Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

Holy Absolution: Objective Justification Received by Subjective Faith

Throwback Post

Luther’s significant catechetical sermon of 1519 clearly shows his belief in the divine power and sacramentality of the Word of God. In “The Sacrament of Penance,” Luther begins by radically modifying his pre-Reformation theology of confession and absolution in light of his discovery the gospel as the pure promise of righteousness and salvation for the sake of Christ. The medieval Church had spoken of three parts to penance: confession, absolution, satisfaction.1 By contrast, Luther now speaks of three elements: absolution, grace, and faith.2  

In the beginning of the sermon, Luther boldly states that absolution is a unilateral and unconditional divine action: “It follows, then, in the first place, that he forgiveness of guilt, the heavenly indulgence, is granted  to no one on account of the worthiness of his contrition over his sins, nor on account of his works of satisfaction, but only on account of his faith in the promise of God, ‘What you loose . . . shall be loosed.”3 Jesus’ historical promise establishes the validity of the word; receiving the word in faith makes it efficacious. “For as you believe, so it is done for you.”4 Here we can observe Luther’s use of the Ockhamist concept of covenantal causality, albeit used in a way that guarantees the promise of grace rather than the meritorious character of congruous merit.

Absolution is a divine efficacious word (Thettel-Wort) and not a mere piece of information (Heissel-Wort).5 The word that the priest (or pastor) speaks is a sacramental instrument wherein the wholly present God communicates his grace: “This is why it [confession and absolution] is called a sacrament, a holy sign, because in it one hears the words externally that signify spiritual gifts within, gifts by which the heart is comforted and set at peace.”6 The sinful heart is only set at peace by divine grace present in the objective word. It follows that the word itself is the divine instrument that creates faith in the heart. As suggested earlier, the logical implication of this is that validity of the sacrament and its efficacy are all contained in the Word of God itself.7   

As a result of this understanding of absolution, Luther modified St. Augustine of Hippo’s concept of res and signum in a sacrament. Although there is still a distinction between the visible sign and the invisible grace, the signum (the word of absolution) does not somehow point beyond itself to the invisible res (the work of the Holy Spirit). Rather, the res is present in and communicated through the outward signum (i.e., word). When faith appropriates the word, it appropriates divine grace and forgiveness itself. As German Lutheran theology Oswald Bayer observes:

That the signum itself is already the res, that the linguistic sign is already the matter itself—that was Luther’s great hermeneutical discovery, his reformational discovery in the strictest sense. . . Since the sign is itself already the thing it declares, this means, with reference to absolution, that the statement “I absolve you of your sins!” is not a judgement, which merely establishes that something is true already . . . Instead, in this instance, a speech act actually constitutes a reality.8

The faith that appropriates the promise is not an autonomous action of the human person. Rather, faith is a product of divine grace. Nor is faith an independent factor that transmutes absolution as a possibility into an actuality. Rather, the absolution is an objective and fully actualized reality received by faith: “Christ, your God, will not lie to you, nor will he waver; neither will the devil overturn his words for him. If you build upon them with a firm faith, you will be standing on the rock against which the gates and all the powers of hell cannot prevail.”9 In other words, faith does not make the word a reality any more than a house built on a rock is secure because of the act of building. The house built on a rock is foundationally secure because of the rock it is built upon (Mt. 7:24-7).

We especially see Luther’s emphasis on the objectivity of the Word of God in how he deals with the reality of unbelief: “By such disbelief [in the word of grace] you make God to be a liar when, through his priest, he says to you, “You are loosed from your sins,” and you retort, ‘I don’t believe it,’ or, ‘I doubt it.”10 If the absolution became true by believing it, then Luther would not accuse the unbeliever of making God a liar. If the believer actualizes absolution by his faith, then unbelief would prevent the word of absolution from becoming a true word. As a consequence, God would not be insulted as a liar, since without faith no absolution would occur. 

What Luther claims instead is that although unbelief prevents divine grace and forgiveness from being received, faith does not actualize absolution as a reality. To borrow a term from Gerhard Ebeling,11 the “word-event” (Wortgeschehen) of absolution exists prior to faith and determines its reality. Grace and forgiveness are already actualized in the word-event of absolution; faith merely receives and participates in them. 

Indeed, as Luther observed in the Large Catechism of 1529, we pray for forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer not to enact it, but to recognize that God has already enacted it: “Therefore there is here again great need to call upon God and to pray: Dear Father, forgive us our trespasses. Not as though He did not forgive sin without and even before our prayer (for He has given us the Gospel, in which is pure forgiveness before we prayed or ever thought about it). But this is to the intent that we may recognize and accept such forgiveness.”12 Therefore, the absolution is reality; unbelief is merely the sinner obstinately clinging to the unreality of his sin.  

Absolution present in the minister’s Gospel word is a channel for the objective and universal reality of the absolution of the whole world in Christ. Although this notion is not present in “The Sacrament of Penance” (1519), the older Luther drew out the implications of the unconditional nature of absolution. We see this in an argument for the objective and universal validity of absolution in his sermons on the Gospel of John from 1537. Here Luther states that all sin and its consequences have been simply unilaterally forgiven in Christ. The world is only accounted guilty because it obstinately opposes the forgiveness that Christ won and proclaims to all: 

Now the joyful message follows that the judgment is over; this means that he wrath of God, hell, and damnation are no more. For the Son of God came that we might be saved and delivered from death and hell. The what is still lacking? Faith.  People refuse to believe this . . . [Therefore, Christ says] “Whoever believes, does not go to hell; whoever does not believe, already has the sentence of death pronounced on him.” Why? Well, because he does not believe in Christ. This is the judgment: that such an ineffably comforting doctrine of God’s grace, procured for the world through Christ, is proclaimed, but that the world still wants to believe the devil rather than God and His beloved Son. And this despite the fact that God assures us: “Sin, hell, judgment, and God’s wrath have all been terminated by the Son.” We wretched people might well bewail the sin into which we fell through Adam, the death which resulted, and all the attendant misery, also the judgment of God which we must bear. All this often makes it appear that God is angry with us, that God is too harsh and stern, like an unfair judge. But God wants to inform us in this text: “Good and well. Through My Son I shall cancel My charge against you so that you need lament no more. To be sure, you have sinned, and with this sin you have deserved the judgment of God. But your sin shall be pardoned, death shall be abolished; I shall no longer remember man’s sin, in which he is born and in which he lived. The accounts are to be considered settled. God will not again call a single sin to mind. Just believe in My Son.” Now what is still lacking? Why the judgment if all sin has been removed by the Son? The answer is that the judgment is incurred by man’s refusal to accept Christ, the Son of God. Of course, man’s sin, both that inherited from Adam and that committed by man himself, is deserving of death. But this judgment results from man’s unwillingness to hear, to tolerate, and to accept the Savior, who removed sin, bore it on His shoulders, and locked up the portals of hell.13

Therefore, by appropriating the categories and terminology of later Lutheran theology,14 we can say that Luther taught there is a universal and objective justification of the whole world in Christ. This is objective reality that determines God’s relationship to all humanity through Christ, even if outside of Christ his relationship to humanity remains one of judgment. Through faith, subjective justification appropriates this objective fact. Humans are only damned because they resist the reality of objective justification and cling to the false subjective reality of their unbelief.

Jesus gave the gift of objective absolution to the Church. However, it is always Christ who absolves and forgives sin, not the minister (AE 54:394).
  1. Kenneth Appold, The Reformation: A Brief History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 43-4. ↩︎
  2. LW 35:11. ↩︎
  3. LW 35:12. ↩︎
  4. LW 35:11. ↩︎
  5. LW 37:180-88. See David Steinmetz, “Luther and the Two Kingdoms,” in Luther in Context (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 115. ↩︎
  6. LW 35:11. ↩︎
  7. Kolb and Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology, 176-88. ↩︎
  8. Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 52-3. ↩︎
  9. LW 35:12. ↩︎
  10. LW 35:13-4.  Emphasis added. ↩︎
  11. Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 325-32. ↩︎
  12. LC, 3.5; CT, 723.  Emphasis added. ↩︎
  13. LW 22:382. Emphasis added. ↩︎
  14. For the later Lutheran terminological distinction between objective and subjective justification see: Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3 vols.  (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951-1953), 2:321, 2:347-8, 2:508-12; Eduard Preuss, The Justification of the Sinner before God, trans. J.A. Friedrich (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2011), 29-61. ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word: Restoring Sola Fide (Lexham Press, 2022), chap. 4.

Cover image from Michael Schuermann, “Confession and Absolution – Setting Free the Conscience,” Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod: Resources, September 13, 2016, accessed July 16, 2024, https://resources.lcms.org/reading-study/confession-and-absolution-setting-free-the-conscience/; other images: Martin Luther quotation memes from St. John Lutheran Church, Wheaton, Illinois, https://www.facebook.com/stjohnwheaton