The Theology of Martin Luther CH509

 LESSON 08 of 24

Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.

Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

Luther exalted in the fact that he was a child of God; and he had a
very high view of the human creature as God’s favorite creature, as
the steward of creation charged with important responsibilities.
I think it’s often thought that Luther did not have a particularly
high view of the human creature because Luther took sin so
seriously and because he can say such nasty things about us as
sinners. People often have the impression that he was down on
humanity. In part he was down on the fallen human creature
because he had such a high view of what it meant to be human.
He had a high view even of human possibilities apart from the
gospel, apart from faith. He believed that pagans could be what he
called, “civically righteous,” that they could practice a kind of civil
righteousness that indeed could make a society better rather than
worse. But he also believed that even these civically righteous
people were missing the best part of their humanity. The best part
of their humanity was—as we have already said—fearing, loving,
and trusting in God above all things.

Luther struggled with expressing a concept of the image of God.

In his Genesis Commentary, from the latter years of his life and
also in a number of other places, he wrestled with a description
of something that he thought was (at least in part) lost or, if
that image is defined as simply “the relationship with God,”
totally lost by those in sin. He had a surprisingly modern view
of the relationship between animals and the human creature.
He commented once that “the human creature and the beasts
are really quite similar, but critically different as well.” For the
human creature was created in a different way, not simply by God
speaking, but by God taking the dust of the earth and breathing
into that dust His own breath. And God provided for the human
creature in special ways and gave the human creature a special
relationship with Himself. At times Luther said that the human
creature was “bound for glory even if there had been no fall into
sin.” At other points he seems to suggest that what the work of
Christ does [is to?] restore us to that perfect fear, love, and trust
in God which Adam and Eve had in the garden.

What is the image of God? Well, Luther was willing to grant

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

that those who said that it was memory and will and reason had
something of the whole thing there. But on the other hand, he
said, Satan has memory and Satan has will and Satan has reason
too, and so that cannot be the whole of the image of God, that
cannot be the heart of the image of God. What was it then in
Adam and Eve as they lived in Eden that really represented what
the Bible means when it talks about the image of God? “Adam and
Eve had,” Luther suggested, “contentment with God’s favor.” They
were at peace, they enjoyed shalom—they enjoyed that sense of
harmony of having it all together—of having life as it really ought
to be and the order in which God wanted it to be. They had a kind
of total godliness, a total harmony with the will and the Spirit of
God. That meant, for instance, that they had no fear. They had no
conception of death. They had no conception of disobedience or
of disorder in human life. They simply rested in the peace of God
which He provided them with His presence as they walked and
talked in the cool of the evening.

Luther believed that the human creature had been given that very
special place as crown of creation through the gift of dominion;
rule over the earth for the sake of the Lord and in God’s stead.
Luther recognized that this dominion was not a kind of exercise
of power in what our Lord called “Gentile fashion.” He recognized
that it was a care for creation. He recognized that human creatures
were called to project God’s own love and His own concern for
one another and for all of inanimate creation. Luther did believe
that the exercise of this dominion was badly damaged—it was
even lost—through the fall into sin. He could say that the human
creature had, after the fall, the title of dominion but did not
exercise the power of dominion any longer. Instead, nature had
been turned against the human creature.

Before we leave the subject of the image of God, it is important

for us to note Luther’s views on women, since they have obviously
been much discussed in our era. The medieval view that a wife
was a necessary evil is not completely absent from Luther’s
conversation. But Luther did mark a dramatic difference, a
dramatic change from the medieval and Renaissance viewpoint
that women were inferior and simply a necessary evil. Luther
insisted that Eve and Adam were partakers of the same grace.
They had the same mental gifts. They were partners in exercising
dominion in the care of their children, in the care of all of
creation. In the fall, Luther believed women and men had fallen
equally, but the results for each were different. And, therefore,
he believed that wives lived in subjection to their husbands, but
that subjection was a subjection embraced in love. Husbands and
wives, he insisted, were to live together in mutual love and mutual
care and concern and mutual affection and mutual holiness as

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

they served God by caring for one another. Sin had not altered the
nature and the bond of marriage, he insisted.

He saw that Adam and Eve had lived together in a world of three
estates or three situations, three divisions of labor. Adam taught
the Word, and so he represented the estate of the church, as it
was to be developed. He worked in the garden, he cultivated the
garden, and so he projected the image of the human creature at
work in the world in the context of family and occupational life.
And thirdly, Adam guarded and watched the land as a symbol, as a
representative of the political figures whom God would give later
to people in the midst of a sinful world as the ones who protected
justice and who provided defense for their people. Luther could
also say that Adam and Eve had no need of political power,
contradicting what I have just said. But he also read back into
Eden (at other points in his writing and his teaching) the three
estates of medieval social theory. Adam and Eve had lived in a
world in which they shared the Word of God with their children,
in which they worked and cultivated the garden, in which they
guarded and watched the land in perfect peace, in the full and
complete image of God.

The fall into sin changed all that. To understand how Luther
assessed the impact of the fall into sin, we must remember that
he distinguished those two dimensions of life, those two kinds
of righteousness, and most of what he says about the fall into
sin concerns the vertical relationship and not the horizontal
relationship, although we must concede that the two can never
be separated. He certainly saw the love of neighbor, as practiced
by the sinner, damaged and in some cases completely destroyed
by the fall into sin. But he was primarily concerned about the
disruption of the love of God and the response of trust. He was
primarily concerned about the loss of faith in God, which for him
was the key to the practice of our whole humanity.

So Luther made a point often of rejecting various medieval views

of sin. He could not see it as simply a depravation of original
righteousness, which had served as a kind of adornment, a kind
of add-on to the basic essence of our humanity. Instead, he
believed that trust in God had been the key, the gyroscope, the
point of orientation for human life. And sin, defined as a rejection
of that faith—sin defined as doubt of God and His Word—then
had permeated all of humanity and had in a sense ruined all of
humanity, even though in the horizontal realm virtue could be
practiced even by the unbeliever.

Again, turning to Luther’s commentary on Genesis, we get a

glimpse of his entire doctrine of sin that focuses upon the story

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

of Adam and Eve. Genesis 3 was a story of fleeing and of fright;

it was a story, first of all, of withdrawal from God. The human
creature has at the very heart of the relationship with God turned
away, and the solution for that, of course, is the turning back,
of repentance. In Eden, Adam and Eve reoriented their lives
away from the critical relationship, which was the key to their
humanity. They reoriented their key relationship with God, and
thus they reoriented life itself. They went from life into death by
separating themselves from the Author of life, Yahweh Himself.

As I’ve just said, the nature of that temptation for Luther was
that it was doubt of God and of God’s Word. The Word of God,
God speaking to Adam and Eve as they walked and talked in the
cool of the evening, for instance, was the heart of Adam and Eve’s
humanity. And now at that point at which trust meant the Word
of God, and thus meant God Himself, there was disruption, there
was a break in the relationship. And the result was that henceforth
humanity flows not from the peace which comes from trusting
God, the practice of our humanity flows from a fear of God (and
well we might be afraid, for we have turned our back on Him).
It comes from a hatred of God. “And well we might hate God,”
Luther would say, “because His Law threatens to destroy us.” The
practice of our humanity now stems from our attempts to avoid
God, for we want to live life on our own terms, not on His, and we
live in that fear. So the loss of God’s Word is the loss of God. For
that reason, Luther took heresy so seriously because he believed
that a misunderstanding of any part of God’s Word threatens the
whole relationship with Him. And in that relationship that is
now broken, in the tattered, torn relationship of unfaith, in that
relationship which turns to God’s gifts rather than to God for an
ultimate sense of identity, we find a human creature who is totally
bent on self-seeking. All other sins, all the damage that comes to
human relationships within the horizontal realm of human life,
all these other sins stem from the self-seeking which has resulted
from our lack of trust in God.

So even the best of human works, Luther believed, were like filthy
rags. They were permeated by sin. Even the noblest of human
deeds showed the mark of imperfection, showed the mark of a life
that is focused no longer on that source of perfect peace, Yahweh
Himself, but instead is focused on some kind of false god, perhaps
on human performance itself. Luther not only noted that our
good deeds are imperfect, but he also noted that they are often
perverse when we want to rely on them for restoring life and
salvation to ourselves.

And so Luther expanded a great deal on the pride and the self-
satisfaction which stem from our looking away from God. Looking

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

away from God has made us deaf to His Word and blind to the
structure of life which He has written into our existence. So in our
pride and in our self-satisfaction, we pursue courses of action. We
plan life in such a way that it drives us ever further away from God,
drives us into an ever-increasing kind of robbery of God, which we
commit through our ingratitude toward Him, in which we commit
through our ignoring of His Word. This ingratitude toward God,
Luther labeled “the most shameful vice and the greatest contempt
against the one who has made us.” And in robbing God of His
place as our Lord, we also rob our neighbors. We use them instead
of serve them. We use them for our own purposes; we make them
cushions upon whom we can fall when we trip up in life. We use
them as hostages to defend ourselves against the slings and arrows
of still other people. And furthermore, we rob the neighbor of the
service which we owe to him or her, the service to which God calls
us as His people to give.

What that means, finally, is that human creatures are driven into
impenitence because we continually have to protect ourselves
from the accusation of the Law. And that impenitence drives us
into despair. Luther saw two routes to despair, one more direct:
(1) We simply recognize the inadequacy of our own plans and our
own devices, our own path for life as we have laid it out. (2) The
other route to despair goes by way of pride and self-satisfaction,
for we count on ourselves to be able to construct the good life
through our own good works, through our own reason, through our
own attempts at making ourselves into gods. “But we are driven,
finally, after perhaps months or even years of self-deception, into
the same kind of despair,” Luther said, reflecting his own despair
at having tried to live out a life, which could by virtue of human
performance, by virtue of its own works, set aside all the evil that
Luther felt in himself. And he knew how to speak of “a wretched
conscience,” of the despair of a wretched conscience, because he
had experienced it firsthand.

“That kind of despairing conscience hurls accusations against

God,” Luther said. We want to go into combat against God
himself as sinners, for our sinfulness, (first of all), doesn’t want
to be recognized as sin at all, instead it wants to claim that it is
righteous, and it calls God a liar when God’s Law reminds us that
our sin is wrong and denies our own humanity. Secondly, our sin
does not want to be punished even if it is sinful. It defies God to
punish it; it puts the blame on God and argues that we had no
choice but to sin. But all those accusations fall flat in the face of
an Almighty God whose Law continues to accuse us, to condemn
us, to crush us.

“What has happened in our sin,” still focusing on the first

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

commandment, Luther says, “is that we have exchanged gods, we

have fled to the devil for refuge because we refuse to find refuge in
God himself.” So we have become obedient to the devil, we have
become as Jesus says in John 8, “the children of the devil,” instead
of the children of God. That’s very stupid, Luther observed and
repeated often and often again. Part of his problem with human
reason was that human reason seems to have been so stupid in
choosing the devil over God.

The fallen creature can’t even recognize the depth of sin. Luther
said that it is “part of the natural knowledge of God indeed to
see that what we do wrong is wrong.” But the nature of the depth
of our corruption, the nature of original sin itself as a failure to
fear, love, and trust in God above all things, that is something that
“only the Holy Spirit can teach us,” Luther wrote in the Smalcald
Articles. For only when we recognize that God is God—when
we recognize that Yahweh who has revealed Himself as Jesus of
Nazareth is God—can we see how wrong it is, how damaging and
destructive it is of our own humanity to reject Him as God.

This sinfulness is above all, Luther taught, a reorientation to

the Word. Because we no longer listen to God, because we have
become deaf to the Word of God, we cannot hear God’s Law. It was
a good word for us. It was a gift. It was the gift of the structure
of new life. But now it only opens our eyes to the fact that we
have betrayed God; that we have fallen short of His glory and of
His demands for life. Now we encounter the Law above all not as
friend but as foe. Even when we encounter it thinking that it is
our friend, Luther says, “thinking that we can use it as a ladder to
climb back into God’s grace, it will turn on us.” It will become that
wolf that devours us, even though we thought we had tamed it to
be a good Seeing Eye dog.

In addition, this reorientation to the Word of God, this doubt of

His promise deafens us to the gospel of His grace as it blinds us to
His fatherly disposition. And so we hear neither His word for our
daily lives in His Law correctly anymore, nor do we hear His word
for the core of our existence—His word that we are His children
and that He will be our Father—correctly. Instead, the faint echo
we get of His claim upon us becomes a roar of an angry God, the
roar of a wrathful God, a voice of condemnation.

The prime result of this is death. Luther took very seriously

Paul’s word in Romans 6:23, “the wages of sin is death.” He took
that seriously from both directions. Sin cannot help but lead
us to death. There is no other solution for sin than death. Sin
is so serious; sin has permeated our existence so deeply and so
greatly, that there is only one solution—death. Sin can’t be fixed.

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

The metaphor of cleansing is one that Luther used often, but [it]
is finally too weak for him. The metaphor of healing is useful,
but finally too weak for him. His theology is determined by his
conviction that sin has so ruined the human creature that human
creatures must die. And in his reading of Romans 6, he saw that
death coming either eternally or through the gift of God; the gift
of God which earlier in Romans 6 had been described through the
gift of baptismal death in which our sins are buried with Christ
in His tomb, and the gift of life which comes in being raised from
baptismal waters to the new life in Christ. Therefore, Luther spent
a good deal of time talking about death as Satan’s worst weapon.
And it was there in death that the enemy had to be met. That is
why Jesus Christ had to pour out His blood. That is why He had
to be obedient even unto the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8),
because only there by defeating death could all of Satan’s rule be
set aside.

For Martin Luther, Satan was a very important figure in both

dimensions of human life. Luther warned against the temptations
of Satan, to fall away from loving the neighbor as God calls us
to love the neighbor. And above all, he warned against Satan’s
temptation to doubt the good and perfect word of God, which
assures us that we are God’s children.

There was a terrible seriousness in Luther’s view of the devil, a

terrible seriousness that was reflected time and time again. The
early 20th-century historian of dogma Reinhold Seeberg wrote,
“Luther’s devil has more hellish majesty than the medieval
devil.” He had become more serious and more powerful and more
terrible. Indeed, the recent analysis of Luther’s life by Heiko
Oberman, a contemporary Luther scholar, focuses on the human
creature caught between God and the devil. There was no neutral
ground, no middle station, Luther taught, there was no safe haven
in between the two where we could relax a little bit. No, the whole
life of the fallen human creature is a life caught in conflict. And,
therefore, it must be a life of continually being turned by the Holy
Spirit back to God. The conflict between God and Satan was a
conflict to the death, to the death of Satan’s power over God’s
people, to the death of sinners who had to die to sin so that they
might become alive in Jesus Christ.

Satan and God go head to head, according to Luther, in the daily

life of the believer. They go head to head in the little corners of
daily life. Satan teams up; he comes into alliance with the world
around us and our flesh. And Luther took the temptations from
all three of these sources (the devil, the world, and our flesh) very
seriously. The devil, “like a roaring lion,” to use Peter’s words,
“wants to devour us” (I Peter 5:8). And he wants to devour us not

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

only with the temptations of his black demons who come to us

and say, “Wouldn’t sin be fun?” he comes to us above all in the
form of the white demons who look like angels, who look like
people with good suggestions, who are people with real needs,
but who tempt us into places, into actions that do not serve God.
He comes, in other words, to pervert us in the midst of daily life
as our own desires, as our own estimate of human life, as our own
faulty reason misfunctions and our flesh drives us into doing the
will of Satan rather than God. Satan comes through the world
which tells us that sin is really okay, or that suggests the necessity
of this kind of sin for the good of the neighbor, for the welfare
of the city, for the prosperity of the world. Satan comes to drive
us from God through temptations to sin. He also comes through
afflictions, afflictions in the body, afflictions in our spirit. He
comes to suggest that we can go his way rather than God’s. He
comes to suggest that his way is God’s. So the Christian must ever
be on the lookout for the lies of Satan, for Satan is, again, as Jesus
said in John 8, “the father of lies.”

Particularly in the church, Luther noted, the devil has attacked

God on a grand scale. First of all, he attacks the Word of God
through the corruption of the church’s doctrine and life. So Luther
spent a great deal of time in his critique of the church, because it
was the church, he believed, that had drawn him under the power
of Satan. The church had corrupted the Word of God. The church,
where God’s Word ought to be safe and rightly proclaimed, the
church itself had perverted the doctrine of God. So Luther taught
there is no human institution upon which we can rely, just as there
is no human performance of the good upon which we can rely.
Only the Word of God, only the gospel can defend itself, and every
form of human power expressed in performance or an institution
is bound sooner or later to fail and to fall. And that was the case
in the medieval church’s life. That was why Luther believed he
was called to bring the church the message of repentance, of
institutional reform.

Satan also attacks the Word of God within the church through
persecution. That persecution may come from outside the
church; and the church had to offer up its martyrs in praise
to God at the altars of the Roman persecutors of the ancient
empire. But Luther himself was experiencing persecution within
the church. Luther noted that it was the church itself that had
become the agent of Satan in driving the gospel underground, in
attempting to eliminate the gospel. Already in the early 1520s,
his followers began to suffer persecution. Because of the political
situation in the German empire, not as many Lutherans suffered
persecution as followers of John Calvin in France or followers of
the Protestant leaders in England during the reign of Mary Tudor.

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

But nonetheless, Luther was painfully aware of the fact that the
church itself had become Satan’s instrument using the temporal
sword to suppress the gospel. And he saw this as one of the best
evidences that indeed the power of Satan was alive and well in his
time. But he also took the persecution of his message as a sign
that God would not let His church and His Word fall from human
hearing, that God would reassert even against the persecutor
His presence in the Word that was proclaimed for the life of His
people.

Luther also recognized that Satan comes to afflict the individual

Christian through God’s good gift of His word of Law. Luther himself
had experienced this affliction of Satan in his anfechtungen—in
these spiritual battles, in these spiritual anxieties that had almost
torn him apart psychologically. It was Satan who came—Luther
experienced—after he had heard the gospel, to defuse the gospel,
to discourage Luther from taking it seriously. So Luther warned
time and time again against listening to the Law of God when it
is the voice of Satan, when it continues to accuse the sinner of
being a sinner when the sinner has been safely taken through the
forgiveness of sins into the arms of Christ, into the company of
God our Father. Luther was painfully aware that the Law of God,
good gift though it be, could indeed become the worst oppression
of the devil himself. And, therefore, Luther said things that you
and I find strange today. It is against this background that we must
see those phrases that we have already heard in the lecture on the
two kinds of righteousness, “That the Christian simply doesn’t
listen to the Law anymore.” Luther indeed embraced the law for
the information it gives about living the good life, but he knew
altogether too well that the voice of the Law in Satan’s mouth is
the voice of destruction; it is the voice of despair; it is the voice
that drives people from God. So Luther asserted again and again
that the poor, beleaguered, bedraggled, but repentant sinner can
listen alone to the Word of the gospel, which restores that core
identity which calls and enables believers once again to fear, love,
and trust in God above all things.

Indeed, it is important for us to see how Luther then made the

proper distinction of Law and gospel work in the daily life of the
believer. Both in the life of the believer and the unbeliever, the
Law of God, the structure of God, was expressing itself in external
acts which serve the needs of the neighbor. Again, let me repeat
what I said at the beginning of this lecture: “God is capable of
bringing civil righteousness out of pagans too; unbelievers also
will externally comply with the Law of God.” And Luther did not
discount the importance and the goodness for the horizontal
realm of that kind of civic righteousness. Luther criticized reason
roundly, as we have said, when reason tries to assert something

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

false about our relationship with God—that our sin is not sin, for
instance, or that we can earn God’s favor through our own good
works. But Luther valued reason as it estimated how to love the
neighbor, how to build the good society, how to preserve the city
of human creatures in an externally godly way. This was very
important for Luther, but finally it was penultimate. For Luther
recognized that what is at the heart of all the problems of civil
society (run at its best by good civic righteousness) was the
flaw and the fault at the heart of our creatureliness—our failure
to recognize the Creator as Lord, as Creator of our lives. And
Luther was convinced that this kind of sinfulness so permeates
our being that we can put no faith in the civic righteousness of
ourselves or of others because sin will always reassert itself. And,
therefore, he believed that the whole life of the Christian was a
life of repentance. And he believed that the whole life of civic
society is a life of rising and falling and readjusting and reforming
and falling once again because of the way in which sin (as Satan’s
tool) reasserts itself and ruins life once again. He believed that
the human creature really has no choice because we are born in
this sinfulness.

In our next lecture, we will look at the specific controversy

of which most of us have already heard, the controversy with
Erasmus over The Bondage of the Will. But we cannot leave the
subject of Luther’s Doctrine of Sin without noting how deeply
he saw sin reaching into the human heart. The human will, he
believed, is bound. Not bound in horizontal relationships where
we experience free choice in all sorts of ways—choosing friends,
choosing food. The choices of everyday life Luther did not want to
deny. But in his own will, he had experienced that try as he might
he could never fear, love, and trust in God above all things. In part,
I suppose we could say it was because he had expectations that
were unreasonably high. But he wanted to be that perfect human
being that he knew God had shaped in His own image to live this
life that flows from perfect fear, love, and trust in Yahweh above
all else. And that he was never able to do. His will, try as it might,
was still bound to end up in self-seeking, in self-satisfaction. It
was bound to end up turned from God.

Luther’s own reading of the Scriptures convinced him that, as

Jesus says in John 15, “I have chosen you; you have not chosen
Me.” So Luther agreed with the Lord that he had not chosen Him
but had received Him only and purely and completely as a gift.
It was out of Luther’s own experience with his sinfulness that
he came to his convictions regarding The Bondage of the Will. It
was because of his reading of the Scriptures, which indeed taught
him time and time again something of human impotence and
incompetence and something of the sovereign, divine power of

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Lesson 08 of 24 Luther’s Anthropology and Doctrine of Sin

God which alone recreates human creatures in His image through

Jesus Christ, even as God alone created the world in the first place.

And so Luther came into Christendom with not only a new view of
God’s grace as it works through faith in the human creature, Luther
came into Christendom with not only a devil with more hellish
majesty than the medieval devil, he came into Christendom with
a message about the human creature which realistically assessed
how bad it has become through the fall into sin. But he could do
that because he, first of all, had a view of the human creature that
took seriously how good we were in Eden, how magnificent God’s
gift of humanity truly is, and thus how wonderful it is that God
has promised the restoration of this humanity through death and
resurrection in Jesus Christ on the basis of His suffering and His
passion, His self-sacrifice on the cross, and His coming to life
again.

Whether we are discussing the Doctrine of the Church, as we shall

see later, or the Doctrine of Public Worship or the Doctrine of
Anthropology and Sin, for Luther the Word of God always comes
back to Jesus Christ. And every doctrine in the whole of his body of
doctrine has to be related back to that gospel where we encounter
Jesus of Nazareth, God come in human flesh, because of our dying
in sin, so that we through Him might die to sin and rise to the kind
of life God wanted us to have in the first place. That’s the key to
Luther’s anthropology and to his Doctrine of Sin.

Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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