Justification Archives - Jack Kilcrease

December 25, 2025December 23, 2025

The Double Benefits of Baptism

Objective and Subjective Justification

Earlier in his Annotations on Romans, Johann Gerhard discusses the nature of salvation in Christ at some length. In particular, Gerhard affirms and grounds the forensic nature of justification in the work of Christ. Contrary to the claims made by some within the Lutheran tradition, the distinction between “objective” and “subjective” justification is not a late innovation. Rather, Gerhard employs the conceptual distinction to explain Christ’s work in both his death and resurrection. Gerhard writes:

He [God the Father] also condemned it, in that He punished our sins in Christ, which were imposed on Him and imputed to Him as to a bondsman. So also, by the very act of raising Him from the dead, He absolved Him from our sins that were imputed to Him, and consequently also absolves us in Him, so that, in this way, the resurrection of Christ may be both the cause and the pledge and the complement of our justification.¹

In a word, Christ paid for all the sins of humanity when they were imputed to him in the crucifixion. Raising Christ from the dead, God the Father “absolves” Christ of the sins of the whole world. This is possible because Jesus has already paid for all sins. Among the many striking images for redemption that Gerhard uses, this is one of the most vivid and compelling.

From this it follows that even before believers subjectively lay hold of Christ in the act of baptismal faith, God pronounces them absolved. Through faith they participate in the objective absolution of Christ in the resurrection. Hence, the pastor does not tell his congregation that “if” they believe, then they will be absolved. Rather, the pastor—serving as the voice of Christ—calls the congregation to trust that God in Christ has already pronounced them absolved.

June 27, 2025June 27, 2025

Justification in Jesus Christ is the Center of Theology

Theology is centered on, yet not exhausted by, the message of justification in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ offers a unilateral and unconditional promise of salvation. Therefore, the distinction between law and gospel is also central to the enterprise of Christian theology.

The central problem of human life is the question of justification. Social psychologists have demonstrated that across culture and times, humans are driven on by status seeking behavior in their relationships with other humans. A given cultural group sets standards of behavior, and humans compete with one another to see who can best embody them. The ultimate goal of this competition is gaining a status of proper recognition before others (i.e., social justification). In religion, this principle also holds true. Whatever the ultimate goal of salvation is in a given religion, adherents will invariably achieve it by performing a set a works (be they moral, ritual or both). Another option might be to mystically dissolve the self to escape the relentless demand of the gods or God. Even modern atheism embodies this impulse, since by pretending that God and his law do not exist, one is free from the need to justify oneself before God, or at minimum, religious authorities. Rather, the self dissolves upon death.

April 6, 2025April 7, 2025

The Suffering Servant as Our Eternal High Priest

Throughout so-called Deutero-Isaiah, the Servant eschatologically fulfills the role of priestly and prophetic mediation, but also seems to be the Davidic Messiah spoken of earlier in Isaiah. Earlier, Isaiah speaks of the Davidic Messiah as “a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch” (Isa. 11:1) and “root of Jesse who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire” (Isa. 11:10). Parallel to this, the Servant of the later chapters of Isaiah is called a “shoot” coming “out of dry ground” (Isa. 53:2) and a “light to the nations” (Isa. 49:6).

The Suffering Servant

Another parallel between the two figures is that the Davidic Messiah and the Servant are both described as redeemers and servants of YHWH.¹ Indeed, like David prior to his enthronement, the Servant suffers before receiving glory. Hence, it seems logical to think that Isaiah is speaking of the same figure when describing the Davidic Messiah and the Servant of the YHWH.

It should also not go unnoticed that Isaiah’s Servant of YHWH takes on divine qualities as well. As we have noted earlier, after having left during the Babylonian exile (Ezek. 10), Isaiah informs us that YHWH himself will return to Zion (Isa 40). The returning divine presence merges throughout the latter half of Isaiah with the Servant. In this vein, the Servant is the luminous glory of the Lord in that he is a “light to the nations”(49:6). It cannot be denied that this description parallels the manifestation of the returning Kavod in Isaiah 40:5. Moreover, the Servant is also called the “arm of the Lord”(Isa. 53:1, 63:12), well as the divine “Angel of the presence” sent to save the people of God (Isa. 63:9).²

February 18, 2025February 18, 2025

Pastoral Disaster: Justification After the Formula of Concord

Throwback Post

Although the Formula of Concord affirmed Luther’s concept of justification by the word, Lutherans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century quickly returned to the problematic paradigm St. Augustine bequeathed to the West. In this, Lutheran theology tended to take the sacramentalist trajectory in the Augustinian Dilemma.¹ This is probably partially based on the early Lutheran desire to polemically to differentiate itself as a confessional tradition from Calvinism. It is also possible that there were lingering Melanchthonian undercurrents regarding how question of sin and grace was conceptualized. Nevertheless, the largest catalyst for the almost total abandon of the doctrine of election lay in the overreaction to the teaching of a Swiss Lutheran theologian named Samuel Huber.²

Samuel Huber and Theological Overcorrection

Samuel Huber began his career in the Reformed communion.³ Having been censored for some his views of divine grace, he left the Reformed confessional camp to become a Lutheran and taught at Wittenberg.⁴ Huber held that because the grace of God was universal as the Formula of Concord had taught, then it must logically follow that election was also universal.⁵ In teaching this, he was not affirming universalism as many of his contemporaries claimed, but merely conflated election with the gracious invitation of humanity to trust in the gospel.⁶

Aegidius Hunnius, Superintendent and Faculty of the University of Wittenberg

In response to Huber’s claim, Aegidius Hunnius⁷ and Leonhard Hütter⁸ asserted that election is merely God’s passive foreknowledge regarding who would come to faith and preserve it to the end of their lives (ex praevisa fide). Although humans cannot initiate their relationship with God,⁹ humans could lose their faith as Luther had himself affirmed.¹⁰

From the possibility of apostasy, later Lutheran theologians like Johann Gerhard drew the conclusion that preserving or wrecking faith was a matter of contingent human volition (albeit, supported by the power of the Holy Spirit), and hence not subject to the predestining will of God.¹¹ Because God clearly foreknew who would continue to cooperate with him after regeneration and who would fall away, predestination was little more than divine foreknowledge of human faith.¹²

August 4, 2024August 7, 2024

Christ’s Priestly Atonement as Fulfillment and Transfer of Righteousness

Jesus’s sacrifice of himself on the cross fulfills the three main functions of sacrifice in the Old Testament: praise, atonement, and covenantal ratification. First, Jesus was able to fulfill God’s law as the one true and obedient representative human. He accomplished this purely as an act of praise to the Father and not out of compulsion or obligation.

Christ possessed the fullness of divine glory and was therefore completely free from the law. Consequently, he was uniquely capable of fulfilling the law as a sacrifice of praise. Jesus is the perfect person of faith (Heb. 12:2-3) who trusted that he shared all things with the Father (Phil. 2:6-7). Therefore, he could perform obedient service not because he had to redeem himself or curry favor with God, but only to glorify the Father: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (Jn. 17:4).

Christ’s Death as Atoning Sacrifice

Secondly, Jesus’s death was an atoning sacrifice for sins. Under the old covenant, sin entailed death. As St. Paul wrote: “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:32). Sin necessarily calls for retribution proportionate to the crime in the form of lex talionis. For example, under the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9, taking life must result in the murderer forfeiting his life (Gen. 9:6). Likewise, under Levitical law, the same principle holds true: “you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exod. 21:23-25).