The Theology of Martin Luther CH509

 LESSON 23 of 24

Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.

Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

In his standard work on the subject of Luther’s theology, Paul

Althaus remarks in the chapter on eschatology that Luther’s
theology is and remains a “theology of the cross, and therefore, it
necessarily becomes eschatology.” Faith waits and hopes for the
future when Christ’s lordship will be revealed, Althaus comments,
but in a sense that is only half the story for Luther. For he also
believes that the kingdom of Christ, Christ’s rule in the lives of
His people, has already set in on that last day, which is composed
of His incarnation, His death, His resurrection, and His rule of the
church through the Holy Spirit.

In 20th-century theology, we have talked a great deal about two

views of biblical eschatology, aspects both of which are found
indeed in the New Testament. Luther recognized the “not yet”
quality of the day of the Lord, of the endtimes, for he looked
forward to a specific day on which this plane of existence would
end. But he believed that the rule of Christ had already set in,
that the day of the Lord had happened in the life and death and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and that it was repeated in
that joyous exchange, which is transacted by the Word of God in
baptism and in all other forms of the Word. So Luther believed
both in a future endtime, last day, and in the “alreadyness” of the
rule of Christ. Indeed, Luther did await the end of the world; he
awaited the imminent end of the world.

On the one hand, he is alleged to have said (and we don’t have

this actually in print or in his hand from him) that if he knew the
end of the world was coming tomorrow, he would plant a tree.
That does reflect his attitude toward the eschaton, even if he
didn’t actually say it, for he went about his life, his callings, in
the presence of God. And for him, the translation to the heavenly
kingdom was not unimportant but it was so important as simply
being in the presence of Christ.

In his thinking of that coming of the last day, which he expected

perhaps in his own lifetime, he revealed the eschatological—we
might even say the apocalyptic—expectations of his own age. And
this framework for his thinking seems only to have gotten more

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

intense as he grew older. The gospel did not take hold in the same
way that he would have hoped at the beginning of his career.
The people of Wittenberg themselves, for instance, really didn’t
behave like good Christians should, and he wondered about the
fruits of the gospel. And so he was certain that that was a sign that
the end was near. In some ways he even rode the crest of these
kinds of expectations himself. For his message spread in part
because the common people, and not only the common people
but the intellectuals of his day, particularly among the biblical
humanists, viewed him as an eschatological prophet, as a figure
with almost apocalyptic proportions. Already at the beginning of
his career, some of his students identified him with that angel
that appears in the book of Revelation 14, with the everlasting
gospel to proclaim.

One of the most important signs of the senility of this world for
him was the appearance of the Roman Antichrist, of the papacy,
as the expression of Satan’s power in this world. As we have
mentioned in the lecture on ecclesiology, Luther identified the
papacy as an institution with that man of sin that is mentioned
in II Thessalonians 2. Sometimes he also shared that wider belief
of his time that the Turkish threat was also an Antichrist, but he
tended more often to see the Turk as a sign of God’s wrath and a
sign of the coming end, a sign of the weakness and fragility of the
world as it grew old, but probably not the Antichrist.

Indeed, from I Timothy he took the cue, as Paul there describes

the doctrine of demons, as a doctrine which forbids marriage and
food. He took that cue from the New Testament to reinforce his
view that clerical celibacy and the fasting laws of the medieval
church confirmed that the papacy was indeed the man of sin.

It was not that this sign of the last times had descended suddenly.
For a thousand years the anti-Christian nature of the papacy had
been growing, as far as Luther was concerned. He saw the turning
point in the history of the church as coming already at the papacy
of Pope Gregory I, Pope Gregory the Great. For there it was,
according to Luther’s view, that a reliance on human tradition,
that the word of man, became particularly strong and exercised
a perverse influence upon the whole life of the church. It was
there he believed that the belief that the Mass was not God’s gift
but an occasion for human sacrificing or re-presentation of the
sacrificial work of Christ as a human work. It is at that time when
this mistaken perception took hold. But it was not only that, there
were all sorts of signs that the world was tottering in the disease
and pestilence of the period, in the despair which people felt over
and against secular government in any number of ways. And then
for Luther it was also a sign of the coming end, that the gospel

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

was being preached one last time, from his perspective. That
was his understanding of the significance of John Huss, who had
appeared one hundred years earlier, with ideas at least somewhat
similar to some of Luther’s ideas; and he recognized in his own
ministry, in his own calling as a reformer, a particular gift of God
at the endtime.

Indeed, Luther rejected every form of millenarianism; he believed

that there would be no earthly kingdom that would be set up by
Christ at the end of the world. He viewed that as a Jewish heresy
or a Jewish-influenced heresy. Indeed, when the end of the world
comes, the trumpet will sound and Christ will return, and that will
be it for this plane of existence. He was familiar with a good many
millenarian traditions—particular that of Joachim Fiore—and he
rejected all these approaches or definitions of the endtime. Christ
would come, he believed, and after that the judgment and the gift
of life for believers.

Nonetheless, in view of the imminence of Christ’s return, in

the shadow of the coming judgment day, Luther very sharply
preached his word of judgment upon contemporary church and
contemporary society. He continually throughout his life called
for repentance on the basis of his expectation that the days of
this world were few. He preached a message of judgment against
the moral turpitude, against the moral decadence of his time, and,
above all, he called upon the church to repent a false teaching. He
called upon those who were teaching another gospel than that
which he believed Paul, John, Peter, and, above all, Jesus Christ
Himself had preached. And in this sharp preaching of judgment
he bestowed upon his followers, bequeathed to his followers, a
sense of the imminence of Christ’s presence as the final judge.

But it was not just that Luther looked forward to the last time.
Luther also believed that Christ had already come, that God was
present in His fullest form possible, in His very special way, in
Jesus of Nazareth, who now made His presence felt as both judge
and liberator in the Word of God as it was proclaimed to the people
of God. Jesus Christ was present as judge in the word of law, which
placed the burden so squarely upon its hearers, if it was preached
correctly, that they were crushed; and every pretense of self-
sanctification was crushed by the presence of Christ the judge in
the law. But Luther also recognized that Christ the liberator had
come in the gospel and was present as the gospel was preached
and the forgiveness of sins was pronounced upon the people of
God. This is, in some sense, a more profound eschatology than
that which was voiced by many at his time, in every corner of life,
the presence of the God who will bring all things to an end in this
sphere of existence, that sin may be set aside, that death may be

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

laid aside, that Satan may be roundly defeated.

As a part of Luther’s eschatology, we must take a look at what he

preached about death, about human dying, and about the death
that follows that human dying, the death which lasts forever in
hell. Luther once observed that we all try to escape the seriousness
of death; we all try to avoid bearing its burden too long. He
pointed to ancient philosophers, but also some contemporaries
who thought that death was just natural, and it was just the fate
and the lot of all humankind. To that point of view, Luther spoke a
definite no. For him, death was the enemy; death was the wage of
sin; death was the judgment of God; death was, at its worst, eternal
and infinite misery and wrath. And it was a curse and nothing but
a curse on those human creatures that God had created for life.

Luther took very seriously the fact that death expresses the wrath
of God, and he used this fact repeatedly in his preaching, in his call
for repentance. But he also recognized that death is such an awful
curse that human creatures cannot see it for what it is, only in
faith (Luther said) can death’s seriousness be viewed realistically.
In the same way that he suggested that original sin could not be
fully understood apart from that gift of the Holy Spirit, which
makes us safe enough in Christ to confront its awful reality, so
Luther suggested that we try to avoid thinking about death until
we can face it squarely, because we know that death’s word is not
the last word for us who belong to Christ.

Indeed, Luther recognized that the death to sin had taken place
for believers already. Believers had died in their baptism, and so
physical death he compared to a father’s rod which was used to
punish a child. Painful enough to make even Christians scared
before it. But at the same time, Luther recognized that physical
death completes the baptismal action of God. It is God’s trick on
death, to use death as the means whereby he translates us into
enjoying being a member of his family fully. And thus, Luther
cultivated his own version of the medieval ars moriendi (the art
of dying).

Luther recognized that there were those who viewed death as

simply sleep in the Lord and conceded to them that this was not
wrong. Death is indeed a narrow gate, he wrote, it is the narrow
way to life, and he compared it to a birth canal. The pangs of birth
are similar to the pangs of rebirth into heaven. For death hurts,
death hurts not just physically, Luther said, but it hurts with the
anxiety that it casts across our lives.

And so Luther saw in death that message of God that is the final
condemnation, but he also saw that message of God which is

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

the sure hope of everlasting life. It depends on who you listen

to, Luther would say. He pointed out that, according to the law,
human creatures observe that in the midst of life we are in death,
but the gospel reminds us that it is precisely in the midst of our
physical death that we complete the gaining of life.

Luther did not in any way sell short the fact that Christians also
experience the pangs of death. For Luther, our physical death is
Satan’s last stand. And so Satan puts on full pressure; he ups the
ante. He reinforces his temptation to doubt the Word of the Lord
and to despair of the presence of Christ. But Luther knew that
he would go to his own death with the cross of Christ imprinted
upon his forehead and his heart, and so in fact he went to his
death telling those who were gathered around his bedside: “We
are beggars all.” And in this confession, he was acknowledging
as well his total and complete dependence on Jesus Christ
and his absolute assurance that Jesus Christ would complete
the resurrection that he had given him in his baptism and had
repeated in the many sermons and in the absolution and in the
Lord’s Supper all the many times that Luther had received the
Word preached and the Word pronounced, the Word fed.

And so as Luther did construct consolations for the dying in one

form or another in his sermons and in special tracts, he aimed at
reinforcing the gospel above all. He aimed at helping his readers
or his hearers to recognize that death has lost its sting, that
death has been defanged, that death has been put to death by the
resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For Luther, who understood the goodness of God’s creation so well

and emphasized it so strongly, the personal bodily resurrection
of the believer was of special importance as the completion of
what Christ had begun in our baptism and as an expression of
the goodness of God’s gift of all that is material. A good deal
of contemporary Luther scholarship has been concerned with
Luther’s understanding of death and resurrection, focused on
the question of the unity of body and soul as it is taught in the
New Testament or the separation of body and soul in death which
much of the church has taught. Some see in Luther a doctrine
of soul sleep, that the body and soul are united and cannot be
separated, and therefore, the soul sleeps with the body in the
ground until the final resurrection. A full reading of Luther texts
makes the problem a little more complicated, at least a little more
complicated to sort out easily into the categories with which most
of late 20th-century Christians are comfortable. Luther wrote
against the Fifth Lateran Council, which had met while he was
studying at Wittenberg, and condemned the views of the Italian
contemporary philosopher Pomponazzi on the whole matter of

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

the existence of the soul. And out of those remarks some have
come to think that he, at least early on, taught a doctrine of soul
sleep.

It is clear that Luther followed the medieval tradition in talking

about a temporary separation of body and soul. It is also true
that he insisted on the inseparability of body and soul. He also,
however, taught that believers immediately enjoy the bliss of
heaven. It is probably impossible to sort out in the categories of
the modern debate just how Luther stood on the questions which
people have asked in the 2oth century. What is clear is that he
believed in the bodily resurrection of every believer, as well as
the bodily suffering into eternity of all unbelievers in hell. And he
believed indeed that he would see his Lord when he died.

Luther recognized the importance of helping Christians prepare

for their physical death. But a complete look at his eschatology
focuses much more importantly on the fact that his entire doctrine,
the whole of his teaching, emphasized (particularly in the second
and third articles) the fact that Jesus Christ is present to kill and
to make alive. Luther saw God’s rule as immediate in law and in
gospel, in death for sinners and in the gift of life to those who
had forfeited life by denying the lordship of Christ. And so his
proclamation and his understanding of the sinner’s state and the
believer’s salvation emphasized, first of all, the wrath of God over
everything that is touched by human sinfulness.

We have spoken several times about how highly Luther valued civil
righteousness as it makes the horizontal dimension of human life
run well, even if that civic righteousness is practiced apart from
faith in Jesus Christ. That did not deter Luther from, at the same
time, concluding all under sin and seeing the wrath of God burn
hot against everything that separates His people from Himself,
even with what is good in the horizontal realm.

Luther’s understanding of justification and sanctification were

also set in the eschatological setting of the conflict with Satan
that occupies the whole of the history of the church. In both the
horizontal realm and the vertical realm, Satan and God continued
to go head to head, Luther believed, in fighting for the human
creatures whom God had made. Luther viewed the whole of the
history of the church as that eschatological battle. He viewed
really the history of the church in no other way than as a history
of conflict. Within the realm of the relationship with God and
within the realm of the relationship with God’s creation, that
battle goes on as believers proclaiming the Word find those
special times when God exercises His power in one dramatic
way or another. Luther took that biblical understanding of kyros,

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

which he expressed in the German word schtindaline (the little

hour), and he prepared his people to look for those moments in
the history of the church, in the history of God’s world, in which
they could contribute their own special blow against the advance
of Satan into their own lives and the lives of others.

Satan, according to Luther, had recognized God’s plan to save His

people, and so he pulled out all the stops, he marshaled all the
guns he could. From the little temptations of everyday life, which
are also a playing out of the eschatological battle, to his greatest
gun, the Antichrist—the one within the church, the leader within
the church, who had perverted the message of the gospel and had
oppressed those who were teaching it. And in between those little
moments of our failures and foibles, and the grand plan of Satan
to pervert the church itself, Luther recognized that the battle
against evil, against the evil one, goes on in all our temptations,
in all our confrontations with the law of God which condemn us.

Although indeed the battle goes on in the family and as the family
goes about its occupation, and in the state and society, it is the
church that is the critical background, Luther believed, for this
eschatological battle against Satan. It began, he taught, with Cain,
who was the firstborn, who was the pope of his day, who was the
one appointed to give the proper sacrifices. But he did not, and
when Abel came and sacrificed—worshiped God faithfully and
truly—Cain had no choice but to persecute him, to kill him, to
eliminate him. And so also in the conflict between Esau and Jacob
or between Ishmael and Isaac, Luther saw early dress rehearsals
of the battle that was joined finally in the cross of Christ. And
the mopping up action goes on, Luther taught, throughout the
rest of the history of the church as the church fights with the
confession of the Word of God against every perversion, every
satanic temptation to repeat Adam and Eve’s rejection of God as
Lord once again.

Also in concert with his colleague Philipp Melanchthon, who

developed history lectures outside the formal curriculum where
they had no place, Luther taught that there is a rhythm in the
history of the church of apostasy and restoration. And in this
rhythm the true church is always a hidden remnant, but God is
always coming to find the “Abels” of the true church, persecuted
because they confessed the Word, to lift them up and to let the
Word go forth from them again.

Indeed, as we have noted, his eschatological or apocalyptic

preaching of judgment condemned bad morals, as well as bad
teaching, but Luther really viewed heresy as the worst of sins
because it perverted God’s Word, which identifies His people

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

and liberates them as His children for service in this world. So

he opposed not only the papal party but also those he called
schwermer—those anticlerical and antisacramental reformers
who wanted to pervert the Christian’s view of the power of the
Word and give that Word short shrift. The result was the same, he
believed, both to his right and to his left, papacy and schwermer
alike finally ended up with the law exalted over the gospel with
Christians being turned to their own works and their own morality
rather than the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.

But the cross and the resurrection had turned that all around.
Indeed, as Althaus noted in the quote that I cited at the beginning
of this lecture, it is because Luther’s theology is a theology of the
cross that [it] takes the necessity of the death of the second person
of the holy Trinity linked with Jesus of Nazareth in this person
seriously. It is because Luther’s theology is a theology of the cross
that his theology is so permeated with that eschatological sense
of conflict against the background of the eschatological victory of
Jesus Christ in his own resurrection.

So Luther’s understanding of the joyous exchange repeated that

eschatological message day in and day out as Christians confess
their sins, as Christians receive absolution, that exchange of
righteousness and innocence is impressed and imprinted upon
them again. And so the daily experience of confession and
absolution repeat, first of all, the day of creation, but secondly are
a kind of dress rehearsal for the day of liberation, the judgment
day, the last day. The triumph has already taken place, the triumph
is history. There can be no doubt about how it’s going to come
out; the outcome is set by Christ’s death and resurrection. But
now Christians live in the period of mopping up, and all the little
battles that loom so large in the life of the individual Christian
serve to reinforce the lesson that Satan must be taken very
seriously. But Christians also should see that other lesson—that
nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

And, therefore, it is important to note that Luther’s understanding

of the election of the chosen people of God is also an important
part of his understanding of the endtimes. It is because God
already, before the history of the world, laid down His choice for
His people that He can then proceed with His affirmation of the
victory in the lives of individual people. Throughout his career,
from 1518 on, Luther used this parallel of the first Adam and the
second Adam, the death and the resurrection, which the second
Adam gives us who are caught in the sin of the first Adam. From
1518 on, he used this model as the eschatological outline for all
his proclamation.

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Lesson 23 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of Eschatology

This rhythm of death and life happens also in the horizontal

realm as we live out the life of sanctification. And so Luther’s
understanding of the sanctified life is indeed a life, again, that is
outlined in that rhythm of death and resurrection in repentance.
He believed that God mortifies human flesh, sinful flesh. Ideas that
came originally, I suppose, from the mystics who wanted to empty
themselves of all human pretension, helped shape Luther’s view
of the mortification of the sinner in daily life. Luther was utterly
realistic and had some sense of the psychological dimensions of
how the sinner had to fight against sin, not only on the grand
scale of trusting in Christ but also in those little battles that are
waged when trust in Christ is applied to the specific dilemmas,
to the specific situations of temptation that plague daily life. In
the midst of this struggle against Satan’s temptation, Luther did
teach that we battle for a greater degree of righteous performance
in our lives through the Holy Spirit’s power. We battle as God takes
hold of our lives and shakes off the sinful habits of this world, of
this flesh, so that we may indeed be serving God by serving the
neighbor. So the eschatological battle goes on as we plant the
trees that give shade to the neighbor’s life.

Important in Luther’s understanding of how that works in the

daily struggle is the reinforcement for Christian faith that comes
from the Lord’s Supper. For in receiving Christ’s body and blood,
we repeat the dying and the rising, and we also (quite important
for Luther) express the eschatological unity of the family of God
as we gather around the supper table of the Lord. Because the
polemics of the period obscured it, it is important for us here
to recognize Luther’s emphasis on the Holy Communion as the
communion also of Christ’s people with one another. For in the
supper table, at the supper table, the Lord was linking His people,
the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, into an indissoluble family
bond.

Martin Luther preached as a prophet of the endtime, his students

and followers suggested. Luther himself believed he was
preaching in the last time, and he believed that the Christian life
is a life lived out in confrontation between the believer on God’s
side and all the temptations and all the forces of evil that Satan
can marshal against us. And so Luther believed the condemnation
which God works as a call for repentance had already prefigured
the death that we would experience physically and had done away
with the eternal death that we had earned through our sinfulness.
And instead, Luther taught, from the moment of our baptism on,
we march in God’s grace confident of victory through Jesus Christ
and eternal life.

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