Dr. Eric W. Gritsch
The Rev. Dr. Eric W. Gritsch Memorial Fund, Ltd.
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2018 Archive
2018 Symposium Martha Stortz Presentation
2018 Featured Speaker: Dr. Martha Stortz
Bernhard M. Christensen Professor of Religion and Vocation
Augsburg University
"Luther's Body Language: Re-Membering the Reformer"
We all watch body language. It yields important social and cultural cues. We listen to words, particularly if they’re in a language we understand; but we watch bodies, gestures, facial expressions, to see how they nuance the words. Body language.
It’s hard to watch body language historically, across cultures and languages different from our own. Still, body language yields insight. I want to watch body language in the Reformer we celebrate in this 500th year of the Reformation, Martin Luther. Luther’s Reformation is too often taken as a head trip, and theologians spend a lot of time talking about the Reformer’s theology, the great doctrines he launched, like the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, the Reformation solas – by faith alone, sola fide; by grace alone, sola gratia; by scripture alone, sola scriptura; and Christ alone, solus Christus.
But that theology comes out of hands-on experience, and each of those great doctrines was attached to concrete situations and actual bodies in motion. I want to look at Luther’s theology in the context of his body language, and see what that language might mean for us today. In short, I want to pose to Luther’s body language a very Lutheran question: “What does this mean?” For us. Today.
To do that in three parts, I propose to look at how Luther regarded the human body, the body of Christ, and the body politic. According to a new and powerful biography of Luther and his movement, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, by Oxford University’s Regius Chair Lyndal Roper, seen from the perspective of the body, Luther struck a “new note” in theological thinking.[1] Let’s see if she’s right.
The Human Body
We begin with Luther’s own body: people paid a lot of attention to it. A host of friends and counselors attended Luther’s dying, in part to sing hymns and say prayers, but also to see how the reformer exited one world and entered another. The fate of his movement hung in the balance. If the reformer died in agony and doubt, the movement he spawned might not have divine favor. In contrast, a peaceful death was physical confirmation of Luther’s movement. Happily, Luther died in peace, as a death mask certified.
Viewers of the macabre artifact also noticed the reformer’s corpulence. Luther himself alluded to his greater girth, and he joked the evening before his death: “When I get home to Wittenberg again, I will lie down in my coffin and give the worms a fat doctor to feast on.”[2] He never made it home, dying in Eisleben where he’d been born and where he found himself in the days before his death, settling a dispute between two squabbling noblemen. But Luther’s sheer physical presence was another affirmation of the movement for reform, a sort of sign of divine blessing. His comment about “giving the worms a fat doctor to feast on” displays the ease and earthiness with which the reformer treated his own body. It wasn’t always the case.
As a young Augustinian friar, Luther had a quite different relationship to his own body. Monastic training taught Luther to treat the body as an impediment to spiritual progress, and monastic life was regulated to subdue it. The soul mentored or disciplined the body, and the rules of the Order of Augustinian Eremites ensured that happened:
· Time was regulated: there were set times for prayer, for work, for sleep; there were portions of the day dedicated to conversation, others to silence.
· The appearance of the body itself was regulated: monks shaved their heads in what is known as a tonsure; they wore rough clothes, modified slightly depending on the order.
· The behavior of the body was regulated. Sexual relationships were forbidden (celibacy or chastity was required of all priests, monks, and nuns). Even “special friendships” were discouraged. Monks were to treat everyone with equal regard and not play favorites.
· Possessions were left behind: upon entering monastic life, monks renounced their worldly goods.
As a young friar, Luther felt the weight of these bodily regulations. He took seriously the asceticisms of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They made an already anxious man obsessed. Luther would get so busy studying, he’d forget to observe the prescribed hours of prayer, racking up a huge “prayer debt,” a backlog of mandatory devotions. Worse, he was convinced that his procrastination angered God, and that made him despair even more. In the end, he doubted that he could ever manage to make amends, and he imagined he heard the Devil outside the door of his cell gnashing his teeth in gleeful anticipation.
Unsure what to do with this hyper-anxious, overly imaginative young monk, Luther’s spiritual director told him simply to throw himself onto the mercy of God. And so he did. In a flash of insight, which came to be called “the Reformation discovery,” which occurred, as Luther reported, “on the toilet” (auf dieser cloaca), Luther realized that he had gotten the righteousness of God all wrong. Righteousness or goodness was not something God required of the human creature, but something that God granted the human creature simply for the asking – or rather, as Luther discovered, for the believing. Therefore, that righteousness was not something humans had to work for, as if they even could. Rather, the goodness of God had come to them in a human body, the body of Christ. All one had to do is embrace Christ, the righteousness of God, by grace through faith. In short, all one had to do is believe that God could be so good, in coming to creatures in a body they could touch, taste, smell, see, and hear.
Building out this Reformation insight theologically in “The Freedom of a Christian,” Luther describes the righteousness of God that comes to the human creature for the believing in terms that are quite literal and frankly sexual. He explores the whole notion of justification, that transfer of God’s goodness or righteousness to the human creature, and he elaborates justification in two contexts: a courtroom and a bedroom. First, he uses a juridical – or courtroom -- analogy and references the apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:5-11), concluding that creatures are declared to be righteous, just as a judge declares a petitioner to be innocent. But then Luther turns to another analogy and another letter of the apostle Paul’s, this one to the Ephesians, and here the analogy is from the bedroom. Luther puzzles over Ephesians 5:31: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” While the author of Ephesians clearly refers to a “one-flesh union” between a man and wife, Luther applies the union to the relationship between the believer and Christ. Faith unites the believer to Christ in a “one-flesh” union, as “a bride is united with her bridegroom.”[3]
What results in this union is an exchange, not of bodily fluids, but an exchange of righteousness, wherein Christ takes on the unrighteousness of the believer and infuses the believer with his righteousness. Luther called this the “happy exchange” (frohliche Wechsel). It’s a juicy description and frankly sexual.
The infusion of Christ’s abundant righteousness more than made up for Luther’s sins, real and imagined. But this discovery of the intimate, deeply embodied embrace of grace, the righteousness of Christ, rocked Luther, and it freed him to treat the body not as an impediment or demon, but simply as a part of the human condition and a vehicle for service to the neighbor.
Accordingly, Luther regarded bodies with affection, realism, even humor. Let’s talk about specific body parts: the parts that are involved in sexuality, but also parts that Luther worried about even more; the ears and the mouth.
In regard to sexuality, Luther thought celibacy or the rule that forbid priests, monks, and nuns from having sexual contact, could not be a requirement of the Pope but a “gift” of God, and it was rarely given. Only a few -- he calls him a “rare bird” (rara avis) -- was suited to life without sex; everyone else ought to be free to marry. Sex is natural to humans, and “the Pope has as little power to command this, as he has to forbid eating, drinking, the natural movement of the bowels, or growing fat.”[4] Consider this list of bodily functions: eating, drinking, crapping, gaining weight, having sex. All are part and parcel of being human. Luther urged a woman whose husband refused to consummate their marriage to “flee to a foreign country” and contract a proper union.
Eventually, Luther contracted a proper union himself, marrying runaway nun Katerina von Bora. Over time, a marriage that begin in mutual respect deepened into full-body, full-on love. When he cannot attend the wedding of a trusted counselor, Georg Spalatin, Luther promised him that on his wedding night he would think of him, and he said, “I shall make love to my Catherine while you make love to yours, and thus we will be united in love.”[5] The “one-flesh union” surfaces again, now as a gesture of communion with his dear friend. But what I want to note is that, like the body, sex here is neither demonized nor sacralized, but rather simply a part of being human.
As a biblical scholar, Luther attended to the bodies that animated the texts. Writing on Genesis, he described the first inhabitant of the Garden of Eden as “intoxicated with rejoicing.”[6] Ah, Luther knew intoxication himself, as his Tischrede or “Table Talk,” reveals. His wife Katie proved to be a formidable brewmaker. But note here how Adam frolics before the fall. Full-body delight, not some passive beatitude, was the intended natural state. Even after the incident with the forbidden fruit, Luther does not demonize bodies, nor does he single out sex as a culprit, as indeed the founder of his monastic order St. Augustine had. The real culprit in the “fall” involves other body parts, the ears and the mouth. Luther exercises more vigilance of these organs.
In Luther’s hands the stories of creation and fall are oral and aural events. Creation is quite literally a product of speech. Three words animate worlds: “And God said….” When humans enter the creation, God speaks (deus loquens); the creature listens (homo audiens). Created in the image of this kind of God, the man is invited to speak in turn, and he names all the other creatures in obedience to God’s invitation. Importantly, obedience in the context of a divine-human dialogue literally means “listening for” God’s word (ob- + -audire).
And first man and woman do listen -- until they don’t. In Luther’s understanding, the “fall” interrupts an ongoing conversation between God and the creatures. A pivotal point for him in the story of the “fall” is the serpent persuading the first couple to doubt God’s word: “Did God really say….”
Luther’s interpretation of the “fall” as quite literally a conversation stopper lends force to his catechetical instruction on the Ten Commandments.[7] Not surprisingly, Luther focuses his interpretation of the commandments on the ears and the mouth. Turning even the “thou shalt not” commandments into positive injunctions, “thou shalt,” he raises the bar for believers’ conversation with God and with others.
· Not only should they not swear in the name God’s name, but “call upon him, pray to him, praise him, and give him thanks.” And of course, calling on God, praying to God, praising God, giving God thanks are all human attempts to re-establish a conversation that got interrupted.
· Explaining the commandment to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy,” Luther designates Sundays as a time for listening, where one “gladly hears and learns” God’s word. And the place where Christians listened was church, quite literally, the Mundhaus, as Luther called it, the “mouth house.”
· Writing on the commandment not to bear false witness, i.e., not to slander, gossip, or tell lies about someone else, Luther ups the ante. Not only does he warn people against lying, gossiping, and spreading rumors, they are to actively “speak well” of the neighbor, presenting all that she does in the best possible light.
Words, spoken, heard, and written, matter. For this theologian, they have a kind of physical, visceral force.[8]
What does this mean for us today?
At first glance, the notion of the body as a battleground between God and the Devil, strikes most of us as quaint, even laughable. But stick with that notion of the body as a site of conflict, and let’s leave for a moment God and the forces of darkness out of it. What battles do we wage on the body? Certainly there’s a quest for whatever counts as the perfect body, or the perfect weight, or the perfect face. That quest keeps fitness centers and plastic surgeons and personal trainers in business. But it also keeps these seekers of perfection in a state of permanent anxiety, as they try to find just the right diet, treatment, or exercise routine that will lift them to perfection.
Indeed, when I taught in Berkeley, the gods people worshiped on Sundays were to be found in fitness centers, gyms, and coffee shops, the churches of the ‘Latte Day Saints. Let’s hear it for Justification by Workout! By exercise alone! Solo exercitio!
But the struggle for bodily perfection and youth leads to a range of behaviors from “poor body image” to anorexia, with all its attendant self-hatred. Suddenly the anxieties of the young Luther don’t seem so quaint after all. Human creatures can’t achieve their own perfection any more than they can work their own righteousness.
I’m also struck by the body parts Luther talked about in specific. He took for granted that people would have sex, and he worried about arrangements that would offer the most delight, cause the least damage, and ensure adequate protection for any children that might issue from a sexual union. What emerges is a robust sexual ethic that neither demonizes nor sacralizes sexuality, but rather operates with a realistic assessment of how powerful sex is and offers some help discerning what constitutes appropriate uses and dangerous abuses.[9] In my work in Lutheran sexual ethics over the years, I’ve been struck the dominant moral discourse about sexuality, which is that it is a “gift,” language which leads easily to a list of rules around who gets to open that gift, under what conditions, and when. Remember that Luther regarded celibacy as the “gift” not sexuality -- and Christ was the greatest “gift” of all. For Luther sexuality was not a gift but a given, part and parcel of the human condition.
More challenging is the attention to other body parts, the mouth and the ears. This chastens a political climate when no one feels compelled to “speak well” of anyone, much less refrain from gossip, lies, and slander. Luther knew the corrosive effect of hate speech on human community -- though he did not always practice it. The conclusion will treat this more fully; for now, take Luther’s concern with what comes out of the mouth and what goes into the ears as cautionary counsel for the present.
The Body of Christ
Bodies matter; after all, God had one. In Christ God enters human history in human form. Both the incarnation, the story of Christ’s birth, and the crucifixion, the story of Christ crucified, are a “stumbling block and a folly” (1 Corinthians 1.23) to subsequent generations of Christians. Authors of the canonical gospels themselves seem uncomfortable with the aftershocks. Two of them, Mark and John, introduce Jesus as an adult, walking, talking, and speaking with authority like a seasoned rabbi. Only Luke and Matthew include birth narratives. The paradox of the creator of all worlds taking on the most vulnerable of bodies in the humblest of circumstances delighted Luther. In his hymns he celebrates the paradox of incarnation:
O Lord, you have created all!
How did you come to be so small
to sweetly sleep in manger-bed
where lowing cattle lately fed.[10]
The Lord of all creation came into the world as an infant – and spent his first hours in a feeding bin for animals! Luther loved it. The manger at Bethlehem held not a book of confessions, not a Bible, not even Luther’s beloved translation of scripture into vernacular German, but a baby!
But if incarnation delights Luther, the crucifixion deeply moves him. In the body of Christ God took on the full range of human experience: not just birth, but suffering, torture, and finally, death on a cross. This God knew the killings fields, because this God had been there. Surrounded by plague, war, and famine, late medieval people needed that consolation. Religious art registers the yearning Luther found around him. Historian Ewert Cousins observes, “As the Middle Ages progressed, the passion of Christ permeated more deeply the religious psyche of Western Christendom.”[11] A single icon captured the cult of suffering: Francis of Assisi receiving the wounds of Christ, the stigmata, into his own body.
A predecessor of Luther’s by about three hundred years, Francis received the stigmata in 1224 after a long night of fasting, prayer, and meditation on the crucified Christ. When he awoke, he found his body bore the same marks that were on Christ’s crucified body. From that day until his death two years later, Francis was a marked man.
This image of Francis receiving the stigmata captured the imagination of medieval artists and ignited popular piety for the next several centuries. It’s clearly an image known to Luther, and although he deeply respected Francis as a holy man, Luther spilled a lot of ink worrying about whether Francis really saw the crucified Christ or whether Francis really was marked.[12] In the end, Luther would not settle for an incident that was so singular, virtuoso, and selective. If the church is the body of Christ in the world, then that entire body is marked. All Christians bear marks of the crucified and risen Christ. All Christians bear the wounds of the crucified Christ, the stigmata.
Luther built out this body language about the church in a treatise he wrote six years before his death, “On the Councils and the Church” (1539), when a split with the Roman Church seemed inevitable.[13] Here he picks up on an ancient, patristic understanding of the church as the body of Christ in the world. Only Luther identifies the church not as a series of abstract “marks”(one, holy, and catholic), and also not as a place – say, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – or a papacy – say, Pope Leo X -- but as a people, the congregation of the faithful (congregatio fidelium). Then he addressed the question: “How can a poor confused person tell where such Christian holy people are in the world?”[14] His answer: you identify those people by their marks, seven practices that are etched on the bodies of believers like so many tattoos. Listen to them:
Where you find people preaching and hearing the Word, there you find the church;
Where you find people baptizing, there you find the church;
Where you find people breaking bread,….;
Where you find people forgiving and being forgiven,…;
Where you find people calling out leaders,…;
Where you find people praying, praising, teaching their children,…;
Where you find people walking in the way of the cross, there you find the church.
This is Luther’s version of the stigmata, and these practices mark believers, just as the wounds of Christ literally marked Francis. Anyone looking for the body of Christ in the world today should look to where people are doing these kinds of things. One could have no better map.
The central mark or practice is the preaching and hearing of the word, proclamation. Given Luther’s concern for the mouth and the ears, this should not surprise anyone. The preaching and hearing of the word orient the other practices like the sun anchors the solar system. All other practices revolve around preaching and hearing of the Word or proclamation. In tightest orbit around proclamation, the center of this solar system, are the practices of baptizing and breaking bread in the name of Jesus, the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist. To elaborate these two practices, go back to that deeply sexual metaphor of a “one-flesh union.” In baptism, the rite of Christian initiation, one is taken up into the body of Christ. In the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper, the believer takes the body and blood of Christ into one’s own, in a very real sense becoming what she eats. These two central practices re-enact that the “one-flesh” union between Christ and the believer.
In orbits further out from proclamation, from baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are other practices that mark the body of Christ in the world: forgiving and being forgiven, calling out leaders, praying/praising/catechizing – those important practices of re-invigorating the conversation with God started in creation, and walking in the way of the Cross. All these practices are held in place by the gravitational pull of proclamation, the preaching and hearing of the world.
And, if you’re a practicing Christian of the Lutheran persuasion, in the outer reaches of the solar system are practices of casseroles, coffee, molded Jello salads – which belong in this solar system so long as they are oriented by the preaching and hearing of the word. But I want to underscore all of these practices because they reveal Luther’s reformation as not only a reformation in doctrine, but a reformation in practices, that is, a reformation marked on the bodies of the people gathered into the body of Christ.
What does this mean for us today?
I see hunger for a reformation in spiritual practices today. I was in the locker room of my favorite pool in Berkeley about ten years ago, and a woman -- whom I know quite well after changing clothes in the same space so many times -- asked me: “are you a practicing Christian?” Without thinking, I snapped back: “No, I got it right the first time.” This was exactly the wrong answer, because I hadn’t gotten the practices of my faith right at all; rather, they had gotten me. They’d marked me.
But then I turned the question back to her: “How about you?” She identified herself as many do in this post-Christendom era: “spiritual, but not religious.” She considered swimming a spiritual practice – she did it mindfully; she practiced yoga; she journaled; she meditated, checking in daily with the great mystery she found at the heart of the universe. For her being “religious” meant affiliation with an institution which prescribed certain ways to believe and behave and belong, to draw on Diana Butler Bass’ helpful typology in Christianity After Religion, while being “spiritual” indicated a deep longing for mystery – and the desire to be marked by it.[15] I don’t necessarily agree with my swimming buddy’s distinction between religion and spirituality, nor do I think they are mutually exclusive.
But what struck me was what we shared in common: these deeply embodied sets of practices, etched on our bodies like so many invisible tattoos. I see even and especially in organized religions a return to spiritual practices, practices that mark the body, activities done over time and in community, that identify us to ourselves and to others.
For example, a Catholic parish in Berkeley, California, the Corinth of the post-modern world, returned to the practice of saying the rosary -- with rosary beads, along with the practice of novenas, a nine-day intentional ritual observance marked by prayer or procession or worship. Other Protestant churches offer Saturday or Sunday night services that involve prayer, silence, and candles, nothing more – and nothing less. A more secular example might be the practice of piercing and tattoo, all ritual ways of marking the body. Journalist and public intellectual Krista Tippett described accompanying her daughter to a tattoo parlour as packed with almost sacramental import. All of these practices lay claim to the body, which may be the “still point of the turning world,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “Burnt Norton, IV” in his Four Quartets.[16] Religion becomes less a matter of assenting to certain propositions than a matter of engaging in certain practices that allow the body to mentor the soul. The body is the only place we can claim in this spinning, seemingly chaotic planet.[17]
In sum, what does this mean for how Christians think about the church?
· First, it means the church is not place, but people, not a campus, but primarily a congregation, the people gathered.
· Second, it means the church is mobile. It comes together wherever people gather for any of these practices; it’s not dependent on a building.
· Finally, it means the church is in motion, doing things. And for that reason, the practices are identified in gerund form: preaching and hearing the word, baptizing, breaking bread, forgiving and being forgiven, and so on. As the body of Christ in the world, the church functions as God’s hands active in the world today, and the most important action for Luther is being and serving the neighbor.
The Body Politic
Beyond these practices, Luther gave additional direction to anyone who wanted to find the body of Christ in the world. This final directive also pointed not to place but to people. Luther’s central political unit is the neighborhood, and he regarded people in it as neighbors. Surely it was biblical language, but in the context of Luther’s “body politic,” the language of “neighbor” and “neighborhood” had urgency, frequency, and a repeated emphasis. If to a pickpocket, all the world’s a pocket; to a Lutheran, all the world’s a neighbor.
In his biblical commentaries, catechisms, and pastoral writings, Luther supplied word “neighbor” even when the text or situation did not. It’s striking. Luther had come out of a monastic context where people addressed each other as “brother,” and that form of address signaled a shift in family affiliation, from a family constituted by blood to a new family constituted now by vows. When they entered religious life, the friars left their families of origin behind and gained another. Body language marked the shift. In a community of men, the other was addressed as a “brother;” in a community of women, a “sister,” and that form of address imprinted that shift in loyalty on people’s consciousness. Again, the body parts involved in this shift in address are the ears and the mouth. The body mentors the soul.
Not surprisingly, when Luther leaves the monastery to enter ordinary life, the other becomes, not “brother” or “sister,” but “neighbor.” Luther repeats the word over and over again, imprinting the importance of this relationship on the hearts of the people around him. He uses his mouth and their ears. More importantly, Luther urges people around him to “bear the face of Christ” to the neighbor in need. This was no pastoral platitude, but a matter of deep practical urgency. Leaving the Roman Catholic church meant erasing social services that cathedrals, monasteries, and convents supplied. Reformation cities quickly needed to devise some way of caring for the poor in their midst, because there were so many neighbors in need.[18] Believers were to “bear the face of Christ to them.”
But Luther also reminded believers that the neighbor bears the face of Christ to them. Christians are to “be” Christ to the neighbor, but also to “see” Christ in the neighbor.[19] Neighborhoods functioned on the basis of mutual beholding, as bore to one another the face of Christ.
If, as Luther argued, everyone is a neighbor to another, what are the implications for the body politic? Unpacked, the statement yields three seemingly common-place implications: we all are neighbors; we all have neighbors; and, we live in neighborhoods.
The first implication concerns the identity of the people around us: we have neighbors. Again, this seems self-evident until we realize how many other ways there are of designating the “other,” particularly in a vicious political climate. The relationship of self-and-other is run through a binary grinder of relationships that yield various “us vs. them” scenarios: liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic, citizen or alien, friend or enemy, resident or stranger in your land, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual. To see the other primarily as “neighbor” and not as primarily by their racial identity, nation of origin, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, etc. is striking. Regarding the other as “neighbor” acknowledges the fact of sharing a common space.
The second implication concerns our own identity: we are neighbors. In naming ourselves neighbors, we acknowledge our primary identity as “neighbor,” not liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic, citizen or alien, friend or enemy, etc. To claim “neighbor” as our primary identity means not hiding behind political or religious affiliation, citizenship, race, economic class, status or profession. To be to the other primarily a “neighbor” acknowledges the fact of sharing a common space.
The final implication concerns that common space: it is a neighborhood not a conflict zone or a marketplace or an aggregate of “lifestyle enclaves” or bubbles.[21] The space between neighbors is a “commons,” and the commons does not require a wall or border or gate. To regard the space between various neighbors as a “commons” and to live in that common space together gives new life to the body politic.
What does this mean?
Four revolutionary insights follow from re-conceiving the body politic as neighborhood, and these insights frame a kind of neighborhood constitution.
First, “neighborhood” is not the language of family, a community bound by blood, where, if you don’t have the right bloodline, usually on your father’s side, you don’t belong. Nor is it the language of friendship, a community bound by loves and
preferences. Here, if you don’t have the right taste in clothes or music or pizza or sports teams, you don’t belong. It’s also not the language of “enemy,” a community bound tightly together by hatred. If you don’t hate the same people I do, you’d better watch your back. Finally, it’s not the language of “stranger,” language that erodes community like an acid, creating a place where no one belongs. Instead, regarding the other as neighbor describes a community bound together by place, nothing more—and nothing less. Neighbors share a common neighborhood.
Second, neighbors share relationship that is involuntary. You don’t choose your neighbors—and they don’t choose you. It’s a relationship over which no one has much choice. But sharing a common space, however messy, invites neighbors together on common projects for the good of the neighborhood.
Third, neighborliness presumes a radical equality, as Luther caught in his sermon on the Good Samaritan. After all, the scriptural counsel to “love your neighbor as
yourself”—not more than or less than yourself. Self-love then is the condition for neighbor-love; self-love is the qualifier of neighbor-love. And for the Christian neighbor, all loves are ordered by the love of God. That primary love
keeps the all neighbors from playing God. The role is already taken. The radical equality of neighborliness cuts through privilege. The neighbor-to-neighbor relationship is not a hierarchical relationship of patron-to-client, employer to employee, parent-to-child, or teacher-to-student. A neighbor-to-neighbor relationship confers equal status on both parties.
Finally, the neighbor is characterized not by ethnic background or homeland or gender or race or what spices waft out of their kitchen at 5 p.m. The real neighbor is defined by
she acts. Actually, the word “neighbor” is more a verb than a noun. Luther says the Samaritan “neighbors” the beaten man by showing him mercy, and that mercy manifests not just in pious talk but concrete actions, as the Samaritan binds his wounds, saddles him on his own mule, checks him into an inn, and pays for his care.
The Samaritan embodies compassion; he doesn’t merely talk about it.
But by telling the parable to someone who patently wants to trick him, Jesus also “neighbors” his interlocutor, in effect showing him how to be a neighbor.
The framework for a neighborhood constitution rests on these four revolutionary insights into the body politic:
1. “Neighbor” is a not the language of friend, enemy,or stranger, but language for people who share nothing more – and nothing less – than a common space;
2. Neighbors don’t choose each other, but they are, in a very real sense, chosen by that common space;
3. The relationship between neighbors assumes a kind of equality;
4. The relationship is defined by action. Quite simply, neighbors “neighbor” one another. And that means showing compassion and enacting forgiveness.
Concluding Thoughts on Luther’s Legacy
Luther did not always practice what he preached. He did not always “see” Christ in face of the neighbor, certainly not the neighbor who was Jewish or Muslim. Nor did Luther the polemicist follow the counsel of Luther the pastor. As a polemicist, he did not “speak well” of his opponents, and he shoveled invective on representatives of the popes and princes alike when his theological proposals led to excommunication and exile. Add to that Luther’s later tirades against to the Jews, the “Turks,” and the “murdering hordes of peasants,” and find a clear path through Nazi Germany and into the current hate-filled populist movements of the present. The reformer left behind a rhetoric that demands repentance, not just in words but in embodied actions. Any conversation about Martin Luther must make amends for the reformer’s hate speech, because hate speech continues the crucifixion, breaking the body of Christ still further.
In this year of the 500th anniversary commemorating the posting of Luther’s 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral, one way to repent is to refrain from hagiography and re-member the reformer whole, celebrating his stunning accomplishments without downplaying his equally stunning failings. Finally, this is the best tribute to a man who regarded himself as both saint and sinner, simul justus et peccator.
Martha Stortz 2018
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