Universal justification

http://www.wlsessays.net/files/BeckerUniversal.rtf

Luther's posterity

Last week, Jordan Cooper linked to an old post of mine:

http://justandsinner.blogspot.com/2013/03/why-interacting-with-reformed.html

Referring to this:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-death-of-lutheranism.html

This, in turn, prompted some of his loyal readers to try leaving comments on my old thread.

Cooper’s title (“Why Interacting with Reformed Christians Can Sometimes be Frustrating”) is ironic considering the fact that he himself never interacts with the argument.

J. Dean said...

    Hmm.. I pointed out that he put together a caricature of Lutheranism, and my post didn't stand...

That’s because, on current settings, if you try to comment on a post that’s been up for more than five days, your comment is automatically redirected to the moderation box. It’s a way for us to track new comments on old posts. Posts that have disappeared into the archive.

Jordan Cooper said...

    Well, that's not surprising. Someone who talks like this doesn't want serious, thoughtful interaction.

    No the confessional Calvinists I know are for the most part much more respectful and thoughtful than this Steve fellow. But unfortunately, it is the people like this that are apt to contact you when you critique Calvinism.

Let’s see how “serious, thoughtful, and respectful” Cooper’s Lutheran buddies are:

 Daniel Casey said...

    now my brain hurts

  

Is that what Cooper meant by serious, thoughtful, and respectful?

Anonymous said...

    Yeah, that was pretty bad. He sadly mischaracterizes the Lutheran (and classical Anglican) view of the sacraments and thus ignores their place within the life of faith.

Doubting Thomas

Is that what Cooper meant by serious, thoughtful, and respectful?

  

Lutheran said...

    Wow. You can't argue with that level of ignorance.

   

Is that what Cooper meant by serious, thoughtful, and respectful?

J. Dean said...

    I have to confess that that was a pretty sad and pathetic straw man argument.

Is that what Cooper meant by serious, thoughtful, and respectful?

  

mattlush said...

    Absolute ignorance.

   

Is that what Cooper meant by serious, thoughtful, and respectful?

Let’s turn to the comments that some of them tried to leave on my old post:

Daniel Baker:

"For folks like you, bread and wine become a substitute Jesus." No substitute; we believe It is Jesus.

But, of course, if the bread and wine are not Jesus, then the communion elements become a substitute Jesus in Lutheran piety.

Martin Jack:

"It's a spiritual delusion to ground salvation or the assurance of salvation in diligent attention to externals." Umm, Jesus dying on a cross is an "external", unless Jesus died for your sins in your heart.

Is Jesus doing something on our behalf and in our place equivalent to us doing something? Is Jesus dying for us equivalent to us performing rituals? Why is Jack oblivious to that rudimentary distinction?

Cole Johnson:

Then what exactly must a person _DO_ for salvation? This argument sounds a little like the pot calling a kettle Pharisaical.

What a sad question for a Christian to ask. What must a person do for salvation? What about repenting of your sins and trusting in the person and work of Christ?

J. Dean:

Funny... I've heard ritualism ascribed to Calvinism as well... By the way, what's wrong with ritual? I'm a little lost as to why it's such a bad thing to have a set repetition of events. And I have news for you: EVERY church (yes, even CoWo churches) have ritual, whether or not they realize it.

Why can’t Dean tell the difference between rituals and ritualism? Trusting in rituals for your salvation is hardly equivalent to having rituals.

 As for universal objective justification, I profess not to be an expert on the topic, but what you're describing is universalism, and I have yet to hear any confessional Lutheran I know of subscribe to universalism. The two are not one and the same.

Here’s what I originally said:

If that wasn’t bad enough, “universal objective justification” has become mainstream dogma in contemporary Lutheranism. Instead of justification by faith alone as the doctrine on which the church stands for falls, we now have justification minus faith. Believers and unbelievers alike are justified. Muslims are justified. Atheists are justified. The damned are justified.

Did I describe universalism? No.

Rather, I pointed out that if, according universal objective justification, both believers and unbelievers are justified, then Lutherans have repudiated justification by faith alone. If even unbelievers are justified, then faith can’t even be a necessary, much less sufficient, condition of justification.

It’s not a complicated argument. Why does Dean find that so hard to grasp?

Justification by faith makes justification contingent on faith. Indeed, faith alone. Well, if everyone is justified, including unbelievers, then sola fide goes right out the window.

Perhaps you should actually engage in discussion with real and vibrant Lutherans rather than just construct a straw man to blow over with superficial counters.

Well, I’ve engaged in discussion with Paul McCain, Edward Reiss, and Josh Strodtbeck–among others. I doubt they’d appreciate Dean’s demotion. Are they dead, unreal Lutherans?

Dirk Jensen:

What about John 20:23 "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” So what is your proof text for that being Pharisaical?

How did Jensen leap from a promise made to the Apostles to a Lutheran pastor? Where’s the connecting argument? Does Jensen think that everything Jesus said to the disciples applies to Lutheran pastors?

What about this statement:

Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house that he enters (Lk 22:10).

How often do Lutheran pastors do that?

What about this statement:

Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once (Mt 21:2-3).

How often to Lutheran pastors do that?

 Jesus said it, just as He also said "This IS my body...This IS my blood." Well I guess from your post further down that you don't like proof text. What then are you saying, you don't believe God's Word?

Jesus also said “I am the vine.” Is Jesus a grapevine?

You attack beliefs that you obviously do not clearly understand, then you call it Pharisaical?

Ah, yes, because the Lutherans at Cooper’s blog are such theological sophisticates.

Michael Liccione finds ‘the Lutheran IP’ ‘utterly unsatisfactory’

I thought this was funny:

NathanRinne is a Lutheran writer, and Lutherans are quite fond of holding out to Reformed folks that there are things that God just consigns to mystery, and we are  best not to inquire about them. [Reformed theologians go with the things which “by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture”, but that is a no-no for Lutherans, as I understand it].

So here we have a Lutheran, who is more than willing to have those “rough edges” at the border of the “formal proximate object of faith”, in a discussion with a Roman Catholic, who blows right beyond “good and necessary” deductions and resides squarely in the infallible certitude “of a principled, rather than an <i>ad hoc</i>” way of arriving at the boundaries of “the formal proximate object of faith”. A “principled” way of determining the content of “divine revelation” as opposed to what is merely “human opinion”.

I hope these two men continue the discussion.

Lutheranism is application; Calvinism seeks to understand

Given that a number of Lutherans are commenting here, I think it’s important to try and further the understanding between them and the rest of us “Reformed Radicals” (as they tend to regard non-Lutheran Protestantism) by looking at some of the differences between us.

And following some others, I believe that the difference between “application” and “understanding” is one of the simplest ways to describe the differences. It’s very largely the same theology that’s being discussed.


In comments below, Jim Pemberton gave one of the best summaries I’ve seen of where Luther fit into the overall Reformation:

There is certainly much to appreciate about Luther's key role in the Reformation, but he was a stepping stone. His own theology changed throughout his life. I find it interesting, indeed telling, that our idea of reformed theology today differs from his purpose of reforming the RCC in that he never wanted to break away from the RCC. He only wanted to reform the theology and he labored to reconcile much of the RCCs ecclesiology with what he was discovering under the idea of sola scriptura. But since the ecclesiology he was trying to reconcile was still a product of sola ecclesia, I wager he had more to reconcile than he ever got around to. Given another lifetime, he may have discovered this conflict and given the rest of his thinking over to sola scriptura.

Luther wasn’t in a mood to throw things out.

Lutheranism arose out of Martin Luther’s personal struggles, which, at their earliest, arose in answer to the question “how am I made right with God?”

Not long afterward, Luther’s theology seemed to evolve out of a pastoral desire to teach his followers “how should we then live?”

It was his experience in the monastery that he sought to “reform” in some way, and bring it to the common folk.

In another comment thread, the Lutheran writer Nathan Rinne described it this way:

We view justification differently. These differences exist not so much because Luther is hard to understand, but rather because justification as envisioned by Luther cannot be understood apart from its practical application,

In that regard, Luther’s Small Catechism (1529) for example is very personal. The admonition “the head of the family should teach [these things] in a simple way to his household” is repeated throughout the work.

* * *

On the other hand, Calvin famously began his Institutes with the following statement:

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

He was seeking to understand.

His treatment through the four books of the Institutes then follows a systematic pattern, through: “The Knowledge of God the Creator”, “Knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ”, “The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of Christ”, and book four, “External Means” and “The Society of Christ”.

Later Reformed theology tended to follow this pattern of stepping back and looking at the “big picture” of Christian theology in a logical and comprehensive way, following the general pattern of “prolegomena”, then “Theology proper” (the study of God, generally), creation, sin, Christ and redemption, and the church.

* * *

This comports nicely with a blog post from a while ago that described the major differences among the earliest churches of the Reformation as if “church tradition” were a “junk drawer”. It went like this:

We all have a “top dresser drawer” into which we throw everything that there's no other place for. Over time, it just gets full of all different kinds of things. In church history, “tradition” kind of filled up the way that drawer does. And there were four different ways that the Reformers dealt with that drawer.

The Lutherans went through the drawer, looking for things that weren't Biblical. Lutheranism took out the things that weren't biblical, but they left everything else in there.

The Reformed took the drawer and dumped everything out on the bed. Then they went through all that stuff, checked it over carefully, and put back the things that were Biblical.

The Anglicans opened the drawer and took out one thing, called "the Pope," and put back in one other thing, called "the Archbishop of Canterbury." (This was probably the least analogous parts of the metaphor, given the 39 articles and all.)

The Anabaptists took out the whole drawer, dumped everything in the trash, and lit the trash can on fire.

Luther didn’t want to throw anything out.

Martin Luther’s Understanding of Baptism

Since most of our readers are Reformed, and since the Lutheran concept of baptism has been brought up, I thought it would be helpful to share what Bernhard Lohse, a Lutheran Professor of Church History and Historical Theology, has written about Luther’s view of the sacraments in general and of baptism in particular:

Formation of a new, Reformation theology of baptism went hand in hand with Luther’s entire theological development, particularly during his first lectures on the Psalms and Romans. In dealing with the sacraments, concentration on questions such as judgment and gospel, righteousness and faith, or on the divine promise and human confidence, led to a new impulse and important consequences: the criterion under which Luther dealt with baptism and baptismal usage. In other words, the relation of baptism to life from the perspective of the acceptance of the divine judgment promised in baptism took center stage. Since Luther’s understanding of the nature of sin was more radical than the theology of late scholasticism, he could no longer share the view that baptism purges inherited sin, of which a mere “tinder” (fomes) remains, and against the seductions of which the baptized can successfully resist.

The Lutheran Mind

When I left Roman Catholicism, I was looking first of all for polemical tools that would describe the differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, but also for a church body where I could fellowship. I found both of these very readily in the Reformed world. For some reason, Lutheran materials seemed harder to find.

But Concordia Seminary in St. Louis has produced a large number of classes and lecture series through iTunes U. Here’s an introductory theology series called “The Lutheran Mind”, which I’m listening to right now.

This seems to me to be an appropriate way to introduce oneself to Lutheranism. Lutherans do seem to have a different “mind” from the Reformed. Over at Andrew Clover’s Lutheran and Reformed Discussion, I was very surprised to find some hostility to even some basic Reformed teachings, such as the Westminster Catechism Question 1: “Man's chief end is to glorify God, And to enjoy him forever.”

It seems as if Lutheran theology today relies very heavily on Luther’s “Theology of the Cross”, which really makes every person (believer or not) into either a “Theologian of the Cross” or a “Theologian of Glory”. At this point, I think some Lutherans might mistakenly tend to categorize the statement in WSC Question 1 as something that a “Theologian of Glory” might say.

At any rate, while Reformed theology is very well-ordered, “systematic”, perhaps even “scholastic”, Lutheran theology seems much more down-to-earth and practical. Luther’s Small Catechism is a series of instructions, for example, many of which begin with the phrase, “As the head of the family should teach it in a simple way to his household…”

Luther himself made this observation about his own writings:

by God’s grace a great many systematic books now exist, among which the Loci communes of Philip [Melanchthon] excel, with which a theologian and a bishop can be beautifully and abundantly prepared to be mighty in preaching the doctrine of piety, especially since the Holy Bible itself can now be had in nearly every language. But my books, as it happened, yes, as the lack of order in which the events transpired made it necessary, are accordingly crude and disordered chaos, which is now not easy to arrange even for me.

From John Dillenberger, “Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings”, New York, NY: Anchor Books, ©1962, “Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings, 1545”, pgs 3–4).

Still, several of Luther’s writings to this day are foundational, confessional documents for Lutherans, and they may be found in the Book of Concord.