Cross in Tensions. Philip Ruge-Jones
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leads to Peura’s work on Luther’s understanding of justification. Simply stated, Luther comes to understand justification as the basis for the internal structure of deification. The emphasis on justification protects the sovereignty of God. The gift always remains a divine gift, but this gift is really and truly received by the Christian due to the grace of God. The gift is not due to extortion on the part of the believer; the motive for the giving is located in the same God who gives through the word. The reason for the giving is not, therefore, to be found within the Christian. In fact any preparation within the believer that makes possible the act of reception is also the act of God through the word. Peura writes:
Luther understands God working in the word in a way analogous to God’s relating at the cross. God executes his work on the person in the same way that God has done so already to Christ. The persons must, if desiring to believe and assume the word, first become weak and foolish in order to be able become strong and wise in the power and wisdom of God. Glorification and exaltation presuppose kenosis and abasement.101
Through the word, God destroys the self that is a self-justifying self; the sinner is reduced to nothing.102 Through this reduction God creates a vacuum wherein God makes the person capable of bearing divinity.103 God bestows God’s name through a happy exchange as the sinner clings to God in faith and, solely by that faith, God justifies the sinner.104 Justification results in the real transformation of the person as the name of God, which is God’s essence or divinity, comes to reside, and this truly, in the Christian. This indwelling is not only founded in externality. The “real presence of God” indwells the believer as that person also dwells in the Godhead through participation (but not fusion) in the same. This transformation is integral and includes even the transformation of the human will together with other faculties such as the intellect.
Transformation realizes itself in this life above all through the faith that transforms the faculties of the person and leads him to knowledge of the divine will. Transformation thus refers to how—already at justification’s beginning—the whole person is renewed with his will again and again. The transformation of the will is important, because only thereby can the love of the new person increase.105
The transformation of the Christian leads to a new way of relating to God from the human side of the relationship:
The caritas dei works in the Christian so that the person wills and loves what the intellect has allowed him to comprehend. The love of God for the person changes the person who then loves God willingly and seeks God again and again. For that reason Luther understands here by the love of God a constant affection (affectus) for God.106
So a new being that is ontologically transformed has been bestowed upon the believer, and this gift yields a new activity. The being of God within the Christian translates into a new doing wherein the deified Christian loves with the actual love of God; put another way, the God who is ontologically present in the believer becomes the subject of his or her actions.
Peura’s interpretation of Luther differs dramatically from those we have already examined, yet he does claim as emphatically as they did that Luther’s theology is a theology of the cross. Deification does not nullify the theology of the cross, but rather is the firm foundation upon which Luther built his theology of the cross. In what sense does Peura see the confession of Luther’s theology of the cross within this framework?
First of all, the theology of the cross is a critique of certain aspects of scholastic theology since that theology of glory seeks to ground itself in a capacity that humans by nature possess. Peura writes:
According to Luther, the theologia gloriae leads inevitably to the false striving of the person to deify himself. This way of thinking rests upon assumptions of natural human capacity and finally on the idea of liberum arbitrium. Thus Luther sees in the theologia gloriae an intensification of human sin, because, at base, it would like to realize its own egoistic, self-willed aspiration to divinity.
By no means does it follows from this criticism of the theologia gloriae that Luther also rejects the true deification of the person as willed by God. On the contrary, over and against his criticism of the metaphysical basis for the theology of the love held to by the aristotelian scholasticism, he demonstrates that true deification (in the sense of an ontological transformation of the person) is the conditio sine qua non for true love.107
Thus the theology of the deification in Luther is also a theology of the cross because it sees God as the sole source of transformation.108 Though this transformation is an actual, ontological transformation of the person, it is so not as a human act, but as an act of God alone. The error of the scholastics was to attribute to innate human capacity what can be done in humans by God alone.
This first characteristic, that is, that God alone justifies and deifies, has implied the second characteristic that qualifies Luther’s theology as a theology of the cross. If God alone deifies, then the human being is not the subject or agent who brings about that deification. Thus, the word’s act of reducing us to nothing destroys all attempts at self-justification. God again creates out of nothing, and, in this case, through the word, God is also the creator of nothingness. The human being has no grounds for boasting in the gift that dwells in him or her, because that gift, even when received and rooted, never loses its givenness.
Next, this focus on deification does not lead to a theology of glory, because the theologian of the cross knows that the deification truly present is a hidden reality and remains so throughout earthly existence. Deification is not apparent to sight, though it has actually occurred. It is hidden under the opposite, that is, under the reality of the believer who is also a sinner. Only faith living under the sign of the cross is able to make the profession that God is certainly within the Christian bringing about deification.
Finally, the theology of the cross is manifest in that deification is a lifelong process of divine activity that is not ended until death and even beyond. People of faith recognize that sin remains within them even though they truly are united with God, and this recognition of their own sinfulness turns them outward toward God and the neighbor in need. This recognition of sin is so strong in Luther that he takes the descent into hell with the utmost seriousness, believing that one really does descend to hell, but that one is utterly and really transformed when in that very place God is present with and in one in hell; and this presence of God is a gracious presence wherein God is there in order to love transformatively.109
Luther held in short an “ontology of the cross” that recognized that God makes the Christian “mehr als ein Mensch,” thus the title of Peura’s book. The divinely transformed person is more than human on the basis of God’s indwelling. Peura is quick to add that Luther was not interested in specifying more than this about the meaning of the “more.”110
The threat to Forde and Ebeling’s approach that this interpretation poses is clear. Peura makes this explicit in his summary of his research. He writes:
interpretations which leave the real, ontological character of Luther’s thinking more or less out of consideration, cannot explain important intentions of the reformer satisfactorily. The deification of the person is not adequately understood as a phenomenon, when the being of God and the being of the person are grasped in exclusively relational terms (the relating of conscious “being”, cognitive or otherwise) nor when they are grasped in a way wherein the one being is and remains definitively outside