In 1518, Luther had labeled the theology of the cross, “Our Theology.” As he published the lectures, which he had delivered on the epistle to the Galatians in 1531 and 1532 (he published those lectures in 1535), he wrote a preface in which he said, “ ‘Our Theology’ is the distinction between the two kinds of righteousness.” He labeled these two kinds of righteousness the “active” and the “passive,” and he explained that he was distinguishing these two kinds of righteousness so that morality and faith, works and grace, secular society and religion may not be confused.
As a matter of fact, Luther’s treatment of the distinction between two kinds of righteousness was not new in 1535. As a matter of fact, in that period in which he moved toward his evangelical breakthrough in decisive fashion, one of his key tracts was called On the Two Kinds of Righteousness. And in 1518 and 1519, he was thinking a great deal about this distinction. As a matter of fact, he also wrote a tract almost at the same time entitled The Three Kinds of Righteousness. In that tract on The Three Kinds of Righteousness, he distinguished the good works of the Christian from the good works of those who are not motivated by the love of Christ, calling the latter “civic righteousness.” But as a matter of fact, these two kinds of righteousness—the good works of the Christian and the good works of the nonbeliever—are in fact, Luther recognized, the works of the same law, the works of the same structure which God has written into the hearts of His human creatures.
As a matter of fact, in 1535, Luther began his summary of the argument or the approach, the basic message of Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians. He began introducing his treatment of this argument, which revolves around the two kinds of righteousness, by distinguishing four kinds of righteousness (just to make it a little more complicated). He begins by saying, “Paul’s argument runs like this: He wants to establish the doctrine of faith, grace, the forgiveness of sins, or Christian righteousness (note that faith, grace, the forgiveness of sins—that’s what constitutes Christian righteousness), so that we may have a perfect knowledge and
Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
know the difference between Christian righteousness and all other kinds of righteousness. We may understand righteousness here as that which makes us right, that which describes what it is to be human and to be human in specific relationships or ways.” First of all, Luther says, there is a political righteousness, there is a way of being a right subject or a right ruler; a right citizen, we would say in our day and age. Political righteousness, positive law is prescribed by human secular governments. That’s a good kind of righteousness. Laws can be written against the Law of God by human rulers, but political righteousness—when it corresponds to God’s structure for our human existence—is good, and we ought to follow it.
Secondly, there is a ceremonial righteousness, and he uses as an example the traditions of the medieval church. And he comments:
Parents and teachers may teach this righteousness without danger, so long as they don’t attribute to it any power to make satisfaction for sin, to placate God, or to earn grace. Ceremonial righteousness, doing the ceremonies of the church, is fine and God pleasing so long as it is done in faith in Jesus Christ, so long as it is not seen as something that satisfies God, placates his wrath, earns his grace. Instead, these ceremonies are used for moral discipline, for instructing in the faith, for structuring the way in which the Christian’s prayer and praise is conducted.
Luther recognized the importance of ritual in human life and in human society, and as long as that was done in a proper way that’s fine, that’s right, but it is not saving righteousness.
More fundamentally there is another righteousness, and that is moral righteousness—the righteousness of the Law, the righteousness of the Decalogue. It is a righteousness of human performance. It is a righteousness which governs the relationships of God’s creatures (especially His human creatures) in relationship to one another in the horizontal relationship of one human creature to another. “But neither is it,” Luther says, “saving righteousness.” Saving righteousness—the righteousness that makes us truly human once again—is the righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness. And Luther warns this has to be very carefully distinguished from all other kinds of righteousness because they are all contrary to this kind of righteousness. They proceed from a different source. They proceed from the laws of emperors or the traditions of the church or God’s commands for human performance over and against each other. But that is a different entity; it is different altogether than that which makes us who we are at the heart of our being children of God. And this is a righteousness which then expresses itself in faith. It is a
righteousness which God gives to us through Christ without works. So it’s a merely passive righteousness. It’s not political obedience. It’s not ceremonial observance. Nor is it moral performance. It is the righteousness of being a child of God because He has given us new birth.
So Luther goes on in this preface to the Galatians to say, “Here we work nothing, we render nothing to God. We only receive and we permit someone else to work in us (that is, God works in us).” So it is appropriate to call the righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness “passive” because it is a righteousness hidden in mystery, and we do not understand it by fallen nature, as sinners, because we want to be the boss. “Even Christians don’t understand it,” Luther says (and he was speaking here from his own sorry experience). “Even Christians don’t want to grasp that they are righteousness, that they are good, only and alone by the gift of God.”
So we might summarize what Luther has said here by looking at the two relationships in which righteousness figures for Luther. In the first kind of righteousness, the righteousness of the horizontal sphere of our lives, we are looking, as we have just said, at human performance. It is external. It is measurable, and it is an active righteousness. It is the righteousness of human performance. And if we are to understand Luther correctly, we may best look at this kind of righteousness by focusing on where the burden falls, where the responsibility falls for making sure that human creatures are righteous. The righteousness of God’s prescription—God’s law, God’s structure—for the way in which we treat other human creatures falls on us. And when we are sinners, when we are caught in our sinfulness, when we are not able to perform what God structured and created and shaped our lives to do, then the burden crushes us. And so the chief result of focusing on horizontal righteousness, at least at the beginning of Luther’s approach to the sinner, results in that Law being a terrible crushing burden.
Again, to quote from his argument or his summary of Paul’s approach in the epistle to the Galatians, Luther writes:
Such is human weakness in misery that in the terrors of conscience and in the danger of death we look at nothing except our own works, our own worthiness, and the Law. When the Law shows us our sin, our past life immediately comes to mind and the sinner in his great anguish of mind groans and says to himself, “Oh how damnably I have lived, if only I could have lived longer, then I would amend my life.”
Luther, then, out of his own experience, says, “Thus, human reason cannot refrain from looking at active righteousness, that is, its own righteousness. And it cannot shift its gaze to the passive righteousness, Christian righteousness; it simply rests in this active righteousness, the righteousness of human performance.”
Then Luther makes an observation about practical everyday life which reflects his experience, indeed which reflects his own particular personality, with its scrupulous looking at whether he had really kept the Law of God perfectly. But out of his experience, he says:
Satan comes to take advantage of the weakness of our nature. Satan increases and he aggravates these thoughts in us. And then it is impossible for the conscience to avoid being more seriously troubled and confounded and frightened. For it is impossible for the human mind to conceive any comfort of itself, or to look only at grace amidst its consciousness and terror at sin. It is impossible for the human mind under sin to reject all discussion of works. To do this is beyond human power and thought.
Luther was convinced he had come to recognize what Christian passive righteousness is only by the work of the Holy Spirit. And so he says it is impossible for the human mind to do this. It is beyond human power and thought. It is even beyond the power of God’s Law, His prescription to us to do that. “The Law is the best of all things in the world,” Luther says. He recognized the Law. The structure of human life as it ought to be lived was a good gift of God. But it cannot bring peace to a terrified conscience. It makes that conscience sadder; it drives that conscience to despair. He refers to Romans 7:13, and says, “By the law, sin becomes exceedingly sinful.”
And so Luther, out of his own experience again, taught that the burden of human performance, of God’s demand for human performance, of God’s prescription through His structuring of human life with the commands of the Ten Commandments, that He had placed the burden on the human creature. You’ll note that Luther says, “The Law is good” because the structure is good. It’s a good creature of God that God made when He shaped Adam and Eve in the garden. But under sin, that Law has come to crush us. And so we must look back to God who created us in the first place if we are to understand that we are truly worthwhile, that we are truly righteous through Jesus Christ.
Sinners have received what Adam and Eve received in the first place, the gift of life. The gift of life lived in favor under the grace of the Author of life. So our vertical righteousness is a product of
God’s love. And this love of God, as He gives Himself sacrificially to us in Jesus Christ, this love of God evokes in us trust and faith. But trust itself is a gift. Trust itself is something we cannot muster on our own. So Luther calls this a “passive righteousness.” It is a righteousness of relationship. It is not a righteousness of performance. It is a righteousness that is not measurable as the external good works that flow from it are measurable. Instead, it is a matter of being a child in the presence of the heavenly Father.
And so the burden here falls on God. It is God who initiates this relationship, just as parents initiate the relationship they have with their children. It is God who gives life. “It is God who gives birth and who gives new birth,” Luther taught, “to those whom he claims as His children.” And this new birth comes through Jesus Christ.
Luther continued, as he introduced the epistle to the Galatians:
The afflicted conscience has no remedy against despair and eternal death except to take hold of the promise of grace offered in Christ. That is, the righteousness of faith (this passive or Christian righteousness). Then the conscience can say, I do not seek active righteousness, I ought to have and perform this righteousness, but I declare that even if I did have it and even if I did perform it, I cannot trust in it. I cannot stand up before the judgment of God on the basis of it [here we see the influence of that Scotus-Ockhamist tradition], thus I put myself beyond all active righteousness, all righteousness of my own or of the divine law, and I embrace only that passive righteousness which is the righteousness of grace, mercy, and the forgiveness of sins.”
So speaks the conscience of Martin Luther. Then he goes on to add: “In other words, this is the righteousness of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. We don’t perform it. We receive it. We do not have it, but we accept it. It flows into us.” In other words, when God the Father grants it to us through Jesus Christ.
It is through Jesus Christ. I made the comparison a moment ago with [Duns] Scotus (1265–1308) or with [William of] Ockham (1288–1348). You remember that Scotus had taught the principle that nothing created has to be accepted by the creator. The creator is the shaper of the pot, the creator is the one who decides whether something is acceptable to him or not simply in his total freedom, which indeed has become mercy for us, according to Scotus, according to Ockham. Although both of them introduced a
much larger factor of human performance than Luther did. Luther thinks in terms of “justification” rather than “acceptance.” But it is against that background of his Ockhamist training, I think, that he can say, “Even if I did perform the works of the Law, even if I could keep God’s commands perfectly, that would not be the basis on which I would stand before God. For then I would be trusting in my works rather than in God.” The passive righteousness that Martin Luther is teaching here is a righteousness which consists only in that gift God gives. Adam and Eve were not righteous because they were good. They were good, and therefore they produced the deeds of righteousness. But the goodness, the righteousness which they had, was a gift of God when He made them to walk and talk with Him in the garden, when He made them to be His children, when He created them as the human creatures that He wanted to have in this relationship with Him.
Luther expands on that in an analogy, again from the Preface to the Galatians Commentary:
The earth itself does not produce rain. The earth doesn’t merit rain. The earth is unable to acquire rain by its own strength. It can’t worship the rain and call the rain down upon it. It can’t force the rain to come. It receives it. It is a heavenly gift. (So this heavenly righteousness is given to us by God without any merit or any work on our part). As much as the dry earth of itself is able to accomplish in obtaining the right and blessed rain, that much we can accomplish by our own strength and works, to obtain that divine, heavenly, eternal righteousness.
In other words, we can’t attract it to ourselves at all; we can only obtain it through the free imputation and indescribable gift of God. And therefore, the highest art and wisdom of Christians is not to focus on the Law—not to know the Law in terms of knowing who we are at our very heart in terms of our salvation—the highest art and wisdom of the Christians is to ignore works, to ignore active righteousness, and simply to soak in this wonderful, this marvelous gift of God.
But we have sinned. We have fallen short of the glory of God, Luther continually impressed upon his hearers, again reflecting his own sorry experience. So he says that this righteousness is given to us sinners only through Christ, who takes our sin away by absorbing it into Himself and burying it in His tomb and taking us with Him into new life through His resurrection. Again, from the Commentary on the Galatians:
This righteousness means to do nothing, to hear nothing, to know nothing about the law or about works, but to know and believe only this: That Christ has gone to the Father. He’s now invisible. He sits in heaven at the right hand of the Father, but He is not there as a judge. He is there as one who has become for us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption from God.
In other words, He has exchanged for our sinfulness His wisdom, His righteousness, His holiness, His being freed from sin. What that means is, Luther says, “He is our High Priest, He intercedes for us, and He reigns over us and He reigns in us in grace.” And when Christ is the focus of our lives—when we trust in Him, when our faith grasps and grabs the gift of righteousness He gives—then we no longer notice sin, we no longer feel terror or remorse of consciousness. Sin just doesn’t happen in this Christian righteousness.
So sin doesn’t have a place, and so we simply stand before God knowing that we are His children. Now, if the focus changes—if we focus again on our own sinfulness, if we fall back into sin—then conscience and fear becomes present and the righteousness is not ours to enjoy. We have lost sight of grace. Christ is hidden and out of sight. But Luther repeats, calling us again to the kind of faith which saves:
Where Christ is truly seen there, there must be full and perfect joy in the Lord and peace of heart, where the heart declares: Although I am a sinner according to the Law, judged by the righteousness of the Law, nevertheless I do not despair, I do not die because Christ who lives is my righteousness. He is my eternal life. He is my heavenly life. In that righteousness in life, I don’t have any sin anymore. I have no conscience that afflicts me. I have no threat of death over me.
“Yes, indeed,” Luther says, I am a sinner according to the present life and its righteousness as a son of Adam. Here the Law does accuse me, here death reigns, here it devours me. But above this life, above this life priority given to the second focus, I have another righteousness, another life, which is Christ, my life is Christ the Son of God, and He does not know sin and death. He knows only righteousness and eternal life. For His sake this body of mine will be raised from the dead and delivered from the slavery of the Law and sin, and will be sanctified together with the Spirit.
When we come to discuss Luther’s doctrine of justification, we will talk about this very view once again. It is often summarized
with the words saint and sinner at the same time. Indeed, Luther did teach that the people of Christ are still experiencing their sinfulness, but are in God’s sight righteous, having received through the joyful exchange with Christ the gift of life and righteousness and goodness.
And so Luther’s distinction of the two kinds of righteousness is really fundamental for understanding his whole approach to theology. And it creates for Luther then two corollaries or two, we might call them, operating principles. Operating principles for working out and living out the theology which God has presented to us in the Bible, the understanding of life which God has presented to us in the Bible.
The first corollary of Luther’s distinction of the two kinds of righteousness is the distinction between Law and gospel. Law and gospel for Luther were not merely two doctrines that you could lay beside each other on a page or that you could recite one after another in an examination. Instead, they really were operating, active, working principles that engage the fallen human creature at different places in his or her existence. And therefore, Law and gospel—though Luther understood them to be complimentary in Eden—have now become opposites; have now become warring words of God. The contradiction, of course, does not lie in God, for His first word was a word of what Luther would call, “passive righteousness.” It was a word in which we are passive. It was the word: “I am your God, and you are my child.” But then God went on to give a good gift that says, “Here is what a child of Mine performs.” And you can hear already in what I’ve just said the two kinds of righteousness. In the first word of God, a word that Luther would label “gospel” in a kind of narrow sense, he can use the word gospel for everything God has said, but in a narrow sense this word, which puts the burden on Him as our Father, as the giver of life, as our Creator, then is complimented by this word which tells us how to live the good life. But there the burden, the focus, the performance comes into our court, falls upon us.
And so Luther distinguished the Law as a good word which becomes a bad word for those who do not keep it. It is a word that gives the proper structure for human life, but it is also a word that talks about this structure in measurable terms. It evaluates us. So whenever the Law and the sinner come together, the sinner may get good instruction for how to live the good life, but the sinner will also somewhere in the back of the mind hear that word of evaluation. And that word of evaluation always says, “Your life is not as good as it could be.” So that word of Law that puts the burden on us, that evaluates our performance, that word of evaluation crushes and condemns. So God comes with a new word
of gospel, a new word which takes the burden from the sinner crushed by the Law and puts that burden on God, on God as He comes in human flesh.
Luther could speak of two uses of the Law, though Lutherans understood him to have really treated the Law in three different ways. Luther labels the first use of the Law a political or a civil use of the Law. In this civil or political use of the Law, the Law pressures, governs, goads, prods people to do the right [thing]. The Law gives the structure for human living and then it also coerces or cajoles us into external performance of the Law. This civil or political usage of the Law is a good and proper thing in the horizontal sphere of human life, Luther says. It’s what keeps order in a society that threatens to break apart because of human sinfulness. This use of the Law, however, can become demonic. If indeed we take what is designed for civil order, for order in the horizontal world, and present those works as something that ought to make us righteous in the vertical relationship as well, that just won’t go. Luther says, “For our works can never be good enough. Our order can never be perfect enough, because it’s not a matter of human performance that pleases God anyway. God is pleased with us sheerly and purely out of grace. He looks upon us with His favor simply because He wants to look upon us with His favor, and the human mind can never plumb the depths of God’s reasoning there.”
The second use of the Law, according to Luther, is this crushing condemning use, the use that evaluates us and points out to us that we have failed to be truly and fully human in the little ways and also in the big ways—in our faith and trust toward God. We’ll talk more about that in Lecture 7, “Luther’s Point of Departure: The First Commandment.”
Luther did not say there is also a third use of the Law, the use of the information which this Law gives in the Christian life to understand and to contribute to Christian decision making. Some 20th-century Luther scholars, particularly Werner Elert (1885–1954) in Germany, taught that Luther had no third use of the Law, that he derived the information which the Law gives from that first use. Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s sidekick at the University of Wittenberg, did teach a third use of the Law, and most of Luther’s students took up this threefold (even sometimes had four and five) use of the Law in their systems. It is important, I think, to note that Luther clearly does look to the Law of God for information, but he distinguishes very sharply the motivation for doing the will and works of God. In that first use, the Law itself motivates through its coercive or its cajoling power. As Luther presented information from the Law to Christians in what we
might call a third use, he certainly did not understand the Law as the motivating factor there at all. “Christians do good works out of a free and merry spirit,” one of his students said. They do good works because of the love of Christ, as John says in his first epistle: “We love because He first loved us” (I John 4:19).
So Luther understood this informational use of the Law as always a use that comes to people who are being motivated by the gospel. Otherwise, if the Law is cajoling or coercing us, that is not truly the righteousness performed in faith. And therefore it is an empty kind of performance, even though Christians may often find themselves being cajoled and coerced by the Law and not acting out of the right motivation. But Luther insisted we are not saved either by our performance or by our motivation. We are saved by nothing in us. We are saved passively by the gift of Christ’s righteousness. But Christ’s righteousness comes to us through God’s recreative word, through a word that forgives our sin and lifts the burden from us and places it on Christ.
Because Luther understood the way in which God deals with us, as very down-to-earth and very realistic, as addressing us in the life we actually live, he insisted then that theologically (not always chronologically, I suppose) the Law for the sinner will always precede the gospel. In Eden, the gospel preceded the Law, the gospel claimed us as God’s children by His creative Word, and then it told us how to live. But now, as we live as sinners not listening to God, it is the Law that comes to us first because the Law must prepare us.
First of all, what Luther called “the old Adam” or “the old man” needs to hear that Law to understand his or her need for the gospel. So it is only when a person is sufficiently contrite (that is, oppressed by the law), terrified by sin, thirsting for comfort, “Then it’s time for me,” Luther writes, “to take the law and active righteousness from his sight and to set before him through the gospel the passive righteousness which excludes the law but shows the promise of Christ who came for the afflicted, who came for sinners.” Understand him correctly now, he is saying that the person who is relying on something God has made rather than on God Himself, the person who is relying on his own works, his own piety, is not going to be interested in any gift from God. [He or she] doesn’t need it. A person has to be oppressed by the law, a person has to be terrified by sin, a person has to be (as Luther said) thirsting for comfort, and then the gospel comes. The good news that Jesus Christ is the one who gives us life, the good news that God has decided to choose us as His children, that is the word that comes only after the Law has made its mark, after the Law has destroyed that arrogant sinner who thinks that he or
she can live without God. The sinner must be broken before this distinction between Law and gospel can function in such a way that the gospel becomes the word of life for us.
In addition to this corollary of the proper distinction of Law and gospel, Luther’s understanding of the two kinds of righteousness had a second corollary, a second operating principle. It is often called the operating principle of the two kingdoms. I don’t like that language because Luther had two sets of two kingdoms. Luther had a kingdom of God opposed to a kingdom of Satan. And then he also had the two kingdoms that we will talk about, as two governments or two realms.
Indeed, Luther did understand all of human life as a battlefield between the forces of Satan and the forces of God. He also then described the field on which God and Satan fight it out. That is, the structure of human life as a field in which there are two realms, two governments. Human life has, we might say more clearly for our day and age, two kinds of relationships, two dimensions, two sets of relationships. He described the vertical relationship as a kingdom, [new sentence?] he often said, (we are going to say government or realm) realm of God’s right hand. It is what he often called “the heavenly realm.” Here God rules us as individuals at the core of our identity. Here He speaks the good word of His gospel to us and claims us to be His children. And we respond in faith. The vertical relationship, the heavenly realm, the government of the right hand is a relationship of God’s word of love and our response of faith or trust.
On the other hand, the realm of the left hand (also a good and godly realm), what Luther calls his “earthly government,” is that part of human life in which we relate to one another and to the rest of God’s creation as well. In this left-handed realm, in this earthly government, God speaks the word of Law. He structures our life for us. He tells us how we are to live out—how we are to perform—the good life. So what matters in the realm of the left hand are our works; that’s what really matters. The neighbor does not care so much about whether we are motivated to do something good but never get around to do it. He wants to be served. She wants to receive the service which God has designed for us to give. Now in this left-handed realm, God works His, what the 20th-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has called “penultimate good,” through Christians and non-Christians alike. In the vertical realm, only the Word of God, only faith in Jesus Christ, only the proclamation of the Christian church can establish what is ultimately good. But in the penultimate part of our lives, in the horizontal realm, indeed both believers and unbelievers, can work the externally goods works of God and keep order in society
and serve one another. As I mentioned above, Luther calls this civil or civic righteousness or political righteousness. It is what Luther called, “the first use of the Law.”
In this realm, God has set up a specific structure through which His people are His masks. Luther used the Latin term larva Dei, “masks of God.” God’s providential hand comes behind members of the family who cook for one another, the baker and the miller who provide the things we are to eat. He comes through rulers who keep order, through citizens who pay taxes, and the like. The righteousness of this realm, of course, has no role in the vertical realm. The two realms dare not be confused. But Luther taught that God has structured human life in this horizontal realm to carry out His will and to provide His love and care and concern for one another. We will talk more about this structure of human life when we talk about Luther’s “Doctrine of the Christian Calling” in Lecture 19, but at this point let me just say as a kind of preface to that, that Luther understood the way God has structured human life in much the same way that his contemporaries did. Luther was not an innovator here; he took over medieval social theory.
Medieval social theory taught that human life is structured in three, what were called, estates. And in these three estates, (1) the home—in which people live and work together as families, (2) in the state—the political aspect of our lives, and (3) in the church—the religious aspect of our lives, God is present and God is carrying out His will, even in a fallen world, so that people may enjoy a better life rather than a life that is not so good, that is more marred by sin in external and horizontal ways.
And so Luther saw for Christians no different role in governing or in taking care of families, certainly different in the practice of the faith. But Luther also saw the possibility that nonbelievers would in the political realm and in the realm of family and occupation be able to make life better rather than make it worse. He is alleged to have said that he would rather live under an “unbelieving Turk” who knew how to govern, who had the skills to govern the secular realm well, than under “a believing Christian who was incompetent.” Now obviously that kind of principle can’t apply in the church. He recognized that there is no Christian way to change diapers, though he would hope that Christian mothers and fathers would change diapers with a special kind of love, but the techniques of carrying out the duties, the obligations, the responsibilities of life in the horizontal realm are given to unbelievers and to believers alike.
We will indeed say more about the two realms and about the two words of God, Law and gospel. For these two operating principles
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flow out of Luther’s conceptual framework that we label the two kinds of righteousness and the distinction between the two. If there is anything unique in Luther’s theology, it probably lies in these two sets of presuppositions—these two elements of conceptual framework that we have discussed in this lecture and the last—(1) his theology of the cross, based on I Corinthians 1 and 2, and (2) his distinction of the two kinds of righteousness, that in some ways flows out of our Lord’s distinction between love for God and love for the neighbor, as he is summarizing human life as it is structured in the Law. Luther’s distinction of the two kinds of righteousness must be understood before we can go on to understand either his understanding of Christian sanctification in daily life or his understanding of the justification of the sinner in the sight of God through the gift of the righteousness which Christ trades for our sinfulness, as Luther explained it in his concept of the joyous exchange. On the basis of the two kinds of righteousness then, we go on to survey Luther’s theology.
