Faith & Spirit Quote by Martin Luther

Luther’s line lands like a dare because it is one: stop trying to manage your way into holiness by minimizing your mess. “Sin strongly” is not permission to binge on vice; it’s a weapon aimed at a very specific enemy - the anxious, self-protective piety that treats salvation like a fragile spreadsheet. In the Reformation’s key dispute, the Church’s sacramental system and penitential economy could make forgiveness feel incremental, mediated, and never quite finished. Luther counters with a jolt: if you’re going to be honest about the human condition, be honest all the way.

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Pastoral, because it tells the scrupulous conscience to quit rehearsing its own unworthiness and instead cling to Christ with reckless confidence. Polemical, because it undercuts the idea that moral self-improvement is the engine of justification. The subtext is Luther’s hallmark anthropology: you’re not a basically-good person who occasionally slips; you’re curved inward, incapable of curing yourself. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you holier, it just makes you arrogant or terrified.

The second half - “but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ” - is the fuse. Faith isn’t mild assent; it’s audacity. Luther is arguing that grace must be bigger than your worst day, or it’s not grace at all. The shock value does rhetorical work: it severs the listener from the fantasy of control and forces a choice between two trusts - in your own caution, or in Christ’s sufficiency.