THE MARRIAGE & FAMILY INSTITUTE

Theology is systematic. All the pieces are supposed to fit together. Within Protestantism there are two very distinct systems of theology. One is a Theology of Glory and the other is a Theology of the Cross. I believe that it is very important that we understand the differences between these two ways of thinking. In so doing, I believe we will arrive at the conclusion that these two systems cannot be mixed.

The Protestant theology of glory begins with a one-time trip to the Cross of Jesus Christ. The preaching of human sin and divine grace is only directed at the unbeliever in order to "get him saved." The person who gets saved can sing, "At the Cross, at the Cross where I first saw the light and the burden of my sin rolled away . . . and now I am happy all the day."

Very often, when discussing on Issues, Etc. the place of the Gospel in preaching and teaching, someone will call-in and say, "I’ve already been to the Cross. I’ve heard the Gospel. I’m saved." In other words, in the thinking of that person, the preaching of the Gospel is directed at unbelievers. Once unbelievers are saved the Gospel in no longer relevant.

The theology of the Cross is quite different. The preaching of sin and grace or Law and Gospel is not only intended to convert the unbelieving sinner but is intended to produce sanctification in the Christian. The preaching of the Law continues to convict the Christian of sin, leading to contrition, and the Gospel continues to produce faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ.

A theology of glory defines repentance as a sinner being sorry for his sins and determining not to sin anymore. Repentance is the determination of the sinner to live a better life. Before being saved, the sinner is required to repent of all known sins. Incomplete repentance will cause a person to doubt whether or not they have really been saved.

Alternatively, the theology of the Cross defines repentance as contrition and faith rather than contrition and human determination. While the preaching of the Law will lead to contrition or sorrow over sin, the preaching of the Gospel will produce faith in the redemptive work of Christ Jesus.

Repentance is therefore not a singular act that precedes "getting saved" but defines the totality of the Christian life. The preaching of Law and Gospel produces repentance – sorrow over sin and faith in Christ Jesus.

A theology of glory separates the Christian life from the Gospel. Once you are saved you are given a list of do’s and don’ts. More often than not, these are "evangelical house rules." If you continue to break the rules or backslide, the solution is the rededication of your life to God or, in some cases, the emotional determination to keep your promises. You wouldn’t go back to the Cross again because you already did that when you got saved. Rather, you rededicate your life, because "once saved, is always saved."

The theology of the Cross never gets you past the Cross. The preaching of the Law is not intended to provide you with a list of do’s and don’ts. Rather the preaching of the Law is intended to drive you back to the Cross through the hearing of the Gospel. As a result of the Gospel, your faith is strengthened. Out of faith, the good works defining the Christian life are produced.

Those who mix the theology of glory with the theology of the Cross may initially preach Law and Gospel but will end the sermon with Law, principles, or house rules. This is usually introduced with "May we" or "Let us." Such a sermon will cause you to go home, not rejoicing in forgiveness, but determined to live a better life.

A theology of glory produces people who think they are better than other people. "Getting saved" moves you to a higher level. You are now a better person, a step above those who are not saved. You can think of yourself as a part of the "moral majority" as opposed to the "immoral minority." You share your testimony so that other people will get saved and be a good person just like you are.

The notion of getting saved as taking a higher step on the ladder of holiness begets other steps. Some teach that getting saved is merely the first experience, now you have to get sanctified. This is the "second work of grace." This second work removes your old sinful nature so that you are no longer a sinner.

You now add to your testimony your experience of perfect sanctification. You not only witness to unbelievers, but you tell other Christians who still refer to themselves as "sinners saved by grace" that you are no longer a sinner. You have taken the next step. They should do the same.

The Pentecostals (and Charismatics) add another step on the ladder of holiness. They promote a baptism in the Spirit with speaking in tongues which gives you spiritual power that you didn’t have before. Former Southern Baptist pastor Charles Simpson said, "Before I got baptized in the Spirit I almost wore out my rededicator." In other words, now that he has received power, unlike other Baptists, he no longer has to rededicate his life.

There may be many more steps and experiences for you to take. The popular Charismatic showman Benny Hinn speaks of four or five different anointings awaiting you as you climb the ladder of holiness. The so-called revivals that have broken out in Toronto and Pensacola offer a wide variety of experiences from being "slain in the Spirit," to being "drunk in the Spirit," to simply standing in one spot and shaking your head back and forth. According to testimonies, these experiences will produce in you higher levels of spirituality and holiness as you move on to glory.

Your testimony will now focus on trying to convince other Christians that they should come to where you are and get baptized in the Spirit, speak in tongues, and seek these other experiences. Even though you don’t say it, everyone knows that you think you are a better Christian, because you have taken the next step.

Living in a theology of the Cross never makes you any "better" than anyone else. Every day in every way you are not getting better and better. In fact, the preaching of Law and Gospel will not lead you to an awareness of your holiness, but rather to greater awareness of the depth of your sin. As a result, you will develop an ever-increasing faith in and appreciation for the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.

Your witness will focus upon the work of the Cross, not upon your experience of getting saved, sanctified, or becoming more spiritual. You have taken no step toward God or arrived at any higher level of holiness. You don’t talk about your spirituality. You talk about the grace of God in Christ Jesus.

When dealing with these issues on the radio, I often encounter opposition. People will fight to defend their theology of glory. I often challenge them to share their testimony without ever talking about themselves. I have developed the pet phrase, "This thing called Christianity – it’s not about you!"

Martin Luther accurately defined sin as man turning in on himself. While a theology of glory continues to turn you to yourself as you measure your growth in holiness against a plethora of spiritual experiences, the theology of the Cross turns you away from yourself. As a result of the conviction of the Law, you forsake your own good works and spiritual experiences and cling to the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Any reading of the New Testament will demonstrate that the systematic theology of the Apostle Paul was a theology of the Cross. His focus was not upon his spirituality but upon the Cross of Christ. He boasted of his weaknesses. He referred to himself as the "chief of sinners" and a "wretched man." As far as he was concerned, his holiness and goodness was manure compared to the righteousness of Christ. For the Apostle, the dynamic of both justification and sanctification was "not I, but Christ."

The Reformation theology that characterizes both Lutheranism and traditional Calvinism is a theology of the Cross. There is no doubt that the theology of glory appeals to natural man. It is a theology of Adam. It is self-focused. It defines "popular Christianity." The reality is, it is not biblical Christianity.

No one could have expected that the Reformation would be launched by Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses against Indulgences in October 1517. The document itself simply proposed the framework for a university debate. Luther was arguing only for a revision of the practice of indulgences, not its abolition. He was certainly not offering an agenda for widespread theological and ecclesiastical reform.

Indeed, he had already said much more controversial things in his Disputation against Scholastic Theology of September 4, 1517, in which he critiqued the whole way in which medieval theology had been done for centuries. That disputation, however, passed without a murmur. Indeed, humanly speaking, it was only the unique combination of external factors—social, economic, and political—that made the later disputation the spark that lit the Reformation fuse.

Once the fuse had been lit, however, the church made a fatal error: she allowed the Augustinian Order, to which Luther belonged, to deal with the problem as if it were a minor local difficulty. There was to be a meeting of the Order in Heidelberg in April 1518, and Luther was asked to present a series of theses outlining his theology, so that it could be assessed by his brethren. It was here, then, that the relatively bland Ninety-Five Theses gave Luther an important opportunity to articulate the theology that he had expressed in his September Disputation.

The Heidelberg Disputation is significant for two things. First, there was at least one other future Reformation giant present. This was Martin Bucer, the Reformer of Strasbourg, who would end his days as professor of divinity at Cambridge. A man of vast intellect and wide ecumenical vision, Bucer was to have a profound influence on a generation of Reformers, not least John Calvin. And his first taste of Reformation thinking was provided by Luther at Heidelberg in 1517. Yet, while Bucer left the disputation marveling at how Luther had attacked what the church had become, he missed the theological core of what Luther was saying. This is the second point of importance: the theology of the cross.

Toward the end of the disputation, Luther offered some theses which seem (in typical Luther fashion) nonsensical, or at least obscure:

19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened [Rom. 1:20].

20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

21. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.

22. That wisdom which sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened.

These statements actually encapsulate the heart of Luther's theology, and a good grasp of what he means by the obscure terms and phrases they contain sheds light not just on the doctrinal content of his theology, but also on the very way that he believed theologians should think. Indeed, he is taking Paul's explosive argument from 1 Corinthians and developing it into a full theological agenda.

At the heart of his argument is his notion that human beings should not speculate about who God is or how he acts in advance of actually seeing whom he has revealed himself to be. Thus, Luther sees God's revelation of himself as axiomatic to all theology. Now, there probably is not a heretic in history who would not agree with that, because all theology presupposes the revelation of God, whether in nature, human reason, culture, or whatever.

Luther, however, had a dramatically restrictive view of revelation. God revealed himself as merciful to humanity in the Incarnation, when he manifested himself in human flesh, and the supreme moment of that revelation was on the cross at Calvary. Indeed, Luther sometimes referred enigmatically to Christ crucified as "God's backside"—the point at which God appeared to be the very contradiction of all that one might reasonably have anticipated him to be.

The "theologians of glory," therefore, are those who build their theology in the light of what they expect God to be like—and, surprise, surprise, they make God to look something like themselves. The "theologians of the cross," however, are those who build their theology in the light of God's own revelation of himself in Christ hanging on the cross.

The implications of this position are revolutionary. For a start, Luther is demanding that the entire theological vocabulary be revised in light of the cross. Take for example the word power. When theologians of glory read about divine power in the Bible, or use the term in their own theology, they assume that it is analogous to human power. They suppose that they can arrive at an understanding of divine power by magnifying to an infinite degree the most powerful thing of which they can think. In light of the cross, however, this understanding of divine power is the very opposite of what divine power is all about. Divine power is revealed in the weakness of the cross, for it is in his apparent defeat at the hands of evil powers and corrupt earthly authorities that Jesus shows his divine power in the conquest of death and of all the powers of evil. So when a Christian talks about divine power, or even about church or Christian power, it is to be conceived of in terms of the cross—power hidden in the form of weakness.

For Luther, the same procedure must be applied to other theological terms. For example, God's wisdom is demonstrated in the foolishness of the cross. Who would have thought up the foolish idea of God taking human flesh in order to die a horrendous death on behalf of sinners who had deliberately defied him, or God making sinners pure by himself becoming sin for them, or God himself raising up a people to newness of life by himself submitting to death? We could go on, looking at such terms as life, blessing, holiness, and righteousness. Every single one must be reconceived in the light of the cross. All are important theological concepts; all are susceptible to human beings casting them in their own image; and all must be recast in the light of the cross.

This insight is one of the factors in Luther's thinking that gives his theology an inner logic and coherence. Take, for example, his understanding of justification, whereby God declares the believer to be righteous in his sight, not by virtue of any intrinsic righteousness (anything that the believer has done or acquired), but on the basis of an alien righteousness, the righteousness of Christ that remains external to the believer. Is this not typical of the strange but wonderful logic of the God of the cross? The person who is really unrighteous, really mired in sin, is actually declared by God to be pure and righteous! Such a truth is incomprehensible to human logic, but makes perfect sense in light of the logic of the cross.

And what of the idea of a God who comes down and loves the unlovely and the unrighteous before the objects of his love have any inclination to love him or do good? Such is incomprehensible to the theologians of glory, who assume that God is like them, like other human beings, and thus only responds to those who are intrinsically attractive or good, or who first earn his favor in some way. But the cross shows that God is not like that: against every assumption that human beings might make about who God is and how he acts, he requires no prior loveliness in the objects of his love; rather, his prior love creates that loveliness without laying down preconditions. Such a God is revealed with amazing and unexpected tenderness and beauty in the ugly and violent drama of the cross.

Luther does not restrict the theology of the cross to an objective revelation of God. He also sees it as the key to understanding Christian ethics and experience. Foundational to both is the role of faith: to the eyes of unbelief, the cross is nonsense; it is what it seems to be—the crushing, filthy death of a man cursed by God. That is how the unbelieving mind interprets the cross—foolishness to Greeks and an offence to Jews, depending on whether your chosen sin is intellectual arrogance or moral self-righteousness. To the eyes opened by faith, however, the cross is seen as it really is. God is revealed in the hiddenness of the external form. And faith is understood to be a gift of God, not a power inherent in the human mind itself.

This principle of faith then allows the believer to understand how he or she is to behave. United to Christ, the great king and priest, the believer too is both a king and a priest. But these offices are not excuses for lording it over others. In fact, kingship and priesthood are to be enacted in the believer as they are in Christ—through suffering and self-sacrifice in the service of others. The believer is king of everything by being a servant of everyone; the believer is completely free by being subject to all. As Christ demonstrated his kingship and power by death on the cross, so the believer does so by giving himself or herself unconditionally to the aid of others. We are to be, as Luther puts it, little Christs to our neighbors, for in so doing we find our true identity as children of God.

This argument is explosive, giving a whole new understanding of Christian authority. Elders, for example, are not to be those renowned for throwing their weight around, for badgering others, and for using their position or wealth or credentials to enforce their own opinions. No, the truly Christian elder is the one who devotes his whole life to the painful, inconvenient, and humiliating service of others, for in so doing he demonstrates Christlike authority, the kind of authority that Christ himself demonstrated throughout his incarnate life and supremely on the cross at Calvary.

The implications of the theology of the cross for the believer do not stop there. The cross is paradigmatic for how God will deal with believers who are united to Christ by faith. In short, great blessing will come through great suffering.

This point is hard for those of us in the affluent West to swallow. For example, some years ago I lectured at a church gathering on this topic and pointed out that the cross was not simply an atonement, but a revelation of how God deals with those whom he loves. I was challenged afterwards by an individual who said that Luther's theology of the cross did not give enough weight to the fact that the cross and resurrection marked the start of the reversal of the curse, and that great blessings should thus be expected; to focus on suffering and weakness was therefore to miss the eschatological significance of Christ's ministry.

Of course, this individual had failed to apply Luther's theology of the cross as thoroughly as he should have done. All that he said was true, but he failed to understand what he was saying in light of the cross. Yes, Luther would agree, the curse is being rolled back, but that rollback is demonstrated by the fact that, thanks to the cross, evil is now utterly subverted in the cause of good. If the cross of Christ, the most evil act in human history, can be in line with God's will and be the source of the decisive defeat of the very evil that caused it, then any other evil can also be subverted to the cause of good.

More than that, if the death of Christ is mysteriously a blessing, then any evil that the believer experiences can be a blessing too. Yes, the curse is reversed; yes, blessings will flow; but who declared that these blessings have to be in accordance with the aspirations and expectations of affluent America? The lesson of the cross for Luther is that the most blessed person upon earth, Jesus Christ himself, was revealed as blessed precisely in his suffering and death. And if that is the way that God deals with his beloved son, have those who are united to him by faith any right to expect anything different?

This casts the problem of evil in a somewhat different light for Luther than, say, for Harold Kushner, the rabbi who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. They happen, Luther would say, because that is how God blesses them. God accomplishes his work in the believer by doing his alien work (the opposite of what we expect); he really blesses by apparently cursing.

Indeed, when it is grasped that the death of Christ, the greatest crime in history, was itself willed in a deep and mysterious way by the triune God, yet without involving God in any kind of moral guilt, we see the solution to the age-old problem of absolving an all-powerful God of responsibility for evil. The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good. Romans 8:28 is true because of the cross of Christ: if God can take the greatest of evils and turn it to the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well.

Luther's theology of the cross is too rich to be covered adequately in a single article, but I hope that my brief sketch above will indicate the rich vein of theological reflection which can be mined by those who reflect upon 1 Corinthians 1 and upon the dramatic antitheses between appearance and reality that are scattered throughout Scripture and marshaled with such force by Martin Luther. An antidote to sentimentality, prosperity doctrine, and an excessively worldly eschatology, this is theological gold dust. The cross is not simply the point at which God atones for sin; it is also a profound revelation of who God is and how he acts toward his creation.

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The author is professor of church history and historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is the author of Luther's Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers 1525-1556. Reprinted from New Horizons, October 2005.

In his book Luther's Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther's Theological Breakthrough, Alister McGrath takes the reader through the complex labyrinth of medieval thought out of which Luther eventually broke free. My appreciation for Luther as a first-rate scholar was significantly increased as McGrath (a first-rate scholar himself) traced Luther's long theological journey by taking the reader through many of Luther's own writings from 1509-1518. This tour of the documents helps one see that Luther was not simply a visceral reactionary and that Reformation thought was not a quick flash of illumination.

McGrath points out that Luther's theology of the cross was introduced between the "mountains" of 1517 (95 Theses) and 1519 (Leipzig debate) at the disputation in Heidelberg (1518) before his own Augustinian monastic order. Luther's concept of the "crucified God,” was not only the foundation of his theology, but the key to a proper understanding of God's nature. As Luther saw it, the "hidden God" was revealed in the scene of dereliction upon the cross, not by a display of overwhelming power or kingly glory.

Part I of the book provides the background of Luther as a late medieval theologian during 1509-14. As McGrath puts it, there was "considerable confusion on matters of doctrine" in the medieval period, "particularly concerning justification." The question, "what shall I do to be saved?," seemingly so easily answered by Paul in Acts 16:30,31, became enigmatic in a quagmire of conflicting traditions, theologies, and philosophical orientations.

Three major influences on Luther are traced by McGrath: humanism, the philosophical nominalism of the via moderna, and the theology of the Augustinian Order .

Seeing these influences emphasizes, rather than detracts from his genius. There comes a point where Luther can no longer be explained in terms of his origins and environment, and where he began to pursue a course significantly different from the thought-world of his contemporaries, as the cross of Christ embedded itself more and more deeply into Luther's theological reflections. (26)

The contribution of humanism (not to be confused with modern, secular humanism) was to expose Luther to the ancient sources-- scripture and the writings of the early church in Greek. Luther also, along with the humanists, rejected scholasticism—a tendency in some university circles toward extreme theological abstraction. McGrath notes that the influence of humanism is more a one of means than substance. Luther was helped by the tools of humanism (primarily the Greek New Testament), not so much its teaching. The humanist ideal of reform ( as per Erasmus) was not primarily doctrinal, but moral and administrative.

Luther was also influenced by nominalism, which was a denial of universals (realism) in favor of a focus on particulars which derive their qualities. Where nominalism pertains to our discussion is the in the dialectic between the two powers of God, the absolute (the initial set of possibilities open to God) and the ordained (the subset of possibilities which God determined to use). The dialectic was set up to assure that God acted reliably but not out of necessity .

Within the framework of God’s absolute power, they [the theologians of the via moderna] emphasized that God was at liberty to justify man by other means than an infused habit of grace. Although the conditional or de facto necessity of such habits was not called into question, it was stressed that the implication of such habits in justification was the result of the divine decision that they should be thus implicated, rather than because of any natural causal relationship between such habits and justification. (57)

In other words, man did not merit justification, God freely chose to grant it by giving value to the habit of grace. The habit had no inherent value (like coins, the value is derived). McGrath says, "Luther did not use the two powers concept to any significant extent, but he did incorporate some its consequences. One such consequence was the notion of a covenant (pactum or testamentum) between God and man, on the basis of which justification takes place." (58) This is called covenantal causality in contrast to ontological causality, which is tied to things having inherent value (in this case man's works). In covenantal causality, God gives man's work a value that is not merited. This was how the idea of works- righteousness was promoted without actually denying the doctrine of grace. So, we can see that even before Luther's breakthrough, he was part of a tradition that taught justification apart from human merit. Luther's breakthrough was not that he moved from believing human works earned God's acceptance to believing God grants salvation. The change was regarding "on what basis does God grant salvation?"

While there was no monolithic teaching of the Augustinian order, the influence of Luther's Augustinian order (and/or the person of Staupitz, mentor in the monastery) was the move toward a more personal concept of grace—the personal presence of the Holy Spirit within the believer.

By the time of Luther, a theology of justification had developed within the certain sections of the Augustinian order which can only be regarded as a hybrid species, incorporating much of the authentic theology of St. Augustine (for instance, the emphasis upon the depravity of man, the priority of grace and love, and the necessity of grace for morally good acts), while simultaneously including the results of the application of logico-critical methods, such as the dialectic of the two powers of God, associated with via moderna...(67)

That theology of justification, while sounding familiar to Protestant ears, still had to be broken free from. Justification was still seen by Luther and his medieval contemporaries as requiring something from man. No, it was not meritorious works, but a “prepared condition” to receive grace. That condition, for Luther, appears to be a recognition of one's need for grace, and an appeal to God, in his mercy, to bestow it. Yet, with all that said, Luther's concept was a humanly initiated state that God would then respond to. Faith required humility, and humility was understood as a self-abasing state, the condition of seeing oneself as detestable. If you think about this very long, you realize that faith has taken on the role of a work--a rigorous one at that. How could one know if he has become humble enough? He could not.

McGrath summarizes Luther at this point in his development:

In 1514 Luther held a doctrine of justification which was still within a well established medieval theological tradition. All that was required of man was that he humbled himself before God, in order that he might receive the grace which God would then bestow on him...the break with this tradition came about through Luther's prolonged meditation upon a concept which he frequently encountered during his exegesis of the Psalter--that of "the righteousness of God."  The origins of the theology of the cross lie in Luther's initial difficulty in seeing how the idea of a righteous God could conceivably be good news for sinful man.(92)

Part II charts Luther's breakthrough itself, the crucial step of which, according to McGrath, was Luther's discovery of the "righteousness of God." The medieval understanding of righteousness had been colored by Roman (Latin) ideas of justice. Cicero's idea of justice was “giving to every man as he is entitled.” Under this notion of justice, it would be impossible for God to justify the ungodly ( as per Rom. 4:5). In the thinking of the via moderna, the righteousness of God was His faithfulness to the pactum or covenant. So, righteousness is a reward or punishment. To be saved was to be rewarded, not for meritorious works, but for meeting the condition of the pactum in order to receive grace. As we saw earlier, that condition was self-detesting humility. This is how Luther had understood the "righteousness of faith."

The change that Luther eventually came to was that he no longer believed that man was capable of the true humility required of him to meet the condition of the pactum. It would require an act of God to move man to repentance. Man would need the "alien righteousness of God." It is "alien" because it is not ours. We are sinners by nature. The righteousness of God is given (imputed) to man as a gift and therefore is good news (Rom. 1:17)

In this sense then, God's righteousness is contrary to reason, as reason was understood by Aristotle. The Aristotelian idea of righteousness was the quality that came about from performing good deeds. McGrath insists that Luther's critique of reason is not a repudiation of rationality in general, but of projecting human ideas into God. God's reveals himself to be surprisingly different from our expectations.

The importance of Luther's breakthrough for all aspects of theology is pointed to by McGrath:

Luther's insight into the true nature of the righteousness of God represents far more than a mere terminological clarification: latent within it is a new concept of God. Who is this God who deals thus with man? Luther's answer to this question, as it developed over the years 1513-19, can be summarized in more of his most daring phrases: the God who deals with sinful man in this astonishing way is none other than the 'crucified and hidden God'--the God of the theologica crucis. (147)

The cross shatters all human ideas of strength and wisdom, for God's power is revealed in weakness, his glory in shame, and His wisdom in the "foolishness" of a crucified savior. No one can rightly say that God is not involved in human suffering, because He so clearly identified Himself with it.

Reading this book opened up to me the tremendous subtly of the medieval theological situation. There was not a uniform and simplistic works theology .This is a sober warning not to take our theology for granted--to not stop teaching justification by faith in all its depth just because we have "heard it all before."

I was also impressed that God did not bypass Luther's mind, but worked through it. Nor did God bypass Scripture, but spoke through the Scripture. Certainly God could have given Luther or anyone else a direct vision about the righteousness of God. But He did not. He led Luther and others to a thorough understanding of His word that could be communicated objectively again and again. If Luther had a vision and it was not duplicated for each person would it have had the staying power of being able to see with the eyes the words of Scripture? I seriously doubt it. If only today's reformers would stick with the word of God and seek to open its contents for all to see.