Lutherans: Justifying Justification

Man sins — and is saved. But is he saved through a life of piety and good works, or through abiding faith in Christ as Lord and Savior? The question of justification, which in the theological sense is the way in which man achieves freedom from guilt, is as old as Christianity, and so is the battle over what the right answer is. The latest skirmish in this theological war was fought this month in Helsinki, where 800 dele gates to the fourth Assembly of the Lu theran World Federation spent twelve days trying to produce a modern statement of Luther’s classic Reformation doctrine that man is justified by faith alone. The debate ended in failure; after rejecting two separate drafts, the delegates turned the rewriting job over to a new theological commission, with orders to try again for the next assembly in 1969.

Even the New Testament seems to offer two contradictory interpretations of justification. The pseudonymous au thor of St. James’s Epistle urged his readers to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only,” and sternly warns that “faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” But the mighty St. Paul proclaimed to Christendom that Jesus Christ had freed his followers from obedience to the duties and behavior prescribed by the Jewish law, and that “the just shall live by faith.”

Man’s Depravity. The Gnostics of early Christianity, who claimed to possess a “secret wisdom” left them by Jesus, argued that they were exempt from provisions of moral law, and for so believing were expelled from the church. The British monk Pelagius, who died around 418, in effect contended that man could achieve salvation by his own actions apart from God’s gift of grace; he was formidably countered by St. Augustine of Hippo, who emphasized the utter depravity of man and the absolute necessity of Christ’s death at Calvary for redemption.

The Middle Ages’ Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, hewed to a middle way that became the orthodoxy of the modern Roman Catholic Church after it was canonized by the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Aquinas taught that faith was essential to salvation, but so were good acts done under the influence of faith. St. Thomas’ successors failed to preserve his careful balance. Late medieval theology overemphasized active piety: Christians were encouraged to expiate the punishment for their sins that awaited them in purgatory by gaining papally-provided indulgences —available for such good works as do nating money to ecclesiastical building funds.

An Unworthy Friar. It was the sale of indulgences for good works that touched off Martin Luther to publish his 95 theses at Wittenberg. As a devout young Augustinian friar, Luther had been obsessed by the thought of his unworthiness as a sinful man before God, and no routine of works, confession, penance or asceticism could mitigate his spiritual anxiety. But seated one day in the study of the monastery, as he later related, Luther suddenly gained an insight into what St. Paul meant by the just living by faith. Luther interpreted Paul to mean that the sinner was justified only by a gift of God’s grace, which came solely through faith in Christ’s redemptive act of dying on the Cross. Because of man’s unworthiness, good works could not affect God’s favoring glance; they were simply “the fruits of faith” −the response of man to divine favor. “Here I realized,” Luther wrote later, “that I had been truly reborn, and had entered Paradise itself through open doors.”

The doctrine of justification by faith alone was the keystone of the Reformation. Although modified in various ways by Calvinists and Anabaptists, justification by faith was accepted by every Protestant church. In the earliest Reformation confessions, Lutheran Theologian Werner Elert sums up, justification is “the nucleus; in the later ones it is the central point; in the most recent ones it is the assumption that no longer can be called into question.” But at Helsinki, justification and its meaning for modern man came in for some severe questioning. “It is an open secret,” charged Dr. Gerhard Gloege of Bonn University, “that today neither the church nor the world knows what to do with this doctrine of justification. For the fathers it was the fountain and rule of faith and life. For the church today it is clearly an embarrassment.”

Closer to Rome? One reason that it embarrasses churchmen, suggested a rejected draft of a Federation statement on justification, is the plain fact that even after four centuries, justification by faith alone is only vaguely comprehensible to millions. Another is that downgrading works seems less acceptable than ever to self-justifying, activist modern man. A third and more serious challenge to traditional Lutheran thinking came from the Federation’s Commission on Theology: modern Biblical study makes it clear that justification is not, as Luther thought, the dominating theme of the New Testament.

Ironically, re-examination of this central Protestant doctrine could some day lead to a gradual healing of the breach between Rome and Reformation. Dr. Johannes Witte of Rome’s Gregorian University, one of two Roman Catholic observers at the assembly, argued that many modern Lutheran interpretations of justification, by stressing the life of faith rather than the initial encounter with God, are moving closer to Catholic doctrine. And Catholic scholars are quick to notice the similarities: in a 1957 book that rocked German theological circles, Father Hans Kiing of Tiibingen argued that Karl Earth’s understanding of justification was essentially compatible with the teachings of the Council of Trent. For Theologian Barth, God’s grace, acquired through faith, implies a command to service in this life.

Today other Roman Catholic theologians are exploring anew the literature of the Reformation in an attempt to discover where disagreement may have been due to a misunderstanding of terms. So unpolemical is this exploration, reports Yale Theologian George Lindbeck, a Lutheran observer at the Vatican Council, that in Germany, “Lutherans feel right now that the Roman Catholic theologians are so enthusiastic about dissolving differences that they feel they must remind the Roman Catholics that some outstanding differences still remain.”