It is commonly held that Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses this day five hundred years ago. This marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, a movement not only radically changed the history of Christianity but also contributed to the formation of modern Europe. While Luther is widely celebrated as the hero of Reformation, his doctrine of “justification by faith” is misunderstood by many.
Many Protestant Christians think that “justification by faith” means that we are justified — caused to be righteous — by means of believing in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour. Although it correctly expresses the core element of Christian faith, it is far from what Luther actually meant. For Luther, faith is not some cognitive content to be accepted. Nor it is an act of taking something as our belief. Rather, it is entirely a gift bestowed upon us. We can do nothing to gain it, but can only receive it thankfully. This is the key to Luther’s teaching of salvation.
In fact, the accurate phrase of this teaching is “justification by grace through faith” instead of the more reputable “justification by faith.” It is not what we choose to believe that justifies us before God. Grace alone does the job. In this sense, faith is nothing more than a humble and thankful reception. Faith is completely passive, and grace is radically alien. Faith is passive because we cannot acquire it by any human work; grace is alien because it is conferred by God and is never a part of us.
Therefore, if we accept Luther’s teaching, it is no longer appropriate to consider that we believe so that we are justified. On the contrary, we ought to say that we believe because we are justified. Justification is not a process in which we attain to righteousness; rather, it is the moment at which we are counted or seen as righteous. For this reason, being a Christian does not make us a good person. Conversely, we strive to be a good person, for it is an appropriate response to God’s alien grace.
It is a scandal that we Christians often attempt to judge others with little or no self-reflection. We tend to think that we are morally superior than those who do not possess Christian faith. We, often unconsciously, think that we are a better person because our faith has made us righteous. This stance is most obviously seen in issues of sexuality. The 500th anniversary of Protestant Reformation reminds us once again that this thought is not only wrong but also virtually anti-Reformation. Grace is always alien, and thus we are only declared as righteous without really being righteous. Indeed, being a Christian is to humble ourselves.
Similarly, we Christians always fall prey to epistemic arrogance. Just as we are tempted to regard ourselves as righteous, we are also lured into the illusion (or worse, delusion) of possessing the truth. Of course, being a Christian is a quest for truth, just as being a Buddhist, being a Muslim, or being a philosopher does. However, we are always on the journey. The destination is beyond our reach in this life. Luther declared that the Pope could be wrong and indeed the whole church could be erroneous. In the same way, Luther, just like any other persons, could also make mistakes. The fact is that we never possess truth. Strictly speaking, we even do not possess any sparkles of truth. Truth is radically transcendent and at the same time radically immanent. Only God is true, and we are no god. Truth is, therefore, something entirely alien. The Enlightenment told us to be critical of authority, and postmodernism asked us to be critical of human reasons. But the Protestant Reformation taught us to be critical of ourselves.
The Reformation began this day five hundred years ago. Some people may think that it ended in the Peace of Westphalia (1648) or at the formation of Protestant Orthodoxy. But to my mind, it never ended. The church needs to keep being reformed, for we never achieve grace and never possess truth. As modern theologian Paul Tillich has remarked, “The Protestant principle is the judge of every religious and cultural reality, including the religion and culture which calls itself ‘Protestant’.”
