ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 90 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. *** >> I've been Lutheran all my life and attended Lutheran schools until college. Justification was taught to me when I was very young, early elementary school, and taught to me in every year of school that followed. It is obviously important to us Lutherans. But why is justification the article by which the church stands or falls? Shouldn't it be Trinity or Christology? Have we really placed the emphasis where it ought to be? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: This is an objection that you will hear from other church bodies as if what Lutherans are doing is they are taking their pet doctrine and elevating it to the highest possible place in the realm of theology. And I think it's an important question. Because you'll be faced with it. And we do, in fact, use this terminology. We say that justification is the article by which the church stands or falls. So that where the article of justification is false, then the entire theology, all of it falls to the ground. Because justification is the heart of all of it. But I think your question exhibits a sensitivity not only to other denominations but I think also historically when you mention Trinity and Christology, too, because obviously these are very important articles of doctrine, as well. And how is it that Lutherans claim that justification then is more important than that? And I would actually argue that that's not what we're saying when we say that justification is the article by which the church stands or falls. Because if you understand the history of the Trinitarian controversies and christological controversies, I think you will see that the reason these things are controversies was because salvation was at stake. So in a sense, the controversies about the Trinity and about Christ are controversies about salvation. The church did not actually go through a controversy explicitly about salvation until the Pelagian controversy in the Fourth Century where Augustine opposed Pelajus. Now, that was explicitly about salvation. Before that, the way that they hashed through questions of salvation was by talking about Christ and who Christ is. Is he God or not? And what about the doctrine of the Trinity? And let me give you an example. When it comes to the Nicene Creed, the Nicene Creed does have a little bit to say about salvation. It says who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven. But it really doesn't explicate that. The real emphasis on the Nicene Creed is the fact that Jesus is God. And that he is, in fact, ***homo esius, of the same substance of the Father. Now, why was that important? Well, it's because the church fathers in the Fourth Century -- this is the early Fourth Century now -- had a vivid appreciation of the fact that only God could save us. And they were well aware that if they went with the opposing position which was advocated by a priest named Arias, that Jesus is not fully God, then that would, in fact, undermine salvation. Because only God is able to save us. Now, I would say that this christological controversy about whether Jesus is God or not is ultimately about justification. Now, even though they are not using the term justification, it is about salvation. How does God save us? Is it, indeed, God who saves us? Or is it some inferior being? And because these questions impinge on salvation, once you recognize that the controversy and the history of the church are driven by the question of salvation, then I think you're in a better position to realize that when we say that the doctrine of justification is the article by which the church stands or falls, that does not mean to exclude the Trinity and Christology. But rather, I would see that justification debates in the 16th Century as another facet of the same thing. In other words, it is God who saves us. And if we return again -- I know I mentioned this before -- to Luther's explanation of the First Commandment in the large Catechism, what does it mean to be God -- or to have a God? I should say: What does it mean to have a God? It means to look to that God for all good things. So if you're trusting in something other than Christ, if you're trusting in your pocketbook or in your own abilities or in a relationship or whatever, something other than Christ, that is tantamount to saying that Christ is not God. And it's implicitly denying Christology. Not just justification. Because those two things go together. That if you're going to treat Christ as God, you're going to trust him for all good things. That is to say you are going to rely on him for your justification and not on yourself. And so throughout the history of the church, all of these different controversies and articles of doctrine at their heart are issues about salvation. And so they are all ultimately about the doctrine of justification. Whether or not that term is used. Whether or not it's explicated in the way Lutherans phrase things. But that's what it's about. *** 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. ***