Lately, I have been reading a lot by and about Martin Luther. The immediate reason for this was my reading most the chapters of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology. No, I didn't purchase the book. At the suggestion of a friend, I borrowed it through an inter-library loan. It was in reading a couple of the opening chapters that I discovered the influence of Luther on the philosophy of Heidegger. This led me to purchase two further books: Luther: An Introduction to His Thought, which is a published series of lectures by Luther scholar Gerhard Ebeling and Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought. Of particular interest in the latter volume, which is a series of essays edited by Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, are van Buren's essay "Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther" and Kisiel's contribution, which is an overview of some of the last lectures that comprised Heidegger's course, taught winter semester 1920-1921, entitled Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion."
As Kisiel notes, the first part of the class, in fact, the bulk of the class, consisted of Heidegger explicating (for the only time) his own phenomenological method. It was not until late in the semester that he taught on the application of his method to Saint Paul's First to the Thessalonians, and chapter X of Saint Augustine's Confessions. What Heidegger wanted to examine was the nature of the primal Christian experience. Of course, 1 Thessalonians is wonderful for this because it is likely the first letter Paul wrote. First Thessalonians, in all likelihood, is the earliest book of the uniquely Christian Scriptures (i.e., the New Testament). No, I am not going to go into Kisiel's explication of Heidegger's lectures on Paul and Augustine. Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of 1 Thessalonians, I will write, is really quite remarkable vis-à-vis getting to the essence of primal Christian experience, which was, without a doubt, shuttled in favor of Hellenistic systematization.
I do want to share some things from Ebeling's lecture on Luther entitled "Letter and Spirit." "The concealment of God on the cross," according to Luther as per Ebeling, "is paralleled by the structure of faith, which consists of concealment under a contrary" (Luther: An Introduction to His Thought, 105). This concealment is what it means to spiritual, which does not mean disembodied, just not obvious and perhaps even seemingly contradictory.
"Salvation," according to Luther, "in so far as it is not affirmation of worldly existence or as the bestowal of temporal goods, but [is] being crucified with Christ, and so possessing life in death" (Luther: An Introduction to His Thought, 105-106). Hence, the "Church is spiritual, as long as it regards itself as hidden in this life, and does not place its trust in earthly instruments of power, but realizes that it must be persecuted, and that the most dangerous temptation is the temptation not to be persecuted but to live in safety" (Ibid., 106).
"The spiritual," then, for Luther, "is the category of true understanding" (Ibid.).
Someone whose existential being is spiritual exists of course in the visible world, but his real existential being is not made manifest. What can be seen exists, but it is the contrary, and not the spiritual life as such. Consequently to live in the Spirit is to live in faith. The Spirit and faith are the same (Ibid.)I could go on but I won't except to say that, hearkening back to Martin Marty's short biography of Luther, Luther was often dragged into political matters, something he hated by felt obligated to weigh-in. His weighing in on several occasions led him to comprise, something of which he was keenly aware and bothered by.
Luther, of course, composed many hymns. Our traditio for this final Friday of May, our first week back in Ordinary Time after Easter, is Luther's "In the Midst of Earthly Life."
While "Ordinary Time" is okay, I still prefer numbering the Sundays and weeks after Easter as "the Third Sunday After Trinity," etc.
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