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. *** >> Dr. Maxwell, my name is Eric. Already in my readings I've come across a phrase that needs clarification for me at least. Maybe the others already understand it. I think I understand what forgiveness of sins means. But what does it mean to obtain righteousness? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, thank you, Eric. I had mentioned that the Augsburg Confession Article IV is our place to go to look for the definition of justification. And it does mention not only forgiveness of sins but obtaining righteousness. And righteousness is one of those words that is fairly rare at least outside of a church context. We hear it all the time in church. But you're not going to hear the term righteousness I think in your daily life very often. So it's somewhat of a specialized term. But we have to understand what it means simply because the word is in the scripture. It is something that our people will encounter in church all the time. And righteousness would mean that we are right with God. That is to say God finds us acceptable. That we meet his standards. Now, having said that, I think it's important to elaborate. Because there are a number of different ways that righteousness can be understood even within that definition that I gave. And the first one of these is what Luther grew up with. And that is that Luther thought that the righteousness of God meant that God punishes sin. Now -- and the image that Luther had in his mind was Jesus as judge sitting on a rainbow ready to punish every infraction that you make. Now, as you can imagine then for Luther, the phrase righteousness of God was a terrifying phrase. And it's really part of the history of the Reformation and what brought the Gospel clear to Luther when he realized that this is not, in fact, what God's righteousness is all about. As Luther is -- as -- at the end of his life looks back on his experiences and on his reading, he identifies this point as the point at which the gates of heaven were open for him. And that is the point at which he realized that the righteousness of God is not synonomous with God is ready to judge you. But rather the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which he pronounces us to be righteous. That it's a gift to us. It's not a threat to us. And that is one of the fundamental things in Luther's life and in Lutheran theology: That righteousness is a gift. And I should mention parenthetically that Luther was aided greatly in his discovery by the church father St. Augustine. Now, Augustine was a Fourth Century church father. Whereas Luther lived in the 16th Century. So we're covering quite a timespan here. But Augustine in a treatise called "The Spirit and the Letter," which it's formally Augustine's commentary on the book of Romans, that's what he's engaging in that text. Augustine discusses the righteousness of God. And Augustine makes the point that the righteousness of God is not that righteousness by which he himself is righteous, that is by which he judges sin. But rather, it's the righteousness by what he makes us righteous. And this is the discussion that really brought peace to Luther, that righteousness is a gift. Now, we'll have more to say about St. Augustine and why Augustine makes the phrase "make righteous" instead of "pronounce righteous." But I just want to point out now that Augustine was instrumental in Luther's discovery where the Gospel came clear to him. And that was a point at which he understood God's righteousness to be a gift. Now, in Lutheran theology -- so -- I'm going to make some further distinctions. So let's leave aside the idea now of righteousness as God's judgement because that doesn't really play a role in what we're talking about now. And let's just concentrate now on as God's gift to us, within that notion of righteousness as a gift. There are, in fact, two kinds of righteousness. And Luther himself discusses this. They go by the terms alien righteousness and proper righteousness. And these two terms correspond to two different dimensions of human life. Human beings live in a relationship to God which we might call a vertical dimension. But we also live in relationship with our neighbors which we might think of as a horizontal dimension of human life. And these two kinds of righteousness, alien righteousness and proper righteousness, correspond to these two dimensions of human life. Alien righteousness is the righteousness which Christ won for us. Now, you might think that alien is kind of a strange name to describe this kind of righteousness. You know, does it mean that the righteousness comes from some other planet? Are we talking about martians or something? That's not what we're talking about. Alien simply means to belong to someone else. In this case, this is the righteousness that belongs to Christ. And proper means belonging to oneself. So this is the righteousness that belongs to us in our interaction with our neighbors. Now, when we speak of alien righteousness, this alien righteousness has a number of characteristics that distinguish it from proper righteousness. Alien righteousness for one thing is passive. That is to say -- I suppose it would be more precise to say we are passive in relation to it. That this is something that's given to us. It's not something that we ascend up to heaven and grab for ourselves by our efforts. But this is a gift of God to us that we simply receive. We have no role in obtaining it other than the fact that God -- that God gives it to us. Furthermore, this righteousness is infinite. It swallows up sin in a moment. Because this, in fact, as I said, is the righteousness of Christ. This is not the righteousness of us doing good deeds or something like that. This is the righteousness of Christ himself. And so there is no sense in which this righteousness is lacking. It's total. It is complete. And it swallows up sin in a moment. And when I say "swallow up," I mean it forgives sin in a moment. You might think of this righteousness as our identity. This is who we are in our baptism is that we are identified with Christ. As Dr. Scaer explained, we are buried with him in baptism. And as such, we have this righteousness which is his. Now, we can compare that to the notion of proper righteousness. That is to say this is the righteousness that is our own. That comes from -- or that has to do with what we do in our relationship to our neighbors. In this case, we are active because we are doing good works. And so it's not simply reception. But it actually involves a performance of good works. Unlike alien righteousness, this righteousness is not complete. In fact, in this life what we experience is really only a beginning of the kind of righteousness in which our total lives correspond to God's law. So it is incomplete. It grows as we continue in the life of faith. Though it is similar to alien righteousness in that it does come from God, it's an outflow of the alien righteousness that Christ gives us. What he gives us vertically then flows out to our lines horizontal. So we might think of this as our activity. So our identity comes from our vertical relationship with God, which then issues forth in activity that's in our horizontal relationships towards our neighbor. Now, I realize that some of this discussion is a little bit technical and perhaps it's a little bit abstract. But let me give you some concrete examples that I think will help clarify why these distinctions are important. It has to do with the relationship of faith and good works. Jesus himself identifies this relationship in the gospels when he says, "Make a tree good and its fruits will be good." Now, when we talk about making a tree good, that is a question to the identity of the tree. This is our identities as Christians. This comes from us from the outside. This comes from us only through Christ and what he accomplished for us on the cross. So our identity has to do with this alien righteousness that's received by faith that's complete, that swallows up sin in a moment. But Jesus says when the tree is good, then the fruit will be good. So the good works then are not a cause of the tree becoming good but they are rather a result of it. So when we think about how do we gain our identity as children of God, we don't gain our identity by first trying to do good works. See, that reverses the order. The order is first you need the identity. And then you can do the activity. So trying to reverse the order would be to say if you have a tree that's dead, you're going to try and revive it by taking some fruit and stapling it on. It doesn't work that way. That's not going to do anyone any good. But rather you need the tree to be good. And that happens in baptism. It happens in justification. And I would include preaching and the Lord's Supper. Justification happens in all of these ways. But we need the identity before we can do the activity. Now, in our society, you can see a great example of this when -- in the political realm when you have -- and I'm thinking especially of the Christian right, which I realize that many of our people have an affinity to because Lutherans tend to be theologically conservative and many are even politically conservative. And so the Christian right holds some appeal. But here is one area in which the Christian right I think totally misses the boat. Because sometimes you can get the impression from political rhetoric in this country by Christians. Now, I mean that the way to make America a Christian nation is by passing laws which more closely conform to the law of God. So we can make America Christian by having school prayer. We can make America Christian by cracking down on pornography. We can make America Christian by outlawing abortion. And while all of these things may have something to say for them -- I'm not trying to tell you not to oppose abortion or something like that because we have a very strong concern for the life of the unborn. The error here is the idea that we're going to make America Christian by forcing people to do good works or forcing people to live in accordance with God's law. That would be like trying to take fruit and staple it on a dead free. It's not going to do anyone any good. At least not in a vertical relationship. When it comes to political activity and concern for the unborn and whatever political positions that Christians might take, that's going to deal with a horizontal realm. But right now we're going to talk about you're standing before God. And in that case we can make America obey the law of God to the inth degree. And it's not going to do any good. At least not for Americans standing before God. Because what needs to happen is they need the identity first and then the good works can follow. And that identity will only come from -- from justification -- I almost said the doctrine of justification. But it's actually Christ himself justifying you that gives you that identity. Now, on the flip side, the fact that our identity comes from God doesn't mean that that identity then erases distinctions in the horizontal realm, either. For example, we still have civil law. So if someone commits a crime, then they go to jail or there's some other punishment for it. And it's not the case that the judge is going to say, "Well, because Jesus forgives you, you don't have to go to prison." No, it doesn't work like that. Because when we're talking about civil realm, we're talking about the horizontal relationship. And that's a different issue than our standing before God. One final example of this would be when I teach courses at the seminary, I have to assign grades. And that's kind of a law thing to do. And I don't -- you know, I'm really not allowed to take the position that "Since Jesus forgives you, I'm going to give you an A for this paper that clearly deserves a D" or something like that. It doesn't work like that, either. So this is where this distinction of two kinds of righteousness is helpful. Because it allows you to keep the different truths together as long as you assign them to the right realm without having one thing kind of erase the other. You don't have the civil righteousness erase what righteousness really means before God. But neither do you have justification then destroying civil order. So that's why I think that your question is helpful and why this distinction is important. *** 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. ***