Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Marilyn McCord Adams on Luther's Theology of Divine Wrath, Alien Imputation, and the Humanity of Jesus


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)