A Note on Lutheranism and the Cross, Part 1

Luther’s theology of the cross, an emphasis on weakness

Martin Luther of the very early 1500’s promised St. Anne, “Help me, and I’ll become a monk.” Remember, he had been walking in a violent rainstorm, and at the bone-rattling sounds of colossal thunderbolts, he made his cry to Anne. He believed that she had protected him that day, and so he left law school and entered an Augustinian monastery. At that point, his spiritual journey began.

As a student and teacher, he started to dig into the Word. He hop-scotched from Rome’s view of personal righteousness, then over to his growing disdain for man’s practice of penance, and then over to his own personal guilt about his sin, then over to various Bible passages on the grace and mercy of God. He landed on Romans 1:16-17. He writes about how this text particularly and other passages in Romans became a floodgate of light on his soul; praise God, he was re-born to paradise. He experienced new-found liberty! God’s just sentence of death had been hanging over him, a sentence of judgment so well-deserving because of the weakness of man’s flesh to obey and to keep obeying God’s righteous law. How could God ever accept him?

The cross of Jesus Christ was the biblical thunderbolt that got Martin’s attention. Over time, it became the heart-penetrating bolt of life for him. The Book of Galatians inflamed his soul and rightly so. Galatians 2:20 was a bread and butter text, maybe we can call it a life verse: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Luther knew his own body had been nailed to the tree at Calvary in the atoning work of Jesus; he also knew that he, with his guilt, had been buried with Christ in the tomb. This is to say, his life and his death in being united to Christ’s life and death, meant judgment had passed! Christ’s work satisfied divine justice. It’s nothing of Luther’s own righteousness that God would look upon, it’s all of Jesus and His blood and righteousness! Righteousness is accounted to him by faith in Christ; such a gift and all other graces Luther would come to say are alien to him. Heavenly gifts are showered from above.

Since Luther underscored Christ’s identity with our very humanity to be our Savior, it’s important to keep the implications in view. What one implication needs attention? Author and Teacher Carl Trueman reminds us of how there are teachers and theologians who emphasize a theology of glory, that is, they reflect on God and His ways in His loftiness and splendor, His heavenly glory, and they neglect the bodily and earthly splendor of His revelation in Jesus. The cross tells us something of the majesty and glory that is very earth-bound. The cross beams with light!

Trueman says that because of the work of Christ at Golgotha, Luther’s meditation and theology received new color. Trueman would remind us to keep Luther’s work on this topic in mind; it should help us with the use of particular words when thinking about the Christian life.

Trueman writes:

“Take for example the word power. When theologians of glory read about divine power in the Bible, or use the term in their own theology, they assume that it is analogous to human power. They suppose that they can arrive at an understanding of divine power by magnifying to an infinite degree the most powerful thing of which they can think. In light of the cross, however, this understanding of divine power is the very opposite of what divine power is all about. Divine power is revealed in the weakness of the cross, for it is in his apparent defeat at the hands of evil powers and corrupt earthly authorities that Jesus shows his divine power in the conquest of death and of all the powers of evil. So when a Christian talks about divine power, or even about church or Christian power, it is to be conceived of in terms of the cross—power hidden in the form of weakness.”

My former pastor down in San Diego, Dick Kaufmann, first taught me this theology of weakness. He learned it from the late Jack Miller of the Philadelphia area and his preaching and writings. The gospel hymn has it for us: There is power, power, wonder-working power, in the precious blood of the Lamb.

No question, the theology of weakness seen through the window of 1 Corinthians 1:18-ff, for example, gives shape to our view of God’s saving plan, His calling us out of sin and darkness, the task of preaching, the view point and approach of the world’s mindset, and the fruit with which we’re concerned. In this way, we can acknowledge with the apostle Paul that all we desire to be about is to know Christ and Him crucified.

It was Martin Luther that brought this kind of teaching to the Protestant Reformation table of the 1500s. There’ll be little more on Luther’s teaching on the cross, weakness and the Christian life soon.

G. Mark Sumpter