis on letting it happen by trusting Self 2 reminds so much of Luther’s conviction that it is not by our own effort but by the working of the Holy Spirit. Gallwey says that you have to trust Self 2, your body, with the effort and all the trying and making of

Self 1 is to no avail. It has to allow Self 2 to do it. “But letting it happen does not mean going limp, it means letting Self 2 use the muscles necessary for the job” (79). For my purposes, I would say, letting the new self take over. I would then add, we are thus not passive, but active out of an inner force.

This correlates with the passive righteousness that Luther speaks of in his experience of having been justified by faith. In relation to God, passive righteousness is not the active righteousness through which one is judged and found wanting, but a righteousness that imbues the believer with righteousness, making the sinner righteous. The believer also has to be passive before God in this exchange, that is, on the vertical axis. The believer has to let it happen to him or her. But before others on the horizontal axis, the initiative for being active is brought out of the person. We could say the person is passive before God, coram deo, and thus very active among others, coram hominibus.

Gallwey continues: When self 1 does it, a certain ego satisfaction is attained. But when Self 2 does it, it doesn’t feel as if it was you who did it (81). And you do not feel that you can take the credit for what transpired. That applies to doing things out of the Holy Spirit, out of the grace of God. Then as Isaiah says, all our works are thy doing, O Lord (26:12). So if they are done by our Christ-self, then we cannot take credit for what Christ has done. As St. Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). That saying can easily be extended to “It is no longer I who work, but Christ who works through me.”

Luther also knows that fighting the mind does not work, as Gallwey notes (82). Luther somehow identifies what Gallwey calls the ego-mind or Self 1 with the devil and advises wiles to use against the devil’s invoked temptation to surrender to depression, for example.

The devil is conquered by mocking and despising him, not by resisting and arguing with him. Therefore, my Jerome [the student Luther is counseling] join in jokes and games with my wife and the rest, and in this way you will cheat those diabolical thoughts and take good courage.[5]

Like Gallwey says old habits cannot be broken directly, they have to be replaced by new habits, Luther advises, play the piano or play a flute, avoid being alone. Luther is trying to get someone out of depression, however, which is somewhat different from unlearning a bad habit in the skill of playing a game. But the diabolical ideas that plague the depressed students that Luther is counseling resemble the self-judgment and heavy self-criticism that Gallwey is dealing with.

The best way to quiet this mind, is not by telling it to shut up, or by arguing with it, or criticizing it for criticizing you. Fighting the mind does not work. What works best is learning to focus it. (82)

That is not a Luther insight.

There is a better correlation of Luther pejorative sense of reason, which he calls Dame Reason, with Gallwey’s ego-mind and Self 1. Gallwey says, “the problem of letting go of Self 1 and its interfering activities is not found to come easy” (82). We already included citations where Luther says the same about living out of justification by faith or knowing Christ and living in the second self in the Gospel through grace. He could become impressed by himself and want credit or he could condemn himself and doubt everything he said and stood for, as if in the whole world only Luther was right. The first case he called falling off a log on the right and the second one was falling off on the left.[6]

Gallwey says that relaxed concentration with a quiet and focused mind is the supreme act (83), while Luther would say justification by faith was the supreme act, but ascribe the act to God and not to ourselves. Luther also relates to faith in a similar way. He first calls it the captain of all our works and then progresses to saying, faith is God’s work in us, with which we can have nothing to do. He moves this way from his “Sermon on Good Works” to his Babylonian Captivity of the Church, where faith has become the action of God completely beyond our competence.

Gallwey says, “Not assuming that you already know [something] is a powerful principle of focus” (85). Luther does not tire of emphasizing this same point. When he speaks about the Epistle to the Romans, for example, he writes:

It is worthy and valuable for a Christian not only to know it word for word by heart but also to indulge in it daily as the soul’s daily bread. It can never be read or pondered too often. The more one indulges in it, the more valuable it becomes….[7]

Again Luther speaks of working with a Psalm in Scripture:

You should meditate, not only in your heart but externally, aloud, so that, in constantly repeating the words, you can compare your oral words with the ones written literally, contrasting them, as it were, reading and rereading them, with diligent attention and reflection in order to understand what the Holy Spirit means by them. And be on guard that you do not become satisfied and start to think that, after reading it once or twice, you have read, heard, and spoken it enough and have gotten to the bottom of it and understood it.[8]

Another example: For Luther the Lord’s Prayer has to be thought, read, rethought, reread again and again, because its depth cannot be exhausted.

Gallwey is attempting to keep the mind focused.

The question arises how to keep the mind focused for an extended period of time. The best way is to allow yourself to get interested in the ball. How do you do this? By not thinking you already know all about it, no matter how many thousands of balls you have seen in your life. Not assuming you already know is a powerful principle of focus (85).

Gallwey writes about consciousness very beautifully.

Consciousness is that which makes all things and events knowable. Without consciousness eyes could not see, ears could not hear, and mind could not think. Consciousness is like a pure light energy, whose power is to make events knowable, just as electric light makes objects visible. Consciousness could be called the light of lights because it is by its light that all other lights become visible (91).

That passage reminds very much of the Psalms, especially “For with you is the fountain of life and in your light we see light” (Psalm 36:9). The Psalm speaks of divine consciousness that lights up our consciousness and our lives deriving from the divine fountain of life.

Gallwey continues: “Attention is focused consciousness and consciousness is the power of knowing” (92). “Our minds project what is about to happen or dwell on what has already happened” (93). This distracting mind is what Luther calls Dame Reason, which makes him furious because it interferes with his trust in God, like the ego-mind interferes with Self 2 in Gallwey. The ego-mind of Self 1 wants to do what Self 2 could do with spontaneous inspiration. Dame Reason is convinced that she created God and thus interferes with faith in God, and in the same way as Self 1 is a small light obliterating the great light, like a street light erases the stars in the sky.

At this point Gallwey gets into his discussion of getting into the zone. I have already dealt extensively with being in the zone.[9] Here I will first record more of how Gallwey describes this athletic experience and then compare it with a more universalizable religious experience like Luther’s justification by faith. A course in the Sociology of Religion, taught by Prof. Robert Bellah was helpful here.

When athletes have gotten into the zone, to start with Gallwey, they say: “I wasn’t there. Something else took over. I didn’t do it, it just happened” (98). St. Paul would say, “It was not me, but Christ in me.” The Holy Spirit took over. Gallwey continues by describing the zone further: “It comes as a gift. The secret is not thinking: the mind gets in the way” (99). That sounds very much like Dame Reason getting between Luther and God again.

Gallwey continues that as much as Self 1 would love to get into the zone, it can only be entered when Self 1 is left behind (99). “As trust increases Self 1 quiets, Self 2 becomes more conscious and more present, enjoyment increases and gifts are being given” (100). “If you are willing to give credit where credit is due, and not think you ‘know’ how to do it, the gifts are apt to be more frequent and sustainable” (100). In a passage like Luther’s Gallwey continues:

I’ve been courting Self 2 for a long time now, over 25 years consciously, and it comes at its own timing, when I am ready for it – humble, respectful, not expecting it, somehow placing myself lower than it, not above it. Then when the moment is right, it comes, and I enjoy the absence of Self 1 thought and the presence of joy. I like it a lot. Grab for it, and it will squirt away like a slippery bar of soap. Take it for granted, and you will be distracted and lose it. I used to think that whatever was present was ephemeral. Now I know that it is always there and it is only I who leave. When I look at a young child, I realize it is there all the time” (100).

In writing this book and wanting to transcend the game of tennis by seeing the Inner Game applying to all of life, Gallwey almost becomes theological about getting into the zone. Gallwey also tells a story about his car breaking down on a freezing night far away from any help. He experiences a kind of death of his frightened self that was so afraid of dying and starts running and runs for forty-five minutes until he reaches a house and finds help. Really he felt he was running toward life (132).

It is letting go of the concerns of Self 1 and letting in the natural concerns of a deeper and truer self. It is caring, yet not caring; it is effort, but effortless at the same time” (132).

Prof. Robert Bellah of the University of California at Berkeley compared being in the zone with Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences.[10] He said that when they occurred in athletic feats they could rival contemplative graces. Joe Montana reports entering a “zone” and no longer hearing the crowd – everything becoming one. The difference between player and game, dance and dancer disappears. The minute you worry what will happen next it is gone and you are out of the zone. Bellah confirms the discovery of Gallwey here, too. Bellah continues that it is an experience of the felt whole. The feeling proceeds through participation.

While an athlete remains an athlete, a religious experience contains life-entailments, according to Bellah. Gallwey becomes somewhat theological by also applying his insights to life beyond the game of tennis. A mystic or a saint, however, is not in a game, according to Bellah, but transcends all categories in a higher experience. One has to have had this experience it to understand it. Timothy Gallwey’s athletic experience of the zone is strong and his witness is therefore helpful as he transcends the game of tennis and begins to universalize his experience and insights in an almost religious way; he is not merely an athlete reporting about having been in a zone like Montana. According to Bellah, however, a religious experience is a felt whole, related to the ultimate, the transcendent, thus opening the possibility for a more radical set of implications. The experience of the saint is superior to that of an athlete. The religious experience is a challenge to the total self, (Bellah mentions Luther, as an example). The athlete’s experiences are partial.

Thus the religious experience is over-arching and the athletic experience is one individual this-worldly reflection of the other-worldly reality.

Thus I believe the many correlations between Luther’s life and theology and Gallwey’s Inner Game come about, because Gallwey is also dealing with a religious experience. He uses his game of tennis for a way to understand his life before the ultimate, although he is careful to remain secular. I also think that Luther sometimes experienced such a feeling and focused oneness when praying, studying, and writing. Being in a zone, might partially explain his phenomenal productivity. I know my late mentor, Prof. Robert Goeser, would just deny that explanation, the way he denied so many other explanations I attempted. Luther’s productivity according to Goeser could not be explained. But something like the zone is involved in being in the new self in Christ. Our body and mind, our whole self, caught up in the Holy Spirit, can be like a leaf blowing in the wind. But the wind is at the outer edges of physicality, while the Holy Spirit is the breath of pure life, thought, and love. There is also an emergence of the body, physicality, and creation in Luther’s theology, because he favors the Hebrew sense of religion over the Greek sense of philosophy, and marriage over virginity. Gallwey is also very much dealing with physical performance and the inner capacity involved in attaining peak bodily performance.

Let me conclude with Luther’s experience, which we call justification by grace. Luther was struggling mightily to interpret the scripture passage found in Romans 1:17:

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that God was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punished sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with God’s righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless I beat importunately upon Paul at this place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.

At Last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘One who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live, by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, the passive righteousness by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “One who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the scripture from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word, “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was truly the gate to paradise.[11]

Here Luther’s struggle with the interpretation of a text (central to an angry issue he has with God) resolves and overflows into a complete renewal of his life and thought, which overflows again into a renewal of the church.

We could go on and tell of St. Augustine and his mother, Monica, being taken up as they talked at a window sill overlooking a garden[12] or even the transfiguration of Jesus, between Moses, and Elijah in the presence of Peter, James, and John.[13] Here the physical bodies on that high mountain and the whole creation become involved. But it was Reformation Day and for our purposes the correlation of Luther’s theology and Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game, was what I wanted to bring into better focus.

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[1] W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: the Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance, (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1974-2008). Throughout this study, the numbers in parentheses are the pages of his book.

 

[2] (D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Vol. 40.I, (Weimar: Hermann Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1883-), page 129.

[3] Ibid., Vol. 31.I, pages 255ff.

[4] See Philip and Peter Krey, Luther’s Spirituality, (New York: Paulist Press, 2007), pages 69-90.

[5] Ibid., page 8-9.

[6] Ibid., page 61 and 63. On page 61 Luther has the image of someone like a lumberjack perched on a log floating in water and trying to get a footing. I combine that with page 63 and falling off the log on either the right or the left side.

[7] Ibid., page 105.

[8] Ibid., page 122.

[9] See my post of July 26^th 2008, “Time Slows Down in the Zone” where I have already dealt with some of Gallwey’s important insights in this matter.

[10] Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1968).

The words of Robert Bellah, Professor of Sociology, are my notes from a lecture held on January 25^th 1996 in his course on the Sociology of Religion, the Spring Semester, at the University of California in Berkeley.

[11] Walter von Loewenich, Martin Luther: the Man and his Work, Translated by Lawrence W. Denef, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1982), Page 84.

[12] “The Vision at Ostia,” The Confessions of St. Augustine, book 9, Chapter 10. In John K. Ryan’s translation, (New York: an Image Book, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), page 221.

[13] See Mark 9:2-8; Matthew 17:1-8; Luke 9:28-36; and also see 2 Peter 1: 17-18.

Notes upon Another Reading of the “Freedom of a Christian.” (March 25, 2009) Dr. Peter Krey

Luther organizes his pamphlet into three parts:

Part One: Points 1-19: the inner person or the soul

Part Two: Points 19-24: the outer person or the body

Part Three: Points 25-30: the relation of outward persons.

Right in the introduction or dedication, Luther’s language is filled with conflict and tension (Page 70).^[1]

“Christ should be a sign and stumbling block, resisted and contradicted, against whom many take offence, who need to fall and be resurrected again” (70).

The two contradictory statements present the tension between freedom and responsibility:

A Christian person is a free sovereign,

above all things, subject to no one [by faith].

A Christian person is a dutiful servant

in all things and subject to everyone [by love].

The next opposition comes between the inner person or soul and the outer person or body of the Christian.

The soul is spiritual, new and inward

The body is physical, old, and outward. This may be an oversimplification, because Luther speaks of the spiritual not in an object itself, but in how the object is used.

Point 3 seems to be absolute. I wonder if it is.

Point 4 argues that external acts are irrelevant to the righteousness [or integrity] of the soul.

Point 5  The Word of God, the Gospel preached by Christ makes the soul of a Christian alive, righteous, and free (p. 71). The soul is moved by the Word of God (72). It is written that the Word of God helped them. Christ was sent only to preach the Word of God.

Point 6 the gospel has to be preached in such a way that you hear your God speaking to you! So that you can come out of yourself, have your coming out party! When you are addressed by the Word, you surrender to the Word and trust the Word boldly.

Point 7 Forming the Word and Christ in us is the only work and exercise of a Christian (73), which is the dynamic of faith. The only work you need is to believe in the one God sent, that is in Jesus Christ. Obeying the first commandment of the ten is the one out of which the obedience to all the others flows. It represents the treasure of faith, because it requires trust in God and trust in God’s Word.

Isaiah 10:22. “Freedom of a Christian” itself is like the brief summation, the brief nutshell, and gospel lives can overflow from it and like a primal flood cover the earth. In other words, those filled by the Word of faith, filled by trust in God are a remnant out of whom the overflowing promises of God can come and cover the earth.

It is “the faith in which every commandment stands fulfilled” (73).

Point 8 Faith alone without works is a superabundant treasure. Scripture is filled with commands, which are old testament and by promises which are new testament. Here OT and NT are understood as the last will and testament of Christ, who died for us making us the heirs of all God’s promises. The whole gospel can be inside of this word, “testament.” These words can also mean the parts of the bible.

Point 8 to 9 goes from the law to the gospel (74).

“Believe it and you have it, don’t and you won’t.”

Heraklitus of old: everything changes but change itself. Parmenades: everything stays the same. Nothing changes. Luther’s theology places opposites in tension, just like Heraklitus and that brings change, growth, and development.

When gold was money, Heraklitus said: “All things can compensate for fire and fire can compensate for all thins, like goods for gold and like gold for goods.” Not all things, but people believe that everything can be changed into money and money can be changed back into everything. Friendship and love and trust are some things that money cannot buy. Everything in the life-world can be changed into language and words are a kind of currency in this sense. “Words and words are all I have to steal your heart away.”[2] Luther argues that faith and trust are also like that. “For I have placed all things in a compact form inside of faith, so that whoever has faith has all things and is saved and whoever does not have faith has nothing” (74). Trust is an all inclusive currency out of which all righteousness comes and returns.

Gold: all things go in and come out.

Money: all things go in and come out.

Words: all things go in and come out.

Trust/ faith: all things go in and come out.

The promises of God provide what the commandments require.

Point 10 The Word and the soul are like an iron put into a fire, making the iron become red-hot. “The one who hears the Word becomes like the Word, pure, good, and just.”

Luther is saying that the work of the soul has to be done in the self and a focus on the self is necessary before considering an action agenda, to use other words for “works” (74-75).

Point 11 By believing God Luther means that we look upon God as addressing us in good faith. A lawyer noted that their code words for, “I am going to sue you!” are “you are no longer operating with me in good faith.” Not to believe God is to hold that God is not relating to us in good faith (75).

Point 12 Luther used the picture of an iron in the fire for the soul in the Word. Now he uses the picture of a marriage between Christ the bridegroom and the soul as the bride. “Christ and the soul become one body” (75). This is called the marvelous exchange and the struggle is the deadly duel which is involved for the joyful marriage to take place.

The exchange: old birth for the new birth

Our birth for the birth of Christ

Poverty for riches

Hatred for love

Sin for righteousness

Death for life

Curse for a blessing

Whore for a happy housemother and wife

That is harsh, but probably accurate. We receive all the attributes of God, while Christ takes our birth, sin and mortality and in the almighty power of God overcomes them and provides forgiveness.

Point 13 You can be filled with good works from head to toe and yet this marriage has not transpired.

Luther is uncovering the source of all good works, which is the faith of the heart. Trust and faith are the head and the whole essence of righteousness (77).

Point 14 Luther says, “What other good things do we find in Christ” as if he were opening a sack filled with presents, as if opening a treasure chest. Christ is like Santa Clause with a sack full of presents. It is here where what I call the existential rapture becomes obvious, but the tension of opposites right from the start generate this growing and maturing in Christ (77). “The Christian person is lifted up so high over all things!” (78) (Carl Gustav Jung calls this the transcendent function.)

In Christ we receive the first born son status, whether we are sons or daughters, no matter our birth order. The real Son of promise is Jesus Christ. The first born is the heir and becomes the king/queen and priest. We are not heirs to earthly possessions but of spiritual goods, “although temporal goods are not thereby excluded.” “Christ teaches us inwardly in our hearts.” We could also use the word sovereignty instead of rapture: a person is lifted up so high over all things. We receive a truly almighty sovereignty over a spiritual kingdom: such is the authority and freedom of a Christian. Even evil and death have to serve the Christian (78).

Point 16 Who can even imagine how high the honor and status of a Christian is?

The person in Christ and Christ in the heart of the person:

→ First born son and heir → the ascent of faith → Nobility of the spirit → king or queen → priest interceding before God → Christ → into God.

The descent in love goes all the way down humbly serving “the least of these.” This rapture takes place by faith and not by works. To want it by works is like Aesop’s dog with a bone in his mouth, sees his reflection in a stream and tries to snatch the bone out of that dog’s mouth and loses both his bone and the reflection. Works will not provide these benefits.

Point 17 We are the priesthood of believers: what of pastors? They are merely performing a different function; they are not different in status.

The power and privilege usurped by the clergy estate, where they used their sword of the spirit and sword of iron, for their material benefit, obscuring the whole gospel. They took Christ away (79). Christ has to be preached (80). This Word of God has to be preached. It makes us rejoice in the core of our being. Christ becomes our sweet heart of love.

Part Two: Point 19 Luther moves from being a sovereign to being a servant; from the ascent in faith to the descent in love, from faith to love, from the soul to the body (80-81). It is in the external that we achieve the first fruits.

Point 20 The spirit has to harness and discipline the body. The inner self is united with God, the flesh has a recalcitrant will and desires pleasure. We are to pummel the body so it conforms to our spirit. Note: “The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak.”

Works have to be done freely out of love and be done for nothing, just to please God. to do that we have to subdue the obstinate willfulness of the body. But righteousness remains by faith and not by doing more and more good works (82). Point 22 The examples: Adam and Eve, the bishop, the tree and the fruit, and the carpenter. Adam and Eve were created righteous and tilling the soil and gardening was their joyful response. A person going around consecrating churches and ordaining pastors is an impostor and will never that way become a bishop (83). Neither do we become good person by doing good works.

Point 23 A good and righteous person does good and righteous works and not vice versa. A tree bears the fruit and not vice versa. The self has to grow and mature and the action agenda depends on that. The action agenda of a psychotic person does not make them whole, but the therapy, the talking cure, which heals the disturbed and distorted self can. In the empathy and trust of the relationship, the self becomes whole, not through doing good. When a person has faith and receives grace, then the person seeks to please God by works.

Point 24 Righteousness or evil does not follow from works but from faith. The beginning of sin is to depart from God and trust in God (84). It is a falling out of relationship.

We have to start with the person, not the works. In the eyes of people coram hominibus good works = good person. Luther is writing about the person before God, i.e., coram Deo. But to make external works determinative makes for the blind leading the blind. One must look inside the person. Luther looks at our soul with in-depth psychology or theology. We do not believe in salvation by works but by faith.

Law (commands) and Gospel (promises): the Word of God in the form of commands frightens us into contrition, while in the form of promises of grace we are comforted by faith (85).

Part Three Point 26 Outward bodies in relation with others:

Here good works are required for which our faith has to get to work with pleasure and love (86). All works are done for the good of the neighbor and not in order to go to heaven or do penance. Because we have received all things over abundantly by faith in Christ, all our works and our whole lives are left over to be able to serve our neighbor freely with love. We empty ourselves (Phil 2:5) and becoming human we take the role of servants: the kenosis theme (86-87).

Point 29 Here Luther takes the ascent of faith into Christ: To my neighbor I will become a Christ just like Christ died for me and I freely serve my neighbor for nothing. Mary humbles herself and goes under the law in solidarity with common folk (88). Paul circumcises Timothy but not Titus. Christ has Peter pay the head tax, even though children of the king pay no taxes. We are to submit to civil authorities. Works done in penance are for our selfish salvation and they are not done for others (89). Luther now describes the joyful economy of abundance. We inherit the whole testament. Thus God’s possessions must flow from one person into another and be [held] in common. Each person should accept the neighbor as if the neighbor were him or herself. Christ is the currency and Christ is the clearing house of all our gifts received from on high. Even our faith and our righteousness is not for ourselves but are for others.

Point 30 This great paragraph (90) is lost in the Latin version of this pamphlet. It shows how the existential rapture ends as well as begins Luther’s summary of the Christian faith and life.

A Christian is in ecstasy, outside him or herself, extra nos. A Christian’s ecstasy is in Christ and in the neighbor: in Christ through faith and in the neighbor through love. In faith one ascends above oneself into God and from God one descends below oneself and yet always remains in God and God’s love. The heavens open and the angels of God ascend and descend upon the Son of Man. This is another look at the existential rapture. The Son of Man can refer to Christ or to anyone in Christ or who has Christ in his or her heart. Christian freedom is higher than any earthly freedom as the heavens are above the earth (90).

PLTS Prof. Robert James Goeser Lectures

for the course “Advanced Luther Readings,”

February 9^th 1998 through…May 12^th 1998[1]

Notes Taken by Peter D.S. Krey, his Teaching Assistant.

Lecture of February 9^th 1998: Luther wrote in the vernacular or the common language. He published a virtual media blitz of pamphlets starting in 1517. Pamphlets or tracts are called Flugschriften in German, libella in Latin, or again in German Büchlein, which are small books. They are polemical, meaning that they are fighting and argumentative; they are arguing something. These pamphlets are like a genre, a literary form, like for example a novel.

In 1520 Luther writes the famous treatises “The Freedom of a Christian,” the “Treatise on Good Works,” “A Treatise on the New Testament, That is, the Holy Mass,” “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the Improvement of the Christian Estate,” and the longer work in Latin, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.”

First Reading: Martin Luther’s “The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ — Against the Fanatics.” (1526)[2]

On Easter Day 1526 Luther preached two sermons that dealt with those on the left and the right [in the Reformation movement]. A variety of people were to the left. To these two sermons, associates of Luther added another of his sermons on confession and compiled the three sermons together to make the above tract. Luther did not publish it himself nor would he have put “Against the Fanatics” into the title.[3]

Huldrich Zwingli held that Christ cannot be on the altar and at the right hand of God at the same time. Luther held that Christ is everywhere because Christ is in the Word. The Word is more than words and the Word is less related to the Greek logos than to the Hebrew word, DABAR.

We have

Jesus and the logos

Time and eternity

History and eternal truth

Theology and philosophy

The Word is proclamation as address not as eternal truth. God speaks and it is done. God speaks and it is created. The Word makes Christ real in the bread. The Word calls me to responsibility. A parable uses the language of address, for example the Prophet Nathan addressing David: “You are the man!” The parable engages the hearer in such a way that she or he cannot weasel out.

For John Calvin, Christ has a spatial limitation. Luther held that Christ’s body was ubiquitous. He denied any circumscription of Christ’s body. The right hand of God was not spatial. The Ascension was not spatial. Heaven is not a place but a condition. We do not have a three story universe. The issue was not how to get Christ down from heaven and to the altar, but to get Christ recognized. For example, how do we recognize Christ in our neighbor? Christ is already present, too close, too involved. How do I recognize the Word Incarnate everywhere? How does the Word of Address make us responsible? I spend my life-time weaseling out. I use my intellect to weasel out. A great deal of literature addresses you like the Prophet Nathan did David, “You are the man” and you can’t escape!

In the novels of Joseph Conrad, a person cannot finally escape the truth. The question posed is how to open my eyes and make me own my past.

It’s not Christ from the right hand of God brought to the altar. We have to bring them together in one construct, [in the Word]. Luther writes, “Again I preach Christ and with my bodily voice, I bring Christ into your heart.”[4] That means in my heart and not that he sits there in a chair.[5] But Christ is at the right hand of the Father and is brought into the heart. By the way: in that sentence you have all the course of homiletics that you need. Make the “Right Hand of the Father come into your heart” work for you on all kinds of levels.

Now Luther is a peculiar 16^th century fellow for us. We have many different problems issuing from him. But just hear to the text.

We do not have objective certainty, ecclesiastical or theological. Nor do we have subjective certainty, where you can believe anything you please. Christian communication has a special kind of certainty. It has a distinctive character. For communion, there is a uniqueness to Christian communication. Get beyond the theological definitions. The heart, for example, does not mean either the intellect or the emotions. [It is the center of the responsible self.] Luther’s imagery is not fair, but it is awfully good. He’s good at making catalogues. Luther connects belief and certainty. If Christ enters into the heart, Christ can enter the bread and wine. If Christ can enter the heart without putting a hole in it, then he can enter the bread without putting a hole in it.[6] Christ is around us, in us, and in all places. Ubiquity is not like a definition of the sacrament, but it is recognized in life. A function of a play is to bring characters to recognition and then bring the audience to recognize themselves. If it fails, it is a matter of language or the audience.

Luther opposes the arguments that

1. It is not fitting, appropriate, and reasonable that Christ is in the sacrament.

2. It is not necessary that Christ be in the sacrament.

For those who hold that argument you do not have an incarnation of the Word in the sacrament, but for Luther you do. He insists, “This is my body. Christ said it.”

Theology is not creating problems, but wrestling with

some real problems. If you do not mean the physical body, then what do you mean? We mean presence. What kind of an “is” is it? “Is” correlates exactly with what you mean by body, by presence. When the opposing side takes the literal or symbolic interpretation of “is,” then Oecolampadius, for example asks “Why do you need a baked God?”

The crucial term is “physical.” What is the importance of something physical in this? Are you getting a theology that is not well baked? The question arises, what is the relationship of the spiritual and the physical? Did Lutherans trap themselves in something as if the physical is the reality?

Theology raises these kinds of questions. They are real issues and you can come to different resolutions. What is the relation of the spirit to the body? For Luther the spiritual and the physical cannot be separated. The spiritual has to be embodied. What is the connection between creation and redemption? Is it the created which is redeemed or is only something spiritual redeemed? Do you leave your body behind when you go to heaven? Is the body irrelevant to salvation?

For Luther Christ always comes embodied, coming in, with, and under the physical, the created. You do not escape the fact that you are a creature. You do not escape body, time, and history.

Zwingli had another view of reality. In a certain sense he is a dualist with a sharp distinction between the spirit and the body. He held that the physical was not an adequate medium of the spiritual. [Finitum Capax Infinitum][7] Zwingli reflects a Hellenistic position that opposes spirit to matter. He feels that you always have to protect the spirit from the body. In a sense, he sees evil partly in the body and matter.

For Luther the problem is not the body but sin. Not “sins” but sin. The problem is not something external from me. It is not my body. The problem is my self; the problem is the person.[8] The problem is not external, but in here, in my responsibility. The problem is not that I have a body. It is the very best in me that gets distorted. It is “better-than-ness.” I want my identity by being better than you. An example is the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, as well as in the Fall. I fall out of trust, because I do not want to be in relationship. I want to have it on my own and I want to have it on my own by being good.

The problem is not the limitation of my mind, body, or “creatureliness” but I want it in my isolation and I want to be better than you. We are so worried about sins, it never get to sin. I do not want to recognize evil for the wretched thing it is. I use people as things and I alone am a non-thing. I do not want to join the race. We continually say “they” and not “I”. Oh! We are happy to say “I” when it makes us special. Maturity, however, is to say “I” in responsibility. In taking responsibility we become strangely dumb and somehow we cannot utter the word, “I.” We do not want to take evil seriously and we distort the good ourselves and say “they” instead of “I”.

It is not the problem that we have a body, but our unwillingness to accept our “creatureliness.” I am an embodied self. I accept the physical. I am free. There is the “Bondage of the Will.” But the bondage does not come from the outside. It is my body. (Here in the sense of ownership.)

That Christ is in the sacrament is miraculous.[9] Luther takes issue with Zwingli’s view of reality. The heart is the problem. The problem is me. It is located in the realm of commitment, of decision, etc. The creature is a miracle. Look at a grain of wheat or a seed. The metabolic process is a miracle. The problem is not in the created. Creation is a miracle. You participate in creation and it is not the spirit against matter. It is creation versus sin, creation versus the heart.

In freedom I own that I did that. Just think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. The Rev. Dimmesdale is in the height of his glory while Hester Prynne is experiencing one more moment of absolute rejection.

For Hester: the quintessence of shame is good.

For Dimmesdale: the quintessence of good is evil.

This is enough for Luther’s tract, “The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ — Against the Fanatics.”

Next time Luther’s “Eight Sermons Delivered at Wittenberg in 1522” during the student uprisings.[10]

Assignment: write two pages each on the Word and sacrament, Law and Gospel, Theology of the Cross and just the basics about what they mean in life.

I just reread an essay by Robert J. Goeser called “From Exegesis to Proclamation.”[1]

It is a very good demonstration of what themes were discussed in his classes, what experiences we encountered with him there, and his theological rationale for his Luther interpretation. He presents Luther’s commentary on the book of the Prophet Jonah and explains how Luther isolates trust in the goodness of our gracious God within this world of history. He finds Luther in the drama and moral rebirth of the moment making his words become an event with encounter, because we usually read the text knowing how it will come out. The actors, however, did not know how their story would end. The words of Luther become what is the opposite of words. They catapult the readers into the experience of the shattering of their pretentious ideal selves, where they feel like “a breed apart” and have to join the human race, own their past, and live out of God’s grace. At the end of his essay, Goeser cites some of John Calvin’s same commentary on Jonah and the difference between Luther and Calvin cannot be better underscored. Calvin writes about what Luther and Jonah, if you will, really experienced.

In my theological lectures, I have a post about my dislike about speaking of “our God concept.” I take off from a chapter of Isaiah and I use Luther and Gerhard Ebeling in my argument. Goeser picks up on the inadequacy of reason alone to understand the biblical God who resides in our trust in his promises. Let me quote Luther as Goeser does:

“Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would neither do one or the other  if it were not conscious of the existence of God or it it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily and assigns the name of God and describes divine honor to its own idea of God.” (Page 212 of Goeser’s essay and in Luther’s Works, Vol 19, p. 55 and in Luthers Werke Weimar, 1883: vol. 19,207.3).

Goeser responded: “This ‘despair with the self‘ is what I consider the quintessence of existentialism. Later in Lutheran orthodoxy, what Luther had was lost to a kind of generalized experience, and Pietism went over into affect which Luther, however, never disconnected from intellect.“

“We Lutherans often do not understand Luther, because our familiarity with his words, somehow obscures the radical nature of what he says, and we remain in our ‘dogmatic slumbers.‘ Those who criticize him from outside our tradition, have usually never read him – that, of course, goes for many Lutherans as well. They have never read him.“ I offered.

“What we are reading and experiencing here is not just a question of Lutheranism, nor of a question of Luther‘s being German. It is a question of a great thinker dealing with the human condition.“ Prof. Goeser concluded. “Let’s read 50 pages more for next week.”

Dr. Peter D. S. Krey

In our Pastors’ Bible Study that meets Tuesday mornings at Resurrection Lutheran Church, Euclid Ave, in Oakland, CA we were discussing this Sunday’s lessons (Matthew 14:22-33 and Peter’s walking on water). We were noting that Jesus often reproaches his disciples as having little faith. How does our faith increase so that we can have a stronger more fervent faith? Perhaps the transition required can be charted by Luther’s insights below, where faith’s center of gravity transfers from being part of our effort to a “pure work of God in us.”

This was a footnote that I added to my dissertation, Sword of the Spirit, Sword of Iron.[1] One of Luther’s sermons of 1522 shows his peculiar notion of faith as well as its development as a concept that was completely independent of human doing.

¹⁷⁷How Luther’s distinctive concept of faith continues to develop can be seen in his pamphlet, “Sermon about Unrighteous Mammon,” (untranslated), delivered August 17, 1522. It received 15 editions in Luther’s life-time, as well being included in three editions of sermon collections. He writes: “The real faith of which we speak, will not allow itself to be made out of our thought, because it is a pure work of God in us, without our being able to add anything we do to it. Thus St. Paul says in Romans 5:15: ‘It is God’s gift of grace won for us through Christ.’ That is why it is such a mighty, active, restless, and busy thing, which immediately renews the person, gives a second birth, and leads the person into new ways and into new being. It is impossible for this same self not to do good works, continuously, [spontaneously] without interruption.” Weimar Ausgabe 10.3: 285.24-30.

Also footnote 429 traces the development of faith through On Good Works, “Christian Freedom,” and Babylonian Captivity.[2]

⁴²⁹In On Good Works, Luther makes faith the first and highest of all good works, then the foreman and captain of all the others. Here in “Christian Freedom” he makes it the head and the whole essence of piety or being religious. In Babylonian Captivity, he made another move. “Faith is not a work, but the lord and life of all works.” _{LW 36:47, CL1:452:30, and WA6:520.26-27}. And several pages later, writes that it is the work of God and not a human one, citing Ephesians 2:8. Then he states: “The other works he works through us and with our help, but this one alone he works in us and without our help.” _{LW 36:62, CL 1:463:41, and WA 6:530.17-18}.[3]