Not in Morality, but in Faith

Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther

The law should be able to teach a person to call upon the Holy Spirit who gives us a new heart. It should be able to take them out of themselves because this Pointing-Away-from-Myself is the task of the law, which is why it is called pedagogue and teacher! It should be able to show a person that next to and apart from the Law there is something else, someone else, namely Jesus Christ, to whom it points as an example set by God. But the person who is so smitten by his own deeds will not allow himself to be shown. He will answer the question of the law with his own accomplishments. He could be shown – but will not allow himself to be so instructed! And when it comes to the point of tragedy in the life of this person through the law, then it is understood correctly not as tragedy but as guilt. For the law is innocent. It is sin that is guilty of corrupting the person in their deeds so that not even the law is able to convict them and their sinful deeds prevail. The person who looks at his own good works is like an ignorant child who believes that one can put out a fire by blowing on it. And so it continues to be true: the more the law, the more the sin. Wherever the law exists, it gives rise to the transgression of it. Thus, the person’s help and salvation is found totally apart from the sin that binds him and he must find God somewhere else than in His revealed law. Not in the law, but in the Cross; not in deeds but in the hearing of the Gospel; not in morality, but in faith alone is the help that we need. What then is the goal of the law cannot bring us any further than to the limits of our own capabilities which for us is its ultimate meaning and goal? The answer is this: only under the law and through the law are our limitations made clear to us! It may be that a person must live and, perhaps already does live, within these limits. However, he recognizes them first through the very specific and special language with which God speaks to man in His commandments. Recognition is, in short, the positive work of the law. The law gives recognition where there was previously illusion, drunkenness, immoderation, and self-deception. I do not mean recognition in the sense of the mediation of the knowledge of facts, or of the external appearance of my life, because all of that is attainable without the law through experience, information, observation, and psychology. The recognition that the law brings does not lie on this side of the grave, but rather in the other side; for the law kills faith in oneself and satisfaction with oneself. It establishes enmity in people – the enmity of the flesh against the spirit – because it causes hatred of the self and the love of that which is not, or is not-yet. To be sure,, Luther says something here that has a double meaning: the brings recognition of sin and at the same time brings recognition of myself. It can do no more than that, says Luther, but even within these limitations the law can work a positive effect. On the other hand, the law cannot produce that which it demands because it cannot give a person a new spirit to bring about a new creation and existence or to make the heart new, true, pure and straight. It can reveal that which is right now with a clarity that portends of the final judgment. Perhaps we can only grasp Luther’s much repeated assertions about the achievements of the law when we understand that under the light of the law both powers – those of sin and of the “I” – encounter each other and merge together like two parallel lines that on into infinity. The intersection of sin as a supra-personal, universally human power, and the recognition of the self is what it means to step into the light of the law.