05-4 Theology of the..

JUSTIFICATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR EVANGELICALISM 21
with an extensive norming authority for justification in the life of
the church. If, on the other hand, justification is the doctrine by
which the church stands or falls, then the redemptive work of
Christ must not be seen as a doctrine among many with various
doctrinal theories and “tendencies” to be worked through in theology.
Justification could then only be the doctrine.
A declaratory righteousness given by a verdict of God would
be offensive to many evangelicals, who would cry that human
feeling is being trampled on by this external, juridical doctrine. 55
Furthermore, their notion of “atonement” would be considered
an inadequate analog to justification by Lutherans. Discussion
by evangelicals of spiritual renewal would also give birth to grave
conflict where faith is conceived of as pure passive. Most evangelicals
would presume this to be a Manichaean-Stoic rejection of
human responsibility. Lutherans would reject the synergistic and
semi-Pelagian notion that human response is a receptive cause of
justification. 56 Justification thus provides a clear dividing line
between Lutheranism and American Evangelicalism. American
Evangelicalism will never and can never accept the Lutheran
doctrine of justification. If Lutherans adopt evangelical methodologies,
that adoption will destroy the precious gift of justification
from God and leave them lamenting the same poverty of
faith and theology over which thoughtful evangelicals now
grieve. 57 LOGIA
1. This list has been adapted from George Marsden, Understanding
Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Wm.
B. Eerdmans, 1991), 4–5.
2. Mark Ellingsen typifies this ambivalence in his contribution
to Donald Dayton and Robert K. Johnston, eds., The Variety of
American Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press,
1991), 222–244. In this article Ellingsen wrote: “Not even the champion
of theologically conservative Lutheran orthodoxy, the
Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, officially identifies with the
evangelical family usually associated with the National Association
of Evangelicals” (222).
3. Erwin Lueker, ed., Concordia Cyclopedia (St. Louis: Concordia
Publishing House, 1954), s.v. “Justification.”
4. Quoted in Thomas Sheridan, Newman on Justification
(New York, 1967), 11. The watershed event in the conversion of John
Henry Cardinal Newman from the Church of England to the
Church of Rome was his lectures on justification. See Scott Murray,
“Luther in Newman’s Lectures on Justification,” Concordia Theological
Quarterly 54 (April–July 1990): 155–178.
5. The phrase “the article by which the church stands or falls”
seems to have come into common usage at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. See Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 2 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2: 193, n. 3. The
ipsissima verba have been wrongly attributed to Martin Luther.
The phrase certainly captures Luther’s own view of this doctrinal
concept. Luther denominated justification the Hauptartikel (primary
article) in the Smalcald Articles of 1537 (SA II, I, 1; cf.
Triglotta, 461).
6. Gerhard O. Forde, when commenting on Eric W. Gritsch
and Robert W. Jenson’s Lutheranism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1976), commended them for saying that justification is not merely a
doctrine but the doctrine. “The church is to pronounce, to do the
imputation, unconditionally. Particular preoccupation with or
dependence on the legal metaphor or the problems of conscience is
not the reason, dogmatically speaking, for the primacy of the doctrine
of justification. The reason is to show clearly and unmistakably
the kind of communication that must go on in the church. If
the church forgets to speak the kind of language demanded by justification,
a language that actually does what it talks about, then the
church will ‘fall’ and lose its reason for being. The sixteenth-century
reformers saw the whole of Scripture agreeing on justification,
and insisted that all doctrine be judged in the light of justification
NOTES
precisely for this reason. The point is to deliver the goods.” Gerhard
O. Forde, “Christian Life,” in Christian Dogmatics, 2 vols., ed. Carl
E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1984), 2: 422.
7. Martin Chemnitz, Loci Theologici, 2 vols., trans. J. A. O.
Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1989). Chemnitz’s
Loci is an extended commentary on Melanchthon’s shorter work.
8. Johann Gerhard, Loci Theologici, 9 vols., ed. Eduard Preuss
(Berlin: Schlawitz, 1867).
9. A biography of Pieper by David P. Scaer, professor of systematic
theology at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne,
and frequent contributor to Christianity Today, appeared in Walter
A. Elwell, ed., Handbook of Evangelical Theologians (Grand Rapids:
Baker Book House, 1993).
10. Franz Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3 vols., trans. Theodore
Engelder et al. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951), 2:
397–557. Here Pieper followed the terminology of the later seventeenth-century
Lutheran dogmaticians.
11. Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, eds., Christian Dogmatics,
2 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
12. Lutheran dogmatics has been analytic in its structure since
the mid-seventeenth century. The analytic method argued effect to
cause. Previously, Chemnitz, Melanchthon, Hutter, and others
used the synthetic approach, moving from cause to effect.
13. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2
vols., trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans,
1975).
14. G. C. Berkouwer, Faith and Justification (Grand Rapids:
Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1954), 18.
15. J. I. Packer, “Evangelicals and the Way of Salvation; New
Challenges to the Gospel: Universalism, and Justification by Faith,”
in Evangelical Affirmations, ed. Kenneth S. Kantzer and Carl F. H.
Henry (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1990), 108.
16. E.g., J. McCleod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1878); R. W. Dale, The Atonement
(London, 1875); Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian
Theology (London, 1919); and more recently, Leon Morris, The
Atonement (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1983).
17. Alister McGrath, “The Article by Which the Church Stands
or Falls,” Evangelical Quarterly 58 (July 1986): 212. McGrath judged
that atonement was a “much less felicitous choice than ‘justification’,”
primarily for linguistic reasons.