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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Martin Luther's revolutionary insight concerning the location of the event of justification in the “bottom of the heart” contained, as is well known, some ancillary results toward the displacing of external activities—”works”—from a central position in the quest for salvation. One effect of his theology was a radical redistribution of weight in his anthropological understanding, a shifting of focus away from a person's active participation in liturgy and the sacraments, asceticism and good works, and toward the event of justification in the “consciousness,” “depths of the heart,” or “the inmost heart.” Moreover, a new understanding of the psychological situation in which the Gospel can operate involved Luther in new methods for preparing and reinforcing the justification event. This article will examine Luther's description of the psychological situation in which justification occurs; his revised anthropology, especially as it affected his view of the human body; his identification of the ear as the direct access to the “bottom of the heart”; and, finally, the consequences of Luther's anthropology for the understanding of asceticism, death, and the sacraments.
1 Luther's sententia has been read as conscientia by the Erlangen edition of the 1525 Latin text of the Lectures on Jonah, and has been translated accordingly “conscience” by Froehlich, Charles D. in Luther's Works (= LW) 19 (ed. Oswald, Hilton C.; St. Louis: Concordia, 1974).Google Scholar The 1526 German text of the Lectures on Jonah gives the word Gewissen, which is also translated as “conscience” by Martin H. Bertram (ibid.). I prefer to translate both the Latin and German words as “consciousness” in most contexts in this article. “Consciousness” is, in my judgment, more accurate in denoting Luther's meaning in contemporary usage. “Conscience” carries connotations that emphasize a socially conditioned sense of guilt, while “consciousness” designates a subjective activity in which thinking and feeling are coordinated in the construction of a world view and self-image that govern, in turn, the formation of one's perceptions, values, and behavior. Luther's description of the capacity of the justification event to constellate altered and more accurate reality-oriented values, perceptions, and emotions is better described by “consciousness” than by “conscience.”
Throughout the article I have slightly altered quotations for the sake of gender inclusiveness.
2 Translation adapted from Dillenberger, John, Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (New York: Anchor, 1961) 11.Google Scholar The translation in subsequent citations from Dillenberger has also been adapted. Scholars have questioned the accuracy of Luther's description, written long after the event of his early experience. Even though this description may schematize his experience in order to highlight its essential moments, we may not, I think, discount Luther's own description; it is a somewhat dramatized, but not essentially inaccurate report.
3 Quoted in Simon, Edith, Luther Alive: Martin Luther and the Making of the Reformation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968) 32.Google Scholar
4 Lectures on Jonah 2:7 (LW 19. 79).
5 Preface to the Latin Writings in Dillenberger (ed.), Writings, 11.
6 “Preface to the Prophet Jonah,” Lectures on Jonah (Latin text; LW 19. 4).
7 Ibid., 10.
8 Ibid., 18.
9 Ibid., 48 (German text).
10 “Introduction” to Magnificat (LW 21. 300). Emphasis mine.
11 Lectures on Jonah 2:2 (LW 19. 72–74).
12 It has been remarked by several modern expositors of Luther (among them Kerr, Hugh T., A Compend of Luther's Theology [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1943] ix) that Luther's “positive theology” is “extremely simple,” consisting of the “elaboration of a few simple themes.” In spite of the long list of “subjects with which it is necessary to deal in the true Christian Church,” in An Exhortation to the Clergy Assembled at the Diet of Augsburg, Luther himself did not follow his own program. Again and again he expounds the themes of law, sin, grace, and faith that comprise his idea of the consciousness in which simultaneously shelters melt and the “righteousness of God” as formulated in God's promise becomes the trustworthy shelter of the person.Google Scholar
13 See, e.g., Luther's accusation that Erasmus did not take seriously the debate concerning free will due to his feeling “no personal interest; he never has his heart in it and finds it wearisome, chilling, or nauseating, (thus) how can he help saying absurd, inept, and contradictory things all the time since he conducts the case like one drunk or asleep … theology requires such feeling as will make a person vigilant, penetrating, intent, astute, and determined” (On the Bondage of the Will [trans. Philip S. Watson]; Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation [ed. E. Gordon Rupp, Philip S. Watson; Philadelphia: Westminster]) 179.
14 Magnificat (LW 21 303) on Luke 1:46.
15 Ibid., 303–4.
16 Translation from Works of Martin Luther (trans. Jacobs, C. M.; Philadelphia: Holman, 1932) 6. 453.Google Scholar
17 Lectures on Jonah 1:3 (Latin text; LW 9. 8).
18 Preface, Epistle to the Romans; Jacobs (trans.), Works 6. 453.
19 Magnificat (LW 21. 305–6) on Luke 1:46.
20 Preface, Epistle to the Romans; Jacobs (trans.), Works 6. 449.
21 Lectures on Genesis 1:26 (LW 1. 62).
22 Ibid., 143.
23 Ibid., 143–44.
24 Ibid., 63; see also 65: “Although we utter the words, who is there who could understand what it means to be in a life free from fear, without terrors and dangers, and to be wise, upright, good, and free from all disasters, spiritual as well as physical?”
25 Lectures on Jonah 1:1 (Latin text; LW 19. 8).
26 Cf. Calvin's statement: “Place must be given to faith alone, whose nature it is to prick up the ear and shut the eye“(Institutes of the Christian Religion III.xii.4 [trans. Battles, Ford Lewis; LCC 20; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960] 20. 767).Google Scholar
27 See my article, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in St. Augustine's De Trinitateand the Confessions” JR 63 (1983) 125–42.Google Scholar
28 The first specific identification of passivity/hearing as the appropriate mode of human access to God of which I am aware is that of Meister Eckhart: “Hearing brings more into a man, but seeing he gives out more, even in the very act of looking. And therefore we shall all be blessed more in eternal life by our power to hear than by our power to see. For the power to hear the eternal word is within me, and the power to see will leave me; for hearing I am passive, and seeing I am active. Our blessedness does not depend on the deeds we do but rather in our passiveness to God … God has set our blessedness in passivity” (Meister Eckhart [trans. Blakney, Raymond; NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1941] 108).Google Scholar
29 “The Argument,” Lectures on Galatians (LW 26. 5–6).
30 Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther the Expositor (Companion Volume to LW) 63.
31 Ibid., 63–64.
32 Magnificat (LW 21. 326) on Luke 1:49.
33 As Christensen, Carl C. states: “Iconoclastic disturbances can be useful as an index of the degree of public support for the reform” (Art and the Reformation in Germany [Boulder, CO: Ohio University Press, 1969] 23).Google Scholar
34 Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments (LW 40. 84).
35 Ibid. Karlstadt's statement is quoted by Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 25: “My heart since childhood has been brought up in the veneration of images, and a harmful fear has entered me which I would gladly rid myself of, and cannot.… When one pulls someone by the hair, then one notices how firmly his hair is rooted. If I had not heard the spirit of God crying out against the idols, and read his word, I would have thought thus: ‘I do not love images.’ ‘I do not fear images.’ But now I know how I stand in this matter in relation to God and the images, and how firmly and deeply images are rooted in my heart.”
36 “Men kneel, bow, and remove their hats before them; men name them after the saints whom they represent; men kiss them; men adorn them with gold and jewels; men designate them with the appellation merciful or gracious; men seek consolation merely from touching them, or even hope to acquire remission of sins thereby” (Ibid., 22).
37 “Such penitence is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh” (Dillenberger [ed.], Writings, 490).
38 Cf. The Freedom of a Christian: “We must, however, realize that these works reduce the body to subjection and purify it of its evil lusts, and our whole purpose is to be directed only to the driving out of lusts. Since by faith the soul is cleansed and made to love God, it desires that all things, and especially its own body, shall be purified so that all things may join with it in loving and praising God.… In this way everyone will easily be able to learn for himself the limit and discretion, as they say, of his bodily castigations, for he will fast, watch, and labor as much as he finds sufficient to repress the lasciviousness and lust of his body” (Ibid., 68). Two suggestions are made in this passage: first the suggestion that bodily disciplines are effective in addressing what is essentially a bodily problem—lust. This is in striking contrast to medieval authors who, taking their clue from Augustine, understand lust as a disorderly energy of the soul which imposed itself on the body and used the body as its tool and expression. See my Augustine on the Body (Missoula: Scholars, 1979) chap. 3 and passim. Secondly, Luther here, as elsewhere, describes the purification of the body to follow as the result of the soul's cleansing.Google Scholar
39 LW 35. 39.
40 Ibid., 41.
41 Ibid., 39–40.
42 Dillenberger (ed.), Writings, 65.
43 Ibid.
44 LW 54. 296.
45 Ibid., 65; Table Talk, recorded by Veit Deitrich, 1531–33: “I don't like to see examples of joyful death. On the other hand, I like to see those who tremble and shake and grow pale when they face death and yet get through. It was so with the great saints; they were not glad to die. Fear is something natural because death is a punishment.” See also Fourteen Consolations (LW 42. 129): “There is no one who would not choose to submit to all other evils if thereby he could avoid the evil of death. Even the saints dreaded it, and Christ submitted to it with trembling fear and bloody sweat.” See also Luther's pamphlet, “Is it right to Fear the Death.” Luther's ideas on death are discussed by Blanke, F., “Die Bedeutung von Tod: Auferstehung und Unsterblichkeit bei Luther,” Luther (1926) 49–56.Google Scholar
46 “The Future Blessing,” Fourteen Consolations (LW 42. 150).
47 Table Talk (LW 54. 429), recorded by Caspar Heyenreich; see also LW 42. 142: “For us death is dead.”
48 Ibid., 336; Table Talk, recorded by Anthony Lauterbach.
49 Fourteen Consolations (LW 42. 150). Emphasis mine.
50 The Table Talk of Martin Luther (trans. Hazlitt, William, London: George Bell and Sons, 1875) 320.Google Scholar
51 Dillenberger (ed.), Writings, 213.
52 Christian Songs, Latin and German for Use at Funerals, Jacobs (trans.), Works, 6. 290.
53 Magnificat (LW 21. 306) on Luke 1:46.
54 Lectures on Jonah 2:1 (German text; LW 19. 70).
55 Table Talk (LW 54. 190).
56 Lectures on Jonah 3:9 (German text; LW 19. 89).
57 Ibid., 15 (Latin text).
58 Ibid., 67 (German text).
59 Ibid., 79.
60 Commentary on Galatians (1531); Dillenberger (ed.), Writings, 112.
61 “These promises of God are holy, true, righteous, free, and peaceful words; the soul which clings to them with a firm faith will be so closely united with them and altogether absorbed by them that it will not only share in all their power, but will be saturated and intoxicated by them” (The Freedom of a Christian; Dillenberger [ed.], Writings, 58). See also Luther's “A Sermon on Preparing to Die” [1519] in LW 1 passim.
62 A Treatise on Baptism (1519); Jacobs (trans.), Works, 1. 57.
63 Ibid., 57–58.
64 The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (LW 36, passim).
65 A Treatise Concerning the Blessed Sacrament (1519); Jacobs (trans.), Works, 2. 24–25.
66 Ibid.
67 On the Councils and the Church (LW 41. 145–46). Emphasis added.
