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Everyone is familiar with Luther's formal definition of a god in his exposition of the First Commandlnent Commandment in the Large Catechism.

A god \[he says\] is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.

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To take the italicized clause seriously is to realize that Luther appreciates, in his way, as much as any of us does, that faith has an active aspect as loyalty as well as a passive aspect of trust, and that God, accordingly, can only be – -- in H. R. Niebuhr's terms – -- the cause we serve in all that we do as well as the center of value that makes us and everything else valuable. This means, of course, that he does full justice to Paul's confession that, "For us, there is one God the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Cor 8:6).

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