Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1954, Page 42

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42 Proceedings of the Forty-Third Convention,

denied within the American Lutheran Church, yet the Common
Confession does not definitely state that God has declared_all
mankind to be righteous in Christ” (Our Relations with The Lu-
theran Church — Missouri Synod, p. 9, under “Secondly”).

6. That the Common Confession “still leaves room for the
thought that the justification of the sinner is not complete until
the missing factor of personal (subjective) faith is supplied”; that
it “admits of false answers to the question concerning the function
of faith in justification” and thereby “impairs” the truth in the
article of objective justification (Wisconsin Synod Proceedings,
1951, p. 129); and

7. That “the Common Confession gives support to the thought
that justification occurs only when faith is already present” (our
emphasis; see the Wisconsin Synod’s Tract No.3, Every Sinner
Declared Righteous, p. 6).

Answer: Basically all these allegations amount to saying that
the Common Confession either does not at all, or at least not
clearly, confess the doctrine of Objective Justification, or that it
teaches merely a so-called doctrine of the universal redemption
of mankind from which the actus forensis, or the act of justification,
is excluded.

The position taken in these allegations appears to be founded

on the wholly mistaken notion that the terms which are employed
in the Common Confession for the purpose of expressing objective
justification are not forensic or juridical concepts, i.e., that they
do not include within themselves the decision, verdict, or declara-
tion of God as Judge. But such a position is potentially dangerous
and could easily terminate in a breaking down of the very doctrine
it is meant to defend, namely, the doctrine of Objective Justification.
It is fraught with danger because it threatens to tear at the very
foundations on which objective justification rests, for the terms
employed in the Common Confession under the articles of Re-
demption and Justification have always been regarded by the
writers of the Holy Scriptures and by our fathers as containing
within themselves the actus forensis, and they have been so used
by them. This is the issue which we cannot ignore.
-" The strongest of these terms is perhaps the forensic phrase
“forgiveness of sins.” Dr. Francis Pieper employs just this phrase
to establish the forensic nature of the term “justification.” He says:
“Byrthermore, the actus forensis (of justification) is clearly proved
by all those Scripture passages in which justification is described
as being the forgiveness of sins, the covering of sins, the nonim-
putation of sins (Rom. 4:6-8). Paul uses the terms ‘iniquities are
forgiven,’ ‘sins are covered,’ ‘not impute sins,’ as synonyms of ‘God
imputeth righteousness,’ of dikaioun.” Dr. Pieper quotes also with
approval what Luthardt says of these terms. Luthardt says: “These
words show that Paul does not take justification to be the moral
transformation of man, but as being identical with remission of
sins.” (Dogmatics, F. Pieper, TI, 525, 526.)

The Formula of Concord also defines the “forgiveness of sins”
as an actus forensis conversely when it says: “We believe, teach
and confess that according to the usage of Holy Scripture the worc
justify means in this article to absolve, that is, to declare free fror
sins... . Prov. 17:15; Rom. 8:33 (F. C., Epit., WI, Trigl., 793, par. 5)
It even condemns as an error the position that “the words justify