Theology Today - Vol 41, No.2 - July 1984 - ARTICLE

146 - Law in Luther And Calvin

Law in Luther And Calvin

"Despite agreement between them on many denotations and designations for law, and upon a doctrine of justification by faith alone to the exclusion of all merit, Luther and Calvin do differ profoundly on the role, function, or use of the law for the Christian. "

THE root of the Protestant Reformation, for the Reformed tradition as well as for the Lutheran, is found in the early life work of Martin Luther, born five centuries ago, Nov. 10, 1483. Luther is the Reformation figure of unique world historical importance. Recent and significant confirmation of this has come on the 500th anniversary from unexpected quarters. The East German government published sixteen theses on Luther in a handsome booklet containing a fine selection of photographs of Luther monuments in Germany. These theses are a modification of the old Marx, Engels, and Kautsky line which condemns Luther and elevates Thomas Münzer as the revolutionary hero of the age, with surprising stress on positive aspects of Luther's role in history, and remarkably containing no anti-religious propaganda at all. This publication justifies the expenditure of money, labor, time, and the formation of national policy statements in support of the Luther festival for an entire year in the Marxist part of Germany-the area where Luther lived and worked.

From quite another direction, Pope John Paul II has embodied a revisionist Catholic picture of Luther in a letter dated on the anniversary of the Ninety-Five Theses, and has subsequently preached during a service of Protestant worship from the pulpit of a Lutheran church in Rome. This act of immense symbolic importance is paralleled by another development of greater substance. An official body composed of Lutheran and Catholic theologians has decided that, despite continuing divergences, there are sufficient convergences in the Catholic and Lutheran doctrines of justification, that this teaching can no longer be regarded as adequate grounds for schism.

Edward A. Dowey is Professor of the History of Christian Doctrine, Princeton Theological Seminary. Since his first book, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology (1952), Dr. Dowey has become known for his intensive research on Luther, Bullinger, and the Reformation creeds. He was Chairman of the Presbyterian committee that prepared the widely used Confession of 1967. This present discussion of the two great Reformers, Luther and Calvin, was originally presented at a Faculty Seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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In what did Luther's reforming activity consist? He was a genius of the kind that embodied and intensified all the main motifs of the cultural and religious complex in which he lived. Born of peasant stock, and very much a German-a late Medieval man almost untouched in his early years by cosmopolitan renaissance humanism-he passionately adhered to all facets of the dogmatic, sacramental, hierarchical, and ascetic Christianity of his time. He was a monk of unusual zeal in a monastic establishment of unusual purity, and he was a priest awed by the miraculous power of bringing about the local presence of the very body of Jesus Christ on the altar of the sacrifice of the mass. By prayer and fasting, absolution and satisfactory good works, he received and exhausted the resources of the sacrament of penance, against which every thought and deed of human life was measured. And all the while he was a profound student of the Bible, a doctor of the church in the very Scripture which the church had always held was its chief source of life and thought. Luther held his doctorate not as a private achievement or decoration, but as an office of the church to which he was called, and through which he was called upon to speak in and to the church.

So developed a conflict, we might say, between Brother Martin and Dr. Luther, between sacramental doctrine and practice and the growing apprehension of biblical teaching. The widening chasm became an unbridgeable abyss: on one side, Luther kept himself in a state of grace through sacramental good works so that in the terrible days of death and judgment he would not be cast off into eternal fire; on the other, he found himself addressed by a Gospel of grace as free forgiveness, and a recipient of the sheer gift of eternal life, apart from all works. On one side of this abyss was what Luther called Law, and on the other side, Gospel.

There are several pairs of concepts throughout Luther's writings as a Reformer, in fact through all his theological work whether in sermons, biblical commentary, polemic treatises, or catechetical and confessional works, that reflect the same existentially divided human reality, such as letter and spirit, flesh and spirit, reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, the secular and spiritual kingdoms, bondage and freedom, theology of glory and theology of the cross, life in the presence of God and life in the presence of the world, spiritual witchcraft (the distortions of Satan) and biblical truth. But the most appropriate language for a comprehensive reference to this dichotomous but dialectically related reality is the very familiar word-pair -Law and Gospel.

Especially true of the mature Luther, as for example, in the Lectures on Galatians (1531-1535), these well known, well worn, even hackneyed terms for the understanding of Luther have not always themselves been well understood. The first of them, law, has presented difficulties through the centuries especially in the debates and the often vicious

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polemic between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions on the "Third Use," that is, the function of law in the life of a Christian.

This present essay offers some reflections on the meaning of law within the thought of both Luther and Calvin, with a view to clarifying some aspects of the controversy. We can divide the "meaning" of law into two parts, denotation and connotation. As we deal, first, with the denotations of the term in Luther and in Calvin, we find they are practically identical, and mostly uninteresting for our concerns. As we turn to the connotations of law and the theological frame of reference surrounding it, we find wide variance. It is the latter, not the former that determines the role that law plays in these two theologies, and unless these profound differences are appreciated, discussions among Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic theologians will continue to suffer from terminological by-pass.

III

What does the term law denote? By denotation, I refer to the direct referents of law terminology and definitions given explicitly (such as one finds in a dictionary) or taken for granted as self-evident. For Luther and Calvin, I offer the following, without documentation, as common place and not innovative for either theologian. On these designations both Luther and Calvin receive available terminology largely inherited from Christian and classical antiquity, and they use it conventionally.

Natural law refers to God's ordering of the universe and the functioning of the human will in accord with God's will. The latter is natural right, or justice, understood in human society as distributive justice entailing appropriate guilt and punishment for violation. The human conscience is natural right within the human soul, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Conscience is also more problematic in its theological use in both Reformers because of the revelatory character of natural law, and becomes roughly equivalent to God-consciousness.

Divine law and moral law refer generally to special revelation of the universal orderly will of God for creation, particularly as republished for the chosen people in the Decalogue, and commented upon by Jesus, prophets, and apostles.

Positive or statutory law refers to the civil statutes of the political order, which aim to approximate the justice of the natural law according to local and temporal circumstances. Both Luther and Calvin recognized much law within the "Books of Moses" as merely of local significance (Luther: Judischer Sachsenspiegel) for early nomadic or agricultural society. Civil and judicial laws belong here. Ceremonial law referred to Old Testament worship from the sacrifices of Cain and Abel through the elaborate prescriptions connected with temple worship. Canon law was the collection of church ordinances, in which both Luther and Calvin, and especially Calvin, were well informed.

There are many fascinating problems that might be discussed in

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relation to the foregoing, such as the varieties of punishments among various societies for the same or similar crime, or the question of how or whether the Sabbath prescribed in the Decalogue belongs to the natural law. But differences here are not highly significant for the thought of Luther and Calvin in the vein of the present inquiry.

One theme only might be pursued because of its relation to sin and salvation. Luther, in his comment on Gal. 5:14, wrote:

All men have a certain natural knowledge implanted in their minds, (Rom. 2:14-15), by which they know naturally that one should do to others what he wants done to himself (Mat .7: 12). This principle and others like it, which we call the law of nature, are the foundation of human law and all good works (Luther's Works, vol. 26, p. 53).

Calvin, too, could have written that, or Aquinas. For both Luther and Calvin, the Decalogue summarized and sharpened natural law for special purposes in the history of salvation, chiefly to accuse the consciences of those who thought themselves, righteous. For both, perfect obedience would make salvation unnecessary, but for both, human sin totally defeats this possibility. No one avoids the condemnation of the law. All have sinned and "every sin is mortal," so none escapes.

By and large Luther and Calvin are together in the various designations of law here quickly reviewed, and generally this represents inherited material belonging to what John T. McNeill called "passive" elements in their thought. It is quite different when we consider what law connotes rather than denotes for each of the Reformers.

It is often the case that the foundational ideas of a comprehensive thinker are hard to define precisely. This may be because of their fruitfulness and the way they ramify into all parts of thought and life. So it is with the enormously complex motif of law in Luther, when all of its connotations and implications are considered.

We can approach this matter most conveniently under the rubric of the "uses" of the law: the usus civilis or politicus, and the usus spiritualis or theologicus. The term "use" here has very little to do with instrumentality. It is, as Gerhard Ebeling suggests, a term, for indicating an "existential relationship" (Word and Faith, pg. 71). Ebeling says that "law is for Lutheran an existential category which sums up the, theological interpretation of a human being as it in fact is. Law is not therefore an idea or an aggregate of principles, but the reality of fallen humanity" (p.75).

This conception applies to both of the "uses" of law for Luther. The civic or political use is almost as horrendous in its expression as the theological use.

God has ordained civic laws, indeed all laws, to restrain transgressions... When I refrain from killing or from committing adultery or from stealing, or when I abstain from other sins, I do not do this voluntarily or from the love of virtue but because I am afraid of the sword and of the executioner....

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Therefore just as a rope holds a furious and untamed beast and keeps it from attacking whatever it meets, so the Law constrains an insane and furious man lest he commit further sin (LW 26, 308).

Since the Devil "reigns in the whole world and drives men to all sorts of shameful deeds," God has ordained civic ordinances "to bind the hands of the Devil and keep him from raging at will" (LW 26, 308f.). This is the magnitude, law, that surrounds and includes the natural and civil order, under the conditions of sin.

Then there is the second use, "the true function," the "chief and proper," the "absolute" use of the law, which is "to reveal to humanity sin, blindness, misery, wickedness, ignorance, hate, and contempt of God, death, hell, judgment, and the well-deserved wrath of God" (LW, 309). In this function the law is "a hammer that crushes rocks, a fire, a wind, and a great and mighty earthquake that overturns mountains" (LW, 310). Again, "The awesome spectacle and the pomp with which God gave the Law on Mt. Sinai symbolizes this use of the Law," and Luther goes on to describe the "horrible spectacle of the mountain smoking and burning, the black clouds, the lightning flashing," and so on. But it is not only at Sinai, but throughout the lives of Christians that the law comes in this way. On Gal. 4:6, Luther wrote:

But in the midst of these terrors of the Law, thunderclaps of sin, tremors of death, and soarings of the devil, Paul says, the Holy Spirit begins to cry in our heart: "Abba Father." And his cry vastly exceeds, and breaks through the powerful and horrible cries of the Law, sin, death, and the devil. It penetrates the clouds and heaven, and it reaches all the way to the ears of God (LW 26, 381).

After this stark contrast, one might wonder why Luther makes such a fuss about the difficulty of distinguishing between Law and Gospel as in one of his most famous statements:

Whoever knows well how to distinguish the Gospel from the Law should give thanks to God and know that he is a real theologian. I admit that in time of temptation I myself do not know how to do this as I should (Gal. 2:14; LW26, 114).

This introduces another aspect of the approach of Satan through the law, namely subtlety and seduction. The greatest achievement here is the "spiritual witchcraft" ("O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?") in which the "white" devil appears "arrayed as an angel of light." The devil is a Tausendkünstler, a trickster of formidable range. "I am a doctor of theology," writes Luther, "...but the devil often suggests a false Christ to me" (Gal. 3:1; LW26, 196). Again, he says:

Thus those who are persuaded that they are justified by the works of the Law or by the works of human tradition are bewitched; for this persuasion is directly contrary to faith and to Christ (Gal. 3: 1; LW 26, 196f.).

The greatest deception of the devil is to metamorphose Gospel into Law.

Satan's most successful deception is to have transformed the biblical

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sola fide into the scholastic fides caritate formata. Luther well knew that medieval Christianity held that salvation is by the grace of God alone. But the devil, he held, has transmuted this into a grace effective only when the human will cooperates, when the Christian acquires the habitus of holy living, and of doing the works of love that make faith effective for salvation. These "works of love," sacramental or otherwise, when construed as necessary to salvation are the return of law, and they contravene the Gospel.

Luther's apprehension of law as a curse and a killer, from Scripture in correlation with his own experience as a monk and a priest, made it forever impossible for him to consider a third, positive "use" for the Law, the usus in renatis, in the life of the believer. It is precisely here that the great debate with Calvin and Calvinism begins. For all the agreement on various designations for law in these two theologies, and even that it is the law that curses and kills, there is a very different fundamental apprehension of law in Calvin, which controls his usage and creates a very different connotative field of force whenever the law is mentioned with reference to the life of the believer.

It is important to remember that John Calvin belongs to the second generation of the Reformation, Lutheranism already had its classic formation in the Augsburg Confession. Zwingli, founder of the Reformed tradition, had lived and died before Calvin, who was to give his name to that tradition, had become a Protestant. Calvin was never a monk or a priest, nor was he ever a matriculated student of theology. A pious, precocious young Catholic scholar in law and the humanities, and in demonstrable dependence on Luther's teaching about justification by grace through faith alone, Calvin came into the fold of the Reformers by an "unexpected conversion."

From Calvin's earliest reformatory writings, more especially the first edition of his Institutio (1536), there can be found a doctrine of justification derived (at places, even verbatim) from Luther's Babylonian Captivity, and also three uses of the Law. The first use, which "condemns every man of his own unrighteousness" (Institutes II. vii. 6), is here called the pedagogical use, as in Melanchthon. The subject is developed with less colorful language than that of Luther, but contains essentially the same ideas. In Calvin's Commentary on Galatians (1548), he wrote:

The law justifies him who fulfills all its precepts, while faith justifies those who are destitute of the merit of works, and who rely on Christ alone. To be justified by our own merit, and to be justified by the grace of another, are two schemes which cannot be reconciled: one of them must be overturned by the other.... You will more easily unite fire with water, than reconcile these two statements, that men are justified by faith, and that they are justified by the law (Pringle translation, p. 90).

Here is what Luther had been saying about the "theological" use of

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the Law, in obviously different and much more moderate literary style. But is the difference more than one of vehemence and concrete imagery? While reserving judgment on this matter, we should note that both Zwingli and Bullinger in Zurich had reservations about the radicality of Luther's separation of Law and Gospel. This was noted by the young Bullinger in 1527, in his Ratio Studiorum.

The civic use of the law for Calvin is, like that of Luther, aimed to express God's providential restraint of the wicked in human society through statutory laws, punishment of violations, and such.

This constrained and forced righteousness is necessary for the public community of men, for whose tranquility the Lord herein provided when he took care that everything be not tumultuously confounded (Inst. II. vii. 10).

Again, Calvin agrees with Luther, but does not "sound" like him. This may be a clue to a quite different Connotative frame of reference in Calvin from what we find in Luther.

There is also in Calvin a third use, as already indicated. It may be in the statement and working out of this use (again, an "existential relationship" as Ebeling designated for Luther) that a difference emerges casting light on the two former uses.

For Calvin the third use of the law is the "principal use, which pertains more closely to the proper purpose of the law, finds its place among believers in whose 'hearts the 'Spirit of God already lives and reigns" (Inst. II. vii. 12). In this setting; the law helps believers "to learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord's will to which they aspire, and to confirm them in the understanding of it" (ibid.). In lengthily commenting on the Decalogue under the rubric of third use, Calvin takes each command and elaborates it by turning the negative form into positive admonitions, by transforming the particular into the general, and expounding the outer prohibition also in an "inner" spiritual manner. Calvin's discourse on "The Life of a Christian" found in the Institutio, Book III, chapters vi through x, which have sometimes, been published separately as guidance for believers, is a further expansion of the third use .

Throughout, Calvin constantly repeats that grace abrogates the law as a curse, but not as a guide. The law and all works remain always it non-metorious, and the law continues to be a convictor of sin so far as is necessary in the imperfect lives of believers on earth. But chiefly, and principally, Calvin emphasizes that love is the summary precisely of law and therefore is not antithetical to it (Inst. II. viii. 51-57). "The law of God contains in itself that newness by which his image can be restored in us" (III. vi. 1). For Calvin, it may be said that law in the new life under the Gospel is the structure of love. Once the legal curse is removed and so long as all justification by works of any kind is banished, the law can return to its original and proper role of being an articulation of the love of God and thus helpful in the Christian life,

Thus, for Calvin it is the fundamental alliance of law, not with the

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devil and his perversions, but with the created order and thus with the restoration of the image of God in redemption, that is presupposed in all his discourse about law. This lies at the base of Calvin's third use.

For Luther and Lutheranism, the Calvinistic version of the third use of the law is a failure to perceive the radicality of Luther's first use, and it risks a new form of legalism in the doctrine of salvation. For Calvin and Calvinism, Luther's view elevates the accidental, sin caused function of the law into its all-inclusive tole at the expense of what God meant to be the law's proper function both in creation and in redemption.

Our purpose here is to point out the different freight that the term carries for the former Augustinian monk and priest, and for the legally and humanistically educated second-generation Reformer. Despite agreement between them on many denotations and designations for law, and upon a doctrine of justification by faith alone to the exclusion of all merit, Luther and Calvin do differ profoundly on the role, function, or use of the law for the Christian, To put the case for connotative difference crudely: Law for Luther raises images of a theology of self-salvation and a devilish perversion of the divine promise; and for Calvin, law raises images of order and structure, indeed the very structure of God's love in both creation and redemption. Granting that Luther can praise the law in as high terms as Calvin, and Calvin can condemn legal righteousness in terms almost as scathing as Luther, we can maintain that the connotative and apperceptive use is very different between the two, and between their two traditions. This must have a lot to do with the well known contrasts between the ethos of each of the two traditions. It must also have a lot to do with their difficulties, which continue to the present, in discussing the subject of law and its possible third use.