Humans are responsible for creating faith within themselves, but having once accomplished the achievement of faith, they can simply allow themselves to exist in the cocoon of divine love. Christ has done the work for others through his life and death. (Countering this is the idea of Luther's that all Christians serve as a communal priesthood, although it is not entirely clear to what extent he means this to be literal and to what extent he may be allowing for the metaphorical.) This tension between the active and the passive (or perhaps "accepting" might be a better translation of Luther's ideas than "passive") brings us back to the seeming contradiction posed in Luther's opening statements. It allows us to see another level of complexity in Luther's...

but, of course, this was no contradiction to Luther himself.