Exchange, Atonement, and Recovered Humanity: Martin Luther on the Passive Obedience of Christ

Abstract This article engages Luther’s doctrine of Christ’s passive obedience ( obedientia passiva )––a theme that comes to fullest expression in his Lectures on Galatians (1531/5). There, Luther argues that the sins of the godless become the true possession of the vicariously suffering Son. In turn, Christ’s atonement for the sake of the world underwrites a soteriology of the creature’s renewed humanity in which the sinner is reoriented outwardly in loving servitude of the neighbor. Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian (1520) provides the contours of this linkage most fully. This article therefore seeks to elucidate the connections between God’s exposure to sin at the cross and the subsequent logic of the human’s recovered relation to the other within the creation.