Lutherans in Practice

… the old and the more recent Calvinists teach that those who are actually illuminated unto faith and salvation do not receive this illumination through the external Word, the Scriptures, but receive it without this Word, through an immediate illumination of the Holy Ghost. It is obvious that such teaching makes the truth that Scripture is God’s inspired Word entirely worthless for practical purposes. Calvinists must become, as has been pointed out by men in their own midst, Lutherans in practice, that is, they must forget their ‘gratia particularis’ and their ‘immediata Spiritus Sancti operatio’ if, terrified by the Law, they desire to derive any consolation from the written Word as the Word of God. And the grace of God leads many a Calvinist to forget his Calvinism in the time of need. The synergists too – those that still teach the inspiration of Scripture – make this doctrine practically worthless. Because the synergists make the obtaining of God’s grace dependent on an achievement of man (self-decision, self-determination, “different conduct,” lesser guilt in comparison with others), and because this required achievement is found in no man (Rom. 3:19: “That all the world become guilty before God”; v.22: “There is no difference:), by their obstruction of the ‘sola gratia’ raise as strong a barrier against the obtaining of God’s grace as do the Calvinists by their obstruction of the ‘universalis gratia.’ The Christian faith which is counted by God for righteousness is convinced that God “justifieth the ungodly” (Rom. 4:5). Whoever considers himself as being better before God, or less guilty than the other men, is ‘eo ipso’ excluding himself from grace (Luke 18:9-14; Rom. 11:22). A synergist can be saved, just like the Calvinist, only if he becomes inconsistent. As the Calvinists must forget their limitation of the ‘universalis gratia,’ so the synergists must forget their limitation of the ‘sola gratia’ if the truth that the Scriptures are God’s own Word is to be of any practical value to them. And here, too, this forgetting, no doubt, occurs in many instances. It is solely the grace of God which saves from an error which is fatal in itself. It goes without saying that the Romanish theologians, too, completely destroy the practical value of their profession of the inspiration of Scripture by assigning the authoritative interpretation of Scripture to the Pope. The result of this exegetical method is that it is no longer God who through His Word, the Holy Scriptures, speaks to men, instructs, and rules them, but that the Pope – pretending to speak in the name of Scripture – subjects the Church and the State to his papal Ego. Luther is right in declaring that the principle of the “Romanists” that “the interpretation of Scripture belongs to no one except the Pope” is one of the “three walls” behind which the Papacy has entrenched itself and seeks to set up and maintain its rule. (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, St. L. X:269f.)

Via Pieper’s “On the History of the Doctrine of Inspiration,” from Christian Dogmatics, vol. 1, 275-76.