ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 64 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. *** >> Thank you. All of this has been helpful. But while you've told us what righteousness is, you haven't told us how we obtain it. Could you spend some time on this, please? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, thanks, Eric, for getting me back on track. We were talking about this notion of obtaining righteousness from Article IV of the Augsburg Confession. And I'm going to delay most of my answer to when we get to the section on faith. And I should mention that the way we'll be proceeding today is kind of outlined by the -- by Article IV. We'll talk about justification. We'll talk about grace. We'll talk about the "for Christ's sake." And then we'll talk about faith. And then there will be some other issues at the end that we need to cover, too. But in this way Article IV of the Augsburg Confession will structure our time together today. So as I said, it's really in the section of faith that I want to address most of your question. But let me say one thing now. And that is I want to talk about the nature of the word of God. And the fact that the word of God is not merely information. But that it is actually -- it actually does what it says. And here we can make a distinction between information and proclamation. Information would be simply here is the data. You know, here is -- here is the stuff you need to know about God. Whereas proclamation is actually God speaking to you. And that's really how we obtain righteousness. Is that God speaks faith into our hearts. And by doing so, he gives us his righteousness. And this has tremendous implications for how you understand what goes on in church Sunday morning. Consider the phrase "You go to church to learn about Jesus." And that's a phrase I think that we've all told our children as an explanation "Well, why do we have to go to church?" "well, we have to go to learn about Jesus." So I don't want to completely attack this little phrase. But I want to note something about it. If we're learning about something, that sounds like what we're getting is information. It sounds like what we're getting is our facts about Jesus. And that's very different than going to church to hear Jesus. That's the distinction between information and proclamation. We go to church to learn about Jesus means we get information about him. But in fact, the Lutheran view is you go to church to hear him. Because it is in church in the scripture readings and the sermon where you hear him speak. And when he speaks, his word does what it says. And so this view of the word of God then has implications about how you understand conversion to take place. And here again, we'll talk more about conversion in a little bit. But just think about what does it mean to become a Christian if hearing God's word means learning stuff about Jesus? Well, what that means is you get the information and then you got to act on it. So what God is giving you is information. And then it's up to you to supply the action or the assent or the faith or whatever it is you think you need to supply. But God is just giving you information. It's kind of like the way that we have these anti-drug education campaigns. We have a drug problem in America. And so the answer to that is to educate people. To tell them "Drugs are bad for you." But then it's really going to be up to them to decide whether to do drugs or not. That's not how God's word works. What his word is it actually creates faith. It doesn't just give you information that you can act on. But it changes your will. It gives you faith. It gives you righteousness. That's how you obtain righteousness. *** 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. ***