Give to Caesar

“Let me see the money you pay the tax with?” They handed him a denarius, and he said, “Whose head is this? Whose name?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. He said to them, “Very well, give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and God what belongs to God.”

Matthew 22:19 - 21

Not unusually for the Pharisees and Herodians, they set out to trap Jesus. And it is a clever trap. But it is a lot more than the paying of taxes.

Two things strike me. The need to give credit where credit’s due. This is a maxim worth remembering. Just turning our words into positive comments can be a challenge when we see the good work being done by others. It may not have been done the way we would have done it, perhaps not even as well as we might do it, but credit must be given where it’s due.

Some people can live long lives and yet are still unable to fathom the gift that others have been to them. The people who walk with us in our lives are not stepping stones, they are companions. For better or worse our companions guide, support, nourish, encourage, cajole us. Their relationships with us are gifts. But acknowledging those gifts is often far from our minds. There are those moments when a genuine expression of gratitude is offered. Is it enough?

The words of solace, of comfort, the words that push and growl, the words that soothe, that correct and praise, the gestures that heal and calm, the looks that assure and encourage. All of these gifts are not the sum of who I am as a person, but they certainly add to and build up and pull me together. As an adult I need to be able to offer these same gifts generously to others, and to reflect and acknowledge those who passed them on to me.

Our children have a right and an obligation to thank those who contribute in their growth as a person. Credit must be given where it is due. We must give thanks to the God who created us, loves us – and this we pay with our whole selves, our whole being.

Secondly, there is the deeper dichotomy that we all experience when our allegiances are challenged by two competing ideologies or values. Perhaps professional and personal life; faith and religion; love and marriage; praxis and practice; sarx and soma; dual nationality. There are situations where we may have an ideal and a reality that are somewhat different. This is what stymied the Jews. They struggled between the Law and love. Ideally obedience to the Law would result in a love of God and neighbour. It failed then as our own version of Christian law is failing now.

If we choose Jesus, we choose love. That is the Great Commandment.

Peter Douglas

MARTIN LUTHER’S NEW RELIGION: LUTHER’S TEACHING ON JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE DEMANDED A COMPLETE RESHAPING OF CHRISTIANITY

11 October 2017  by Richard Rex

The quincentenary of Luther’s historic protest in Wittenberg is a good moment to clarify what he was about. It was not indulgences. What mattered about the Ninety-Five Theses he launched against indulgences was that the ensuing furore made Luther a celebrity. This had two effects. The well-known one is that it made him a hot property in the growing publishing industry. Rather less well-known is that it gave him the confidence to pursue his own theological insights in more innovative and disruptive directions. His central doctrine, “justification by faith alone”, was formulated not before the Ninety-Five Theses, but in the interval between then and the following Easter. It took another two or three years for the full implications of this doctrine to dawn even on Luther, but its radical potential was clear from the start. The papal legate and theologian Cardinal Cajetan intuitively identified the seeds of a new religion in it when he met Luther at Augsburg in October 1518.

Luther’s key doctrine is deceptively simple. What justification by faith alone definitely does not mean is what perhaps everyone who has ever encountered the idea for the first time immediately thinks: “Ah, then – so as long as I have ‘faith’, it doesn’t matter what I do. I’ll go to heaven anyway.” Luther and the various Protestant Reformers who came after him unanimously insisted that the justifying faith that they preached was a faith which necessarily, by its very nature, bore fruit in good works and charity. It was not a licence for “antinomianism”, for the blithe disregard of moral principles and obligations.

The essence of Luther’s teaching was found in his conception of faith. For what he meant by faith was not the infusion into the soul of intellectual assent to the principles or claims of Christianity, to the articles of faith set out in the creed. For him, it was specifically the certainty of any given individual Christian that, by believing, he or she enjoyed the saving grace of Christ. This was an idea scholastic theologians termed “certainty of grace”. They had unanimously concluded, in a consensus stretching over several centuries, that the individual Christian could not enjoy such certainty of grace (absolute, infallible certainty – the kind both they and Luther were talking about) except by some special, personal revelation from God. Luther, by contrast, held that this certainty was engendered in every real Christian by the operation of grace itself. Luther’s “faith” was certainty of grace.

This doctrine of certainty is now and was then the most important difference between the Lutheran and the Roman Catholic theological understandings of grace. Luther’s demand for certainty explains his insistence that justification was by faith “alone” – without any human contribution or co-operation on the part of the believer. That which was human was necessarily corrupted or impaired by Original Sin, and was therefore necessarily unreliable. If a human element was involved in any way in justification, the process would be flawed by a sliver of uncertainty that would make certainty of grace impossible. So, “good works” could not have any place in the process. Neither could “free will”. If human free will was involved, the weakness of the will rendered the outcome uncertain.

Luther’s rhetorically charged denunciations of “good works” and “free will” appalled some readers, such as Thomas More and John Fisher, but were designed to drive home the message. Only by excluding the flawed human element from the process could Luther render the operation of justifying grace something about which the Christian, relying therefore solely upon the divine, could have absolute certainty.

The act of faith was still, at its core, an act of intellectual assent. But its focus was now the “gospel”, the promise of salvation that Christ made to those who repented and believed. All that was needed to benefit from that offer was to believe the promise. And because God was necessarily truthful and trustworthy, believing in the promise, in the gospel, was in one sense perfectly easy. Indeed, as Luther emphasised, the only difficulty lay in accepting that it really was so easy. For this demanded accepting one’s own utter incapacity, as a sinful human being, to contribute one iota towards one’s own justification.

And that was a huge blow to self-esteem. To realise one’s incapacity for good was, paradoxically, precisely to accept that God alone could justify: and that was faith, that was justification, that was certainty. Of course, even this belief was not in itself the achievement of the believer. It was an action performed in the faithful by the grace and will of God. Otherwise, it was impossible.

This intuition about the workings of grace put the medieval understanding of the sacraments in doubt. They could no longer be seen as channels or vehicles of grace. Luther reconfigured them as tangible signs of the specific promise of the gospel in which Christians were called to believe. By the end of 1520, he saw only two of the traditional seven as sacraments in any proper sense: baptism and the Eucharist. The rite of penance was almost sacramental, but it was in effect merely preaching the gospel in an individual rather than a collective context. Guiding a soul in confession was just a bespoke, one-on-one form of preaching. The two genuine sacraments, however, combined the promise of salvation with a visible ritual sign to help the mind to grasp the promise more firmly by means of the imagination. “This is my blood, shed for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins …” was rendered more accessible by the proffering of the eucharistic cup to the believer. Hence Luther’s insistence on giving Communion “in both kinds” to the congregation.

Human sinfulness was, for Luther, indelibly inscribed in human flesh. According to his reading of St Paul, not even baptism uprooted Original Sin from the human person. This deep-seated flaw also explained the unreliability of human authority in matters of doctrine. For many years, one of Luther’s favourite scriptural citations was omnis homo mendax – “all men are liars”. All human teaching authority was therefore prone to error. Fathers, theologians, popes and councils notoriously contradicted each other, so no human authority could be relied upon to resolve doctrinal disagreements. Only the Bible, the pure Word of God, was divinely guaranteed truth. Sola scriptura (scripture alone) was thus conjoined with sola fides (faith alone) at the foundations of his theological system.

The persistence of sin in the flesh and therefore in the person explains another of Luther’s powerful paradoxes: that the Christian remains in this life, in the fullest sense, both justified and a sinner. Only the death of the body could free the believer completely from the taint of sin. But the moment it did so, there was no more sin or taint to be redeemed or purified, and therefore no need for pur­gatorial suffering. At a stroke, the entire intercessory economy of late-medieval Catholicism was swept away. Prayers and Masses for the dead, indulgences, confraternities, monasteries: it was all useless. The complete reshaping of everyday worship that arose from this and from the new understanding of the sacraments was what constituted “the Reformation”, the visible emergence of alternative versions of the Christian religion.

When Luther refused to recant his disturbing ideas, he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X. In return, he denounced the papacy as Antichrist plc. After his death, the anathemas of the Council of Trent snuffed out whatever faint hopes of compro­mise lingered on. And the mutual goodwill of ecumenical negotiations since Vatican II has not succeeded in bridging the theological gulf.

In the wider body of his teaching there remained much in common with Roman Catholicism. Even within the narrower range of his distinctive theological insights there was much that might have borne fruit within Catholicism, had it been developed in other ways, and without the sundering intensity of a man who seemed to assume there was one exception to the principle of omnis homo mendax. As it turned out, Cardinal Cajetan got it right. It was a new religion.

Richard Rex is Professor of Reformation History at the University of Cambridge. His book The Making of Martin Luther is newly published by Princeton University Press. This article appeared in the Tablet of 14 October 2017.