LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2001, Page 418

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418 ADDITIONAL THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS AND REPORTS—OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

dered, but Rome was not required to reform her traditional defini-
tion, which was officially restated in the 1994 Catechism of the
Catholic Church: “Justification includes the remission of sins, sanc-
tification, and the renewal of the inner man” (498). The character-
istic Roman Catholic fusion of “forensic” and “transformist” views
of justification has been wrongly attributed to Luther by such
prominent scholars as Alister McGrath and Tuomo Mannermaa, as
will be shown below.'?

2. Sola Gratia: No Real Advance

The present Declaration is willing to grant sola gratia simply
because the Lutheran and Roman parties had different understand-
ings of “grace.” If saving grace is God’s undeserved favor, as in
Rom. 4:4 and 11:6, then, in the article of justification, grace and
works (Law) are clearly mutually exclusive. Justification is either
by grace or by works, but not both. But if grace now means infused
grace, a spiritual power poured into the soul by which we love God
and merit salvation, then such infused grace and works in justifica-
tion are related as “both/and.” Neither the Joint Declaration nor the
background dialog have come to terms with these contradictory
meanings of “grace.”!* This would have unraveled the illusory
“consensus” on justification. Another ELCA critic of the Declara-
tion, Louis A. Smith, writes:

Second, and in witness to the confusion produced by the niceness,
the document keeps pointing us 1o a doctrine of justification by grace, as
if ihe mere agreement on that terminology was some kind of break-
through. Ii isn’t! The 16th century had any number of colloquies be-
tween Roman Catholics and Lutherans who knew perfecily well that
the disagreeing parties used the same language. Whai they disagreed
aboul was the meaning of the terms. Grace was for Lutherans favor Dei,
the persona] good will of God. For Roman Catholics, grace referred to a
quasi-substantial something, habitus or qualitas that was infused
(poured) into the human soul. Indeed, in the 16th century, even the lan-
guage of justification by faith could have been agreed on, if Lutherans
would only have accepted that faith referred to the beginning of and a
necessary element within a process, which then gave its name to the
process as a whole.”

Perhaps the only genuine departure from the Tridentine scheme
is section 4.6, Assurance of Salvation (36. Catholics can share the
concern of the Reformers to ground faith in the objective reality of
Christ’s promise. .. .No one may doubt God’s mercy and Christ's
merit... Recognizing his own failures, however, the believer may
yet be certain that God intends his salvation.” The six ELCA the-
ologians see here “a possible ecumenical breakthrough,” although,
in their opinion, it is “undeveloped.” Unfortunately, they say, this
section “appears to have no connection to the rest of the docu-
ment.” The Finnish document commended the stronger language
of an earlier version: “Thus it is true to say: faith as assurance of
salvation [is] a profound consensus on this question.” This formu-
Jation required Roman approval and so it is not surprising that the
final version toned down the language. Smith is genuinely pes-
simistic about the overall value of this section and the other “good”
one, “Law and Gospel.” He notes: “Unless it should turn out that
sections 4.5 and 4.6 are to be taken as the hermeneutical keys to
the entire document, . . . [then] the rest of the document is much
fluff, an appropriate target for a white-out sale.”!7

3. Justification: The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls, or
One Truth Among Others?

Much more is at stake in this discussion for Lutherans than for
Roman Catholics, who see justification as one topic among others
and give it another definition.!8 For Lutherans justification is the
integrative center of all faith and theology.'? Without justification,
Lutherans lose the distinctive characteristic of their theology and
the reason for their existence. It is the core of all Christian truth
and gives form and shape to all other biblical articles. All articles
are at stake in justification, and justification is at stake in all arti-
cles. It is the very engine that drives not only the Augustana (XX,

2001 Convention Workbook

8) but the entire Concordia (Apology IV, 2; XII, 3, 10; Smalcald
Articles II/I; Large Catechism, Creed, 33, 54, 55; Formula of Con-
cord, S.D., III, 6; V, 1). The six ELCA theologians are quite right in
saying: “Lutherans have always insisted that justification by faith
alone is the chief article and the criterion, the ‘plumb line’ by
which all doctrine and practice is to be judged.”"°

Paragraph 18 of the Joint Declaration tries to accommodate the
Lutheran position by saying that the article of justification “is more
than just one part of Christian doctrine” and that it “stands in an
essential relation to all truths of faith.” However, as we have seen,
the attempt to have the article of justification defined as overall
“criterion” was blocked by the Vatican and the “criterion” reduced
to one among others.

Some who may find the protracted discussion on justification
too abstract, easily recognize differences in beliefs and practices
that the Declaration leaves untouched. These “neuralgic points” are
concealed under broad dogmatic terminology in paragraph 43 of
the Declaration. The U.S. dialogue, however, was more forthright:
“Some of the consequences of the differing outlooks seem irrecon-
cilable, especially in reference to particular applications of justifi-
cation by faith as a criterion of all church proclamation and prac-
tice” (paragraph 121). To wit: “Catholics and Lutherans, for
example, traditionally differ on purgatory, the papacy and the cult
of saints” (153). The solution of “this impasse” (121) is, of course,
for the Lutherans to surrender the Reformation position: “Luther-
ans, however, do not exclude the possibility that such teachings can
be understood and used in ways consistent with justification by
faith; if such teachings are preached and practiced in accord with
this doctrine, they need not, from this Lutheran perspective, divide
the churches even though Lutherans do not accept them” (153)!?!
The Augsburg Confession (XXI-XX VIII) and the Smalcald Arti-
cles (Part II) applied the criterion of justification to practice in the
same way they applied it to doctrine. Lutherans of Reformation
times held that practices which contravened justification did in fact
divide the church. Practice mattered as applied doctrine. The Evan-
gelical-Roman Catholic Gift of Salvation paper spells out “diverse
understandings of merit, rcward, purgatory, and indulgences, Mar-
ian devotion and the assistance of the saints in the life of salvation,
and the possibility of salvation for those who have not been evan-
gelized.” For Lutherans it is nonsense to speak of consensus on jus-
tification if these issues remain unsettled. Differences in practices
point to fundamental doctrinal discrepencies.

4. Original Sin?

Behind the Lutheran-Roman Catholic differences on justifica-
tion are equally fundamental differences on how original sin is un-
derstood. Differences on one doctrine mirror differences in others.
Lutherans hold that original sin is really sin and that it remains after
Baptism. Roman Catholic doctrine holds that original sin is eradi-
cated by Baptism and that concupiscence is not really sin. Avery
Dulles raises the issue in his cautionary piece: “Can unjustified sin-
ners, with the help of grace, freely dispose themselves to receive
the grace of justification, as affirmed in Trent’s canon 4 on justifi-
cation? Or are sinners so radically corrupted that they cannot, even
with the help of actual grace, prepare themselves for justifica-
tion?”** The issue came to a head in Trent’s Decree Concerning
Original Sin (Fifth Session), which calmly anathematized St. Paul:
“This concupiscence, which at times the Apostle calls sin [Rom.
6-8; Col. 3] the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has
never understood to be called sin, as truly and properly sin in those
born again, but because it is from sin and inclines to sin. But if any-
one is of the contrary opinion, let him be anathema.”** Hubert
Jedin, the great modern Roman Catholic authority on Trent, ac-
knowledges that problem: “The Council was now brought up
against the very basis of the Lutheran teaching on justification, and
one of the most difficult points of controversy, because Luther’s