Notes

A Daily Luther Breviary, Sampled

November 4

This is the will of ‘our awesome God for his saints’ [Ps 4:3]: that they are righteous while still striving to become justified and that at the same time they are unrighteous precisely because they are striving to become justified. Actually, in themselves they are unrighteous, but because God accepts this faith of theirs, and their prayer for mercy, they are righteous. They are at one and the same time sinners and saints, conscious of being sinners but unaware of being saints; we could even say that they are sinners in reality but saints in hope. . . . So sin and the absence of righteousness both remain, and yet the sin is no sin, the unrighteousness no unrighteousness because, as we see it, our God is merciful and our seeking is counted as righteousness. So we are righteous on account of the righteousness outside us, but unrighteous because of the unrighteousness within us; we are saints from without and sinners from within. In our life and work we are unrighteous, but in God’s judgment alone we are righteous.

AWA 1/1 (Corrolarium on Psalm 5:12, 1516/17)

Here we have all the essential distinctions that are fundamental to Luther’s theology concentrated in one passage.

A Year with Luther: Readings from the Great Reformer for Our Times. Selected, introduced, and discussed by Athina Lexutt; edited and translated by Jeffery G. Silcock (Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2016). As reviewed in our Summer issue.

The Universal Priesthood of Believers

Justo González comments on two of Our Ninety-Five Theses:

84. The universal priesthood of believers does not only mean that everyone can approach God directly, but also, and above all, that we are all priests for all. Part of what unites the church is the constant prayer of each believer, and of all jointly, for the entire community of faith.

85. This universal priesthood means that the church is a priestly people. As a sacerdotal people, part of the mission of the church is to pray for those who do not pray, taking all of creation before the throne of God.

But we must take care lest in interpreting the universal priesthood of believers we are led astray by the surrounding culture, with its own prejudices and preferences. No matter how often we have heard it said, it is not true that the universal priesthood of believers means above all that every believer can approach God by herself or himself. There is no doubt that this is true. But by its own definition a priest is someone who takes the people before the throne of God. Therefore, the universal priesthood of believers is not simply that each person is his or her own priest, but much more, that each one is a priest for all the rest, and that the church itself is a priestly people part of whose task is to pray for the rest of the world. If we limit universal priesthood to the private and personal priesthood of each believer, we are being led astray by the individualism that surrounds us. This is not what Luther meant, and it is not what the early church did.

Justo L. González, “Exploration of Our Ninety-Five Theses,” Our Ninety-Five Theses: 500 Years After the Reformation, ed. Alberto L. García and Justo L. González (Orlando, FL: Asociación para le Educación Teológica Hispana, 2016), p. 276 f., commenting on theses 84 and 85 on p. 290.

A Dictionary on Luther and Lutheran Traditions

Timothy J. Wengert introduces Baker’s new and major reference work on Luther and the Lutheran traditions:

Today Lutherans form a worldwide movement within the church catholic. This dictionary demonstrates that thesis at every turn. Not only did Martin Luther and his colleagues in Wittenberg and beyond insist on their continuity with the witness of the early church and even of certain medieval thinkers, but also from the very inception of the Reformation the Reformers influenced church life and proclamation for a much wider audience than simply German-speaking Christians within the Holy Roman Empire. Students from all over Europe came...