Philosophical Luther

Brian Gregor’s A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross isn’t “a specifically Lutheran anthropology,” but Gregor does think Luther “demands philosophical attention.” Luther influenced Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and these influenced Ricoeur and Bonhoeffer. Post-Heideggerian Lutheran theology also, of course, bears the marks of Luther’s influence (8-9).

Gregor’s book is “attuned to those themes in Luther that have been significant in shaping these thinkers: the human being as addressed and constituted by a prior word, as standing ek-statically outside itself in faith and hope, as defined by eschatological possibility.” The result is “an ontology of justification by faith” that stands in opposition to “our default mode of being in the world – namely, the ontology of self-justification,” the ontology of the self “curved in on itself, seeking to be the origin of its own identity, meaning, and goodness,” a self driven by “reckless self-actualization” (9; the last phrase is from Jungel).

Gregor puts Bonhoeffer’s work on Genesis to work in sketching the ontology of self-justification. Adam was created free, but “the biblical conception of freedom is not a quality or attribute that a human being possesses in isolation, in and of itself. Freedom is a relational phenomenon; it only appears in relation to others.” As Bonhoeffer put it, “Being free means being-free-for-the-other, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free” (69). In Adam, though, we seek freedom from others rather than for others. When we curve in on ourselves, we curve away from the others for whom we exist. Negative freedom is incoherent; we are free to choose and do, but to choose and do what? Freedom is “inseparable from strong evaluations regarding what is desirable and what I should do.” Freedom without such orientation is conflicted and confused; the fallen self “exists in self-division and self-bondage.” It is not truly free; in its very claim to freedom, it renounces the very thing that would make it free (69-10). 

A self bound to itself is a self locked into self-justification: “the self constitutes the meaning of its existence through its own acts and operations. . . . The self is bound because it is driven to justify itself, to prove that its existence is warranted and meaningful.” This problem is intensified in modernity: “The self has a greater liberty of self-determination and is free to pursue its own happiness.” Yet it is also liable to collapse into a deeper abyss of despair (71-2).

The gospel breaks through as an announcement of justification by grace through faith, and so offers an alternative ontology of the self, liberation from the self’s curvature toward itself, liberation to true freedom for others. The ontology of justification – which is an anthropology of the cross – is “eschatologically oriented. The being of the self is not defined by static essences, but by faith and hope. Our substance is radically futural; it is not yet apparent what we will be (1 John 3:2). the self is not a finished reality, a stable achievement. Thus there is no resting point – no intuition, no actualized virtue, no piety – on which the self can rest. The faithful self is restless because it is res-less” (51). My self is not founded by anything in me; it is established before God by the God who upholds me.

The radical philosophical import of Luther’s theology was missed, Gregor argues, in part because Lutheran scholastics “resumed thinking within the conceptuality of substantia and accidens,” illustrated by the controversy between Matthias Flacius Illyricus and Victorinus Strigel over whether sin is substantial or accidental. Gregor quotes Robert Jenson’s evaluation of the debate: “accidents come and go without ontologically deep disruption, which does not seem to be the case with original sin as Christian theology and piety otherwise treat it.” On the other hand, to say sin is “substance” suggests that it is “ineradicable,” and salvation becomes impossible. The solution is not to balance the alternatives; the solution is to start again within a more evangelical framework.