Sinner in Reality, Righteous in Hope
Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther
To speak of the righteousness of the sinner is not the exception and to speak of the righteousness of the righteous is not the rule. On the contrary, the God who is revealed in Christ makes the sinner righteous – that is the rule, without exception. In order to create, God has to destroy what we have created. God’s righteousness is not a quality that He has for Himself like a person has qualities, but in Christ God’s qualities – wisdom, power, and understanding – become ours. Just as God gives life to everything that He creates, so also He meets us as the God who makes us like Himself. We do not have the existence – this new life from God – the way we have and feel the life that we have here on earth, because we have it only in faith and in the hope that we have it, or that it has us, as our future life. Luther likes to say that we have it as a promise. Just as the pious were promised Christ in the Old Testament, so also we are promised in Christ the forgiveness of sins and the righteousness of God. Lither coins a famous formula that is essential for the newly given righteousness of man: peccator in re, iustus in spe! (sinner in reality, righteous in hope) This formula means that we are sinners in the reality of our existence, but righteous in the hope that we have in God. The life of a person exists between these two poles and is, inasmuch as faith is lived, always the victory of hope that one doesn’t see over the reality that one does see. Luther gained these insights inly after many, long battles. He thought at first that forgiveness of sins (remissio peccati) and the removal of sin (ablatio peccati) were the same thing. He thought that sin was a condition that lay beyond the person of faith, but he also recognized that out of that perspective grew self-assuredness, indolence, and pride. Then Luther found that both are present and both encompass the entire person: sin and righteousness, condemnation, and grace. As a sign of this ground-breaking discovery he coined this formula: “sinner in reality, righteous in hope!” Faith therefore means to shift my sins and God’s grace into the same time frame, because faith means that both sin and righteousness are present together. Both are real, but in the former we live in a physical sense and the latter we live by the power of hope. One is seen and the other is not seen. Because the person of faith knows both things – that being righteous means God’s Word is for us and that in the reality of sins God’s Word is against us – then he also knows that which is and remains the true reality and which one must eventually give up. Thus, the yielding of sin depends upon faith in forgiveness – but this faith is not dependent upon the yielding of sin!
