05-4 Theology of the..

18 LOGIA
and assurance of salvation. This suggests the indissoluble
bond between the problems of faith and justification, faith
and sanctification, and faith and perseverance. This is what
makes justification such an existential problem; it is really
the heart of the matter. 14
More recently, J. I. Packer, the English evangelical, asserted
that the essential “foundation-principle, the substantial one, is
justification by faith only.” 15 This doctrine of justification is at
the very heart of the issue between Rome and Protestantism,
even at the very heart of western Christianity itself. Packer has
broken with the methodology of his fellow British, in that English-speaking
theologians have tended to summarize the work
of Christ under the doctrine of the atonement. 16 The British
theologians’ treatment of atonement is not equivalent to the
Lutheran concern for justification, because atonement does not
carry the metatheological import that justification has for
Lutherans. 17
Twentieth-century theology has happily
proclaimed that justification is no
longer an issue worthy of deep
theological interest.
nb
Donald Bloesch followed the pattern of British evangelicals
by characterizing the work of Christ as “atonement” in his
Essentials of Evangelical Theology. 18 He also included loci on salvation
by grace and on faith alone, however. Bloesch would not
place justification in the center of either the method or the content
of his theology. Indeed, justification itself is subsumed
under “faith alone.”
Millard Erickson employed a traditional Reformed structure in
his monumental Christian Theology. 19 The topics follow this
order: the work of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and salvation. 20 Justification
is included under “The Beginning of Salvation: Objective
Aspects” and is situated after predestination and a discussion of
the ordo salutis. Thus justification is merely one among several
parts of the objective aspects of salvation, with only eight out of
more than twelve hundred pages committed to it. Erickson followed
the methodology of Theodore Beza, who established the
centrality of the doctrine of predestination in Reformed theology.
As Alister McGrath pointed out:
[Reformed] Orthodoxy tended to make the divine decrees
[of predestination] themselves the starting point for theological
speculation. All else, justification included, is therefore
a consequence of the divine decrees, decrees actualized
in time as the ordo salutis: praedestinatio—vocatio—justificatio—sanctificatio—glorificatio.
This inevitably results in justification
becoming a purely incidental aspect of the actualization
of the divine decision to elect. 21
Erickson heads the locus of salvation with a discussion of predestination,
but he fails to take into account the degree to which predestination
orders and directs his discussion of salvation. 22 Evangelical
dogmaticians have not taken into account the overarching
critical use of the article of justification, in many cases relegating
it to the fringes of their theology. Lutherans should take note of
this and ask afresh if they are indeed, in the modern American
sense, evangelicals.
ATTACKS ON THE CENTRALITY OF JUSTIFICATION
Twentieth-century theology has happily proclaimed that justification
is no longer an issue worthy of deep theological interest, for
the Biblical record has been found to be devoid of an overarching
concern with the article of justification. 23 Starting with the work
of Albert Schweitzer, modern exegetes and theologians have questioned
the centrality of the doctrine of justification for the Christian
canon. 24 It is argued that certainly justification could be said
to be important in Romans and Galatians, but hardly for the synoptic
Gospels or the book of Leviticus. Furthermore, some theologians
have now argued for a decreasing importance of justification
in theology for psychological reasons. Following an analytic
theological method, Wolfhart Pannenberg has argued that
since modern people no longer have the experience of
Anfechtung, the crisis of guilt coram Deo (before God), they can
no longer make sense of justification as an overarching theological
theme. 25 For Pannenberg the doctrine of justification cannot
make sense outside of the context of the late medieval penitential
system. 26 Brian Gerrish summarized the modern debate over justification
with these haunting words: “Much of the twentiethcentury
discussion has turned around the question whether for
one reason or another, the entire concept of justification no
longer speaks to the condition of modern man.” 27 Indeed, recent
dogmatical works have positively ignored justification. A muchheralded
book edited by Peter Hodgson and Robert King, Christian
Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks, included
only a few sentences on justification in a more-than-four-hundred-page
book. 28 The well-respected Anglican John Macquarrie
included little more than a historical discussion of justification in
his Principles of Christian Theology, saying, “[E]ven so, the whole
notion of justification has been vastly exaggerated in the attention
that has been paid to it.” 29
LUTHER’S REFORMATION AND JUSTIFICATION
Scholars have debated the nature and timing of Luther’s (re)discovery
of the good news of salvation. Luther himself said that he
discovered the meaning of the righteousness of God by 1519,
beginning that odyssey in 1514 as he lectured on the Psalms. 30 Previously
Luther held a nominalist position which he had been
taught at the University of Erfurt. 31 Luther came to the conclusion
that the righteousness of God was not the holy, consuming justice
of God. In his 1514–15 lectures on the Psalms he thought that this
righteousness was a righteousness that came from God, but that it
was an inhering or personal righteousness. At this point Luther
was thoroughly Augustinian. He eclipsed the Augustinian position
during his 1515–16 lectures on Romans, when he determined that
the divinely wrought righteousness of justification was not an
inhering personal righteousness in the Christian individual, but