[1] What does theology have to do with ethics? The significance of this question might not be as pressing for Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians as it is for Lutheran theologians and ethicists. Roman Catholic theology has a history of connecting doctrine with moral teachings. Similarly, Reformed theology has historically insisted on the relation of doctrine to the “third use of the law,” or specifically the type of behavior that Christians ought to embody. Lutheran theology digresses from this western theological consensus. Lutheran ethics is sometimes considered “antinomian” (anti-law). Some Lutherans seem to think that Christians’ behavior after justification is subject to no law; the justified sinner is oriented spontaneously to the good. In this paper I focus on a particular model of Lutheran theology, what I call the “signature Lutheran consensus,” as one that denies any connection between theology and ethics. I then describe an alternative model, one that Professor Amy Carr and I described in our book, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Baylor University Press 2023) that makes the case that theology provides a space for thinking clearly and honestly about ethics.
The Signature Lutheran Consensus
[2] I distinctly recall the first time I was made explicitly aware of the Lutheran disjunction between theology and ethics. I was a student in a rather large lecture class on theology at the University of Tübingen. The instructor was Professor Eberhard Jüngel, the German Lutheran theologian from the former East Germany, who made an apologetics for faith against atheism and a Lutheran theological theory of language central to his theology. I still consider Jüngel one of the most creative and literarily inspiring theologians I have ever read. I cannot remember the precise discussion in which Jüngel made the remark that would inspire my reflection for decades, but I recall the comment. Jüngel exclaimed, “Theology has nothing to do with ethics.”[1] The indicative claim etched its truth into my soul. This was the gospel truth, the signature claim of Lutheran theology that lifted systematic theology up as the apex of the theological curriculum, insisting on the theoretical truth of doctrine and denying any connection to the lived reality of the Christian life.
[3] The claim that theology has nothing to do with ethics stuck with me. I would later devote my research to its analysis. Why could there be no connection between theology and ethics? Was this a category mistake, akin to Kant’s prohibition against applying a category of the understanding to the divine reality?
[4] The way I have come to understand (although disagree with) the common Lutheran disjunction between theology and ethics has to do with a particular historical-theological development. This development began in Protestant theology faculties in German universities at the turn of the twentieth century and had to do with a new approach to Martin Luther. Karl Holl, the church historian in Berlin, is acknowledged as founder of the Luther Renaissance with his study of Luther that he published in 1917 (the year of the four-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and a year that anticipated Germany’s loss in World War I in 1918). In his book, What Did Luther Understand by Religion?, Holl aimed to capture Luther’s experience of justification as a religious experience that Luther would subsequently conceptualize as the doctrine of justification.[2] Holl described how Luther experienced the divine wrath meted on the sinner who could not fulfill the divine command for a union of wills between human and divine. Holl’s description stopped short of an experience of divine love. For Holl, the experience of grace was a paradox. The unity of wills required the self’s denial of self, a happening that only the divine wrath could execute. At the moment of the divine wrath’s annihilation of the self, the divine command was fulfilled. Yet the self could not even hope for the divine love that would sustain the self through its annihilation. It could only endure the divine wrath directed at the self. No self could be sustained through the experience of wrath so that it could eventually enjoy the benefits of divine love that followed the wrath.
[5] Holl’s description of Luther’s religious experience became the template for the later Lutheran doctrinal trope of “law and gospel.” The development of the law/gospel paradigm had to do with charting the shift from Luther’s experience of terror under the divine wrath to subsequent relief when the gospel effected the sinner’s forgiveness. German Lutheran theologians, like Oswald Bayer, claimed that the experience of justification was the result of an audition of the word of the gospel.[3] The promissio, according to Bayer, was God’s word of forgiveness that was efficacious in creating the reality of forgiveness. The word of law structurally preceded the gospel as simultaneously identifying the sinner’s perdition under the divine law and in preparing the sinner for the gospel (the preparatio evangelii). The structure of the sinner’s experience consisted of two modes of divinity’s relation to the sinner, first through the word of law that exposed the sinner’s sin and then the word of gospel that effected forgiveness. This logic—from law to gospel, from sinner to saint—informs the doctrine of justification. The doctrine of justification articulates the experiential shift from terror to relief, from sin to grace, from law to gospel.
[6] The doctrine of justification is a signature Lutheran theological consensus. It represents a unique contribution to modern Christian theologies of grace. The Lutheran view attributes justification to the divine agent alone. Even faith, the instrument by which justification is apprehended as gift of forgiveness, is a divine creation. The entire action of eliminating the totality of sin that clings to the sinner both as their responsibility and as having been sinned by others is God’s work. Grace is the divine gift, freely given so that they sinner might live. The justified sinner lives not by virtue of any works or merit, as Article IV of the Augsburg Confession claims, but from Christ’s righteousness.
[7] The signature Lutheran emphasis on grace as divine gift is a unique contribution to Christian theologies of grace. It singularly upholds grace alone as the cause of the sinner’s justification. There are no strings attached—works or merit have no standing before the divine judgment nor can works performed after justification claim any privilege either. The Lutheran consensus remains remarkably nonchalant when it comes to prescriptions regarding the Christian life. In fact, some accounts of the signature Lutheran position brag about a Lutheran antinomianism. Sin boldly, some Lutherans prescribe in the face of their more uptight Christian compatriots who fear self-examination or excommunication. Lutherans have no third use of the law, as their Reformed colleagues do. The justified Lutheran sinner need only follow the civil (or first) use of the law, just as any human being should. The signature Lutheran consensus, driving the conscience to indescribable terror with the second use of the law, has nothing substantive to say about the Christian life.
[8] The Lutheran nonchalance about the Christian life that issues from the confidence in justification occupies a unique position on the Christian theological landscape. It is also a liability. This liability sets Lutheran theology at odds with its counterparts in western Christianity, namely Roman Catholic and Reformed theology. Roman Catholics and the Reformed, also stress the divine act of grace to justify the sinner. Yet unlike Lutherans, Roman Catholics and the Reformed are also interested in the following questions: How ought the justified sinner exhibit their faith in works of love? What rules govern loving expressions of faith? Which virtues direct Christian practice such that the Christian becomes more Jesus or Christlike in their actions? In contrast, the signature Lutheran consensus sometimes seems oddly noncommittal when it comes to normative claims about a virtuous Christian life.
[9] The signature Lutheran consensus regarding the doctrine of justification has significant implications for understanding the relation between theology and ethics. This consensus has been theologically built on the grounds Holl laid out in 1917. The experience of justification that Holl reconstructed as it was supposed to issue into doctrinal expression was one in which Luther could only experience the divine wrath, never the divine love. The doctrine of justification was built up in such a way that good works could never be connected necessarily to justification. Theology has nothing to do with ethics, as I heard Eberhard Jüngel once exclaim.
[13] The signature Lutheran consensus differs radically from its Roman Catholic and Reformed counterparts. These latter two Christian denominations can connect theology to ethics because they presuppose theological anthropological theories that are not agnostic about the change that justification effects in the self. The Roman Catholic doctrine of justification can epistemologically account for substantive change to the self through the infusion of supernatural grace, and the Reformed model advocates for a sort of transparency between inner and outer according to a model of introspection that evaluates the coherence between inner justification and outer sanctification. Roman Catholic theology posits a coherence between doctrine and moral teaching, while Reformed theology sees doctrine in coherent connection to Christian action. The signature Lutheran position that marks a disjunction between theology and ethics is indeed unique on the Christian theological landscape.
A Constructive Proposal
[14] The signature Lutheran consensus does not have to stand as such for all eternity. In fact, the contemporary times are urging new ways to imagine the relation between theology and ethics. This task of innovating the Lutheran doctrine of justification is driven in part by Christians on the left who aim to situate justice as central to the task of showing Christian love to neighbor. On the other hand, some Christians who are committed to doctrine are not necessarily hostile to justice-seeking in the world. Given these affinities, there are at least a few Lutherans who are frustrated with the underdetermination of justice in the signature Lutheran consensus and dissatisfied with the doctrine of justification’s nonchalance with regards to Christian being-in-the-world. There must be another way, one that connects theology and ethics in a meaningful way,
[15] The book that I co-wrote with Professor Amy Carr—Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Baylor University Press 2023)—is intended for Christians interested in finding out how theology can be joined with ethics in a way claiming the centrality of the Christian identity of saving faith in Christ. Indeed, the main question in our book concerns how Christians can live out the “freedom of a Christian” in their justice-seeking endeavors. The answer, as Professor Carr and I explore it, has to do with Martin Luther’s claim that Christ frees the believer from assuming that political identity is central to their status before God. Christian identity, we argue together with Luther, is grounded in Christ, who creates the Beloved Community. Christ frees individuals from their identifications with political positions, and grounds their identity in Christ. Believers are called to live out the Beloved Community’s ethic, namely the freedom to seek justice together with others, even those with whom they disagree.
[16] Ordinary Faith proposes a theological model that connects theology to ethics with a conjunction—the word “and”: theology and ethics. Our book offers a constructive proposal that connections justification and justice-seeking on the grounds of the Lutheran doctrine of justification. We center the doctrine of justification as establishing the basis for Christian identity, and then explain how justification frees the self from practices of justice-seeking that insist on the self’s monopoly of justice. Justice-seeking is a communal practice that gathers together those with different visions, even as different visions are oriented towards a common goal of justice. We constructed a proposal that navigates the relation between theology and ethics without alienating justification from justice, as is characteristic of the signature Lutheran consensus, or conversely by surrendering justification in the interest of justice, as is the case with some contemporary Christian ethicists who have flipped the script and rejected the idea that justice has anything to do with justification. Our deliberate insistence on the conjunction “and” connecting theology and ethics was intended to show a way past the polarization deeply entrenched in the Lutheran imaginary—that between justification and sanctification. The conjunction signals a paradigm shift in Lutheran theology, one that we hope Lutherans will discuss as they seek ways to position the justified sinner in relation to the sinner’s work for justice in church and world. And we also hope that the book conveys to Christians that the Lutheran insistence on justification by faith contributes a unique theological voice to discussions of justice.
[17] How might this look ? As I now think about the book, a few months after its publication, I am drawn to what I am convinced is one of the book’s merits, namely the vision for theology as a space of freedom. Theology is too often cast as a discipline that insists on orthodoxy. There is one right way to think about God and the world. Yet this claim does not do justice to the kind of thinking that many theologians have deployed. Theologians in the past have been remarkably resourceful in using critical and constructive dimensions of theological thinking in the service of discerning God’s work in church and world. Theologians have honed hermeneutical skills in trying to understand texts, authors, and interlocutors, even as they wrestle with urgent questions about being-in-the-world. How theologians tailor their thinking repertoire and invent new ways to tackle problems attests to their creativity in moving past impasses, resolving differences, and opening new avenues for noticing God’s movements in the world.
[18] How can we imagine theology as a discipline ontologically grounded in the new freedom offered by Christ? Might it be possible to envision theology as a discipline oriented to critical and constructive thinking about self, world, and God in such a way as to make room for different conceptions? How might a more open-ended understanding of theology harness the creative energies of different persons to think about God from their distinct perspectives? And can a space for the exchange of theological ideas be freed from the usual distortive hierarchies that theologians tend to impose upon their peers? If Lutheran theologians are to take the radical idea of “freedom in Christ” seriously, then how can their theological thinking embody this freedom?
[19] My second suggestion is that Lutheran theologians construct theological anthropologies that take seriously ways in which the human person (in community) has capacities for connecting personal thinking and acting while retaining the powerful Lutheran insight concerning the opacity of the inner self to outer examination. What I have in mind is the overcoming of the neo-Kantian hegemony on the signature Lutheran consensus. Theologians need to explore other philosophical and anthropological possibilities that account for the connection between inner and outer, while insisting that the “inner” is truly the prerogative of the divine. Contemporary discussions of the intertwining between mind and body, in other words, embodiment, might offer creative models for theologians to work with.
[20] In my study of Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, I have discovered that his transcendental/sensory distinction offers a model for thinking about the embodied person that is relationally constituted, yet as transcendentally posited by God in its singularity. Furthermore, a Lutheran theological anthropology that privileges the verbum externum as constitutive of the inner freedom in Christ would also have to address the embodied dimension of this verbum externum. The inner word is bound to externality. The means of grace are experienced through sense perception: chewing, hearing, smelling, touching, and seeing.
[21] A Lutheran theological anthropology that connects inner and outer, yet retains the opacity of the inner, would also involve accounts of formation. Such an anthropology would take into account how the person is formed in the strengthening of its orientation to Christ’s freedom in thinking and acting. The freedom of a Christian, posited by Christ as constitutive of the “new being,” must become central to personal formation that expresses inner faith in external love.
[22] As my third suggestion, I advocate for more theological work on the doctrine of God. Who is this God who justifies? Why has the centrality of the divine attribute of justice (iustitia dei) been shortshrifted by theologians who seek to claim that love is the divine attribute par excellence? Given the Lutheran theological focus on the doctrine of justification, I think it important that Lutheran theologians adjust their view to the God who justifies. The concept of the iustitia dei as expressed in Romans 1:19 posed the theological problem that triggered Luther’s spiritual and theological struggles. Luther’s reformation had to do with a new understanding of the justifying God. Risto Saarinen’s forthcoming book, Philosophical Justice and Reformation Righteousness: The Latin Aristotle to Luther and Melanchthon (Oxford University Press 2025), leads the way in this regard.
[23] In short, our contemporary challenge for depolarizing Christianity today must be met with more theology, not less. What sorts of theological reflection open up spaces of freedom for thinking about ethics? When theological energy is mustered to be both critical and constructive, it expands models for understanding what it means to be human in a world that is ruled by God. How theologians imagine creative possibilities for seeking justice depends precisely on the expansiveness of their theological models. Theology, indeed, must have to do with ethics.
[1] Please note that this claim was expressed with a particular rhetorical aim. To do justice to Jüngel’s brilliant and moving understanding of justification, please see Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith, trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer (London: Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2014).
[2] Karl Holl, What Did Luther Understand by Religion?, ed. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense, trans. Fred W. Meuser and Walter R. Wietzke (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1977); for a detailed historical-theological description of Holl in the German context of the 1910s and 1920s, see Christine Helmer, How Luther Became the Reformer (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019).
[3] Oswald Bayer, Living By Faith: Justification and Sanctification, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Lutheran Quarterly Books 7 (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2017).
