Luther’s famous treatise contains great consolation for Christians struggling with grace, suffering, and hope.
Martin Luther is often noted as an opponent of medieval scholastic theology. It’s true that much of what he says about the medieval scholastics is critical: to Luther, this method of presentation using philosophical terminology and logic is given to obscuring basic Christian truths. Later Lutherans – and occasionally Luther himself – used the scholastic method. But its proper use requires Scripture’s language and logic to guide, limit, and correct human reason and speculation. The worst abuse of the scholastic method happens when philosophical ethics intrude upon the doctrine of grace, and legalism results. Luther makes this especially clear in his Disputation Concerning Scholastic Theology (1517).
But Luther’s censure of the scholastics isn’t due to ignorance of their work. Nor does Luther dismiss the method’s use when properly related to the gospel and the mysteries of the Christian faith: the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ. Medieval scholars often employed a teaching method for denominating different aspects of God’s revelation to us, and it’s a teaching device Luther employs at the end of The Bondage of the Will (1525). This teaching method describes God’s revelation as consisting of three lights: the light of nature, the light of grace, and the light of glory. Scholastics of the Middle Ages sometimes taught that nature, grace, and glory reveal three successive truths about God.
500 years ago, Luther concluded a long, technical, but crucial argument about the will that provides comfort and wisdom to Christians today. There, he uses this old scholastic teaching device of three lights of God’s revelation. My present reflection will draw upon the insights Luther presents throughout his argument in The Bondage of the Will, given that what he says about the three lights at the end of the book is brief and requires the context of the whole. Luther’s famous treatise contains great consolation for Christians struggling with grace, suffering, and hope.
The first light, according to Luther and his medieval predecessors, is the “light of nature.” Nature shows us truths about the world, ourselves, and God. This light shines on everyone, but it raises a problem. In modern terms, it comes as a question: why do bad things happen to good people? Evil is evident to us from nature – or the world as we perceive it from our senses and reason. We also know that good exists in God’s creation. (Some theologians say that evil doesn’t “exist” in the same way goodness does, but I’ve written about the problem with viewing evil simply as a lack or perversion of goodness here).
The Book of Job is an exercise in debating this question: his friends propose that bad things don’t actually happen to good people; we all get what we deserve. Therefore, Job has hidden a secret sin worthy of God’s punishment. But the question remains for all of us because it appears that God permits and ordains the suffering of people who are apparently innocent. God’s justice and righteousness are on the line, and so we often try to justify God by justifying innocent suffering.
The gospel will outrage the proud, who rush to justify God’s righteousness.
However, the problems multiply. The “light of grace” makes God appear even more unjust. His righteousness is even more questionable when God’s grace enters and sinners are forgiven. Jesus Christ arrives in the flesh just as Isaiah foretold: to bear our sin and sorrow (Isa. 53:1–12; see 1 Peter 2:24). When Christ through his word declares sinners righteous, the proud ask another question: why do good things happen to bad people? Christ in his own person is innocent and sinless but has made himself sin and a curse (Gal. 3:13; 2 Cor. 5:21).
God now looks supremely unjust. He exchanges his own righteousness as God for all human unrighteousness, canceling the record of debt that stands against the world (Col. 2:14). Through Christ, blessing upon blessing has been heaped upon the sinner, chiefly the sinner lucky enough to hear a promise declared “for you.” The gospel will outrage the proud, who rush to justify God’s righteousness. This comes crassly when people decry the church as full of hypocrites, even though the only people who belong in church are sinners. It also comes in more sophisticated theories that try rationally to reconcile God’s justice and mercy in the highest heaven. Such theories are bloodless, neglecting the conflict of mercy and wrath enacted in the crucified body of Jesus Christ, who bears the sin of the world in his mercy.
The other kind of question raised by the light of grace comes not from pride but humility. I, the sinner, have not merited God’s blessing and grace. The usual way things work under the law, by all common sense, and according to the great religions of the world is that I get what I deserve in life. The humble sinner fears that forgiveness can’t possibly be true, that it can be lost, or that it didn’t work well enough to reform one’s life.
Human pride is offended by Christ, and the gospel’s continual proclamation is the only thing that will humble the proud.
In the condition of sin, suffering, and pride that persists until the day of Jesus Christ, the gospel must be preached continually. Experience and reason will convince us that sin abounds just like it always has. Therefore, forgiveness must be given over and over. Suffering is an ever-present reality, and so the resurrection of the dead in Christ must be preached over and over. Human pride is offended by Christ, and the gospel’s continual proclamation is the only thing that will humble the proud.
Luther’s “light of glory” speaks of the revelation to come. Here all that is hidden will be manifest. Christ’s appearing in mercy to raise the dead and deliver his saints will also spell the end of suffering and evil. Some theorize that evil and suffering will be revealed as necessary steps on the way to a higher resolution of all things in glory. This isn’t what Luther teaches, however. “[F]aith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). For now, faith grasps all the blessings of God to come – but without seeing those blessings. In the light of glory, God will not justify himself before our reason and experience for permitting evil or using it for his own purposes. Instead, God will banish and destroy evil forever. Only then will he justify himself.
Faith doesn’t rationalize God’s goodness in the face of evil and suffering. Nor will glory prove God correct all along, thereby justifying evil. Instead, glory will display God’s goodness in the actual – not theoretical – destruction of evil, sin, and suffering. As Luther says, “[T]he light of glory tells us . . . that the God whose judgment here is one of incomprehensible righteousness is a God of most perfect and manifest righteousness. In the meantime, we can only believe this, being admonished and confirmed by the example of the light of grace . . .” (LW 33:292). This is the foundation of our hope which for now waits upon that which we cannot yet see.
