Bad News and Good News: The Gospel According to Luther

The bad news, as Martin Luther continually reminded himself and others, is that I am a sinner. Inevitably, I intractably doubt, disregard, or dismiss God’s speaking to me from the pages of Holy Scripture, defying his will and demanding to go my own way. That, Luther knew, leads only to death.

The good news is that my Creator has come into human flesh and blood, skin and bones. Jesus, the eternal word made flesh, died to eliminate my defiance and doubt of God. Jesus rose from death to restore my identity in God’s sight as his beloved child (Rom. 4:25). Although Luther recognized that Scripture and general usage have several definitions for the words law and gospel—and he used them all—he employed the terms as a team in tandem as a hermeneutical principle. In this team, “law” designates God’s plan for human life and his expectations of his human creatures. “Gospel” presents and pronounces God’s saving plan for his own act of re-creation in reconciling sinners to himself. This sensitivity to the distinction of God’s expectations and God’s gift of forgiveness, life, and salvation informs the Lutheran view of human life still today.[1]

Because taking God’s expectations seriously continually reminds us of the little flaws and failures of our daily performances—to say nothing of some massive gaps between his good plan and what we produce in any given hour—we need the good news of rescue and restoration. According to Luther, this good news comes in the form of a person, Jesus Christ, and in the form of the attitude of our Creator toward us: even while we were yet sinners, he showed us favor (Rom. 5:8). Good news comes in the form of his promise to us; in the form of its contents or impact, forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation; and in the form of God’s communication of the promise and its benefits in oral, written, and sacramental media.

Luther did not believe that “when you’ve said, ‘Jesus,’ you’ve said it all.” He did believe that the good news of the restoration of truly human life depends solely on what the incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity accomplished in his death and resurrection. The story of God’s saving intervention in human history includes Jesus’ birth as the son of the Virgin Mary, his life of service lived in conformity with God’s eternal design for human living, his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, his continuous mediation for his people, and his return at the end of this age. Paul focused on the heart of that story when he summarized Christ’s mission of rescue and restoration in Romans 4:25. By dying on the cross, Christ lifted sin from sinners and, as Paul followed up in Romans 6:3, through the practical consequences or effect of his death, he buried our sinful identity in his tomb, and was raised for the restoration of the righteousness of sinners. In Romans 6:4, as Luther read it, God also raises up his people to walk in Christ’s footsteps.

Luther described this rescue and restoration in terms of justification, the gift of righteousness. In the restoration of the Edenic relationship with our Creator, we are passive. We receive our identity as God’s children as we received the gift of life from our parents, without asking, without condition. But as earthly parents have expectations of their children who receive life from them free of charge, Luther insisted that God expects those restored to being his children through the gospel to behave as his children by conforming to his design for life. In contrast to the passively received righteousness or identity as God’s child that defines our relationship with him, he expects us to be truly righteous in our relationships with his other creatures—human and nonhuman—and to act as his children. This active righteousness in no way determines our relationship with God, but he does call us to turn back to him and his design for life as expressed in his law because Christ has restored us to his family.[2]

Luther thought that the concept of “satisfying the law” alone too weakly expressed the full glory of Christ’s saving work.[3] He did insist, nonetheless, that Christ satisfied the law’s demand for the death of sinners (Rom. 6:23a). In the mystery of God’s plan made before the foundations of the world (Eph. 1:3–11), he substituted himself for sinners under that judgment. His substitutionary death for the sins of the world cleared sin from the record of those who trust his promise or pronouncement of forgiveness.[4] Luther also describes Christ’s saving action in terms of resurrection victory over death, sin, Satan, and every evil. Luther’s Large Catechism describes his resurrection in dramatic terms as a jailbreak, in which Christ bursts into the devil’s prison and frees those held captive there.[5] Luther also compares the gift of Christ’s resurrection as a parallel to God’s creating the world out of nothing, out of chaos, as Jesus rescues his people from the nothingness or chaos of their sin. Luther found that passages describing baptism as a new birth as a child of God presented the origin of our new creaturely status (2 Cor. 5:17).[6] He, and especially his colleague Philip Melanchthon, also relied on the mediating voice of Christ as he daily pleads the case of sinners before the Father’s throne. Luther’s Small Catechism presents Christ’s death and resurrection as his regaining possession of what had belonged to God but came into Satan’s possession, so that his people might be “his own”—members of his family as in Eden—and “live under his rule” so that they may have the joy and peace of “serving him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.”[7]

The good news is that God has done all this for his human creatures. As Luther wrote, God’s creative goodness brought the world into existence, “out of pure, fatherly goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness” on our part.[8] Jesus died and rose for those who are totally dependent on the Creator, who had alienated themselves by finding false sources for their identity, security, and meaning. Luther redefined “grace” so that it was no longer simply an enabling factor the Holy Spirit gives to sinners to enable them to perform works that make them look good in God’s sight. For Luther, Scripture asserts that grace is God’s attitude of favor, love, mercy, and steadfast lovingkindness that he bestows upon his people in and through Christ.

The good news is that this divine favor regards Christ’s substitution for sinners as sufficient for him to disregard their sin. Luther knew that since what God thinks and says determines reality, God’s favor to us delivers the realities of forgiveness of sins. His forgiveness does not merely return us to some neutral spot between himself and Satan; it restores the Edenic relationship of love and trust that constitutes the heart of our humanity. Forgiveness—the absence of sin—means the restoration of life itself. Luther coupled the forgiveness of sins and the restoration of life as salvation itself, the return of Edenic shalom, the totally harmonious relationship of those who trust in him with their Creator.

The good news is that God has promised this restoration to those who trust his promise of forgiveness and life. Luther deepened the understanding of the word promise. Since promises guarantee something in the future, we sometimes dwell on not yet having what has been promised. Luther argued that because God has made these promises and he does not go back on his promises, believers can have confidence in what he promises. When he says that we belong to his family, we are truly his children here and now. The future may seem clouded by the mystery of the continuation of sin in the world, but the crystal-clear promise of the Creator and Re-creator cuts through that fog. Christ has claimed us as his own. We are his. When we stray from and transgress his plan for our lives, he condemns us with the law in no uncertain terms. The mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the faithful cannot be rationally mastered; it must be addressed in its existential manifestations through properly distinguishing law and gospel.

The good news is that God makes that promise through effective use of tools he has fashioned out of selected elements of his created order—his own incarnate flesh and blood, human language that pronounces forgiveness and life, the expression of the promise joined with the signs of water and of bread and wine. As a student of certain disciples of the fourteenth-century thinker William of Ockham, Luther believed that God is truly the Almighty Creator and that he is able and free to plan any program for saving sinners. He also believed that God is comfortable being present in his created material order, using it as he deems best. Because God reveals himself as a God who loves conversation and community, God arranged for the gospel—the proclamation of the gospel as kerygma (Rom. 1:16)—to actually exercise his power, delivering good news to his human creatures, and effecting it in their lives on earth.

Luther found great comfort in God’s approach to him through the church, the people of God, whom God calls to bring his promise to those caught in the web of their own sinning and their suffering the sins of others. He trusted that word from God that had been spoken over him at the baptismal font as the Holy Spirit’s action to assure him that Christ’s empty tomb provided him a clear path into God’s eternal presence. He rejoiced in hearing and delivering Scripture’s promise into the congregation of members of Christ’s body, the church, receiving the promise that Christ’s body and blood had been given for us. Luther delighted in sharing these words of forgiveness and life in his family circle and among his friends.[9] Thus in his Smalcald Articles (1537), he labeled his summary of the “guidance and resources against sin” that God provides as “gospel.” As a multimedia communicator, he engaged his people through preaching, absolution, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and Christian conversation conveying Christ.[10] Forty years later, Lutheran theologian Jakob Andreae wrote in the Formula of Concord,

For everything that provides comfort—everything that offers God’s favor and grace to those who have transgressed the law—is and is called the gospel in the strict sense. It is good news, joyous news, that God does not want to punish sin but to forgive it for Christ’s sake. Accordingly, all repentant sinners should believe in, that is, place their trust alone in, the Lord Christ, who “was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” [Rom. 4:25]. “For our sake he became sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” [2 Cor. 5:21]. He was made our righteousness [1 Cor. 1:30].[11]

Therefore, Andreae confessed, we rejoice in this good news that in his gracious favor God gives to us on the basis of Christ’s death and resurrection in the form of his promise conveyed in his word in oral, written, and sacramental forms. There is no better news.

Robert Kolb is mission professor of systematic theology emeritus at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including The Genius of Luther’s Theology, Luther and the Stories of God, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith, and The Christian Faith: A Lutheran Exposition. Kolb is coeditor of The Book of Concord (2000 translation). He has lectured at more than forty educational institutions on five continents and at many ecclesiastical gatherings. Since 1996, he has been a guest lecturer at Lutheran Theological College in Oberursel, Germany.