Tag: Justification

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First Thesis on Justification

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

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The Fulfillment of the Law and Active and Passive Righteousness

Perhaps one helpful way of conceptualizing how the law can be fulfilled and abrogated coram Deo, while remain a rule of life coram mundo, is through Luther’s distinction between two (active and passive),[1] or in some cases three (civil, imputed, sanctified),[2] kinds of righteousness.[3]  Coram Deo, humans are righteous or unrighteous not on the basis of what they do, but through what they receive.  We passively receive our sinful nature from our parents, which in turn colors everything we do or leave undone.  Likewise, faith is created by a monergistic act of the Holy Spirit, and we receive the gift of imputed righteousness and a renewed heart passively.  This passive gift of righteousness completely abrogates the law coram Deo.  From the perspective of this relational horizon, the law as condemnation moves to the gospel as freedom from condemnation.  Once the gospel has arrived, the law no longer holds sway since it is completely fulfilled.

In terms of our external person coram mundo, humans are good or bad based on what they do (i.e., active righteousness).  Under the first use of the law, the unregenerate can make better or worse decisions and likewise be judged as just or unjust based on what they do.  A person is defined as a good spouse, parent, or citizen based to what extent to which they behave well in these roles.  Indeed, as far as active and civil righteous is concerned, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas are essentially correct.  One can indeed train himself to act in a habitually correct way within his roles in society.  Likewise, under the gospel and the third use of the law the regenerate can cooperate with the Holy Spirit and can listen to and obey the commandments of God through specific external actions.  The faithful do this both as an act of gratitude for the gifts of creation and redemption that they have received, as well as restrain the wicked impulses which remain present in them this side of the eschaton. 

It should be noted that fallen humans tend to reverse these two kinds of righteousness.  Rather than being judged by who they are before God (children of Adam, or redeemed sinners in Christ), humans desire to be righteous on the basis of their works.  As a result, humans have created the various world religions (which work on the basis of the opinio legis),[4] as well as rationalistic/moralistic schemes of theodicy.[5]  Coram mundo, humans desire not to be judged righteous and worthy of status on the basis of what they do, but on the basis of who they are. Likewise, human desire to judge others on the basis of their identities.  In human history, this has given rise to the sins of racism, sexism, and classism, among others. 

[1] LW 26:7-8, LW 31:297-306.

[2] WA 2:43-7.

[3] See Charles Arand, “Two Kinds of Righteousness as a Framework for Law and Gospel in the Apology,” Lutheran Quarterly 15, no. 4 (2001): 417–439; and Robert Kolb, “Luther on the Two Kinds of Righteousness: Reflections on His Two-Dimensional Definition of Humanity at the Heart of His Theology,” Lutheran Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1999): 449–66.

[4] Chris Marantika, “Justification by Faith: Its Relevance in Islamic Context,” Right with God: Justification in the Bible and the World, ed. D.A. Carson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 228-242; Sunand Simithra, “Justification by Faith: Its Relevance in Hindu Context,” in Right with God, 216-27; and Masao Uenuma, “Justification by Faith: Its Relevance in Buddhist Context,” in Right with God, 243-55.

[5] Gregory Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997); and idem, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001); Gottfried von Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2010).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

Image from R. J. Grunewald, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” Grunewald, accessed May 24, 2021, https://www.rjgrune.com/blog/two-kinds-of-righteousness.

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The Pattern of Flight from Condemnation to Grace

God’s wrath is revealed to all outside the garden (that is, outside the sphere of divine grace and promise) through his creaturely masks. Indeed, God’s “invisible attributes [i.e., including his holiness and wrath], namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20, Emphasis added).[1] 

Nevertheless, God established a new word of promise in the form of the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15.  The grace of the protoevangelium took on an even more definite form in the corporate life and history of Israel through the promise God attached to Abraham’s “seed” (Gen. 22:18).  This effective Word of promise pushed the history of Israel inexorably along to its fulfillment in the person of the Messiah, even in the face of human opposition.  Nevertheless, the movement of the divine Word toward its final fulfillment could often appear as a failure even as it succeeded.  When Moses pronounced the divine Word “Let my people go,” it appeared ineffective to both the Egyptians and Israelites.  Indeed, Pharaoh was apparently unmoved by the pronouncement of the divine deed-word and, in turn, increased Israel’s labor (Exod. 5).  Nevertheless, it was through Pharaoh’s very obstinacy that God worked his redemption and was finally able to bring a plague so horrific that Egypt expelled Israel.[2]  God likewise told Isaiah to speak a word of repentance to Israel that they would ignore, thereby ensuring their suffering in Babylon (Isa. 6:9-13).  But Israel’s destruction was be the occasion for their true repentance, something that would prepare them for the grace of restoration and the coming of the Messiah (Isa. 40).  Finally, God’s Word of redemption found ultimate fulfillment in the opposition and murder of Jesus by his opponents.  By killing God himself, Jesus’ enemies brought about the fulfillment of the very Word of God that they sought to thwart.  As Luther’s theology of the cross shows, God works under the form of his opposite.  

God fulfills his Word under the outward appearance of it having failed.

Likewise, throughout the history of Israel, God’s pattern of attaching his dual words of condemnation and grace to created masks continued.  By doing so, the Lord bid his covenant people to flee from the word of condemnation to that of grace.  Although Jacob is attacked by God in the night, he demands the name of the shadowy attacker and thereby hearkened back to the promise of blessing that God had made to him at Bethel (Gen. 32:22-32).[3]  Moses is also attacked by God on his return to Egypt but flees to the promise of grace found in circumcision of his son (Exod. 4:24-26).[4]  God threatened with death those who came near Mt. Sinai, the mountain where he gave his law (Exod. 19:10-13), but promised forgiveness and a share in his personal holiness to those who approached him through the sacramental channels of the Tabernacle/Temple at Mt. Zion.[5] 

This pattern of fleeing from condemnation to grace also continued in the life of Christ.  In the crucifixion, God designated Jesus and the sacraments of the New Testament, which flowed from his side (Jn. 19:34) on the hillock of Golgotha, as the new place of grace. Likewise, he designated the Temple mount and works connected with it as a place of condemnation (Gal. 4:25-6).  In his resurrection, Jesus insisted that the women flee his tomb (the place of death and condemnation) and instructed them to tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee.  In Galilee, Jesus told the disciples look for him now not in the tomb, but in the word and sacrament ministry of the Church (Mt. 28:8-10, v. 16-20).

[1] Steven Paulson, Lutheran Theology (New York: T & T Clark International, 2011), 70-4.

[2] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 229-43

[3] LW 6:122-55.

[4] Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1, 17-8.

[5] See good description in: John Kleinig, Leviticus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2003).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

Image: Gustave Doré, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1855.

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The Irony of N.T. Wright’s New Perspective Approach to Paul

Throwback Post

If you’re interested in the Apostle Paul, you should definitely pick up a copy of Anglican theologian N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Though I don’t always agree with Wright (particularly on his interpretation of Paul, as we will see below), I do consistently find him to be an engaging author from whom I have learned a great deal. 

A dapper N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, 2003-2010 and currently a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall

A lot of what Wright says criticizes a certain trajectory of scholarship on Paul that begins with a Church historian and biblical scholar named Ferdinand Christian Baur.  Baur taught at Tubingen, in southern Germany, during the heyday of Hegelianism (1830s) about twenty years before the movement collapsed in the wake of the failures of the 1848 revolutions.  As a result, his interpretation of the New Testament and early Church history tends to mirror Hegelian dialectic.  The “thesis” of early Christianity was Jewish Christianity, as represented by Peter.  It was legalistic and backward, and generally not that great.  Then there was a Gentile Christianity, as represented by Paul. This had a high Christology (as opposed to the Jewish low Christology) and was generally open minded and tolerant. Moreover, Pauline Gentile Christianity pretty much rejected everything Jewish.  These two forms of Christianity fought it out over the first few generations, until the the second century, when Luke wrote Acts in order to pretend that although the Apostles might have had some conflicts, they eventually got along (bear in mind, that Baur dated the NT documents mostly from the second century, something that even secular historical research would not accept at this point!).  Acts created the beginning of a synthesis between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, which found its fulfillment in John’s Gospel of love (love being the virtue that reconciles). We see this synthesis take final form in what one might call the “early Catholicism” of Church Fathers like Irenaeus.  This, of course, was a betrayal of Paul’s theology and “early Catholicism” for Baur is a kind of Christianity that has lost its nerve.  So, the Hegelian dialectic goes thesis (Jewish/Petrine Christianity), antithesis (Gentile/Pauline Christianity), synthesis (Johannine/Lukan/early Catholic Christianity).  Bam!

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Luther on the Law

https://unsplash.com/photos/jrazH5W7niA

The reality of the law as a principle of legal relationship (morally charged human activity resulting in merit or demerit), as opposed to a principle of grace/promise relationship (i.e., protoevangelium, new covenant), applies across cultural and historical situations (Pharisees/Judaizers vs. Ockhamism). As a result, Luther gave expansive definitions of the law throughout his career rooted in the principles he discovered in his biblical exegesis.  Much like many in the early and medieval Church, Luther held that God’s commandments given to Israel and the Church expressed his just and holy eternal divine nature.  It logically follows that if God is eternal (as Scripture affirms) then his will (which includes the law) must also be eternal.  In his Antinomian Disputations of the 1530s, Luther affirmed that “the Decalogue is eternal.”[1]  Elsewhere Luther states the same doctrine.  The law is: “His [God’s] will and counsel,”[2] it “serves to indicate the will of God,”[3] “commands firmly and forever,”[4] and is “the eternal and immutable judgment of God.”[5]  Later Lutheran Scholasticism[6] would follow Luther and express the truth that the law is rooted in God’s eternal nature through the utilization of the Stoic concept of lex aeterna.[7]

Beyond affirming that the law was God’s eternal and immutable will for his creation, in the the Antinomian Disputation of the 1530s Luther also spoke of the law as anything in creation that expresses the condemnation of sin.  Part of this formulation was a response to the work of the early Lutheran heretic Johann Agricola.  Agricola believed that only a heartfelt love of God could inspire true repentance.  Because the gospel, and not the law, inspired fallen humanity’s love for God, it followed that preaching the promise of the gospel to the exclusion of the law should occur.  For Agricola, then, the law was good, but only for the use of the civil authority.[8] 

Luther countered Agricola’s claims by noting that God’s wrath against humanity deriving from the violation of the law extended to the whole of creation. Therefore, simply excluding certain biblical texts or the word “law” from preaching would do no good.  Death, destruction, illness, and all the vicissitudes of the fallen creation preached the law (i.e., the consequences of not following the law) to fallen humans without any explicit word of law from preacher: “Anything that exposes sin, wrath, or death exercises the office of the law . . .”[9]  Hence, the preacher achieved nothing by excluding the preaching of the law.  Indeed, since God mandates the preaching of both the law and the promise, the preacher would be guilty of dereliction of duty by not preaching the law.[10] 

[1] LW 73:112.

[2] LW 9:51

[3] LW 22:143.

[4] WA 5:560.  “inaeternum et stabiliter.”  Translation my own.

[5] LW 7:275.

[6] See: Gerhard Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate: An Interpretation of Its Historical Development (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969), 3-11.

[7] Gunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje, A History of Western Thought: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century(London: Routledge, 2001), 94.

[8] See discussion of Agricola’s early position in Timothy Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 84-9.  Also see description in F. Bente, Historical Introductions to the Book of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), 161-9. 

[9] LW 73:54.

[10] LW 47:111.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).