Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of premodernity 159
as one’s faith rests on God’s omnipotence, it is impossible to leave this God
concealed, impossible not to speculate on what is possible by means of his
absolute power. Th e believer thus hovers between these two visions of God,
and his faith can be sustained only by constantly revivifying the kataleptic
experience of the word of God by which he was converted into a Christian.
Tortured by the doubts that divine omnipotence engenders, he must
constantly recur to the Scripture, to preaching and teaching to counteract
the corrosive eff ect of this vision of the hidden God. Th e Stoic reading of
Augustinian Christianity that Luther develops in his response to Erasmus
thus can only with great diffi culty be combined with the notion of omnipotence
that Luther received from nominalism.
Perhaps even more important from a Christian point of view is the fact
that Luther leaves open the question of the origin of evil that was so central
to the debate between Augustine and the Manicheans. He attributes evil to
Satan, but he does not explain Satan’s relationship to God or how Satan became
evil. As a creature, to use Luther’s own analogy, Satan must at some
point have been ridden by God. How then did he become a rider? 94 And if
Satan was able to become a rider, why shouldn’t God’s other creatures as
well? Why not us? Moreover, what makes Satan evil? Th e answer for Luther
seems to be merely the fact that God wills him to be evil and wills that
what he does is evil. 95
Not only does Luther have no explanation for Satan’s evil, he also cannot
explain the Fall, which in the absence of human freedom and responsibility
is morally meaningless. If God is as omnipotent as Luther contends, no
individual can be responsible for his sins and therefore no one can justly be
condemned. Th e fact that God does condemn some people to damnation
for the evil that he himself elicits leads inevitably to the conclusion that
God is unjust. In trying to make sense of this, Luther occasionally recurs
to the scholastic argument that “God cannot act evilly although he does
evil through evil men, because one who is himself good cannot act evilly;
yet he uses evil instruments that cannot escape the sway and motion of his
omnipotence,” but this is an unconvincing argument and he is well aware
of this fact. 96 More characteristically, however, he simply admits that God
“acts even in Satan and the impious.” 97 In responding to Erasmus on this
point, Luther in the end takes refuge in the notion of divine inscrutability,
asserting that while we cannot understand how God can be righteous
in causing evil in others and then punishing them for it, we must accept
this, because his justice is beyond our comprehension. Indeed, “this is the
highest degree of faith, to believe him merciful when he saves so few and
damns so many, and to believe him righteous when by his own will he