Luther on the Theology of the Cross

By Robert Kolb
In John 14 [:8], where Philip spoke according to the theology of
glory, “Show us the Father,” Christ straightaway set aside his
flighty thought about seeing God elsewhere and led him to himself,
saying, “Philip, he who has seen me has seen the Father”
[John 14:9]. For this reason true theology and recognition of God
are in the crucified Christ.1
Of all the places to search for God, the last place most people
would think to look is the gallows. Martin Luther confessed
that there, in the shadows cast by death, God does indeed meet his
straying, rebellious human creatures. There God reveals who he is;
there he reveals who they are. Not in flight beyond the clouds, but
in the dust of the grave God has come to tell it like it is about himself
and about humanity.
In late April 1518 Luther’s monastic superiors summoned him to
Heidelberg to explain himself, at an assembly of the German Augustinians.
He did not comment on the issues that had gotten him
into trouble with the church, his critique of indulgences or his defi-
ance of ecclesiastical authorities.He cut to the quick and talked about
the nature of God and the nature of the human creature trapped in
sin. His assertions on these topics constituted a paradigm shift within
Western Christian thought in the understanding of God’s revelation
of himself, God’s way of dealing with evil, and what it means to be
human. His Heidelberg theses floated before his monastic brothers a
new constellation of perspectives on the biblical description of God
and of human reality. Luther called this series of biblically-based observations
a “theology of the cross,” and he later called this theology
of the cross “our theology.”2 “The cross of Christ is the only instruction
in the Word of God there is, the purest theology.”3
What he offered his fellow monks in Heidelberg was not a treatment
of a specific biblical teaching or two. He presented a new conceptual
framework for thinking about God and the human creature.
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He provided a new basis or set of presuppositions for proclaiming the
biblical message. Luther stepped to the podium in Heidelberg with
an approach to Christian teaching that came at the task from an angle
significantly different from the theological method of his scholastic
predecessors. They may have disagreed among themselves on a range
of issues, but they all practiced a theology of glory, according to the
Wittenberg professor. Luther called for a different way of thinking
about—and practicing—the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus
Christ. Indeed, more than a proposal for a codification of biblical
teaching, a theology of the cross, Luther called for the practice of this
theology in the proclamation and life of theologians of the cross.
However, Luther’s followers in the sixteenth century very seldom
talked about their theology as a theology of the cross, and they preserved
this new orientation for addressing theological topics only
partially. They had no intellectual equipment for the analysis of presuppositions
and conceptual frameworks. Melanchthon had taught
them to think in terms of organizing ideas by topic (loci communes),
and they presumed that all rational people would share their orientation
to the material. They took for granted that the inner logical
and theological structure of their thinking would be obvious to all.
Luther’s “theology of the cross,” however, is precisely a framework
that is designed to embrace all of biblical teaching and guide the use
of all its parts. It employs the cross of Christ as the focal point and
fulcrum for understanding and presenting a wide range of specific
topics within the biblical message. In Melanchthon’s Loci communes
theologici and similar works written by his and Luther’s students the
dogmatic topic “cross” treated human suffering,4 not God’s suffering
on the cross. Thus, the cross served a very different, and less allencompassing,
purpose than providing the point of view from which
to assess God’s revelation of himself, humanity-defining trust in that
revelation, the atonement accomplished through Christ’s death and
resurrection, or the Christian life. In subsequent Lutheran dogmatic
textbooks, this topic consistently treated only one aspect of the Christian
life, persecution and afflictions of other kinds.
If already in the sixteenth century Lutherans did not find Luther’s
theology of the cross particularly helpful, is it possible that Luther’s
use of Christ’s cross as the focal point for determining the dimensions
of biblical proclamation is even more out of date and distant
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today than it was four hundred years ago? For North Americans or
Western Europeans today the problem is not that we do not have
what God wants or expects of human beings (Luther’s problem). We
define the fundamental human problem differently than Luther did:
I do not have and receive what I want and expect—and I want to
know the reason why! Luther viewed God as the divine power that
was altogether too present in his life, as an angry demanding parent.
We view God as a modern parent, neglectful, absent, too little concerned
about us to be of much use. Luther’s theology of the cross
evolved from a concern that human creatures do not have—they
cannot produce!—what God in his justice demands from them.
Modern people complain because God does not produce what they
demand as their rights from him.
Some might therefore argue that the gap is so great that Luther’s
paradigm for the practice of theology as theologians, thinkers, under
the cross has itself become outmoded. In fact, Luther’s theology of
the cross reproduces for every age the biblical message regarding who
God is and what he does—and regarding the characteristics his
human creatures have—beneath the superficial fluctuations of history
and culture. The theology of the cross does more than address
the fleeting problems and miseries of one age. It refines the Christian’s
focus on God and on what it means to be human.
Theology of Glory,Theology of the Cross
Luther’s theology of the cross developed in his Heidelberg Theses
and in his great work of 1525, On the Bondage of Human Choice.
Summarizing this framework for the practice of all theology must
begin by distinguishing it from a theology of suffering and from a
theology of glory.5
First, the theology of the cross is not a theology that simply supplies
good tips on how to cope with tribulations and tragedies.Luther knew
alot about human suffering,but he never became fixated on suffering,
nor on blessing.His faith fixed his attention on God.Luther knew how
to give thanks to the Lord, not only for his grace and goodness but for
the all the necessities and nourishment of the body, for family and good
government, for good weather, good friends, peace, health, for music
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and a finely crafted poem. He knew how to enjoy God’s creation, also
with a song on his lyre. But Luther also knew that there are times in
the course of human events when guitar music is not appropriate.Physical,
emotional, spiritual suffering all fell to him as lot in life with some
frequency, and so he was very realistic about the evil of suffering—as
the deaths of two of his children overwhelmed him, as he felt betrayed
by a beloved student, Johann Agricola, as he coped with the pains of
his own body, as his anger and discouragement over the failure of Wittenberg
citizens to live under the power of his proclamation drove him
out of the town. But human suffering in itself was not the focus or
function of the theology of the cross.
What then is this theology of the cross? Luther says that it is the opposite
of a theology of glory. Theologies of glory presume something
about God’s glory, and something about the glory of being human.
First, medieval systems of theology all sought to present a God whose
glory consisted in fulfilling what in fact are fallen human standards for
divine success: a God who could make his might known,could knock
heads and straighten people out when they got out of line, even, perhaps
especially, at human expense. These scholastic theologians sought
to fashion—with biblical citations, to be sure—a God worthy of the
name, according to the standards of the emperors and kings, whose
glory and power defined how glory and power were supposed to look.
Medieval theologians and preachers wanted a tough,no-nonsense kind
of God to demand that they come up to their own standards for themselves
and to judge their enemies. They did not grasp that “lording it
over” others was the Gentile way of exercising power, not God’s.6
Second, out of his experience as a student of theology at the University
of Erfurt Luther suggested that these medieval systems of biblical
exposition taught a human glory, the glory of human success:
first, the success of human reason that can capture who and what
God is, for human purposes. Gerhard Forde observes that this glory
claims the mastery of the human mind in its investigations regarding
both earthly matters and God’s revelation of himself. “Theologians
of glory operate on the assumption that creation and history are
transparent to the human intellect, that one can see through what is
made and what happens so as to peer into the ‘invisible things of
God.’ ” For they attempt to construct their picture of God on the
basis of human judgments, abstractions that make universal some
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selected bits and pieces of the human experience and put human
epistemologies in charge of divine revelation.7
Alongside this glory of human reason, Luther found in medieval
theological systems an emphasis on the glory of human performance,
of works that can capture God’s favor by sheer human effort, plus
some help from divine grace. Religions of glory have as their first
and foremost goal the encouragement of good human performance.
The theology of the cross aims at bestowing a new identity upon
sinners, setting aside the old identity,by killing it, so that good human
performance can flow out of this new identity that is comprehended
in trust toward God. Therefore “the theology of the cross is an offensive
theology . . . [because] it attacks what we usually consider the
best in our religion,”8 human performance of pious deeds. A theology
of glory lets human words set the tone for God’s Word, forces
his Word into human logic. A theology of glory lets human deeds
determine God’s deeds, for his demonstration of mercy is determined
by the actions of human beings.
Although another element of Luther’s presuppositional framework,
his distinction between two kinds of righteousness,was not an integral
part of his Heidelberg presentation, it was developing about this
time, and apart from this presupposition Luther’s theology of the cross
will not come clearly into focus. Luther revised the theological paradigm
of discussing humanity when he posited two ways of being
righteous—two ways of being human—that must be distinguished to
understand the biblical definition of humanity. Human creatures are
righteous in God’s sight with a “passive”righteousness;we are human
in the vertical sphere of our lives only because of his mercy, favor, and
love, because he created us and re-creates us in Christ. At Heidelberg
Luther stated simply, “The love of God does not first discover what
is pleasing to it but rather creates what is pleasing to it.”9
Human creatures are righteous in relationship to each other and to
the rest of creation, however, with an “active” righteousness; it consists
in carrying out God’s commands to care for the world around us.
That means that human decision and human performance of all kinds
are designed for the horizontal sphere of life, where God has given us
stewardship for his creatures. When we attempt to use our decisions
and performance to please God—or some created substitute we have
made into an idol—we are taking them out of their proper sphere and
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laying upon them responsibility for making us God-pleasing. They
break under the weight of this falsely placed responsibility.
A religion dependent on human willing and human works is on
the prowl for the hidden God and will inevitably reshape God in our
own image. This kind of religion has nothing to do with the true
God. For it misunderstands the purpose and function of God’s law.
It attributes to the law the power to bestow life. In fact, the law only
evaluates life, Luther claimed. God gives and restores life. Thus, in
the midst of human life gone astray, the law—as God’s plan for what
human life really is to be and accomplish—“brings the wrath of God,
kills, reviles, accuses, judges, and condemns everything that is not in
Christ,”10 including the noblest of human sinners, according to Thesis
23 of the Heidelberg Disputation. Forde comments, “Thesis 23
announces flatly that in spite of all the glorious hot air, God is not
ultimately interested in the law. The real consequence of such wisdom
is laid bare: The law does not work the love of God, it works
wrath; it does not give life (recall Thesis 1!),11 it kills; it does not bless,
it curses; it does not comfort, it accuses; it does not grant mercy, it
judges.” “In sum, it condemns everything not in Christ. It seems an
outrageous and highly offensive list. As Luther’s proof quickly
demonstrates, however, it comes right out of Paul in Galatians and
Romans.”12 Luther insists in the next thesis that the wisdom of the
law in itself is good. It is simply not to be used as a means of winning
God’s favor. Theologians of glory misuse the law in that way.13
Luther found these theologies of glory inadequate and insufficient,
ineffective and impotent.For such a theology of glory reaches out for
a manipulable God, a God who provides support for a human creature
who seeks to master life on his or her own, with just a touch of
divine help. That matched neither Luther’s understanding of God nor
his perception of his own humanity. Theologians of glory create a
god in their own image and a picture of the human creature after their
own longings. Neither corresponds to reality, Luther claimed.
Calling the Thing What It Is
“A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is,” he asserted.
14 The cross is the place where God talks our language: it is
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quite clear what is happening as Christ cries out, “My God,my God,
why have you forsaken me,” and dies. At the cross God meets his
human creatures where they are, in the shadow of death.For the cross
is not an instrument of torture but of death. On it people die. From
it Christ made his way back to life. That is where human beings can
see what God’s experience,God’s disposition—even God’s essence—
really are and what humanity really is, claimed Luther.
The theology of the cross involves not only the cross itself, as the
locus of the event that has determined human history. It involves also
the Word that conveys that event and its benefits to God’s people. The
word of the cross is folly to the perishing; this word is God’s power for
those whom he saves through it.15 Luther believed that when God
speaks, reality results. The cross and the Word that delivers it have created
a new reality within God’s fallen creation: a new reality for Satan
(since God nailed the law’s accusations to the cross and rendered them
illegible by soaking them in Christ’s blood); a new reality for death
(since it was laid to eternal rest in Christ’s grave); a new reality for sinners
(since they were buried, too, in Christ’s tomb and raised to new
life through the death and resurrection of the Crucified One).
To force Luther’s observations from the foot of the cross into four
convenient categories for easier consideration, it can be said that he
saw from the vantage point of the cross 1) who God really is, 2) what
the human reaction to God must be, 3) what the human condition
apart from God is and how God has acted to alter that condition,
and 4) what kind of life trust in Christ brings to his disciples.
1. God Hidden, God Revealed. Luther distinguished the “revealed
God” (Deus revelatus) from the “hidden God” (Deus absconditus), by
which he meant, in different contexts, either God as he actually exists
beyond the grasp of human conceptualization—particularly when
the human mind is darkened by sin—or God as sinners fashion him
in their own image, to their own likings. In addition, it must be noted
that the revealed God hides himself in order to show himself to his
human creatures. Luther observed that God is to be found precisely
where theologians of glory are horrified to find him: as a kid in a
crib, as a criminal on a cross, as a corpse in a crypt. God reveals himself
by hiding himself right in the middle of human existence as it
has been bent out of shape by the human fall. Thus, Luther’s theol-
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ogy of the cross is a departure from the fuzziness of human attempts
to focus on God apart from God’s pointing out where he is to be
found and who he really is.
In the Heidelberg Disputation, and in his expansion of its insights,
for instance in his Bondage of the Will, Luther focused first on the blank
wall created by the impossibility of human and sinful conceptualizing
of God; with fallen eyes no one can see God. With fallen human ears
no one can return to the Edenic hearing of his Word. Then Luther
focused very sharply on God in his revelation of himself:16 no one has
seen God, but Jesus of Nazareth, God in the flesh, has made him
known:a God with holes in his hands, feet, and side; the God,who has
come near to us, into the midst of our twisted and ruined existence.
This God on the cross reveals the fullness of God’s love as well as the
inadequacy of all human efforts to patch up life to please him.
2. Humanity Defined by Faith. Human attempts to claim God’s attention
and approval always draft a plan that tries to place God under the
control of human logic, or testing through signs of some sort or another.
17 People draw up job descriptions for God and become angry or
disappointed with him when he does not prove himself equal to their
tasks. Neither rational nor empirical proofs that would place God under
human domination can lead to God. God reveals himself through his
still, small voice,18 through the seemingly foolish and impotent Word
from the cross,19 in the Word made flesh,come to dwell among his people.
20 Luther’s theology of the cross is a theology of the Word of the
cross, a Word that conveys life itself on the power of its promise. Luther
insisted that trust alone—total dependence and reliance on God and
what he promises in his incarnation and in Scripture—is the center of
life, the living source of genuine human living. To recognize trust as the
core of our humanity is to perceive the true form of being human as
God created his human creature. That means that at the core of human
life our own performance, accomplishment, behavior, has no place. For
“a human work, no matter how good, is deadly sin because it in actual
fact entices us away from ‘naked trust in the mercy of God’ to a trust in
self.”21 Not trust in self,nor trust in one’s own logical or empirical judgment,
can constitute human life. God has designed life to center upon
trust in him. Heidelberg Thesis 25: “He is not righteous who does
much, but he who, without work, believes much in Christ.”22
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3. Handed Over for our Sins, Raised for our Justification. By showing
how God solves “the human problem,” the cross gives humankind its
best view of the nature of God,for it reveals his modus operandi, his way
of dealing with evil and reclaiming humanity for himself.Luther taught
that God’s true righteousness—his true nature, his essence—is revealed
in the cross, and it turns out that he is love and mercy.23 For God sent
his Son into this world to take sin and death into himself and to bury
sinners in his tomb.24 Apart from his sacrifice of his own life as the
substitute for his people under the law’s condemnation, there is no
life.25 Exactly how and why it is so is never explained in Scripture.
Forde warns against attempts to draft atonement theories that try to
elucidate the eternal truth behind the cross. “If we can see through the
cross to what is supposed to be behind it,we don’t have to look at it!”26
God’s Word simply presents us the cross. The fury of God’s wrath appears
there in all its horror. God’s anger reveals the horror of sin and
how it has ruined the human creature whom he loves. But that very
presentation of God’s wrath appears at that place,Golgotha,where God
has poured himself out in order to bury our sinful identity and give us
new life.Greater love has no one.27 Because of our sin God’s mercyseat
has taken the shape of the cross.
Sin is the problem. It is the original problem, the root of the problem,
the motor that drives the enmity between Creator and rebellious
human creature. Sin means the rejection of God and his standards
for being human. Rejection of God is the core kind of
sinfulness. Rejection of all the expectations that flow from his gift of
identity as his creature and child is the second kind of sinfulness. It
can be analyzed, or at least experienced, apart from acknowledgement
of the Creator. Death is a symptom of the problem. Disgust at
one’s own failures, discouragement because of the antipathy or apathy
of others, deterioration of health or memory or reputation are
all symptoms of the problem.Yet each of these symptoms can be the
point at which the cross begins to emerge out of the darkness and
come into focus. Any dissatisfaction with life and identity can form
the basis of conversation that leads to Calvary and to the heart of the
human dilemma. Even in a “guiltless” society the theology of the
cross provides the firm undergirding for discussion of topics that seem
distant at first, the topics of redemption or atonement.
For even sinners conscious of guilt cannot comprehend the overwhelming
extent to which sin has determined human existence after
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the fall. No one can grasp the enormity of the love of God that overcomes
the problem of sin and guilt. Luther rejected any cheap atonement
in which Christ bought off the enemies of his people with a
pittance of suffering, like a bit of gold or silver.28 He suffered unto
the death of the cross29 and thus met the law’s demand that sinners
die.30 But Luther not only depicted Christ’s saving act as a “joyous
exchange” of the sinner’s sin and death for his own innocence and
life.31 Luther also confessed that Christ had won the battle against
Satan in a “magnificent duel,” in which he inflicted fatal wounds on
Satan, sin, and death.32 God at his most glorious, in his display of the
extent of his mercy and love for his human creatures, appears, Luther
believed, in the depth of the shame of the cross. There he is to be
seen as he really is, in his true righteousness, which is mercy and love.
There human beings are to be seen as those who deserve to die eternally
but who now through baptismal death have the life Christ gives
through his resurrection, forever. For it is not true that Luther’s theology
of the cross excludes the resurrection. “A theology of the cross
is impossible without resurrection. It is impossible to plumb the
depths of the crucifixion without the resurrection.”33 He died for
only one reason: that his people might have human life in its fullest.34
Only at the foot of the cross can true human identity be discovered.
There, realizing whose I am, I realize who I am.
4. Take Up Your Cross and Follow. Finally,Luther understood that the
Christian life is not necessarily marked by earthly definitions of success
or suffering, by neither bane nor blessing, but instead is shaped by
Christ and his cross.35 Christ’s cross demonstrates that his people have
nothing to fear from any of their enemies,not even death itself. Therefore,
they are freed to risk all to love those whom God has placed
within the reach of their love.Having come to understand at the foot
of the cross what is really wrong with human life—not just its crimes
of magnificent proportions but the banality of our evils and the
wretchedness of doubt and denial of God—believers also recognize
from the vantage point of the cross what joy and peace come from living
the genuine human way in self-sacrificial love and giving.
Indeed, the theology of the cross is a paradigm for every human
season, also and perhaps especially, the beginning of the twenty-first
century, because it presumes and reasserts the biblical assessment of
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human life.Christian Neddens calls it “relevant and explosive” in its
application in twentieth century theology because it is, according to
the appraisal of Udo Kern, a fundamental norm for theological
knowledge and practice and therefore a “fundamentally critical theory.”
Neddens describes the critical function of the theology of the
cross in engaging objections to the Christian faith on the basis of
modern science and learning, and in regard to human autonomy and
human suffering. This theology serves as critical analysis for the misuse
of theology and a natural tendency toward theologies of glory.36
The theology of the cross functions as both a hermeneutical
framework and an orientation for theological criticism. It can aid in
sharpening the formulation of a host of questions, but this essay focuses
on its usefulness in discussions of “theodicy” and in defining
what it means to be human.
The theology of the cross clears the focus on human life, both as
it is misapprehended by those who try to think about humanity apart
from God,and as God reveals it through his own incarnation and his
death for fallen human creatures on the cross. In Luther’s theology
of the cross we encounter not only Deus absconditus—God beyond
our grasp, God as he can only be re-imaged by fallen human imagination—
and Deus revelatus—the only true God revealed in Jesus
Christ, who speaks to his human creatures from the pages of Scripture.
We also meet—though Luther never said it this way—ourselves,
first as homo absconditus—the human creature hidden from our own
eyes and assessment, in both our sinfulness and in the unexperienced
potential of humanity that sinners cannot grasp—and homo revelatus—
God’s perception, the only accurate perception and definition,
of what it means to be human.
What it means to be human is a question that interests Western
people of this age. Why life does not turn out better than it does, or
why God has disappeared, is another such question. If Luther’s theology
of the cross can aid contemporary searchers for haven and help
to understand the gap between their sense of what they could be and
their experience of what they are, it might be a message for moderns.
And if it could help explain why God, if he really does exist, falls so
far short of our expectations—if it can help us justify his treatment or
his neglect of us—then it might indeed be a theology for the twenty-
first century. These two aspects of the theology of the cross do not
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exhaust its sigificance and usefulness for guiding biblical proclamation
in this time, as Neddens shows, but this essay focuses on them as
examples of its contemporary significance and usefulness.
Deus Absconditus and the Cry of “Why?”
Deus Revelatus and the Response “Christ”
Luther’s theology of the cross developed out of his struggle with
the anger of God. But now the tables are turned: God is in the hands
of apathetic sinners. At the beginning of the twenty-first century people
struggle with the indifference of God but in this case turn-about
seems like fair play, for sometimes those who struggle most with the
apparent absence or indifference of God in their lives are those who
have not given thanks for a good bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape or a
sterling performance on the playing field, to say nothing of their very
existence. The burning question which Luther posed in the sixteenth
century regarding his standing before his Creator has turned into a
resentful complaint about God’s distance from anything important—
that is, anything that escapes our control—in our lives. People who
have believed in a Creator have thrown Job’s complaints back at the
Lord from time immemorial, but only since the Enlightenment have
self-confident human beings tried to engage in the attempt to justify
God’s indifference,impotence, inactivity in behalf of human creatures.
Three hundred years ago the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibnitz devised the term “theodicy” to describe the human
attempt to justify God by explaining evil. Theodicy is the attempt to
deal with a God from whom we expect all good things when he does
not deliver the good we expect. Although Luther was not addressing
the question of “how God could do such awful things to us” as he
formulated his theology of the cross in 1518,it speaks to the felt needs
of the twenty-first century people around us, at least in the West, to
explain evil—in hopes of mastering it.
1. God Has Come Near in the Blood of Christ. The theology of the
cross focuses our attention on the God who has come near to us in
the midst of our afflictions, not just with sympathy but with the solution
for the evils that afflict us. In the cross God has rendered his
verdict upon sin: it is evil, and it must be destroyed. And on the cross
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Christ destroyed our sin as the factor that determines our identity.
Luther did not fashion a justification for God’s permitting evil or his
failure to cope with it adequately. Bound to Scripture, he found no
more of an answer to the “why” of evil than that given to Job. He
simply let God be God. He trusted that the God who had come to
engage evil at its ugliest on the cross would triumph finally over every
evil. Therefore, he did not feel himself compelled to veil any part of
the truth about God or about evil. Theologians of the cross “are not
driven to simplistic theodicies because with Saint Paul they believe
that God justifies himself precisely in the cross and resurrection of
Jesus. They know that, dying to the old, the believer lives in Christ
and looks forward to being raised with him.”37 For God has “justified”
himself by delivering and restoring us to the fullness of humanity
through Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross.
Luther’s On the Bondage of Human Choice sought above all to confess
that God is Lord of all. In that work he did not shy away from
those passages in Scripture in which God seems to be responsible for
evil. The reformer can be accused of trying to explain too much in
this work, and when that is true, he explains God in the way of the
Old Testament prophets who saw God at work in good and evil.38
But Luther did insist that human creatures dare not pry into the secret
will of God as he treated Matthew 23:37, Christ’s lamentation
over Jerusalem,39 and as he lectured on Genesis a decade after the
appearance of The Bondage of Human Choice, he did provide a corrective
to misimpressions he might have caused in his response to
Erasmus. In addressing the question of why some are saved and not
others, Luther there interpreted his earlier writing:
a distinction must be made when one deals with the knowledge, or rather with the
subject of the divinity. For one must debate either about the hidden God or about
the revealed God. With regard to God insofar as he has not been revealed, there is
no faith,no knowledge,and no understanding. And here one must hold to the statement
that what is above us is none of our concern. . . . Such inquisitiveness is original
sin itself, by which we are impelled to strive for a way to God through natural
speculation. . . . God has most sternly forbidden this investigation of the divinity.40
Luther then places in God’s mouth the following words:
From an unrevealed God I will become a revealed God. Nevertheless, I will remain
the same God. I will be made flesh, or send My Son. He shall die for your
sins and shall rise again from the dead. And in this way I will fulfill your desire, in
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order that you may be able to know whether you are predestined or not. Behold,
this is my Son; listen to him (cf. Matt. 17:5). Look at him as he lies in the manger
and on the lap of his mother, as he hangs on the cross. Observe what he does and
what he says. There you will surely take hold of me. For “he who sees me,” says
Christ, “also sees the Father himself ” (cf. John 14:9). If you listen to him, are baptized
in his name, and love his Word, then you are certainly predestined and are
certain of your salvation.41
Luther here goes further.He rejects any discordance between hidden
God and revealed God even though the hidden God goes far
beyond human grasp.
If you believe in the revealed God and accept his Word, he will gradually also reveal
the hidden God, for “he who sees me also sees the Father,” as John 14:9 says.
He who rejects the Son also loses the unrevealed God along with the revealed
God. But if you cling to the revealed God with a firm faith, so that your heart is
so minded that you will not lose Christ even if you are deprived of everything,
then you are most assuredly predestined, and you will understand the hidden God.
Indeed, you understand him even now if you acknowledge the Son and his will,
namely, that he wants to reveal himself to you, that he wants to be your Lord and
your Savior. Therefore you are sure that God is also your Lord and Father.42
The search for answers ends where the search for God ends: at the
cross, where God reveals his power and his wisdom in his own broken
body and spilled blood.43
2. Faith Clings to the Crucified One. Thus, Luther’s theology of
the cross focuses our attention on trust in the God who loves us
and promises his presence in the midst of afflictions. A doctoral
student of mine and his wife lost a baby shortly before birth a few
years ago.He related that a member of his congregation, trying to
offer comfort, had said, “Well,Pastor, at a time like this, all that theology
you’re learning does not do much good.” “In fact,” Mark observed,
“true comfort comes precisely from knowing the theology
of Martin Luther; it gives assurance that God is only that God who
shows love and mercy toward us. If we had to wonder what the
God behind the clouds really intends and why he is delivering this
evil upon us, doubt and distress rather than comfort would be our
lot. We cannot know why God took our child, but we do not have
to question how God regards us. He has shown us that decisively
in the cross.” The theology of the cross redirects our gaze from
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probing the darkness further and directs those who hurt and ache
to cling to Christ, whose love is certain and whose faithfulness is
beyond all doubt.
3. Evil Identified, Nailed to the Cross, Drowned in Christ’s Blood. The
theology of the cross reminds those caught in evil that evil is truly
evil, the opposite of what God wants for his human creature. It reminds
fallen human creatures that God has come to lift them once
again to true human life through his own death and resurrection. Instead
of justifying God’s failure to end evil today, or justifying human
actions that are truly evil, it justifies sinners so that they may enjoy
true life, life with God, forever. The problem with “theodicies” is
that they have to tell less than the truth, they have to avoid some part
of the problem, at one point or another. Whether they are working
at justifying God or justifying themselves, they always end up calling
what is truly evil good and what is good evil. In the final analysis,
sinners in the hands of an almighty God always find it difficult to
cope with what is not true, good, and beautiful. Instead of relying
on the person of the rescuer, the restorer of human life, they rely on
the explanations they have fashioned for mastering their problems.
The realism of Luther’s theology of the cross is able to confront
the horrors and the banalities of evil in all their perversity because it
enables us to avoid feeling obligated either to seek the good in evil
or to justify God.
Whereas the theologian of glory tries to see through the needy, the poor, the lowly,
and the “non-existent,” the theologian of the cross knows that the love of God
creates precisely out of nothing. Therefore the sinner must be reduced to nothing
in order to be saved. The presupposition of the Disputation . . . is the hope of
the resurrection. God brings life out of death. He calls into being that which is
from that which is not. In order that there be a resurrection, the sinner must die.
All presumption must be ended. The truth must be seen. Only the “friends of the
cross”who have been reduced to nothing are properly prepared to receive the justifying
grace poured out by the creative love of God. All other roads are closed.44
Waiting on God in the midst of the shadows creates the patience
that endures and fosters hope when believers can listen to his voice
through the darkness. For they know their Master’s voice and they
have confidence in both his love and his power.
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For God does not reveal the past of evil by explaining where and
why it arose, but he does tell us something of its present and everything
about its future.He comes to us as a God who has experienced
loss, suffering, and death, but he does not give answers as to the origins
of evil. The alternatives for solving that riddle seem to be two:
we are at fault, or he is at fault. The former justifies God, and we are
dead. The latter is an even more horrible solution: God gets pleasure
from our suffering. Instead of answers about evil’s origin, God
gives us his presence through the presence of his people and the
proclamation of his Word. He gives us the promise of the certain,
final, everlasting liberation from evil that he effected through Christ’s
resurrection.
4. Cruciform Humanity. The theology of the cross enables God’s
children to understand the shape of life as God has planned it for
them, following Christ under the cross. It provides the hope and
confidence that enables them to conquer evil in the lives of others,
as they follow the model Christ gives them. His atoning suffering,
death, and resurrection has conquered evil in their lives, and they recognize
their call to carry love into the lives of others—in some instances
through their own suffering and the bearing of burdens. True
“theodicy” is lived out in the lives, in the love, of his people as they
deliver it to neighbors caught in the grip of evil. That theodicic action
demands that children of the cross recognize the familial dimension
of their new life in Christ. Some evils may be combatted
by individuals, but most of the perversions of God’s plan for human
living have roots deep enough and facets numerous enough to demand
more than any one Christian can do to bring God’s presence
to the suffering. Not only the suffering but also the believers need
the support that comes from the larger company of Christ’s people.
In regard to their own struggles with evil, believers find in the cross
the reminder that they pose a false question when they demand to
know why the Creator does not treat them better. Finally, the expectations
of the human creature cannot demand more of the Creator
than he has promised. Indeed, his ultimate promise will bring
the end of all evil, but in the interim he has promised his presence
in the midst of evil, not its exclusion from our lives. Nor dare our
expectations of ourselves be less than God’s expectations of us.God’s
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promise of life and of his steadfast love suffice. The promise in fact
gives hope and joy and peace. It fosters a defiance of evil and the assurance
that the people of God can move through life on the solid
ground of the love Christ revealed on the cross.
Homo Absconditus and Homo Revelatus:
What It Means to Be Fallen and What It Means to Be Human
Luther’s Deus absconditus and Deus revelatus also reveals a great deal
about his understanding of what it means to be human. It might be
said that his anthropology taught both a homo absconditus and homo
revelatus.
1. “Human”Means Trusting God Above all Else. Being fully human
is first of all to recognize that God is the fundamental point of orientation
for humanity. Not to know him as Creator and Father imposes
bondage upon those who are created to trust in him. It enchains
them to their false gods, tyrants all. Sin springs from doubt
that denies God’s place in our lives and defies his lordship. Luther believed
that our sinful turning the center of our attention to ourselves
hides from our own view the depth of our own sinfulness, indeed
the nature of our own sinfulness. In the Smalcald Articles he wrote,
“This inherited sin has caused such a deep, evil corruption of nature
that reason does not comprehend it; rather it must be believed on
the basis of the revelation in the Scriptures.”45 The heart of the
human failure to be all that we can be, according to Luther, consists
of our failure to fear, love, and trust in God above all things. Both
sinners whose behavior openly defies God and the “wise, holy,
learned, and religious”who want to secure their lives with their own
works refuse “to let God rule and to be God.”46 This failure to trust
in God led to the defiance of God’s other commands, according to
Luther’s interpretation of the Decalogue in the Small Catechism.47
Therefore, until sinners recognize their failure to trust in the true
God,revealed in Jesus Christ, they are blind to the depth and the root
cause of their troubles in this world. The law crushes sinful pretensions
to lordship over life in many ways, but only by driving people to
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the cross can it focus their understanding clearly enough to see that
the original, root, fundamental sin that perverts and corrupts life lies
in this lack of trust. When his human creatures do apprehend who
God is, in the fullness of his love, they then see themselves as his beloved
children. This perception of ourselves as the heirs of Christ and members
of the Father’s family liberates us from the bondage of caring for
ourselves and presiding over our own destinies.We are freed by Christ’s
cross to be fully human again because our Lord has made us children
of God through death to sin and resurrection to new life in him. The
success of this identity cannot be measured; the certainty of this identity
cannot be shaken. From the foot of the cross we see a grandeur in
our humanity so delightful that reason cannot comprehend it.
2. Bound Not to Trust, Liberated to Trust. But the fallen human nature
cannot fear, love, and trust in God above all things. A vital part
of Luther’s theology of the cross is his recognition of the impossibility
of turning ourselves back to God, of the boundness of human
choice. He did not deny that sinners have an active will, as is sometimes
suggested by scholars who have not read his De servo arbitrio
carefully. He did deny that the sinful will is free to choose God as
long as it remains caught and trapped by its need to supply an identity
for its person since it does not recognize God as creator and giver
of our identity. “Free will, after the fall, has the power to do good
only in a passive capacity, but it can always do evil in an active capacity,”
48 Luther explained to the Augustinians in Heidelberg. Like
water, which can be heated but cannot heat itself, the will is driven
by Satan or by God, as it acts in the vertical sphere of life. Instead of
trusting the Word of the Lord,we turn to the lie of the Deceptor,49
and doubt binds our wills as it deafens our ears. Freedom comes only
through the new identity given through Christ’s death, that becomes
our death to captivity and deception.
Under the illusion that God will provide grace enough to supplement
the efforts of our own strivings—up to 99.9 percent if necessary—
those who claim that they can freely exercise enough of their
damaged will, at least to accept what God offers, are never able to
understand what Jesus meant when he said that we must be born
anew to enter the kingdom of God.50 Indeed, striving for the standards
people set for themselves can convince them that they are not
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able to reach their goals, but apart from the perspective at the foot
of the cross they will not understand that the solution lies not in trying
harder but in dying to their sinful identity. At the foot of the
cross sinners finally lose the presumption that they simply must
stretch a bit higher. They fall to the earth to die to their sinful identity.
Forde labels the claim that some human contribution,how minimal
a mite it might be, can secure human life “effrontery.” He compares
the vanity of such impertinence to what has to happen to the
addict: “a ‘bottoming out’ or an ‘intervention.’ . . . there is no cure for
the addict on his own. In theological terms,we must come to confess
that we are addicted to sin, addicted to self, whatever form that
may take, pious or impious.”51
Thus, the theology of the cross reveals that it is hopeless to hope
that human performance of any kind can contribute to improving
our status in God’s sight. Recognizing that we are no more and no
less than creatures frees us from the need to assume the impossible
burden of being the God who orders and frees our lives. Luther’s “let
God be God” lets us be us, creatures who can be all that he made us
to be.
3. Born Anew. For God has made us anew. He is the Re-Creator
as well as the Creator, and his work of re-creation has taken place on
the cross and in Christ’s resurrection. From this throne of the cross
God does our sinful identity to death and gives us new birth as his
children.God is in charge.He is Lord.He determines who his human
creatures are.
From the foot of the cross, Luther confessed, the bent and broken
shape of humanity in flight from, in revolt against, God can be seen
for what it is. The fundamental fact of human existence after the fall
is that sin pays its wage,52 and sinners receive what they have earned
through their doubt of God’s Word and defiance of his lordship—
death. Reflecting on Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus,53 Forde
writes, “No repairs, no improvements, no optimistic encouragements
are possible. Just straight talk:‘You must be born anew.’ ”54 Sinners
must die, eternally or baptismally. The children of God become his
children not by recovering from serious illness but by being born
anew, and that new birth presumes death to the old, sinful, identity.
For God confronted both kinds of human sinfulness on the cross—
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the symptoms and the root sin of doubt, denial, and defiance of himself.
His declaration of war against them seized the victory in the battle
at Calvary, and he delivers the fruits of the victory in baptism55
and in the return to baptism in daily repentance.
“When Christ calls a person, he bids him come and die,” Dietrich
Bonhoeffer observed. “Every command of Jesus is a call to die, with
all our affections and lusts. But we do not want to die, and therefore
Jesus Christ and his call are necessarily our death as well as our life. The
call to discipleship,the Baptism in the name of Jesus Christ,means both
death and life.”56 By incorporating fallen human creatures into the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ through baptism, the Creator has repeated
his modus operandi of the first week,at the beginning.He brings
forth a new creature through the creative power of his Word.
Adam and Eve were not given a probationary period in which to
demonstrate that they were worthy of their humanity. It could not be
earned. It was a gift. Human performance—proper human behavior—
flows from the gift of identity, the gift of life.Human identity as
child of God cannot be earned. It must be passively received.For those
addicted to sin, as for the alcoholic, “Thou shalt quit!” is a salutary
command, “but it does not realize its aims but only makes matters
worse. It deceives the alcoholic by arousing pride and so becomes a
defense mechanism against the truth, the actuality of addiction.”57
Law-ism, behavior-ism, tells the sinner the same kind of lie. The theology
of the cross labels as a lie the idea that human performance can
establish human identity as a child of God and a true human being.
Beyond this denial of the nature of the evil that captivates us, in
our rejection of the love of our Creator, sin also prevents us from
perceiving clearly the height of our own possibilities as people freed
from sin, law, death, and the devil. We have been liberated from slavery
to all that focuses life on our works and ourselves. We have been
freed to love our neighbor in a way that brings the good to them
and pleasure to us which is the fulfillment of our humanity. The light
of the cross does liberate sinners from the darkness of the fears that
have driven them in upon themselves so that they can appreciate the
wonder of the creature God has made them to be. The light of the
cross generates the power to fulfill God’s plan for human living—in
a sinful world, even under the cross—and to acknowledge and appreciate
the joys of life as God’s child.
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4. Living as a New Creature. That means that the cross reveals our
true humanity to us. The cross reminds us that “ ‘we live on borrowed
time’—time lent us by the Creator.Yet we also see in the death
of Jesus on the cross our rebellion against that life, and we note that
there is absolutely no way out now except one. God vindicated the
crucified Jesus by raising him from the dead. So the question and
the hope come to us.‘If we die with him, shall we not also live with
him?’ ”58 In the cross we recognize not only the awful truth but also
the wonderful truth about ourselves.
In Christ we recognize ourselves through the Word of the Holy
Spirit. We are the forgiven children of God,with identities no longer
determined by sin but rather by the forgiving, life-giving Word of
the Lord. We are children of God, with great potential, even in the
midst of a world plagued by evil, for bringing love, peace, and joy to
those God has placed around us. The cross also makes it clear that it
is not good for human beings to be alone, according to God’s plan for
humanity.59 Gathered into God’s family by the cross, those who have
been given new life there are inevitably drawn as members of the family,
with other members of the family, into that world to demonstrate
God’s love and to call others to the cross and thus into the family.
Thus, we demonstrate this truth that we are children of God in
our actions, and we use God’s truth that we are his own as a weapon
against temptation. When Satan suggests that, while we indeed have
a ticket to heaven, our sinful identity determines who we are on
earth, until death, so that we can only live life on his terms, we can
tell him to go home. We can assert the promise of God in the cross
and smother the smoldering sparks of our inclinations to live life on
our own terms rather than God’s. For the word from the cross is a
weapon in the battle within us as well as outside us.
The theology of the cross cannot be taught and confessed without
its implications for the whole human community becoming
clear. The cruciform nature of the individual believer’s life also
stretches out the arms of the body of Christ, the church, in the direction
of those around it, within its reach.For the cross was designed
to restore the whole family of God as a family.
The cross also invades our lives in the midst of the struggles against
those desires that would lead us back to idolatrous living. The Holy
Spirit leads us constantly back to the cross to crucify our flesh, our
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desires to live apart from his love and his plan for daily life.Every believer
knows well the struggle that Paul confesses in Romans 7 and
8. All believers recognize that there can be no compromise with the
law of sin. We sinners must be put to death. We have been put to
death once and for all in our baptisms,but in the mystery of the continuing
force of evil in our lives, the rhythm of daily repentance leads
us again and again to the cross, to die and to be raised up.
Conclusion
Luther believed that the best view of all reality was to be had from
the foot of the cross on Calvary. The death and resurrection of Christ
parted the clouds, and he could see God and himself clearly. His theology,
the theology of the cross, performs the same function at the beginning
of the twenty-first century. In Christ it reveals God’s Godness
and our humanity. In an age of profound doubt about God’s
existence and his love the cross of Jesus Christ focuses human attention
on how God reveals himself to us as a person who loves and shows
mercy, in the midst of the evils that beset us. In Christ it shows fallen
human creatures who God really is. In an age of profound doubt about
what human life is and is worth, the theology of the cross defines
human life from the basis of God’s presence in human life and his love
for human creatures. It shows human beings who they are. Luther’s
theology of the cross is indeed a theology for such a time as this.
This essay has appeared in substantially the same form under the title
“Deus revelatus—Homo revelatus, Luthers theologia crucis für das 21.
Jahrhundert,” in Robert Kolb and Christian Neddens, Gottes Wort vom
Kreuz, Luthers Theologie als Kritische Theologie, Oberurseler Hefte
40 (Oberursel: Lutherische Theologische Hochschule, 2001), 13–34.
NOTES
1. “Heidelberg Disputation, 1518,” Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 57 vols.
Eds. J.F.K. Knaake, et al. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883ff.), 1:362,15–19 [hereafter cited as WA].
Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols. eds., J. Pelikan and H. Lehmann (Saint Louis
and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress, 1955), 31:53 [hereafter cited as LW].
2. “In XV Psalmos graduum, 1532/33” (1540) WA 40,III:193,6–7 and 19–20.
3. “Operationes in Psalms, 1519–1521,” here on Psalm 6:11: WA 5:217,2–3.
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4. Corpus Reformatorum. Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. C. G. Bretschneider and H. E.
Bindweil (Halle and Braunschweig: Schwetschke, 1834–1860), 21:528–536 (2nd ed.) and
934–955 (3rd ed.).
5. Luther’s theology of the cross has been analyzed in different ways, with different accents,
by scholars. The new discussion of this topic began with Walther von Loewenich’s
Luther’s Theology of the Cross, trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976),
first published in German in 1929; it focuses particularly upon its implications for Luther’s
concept of faith and the Christian life. Philip S. Watson, Let God Be God! An Interpretation
of the Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia:Muhlenberg,1947), combines an analysis of the
theology of the cross in relation to Luther’s understanding of revelation and of the atonement
with his doctrine of God’s Word.Further important contributions to the topic include
Hans Joachim Iwand’s essay, “Theologia crucis,” in his Nachgelassene Werke II (Munich:
Kaiser, 1966), 381–398; Jürgen Moltmann, Der gekreuzigte Gott, das Kreuz Christi als Grund
und Kritik christlicher Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1972); Dennis Ngien, The Suffering of God
According to Martin Luther’s ‘Theologia Crucis’ (New York:Peter Lang, 1995);Gerhard O.Forde,
On Being a Theologian of the Cross, Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), and Klaus Schwarzwäller, Kreuz und Auferstehung. Ein theologisches
Traktat (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000). The topic is also treated in other standard
assessments of Luther’s theology.
6. Mark 10:42–45.
7. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 72–73.
8. Ibid., 2.
9. WA 1:254,35.36; LW 31:41, Thesis 28, following the translation of Forde, On Being
a Theologian of the Cross, 112.
10. WA 1:354,26–26; LW 31:41.
11. Thesis 1 stated, “The law of God, the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance
a person on the way to righteousness but is rather a hindrance.” WA 1:353,15–16;LW 31:39.
12. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 95–96. See also Gal. 3:13,10; Rom. 4:15,
7:10, 2:12.
13. Ibid., 97–98.
14. WA 1:354,21–22; LW 31:45, Thesis 21.
15. 1 Cor. 1:18.
16. John 1:18.
17. 1 Cor. 1:22–25.
18. 1 Kings 19:12.
19. 1 Cor. 1:18–25.
20. John 1:14.
21. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 35.
22. WA 1:354,29–30; LW 31:41.
23. 1 John 4:8.
24. Rom. 6:4; Col. 2:12.
25. Rom. 6:23b, 4–18; Col 2:12–15, 3:1.
26. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 76.
27. Rom. 5:6–8.
28. See the explanation of the second article of the Creed in the Small Catecheism. Die
Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche. 11th ed. (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1992), 511 [hereafter cited as BSLK]; The Book of Concord The Confessions of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2000), 355 [hereafter cited as BC]; The Book of Concord The Confessions of the Evan-
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gelical Lutheran Church, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1959) 345 [hereafter cited ad BC-T].
29. Phil. 2:8.
30. Rom. 6:23a.
31. E.g., in his Galatians commentary of 1535, WA 40,I:432–438; LW 26:276–280.
32. E.g. in his Galatians commentary, WA 40,I:228–229; LW 26:163–164.
33. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 1.
34. John 10:10.
35. Matt. 16:24–26.
36. Neddens, “Kreuzestheologie als kritische Theologie, Aspekte und Positionen der
Kreuzestheologie im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Kolb/Neddens, Gottes Wort vom Kreuz, 35–66,
here 35–41. Neddens analyzes the work of von Loewenich, Iwand, Moltmann, Forde, and
Schwarzwäller mentioned in note 5.
37. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 13.
38. Ex. 4:11; Isa. 45:7; Amos 3:6.
39. WA 18:686–690; LW 33:144–147.
40. WA 43:458,35–459,15; LW 5:43–44.
41. WA 43:459,24–32; LW 5:45.
42. WA 43:460,26–35; LW 5:46.
43. 1 Cor. 1:18–2:16.
44. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 114–115.
45. BSLK, 434; BC, 311; BC-T, 303.
46. Philip S. Watson made this expression the central point of his summary of Luther’s
theology in Let God Be God!, esp. p. 64. The unclear reference in Watson’s footnote at this
point is to Luther’s Kirchenpostille, WA 10,8,1:24, 4–11; Luther’s Epistle Sermons, Advent
and Christmas Season, trans. John Nicolaus Lenker, I (Luther’s Complete Works VII) (Minneapolis:
Luther Press, 1908), 117.
47.BSLK,507–510;BC, 351–354;BC-T 342–344. The words “We are to fear and love
God” that introduce explanations to commandments two through ten echo and stand on
the basis of the first commandment,which Luther interprets, “We are to fear, love, and trust
God above all things.”
48. WA 1:354,7–8; LW 31:40, Thesis 14.
49. Gen. 3:1–5.
50. John 3:3.
51. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 17, cf. 64, 94–95.
52. Rom. 6:23a.
53. John 3:7.
54. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 97.
55. Rom. 6:3–11; Col. 2:11–15.
56. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 79.
57. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 25.
58. Ibid., 9. Cf. Rom. 6.
59. Gen. 2:18.
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Cross Talk: A Feminist Appreciation of Luther’s Theology

Cross Talk: A Feminist Appreciation of Luther’s Theology
by Mary M. Solberg
Dr. Mary Solberg is Assistant Professor of Religion at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota. USA. The following article appeared in the Bangalore Theological Forum, Volume 34, Number 1, June 2002, page, 41-58. Bangalore Theological Forum is published by The United Theological College, Bangalore, India. Used by permission. This lecture was delivered at the United Theological College, Bangalore, on July 3rd, 2001. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
Reflections on another view of Luther
Tracing one’s intellectual or theological ancestry is a worthwhile and honorable pastime. But there are hazards. Chief among them is that, as much as we may come to understand the world within which our historical forbears functioned, we must make all our judgments about them and about the past in the present.
All that we are able to learn about the objects of our study, those now defunct great men (or less commonly, great women) of theology, we learn in terms provided by contemporary reality, a reality that would be utterly foreign to the one from whom we want to claim our inheritance. The foundations for our judgments and explanations may be in centuries past, but however timelessly truthful we are convinced they are, we are irremediably inhabitants of a postmodern, 21st-century world.
Now all of this would be too obvious to mention -- even though its particular consequences hardly ever are -- if we bothered to think about it. Even when we are intellectually honest enough to concede that our "situation" might shape our perception, we seldom have the nerve to find out how. We decline to engage in critical dialogue with others who know both theology and life from another angle. We talk instead with others whose differences from us are not the kind that could ever or would ever correct our errors of vision, theological or other.
There are good theological reasons to make an issue of all this. For people whose faith claims rest as resolutely on incarnation as Christian claims do, the impact our own peculiarly incarnated lives have on the way we do theology -- and therefore on the sort of theology we do -- ought to fascinate us. Convicted of the power of the Holy Spirit to work miracles, even through the most mundane things, and of the creating, recreating power of the Word of God in its multiform instances, we ought to be a good deal less worried that we generally are about preserving and protecting the tradition. It is not a penalty, but a gift, that the Spirit speaks both newly and truly.
Luther’s descendants are people of the Book, and of books -- of tradition, doctrine, language, dispute. We Lutherans take the way we do theology seriously, sometimes more seriously than we take the way we live. We are usually terribly serious about getting our theology right, and very hard on those we believe are wrong. Adamant about the centrality of justification by faith through grace, we sometimes verge on a perverse kind of theological works-righteousness. Outside the theological arena, we suddenly become reticent, shy about noticing the practical, political consequences of our theology on the world we live in.
Across the range of Lutheran activities and attitudes, Martin Luther has generally counted as a principal authority. In serious theological disputes among Luther -- is there any other kind? -- Luther is often quoted or cited more frequently and with greater emphasis than St. Paul or even Jesus.
Almost all Lutheran theological writing has been generated in European or North American academies -- in part, the legacy of Luther’s own concern for learning and education -- and it has been done almost exclusively by European or (more recently) North American men among whom differences of race, economic and social class, and level of education are even less remarkable than their theological differences. It is still very unlikely to occur to most Euro-American Lutheran theologians to consult anyone outside this relatively comfortable, homogeneous coterie on matters of theological moment. The Spirit may blow when and where it will, but on the whole -- it seems to them -- it is more likely to blow (probably in German or English) through the studies and seminars of learned men of the North, than to blow elsewhere or otherwise.
Simmering under all of this is, of course, the volatile question of what purpose our theologizing, Lutheran or otherwise serves, anyway. In The Liberation of Theology, Juan Luis Segundo writes, ‘"A human being who is content with the world will not have the least interest in unmasking the mechanisms that conceal the authentic reality.’" A theologian who is content with the world is unlikely to use the tools of the theological trade to analyze, much less try to fix, what is not perceived to be broken. A theologian who perceives the world to be broken may draw no connection -- ideological, political, or spiritual -- between the theological trade and the state of the world; between who the church thinks it is and how it acts, on the one hand, and the lay of the land where the church resides, on the other. A theologian who laments the brokenness of the world may be persuaded that, in the face of human bondage to sin, there is little point in engaging theology in the struggle toward the reign of God. And, if the truth be told, there are some theologians who, in the face of the reality of suffering, would just rather do theology for its own sake.
Martin Luther is not, and ought not to be, very pleasant company for any of these theologians. To the degree that he has become easy academic company, one could concur with Brazilian Lutheran theologian Walter Altmann that "much of Luther’s liberating and revolutionary impact has been lost."2 In Luther and Liberation. A Latin American Perspective, the first book about Martin Luther by a Latin American, Altmann writes that
Luther himself was quite . . . unconcerned with the preservation of traditions, concerned rather to proclaim the gospel without fear, always challenging new situations. For this reason, the study of Luther is especially -- and perhaps only -- relevant to the extent that it asks what help (or impediment) Luther offers for evangelical witness and life in the face of the challenges that Christians must confront in the present.3
Luther lived and worked during a time of historical upheaval; he both fomented and responded to the dramatic events unfolding in Europe in the 16th century. As theologian and as historical figure, this passionate, difficult, brilliant German monk and his highly unsystematic theology had an incalculable impact on his own time. In order to appropriate what Luther said and wrote for our time, it seems to me, we must keep his 16th-century context in mind. We must also be reading the political, economic, and social signs of our own times. Critical, historical self-awareness is not simply a matter of being "politically correct" in a postmodern world. It is an essential part of intellectual honesty, ethical integrity, and theological rigorousness.
In his time, Luther’s articulation of justification by faith took account of widespread longing for authentic personal faith well as for the reform of the church, sometimes coupled with nationalist protests against Rome. In our contemporary context, I would suggest, church reform is less urgent than the reform of political, social, and economic systems of domination, today exacerbated greatly by the phenomenon of economic globalization.
I am convinced that today, as in the 16th century, Luther’s theology can be a resource for genuine liberation. It is because of this conviction that I undertook the project I would like to share with you today, a project that draws together two quite unlikely conversation partners for the sake of a world that needs to be known and responded to.
The question that moves the project
The question that moves the project is this. What sorts and sources of knowing should we consider compelling as we seek to live faithful lives; in other words, Where do we need to look to learn what we need to know so that we may do what we ought to do? The reflections that follow do not answer these questions, but I hope they may provide some guidance.
Traditional theories of knowledge, called "epistemologies," have focused chiefly on whether we can know anything and, if so, on what grounds we can say we do. Little significance has been attached to questions like, "Who qualifies as a ‘knower,’ and who doesn’t, and why?" Or, "What is ‘real’ knowledge, and who decides what belongs in that category and what doesn’t?" Or, "What is knowledge for?" These are questions that point to the ethical dimensions of knowing.
Feminist philosophers who have written about knowing argue that theories about whether, how, and what we can know function in unavoidably ethical ways. These theories act as lenses, drawing us to notice some things and excluding others from view. Knowing and not-knowing have profound consequences for what we do and don’t do, and for how we justify what we do or don’t do.
Now, of the people with whom one might expect feminist thinkers of this sort to be in conversation, Martin Luther might be one of the last. Remarkably, however, Luther’s theology of the cross offers a solid basis for just such a conversation. Luther’s theology of the cross, sketched out in his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 -- and it was never really more than sketched anywhere in his work4 -- sets the stage for its contribution to the dialogue in three important ways:
(1) First, it critiques "official" theology -- what Luther calls the "theology of glory" -- and human pretensions to know;
(2) second, it announces God’s solidarity with humankind and the value of embodied experience, especially through the incarnation and suffering and death of Jesus the Christ; and
(3) third, it aims to equip humans to live in the real world not least of all by "calling the thing what it actually is" to use Luther’s words in the Heidelberg Disputation.
The framework for knowing that I will propose -- what I call an "epistemology of the cross" -- emerges from a conversation between secular feminist philosophers of knowing and Luther’s theology of the cross. This framework raises and responds to essential questions of power, experience, objectivity, and accountability; in doing so, it aims to help focus our attention on what should govern our knowing, and where we must look to learn it, as we seek to live faithful, responsive lives.
Beginning with Luther
At the heart of Luther’s theology of the cross is a profoundly epistemological question: the question about knowledge of God. For Luther, knowledge of God comes into being at what is by all human standards the least likely place, namely, the cross of Christ. Equally central to Luther’s approach is his conviction that theological reflection occurs only in the light of what transpires between God and humans, humans and God.
On the other hand, salvation is not a question of knowing; justification, or coming to trust God utterly, does not depend on what a person knows theologically or any other way. Moreover, Luther’s own lived experience made it clear to him over and over again that even good theology is imperfect, a human attempt to describe and interpret what God reveals to and through faith in the daily living of it. What "makes" a theologian is his or her daily, creaturely living, not intense study of the "things of God."5 It may be of interest to note, incidentally, that Luther is far more concerned to describe a theologian, than a theology, of the cross.
Faith, too, is existential; it pervades the dailiness of life, makes the living of life possible. In this sense, the knowledge of God born of and borne by faith is for Luther intimately related to knowledge of the world -- call it "ordinary knowledge." Theology that tries to describe faith’s knowledge of God is also intimately related to all other kinds of knowing -- of things, persons, or what we might call "truths." For Luther these realms of knowing are related in several ways and for several reasons.
(1) In one sense, "knowledge of God" and "ordinary knowledge" (including theological knowledge -- I use these clumsy concepts here mainly to distinguish them and so to argue their relatedness) are related because they set each other off; they help define one another by spelling out what each is not.
(2) They also make each other possible, in the sense that each has its proper bailiwick. In other words, faith’s knowledge of God both "frames" other knowing and "frees" the justified knower to know all kinds of "ordinary" things.
(3) Finally, because faith’s knowing functions in these two ways, it also requires and enables accountability. Human knowers must and can act responsibly in the world, in relation to others.
Once we know, with Luther, what we cannot and do not know -- for example: God directly; or anything that contributes to our own justification or salvation -- then what must we know to live our lives as faithful people? The answer to this question is not defined by its content. Rather, the answer is a series of other questions -- I would call them "epistemological" questions, or questions about knowing -- that have to do with the sources and purposes of our knowing. Here, I believe, what I will call an "epistemology of the cross" can help us.
My motives clarified
Before I spell out the elements of this framework, however, let me clarify my motives.
I believe my task as a theologian is to theologize responsibly, not for the marginalized or the "convertible," but rather for those who, like me, want to know "what time it is" and, in the face of that reality, how we can live most faithfully. I am white, North American, and in socio-economic terms, compared to most of the world’s people, extraordinarily privileged. I take seriously my co-responsibility -- moral, political, and intellectual -- for causing and tolerating the oppressive consequences of systems and ideologies from which I benefit much more, and much more often, than I suffer. Such systems and ideologies thrive on ubiquitous discrimination against persons based on their color, their sex, their sexual orientation -- might I be permitted here to add their caste to the list -- and on the gross maldistribution of economic resources and political power within nations and across international boundaries in all directions. I also take quite to heart the ways in which the religious tradition lam part of has fomented, exacerbated, and then walked past much of the suffering caused by people and institutions that have claimed to be the very messengers of God.
I do not plead innocence.
And yet the cause of human liberation deserves and needs more than a guilty plea by those conscious of their relative privilege. It is better served, it seems to me, by the sort of metanoia, or turning-around, that involves rigorous self-examination leading to course corrections. In turn, this requires me to solicit the collaboration of others like me -- Christians or no -- who are in any case committed to being and bearing "good news" to those who most need it.
Elements of an epistemology of the cross
Just a word about the relation between Luther’s theology of the cross and the contemporary proposal that lam calling an "epistemology of the cross." My chief concern here is not to repristinate Luther’s 16th-century work for the 21st century, but rather to appropriate it -- fairly and responsibly -- in order to respond more faithfully to some of the urgent problems facing our societies and our world. I believe that -- in principle at any rate -- Luther would approve. He certainly did not shrink from responding theologically to the world around him.
I will proceed now to describe what I think are key elements of the proposed framework (Recall that it is designed to help us respond to the question, "What sorts and sources of knowing should we consider compelling as we seek to live faithful lives?") Considerations of power, experience, objectivity, and accountability are central. A description of how an epistemology of the cross responds to each of these considerations suggests the sort of "disposition" one would expect this framework to foster.
Power
To examine what an epistemology of the cross has to say about power is principally to underscore the critical element at its center.
Power in epistemological garb affords itself many of the same luxuries it indulges in elsewhere. Insulated by the wealth of possibilities the privileges of power confer, powerful knowers can ignore limits and resolve ambiguities. When they experience limits and ambiguities -- and which of us as human persons does not, from time to time? -- power-knowers read these as humiliations rather than as features of the daily human landscape that should require only sobriety, not courage, to acknowledge.
An epistemology of power -- Luther might call it an "epistemology of glory" -- has all the answers, or thinks it can get them -- if not now, then eventually. If necessary, it takes the liberty of refraining the most difficult questions themselves into more manageable terms. There is a neat partnership between epistemological hubris and the quasi-religious belief in progress. Both want to banish even the thought of human limits. There is a kind of never-look-back, don’t-look-down single-mindedness at work here: reality is what power-knowers say it is.
An epistemology of the cross, by contrast, refuses to ignore or underestimate the infrastructure of knowers, knowledge-generating projects, and "items" of knowledge required to sustain power-knowers’ conviction that there is really only one true story, whether in science, philosophy, or religion. Rather, an epistemology of the cross engages power-epistemology critically. It harbors an intrinsic suspicion of power imaged and experienced in its most common format: domination, or power-over. Fueled by this suspicion, it questions the legitimacy of the powerful as knowers and their right to decide who is and is not "one of them." It scrutinizes whose interests and what causes are served when knowledge is generated in real life. It suspects that there might be a direct relationship between "accepted definitions of ‘reality’ and socially legitimated power."6
The critique emerges not from a neutral space, but from a perspective learned with and from those relegated to the margins of what might be called the "dominant meaning system."7 It challenges the definition of power as domination and insists on the partialness of what can be known by any of its knowers and/or by all of us together. It refuses to recognize or share the global claims power-knowers make; instead it lives -- often uncomfortably -- with ambiguity and doubt.
Power as it is being discussed here is played out in "politics" -- in personal relationships, in institutions like government, family, schools, and religious communities, in international arenas that are as often economic as political. Politics has a great deal to do with decisions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge, who may claim it, and what it is for. Much is at stake. If an epistemology of the cross were about no other task, its contribution to the critique of power-as-domination would justify its existence.
Experience
For an epistemology of the cross, lived experience is the locale and the medium of all knowing. Among the implications this has are the following:
(1) Knowing about people, propositions, even God, occurs in, with, and under the material realities of knowers’ everyday lives. There are certainly other ways of speaking about the daily realities within which knowers come to know; but their concreteness, their "embodied-ness," must never be lost sight of -- something that happens when "experience" sounds more like a concept than an unavoidable part of the human condition.
Korean feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyung writes eloquently of a framework for knowing inscribed by Asian women’s experience of suffering:
The power of [the women’s] story telling lies in its embodied truth. [They] talk about their concrete, historical life experience and not about abstract, metaphysical concepts. Women’s truth [is] generated by their epistemology of the broken body. . . Their bodies record what has happened to their lives. Their bodies remember what it is like to be no-body and what it is like to be a some-body.
(2) Such a framework of knowing emphasizes the "given-ness" of the creaturely life that lived experience articulates. To recognize this "given-ness" does not mean to accept the political or economic status quo, as if it reflected presumed orders of nature; it is rather to acknowledge that limits in knowing, as elsewhere, accompany our (common) existence as human beings.
(3) Partly in view of its critique of power-or privilege-based knowing, and partly because of its acknowledgment of creaturely limits, this cross-based framework recognizes that experience is always interpreted and that any interpretation is likely to be both partial and contested. For example, knowing based simply on "having had X experience" can be problematic.8 There are no guarantees that unreflected experiences, whether from the center or from the margins, will yield up liberatory insights. The experience of marginalization does not guarantee by itself the overcoming of prejudices that some may associate more commonly with the privileged. The authority of lived experience must be subscribed to carefully as well as constantly.
(4) Finally, experiences are lived by particular knowers and, in that sense, have a "tailor-made" quality that invites attentiveness and resists generalization. It is difficult to "collect" experiences into any sort of category that can be said to be true of everyone’s living -- except in a way that loses both its explanatory power, as it departs from each one’s actual living, and its moral value, in accounting for that valuable person, and that one, and that one.
At the same time, a framework of knowing oriented by the cross grants prima facie value to the sort of knowing that comes from the lived experience of struggle at the margins. These are "limit-experiences," places that usually test the integrity and purpose of knowers and the durability and responsiveness of their knowing. Luther interpreted his many personal experiences of suffering in terms as existential as they were theological. He called them evidence of God’s "alien work," which brought Luther the human being to his limits; he believed that only there, in experiencing those limits, could he be convinced to throw himself into the arms of the One he otherwise refused to trust. Only then, he believed, could and did he experience God’s "proper work" -- the grace that was life and made his experience of every day possible. This could happen, Luther said, because of the realized mystery of sinners’ participation in the cross of Jesus Christ, which was itself the participation of the self-revealing God in the cross of human brokenness, the "state of the art" of human living.
What is the epistemological point? Just this: knowing that ignores or papers over our individual and corporate human experiences of the cross is of little value and even less use in a world that testifies daily to the reality of such experiences. An epistemology of the cross takes these "experiences of the cross" as its "permanent standing ground. . . [and the cross as] a symbol of the reality in which [we] participate . . . and into which [we] must again and again be initiated."9
To know truly on the basis of lived experience is to know from the margins -- of life, of sanity, of dignity, of power. Coming to know in this way is possible because and by means of the incarnated mystery of solidarity.
This dimension of an epistemology of the cross shares with feminists a conviction that special value attaches to knowing that emerges from those personal and collective quarters where resistance to injustice and suffering begins with the "knowing" of them.
Objectivity
Traditional science prizes what it calls "objectivity," that perspective from which (it seems to those who prize it) what one sees -- one’s "perception" -- and what is there -- "reality" -- coincide. To be "objective" is, in a real sense, to exercise control, at least the kind measurement and prediction promise. Feminist theories of knowing claim, in contrast, that prevailing cultural and political forces have much to do with what is defined as "objective" and that objectivity is a problematic context-dependent notion in any case.
An epistemology oriented by the cross shares feminists’ skepticism about traditional science ‘s claims about objectivity. But it also has a distinctive epistemological starting point: the foot of the cross. To stand there is not to claim or even to seek the objectivity positive science treasures, nor is it to content itself with the necessary relativization of objectivity as science has defined it. Instead, an epistemology of the cross seeks "to be with the victims.4where it becomes possible to come to know, as theologian William Rankin wryly observes] that it is not the poor who are a problem to the rich but the rich who are a problem to the poor."10
"To come to know" in this way in this sense is to experience what liberation theologians call an "epistemological break."11 By means of a process or an event (it is difficult to define it precisely), one who by all odds could otherwise claim epistemological privilege becomes aware of a complete reversal of the notion of "privilege" finds that an extraordinary kind of truthfulness (which is not "objectivity") attaches to the "partial" perspective glimpsed from the vantage of the struggle of the poor, the discriminated-against, the forgotten-about. the thrown-away. It is "partial" both in its frank partisanship and in its equally frank lack of concern about the "larger picture" whose purported completeness requires including the perspective of the rich, the discriminator, the forgetter, the one who throws away.12
Salvadoran theologian Jon Sobrino describes this "phenomenon" -- which he has both experienced himself and witnessed, as countless European and North American visitors have passed through his San Salvador parish
From the poor [we] receive in a way hardly expected new eyes for seeing the ultimate truth of things and new energies for exploring unknown and dangerous paths. At the very moment of giving [we] find ourselves expressing gratitude for something new and better that [we] have been given. . . Whether this gratuitousness is explicitly referred back to God or remains unidentified, it is clear that in aiding the poor one receives back from them meaning for one’s life.13
As a result of such an "epistemological break," the power of objectivity and the "objectivity" of the powerful must be judged according to new and somehow more stringent standards.
Whether the subjugated have an epistemological prior claim on "truth" is no more at issue than whether they are closer to God or spiritually more developed than those who are not subjugated. But an epistemology of the cross shares with feminist epistemologies the conviction that the place of the least favored -- at the foot of the cross, in all its contemporary forms -- is a better place to start knowing than any place of domination could be. There is much that simply cannot be seen or known -- about how things really are -- without being there.
And yet there are significant difficulties in our getting to that epistemological "there." Feminist philosopher Sandra Harding believes that relatively privileged people can "choose to become ‘marginalized,’ and in so doing can gain a more critical clearer view of themselves as knowers and doers deeply implicated in the fact of others’ marginalization and responsible to collaborate in the transformation that calls for." Those of us who are privileged, she writes, "can learn to think and act not out of the ‘spontaneous consciousness’ of the social locations that history has bestowed on us but out of the traitorous ones we choose. . . ." 14 This initiative -- Harding calls it "reinventing ourselves as ‘other"’15 -- depends on the possibility that we may be capable of embracing, within our individual selves and among us as groups of selves, the "other/s," or marginalized ones. These knowers occupy epistemological standpoints that are salutary precisely because of, and almost in direct relation to. their capacity to subvert dominant knowledge projects.
An epistemology of the cross can offer theologically informed support for this project. To begin with, an epistemology of the cross cannot be used by knowers whose claims to objectivity are predicated on domination, for it harbors a deep suspicion of power-based knowledge claims and those who make them. This cross-based framework for knowing draws our attention and concern toward unexpected places and moments of coming to know. Generally, they are those in which what Douglas John Hall calls "the experience of negation" occurs, ". . . in human suffering and degradation, in poverty and hunger, among the two thirds who starve. . ." 16
We may even discover such places as we look in the mirror and see selves stitched together of some identities that are privileged and of some that are stigmatized. We may discover such places, too, in our ambivalences about the "categories" of persons with whom we share, happily or unhappily, race, nation, religion, gender, caste, sexual orientation, class, and so forth. We may also discover them in the interstices among these individual and corporate identities, where we must often come to terms with dilemmas that seem to pit us against ourselves and one another.
There is no innocent place.
Philosopher Donna Haraway suggests that our strategy must be to "negotiate the very fine line between appropriation of another’s (never innocent) experience and the delicate construction of the just-barely-possible . . . connections that might actually make a difference. . . ."17 Power-brokered objectivity has no role here; humility and a capacity to take risks do. And none of it can be done without hope; one might even call it hope against hope.
In the end, is there any point to discussing objectivity in the context of an epistemology of the cross? If objectivity is defined as what underpins the "one true story position often taken by science or theology, then the answer is No. It is a truism not often honored in science or theology that there is always more than one version of any story. While the speaker with the most expensive sound truck may have something worthwhile to say, one must always consider the source.
An epistemology of the cross would be more comfortable with the kind of "objectivity" described by philosopher Sandra Harding. She calls it "strong objectivity," and its particular strength rests of the participation of many knowers, beginning with the least favored, and requires a commitment to critical examination of the causes of beliefs, especially those that pass for "objective truths."18 Or with Donna Haraway’s understanding of objectivity, which (she argues) is not about transcendent knowing, but about answerability, "not about dis-engagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where ‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is, not in ‘final’ control. . . ."19
Accountability
The theology of the cross on which this epistemological proposal relies in part was and is profoundly relational. For Luther, the relationship of God and humans was the basic framework for meaning, for theology, for humans’ ultimate destiny -- and for every dimension of daily living as individuals and in company with one another. We are, Luther believed, always living "before" or "in the presence of" God (coram Deo). At the same time, we also live "before" or "in the presence of" the world of nature and other humans (coram mundo), a state of things made possible and encompassed by our relationship with God. Our living is never just a private matter.
Accountability within a framework for knowing oriented by the cross emerges from this background. I will describe briefly the several roles it plays.
(1) Earlier I quoted theologian Juan Luis Segundo: "A human being who is content with the world will not have the least interest in unmasking the mechanisms that conceal authentic reality." As a lens on the world around us, an epistemology may be one way to maintain, if not create, contentment with the world -- insofar as it functions to conceal the realities of exclusion and injustice. In its critique of ways of knowing based on power and privilege, an epistemology oriented to the cross expresses the insistence that accountability entails taking steps to become aware of such realities. In this sense it is itself a demand for accountability.
Among the most important dimensions of this critique is its insistence that knower and "knowee" are, in relation to one another and before God, both subjects and objects. To envision the knowing relationship as a non-reciprocal, "subject over against object" one, is not only scientifically faulty but morally irresponsible. An epistemology of the cross exercises a critique that is, in the first instance, a call for this sort of accountability.
(2) By the same token, this critique announces that an epistemology of the cross also requires accountability of itself. This is understood as acknowledgment of implication in and co-responsibility for the reality that privilege-based epistemologies conspire to conceal, intentionally or not. Repeatedly, feminist epistemologies remind us that accountability is the epistemological value we must most passionately uphold -- and (nearly in the same breath) that neither we as knowers, nor descriptions (as knowledge), nor the practices of knowledge-producing (like research) or knowledge-acquiring (like formal education), are "innocent."
To acknowledge our individual and collective, and collaborative, lack of "innocence" means to confess, at the very least, that we have seen/that we do know, and, at the very most, that we have done something. Of course the object -- what we have seen/what we know/what we have done -- makes an enormous difference. Ethically, among other things, it may matter in terms of what we or others judge we must then do. But at the core of the matter is the plain fact that to name and recognize our lack of innocence is to describe ourselves as accountable for who we are and for what we know. An epistemology of the cross shares with feminist epistemologies a deep conviction that we are accountable "non-innocents."
(3) ". . . [T]he liberating function of theological understanding," Jon Sobrino observes, "does not consist in explaining or giving meaning to an existing reality or to the faith as threatened by a particular situation, but in transforming a reality so that it may take on meaning, and the lost or threatened meaning of the faith may thereby also be recovered."20 Theology, in other words, cannot be separated from the ethical and the practical -- not only in its implications but also in its sources and resources. If Sobrino is right as he alludes to Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach, then those who do theology are accountable, not to judge or bless what Sobrino calls "the wretched state of the real world," but to change it.
An epistemology of the cross plays a key role in facilitating this transformational accountability -- not only theologians’ accountability, but that of others committed to the struggle for human dignity. Feminists began their critical work in response to insults and injustices generated -- to paraphrase Sobrino -- by scientific and philosophical understandings that "explained" and "gave meaning to existing realities" of exclusion, especially of women. The tasks of "contestation" to and "deconstruction" of these understandings continue, but they have been augmented by what might be called "passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing."21 Accountability involves both critical and creative, transformational work. If critical accountability’s project is the unmasking, then creative accountability’s project is proposing visions and gathering the handiworkers to discuss, revise, and attempt to realize them.
An epistemology of the cross owes its view of the created world to faith’s conviction of the transformative solidarity of God with the world. In enabling a clearer view of reality, in helping us to recognize our implication in that reality, and in equipping us to act on behalf of human dignity within that reality, this framework expresses and sustains its essential accountability.
Concluding words
I am deeply in your debt for the opportunity share with you some of my work on Luther.
I believe most passionately that we are part of "living traditions," whatever our faith community -- traditions that are like the great life-giving rivers that have sustained human communities for thousands of years. I hope that my contribution has generated some light . . . and perhaps even some heat, and that it may fuel further thought and conversation of matters much too important to leave to others.

End Notes
1 Juan Luis Segundo, The Liberation of Theology, trans, John Drury (Marykooll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1976), p. 10.
2 Walter Altmann, Luther and Liberation: A Latin American Perspective, trans. Mary M, Solberg (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. ix.
3 op. cit. pp. 134-35.
4 According to Joseph E. Vercruysse, Luther himself used the expressions theologia_crucis and theologus crucis (theologian of the cross) in only five texts: "Four of them were written in the spring of 1518, namely the Asterisci Lutheri adversus Obeliscos Eckii, the Lectures on Hebrews, the Resolutiones disputationum de—indulgentiarun virtute and finally the famous Heidelberg Disputation. The fifth one is in the Operationes in Psalmos. Luther’s second course on the Psalms. held from 1519 to 1521." The first four were probably written between February and April. 1518, just before the meeting in Heidelberg. See Vercruysse’s article, "Luther’s Theology of the Cross at the Time of the Heidelberg Disputation." Gregoriarnum 57 (1976):532-548.
5. According to Luther. "Experience alone makes a theologian. . . . It is by living -- no, rather it is by dying and being damned that a theologian is made, not by understanding, reading, or speculating." The first part of the quotation -- "Experience . . . theologian" -- is from LW 54,7 (part of the famous Table Talk compendium): the second part -- "It is by living or speculating" -- is found in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. 1883-) 5,163,28. Cited hereafter as WA. The combination of the two quotes seems both fair and mutually illuminating.
6. Sandra Harding, ‘The Instability of Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory." Signs II, no.4 (l986): 647.
7. Elizabeth Kammarck Minnich. Transforming Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). p. 5.
8. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 199l), p. 311.
9. Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), P. 116.
10. "The Moral Use of Knowledge: Part 2," Plumbline II, no. I (April 1983): 10-11.
11. See, for example, Jon Sobrino, The True Church and the Poor trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. 1984), pp. 24ff.
12. During my time in El Salvador, Central America (1983-86), I was always thunderstruck when, after a group of U.S. visitors had spent a couple of hours listening to the stories of the Mothers of the Disappeared or to officials of the non-governmental Human Rights Commission, at least one earnest soul would take me aside to ask whether "we’re going to get a chance to hear the other side of the story."
13. Jon Sobrino and Juan Hernandez Pico, Theology of Christian Solidarity, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985), p. II
14. Harding, Whose Science?, p. 295.
15. Ibid., pp. 268ff.
16. Hall. p. 151.
17. Simians,. Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. II 3.
18. Whose Science?, pp. 147, 149.
19. op cit., p. 201.
20. op. cit., p. 15.
21. Haraway, op. cit., 191.
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