Justification or gratitude

In a Biblical Horizons lecture, Rich Bledsoe argued that the doctrine of justification by faith was the doctrine that needed to be emphasized in the 16th century to exorcise the medieval world where power was based on condemnation. Because of Luther, everyone could stand up to the condemnation of the medieval church or the contempt of an aristocracy say “You can’t condemn me; I’m justified in Christ.”

Luther’s doctrine was necessary and the right thing to emphasize. But we don’t live in a world of condemnation anymore; we live in a world of critique, a world partly made by the power of Luther’s doctrine of justification.

When detached from the gospel and secularized, as it was in modern thought, Luther’s critique of the medieval system is made into a tool that dissolve and breaks down everything. What we need is for the world to be put back together again, and that can’t be done by the doctrine of justification because justification is what broke things down in the first place. Bledsoe argued that the world can be put back together through an emphasis on gratitude.

Two comments. First, I agree with Bledsoe that gratitude must be one of the main themes of Christian theology and practice in our world. But in addition, it’s possible to combat the corroive effects of secularized Protestantism while maintaining a central place for justification. What’s needed is to emphasize that justification is, in its fullest biblical sense, a doctrine of unification and not one of critique only. What’s needed is, we might say, a new perspective on Paul that reckons with the ecclesiological dimension of justification as found most clearly in Gal 2.

Second, Bledsoe’s comments implicitly reveal one of the major fault lines of the current controversies in the Reformed churches. On the one hand, there are theologians and pastors who believe that justification must FOREVER have the same role in theology and piety it had for Luther; they refuse to entertain the possibility that a new set of historical circumstances might require a different emphasis in the church’s teaching; their theology and practice is basically timeless and ahistorical. On the other hand, there are theologians who entertain the possibility that Luther got it exactly right for his own day, but emphasize that his day is not our day; they seek a theology and practice that is acknowledges the difference and brings the gospel to bear on the needs of our particular historical era. The former will inevitably consider the latter historical relativists; the latter will inevitably consider the former to be stuck in previous century.

The debates today are not about the formulation of justification, on which point the differences between one side and another are miniscule. The debates are about the place of justification in Christian theology, and therefore debates about time and history. This way of describing the debate may help to explain the strange-bedfellowism that we see everywhere, as broad evangelicals who want to minister in the contemporary city find common ground with those who want to reform worship in a high liturgical direction.

It comes down to this: The battle is about postmillennialism.