God Reconciles All People Objectively and Universally

Christ’s work reconciles God and humanity. This occurs both objectively and subjectively. Moreover, since each person of the Trinity is involved, reconciliation takes on a threefold movement. This threefold movement can be summarized in the distinctive realities of atonement, justification (both objective and subjective), and election.¹ The New Testament distinguishes each aspect of reconciliation from the others, although theologians have often confused them throughout Church history. 

The event of atonement constitutes the first movement of reconciliation, or redemption, as already examined in the last section. The movement of atonement proceeds from the Son to the Father. Having received all things from the Father, the Son is capable of returning himself to the Father in the power of the Spirit….

Universal Objective Justification

The second movement of reconciliation is universal and objective justification.² Universal objective justification is the Father’s response to the Son’s payment for the sin of the whole world. The Father declares the whole world forgiven on the basis of the Son’s objective atoning work. Objective atonement and objective justification are therefore distinct and should not be confused with one another: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men” (Rom. 5:18, emphasis added). And “. . . in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them [i.e., justification]” (2 Cor. 5:19, emphasis added).  

The Son’s payment to the Father for the world’s sin occurred in and is manifest in the crucifixion. The Father’s response in the form of a universal objective decree of absolution for the whole world is manifest in the resurrection: “[Christ] was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25, emphasis added). As Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard put it: 

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.³

In other words, God the Father imputed all sins to Christ and he paid for them on the cross. Since the wages of sin is death, Christ’s death wiped away all sin. The natural result was his resurrection.⁴ In return for giving his very self to the Father as payment for sin, the Father returned to Christ what he had given him in the power of the Spirit. 

Significantly, the Father absolved the sins imputed to the Son through the Holy Spirit. As noted, Father’s absolution manifests in the gift of resurrection. The Son, in turn, can then give the same gift of absolution to the Church: “And when he [Jesus] had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld’” (Jn. 20:22-23). 

Objective Justification is Not Universalism

Unfortunately, many have misunderstood the doctrine of objective justification as a form of universalism or implied universalism.⁵ Nothing could be farther from the truth! Indeed, faith remains central to this account of justification. Faith alone subjectively appropriates the objective verdict of forgiveness that God has pronounced over the whole of humanity. Nevertheless, God’s verdict over his creation is reality. Human resistance to God’s objective verdict is unreality. Our faith does not somehow make God’s verdict “real.” Rather, our faith merely receives, or trusts, the objective verdict. In his sermons on John’s Gospel, Luther wrote: 

Now the joyful message follows that the judgment is over; this means that the 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. But 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.⁶

The Spirit’s Objective Work in Word and Sacrament

Finally, the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead shares the universal and objective verdict of the Father. The Holy Spirit objectively delivers the Gospel message of the Messiah’s atoning death and resurrection through the Church’s Word and Sacrament ministry. Valerius Herberger writes that in the Church believers are “sprinkled with Your [Christ’s] blood in the sermon and in the Holy Sacraments….”⁷ Those who accept the proclamation of justification by faith receive the very presence of the risen Jesus in the power of the Spirit. 

It is not an accident that the Gospel narratives of Jesus’s earthly ministry begin with his reception of the Spirit. Nor is it coincidence that Acts begins with the Body of Christ—the Church—receiving the Spirit from the risen and ascended Jesus. The Holy Spirit is always the Spirit of Jesus and, therefore, tethered to the man Jesus’s life and work.⁸ The Spirit conforms the Church to Christ’s reality as one who died and rose. In this, the Church subsists in the Spirit through the person of the Messiah. 

Through baptism, the Holy Spirit sculpts the Church into the narrative pattern of Christ’s death and resurrection (Rom. 6). The Spirit-filled perpetual proclamation of the law and the gospel also molds the Church. Luke summarized the basic mission of the Church as preaching “repentance [law] for the forgiveness of sins [gospel]” (Lk 24:47). Like baptism, the proclamation of the law and gospel is a death and resurrection: “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6).⁹

As the great cosmic judge, the Son of Man, Jesus proleptically shared his presence and verdict with the eschatological Israel in his earthly ministry. Now the Christian Church mediates Christ’s presence and Gospel message. The objective means of grace define the Church to which Jesus has attached his Name, that is, his very presence. Therefore, connection with the means of grace grafts believers into the Church—the Bride of Christ and his mystical Body—and thereby grants union with the risen Jesus. The Church and Divine Service (Gottesdienst) replace the Temple (Eph. 2:19-22) and its service. As the Body of Jesus, the catholic Church is now the true eschatological Temple in the flesh (Jn. 1:14). 

The Son of Man’s Objective Verdict as Judge

As the Son of Man, Jesus proleptically elected and worked justification in the midst of the outcastes of Israel. Jews and Gentiles alike responded to Jesus’s words of judgment and grace with either belief or unbelief. On the basis of their reception of his words, Jesus rendered eschatological verdicts for his hearers prior to the Last Judgement.¹⁰   

Even before Pentecost, Jesus himself passed his word of judgment and grace to his disciples and his gathered remnant of Israel (Mt. 10, Lk 10). In both Matthew’s and Luke’s accounts, Jesus gives his word of judgment and grace to the apostles and commissions them to preach the coming Kingdom of God. In his commission, Jesus promises to be supernaturally present through their word: “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me” (Matt 10:40). And again: “one who hears you hears me” (Lk 10:16).

Hence, just as acceptance of Jesus’s word of grace through faith entails redemptive reception of Christ himself, so too those who reject the word stand under divine judgment of the law: “And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the Day of Judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town” (Matt 10:14-5). 

Jesus suffered the scorn of disbelieving mockers at his crucifixion. Yet, God vindicated him through his resurrection and by sending the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Through the power of Christ’s resurrection and ascension to God’s Right Hand, the Paraclete works the gracious ministry of Christ’s presence in the post-Easter Church.¹¹ Jesus is fully present in the word of judgment and grace spoken by the apostles. Christ’s promise to be present assumes the doctrine of the genus majestaticum and the doctrine of the absolute omnipresence of Christ’s human nature.¹² For Jesus to be fully present wherever his word is spoken, his human nature must have the capacity to at least potentially exist everywhere.

Jesus’s Objective Saving Presence in His Name

Toward the end of his earthly ministry, the Lord promised that the presence of his Name in the midst of those gathered would be identical with his living presence: “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Mt. 18:20). Jesus’ Name takes on the role of YHWH’s Name in the Old Testament. As we may recall from an earlier section, the gift of the divine Name is inexorably tied to the gift of the promise of grace. God established solidarity with Israel, and later the Church, through the promise. The gift of God’s Name acted as the pledge of the promise. Those who receive the divine Name can call upon it in faith for salvation. In a later chapter we will suggest this privilege forms the basis of the Lord’s Prayer. 

Remember that the gift of the promise is the gift of the very divine self. Therefore, it makes sense that the Temple, which was called “a house for my name” (2 Sam 7:13), constituted the primary channel of grace in the Old Testament. In the era of the New Testament, Jesus attached his Name to the Word and Sacraments (“baptizing them in the name” Matt. 28:19). Thus, each liturgical gathering becomes a realization of the eschatological Temple. The New Testament designation of the Church as the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-14, v. 27; Eph 4:12; 5:23; Col 1:18, v. 24, 2:19) and the new Temple (1 Cor. 3:16, Eph. 2:19-22, Heb. 3:6) makes perfect sense because Christ himself is the new Temple/Tabernacle (John 1:14, 2:21).

Jesus further clarified how his divine Name will be proclaimed among the nations where “two or three” are gathered in the baptismal command at the end of Matthew. The Holy Spirit, who exists in intimate connection to the person of the risen Christ, will give the ability to forgive sins (i.e., subjective justification) in the Name of Jesus (“repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations” [Lk 24:47, emphasis added, also see Jn. 20:23]). Moreover, the Spirit will also work forgiveness through Jesus’s Name in the Sacraments of the New Testament.

Christ’s Name in the Sacraments

In Matthew 28:19, Jesus commissions the apostles to baptize in the Triune name (which includes that of Jesus). This apostolic proclamation and activity of baptism itself will mediate the presence of Jesus. Indeed, the manner of Jesus’s mediated presence mirrors the way the Temple mediated the presence of YHWH to Israel: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt. 28:20).

In the institution of the Eucharist, Jesus confirmed his new testament of forgiveness by offering the disciples his own Body and Blood (Mt. 26:26-9). The Church continues to consume Christ’s Body and Blood, which obviously remain attached to his Name. Particularly in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus’s presence at common meals directly communicated forgiveness and solidarity to sinners.¹³ Indeed, such meals were also eschatological because they proleptically anticipated the feast of the Kingdom where “many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 8:11). 

The establishment of the Lord’s Supper fulfilled and transcends Jesus’s common meals with sinners. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives his true Body and Blood, which won humans from sin, death, the Devil, and the law, into the mouths of sinful believers. Through this sacrament, Jesus ratifies and verifies his promise to sinners that they are forgiven (subjective justification) and that he has chosen (election) them for eternal life in his kingdom. It is therefore to the nature of subjective justification and election that we now turn….    

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Response to a Reader Question: Neither the Bible nor the Lutheran Confessions Use the Terms Objective(ly) or Subjective(ly) Regarding Justification. So Where Did This Teaching Come From and How Can We Regard it as True? Is Universal Objective Justification Merely a Legal Fiction if Not Everyone is Ultimately Saved Due to Unbelief?

The concepts [of objective and subject justification] are present in Luther (as I show) and others, but Lutherans developed that language in response to the criticism of Roman Catholic apologist Robert Bellarmine. The conceptual scheme appears first in Abraham Calov’s commentary on the Augustana. The language was formalized in Johann Christian Knapp’s Lectures on Christian Doctrine in the early 19th century. C. F. W. Walther utilizes it and it passed into the traditionary conceptual toolbox of Synodical Conference theology.

It would be mistake to call objective justification a legal fiction prior to its subjective appropriation. The key is that Christ, as the second and true Adam, has priority over our humanity. He is the true human, and we are human by derivation and participation. Hence, what happens in him is ontologically real. We are true to our identity to the extent that we participate and appropriate what he has done. We sink into unreality to the extent that we reject and resist it.

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1. Adolf Hoenecke, Evangelical Lutheran Dogmatics, 4 vols., trans. Joel Fredrich, James L. Langebartels, Paul Prange, and Bill Tackmier (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 1999-2009), 3:179-216, 3:317-384; Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 2:342-2:381, 2:503-551, 3:473-506. ↩︎
2. Tom G. A. Hardt, “Justification and Easter: A Study in Subjective and Objective Justification in Lutheran Theology,” in A Lively Legacy: Essays in Honor of Robert Preus, ed. Kurt E. Marquart, John R. Stephenson, Bjarne W. Teigen (Ft. Wayne: Concordia Theological Seminary, 1985), 52-78; Eduard Preuss, The Justification of the Sinner before God, trans. J.A. Friedrich (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2011), 29-61; Robert Preus, “Objective Justification,” in Doctrine is Life: Robert D. Preus Essays on Justification and the Lutheran Confessions, ed. Klemet Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006), 147-155. ↩︎
3. Johann Gerhard, Annotations on the First Six Chapters of the St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, trans. Paul Rydecki (Malone, TX: Repristination Press, 2014), 214. ↩︎
4. C. F. W. Walther, “Christ’s Resurrection – The World’s Absolution,” The Word of His Grace: Occasional and Festival Sermons (Lake Mills, IA: Graphic, 1978), 225–236. ↩︎
5. Gregory L. Jackson, Luther vs. the UOJ Pietists: Justification by Faith (Chemnitz Press, 2012), 57, 124.  See other criticisms in: Paul Rydecki, Theses on the Article of Justification: and The Forensic Appeal to the Throne of Grace in the Theology of the Lutheran Age of Orthodoxy (Malone, TX: Repristination Press, 2014). ↩︎
6. Sermons on the Gospel of John (1538); LW 22:382.  Emphasis added. ↩︎
7. Valerius Herberger, The Great Works of God: Part Seven: The Mysteries of Christ in the Book of Leviticus, Matthew Carver, trans. (Fort Wayne, Indiana: Emmanuel Press, 2024), 69. ↩︎
8. See discussion in: David Scaer, “Inspiration in Trinitarian Perspective,” Pro Ecclesia 14, no. 2 (2005): 148-154. ↩︎
9. See: Gerhard Forde, Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012). ↩︎
10. See my argument in: Kilcrease, Justification by the Word, 50-64. ↩︎
11. See similar argument, in a modified form in: Kilcrease, The Self-Donation of God, 192-194. ↩︎
12. Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, 241-402. ↩︎
13. See: Craig Bloomberg, Contagious Holiness: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005). ↩︎

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From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

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Cover image: Copyright © Edward Riojas. Used by permission, Zion Altarpiece: Holy Week, 2017, at “Faith in God,” Sacramental Streams, July 2, 2024, accessed July 11, 2024, https://sacramentalstreams.wordpress.com/; other images from Christopher R. Gillespie, “‘GOD’S HIGH PRIEST, GOD’S TEMPLE, AND GOD’S SACRIFICIAL LAMB’ — GOOD FRIDAY 2023,” St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church and School, April 7, 2023, accessed July 8, 2024, https://stjohnrandomlake.org/gods-high-priest-gods-temple-and-gods-sacrificial-lamb-good-friday-2023/; Lucas Cranach the Elder, detail of Christ as Savior with Martin Luther, 1552, at Lutheran Theology: An Online Journal, accessed July 8, 2024, https://lutherantheology.wordpress.com/; Quotation memes from Martin Luther and John Kleinig from St. John Lutheran Church, Wheaton, Illinois, https://www.facebook.com/stjohnwheaton; and Gottesdienst meme from Liturgy Matters, Facebook Group, https://www.facebook.com/lutheranmass.