Just by Faith Alone and by Grace Alone by Ingo Baldermann

Just by Faith Alone and by Grace Alone By Ingo Baldermann [This article published in Junge Kirche (2017) is translated abridged from the German on the Internet.] A fatal pressure can emanate from heirlooms to honor them although they have long been unusable. A person becomes just without the works of the law by faith alone. This sentence will encounter us a thousand times in this Luther year but, I fear, always in the mouths of the wrong people. I recall this very crassly from the time of the great protest movements, the peace movement and the anti-nuclear movement. The storage of pinpoint precision nuclear weapons in Central Europe – with medium range, intended for inner-European or even inner-German use – demanded a “No without any Yes,” an unequivocal decision of our faith. But we only heard: a person becomes just by faith alone, not by his works… That we could die in this faith was crucial, not our conduct. In those days, my mother died. It was clear to me that such a peaceful death would not happen any more after the nuclear emergency. Yes, there was opposition. Our protest was disobedience against God. If the Lord wanted this world to perish in a nuclear inferno, we should not hold him back. What was wrong in this? Everything! For Luther, nothing violated faith as much as selfrighteousness. Here faith (the true faith!) was the instrument of self-righteousness. What Luther discovered as a living source became the standard of supposed orthodoxy. The Language of the Hebrew Bible How could this happen? The reason lies in the nasty wide gulf opening up between the language of the Hebrew Bible and the language of western theology. Luther was very familiar with the language of the Hebrew Bible. Otherwise, he could not have done his immense work of translation… Being just and exercising justice is the office of the judge. That is true in both languages. But the judge in the Hebrew Bible is defined very differently than during the western Justitia with blindfolded eyes “without respect of person.” His office is that he sees more sharply than others with open eyes where people are cheated about their right to life. His office is helping the oppressed receive justice. He exercises justice. The great judges in the times of oppression acted for all Israel and for threatened persons in the gate of the cities. In his writings, Luther emphasized again and again how much he learned from the Hebrew texts. The Psalm verse that led to the breakthrough “Rescue me speedily” (Psalm 31, 2) could only be understood by someone like Luther as a cry from the deepest despair. For him, only rejection could come out of God’s righteousness! But he sought the other meaning time and again “that the words had with the Hebrews.” He understood God’s righteousness very differently: as a love and affection that freed him from all estrangement in deadly pressures.