3:00PM
Righteousness Like Filthy Rags: Luther, Bob Dylan, and the Problem of Goodness
Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 3:00PM | by Otter A Question Has Come Up.
I think it's common for people to see the passage in Isaiah [Isaiah 64:1-7] calling our works "filthy rags" and then placing it with the passage in Ephesians [Ephesians 2:8-9] that says we're not saved by works and concluding that any and all works we do are filthy rags. Problem is that Ephesians 2 goes on to say that we do have works that God wants us to do, and they *aren't* filthy rags! Why would God call us to produce filthy rags?
This is among the most annoyingly misinterpreted verses ("righteousness... like filthy rags"), right next to "...gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast", and it makes me want to just block them out of the Bible for two hundred years until Christianity comes to its senses.
I'll give this some attention when I've had some sleep.
But just let me point out in this passage that the righteous deeds are part of a parallelism. Here's the relevant chunk of Isaiah 64 (from the NASB):
1 Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down,
That the mountains might quake at Your presence--
2 As fire kindles the brushwood, as fire causes water to boil--
To make Your name known to Your adversaries,
That the nations may tremble at Your presence!
3 When You did awesome things which we did not expect,
You came down, the mountains quaked at Your presence.
You came down, the mountains quaked at Your presence.
4 For from days of old they have not heard or perceived by ear,
Nor has the eye seen a God besides You,
Who acts in behalf of the one who waits for Him.
5 You meet him who rejoices in doing righteousness,
Who remembers You in Your ways
Behold, You were angry, for we sinned,
We continued in them a long time;
And shall we be saved?
6 For all of us have become like one who is unclean,
And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment;
And all of us wither like a leaf,
And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment;
And all of us wither like a leaf,
And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
7 There is no one who calls on Your name,
Who arouses himself to take hold of You;
For You have hidden Your face from us
And have delivered us into the power of our iniquities.
Who arouses himself to take hold of You;
For You have hidden Your face from us
And have delivered us into the power of our iniquities.
Notice that the passage has to do with the relationship between the clean-garment righteousness and God's protection. It's a lamentation for the soiling of the garment and the removal of the protection of God.
"All of us have become like one who is unclean" (v. 6, first line) that is, the inhabitants of Judah are now like those of the nations/Gentiles in spite of their awareness of YHWH's deliverance. They have, as it were, ceased to be clean Jews. The comparison to a garment is to something once clean (righteousness, Jewishness) that is now defiled (iniquity, "Gentileness").
The second part of the parallelism (v. 6, second line), restating the same general idea, is that their (former) righteousness is now defiled. In other words it's not talking about the supposed worthlessness of the righteous deeds. The righteous deeds are just fine, and indeed in short supply. It's talking about how they are no longer what they were. The deeds, imagined as a once-white garment, are now defiled. The former time of righteous deeds is now blown away like an autumn leaf, and is contrasted with the new time "of our iniquities" into which God has delivered the people. The righteous deed is the garment. The cessation of it is the soiling.
The second part of the parallelism (v. 6, second line), restating the same general idea, is that their (former) righteousness is now defiled. In other words it's not talking about the supposed worthlessness of the righteous deeds. The righteous deeds are just fine, and indeed in short supply. It's talking about how they are no longer what they were. The deeds, imagined as a once-white garment, are now defiled. The former time of righteous deeds is now blown away like an autumn leaf, and is contrasted with the new time "of our iniquities" into which God has delivered the people. The righteous deed is the garment. The cessation of it is the soiling.
Nothing at all wrong with righteous deeds here, except they aren't being done any more!
This site (which you don't really need to read to get what follows) strikes me as being fairly typical for some segments of Protestant evangelicalism. Its major premise is that:
A righteousness is that which perfectly and completely satisfies the demands of God's law – the fulfillment of "the righteous requirement of the law" (Romans 8:4), "the law of righteousness" (Romans 9:31). It is that which is performed as perfectly and as sinlessly as God Himself would perform it.
A more ordinary definition of "righteousness" would simply be "doing what is right."
But because of certain quirks and turns in the history of Christian theology and interpretation of the relevant verses, "righteousness" has been defined in this absolute, metaphysical way: it is the impossible standard, the attempt destined for failure, the Sisyphean effort with zero effects.
Furthermore, add to this the Catholic and Protestant doctrine of Original Sin, and what you have is a human default to damnation: it doesn't matter whether you're good or bad. You're literally born sinful, offensive to God, and no amount of "doing what is right" is going to make a whit of difference.
While Catholicism was embracing the root of that in Original Sin, by the 16th century Protestantism would be bringing to full fruition the branches. Luther preached a famous sermon on "two-fold righteousness":
But because of certain quirks and turns in the history of Christian theology and interpretation of the relevant verses, "righteousness" has been defined in this absolute, metaphysical way: it is the impossible standard, the attempt destined for failure, the Sisyphean effort with zero effects.
Furthermore, add to this the Catholic and Protestant doctrine of Original Sin, and what you have is a human default to damnation: it doesn't matter whether you're good or bad. You're literally born sinful, offensive to God, and no amount of "doing what is right" is going to make a whit of difference.
While Catholicism was embracing the root of that in Original Sin, by the 16th century Protestantism would be bringing to full fruition the branches. Luther preached a famous sermon on "two-fold righteousness":
The first is alien righteousness, that is the righteousness of another, instilled from without.
As a late medieval thinker, indeed in what I think was the last great medieval intellectual move, Luther was able to draft a sort of metaphysical idea that righteousness is a sort of condition, not an activity.
He therefore interpreted all the relevant verses in light of this assumption: you can go through the entire Bible by the light of Luther's candle without missing a beat or finding an overt contradiction, but without ever realizing you're making this leap with him on the interpretation of the word "righteousness."
He therefore interpreted all the relevant verses in light of this assumption: you can go through the entire Bible by the light of Luther's candle without missing a beat or finding an overt contradiction, but without ever realizing you're making this leap with him on the interpretation of the word "righteousness."
The second kind of righteousness Luther posited was "doing rightly," but notice how he phrases it:
The second kind of righteousness is our proper righteousness, not because we alone work it, but because we work with that first and alien righteousness.
In other words, he begins with the idea that righteousness is a condition; he borrows from Roman Catholicism the idea of Original Sin that he was steeped in, and inherits from it the idea that the condition of righteousness is totally alien to a human being; and then he subverts the idea that righteousness is possible without "alien" righteousness imputed to one from without. He really takes the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin to its logical conclusion, in my view: one of the least satisfactory theological moves of the RCC to me is the uneasy affirmation of good works with the doctrine of Original Sin. But that's by-the-way: what matters most is Luther here and his amplification of what it means to live under Original Sin.
This becomes his whole gospel: you are utterly without righteousness until it's gifted to you.
After Luther, this is broadly speaking the a right lens with which to read scripture, and it's fully systemetized by Calvin and the other great Reformers (who were no dummies: Calvin remains in my view one of the most careful exegetes in history, though I disagree with him at almost every turn).
Even Bob Dylan interprets it this way (and for me this is the most heartbreaking admission of all, or would be if I couldn't attribute to him the subtlety of metaphor):
This becomes his whole gospel: you are utterly without righteousness until it's gifted to you.
After Luther, this is broadly speaking the a right lens with which to read scripture, and it's fully systemetized by Calvin and the other great Reformers (who were no dummies: Calvin remains in my view one of the most careful exegetes in history, though I disagree with him at almost every turn).
Even Bob Dylan interprets it this way (and for me this is the most heartbreaking admission of all, or would be if I couldn't attribute to him the subtlety of metaphor):
You can't get to glory by the raising and the lowering of no flag.
Put your goodness next to God's and it comes out like a filthy rag.
In a city of darkness there's no need of the sun
And there ain't no man righteous, no not one.
It's an elegant system: if you spend any time around Protestants you've heard it before: I dealt above with the Isaiah passage that is frequently misinterpreted to support Luther's vision of righteousness. The epistles of Paul, which are constantly steeped in misunderstanding and misinterpretation, are very often taken to support Luther's view (indeed, he more or less got there by reading Paul).
But two things have to be said about that: the first is that Paul is frequently read as opposing a highly legalistic Judaism that felt it was by its own good works that one became reconciled to God. This is a great oversimplification, as has been shown by Stendahl, Sanders, Wright, and others. It's easy to see Paul this way, because he's addressing a particularly urgent problem in (for example) Galatians: what aspects of the Torah ought to be added to the reception by faith of the Holy Spirit? The question as Luther saw it was, "Shall we be saved by the righteousness attained through the Torah or by the simple reception of the message that we are reconciled [that imputes the metaphysical condition of righteousness]?" But in fact, the question before the Galatians is, "Having received the reconciliation of God, what would application of the Torah add to that?"
But two things have to be said about that: the first is that Paul is frequently read as opposing a highly legalistic Judaism that felt it was by its own good works that one became reconciled to God. This is a great oversimplification, as has been shown by Stendahl, Sanders, Wright, and others. It's easy to see Paul this way, because he's addressing a particularly urgent problem in (for example) Galatians: what aspects of the Torah ought to be added to the reception by faith of the Holy Spirit? The question as Luther saw it was, "Shall we be saved by the righteousness attained through the Torah or by the simple reception of the message that we are reconciled [that imputes the metaphysical condition of righteousness]?" But in fact, the question before the Galatians is, "Having received the reconciliation of God, what would application of the Torah add to that?"
Thus Luther reads in Galatians 2:20:
"I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ who lives in me. And the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith[fulness] of [Luther preferred "in"] the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."
Since Luther's great problem is how to get the condition of righteousness imputed to the righteousness-less Paul, he sees, naturally enough, a metaphysical application of the merits (also metaphysical) of Christ's death. It's as if Christ's broken body leeched righteousness out to unrighteous men, who must then have faith in order to grasp that condition.
He's close. But he's not dead center.
He's close. But he's not dead center.
What Paul is doing is metaphor, not metaphysics, and what he is talking about is the fact that the meaning of Christ's life is that one is already reconciled to God if one has pistis[faith / faithfulness] to the Kingdom of God and its Messiah. This the Galatians had: Christ was presented to them, and they believed in the Messiah and the Kingdom, and (according to Chapter 3) they received the freaky shit that always comes with such a reception, a kind of divine eruption of the Holy Spirit. The crucifixion metaphor then is applied to Paul as a Jew (he's just been writing for a whole chapter about his Jewishness and his relationship to the Torah!), who dies to that old notion that keeping the Torah might add anything to the life lived in faith: that's just done by God: notice that in the Greek it's done by "the faith[fulness] of the Son of God," not the faith[fulness] in the Son of God," as Luther preferred to read it.
What's missing in Paul is any discussion of the crucifixion as an agency of imputing righteousness: for him, righteousness still means, "doing what's right," not some condition that he himself is missing. If he keeps the Torah, it's still right to do, but it just isn't the means by which humanity is reconciled to God. But so far as I know, nobody in Christianity ever said it was. Indeed, Judaism apparently never did either.
But nowhere in Paul does one see that the human condition is one in which righteousness "doesn't count," or "doesn't matter." In fact, Paul, like Isaiah, emphasizes that the trouble is unrighteousness. But he sees right action as flowing out of an encounter with the Holy Spirit in the context of the Church: his major metaphor for this cessation of unrighteousness for righteousness to be the cross, a point at which one's disobedience is put to death and one begins to behave rightly: it is the encounter with the message of the cross that makes the change, when one has faith in it. But this is emphatically not a metaphysical exchange of Christ's "condition" of righteousness with ours, a substitution or imputing. It's a point at which the unbeliever is asked to believe in the power of God, and so to act rightly. To live, as it were, as one reconciled to God.
It's a subtle difference, but it's huge: it destroys utterly the false assumption that righteousness or "works" are a bad thing or even suspicious, and that they're not important to God or of no value. They're of huge value. More importantly it destroys the false assumption that becoming a Christian is something that happens irrespective of one's actions. To claim one is a Christian without doing well is to either be a really bad Christian or to be a liar, depending on where you lay your scriptural accents.
Specific passages will be exegeted free of charge.
But nowhere in Paul does one see that the human condition is one in which righteousness "doesn't count," or "doesn't matter." In fact, Paul, like Isaiah, emphasizes that the trouble is unrighteousness. But he sees right action as flowing out of an encounter with the Holy Spirit in the context of the Church: his major metaphor for this cessation of unrighteousness for righteousness to be the cross, a point at which one's disobedience is put to death and one begins to behave rightly: it is the encounter with the message of the cross that makes the change, when one has faith in it. But this is emphatically not a metaphysical exchange of Christ's "condition" of righteousness with ours, a substitution or imputing. It's a point at which the unbeliever is asked to believe in the power of God, and so to act rightly. To live, as it were, as one reconciled to God.
It's a subtle difference, but it's huge: it destroys utterly the false assumption that righteousness or "works" are a bad thing or even suspicious, and that they're not important to God or of no value. They're of huge value. More importantly it destroys the false assumption that becoming a Christian is something that happens irrespective of one's actions. To claim one is a Christian without doing well is to either be a really bad Christian or to be a liar, depending on where you lay your scriptural accents.
Specific passages will be exegeted free of charge.
Reader Comments (1)
Very helpful. I'm glad you wrote all that out... it's given me a lot to mull over. Thanks!