Co-missioners,
On this Maundy Thursday we send you the ninth and final section of an essay by Robert W. Bertram entitled “How Our Sins Were Christ’s: A Study in Luther’s Galatians (1531).” We invite you to use this tomorrow as a Good Friday devotion. When you start reading, you’ll quickly find that there is nothing light or easy about it. Read anyway; bear the burden of struggling through it, if struggle you must. On reaching the end you’ll have tasted riches that are not otherwise available in 2025 as people reflect on the death of Jesus and what this means for us today.
For more of these riches we commend the entire essay to you, of course. Bertram lifted it from his doctoral dissertation of 1963 and added it to The Promising Tradition, a mimeographed primer in Law/Gospel theology developed for Seminex students. It appears there with meticulous footnoting that connects what Bertram asserts to Luther’s lectures on Galatians of 1531 (Luther’s Works, V. 26). We have taken the liberty of stripping those footnotes from what we present below. Let them not distract you from your meditation on the incomprehensible marvel of all that God has done for us and for the world in Christ Crucified.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Ex Magna Charitate
[=Out of Great Love]
Girolamo Romanino (1485–) – Christ Crowned with Thorns, and Ecce Homo
From Wikimedia Commons
It was not for nothing that Luther invoked every biblical description of Christ’s sinnerhood which would show that, according to the moral grammar of predication, Christ was rightfully and legally subject to the law’s condemnation, that our sins “are as much Christ’s own as if he himself had committed them.” For, by granting the legal order its maximum due, it is now drawn into the fray, not at its worst—not as the emasculated legalism of the scholastics, not as some miscarriage of justice by the Sanhedrin—but at its best. As a consequence, it is the divine law in its own holy integrity—that is, as it justly condemns every sinner, no matter how pious, as the enemy of God—which now does what it has to do to this peccator peccatorum [=sinner of sinners]. And it is this same law at its holiest and best which, in the mirabile duellum [=astonishing duel] which ensues, is eternally discredited. The other antagonists as well—sin, devil, curse, wrath, death—are present not as caricatures but at the height of their power.
It is only because the enemies involved are the real enemies—the ones, in other words, with whom [human beings] have to reckon for life and death before God—that the mirabile duellum becomes indeed a “very joyous duel,” iucundissimum duellum. Here we find Luther applying his own hermeneutical rule, exploiting the antithesis of the opponents (and doing so even more trenchantly than he did in his dialectical display against Erasmus) in order not only to “reveal their infamy and shame” but to celebrate in turn our “knowledge of Christ and most delightful comfort.” The whole legal mode of predication, so elaborately employed for what seemed a merely negative detailing of Christ’s sinnerhood, now “by contrast serves to magnify the grace of God and the blessings of Christ.”
“The grace of God and the blessings of Christ”—that is the secret of the iucundissimum duellum. Or rather what is the secret is that this divine grace, “the blessing,” is locked in mortal combat with the curse “in this one person.” “Now let us see,” asks Luther, “how two such extremely contrary things come together in one person.” The answer, as might be expected, is that when they do come together it is the divine powers—divine righteousness, life, and blessing—which of course prevail over their lesser contraries, sin and death and the curse. But the secret, indeed the prerequisite, of the victory is that it all occurs “in his own body and in himself.” Both sets of contraries are really his. If the sin had not been his, as truly as the righteousness was, the law could easily have avoided its blasphemy against him by cursing only the one and not the other. However, “he joined God and man in one person. And being joined with us who were accursed, he became a curse for us; and he concealed his blessing in our sin, death, and curse, which condemned and killed him.” His intentional self-incrimination, his personal decision to attach himself to the enemies of God—the very reason he was cursed, and rightfully—was the selfsame decision of the selfsame person (the merciful decision of the divine person) which to curse was sheer blasphemy. The wonder, therefore, is not just that the curse was conquered by the blessing. The prior wonder is, Why should the curse want to attack the blessing in the first place? Luther’s answer is that, because God’s blessing and our sin were so intimately joined in this one person (as intimately as the “person” and his “work”), therefore the curse, which had no choice but to condemn our sin, necessarily condemned the divine blessing as well. “This circumstance, ‘in himself,’ makes the duel more amazing and outstanding; for it shows that such great things were to be achieved in the one and only person of Christ.”
We began the essay by asking, as a problem in theological predication, by reason of what can such a contradictory predicate as sin, our sin at that, really and meaningfully belong to Christ, this “purest of persons,… God and man?” Luther’s answer must finally be, by reason of Christ’s love. He “did this because of his great love; for Paul says : ‘who loved me’.” In the last analysis, the explanation of Christ’s paradoxical sinnerhood is simply that “he is nothing but sheer, infinite mercy, which gives and is given; “the kind of lover who gives himself for us and…who interposes himself as the Mediator between God and us miserable sinners.
Photo by Jerome Burce
Yet to speak of Christ as the “Mediator between God and us miserable sinners” seems to suggest that, while Christ may lovingly have predicated our sins of himself, “God” (perhaps the first person of the Trinity) may not so spontaneously concur in this predication but prefers to reserve judgment. For Luther this would be tantamount to saying that the ultimate and terrifying truth about the Divine Majesty is that he is our judge and that the whole project of overcoming his judgment and abolishing our sin must be achieved “in the person” of someone other than himself, finally in our own persons. And that is exactly the fatal heresy, Luther would say, of those who prefer to speculate about the Divine Majesty apart from Christ, and who prefer to do so just because they suppose they can face his judgment on the strength of whatever behavioral transformations occur within their own persons.
But this is to deny what Luther, as we saw previously, so vigorously affirmed: namely, that “to conquer the sin of the world … and the wrath of God in himself—this is the work, not of any creature but of the divine power.” “Therefore when we teach that [human beings] are justified through Christ and that Christ is the victor over sin … we are testifying at the same time that he is God by nature.”
Accordingly, the final explanation which really and meaningfully predicates our sin of Christ is that same loving will which he who “is God by nature” shares with his Father. “The indescribable and inestimable mercy and love of God,” who saw “that we were being held under a curse and that we could not be liberated from it, … heaped all the sins of all [human beings] upon him.” The culpable decision by which Christ attached himself to the enemies of God is simultaneously the decision of this very God. “Of his own free will and by the will of the Father he wanted to be an associate of sinners.” Indeed, it is “only by taking hold of Christ, who, by the will of the Father, has given himself into death for our sins,” that we are “drawn and carried directly to the Father.” The only alternative is to withdraw our sins from Christ, hoping wanly that God might enable us to remove and replace them in our own persons, and thus to be left alone with the mortifying “majesty of God.”
Yet even the Divine Majesty, the very name by which Luther had described the hidden and intolerable God of the De Servo Arbitrio [=The Bondage of the Will], becomes for believers, the same God who lovingly destroys our sin in the person of his Son. “For this is a work that is appropriate only to the Divine Majesty and is not within the power of either man or angel—namely, that Christ has abolished sin.” “… The Divine Majesty did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.” The maiestas Dei , before whose inscrutable depths and dreadful judgments the sinner was forbidden to ask Why, now, in Christ, provides the sinner with new depths of mystery and perhaps even an answer to his question, but of an altogether different order.
“The human heart is too limited to comprehend, much less to describe, the great depths and burning passion of divine love toward us. Indeed, the very greatness of divine mercy produces not only difficulty in believing but incredulity. Not only do I hear that God Almighty, the Creator of all, is good and merciful; but I hear that the Supreme Majesty cared so much for me … that, he did not spare his own Son, … in order that he might hang in the midst of thieves and become sin and a curse for me, the sinner and accursed one, and in order that I might be made righteous, blessed, and a son and heir of God. Who can adequately proclaim this goodness of God? Not even all the angels.”
By reason of what, then, is our sin Christ’s own? “By divine love sin was laid upon him.” In fact, it was the divine love, his very willingness to be the peccator peccatorum, which before the law was the most sinful thing about him. And it was his “sinful” divine love, by compelling the law to attack him, which invalidated that law and its whole legalistic mode of predication, so that henceforth “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
