ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 79 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Why do we speak of justification by faith alone? Does the Bible use that language? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, one thing that I think we need to recognize about theological terminology, Josh, is that the intent of theological terminology is to present the doctrine of scripture by which I mean a content of scripture. It is not necessary in theology for our terminology necessarily to be drawn directly from the Bible itself. And let me give you an example of this. The Bible nowhere uses the term Trinity. And yet, churches across the world are in agreement that the Trinity is, in fact, a scriptural teaching. It's not just something we came up with. Even though the word isn't in the Bible, the doctrine is there. If I may summarize from the Athanasian Creed, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. And yet they are not three gods but one god. Now, you can find a scriptural presentation of that statement that I just gave you from the Athanasian Creed. When you draw together all that the Bible has to say about God, it's clear that there's only one God. Deuteronomy 6 makes this clear. "Hear O Israel the Lord our God. The Lord is one." It's also clear that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Spirit is God. And I'm not going to rehearse the biblical evidence for that at this point. But it is easy to find that kind of evidence. So just because the word Trinity is not in the Bible doesn't mean that the doctrine of the Trinity is not in the Bible, either. Another example that I would like to mention is in the Nicene Creed, it states that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. The Greek word there is homo ***useious meaning of the same substance. In fact, this caused quite a controversy in the early church because the word homo useious is not, in fact, in the Bible. And this really upset people. In fact, the church Father Athanasia, a generation after Nicea is still trying to defend the Nicene Creed. Because people are upset that the word homo useious is not in the Bible. And his defense is to say that while the word is not there, the teaching is there. And I think it's the same thing with the term faith alone. While you're not going to find the exact phrase faith alone the way that we use it in our Lutheran terminology in the Bible, it is a faithful reflection of the teaching of scripture. And in particular I would like to draw your attention to a whole list of what we call exclusive particles. And especially these are found in the writings of Paul. And we've already seen them in Romans 3 and 4, for example, where Paul says, "This righteousness from God is apart from law." That's an exclusive particle. It is saying it is excluding law from the righteousness. Or when Paul in Romans 4 distinguishes between wages and a gift. There again, it's excluding the notion of earning pay from the kind of gift that God gives us with his righteousness. Or another example of this would be in Galations 2 where Paul tells us that if righteousness could be gained through the law, then Christ died for nothing. So all throughout the epistles of Paul, Paul is extremely careful and extremely adamant to exclude the law from the doctrine of justification. And that's exactly what we are representing when we use the term alone. When we say faith alone, what we mean is faith excluding works of the law. And this is faithful to the message of Paul *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***