Lutheran Spirituality

by Esko Murto

Is it sensible to ask whether there is something particularly “Lutheran” about Lutheran spirituality? On the one hand, we might say no, realizing that devotion and piety have always been areas where grass root ecumenism has made great successes. Lutherans, Catholics, Anglicans, and other Protestants happily borrow hymns and prayers from one another, read the same devotional classics, and admire similar pieces of art.

On the other hand, the Lutheran Reformation was deeply devotional in nature from its very beginning. The popular narrative of a personally anguished monk seeking a merciful God is not altogether wrong. Many explanations have been offered to the question of why the writings of Martin Luther spread like wildfire, but the most obvious, credible, and true is this: Luther’s preaching of the Gospel met the deep spiritual need of ordinary Christians. The Lutheran Reformation did not remain merely an academic project; it broke out of the Wittenberg lecture halls and into parish churches and the prayer chambers of private homes.

Is it sensible to ask whether there is something particularly “Lutheran” about Lutheran spirituality?

Seeking clarity in matters of salvation and finding peace of conscience have always been central to Lutheran faith and spirituality, and they remain so in our day as well. The Lutheran insistence on certainty of salvation—certainty that Christ was crucified and resurrected for you—has sometimes been criticized as neurotic, but such criticisms fail to understand the gravity of the alternative: condemnation for sin and eternal damnation. What therefore characterizes Lutheran spirituality more than anything is the centrality of repentance and forgiveness.

Godly Grief

St. Paul speaks of grief that leads to salvation as “godly grief,” writing: “I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us” (2 Corinthians 7:9). God wants His creatures to be happy, but in order to secure their eternal happiness He allows them to experience temporal grief in this life. The idea that Lutheran, Gospel-centred faith would have no room for grief over sin, or that all grief is simply a sign of lack of faith, must be rejected.

Grief in itself has no merit in the eyes of God. No one should imagine that by grieving over sins they can somehow obtain forgiveness. The popular idea that “the Law drives us to Christ” is not strictly speaking true, not if one speaks of the Law alone. If left unchecked, guilt and grief eventually cause only despair and hatred against God, as Luther points out in Smalcald Articles. Repentance, terror of conscience, and grief over sin benefits man only through negation. They force him out of the illusion of self-sufficiency and hypocrisy that has until then allowed him to think that he somehow manages his life even without God, or that he in some manner can stand before God trusting in himself.

Repentance does not mean, however, that Christians ought to have constantly bruised consciences before God. Lutheran spirituality is very gentle and understanding towards people with burdened hearts, but such sorrow is not idealized as the whole purpose of Christian faith—something that sometimes happens in certain legalistic Pietistic groups.

Wounding of the conscience is, following Luther’s language, “God’s alien work.” In other words, God doesn’t trouble consciences just for the sake of troubling consciences; but the Holy Spirit must wound consciences in order to rouse sinners out of their false sense of security. Once that has been achieved, terrors of conscience serve no purpose anymore. In Lutheran language, a great difference exists between “security” of salvation and “certainty” of salvation. The former is a false sense of sinful complacency where sinners turn their backs to God and still believe themselves to be safe; the latter is instead the sure certainty that God is truly merciful in Christ and that His promises in the means of grace hold true.

Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses state that “the entire life of a Christian should be one of repentance.” Repentance does not mean, however, that Christians ought to have constantly bruised consciences before God. Lutheran spirituality is very gentle and understanding towards people with burdened hearts, but such sorrow is not idealized as the whole purpose of Christian faith—something that sometimes happens in certain legalistic Pietistic groups.

The Blessed Exchange

The true heart of Lutheran spirituality is faith in Christ as the one who forgives sins and causes the justification of the ungodly. The grace of Christ is received through faith, and, as Lutherans understand it, this faith is no work of man. In theological terms, faith’s role in salvation is called an ‘instrumental cause’ (causa instrumentalis), which means that faith ‘transmits,’ ‘enables,’ or ‘communicates’—whatever word one might use—something man requires for salvation. But faith does not itself cause salvation; it receives it.

The true heart of Lutheran spirituality is faith in Christ as the one who forgives sins and causes the justification of the ungodly.

Philipp Melanchthon summed it up in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession when he writes that “faith does not justify or save because it is a worthy work in itself, but only because it receives the promised mercy.” It would be completely wrong to assume that faith (even when received as a gift from the Holy Spirit) somehow saves through its own merits; faith is not a human action which somehow pleases God and outweighs the guilt of man’s sin. If that were so, all the commands of the Law would be replaced by this one commandment: “believe.” But Heaven is not opened through something man does or has.

Faith is central to man’s salvation because through faith he becomes Christ’s own, and therefore comes to enjoy and even possess all the holiness and forgiveness Jesus Christ has won for mankind through His holy death and resurrection.

Faith is central to man’s salvation because through faith he becomes Christ’s own, and therefore comes to enjoy and even possess all the holiness and forgiveness Jesus Christ has won for mankind through His holy death and resurrection.

Luther agreed with mediaeval writers in describing the connection between Christ and the sinner in terms of marriage. The marital imagery does not simply describe the love of Christ, but goes beyond that, bringing in the legal side of the marriage contract. In The Freedom of a Christian, Luther speaks of Christ as the completely holy, undying, righteous person who “by the wedding-ring of faith takes a share in the sins, death, and hell of his wife, nay, makes them his own, and deals with them no otherwise than as if they were His.” Christ commits Himself to the believer and takes upon Himself her sins, suffers the punishment for them, defeats the enemies of death and the devil, and attains righteousness in the eyes of God and life through His resurrection. The believer receives in turn from Christ blessedness and grace, which truly become hers—just like a wife truly becomes a co-owner of the property of her husband.

Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of its husband Christ. This is called a ‘blessed exchange.’ Luther puts it this way: “By a wonderful exchange, our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s and the righteousness of Christ not Christ’s but ours. He has emptied Himself of His righteousness that He might clothe us with it and fill us with it. And He has taken our evils upon Himself that He might deliver us from them… [I]n the same manner as He grieved and suffered in our sins, and was confounded, in the same manner we rejoice and glory in His righteousness.”

Heart and Head

What is characteristic of Lutheran spirituality is the way in which unites both head and body, mind and heart, understanding and mystery—or, to say it in plain terms, the Word of Scripture and the Holy Sacraments. Lutheran spirituality can be described as a blessed middle between mystic ritualism and doctrinal clarity. To borrow Wilhelm Löhe’s image, it is not merely a golden “middle” but rather a warm, glowing hearth in the middle of a house which gathers others around it.

In practical terms, Lutheran spirituality cultivates the Word of God, through Scripture reading of course, but also through hymns, art, and rich devotional literature: these are the green shoots that spring from the ground once the Word falls upon it like fresh rain (Isaiah 55:11). More than the members of any other denomination, Lutherans bring remembrance of their baptism into daily devotion, following Luther’s advice on how baptism ought to be practiced daily by drowning the sinful deeds and desires and allowing the new, God-pleasing life to grow.

What is characteristic of Lutheran spirituality is the way in which unites both head and body, mind and heart, understanding and mystery—or, to say it in plain terms, the Word of Scripture and the Holy Sacraments.

Christian spirituality consists of both what is believed and how that belief is put into practice in Christian devotion. Neither can survive without the other, and when both are based on the life-giving Gospel of Christ, they only strengthen one another. It is the correct doctrine and preaching of the Word that warms the heart to prayer; it is the life of devotion, prayer, meditation, and frequent use of the sacraments that makes doctrine to be more than mere theorems and preaching more than a mere inspirational message.

It is in the reality of spiritual life that the wondrous truths of the Gospel are made present in the lives of Christian people.

———————

Rev. Esko Murto is a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, a partner church of Lutheran Church–Canada.

Print this article