Chemnitz and Luther

Robert Kolb offers this helpful analysis of the differences between Luther and Chemnitz on justification: “Luther understood justification as the execution of the wages of sin . . . upon sinners and their simultaneous resurrectionto new life in Jesus Christ . . . . Chemnitz did not pursue this aspect of the biblical meaning of the word. Thus he missed the opportunity to work out Luther’s understanding of justification in a more completely consistent form. For this defintition of justification is ultimately fundamental to the definition of righteousness apart from human performance of the law in Luther. The definition of justification as an execution of justice ends the pretension of every human attempt to keep the law. It also clarifies the fact that God, not the law, ‘calls the shots,’ that the law is God’s tool, not his partner, and certainly not the master. The law was fashioned by God with definite functions related to its nature as his specification or design for human life. It is not an exeternal and independent entity so strong that it can demand satisfaction for itself even from God. According to this definition of justification God appears in his ‘judicial’ action as the just judge, who demands the death of the sinner, and the new creator, who gives new life as unconditionally as he did in Eden. Sinners must die. Sinners must be raised to new life. The cheap atonement of buying off the law is set aside.”

Two things strike me. One, the personal context of Luther’s conception, as opposed to the more impersonal context of Chemnitz in his emphasis on the law; two, that justification is the execution of a sentence and not merely pronouncement of a verdict. And if justification is God’s act of killing and raising the sinner, then justification is an act of deliverance.

Kolb goes on to suggest that there is a further key difference between Luther and Chemnitz in regard to the law and justification. For Chemnitz, human performance of the law did effect salvation, since it is Christ’s obedience to the law that effects the reconciliation of God and sinners: “Instead of, like Luther, seeing Christ’s obedience to his Father and his joining believers with his own death and resurrection through baptism as the critical factors in the salvation of the sinner, Chemnitz emphasized that God issues his judgment of innocence upon believers on the basis of Christ’s obedience to the law , his satisfaction of the law’s demands, and his death that grants the law its pound of flesh.” Whereas Luther emphasized that Christ’s obedience to the Father led to His death and the destruction of “death’s claim on the sinner” and also the end of the law’s claims, Chemnitz treated the law as the eternal and permanent standard of human righteousness such that Christ’s obedience to the law had a critical function in achieving salvation. In short, “The satisfaction of the law through human performance of righteous deeds . . . causes justification.” I suspect that all this rests a somewhat skewed reading of Paul that treats “law” as generic divine demand rather than as Mosaic Torah. It is also difficult to see how even Kolb’s Luther avoids introducing human performance into the achievement of redemption (since the God-man still must be obedient).

The contrast is perhaps this: Chemnitz taught that Christ’s obedience satisfied the law’s demands on our behalf, and His obedience is the righteousness we receive. Luther, however, taught that Christ’s obedience led (in a sinful world) to an ultimate showdown with His enemies, resulting in His death; the Father vindicated His Son in His resurrection, and now sinners die and rise with Christ in baptism. Jesus’ death is thus not a bow to the invioable law, but the (predestined) inevitable result of obedience to the Father. And Luther is not working so much in an Anselmian as in a Christus Victor framework on the atonement (as Aulen argued). (All this may be less Luther than a mish-mash of Luther and NT Wright, combined with the aftereffects of the lentil soup I had for lunch). Whatever the details, Luther’s emphasis (again) on the personal character of the achievement of redemption (Son obeying Father) is worth pondering further. And, the way Luther integrated justification with justice and judgment, with RIB and MISHPAT, and thus inevitably with death and resurrection, is much to be emulated.