ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 69 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. *** >> Does that mean that God just pretends we are righteous though we really aren't? I don't mean to be flip with that question. I'm just really curious. >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, Nick, that's kind of the other side of the coin. We do ourselves a disservice when we mischaracterize Catholic theology. And they do a disservice when they mischaracterize ours. And that is certainly the wrong way to portray Lutheran theology as if God is just pretending. Now, I don't think you can fault Catholics for doing this to us because I think sometimes we do it to ourselves. We can sometimes say things that can make it sound like we are not really righteous but God is just pretending. Though from the very beginning of the Reformation the Catholics have accused us of teaching a legal fiction that God is pretending. Now, I think the way we fall into it is when we say things like "Well, justify me means just as if I have never sinned" or "I'm not perfect. I'm just forgiven." Those kind of phrases I think make it sound like the reality of the situation is that I'm a sinner and that God is just going to overlook that or he's going to pretend that's not the case. And that gives the impression that the fundamental reality is the sin. Now, what I think that loses sight of is that we talked about the nature of the word of God. That God's word actually does what it says. God says, "Let there be light" and there was light. It wasn't just pretend. So that when God imputes righteousness to us and he says that we're righteous, we really are righteous. Now, it is, in fact, the case that that righteousness is alien righteousness. That that righteousness is the righteousness of Christ that's imputed to us. I mean, it's not that we are righteous because we are now transformed so that in every part of our life we measure up to God's law. But rather, that forgiveness in sins, in fact, is righteousness. And it belongs to us because God gave it to us. So what I'm saying is that we can't say that God is just pretending. Because what God says about us is true. It's not pretend. And so for Lutherans, what this means is that we fully acknowledge both truths about ourselves. We do acknowledge that we're sinners. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that that sin is not a reality. In fact, we would say we're 100% sinners. But at the same time we acknowledge the other reality, too. And that is that we truly are 100% righteous. And the term -- we have a slogan for this. In Latin it's ***simulustus alpacator. Simultaneously righteous and a sinner. Or sometimes if you want to make it a little catchier, you can say saint and sinner at the same time. But that's what that phrase gets at. Is that we acknowledge both truths. And both are real. It's not that the sin is real and the righteousness is just pretend. Both are real. But we are both at the same time. *** 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. ***