Let's Talk

20 years of
Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod since 1996

  • Home
  • Issues
    • Welcome to Let’s Talk 2020
    • 22. 2 Reformation Jubilee 500
    • 22.1 Death and Dying
    • All Issues 1996 – present
  • Noted Guest Authors
  • About
  • Contact

Powered by Genesis

You are here: Home / Reformation Jubilee 500 / Indulge Me: The Heidelberg Theses and the Theology of the Cross

Indulge Me: The Heidelberg Theses and the Theology of the Cross

October 10, 2017 by Benjamin Dueholm

“The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.” I can still remember reading these lines, the twenty-eighth thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation. I don’t recall what prompted me to open Timothy Lull’s Luther anthology to that document, but the startling antinomies and paradoxes caught my imagination immediately and have never since let go. “The law of God, the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance man on his way to righteousness, but rather hinders him.” “Although the works of God always seem unattractive and appear evil, they are nevertheless really eternal merits.”

The occasion of their composition, I would later learn, was a formal academic disputation of the Augustinian order, over which Luther presided in April of 1518. The theses and their explanations repeatedly cite Paul’s letters in light of the Augustinian theology that was flourishing at the time, in reaction to the major scholastic movements of the preceding centuries. Among those present at the disputation were friars who would bring the Reformation to new cities in the years to come.

In a way that was novel then and is still shocking now, Luther’s theses for the Heidelberg Disputation proposed a radical reordering of the relationship between human righteousness and God’s righteousness. Instead of half-meritorious human works being accepted or elevated by God’s grace, as in scholastic theology, Luther insists that without grace, human works can only be evil. “The law says ‘do this,’ and it is never done,” Luther says, in a preview of the Law/Gospel theology he will fully develop later. “Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”

It is tempting to wonder what might have happened to these ideas if they had not been entangled with Luther’s concurrent attack on the practice of indulgences, which apart from its theological consequence was also an attack on the cornerstone of Pope Leo X’s capital campaign. The extreme Augustinianism of the theses is at once less immediately threatening and more radical than the critique of indulgences. Perhaps these debates would have played out very differently if they had been confined to academic theology, instead of splashing across a continent-wide crisis of the church’s polity and economy.

As one whose engagement with that academic theology is strictly amateur, however, I found in the Heidelberg theses something like a Rosetta Stone of my own preoccupations. I had started years before with Augustine, from whom I learned angst and guilt. And I had already leaped ahead to Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer, from whom I had learned about paradox and contradiction. Luther, in these theses, connected it all. What had fascinated me in theology, from the start, was something too severe, too extreme for the common metaphors of healing, enlightenment, amelioration, gradual improvement: it was the image of being created anew, put to death and buried and resurrected. Here, in Luther’s theses and their “theology of the cross,” was something that could make sense of very little, except for the stunning reversals in Scripture, where the first is last, the cruel brothers are forgiven, the hungry are filled and the rich sent away empty, the rich man’s gate becomes a fiery prison, the scrupulous search for worthy hungry to feed becomes the surprise condemnation, and the cross becomes the tree of life.

It is common, even expected, for Christian theologians to praise the cross. It adorns our churches and our jewelry, after all. But this, for me, was the cross in a new light. It wasn’t an accounting gimmick–Christ paying off my balance–or a principle of self-abnegation. It was really and truly a cross, an ugly and horrid thing. Since sinful humans cannot perceive God in God’s goodness and power, God chose to be “found only in suffering and the cross.” The people Luther calls theologians of the cross understand this, and perceive the visible things of God through suffering and the cross. The theologian of glory, on the other hand, “prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.”

This is an even more penetrating claim that Luther himself indicates. The cross, as was not much acknowledged in the theology of Christendom, was a punishment reserved by Roman law for non-citizens. It was not the civil sword that punishes wrongdoers as part of the political community; it was an act of public terror that degraded and dehumanized people outside of that community. It was significant that Jesus did not die by the civil sword, or by a lingering fever, or a criminal ambush–all of which would have served to balance the divine ledger or embody an ideal of abstract suffering. Jesus died under a very human kind of curse. Reason still rebels at finding our righteousness and redemption in such a thing.

So the theologian of glory is a persistent presence in the church today, and the theologian of the cross is always needed. There is always a temptation to insist that the contradiction between the world and a God revealed in a viciously executed Jewish messiah is not quite total, not entirely incapable of compromise and accommodation, not yet wholly resistant to our modes and methods of wisdom and understanding. Our noble theologies, our beautiful art, our civilized institutions, our just politics, and pious modes of living have to count for something. The cross can be brought into those systems somehow, given a place of prominence, acknowledged as the completion of an otherwise admirable worldview. Our need can’t be so great as to sweep all of that away.

And perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps the genius of the Heidelberg theses is strictly literary. Augustine, after all, argued that the difficult passages in Scripture ought to be interpreted in light of the clearer ones, and not the other way around. We tend to read law and philosophy as Augustine recommends reading Scripture. Searching for the unaccounted exception or the scandalous reversal is what we do when we read, say, Hamlet.

But for me as a pastor, a writer, and a Christian, and I suspect for the history of theology more generally, Luther’s theology of the cross held Christian thought open in a critical way. Christians, Luther would later write, must be regarded as the worst of all people, and be persecuted and punished solely for wishing to have Christ and none other as their head. The eschatological and political marginality of the early church–its Messianic severity–is left as a possibility in this theology, even if only by analogy. It is a possibility taken up in Christian existentialism, in liberation theology, and in the best of Christian political and cultural engagement in the world. The cross that cannot be fully captured or concluded within any moral or intellectual system, or any institutional form, is Luther’s great contribution to Christian thought.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Filed Under: Indulgences, Reformation Jubilee 500


Let’s Talk welcomes thoughtful responses to our articles from all readers. Post your thoughts on our Facebook page or scroll down to the bottom to leave a comment.

Subscriber Sign-up

About Benjamin Dueholm

Benjamin J. Dueholm is pastor at Christ Lutheran Church in Dallas, Texas, and the author of Sacred Signposts: Words, Water, and Other Acts of Resistance (Eerdmans 2018).

Issue 22.2 – After Pentecost 2017

Pop art Martin Luther

Reformation Jubilee 500

Appreciating Luther

Martin Luther, The Peasants’ War, And Anti-semitism: A Quincentennial Rumination

By Gregory Holmes Singleton

Why Did Luther Demonize His Theological Opponents?

By Robert Saler

More Than Just Table Talk

By Francisco Herrera

“Are you ignorant of what it means to be ignorant?”: Luther’s Insults

By Tyler Rasmussen

An Appreciation of Luther’s Pastoral Writings

By Anna Marie Johnson

My Appreciation of Martin Luther’s Sacramentality and His Attention to the Human Body

By Frank C. Senn

An Appreciation of Luther’s Critique of the Eucharistic Sacrifice

By Shane Brinegar

Indulgences

Indulge Me: About the Lollards

By Benjamin Dueholm

Indulge Me: Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), Christian Humanist and Hebrew Scholar

By Theodor Dunkelgrün

Indulge Me: King Johan III

By Frank C. Senn

Indulge Me: The Book of Common Prayer

By Pamela Dolan

Indulgence: Johannes Bugenhagen Pomeranus, Reformer of the Church

By Kurt Hendel

Indulge Me: Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553)

By Frank C. Senn

Commemorative Projects

Unity and Reconciliation Challenges Chronic Homelessness in Lake County

By Dawn Mass Eck

Evanston Reformation 500 and Beyond: The Proof is the Beyond….A Joint Reflection

By Betty Landis and Joseph Tito

Music Events at Grace for Reformation 500

By Michael D. Costello

Historic Medallion Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation

By Frederick J. Schumacher