luther’s doctrine of the person of christ...nature and the divine nature of jesus christ and in a...

The Theology of Martin Luther

Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 10 of 24CH509

Luther’s Doctrine of the Person of Christ

The Theology of Martin Luther

For Martin Luther, Jesus Christ stood at the very center of his theology. We might describe his theology as a theology of justification by grace through faith, or we might describe his theology as a theology of the word. We know that he described his theology as a theology of the two kinds of righteousness or of the cross. And we have often summarized his theology as a theology of grace alone, faith alone and Scripture alone. But as a matter of fact, perhaps the best summary of Luther’s theology is a theology of Christ alone, though for Luther Christ was never separable from the other two persons of the Trinity. The charge of Christomonism (that he focused so much on Christ, he ignored the Father and the Holy Spirit) is not true, and nonetheless God’s revelation in Jesus Christ stands at the very heart of his theology.

As a presupposition for looking at his Christology, we must first remember that he did operate his entire life long with certain principles of nominalist logic, and these influenced also the way in which he expressed his understanding of the biblical doctrine of Christ. According to nominalist logic, terms for concepts may vary with the nature of the discourse. And so the correct hermeneutical order for determining meaning is from the subject matter to the grammar. The subject matter determines the grammar; it is not the grammar of theological terms that determines the language of faith. So the subject matter of God’s promise in Christ determines all, and this sets up the situation in which then paradox is possible for Luther. So Luther’s entire theology is indeed based upon the tensions that exist between God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and the way in which human reason sorts out human life and our image of the hidden God.

Scholars have suggested that Luther’s doctrine of Christ, which operates on the basis of this hermeneutical principle that the subject matter of God’s revelation determines the grammar and expression of the faith, scholars have noted that there are three basic traits in Luther’s doctrine of Christ which then determines this grammar of faith. First of all, Luther comes to the text of the Gospels and their reports on Jesus of Nazareth with a strong sense of historical realism. He takes their reports very literally

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology

at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri



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as the expressions or the descriptions of what God is doing as the Word made flesh. He looks at these reports, however, from the standpoint of Soteriology, he is always asking the question, what must a sinner do or receive to become righteous before God? He is always concerned about the question of salvation. {there is no SECONDLY }Thirdly, in his understanding of Jesus Christ, he consistently insists on the uniqueness of the Word made flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, on the necessity of God’s becoming flesh, and on the all-sufficiency of God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Jesus was unique, God takes the human form in no one else but this historical figure, this Jew from Nazareth who lived in what we now call the 1st century, AD. There is one Jesus, one revelation of God that climaxes all the other words He spoke, and this is that Word made flesh. Secondly, it is absolutely necessary to understand that God had to become man to save us. God took on human flesh in a necessity that we cannot explain. As we will comment in the next lecture, Luther resists the attempt to comprehend and nail down and explain completely God’s way of salvation in Jesus Christ, but he is also convinced this salvation had to, for some mysterious reason, come through the incarnation of God. And thirdly, he believes there is no other God but the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ, and all he wants us to know, all we need to know (not all we want to know, as I have said, but all we need to know) is there in Jesus Christ.

In the 16th century, German merchants put a kind of sample on the outside of a package of their wares so that people could examine it. The most common example would be cloth, if there was a bale of a certain kind of cloth wrapped up for shipment to a merchant in another city, the manufacturer of the cloth would put a small swatch of it on the outside of the package so that the potential buyer could sample it there and see what the reality of the whole was like. That was called in German an austput Well Luther used this analogy for what God has done in Jesus Christ; He has given us an austput, a sample, a genuine representation of who He is and what His disposition toward us is. So we see, as a reflection of the theology of the cross, in Jesus Christ, according to Luther, we see the nature of God. We see His total love for us, His unconditional mercy for us.

In looking at the person of Christ, we, of course, are looking at the doctrine of the Trinity, which we have already touched in Lecture 7. Luther initially did express some reservations about Trinitarian language, but he never had any reservations about affirming the divine nature and the human nature of Jesus Christ. Jesus and the Father are one, Luther confessed, using the Gospel of John and our Lord’s claim there, “I and the Father are one”. So he recognized



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always that this human creature was God come in human flesh, even if at the beginning of his career he wondered aloud as to whether the language, the dogma of the Trinity was the best language possible. Soon thereafter he affirmed the traditional dogmatic expression of the truth that God is in three persons, that the second person of the holy Trinity was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, he affirmed that and understood it and proclaimed it without reservation throughout most of his career. He pledged himself to the ecumenical creeds, and gloried in the Athanasian Creed as well as the apostles and the Nicene.

His doctrine of the Trinity, and therefore his doctrine of the person of Christ, was greatly influenced by the expressions of the church fathers. Luther just worked naturally with the church fathers, they were his instructors in the writings he read, and he made great use of new editions of the ancient Christian fathers. We know that Augustine was his favorite, and although he could criticize Augustine, he cited Augustine frequently. But Greek Christology also influenced him a good deal, and he confessed that Jesus Christ is true God, fully equal in majesty with the Father and the Holy Spirit. He is as they are creator and preserver; he is the eternally begotten second person of the holy Trinity. But in a magnificent fashion, Luther brings together the human nature and the divine nature of Jesus Christ and in a hymn sung at Christmas time (written perhaps in 1523 by Luther) we get some glimpse of the tradition of the fathers as it comes now to poetic expression. I use the translation of Luther’s Works (the American edition of Luther writings), from volume 53, pages 240-241. A somewhat wooden translation at points, we might think, because it attempts genuinely to express the German original, but to do so in English rhyme. Luther begins with the praise for Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the human Messiah, who is God come in flesh.

“All praise to thee, O Jesus Christ, that a man on earth thou liest.

Born of a maiden it is true, and this exalts the heavenly crew.

Curea elayizon. {-No idea what the correct spelling is or what it means}

The Father’s only son begotten, in the manger has his cot.

In our poor dying flesh and blood does mask itself the endless good.



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Whom all the world could not enwrap, lieth he in Mary’s lap.

A little child, he now is grown, who everything upholds alone.

This little child that lay in Mary’s lap, now holds everything in his hands.

In him the eternal light breaks through (Luther’s Christology is heavily

influenced by the Gospel of John and John’s epistles as well), and gives

the world a glory new.

A great light shines amid the night, and makes us children of the light.”

Here again we see that it is impossible really to discuss the person of Christ without discussing the work of Christ, but the eternal light who breaks through in this human creature who was in this manger in this poor, dying flesh, He makes us children of the light.

“The Father’s son, so God by name, a guest in this world became.

And leads us from the veil of tears, he in his palace makes us heirs.

Poor to the earth he cometh thus, pity so to take on us.

And makes us rich in heaven above, and like the angels of his love.

All this for us did Jesus do, that his great love he might show.

Let Christendom rejoice therefore, and give him thanks forevermore.

Curea elayizon.”

In this hymn, we have a reflection of the constant theme of Luther’s Christology, that mingling of the doctrines of his person



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and the doctrine of his work. And so Luther viewed Christology with the same kind of concern that brought Athanasius and then Augustine and then Anselm to their doctrines of the person of Christ. It is only and always a matter of salvation.

To use Luther words, if Christ is divested of His deity, there remains no help against God’s wrath and no rescue of His judgment. God became a human creature; this human creature is God in human flesh, so that we may be saved.

Luther used Philippians 2 (the hymn that begins in Philippians 2:3) a great deal as he stressed that Jesus of Nazareth was one who did not hang onto His Godness, but who obviously was one who was God and who deserves the worship and the praise and the obeisance of all human creatures, but this God was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

We will say something a few moments later about Luther’s adaptation of the ancient doctrine of the communication of attributes, but it is clear already in what we have noted here that Luther brings that doctrine of the sharing of the characteristics of the divine and human nature to a new sharpness and clarity as he expresses how God and the human creature come together in this God-Man Jesus of Nazareth.

The contemporary Australian Luther scholar Ian Siggins points out that the new emphasis in Luther is that God has become flesh “for me”. He does not concentrate on philosophical questions about God’s incorruptibility that plagued many theologians throughout the history of the church, how can we keep God God as He comes onto this dangerous ground of human flesh? For Luther, the whole understanding of Christology revolves around God’s coming among us for us, that “pro me”, “pro nobis” (for me, for us), that focuses on God’s disposition, His heart, His will, especially as they relate to me in my fallen condition.

Luther emphasizes that whoever sees Christ sees the Father. We sometimes say that Luther is simply a Pauline theologian, but that’s not at all true. The Gospel of John in particular, but the whole Johannine corpus, shaped Luther’s theology a great deal, and in Christology we see that quite clearly. Here we encounter, according to the theology of the cross, God. Here we encounter the love and the heart of the Father as the Father has sent Jesus Christ to come to forgive sins. Augustine had said, through the heart of Christ we go to the heart of God. And Luther repeated that line many times, not in the sense that we in some mystic way penetrate into the hidden God, we see in Jesus Christ what God really thinks of us. And what God thinks of us in Christ is



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that we are worth so much that He is willing to sacrifice Himself, He is willing to die for us. So the linkage with God is not in some mystical union but in simple trust, in the restoration of that simple trust that informed the relationship between Adam and Eve and their Creator in [the Garden of] Eden.

Luther said, I know of no other god except the one called Jesus Christ. It is important to recognize, however, that such statements are not to be isolated from Luther’s affirmation of a strong doctrine of the Father and a strong doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Luther’s doctrine of the Father, as we have already noted, is particularly present in his doctrine of creation, but it is also very much there in his understanding of the Father being the one who sends the Son to reveal His own will. And the Spirit is the one whom Jesus sends; who indeed proceeds from the Father, but who then comes with the message of Jesus Christ, to make Jesus Christ and His benefits present in the lives of those to whom He comes through the means of grace. Indeed, the means of grace are a very important part of understanding how Luther believed Jesus Christ comes to us. They are really the entire method and means by which, (according to Luther) the Holy Spirit brings us to faith and connects us then with Christ and with the Father. Christ is revealed as the Word of God, the Word made flesh, God’s explanation of His love for us, His expression of His love for us, and then Christ is revealed through the word of the apostles as it is recorded in the Scriptures and as it is proclaimed by His people in the daily life and existence of the church.

This understanding of Jesus Christ is always under threat. The Christian life is a life of conflict on that battlefield of the human existence between God and the Devil. And so the most formidable expression of the Devil’s hatred for God and for His people is found around the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Luther particularly emphasized two weapons that the Devil uses to undermine trust in Jesus as Savior. First of all, he tends to focus our attention only on the human Christ. And if some would see in Luther a certain over-emphasis on the divine nature of Christ it may be due to the fact that Luther thought that it was much more likely that the Devil would take away our understanding of the divine nature than of the human nature. For God in human flesh is obviously tangibly before us in the description of the Bible as a human being, and so in some ways it is much more difficult to believe in Him as God in human flesh than it is to believe that He is simply a human creature.

Though Luther was aware that the Docetists also emphasized the divine nature in such a way that the human nature was not taken seriously. And as we have seen in the hymn which we just cited,



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he lyrically, beautifully expresses the human nature of this baby in diapers in Mary’s lap, of this corpse that was laid in the tomb, a human being whose life had departed from Him. Nonetheless, Luther is particularly concerned that we not focus only on the human Christ but that we see in this God, laid in [a] crib and nailed to [the] cross and laid in [a] crypt, the true God.

The second point at which the Devil undermines our belief in Christ is that he lets us hold a very orthodox, a very biblical understanding of the person of Christ, but without truly trusting in Jesus. So Luther stressed again and again how important it is that we trust in the One who was hanging on the cross for us, but who reclaimed life for us as He came out of the tomb.

Luther has been criticized, I suppose, more by other Protestants for his understanding of the communication of attributes than for any other aspect of his Christology. His opponents accused, at least his followers if not Luther himself, of having a new dogma of the Christ. Luther, however, understood his position as quite biblical and quite necessary in the expressions he chose if one is really to recapture what the Bible says about Jesus of Nazareth, the second person of the holy Trinity. His emphasis is neither, in some ways, on the divine nature or on the human nature, but on the unity of the one person, Jesus Christ. And because he believed it so necessary to emphasize this one person and the unity of the person, he taught that what the ancient church meant with its doctrine of the communication of attributes was that the two natures share their characteristics, even though the natures remain distinct and the characteristics remain distinct. Luther insisted that the divine characteristics and the human characteristics are shared by the other natures, but they remain distinctly the characteristics of one nature or the other. That means that in the unity of the person, the characteristics are exercised by both natures but remain the property of one or the other.

In the incarnation that meant that Jesus continued to possess all the attributes of God, but He simply did not use them. If we return to Philippians 2, Luther understood the phrase “he emptied himself” in a different way than most of the ancient fathers. They understood the emptying of self as an act by the preexistent Christ at incarnation. Luther saw it not as a one-time act which prepared Jesus for incarnation, instead he saw it as an attitude of the incarnate earthly Jesus. Jesus continued day in and day out not to reclaim or not to use the powers that He had as God, His wisdom, His righteousness, His goodness, His freedom. Instead, He took on the form of a servant and daily He subjected Himself to all evils, He became impotent for our sake, He took on



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the sinfulness of our human nature as He went to the cross. So His assumption of our flesh, His assumption of our humanity was really the assumption of all human burdens under sin.

For instance, Jesus was poor. It was not the assumed poverty of the Franciscans, it was not the poverty of choice that was designed to make the monks of the Middle Ages in Luther’s view look good in God’s sight, instead He became the poor human creature, humble, who simply had nothing of His own to offer because He was there in our place. And He went about His life expressing the best of human virtues, mercy and love, doing the servants work, but without any presumption, without any claim to any kind of human dignity, to say nothing of a claim to divine dignity. He had the characteristics of Isaiah’s suffering servant (Luther’s exposition of which we’ll look at in a few moments). Indeed, His divine power peeks through in the miracles, and Luther saw them, as had the entire medieval tradition, as proofs of Christ’s divinity. But they were not particularly important for Luther; he also saw the proof of Christ’s divinity in the foolishness and impotence of the cross. God alone would be so foolish and so impotent as to come to a cross to express His wisdom and His power. And so while Luther could indeed embrace the medieval view that the miracles showed the power of God, he also held somewhat of the opposite opinion.

Luther was particularly good when he was preaching on the Passion. In his sermons on the Passion, he expressed this belief that God reveals His love in His foolishness and impotence in the cross. Luther’s Passion preaching treated the narrative in the Gospels very, very carefully. Luther was very much interested in the details of Christ’s suffering, in the way in which He offered Himself up for sacrifice. Luther stressed Christ’s submission, His obedience to the Father’s will, as He took on suffering and shame for our sakes. And he developed that as he nursed the narrative into the 16th century world. But for him, above all, the use of the Passion was important, and he took medieval models and really transformed those medieval models, which often looked at the use of the Passion as something for us to do to prepare ourselves for God’s grace, instead Luther used the Passion narrative to impress upon the believer the gift of Christ’s death and resurrection, and through that elicited trust and salvation. Luther also used the example of Christ in these Passion narratives to talk about certain Christian virtues, but the emphasis was on law and Gospel, upon looking at our sin through the mirror of Christ’s suffering for it, and looking at His love through His death and resurrection.

In sorting out who this was then that suffered for us, Luther emphasized the communication of attributes and its so-called



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genus majestaticum (that majestic genus), which describes Jesus as possessing all divine power and all attributes of the divine nature even as a human creature. But he continually linked that majestic nature of the person of Christ with the genus tapeinoticon, God is in human flesh sharing our weakness, our suffering, our humiliation. So human nature and divine nature come together, both sets of characteristics are there, but one set of characteristics is laid aside so that Jesus Christ can assume everything that we have to suffer (above all, our death) in order to obtain life.

Luther’s emphasis on the communication of attributes simply wanted to secure salvation. He was not interested in securing the sanctity of the divine nature; he believed God could take care of the sanctity of the divine nature Himself. He wanted so to link in this person the divine and the human, that there would be no doubt about the power of God to save us, no doubt about the assumption of all evils into this divine human man, and His defeat, His obliteration of all our sin and of our death as He went to the tomb with sin and death in Him.

Luther used his understanding of the communication of attributes also in his controversy with Ulrich Zwingli in the argument over the Lord’s Supper, and we’ll come back to the Christological elements in it at that point. It is important to note that while Luther could use the communication of attributes to argue that it is indeed possible for the human body and blood of Jesus Christ to be present where God wills it in the Lord’s Supper, but we must note that his fundamental concern in discussing the communication of attributes and in teaching this unity of the divine and human natures that enables the two natures to share their characteristics fully, that was essentially a pastoral concern. He was concerned about comforting the troubled consciences of those who needed to have the power of God for their salvation, but who needed to have their sins and all their afflictions (especially the affliction of death) taken from them and placed apart from them in Christ’s tomb.

One of the many places in which Luther beautifully expresses his understanding of Christology is in his lectures on Isaiah in 1544AD. A brief set of lectures at the end of his life, but in these lectures he sums up a good bit of his understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. So I’d like to take a few moments to summarize what Luther said in Isaiah 53 about the person of this suffering servant Jesus of Nazareth who came as God in human flesh to save sinners.

Luther begins by making certain that we understand that Jesus



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of Nazareth was, above all, a preacher, a proclaimer of the word. And yet Luther looks at His message less than His office as the proclaimer of the word. All of His work is comprehended as God speaking in Him and God speaking as Him. This proclaimer came to proclaim not only in His words but also in His whole life and in His death and in His resurrection that God has come to save.

The suffering servant figure expresses the paradox of the king as servant and the servant as king. At the end of his life, Luther is still operating with the theology of the cross. In this paradox, God the ruler of the world becomes this little baby, the creator of the world becomes the criminal on the cross, the one who shaped the heavens and the earth and controls all things is the one who marches out of the crypt as the risen corpse. In this understanding of king as servant and servant as king, Luther expresses again his understanding that all the characteristics of the divine king are still there in the possession of this lowly human servant, but this human servant serves rather than exercises His divine characteristics in glory. But the servant is also the king, and the king has those characteristics which belong to the servant. And so even now in the right hand of God, in the councils of the Trinity, the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth is there mediating and pleading for human creatures.

In treating Isaiah 53, of course, Luther concentrated on the suffering of Jesus. He did not date the beginning of Christ’s suffering to the beginning of holy week; he saw His whole life as a sacrifice. Jesus came to lay down His entire life in obedience to His father, in carrying out the will of His father, in living that life of one who is pleasing to God as the chosen servant of God. And Luther stressed that Jesus came to lay down His whole life, to be obedient throughout His whole life, to suffer in this way as the servant of God, not just for the whores, not just for the tax collectors, not just for the sinners. Luther emphasized that He came, above all, for the pious, for those who were like his understanding of the Pharisees, those who were in his own day trying to work their way into Heaven through their own good works. Jesus came to suffer for those who want to be religious, for those who want to rely on their own religious works. And for them He assumed all of humanity. Although He did not sin, He assumed sin, He became sin for us (in Paul’s words in the second letter to the Corinthians), and He bore it in obedience to His father.

It was important, Luther believed, to stress that He assumed all of our humanity, He took on our flesh and our blood, and He even bore on His own back the stripes of our sinfulness, because that which is not assumed is not dealt with by God. Luther sometimes used the line of the ancient father Gregory of Nazianzus, “What



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is not assumed is not saved”. In the Christological context that means that God has become a complete and total human being and no part of our humanity was left aside. The ancient heresy of Apollinarianism, which suggested that part of our humanity was replaced by the divine Word, was rejected quite clearly by Luther. In assuming all of our humanity, He also then took our sinfulness upon Himself and that meant that He also took the result of our sinfulness, our death, upon Himself.

And Luther did not shy away from saying that God Himself entered into our death in the second person of the holy Trinity, he was not a patri-passion, he did not believe that the Father (or the Holy Spirit for that matter) suffered or died. But in those most awful of human words, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me”, Luther understood that this person (God and man in one person) died, and so God Himself had entered into our death, into the worst of our enemies, so that He might kill it. And this was the heart of Luther’s faith, this was the way that he dealt with God’s wrath. God dealt with his own wrath by meeting it in death itself, God took on the worst of our enemies, death itself, with His own substitutionary death.

And, of course, Luther could not as a biblical theologian leave it at that. So although we speak of his theology of the cross, a part of that theology of the cross is the revelation of the love and power of God in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, for it is the key to our life. And in the resurrection, the accusation of the Law, the condemnation of the Law was simply swallowed up because Jesus brings us out of our baptisms, according to Luther, as new creatures who have been given new life through the trust that was the foundation of the relationship between Adam and Eve and their God already in [the Garden of] Eden.

So what we see in Luther’s understanding of the person of Christ is that it is really inseparable from His work. The whole key to Luther’s entire approach to salvation is this bringing together of divine nature and human nature into a person who can take on the forces of evil, who can wrestle death to the ground, who can express in what Luther calls the “Magnificent Duel” everything that God has done for us. And we will discuss more in the following lectures just how it is that God has come to terms with the enemies of the human creature. Christ lives as the God-Man to all eternity, He lives as the intercessor and Lord that is the one who is revealed in Isaiah 53, and that is the one whom the human creature embraces as the Lord of life.

As we then look forward to Luther’s doctrine of justification in the coming lecture, it is important for us to see that Luther made the



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transition from person to work of Christ by focusing on the office of Christ. Luther did not describe the activities of this person in the traditional medieval schema of which John Calvin employed, the schema of prophet, priest and king. He did use the designations “king” and “priest” together, though fairly infrequently. But for Luther the office of this Jesus of Nazareth was as a preacher. He was called by God to proclaim the word, He was a pastor, He was a shepherd, He was Seelsorger (German), He was a curate of souls. He was one sent by God who would shepherd the sheep of God, He would find the lost sheep, He would bring them into the flock of God, He would pick them up and carry them as the sheep (the children) of God. When Luther used the term prophet, he focused on Deuteronomy 18 and Jesus’ fulfilling of that prophecy - that one would come like Moses to be the eschatological prophet, the one who would proclaim the word of the Lord at the end time. So Luther saw Jesus’ coming, sent by God to do specifically that task.

This preacher actually then came with, what Luther calls, an alien work or a strange work, the work of the Law, and with a proper work, the work of proclaiming the Gospel. Luther’s whole understanding of Jesus then in His work is indeed summed up in that conveying of the word of God that condemns sin and sinners and restores life through the Gospel. Again, that concept of the word of the Father come in human flesh.

In this office then, Jesus did what he could do only as the one who was both God and human creature in one person. He brought the Law to bear on people with the message of, what Luther sometimes called, his left hand (that word of condemnation) which simply assesses the sinner who has strayed far from the word of God and turned his back on the person of God. And then Luther went about His proper work, the work He delights in, the work of bringing life and light to human creatures who, again had rejected Him but whom He has chosen to restore. As He exercised that office then, Jesus went about playing out His human and His divine characteristics in this one person in which these characteristics were shared, in which these characteristics describe the whole of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth.

Luther’s theology then centered in Jesus Christ, in His person and in His work. As we see in the biblical descriptions of Jesus, Christians have never been able to separate descriptions of His person and His work, and for Luther too it was impossible to separate God’s coming in human flesh from the work of pouring out His blood, laying down His life, claiming it again in the resurrection so that the straying sheep of God’s flock could be brought back into the family of God and into the life which they live serving Him by serving the neighbor.

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