Article SCE

Studies in Christian Ethics

2018, Vol. 31(1) 65-78
The Justified Body: Hauerwas, © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0953946817737928
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(DSAGE
Justin Nickel1
Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, USA

Abstract
Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the
theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who
experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues
to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can
be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance
for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam
and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the
Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification
but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to
embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

Keywords
Body, Christian action, Fall, Hauerwas, Luther, sacraments

Introduction
Let us begin with this common charge against Luther. His singular focus on God’s justifi­
cation of sinners—positive intentions notwithstanding—is not a so-called breakthrough
that returns a wayward church to its core proclamation. Rather, it ends the great catholic

1. This article began as a presentation at Duke Divinity School’s annual graduate student con­
ference. I am grateful for the questions and criticisms I received there, including helpful
comments from J. Ross Wagner. I would also like to thank Thomas Seat, Jeffrey Skaff and
two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Finally, I owe a special word of
gratitude to John Bowlin for his generosity in offering feedback on this article.

Corresponding author:
Justin Nickel, Princeton Theological Seminary, 64 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
Email: justin.nickel@ptsem.edu
66 Studies in Christian Ethics 31(1)

synthesis of habit and grace, action and gift, body and soul, nature and revelation.2 With
this focus on justification, Luther opts for the second member of each pair: grace, gift, soul
and revelation. Habit, the human body and human actions are all left behind, necessarily
disconnected from the Christian life. Justification means forfeiting the idea that a Christian’s
bodily actions—along with the habits she builds up—can have any positive impact on her
relationship with God.3 Embodied human nature, after the Fall, is just too sinful for that to
be the case. Instead, the great gift of justification is this: God does for us what we cannot
do for ourselves, and so God’s merciful acceptance of us eclipses even these bodies of sin.
Justification comes to mean that we are freed from our bodies and their fundamental diso­
bedience. With this doctrine, Luther furnishes the West with a way to deny the body’s sig­
nificance, with a way to tell false stories about how human agency actually works.4
Portrayed in this way, Luther is an author of the West’s decline into falsehood.
To be sure, there are aspects of Luther’s thought, particularly in its early, polemical
form, that lend themselves to this story. However, Luther, in his later thought, does not
split body from soul, but instead holds to a holistic anthropology. He thinks of human
beings as unified selves for whom body and spirit cannot be split, at least in this life. In
this, Luther is an undervalued resource for Christian reflection on the body’s moral sig­
nificance. I support this claim through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam
and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and Luther’s sacramental theology in
‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’.5 From these texts, I am authorized to make the follow­
ing claims on Luther’s behalf. Original sin is dependent on a denial of creatureliness and
embodiment. Adam and Eve fall by believing they can love and trust God and yet disre­
gard God’s commandments that require embodied obedience. Their disobedience is only
possible because they believe the serpent’s lies, including the lie he tells about their status
as embodied creatures. If this is true, then disregarding our bodies’ moral significance is
not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. We can also
put the claim this way: justification results not in a denial of the body’s importance but
instead in a return to the body as the site of Christian life. Finally, I follow several scholars
who point to the development of Luther’s thought. While there are differences in their
accounts, a key similarity is this: as Luther begins to set the terms for his own thought, he
moves away from the radical dualisms of inner/outer, body/soul toward a more holistic
vision of the Christian person. This vision includes participation in visible church prac­
tices and a deepening appreciation for the gifts of creation. I add the body to this list.6

2. For instance, Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 173-98; John Milbank, Theology and Social
Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
3. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized
Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 147^48.
4. I take this to be one of the main conclusions to draw from the works listed in the footnotes
directly above.
5. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut Lehman and Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis, MO:
Concordia, 2009), vol. 1; ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’, vol. 40. Hereafter LW.
6. See F. Edward Cranz, An Essay on the Development ofLuther’s Thought on Justice, Law, and
Society (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler Press, 1998); Mary Gaebler, The Courage ofFaith: Martin
Luther and the Theonomous Self (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013); David S. Yeago,
‘AChristian, Holy People’, Modern Theology 13.1 (January 1997), pp. 101-120.
Nickel 67

Hauerwas’s Luthers
I begin with Hauerwas’s portrait of Luther.7 Hauerwas is an intriguing interlocutor, in
part, because he offers multiple readings of Luther. His ambivalence suggests that
Luther’s legacy is more complicated than the stories of decline allow. Regarding this
ambivalence, Hauerwas first gives us the standard Luther who denies the body’s signifi­
cance.8 Hauerwas drafts Luther into his decline narrative wherein Luther’s account of
justification generates an irrevocable split between soul and body. This portrayal of
Luther misleads because it only gives us half the story.9 In his later work, Luther’s
anthropology is more nuanced, and he is thus more difficult to draft into Hauerwas’s
story of decline. Hauerwas has some sense of this development, but this does not lead

7. For North American treatments of Luther, this portrayal begins with Troeltsch’s description of
Lutheran social teaching in Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches,
vol. 2, trans. Olive Wyon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 515-44. Key
features of Troeltsch’s description of Luther are found in the following: James Gustafson,
Christ and the Moral Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 124-27; H. Richard Niebuhr,
Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), pp. 149-89; Reinhold Niebuhr, The
Nature and Destiny ofMan, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), pp. 185-89.
For an immanent critique of Troeltsch’s reading of Luther, see William Henry Lazareth,
Christians in Society: Luther, the Bible, and Social Ethics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,
2001), pp. 3-10 and Leif Svensson, ‘The “Communitarian” Critique of Luther’s Ethics’, in
Carl-Henric Grenholm and Goran Gunner (eds), Lutheran Identity and Political Theology
(Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2015), pp. 172-89.
I am indebted to Svensson in the following ways. Like him, I seek to defend Luther from
a ‘Communitarian’ critique and do so by drawing on some of the same sources, including
Luther’s essay ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’ and David S. Yeago’s masterful interpreta­
tion of it. Nevertheless, we read Hauerwas’s treatment of Luther in different ways. Svennson
holds that Hauerwas ‘does not criticize Luther’s thinking on morality to any great extent in
any of his texts’ (‘“Communitarian” Critique’, p. 176). While I am not sure what ‘to any great
extent’ means here, I will argue there are numerous instances in which Hauerwas does just
this, particularly with respect to the conclusions he draws about Luther. I take this as a differ­
ent question from whether Hauerwas provides ample evidence for these conclusions.
8. In addition to the works I examine in the texts above, similar critiques can be found in the
following Hauerwas works: ‘How “Christian Ethics” Came to Be’, in Stanley Hauerwas,
John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright (eds), The Hauerwas Reader (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001), pp. 37-50 (42); Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice
ofNonviolence (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), p. 51; and the essay ‘How to Do or
NotDo Protestant Ethics’, in The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), pp.
53-69.
Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San
Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1985), p. 4.
9. Perhaps surprisingly, some of Luther’s friends read Luther in a similar way. So-called ‘Radical
Lutherans’ will make many similar claims about Luther; they simply differ in their evalua­
tion of these claims. For these radicals, the severing of soul from body is a mark of gospel
freedom. By virtue of this agreement, my argument should be read as an implicit critique
of these radicals as well. See Gerhard O. Forde, Mark C. Mattes and Steven D. Paulson, A
More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004).
68 Studies in Christian Ethics 31(1)

him to recast Luther’s role.10 He continues to cast Luther as a figure whose anthropology
must be overcome if Christians are to give the body its just due. This shows that Hauerwas
has not followed the implications of his ambivalence far enough, in that he has not come
to see Luther for the ally he could be.
For Hauerwas, Luther’s chief sin is his false and destructive theological anthropology.
Luther’s emphasis on justification splits the Christian into two people. Luther seemingly
believes that the Christian is made up of two distinct selves, the internal conscience and
the external body. God, in Christ, justifies the internal, spiritual person, leaving little for
the external, bodily person to do, at least regarding the growth of the inner, spiritual per­
son.11 So Hauerwas: ‘Protestants have tended to emphasize the dual nature of the self, the
“internal”, justified self divorced from the “external”, sinful self.’12 The gospel not only
splits the person into two selves, but it is then aligned with only one of those selves. The
gospel-created self is described in the following terms: conscience, internal, spiritual,
passive and free. Because Luther associates the inner self with the gospel, he limits the
importance of outward, bodily action for the Christian life.
Owing to this separation, the body’s role in the Christian life is minimal. Luther and his
heirs have ‘made it impossible to account for the importance of the ongoing determination
of the self through its acts’.13 The inner person does not take form through the regular and
disciplined actions of the body. What we do in our bodies cannot impact our standing
before God. No doubt, the body still has this role to play in this vision of the Christian life.
It mediates the inner self’s activities through ‘discrete acts of neighborly love’.14 These
acts will vary depending on the neighbor’s need.15 The body has become a mere medium
for the conscience’s activity in any given moment. Or in Hauerwas’s words: ‘man’s [sic]
“external” acts are only the ambiguous manifestations of his “true internal” self’.16 Note
the way Luther restricts the body’s importance. It has but one role, to manifest the true
Christian self. Even when this is successful, when the body does manage to manifest the
internal self, this does not bear on a Christian’s righteousness. By assigning the body such
a limited role, Luther, and Protestant ethics with him, cannot account for a central fact of
Christian life and witness. Specifically, Protestant ethics has failed to account for the way
in which ‘men’s [sic] dispositions, intentions, and actions actually embody whatever is
considered to be the normative “style” of the Christian life’.17
Hauerwas creates this Luther with a few citations from The Freedom of a Christian.
He does not offer an exhaustive or even detailed reading of Luther’s theological

10. Stanley Hauerwas, ‘The Truth about God: The Decalogue as Condition for Truthful Speech’, in
idem, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 37-59.
11. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, p. 4.
12. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, p. 4.
13. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, p. 5.
14. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, p. 4.
15. For this reason, Hauerwas thinks of Luther as a major force in Protestant’s decline into moral
occasionalism. See Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, pp. 4-10.
16. Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue: Essays in Christian Ethical Reflection (Notre Dame,
IN: Fides Publishers, 1974), p. 51.
17. Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, p. 51.
Nickel 69

anthropology.18 Given the lack of textual engagement, some might wonder if Hauerwas
even intends to give a reading of Luther, as such. They might ask whether I am making
Hauerwas say more than he himself would, but this defense has a significant problem.
Hauerwas, regardless of his level of textual support, still assigns Luther his role in famil­
iar narratives of decline. I am focused on the role and not the texts offered to support it.
Regardless of textual support or its lack, Luther becomes a primary author of
Protestantism’s denial ‘that the actual shape of a man’s [sic] righteousness has any effi­
cacy in the attainment of his righteousness’.19 This is the role we have been taught to
expect for Luther. He thinks that God’s gift in Christ is given to the inner person, a dis­
tinct entity from the outer, and so the body is finally of little significance in the Christian
life. Granted, at his most generous, Hauerwas admits that Luther does not separate theol­
ogy from ethics as disciplines. However, Luther’s focus on justification begins the move­
ment that eventually will. Even in this more modest claim, Luther’s role is marginally
revised, in that his anthropology, which breaks up the person, will set the terms for theol­
ogy’s divorce from ethics.20 Put otherwise, Luther still plays his part.
Hauerwas’s first Luther is the stock character of post-Reformation decline stories.
Given this, his next Luther may surprise. Take the essay ‘The Truth about God’.21 There,
Hauerwas argues against ‘the abstract relation between nature (natural law) and grace
(revealed law) which so dominates theological thinking in modernity’.22 Hauerwas’s aim
is to place this relation in the concrete practices of Christian life, and in so doing, to show
how we come to knowledge of God. He asks Luther to help with this task. Hauerwas
writes positively of Luther’s reading of the Decalogue, noting the way in which Luther
thinks that the commandments ‘entail positive duties the following of which constitute a
life of human flourishing’.23 The result is that ‘the commandments are interconnected to

18. Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520) in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings,
ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 401. To counter Hauerwas,
Luther’s defenders will note Hauerwas omits a crucial section ofthat treatise, Luther’s remarks
on bodily discipline: ‘In this life, he [sic] must control his own body ... [h]ere he must indeed
take care to discipline his body by fastings, watchings, labors and other reasonable discipline
and to subject it to the Spirit so that it will obey and conform to the inner man and faith.’ The
outer person does more than mediate the inner person’s discrete acts of love. Instead, the
outer person becomes a project for the inner person. That is, once God grants faith, part of
the Christian life becomes bringing the outer person into conformity with the inner, spiritual
self. However, Hauerwas would have a ready rejoinder. Even if we grant that the body can be
brought into conformity with the spirit, the following issue remains. Even so, the following
issue remains. The influence only goes one way, from inner to outer. Hauerwas’s concern
persists. To suggest that we must discipline our bodies and serve our neighbors through them
is not yet to claim that this discipline constitutes the inner person.
19. Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, p. 50.
20. Hauerwas, ‘How “Christian Ethics” Came to Be’, p. 42. Here Hauerwas distinguishes between
Luther and the forms of Protestantism that follow him.
21. Hauerwas, ‘The Truth about God’, pp. 37-59.
22. Hauerwas, ‘The Truth about God’, p. 44.
23. Hauerwas, ‘The Truth about God’, p. 43.
70 Studies in Christian Ethics 31(1)

the single goal of rightly worshipping the one God’.24 On this reading, true worship
requires a unity between conscience and body, such that our bodies are taken up into
conscientious action. ‘Luther understood the interrelationship of the commandments of
the Decalogue as practices capable of making us a people truthful before God and one
another.’25
This Luther appears to do much of what the first Luther does not. Faith and ethics are
united for him. The rift between an inner self and the active body is potentially over­
come. Still, a couple of issues remain. Note Hauerwas’s aims in this piece. He enlists
Luther for the task of showing the fundamental relationship between our lives and our
truth claims. Nevertheless, Hauerwas does not rescind Luther’s role in the decline narra­
tive. The closest Hauerwas comes to this is in a footnote where he mentions that Luther
has frequently been taken as virtue’s staunch critic, in spite of contrary evidence.26 Here,
we have no straightforward replacement of one Luther with another. At best, the two sit
uneasily next to one another, and so Luther remains a key part of Hauerwas’s decline
narrative. In what follows, I will argue that the mature Luther is ill-fitted for his role in
the narrative of decline. This calls into question the decline narratives themselves, inso­
far as their characters, Luther included, tend to be too flat to account for the difference
and development of any given thinker. The mature Luther, like Hauerwas, thinks that our
bodies are central to our Christian righteousness. Faith and trust are received and
expressed in and through our bodies. On this telling, justification cannot serve the ideol­
ogy of disembodiment, but rather corrects the consequences of our failed bid to escape
our bodies and still serve God. In this, Luther is more Hauerwas’s ally than even ‘The
Truth about God’ permits.

Back to the Garden

To see how this is so, I turn to another text, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis (1545). I open
with Luther’s description of Adam in his original state. Luther begins with Scripture’s
confession that humanity is created in the image of God,27 and this image in Adam was
‘something far more distinguished and excellent’28 than we now experience in our post-
Fall condition. Luther is quite serious about this excellence. For instance, Adam’s ‘inner

24. Hauerwas, ‘The Truth about God’, p. 43.

25. Hauerwas, ‘The Truth about God’, p. 43.
26. Hauerwas, ‘The Truth about God’, p. 50. There is a bit of irony here, given that Hauerwas is
among those who have thus charged Luther.
27. There is no current Lutheran consensus on how to interpret the Imago Dei. In Hegelian fash­
ion, Bayer thinks of our humanity in terms of our ability ‘to hear, to answer, to give an account
of ourselves’, and so notes the fundamentally communal nature of our humanity. Oswald
Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003),
p. 2. Lohse thinks of humanity’s uniqueness in terms of our position in the creation, which
is closely aligned to our capacity for spiritual life. See Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s
Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development, trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 1999), pp. 243-47.
28. LW 1: 62.
Nickel 71

and his outer sensations were all of the purest kind. His intellect was the clearest, his
memory was the best, and his will the most straightforward.’29 This excellence results in
Adam living ‘in the most beautiful tranquility of mind, without any fear of death and
without anxiety’.30 His will and intellect know only to love and serve God. Adam’s
excellence, though, was not limited to his psychological powers. Instead, Luther believes
that he was possessed of physical, bodily powers that would make a superhero envious.
For instance, ‘his eyes were so sharp and clear that they surpassed those of the lynx and
eagle. He was stronger than the lions and the bears, whose strength is very great; and he
handled them the way we handle puppies.’31 If it were not already the case, Luther’s
imagination gets carried away even further. For Adam and Eve also had a ‘perfect knowl­
edge of the nature of animals, the herbs, the fruits, the trees, and the remaining crea­
tures’.32 In fact, this physical excellence ironically provides one of the conditions for
Adam and Eve’s fall from God’s grace, as Eve speaks with the serpent ‘without any fear,
as we do with a lamb or dog’.33
Adam and Eve’s excellence in both body and mind results in total communion with
God, that much is clear. I turn now to the way that Adam and Eve live in this communion.
Luther’s remarkable descriptions ofAdam and Eve heighten our expectations for Luther’s
description of their worship. How, exactly, might these two titans worship God? From
the perspective of these expectations, Adam and Eve’s worship is, perhaps, a bit disap­
pointing. Luther reads Gen. 2:16-1734 as the establishment of the church. This church,
‘established without walls and without any pomp, in a very delightful place’,35 is to be
the site at which ‘the Lord is preaching to Adam and setting the Word before him’.36
Adam’s worship is nothing more than hearing the brief commandment that directs his
eating. That’s it. There is no unmediated splendor, no super-spiritual power that would
allow Adam and Eve to commune with God apart from their bodies, no spiritual equiva­
lent to their bear-like strength and hawk-like vision. Instead, the tree and its sermon mark
the limit of Adam’s creatureliness.
Certainly, Adam experiences this brief sermon as entirely satisfying: ‘if Adam had
remained in innocence, this preaching would have been like a Bible for him ... and we
would have no need for paper, ink, pens, and that endless multitude of books which we
require’.37 Luther, however, seems to anticipate a bit of disappointment, noting that,
despite this worship’s brevity, it is worth our consideration.38 This sort of worship would

29. LW 1: 62.
30. LW 1: 62.
31. LW 1: 62.
32. LW 1: 63.
33. LW 1: 63.
34. ‘And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of
it you shall die”.’
35. LW 1: 103.
36. LW 1: 105.
37. LW 1: 105.
38. LW 1: 105.
72 Studies in Christian Ethics 31(1)

have continued in perpetuity, with Adam acting as chief priest. On Luther’s telling, Adam
‘would have admonished his descendants to live a holy and sinless life, to work faithfully
in the garden, to watch it carefully’.39 Most significantly, though, Adam would have
preached this brief commandment, including its sanction and prohibition. Adam and his
descendants would have begun by ‘refreshing themselves from the tree of life ...
prais[ing] God and laud[ing] Him for dominion over all the creatures’.40 Here, Adam
expressed gratitude for all that God has given him, for the sustenance he experiences and
the activities that make up his life. Next, Adam would preach ‘to beware with the greatest
care of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.41 With the moral seriousness due a
divine command, Adam would have preached abstention from this tree’s fruit. ‘This
outward place, ceremonial word, and worship’42 comprise Adam’s devotion to God.
Before pivoting to the way that Adam and Eve lose this innocence and fall into sin,
the relationship between Adam and Eve’s worship and their bodies requires attention.
Adam and Eve, even in their state of innocence and heightened physicality, do not have
access to God apart from their bodies, apart from the ‘outward, ceremonial’ worship that
God has set up for them. Further still, their worship reads like a gross underuse of their
physical prowess. In fact, worship marks the very limit of their creatureliness, however
fantastical it may otherwise be. They must access God in a designated form. In order to
praise and worship God, they place themselves in that ‘delightful place’, resting from the
labor that consumes the other six days. They must attend to God’s commandment and
obey that commandment through a bodily action. Resting, hearing, trusting in God’s
Word, refraining from eating, laboring in the garden and enjoying its bounty. Adam and
Eve’s spiritual life consists in these activities. Their whole spiritual life hangs on what
they do and do not do in their bodies in very ordinary ways.
Because we are dealing with the drama of salvation, this state of innocence cannot
last. Because we are dealing with Luther, the effects will be drastic. This much is a given.
The question, though, is what role does the body play in the Fall? Returning to the
Lectures, here is how Luther narrates the scene. As mentioned above, Eve’s first mistake
comes about because of her innocence, as she begins speaking kindly and openly with
the serpent who plots her destruction.43 In recognizably Lutheran terms, the serpent’s
main gambit will be to attack God’s Word and so cause Adam and Eve to fall from their

39. LW 1: 106.
40. LW 1: 105.
41. LW 1: 106.
42. LW 1: 106.
43. A brief word is required about Luther’s interpretation of Eve. On the one hand, it is clear that
he bears the sexist prejudices of his time. This is evident when Luther painfully concludes that
Adam’s nature was more perfect than Eve’s and so Adam would have resisted the serpent’s
temptations (LW 1: 151). These comments obviously merit our condemnation. At the same
time, though, Luther is capable of surprising contemporary readers with his attitudes about
women. For example, he also critiques the ‘baseness and wickedness’ of ‘men who think it
is clever to find fault with the opposite sex and to have nothing to do with marriage ... [and]
men, who, after they have married, desert their wives and refuse to support their children’
(LW 1: 134).
Nickel 73

innocence.44 More interesting, though, is how this temptation is also a call to disregard
the body. Here is how Luther thinks of the devil’s ‘awful boldness’45 that would question
God’s command: ‘Surely you are silly if you believe that God has given such a com­
mand, for it is not God’s nature to be so deeply concerned whether you eat or not.’46
Luther has the serpent question whether God could be all that interested in eating, in this
particular embodied activity. The serpent tempts Eve to think that she can still serve God
even as she disregards a command she hears, a command that directs her to do and leave
undone certain bodily activities. The serpent suggests that God does not care about
something as minor, as bodily, as eating and drinking. The conclusion to be drawn is that
Eve may worship God while disregarding the bodily word she has received. Put other­
wise, the serpent tempts Eve to split her devotion to God from what she does in her body.
The serpent adds a second line of temptation. While the first would have Eve question
the spiritual significance of her body, the second will ask her to overestimate it. Eve is
not only wrong to believe that God cares about her eating, she just as wrongly believes
her eating should be restricted. So the serpent tells Eve that God ‘created the trees on
your account. How can He, who favored you with all these things, be so envious as to
withhold from you the fruits of this one single tree, which are so delightful and lovely?’47
The serpent presses, telling Eve she has ‘the universal rule over all the beasts. Should not
God, who gave you this universal rule over all the beasts also give you all the trees? Just
as God has put the whole earth... under us, so He also permitted the use of all things that
spring from the earth.’48 Here, the serpent does not call Eve to disregard her body, as
though its actions were insignificant to God. Instead, he claims that Adam and Eve’s
place in the creation justifies any bodily desire. Their status within the creation justifies
this freedom, even and especially when it would conflict with God’s command. Because
God has created all things for them and put all things under their rule, they should enjoy
an unrestricted use of the creation. Any limits would seem arbitrary at best and unjust at
worst. Because the creation must submit to their bodily rule, Adam and Eve should not
be restricted in how they use their own bodies. Surely, they should have access to what­
ever they desire to eat, regardless of God’s command.
This second temptation’s logic initially moves in a direction opposite to the first. The
serpent first suggests that Eve’s bodily activity is of such little significance that it does
not concern God. Conversely, with this second temptation, the serpent seduces Eve into
overestimating her bodily significance, suggesting that even God should not curb it. Both
temptations, though, result in the same conclusion. Luther describes the serpent’s work
as ‘a twofold temptation ... by which, however, Satan has the same end in view’.49 The

44. Althaus here represents a standard, Lutheran view: ‘the primal or original sin which is essen­
tially unfaith toward God and his Christ, the sin against the First Commandment’. See Paul
Althaus, The Theology ofMartin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress
Press, 1966), p. 141.
45. LW 1: 149.
46. LW 1: 149.
47. LW 1: 152.
48. LW 1: 153.
49. LW 1: 153.
74 Studies in Christian Ethics 31(1)

end of this temptation is Eve’s ruin in that she ‘is drawn away from the Word and faith’,50
a recognizably Lutheran assessment. Because both temptations lead to the same result, it
matters little which finally convinces Eve. Only the result matters, as Adam and Eve
transgress God’s commandment with that fateful bite.
Of particular interest, though, is the way in which this drawing away from Word and
faith is dependent on the serpent unsettling Eve’s relationship to her body. In fact, given
Luther’s setup, to be drawn away from the Word is, at the same time, to be drawn away
from one’s body and its God-given powers and limitations. Recall the way Luther
describes this faith-commanding Word from God. With respect to Adam and Eve’s bodily
activity, it does the following. First, the commandment provides a limit to both their bod­
ily power and activity. In this, the command reminds them of their creaturely dependence
on God, despite their innocence and bodily power. Second, this command connects their
bodies to their worship. To trust God is not just some internal, individual state. Rather
trust is something done in and with the body. For Adam and Eve, their trust of God is not
logically or sequentially prior to bodily activity. Rather, trusting God means abstaining
from particular fruit, worshipping on the Sabbath, attending to the garden and other activi­
ties. Trust is embodied, enfleshed, in these actions. Crucially, Adam and Eve cannot trust
God and abstain from these activities. In Hauerwas’s language, these are the normative
forms of their God-pleasing lives. The serpent’s two-pronged approach reflects these con­
nections between the body and worship and trust of God. He effectively convinces Eve
that her bodily activity is somehow both insignificant and unrestricted. It neither concerns
God nor should be limited by God. For Adam and Eve to fall prey to the serpent’s lies and
temptations, they must come to disregard the significance of their bodies. They must
believe that the commandment—which directs their bodies to certain activities—is not
the only way to serve God, that they can yet access divine favor apart from their bodies in
all of their limited glory and divinely directed activities. They believe this and find ruin.

A Deep and Evil Corruption

That Adam and Eve end up eating the fruit has tremendous consequences, and one might
question whether these consequences undermine my argument. The question here is
whether the effects of sin are damaging enough that the relationship between the body
and worship is also lost. That is, does Luther offer us reasons to believe that, after the
Fall, our bodies can still bear this significance, that they can still be the site of our wor­
ship and discipleship? Those pushing this objection would point to Luther’s description
of our sinful condition, and ask if our bodies are so determined by sin that they cannot
function as they did in the state of primordial innocence. A number of Luther’s com­
ments, many of which come from The Lectures, encourage this objection. Consider his
remarks about our current sinful condition. It is worth quoting him in full:

let us rather follow experience, which shows we are bom from unclean seed and that from the
very nature of the seed we acquire ignorance of God, smugness, unbelief, hatred against God,
disobedience, impatience, and similar grave faults. These are so deeply implanted in our flesh,

50. LW 1: 153.
Nickel 75

and this poison has been so widely spread through flesh, body, mind, muscles, and blood,
through the bones and the very marrow, in the will, in the intellect, and in reason, that they
cannot be fully removed but are not even recognized as sin.51

Here, Luther’s radicalness remains, but rather than depicting Adam and Eve’s pre-Fall
glory, it now depicts the sinfulness of a post-Fall humanity. Good Augustinian that he is,
Luther assumes that sin is transmitted bodily, and so we are ‘born from unclean seed’.
More striking, though, is the way that he uses the body’s physicality to discuss this sin.
Spiritual attitudes such as smugness and unbelief are planted in the flesh and spread to
the rest of the body. Smugness and unbelief affect even the marrow of our bones. In fact,
one gets the sense that the body’s very components—muscle, blood and bone—are what
make the depth of this sin possible in the first place. Further still, these spiritual attitudes
have bodily manifestations. We express smugness and unbelief in how we relate with our
neighbors and our God. In this, the body appears both to facilitate the spread of sin and
to manifest it.
As stark as Luther’s description is, I suspect that he does not intend to suggest the
body is more sinful than the rest of the human and so incapable of joining in the renewed
life. The reader will note that the passage is aimed at a different point. Luther argues
against the idea that, after the Fall, our ‘natural endowments remain perfect’.52 His point
is that original sin impacts all aspects of our personhood. This includes the uniquely
human faculties of intellect and will. These faculties fare no better than the external per­
son. Accordingly, simul justus et peccator does not mean drafting certain aspects of our
humanity into the relevant categories. Rather, the simul points to the ways that we may
use our whole selves for love or disdain of God and neighbor.53 Luther uses the body to
make a theological point,54 the content of which is this: after the Fall, there is no aspect
of our humanity free from sin, even as we may speak of sinful and righteous uses of these
selves.
Further still, for Luther, forgiveness from this sin requires that we do certain things in
our bodies. We cannot be justified apart from certain practices, most notably participa­
tion in Word and sacrament.55 We fulfill the first commandment by bodily activities
through which God gives and nourishes faith. Significantly, these practices connect us to

51. LW 1: 166.
52. LW 1: 166.
53. Elisabeth Gerle, ‘Eros, Ethics and Politics: Nuptial Imagery in Luther as a Challenge to
Traditional Power Structures’, in Grenholm and Gunner, Lutheran Identity and Political
Theology, pp. 222^1 (225-26).
54. This was a common rhetorical practice for Luther. For a wonderful introduction to this prac­
tice, see Lyndal Roper, ‘Martin Luther’s Body: “The Stout Doctor” and his Biographers’,
American Historical Review 115.2 (April 2010), pp. 351-84.
55. Drawing on Wilfried Joest, Wendte also ties Luther’s holistic anthropology to his sacramental
theology. See, for instance, Martin Wendte, “‘This is my body, which is for you”: Exploring
the Significance of Luther’s Theology of the Eucharist in a Technological Age’, in Marius
Timmann Mjaaland, Ola Sigurdson and Sigridur Lorgeirsdottir (eds), The Body Unbound:
Philosophical Perspectives on Politics, Embodiment and Religion (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 99-103.
76 Studies in Christian Ethics 31(1)

our primordial past, insofar as the form is the same, even as the content of our worship is
different in view of our sin.56 Like our primordial parents before us, we are to worship in
bodily ways that God specifies. Our bodily activities make up our spiritual lives: the
Word we hear, the body and blood we take in, the poor and suffering bodies that demand
our attention. Even after the Fall, we do not have access to God apart from these bodily
practices. As a result, our worship of God requires that we give our bodies their proper
due, that we live our faith in and through them. Luther recognizes both that human action
is embodied and that this action matters to God.
This is true even when Luther uses his inner/outer person distinction to describe worship
in Word and sacrament. Luther believes that God publishes the gospel in a two-fold way,
‘first outwardly, then inwardly’.57 These outward dealings include ‘the oral word of the
gospel ... and material signs, that is, baptism, and the sacrament of the altar’.58 Inwardly,
God ‘ deals with us through the Holy Spirit, faith and other gifts’ ,59 In this, however, we have
not returned to a dualistic Luther. Instead, Luther, again echoing Augustine, is adamant that
‘outward factors should and must precede’ precisely because the ‘inward experience follows
and is effected by the outward’.60 This relationship is not incidental. Rather, God ‘has deter­
mined to give the inward to no one except through the outward’.61 With these and similar
statements, Luther points to the fundamental unity of the human person, both body and soul.
Even the first commandment is fulfilled through bodily activities. We come to trust God as
we hear and taste the Word of God that is graciously given, broken and shed for us.
Likewise, this trust returns us to the creation and enables us to receive all of it, our
bodily selves included, as sheer gift from God. Bayer makes the point well: ‘[t]he new
creation is a conversion to the world, as a conversion to the Creator, hearing God’s voice
speaking to us and addressing us through his creatures ... Luther emphasizes the pene­
trating this-worldliness of God.’62 Justification not only occurs through our bodies, but
also returns us to them, as a part of God’s good creation. Note the understanding of sin
that stands behind this claim. Like our primordial parents, we are ever tempted to believe
we can or must serve God apart from our bodies, that our devotion to God must lift us out
of these mortal frames. This, argues Luther, is no pious instinct but the original sin from
which we must be saved. We are justified as living bodies or not at all.

Conclusion
I have argued that a version of Luther does not hold to the radically dualistic vision of
the Christian life and person. Rather, he holds that our spiritual lives and identities

56. Luther sees continuity in Adam’s worship, that of the patriarchs after him and even contemporary
worship in Word and sacrament. Luther picks up this continuity with the language of ‘signs’,
which, crucially, points to the external and embodied nature of these signs. LW 1: 248—49.
57. Martin Luther, ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’, LW 40: 146. For the best interpretation of
this treatise and its consequences see Yeago, ‘A Christian, Holy People’, pp. 101-120.
58. LW 40: 146.
59. LW 40: 146.
60. LW 40: 146.
61. LW 40: 146.
62. Bayer, Living by Faith, p. 28.
Nickel 77

depend on certain bodily practices by which the Holy Spirit grants faith, hope and love
and through which we express trust in God and love for neighbor. Further, denial of the
body’s importance is not the mark of justification, but rather the lingering effects of
original sin. In this, Luther, at least in his mature position, is no proto-Descartes. Instead
and like his critics, he is an anthropological holist for whom the body and soul cannot
be separated. Though Luther shares this anthropology, he nonetheless makes his own
offerings to how we understand the Christian life and the way sin distorts it. In his tell­
ing of the Fall, he provides theological rationale for why we desire to escape our bodies.
His is a compelling story that links original sin and our distrust of embodied life.
Because Luther understands sin this way, justification means receiving our creatureli-
ness as a gift from God.
Whether we can square these claims with The Freedom of a Christian’s anthropol­
ogy is a larger question. Certainly, such attempts have been made. For example,
Wannenwetsch seeks to unify Luther’s moral theology at the grammatical level, not­
ing resonances between the various language games Luther plays.63 Drawn though I
am to Wannenwetsch’s Wittgensteinian vocabulary, I suspect that Luther’s moral the­
ology finally defies such unification. As noted in the introduction, there is a compel­
ling case to be made that Luther’s theology, and so his anthropology, develop through
his career. Yeago argues that the early Luther’s dualistic thinking is not a developed
rhetorical strategy. Rather, it represents a failure to think apart from his opponent’s
terms.64 From this perspective, the early Luther ignores the role of bodily activity for
specific reasons. These include the too-easy identifications of the true church with
Rome and true faith with participation in Rome’s visible structures. To counter these
identifications, Luther stresses inwardness, the conscience and other terms. When
Luther begins to think of the Christian life with his own terms, when he must institu­
tionalize his theology, the body’s importance, along with the church as a visible struc­
ture, reemerges. For Yeago, Luther’s radically dualistic approach to the true and false
church disappears after 1521.65
This year separates The Freedom of a Christian from the works with which I have
engaged. Because Luther wrote The Freedom of a Christian in 1520, it is reasonable
to suppose that Luther eventually improves upon its anthropology as well. This
becomes more plausible given how tightly Luther connects church practice to theo­
logical anthropology. Hauerwas implicitly recognizes this development, in that his
second Luther writes in 1530. Along with Hauerwas, we may find fault with The
Freedom of a Christian’s anthropology. We would be wrong, though, to argue that this
is Luther’s final word on the matter as Hauerwas implies in his decline narrative.
Once Luther is so cast, it becomes more difficult to hear anything else from him, pre­
cisely because the role, by definition, requires that Luther be only one thing. Rather

63. Bemd Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther’s Moral Theology’, in Donald K. McKim (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Martin Luther (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.
120.
64. Yeago, ‘A Christian, Holy People’, pp. 104-106.
65. Yeago, ‘A Christian, Holy People’, pp. 104-106.
78 Studies in Christian Ethics 31(1)

than accept this final verdict, we should let a better Luther speak. This would mean,
of course, that we must be open to multiple readings of Luther and multiple stories
about post-Reformation Europe and its intellectual development. Telling these stories
is too big a task for this article. However, I have shown why, at least in Luther’s case,
such stories are needed. Finally, we should prefer Luther’s mature position for rea­
sons that extend beyond these knotty interpretive questions. If our goal is to trust and
follow the one who gave his body as our salvation, then we disregard our bodies at our
own peril. Our salvation is quite literally bound to them.
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