And other quotes
The adherents of the sects always utter some words from which their doubting spirit becomes manifest: ‘I hope I’m godly,’ ‘I hope I’m righteous.’ The Christian, on the other hand, says, ‘I do what I can. What I don’t get done the suffering of Christ will pay for me. I’m saved in Christ. Nobody shall take this confidence from me. Jesus is my Savior.’ There’s nothing else by which our God and our conscience may be put at rest. Those who put their trust not in Christ but in their own righteousness are always in doubt. “When [as a monk] I had prayed, and said my mass, I was very presumptuous. I didn’t see the scoundrel behind it all because I didn’t put my trust in God but in my own righteousness, and I didn’t thank God for the sacrament but expected him to thank me and be glad that I had sacrificed his Son to him. – Luther writings
Cary – To find God in this way is to see the point of the doctrine of the Trinity differently from Augustine. Instead of an invitation to spiritual ascent, purifying the mind in order to see God in his eternal being, the point is that believing in the baby in Mary’s lap and the man on the cross, as given to us in the Gospel, is nothing less than knowing the eternal God in person.
Union with Christ –
The self-giving of God has the effect that a Christian becomes, as Luther says, “full of God.” Luther’s view of salvation includes ideas of participation in God and divinization that are usually better known from the writings of the first centuries of the church or from the Orthodox tradition. The Reformer argues quite often for a notion of theosis and underlines it as a central part of his doctrine of justification.
Finally, I take to myself the Blessed Sacrament, when I eat his body and drink his blood as a sign that I am rid of my sins and God has freed me from all my frailties; and in order to make me sure of this, he gives me his body to eat and his blood to drink, so that I shall not and cannot doubt that I have a gracious God.
Luther Basic Theological Writings