§4 Luther

The man who thought out first, and with most originality and force, the basic antimedieval and, as we saw last time, the basic antimodern thought of the Reformation, that of the theology of the cross, was neither Zwingli nor Calvin but Luther. Both Zwingli and Calvin learned from Luther, not without at once contradicting him, not without giving their own shape to what they learned, yet learning from him at the decisive point. Luther's Reformation was not the whole Reformation. It was not even the source or place of origin of the whole Reformation. Nevertheless, it initiated the movement which characterizes the whole and of which the Reformation of Zwingli and Calvin was primarily a repetition, even though a second turn was given to the Reformation in and with the repetition. That turn took place, as I said yesterday, in wrestling with the medieval and modern problem of ethics, which for Luther seemed to be suspended for a second between the times,? but then, in a wholly normal way, to call for fresh treatment.

A good member of the Reformed communion must begin by simply

R. Staehelin, Huldreich Zwingli.. ., 2 vols. (Basel, 1895 and 1897); H. Bauke, Die Probleme der Theologie Calvins (Leipzig, 1922); K. Frohlich, Die Reichsgottesidee Calvins (Munich, 1922); P. Wernle, Der evangelische Glaube nach den Hauptschriften der Reformatoren, vol. I: Luther; vol. 11: Zwingli; vol. Il: Calvin (Ttibingen, 1918 and 1919).

2. An allusion to the title of G. Gogarten’s essay “Zwischen den Zeiten” (1919), which then became the title of the journal founded in 1922 with Barth and his circle as contributors and G. Merz as editor. recognizing Luther's unique position in the Reformation, not moving away from or forsaking Luther, nor, in following the hints of Zwingli and Calvin, feeling compelled to go a step beyond him; but instead, while consciously following those hints, constantly coming back to him. At the outset we distinguish ourselves from Lutherans in this way. As disciples of the most loyal disciples of Luther, we do not detract from Luther any more than Lutherans do, whereas they for their part can never manage to promote regard for Luther without open or concealed polemics against Zwingli and Calvin.

In respect of discipleship of Zwingli and Calvin rather than Luther, we have to proceed with caution. What is a disciple? A loyal disciple? Is it the one who with the urge to be the self, yet also no ability to go beyond the self, sits at the feet of another, and, more or less successfully overcoming the resultant conflicts, seeks to say what the master has said? If so, Luther’s loyal disciple was Melanchthon. But was he really a loyal disciple? In the hands of the loyal communicator Melanchthon, just because he was able to mediate Luther’s legacy so loyally and painfully, did not the Lutheran Reformation become something alien to Luther himself?

A disciple might also be — you may recall what I said about this in the first hour — a person who can be and say something individual but who has also the ability to let something be said to him or her by another, which means achieving from the other agreement about oneself, so that this person, in whom is both productivity and receptivity, never ‘ceases more or less successfully to appropriate what is heard, to say it, too, when it is heard, but to say it as something individual. Zwingli and Calvin were loyal disciples of Luther in this sense. Students complete their course when they cease to be students. They become masters when they take a step beyond their own master, whether the latter likes it or not. How remarkably obscure it all is when we are assured in the sense and tone of disparagement and superiority that Zwingli was only a disciple of Luther and that Calvin, as we read in Ritschl and Loofs,> was only an epigonos of Luther. It is surely as clear as daylight, and has simply been confirmed by continued polemics up to our own day, that disciples in the sense of slavish followers, epigonoi of Luther, are not to be found, at least in Zurich or Geneva.

We will first try to fix and understand more precisely the point at

3. A. Ritschl, Geschichtliche Studien zur Lehre von Gott, vol. Il of Gesammelte Aufsitze (Freiburg, 1896), 97; Loofs, 876. which students cease to be students and become teachers themselves, that is, the point at which the step was taken that took Zwingli and Calvin beyond Luther. When I read the works of especially the younger Luther up to about 1520, I get the picture of a curtain, thick in some places, thin in others, behind which a big, bright flame is burning. I see this flame flickering through the curtain. It is coming closer. The flickering becomes stronger. Every moment we expect the flame to engulf and*consume the curtain that conceals it, so that only a blazing fire will be before us. It will be dangerous, it will be terrible, but it has to be. Something great and impossible and unheard-of will happen — and then? We dare not think beyond that. We do not know whether we ought to be terrified or to rejoice. Yet what we expect does not happen. The flame does not stop advancing but the curtain remains intact. It is as if at the last moment something invisible separates it from the flame. All we have is possibility, even probability, expectation, fear, and hope. All we have is — shall we say terrible or shall we even say intolerable? — tension. It is perhaps both.

I do not get this impression at all, however, when I read Zwingli’s Shepherd or Calvin’s Catechism.4 Here again we must use a figure of speech. The fire has blazed up, it has burned a hole in the curtain, the great thing has taken place. The fire is still glimmering and flickering, but a thick pall of smoke now covers everything. The great thing has taken place, but it is not the impossible or unheard-of thing. The curtain as a whole is still intact. The fire is not spreading. For the moment the great flame flared up it began to die down, and the remaining sparks are not strong enough to burn up the whole. Something did happen, but obviously not what was really meant to happen. The approaching thing has become a static thing at a distance, the expectation has become a quiet survey of possibilities that are already to some extent known. Fear can be laid to rest and hope may to some extent be disappointed. The tension is no longer so terrible or unbearable.

Or should we not rather state with admiration and gratitude that at least something was achieved and did take place? We may put it either way. Note well that it was the flame of the knowledge of eternal judgment and eternal mercy, of the vertical line, of the twofold work of God, that Luther, and after him and with him Zwingli and Calvin, understood to be the beginning and end of all we humans do. The curtain is human life

4. Zwingli, Der Hirt (1524), Z 3, 68; Calvin, Geneva Catechism (1545), OS Il, 72E£.; cf. Tracts and Treatises, 11, 37ff. (Grand Rapids, 1958).

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in time in its whole range, our good and bad works from the very least to the very greatest, the horizontal line on which the Middle Ages once sought the infinite and the modern age with the same fervor seeks the finite, the strange central stretch that is at least also there between the clearly perceived beginning artd end. For so it is! That is how Luther himself once put it: Our human being and nature cannot for a moment be without action or inaction, suffering or flight, for life never rests (Tschackert, 97).> The horizontal did not vanish when struck by the vertical. We move every moment on that horizontal line. The world does not perish because the kingdom of heaven has drawn near [Matt. 4:17]. No, we live in the world, and not for a moment can we forget it. Action does not cease because we assert its radical questionability. No, we work no matter what, even if it is by sinking into the passivity of a Buddhist monk. But the fire that might have been kindled when the flame touched the curtain, and perhaps was kindled, obviously means that the vertical really intersects the horizontal; that the cross is really visible in our life; that time and eternity, God and humans, are not in metaphysical antithesis but indissoluble relation; that the power of the next world is the power of this world, as Troeltsch might put it.° In other words, the problem of so-called dogmatics is the problem of so-called ethics.

What do life and time and the world and human existence and nature look like if what Luther heard is true, namely, God’s Word to the effect that God alone is the Lord and none other [cf. Isa. 45:5]? I referred yesterday to the fateful question that the Renaissance put to the Reformation. It would have had to be put in any case even if there had been no Renaissance. It was unavoidable. The dialectic of the matter demanded it. But the remarkable contemporaneity of the Reformation with this movement — which at the very same time as the former in its opposition to the Middle Ages discovered the vertical, emphasized the horizontal with a new sharpness and consistency such as the Middle Ages had never achieved — can hardly be an accident. To the Reformation answer in terms of eternity, pressed by the final problematic of human existence, it had to

5. M. Luther, Von den guten Werken (1520), WA 6, 212, 32ff., quoted with modernized spelling in Tschackert, 97.

6. Cf. Troeltsch, Social Teaching, vol. II (Louisville, 1992), 1006: “Das Jenseits ist die Kraft des Diesseits,” quoted also by Barth in the same inaccurate version in “The Christian’s Place in Society” (1919), in The Word of God and the Word of Man (London, 1928), 2726.

‘Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

pose the counterquestion of time,” now that in opposition to the medieval answer in terms of time there had been posed the question of eternity. The closely intertwined antagonists of the old and the new were ultimately in one hand. On this fateful question the ways of the Lutheran and Reformed reformation parted company, and fundamentally they are still apart today. The flame that approached but did not blaze up is Lutheranism. Its tragedy is that though the kingdom of heaven was here so close in the world, nothing happened, and the imminent kingdom of heaven is thus a dubious entity. The great fire that flares up yet fails to blaze, and finally dies down, stands for the Reformed. Their tragedy is that something, something truly great, did take place in the world, but in the process the kingdom of heaven moved further away, so that even that great event is a dubious entity. Lutherans and Reformed really have no cause to attack one another with correction and accusation. Normally they can only bear together that which is in different ways their common embarrassment and promise.

I realize, however, that this account of the problem is schematic and does not do justice to the full historical reality. It must be noted, then, that in this way we are simply describing general tendencies. If we are to go to the starting point of the movement, we must not make of Luther a Quietist who fixed his thoughts solely on justification by faith alone and had no feeling at all for the problem of ethics. He did have an awareness of this problem and wrestled with it all his life. K. Holl (“Die neue Sittlichkeit”) has shown in what is for me a convincing manner that Troeltsch did violence to Luther when he roundly ascribed to him the sharp dualism of a double morality based partly on the Sermon on the Mount and partly on natural law, an ethics of love on the one side, a secular ethics on the other.8 Though Luther was definitely not a man of the Renaissance, but a monk who then emerged into the world, he saw the link between gospel and law, the need for good works, the task of giving a Christian shape to both individual life and life in society, and he made genuine efforts to put these insights into practice. With increasing definiteness, of course, but from the very outset, he related the question of the gracious God to that of the obedience of the recipients of grace in

7. The MS had entgegengeworfen here, altered by the editor to entgegenwerfen.

8. K. Holl, “Der Neubau der Sittlichkeit,” in Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Kirchengeschichte, 1, 2nd and 3rd ed. (Ttibingen, 1929), 281f.; cf. Troeltsch, Social Teaching, Il, O73. the world, the forgiveness of sins to the new life, redemption to our existence in God’s creation as the children of God, so that no one of these things can arise without at once bringing the other with it. Luther was not, as the Reformed can easily suppose if they do not look properly, a man who stood on one leg looking up to heaven. In the logic of his own innermost thoughts there had to be hoping and striving for the kindling of fire on earth. For “when the soul is pure through faith and loves God, it also wants all things to be pure, first its own body, and that everyone should love and praise God with it,” he stated in 1520 (27, 189), and in the same context he lamented that “though the Christian life is so noble, unfortunately it not only does not exist anywhere in the world, but it is neither confessed nor preached” (27, 196).? The first saying expresses Calvin’s thought of the glory of God, for the sake of which we cannot ignore the relation between faith and life, while in the second we find Zwingli’s concept of the reforming of life that must flow naturally, as it were, from faith if that faith is authentic. Luther thought both these thoughts frequently, seriously, and radically.

Nevertheless, we may and must say that these thoughts were not natural or intrinsic to Luther. They were implications that he made resolutely but secondarily. The whole relation between the vertical line and the horizontal, or rather the outworking of this relation, was for him, strongly though he emphasized it, of secondary and not primary importance. We often detect indeed how he gives himself a push to turn back from faith, his real concern, to works, which were not in the full sense his concern. We also detect at this point a deficiency. He is not by a long way so original or effective in this field. Above all we detect a constant looking back from the second concern to his real concern. Read again from this angle his 1520 Freedom of a Christian or his Sermon of Good Works from the same year.!0 Read these writings that are so decisive for our problem with the question: What was really on Luther's heart? What did he really want to say to us? That we must do good works to please God and help our neighbor, or that good works can issue only from faith, and that without faith they are dead and in themselves at least neither good, demanded, nor necessary? Undoubtedly both. But you will clearly find that Luther's real interest is in the second point and not the first, not in the step into life and the doing of works, but in the fact that when they

9. WA 7, 30, 36-31, 2; 36, 8ff 10. WA 7, 3-38; 6, 202-76. are done they are done in faith. Rather maliciously we might compare Luther’s ethical writings to the Echternach spring procession! in which there is one step backward for every two steps forward, so pitilessly upon the resolve to do good works does the weight lie that we must not think that in this way we can get to heaven, so unceasing here are reservations and limitations of every kind. Hardly anything is commanded that goes beyond the first commandment.

As we read, there seem to hover before our eyes reminders that call everything into question, the reminders that good works have value only for Christ’s sake, and when done in faith. This is no real dishonor to Luther. The dialectic with which he made play so brilliantly is the dialectic of the matter itself. He cannot get away from it because he takes so seriously the need to ground action in transcendental freedom.!? As we note also in Zwingli and Calvin themselves, there is a need constantly to go back again from what is plainly the Reformed ethical approach to a line where we speak as Luther did, in a way that is broken and dialectical and that refers back again and again to the commandments of the first table. But however that may be, it isa historical fact that Luther’s heart concern was with the basis of works and not the will for them, with fighting against papist works and not fighting for works of the Spirit and love, remarkable and vital though what he said about these might be. It is surely no accident that the second half of his Freedom of a Christian,!> the active part of Lutheran ethics that presses forward, was not the more effective part but the halting and hesitant part.

To see what it looks like when a theologian really stresses and unites both parts, when the fight for works of the Spirit is also self-evident and a heart's concern, we may turn in comparison to the beginning of Calvin's Geneva Catechism. In the closest connection we find here the question of the chief end of human life and the knowledge of God as this end.!4 For God created us and put us in the world in order to be glorified by us. Since he is the origin of our life, it is right that we should place this life in the service of his glory. That this should take place is our supreme good. Should it not, we are in sorrier state than animals. Nothing worse can happen to us than not living our lives for God. And here again we have

11. Cf. “Echternach,” RGG, 3rd ed., II, 301f.

12. Cf. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (New York, 1950), 43ff.

13. WA 7, 29, 31-38, 15.

14. OS 75, 3£, Tracts and Treatises, Il, 37.

G4 Se:

true knowledge of God in which we know him as we come to awareness of the honor we owe him. But the way in which to pay this honor that we owe is fourfold, (1) by putting our whole trust in him, (2) by seeking to serve him with our whole lives and doing his will, (3) by calling upon him in need and seeking salvation and every good thing in him, and finally (4) by recognizing him with heart and mouth as the “sole author” of all good. These four points are the basis of Calvin's whole presentation of Christainity. This, mark you, is what I would call a definite and unequivocal approach to ethics in contrast to Luther’s. Calvin, too, realizes that faith alone justifies us and that good works can spring only from faith, but from the very first this insight regarding God is for him a significant and dynamic part of life as its chief and final end. In Luther the cross often seems to be open or only loosely related, but in Calvin it is related to the real cross.!> His concern is not just that faith should be pure and fixed on God alone, but that this faith which is pure and fixed on God alone should be the final end of human life.!© For him justice must also be done to the need to live out this faith before God and for God on the horizontal line. Calvin’s whole Christianity is built on the need that to God’s glory something must take place in faith, just as we might sum up Zwingli’s whole Christianity in a saying from his letters: “For God’s sake, do something brave!” (5.11.22).!7

This relating to the horizontal, this unity of faith and life, dogmatics and ethics, this attempt to answer the question of human striving and willing that Luther’s discovery had for a moment pushed into the background, was distinctive, natural, and original in the Reformed. In the self-evident way in which they make this step from Luther's basic view, the step into life, they are more original than Luther. What was Luther's own emphasized intuition occurs naturally, powerfully, and with a necessary basis in them. Though they never lose sight of the vertical, and just because they keep it in view, their concern is with the whole of the Christian life, something we could never say of Luther even though we recognize his desire to deal with ethics. The Reformed were also aware that by the Holy Spirit the work of God in Christ is the origin and goal of the Christian life. They, too, genuinely speak about despair, humility,

15. In the margin Barth has a diagram here.

16. See n. 9 above.

17. Cf. Zwingli’s letter to the mayor and council of Zurich from the Kappel camp dated 6.16.1529, Z 10, 169, 4ff. (no. 858).

~ and the fear of God!8 as the first and last thing that is possible for us vis-a-vis God, and about the paradox of the sheer trust with which in that situation we have to fling ourselves into the arms of God. The unheard-of thing of this primary event to us and in us, in both judgment and grace, is constantly before them. No less than Luther they have before their eyes the lightning flash in the tower at Wittenberg, the bolt at Luther's feet: “The just shall live by faith’ (Rom. 1:17),!9 though they were definitely not monks who had been happily freed from the basic conception of the Middle Ages but Renaissance men who had been converted to God. In neither Zwingli nor Calvin will we find even a single line in which they deal lightly with such matters as the bondage of the will, imputed righteousness, or the nonmeritorious nature of good works. On the contrary we find, especially in Calvin, systematically the clearer of the two, a stress on this side of his theology, even if with a certain nervous tension that we see in Luther only in his debate with Erasmus. As a Lutheran Calvin felt a need to work out consistently and to champion relentlessly the doctrine of double predestination, that sharpest of all the formulations of the concept of the vertical. He rightly perceived — and if we understand this we have already grasped the main point of his theology — that everything would be lost for Reformed theology if at this point, too, it let itself be robbed by just one jot of its well-considered definitions of the paradox of grace. The nervous tension with which he stressed and underlined this is undoubtedly an indication that here was the threatened point of this theology.

But in Luther’s theology, too, there was a threatened point at which we see in him the same nervous tension. It was and is a dangerous undertaking to think through to the very end the thought that God’s eternal judgment and eternal mercy immediately and unceasingly relate to real people living in this world in time, just as dangerous as thinking through the other thought that at every moment in time, over against every possibility in the world, these are always and unceasingly God’s acts. If the Calvinistic thought might yield to the view that our seeking of perfection i in this world in time is in itself the goal of our existence and a_ fulfillment of the will of God, we might infer from the Lutheran ‘thought; that our action in this world in time is hermetically sealed off against God, —

18. See above, 46f.

19. Cf. what Luther says about himself in the preface to vol. I of the Latin works in the Wittenberg ed. (1545), WA 54, 186, 3ff follows its own laws, and is justified in itself by its relation to the eternal God. In practice we have here one and the same thing. If “the just lives by faith” was under threat in Calvin, “the just dives by faith” was under threat in Luther.;

The result in both cases would be that we who live in this world in time are, as it were, secured against the claim and threat and promise that confront us as the righteousness of God. The medieval and modern concept of the triumphant horizontal line would then have gained the victory, in the one case by thoughtless emphasizing of the ethical significance of the knowledge of God, in the other by its thoughtless neglect. Luther naturally feared that victory no less than Calvin, and each was quick to detect the special danger and to counteract it. On

the one hand, Luther had to show that his knowledge of God was ethically intended, and hence he could not do enough to assure us that the children of God can and must do good works of love in the world, in their callings, within the orders of creation, and even in questionable situations, for example, at times when it might mean cursing and slaying. On thg other hand, Calvin had to show that his ethics was intended as knowledge of God, and hence, in paradoxical contradiction of the obedience that he required of our human will for God, he could not exalt too highly the majesty and sovereignty of this God even to the point of an almost unbearable concept of the unrestrictedly free divine good pleasure that rules over things almost like natural fate, and concerning the basis of which we can say nothing, or nothing other than that God himself wills it.2° Here, then, we have self-corrections that are so vigorously made that they themselves by no means arbitrarily kindle the need for their own correction. These selfcorrections are externally the most striking features of Calvinistic theology on the one side and Lutheran on the other. But we must not judge either of these theologies by these features. We must judge them by the opposing tendencies that in both cases, as these features show, had to be protected against misunderstandings.

If we inquire into the tendency that stands opposed to the most striking feature of Calvinist theology, the doctrine a

predestination, and

viously come t

up

against th

the

“strong. “desire t to

o shape the world, or at least to do work j

in it. “Here we have the basic tendency of this theology and of seen

20. Inst. Il, 21, 1: “Then only do we acknowledge that God of his mere good pleasure saves whom he will and does not pay any reward, since he owes none."

Reformed theology in general. Naturally, the world was to be shaped and work done in it to the glory of God and under the strong urge to carry through the intersecting of the horizontal by the vertical, that is, to relate each to the other; yet the stress is on shaping, on work, on taking in hand, on doing something brave, as distinct from hesitation, holding back, passivity, letting things take their course, or basically giving autonomy to the course of things in this world. Of Luther, it is true, one may fairly say that there is only a certain hesitation and embarrassment about the fact of the ethical task, for he was at one with the Reformed in rejecting passivity or any recognition of the autonomy of worldly things. Yet the Reformed showed much less hesitation than he did.

Reformed theology, as we see especially when we study book III of Calvin's /Institutes, is a bold attempt to overcome the whole distinction of first and second, of there and here, of orientation to God and orientation to the world, and to grasp as a unity the forgiveness of sins and sanctification, faith and obedience, but also divine and human action. Think of - the well-known opening of book I of the Institutes in which Calvin points to knowledge of God and ourselves as the sum of human wisdom.?! The two “parts” of knowledge are so closely related that it is hard to say which precedes the other or results from the other. The content of knowledge, ~ as knowledge of God and ourselves, is in both cases the same:?? knowledge of the infinite wisdom and goodness of God, and in contrast thereto, knowledge of our own nothingness, so that Calvin does not help us much in ranking the one standpoint above the other, and indeed at the end of ch. 1 he says that it is only the order of right teaching (ordo recte docendi) that requires us to discuss the knowledge of God first.23

If Calvin had really succeeded in carrying through the systematic idea that he obviously had in mind, that is, in truly and literally presenting a theology of the cross, of the vertical and the horizontal, of the point of intersection; in really leaving unseparated the knowledge of God and ourselves, the free imputation of righteousness and the sanctity of real life, whose inseparability he maintained (III, 3, 1);?4 in so relating dogmatics and ethics that each dogmatic statement would also be an ethical statement and vice versa; in ceaselessly depicting faith as obedience and obedience

Pls OS Mil; Bil, G8.
22. The editor corrected here the dieselbe of the MS to derselbe.
23. OS Ill, 33, 38ff.
24. OS IV, 55, 8ff.

as faith; in achieving on his side the unity that Luther also sought on his, though he did not achieve it — if, I say, Calvin had succeeded in carrying through this program that does not merely supplement Luther but goes beyond him, unquestionably we would have had to say that the work of the pupil was greater than that of the teacher. For clearly the aim of all theology is no longer to say first and second but to say the one thing that is the whole. Only those who can say this and the whole do a work that strictly deserves to be called theo-logia, talk about God, but such a work would deserve it.

As: we shall see, however, Calvin did not succeed in carrying through the program any more than any other theologians either before or after him. In the very first sentence, by speaking about two parts (duabus partibus) of wisdom, he betrayed the fact that the unity he had in mind was breaking apart in his hands, so that he could only point urgently to the inseparability and interrelatedness of the two parts, and then the deliberations in book III involve an endless dialectic of the two standpoints?> from which it is clear that Calvin was aware of the original unity, but could assert it only by tirelessly playing off each side against the other and thus expounding the duality that the unity entails.

As I told you last time, however, Luther’s theology also moves within this dialectic of the two standpoints. Calvin failed to press on further toward unity, toward one word. He simply came at it — and this is his independence as a teacher — from the other side, namely, as a Renaissance man, from the side of ethics. His heart’s concern was to proclaim the glory of God as the only worthy, the only real power over real people living in this world in time, or, to put it the other way round, to call rebellious people to submission to the will of the only wise and good God. Just as Luther, when he spoke about the new life of obedience, constantly came back with confusing zeal to faith, the Spirit, and the person and work of God, in a word, to the source of the new life, so Calvin, in all his depictions of this source, constantly jumped ahead to the demand for humility, for worship, for active obedience, for subjection to God’s holy commands. “The just lives by faith,” says Luther. Yes, indeed, says Calvin, and he says exactly the same thing, but he makes it a major instead of a minor third, putting the stress at the end in the Latin form: Justus ex fide vivit (“The just lives by faith”). The third possibility, that of saying one word, seems at all times to have been for theology a squaring of the circle, an impossible

25. The editor here corrected the erschépft of the MS to erschopfen. possibility that God has reserved strictly for himself alone to proclaim. I at least know of no theologian, not even those of the Bible, who succeeded in doing what Luther and Calvin failed to do and speaking this word. The things we know are simply pointers to the fact that Christ zs this Word, the Logos, pointers that are not themselves the Word, but 2 word, tilting sometimes more to the one side and sometimes more to the. other.

I would thus see in the theology of Calvin a word on one side, a one-sided word, and not a theological panacea. Its value is that as a converted Renaissance man he felt and saw more sharply than Luther, the liberated monk, the problem of ethics that the problem of God does not eliminate but truly poses for the first time. But this value of Calvin's theology is also a source of danger. ‘Those who emphasize so strongly obedience and working for the glory of

God can easily lose sight of the independent weight of the question of God. Calvin sees the danger, and the weapon with which he tries to repel it is his remarkably sharp understanding precisely of the concept of God. The interrelating of the true ethical tendency of his theology with the self-correction in the Lutheran sense with which he permits it to take effect results in the inner problematic of his theology, although outwardly, as distinct from Luther, it is characterized, generally speaking, by that ethical tendency. Those who as Reformed theologians have the task of making clear what is distinctive about their Reformed Christianity must direct their attention above all to the inner problematic of Calvinistic theology due to that self-correction in the Lutheran sense. Those who as Lutheran theologians see that Luther’s theology needs to be supplemented must realize how its supplementing by Calvin powerfully develops the possibilities offered by Luther but also brings to light the difficulties of Lutheranism. We all of us see ourselves confronted by a grandiose human effort and yet also by the limitation of all human efforts, by the need to undertake such efforts seriously and yet also by the need to accept the seriousness of other efforts than those that we ourselves venture. If anything is calculated to make us seriously zealous and yet also seriously tolerant, it is the study of the history of the church ~ and dogmas, especially as it relates to the Reformation period.

Before going further I want to try to give you an illustration of one part of the problem and my understanding of it. I have in mind the attitude of Luther and the Reformed to the questions raised by the Enthusiasts. It seems to me that at this point especially we see clearly the presupposition of all that has been presented, namely, that for Luther the ethical problem was properly and from the very outset a secondary concern and that his ever so intensive preoccupation with it was to some extent a shift to another genre. I_view Reformation Radicalism, including spiritualizers like Sebastian Franck, as not merely an attempt to have the vertical line of the knowledge of God intersect th¢ horizontal line of life in this world, serving merely as an occasion for ethical reflection on God’s commands and the ensuing ethical obedience, but

as an attempt to depict the vertical line directly, to have justification by faith tread the world’s stage in person and without concealment, avoiding ethics and relying solely on inspiration and the power of the Spirit. What we have, then, is a brilliantly shortsighted simplification of the problem. The kingdom of heaven has drawn near [Matt. 4:17]. Jz, It, the great It, has been given openly and is possible and stands ready. We have simply to let it happen, whether in act or suffering. We have simply to set it forth in palpable reality, whether by a very holy or a very free private life, whether by the gathering of holy communities or by the replacing of all the orders of state and church and society by new and this time holy orders.

“Am I mistaken if I say that Luther was intrinsically closer to this brilliantly shortsighted attempt than Zwingli or Calvin? He soon found reasons not in fact to take this path, but the rejection was primary and more natural and self-evident for Zwingli and Calvin than for Luther. For the Reformed this path was never a temptation. When they began to pen their first theological works any attempt along such lines, if it had ever been of interest to them, was at an end. They were convinced from the very first that we live in the world and not in heaven, that the commands of God are directions for living in the world and not in heaven, and that no human work, even the most holy, is in itself justified by faith. The justified here are in the first instance citizens of Zurich or Geneva with all that that involves. As such they are, of course, subject to God’s commands, but only as such. The divine commands are not just norms of what is required of us but also norms of what is possible and attainable for us, even if in weakness and with no merit. There is no thought of leaving the world to achieve greater perfection, of a life’s endeavor outside the existing orders whose continued existence is simply confirmed by God's commands..

Naturally Luther himself powerfully developed this repudiation, and it quickly enough found expression. But it seems to me that among the Reformed the “naturally” was a good deal more natural than in Luther. For Luther enthusiasm was a temptation that he had overcome. Who was it who read the German Theology twice with all the marks of affinity and enthusiasm and agreement, placing it directly side by side with the Bible and Augustine?26 This little book was later the Magna Carta of all spirituals. Calvin, with an appeal to all that 4e understood as the Word of God, called it twaddle that the devil had produced to confuse the simple gospel and that was deadly poison for the church (17, 442; cf. 16, 592, and Farel, 16, 549).27 Again, spirits like Carlstadt and Thomas Miinzer and Sebastian Franck and Caspar Schwenckfeld flourished in the atmosphere of the Lutheran Reformation. From the.very outset Zwingli and Calvin kept their distance from such people when they came within their orbit. They might spring up in Zurich or Geneva, but they could not possibly prosper there, and therefore the battle against them plays a relatively subordinate role.

Again, can we really say that the appeal of the revolutionary peasants to the gospel of Luther made no sense and is not understandable, and in contrast can we think there could ever even be any question of a similar appeal to Calvin’s /Institutes?

The very force with which the pendulum later swung to the other side in Luther, the antiradical, antispiritualist, antirevolutionary zeal with which he later put the Reformed reformers in the shade, and with which, as we know, he even turned against Zwingli himself, is simply a sign that at this point he had to fight something that he knew only too well, just as the surprising emphasis with which he then argued that a Christian life that is pleasing to God is possible within the relations and orders of this world is a sign that at this point he had to convince himself of something. The Reformed were in a position to look more calmly and objectively at the problems that the task of living a secular life in obedience to God poses. They did not try to maintain so frenziedly against the Radicals that which we are not to maintain, namely, that marrying and vocation and war and public office may be works of Christian love. From the very first, unlike Luther, they stood on the ground that all such things rest on the natural law that the commands of God confirm, not precisely as works of love —for real ethicists are more sparing in their use of the term “love” than ~ Luther was — but as works that we may not avoid in the context of the

26. Cf. Luther’s “Vorrede zur Theologia Deutsch” (1518), WA 1, 378, 21ff He published the work with prefaces in Dec. 1516 and June 1518, WA 1, 153 and 378f.

27. Cf. Calvin's letter to French refugees in Frankfort dated 2.23.1559. See above, n. 39, on 64. Cf. the two letters of Farel to Bullinger dated 7.28 and 8.31.1557 in reaction (along the same lines as Calvin) to Castellio’s Latin translation of the German Theology (1557): total action that God requires of us. More frequently and more beautifully than they, Luther spoke of the way in which the children of God, adapting themselves to the orders and necessities of this world, may and must live in it, consoled by théir faith, always in need of forgiveness, yet joyfully doing their duty as housewives, servants, artisans, soldiers, councilors, or preachers.?8 But he spoke suspiciously loudly and zealously along these lines, and no less suspiciously made cautious practical use of this turning to the world. The Reformed spoke more softly and with more restraint, but they lived more calmly and with more self-assurance in the sense that Luther really intended.

I must offer some examples. In no work did Calvin try to prove that soldiers, too, can live in a state of grace.2? Nor did Zwingli. On the contrary, Calvin often stated most definitely that those who resort to arms should do so with regret and should consider that this enormity has its root only in human malice; that the one who kills even in the most just of wars is soiled (souillé)?° by the fact that it is done with guilt and not innocence; that such a one is expressly a homicide (26, 325; 27, 543). He could say this even though he cold-bloodedly drew up orders for the artillery that would defend the walls of Geneva against its wicked Savoy neighbors,?! and even though Zwingli, as we know, died on the battlefield and his weapons may be seen in the Zurich museum, offering indisputable traces that he was not there simply as a military chaplain. We may say with some confidence that if the German Protestants had entered the Schmalkald War with the theology of Zwingli or Calvin, the outcome might well have been very different. We do not say this to slight Luther. What it shows is that he was not as convinced by his own arguments as might appear.

Again, Luther made some strong and confident and one-sided statements about the natural order of sexuality and the fact that marriage is pleasing to God. But how did he view his own marriage to Katharina von Bora except as an extraordinary act of defiance against the devil and the pope!32 In spite of everything, how unexpected was this step even to the

28. Cf. Luther’s Von weltlicher Obrigkeit ... (1523), WA 11, 258, 5-8.

29. Cf. Luther's Ob Kriegsleute auch in seligem Stande sein kénnen (1526), WA, 19, 623ff.

30. Sermon on Deut. 19:1-7, CO 27, 543. On Deut. 5:17, CO 26, 325: God will pardon killing in a just cause; nevertheless “c’est une macule, l'homme est souillé.”

31. Cf. CO 10/I, 126ff.

32. E.g., WA TR 6, 275, 15f. (no. 6928), where Luther says he took a wife to defy the devil and to put to shame papal harlotry. loyal Melanchthon,33 who, if anyone, ought to have understood his mentor! About the sexual problem, as about ‘the military, Calvin was much more skeptical than Luther. For him the little heaven of fathers, mothers, and children lay much more under the shadow of original sin (24, 312; 26, 342; 28, 159; 46, 417; 49, 406).34 But when the question of marriage arose for himself, he dealt with it very quietly as a self-evident.matter, with no illusions at all but also with no reservations at all. The only problem for him was finding the right wife, and in the main he left this to his friends.3> With both feet Calvin stood on the earth on which marriage is a divine order to guard against greater ills. He did not first have to make a leap onto the earth.

As one who was trained in law, Calvin also described the function of the state unromantically as that of doing police work on God’s commission, a primary task being that of caring for the church of God on earth. So far as I can see, calling the work of government a work of love, or similarly explaining or spiritualizing something that as things are is necessary and commanded, finds no place either in the famous concluding chapter of the Institutes (IV, 20) or in other writings in which he speaks about the state and law and order (e.g., 27, 455 and 688; 29, 660; 49, 248ff.).3° Calvin was so convinced that the political function is necessary and commanded, that the natural law of equity on which civil order rests is simply confirmed by the moral law of God ([Inst.] IV, 20, 16),37 that even as a minister of the divine Word he never hesitated to act personally as a statesman. It was he who in his last decade actually shaped the foreign policy of the free state of Geneva, and in truth this was no more simple matter than if it had been a matter of the policy of electoral Saxony. It

33. Cf. Melanchthon’s letter to I. Camerarius dated 7.21.1525, CR 1, 754 (no. 344).

34, Cf. the sermon on Ley. 12:1ff., CO 24, 312; also on Deut. 5:18, CO 26, 342; on Deut. 24:1ff, CO 28, 159; and on Luke 2:36-39, CO 46, 417; and the commentary on 1 Cor. 7:6, CO 49, 406. Calvin points out that apart from the fall marriage would have been perfect, but it is now an aid against a dissolute life to those who cannot abstain and who enter into it after prayer.

35. Cf. Calvin's letter to Farel dated 5.19.1539, CO 10/II, 348 (no. 172). With Bucer’s help he married Idelette de Bure in August 1540.

36. For the Institutes, see “On Political Administration,” OS V, 471-502. Other writings include the sermon on Deut. 17:12, CO 27, 455; also on Deut. 21:18-21 (on 21b), CO 27, 688; also on 1 Sam. 11:7, CO 29, 660; and the commentary on Romans at 13:1ff., CO 49, 248-54.

37. OS V, 488, 3ff.

A

was he who in 1541 revised the civil as well as the ecclesiastical laws of Geneva (10 [I], 128ff., 132ff.).38 It was he, too, whom the Geneva council would approach in 1557 (Kampschulte, II, 380)39 with the request that he should investigate a new and supposedly cheaper system of heating. As I see it, in Luther a relatively much stronger-emphasis on Christian vocation and the justification of government, based on the thought of love, is accompanied in practice by a broad gap between the parsonage and the council chamber, and political activity is something rather compromising at least for preachers of the gospel — but if so, why not for all other Christians?.

In saying all these things, I am not reproaching Luther. The dubious element in Calvin's approach, as we see from the examples given, is clear enough, and there were good reasons for the more hesitant approach of Luther. I am simply saying that when Luther had to make the step from faith to ethics concretely and not just theoretically he hesitated, whereas in the mind of Calvin, no matter what we think of it, faith and ethics were in practice coincident. The rejection of enthusiasm; the establishment of ethics, that is, of a practical goal which might well be a broken one due to a sense of the ultimate questionability of all human willing and doing, but which could be embraced all the more firmly and cheerfully precisely because of that sense, resting as it did on affirmation of the divine order that God has set up in the world to guard against greater harm; the insight that It, It, the great It of the kingdom of heaven, of the Holy Spirit, cannot be given or put into effect in any possibility of human action, and that therefore, in practice, it can be seriously seen only in broken form, in the form of the command of God that is appropriate to this world — of all these things Luther was well aware and would often speak most profoundly. But it was the Reformed, the Reformed Lutherans, one might say, who really put them into practice, and in so doing, I might add, accepted the new ambivalence and difficulty of which I spoke yesterday. It was indeed necessary by way of compensation, and to guard against a new righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees [cf. Matt. 5:20], that the doctrine of double predestination should be given the emphasis that Calvin gave it. Again, I might add, Calvin’s great stress on the hope of the hereafter, on

38. CO 10/I, 125-46, where the editors have assembled fragments on civil and political legislation, on a police code, and on civil procedure.

39. E W. Kampschulte, Johann Calvin.. ., vol. I (Leipzig, 1869), and vol. II, ed. W. Goetz (Leipzig, 1899).

Calvin, Luther, and’ Zwingli

meditating on the future life,4° or something similar, was necessary as compensation if Reformed theology were not to take on the appearance of Christian Pharisaism, of which we have plenty of examples in America, England, Holland, and Switzerland even to'our own day.

But let us stay with our thesis that in Zwingli and Calvin, in contrast to Luther, action in the world, faith’s attack and defense on the soil of reality with all that is fitting and unfitting there, the translation of the absoluteness of faith into the relativity of the new obedience, is identical with the Christian life of faith. Here, then, the last trace has been lost of the monastic reaching and striving for perfection whose echo we catch in the ideals of the Radicals and from which — not without reason, we may say— Luther could not completely break free. With the eternal decree of God behind them, the law of the will of God above them, and future life ahead of them, Reformed Christians stood with both feet on the earth. That is either the completion of the Reformation or its end, or both at the same time. At any rate, the intersection of the two lines was made, the second turn in the Reformation had come, the theology of the cross had taken on its second sense.

In this regard at least, no matter how we interpret it, Zwingli and Calvin were not students but teachers, independent of Luther, rejected by Luther himself with the famous saying that they had a different spirit*! there at the painful hour of division at Marburg that we might equally well call an hour of birth, for the eucharistic controversy was only an important but in itself indifferent battleground on which the first and second meanings of the theology of the cross collided. The debate whether Luther or the Reformed reformers were greater makes no sense so long as we measure Zwingli and Calvin by Luther's faith or Luther by the ethics of Zwingli and Calvin, for then it is clear that one may easily gain a confessional triumph for either side. What we need to do is to try to find the strength of both parties at very different levels and to see that the strength of neither lies at both levels. I would argue this even against K. Holl’s account of Luther.42 When we see that, we will stop playing off the significance of one level against that of the other, faith against ethics and ethics against faith. We will stop trying to

40. Inst. Ill, 9: “Meditation on the Future Life.”

41. According to Osiander’s account of the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 (WA 30/III, 150, 51ff) Luther said it was obvious “das wir nicht ainerley gaist haben,” nor can we when God’s Word is simply believed in one place, but at another believing it is censured (with reference to “this is my body”).

42. Barth had in view here Holl’s “Der Neubau.. .,” in Gesammelte Aufsitze zur Kirchengeschichte, 1, 155ff.; and “Was verstand Luther unter Religion?” in ibid., 1ff., esp. 95ff. decide the historical debate with the most inadvisable help of a premise taken from philosophical dogmatics. Instead, with fear and trembling [cf. Phil. 2:12], we will think of the one hand in which the two are one, of the unity over against which the figures of history are always in the wrong with their one-sidedness. Similarly, the artificial product of a theological and ecclesiastical union will then be irrelevant, and powerfully and resolutely developed distinctiveness on both sides will be a possibility, once Reformed and Lutherans find one another in a union of objectivity, of being right only by being wrong.

I thus understand the Lutheran Reformation as the characteristic opening up of the way, the first turn of the Reformation. To do justice to Luther in terms of his faith we must not speak of him as an academic or churchman or politician or German citizen, though naturally he was all those things as well, but as the monk who cut the Gordian knot of the monastic problem and thus destroyed the medieval view, when, as innocently as a child, he blabbed abroad his new insight into the Deus absconditus who is revealed in Christ, into the forgiveness of sins and the church of the elect, not knowing what he was really doing, not suspecting what enemies he would make or false friends he would attract, not suspecting or concerned what would be the fate or impact of the word that he thus placed in the world, concerned only that it should be kept pure, pure of the old leaven [cf. 1 Cor. 5:7], of the horizontal path, of reason and good works. What he then said, without the negative gestures of the Enthusiasts, whose ephemeral brilliance and tragic vehemence he could never understand because he understood them too well, without the frenetic attempt not to be a monk any more, but seeking only to proclaim directly to housewives, servants, princes, and soldiers the forgiveness of sins, simply trying to tell things as he saw them in Romans and the Psalms, no matter what the outcome might be in the empire of Charles V — that was Luther, the reformer of the first turn, and I would not hesitate to concede that in this regard Zwingli and Calvin, though they, too, knew what he knew, are not to be compared even remotely with him.

I would go on to say, however, that once the ethical problem came on the stage, the age with its questions and tasks, Zwingli and Calvin spoke more cautiously, confidently, consistently, and credibly than Luther did, notable though the insights and sudden flashes of Luther might be in this field, too. The Reformed version is the no less characteristic continuation and conclusion of the movement. The Reformed made this second turn in the Reformation much better than Luther did. Calvin, not Luther, made the Reformation capable of dealing with the world and history when he hammered the faith of Luther into obedience. Calvin was the guiding spirit in the great defense against the developing Counter- Reformation around the mid-16th century. Calvin was the creator of a new Christian sociology that was so shaped as to be able to interact fruitfully with the different social principles of the new age inaugurated by the Renaissance, and to play a decisive role in their birth and development. Calvin was also the creator of a theological system that in virtue of a certain congeniality was inwardly adapted from the outset for debate with the unequivocally rational worldview of the modern period that was now arising. Reformed theologians were the ones who had sympathy with the first great philosopher of the modern period, Descartes, whether they agreed with him or rejected him.*? It was to Calvin’s system that later the historically most successful attempt to restate Protestant theology in the spirit of the modern period, that of Schleiermacher, attached itself.

The ambivalence of Calvin in this second field, that of history, as is clear from the example just given, is due to the ambivalence of the field itself. History is the field on which we have to live out Christianity but on which we have to compromise in order to fulfill our vocation through its movements of advance and decline, in order to be witnesses to that other kingdom which can never be moved [cf. Heb. 12:28]. Calvinism represents the historical success of the Reformation because it is its ethos. But to say success here is to say failure, inner loss, secularization. To say ethos is to stride off from God into the world; it is to turn one’s back on God. We have to see both sides, the need to take this step, but also the need for renewed reflection and conversion. But when we see that, we see the need for both Luther and Calvin, both Calvin and Luther.