Grace After Luther
By the seventeenth century Luther’s formulation of justification had been contradicted in part if not in total by the Protestant doctrine of applied grace. This marked a curious commonality between Lutherans and their presumed Roman Catholic opponents. In Roman Catholic teaching applied grace is at the heart of grace in general. In Lutheranism it became the center of the doctrine of justification. In both traditions applied grace becomes definitive, Wilhelm Dantine writes, “of a personal appropriation of salvation; it is a matter of becoming a believer and of being a believer.”
For Roman Catholics, justification meant very little for practical piety. For Lutherans faith in justification became something visible, a subjective way of appropriating salvation. Whether it was in devotional writings or choral music personal piety had developed a profound and layered function amongst Protestants. But how did this turn away from Luther’s fundamental hermeneutic of justification occur? Perhaps the answer is best located in the development and popular acceptance of the ordo salutis. In the Protestant understanding of the “order of salvation” justification was fitted into a scheme of salvation, losing its most elemental character and strength: the simul. For Christians the Gospel is a double exchange (a double in-dwelling). Christ takes on the sinner’s struggle with sin, Satan and death (the unhappy exchange – the Cross) and the sinner receives Christ’s victorious righteousness, life and salvation (the happy exchange – the Resurrection). According to the ordo salutis this way of speaking had almost no theological currency.
Stemming from the era of late Orthodoxy and early Pietism the term ‘ordo salutis’ gained its footing in the middle of what is referred to by Church historians as “the time of High Orthodoxy.” The ordo was formulated as a system of divine actions, following and worked out one from another, constructed in such a way that one could come to know the riches of the Holy Spirit’s blessing and significance for his life. Eventually even the Holy Spirit with all his benefits was understood as a chain of religious occurrences in the inward man. The ordo salutis became nothing more than a scheme of salvation in which one was transformed through a process of inward grace-provoked growth. Reading the works of Reinhold Seeberg, Heinrich Schmid, and Christoph Luthhard one can follow this break from Luther’s formulation of justification. It is rooted in the use of juridical categories to define the function of justification.
In the sixteenth century theologians such as Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer had used “forensic” language as a means of describing the biblical character of justification: a pardon is declared by the divine judge on account of Christ’s merit. But pushed far enough and faith emerges as a means (medium salutis) of justification. As Dantine writes, “it followed logically that faith, because of its undeniable importance to the salvation of the individual, in the end became the all-supporting ‘means,’ the secret mediator, and in any case the central pillar of the entire justification event.” This can be seen most readily in Pietism and its off-shoots.
As the effect of faith (effectus fidei) justification was defined in such a way that faith itself became the secret hub of Christian life. Faith became the feeling of absolute dependence in exactly the manner Schleiermacher defined it. As Heinrich Schmid explained, “This act occurs at the instant in which the merit of Christ is appropriated by faith.” “Faith,” for Schmid, sounds remarkably similar to the Roman Catholic teaching about the Mass! The doctrine of faith as something applicatory moved away from Luther’s formulation of justification, reversing in many ways what Luther had clarified regarding the distinction between law and gospel, faith and works, God hidden and revealed, etc. One can recognize this “reversal” running through Pietism, the Great Awakening, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Bultmann, and the Finnish school of Luther research which presumes that faith effects justification.
In the Finnish school, for example, the work of theologians such as Tuomo Mannermaa marks a pre-occupation with faith and the inward man. For Maanermaa, to maintain a purity regarding justification with its grace centered character the continuity of salvation must be clearly mapped – in this case, as a development that takes place intra nos, in the inner-self of believers. This understanding that faith effects a change in the ‘inner-man’ has also been helped along by the Protestant and Roman Catholic reliance on legal norms and idealistic ethics of sentiment to define how justification assists in helping one work out salvation according to an ordo salutis.
As a result justification is not necessarily equated, for Lutherans, with Luther’s formulation of the frohliche Wechsel – the joyous exchange. Instead it has been re-formulated and defined according to an ordo salutis. The description of justification at present has come to sound remarkably similar to the language used at the Council of Trent that, “for those who work well unto the end and trust in God, eternal life is to be offered, both as a grace mercifully promised to the sons of God through Christ Jesus, and as a reward promised by God himself…”