Martin Luther and the justification of God

In his rediscovery of a God-centred gospel, Martin Luther very much a man for the 20th Century. Robert Doyle explains why.

In a provocative article in issue 35 of The Briefing (16 Oct 89), the author convincingly argued that the language of Luther's great discovery, ‘justification by faith alone’, is a disaster for evangelism. He wanted new words to express ‘faith’, but thankfully not new words for ‘justification’. Why am I delighted that ‘justification’ escaped? Mainly because too few Christians understand what the Bible teaches about it. We understand better what ‘faith alone’ means because that is what we do, and because we like nothing better than to talk about ourselves, it receives the great attention. ‘Justification’, however, talks about God.

In his exegesis of Romans, Luther captured the two foundational thoughts in Paul. In Romans 1-3, Paul is answering charges laid against the message of Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is who he said he was, and if what he did is as important as Paul claims, then God is in trouble. God has two charges to answer: he is unrighteous or unjust. He has not kept his promises to the Jews (3:1-5) and he has forgiven the sins of ungodly people—that is, rank outsiders to the Jewish religion (3:25-26, 4:5).

Paul's answer comes together in a tightly packed section at the end of Romans 3, verses 17-29. God is justified, or made righteous in two ways. First, he has kept his Old Testament promises by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, who fulfils those promises in his life and death and resurrection, as indeed the law and the prophets of the Old Testament show (Rom 3:21-22a). Secondly, God is justified in declaring the ungodly ‘righteous’ because he has sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to pay the penalty for our sin by his life and death (3:22b-26).

These two lines of the justification of God both end in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. His death on Golgotha both fulfilled God's ancient promises to rescue his creation from its rebellion against him, and slaked the wrath of God against our sins. Because his Son has brought in the new creation and the free forgiveness of sins, God can and does declare us, who are ungodly, ‘righteous’—that is, in a right relationship with him, forgiven, restored, adopted children.

There are only two responses we can possibly make. Either with Paul's opponents we say ‘no’ to God's ‘yes’ to us in Jesus Christ, and remain under judgement, or we say ‘yes’ to that ‘yes’, and believe God's promises, and respond to them by faith—and faith alone. The message of Paul's closely packed argument in Romans 3:21-31, which is filled out in the rest of his letter, is clear. ‘Justification’ is really God's story—the story of his faithfulness, mercy and grace. On the basis of that, and as a necessary second focus, we are justified by faith and faith alone.

Luther grasped this great fact, and saw its implications for how the Christian message had been understood and implemented in the theology and sacramental system of the Christian church for over 1,200 years. It caused a revolution.

Focus on the biography of God

We can sum up the nature of this revolution in a way which highlights its New Testament focus. Since the formative writings of Augustine of Hippo, the medieval church was primarily concerned with the biography of the human soul. The central question which Luther inherited was, ‘What must I do to be saved?’. The question was answered in terms of what had to happen to the soul for it to see God in heaven—hence the medieval way of salvation. The Reformers, turning to St Paul to answer the same question, came up with an answer which was essentially a biography of what God had done to save us in Jesus Christ. Therefore the sinner ends up looking not at himself, nor at the church, and escapes being fixated on his own progress in the matter of salvation, his own spiritual biography. Instead, by fixing his eyes on God's biography, the sinner there finds assurance that he is already justified, and commits his life to that fact, by faith.

The implications of this were enormous. Good works were now longer done for the self-centred reason of gaining progress for the soul on its way to salvation, but out of gratitude for the relationship God has already given us in his Son, by faith. The measure of good works is not the good it does me, but the good it does my neighbour—materially, by meeting his physical needs and spiritually, by pointing him to the righteousness of God which is also his, by faith.

The medieval church vigorously claimed the right to be the arbiter of all right and wrong, even in everyday or secular activity, because everything a Christian did contributed to his soul's progress to heaven, or in the opposite direction, to Purgatory. In that context, the Reformers' rediscovery of ‘faith alone’ caused a social revolution. Martin Luther called it ‘liberation’, and wrote a tract entitled On Christian Freedom. He summed up the life of all Christians, whether clerical or lay, as properly being lived “in God by faith, and our neighbours by love”.

Christians in secular occupations (especially government) as well as clerics grasped the implications of ‘faith alone’, not only for their soul's eternal security, but also for all of life. The church was dethroned as the all-embracing authority by being placed on the other side of the justification won by Jesus Christ. The institutional church and the state both stood on the other side of what God had done for sinners in Jesus Christ so that, in different ways, they might help believers “to live in God by faith, and our neighbours by love”.

Of Germany's almost 200 cities and towns with populations in excess of 1,000, most witnessed Protestant movements. Some of the largest, with populations in excess of 25,000, became overwhelmingly Protestant. Steven Ozment, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University (previously Yale), lists the religious and social changes brought by the Reformation in 16th century Europe:

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Even in its most modest form the Reformation called for, and in most Protestant areas permanently achieved, an end to mandatory fasting; auricular confession; the worship of saints, relics, and images; indulgences; pilgrimages and shrines; vigils; weekly, monthly, and annual masses for the dead; the belief in Purgatory; Latin worship services; the sacrifice of the Mass; numerous religious ceremonies, festivals, and holidays; the canonical hours; monasteries and mendicant orders; the sacraments of marriage, extreme unction, confirmation, holy orders, and penance; clerical celibacy; clerical immunity from civil taxation and criminal jurisdiction; non-resident benefices; excommunication and interdict; canon law; episcopal and papal authority; and the traditional scholastic education of the clergy.¹

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The problem for 20th-century English-speaking evangelicals is that, in standing as the beneficiaries of these gains hard won by our 16th-century ancestors, we may forget the importance of what they lost, and the need for it to stay lost.

Why? Because we tend to forget that ‘justification by faith’ is primarily the story of God's faithful actions in the world in his Son, Jesus Christ. It is because God justified himself that we are justified, and only for that reason. It is too easy in our preaching to make ‘faith’ something we do—a work almost—which smuggles in all the dross and anguish of human-centred religion which Luther left behind.

I am, of course, not against using new words in gospel preaching, so long as it is gospel preaching—telling the mighty story of God's acts already done outside of us, for us, in Jesus Christ:

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The Gospel must be preached in an evangelical way, that is, in accordance with the nature and content of the Gospel of free grace, else it is ‘another Gospel’. It is not faith that justifies us, but Christ in whom we have faith. But the history of Protestantism shows that it is possible to speak of justification by faith in such a way that the emphasis is shifted from ‘Christ’ to ‘me’, so that what becomes finally important is ‘my faith’, ‘my decision’, ‘my conversion’, and not really Christ himself.²

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Endnotes

¹ S Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities, [Yale, 1975] 117-118.

² TF Torrance, God and Rationality.