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LESSON 10 of 24
Jesus was unique, God takes the human form in no one else but
this historical figure, this Jew from Nazareth who lived in what we
now call the 1st century, AD. There is one Jesus, one revelation
of God that climaxes all the other words He spoke, and this is
that Word made flesh. Secondly, it is absolutely necessary to
understand that God had to become man to save us. God took
on human flesh in a necessity that we cannot explain. As we
will comment in the next lecture, Luther resists the attempt to
comprehend and nail down and explain completely God’s way of
salvation in Jesus Christ, but he is also convinced this salvation
had to, for some mysterious reason, come through the incarnation
of God. And thirdly, he believes there is no other God but the God
who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ, and all he wants us to know,
all we need to know (not all we want to know, as I have said, but
all we need to know) is there in Jesus Christ.
always that this human creature was God come in human flesh,
even if at the beginning of his career he wondered aloud as to
whether the language, the dogma of the Trinity was the best
language possible. Soon thereafter he affirmed the traditional
dogmatic expression of the truth that God is in three persons,
that the second person of the holy Trinity was incarnate in Jesus
of Nazareth, he affirmed that and understood it and proclaimed
it without reservation throughout most of his career. He pledged
himself to the ecumenical creeds, and gloried in the Athanasian
Creed as well as the apostles and the Nicene.
The Father’s only son begotten, in the manger has his cot.
In our poor dying flesh and blood does mask itself the
endless good.
This little child that lay in Mary’s lap, now holds everything
in his hands.
All this for us did Jesus do, that his great love he might
show.
Curea elayizon.”
Though Luther was aware that the Docetists also emphasized the
divine nature in such a way that the human nature was not taken
seriously. And as we have seen in the hymn which we just cited,
For instance, Jesus was poor. It was not the assumed poverty of
the Franciscans, it was not the poverty of choice that was designed
to make the monks of the Middle Ages in Luther’s view look good
in God’s sight, instead He became the poor human creature,
humble, who simply had nothing of His own to offer because He
was there in our place. And He went about His life expressing the
best of human virtues, mercy and love, doing the servants work,
but without any presumption, without any claim to any kind of
human dignity, to say nothing of a claim to divine dignity. He
had the characteristics of Isaiah’s suffering servant (Luther’s
exposition of which we’ll look at in a few moments). Indeed, His
divine power peeks through in the miracles, and Luther saw them,
as had the entire medieval tradition, as proofs of Christ’s divinity.
But they were not particularly important for Luther; he also saw
the proof of Christ’s divinity in the foolishness and impotence
of the cross. God alone would be so foolish and so impotent as
to come to a cross to express His wisdom and His power. And so
while Luther could indeed embrace the medieval view that the
miracles showed the power of God, he also held somewhat of the
opposite opinion.
In sorting out who this was then that suffered for us, Luther
emphasized the communication of attributes and its so-called
And Luther did not shy away from saying that God Himself
entered into our death in the second person of the holy Trinity,
he was not a patri-passion, he did not believe that the Father (or
the Holy Spirit for that matter) suffered or died. But in those most
awful of human words, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken
me”, Luther understood that this person (God and man in one
person) died, and so God Himself had entered into our death, into
the worst of our enemies, so that He might kill it. And this was the
heart of Luther’s faith, this was the way that he dealt with God’s
wrath. God dealt with his own wrath by meeting it in death itself,
God took on the worst of our enemies, death itself, with His own
substitutionary death.
In this office then, Jesus did what he could do only as the one who
was both God and human creature in one person. He brought the
Law to bear on people with the message of, what Luther sometimes
called, his left hand (that word of condemnation) which simply
assesses the sinner who has strayed far from the word of God and
turned his back on the person of God. And then Luther went about
His proper work, the work He delights in, the work of bringing
life and light to human creatures who, again had rejected Him
but whom He has chosen to restore. As He exercised that office
then, Jesus went about playing out His human and His divine
characteristics in this one person in which these characteristics
were shared, in which these characteristics describe the whole of
the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth.