Lutherans: Justifying Justification

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An Unworthy Friar. It was the sale of indulgences for good works that touched off Martin Luther to publish his 95 theses at Wittenberg. As a devout young Augustinian friar, Luther had been obsessed by the thought of his unworthiness as a sinful man before God, and no routine of works, confession, penance or asceticism could mitigate his spiritual anxiety. But seated one day in the study of the monastery, as he later related, Luther suddenly gained an insight into what St. Paul meant by the just living by faith. Luther interpreted Paul to mean that the sinner was justified only by a gift of God's grace, which came solely through faith in Christ's redemptive act of dying on the Cross. Because of man's unworthiness, good works could not affect God's favoring glance; they were simply "the fruits of faith" −the response of man to divine favor. "Here I realized," Luther wrote later, "that I had been truly reborn, and had entered Paradise itself through open doors."

The doctrine of justification by faith alone was the keystone of the Reformation. Although modified in various ways by Calvinists and Anabaptists, justification by faith was accepted by every Protestant church. In the earliest Reformation confessions, Lutheran Theologian Werner Elert sums up, justification is "the nucleus; in the later ones it is the central point; in the most recent ones it is the assumption that no longer can be called into question." But at Helsinki, justification and its meaning for modern man came in for some severe questioning. "It is an open secret," charged Dr. Gerhard Gloege of Bonn University, "that today neither the church nor the world knows what to do with this doctrine of justification. For the fathers it was the fountain and rule of faith and life. For the church today it is clearly an embarrassment."

Closer to Rome? One reason that it embarrasses churchmen, suggested a rejected draft of a Federation statement on justification, is the plain fact that even after four centuries, justification by faith alone is only vaguely comprehensible to millions. Another is that downgrading works seems less acceptable than ever to self-justifying, activist modern man. A third and more serious challenge to traditional Lutheran thinking came from the Federation's Commission on Theology: modern Biblical study makes it clear that justification is not, as Luther thought, the dominating theme of the New Testament.

Ironically, re-examination of this central Protestant doctrine could some day lead to a gradual healing of the breach between Rome and Reformation. Dr. Johannes Witte of Rome's Gregorian University, one of two Roman Catholic observers at the assembly, argued that many modern Lutheran interpretations of justification, by stressing the life of faith rather than the initial encounter with God, are moving closer to Catholic doctrine. And Catholic scholars are quick to notice the similarities: in a 1957 book that rocked German theological circles, Father Hans Kiing of Tiibingen argued that Karl Earth's understanding of justification was essentially compatible with the teachings of the Council of Trent. For Theologian Barth, God's grace, acquired through faith, implies a command to service in this life.