Faith & Spirit Quote by Martin Chemnitz

Chemnitz is doing something quietly radical: he refuses to let "faith" float off into misty reverence. He yanks it down into the grit of a body. "In the first place" signals triage. Before you argue about sacraments, church politics, or moral effort, get the core grammar right: faith does not clutch at an idea called God; it lays hold on Christ as God and man.

That double insistence is the Lutheran Reformation’s pressure point. Chemnitz writes in a post-Luther landscape where Rome is accused of smuggling salvation back into human achievement, and where some Protestants are tempted to treat Jesus as a spiritual emblem rather than a flesh-and-blood mediator. His phrasing defends orthodoxy against both errors: deny Christ’s divinity and you lose saving power; deny his humanity and you lose saving proximity.

The subtext is pastoral, not merely doctrinal. Chemnitz knows that anxious consciences do not need a distant deity or an abstract atonement; they need a neighbor. By calling Christ "our neighbor, kinsman, and brother", he turns the Incarnation into a relational claim with legal overtones: kinship implies shared inheritance, obligations, and representation. In early modern terms, a kinsman can stand in for you, plead your case, pay your debt. Faith "laying hold" is tactile language for trust that grabs the one person who is close enough to substitute for you and strong enough to save you.

It works because it makes theology behave like intimacy: the cosmic becomes graspable, and salvation becomes less a ladder and more a handhold.