1 John. L. Daniel Cantey
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construed this experience as the sigh of faith in the midst of spiritual trial: “In every temptation and weakness, therefore, just cling to Christ and sigh! He gives you the Holy Spirit, who cries ‘Abba! Father!’ Then the Father says: ‘I do not hear anything in the whole world,’ neither the terrors of the devil nor the threats of hell, ‘except this single sigh’” that is the Christian’s acknowledgment that justification belongs to Christ alone, and that nature and the law play no part.
The final deforming of the law, in which it loses all authority for justification at the same time that it relinquishes all limits, occurs at the hands of grace as a new and different power. Only through this new path of assurance, this justification grounded solely in the work of Christ, does the sabotage of the law’s authority begun in its infinite expansion find its explosive consummation. The law gives up all authority as a way of justification in the believer’s acknowledgment of Christ’s grace “for you and me,” the sigh of “Abba! Father!” that expressed Luther’s turn exclusively to Christ in abdication of the righteousness of the law and nature. In that moment, the law’s movement to infinity gains an equal footing with its temptation as a supposed means to heal and enrich, annulling the temptation and negating the law’s claim to compel. The growth into a tyrannical infinity that is the law’s annulment as merciful concludes in the annulment of the law per se.
In this latter annulment the limit that gave the law definition as law succeeds in its withdrawal at the same time that the law’s authority is abolished. Nature’s turn to Christ by faith alone entails the proclamation that the will is utterly powerless and thereby utterly bound, reducing its freedom as well as its supposed righteousness to nothingness. The free will squeezed by the law’s advance to infinity becomes the limit abolished by the individual’s own abdication of it. This abdication destroys the law’s object in the will, and the destruction of the will means the destruction of the law. The latter no longer has a limit because it has no will to limit it, just as it has no authority because it meets no will to receive its commands. The law no longer makes sense as law, both as uncontained and lawless in its boundlessness and as inchoate in its lack of strength to command. In this vein Luther writes of Christ’s grace as “the death of death”: “Thus in my flesh I find a death that afflicts and kills me”—the law and its punishment for sin—“but I also have a contrary death, which is the death of my death and which crucifies and devours my death,” that is, the death of Christ, appropriated by Luther through faith, that vanquishes the law’s terrors. “Thus the law that once bound me and held me captive is now bound and held captive by grace or liberty, which is now my law.”
The undoing of the law means the liberation of nature, which finding the accusing law accused and the condemning law condemned, grasps its existence under “the law of liberty.” And yet, because the law put to death by grace is also the natural law that gives nature its form, nature suffers a parallel devolution. Because the death of the law negates the principle by which nature possesses definition, one cannot distinguish nature’s liberty from law from its life apart from definition. The liberty realized through faith alone, the righteousness of God through Christ experienced as the gates of paradise thrown open, drives home the fiat in which the law melts into mist so that nature might follow it there. The same grace that proclaims “the death of death” for the law as the giver of nature’s definition announces “the law of liberty” for nature as deprived of form.
This is the work of the Christ-Idol, that man should scale the summit of a draconian demand and at its peak lay hold of a power thought to liberate him from darkness, breaking the bonds of his taskmaster and bursting his limit as if the sun’s light had permeated his flesh. But in his freedom from the law, in his indifference to its commands and his rejection of it as a way of righteousness, standing over it by the blessing of the Christ-Idol, man proclaims for himself a freedom in which he relinquishes his definition. Whereas man cannot absorb the infinite-unto-dissolution by his own power, crying out under the burden it impresses upon his conscience, the Christ-Idol delivers that power and dissolves the law at the same time that nature crumbles into the scattering. Justified by a righteousness acquired through faith alone, man arrogates universality as a curse concealed as blessing, a death concealed as new birth, a de-formation paraded as Reformation. Docetism unmakes his nature into the contradiction that believes in its conscience that it resides above the law when it cannot help but break the law, and indeed has nullified the law.
The Christ-Idol erupted from the dialectical innovation implicit both in Luther’s experience and in the doctrine of justification that he built upon it. The medieval age had developed dialectical reasoning as a juxtaposition of contrary legal cases meant to close the gaps between the principles they espoused, but it did not suggest the realization of one of those principles as accomplished in the movement through its opposite. Dialectics at that early stage acknowledged no intrinsic connection between the alternatives beyond their shared grounding in a more fundamental concept of law. Luther’s experience of the law in the matter of the justified conscience—the same law collected and ordered in the Summae of the preceding centuries—accelerated the interrelationship of the opposites at the same time that it redefined them according to universal categories. Rather than a single legal case or maxim set against another for adjudication, Luther set the oppression of the conscience under an infinite and dominating law against the freedom of the conscience as the total liberation from its oppression. The dialectic now called a comprehensive, inescapable, and merciless demand into battle against an indifference to law that renders its legal character obsolete. The genius of the dialectic consists in Luther’s assertion that man cannot know the liberty of Christ, cannot receive righteousness by faith alone nor assurance of pardon, until he has passed through the hell of the law’s limitless requirement. The law must crush man’s nature, including all his powers of reason and will, until he knows no natural freedom and no hope apart from Christ. The liberty of grace presumes man’s oppression under the law, germinating in the progressive tyranny in which man bows to the infinite demand. The dialectic concludes in the achievement of joy-through-terror, the explosion that Luther errantly understood as forgiveness and a new communion with his creator.
This explosion reveals the Christ-Idol in man’s experience as the validation of his universality. The whole process of docetic grace means man’s liberation from law natural and divine, a process crystallized in Luther’s conscience and brought to dialectical fruition in the electrifying discovery of Christ “for you and me.” For the dialectical expansion of the law divides man against his nature, rending him into two parts. One side of his nature stands with the infinite law, imposing the boundless demand upon the finite creature as if man were the infinite, as if his nature could absorb infinity. Cowering beneath this terror, oppressed and horrified like Luther before the Judge and Tormentor, is that same nature as hopelessly unable to fulfill the law’s demands. Man at once becomes executioner and victim, destroyer and destroyed. The interweaving of nature and law, two realities bound under the grace of form, splinters in a dual and antagonistic movement toward the infinite. The law and nature as its ally accept expansion to infinity as legitimate at the same time that each shrinks into nothingness, though the law better expresses the expansion and nature the diminution. Docetic man does not understand (and Luther never understood!) that the dialectical culmination of brutality in the grace of the Christ-Idol means man’s absorption into the infinite and the disintegration of his being. In the Christ-Idol man stands above the law because he renounces all law; he feels the exuberance of chains broken because he has torn his nature into pieces. Man confuses this advance toward the scattering with beatitude and assurance, with Luther trumpeting the deformity of the conscience as justification by faith alone.
If Luther introduced the dialectical intensification that provokes inner terror for the sake of man’s liberation from it, he did so primarily in the spiritual order. His breakthrough cast down the ramparts of an infinitized ecclesiastical and divine law, destroying the monastery and holding out a new way of life that called itself Christian though it rejected the habit of finitude. Luther nonetheless fancied himself no revolutionary, no disturber of the peace nor political gadfly, but saw himself rescuing sinners from a God depicted as hot with anger by the church. At least in his own mind Luther would keep the natural order and its political systems intact, and this despite his consideration of divine law as a restatement of the natural and as fundamentally synonymous with it. Luther did not rigorously press man