Luther’s understanding of the Christian life, as it’s comprehended in his understanding of God’s rule in two realms, has a lot to say about the way in which the Christian relates to culture, in which the Lord relates to his gift of culture to not only Christians but actually to all human beings. Our understanding of Luther’s attitude toward Christ and culture has been determined by the author of that phrase, H. Richard Niebuhr, a professor at Yale some two generations ago, who in 1951 wrote a book entitled Christ in Culture, on the basis of some lectures he had given in which he followed an academic model that was perhaps more in vogue then than now in analyzing five types of Christian analysis of the relationship between God and human culture. Niebuhr’s analysis sorted out the Christ against culture model (in the 16th century, the model represented, for instance, by the Anabaptists, though by strains of monastic thought as well); the Christ of culture; the Christ above culture; Niebuhr’s own favorite, the transformer of culture; and finally Luther’s understanding, Christ and culture (as Niebuhr labeled it) in paradox.
Niebuhr focused on four examples or representatives of Christ and culture in a paradox kind of thought. He placed Luther in the company of the apostle Paul himself, the ancient heretic Marcion, and the 19th-century father of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard. Niebuhr’s analysis is almost right. His search for types may be a little bit outdated, but his analysis is very helpful; and perhaps more important than that, it has been very influential in the way at least North Americans have understood Luther’s understanding of social thought of the whole question of the relationship between God and human culture.
Because Niebuhr’s analysis is so important, I would like to review it for you and analyze it, and then go on to look at some specific elements in human culture which Luther recognized as gifts of God, and then also to look at Luther as the product of his own culture in at least one most unfortunate way. In the next lecture we will look at one of the most important components of any theologian’s attitude toward human culture: Luther’s attitude toward questions of church and state, as we would say it today.
Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
Niebuhr’s analysis of Christ and culture in paradox, as he applies it to Luther, details a number of characteristics of this particular approach to questions of the Christian faith and human culture. First of all, according to Niebuhr’s analysis, Luther (among these four, with these other four) anchors his understanding of the relationship between Christ and culture in the assertion that Christ is Lord of every corner of life. Niebuhr really does not understand Luther’s distinction between the two kinds of righteousness, and so he does not distinguish two kinds of lordship, a lordship of the left hand (we might say), Christ’s lordship over human culture through the law, a lordship He exercises also through unbelievers apart from faith; and then His lordship over His own people, that vertical relationship that we have discussed a number of times already. But Niebuhr does recognize that when Luther says in his Small Catechism, “We believe that Jesus Christ is our Lord,” we acknowledge His lordship in every corner of life. And so Luther believes that all culture is under God’s lordship. Even though it may have no saving worth in and of itself, all culture is a good gift of God, and all culture is properly enjoyed by human creatures only when God’s rules for our humanity, God’s rules for our enjoyment of all aspects of culture, are observed, whether God is recognized by the unbeliever or not.
Niebuhr’s second characteristic emphasizes that Christ and culture - a paradox people - recognize how deeply sin and evil permeate every aspect of daily life. All cultural gifts that the human creature enjoys have been affected by sin and evil. What Niebuhr does not recognize is how deeply Luther’s understanding of the goodness of creation goes in his theology. Luther’s doctrine of creation saw every cultural factor as a good gift of God, good and at least to some extent usable (we might even say in a penultimate sense, redeemable from the perversion in this world). So Niebuhr properly notes that the logical, the theological, starting point for Luther was the sinfulness of the human creature, our fallenness, the rupture between the human creature and God. He does not note that also in Luther’s theology, the logical or theological starting point for God is His creation, is His goodness in creation, the goodness of the gifts that He has made, and their potential better use (even if not absolutely good use) even in a fallen world. And I say that not to underestimate the importance of Luther’s recognition of how deeply sin and evil permeate our daily life. That is an important part of his view of culture and that is why he can view it all somewhat tentatively, but he also sees it as a good gift of God.
This leads thirdly to a very sober sense of Christian realism in Luther’s understanding of the relationship between Christ and culture. That means that Luther is able to adjust to things as
they are in a fallen world. He does not get caught up in utopian dreams. He does not insist that things have to be a certain way, but he looks realistically at the specific situation. His concern is not to build the ultimate utopia on earth, but his concern is immediate service to the neighbor in a God-pleasing way. So Luther was content to seek what is better rather than the absolute good, because he believed that even if we would attain briefly the absolute good in the horizontal sphere, our sin, the evil around us, would pervert it rather quickly. So we go for the best we can, in Luther’s understanding of Christ and culture.
At the same time, fourthly, Luther believed that Christians are quite at home in God’s world. They are on their way to the heavenly realm, but they are quite at home since they are God’s children and the world belongs to God. And they are at home there for service this day, for service to the neighbor in the immediate situation. So Luther’s understanding of culture never provides an eschatological escape hatch. Christians are called to be part of God’s world as God designed it.
Nonetheless—and this is the fifth characteristic that I have singled out in Niebuhr’s analysis—everything in the cultural sphere, everything in the horizontal sphere of life is (to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase) penultimate. The things of culture, the gifts of culture, never become ends in themselves; they are always the means to the end of serving the neighbor.
That means, my sixth point, that there is a tremendous freedom that the Christian has, the freedom to seek the best way to serve the neighbor, the best way to enjoy God’s gifts of culture in any form they may take. The Christian is free because we no longer worry about pleasing God. We know that God has decided to be pleased with us. So we have a kind of self-forgetful service to the neighbor that is simply our way of life. We need not worry about whether we are doing what God wants us to do; we want to do what God wants us to do, but we don’t worry about it anymore because we know that we are safe and secure as His children. So we simply focus on the neighbor’s need and on the commands of God; and we freely do them knowing that we do not earn His favor because we already have it, knowing that we are only there to carry out His will.
My last point of analysis that I’ve gleaned from Niebuhr’s discussion: We always do this within the limits of our humanity. There is no stretching humanity beyond God’s design. God’s will governs what we do; His law remains the structure of our lives; His law is in force as we use all the gifts of culture.
Niebuhr warned against two dangers (I think we could safely label them) within the Christ and culture in paradox model. First of all, there is the temptation to quietism, to escape from responsibility, to escape from God’s call truly to serve. There is a kind of abandonment that comes from a false view of God’s goodness and providence. And it is true that some of Luther’s followers have indeed been tempted to be quietistic, to fail to live out the full calling that God gives them, particularly in society. But Luther was not quietistic. He was very active. He was active in his use of the good gifts of God’s culture, and he was active in his critique of those (even the leaders of his culture) who abused these gifts.
The other danger that Niebuhr notes is a kind of antinomianism, a kind of submission to the forces of culture, that in some ways parallels what he labels the Christ of culture syndrome. It is the temptation simply to abandon parts of God’s world to other forces. To say that, for instance, a government is given by God and so whatever government does is all right. And as we’ll see in this next lecture, Luther insisted that (as we know from Peter’s words in Acts) we must obey God rather than man. For Luther was committed to seeking justice, he was committed to obedience within the calling no matter who the person was. Rulers just as well as subjects must be obedient to God’s command.
My fundamental critique of Niebuhr’s analysis is that it is not, as he labels it, a dualist point of view. I think that Niebuhr is correct when he indicates that he uses the term dualism for want of a better term, and there are better terms. It is more important, I think, to see what Niebuhr did not see, that Luther’s whole view of culture is based upon the two-dimensionality of his two kinds of righteousness. In a sense, I suppose you could label that dualism, but generally we use the term dualism for a Manichaeism kind of viewpoint, and that Luther certainly was not. He emphasized the strong conflict between God and Satan, between those two kingdoms, but he never had any doubt who was Lord and who had already won the battle.
My other linguistic critique of Niebuhr’s analysis is that Luther’s point of view is not really paradoxical. It does not seem to me paradoxical, for instance, that the parent who can severely discipline a child also can dote on that child. So it is not paradoxical, I think, that in the vertical realm there is one kind of righteousness over and against the heavenly Father, and there is another kind of righteousness that is practiced in the horizontal realm. That is not a paradox, but that again is seeing life in two dimensions—in the dimension of our personal identity and in the actions that flow from that identity, distinguishing our attitudes as determining our person and our actions as that which flow
Nonetheless, as I have said, Niebuhr’s analysis is helpful, even if it is incomplete and flawed by his failure to recognize the two kinds of righteousness as the presuppositional setting in which Luther operates in every regard as he views the relationship between God and the human culture, which he gives us as a gift.
Luther embraced his culture critically but joyfully, and that joy was expressed, I suppose, nowhere more profoundly and more completely than in his appreciation of the arts, particularly the art of music (although Luther also was appreciative of the graphic arts). He was caught up at the beginning of his career between the medieval abuse of the arts for what he considered superstitious and impious purposes on the one hand, and then the iconoclastic rejection of the use of the arts as the means of worshiping God. It is interesting to note that while Luther’s understanding of the graphic arts was perhaps not as deep and full as his understanding of the musical arts, he nonetheless attracted the support of some of the best of the graphic artists of his day. Albrecht Durer was sick at heart when, at the end of the 1520s, he heard a (it turned out to be false) rumor that Luther had died. Durer expressed his praise for Luther’s contribution to the life of the church a number of times. Other German artists of the period (Tilman Riemenschneider, Matthias Grunewald, for example) were followers of Luther who experienced some persecution for the sake of Luther’s proclamation of the gospel. And it is particularly well-known that Luther was a friend of Lucas Cranach, the local artist in Wittenberg, whose career was certainly boosted by Luther’s presence there. Cranach’s art was not just religious art, it was secular; it embraced pagan themes. Cranach made a living by producing the kind of art that middle class and noble people bought for their homes, but Cranach also used his art in the service of the Reformation. And Luther used Cranach’s art to spread his message and to support particularly his catechetical instruction. In the catechisms, in the editions of the Small Catechism, which were issued under Luther’s supervision, Cranach’s woodcuts were very important. They were also important in the Bibles which were published: Luther’s translation of the Bible which was published at his time in Wittenberg and in other cities.
And so Luther learned how to use religious art to support his own movement. He had begun in the first blush of the Reformation by arguing against the necessity of images and pictures. For him, faith was what was important, and what was important was that faith was produced by the hearing of the Word. He also expressed a social concern about excessive expenditures for ecclesiastical art at the beginning of the Reformation. But above all, he was
worried about the association of many of the images in churches, in altars, in statuary, and the like with the veneration of the saints. And he had early on a deep appreciation for the concern of the iconoclasts, but he believed that their approach to religious art was very simplistic and, therefore, false. For destroying the images cannot destroy the idolatry; instead, Luther believed, Christian people needed to be instructed in the proper enjoyment and usage of these good gifts of God.
So he moved to a kind of pedagogical argument that religious art had been and would continue to be important as a learning device, as a teaching device. For religious art, he argued, can imprint mental images that can be used by teachers for effective learning and also for devotion. He also opposed the iconoclasts because he believed they were making a law out of something that God had not made a law out of. Graven images for purposes of idolatry, Luther condemned completely, but he recognized that in the crucifix and in the depiction of biblical stories in altarpieces and paintings, indeed the gospel was conveyed.
He did not move far beyond a kind of utilitarian approach in his appreciation of art. Art for art’s sake was perhaps simply beyond him, but he did see the graphic arts as good gifts of God. He also enjoyed music, he was able to sing and to play; and he had a high appreciation for this gift of God, which he regarded as next to theology among the good gifts of God. He learned music as a schoolboy, and some scholars have suggested that the influence of the Dutch cantus firmus tradition of his day was influential in shaping his understanding of music, but he was quite adaptable. He was a good friend of the musician Johann Walter, and he kept up with current developments far beyond Wittenberg in Saxony in the music, for instance, of Dupre and others.
Again, Luther recognized this good gift of God, music, as support for his own work, and he preached the gospel mightily through his hymns. But he thought that music of all kinds, secular music as well, was good for fighting melancholy, for letting good Christian believers enjoy life and relax.
His view of Christian liberty stood against all limitations of the use of musical forms and musical instruments. He had no sympathy at all with those who tried to suggest that there were certain instruments or certain kinds of music that could not serve to either lighten the human heart or specifically to lift that heart to God.
Luther’s hymns reflect his own linguistic gifts, as well as his musical gifts; he both composed lyrics and he wrote music. He was a good
poet, he loved literature, he had a particularly fine feel for the German language, and he was able to weave the biblical message into paraphrases of Scripture passages and into expressions of the creedal faith that set the message which he was preaching into the hearts of his people through song. His music is in its own way very much upbeat, expressing the confidence of his faith. It is pedagogical indeed, but it expresses a deeply felt praise for God. His hymns are confessions of faith. They are objective. They are not the light fluff of which some modern hymns are made, but he always used them to give praise to God, as well as to convey the faith. His hymns come from a number of sources. He seized on the tradition and translated some Latin hymns. He took some traditional hymn texts and simply translated them; in other cases, he revised them or he added to them. He took German folk songs for his melodies and sometimes even played on their lyrics as he wrote his Christian hymns. He used Scripture texts with a good deal of poetic license sometimes. His “Mighty Fortress” was based upon Psalm 46, but stretched its meaning into the warp and woof of human life in creative ways. And then he freely created some hymn texts, bringing his own understanding of God’s message to the page with his own imagination. The Jesuit Adam Consaneus once remarked, “Luther’s hymns have destroyed more souls than his writings and speeches have.” Indeed, Luther recognized music as the best of God’s gifts after theology, and he used it mightily for his saving message.
Another vital area of culture for Luther was the whole process of education. And he wrote a good deal about the Christian obligation of both parents and rulers to provide for the education of the young. He wanted a minimal education for all—he thought both boys and girls needed to have training and schooling—and he wanted proper appropriate training for all vocations, all occupational vocations. He wanted this so that there would be good leaders in the secular world and in the church; he wanted the educational system to develop skills for leadership. He also emphasized that the schools should be the place where the work of the parents is continued as teachers develop the character, the sense of responsibility, which their pupils have. And finally, in a world in which church and state were not at all differentiated in many regards, he believed that the schools (although they were the responsibility of local governments) were places where piety should be developed. Religious education was simply a part of the education of the whole culture in his world, and he never gave a second thought to that whole proposition.
Luther had a remarkable understanding of the breadth of human knowledge, and he supported study in all disciplines. For secondary schools particularly, he emphasized training in the
biblical languages because he wanted to make sure that young men were trained for ministry. But all needed to know the basics of communication, of grammar, and the like, all needed to learn rhetoric for good communication and logic for good thinking. And they needed to be exposed to ancient literature and poetry, not just religious but secular as well. Luther had a strong interest in music, as we have already noted, and he believed with the Middle Ages that music was an important part of the secondary school’s curriculum. He emphasized mathematics, and he took interest in two areas that were not always part of the medieval curriculum—history and what we might call the natural sciences. Luther commented, “The liberal arts are serviceable and useful to people in this life. They are noble and precious gifts of Christ who used them and uses them according to His good pleasure for the praise, honor, and glory of His holy name.”
As a matter of fact, Luther was part of an educational experiment at the University of Wittenberg, which was not limited simply to the innovations in the instruction and theology— though it is true the new approaches to teaching theology at Wittenberg were very important and influenced universities across Europe in every confession, particularly as they incorporated the program of biblical humanism and emphasized the biblical languages and then biblical studies for the heart of the study of theology. But Luther’s colleagues, also with his encouragement, did far more than just study theology; they had a complete university. And while it may be true that at the other two graduate faculties, besides theology, the faculty of law, and the faculty of medicine, there were no particularly significant advances in Luther’s time.
It is also true that during Luther’s career, there were exciting things happening at the undergraduate level in a number of areas. Luther’s colleague Philipp Melanchthon shared his enthusiasm for history and broke history out of the general study of literature and gave it a place at least at the edge of the curriculum, gave it a place in special lectures that he, Philipp, conducted himself. Luther promoted both the study of sacred history and secular history. He believed that there is a great deal to be learned from both. He believed that the ancient secular historians taught Christians a good deal about human virtue, even if they could not teach anything about the Christian faith itself. So Luther used the historians in his own writings a great deal, and he promoted their study. But also in the area of natural sciences, Luther’s colleagues at least made some important advances, for instance, in the area of botanical studies and also in the area of astronomy. Though during Luther’s lifetime none of the Wittenbergers actually endorsed Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, they did endorse the use of Copernicus’ materials, and thus they helped set the direction of
the study of astronomy in western European universities toward the final adoption of the Copernican theory.
The evaluations of Luther’s approach to learning, his pedagogical principles, differ with the bias of modern observers. Luther warned against excessive discipline, but he wanted obedience in the schoolroom. He shared the point of view which, I suppose, all educational authorities have always held, that culture, a society, has a school system in order to train good citizens—in his day, to train good subjects, who would be useful to society as a whole. No school system has had different goals than that, however they may have expressed them, and some modern observers have not shared the goals of his society and so have criticized what he said about education. He emphasized memorization and oral exchange typical of the Middle Ages, an oral culture, but he was sensitive to the dynamics of classroom teaching, and his comments undoubtedly did help teachers in his day think about teaching and improve it.
Connected with his understanding of God’s good gift of education is his appreciation of technology as a gift of God. Luther saw in various aspects of the developing technology of the late medieval period the hand of God at work. And, of course, the most important technological development, which influenced his own career, was the development of the printing press. He praised it as a gift of God, and he was somewhat imaginative at least in helping printers in Wittenberg and in other places use it for a variety of good purposes. It was again not just that he thought the printing press ought to be used for theological literature (though he put it to very good use in that regard), the printing press would have come to its current use today without doubt if Luther had never existed. But the fact of the matter is, as we have noted earlier, the publication of his Ninety-Five Theses was by accident, certainly by no plan of his, the first modern public relations event, the first modern media event. And Luther recognized once it had happened (caught him unawares), Luther recognized the possibilities; and he recognized how many different kinds of materials he could publish, from sermon helps to his Bible translations to hymns and liturgies, and the like. So Luther made good use of this good gift of God.
There were other areas of human culture, which Luther, it is clear, did not understand so well. One of the foremost of those was the area of the economy. Luther was against capitalism; he saw it as exploitative. He had a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the tricks that merchants use, both the little peddlers that went from town to town and who could add a rock to the grain they were selling or who would soak a piece of cloth to make it weigh more when it was
about to be sold, and he also saw the problems and the faults of the grand merchants, the early prototypical capitalists of his day. He had little, if any, understanding for the way the capitalist system was forming itself, was beginning to work. He only knew greed when he saw it, and he criticized it and believed that it was part of the system. He maintained the traditional Christian opposition to charging interest. God prohibited interest in the Old Testament, in Leviticus, but Luther largely ignored the expressed prohibition and command (not completely), but he much more frequently argued simply on the basis of Christian love, against greed, and for the free sharing of the gifts of God, also the material gifts of God. He simply didn’t understand how interest would work, and so he condemned every form of taking interest as usury.
He exposed in his writings a wide variety of ways that people might cheat other people in the realm of business and in the realm of occupational service. He presumed that people know how to behave rightly. He presumed that there were universal moral standards of service within the economic callings of the people of his day. So he was simply forthright, and from our standpoint somewhat simplistic in his dealing with the problems of employers and employees and of merchants and customers.
He criticized the begging of medieval Europe. He believed that there were betters ways to take care of the needs of the poor than to send out beggars. He was particularly frustrated with the begging of the monks, because he believed that it had been a false kind of asceticism. And so he worked for an organized social system. He wasn’t a pioneer here, from early in the 15th century many German towns or European towns in general had worked to try to organize and simplify and regularize their social service systems. But Luther believed that the Christian community, particularly through its secular government, was obligated to take care of the needs of the poor. He was not a modern Western individualist by any means, he would not have understood the social Darwinian tendencies that so many contemporary Christians embrace as their own standards. He believed that the community had an obligation to feed the poor and to find work for the poor and to support widows and orphans and all others in need. For Luther, there was no doubt that the whole of the community needed to live together, as we might say today, an extended family. And so he wrote letters of advice to city councils on how the social welfare system should be set up and regulated for the good of the whole community and for the specific benefit of the poor.
There is one other topic that I would like to treat; a different kind of topic within the context of Luther’s understanding of culture, and this topic illustrates how cultural conformity can betray
Christian judgment. This concerns Luther’s attitude toward the Jews, a subject which obviously since the time of the Third Reich and the Holocaust has gotten a good deal of attention. As a matter of fact, the Nazis did use Luther’s criticism of the Jews and his call for the ouster of Jews from Christian society occasionally, but far less than we might expect. There was unfortunately more ammunition for them there, but the Nazis were not interested in promoting the Christian faith, many of them at least, and so they were reluctant often to use Luther too much.
Luther was born in a society in which at least anti-Judaic feeling ran high. They were the only “outsiders,” and so frequent scapegoats in medieval Europe. And Luther was born into a society in which something quite different than modern biologically based anti-Semitism was part of the witches brew of culture, but nonetheless a strong anti-Judaic feeling. Luther had no objections to integrating converted Jews into Christian society. He had nothing against Jews as Jews. He had something against their religion because it denied and blasphemed Christ, he believed.
Luther was in some ways somewhat exceptional in his time, for he at least began his career with a much more favorable view of contemporary Jews. In 1523, he published a work, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, in which he expressed his sympathy for the Jews. He said that he would not have become a Christian either had he been born a Jew under the papacy, but he had high hopes that a proper understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ would bring the Jews to faith in Jesus Christ. Obviously a notion that, again, was quite simplistic and simply didn’t recognize the situation of medieval Jewry in Europe.
Twenty years later, when his attempts to convert the Jews through his writings had failed, Luther became rather virulent in his criticism of the Jews. He believed stories about their attempts to convert Christians in far corners of Europe, and he saw them as disturbers of the Christian peace; and he wrote things that no Christian should have written. And even though sympathetic with Luther and those who take his theology seriously, we must simply condemn the kinds of statements he made, even though he made them from a far different basis than the positions of modern anti-Semitism.
This illustration of how cultural conformity can betray Christian judgment would, I suppose, please Luther if he knew we were making a point of it, for he recognized (as we said at the beginning of this lecture) that everything in our use of God’s good gifts within culture can be abused. He saw the penultimate nature of the gift of culture and he distinguished it sharply, though he
Luther’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: CultureLesson 21 of 24
never separated it, from that lordship of Christ, which saves us even from sins like his.
Luther saw believers called into the midst of culture to serve in their callings, above all in family life, and through the family circle to convey the good gifts of culture to the next generation. And then he saw Christians called to serve one another within the total context, the total warp and woof of the gift of culture with all its many blessings, in the arts particularly, in music, in good government, in the educational system, and in the activities of social situation and economic activity. Luther was indeed a child of his culture, but as a child of his culture he also recognized the goodness of God in every corner of that culture, even when he saw human sin perverting the corners of the culture as well.
So as we review Luther’s understanding of what it meant to be a human creature, we recognize in his doctrine of daily life and his doctrine of human culture the presence of the creator God, the God who as Father of all His human children never ceases to give good gifts through faith, but even apart from faith, in the context of this world.
