Luther's Contribution of the Two Kinds of Righteousness
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.ย. 2024
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This talk was first given at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2022. The overarching topic was holiness. This talk is a Lutheran take on holiness which is rooted in Luther's distinction between the two kinds of righteousness.
Me a simple man. Jordan uploads, me clicks.
The Law kills and condems but rightly so. I need the Law to kill me daily because I sin daily. It always chases me into the baptismal arms of Christ and makes me grateful everytime I take the Lord's cup or when I hear God's absolution every week. It makes humble and enables gratitude. This is how Law & Gospel continues to justify and sanctifies me. God be praised.
Need to read all Luther's scholarship library
Two things stand out for me after 50+ years of study. 1. God is the safe yesterday, today and forever. Therefore, all the emphasis on righteous living in the old testament canon is still valid and desirable in the Christian. 2. Jesus taught a deeper level of reality when it comes to sin; the level of "intent", whereby our inner motivation is just as important as our demonstrable action. The bottom line therefore is "actual" righteousness, not just "positional" righteousness is the will of God. You must be "born again" by the Spirit and be transformed into a creature which "desires" to do God's will, rather than your own.
I want Grace
Love the investigation of righteousness in Paul, NT Wright calls it “covenant justice” and I don’t really like that, it seems to omit imputed legal freedom.
Honduras makes me blind and quite forgetful about minor details of Star Trek reruns.
This was a great talk, but I think the problem with what you are trying to do here is that Luther's doctrine of justification is, in fact, inconsistent with the Formula of Concord. Luther has a straightforwardly Augustinian doctrine of justification. The distinction between the two kinds of righteousness is a distinction between God's predestination (where righteousness is infused in the Christian by grace alone, though never fully completed until death), and our own free will (where we cooperate with the faith and love God instills in us, but this does not determine whether we are saved or damned--only God's election does that). Luther has no conception of forensic justification as later Lutherans understand it, where the Christian is counted as righteous on account of Christ's obedience.
Luther has a forensic aspect to his doctrine, but it is totally different from the Formula's. From Luther's Treatise on Baptism in 1519: "Man, therefore, is altogether pure and guiltless, but sacramentally, which means nothing else than that he has the sign of God, i. e., baptism, by which it is shown that his sins are all to be dead, and that he too is to die in grace, and at the Last Day to rise again, pure, sinless, guiltless, to everlasting life. Because of the sacrament, then, it is true that he is without sin and guilt; but because this is not yet completed, and he still lives in sinful flesh, he is not without sin, and not in all things pure, but has begun to grow into purity and innocence...Thus you understand how a man becomes in baptism guiltless, pure and sinless, and yet continues full of evil inclinations, that he is called pure only because he has begun to be pure, and has a sign and covenant of this purity, and is always to become more pure...So, then, we understand that the innocence which is ours by baptism is so called simply and solely because of the mercy of God, which has begun this work in us, bears patiently with sin, and regards us as though we were sinless. This also explains why Christians are called in the Scriptures the children of mercy, a people of grace, and men of God’s good-will. It is because in baptism they have begun to become pure, and by God’s mercy are not condemned with their sins that still remain, until, through death and at the Last Day, they become wholly pure, as the sign of baptism shows."
Luther's view of imputation is that Christians are called pure because they have both the beginning of purity and the promise of God in baptism that he will make us completely pure on the last day. This is completely different from the Formula's understanding of imputation: "He presents and imputes to us the righteousness of Christ’s obedience, on account of which righteousness we are received into grace by God, and regarded as righteous." (Article III)
I've been laboring over the issue of justification in recent weeks. It seems to me that Lutheran theology's complete exclusion of works from the category of justification is inconsistent with the way Scripture speaks of them. It seems that the honest and natural way to read James is that our good works are an actual fulfillment, rather than merely a demonstration, of the justification we have through faith.
That said, would you say that imputed righteousness is incompatible with the kind of "sacramental" righteousness Luther speaks of? Would it not be correct to say that in baptism, our "sacramental" righteousness is an actual acceptance in God's eyes for Christ's sake? Just as we are already heirs of eternal life yet look forward to a future resurrection, can we not say we are actually perfectly righteous through imputation yet look forward to the day when this is made manifest in sinless glorification?
😆 did you get that from the handbook of anti-Lutheran hate speech?
Wasn't Martin Luther the worst human being who ever lived though?
Oh yes. I heard he used to spit roast Jews and Anabaptists over an open flame fueled by papal bulls and books of the deuterocanon.
He’s one of the silliest human beings who has ever existed.
He was also a massive gnostic apparently.
@@Butterinthefield proof ?
@thelonelysponge5029 it's not a claim I agree with, but it's a common accusation I see online from contemporary anabaptists, neo-pelagians and so-called "kingdom christians'.