ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q044 JANUARY 2005 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 LOMBARD, IL 60148 * * * * * This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> NICK: Is there a theological frame or perspective that can help me make sense of the message and argument of the entire apology? If so, might it be helpful for Lutherans when addressing theological issues today? >> DR. CHARLES P. ARAND: I can't think of a more important task for us to undertake than to identify a theological framework for the Apology of the Augsburg Confession. The reason is the Augsburg Confession is the lengthiest document in the Book of Concord. And I suspect at times that students can get lost in the details because there is simply so much there. And when they get lost in the detail, the temptation occurs, methodologically, that you use the Apology of the Augsburg Confession as little more than a collection of quotable quotes. In other words, we come across an issue today, and how do we address it? Well, you find a paragraph or a nice juicy quote from the Apology and then apply it. That has a certain amount of value, I suppose, in some contexts. But it doesn't necessarily help us learn how to think theologically. I think one of the pressing tasks that we have as we go through the confessional documents is to identify their theological concerns, their pastoral presuppositions, to understand how they approach certain questions, how they answer them, and why they answer them in certain ways. When we uncover their principles, if you will, the framework within which they think, we can then use that to guide us in answering questions of our day, even where those questions are not necessarily identical with the questions faced by Philipp Melanchthon. Now, the apology of the Augsburg Confession is the ideal document in which to explore these kinds of questions because it is indeed in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession that we have one of the most thoroughly and tightly argued treatises, particularly on the doctrine of justification, that you will find in all of Christian literature. In fact, I would argue that its treatment of justification in Article 4, which, by the way, is almost a third of the Apology, is perhaps the finest treatment on that topic that you will find in anywhere in the 16th century. Now, let's begin by asking: What are Melanchthon's goals? What is the task facing him? What does he need to do both politically and theologically? I would argue that Melanchthon has two primary goals in the Augsburg Confession. First, he needs to articulate the Lutheran doctrine of justification through faith alone over against the misrepresentations and misunderstandings of it as laid out in the confutation. In other words, it is the very point about justification through faith alone, particularly the *sola, faith alone, that the opponents rejected time and time again in the confutation. It's almost as if that word alone is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. And so Melanchthon has to spend a great deal of time and energy in defending the Lutheran position that we are justified through faith alone, that is to say, apart from works of the law. For that reason Article 4 and Article 12, Article 4 on justification and Article 12 on repentance, take on a towering presence within the Apology. Article 4 lays out the doctrine of justification, you might say, in terms of teaching you what it is. Article 12 then puts justification into practice by showing how it plays out in the doctrine of repentance. That's Melanchthon's first goal. The second goal, however, is he has to take into account the emperor�s concerns and alleviate them. What do you think would happen if one was addressing the emperor and said, we believe that we are justified by faith alone. We don't need works. Brilliant. Well, that might be heard in such a way as saying, no works, that could undermine the very social stability of the empire. In other words, you need people who go to work, who function as judges, who pay their taxes, and the like. So I think there was a genuine fear that the faith alone implied that works were of no value whatsoever. It's almost as if one might say, if I don�t need works for justification, I don�t need them for anything. So Melanchthon's second goal is to guard Lutherans against that charge, or that misunderstanding, of their view of justification. In other words, that justification through faith alone does not undermine the social fabric of the empire, and it doesn't undermine ecclesiastical good order, which they were also charged with doing. So how does Melanchthon accomplish this two-fold task? It's almost as if he has to wager a two-front war, a war on two fronts. How does he argue for justification by faith alone while defending the Lutherans against a charge of undermining good order in the empire by rejecting good works? He does so by employing an important distinction that is, perhaps, best described as the two kinds of righteousness. This is a distinction that is every bit as important as the distinction between law and gospel, and the distinction between the two kingdoms, in some ways, in fact, underlies; it provides the basis for those other distinctions that we know so well. The distinction of two kinds of righteousness preserves the *sola fide of justification while affirming human responsibility within creation. In a nutshell, here is what it is. It affirms that our approval and acceptance by God, *corum Deo, in the presence of God, depends entirely upon the work and person of Jesus Christ whose righteousness is given to us in a promise and is received by faith. In other words, God relates to us as the giver of the gift. Here we render nothing to God. We only receive what God gives and works in us. In other words, in the presence of God, our righteousness is passive, not active. It is a righteousness that we receive, not a righteousness that we achieve. On the other hand, and at the same time, our righteousness within the world, in the eyes of other human beings, is not passive, but active. It depends upon the activities by which we fulfill our own vocation and serve our neighbor. Now, these two different kinds of righteousness are not alternatives between which we must choose, rather, they are two simultaneous dimensions of human existence and human identity that serve different purposes for which reason they must be distinguished. Faith has one task. It grasps and apprehends the benefits of Christ. Love has a different task. It seeks out and serves our neighbor. In other words, you might say Lutherans seek both kinds of righteousness. In the presence of God, we seek only the righteousness of Christ through faith. But within the world and in the eyes of the world, we seek a righteousness of works. The task is not to confuse them. Now, let's unpack this just a little bit. First of all, the word righteousness is not a word or a term that we use all that frequently, I suspect, in our daily life. And in some ways, that's a shame because it goes to the heart of one of our most fundamental needs as human beings. Human beings, I think, need at a very basic level to be accepted, commended, and approved by others. For evidence of this, just watch teenagers sometime. Their desire to win acceptance by their peers, to be regarded as cool, or to be part of the in crowd, and the like. In other words, human beings need others to brag about them. We need to be recognized or acknowledged. We need to be noticed. We want to be affirmed as valuable, worthwhile, good, pretty, outstanding, and the like. Now very often, we gain this recognition by what we do or even by what we buy or what we possess. But in any case, finding approval, being noticed, I think, is a fundamental need of human beings. That's, in a sense, what righteousness has to do with. We might nuance it even further. Righteousness can be defined as conformity to a standard or a pattern of being and achieving that has been approved by someone else. So when teenagers seek acceptance by their peers, it's according to a particular standard that has been established by their peers or by the clothing industry or by the music industry. Well, you can pick that up on another day, I suppose. But it�s conformity to a particular pattern of being or behaving. Now, some of these patterns and standards may be very superficial or artificial and distorted. Theologically, however, we would argue that righteousness involves human beings meeting their design specifications, or to put it another way, it is being and doing what we ought to be and do. That is to say, to be human as God intended us to be. It is to be completely and fully human as God created us to be, and when we conform to that standard, we are righteous, if you will, accepted, approved, affirmed, commended, and the like. Now the distinction between two kinds of righteousness rests on the recognition that we are defined by two sets of relationship, to God and to the world. You might put it this way: Life is lived on two axes. We can conceptualize it by thinking of our relationship with God on a vertical axis, and our relationship with other human beings on a horizontal axis. We need to be righteous, as Luther would say, we must be righteous before both God and man. By the way, this distinction of two axes is really important for your reading of the confessions. Every time you run across the language, before God, that prepositional phrase, you are dealing with spiritual righteousness, righteousness in God's eyes. They are not talking about righteousness in the eyes of human beings because that's a different kind of righteousness. Now, the insight or the recognition that we live life on two dimensions, a vertical axis before God and a horizontal axis before the world, sometimes we call that *corum Deo or corum mundo, may not be a startling insight in and of itself. The key here, however, is to recognize that righteousness in those two *corum relationships, righteousness in the relationship with God and righteousness in relationship with other human beings, is established in two fundamentally different ways. You see, the danger that we're going to encounter time again in Melanchthon�s critique of his opponents is that they assume there's only one kind of righteousness. How we gain acceptance in the eyes of human beings is how we gain acceptance in the eyes of God, and on the same basis, by what we do or by what we achieve or by virtue of our performance. The distinction between two kinds of righteousness recognizes that before God, we are righteous only on the basis of what Christ accomplished for us, and therefore, we are righteous only through faith, the passive righteousness through faith. On the other hand, righteousness in the eyes of the world is achieved in an entirely different way. It is based upon what we do and what we accomplish and what we achieve. Both are vitally important. Righteousness *corum Deo, in the presence of God is important for salvation. It�s the basis for salvation. But righteousness of works is also important for the sake of the world; namely, for the well-being of the human community, the well being of human society. I need the words of my neighbor as much as my neighbor needs my works, you might say. So we're going to see that we need to pursue both kinds, and the value, I think, today is the two kinds of righteousness provides Lutherans with a way of handling that issue of good works and sanctification, as well as the comfort of the gospel, namely, for salvation. Now what I mean by that is this: Very often, Lutherans in particular, are accused of being so neuralgic about any talk of good works; namely, that any talk of good works would automatically be interpreted as works of righteousness. It's better not to talk about them at all. In fact, there is an old joke, I suppose, about the difference between the way Lutherans and Catholics teach the Ten Commandments. The story goes this way. Catholics say that God wouldn't have given us the Ten Commandments if we couldn't keep them so keep them. Lutherans, on the other hand, say God gave us the Ten Commandments to show us that we couldn't keep them, so don't bother trying. Well, there's a little bit of truth, I suspect, in that. The two kinds of righteousness provides us a way for, on the one hand, maintaining the salvation as the work of Christ alone and received through faith alone. But it also provides us a way of encouraging good works. It answers the question of why do good works. Not for the sake of God, but for the sake of your neighbor. God doesn't need them. But your neighbor does.