Chapter IV. The Reformation Principle of Justification by Faith in Christ
1870160 min read
THE circle of thoughts, the historical development of which I am at present engaged in tracing, undergoes in the first instance, at the hand of the Reformers, an important modification in respect of form. In the mediæval system of doctrine, the treatment of the satisfaction or merit which Christ gave or acquired towards God on behalf of the human race or of the elect, was carried out in a purely objective way; the influence of this work upon man was always only alluded to in that connexion, and treated with doctrinal fulness, on the other hand, in an entirely different part of the system, in the doctrine of justification. The Reformers, on the contrary, not only take together the two thoughts in their immediate reciprocal relation to each other, but at the same time fix the chief interest upon the thought of justification, and seemingly assign to the doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction the position of a subsidiary doctrine, which has the function of explaining the assertion they make, that justification is conditioned exclusively by faith. This formal change in the way of putting the problem is, however, an indication of a change in the nature and contents of the thought of justification. When Luther at once places it in a position of central importance, and emphasizes his own view of it as the decisive and indispensable truth, he means by justification through faith in Christ a subjective religious experience of the believer within the Church, and not an objective theological dictum in the Church’s system of doctrinal beliefs. In this respect Luther’s apprehension of justification differs in kind from the Roman Catholic doctrine that bears the same name to such an extent that the customary procedure of the old polemical theology, and of the modern science of comparative “Symbolic” in comparing with one another the evangelical and the Roman Catholic views of justification, as if they were antitheses framed with direct reference to each other, is, at the outset, mistaken, fruitless, misleading. For by justification through Christ solely on condition of appropriating faith is meant an experience of the believer complete in itself and continuous. What the Roman Catholic doctrine understands by justification, on the other hand, on account of the machinery declared to be necessary,—the sacraments and active fulfilment of the laws of God and the Church,—can never possibly pass as a simple experience into the soul of the believer. Nay, rather the assurance of being justified before God, even if it be awakened for a moment by means of absolution, is forbidden to the ordinary course of everyday life as being presumptuous. The difference in kind between the two thoughts, though they bear the same name, appears too in their complete diversity, and mutual irrelevance in application and function. The Roman Catholic doctrine of justification is meant to explain how and by what means an actually righteous person, who can be judged as such in consistence with truth even by God, is produced out of a sinner. The meaning of the religious experience of justification, on the other hand, in the Reformation sense, is that the believer (who as such is regenerate and a member of the Church, and who through the Holy Ghost is capable of producing good works, and actually engaged in them), on account of the abiding imperfection of these good works does not find his standing before God, his righteousness and the ground of his abiding assurance of salvation, in them, but only in the mediatorial and perfectly righteous work of Christ appropriated by faith. It accords only with this definition of the thought that Luther, as well as Melanchthon, the Formula Concordiæ as well as the Apology for the Augsburg Confession, that Calvin as well as Zwingli strive to establish in it the consolation of pious consciences, the quieting of souls anxious about their salvation. It is only as a subsequent and secondary matter that the Reformers direct their attention to the position to be assigned in the theological system to the thought that has been religiously and practically experienced. This last undertaking, however, was not carried out by Luther and Melanchthon with the clearness and independence of the religious and practical employment of that truth that were to be wished, and it will remain to be considered whether and how far succeeding dogmatists have succeeded in finishing the task which their great predecessors had left uncompleted. In the order of the doctrines, that of Christ’s satisfaction had naturally to come first, then follows the doctrine of the awakening of faith or of regeneration, then the doctrine of justification, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and then (not before) the doctrine of the habitual renewal of the justified, so that he becomes fitted for good works. In this shape, now, the evangelical doctrines of justification and regeneration come into contrast with the Romish doctrine of justification or regeneration; and here, first of all, does a comparison between these doctrines and that of Rome become possible. This being so, it is absurd to measure the two doctrines of justification by one another, although they bear the same name; for the compass and extent of the Romish doctrine are covered only by two or three doctrines of the evangelical system taken together. But the reason why the thought, which on the part of the Romish Church is conceived as a unity, is analysed on the part of the Evangelical Church into several distinct notions, is explained by the successors of the Reformers always merely from the religious need on the part of the regenerate for justification by faith, but never from objective considerations of the systematic connexion of Christian doctrine. It will appear also, that in the objective doctrinal exposition of the thought of justification by faith, the Lutherans were precisely those who failed to pay attention to all the conditioning elements under which the religious conception was brought by Luther. When, accordingly, school-tradition raised itself to a position of supreme power in the Lutheran Church, the imperfectly expounded thought of justification by faith came to be unintelligible just in proportion as men treated it, in the first instance, as an objective doctrine, and made its religious value to depend upon acceptance of the formula. And when afterwards Pietism undertook anew to bring back the doctrine to subjective praxis, or actual religious and moral experience, that was not done in the churchly spirit of the Reformation, but in a spirit of separation and sectarianism hostile to the Church. Since, finally, the efforts of the Evangelical Church of the nineteenth century have gone back upon the Reformation, and believe that they have regained the regulative principle at once of Christian life and of theological creed in the distinctive truth of justification by faith, it might probably seem as if no obstacles had to be overcome in the historical investigation of the question, what the Reformers, and particularly Luther, actually maintained. But, unfortunately, the state of the case is far otherwise. For the repristination of Luther’s standpoint in our day has been able to avoid neither the pietistic nor the scholastic distortion of that doctrine from what it originally was to his religious intuition, and on that account the historical and the theoretical ascertainment of the churchly sphere of vision within which Luther connected justification exclusively with faith in Christ’s satisfaction, are alike problems still unresolved, because no one has yet apprehended them.1