Prompted by the ethnographic research of Marcel Mauss, the continuing interdisciplinary inquiry into the nature of gift-giving has, for all its divergences, brought to light modernity's deep-seated fascination with gift and sacrifice as contrasted with the mundane reality of exchange and reciprocity. A distinctly modern sentiment, this fascination has, however, been shown to reflect far more modernity's own dissatisfaction with itself than some lost paradisiacal state of affairs. While some have been led, consequently, to question the possibility of (pure) gift altogether, others, such as the thinkers associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement, have sought to dismantle the romanticised opposition between gift and exchange – but only in order to provide an imaginative reconfiguration of the closer-than-expected relationship between the two.

If one locates the transition from the medieval to the modern in the emergence of this nostalgic idealisation of gift in reaction to the prevalent transactional mindset, then Martin Luther, as a relentless advocate of justification by grace through faith alone, becomes an obvious target. On one level this article seeks to engage this sort of portrayal of Luther, most recently put forth in an essay by William T. Cavanaugh.Footnote ¹ According to Cavanaugh, Luther's critique of the sacrifice of the mass led him, unduly and with disastrous consequences, to idealise the concept of gift and so, paradoxically, to reaffirm the crudely contractual character of social processes. As I will show, however, Cavanaugh's reading of Luther is a misreading. In general, whether Martin Luther should be seen as a medieval figure or a champion of modernity is a question that, instead of doing justice to the actual person, seems to be interested more in its own, not always happy, categorisations. Thus, on another level, this article will attempt to outline Luther's eucharistic thought as an outworking of his incredibly rich understanding of justification, showing that, instead of being a harbinger of modernity's self-delusion, Luther actually anticipates the concerns of our contemporary gift debate. All in all, I will demonstrate that not only is Cavanaugh's interpretation of Luther not nuanced enough but that the alleged exclusion of reciprocity from gift in Luther is a fiction. This article will receive its structure from this twofold objective.

Cavanaugh's critique of Luther

According to Cavanaugh, the medieval emphasis on community as a body both fostered a participatory attitude and assured an ongoing circulation of gifts within the socio-ecclesial organism. This corporal imagery, Cavanaugh observes, had its source in the collective celebration of the eucharist, through which the faithful were made participants in the self-sacrifice of Christ. Their participation symbolically indicated the community's wholeness, both in the sense of healthy functioning and interconnectedness, in that it determined the character of sacrificial postures among the community's members and the community's involvement in them. Put differently, because the church participated in Christ's sacrifice, human self-giving – or, on a more mundane level, works of mercy – likewise implied participation by the community, both on earth and in heaven and, therefore, invariably bore within themselves the hope of return. The ethic of an altruistic self-sacrifice of some on behalf of others was alien to the medieval mindset. To understand what Cavanaugh means by this claim, we may invoke John Milbank's description of self-sacrificial morality as immoral, impossible and a deformation.Footnote ² It is immoral in that, as an attempt to possess one's own deed, self-sacrifice prevents genuine openness to, and receptivity from, the other: it objectifies the other.Footnote ³ Further, it is impossible for a Christian because purely altruistic self-giving demands secularism; and finally, it is a deformation because, by juxtaposing the individual and the community, it creates a rupture within the latter. In short, as a living organism, rather than a structure, the medieval community was characterised by simultaneous giving and receptivity. It was participatory through and through.

Of course, Cavanaugh is far from blaming Luther for orchestrating a wholesale departure from this model. Echoing Luther's concerns, he acknowledges ‘the exchangist character of late medieval piety’,Footnote ⁴ and with it, implicitly, a host of other social processes that ultimately gave rise to the modern contractual conception of society.Footnote ⁵ What Cavanaugh does claim, however, is that Luther became an unwitting ideologue of this shift and even contributed to its acceleration by demolishing the theological foundations of the medieval conception of society. In particular, Luther's harsh criticism of the commercialised piety and the profit-driven ecclesial establishment of his day – deserved as it was – ‘led him into the dualism of exchange and gift’,Footnote ⁶ which, ironically, only formalised and legitimated contractual exchange by making gift into an idealised exception to, and an interruption within, social transactionality. This dualism lies at the root of the commoditisation and alienation of property in modernity.Footnote ⁷ Because the exchange of property is no longer a process intimately involving the giver and the recipient, modernity is individualistic. Out of this individualism it then creates an ethic of altruism, of pure, non-contractual gift, by means of which, while seemingly striving for something better than itself, it only conserves itself.

According to Cavanaugh, several elements in Luther's theology played a role in formalising the dualism between exchange and gift. First of all, Luther's doctrine of justification by grace through faith, with its focus on the benefits for the individual, undermined the communal dimension of the eucharist. More importantly, the reformer's emphasis on the finality of the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Christ destabilised the divine–human reciprocity which made the eucharist paradigmatic for the functioning of the community. With Christ's sacrifice understood both as accomplished and as belonging to the past, the gift could no longer be returned. The mass was not sacrificial. Finally, even if it were possible somehow to return the gift, alleges Cavanaugh, Luther's insistence that only passive human receptivity can guarantee the gift-ness of the divine gift meant, ultimately, that no human individual could participate in the self-sacrifice of Christ. There is thus in Luther a ‘fundamental asymmetry produced by God's justification of miserable sinners’.Footnote ⁸ In consequence, human receiving from God can never be a giving back, so as, in this reciprocity, to be constitutive of a community; it can only be altruistic self-giving in the modern sense of sacrificing oneself on behalf of others.

As an antidote to modernity's individualistic and self-preserving ethic, Cavanaugh proposes a recovery of the medieval notion of gift as invariably involving (divine–human) reciprocation. Before I comment on the specific elements of his reform of gift, it is in order, at this point, to look into Luther's view of justification and then, in its light, into his theology of the mass.

Justification as exchange and ecstasy

To understand what Luther means by God's justification of the sinner, it is first necessary to understand the reformer's view of sin as self-justification. The being of a human person, according to Luther, needs to be underwritten, as it were, from the outside. It is not a locus of its own identity. Identity can either be received by one, or else the person may attempt to construct her own identity. In the former case, what one is, as a creature, is determined by the love of God. In the latter case, believing herself to be a free and autonomous shaper of her destiny, the person embarks on a pursuit of sources of security which could underwrite her being.Footnote ⁹ She defines herself through her actions and commitments. In this, however, she enslaves herself to her own self-justificatory activity, for to refrain from it would be tantamount to allowing one's being to disintegrate. Thus all of the sinner's works, however good they may appear, are ultimately only a modality of self-interest. Luther describes this enslaving pursuit of self-justification as being turned in on oneself (homo incurvatus in se ipsum).Footnote ¹⁰ For the reformer, the sinner is the arch-individualist, and that in spite of all her activism.

What is significant is that Christians are not immune to the temptation of self-justification. Instead of being open to the self-giving of God, they are constantly tempted to make God's moves predictably dependent on their own. This posture is doubly idolatrous since, first, it overlooks God's providential care of his creation and his provision for all the needs of body and soul.Footnote ¹¹ No work is simply one's own. Second, it is even more idolatrous to attempt to influence God through his own gifts, which one has disingenuously appropriated, when they are meant, instead, to enrich one's relationship to the neighbour. Works, Luther asserts, have a social, not self-orientated focus.

It is in this light that one must interpret Luther's criticism of the sacrifice of the mass. Significantly, in his denouncement of it, Luther repeatedly conjoins ‘sacrifice’ with ‘good work’.Footnote ¹² He defines the latter as ‘a work which we do for God for the sake of merit. As a result our work for God is glorified in it and not God's grace toward us.’Footnote ¹³ This implies, first of all, that to say that Luther wishes to exclude human work, in the sense of active participation, from the eucharist is a gross overstatement; rather, he seeks to ban participation when it constitutes an attempt to justify oneself before God, instead of being defined through openness to God's justifying action. Second, it is clear that Luther employs the term ‘sacrifice’ in a highly specific, not to say technical, sense. When he uses it in conjunction with ‘a good work’, it connotes a sacrificial transaction initiated and controlled by a self-possessed and self-justified self. A major weakness in Cavanaugh's account of Luther's eucharistic theology consists precisely in Cavanaugh's failure properly to distinguish between self-justificatory merit and participation, between a work of self-justification and a work which actualises the sinner's justification by God. Because Cavanaugh does not appear to understand what Luther means by sin, he illicitly universalises Luther's rejection of works and misrepresents the reformer's emphasis on reciprocity.

As a matter of fact, nowhere is this divine–human reciprocity more evident than in Luther's understanding of justification – as a divine gift unfolding itself in terms of a ‘fortunate exchange’. Luther offers the following definition of the exchange in his 1531 lectures on Galatians: ‘By this fortunate exchange [feliciter commutans; fröhliche Wechsel] with us He took upon Himself our sinful person and granted us His innocent and victorious Person’.Footnote ¹⁴ In return, believers, as those who have received their identity from God, now justify God as God indeed and the only giver of an enduring identity. In acknowledging God as the author and giver of every good, faith, insists Luther, ‘consummates the Deity. . . it is the creator of the Deity, not in the substance of God but in us’. What is returned to God is precisely his Godhood, which is thus shown to be not an abstraction but a reality with a creation-wide impact. As Luther explains, ‘God has none of His majesty or divinity where faith is absent’; and further on, ‘If you believe. . . You justify and praise God. In short, you attribute divinity and everything to Him’.Footnote ¹⁵

The idea of the fortunate exchange is a recurrent theme in Luther's theology. Note that the gratuity of the exchange is accentuated not only by the fact that, in the form of a divinely justified self, the divine gift creates the conditions for its reception and return,Footnote ¹⁶ but also by its ecstatic character. Already in his sermon on ‘Two Kinds of Righteousness’ of 1519, Luther states that not only does Christ's righteousness, together with all that he has, become the believers’ righteousness, but ‘he himself becomes ours’. At the same time, ‘he who trusts in Christ exists in Christ; he is one with Christ, having the same righteousness as he’.Footnote ¹⁷ Consequently, the exchange is not a contractual transaction. In it, the gift and the person are inseparable – thus Christ is the believer's even as the believer is in Christ.Footnote ¹⁸

But justification as an exchange has a much wider scope. Because divine justification frees a person from the need to justify herself, the person is thus free to orient her works towards others and, in so doing, to justify them. Luther's plea that public offices be filled by Christians must be seen in this context. The transactional nature of the law cannot by itself assure justice, for the law can only objectify those who are under it. It is, therefore, imperative that public officers do not lose sight of those under their authority as persons and apply the law with equity.Footnote ¹⁹ Actually, it is in justifying others through a loving recognition of their personhood that the Christian justifies God, actualising in her freedom from self-concern the power of God's justification and so his Godhood. Believers are thus transformed into the likeness of ChristFootnote ²⁰ and become Christs to those around them. By virtue of having received Christ's person and being in Christ, and thus ‘in the very form of God’ (Philippians 2:5), they exhibit in their lives Christ's other-justifying descent. Luther sums up:

There is no question of altruistic self sacrifice in this network of mutual justification because divine justification, as such, is actualised in, and mediated through, the body of Christ, the believing community. In the first place, the community's existence and functioning depends on this mutual justification. One receives oneself through openness to the neighbour's descent; the Christ-like recognition of one by the neighbour is what defines one. At the same time, existing in the incarnational movement of God's love, one actualises it by justifying the neighbour. Hence no member of the community can be dispensed with. Secondly, even if possible (pace Milbank), altruistic self-sacrifice, as an act of self-possession, would be nothing but a relapse into self-justification. For this reason, when Luther speaks of Christian suffering, he encourages the faithful to endure it, rather than retaliate, not on account of altruism but because they are ‘already sufficiently avenged’.Footnote ²² The works of Christians are motivated by their trust in divine justification, just as Christ's sacrifice was ultimately an expression of his trust that the Father would justify it through the resurrection of the Son. Thus, when he defines the new priesthood's ‘office and sacrifice. . . namely that they should put themselves to death and offer themselves to God as a holy sacrifice’,Footnote ²³ the reformer means nothing but a robust living out of their identity as always and everywhere God-given by refraining from self-justification and ‘descending’ into the neighbour, whoever he or she might be.Footnote ²⁴ There are no individualistic ‘boundaries between what is mine and what is thine’ here, as Cavanaugh fears.Footnote ²⁵ At the same time, differences between the mutually justifying subjects are clearly preserved: God justifies humanity in his descent to the cross and bearing humanity's sinful flesh, which, in turn brings about the imparting of Christ's righteous humanity to the believers. The believers justify God by actualising their freedom from self-concern in justifying the neighbour. The believers justify each other by approaching each other in persona Christi. In short, because justification is always mediated, its ecstatic character does not result in the obliteration of personal identity, one's own or the neighbour's.Footnote ²⁶

Interestingly, this last point shows some convergence with Milbank's definition of gift. It may, therefore, be interesting to invoke it, as our inquiry into the nature of the believing community in Luther's thought continues.

Community of priests

For Milbank, ‘gifts are always regarded as imbued with the persona of the giver, as ultimately inalienable from him and bound one day to return’Footnote ²⁷ This, as I have shown, is also Luther's understanding of the fortunate exchange. But what, according to Milbank, truly differentiates a gift from straightforward, contractual, exchange is delay of return and non-identical repetition.Footnote ²⁸ Neither of these conditions, it seems to me, is met by Cavanaugh's insistence that there be, in the eucharist, a direct return to God (he criticises Luther for precluding the possibility of directly returning one's offering to GodFootnote ²⁹). By contrast, for Luther, the fortunate exchange retains its gift character precisely because the return is indirect, that is, because it is both variously mediated and delayed. It is with this requirement in mind that one must interpret Luther's accentuation of non-eucharistic modes of return rather than see this emphasis as an undermining of the eucharist.Footnote ³⁰ Consequently, I believe, Luther's fortunate exchange fulfils Milbank's criteria better. Besides, Luther's understanding of a work necessitates that the return be appropriately delayed and non-identical. As noted above, works do not simply belong to the person who does them, and they have a social focus. Thus a work is defined by openness to another person, even to God, in that it emerges out of the total context in which the doer and the recipient find themselves. Only then is it a true gift. In other words, though Christians abound in gifts, in non-contractual works of love, these do not circulate randomly or in a forced fashion, but in line with the community's organic needs.Footnote ³¹ Though Cavanaugh, in essence, advocates the same notion of gift as Milbank, his understanding – unintentionally so perhaps – appears to be far more transactional than Luther's by confining the giving and the return of that which is given within the same eucharistic context. While Luther does not deny this possibility,Footnote ³² his broader focus accords better with Milbank's definition of gift, not to mention that, on the reformer's understanding, the eucharistic gathering is then not simply a paradigm for the community's functioning – the community is rather an extension of the eucharistic assembly. More on this last point, below.

What must still be noted at this point is that Luther is not afraid to draw conclusions from this deeply inter-subjective, mutually justificatory character of the Christian community and so is led to affirm that all believers are priests. As already indicated, the reformer's rejection of the mass as a sacrifice is motivated only by what he sees as this sacrifice's self-justificatory dimension. This is, as it were, an interpretation from below, from the perspective of those who gather around the altar. But Luther's dismissal may also be given an interpretation from above: to see the mass as a human sacrifice which can be commissioned on someone's behalf or bought for oneself creates an exclusive priesthood and, in the end, commodifies the laity and even the priests. In other words, it destroys the organic nature of the community.Footnote ³³ To couch this – cautiously – in language reminiscent of Luce Irigaray's critique of patriarchal societies,Footnote ³⁴ we might say, that the eucharist, then, becomes an alibi for the self-perpetuation of relationships within the priestly class. The laity, like women in other contexts, ‘have value on the market by virtue of one single quality: that of being a product of [priestly] “labor”. . . As commodities, [the laity] are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value’. But their value consists only in that they can be exchanged. As such, it is not found, is not recaptured, in them. ‘It is only [their] measurement against a third term that remains external to [them], and that makes it possible to compare [them] with [other lay people]’.Footnote ³⁵ Specifically, the laity – dead or alive – have value in that they require, request and pay for (private) masses. But this sort of perpetuation of the priestly class must come at a considerable cost. Again, to borrow from Irigaray's description, we could say that priests, like men in patriarchal societies,

In sum, when the mass is founded on a formalised conceptualisation of the participants’ roles, it ultimately subverts the community's inter-subjective character. Thus one could reverse Cavanaugh's thesis, based as it is on a thoroughly romanticised view of the medieval community as a well-functioning organism, and claim that the mass of the late Middle Ages itself contributed to the progressing contractuality of social relationships, rather than simply being undermined by the social processes.Footnote ³⁷

For only when the mass is nothing but the fount of dynamic, inter-subjective gift exchange will self-renunciation truly be a rejection of self-preservation instead of a mere modality of the self's autonomy. Proper self-renunciation is characterised by total personal and vocational openness to another – to risk and thus also to grace, as Milbank would have it.Footnote ³⁸ Likewise, only when all contractual exchange is excluded from the mass can it be the case that ‘in the Body of Christ . . . no thing is transferred from one to another’, as both CavanaughFootnote ³⁹ and Milbank (and for that matter Luther) hold, and true giving and receiving can, therefore, take place. Only when sacrifices by means of which a self-justified self seeks to manipulate God or commerce between two already self-posited selves or classes are finally set aside does it become evident that ‘the divine gift . . . is a gift to no-one, but rather establishes creatures as themselves gifts, the divine gift passes across no neutral abyss, no interval of uncertainty during which one waits, with bated breath, to see if the destiny of a gift will be realised’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the words of Luther, ‘We should, therefore, give careful heed to this word “sacrifice”, so that we do not presume to give God something in the sacrament, when it is he who in it gives us all things’. ‘All things’, as Luther's explanation of the Creed in the Small Catechism (1529) makes clear, does not refer to externals but rather to our very being, our very identity. ‘What sacrifices, then, are we to offer?’ asks Luther. There is in the eucharist reciprocity; human offering to God is not excluded – it is simply not an offering of things. Thus Luther answers that we are to offer ‘[o]urselves, and all that we have, with constant prayer, as we say, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”’. This self-renunciation, our gift, is nothing but rejection of self-preservation. It is a return of the God-given self to God. More than that: for Luther it is openness to Christ-like being, which becomes ours in consequence of divine justification. And Christ-like being is nothing but a descent into the neighbour, a justification of the neighbour – it is openness to risk and to grace, for the neighbour may not yet be ready to justify us, to return us to ourselves, to acknowledge our personhood. Nonetheless, ‘with this we are to yield ourselves to the will of God, that he may make of us what he will, according to his own pleasure’.Footnote ⁴¹ His justification endures, and so does the community of the justified, the priesthood of believers, the body of Christ.Footnote ⁴²

Luther on the sacrifice of the mass

By now most of the elements of Luther's view of the eucharistFootnote ⁴³ are already in place. Let me briefly summarise the findings so far. As an expression of God's ongoing justification of the sinner, the eucharist is for Luther the place where the community receives its definition. It does not simply provide a paradigm for social structures; it creates the community as a qualitatively new social reality. Specifically, God's gift of being- and identity-constitutive justification enables reciprocation in which the creature's entire existence is an affirmation of, and so a return to, God. This reciprocation, however, is both delayed and non-identical: because it is indirect and, for humans, takes place by means of Christ-like descent into the neighbour in order to propagate God's gift, it assures both interdependent closeness and inter-subjective distance within the community. Only by virtue of being such, a gift, does justification – through the fortunate exchange – give rise to the community. The community lives only under grace.

Cavanaugh, as noted, fails to do justice to Luther's distinction between participation and a work. Luther can, for example, affirm, on the one hand, that ‘we offer bread and wine, which through God's Word becomes the sacrament, solely for the purpose of giving thanks, in order that we may acknowledge thereby how God feeds us’.Footnote ⁴⁴ On the other hand, he can chastise the Papists for ‘not regard[ing] Christ's body and blood as a sacrifice of thanksgiving but as a sacrifice of works in which they do not thank God for his grace but obtain merits for themselves and others and, first and foremost, secure grace’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Further, when Cavanaugh stresses, contra Luther, that ‘the same thing [sic!] can be both received and offered at the same time by the same subject’,Footnote ⁴⁶ he demonstrates his failure properly to distinguish between mutual giving and a delayed, non-identical exchange. Interestingly, Milbank explicitly disqualifies the giving back of the same thing at the same time and to the same person as gift.Footnote ⁴⁷ Last but not least, Cavanaugh seems unable to tell the difference between the completeness of Christ's sacrifice and its past-ness. It is this last point that I must now address.

When Cavanaugh describes Luther's view of the eucharist as a distribution of the benefits won by Christ on the cross, his passive constructions conceal that, for Luther, Christ is the one who distributes them.Footnote ⁴⁸ Christ is present in the eucharist both through his body and blood and as the one who offers them to the communicants. Thus when Luther refers to the eucharist as a testament, describes it as remembrance, and denies the repeatability of Christ's sacrifice, these do not, in any way, connote the absence of Christ. Rather, what Luther seeks to accentuate is the sacramental presence of Christ as the crucified One, who is, therefore, present bodily in his concrete, self-same roles of victim and priest. This bodily presence, in turn, constitutes the possibility of our incorporation into Christ's sacrifice – not only the cross but his entire life – as, through the ecstasy of the fortunate exchange, we both receive Christ's person and find ourselves in him. Our cruciform life, then, parallels the relationship of the Father and the Son. Just as Christ appears before God the Father in our humanity, so we, too, appear before God clothed in Christ:

In that the cross is an eternal reality in the relationship between the Father and the Son, in the eucharist it also becomes our share in, with, and through the humanity of Christ, as the latter becomes our humanity. Thus Luther can affirm the cross as a mark of the Church.Footnote ⁵⁰

Conclusion

As can be seen from the foregoing, to regard Luther as embodying the transition phase between the medieval, organic, conceptualisation of society and the modern, contractual, understanding of social processes is to fail to do justice to the complexity of the reformer's thought. There is in Luther no separation between gift and exchange; if anything the two are so bound together in his doctrine of justification that the eucharist, instead of being a mere paradigm for social relationships, radically restructures those relationships in the all-embracing unfolding of its own interpersonal gratuity. The advantage of Luther's vision consists in the fact that, rather than undermine the eucharist, he offers a systematic description of its gift-character in terms of socially and vocationally construed delay and non-identical repetition. Moreover, this formal systematicity – because it is an outworking of the reformer's understanding of justification – in no way precludes genuine attention to the material needs of the neighbour. The community is a living organism. Within it, the presence of Christ, as Luther sees it, necessarily radiates beyond the eucharistic celebration – the eucharist is a way of life.Footnote ⁵¹