In recent debates in Pauline theology, one of the perceived weaknesses of the Reformation tradition of reading Paul has been its failure to express adequately the connection between justification by faith and participation in Christ.Footnote ¹ As Richard Hays puts it, ‘The greatest weakness of the traditional post-Reformation understanding of “faith” and “justification” is, as Gerhard Ebeling rightly observed, that it offers no coherent account of the relation between the doctrine of justification and Christology’.Footnote ² Hays' complaint has some force, for, anxious to avoid any hint of righteousness by works, many Protestant accounts offered sharp distinctions between God's declaring and making the believer righteous, between justification as a once for all external act and regeneration as a lifelong process. The result was that justification granted the believer right standing before God, but it was not clear how it accomplished participation in Christ. The two appeared to operate independently, courting the danger of justification functioning as a cold legal fiction divorced from any real sense of an encounter with Christ.

Hays makes his complaint in the context of his work on the disputed genitive phrase πίστις 'Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ, work that has been instrumental in securing acceptance by many Pauline scholars of a subjective genitive reading (the faith/fulness of Jesus Christ) rather than the previously traditional objective genitive reading (faith in Christ). In this debate, Hays understands there to be momentous issues at stake in relation to Pauline soteriology. He labels the subjective genitive reading as a christological interpretation and the objective genitive as an anthropological interpretation. ‘The christological reading highlights the salvific efficacy of Jesus Christ's faith(fulness) for God's people; the anthropological reading stresses the salvific efficacy of the human act of faith directed toward Christ’.Footnote ³ The christological subjective genitive reading explains the connection between justification by faith and Christology in terms of participation by Christians in the saving faithfulness of Christ, whereas the anthropological objective genitive reading suffers from the dangerous tendency ‘to reduce the gospel to an account of individual religious experience, or even to turn faith into a bizarre sort of work, in which Christians jump through the entranceway of salvation by cultivating the right sort of religious disposition’.Footnote ⁴ There is ‘not enough grounding of our theological discourse in the story of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ⁵ Such fears also figure strongly in a significant recent work by Douglas Campbell, another advocate of the subjective genitive construal of πίστις 'Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ and of a participatory model of Paul's soteriology, who repeatedly labels understandings of Paul's soteriology that focus on justification by faith as ‘contractual’ and ‘anthropocentric’.Footnote ⁶

Given all of this, a consideration of the relationship between justification by faith and participation in Christ in Martin Luther's exegesis of Paul seems most unpromising.Footnote ⁷ For Luther is, after all, both the progenitor of the Reformation tradition of interpreting Paul's soteriology primarily in terms of justification by faith and the most famous advocate of the objective genitive interpretation of πίστις 'Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ. One might expect his work to exemplify the difficulties to which Hays and Campbell react. Having committed himself to an anthropological understanding of faith in the disputed genitive phrase, Luther ought to have great difficulty in relating justification by faith to Christology.Footnote ⁸ This paper will argue that the opposite is in fact the case. In his exegesis of Paul, Luther displays a profoundly participatory understanding of justification in which human faith is of salvific significance solely because it is itself christocentric. I will demonstrate this claim first through a general description of the exegetical basis of Luther's understanding of justification. This will be followed by a closer look at Luther's handling of Gal 2.19b–20, a text where, in his famous Galatians commentary of 1535, the christological dimensions of his understanding of justification are especially plain. It is also a text that contains one of the disputed genitive phrases, and it is thus particularly useful in assessing the claims made about the relationship between justification and Christology by advocates of the subjective genitive interpretation. Luther simply assumes an objective genitive reading at this point, and so our discussion of his reading of the verse will say nothing directly about the exegetical basis of the debate. However, the fact that Luther can display a participatory understanding of justification when assuming an objective genitive reading is itself significant for the debate. At one point, Campbell rhetorically asks, ‘Could it really be the case that Luther's favorite letter is a sustained witness to Paul's christocentric conception of faith?’Footnote ⁹ I will argue that not only is Paul's letter such a witness, but also Luther's commentary. Luther has a rather different understanding of christocentric faith from either Hays or Campbell, but it is christocentric nonetheless.

1. Justification in Luther's Exegesis: Christocentric Faith and Imputation

Luther is an elusive thinker whom scholarship finds difficult to pin down. He returns to the same themes and ideas again and again in his vast corpus of work, but rarely for the sake of producing tightly defined doctrines. He produces tracts for the times and expositions of scripture, but not systematic theology. As a result, his characteristic ideas and themes appear not for their own sake but in the service of other goals. Luther is more concerned to counter the arguments of his critics, or to communicate clearly the meaning of the biblical authors, than he is with achieving consistency in the use of his intellectual resources. This is not necessarily to allege that Luther contradicts himself, although his ideas certainly develop during the course of a turbulent career spanning several decades. Rather, it is to acknowledge that his thought is as sprawling as it is fertile. To adapt a metaphor current in NT studies,Footnote ¹⁰ Luther's thought resembles the complexity and variety of a great Gothic cathedral, not the clean lines of a modernist building. There may be genuine coherence and unity, but the structure could scarcely be described as uniform or regular.

It is therefore potentially misleading to discuss Luther's ‘view’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘doctrine’ of justification by faith or, indeed, participation in Christ, as if they constituted single, easily definable entities. In his exegesis he provides different explanations of them as he is prompted by the demands of the text and of debate. Justification can be particularly difficult to pin down. Concern with it permeates his writings, Luther perceiving it as relevant to virtually every other theological issue. Texts where Paul is not directly discussing justification, as well as those where he is, speak powerfully for Luther about that topic. Its all-encompassing nature means that Luther can employ together explanations of justification that were in later eras to seem quite distinct. In what follows, our concern is thus with his dominant or typical patterns of explanation.

In recent decades there has been increasing recognition among Luther scholars that participation in Christ is crucial to his explanations of justification. This has been asserted by a group of Finnish Luther specialists, working in the context of ecumenical exchanges between Lutheranism and Russian Orthodoxy, who regard Luther's explanations of justification as fruitful in dialogue with Orthodox notions of theosis or divinization.Footnote ¹¹ Opponents have sometimes criticized their work as too reliant on the early writings of Luther,Footnote ¹² and the 1535 commentary on Galatians is therefore a particularly significant text in the debate since it is perhaps Luther's most influential exegetical work and indisputably represents his mature thought.Footnote ¹³ At times in the commentary, Luther's thoughts on justification do appear to reflect widespread preconceptions about what he must have taught as the progenitor of Protestant theology. When commenting on Gal 3.6, ‘Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, Luther suggests that its application to the believer is that God reckons ‘imperfect faith as perfect righteousness for the sake of Christ’.Footnote ¹⁴ This works in the following way:

Although Luther does not use explicitly forensic imagery (he rarely does so), the context is clearly God's judgment of sin, and his explanation of justification sits easily with subsequent Protestant understandings of it as a declaration of acquittal. God judges justly because, cloaked in Christ's righteousness, the believer appears in God's sight as a righteous person and not as a sinner. However, the believer continues to sin, and the strength with which this is asserted would appear to support an understanding of the famous formula simul iustus et peccator as ‘righteous before God but a sinner in fact’, a feature which could lead the unsympathetic to speak of a merely fictional righteousness.

Yet while this description of justification is genuinely Luther's own, and genuinely significant in his theology, to present it as a summary of his teaching on justification in this Galatians commentary would be highly misleading. There are other explanations of justification that form the context of the one quoted above, with which it overlaps to give a very different overall picture. It is important to note in the quotation above that Luther says that imputation takes place, ‘on account of the faith by which I begin to take hold of Christ’. For Luther presents a rich understanding of faith that itself has several dimensions. Each time Paul uses this one word, it carries multiple connotations for Luther. Indeed, if one reads through the 1535 commentary alongside his earlier commentary from 1519, it is perhaps the transformation in his concept of faith that forms the most significant development in Luther's understanding of Galatians. The nature of faith receives little reflection in the earlier commentary, but by 1535 it is a major topic. Even in Luther's comments on 3.6 alone, there are several strands to his discussion of faith.

As one might expect, the statement ‘Abraham believed God’ leads Luther to understand faith as trust in God's promises. Abraham believed against reason that God would keep his promise that the aged Sarah would have a son. Similarly, the Christian is called upon to embrace ‘the foolishness of the cross’ (1 Cor 1.18–25), and so ‘faith slaughters reason and kills the beast that the whole world and all the creatures cannot kill’.Footnote ¹⁶ However, this is not all. In thus believing God's promises, faith acknowledges God for who He is. It regards him as ‘truthful, wise, righteous, merciful, and almighty, … as the author and donor of every good’.Footnote ¹⁷ God has been given his place by his creatures, his glory affirmed, and so ‘faith justifies because it renders to God what is due him; whoever does this is righteous’.Footnote ¹⁸ Further, by this giving to God of his glory, faith ‘consummates the deity; and, if I may put it this way, it is the creator of the deity, not in the substance of God but in us’.Footnote ¹⁹ Luther goes so far as to compare faith, in its relationship with works, to the divinity of Christ in relation to his humanity:

Thus when Luther says, ‘Christian righteousness consists in two things, namely, faith in the heart and the imputation of God’,Footnote ²¹ it is important to recognize that faith itself involves participation in Christ. In his earlier comments on 2.15–16, where Paul asserts that justification is by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, Luther emphasizes that Christ himself is present in faith. ‘Faith justifies because it takes hold of and possesses this treasure, the present Christ…the Christ who is grasped by faith and who lives in the heart is the true Christian righteousness’.Footnote ²² This is compared to the mysterious presence of God in the darkness on Mt. Sinai or in the Holy of Holies in the temple. In an important passage, Luther uses another image:

Thus, faith takes hold of Christ and has him present, and because the righteous one is present in faith, imputation is possible. To return to Luther's comments on 3.6, ‘to take hold of the Son and to believe in him with the heart as the gift of God causes God to reckon that faith, however imperfect it may be, as perfect righteousness’.Footnote ²⁴ Christ himself is the gift received by the believer. It is therefore clear that imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer is not defined over and against, or even in indifference to, participation in Christ. The presence of Christ in faith secures an intimate relationship between imputation and the participation of the believer in Christ. God imputes because the Christian believes, but the faith of the Christian is itself a divine gift in which Christ is present.Footnote ²⁵ This christocentric conception of faith means that, for Luther, imputation itself involves participation in Christ.Footnote ²⁶

2. Justification in Luther's Exegesis: Joyous Exchange and the Story of Christ

The understanding that God imputes Christ's righteousness to the believer on account of his presence in faith is closely related to Luther's principal explanation of how such imputation takes place. For he frequently asserts that between Christ and the believer there is a ‘joyous exchange’ in which, having taken upon himself the sins of the world, Christ gives to the believer his righteousness.Footnote ²⁷ What is ours becomes his, while what is his becomes ours. In the 1535 Galatians commentary, this is expressed particularly clearly in Luther's lengthy comments on Gal 3.13, ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’. Luther rages against those, especially Jerome, who are nervous at the apparent impiety of the idea that Christ was cursed by God. Instead, Luther thinks it absolutely necessary to emphasize that, although innocent in his own person, Christ became ‘the greatest thief, murderer, adulterer, robber, desecrator, blasphemer etc., there has ever been anywhere in the world’.Footnote ²⁸ If he is not, then his righteousness cannot become the Christian's righteousness, and salvation is lost. As it is, having taken on himself the sins of the world, Christ is able to give to the believer his righteousness. ‘By this fortunate exchange with us He took upon Himself our sinful person and granted us His innocent and victorious Person’.Footnote ²⁹

Luther links this exchange with Christ's emptying of himself (Phil 2.7), a text that he also used to express the same idea years previously in an important sermon entitled Two Kinds of Righteousness (preached late 1518/early 1519). Because of Christ's willingness to empty himself by taking upon himself all sins, the believer ‘can with confidence boast in Christ and say: “Mine are Christ's living, doing and speaking, his suffering and dying, mine as much as if I had lived, done, spoken, suffered and died as he did”’.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, what Luther achieves by linking together texts such as Gal 3.13 and Phil 2.7 in discussion of justification, even when neither of them ostensibly concerns justification, is to root God's act of justification for the individual Christian in God's wider action in the world. It depends on incarnation,Footnote ³¹ flowing from the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. For it is only in becoming human that the Son of God is able to take upon himself the sins of humanity, and it is only in remaining divine that he is able to overcome both sin and death. As Luther explains, again in his comments on Gal 3.13, because Christ takes upon himself the curse of the law, his person becomes the site of a titanic duel. The curse clashes with the blessing of the eternal grace and mercy of God in Christ, and

By the very reason of Christ's divine nature, the duel inevitably has a positive outcome. All evils are conquered and put to death, including death itself, God's purpose being that through Christ ‘the whole creation was to be renewed’.Footnote ³³ Here, the death of Jesus is the decisive act in God's invasion of a world previously held in thrall to hostile powers. The significance for the justification of the believer is that it is this same Christ, the incarnate son of God, human and divine, who fought and conquered sin and death in his person, who exchanges his righteousness with the believer's sinfulness and who is present in the believer's faith. On this basis, Luther is able intimately to connect the justification of the individual with the apocalyptic dimensions of Paul's theology in general and with the story of Jesus Christ in particular.Footnote ³⁴ Following the lead of Karin Bornkamm, Marc Lienhard suggests that, in the Galatians commentary of 1535, Luther's personification of powers such as sin, the law and death in their enslaving of humanity and their assault on Christ leads him to ‘insert the believer directly into the history of Christ’.Footnote ³⁵ Outside of participation in that history lies only defeat.

3. Christocentric Faith in Luther's Exegesis of Gal 2.19b–20: What it is not

We have now seen that, far from having difficulty in relating justification to Christology, Luther makes Christology vital to his understanding of what Paul says about justification in at least two ways. First, the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer by God occurs on account of the presence of Christ in faith. Participation in Christ is involved in imputation itself. Secondly, the principal means by which such imputation takes place is ‘joyous exchange’ in which what is ours becomes Christ's in order that what is his might become ours. It is only by receiving what is his, and thus by participating in Christ through faith, that the believer is justified. However, simply establishing that Luther offers a strongly christological account of justification and of the part played in it by human faith still leaves a vital question unanswered. What does Luther mean by participation in Christ in its relationship with justification by faith?Footnote ³⁶

Here the work of the Finns has not been as helpful from the perspective of NT scholarship as it might have been, since they have discussed the matter primarily in relation to Luther's ontology.Footnote ³⁷ Their affirmation that the union is an ontological one does not take us very far forward in exegetical terms, especially as Luther ‘wrote little about such questions as “What is the ontological structure of the world?”’Footnote ³⁸ It is here that his exegesis of Gal 2.19b–20 is so revealing, offering the chance to explore what Luther meant exegetically by participation in Christ in relation to justification by faith. However, it is vital to place Luther's comments in historical context, first noting the long-established tradition of interpreting participation in Christ that Luther rejected. As H. A. Oberman puts it, Luther

The key point here is that grace is connected to love and is understood as something that God does within a person. It is infused, and God accepts the sinner because the righteousness of Christ has wrought a renewal within the person. Christ in his righteousness enters into a person and, with their co-operation, produces a righteousness that is inherent to them. There is an objective judgment based on what the human has become. As Daphne Hampson puts it, ‘life is to be conceived of as a via for our transformation. … “In the end” the human should be able to stand before God on account of his merits. That merit is gained through working with God's grace, in which the human remains rooted’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The principal exegetical basis for this view of grace as infused is Gal 5.6, where Paul asserts that, with regard to the hope of righteousness, what counts is not circumcision or un-circumcision but ‘faith working through love’. This is interpreted to mean that only a faith formed by love (fides caritate formata) can justify. In a tradition which understood faith primarily as intellectual belief (fides), that faith should be formed by love appeared necessary if it were to be truly alive.

Luther has an entirely different view of both faith and grace. Defining faith much more in terms of trust (fiducia), Luther is able to regard faith as itself inherently active. ‘Paul does not make faith unformed here, as though it were a shapeless chaos without the power to be or do anything; but he attributes the working itself to faith rather than to love. … He makes love the tool through which faith works’.Footnote ⁴¹ In Gal 5.6, Paul is not discussing justification, and ‘the hope of righteousness’ is an eschatological reference. It is the hope of future freedom from the sin that during their earthly lives clings to the flesh of those who have already been justified. That it should be active through love is indeed the hallmark of true faith, but such activity is not the cause of justification. Luther imagines Paul explaining that ‘I am speaking about genuine faith, which, after it has justified, will not go to sleep’.Footnote ⁴² True faith inevitably expresses itself in love of neighbor, but such works of love do not justify a person.

As regards grace, the distinctive nature of Luther's position can be seen clearly in his preface to the commentary. Here Luther distinguishes between active and passive righteousness. Under the former heading come all the different kinds of righteousness, ‘including the righteousness of the Law or Decalog, which Moses teaches’,Footnote ⁴³ that properly govern human life on earth. However, disaster follows from confusing these diverse forms of active righteousness, expressed in human works, with the righteousness that justifies before God. That justifying righteousness is ‘heavenly and passive. We do not have it of ourselves; we receive it from heaven. We do not perform it; we accept it by faith’.Footnote ⁴⁴ To be under grace is to have passive, justifying righteousness. Grace is not the infused enabler of active righteousness but the attitude of God towards the believer with which righteousness by faith is granted. This understanding of grace had been part of Luther's theology since 1521, when he wrote his treatise Against Latomus. Commenting on Rom 5.15, Luther asserts that grace is ‘an outward good, God's favor, the opposite of wrath’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In what may be an overly subtle piece of exegesis, Luther distinguishes between this as the meaning of Paul's reference to ‘the grace of God’ and faith as ‘the inward good which purges the sin to which it is opposed’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such faith is what is intended by Paul's reference to ‘the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ’. Christ alone among all men and women merits God's favor, hence it is only in the grace that he has that sinners may receive the free gift that is faith in Christ.Footnote ⁴⁷

Thus, Luther maintains that ‘the grace of God is always something external to man, and an absolute, rather than a partial, quality. Man is either totally under grace or totally under wrath. In contrast to this, faith (and its antithesis, sin) are seen as internal and partial’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Luther certainly provides explanations of justification that are both christological and participatory, but in these explanations grace and faith are defined in a manner incompatible with the view that grace is an infused habit and that justifying faith is formed by love. Luther does not perceive the Christian life as a journey towards righteousness in co-operation with divine grace such that the Christian eventually merits heaven (usually via purgatory) on the basis of what he or she has become. This is not the framework within which he understands participation in Christ, and he is explicit about it in his comments on Gal 2.19b–20. When Paul says that ‘it is no longer I who live’, this means ‘not in my own person or substance’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Anyone who could live in his or her own person or substance in such a way as truly to exhibit a faith formed by love, something which in Luther's view is impossible, would in any case not be saved. For they ‘would have only a historical faith about Christ, something that even the devil and all the wicked have (James 2.19)’.Footnote ⁵⁰

4. Christocentric Faith in Luther's Exegesis of Galatians 2.19b–20: What it is

Having established an understanding of the concept of participation in Christ that Luther rejected, we may now turn to his comments on Gal 2.19b–20 in order to explore the concept of participation that he affirmed. As soon as one examines in detail Luther's comments on Paul's assertion that having been crucified with Christ he no longer lives but Christ in him, it becomes apparent that Luther takes the death of the self suggested here very seriously. Far from being gradually changed into the likeness of Christ through co-operation with infused grace, the Christian must leave behind his or her own life for that of Christ:

Luther rams the point home again, cautioning that ‘when it comes to justification, therefore, if you divide Christ's person from your own, you are in the Law; you remain in it and live in yourself, which means that you are dead in the sight of God and damned by the law’.Footnote ⁵² But as he is not paying attention to his own person, and not dividing himself from Christ, the apostle can say that

For Paul to continue to live as Paul would be death for him, but to die and for Christ to live in him is life. Salvation depends not on perfecting the life that he already had, but on living an alien life. Thus, the Christian has Christ's righteousness through participation in him, but that participation does not work on the basis of a transformation of the self of the Christian. It works rather on the basis of the leaving behind and abandonment of that self. As one contemporary Lutheran theologian expresses it, ‘faith as self-forgetfulness is the most intensive form of certainty of God’.Footnote ⁵⁴

To speak of participation in Christ understood in this way as involving a changed or renewed life is therefore potentially misleading. It is simply not radical enough to capture Luther's sense that union with Christ involves the re-creation of the person. If we are to speak of a restoration or healing of the self in this regard, then it can only be on the basis that the Christian has to come out of him- or herself in order to come to him- or herself. In this sense that faith ‘places us outside ourselves’,Footnote ⁵⁵ Luther is repeating an idea that had long been central to his theology, for in 1520, in his famous tract The Freedom of the Christian, Luther had written that, ‘a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This soteriological necessity to live an alien life means that

Luther knows well that this radical discontinuity between a person's own life and his or her life in Christ is open to an obvious objection. To the charge that Paul still appears as Paul with no apparent change, Luther affirms that to the casual, surface-level observer Paul still indeed appears as Paul. He uses physical things such as food and clothing just like any other human being. However, this is only ‘a mask of life’,Footnote ⁵⁸ for although Paul lives in the flesh, it is not on the basis of his own self. Before his conversion, Paul spoke blasphemy, but after it words of faith. Before, Paul spoke, but after, Christ speaks. The voice and tongue were the same in each case, but the words came from an entirely different source. Luther himself cannot teach, preach, write, pray or give thanks except by using the physical instruments of the flesh, but ‘these activities do not come from the flesh and do not originate there; they are given and revealed divinely from heaven’.Footnote ⁵⁹ This alien and spiritual life cannot be perceived by the unspiritual person, who does not recognize its true source. The unspiritual person remains ignorant of the fact that ‘This life is not the life of the flesh, although it is a life in the flesh; but it is the life of Christ, the Son of God, whom the Christian possesses by faith’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Living a life in the flesh that is nevertheless not a life of the flesh but is rather the alien life of Christ, the Christian is inevitably the locus of a struggle. He or she faces constant strife between two modes of existence occupying the same body. When the life lived by the believer is that of Christ grasped by faith (the Christ-life not the Paul-life), the Christian is truly and wholly righteous because Christ is truly and wholly righteous. Nevertheless, it is only outside of him- or herself in Christ that the Christian is righteous. ‘I am a sinner in and by myself apart from Christ. Apart from myself and in Christ I am not a sinner’.Footnote ⁶¹ The righteousness possessed by the believer remains alien, for when faith falters and the Christian lives from the self (the Paul-life not the Christ-life), then the Christian is truly and wholly a sinner. Here we have the true sense of the much misunderstood phrase simul iustus et peccator. Luther does not mean by it that the Christian is partially transformed and still partially sinful, forever suspended mid-way through a stalled process of becoming righteous as a result of internal renewal. The righteousness of Christ granted to the believer in justification is real, not fictional. However, its realization in practice depends upon whether or not Christ is grasped in faith day by day, and this thus becomes the crucial question of Christian existence. Will the Christian live by faith and hence in Christ and hence as righteous, or not? There is a sense in which the Christian can grow in faith and make progress in it, and Luther makes reference to this.Footnote ⁶² It is possible to learn to trust more fully. However, precisely because, as with justification itself, the nature of this progress depends on the appropriation of Christ in faith, such progress in faith is also a return to the beginning.Footnote ⁶³ It can never cohere into a stable internal quality of the Christian's own, since faith concerns the relationship of the believer with Christ. To have trusted God today and to have lived the life of Christ still leaves open the question of what will be the case tomorrow. The human propensity to sin by turning from Christ to self remains, for ‘to the extent that I look back to myself and my sin I am miserable and the greatest of sinners’,Footnote ⁶⁴ hence the need for the Christian ever to take hold of Christ in faith anew.

The practical implications of this can best be illustrated by means of Luther's exegesis of Gal 5.17, where Paul describes the contest in the life of the Christian between the flesh and the Spirit. Sin clings to the flesh, and therefore the Christian will sin. There will be occasions when the flesh wins out over the Spirit. Nevertheless, the Christian life does not on this account seem to Luther a joyless struggle with sin. It cannot be since Christians enjoy the grace of God. ‘This is the wisdom and the comfort of those who are truly godly, that even if they have sins and commit sins, they know that because of their faith in Christ they are not imputed to them’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This security concerning salvation liberates the Christian from despair, while the very fact that there is a struggle between flesh and the Spirit is a sign of spiritual vitality. ‘It is all right for anger or sexual desire to be aroused in them, provided that they do not capitulate to it; it is all right for sin to stir them up, provided that they do not gratify it. In fact, the godlier one is, the more he is aware of this conflict’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Christian can therefore join battle against the flesh with gusto, ultimate victory secure in Christ.Footnote ⁶⁷ This means that although the Christian is indeed both justified and a sinner, the relationship between the two is asymmetrical, for ‘righteousness is supreme and sin is a servant’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The reason for this is that even the triumphs enjoyed by the flesh ultimately serve the ends of righteousness, driving the Christian back to reliance on Christ:

The Christian lives in the shadow of sin and death but is able to snatch victory from their clutches by transforming them into their own opposites through righteousness by faith. Confronted by a struggle between two modes of existence, it is the daily appropriation of the presence of Christ in justifying faith that enables the believer to create joy, comfort, righteousness and life rather than sadness, terror, sin and death. For Luther, justification by faith and participation in Christ are fully integrated aspects of Paul's thought.