ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 78 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. *** >> The confession says that God will reckon this faith as righteousness. Why is faith righteousness? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, faith is righteousness because it receives the merits of Christ. And Eric, this is an important distinction. Because I think that one of the dangers of saying that you're justified by faith alone is that it's possible to think of faith as a work. And of course if you do that, then you've undermined the entire intent of the Lutheran doctrine of justification. Because you've made us justified by a particular work rather than by Christ. And so it's important to consider why it is that faith is reckoned as righteousness as Paul says. Now, it's tempting to think of faith as a work because faith is, in fact, commanded by God. In fact, in Luther's explanation of the First Commandment, what the First Commandment demands is faith. That you are to have no other gods. And Luther's explanation is that means you are to look to God for all good things, not to anyone else. So this is a command for faith. And you can find other explicit commands for faith in the New Testament, for example. Paul tells the jailer at Philippi that he should believe in the Lord Jesus and he will be saved. So there are passages and there are elements even in the large Catechism which might mislead one if you're not reading carefully to think of faith as justifying because it is so good a work. But, in fact, that's not why faith justifies. And it's probably better not to consider faith a work at all. It would be a little clearer if you just don't think that way. Faith is not a work. Faith is a gift from God. But even then faith is a gift. But it doesn't justify because it is a gift. God has plenty of gifts that don't justify us. He sends rain. He gives us health. He gives us sanification. None of these things actually justify us. None of these things make us holy before God or able to stand before him on Judgement Day. So it is true that faith is a gift. But that's not why faith justifies. The reason faith justifies is only because it receives the merits of Christ. That means that faith stands in an instrumental relationship to Christ. Faith doesn't stand on its own. Faith doesn't look at itself. Faith looks only at Christ. It's important when Lutherans talk about we're justified by faith alone. And here is a Latin phrase I'm sure you've heard. We use the phrase ***sola fidae. Now, it is important to recognize in the phrase sola fidae that this is not the subject of sentences. In Latin it's in the obligative case, which is a way of saying that we're justified by means of faith. Faith doesn't do it. Faith is the means by which Christ does it. So faith doesn't stand on its own. Faith is merely the way in which Christ delivers his righteousness to us. And I think that has profound implications for the way in which we speak about faith. Because it is easy to slip into a pattern of saying things which would direct people to examine their own faith or to try and have faith in how strongly they believe. And this would be an error. So for instance, if you use adverbs in your talk about faith, you're kind of treading on dangerous territory. And here is what I mean: If you ask somebody "Do you really believe?" what you're encouraging them to do is to look at themselves rather than to look at Christ. In other words, they have to examine their heart to find out does their faith measure up to a standard which -- and this standard is real belief as opposed to maybe kind of wishy-washy belief or something like that. And in so doing, their faith is now directed to their heart or to their own faith. It's faith in faith rather than faith in Christ. And you might notice in this discussion how this quantitative language has crept back in that we were talking about before. This is a characteristic of a law way of thinking and a law way of doing theology. Do we measure up? And if you encourage people to consider whether they really believe, what you're encouraging them to do is to see if they measure up. And in so doing, you are giving them the law. There is an implicit accusation there that probably they don't measure up. And especially if you're talking about justification, this is really dangerous. Because what you are doing is importing law back into the article of justification. Which the whole point of the Reformation is that we want to exclude the law from justification as St. Paul does in Romans 3 and 4. So that's one diagnostic question you can ask is are there these adverbs like "really believe" in your talk about faith? And if there are, you might want to stop and think about what you're doing. Now, there's some other diagnostic questions we can ask when it comes to faith talk to see whether faith is being directed towards Christ or whether faith is being directed towards itself. Another question to ask yourself is: In your faith talk, do you tend to speak about weak faith versus strong faith? See, there again, there's that quantitative distinction. There's that attempt to measure up. So a strong faith measures up a little bit better than weak faith does. But when it comes to the doctrine of justification, this measure is completely inappropriate. Because it doesn't matter how strong or weak your faith is. Because it's not the strength of your faith that justifies in the first place. Faith remember justifies why? Not because it's strong. But simply because it receives the merits of Christ. And it doesn't matter if it's strong or weak. Any faith receives the complete merits of Christ. So a faith talk that has these gradations in it, strong versus weak or really believe versus maybe not so really believe, all of these things are not appropriate for discussion of justification by faith. Because they impose this measurement. They impose this kind of law way of thinking on justification. Another question you might ask yourself is: Are you asking people to supply their own faith? For instance, if you were to ask people or make a statement "If you would only believe in Christ," you may give them the impression that they need to supply that faith. And then of course in that case, what's going on is you're saying that they need to take the initiative in their salvation. And you're kind of slipping back into that medieval theology of Gabriel Biel in which there's some minimal standard that you meet. And then in response to this, God gives you grace. Faith is not a minimal standard you meet in Lutheran theology. Faith is a gift from God. Faith is created by the Gospel. And then faith justifies simply because that is the way in which the Holy Spirit delivers the merits of Christ to us. So what you need to think about -- and all of these examples of diagnostic questions that I've been giving you really get at the same point. They really get at the question: Does your faith talk or does your preaching about faith lead people to focus on their faith or does it lead them to focus on Christ? And as long as faith talk leads people to focus on faith, then this isn't the Lutheran view of justification by faith alone. However we discuss faith, we need to be sure that faith directs people to trust in Christ for all good things. Because if you trust in your own faith for all good things, then you've made your faith into a god. And that's idolatry. Faith is instrumental. It is the means by which God delivers to us our justification. Now, the alternative to this bad faith talk in which directs faith in itself which suggests that people need to come up with their own faith, the alternative to this would be actually to preach faith into the hearts of people. And you do that simply by preaching the Gospel. Because remember, God's word does what it says. So when you give people the Gospel that Christ has forgiven their sins, that he's merited their salvation by his work on the cross, you are actually creating faith. Even if you never use the word faith. I mean, that's an important point. You don't have to use the word faith in order to create faith in people's hearts. What you're preaching is Christ. And as long as you're preaching Christ and directing people to Christ, that's what we mean by justification by faith alone. *** 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. ***