Martin Luther’s Economy of Faith. Second Thesis: On how Man cannot afford to barter with God for His favor

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, June 30, 2019. Posted Tuesday morning, July 2.

Crisis of faith: Detail from “Dawn: Luther at Erfurt” by Joseph Noel Paton. 1861. Scottish National Galleries via Wikimedia Commons.

Following up from yesterday: If only he’d followed his own logic to its conclusion…

But Luther’s critique of the Roman Church was even now quickly diverging from a a broadly supported list of reforms to church practices and becoming a vision that stood to raze the traditional understanding of what the Church was. In essence, this was a vision of the incommensurateness of man and God. A revelation had struck Luther, namely that God was so infinitely powerful we could not possibly barter with Him for forgiveness using the currency of indulgences and pilgrimages and building churches. You cannot pay someone with cocoa beans and shells hen those things have no value. So infinite was the gulf between the things of God and those of Man that only unconditional surrender---faith---could have any value to him, and tus man’s interior relationship with God was infinitely more important than any external object or act. Though Luther held back from the full consequences of this logic, keeping a place for the Church in fostering this faith by preaching and the administration of the sacraments, it was hard to avoid the conclusion to which this led: in this world of unconvertible currency, there could be no place for the Church as a bureau de change between Man and God, turning the coin of this world that had value in the next.

---from “The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books” by Edward Wilson-Lee.

Comments

[Jennifer]

As someone who was raised as a Lutheran, I always felt that the evolution of religion would be a doing away of the church (any church). Indeed, there was no need for a middleman. Sure, people might still like a place to gather, but ultimately, no one else was needed for a connection with a creator, and if anything, we might feel a stronger connection if we didn't have pesky men telling us how horrible we were, and how we needed them to help with God, while those pesky men were often doing more horrible things than we could imagine...

[FDChief]

I think that this inescapable conclusion is what has forced the Protestant sects to fall back on the insistence that to be "Christian" you need to be in a "community". In practice, I think it's a practical response to the human tendency to invent fantastical personal curlicues and idiosyncracies to our beliefs and habits when not forced into a group and, thus, forced to more-or-less conform TO the group-mean consensus.

So the Protestant prelates that came after Luther saw the plethora of sects and intra-sects and "heresies" and schisms that arose from encouraging every Christian to be his own Pope, and hurriedly tried to force the laity back into some sort of enforced order governed by the Just and the Good.

Of course, the result of THAT was the eventual bifurcation of Christianity into those to whom faith was merely a comfort and a habit - meaning that over time it would lose its appeal and they would slide towards irreligion - and those who clung to their faith as a protection from the obvious random injustice and cruelty of the world around them, meaning that they would become ever-more rigid, intolerant, and spiteful towards anything or anyone that threw shade on their rigid, intolerant faith.

So here we are...