Themes of Broken Bonds: Resurrection
On a summer day in 1505, Martin Luther called together his friends from the University of Erfurt for a special gathering. The young men had spent the past few years studying the law, and Luther had recently received his master’s degree. Together, they would walk the path for which their long hours of reading and disputing had prepared them. They would stand in the great legal tradition of Europe.
But this meeting was to be rather different from those before, for Luther had spoken of strange spiritual revelations: a thunderbolt of judgment, the crushing weight of damnation. Once bound together by a common sense of calling, they now listened as their friend declared he was summoned by God to undertake a course of asceticism and spiritual contemplation. He was, for all intents and purposes, forsaking their world and entering the monastic community of St. Augustine.
It must have been a time of mixed emotions, for on the one hand, they could applaud their friend’s spiritual ambition, but on the other, he was undergoing a kind of death. “Today you see me,” Martin told them, “but never again.”1
A last supper with a dead man walking: so it must have seemed to all present. But Luther did not despair, for he had hope. Beyond this death would come his resurrection. He would be reborn as one set apart for God, purified, embarking upon the path to salvation. Once God had washed him in water, but now he would purify him in the fires of monastic devotion. The following day, Luther passed through the gates of the St. Augustine monastery, which he hoped would be his entry into a new and glorious life.
Instead, he was about to discover just how dead he really was.
The central belief with which Luther entered the cloister was that a man could, if he gave heed to the commands of Holy Scripture, perform true works of righteousness that would justify him before God. It was a simple matter of rejecting evil and embracing the good. God’s Spirit was there to help, of course, for if God saw that a person was genuinely trying to be good, he would not deny the grace necessary to obey the commandments.
This was in line with a strand of late medieval theology that had predominated in the region. The previous century, a theologian named Gabriel Biel had famously taught, “To the one who does what is in him, the Lord will not deny grace.”2 This sort of thinking had seeped into German universities such as Erfurt, and it seemed to make sense. After all, what kind of God would see a person genuinely trying to do good and not help them out?
As it turned out, Luther’s problem was not with the second part of the equation—God’s gift of grace—but with the first. Time and again, he attempted to do what was in him, but even as he managed to bring his outward behavior in line with God’s commandments, his thoughts were still full of sin. Endless trips to confession would purify him temporarily, but immediately he felt the evil rising within him again. Ridding himself of sin seemed a task as hopeless as that of Sisyphus.
“Do what is in you.” That is what Biel had taught, but the more Luther examined his spiritual insides—and he had plenty of time to do so with his monotonous schedule—he found only rot and decay. He was the whitewashed tomb spoken of by Christ, pure before others but dead within.
“The heart is more deceitful than all else / And is desperately sick.”3 Thus, the prophet Jeremiah had written. The Church had always assured the faithful that this sickness could be cured with a steady dose of the medicine of the sacraments, but Luther began to suspect that something far more serious ailed him. He wasn’t just sick: he was dead. To do what was in him was to work deeds of death, forever tainted and rotting. As it turned out, this is what St. Augustine had taught.4 What man needed was not repeated doses of medicine, each giving him just enough strength to make it to the next one.
He needed a resurrection.
Two thousand years before Martin Luther reached this conclusion, the Word of the Lord came to a man named Ezekiel, a prophet of the nation of Judah. This prophet lived through the violent Neo-Babylonian conquest of his homeland. During the siege of Jerusalem, people starved in the streets and the great temple of Solomon was razed to the ground. The holy city, meant to be a beacon of light to the nations, became a place of death.
In a vision, the Lord transported Ezekiel back to this awful scene, setting him down in the middle of one of the valleys below the city walls. Here was a scene out of a horror film: the bodies of Jerusalem’s inhabitants had been thrown into the valley and were now so utterly decomposed, nothing remained but bones. “He caused me to pass among them round about,” Ezekiel related, “and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley; and lo, they were very dry.” (Ezekiel 37:2)
Why mention that the bones were very dry? To emphasize their utter deadness. No remnant of life remained—not a single hint of marrow. Nothing could be deader than these bones.
The Lord then asked Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Surely, the prophet knew that death is final and bones cannot be reanimated by any power of nature. But it was God who was asking him the question, so it required a bit more thought. Ezekiel found it most prudent to respond, “O Lord God, You know.” (v. 3) Then the Lord made an unprecedented statement.
“Again He said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones and say to them, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” Thus says the Lord God to these bones, “Behold, I will cause breath to enter you that you may come to life. I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin and put breath in you that you may come alive; and you will know that I am the Lord.”’”
Ezekiel 37:4-6
Even if Ezekiel believed that the Lord could resurrect people, it must have seemed utterly impossible that he would do so for the fallen inhabitants of Jerusalem. After all, it was God who had pronounced judgment against them in response to their continual breaking of his covenant. The people who were once called by God’s name had not just lost a battle: they had been utterly obliterated, were rejected by their Creator, and no longer existed as a kingdom. Resurrection was a hope unlooked for—a thing far beyond human imagining. But God had commanded Ezekiel to speak, and the prophet spoke.
“So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, sinews were on them, and flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then He said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they come to life.”’ So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.”
Ezekiel 37:7-10
Before his very eyes, Ezekiel beheld the miracle of resurrection. It may have been a vision, but it was a picture of something God would truly do in the future. As he had breathed life into Adam, so God would breathe life into man once again. After all, that was what he had done for the people of Israel in the beginning, as revealed in another of Ezekiel’s visions.
“As for your birth, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water for cleansing; you were not rubbed with salt or even wrapped in cloths. No eye looked with pity on you to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you. Rather you were thrown out into the open field, for you were abhorred on the day you were born. When I passed by you and saw you squirming in your blood, I said to you while you were in your blood, ‘Live!’ Yes, I said to you while you were in your blood, ‘Live!’”
Ezekiel 16:4-6
The image here is of a newborn who has been exposed: left to die by the parent(s) who did not want it. Neither washed nor cleansed, the child lays flailing in its own blood, unable to do anything that might lead toward life. This is what it means to exist apart from the grace of God. We are not capable adults able to accomplish the tasks to which we set our minds, but helpless infants who cannot even breathe if breath is not gifted to us. Therefore, God who gave breath to man and brought life into being by his holy Word speaks the word of resurrection: “Live!”
Luther came to see that the situation of a sinner in relation to God is no different than the exposed infant or dry bones. The fallen creature is unable to work the works of life. It is God the Creator who must declare life over the creature, granting it to him or her as a gracious gift.
Resurrection is not only what God promises to do to physical bodies at the end of time. It is also how he saves souls here and now. As St. Paul writes,
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
Ephesians 2:4-7
If the action of God is necessary for the sinner to be spiritually resurrected, then every part of our salvation is due to him. It is not a cooperative effort, in which we do some of the work and God then responds with grace. It is all grace from beginning to end: grace upon grace. That is what resurrection means.
“For this reason it is by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace, so that the promise will be guaranteed to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the Law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, (as it is written, ‘A father of many nations have I made you’) in the presence of Him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.”
Romans 4:16-17
This is why Luther split from Erasmus on the question of free will, for a dead person can never choose life. He or she can only be resurrected.
Expect to see this theme come up at various points in my novel Broken Bonds and its sequel, Face to Face.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
There has been a delay in the printing and distribution of my novel, Broken Bonds. If you have preordered a print copy, you should receive it November 26 in the U.S. (Potentially later outside the U.S.) Digital preorders should still be honored on November 12. I apologize for this delay.
Click here to pre-order Broken Bonds for delivery on November 12 (digital) or November 26 (print).
Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation, 1483-1521, trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985), 50. Quoting from the Weimar Ausgabe, Tischreden, vol. 4, no. 4707.
This is a slight paraphrase of Biel’s original words in Latin, which have themselves appeared in various places and been debated at length.
Jeremiah 17:9. Unless otherwise stated, all biblical quotations in my articles come from the 1995 New American Standard Bible, copyright The Lockman Foundation.
Augustine taught, like Luther, that salvation was due to God’s grace alone and that man could work no good if God’s grace did not first regenerate him. Luther eventually went beyond Augustine with his full-fledged doctrine of imputed or alien righteousness. Augustine believed that the works that justified a man were his own, but all performed by God’s power, whereas Luther eventually taught that it was Christ’s works alone which justified a man. This meant that justification was in no way progressive for Luther, but a single declarative act on the part of God the Father in sight of the Son’s righteousness.