The Immovable Center
Via Iwand, The Righteousness of Faith According to Martin Luther
Anonymous, "The Birth of Christ" (1400)
Since Luther is for us such an important teacher of the faith, we cannot leave him within the confines of denominationalism. Both friends and foes who see him thus do not do justice either to his intentions or to his teachings. Luther once wrote: “In the first place… I ask that men make no reference to my name; let them call themselves Christians, not Lutherans. What is Luther? After all, the teaching is not mine… How then should I – poor stinking maggot-fodder that I am – come to have men call the children of Christ by my wretched name? Not so, my dear friends; let us abolish all party names… I neither am nor want to be anyone’s master. I hold, together with the universal Church, the one universal teaching of Christ, who is our only mater [Matt. 23:8].” Luther is not the founder of a Christian movement or party, but the reformer of the church. His doctrines are not a denominational specialty, but are common property of the church. Things have even gone so far that, in his essential teachings, Luther now stands as opposed to today’s modern Protestantism as he stood against the scholastic-Catholic system centuries earlier. Whoever thinks that he can easily challenge Luther’s confession from the standpoint of heredity tends to overlook the fact that even we, in a church that descends from him, are called through this inheritance to change and to repentance. The Jews said, “We are Abraham’s descendants” and that made them deaf to the words of Christ. Let us therefore be attentive that we do not make the same mistake regarding Luther! Luther will inly be useful to us to the extent that we are able to learn from him to understand the gospel through him. The challenge for us in the task of explaining the basics of Luther’s theology in so few pages and in its main points is this: Luther’s rich and varied, and for many, multi-layered and cumbersome doctrinal system has just one, may I say, practically immovable center. From this center everything else is simple, convincing and clear. He himself called this center the article of justification, or the righteousness of faith, the “only solid rock” upon which the entire church stands. The article on the justification of people before God is much more than and very different than a tenet, or rule, or system – it is the core that not Luther, but Another, has ordained. It is ordained by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, Himself. One could say, at the very least, that Luther rediscovered this core since the history of the Christian church shows that this core is often lost and that the article of justification is often moved to the periphery, while other teachings take over the position. This is precisely the danger in which we find ourselves again today. Today, once again, we do not take the one and only either/or article seriously and instead replace it with another either/or proposition that appears to us to be more weighty for the existence or non-existence of the church. I am not suggesting that we do not already have a good grasp of Luther’s theology and understand with accuracy its most significant points. Clearly, one dissects a body only when it is dead. The exactness of interpretation, however, is no guarantee that the church has accepted the binding nature of his theology for faith and life.
