Theological Origins of Modernity

158 chapter five
salvation? How can this God provide the certainty Luther needs? Or to
put the matter in other terms, Luther’s theology requires the omnipotence
of God and the nullity of man in order to relieve man of uncertainty, but
this incomprehensible omnipotence itself undermines the very certainty
he seeks. Luther admits:
He is God, and for his will there is no cause or reason that can be laid down
as a rule or measure for it, since there is nothing equal or superior to it, but
it is itself the rule of all things. For if there were any rule or standard for it,
either as cause or reason, it could no longer be the will of God. For it is not
because he is or was obliged so to will that what he wills is right, but on the
contrary, because he himself so wills, therefore what happens must be right.
Cause and reason can be assigned for a creature’s will, but not for the will of
the Creator, unless you set up over him another creator. 92
Th is passage demonstrates the continuing power of the extreme voluntarist
position that played such an important role in shaping the nominalist
movement. Luther seeks to make this God palatable to human beings by
asserting that faith requires us to trust this God’s judgments more than
our own, for “many things as seen by God are very good, which as seen by
us are very bad.” 93 Th is assurance off ers an abstract comfort, but this can
hardly be convincing to anyone, Luther included. Divine inscrutability in
the end is not comforting but terrifying.
Luther like the Stoics believed that happiness and a kind of freedom was
to be found in union with the divine logos. Th is union for Luther, however,
diff ered in several respects from that of the Stoics. First, for Luther
it did not entail the dissolution of human individuality. Man was not lost
in a Neoplatonic or Averroist One; rather God’s will became the will of
the individual. As Luther put it in his Lectures on Romans, “God is allpowerful
through me.” As we saw in the preceding chapter, the consequences
of this unifi cation are quite diff erent than those of Stoicism. It
does not lead to apathia, to a dispassionate acceptance of fate, but empowers
the individual will with a sense of divine mission. What I do becomes
God’s work, a calling that is subject to no earthly judgment or limits. Already
in Luther, but even more clearly in the radicals who followed in his
wake, we see the consequence of his position.
Second, when the Christian is grasped by the word, he becomes certain
because he cannot doubt that God’s promises are true. He thus takes
God’s potentia ordinata to be insuperable. However, this certainty can be
sustained only by avoiding refl ection on the hidden God, the deus absconditus,
whose potentia absoluta undermines this certainty. And yet, insofar