The Decisive Factor
Via The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther
Geertgen tot Sint Jan, "Tree of Jesse" (1500)
Since the good or evil of a work is of a quality that emanates from the relative good or evil of the person that performs it, the burning question of the Reformation is not “How are good works possible,” but is “How does a person become good?” How is the sinner justified? With this last question the others are already answered, not the other way around. Indeed, if it were that case that the question of good works is answered only for the individual himself we would be educating the whole world to be hypocrites. In the same way that the chances are small that a bad tree can bring forth good fruit, so also the odds are very small that a person with whom God is not pleased can do God-pleasing works. Therefore, Luther says, just as the apostle Paul says, that the works of the law are never good even if they resemble true, good works, both in intention and in effect. For, he says, who knows what such a person would do if there were no God, no punishment, no reward, and no human praise in the world! These so-called good works are forced deeds – they are not “natural” and they are not honest. Since Luther really does believe in the possibility of true good works, we must remove the “imitations.” With the imitations we see again the person in the foreground, overshadowing the ‘objective,’ ‘impersonal things,’ such as life or the unity of an ethical system. Both – faith and good works – must be present at the same time because either both are won or both are lost together. There is no halfway mark – no justification without sanctification and no sanctification without justification. The religious and the ethical questions are, at root, the same. On the other hand, when a person’s actions are excluded how can a person become good when he is not, or when, as the philosophers say, he is merely good in a hypothetical sense? For a work to be good the question of the existence of a person must be decided upon in advance; not in the form of an assumption, but in the form of a certainty. Here the decisive factor is faith. That is because when it has to do with a new being and not merely a becoming-better in a moral sense, the person cannot accomplish it by himself. “Opera non faciunt personam, sed persona facit opera” – the works don’t make the person, but the person determines the value of the work. If, of course, a person were in a position to shape his own humanity by himself then he would also be the creator of his own spiritual personality. However, that is an anti-Christian point of view and one that goes against God for those who are under the law, because, Luther says, “whoever holds that our works shape and create us, or that we are the creature of our own work blasphemes. For it is as blasphemous as saying: I am my own god and I created myself [we know that Fichte said this at the high point of his idealistic atheism.] Likewise, it is blasphemous to seek one’s own justification by works.” Thus, our works are born out of our condition and we are not born of our works.
