In her work
on the Medieval debates about the nature of Jesus’ humanity, Marilyn McCord
Adams wrote the following about Luther’s theology of the atonement, imputation,
and the nature of Jesus’s humanity:
Righteous
Wrath
In Anselm’s satisfaction-theory, the argument
proceed at a high level of legal abstraction: created sinners incur a debt they
cannot pay. Luther sticks closer to Biblical language (especially of Paul’s
epistle in the Romans), and perhaps to his own spiritual experience, when he
identifies wrath as a righteous God’s
response to sin. God the Son shows Divine love for human sinners by
volunteering to become human and offer Himself as a substitute target for
Divine wrath. Luther explicitly agrees, this task can be accomplished only
insofar as Christ is innocent in His
human nature—neither is not does anything contrary to the Divine
will. Otherwise He would be liable for punishments of His own.
Alien
Imputation
Luther describes the legal transaction
involved in such penal substitution with the fresh imagery that more deeply
implicates Christ in our post-lapsum human
condition. Borrowing from his teacher Staupitz, Luther explains that Christ
marries the soul with the wedding ring of faith (= an infused confidence that
God will be good to you, that the promises of God are true for you). Prior to
the marriage, the law evaluates the prospective bride and groom separately—renders
a guilty verdict on Adam’s offspring and condemns them/us to hell, while
pronouncing Christ innocent and righteous. But the legal estate of marriage
involves “community” property: all that is Christ’s belongs to the believing
soul, and vice versa. Thus, the human sinner is justified by God’s imputing to
Christ the soul’s sin and liability to death and damnation. As a result of this
“joyful exchange,” the sinner is dead to the whole law in the sense that it can
no longer ender a “guilty” verdict against him/her. More remarkably, where
school theologians say that Christ takes our penalties, Luther boldly insists that alien imputation awards Him
our guilt and liability to punishment as well. (Marilyn McCord Adams, What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy
and the Systematics of Christology [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1999], 90-92)
