[1] Our book Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times offers conversation as the intersubjective mode we have as persons and Christians for exchanging our respective positions on difficult topics. We thank our interlocutors in this issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics for engaging with themes in our book that resonated with them. We began writing Ordinary Faith because we were drawn to participating as theologians in the conversation about how Christians today might discuss the topics that divide us the most. But we also wrote our book to ask how theology might matter to those for whom challenging issues matter and precisely because so many of them were arguing on theological grounds, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly. We are grateful for both the joyful and the uneasy responses to what matters to us in the book, namely the relation between the doctrine of justification and the pursuit of justice.
[2] Our book makes what many Lutheran seminary professors have described as a category mistake. Justification has nothing to do with justice, these professors say. The gospel speaks the word of God’s action of forgiveness in Christ; the law prepares us for the gospel by maximizing our sin. These are incommensurable realities. The gospel mandates no law, this argument continues, because, well, that is what those Calvinists promote as the pesky “third use of the law.” Lutheran identity is freedom from the law; Calvinists presumably add to the gospel by promoting the law uniquely mandated of all justified Christians. Calvinists are busy in the world (as Max Weber claimed), while Lutherans are quietist. The gospel frees Lutherans from the law that can no longer obligate them. Sometimes Lutherans sin boldly, perhaps too boldly, because a life of freedom under the gospel knows no law.
[3] This inherited Lutheran way of thinking is popular and powerful. It is a habit of theological thinking that immediately questions anyone who proposes a relation between justification and justice. Justification, on one hand, must be kept free from any legal intrusion. Justice-seeking, on the other hand, is what Lutherans can do in the world. No causal necessity relates justification to justice. The choice is an either/or: either one promotes the doctrine of justification as the article by which the church stands or falls, or one advocates for justice.
[4] Indeed, the doctrine of justification appears in modern Lutheranism like the ghost of Christmas past. We are embarrassed by it. We acknowledge its antisemitic implications. It lingers in Lutheranism as some sort of nostalgic remembrance of a forgotten identity. It brings us back to our seminary days and as such may be a trigger, for who among us is not triggered when recalling our seminary experience? In fact, the doctrine of justification is so closely identified with Lutheranism that we find it hard to even think about justification as the wonderful reality uniting all Christians! For some of us, the names of Lutheran theologians George Lindbeck and Oswald Bayer serve to discipline any innovation in the doctrine and to dispel feelings of discomfort when challenged by new formulations. The gospel truth of the doctrine of justification must be defended against those who would subvert the disjunction with a conjunction.
[5] The difficult issue for Lutherans is precisely the conjunction we presuppose as our book’s contribution. We query the Lutheran polarization between those who tend to prefer, on the one hand, justification at the expense of justice, and those, on the other hand, who tend to prioritize justice without doctrine. Justification, as we claim, has something to do with justice-seeking in the broad sense of the gerund! In fact, we deliberately chose the term “justice-seeking” in the book to open the conversation to the many ways in which ordinary believers contribute to and participate in the seeking of justice for themselves, their neighbors, their communities, and nations. A critical dogmatics of the sort Paul Hinlicky recommends can do right by the very nature of doctrine as always in a state of re-formation. Doctrine and ethics can go together. The question is: How?
[6] Before addressing the “how,” we acknowledge the popular and pernicious dualism between justification and justice that U.S. Lutherans inherited. Lutherans in the U.S. were taught by (or read books by) seminary professors who for the most part had been trained in a tradition of Lutheran theology that owes its origins to theological developments in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century.[1] These German Lutheran professors of theology or church history, like Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, and Karl Holl, sought to bring theological method into conversation with an academic culture that privileged a historicist method alongside a neo-Kantian conceptuality. While these scholars acknowledged that Christian faith was based on revelation-–a subject not open to historical scrutiny-–they recognized that the historical development of Christianity could be the subject of historical, ethical, and sociological study. To distinguish between the “revelatory” aspect and the empirical aspect of Christianity, they used the Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the phenomenal. The transcendental aspect was that part of Christian experience that eluded empirical scrutiny—for example, the resurrection of Jesus which no human had witnessed, or God’s justification of the transcendental inner dimension of the human person that cannot be phenomenally experienced. The phenomenal or empirical aspect was that part of religious experience that could be discerned and studied-–for example, the witnesses of the empty tomb or the disciples’ sightings of the resurrected Jesus, or a believer’s actions in space and time.
[7] The German Lutherans, who had been students of Ritschl, reacted against him by taking up Kant’s idea that there is no causal relation between the transcendental and the phenomenal. Someone like Holl, and then later, Werner Elert, claimed that there is no necessary connection between justification and sanctification. They argued that the gospel is incommensurable with law;[2] the gospel forgives, while the law demands, and any confusion between the two is a category mistake. The ethical upshot here is that the qualitative distinction between law and gospel serves a quietist ethic in Lutheranism. In other words, quietism is implied by the disjunction between gospel and law.
[8] But some Lutheran theologians have taken up this German inheritance and have questioned why this particular theory about justification’s opposition to justice emerged at a specific time in German history. Risto Saarinen led this line of investigation with his dissertation published in 1989 in which he argued that modern German Lutheran theology is indeed framed by a neo-Kantian conceptuality.[3] Others, like Antti Raunio, have questioned the assumption that Lutherans are quietists, offering an interpretation of Luther’s ethics based on the double love commandment.[4] David S. Yeago has explained how German Lutheran theologians, like Werner Elert, amplified the law/gospel dialectic to an all-encompassing worldview.[5] Christine Helmer has written a book telling the story of how this dualist way of thinking about justification has been conditioned by a particular early twentieth-century German intellectual environment: its cultural celebration of a modern German Protestant Luther at a time of German reckoning with its status as a modern nation-state even as it was losing the First World War, and the disturbing rise in German nationalism.[6] In fact, the dualist theology was advocated by German Lutherans, some of whom went on to become German nationalists (like Karl Holl) and others, like Werner Elert and Paul Althaus, to support the Aryan Paragraph, as James Stayer has so insightfully described.[7] The German Lutheran inheritance of a dualism between justification and justice is indeed stubborn and pernicious. It will require ongoing theological work to query and dismantle, and theological creativity in bringing both sides together in a way that does justice to both the doctrine of justification and the pursuit of justice.
[9] Our proposal in Ordinary Faith is a contribution to the constructive effort of imagining a theology that relates justification and justice-seeking with the conjunction “and.” We think that a dualism between both poles is not tenable, particularly on our currently polarized landscape that foregrounds justice issues in both religious and political terms. Thus, we connect justification and justice-seeking, doctrine and ethics, gospel and law to press a distinctive Lutheran contribution to a public discussion currently dominated by Christians from Roman Catholic and Reformed traditions. Our proposal insists on the distinctiveness of God’s action in Christ as the ground for unity among Christians, which then sets Christians free to navigate their way through their myriad justice-seeking activities-–from doing right by reading people correctly to working for justice in local communities to political activity. We advocate what Ole Schenk beautifully describes as “becoming fluent in the theology of justification,” which is practiced as “ordinary faith rooted in Christ whose love at work in us opens up the gracious space of freedom to listen, dialogue, and engage productively on even the most fraught and risky topics.” We think that justification can sit comfortably with justice-seeking, and to echo the words of Chalcedon, both can co-exist “without confusion or division.” We offer this constructive proposal for others to think along with-–a way to stir us to think more deeply about why theological doctrines matter (if indeed they do)!
Written by Christine Helmer, with assistance from Amy Carr.
[1] The historical trajectory sketched in this and subsequent paragraphs is based on my book, Christine Helmer, How Luther Became the Reformer (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019).
[2] See Antti Raunio, “Luther’s Social Theology in the Contemporary World: Searching for the Neighbor’s Good,” in The Global Luther, Theologian for Modern Times, ed. Christine Helmer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009 ), 210-227.
[3] Risto Saarinen, Gottes Wirken auf uns: Die transzendentale Deutung des Gegenwart-Christi-Motivs in der Lutherforschung, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz (Stuttgart Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1989).
[4] Antti Raunio, Summe des Christlichen Lebens. Die ‘Goldene Regel’ als Gesetz der Liebe in der Theologie Martin Luthers von 1510 bis 1527, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 2001).
[5] David S. Yeago, “Gnosticism, Antinomianism, and Reformation Theology: Reflections on the Costs of a Construal,” Pro Ecclesia 2.1 (Winter 1993): 37-49.
[6] See footnote 1.
[7] James M. Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour: German evangelical theological factions and the interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933, McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion 39 (Kingston, Ontario; McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000).
Christine Helmer is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, where she is also Professor of German and Religious Studies. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the philosophy and theology of Martin Luther and Friedrich Schleiermacher as well as on the nature of theology in the university. She founded the Lutheran Scholars Network, which includes a subgroup “Logic and Luther.” Her most recent monograph is How Luther Became the Reformer (Westminster John Knox 2019) and she is completing a book (with co-author Amy Carr), Justification and Justice: A Theology of Ordinary Faith.