Justification

How Can We Be Saved?

Luther's Story and Justification

The first biography of Luther was written by his friend Philip Melanchthon in 1549. Melanchthon tells us that after Luther graduated, he started to study law. His family and friends confidently expected that the bright young Luther would make a major contribution to the state, but instead he joined the Augustinian monks.

On his entrance there, he not only applied with the closest diligence to ecclesiastical studies; but also, with the greatest severity of discipline, he exercised the government of himself, and far surpassed all others in the comprehensive range of reading and disputation with a zealous observance of fasting and prayer.

But all his religious endeavors could not give Luther any assurance. When a close friend died, Luther became terrified by the thought of the judgment of God. And it was all made worse by the theology of the day.

Medieval theology saw sin as a problem of being that needed healing. This took place through sacraments. In this life the Christian is suspended between the grace of God (mediated through the sacraments) and the judgment of God. Medieval theology, then, added a distinction between actual grace and habitual grace. Actual grace gave forgiveness of sins, provided they were confessed. Habitual grace changed people deeper down, in their very being — overcoming the problem of original sin.

Luther's problem was that since only actual sins confessed were forgiven, he was obsessed with not overlooking sin. He would spend hours in confessing to his superior in the Augustinian order, and then come rushing back with some new misdemeanor he had remembered. At one point his superior said: "Look here, Brother Martin. If you're going to confess so much, why don't you go do something worth confessing? Kill your mother or father! Commit adultery! Stop coming in here with such flummery and fake sins!"

In 1512 Luther, aged twenty-six, was sent by his order as a lecturer of biblical studies to the new university at Wittenberg. It was here, studying Augustine and lecturing on the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians, that Luther came to a radically fresh understanding of the gospel.

Sorting out the development of Luther's thought is notoriously difficult. Luther's new convictions took time to form. There is a lot of debate among scholars about what he believed and when he believed it. So we shall present it in a simplified form as a double movement. It is more complex than this, with significant overlaps, but this form will help us understand what was going on in theological terms.

Luther's First Step: Righteousness as a Gift

One key moment is what is known as Luther's "tower experience." Its date is contested, and it may have a longer process than one "eureka" moment. Luther described his experience like this:

Meanwhile in that same year, 1519, I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again. I felt confident that I was now more experienced, since I had dealt in university courses with St. Paul's Letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the Letter to the Hebrews. I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: "The justice of God is revealed in it." I hated that word, "justice of God" (iustitia Dei), which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.

But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn't be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, "Isn't it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?" This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: "The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written: 'The just person lives by faith.'" I began to understand that in this verse the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: "The just person lives by faith." All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

I exalted this sweetest word of mine, "the justice of God," with as much love as before I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise. Afterward I read Augustine's "On the Spirit and the Letter," in which I found what I had not dared hope for. I discovered that he too interpreted "the justice of God" in a similar way, namely, as that with which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although Augustine had said it imperfectly and did not explain in detail how God imputes justice to us, still it pleased me that he taught the justice of God by which we are justified.

In Romans 1:17 Paul writes, "For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, 'The righteous shall live by faith.'" Luther could not understand how the righteousness or justice of God could be gospel — good news. It seemed to offer only the threat of judgment. Not only does the law condemn us, but so does the gospel! "For in the gospel a righteousness of God is revealed." But Luther began to see the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel not simply as a quality of God — his impartial justice by which he judges sinners....