My new book entitled Justification by the Word: Restoring Sola Fide with Lexham Press will make the case for seven theses on justification. Here’s the draft of the first one:
1. Justification is the center of Christian theology.
Justification is the center of Christian theology because the salvation of sinners is the goal of God’s revelation in the Bible (scopus Scripturae) and the ministry of the Church. In saying this, we do not mean to suggest that justification exhausts the content of the Christian faith. Obviously without doctrines such as the Trinity, the divine essence and attributes, creation, and so-forth, justification would be incoherent and meaningless. Neither are we claiming that all other doctrines are deduced from the single doctrine of justification, as in so-called “Central-Dogma” theory. Rather, what we mean in stating that justification is the central doctrine of Christianity is that the ultimate goal of all of God’s revelation is to clarify and promote the proclamation of the doctrine of justification in the midst of the Church.
Image from the Institute of Lutheran Theology, @InstituteLutheranTheology