revolutionized by his heart's
insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression
in his _De servo arbitrio_ ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the
acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so
many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us
necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in
the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of
love. _If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows
so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be
no need of faith._" There could, in his thought, be no salvation for
man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the
stern judgments of this angry and wrathful God. This way of escape is
found in what Luther calls "the Word of God," by which he means "the
Gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and
glorified."[13] {11} This Word of God is for him the sum total of "the
promises that God is _for us_": "the pure Gospel" of a pardoning,
forgiving God; the revelation in the Cross of Christ that no self-merit
counts or is needed, but that on Christ's account God forgives the
sinner and bestows His Grace upon him.

Speaking theologically, Faith consists in believing in the God whom
Christ has historically revealed--believing without any doubt that He
will be and will do to us according to the things which are said of Him
in "the Word of God." It must be said that for Luther himself, Faith
was an "active, powerful thing," "a deliberate confidence in the grace
of God," which made him "joyous and intrepid" and "for which he could
die a thousand deaths";[14] but there was always an irresistible
tendency in the Lutheran teaching for faith to drop to the lower level
of doctrine, and to consist in the acceptance of a scheme of
justification.

This tendency was, I say, easy and irresistible just because Luther did
not normally and naturally think of God as being inherently and
essentially loving, gracious, tender, and forgiving, that is to say,
_fundamentally a Father_ and in his deepest nature like the self-giving
Christ. For him, as for so many other theologians, God _becomes_
forgiving and gracious on account of Christ's merit and righteousness
and thus no longer imputes sin to us. Because of what Christ did, God
now beholds us with an attitude of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and,
on condition of