On the cross and the Christian life

And what this means for Christian political engagement

I recently read a letter that Luther wrote to Philip Melanchthon in 1522, giving him advice on how to handle the so-called Zwickau prophets. At this point in time, Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg castle following his condemnation at the Diet of Worms. Back in Wittenberg, three men showed up after their expulsion from their hometown of Zwickau for causing religious disturbances: Nikolaus Storch, Thomas Dreschel, and Markus Stuebner. They seem to have taught that they had special spiritual authority stemming not from their reading of Scripture but from direct inspiration by the Holy Spirit, much to the disturbance of the Wittenberg ecclesiastical authorities. Luther was informed of the problem and wrote to Melanchthon with advice on how to handle them.

Much of Luther’s letter deals with his understanding of religious authority and where it comes from, which is pertinent to those interested in Luther’s ecclesiology but need not detain us here. But Luther goes on to also provide a test for the trustworthiness of religious experience, which I think is worth quoting at length:

In order to explore their individual spirit, too, you should inquire whether they have experienced spiritual distress and the divine birth, death, and hell. If you should hear that all [their experiences] are pleasant, quiet, devout (as they say), and spiritual, then don't approve of them, even if they should say that they were caught up to the third heaven. The sign of the Son of Man is then missing, which is the only touchstone of Christians and a certain differentiator between the spirits. Do you want to know the place, time, and manner of conversations with God? Listen: "Like a lion has he broken all my bones"; "I am cast out from before your eyes"; "My soul is filled with grief, and my life has approached hell"...Therefore, examine [them] and do not even listen if they speak of the glorified Jesus, unless you have first heard of the crucified Jesus...

That is, for Luther, anyone who describes the spiritual life as one of pure bliss, of elation only and joy — anyone who describes Christianity in terms of strength and power and vitality — is either trying to sell you a bill of goods or is at best woefully self-deceived. For the Christian life, according to Luther, is one of being put to death and resurrected: God kills and then makes alive. Before God extends the comfort of his grace, he first uses the hammer of the law to break down our attempts at self-justification, our various projects of salvation via our own efforts. And so it is suffering, the experience of being put to death by God, that marks the difference between true Christians and false spirits. The cross, as it put it to Melanchthon, is “the only touchstone of Christians.”

By 1522, this is already an old theme for Luther. In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, for example, he famously contrasts the theology of the cross with the theology of glory. He argues that human works seem attractive but in reality are not, whereas God’s works seem unattractive, even evil, but are the greatest good. False theologians, the theologians of glory, prefer “works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness”; only the true theologians, the theologians of the cross, recognize that “God can be found only in suffering and the cross.”

In Luther’s making suffering the mark of true Christianity and exultation the mark of false spirituality, he echoes a variety of voices in the Christian tradition, including the late medieval mystical text the Theologia Germanica (of which Luther published an edition). This text is deeply concerned with differentiating true from false forms of Christian life, true piety from the false light. How does one differentiate between the two? The anonymous author argues that the answer is in the relationship to suffering. The false light teaches that the highest form of the Christian life is a transcendence of suffering, an enjoyment of divine bliss. But true Christianity, the true living of the Christ-life, a life in which Christ dwells in the believer, is one of suffering and the cross. The cross just is the Christ-life; suffering is not a lower stage of the Christian life to be cast away in favor of permanent rapture in this life but the most perfect form of self-surrendered life in Christ. For the Theologia, true bliss in Christ comes paradoxically in and through suffering, in and through the cross.

And of course, for Luther as for the late medieval mystical tradition (if the Theologia seems extreme in its embrace of suffering, read some Heinrich Suso!), this is ultimately grounded in the words of Scripture: Christ’s promises of persecution for his followers, his call to take up your cross and follow him, Paul’s wish to share in Christ’s suffering, and so on. As these figures see it, Scripture teaches that the Christian life is one of dying and rising with Christ, one of coming to know God paradoxically only in the cross — Jesus’ cross and also one’s own.

I was particularly struck by this Luther letter because I’ve been thinking lately about some of the appalling responses of some Christians to the way that Donald Trump and JD Vance have been stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment as a campaign tactic. Now, I try not to write too much about politics on this Substack. As a minister of the Gospel, I want to be sure that I do not inadvertently bind anyone’s conscience to my own personal political positions as though they were God’s commands. I affirm that one can be a faithful Christian genuinely seeking to love and serve one’s neighbor and hold a variety of political positions. Take immigration, for example, which I am about to discuss: while I think God’s Word gives us a general picture of God’s disposition and our duties towards immigrants and sojourners (we are commanded to welcome, love and care for them!), we aren’t given a set of policies by divine law and there is some room for Christians to disagree. What’s more, I think that one of the besetting failures of mainline Anglicanism in both the United States and Canada is its substitution of center-left politics for the Gospel, as if the very point if the incarnation was for Jesus to teach us to be good social democrats. But I also affirm that Christians, including Christian clergy, do have a duty to speak up in the case of grave evils.

And I have found myself deeply grieved by the behavior of many professing Christians in the last weeks, particularly the ‘Christian nationalist’ circle that emerged around Doug Wilson and his institutions in Moscow, Idaho but has in some cases gone beyond him in political extremism. I’ve seen pastors spread the vilest racist rumors (in many cases rumors that had already been debunked!) about poor migrants, and express glee at the thought of expelling both legal and illegal immigrants from the US and returning it to ‘heritage Americans.’ Love of one’s home, family, and neighbors (in itself a good thing) is twisted to justify hatred of others. And all this is wrapped up in Christianity, as part of a Christian project to take our country back, to make Christianity great again.

I’ve been thinking about how to diagnose where they have gone so terribly wrong, and I think this is why I was so struck by this Luther letter. Most obviously, there is evident racial animus: a lot of these guys just don’t seem to like non-white people, and seem to especially dislike black and Jewish people. But I also think that they fundamentally misunderstand the shape of the Christian life, because they — like the Zwickau prophets or the false lights of the Theologia Germanica — want the Christian life to not be about self-surrender in suffering but about victory, strength, and power.

Driven in some cases by explicit postmillennialism (the belief that Christ’s return will happen after a period of Christian triumph and rule over the world), they teach that ordinary Christians have been betrayed by effete, defeatist evangelical elites who have taught them that “down here, we lose.” Instead, they proclaim that Christ’s present lordship means Christian rule in the here and now, that Christians are empowered by God to build successful, victorious families, cities, and nations while liberal secularism collapses into despair around them. In some cases, there are explicit attempts to ally Christianity with a sort of Nietzschean vitalism, a rejoicing in the use of power to shape the world to one’s will and a condemnation of the weak as, well, losers. It’s this sort of attitude that leads to the criticism of traditional Christian emphases on the love of enemies as weak-willed, as I discussed in a Plough piece last year. It’s an attitude that meshes very well with the ‘dissident Right’ of the Trump era, a movement increasingly uninterested in liberal or even democratic norms and committed to the return to glory and power of those they consider true Americans (needless to say, this category excludes Haitian migrants).

And it’s an attitude, a posture, that I think is absolutely unable to make sense of the cross. That is, the Christian nationalists fail the test that Luther wants Melanchthon to put to the Zwickau prophets. The account of Christianity they offer is not one of distress, death, and hell (well, not for them, anyway). It is not one in which spiritual desolation seems to play a serious role. They do not seem interested in seeing God in suffering and the cross; rather, God shows up in visible victory: the destruction of their enemies, the supposedly coming reestablishment of rule by Christians (which is to say, rule by them) over the United States. They seem to me — just as H. Richard Niebuhr quipped about Protestant liberals — to want a Christianity without a cross…or at least not a cross that provides the pattern or norm for Christian living today.

The point is not, of course, that Christians cannot ever seek to achieve projects or ends, political or otherwise. Certainly we can, in order to honor God and love our neighbors. But this sort of Christian triumphalism, whether in the guise of the pop-charismaticism of much popular Trumpist Christianity or the typically Reformed theology (selectively appropriated) of the online Christian nationalist circles, is exactly what Luther and the Theologia author warn us to resist.

Precisely because the old Adam doesn’t particularly like the idea of being crucified, precisely because it would be more pleasant to us to meet God not in suffering and self-surrender but in victory and self-exertion, we are always looking for ways to avoid the cross. But tempting as it may be, such avoidance does not bring us the peace and joy we seek. For what Luther knew — what the Theologia author knew — what Christ himself tells us — is that it is only in dying that we are made alive, made alive for a life of self-sacrificing love for neighbors and even enemies.