Martin Luther on Hope

The reformation’s gospel recovery and theological exploration had significant implications on hope theology. Martin Luther spoke pervasively to hope’s opposite. He was candid about his own experiences of hopelessness. On many occasions, he found himself in “the abyss of despair” wishing he had “not been born.”[1] His experience impacted his theology. For him, suffering was essential to the formation of a theologian as well as the theology they produced.[2] Luther moved despair to “a radically more significant place within his theology: from branch to root, from peripheral importance to the very center of an understanding of Christian experience.”[3]

Luther suggested that despair was “not a derivative sin, but the very paradigm of sin itself.” In his view, sin has less to do with “superficial acts of vice and more to do with the profoundest depths of our disrelationship with God.”[4] On the other hand, despair functioned as a taskmaster to drive individuals to the gospel. “Without an initial movement of despair, we might never be driven to the trust of absolute repentance.”[5] This line of reasoning led Luther to describe despair as “beautiful…and near to grace.”[6]

The cross was the center of Luther’s theology.[7]  Calvary was a “key moment in his theological understanding of human reality. Jesus on the cross embodies the ultimate despair of a human being in the anguish of despair—a despair issuing from the most extreme and excruciating sense of divine abandonment.”[8] For Luther, the God-man coming low was the highest view of God. His lowliness created a radical awareness that God “is present with us in our sufferings, even at the deepest pitch of desperation—‘bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows’ (Isaiah 53), lifting us up into the very heart of divine co-suffering (the etymological meaning of ‘com-passion’).”[9] The paradox is strong, hope for humanity comes through the despair of Christ.

When facing down hopelessness, Luther prescribed “humor, playfulness, conviviality, and even certain kinds of indulgence.”[10] Underneath this counsel was a conviction: “to seek pleasure over despair is to rely on the steady goodness of God’s creation which sustains us through transient temptations to nihilism.”[11] The best remedy, however, “without which all the rest are as nought, is to believe firmly in Jesus Christ.”[12]

Luther wrote at length about the relationship between faith and hope. “We find it difficult to see any difference. Faith and hope are so closely linked that they cannot be separated.” [13] Yet, distinction must be maintained. Luther suggests five differences.

1) They differ in their sources. Faith is grounded in understanding, hope comes from the will. 2) They differ in function. Faith teaches and directs, hope exhorts the mind to strength and courage. 3) They differ in their objectives. Faith focuses on truth, hope looks to God’s goodness. 4) They differ in sequence. Faith begins before tribulation, hope is born of tribulation. 5) They differ in effects. Faith is a judge, it discerns error. Hope is a soldier, it fights against suffering and despair as it waits for better things to come.[14] Hope and faith are interdependent. “By faith we begin, by hope we continue.”[15]

Luther asserts that hope is gift before it is virtue. He challenges the hope-as-virtue tradition with his heavy emphasis on grace.[16] The dialectic of hope and despair is central to his theology. For Luther, “hope despairs and despair hopes.”[17] Luther anchors his thinking on hope in the present. Cruciform in experience, hope centers in the incarnate God who bleeds and sympathizes with weakness and despair. In short, Luther’s theology of hope is a theology from the cross.

[1]Bringle, Despair, 67. Luther wrote to his friend Melanchthon, “I was for more than a whole week in death and hell, so that I was sick all over, and my limbs still tremble. I almost lost Christ in the waves and blasts of despair and blasphemy against God.” He also said, “One may extinguish the temptations of the flesh, but oh! how difficult it is to struggle against the temptations of blasphemy and despair.”

[2]Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 17. Luther suggested three rules for studying theology: prayer, meditation and suffering. “A theologian is one who driven by agonizing struggle, enters with prayer into the Holy Scripture and interprets what is set forth within it, in order to give insight to others who are engaged in agonizing struggle, so that they a like manner—with prayer—can enter into the Holy Scripture and interpret it.”

[3]Bringle, Despair, 67.

[4]Ibid, 68.

[5]Ibid.

[6]Ibid. Bringle argues that Luther brings the “theme of the positive beauty of despair to its most compelling expression. In spiritual suffering, he writes, the soul ‘is stripped of its own garment, of its shoes, of all its possessions, and of all its imaginations and is taken away by the Word into the wilderness.’”

[7]Robert Kolb, “Luther on the Theology of the Cross” in The Pastoral Luther, ed. Timothy J. Wengert (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 34. “Luther’s theology of the cross is precisely a framework that is designed to embrace all of biblical teaching and guide the use of all its parts. It employs the cross of Christ as the focal point and fulcrum for understanding and presenting a wide range of specific topics within the biblical message.”

[8]Bringle, Despair, 69.

[9]Ibid.

[10]Ibid. 70. “When the devil pesters you with depressing thoughts, at once seek out the company of others, drink more, joke and jest, or engage in some other merriment.”

[11]Ibid.

[12]Ibid. 71.

[13]Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (Grand Rapids: Kregel Classics, 1979), 311.

[14]Ibid.

[15]Ibid, 312.

[16]Ibid. 72.

[17]Ibid. 73.