> Stanley Hauerwas Case #36 - In Secular Times Citizenship Heaven Luther Salvation Secularism

Citizens of Heaven

September 01, 2013

Citizens of Heaven

‘And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.’

This sentence, this innocent but all significant sentence, created the time in which we now live. That time, that is the time in which we now live, is the time best characterised as ‘after the Reformation’. Thus Brad Gregory’s argument in his, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, that the ‘Western world today is an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity, in which the Reformation era constitutes the critical watershed’.[i]

Our complex and tangled lives are testimony to the significance of how this sentence from Genesis determines how we must now live. In particular how this sentence was read by Luther has, I believe, made it difficult for us to imagine what it might mean to be Christian in this time when Christendom seems to be waning. More accurately, how Luther’s use of this sentence has been employed by many of us has meant we have forgotten that salvation involves making us citizens of a time and space that is in tension with all other forms of citizenship. As a result we have been robbed of resources we desperately need if we are as Christians to know how to live in this time ‘after the Reformation’. These are strong claims that no one article should bear, but let me at least try to suggest why I am taking this tack by first directing your attention to what Luther actually says about Abraham.

With his usual love of exaggeration, a characteristic with which I deeply identify, Luther declared in his Commentary on Genesis that the fifteenth chapter of Genesis is one of the most important chapters in the Bible. The fifteenth chapter has such importance, according to Luther, because there we are told that the Lord reckons Abraham as righteous because he believed the Lord. The sentence in which the Lord reckoned Abraham righteous, Luther argued, is one of the most important sentences in the whole Bible.

Hebrew text

Luther supported his claims about the significance of this chapter and sentence by calling attention to Paul’s use of the sentence in Romans 4:23 and Galatians 3:6. Luther wrote, ‘upon this text Paul bases the central article of our faith, which both the world and the devil hate, namely that faith alone justifies and saves’ (Romans 3: 28). Luther continues, explaining that to have faith ‘means nothing else than to assent to God’s promises and to trust that they are absolutely true and dependable… Our righteousness before God is simply this that we trust in the divine promises of Christ.’

Faith, that is, the steadfast and unwavering reliance on God’s grace in Christ, is what saves―not the works of the law, Luther argues. After all, Abraham believed before the law had been given. Luther thundered, we are then ‘justified and saved alone by (divine) grace, which imputes to us (Christ’s) righteousness. Upon this passage, therefore, rests our whole (Christian) doctrine that we (who believe in Christ) are justified before God alone by the grace of God.’ Such a faith justifies, not as our own work, but faith itself is the work of God. This understanding of justification by faith through grace arguably is the heart of the Reformation. Just as important, I assume, the doctrine of justification by faith is the heart of our hearts as Protestants.

What could possibly be wrong, therefore, with Luther’s use of this sentence to remind us that our salvation is not our doing but rather what God has done for us? Surely Luther was right to direct our attention to the centrality of this sentence in the letters of Paul. I have no reason to deny either of these claims. My worry is that the use of this sentence to ‘sum up’ the Gospel can tempt those of us who identify ourselves as Christians to forget our salvation comes from the Jews. Moreover when we lose the Jews, we lose our heavenly saviour, and when we lose our heavenly saviour we no longer believe, or better, desire that our humiliated bodies be transformed into the body of his glory made citizens of heaven.

You are probably thinking—‘What did he just say?’ The connection between God’s promise to Abraham; what it means to live lives determined by the cross of Christ; and the glorification of our bodies so that we become citizens of heaven is hardly clear. But let me at least try to make the connections by suggesting that what is at stake is the recognition that our salvation is about the engrafting of our bodies into a politics begun by God’s promise to Abraham. The emphasis on justification by faith as the summation of the Gospel can tempt us to forget our salvation entails that we are made citizens, a people, and that this is our salvation.

When I lived among the Lutherans, for example, I discovered that the doctrine of justification by faith alone, a doctrine that should provide a profound sense of joy, often produced a deep anxiety. Lutherans were haunted by the thought they might not be justified by their faith. Accordingly they worked very hard at believing that they believed they were justified by their belief that they were justified by faith. Faith so understood turned out to be an act of believing which did not require you to actually drag your body to church. Even more ironic, faith understood as trying very hard to believe what was hard to believe is exactly what Luther meant by a work.

There is the other small problem, moreover, that when the emphasis on justification is made the heart of the Gospel it is not clear why Jesus ended up on the cross. If his preaching was to assure those to whom he preached that they were saved by faith alone why was Herod trying to kill him? If the Gospel is the proclamation that ‘You are accepted’, an unfortunately vulgarised but widespread account of justification, it surely seems to be a profound mistake to kill someone like Jesus who allegedly had as his central message that we accept our acceptance.

Nor do I think Luther’s reading of God’s ‘reckoning’ Abraham righteous to be a problem about the relation of faith and works. Luther had no intention of denying the importance of works. In his commentary on Genesis he says with no hesitation ‘that a faith without works is no faith at all…Faith stretches forth its hand and lays hold on what God has promised.’ The question for Luther was not whether works or the virtues follow upon faith, but rather that faith prior to producing works justifies sinners. Luther, however, forcefully asserted that what must clearly be rejected is the ‘pernicious doctrine’ that faith obtains its value from love.

The problem is not that Luther has no way to account for works, but rather Luther does not attend to the content of Abraham’s belief. What Abraham believed is that he would have descendants that would be as numerous as the stars. The Lord reckoned Abraham righteous because Abraham believed that God would make him the father of a great people. In God’s declaration that Abraham is righteous, the ‘it’ that was ‘reckoned’ by God was a declaration about bodies. Abraham, a man past the age of begetting children, believed God would make him the father of a people. The righteousness that God reckoned Abraham to have is Abraham’s belief he would be the father of a people who by their very existence are God’s glory.

If justification by faith is isolated from Abraham’s belief that he would be the father of a people the results can be—and have been—disastrous. Thus Luther’s chilling judgment that the Jews are no longer God’s people. According to Luther the Jews have been rejected because of their unbelief. God promised to redeem the Jews at a definite time but, Luther observes, that obviously has not happened. As a result they cannot explain why for hundreds of years they have had to wander the earth without a home, a kingdom, or a true worship. Luther proclaims that the Jews ‘are no longer God’s people but have been rejected by Him on account of their unbelief, because they have refused to accept the Savior whom God has sent them’.

Luther missed the fact that even without a home God’s reckoning of righteousness to Abraham had been fulfilled. From generation to generation Jews refused to let their homelessness, the persecution they endured often at the hands of Christians, stop them from having children. Abraham looked to the heavens to see what God has promised and his descendants reflected the heavens. God’s reckoning of righteousness to Abraham is not some general declaration of acceptance, but rather the fleshy existence of a people who exist so the world might know the God who keeps his promises and refuses to abandon us.

Christians are no less fleshy, but there is a difference. Paul tells the Philippians they are to imitate him by observing those who live according to the example he represents. But Paul is without wife and children. That he is without descendants—other than the Philippians and us—is a crucial fact. For it turns out that we believe on Paul’s authority that those of us who follow Christ are Abraham’s heirs. We are, moreover, no less bodily than the Jews. But the bodies we bring to the covenant are bodies determined by baptism through which we are made citizens of heaven.

The Lord told Abraham that his people would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. It is, therefore, no accident that Paul tells the Philippians—and us—that our citizenship is in heaven. Heavenly citizenship does not sound bodily, but that, at least if we attend to Paul’s claim in his letter to the Philippians, it is in heaven that we are given our true bodies. For it is from heaven that we expect the Lord Jesus Christ whose body will transform our bodies, our humiliated bodies, into the body of his glory.

We wonder what that could possibly mean. In the Kingdom and the Glory the Italian political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has suggested that the emphasis on glory by Christians is paradoxical.[ii] It is so because glory is the essential property of God’s eternity which means nothing can increase or diminish God’s glory, yet we are told that all creatures are obligated to glorify God. Agamben argues that God desiring his creatures to glorify him is contradictory because God’s glory means he needs nothing. What Agamben misses, however, is that the glory God would have us reflect is the glorified body of Christ.

Skyscrapers and church

That body, the body of Christ, is the body we participate in through the meal we share. It is that body, a body that has learned like Jews to live in diaspora, God reckons righteous. In this time ‘after the Reformation’, a time when Christians must learn again how to live in a world we know not, it becomes all the more important we live as heirs of Abraham. To so live means we will be without security of place other than heaven, but surely that is the grandest security to be had. Even more wonderful, God has given us all we need to go on, that is, he has given us a meal of bread and wine, of body and blood of Jesus, to sustain us on the journey.

If we are to live faithfully in this time ‘after the Reformation’ let us live as confident and bold bodily creatures who trust, as Abraham trusted, that by so living our bodies might reflect the glory of the One alone capable of making us citizens of heaven. At the very least I should think that might mean that because we have been reckoned righteous through the cross and resurrection of Christ we manifest an infectious joy because we have no doubt that the Lord reckoned Abraham—and us—righteous. We are citizens of a heavenly politics that makes it possible for us to be a people who are an alternative to the worldly politics based on the presumption that God has not kept his promise to Abraham. But God did reckon Abraham righteous and on that our salvation depends.

[i] Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society (Harvard University Press, 2012), p2.

[ii] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford University Press, 2011).