LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 153

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

an idolatry that is in effect a practical, if not a theoretical, ignorance of God. In other words, man’s natural knowledge of God
is always ignoratio Dei when contrasted with the knowledge of
God in Jesus Christ.29
Similarly, the Confessions
do not so much stress the lack of natural knowledge about God
as they do its falseness. The natural knowledge of God sets forth
a distorted picture of Him. It is incapable of showing us the God
who justifies and saves from sin.30
Conclusions such as the above—that sinful man’s ignorance of God is not
to be understood in absolute terms, but only in contrast to that knowledge
revealed in the saving person and work of Christ—are further substantiated
by the manner in which the Confessions qualify and define the vocabulary
employed in discussing man’s natural knowledge of God. This becomes
evident, for example, in the confessional use of qualifying adverbs such as
“truly.” The Formula of Concord can thus assert that “pagans had something
of a knowledge of God,” while going on in the same sentence to remark that
“they did not truly know him.”31 That this adverbial qualifier is best understood in soteriological rather than epistemological terms might further be
inferred by comparison with the Augsburg Confession’s similar usage: “all who
know that they are reconciled to the Father through Christ truly know God.”32
Similarly to be understood is the confessional commentary on natural man’s
understanding (or ignorance) of “spiritual matters.” The Formula of Concord is
quite emphatic, for example, in asserting that “Scripture denies to the natural
human mind, heart, and will every ability, aptitude, capability, and capacity to
think anything good or proper in spiritual matters by themselves.”33 Quoting
Luther, however, the Formula proceeds quickly to define the scope of “spiritual
matters,” referring to “spiritual and divine matters, which concern the soul’s
salvation.”34
In view of the above it becomes increasingly apparent that what the
Confessions—in agreement with Scripture—deny is not any and all natural
knowledge of God, but a natural knowledge of the gospel, as, again, the
Formula makes clear:
[E]ven though human reason or natural intellect may still have a
dim spark of knowledge that a god exists . . . , nevertheless it is
29

Bohlmann, “The Natural Knowledge of God,” 730.

30
Holsten Fagerberg, A New Look at the Lutheran Confessions (1529–1537), trans. Gene J. Lund
(St. Louis: Concordia, 1972), 67.

ignorant, blind, and perverted so that even when the most skillful and learned people on earth read or hear the gospel of God’s
Son and the promise of eternal salvation, they still cannot comprehend, grasp, understand, or believe it on the basis of their
own powers.35
In simultaneously affirming natural man’s “legal” knowledge of God
while denying the possibility of his “evangelical” knowledge of God, the formulators profess not only to be faithfully restating the biblical testimony, but
also to be keeping faith with the theology of Martin Luther (1483–1546). Thus
they rightly note that
Dr. Luther emphasized this distinction with particular diligence
in nearly all his writings and specifically indicated that there
is a vast difference between the knowledge of God that comes
from the gospel and that which is taught and learned through
the law.36
While orthodox Lutherans are doctrinally bound only to the Scriptures
and their explication in the Book of Concord, and not to any of Luther’s own
non-confessional writings, such works do provide important insight for properly understanding both the intent and content of the Confessions. Again, the
Formula itself makes this point explicitly:
Because Dr. Luther must deservedly be regarded as the foremost teacher of the churches that subscribe to the Augsburg
Confession, since his entire teaching in sum and content was set
down in the articles of the Augsburg Confession and presented
to Emperor Charles V, the actual intention and meaning of the
Augsburg Confession should not and cannot be derived more
properly and better from any other place than from Dr. Luther’s
doctrinal and polemical writings.37
For this reason some of Luther’s own extra-confessional commentary on
the natural knowledge of God also deserves brief examination.

C. The Profession of Luther
As noted above, even in Luther’s confessional writings he could appeal to
the universality of worship as implicit evidence of man’s natural knowledge
of God. In doing so he simply reiterated the view that would be regularly
expressed in his exegetical and occasional writings. Commenting in 1535, for
example, he similarly noted that “the forms of worship and the religion that
have been and remained among all nations are abundant evidence that at

31

FC SD 5.22; emphasis added.

32

AC 20.24; emphasis added.

35

FC SD 2.9.

33

FC SD 2.12.

36

FC SD 5.22.

FC SD 2.21; emphasis added.

37

FC SD 7.41.

34

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some time all men have had a general knowledge of God.”38 He not only confesses that even worshippers of false idols “have a knowledge of divinity in
their hearts,”39 but he also goes so far as to conclude that such worship would
be impossible without natural knowledge.40 Thus, too, can he even regularly
reaffirm the more controversial acknowledgement of the Large Catechism,
that even “heathen, Turks, Jews, or false Christians and hypocrites” are not
without the knowledge that “there is only one true God.”41

son must concede that all that is good comes from God; for He
who can save from every need and misfortune is also able to
grant all that is good and that makes for happiness. That is as
far as the natural light of reason sheds its rays—it regards God
as kind, gracious, merciful, and benevolent. And that is indeed
a bright light.42

Perhaps most revealing of Luther’s insistence on this point is his discourse
concerning the mariners on whose ship the prophet Jonah had attempted to
flee his call to Nineveh. Commenting on Jonah 1:5—“Then the mariners were
afraid, and each cried to his god”—Luther writes at length:
Here you find St. Paul’s statement in Rom. 1:19 concerning the
universal knowledge of God among all the heathen, that is, that
the whole world talks about the Godhead and natural reason
is aware that this Godhead is something superior to all other
things. This is here shown by the fact that the people in our
text called upon a god, heathen though they were. For if they
had been ignorant of the existence of God or of a godhead, how
could they have called upon him and cried to him? Although
they do not have true faith in God, they at least hold that God
is a being able to help on the sea and in every need. Such a light
and such a perception is innate in the hearts of all men; and this
light cannot be subdued or extinguished. There are, to be sure,
some people, for instance, the Epicureans, Pliny, and the like,
who deny this with their lips. But they do it by force and want to
quench this light in their hearts. They are like people who purposely stop their ears or pinch their eyes shut to close out sound
and sight. However, they do not succeed in this; their conscience
tells them otherwise. For Paul is not lying when he asserts that
they know something about God, “because God has shown it to
them” (Rom. 1:19).
Let us here also learn from nature and from reason what can be
known of God. These people regard God as a being who is able
to deliver from every evil. It follows from this that natural rea38
Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), in Luther’s Works: American Edition [hereafter
AE], 56 vols, ed. J. Pelikan and H. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, and St. Louis: Concordia,
1955–86), 26:399.
39

Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans: Scholia (1515), AE 25:157.

40

Luther, Lectures on Galatians, AE 26:400.

41

LC 2.66; see, e.g., Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John (1537), AE 22:153: “All
Turks, Jews, papists, Tartars, and heathen concede the existence of a God, the Creator of heaven
and earth,” and Martin Luther, Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (1546), in D. Martin
Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe [hereafter WA], Schriften, 62 vols (Weimar: H. Böhlau,
1883–1986), 51:151: “Turks, Jews, and all heathen know to say of God as much as reason can
know from his works, that he is a creator of all things, that one should be obedient to him, etc.”

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Luther’s commentary on this passage is further revealing, however,
because it immediately proceeds also to highlight the “two big defects”
inherent in what is otherwise a “bright light.”
First, reason does admittedly believe that God is able and competent to help and to bestow; but reason does not know whether
He is willing to do this also for us. That renders the position of
reason unstable. . . . The second defect is this: Reason is unable to
identify God properly; it cannot ascribe the Godhead to the One
who is entitled to it exclusively. It knows that there is a God, but
it does not know who or which is the true God. . . . Thus reason
never finds the true God, but it finds the devil or its own concept
of God, ruled by the devil. So there is a vast difference between
knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is.
Nature knows the former—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart;
the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit.43
The distinction here made between knowing “that there is a God” and
knowing “who or what God is,” though expressed in terms inherited from
medieval scholasticism, is precisely that observed in the previous surveys of
Scripture and the Confessions and associated with the distinction between
law and gospel. Thus it is this language which Luther elsewhere uses to
highlight the same distinction. This is seen most explicitly in his commentary
on the Gospel of John, for example, where he notes that “There are two kinds
of knowledge of God: the one is the knowledge of the Law, the other is the
knowledge of the Gospel. For God issued the Law and the Gospel that He
might be known through them. . . Reason can arrive at a ‘legal knowledge’
of God. . . . But the depth of divine wisdom and of the divine purpose, the
profundity of God’s grace and mercy, and what eternal life is like—of these
matters reason is totally ignorant.”44
It is also in view of this distinction that Luther harmonizes those biblical
passages affirming a natural knowledge of God with those biblical passages
asserting man’s natural ignorance of God. Commenting on Galatians 4:8–9,
for instance, he asks, “If all men know God, why does Paul say that before the
proclamation of the Gospel the Galatians did not know God?” He answers:
“There is a twofold knowledge of God: the general and the particular. All men
42

Martin Luther, Lectures on Jonah (German, 1526), AE 19:53–4.

43

Luther, Lectures on Jonah, AE 19:55.

44

Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, AE 22:150–3.

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2016 Convention Workbook