Co-missioners,
Last week my colleague Robin Lütjohann sent you the first part of Adam Morton’s stunning paper at last month’s Crossings conference. Today you’re getting the second part containing Section III of Adam’s paper. Section IV comes next week and Section V the week after.
As you dig in today, give particular attention to Adam’s section title and his opening paragraph. Two Sundays ago, we heard Paul talking in church about the “scandal” of the Gospel. Here is Luther’s version of the scandal. Conscientious Lutherans—other too, we pray—will want to explore what this is about so they can share the glorious embarrassment of telling the Gospel like it is—this fragrantly; this wonderfully.
Read on.
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor,
for the Crossings Community
Wrestling Jacob and a Series of Tubes:
How the Passive Life Gets Things Done
(part 2)
by Adam Morton
Adam Morton
III. Purely Passive
This question about action is especially fraught for Lutherans, because part of our tradition lands way out on one end of it. Absurdly far out. So far out that nobody—and by nobody, I mean not even most Lutherans—actually likes it. We are about to plunge into the deep darkness of Luther’s teaching on the Christian as purely passive, which is Luther at the extreme of controversy and unpopularity. Understand—to most of the Christian church on earth, Luther is at least as wrong as Pelagius on this question, a man who has clearly overreacted and fallen off the other side of the horse. So we need to look here, closely, and if we do, we’re going to find some exceedingly strange good news.
With that in mind, let’s consider Luther, beginning from a notorious line in a sermon for the 24th Sunday after Trinity, 1531:
A Christian is a purely passive [mere passivus] human, not active…. If you will not suffer yourself to be given to, you are not a Christian. [1]
Again—a Christian is purely passive, not active. And don’t think that maybe Luther only says this once or twice. Here he is again, in the lectures on Genesis:
For what is Abraham except a man who hears God when He calls him, that is, a purely passive person and merely the material on which divine mercy acts? [2]
Some of you will know that Luther is rather fond of speaking about passive this and passive that—it’s an interesting habit born of very creative application of the scholastic, broadly Aristotelian thought he was educated in, and I’ll say more about that in a bit. And you might recall that the issue of passive righteousness is, by his own telling, rather key to Luther’s development at a crucial point—his bombshell discovery that Paul’s phrase “righteousness of God” indicates not active righteousness, the righteousness by which God judges sinners, but passive righteousness, the righteousness by which we who are unrighteous are, well, right-wised. One could think of Isaiah 53 here—my righteous one will make many righteous. But what does Luther mean by any of it, and especially what does he mean by saying that a Christian is a purely passive person? It sounds preposterous. What kind of lunatic would say that a Christian is simply and entirely passive? What would that even look like?
There is an enduring concern in Luther studies—and in theology broadly as well as philosophy—about gifts, reciprocity, language of return and exchange; about the insufficiency of accounts of reception to handle the intricacies of human gift exchange. The literature is quite enormous. I could point you to heaps of just Lutheran stuff on this question, from Oswald Bayer to Bo Kristian Holm to Ingolf Dalferth and Risto Saarinen—but this isn’t that kind of talk. We aren’t going to start with Marcel Mauss’ 1925 book, The Gift—he was a French anthropologist who gets cited a lot. What we need to be aware of is the deep anxiety that attends this matter, because even where Luther’s “mere passive” gets a fair hearing, it tends to be judged as difficult to reconcile with the sheer activity of human life. No doubt Luther teaches that, too—what a living and active thing faith is. Though he says a good deal more if we listen carefully:
“Faith, however, is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God, John 1[:12–13]. It kills the old Adam and makes us altogether different men, in heart and spirit and mind and powers; and it brings with it the Holy Spirit. O it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good works incessantly. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done them, and is constantly doing them. Whoever does not do such works, however, is an unbeliever. He gropes and looks around for faith and good works, but knows neither what faith is nor what good works are. Yet he talks and talks, with many words, about faith and good works.” (Preface to Romans, 1522)
We have to take that first clause as programmatic—faith is God’s work in us. It’s practically a definition, just as in the “Disputation on Man” (1536) a human is justified by faith. That’s a definition. And they are closely linked. For God’s work makes us new—we are reborn. The old Adam dies. Faith is the life of the new creature with all of its powers, alive by the Spirit. Its activity is native to it.
Luther has handed us a paradox—the passivity of faith IS active. So what’s the point of hammering on “purely passive”? Why say that at all if he’s going to turn around and say, “Of course that means you must do everything, be totally active.” There are a number of ways we could try to put this together, but I think one mistake would be to compromise on passivity. What might be useful is to shed a little light on this paradox so that we can grasp it rightly—not that God’s work is not in many ways paradoxical, but so that we don’t create a difficulty where it is unnecessary. Luther’s rule is that faith, the work of God in us—necessarily passive as we are the receivers of the action—is altogether active, indeed, the root of activity. It is where our activity, if it be good, comes from.
Ribera, Jusepe de (1590 – 1652) – Aristotle
From Wikimedia Commons
I’m going to walk you back to Aristotle here, not even just to his ethics, where the philosopher clearly teaches that we become by doing—we are what we do, habitually. That’s really important in the history of our elaborate evasions of the Gospel (also known as human intellectual history), but it’s not the only important thing here, because there’s a place where Aristotle talks about passivity and action in a different and highly influential way. And when I say highly influential, I mean that not only was it shaping Luther’s intellectual context some 1800 years after Aristotle’s death, but it’s still in many odd ways with us.
This is the problem of matter. And here let me introduce you to a word, “hylomorphism.” Hylomorphism comes from two ancient Greek words, hulay, which means matter, and morphay, which means form, as in shape. So hylomorphism simply means “matter-form-ism.” This is Aristotle’s understanding of how real things in the world fit together. It’s that everything—everything real apart from God, that is—is a composite of form and matter.
What does this mean? Let’s start with “form.” Form is most literally the shape something has—its structure. Form is this something’s observable characteristics. The form of the wheelchair I’m looking at right now is its outward shape and the fact that it has wheels on it, and its color, and all those other things about it that are sensible and that my mind can understand— everything that makes it what it identifiable as a wheelchair.
And what is “matter” in this case? Well, matter is what this wheelchair is made of—and here I don’t know quite what that means. What I’m looking at has rubber and metal and plastic and all sorts of other things in it, right? So let’s call that matter. But now let’s look at the plastic. What kind of plastic is it? Well, it has a structure with characteristics I can sense. These would all be its “forms” dropped down to a lower level, the sort of molecular structure it’s made out of—oh, but that also has a form, because I can understand it.
So we just keep moving down layers of form, and matter keeps receding away from us because matter isn’t anything. That’s the dirty little secret of Aristotle’s metaphysics. Matter isn’t anything except pure potentiality, pure passive capacity to receive form. Form does everything. Matter does nothing except take on form
This brings us to one of the most controversial concepts in the history of interpreting Aristotle. It’s called “primary matter.” This is the hypothetical base-layer matter which has no characteristics at all and can’t possibly be understand by definition. So here is the problem: pure matter, pure potential, pure passivity can’t really exist—and yet the ground floor of Aristotle’s scheme still has to be pure potential. This can tie your head in knots. I could show you places, early and late in Luther’s career, where he in fact attacks Aristotle on this question of so-called “primary matter.” He does this in the Philosophical Theses of the Heidelberg Disputation. He also does it in the Genesis lectures.
And even Aristotle has to admit in the end that matter is just a “relative concept.” The issue is that you’ve got a thing here that’s not a thing—a kind of non-stuff, defined only by its ability to take on form. It has potential, which means nothing yet in particular—this is why it’s no great compliment to be told you have potential. It means you don’t have actual, and whether you can get to actual rather than potential is at this point anybody’s guess. Anyhow, the thing about this matter is you can give it a form, but you can’t give it itself in the first place—it’s just there, with and as potential. And so we have a basic ambiguity—it can’t become anything on its own, but its whole point is to become. It’s both radically passive and always sort of receptive or waiting to spring into action. And I think this picture, sunk deep in the Western mind, affects our thinking about humans as active and passive. We need a there there, a subject, an us—a hidden, basic layer of “me”—to sit quietly and then be able to spring into action, preferably with God’s help. So we’re always looking for a middle between active and passive.
From Canva
But the real “from nothing” of God’s work is not Aristotle’s matter, not at all. God and God alone is the creator. There’s no base layer me, not even a pure passivity, that’s there apart from God’s giving. We can scream, “Well am I a puppet? Am I a block of wood? What do you mean, Luther, in calling me passive, denying my free will, making an inert lump of me?” But it can’t be like that, because those things are always already there waiting to be acted on. Kermit the frog is inert and springs into action when Jim Henson puts his hand up his butt. But remember, Jim made Kermit. There’s no Kermit without Jim. And even so with God giving me in “pure passivity.” God has created and redeemed me. I am God’s creature. That’s what I am at bottom. If my behavior exhibits something else, well, there’s a word for that situation. I am a sinner. But my passivity before God is thoroughgoing.
__________
Endnotes
[1] “Christianus est homo mere passivus, non activus…. Si non sinis tibi dari, non es Christianus.” Predigt am 24. Sonntag nach Trinitatis (November 19, 1531), WA 34/2: 414
[2] LW2, 246
