Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith: as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”
On Reformation Sunday, nine of our young men and women stood before the congregation and affirmed their baptism. Each of them prepared a faith statement and shared it with the congregation. I hope you were there to hear them. They also gave me an idea for this months newsletter: prepare and share a faith statement with you.
A newsletter article I want to dedicate to our confirmation students, who task it is to wrestle with understanding of the importance of faith.
“Living by faith” is not only the key component of Paul in his epistle to the Romans but the whole of the apostle’s theology, and indeed the message of the Bible itself. But what does it mean to live by the faith that God’s all powerful? Word creates and imparts?
Those who try to answer this question can learn from Martin Luther. As he himself tells us, the gates of paradise opened for him when this truth disclosed itself to him and he recognized that the righteousness of faith consists solely in the fact that we are justified by the Word of God and with it have forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
There appears to be a general awareness in the worlds of church and theology that justification by faith is the center of Luther’s Reformation, but this appearance is deceptive. When neither the breadth nor the depth of justification by faith alone is understood, and we fail to comprehend what is truly at stake it becomes an empty formula passed on with an apologetic tone. Raising the anxious question if justification has anything to say to us, who are allegedly inquiring not for the grace of God, but supposedly more radically for the very existence of God.
The problems of the Reformation seem outdated. Today the emphasis has shifted, without the former question having been solved, which does not make things easier. In our time, it is not so much atheism that is on the agenda but the return of “new”-often polytheistic (belief in or worship of more than one god)-types of religion.
Generally speaking, today, we do not experience the law as God’s law but rather as anonymous law, or at best a “categorical imperative” (the central philosophical moral concept introduced by Immanuel Kant, often understood as the father of the enlightenment).
Nevertheless, in this and in other modern recasting and debates of our situation before God, there always remains the inescapable obligation (law) that marks every person, an obligation that becomes fatal if the law and gospel are not distinguished. When justification by faith becomes just another option among many instead of the article upon which the church stands or fall we are in trouble. Justification is the hinge on which the very being of the world and its relation to God rest. God is obliged neither to create and preserve the world nor forgive sins.
“All this is done out of pure fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit of worthiness of mine at all,” as Luther states in his explanation of the first article of the Apostles’ Creed.
This in turn raises the question of God’s own righteousness: the question of suffering and of the end to all evil. Justification by faith points towards the eschaton (a fancy theological term that refers to the end times, the final destiny of human kind) removing the hiddenness of God and God’s righteousness.
As one of my theological professors taught, justification by faith is the final judgement giving out ahead of time. Having giving us the final judgement ahead of time we are free to not close our eyes to injustice and suffering, but rather lamenting them and living against them by faith, not giving them the last word.
Justification by faith alone reaches beyond our life time, it is valid not only for the sixteenth or twentieth century, but also for our new century and the times to come. It is the fundamental question of our being, our relation to God, the neighbor, and the world. It concerns not merely one’s own history, not only the world history, but also natural history. Justification is not one theme among many, it is everything. That is why there is a Reformation Sunday.
Blessing on you and yours,
Pastor Dan