Luther's Outlaw God 2: Hidden in the Cross

By Steven D. Paulson

In this second of three volumes addressing Luther's outlaw God, Steven D. Paulson uses several biblical figures (Ezekiel, Jonah, Moses, David, and more) to illustrate Luther's understanding of law and gospel and what this means for preaching. Paulson shows that the challenge of all preaching is revealing God's actual grace without using the law at all. The gospel is what freed Luther from thinking of the world as split into two: an obscure world where law accuses and a magical world where the law blesses. With remarkable depth and clarity, Paulson explores the question: Where do we find a gracious God? For Luther, it was not in the law, but only in the publicly executed and hated God, Jesus Christ, hidden in the cross.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781506458540

Steven D. Paulson

Steven D. Paulson is Professor of Systematic Theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

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Index

Introduction

Christ, the Hated God

The majestic doctrine of the Trinity has always been a stumbling block for the minds of polytheists and monotheists alike, while the incarnation puzzles those seeking transcendence, but the depth of God’s hiddenness is not plumbed until the scandal of the cross offends the best part of you: no folly, no vice, no aberration, no devil is so hated as Christ is.[1] Who could hate this kind, obscure man from Galilee? What is so unnerving about him, not only for those whom he met in the gospel stories, but even for those who have come thousands of years later? The answer is in his cross, passion, suffering, and death—but is hidden even there. The cross is a rock of stumbling, and a rock of offense (1 Pet 2:8 and Isa 8:14–15), and to the offended nothing obscures like hate. Thus, Christ is the hated God and his cross a scandal and stumbling block that cannot be removed: But if I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case, the offense of the cross has been removed (Gal 5:11). Since the cross is complete and inaccessible in history, its offense gets transferred to the preacher of the cross, and so even the poor preacher gets persecuted by it.

Yet, in the middle of that scandal, faith somehow confesses: I know of no other God than this man Jesus Christ.[2] So it is that God’s deepest, darkest hiding place is the passion of Christ, and Christians preach nothing but Christ and him crucified (1 Cor 1:23). Here is a strange paradox: where God hides most deeply, he is found most dearly. How is it that God hides in so many places where he refuses to be found, but in only this one dark place he manages to hide precisely in order that we find  him?  Early  in  his  work,  Luther  surmised  that  it  is  not  the many created things of nature or events which have actually happened in history that humans retain as windows through which to peer into God’s high, distant, and invisible things (like virtue, godliness, wisdom, justice, goodness, and so forth). Rather, a theologian may only begin with the foolishness of God (1 Cor 1:21) by fixing his sight on the passion and cross of Christ.[3] Neither nature, nor history, but only the cross is our proper object for knowing God as he is. For this reason, theology begins not with what attracts humans, but what repels them: he had no form or majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men (Isa 53:2–3).

It is neither original righteousness in the garden of Eden, nor the goodness of all creation from which we can infer God’s eternal attributes. Those things only teach the nature of God’s law but cannot predict or necessitate what happened on the cross. We cannot start with original created goodness, then measure the fall into sin by that plumb line to determine the necessity of the cross’s remedy. In fact, the law itself first came into focus when Luther realized that, apart from the law altogether, the cross destroys the wisdom of the wise, as Isaiah 45:15 states, ‘Truly, thou art a God who hides Himself.’[4] Thus, the first time Luther uses these words, God hides, he does so by fixing his sight on the cross instead of nature’s law.

What, then, is this scandal of the cross? What is so offensive for God to hide there? Luther first suspected that the cross’s offense was in the sheer humility of the thing: It is no benefit to know God in glory and majesty, unless that person knows Him in the humility and shame of the cross.[5] You cannot know beauty, for example, without knowing the lowly, mean, and ugly cross as its opposite. Yet, as Luther plumbed the depths of the cross this was only the tip of the iceberg. It was not the humility of the thing that offended, but the law’s attack on God’s cross, and the end of that same law in that cross that transgresses the human commitment to justice and honor. The cross is the end of the law. Who could have anticipated that, and what dangers does this yield for us ever since this unexpected limit? What the law does with the passion of Christ, and conversely what the cross does with the law, is the thing that makes Christ the one and only hated God. Nevertheless, it is through this hatred, not despite it, that faith is made and the Christian freed. So it is that the most hated words ever uttered, You have killed him, also become the words of life for those who are dying: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21), and likewise, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’ (Gal 3:13). The scandal of the cross is not only that our God is triune, or that our God is a man, but the crucified is a man without sin, who nevertheless is God who became sin.[6]

Nevertheless, not even the shocking truths of Christ’s sin and curse remain mere objects in history, as if the invisible things of God are observable from events which have actually happened (Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 19). The cross sits there in history as an implacable condemnation of the world—and so myself—unless or until these scandals are preached directly to me as absolution that brings God’s majesty and pure absoluteness as law to an end once and for all. Preaching is the final piece Luther added to his theology of the cross, when he realized that Paul was not saying that the thing that saves people is that the cross fulfills the law—though certainly it does—abstractly, hypothetically. It is the wordof the cross given presently and personally that saves someone. Luther once put this realization in his own earthy way when he said it is as if a beggar is told that somewhere cloth for coats is being handed out, and naturally the beggar wants nothing more than to receive the actual coat rather than simply think about it.[7] The cloth coat is the historical event of the cross, and what the beggar wants is not only to be told that this coat exists somewhere, but where he can actually get one for himself. If Christ’s cross really is an end to the law, how do I procure it for myself, since I cannot go back to the day Christ died and gain something there?

Indeed, it is not the cross, sitting there once and for all in history, that offends anyone (although Christ’s murder is undoubtedly the most definite event and heinous crime in the annals of history). Even the most skeptical historians agree that this murder took place, and that at least certain Jews took this death to be God’s own curse. But these goods come to us in the preaching of the cross as condemnation and forgiveness for what is, after all, the original, consistent, universal sin of deicide: This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men (Acts 2:23). You killed him by means of refusing to find God in his word as he wanted—no doubt while looking through the things of creation in order to see the inner nature of God. Yet God raised him up (Acts 2:24), for the sole purpose of absolving this very sin: For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power (1 Cor 1:17). Strange power! What power could this crucifixion have? The cross is foolishness to the wise (the perishing), yet that foolishness is God’s own folly (hiddenness as offense) that is wiser than men (1 Cor 1:26).

This foolishness of cross is a secret, hidden wisdom (1 Cor 2:7)—not of this eon—because the natural person cannot grasp the mind of the Lord (1 Cor 2:14, 16). How is it that the wisdom of this world (which grows by the day) cannot know this divine mind? Because all that the world knows, at its very best, is the law. Yet Paul asserts: we have the mind of Christ, and Christ simply is not the law. This relation of Christ to the law—what the law does to him, and what he does to the law—is what we find so abhorrent. Christ begins above the law, is then born under the law, and ultimately forgives beyond that same law. For this, no folly, no vice, no aberration, no devil is so hated as Christ is. Yet, faith boasts in nothing else than this very same hated cross—God’s second hiding. Nevertheless, though it is second in experience or in our confession of faith, this hiding of redemption must be first in the course of doing theology.

Modern Theology’s Suffering God

God hides first in the things of creation that he pours out upon his human creatures in abundance, though this has become a dreadful, fearful matter that sinks into the muck of suffering and predestination. For that reason, our first volume especially concerned what Luther calls the painful awareness of the two monsters of theology: predestination and suffering. Then God hides a second time in his only begotten Son, who, though he is God, above the law, nevertheless emptied himself, taking the form of a servant (Philippians 2), or, as Paul explicitly says, born of a woman, born under the law (Galatians 4). He who was above the law came to live under it. This second volume takes up the story of what happens when the incarnate word comes not only to dwell among us, but to live under the law—even in its proper accusation. Using Luther’s early language of humility, this second matter has often been called God hiding sub contrario (under the sign of his opposite). It is this strange reality of divine contradiction that has preoccupied modern theology under the increasing preoccupation with what it might mean to have a God who himself suffers. What happens when God is not above suffering, but beneath it? This question is a version, albeit a weak one, of what it means for one person of the Trinity, the Son, to be born under the law. It is occupied with the notion of a divine humility by which God can somehow stoop to suffer, enter into human passion, or even change in his own essence. While this inquiry into divine suffering seemed to be Luther’s own path into some type of modern theology, and so what the Reformation itself means, there was little or no awareness of what Luther was actually teaching about God, Christ, and the law, or why he would bother teaching about Christ and law at all. All we got from recent theological musings is the heresy of a suffering God who knows our pain—a fellow sufferer. But the secret reason for pursuing this kind of crucified God was the notion that God’s suffering could absorb the accusation of the law without diminishing the law’s place in the divine mind or the law’s place in the eternal future of those who enter Christ’s church. God could be understood to die/suffer precisely in order that the law would not die—for God’s sake and our own. God’s suffering saved the law!

For that reason, when Luther’s cross-hiddenness was rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, especially in its early form as Augustinian humility, his theology of cross was used against itself as if this sub contrario were the only way God hid. Although it is counterintuitive, it seemed as if refusing to consider how God hides outside the cross was the only way to be shed of the cross’s own offense. So it has happened that modern theologies of the cross do the opposite of Luther’s own by presenting the cross as strangely attractive. Yet this twist was not new. Thomas Aquinas had earlier surmised the same thing of "the Crucified, because He is the supreme desire of souls of good hope."[8] Crucifixion does not lessen that attraction, but increases it. The cross is taken to be the supreme desire of a truly humble man. So, in order for Christ’s cross to become the center of all modern theology, as it has become, every other of God’s hidings had to be excluded. It was then supposed that God does not, and cannot, hide anywhere else or in any other way than in the person of the crucified Christ unless faith itself would be destroyed as the supreme desire of souls of good hope.

The only cost of this diminution seemed to be that the assurance of an unchanging and impassible God had to be sacrificed for a mutable, suffering God in order to restore the one thing that theologians would not lose: the eternal law. God had to be placed under the law to keep the law intact, but the benefits for practicing humility seemed more than to make up for the loss of an invariable God. Not only the Son, but the Father also (and why not throw in the Holy Spirit?) then suffers—perhaps even eternally!—in order to keep intact the objective pattern of justice without which life appears unworthy of living. So it is that patripassian became the rule as if the cross of Christ demanded it. God suffers so the law does not. In just this way, the suffering God has become so attractive to us, and the cross our deepest desire, in order to assure its practitioners that the cross may have bent beneath the law, but has never broken because of it, nor has the cross ever operated outside of it. The cross was taken as the motor that runs all of theology by means of God’s humility that absorbed evil by succumbing to it, but in mutating himself he preserved the standard of the good by which he and we then shall all live. This suffering cross/God was what supposedly saved the law from being crucified.

This theologoumenon had the purpose of saving the law as the true justice and being of God himself. In this way the cross, which began as opposite one’s desires, nevertheless was presumed to fulfill those very desires in a contrary, unexpected, paradoxical fashion. Especially among Protestants, negation thus became fashionable again. The trick of modern theology is to teach people how to love the cross of Christ as a transvaluation of all values, as Friedrich Nietzsche predicted would happen in a world intent upon liberating itself by using the law: A God stretched on a Cross; God personally immolating himself for the debt of man, God paying himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh, God as the one being who can deliver man from what man had become unable to deliver himself, the Creditor playing the scapegoat for his debtor, from love—CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?[9]

The question was rhetorical since everyone supposedly knows the answer. But then Nietzsche attempted to liberate the world by using the same law without any cross. Instead of Creditor paying the scapegoat, just become the Creditor yourself! But in fact, the cross is not so easily tossed aside. More yet, Christ’s crucifixion is not attractive, and it never will be. Even if all values of the world are turned upside down so that what once was ugly is beautiful and what once was painful is now delightful—even then, the cross of Jesus Christ remains outside humans as an accusation. This is why Paul gave his congregations a rhetorical question along with his counterfactual condition: But if I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed (Gal 5:11).

But Paul was not in fact preaching circumcision—which offended no one—and yet was constantly persecuted. Why? Because no amount of jiggering ever removes the offense of the cross. The great movement of modern theology to become a theology of the cross by having God suffer is merely the attempt to preach circumcision after the law has ended. That is, to preach the sign or law rather than the promise, in order to remove the assault of the cross. God hiding there is not simply an insult to us, but an attack, an aggression or an onslaught. Christ’s death is passive, but the hiding of God there is not. For this reason, the attempt to include the cross as something above the law or beyond the law never works. All one gets is a domesticated God with a universal law that holds out the fake promise that one fine day the law will not attack, condemn, or kill you—if only you can manage to love the old, rugged cross as the highest of your desires. For this reason, the battle over true Christology, or theories of atonement, is neither actually fought over the problem of an impassible God who somehow suffers, nor whether one believes in the miracle of the resurrection, nor even what the expectations could have been for Jews in Jesus’s day concerning the title Messiah (as biblical historians have routinely argued). The real fight is how to preach the cross in relation to the law, and so how it is that God hides there as an onslaught against unfaith. God is attacking your desire to love his cross and will not relent.

Christ, Above, Under, and Beyond the Law

For that reason, the theology of the cross and God’s way of hiding there should be taken up in just the way Luther argued. As difficult as it has been for humans to wrap their heads around the death of God, people can actually get used to (and even like!) that death. That twisted love is what we actually mean by modern theology (used to) and postmodern theology (like). What is much more offensive to theologians is not that God suffered (or even died), or that he nonetheless rises again (made popular in James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, 1890), or even that Christ’s death was innocent at the hands of his enemies (René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 1972), but that Christ died a free and willing death under the power of the law. The law, after all, did not make a mistake when it accused Christ of its offense and laid upon him its curse. Nor was the cross merely a case of mistaken identity by hapless disciples or the abuse of unlawful men. Neither did Christ merely submit to the law in order to become an example, or hero, to others. Instead, Christ actually became hated for this very death.

The scandal of the cross is not simply the death of God that certain Jews and a few gentiles strangely came to tolerate (or even love). The cross is the hatred of God himself. How did God, who is, after all, the highest goal, the dearest desire, and the transcendental object above all others, somehow manage to become the vile, hated, discarded person who himself offends, scandalizes, affronts, insults, slurs, injures, outrages, slights, and enrages his betrayers? The cross’s scandal is not merely because he was innocent, but because he was cursed by God himself so that Christ not only took sin, but became it. Then, the very one who had been over the law, but who had marvelously become flesh under the law, went on to take the law’s most extreme charge. He fulfilled the law, not actively, but perfectly passively—suffering it unto death. He was indicted, not only of sin, but of essentially and uniquely being sin. Then, suddenly this same man was heard (and sometimes seen), operating outside that same law—taking nothing from that very law that had, and always will, accuse rather than reward. That Christ got no reward or treasury of merit for his death on the cross should not surprise anyone, since Christ told his disciples frankly: Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants, we have only done what was our duty’ (Luke 17:9). Even for the divine one who fulfilled the law there is no reward.

An outlaw God not only operates above the law (as God always does even when his person is incarnate) but operates beyond it. Beyond means that Christ, ignoring the law’s righteousness, began imputing his own immeasurable righteousness to those who not only do not deserve this, but are his own betrayers, absconders, and unfaithful, hating disciples. Good works, and the workers who work them, do not like having their best things derided before God and the world as nothing more than sins and obstacles to Christ. What strange hiding is this when the one true God—and one, true man—was crucified once and for all? Then, without concern for reward or merit, Christ (the obedient servant of his Father, even beyond the law) was raised on the third day to seek out his betrayers. But wonder of wonders, when he found them in full retreat, hiding from him for fear of being exposed for their sin, he did not punish them as they deserved, but forgave them apart from the law. Yet, it was this amazing and troubling office of the keys that had caused the hatred in the first place.

Forgiveness operates not only above the law, but beyond it. Beyond the law is what no reason or rule can stand—not even Nietzsche’s or Thomas’s. The God become man, who was above the law, came to be born under the law (Galatians 4). Nevertheless, even under the law, Christ proceeded to operate above the law just as his Father did, for whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise (John 5:19). However, even more troubling than a man forgiving (as only God can), Christ began operating beyond the law with his healing/forgiveness. He not only fulfilled every iota of the law (passively) but suffered the law’s accusation. He was derided because he brought this very holy law to an end by forgiving without regard for the law’s judgment. His forgiveness did not restore the law or repair sinners to operate within that law’s ambit again. As God alone does, he operated outside the law. This the world could not stand: If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: They hated me gratis" (John 15:24–25), freely, undeservedly, as a gift—and in vain.

The Word made flesh, who came to preach the gospel among us, was violently murdered out of hate: but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did (John 8:40). How did this happen? Who exactly should be blamed for this? Was it a case of mistaken identity? Was this an inevitable necessity of God’s for fulfilling the eternal law? Did God demand it for his own justice? In order to answer this, theology has normally functioned as a detective operation to understand the fault of the cross—the who and why. Detection means a crime has been committed and the law itself demands answers and retribution, and since no greater crime than deicide has ever been committed it simply cannot be left unexplained or unanswered. The evidence must be discovered, and criminals identified, rounded up, and punished. In this way the cross comes to be defined by the law in its historical details. It appears that someone abused the law, and the abuse must be corrected, or God and his law would be unsatisfied and the world thrown out of joint. Hidden crimes must come to light, and theologians dutifully step in to finish the job.

When theologians undertake their criminal prosecution, they normally operate with an overall theory as to what God’s all-encompassing plan of salvation must have been from the very start. They do not start from the cross, as Luther insisted they must, but rather start at (and even before) the beginning with the meaning of God’s eternal law. They do not actually start with the crime scene and its evidence, but begin with a pure speculation as to what God must be like and so what God must want to do by way of orchestrating the events that necessarily led to the cross. What other necessity is there—for us or for God—than the law? In that way, the cross is defined by the legal theory as it is supposed to exist in the abstract mind of God—the why—rather than its historical particularity concerning the who and how. The cross is then treated as the supreme example of the law’s purposes and desires. It is supposed that Christ’s killing, especially if carried out by some laws of the state (Pilate), cannot simply be an accidental killing. God must be unfolding some grand plan in this cross that is finally reaching its culmination, since it surely could not come as a historical accident or surprise to him.

Such approaches assess things by looking through the cross for the means, scheme, or blueprint behind or above it, and so cease actually to see the cross. God must have intended this apparent debacle from the beginning to fulfill all righteousness in the form of the perfect, good, beautiful, true law. At the very least, God must have opted for the cross as a second option after the first plan of obedience to the law surprisingly failed, and in that way, God reorganized his original plan to accommodate the unhappy and unexpected occasion. So it is that the cross cannot merely be an abuse of law by lawless men, but it must have occurred through a divine orchestration that fills an otherwise silent, empty law. Investigating the cross—looking directly at it, as Luther said—ceases. Then theology operates outside this cross by looking through it as through a transparent window into the dark realm of divine design.

However, there is always a problem when the cross begins that way with the eternal law. A scheme is a law. A law or rule points, orders, directs, and organizes things to their proper direction without, however, being able to deliver its own end. The law points but cannot give. The law says, Do this, and nothing is done. God orchestrates but cannot predetermine how well the instruments will play. So it is that Paul is supposed to call the law spiritual—but not flesh: For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin (Rom 7:14). The law remains our gold standard of justification, but it cannot move us to it without grace. The cross then becomes that grace that steps in to fill the law that we cannot fill by works of either nature or grace. In this way, the cross becomes a story told entirely by means of the law—a historical crime to solve, or an eternal plan to be discovered. The hiddenness of the cross becomes merely the starting point for what is presumed to be the real matter of theology—which is not what is hidden by God, but what is revealed, known, and necessary. God gives us the hiddenness of the cross precisely so that we will unmask it—discover, solve, or see through it in order to envision the greater divine plan as it is unfurled. So, theology invents theories of atonement that all assume the hidden cross is given as an aid so that we poor of sight will one day gain the full vision of God himself. We figure we can resolve the offense of the cross by unmasking its hiddenness, and the law is the secret key for that unmasking, if only we faithfully follow the evidence and grasp the divine plan behind the thing.

Luther’s Theologoumenon

However, as Luther gradually learned, the cross of Christ is the least hidden thing the world has ever seen. It refuses to be the glass through which we see, however darkly. Nevertheless, God truly does hide there in the public, historical, scandalous horror of the crucifixion—so as not to be found. The cross is and always will be hated. This will never change no matter how many theologians put lilies on the cross by means of their schemes. But then, stranger still, God wants to be found nearby in what Paul calls the preaching of the cross: We preach Christ and him crucified (1 Cor 1:23)—for the sake of his murderers. What kind of most highly desired God offends his own creatures so much that they seek to eliminate him from the face of the earth? Moreover, why does this same God dutifully submit to their vile insurrection when he, by might and right, could resist and prevail against them? Then this same God goes on to publish the crime abroad so that all his enemies see his humiliation from this time forward and forever? He puts the story, not once but repeatedly, in his Bible and sees to the public preaching of the thing to the ends of the earth. He is irrevocably the one and only crucified God. How is it that the almighty God becomes such a loser? Why has the beautiful become ugly, the true false, and the good evil if not to provoke in us a change in desires or attitudes? How is it that God figures that exposing the depths of human hate for their very own Lord is in any sense beneficial? What manner of man is this, who willingly and with determination lays his life down for his own killers? Moreover, what manner of God is this who offends and scandalizes his chosen when he comes near to them? The answer is: an outlaw God; one that is not the law but has still given that law as something divine. Then he succumbs to that very law’s accusation and death, and so brings that law to an end. Having suffered the law’s just accusation, how far outside the law will he go in order to be the God of the living, not the dead? God goes so far beyond the law that he cannot be recognized by the normal traits of divinity like justice, kindness, omnipotence, love, and even eternal life.

Stranger yet, sinners come repeatedly to this one truly universal thing: we  preach  Christ,  and  him  crucified—regardless  of  any  distinctions properly drawn by the law like Jew/gentile, slave/free, or male/female. Here Luther learned to tell the story of Christ’s cross not from the requirement of the law, but from the unflagging, massive divine love that will not relent even in the face of deicidal offense. The cross is only good news, and finally the place where faith clings, when it is given as Christ’s free act at the same time that it was the sinner’s inevitable act that, nevertheless, not only fulfills the law from under it—but now lives above and beyond it.

For this, Luther discovered what he called his theologoumenon: you will have God one way or another, preached or unpreached. The practice of theology depends upon making distinctions, and of course the issue is which distinction is the right one to make. Luther found that proper distinction between God preached and unpreached. In either case God hides, but in opposite ways. He hides in the cross—unpreached—so as not to be found, but then in the preaching of the cross precisely to be found. God hides sub contrario, against all expectations and desires. But this does not merely turn our lofty desires in their reverse, humble direction. It eliminates desire altogether, since the cross operates outside the plan of the law and the receiving of a reward. Instead the law accuses unmercifully until we ourselves come under its judgment just as David did: You are the man! What Christ has done for you in the cross is at first unnerving and awful—unpreached; then free and joyful—preached. He has fulfilled the law and left it behind. He operates over the law, then under the law, but finally God operates beyond the law. Christ is God, born of a woman, born under the law. He then proceeds to operate freely by speaking outside the law, imparting his righteousness to the unjust while they are unjust.

If you do not know the theologoumenon of preached/unpreached God (the distinction of all distinctions), then you are necessarily left with both a detective’s and a speculator’s job. In that case, you will be responsible for the least savory business of life that attempts to square the murder (or conviction) of Christ with God’s eternal plan by means of his holy law. But God is not asking you to understand the cross by means of the law. He is neither presenting you with a puzzle whose broken parts you are to reassemble, nor is he posing the law as his condition for salvation. God was, is, and will be an outlaw God who is above, below, and finally, beyond that very law. This is splendidly true in this second way of hiding under the sign of his opposite (death, curse, cross)—sub contrario. It is fortunate, indeed, that God does not wait to see if you can learn to love this cross, or he would be waiting a very long time.

This volume begins where the first left off in Luther’s most important book, The Bondage of the Will, with Luther’s special words of God, his theologoumenon, that opened up the distinction of all theology: God preached and God unpreached. Everything that God does to and for us comes through this dread distinction. But the culmination of the story comes with Christ’s awful crucifixion, even by his most loyal companions, followed by what God does with such deicidal maniacs who truly hate Christ for this very death. Luther had taken up the impossible task of preaching this offensive tale to the humanist, scholastic, and modernist Desiderius Erasmus in order to save the man from his own devices (or as Luther says, by means of this book to win a very dear friend). To do this Luther had to go to battle with Erasmus on his own chosen field, interpreting Ezekiel 18:32: As I live, says the Lord, I desire not the death of the sinner. Erasmus organized everything, including especially this utterance from God, according to the one great gift he knew had indeed come to him from God: the eternal law. Consequently, Erasmus argued backward from God’s disinclination to kill (I desire not . . .) to the human free will that must be to blame for the death of the sinner. The question—why would God give this law if he knew that its effect would be death?—is then left to Plato’s answer to such impossible questions: what is above us is no concern of ours. Erasmus’s inference from the giving of the law is that there must have once been some eternal benefit to humans in it—called free will—or God would be evil. But Luther recognized that assumption in particular is not what Ezekiel was providing Israel in his sermon. There is a necessary distinction in God (and so among us) between God in his law and God in a promise. If a theologian cannot grasp this, everything is turned into Erasmus’s conclusion that if God did not desire my death, I must have desired it. The resolution of such a conundrum is then for me to stop desiring my own death and join God’s desire. Meanwhile, God sits up in heaven with a hapless will waiting to see how well you can change your desires. So the first chapter takes up this heart of Luther’s Bondage of the Will and the great distinction of all theology between God unpreached and God preached. This theology led Luther to reject the root of the modern attempt, especially presented by the likes of Hegel, to eliminate the contingent. Hegel demands humans rise up and rid themselves of external preachers in favor of the internal power of the free will—supplied no doubt from the one and only Spirit of the eternal law. It also led Luther to call Erasmus’s god a mere Achilles of the Flies, who can do nothing more with dead humans but pine and weep over their dead carcasses—I do not desire the death of the sinners, which I cannot apparently help; that is the modern form of a suffering God. The cross is not this imaginary, suffering God.

Jonah, God’s Worm

In fact, in all matters, but especially in the teaching of God, one cannot eliminate the contingency of getting a preacher, or election by proclamation. So it is that the preacher’s inevitable question in Ezekiel’s sermon (why do some believe and others disbelieve?) is then taken up in earnest by Jonah, God’s worm—the preacher of all preachers. In this second chapter Luther lays out some of his most fruitful exposition of how, where, and why God hides—and where the hiding comes to an end in this little book of Jonah. Jonah experienced drastically different ways that God hides both outside of his word and inside of it. Inside his word, the preached God entails a specific, historical, physical preacher in whom God hides so deeply even the preachers themselves cannot detect it, and come to despise this God for it. Jonah is therefore the story of stories concerning how God uses the mask of a preacher in order to elect his own through proclamation. The cross must be a preached thing, or it is endlessly killing. This allowed Luther the chance to note the relation and great disparity between his own teaching and that of the theological scholastics on the relation of nature/reason and faith. The sailors on Jonah’s ship know much that is true of God, naturally, as creatures of their creator. But they do not have a preacher as Israel and Jonah himself had. Thus, reason knows (but remains uncertain of) its main conclusion: God has mercy on whom he has mercy (Exod 33:19). Nature cannot take this abstract truth, however, and apply it to itself, no matter how much it is infused with grace. A promise cannot be so obtained, and thus must yield to faith or succumb entirely to God’s wrath. Only faith is certain, but faith is certain only at the cost of being offended by the very Christ of which it speaks in the form of a promise. Two things are then true: nature is not master of its own house, and life depends upon God entering a worm as a mask—the sign of Jonah—that delivers the gospel against the better judgment of its own worm/preacher. Thus, God naked without his word and God clothed in his word are so diverse that they conflict and fight until we witness the shocking victory of the lowly, despised God hidden in his preaching worm. God opposes himself so that Gospel and Law enter a great, cosmic duel that is awful to undergo, as Jonah learned. Yet, this duel is the way God has mercy in Christ, apart from the law and through his lowly mask/worm/preacher. Jonah’s story thus removed for Luther the mystic dream of the vision of God’s beatitude (the desire of the highest good and beauty), and put in its place a simple faith in God’s external word of promise delivered concretely—here and now—to the unworthy while they are unworthy.

God against the Gods

The greatest shock of undergoing this divine duel concerns what happens to the law as the great idol of both nature and reason. The effect on the law yields the fight we see with Elijah at Mt. Carmel: God against the gods. So in order to grasp the cross we first pursue a phenomenology of hiding to show how some hide in order not to be found, and others to be found in a new place. Likewise, God hides not to be found in the cross that offends absolutely but hides to be found in the word of the cross, or preaching. This kind of preaching, however, is not what we are familiar with in the form of sophist mouths who address us with their opinions. Preaching the cross is a sub-natural preaching that overtakes the supernatural desire to transcend. This preaching plants or grounds us, in part by teaching us the difference between God hiding in majesty and cross, and finally in the preaching office itself. Learning this distinction allowed Luther to take up the commonest and most effective argument against his discovery of the gospel: are you the only one who knows?

Erasmus used this argument as a final rejection of his preacher, Luther, by referring to Elijah and the fight with the priests of Baal. Consequently, Luther was thereafter always associated with Elijah’s own battle between God and the gods, but unbeknownst to Erasmus, what this battle showed was his own rejection of the gospel on the basis of the exalted, historical, longstanding, communal teaching of the church and its many saints. Can God have hidden Luther’s truth from the long history of the beloved community of church and its worthy saints only to have revealed it to the one and only, lowly Luther? Luther had to take on the whole false theory of history, and especially salvation, or church, history that Erasmus adopted as his own escape from skepticism. Erasmus thought church history was the narrative of saints who had more or less successfully used the self-governing power of the free will in order to obey the law. The church’s history was then a series of signs or traces of God’s absence that pointed spiritual travelers to God’s distant presence. Luther upset this vision by showing the saints of the church have all been arrayed against Christ on account of his cross—until they and their will toward the law were defeated. For some it was too late to write anything more, for some few others they had to take up retractions. In this case history is not the story of those who successfully fulfill the law with the help of grace but is where the law ends with the arrival of a preacher. Consequently, the church is hidden, even where it has positive marks or masks in the form of preaching and hearing the word.

Thus, it is not signs but promises that make anyone holy or saintly. But unlike signs, promises appear sub contrario (against expectation and as an offense). Consequently, the saints also are hidden rather than revealed, and the difference must be made between their mistaken, visible acts of love as the fruit (as if these were saintly), and their truly saintly (but hidden) faith as the only thing that produces those fruits. Luther concludes, to the chagrin of Erasmus and the whole church, the church is hidden, the saints are secret. We want God to be hidden and the church and saints to be visible, but the opposite is the case.

This battle of God against gods, and so the proper teaching of what church is, actually gives us the critical judgment in life that philosophical skepticism cannot, since critical judgment works only when it stands firmly on something absolutely certain. That is why faith is not the power to believe even while unsure, but is a passive gift of freedom from any doubt at all. But faith is not found within (or even in the form of light from outside that comports with one’s internal light, as in the case of Plato and his myth of the cave), but is given from without in the external word of a preacher, whose good news is always in the form of the single promise from Christ, I forgive you.

Adam’s Fall and Cain’s Failure

Erasmus’s fictional history of church and saints (which Luther compared to the sarcastic and farcical True History of Lucian) has one big whopper lie in it that makes the whole thing ridiculous: that the law is God’s gift for pointing the way to salvation—if only one approaches it with a truly free will. The correct will can turn a law that condemns into one that exonerates, rewards, and ultimately saves a fallen sinner. At the heart of this fiction is the tale weaved around Adam in the Garden of Eden and the claim that there in the beginning one finds—at least theoretically—a revealed law that empowers the weak human will to fulfill it in order to receive that very law’s reward of eternal life. From the lie of free will, sinners produce an even greater fiction about the law. Consequently, Erasmus’s lie concerning history is his theory of glory that saints are progressing toward their holiness by desiring the law above all things. Instead, history is told properly as light of grace and even light of glory—but with neither grace nor glory as fulfillment of law. Instead, we undergo the cosmic battle that arrives with a preacher of the gospel. Preachers create a tumult because the gospel brings a sword, not peace. For this reason, true Christians do not fear tumult and destruction—even of the churches—but rejoice in such things since they portend that God’s silence is ended with the arrival of the spoken word.

The faith made by this promise of the gospel is certain (precisely in the tumult of destruction and the end of things in this world) so that there is even rejoicing in evil when being consoled by predestination as irrevocable victory of the absolute absolution (the promise of forgiveness). The point in theology is then not to find how the law can be fulfilled, but where there is no law—since where there is no law, there is no transgression (Rom 4:15). Therefore, copious ejaculations or imperatives in Scripture (like Turn! or Choose!) are dealt with in two opposite ways, depending upon whether the law remains eternally ahead (to be done), or is already behind (as already done by Christ, and so empty and quiescent). In both Scripture’s imperatives and indicatives, everything depends upon whether or not God is preached.

Erasmus followed the common practice of the former, stumbling theologians, since he did not know the difference between a command and promise. In fact, he suppressed this distinction on purpose, and so retold the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden as a romantic novella to which sinners plaintively hope to return. Adam before the fall is articulated as a story of the unfortunate misuse of a free will, along with the hope of returning to the moment before that sin occurred. If that moment could be re-created, we would presumably find the otherwise persistent accusation of the law was now an agreeable voice and obedience to the law was easy and happy again. That is, Adam’s tale repeatedly became a Lucian story searching for a non-threatening law that does not condemn but saves. Erasmus thought he could accomplish this feat through two minor inferences or hypotheses: If implies Can, and (if that doesn’t work) Ought implies Can. The first is taken to be Adam’s original life of happy obedience to the law: In the day you shall eat of it, you shall surely die (Gen 2:17); and the latter Cain’s: The desire of sin shall be under thee, and thou shalt [ought to] have dominion over it (Gen 4:7).

With this sleight-of-hand, Erasmus repeated the longstanding abuse of the difference between imperative and indicative that even today so occupies preaching. In each of these cases, Erasmus turned simple threads of conditionals and commands (Turn!) into the whole cloth of an unnecessary, indeterminate future with the sole purpose of providing space in the present for an imaginary power of will to impose a command—upon its own self! The will is thus presumed to be master of itself—as if that power over one’s self would mean freedom. Thus, theologians mistake the law as the one and only possible future for humans and God alike, and by this law God presumably empowers the likes of Adam or Cain to will their own good—before God himself wills it. Yet, this is not what God clearly says law is for, or what that law actually does to us in life. Law threatens Adam and accuses Cain, since through the law comes knowledge of sin (Rom 3:20). Imperatives are never attractive, as Erasmus dreamt they possibly could be under romantic circumstances. They always threaten and/or accuse in this way, and there is no implied empowerment lying behind this single revelation of law. Where God has revealed, Erasmus demanded hiddenness. Where God hides, Erasmus demanded revelation.

The law, despite dreams to the contrary, is not God’s necessary future. Instead, God gives his indomitable future in the form of a promise—an indicative—that has no if or ought but rather only an Is. When God gives a promise, he is not a lying Lucian. He establishes a necessary future with no space in it for a fictional free will to operate freely as a desire, choice, or turning of itself by itself. God’s promise does not wait for you to become master of yourself. So it is that this distinction must then be made in all of Scripture and theology—despite the fact that Erasmus insists upon saying he does not know it: God either hides with or without his words. Moreover, he has two words, not one, and reveals/hides in two very different ways depending upon what words an external preacher imparts. Consequently, one must learn the difference between a command and a promise, and so between law and Christ with the Holy Spirit.

Cain is not master of himself, but rather, like Adam, learns to let God be God to his own chagrin. God does not hide in the law, but rather reveals sin in us. Nor does God hide in his promise, except insofar as the promise always comes violently or offensively. For Luther, there is no more quixotic search than Erasmus’s, looking for a non-threatening law that will take us back romantically to a time and place that never was in the beginning. That is literally once upon a time, or a fairy tale. If God did not operate outside the law, we would be most pitiable with our oughts and ifs because these never produce any new future. But God ends this charade with a word that Erasmus (until Luther finally preached to him) had apparently never heard as a sure and certain promise: Eve’s seed will crush the serpent’s head. Outside of this, however, is only Erasmus’s perpetual search for the exonerating law, but as Luther concluded: The gouty foot laughs at your doctoring.

Paul at the Areopagus

There is a great distinction, for Luther, between the search for a gracious law and the search for a gracious God. He portrays this using Paul’s famous speech at the Areopagus (Acts 17) to those who sought a hidden God. Luther briefly, but intensely, immersed himself in the mystics, who concentrated not only on Paul’s sermon to the Athenians who sought an unknown god, but on Romans 1:20 and Psalm 18:11: He made darkness his secret place. Mystics, Luther discovered, look for a sign of salvation in what he called a fanatic enterprise. That is, they sought the dark, hidden side of the accusing law, which they assumed would be a gracious law in perfect silence. Luther was taken up in what appeared to be this effort in Paul’s sermon—not only endlessly to seek an unknown God, but actually to find him. The path to this hidden, absolute majesty seemed simple in theory, but hard in practice: if one accepts the total, damning accusation of God in abject humility (to be a monk), and yet never gives up hope, God will finally reward the effort with the highest gift of perfect silence. Luther’s initial attraction fell on the rocks.

One could say that Luther failed at mysticism. But the failure was not due to sloth or weakness. Luther failed because mysticism completely misconstrues the way to deal with the hidden God. It turns out that the long-held theory that humans are by nature seekers, led by desire, is false. Moreover, the path of such seeking that barnstorms heaven in order to get rid of the one thing that obscured their effort (an external word given by an earthly preacher) is not only mistaken but deadly. The dream that in heaven people would hear the law bless them instead of a preacher curse them was itself the origin of enthusiasm’s original sin. In the end, there is one truth that Luther discovered among the mystics. The law’s accusation really does need to be silenced if the soul (or conscience) is ever to live presently—to say nothing of resting in eternity. The mystics were correct that something needed to be silenced—but it was not God. The law needed to be silenced. Yet the law is never silenced in mystically resting beyond the law’s accusation in the inner being of God, but rather happens in time and place when Christ’s cross is preached. In that cross, the awe not only ceases accusing, it actually comes to an end itself. However, this means that Christ is not the law, and neither is the Holy Spirit. The law makes no one holy, but rather reveals their unholiness, and the Holy Spirit uses that law to kill, not make alive.

No wonder Luther seemed so backward to the church’s saints. Yet, the Holy Spirit’s killing is not his proper work. That is even more surprising in the end than discovering that the Holy Spirit is attacking you. The proper work of the Holy Spirit is sending a preacher by whom the external word unto eternal