ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 81 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. *** >> How does one obtain faith? I mean, if it is so important, shouldn't I help my congregation know what to do? How do we find and hold onto faith? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: This question gets us into actually Article V of the Augsburg Confession, which follows directly from Article IV. Not only does it follow it sequentially, but it even follows it grammatically in that Article V is a sentence fragment that picks up where Article IV left off. "Well with," it's a purpose clause. And here is what it says: "To obtain such faith, God instituted the office of preaching, giving the Gospel and the sacraments. Through these as through means he gives the Holy Spirit who produces faith where and when he wills in those who hear the Gospel." And it goes on for a little bit more. But that's the section I would like to concentrate on. And so the answer then is that we obtain faith through preaching and through the sacraments. Actually one of the things that Article V goes on to do is to condemn those or -- who say that we receive the Holy Spirit through our own preparation and our own works as if we could make ourself ready for the Holy Spirit to come into us. Instead of that, Article V says we receive the faith and the Spirit through the means of grace. Now, this ties in directly as in -- we've talked about this before. But let me just mention it briefly again. This ties in directly to a Lutheran understanding of original sin in which we are, in fact, dead in sin. And more than dead. We actually fight actively against God before we're converted. The human will is bound to sin and resists God. So that when the Holy Spirit comes to us through the means of grace, through preaching and the sacraments, the Spirit isn't coming to ask us to do something. The Spirit is coming to create life where there is none before. As the Creed says, "The Spirit is the Lord and giver of life." And that's exactly what he's doing in the means of grace. To use an example that I've used a number of times before in this course when Jesus says, "Lazarus, come out," this is not a demand on Lazarus. But he's actually giving Lazarus life. In the same way when God says, "Let there be light," there's light. God's word does what it says. So this gets to the point of preaching is not just information. But it's actually proclamation through which the Spirit creates life, creates faith and makes somebody a Christian. There is a parallel, in fact, between the conception of Christ and the conversion of a human being to become a Christian. And this is a parallel that's been pointed out by a number of people. There's a Sixth Century church father named Fulgence that I'm thinking about. But also the Lutheran theologian Jan Gerhard makes a similar point in that if you think about the annunciation, the angel comes to Mary and tells her that she is going to give birth to Immanuel. And often when the annunciation is pictured in Christian art, you see an angel and you see a scroll coming down from the angel which is the angel's message. And that scroll goes into Mary's ear. So this is making the point that the word that the angel is preaching to her is what is actually bringing about the conception of Jesus in Mary's womb. So the word brings about the presence of Christ in Mary. And Fulgence draws a number of other implications of this parallel. He makes the point that Mary did nothing to deserve this. That it's not the case that Mary did good works and that God rewarded her good works by letting her bear the Savior of the world. No, for Fulgence, this is completely God's initiative. This is completely God's grace. And God comes to Mary without any regard to Mary's worthiness or merit or anything like that. God just through his word, through the Spirit working through the word, brings about the conception of Christ in Mary's womb. And the conversion of a Christian is similar in that through God's word, through the Holy Spirit coming in through the ear of the Christian just like that picture of the scroll going into Mary's ear, Christ is brought about for the Christian, as well. That this is how faith is created. And if you want to use the language of Jesus in your heart -- and I realize that we've talked about how it's really important what Jesus does outside of your heart. But let's just go ahead and use the language of Jesus in your heart right now -- how does he get there? Well, he gets in our hearts the same way he got into Mary's womb. Through the word, the Spirit working through the word creating faith, and faith receiving the merits of Christ. And Fulgence would also make the comparison that just as Mary did nothing to deserve bearing the Savior of the world, so also we do nothing to deserve being united to God in our conversion. That our conversion as well is something that God does completely out of his mercy and not in response to something that we've done before. So that's another parallel that we can draw between the person -- the person of Christ and the doctrine of justification. One other comparison I would like to mention to make the point that our conversion is passive, that is to say God converts us. We don't participate in that. But this is something that God does is that often conversion in the New Testament is described as a new birth. And this is especially when it's described in the context of baptism. So for instance, in John 3 Jesus talks about being born again of water and the Spirit. Now, if you think about a birth, a baby doesn't cooperate in his own birth or conception. This is -- the baby is conceived by the will of the parents. Not by the baby's decision. And so conversion, if you think of conversion as a new birth, it kind of works the same way in that we are born into God's family in baptism. Not because we decided to. But because this is the gift of life that God has given us. *** 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. ***