ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 85 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. *** >> This has been helpful. I know that we are asking very basic questions. But I hear questions like this every week and really struggle with how to communicate the truth of our doctrine of justification. I'm going to ask one more tough question. What about when Jesus says, "You of little faith"? Isn't he measuring faith? Doesn't that make faith law? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: I can see you've been paying close attention, Eric, to our discussion about how to recognize the law. And I think that that is a challenging passage. Because Jesus does say, "You of little faith." And that is applying measurement. So I would say that that is a law statement. But there are times when law is appropriate. And I think that when Jesus says that, that is one of those times. Because if you think about when that occurs in the Bible, one example is when Jesus is in the boat. And there's a storm. And the disciples think that they are going to be killed by the storm at sea, even though Jesus is in the boat with them. So he says, "You of little faith" as a way of rebuking them for their lack of faith. And so I don't think that this presents actually any problem to Lutheran theology and to a law-Gospel distinction. Because this is a time when Jesus uses the law. And so he is going -- he is telling them that their faith doesn't measure up. That -- now, that's not to say that they've lost their faith and that they don't -- they are no longer righteous before God. That's not what Jesus is talking about. But he is rebuking them for their fear that they are going to be killed by this storm. So my answer is that it is a measurement. It does belong to the law. And that the law is appropriate in this situation. And one of the things you need to realize, too, about Lutheran theology is that while we say that God is totally responsible for our salvation, that he does it all and he simply imputes Christ's righteousness to us, on the other side of the coin, humanity is totally responsible for our sin and for condemnation. So when we're talking about something -- a failure of the disciples, so a sin or a lack of faith in this case, it is -- the Bible is very clear that they, in fact, are responsible for that. So just because God is totally responsible for salvation does not mean that God -- that that gets us off the hook for sin or something like that. We are still totally responsible for sin. And it's one of the unique features of Lutheran theology and the Reformation, to try and fully confess those two total responsibilities. The total responsibility of God for salvation and for good works. And the total responsibility of man for condemnation or for sin. *** 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. ***