ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 61 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. *** >> Hello, Dr. Maxwell. I'm looking forward to this portion of the course. My name is David and I'm serving a congregation in Cleveland. May I begin with what I think is a fundamental question? Why do Lutherans talk about justification so much? What does it mean? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, thank you, David. Your question takes us to the very heart of Lutheran theology, which is, in fact, the doctrine of justification. And to begin to answer your question, what I would like to do is to start with the Augsburg Confession, Article IV, which is very short. So I'll just read it to you now. "Furthermore, it is taught that we cannot obtain forgiveness of sin and righteousness before God through our merit, work or satisfactions. But that we receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God out of grace for Christ's sake through faith. When we believe that Christ has suffered for us and that for his sake our sin is forgiven and righteousness and eternal life are given to us. For God will regard and reckon this faith as righteousness in his sight as St. Paul says in Romans 3 and 4." So this is what the Lutheran Confessions identify as justification. And as you can see in the article, sort of a thumbnail sketch of a definition for justification would be forgiveness of sins or obtaining righteousness. Those are the phrases that are used here. Now, a related question is "Well, why is that the heart and soul of Lutheran theology?" And it has to do with justification being God's answer to sin. Now, when we think of sin, sin actually has two different effects on humanity. One effect is that it condemns us. And the other effect is that it binds us. That is to say it controls our life. It forces us to sin more. And these two different effects correspond to two different ways in which God delivers us from sin. The first of these ways that God delivers us from sin is called justification. And the second is sanification. And I would like to refer to a comment that Dr. Scaer made in his portion of the class. That you always have to keep justification and sanification together. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to do that just because it is impossible to say everything all at the same time. And so in this portion of the course, we are going to be focusing on justification, which is God's deliverance from the condemning power of sin rather than sanification, which is deliverance from the binding power of sin. Now, I will say a few things about sanification. Because I do think that Dr. Scaer is absolutely right, that these two go together. But as I said, one of the difficulties in teaching and learning theology is that you can't say everything all at once. And so what we will be doing then is focusing on justification. Now, when we think of our culture, the idea of sin condemning us before God is something that I think is becoming less and less present in the minds of people. I think -- for instance, a few years ago I heard a talk by a Lutheran military chaplain who had actually served in active combat. And he commented on the common saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. And he assured us, in fact, that this is wrong and there are atheists in foxholes. So that when people begin to face death -- it used to be that we can think when they face death, then they are going to have to think about their standing before God. But this is becoming less and less the case. And so one of your challenges in the ministry will be to bring this issue up before people. That they, in fact, do need to think about standing before God on Judgement Day. What will that be like? Now, we have a few examples of -- well, it's not exactly Judgement Day. But examples of people in the Bible who stand before God. And what is that like for them? And I'm thinking in particular of the prophet Isaiah who in Chapter 6 of the book of Isaiah is standing in the thrown room of God. God's robe is filling the temple. There's incense. There are angels there. And God's glory is so great that the angels are covering their face. Now, Isaiah's response to this I think is telling. That he's not just there witnessing as if he were a spectator. But in fact, his response is "Woe to me. I am ruined for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips." God's answer to Isaiah's plight as he stands before God and contemplates his own ruin standing before the holy God is to have an angel go to the altar and take a burning coal and touch Isaiah's lips and say to him "See, your sin is atoned for." So the atonement is God's answer to the condemning power of sin. And the Isaiah scene I think drives home the point to us that standing before the thrown of God is a terrible thing when one is a sinner. Because a sinner cannot stand in the judgement. And with that in mind then, justification, which is the way that God forgives our sins or it's actually an interchangeable term with forgiveness of sins, then becomes the heart of God's deliverance of us from the problem of sin. Now, I would like to say a few things in answer to your question just about words and the terminology "justification." Because the English word I think is a little bit misleading. And this is really more of a problem in English than it is in the original Greek of the New Testament. But in English the word justification has the suffix fication, which -- we have a lot of words in English that have this suffix. So for instance, beautification. Well, what is beautification? Beautification means you make something beautiful. And that's what the suffix means. It comes from actually the Latin word "to make." So when you think about the word justification in English, it ought to mean that God makes you righteous. But in fact, in dogmatic theology, the definition for justification, is not that God makes you righteous but that God declares you righteous. Which is a little bit more true to the Greek word, which is -- you can transliterate d i k a i o o. Dikaioo is the word for justify. It doesn't have that same make idea. But it's more of a law court where a judge pronounces you to be innocent. Not that God makes you righteous in the sense of transforming your life so that now everything you do corresponds to God's law. So we have that one issue in English that we need to be aware of that the justification means that God is going to pronounce us righteous. It's more the sanification area of things where he get into him making us righteous. *** 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. ***