To emphasize the sufficiency of the individual’s personal affirmation of faith, Luther consistently changed plural pronouns (we, us) into singular pronouns (I, me) in both Scriptural passages and Confessional statements. This phenomenon appears especially in his Summary of the Apostles Creed and the Small Catechism of 1529. In Scripture, Luther makes the same plural-to-singular pronoun substitutions in, for example, Rm 8:21, which he changes to read, “If God is for me, who can be against me?” (WA 6, 528, 34 [“Si Deus pro me, quis contra me?”]) instead of the literal reading, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” To support his pronoun shift, Luther tries to set a precedent from the wording of Gl 2:20 (“Christ gave himself for me”), Luther infers from this: “Therefore read these words ‘me’ and ‘for me’ with great emphasis and accustom yourself. Do not doubt that you belong to the number of those who speak this ‘me.’” (LW 26, 179) Again, it seems that Luther misses the point of the passage. First, since GL 2:20 is the only occurrence in the New Testament in which Paul speaks of salvation acquired from Christ in the singular, this makes Luther’s emphasis highly suspect. The preponderant New Testament language is plural, e.g., “for us,” “for you,” “for all,” “for many,” “for the Church”. One of the most remarkable uses of the plural pronoun to signify the communal aspect of faith, even though it is often prayed in solitude, is the Lord’s Prayer, which beings with “Our Father” instead of “My Father,” and ends up with “deliver us from evil,” not “deliver me from evil.” The stress of the New Testament is often away from the individual and towards the community of believers. Second, the context of Gl 2:15-17 indicates that Paul already established the plural “we” (i.e., “So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus . . .we seek to be justified in Christ . . . “), showing that the use of the singular in Gl 2:18-21 is used to represent the community of Christ in his crucifixion (viz., “I have been crucified with Christ’), not the assertion of one’s individual salvation. For words “for me” denote union with Christ and the Church of which Paul is only a part, not Paul’s assertion of individual assertion in spite of the Church. (Robert A. Sungenis, Not By Faith Alone: The Biblical Evidence for the Catholic Doctrine of Justification [2d ed.; State Line, Pa.: Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2009], 485-86 [print ed.])
