The Impossibility And the Inevitability Of Good Works:
Preaching Paradox the Lutheran Way
© 2005 Timothy J. Swenson, Arnegard, North Dakota
[1] Introduction
Vitality in the Lutheran way of preaching springs from the tension of paradoxes essential to our human identity. Here we’ll look at the tension in one of those paradoxes: “The Impossibility and the Inevitability of Good Works.” We’ll utilize Theses One and Eleven from Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation to plant firmly in the earth one pole of the paradox. We’ll anchor the other solidly in the rock of Christ using a quote from Regin Prenter regarding “faith in Christ.” Preaching that resolves the paradox’s tension aggravates humanity’s identity crisis. Therefore—going into the paradox—we must first look at
2) the nature of paradox and some examples;
5) humanity’s identity crisis—the law;
10) the competing stories: religion and faith (HT. G. Forde)
18) the sinner’s use of the law, grace, and faith.
23) The Paradox: Planted and Anchored
Coming out of the paradox, we’ll discover
27) God’s use of the law, grace, and faith;
33) the jealous story: religion’s acquisitive eye;
36) our human identity resolved—the gospel;
43) in conclusion.
Preaching the Lutheran way holds, unresolved, the paradoxical tension and its vitality delivers life and identity to human creatures with a terminal condition: mortality. It returns them to the gift of creation—for the time being.
[2] The Nature of Paradox
Paradox is the necessity of declaring two contradictory statements in order to speak the truth. Paradox holds opposing and negating poles together in tension. In the Lutheran way, paradox describes the truth of our human identity. There is Luther’s definition of a Christian:
"A Christian is the perfectly free lord of all subject to none. And,
the Christian is the perfectly bound servant of all, subject to all."
There is this truth of our paradoxical identity: “simul iustus et peccator.” Luther continued to sharpen and extend this paradox until it not only meant “simultaneously saint and sinner,” but also totally (100%) saint and totally (100%) sinner—at the same time. So, in the Lutheran way, we can declare our title’s paradox: “The Impossibility and the Inevitability of Good Works”—a paradox of creaturely activity.
[3] The religious story compels “good works” of charity or religious discipline as measured by the law if God’s grace is to be earned or completed. “Good works” are the religious antidote for the human condition. The first pole of our title’s paradox declares this impossible. Its second pole, making its declaration from faith’s story, promises that “good works” fulfilling the law cannot help but be done.
[4] Preaching, then, can come out of two different stories: either religion’s story, which is a theology of glory, or the faith story, which is the Lutheran way where preachers are theologians of the cross. Preaching religion demands the necessity of good works while doubting they’re evitable. Preaching faith, though, declares good works impossible while trusting they’re inevitable. In religion’s story, preaching resolves the paradox, loses the truth, and aggravates humanity’s identity crisis. In faith’s story, preachers maintain the paradox, declare the truth, and resolve humanity’s identity crisis. The Lutheran way, centered as it is in the midst of paradox, gives humanity a 200% identity: totally sinner PLUS totally saint (HT. Steve Paulson). So let’s look at how humanity got into its identity crisis.
[5] The Human Identity Crisis—the Law
Humanity has an identity crisis: we’re creatures, not creators! This identity crisis has been in place since our Edenic progenitors succumbed to the serpent’s seduction. Acting on their own experience (…the tree was a delight to the eyes) and not God’s promise (…did God really say?), Adam and Eve ate the fruit and obtained knowledge of good and evil. That is, they came to know all things, especially a then-to-fore hidden reality: “There Is A God, and You’re Not It.”
[6] Adam and Eve looked at one another to see that as creatures they stood in naked mortality before an eternal Creator God clothed in immortality. Grabbing up some fig leaves, they hid their fear and shame of having nothing—not even life—in themselves. When confronted by God as to why they were hiding, our progenitors in sin began to blame each other, the serpent, and God (…the woman that You gave me) and sought to justify themselves (I was afraid… and I hid myself).
[7] The crisis of being mere mortal creatures and not divine creators like God has afflicted humanity’s identity since the time of our progenitors. In discontent with their creatureliness—ashamed of their nakedness and afraid of their mortality—the people of each generation have clutched at metaphorical fig leaves, attempting to mask the crisis, and appear as beings other than the creatures they are. So, through the years, religion came, reliably and comfortably, to dispense such fig leaves; and, in return, to demand such things as loyalty, allegiance, discipleship, and—yes—good works.
[8] By the sixteenth century religion had settled into a more or less complacent complicity in this cloaking of our mortal identity crisis: In exchange for a person’s good works done according to the law, religion would measure and determine that person’s progress from being a condemned-to-death-sinner toward being an alive-forever-saint. To this fig-leaf-charade of religiosity, Martin Luther proposed a different story; one something like this: “Let’s not have religion but faith; if humanity is to have a true identity, the paradoxes with their tension must be maintained in faith by preaching.”
[9] Traditional religious understandings began to fall beneath the Lutheran way: Justification by Grace Alone through Faith Alone in Christ Alone apart from works of the law. Ever since, religion has been at work to derail the Lutheran way and remain the dominant story. These two stories propose competing solutions to the human identity crisis. Their respective preachers proclaim opposing narratives.
[10] The Competing Stories: Religion and Faith
Let’s explore these opposing narratives: “Religion” and “Faith.” Humanity works one; God works the other. One ascends; the other descends. Religion looks to experience, in spite of God’s promise. Faith holds to God’s promise, in spite of experience. One begins in pretense and ends in despair. The other reveals truth and gives birth to hope.
[11] Religion is the human work of subscribing to doctrines and belief systems (law) by which persons convince themselves that through right behavior and right thinking they might cover their mortality with “good works.” No longer feeling naked, and their identity as creatures disguised, they strive to put their earthly, creaturely existence behind them and—with their false credentials firmly in place—claim some measure of godhood and demand entry to the heavens.
[12] Religion’s biblical paradigm is the Tower of Babel. Discontent with their creaturely existence and confident of their divine pretensions, the people sought to impress the world and build an edifice high enough to take heaven by storm and grasp the godhood their progenitors once glimpsed. God put an end to their endeavor by taking away the understanding of their common language, dividing and scattering them to the ends of the earth. The Babel effort endured, however, as the biblical characters continued to reach toward heaven with altars on hilltops and towering temples.
[13] Religion receives and records a person’s good works and, in exchange, returns a report measuring and determining that person’s progress from earth to heaven, from being a condemned-to-death sinner to being an alive-forever-saint with divine pretensions. Religion drives the sinner on the move. Not content with their being creatures, religion forces sinners on a journey in search of a saintly identity. Preaching the religion story aggravates the identity crisis by proclaiming the necessity of good works while, in religious suspicion, demanding that they be seen and recorded. Preachers in this story resolve the paradox in favor of moving from one pole to the other, disregarding the truth about God and humanity.
[14] Faith, though, is an entirely different matter. It is the work of God: God coming down to us and confronting us; and, in that confrontation, revealing the truth about ourselves as mortals and himself as immortal God. In this revelatory instant we are grasped by the reality of an inescapable paradox: we are simultaneously, totally saint and totally sinner. Astonishingly, we have citizenship in two kingdoms: the kingdom of the world, where we are mortal creatures, dead in our sin; and the kingdom of God, where we are everlasting saints, alive in Christ’s righteousness.
[15] We receive a glimpse of God’s solution to our identity crisis and it isn’t about making progress on some religious continuum from sinner to saint. God’s solution: the sinner must die so that the saint can be raised up, death and resurrection. So—for the time being—faith is in the revelation that we’re dead in sin (mortal), but alive in Christ (immortal).
[16] Faith’s biblical paradigm is the Incarnation. Not counting godhood a thing to be grasped, Jesus came down from heaven and became human with all its consequences. He declared to us the nearness of God’s kingdom, commanding the end of our upward religious quests (repent!) and ordering us to live in this new reality (believe!). As proof of His Word’s effectiveness, Jesus delivered to us both the cause and effect of our new situation: “your sins are forgiven.” Acting like our Edenic progenitors—looking to our own experience and not living in God’s promise—we of humanity did not want our religion to end, so we silenced Jesus by enforcing on him the consequence of sin humanity desired to escape—death to the sinner. But, that faith would be complete, God raised Jesus from the dead to the immortal life which saints have for eternity. In an act of healing at Pentecost, God reversed Babel’s curse, giving back to humanity a common understanding of the language of faith, uniting and gathering from the ends of the earth all that hear this proclamation of good news (your sins are forgiven for Jesus’ sake!) and experience the truth about themselves and God.
[17] Faith locates a person’s “works” right in their creatureliness where real sinners know they can’t call them “good.” Faith locates a person’s saintliness: right there in Christ. Now given definitive location, the person has no need to be on the move in search of an identity. Preaching this story resolves the identity crisis by proclaiming the impossibility of good works while declaring with complete and utter confidence their inevitability even if they remain hidden. Here preaching springs from the paradox’s tension so that hearers receive both faith and their identity.
[18] The Sinner’s Use of Law, Grace, and Faith
When sinners get religion and wrest the use of the law from God, they come to misunderstand and misuse the law, grace, and faith. They see in the law a means to attain righteousness through “good works.” They see in the law the way to move from sin to righteousness, from earth to heaven, from death to life, from mortality to immortality, and from creature-hood to godhood. If the law is understood as the “way,” then grace is like fuel to traverse the way and faith is the degree of the sinner’s commitment. Both, then, are quantifiable and visible through “good works.”
[19] Envision the religious situation like this: the law is a ladder for the sinner to scale the wall between earth and heaven. So there can be room for the work of Christ, the ladder is just a little too short and Jesus Christ makes up the difference. Depending on the form of religiosity to which one subscribes, Jesus either stands at the foot of the ladder and his work is to give the sinner a leg up; or he sits atop the wall reaching down to give one a boost at the end of the ladder. The important part is the sinner’s climb on the ladder, each rung’s advance measured by the appropriate “good works.” Religion then receives and records the good works, and returns a report on the progress from earth to heaven, from being a condemned-to-death sinner to being an alive-forever-saint.
[20] The religion story conceives of grace as fuel for, or a substance applied to, the sinner’s free will. That free will, when properly motivated through preaching, is then able to move the person on the climb up the ladder of the law. This misunderstanding makes of grace a noun, something like a hypodermic injection of ability or a religious vitamin or pep pill to be ingested. Grace empowers or energizes the human will. Grace is quantified by the accumulation of “good” around the sinner.
[21] For the religious sinner, faith has direction. It originates in the sinner, belongs to the sinner, and is directed by the sinner toward something or someone e.g. God, Jesus, church, creed, etc. Faith is the religious sinner’s commitment to continuing in that direction and/or remaining loyal in the relationship. The religious sinner quantifies faith by measuring the amount of hardship and adversity endured, or the amount of sacrifice made, while still adhering to, or continuing toward, the goal.
[22] When sinners get religion, they can’t stand living in the paradox and go on the move. Abandoning creation and straining toward heaven, they have neither one—just the naked creaturely self and its pretensions. Preaching religion’s story has neither vitality nor truth because it releases the paradox’s tension and agrees with the sinner’s pretensions. Its preachers become politicians, prophets, or priests: whatever role is necessary to get the free will on the move and keep it moving. They sell the idea of progress in exchange for allegiance and loyalty, commitment and discipleship. Politicians measure progress through growing institutions and organizations; prophets judge progress through improving morality; and priests prescribe progress in the therapeutically healthier self.
[23] The Paradox: Planted and Anchored
So that preaching will have vitality and truth, the poles of the paradox must hold fast, the tension between them maintained, and the paradox abides… unresolved. Theses One and Eleven from Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation plant firmly in the earth this pole of the paradox: “The Impossibility of Good Works.” In them, Luther states respectively:
“The law of God, the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance man on his way to righteousness, but rather hinders him.”
And,
“Arrogance cannot be avoided or true hope be present unless the judgment of condemnation is feared in every work.”
[24] Here, we are confronted with the truth: no matter how much the sinner yearns to use the law and go on the move to avoid the consequences of being a creature, it’s not possible to use the law in order to advance in righteousness. The law can’t be used by the sinner as the way to escape mortality, judgment, and death. Why not? Because the attempt to do so results in either the sinner’s arrogance over and against God and creation, or it takes away hope by leaving the sinner solely reliant on the sinner’s own abilities, i.e. the naked creaturely self and its pretensions. In the first, God’s grace and Christ’s work are reduced to mere supplements to the human will—arrogance, and in the second it’s unattainable because the law’s demands never cease—despair. Therefore, the only salutary way is to have the law do its proper work on the sinner in creation; that is, the condemnation of every work, even the so-called “good” works. Thus, this pole of the paradox is planted firmly in the earth, planted as deep as the sinner’s grave where no works, not even good ones, are possible.
[25] Now, let’s anchor the far pole of the paradox—“The Inevitability of Good Works”—solidly in the rock of Christ with these words from Regin Prenter (HT. Dick Smith):
“Faith in Christ is the real presence of Christ in us as a redeeming reality which as an invisible and incomprehensible but divine reality tears us away from and places us in contrast to all other realities.”
[26] This pole of the paradox makes a declaration straight from faith’s story. Here the saint is located in Christ, anchored solidly in that rock—driven as deep as nails in a cross, and the sinner is completely dead. The divine reality of Christ’s presence has ripped away all the contrasting realities: not sin but righteousness, not law but the law’s end in its fulfillment, not death but life, not mortality but immortality. The real presence of Christ brings the eschatological event into the present, rends the curtain of time, and collapses all temporal barriers. What God promises, God delivers—no matter what witness our experience bears or what arguments our reason proposes. This divine reality cannot help but produce good works. They are the laughter of exultation as faith in Christ rejoices. Their presence is as inevitable in such a saint as the water, rich and abundant, inevitably gushed from the rock when commanded by the Word of God from Moses’ mouth in the midst of the wilderness. The saint lives in Christ by faith alone, having complete and utter confidence for the presence of good works—even if they are hidden.
[27] God’s Use of the Law, Grace, and Faith
When God makes saints in faith and properly uses the law on sinners, they come to understand God’s use of the law, grace, and faith. They see in the law God ordering his creation out of chaos and ordering its mortal sinners to death. The law is not theirs to use in quantitative measurement, but God’s to use in qualitative actions. Properly located in both Christ and creation, these 100% saints PLUS 100% sinners are 200% human creatures. Each creature knows grace not as a noun but a verb (HT: Jim Nestingen); and it knows faith—not as the sinner’s pretentious degree of commitment to a goal—but as being held in a redeeming reality. The human creature can trust that, just as good works aren’t necessary because they’re impossible to perform, they’re none-the-less inevitably present within that redeeming reality.
[28] Envision the situation like this: there’s a wall between earth and heaven but there’s no ladder of the law for sinners to use in surmounting it. Instead, God uses the law to judge, condemn, and execute mortal sinners with their divine pretensions (repent!). There, in the humility of death, Christ seizes them from the depths of the grave where no work but his is possible and gives these dead sinners new life in the resurrection (believe!). In coming out of the grave, the new saints find themselves on heaven’s side of the wall. No human work of climbing the way of the law’s ladder from sinner to saint as measured by “good works” accomplished that event. Only God’s work of dealing death and resurrection in Christ wrought that reality.
[29] In this reality, grace is not a substance applied to a sinner’s free will. Ignoring the myth of free will—for the will is so bound to the sinner’s escape from mortality that there is but one solution—God does the only thing possible: he graces. That is, he delivers the lost and condemned person from bondage to sin, death, and the devil and binds them to Christ in everlasting innocence, righteousness and blessedness. Grace is a verb, not a noun. It is an action, not a substance. That God graces is evident in the death of sinners and the resurrection of saints, when he transfers them from one kingdom to the other.
[30] For the 200% creature as saint and sinner, faith is location. Faith does not belong to the creature; it originates in the presence of someone else, specifically the presence of Christ. For the creature, faith has no need of direction, it can’t go anywhere. Christ, faith’s owner, isn’t going anyway apart from the creature he’s claimed With no directive impulse of its own, the creature lives and dies without the need for quantifiable progress—existing in the qualitatively different reality of dying and rising in Christ.
[31] When God makes saints in faith and properly uses the law on sinners, they’re located entirely in the paradox and can’t be sinners-on-the-move. Already given heaven, the human creature stays in creation and enjoys both—content with having it all through Christ and being set free by Christ’s truth.
[32] Preaching this story has both vitality and truth as it springs from paradoxical tension and continues in the Lutheran way. Here, God uses preachers to deliver his promise: salvation by grace through faith in Christ. Here, preachers are instruments of emancipation as they declare the Word (“Your sins are forgiven for Jesus’ sake!”) which frees sinners enslaved to the myth of free will by putting them to death so that they will be raised to the freedom of the saint’s new life bound to Christ and hidden in his presence. Here good works are hidden as well, in order to protect the creature’s newly resolved identity.
[33] The Jealous Story: Religion’s Acquisitive Eye
The religious story cannot help but see all that faith has and all that the creature enjoys and accomplishes. Religion becomes jealous and covets faith’s and the creature’s works. Casting about an acquisitive eye, religion latches on to whatever it can call good, claiming that work for its own with insatiable acquisitiveness. Religion’s jealousy steals away the creature’s enjoyment of creation, diminishing the creature to a mere sinner-on-the-move, and ensnaring the sinner in religion’s story once again.
[34] Therefore, to protect the creature’s identity, good works are hidden from its sight and knowledge. Witness Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats at the eschaton: the sheep had no knowledge of the good works they’d done, Jesus had to reveal those works. (Mt 25) The story is Jesus’ parabolic commentary upon his earlier rubric concerning good works: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” (Mt 6) Just as the sheep had to have their "good works" revealed to them, the creature will only know the good works God has prepared beforehand for his creatures to do (Eph 2) when those works are revealed at the eschaton. Until then, good works remain hidden so that all can depend upon Christ and his faith.
[35] Religion, though, is as indiscriminate as it is acquisitive. It will call “good” any work done under the law. Whether such work is actually good, or not, religion never succeeds at enjoying the possessions of faith and the creature. Driven by the insatiable demands of the law, the religious sinner-on-the-move knows no peace as it loses the creature’s contentment. This sinner has no rest until God graces the sinner once again—driving the sinner in humility to the grave (repent!) and raising the saint to walk in the newness of faith in Christ (believe!).
[36] Our Human Identity Resolved—the Gospel
To hear the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to receive a double gift. We commonly acknowledge that the faith worked by such hearing results in a heavenly life for eternity; that is its first gift. The second gift comes from what is not commonly acknowledged; that is, the faith worked by such hearing gives creation back to us as a gift for us to enjoy for the time being. We can be, once again, merely creatures—just as our Edenic progenitors were before their impromptu fruit salad.
[37] This is the delight of the Lutheran way, the joy of preaching faith’s story: that in Christ, God gives it all to us—both heaven and earth. We have an identity that transcends any religious ontology. Our human identity crisis, initiated when Adam plucked a low-hanging fruit from God’s tree, was resolved when Adam’s children pierced Christ as a low-hanging fruit on a man-made tree. And God Raised Him From The Dead! Not to bring vengeance upon his betrayers, but to appear among them and say, “Peace be with you!” So, in Christ we have it all: lord and servant, sinner and saint, mortality and immortality—a 200% existence! We’ve received so much we can even give thanks that: “There Is A God and We’re Not It!”
[38] Restored to our vocation as creatures, we can actually enjoy the two-fisted way that God the Creator grabs hold of his creation in love and orders both it and his creatures. Working with the law of his left hand rule—justice; and the gospel of his right hand rule—mercy; God loves that which he created, that which he called into being from nothingness. Our eyes are open to see that God’s love is not mere sentiment but a force every bit as active, verbal, and verb-like as God’s grace.
[39] The joy and delight we take in receiving creation back is doubled when creation and our neighbors get us back as gifts. Freed from the necessity of good works as an issue of salvation, we and our neighbors are given each other as servants and co-workers with God in bringing about a trustworthy creation. Freed from the pretensions of the naked self, we and our neighbors enjoy mutual confrontation, consolation, and admonition as we acknowledge the working of good among us. Such good is a matter of character, community, and compassion, but not salvation. Having nothing—not even life—in ourselves, we are, once again, dependent creatures—one upon the other and all upon God.
[40] Through the multitude of vocations God gives his creatures, we’re put to work. God charges us, as instruments of his left and right hand rule, to love his creation. Seeing that everyone gets what they deserve and deserves what they get is our task of justice. Yet justice cannot rule alone for, to itself, the rule of justice drives to tyranny. So, mercy must rule as well; but it, too, cannot rule alone. Alone, the rule of mercy lapses into anarchy. Here, then, is yet another paradox to hold in tension: justice and mercy. In that difficult, impossible-for-creatures-to-maintain, paradoxical tension between justice and mercy, we come to know the trials of love. Careening between the poles of tyranny and anarchy, we creatures can only trust in the creation-sustaining-redeeming work of our Creator God who is love itself.
[41] Such is the life delivered through the preaching of the Gospel in faith’s story. This preaching reveals our human identity as saint and sinner, a 200% existence, while maintaining the tension of the paradoxes. Preaching paradox in the Lutheran way delivers faith, locating the creature revealed in creation while hidden in Christ—for the time being.
[42] In Jesus Christ, God puts an end to our "heaven-storming-endeavors" and turns us back into creation to live as creatures totally dependent upon one another. We are humbled, completely and absolutely, by our need for love. Not only are we dependent upon the neighbor for justice in the provision of "daily bread," e.g. food, shelter, clothing, & security; but we also depend upon the neighbor to give voice to mercy in preaching God's saving Word to us, i.e. "Your sins are forgiven for Jesus' sake." As Luther wrote: "We all are beggars. This is true."
[43] In Conclusion
With all that’s delivered by preaching in the Lutheran way: a truthful identity and the creaturely freedom to enjoy heaven and earth, one must wonder why more preachers don’t operate as instruments of emancipation but instead function as politicians, prophets, or priests? One could speculate that religion remains the dominant story and not faith as the Lutheran way is being undone. One could speculate as well about the character of the preacher and that perhaps the preacher finds emancipator a more difficult role than politician, prophet or priest. But in the end one would come to the realization that preachers, too—just like their hearers—act on that which is a delight to their eyes rather than contend with the hidden-ness of God’s promise. Glory remains the serpent’s most potent seduction. And so together we say—that the other might hear: “Your sins are forgiven for Jesus sake!”
The Impossibility
And the Inevitability
Of Good Works:
Preaching Paradox the Lutheran Way
© 2005 Timothy J. Swenson, Arnegard, North Dakota
