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| My favourite speech (quote) from Martin Luther |
In the passage below, originally
written in 1545, the year before his death, Luther reflects on his early life,
and particularly a major theological difficulty which he experienced as a young
man. What was “Good News” about the
proclamation of the righteousness of God? For Luther, this could only mean the
condemnation of sinners, himself included. Luther here relates how, after
wrestling with the meaning of Romans
1:17, he finally came to understand the “righteousness of God (iustitia Dei)” in a different way, thus
opening the door of his theological reformation. He writes,
“Meanwhile in that year
[1519], I had returned to interpreting the Psalter again, confident that I was
better equipped after I had expounded in the schools the letters of St. Paul to the Romans
and the Galatians, and the letter to the Hebrews. I had certainly been overcome
with a great desire to understand St. Paul in his letter to the Romans, but
what had hindered me thus far was not any ‘coldness
of the blood’ so much as that on phrase in the first chapter: ‘The righteousness of
God is revealed in it.’ For I had hated the phrase ‘the righteousness of
God’ which, according to the use and custom of all the doctors (I
think what he means are the theologians), I had been taught to understand
philosophically, in the sense of the formal or active righteousness (as they
termed it), by which God is righteous, and punishes unrighteous sinners.
Although I lived an
irreproachable life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience
before God; nor was I able to believe that I had pleased him with my
satisfaction. I did not love (in fact, I hated) that righteous God who punished
sinners, if not with silent blasphemy, then certainly with great murmuring. I
was angry with God, saying ‘As if it were
not enough that miserable sinners should be eternally damned through original
sin, with all kinds of misfortunes laid upon them by the Old Testament law, and
yet God adds sorrow upon sorrow through the gospel, and even brings wrath and righteousness
to bear through it!’ Thus I drove
myself mad, with a desperate disturbed conscience, persistently pounding upon
Paul in this passage, thirsting most ardently to know what he meant.
At last, God being merciful,
as I meditated day and night on he connection of the words ‘the righteousness of
God is revealed in it, as it is written: the righteous shall live by faith,’ I
began to understand that ‘righteousness of God’ as that by which the
righteous lives by the gift of God, namely by
faith, and this sentence, ‘the righteousness of God is revealed,’ to refer to
a passive righteousness, by which the
merciful God justified us by faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous lives by faith.’ This
immediately made me feel as though I had been born again, and as though I had
entered through open gates into paradise itself. From that moment, the whole
face of Scripture appeared to me in a different light. Afterwards, I ran
through the Scriptures, as from memory, and found the same analogy in other
phrases such as the ‘work of God’
(that which God works with us), the ‘power
of God’ (by which makes us strong), the ‘wisdom of God’ (by which he makes us wise), the ‘strength of God’, the ‘salvation of God’ and the ‘glory of God.’
And now, where I had once
hated the phrase ‘the righteousness of God,’ so much I began to love and extol it
as the sweetest of words, so that this passage in Paul became the very gate of
paradise to me. Afterwards, I read Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, where I found that he too, beyond my
expectation, interpreted ‘the righteousness of God’ in the same way – as
that which God bestows upon us, when he justifies us. And although this is
expressed somewhat imperfectly, and he does not explain everything about
imputation clearly, it was nevertheless pleasing to find that he taught that
the ‘righteousness
of God’ is that, by which we are justified.”
[Source: Preface to the Latin
Works (1545); D. Martin Luthers Werke:
Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 54 (Weimar: Bohlau, 1938), 185.12-186.21]
THINK
BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.
