The Age of the Spirit

Extract

It has traditionally been one of the central tasks of theology to determine man’s relationship to God in his state of redeemed sinfulness. The various solutions put forward in answer to this question contributed greatly to the divisions of Western Christendom as we now know it. The controversy has nearly always turned on the question of what role man can play in his own redemption. For Luther man could only be said to be righteous on account of the merits of Christ imputed to him while he in himself always remained a sinner. Trent gives an somewhat milder form of the doctrine of Simul Justus et Peccator in attributing to man an actual righteousness by which he can make redemption his own through works. Much of the discussion is a matter of terminology, as Hans Kung has shown in his book on Barth’s doctrine of justification. Such discussions seem at their liveliest when a need is felt to return to a more theocentric theology. Luther felt that the Roman Church was turning man away from God with her doctrine of merit and so glorifying man. He felt called to remind the Church that nothing is possible without the grace of Christ and that man can never claim any righteousness of his own. The tendencies to which Luther objected can be said to have been repeated in the ‘reductionist’ theologies of Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher. The present interest of Catholics in the teaching of Marx and the theology of ‘Secular Christianity’ would certainly have seemed to him as it does now to Barth, as further examples of the reprehensible tendency to anthropocentric religion.