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In his introduction to the collection By Faith Alone: Essays on Justification in Honor of Gerhard Forde, Luther Seminary professor Marc Kolden offers his account of the Lutheran reformers’ notion of “justification by faith”:

First, for Martin Luther as well as the other reformers the whole gospel could be summed up in the phrase, “the forgiveness of sins,” because for Luther “where there is forgiveness of sins there is also life and salvation,” as he puts it in the Small Catechism (5:2). Sin (or sins) refers to everything that is wrong between people and God. Jesus bears the sins of the world and on his account God forgives our sins; they are no longer counted against us. Then all is right between God and sinners, both now and in eternity. Note that the phrase, “the forgiveness of sins,” is very inclusive, as Luther uses it, for it encompasses everything from the saving work of Christ to there being a “new creation” to the anticipation of (and participation through faith and hope in) eschatological salvation now and eventually for eternity. Also, since the wages of sin is death, forgiveness amounts to the sinful person being raised from death to life.

In order to explain all of this properly, the Apology [of the Augsburg Confession] uses the image of being pardoned. Again and again “pardon” is used to explain divine forgiveness. When a sinner is pardoned, everything changes. One who is guilty and deserves to be punished is given a pardon and is no longer considered to be guilty but instead has all the privileges and responsibilities of one who never sinned. The sinner’s role in this is passive; that is, it happens to us, God acts on us. God is the actor, the pardoner, who changes everything. Divine forgiveness, therefore, is not one step in a cooperative process of becoming righteous (or right with God); rather, forgiveness is God’s undeserved gift that makes things right.

Second, to make the case doctrinally or dogmatically within the traditional doctrinal language of justification, the concept of “imputed righteousness” is used to present the centrality of the idea of forgiveness as pardon. In order to justify us (i.e., make things right between God and us), the reformers said, God imputes to us the righteousness of Christ; that is, we are counted as being or are “reckoned” as righteous, altogether apart from our own worthiness (or lack of it). Our sins are not ascribed to us or counted against us, but instead Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us; it is counted as ours. We are declared righteous before God on account of Christ and, as this good news is proclaimed to us (and about us), we can be sure that it is trustworthy because it is God’s word of promise. God’s own trust-worthiness in Christ engenders trust in the hearer. Therefore, the reformers said, righteousness before God is through or by faith (trust) in God’s word; hence, “justification by faith.”

This is a radical departure from the medieval tradition that spoke of some sort of intrinsic or “real” righteousness that comes about in the sinful human being as a result of grace. The Reformation notion of a “forensic” (law court declaration) righteousness moved the focus away from any sort of “empirical” or “actual” righteousness in the Christian to the justifying act of God in declaring us righteous on account of Christ. Critics sometimes chided the Lutheran reformers for holding to a “fictitious” righteousness that was not “real” in the sense of bringing about an evident change within the person but was merely verbal and theoretical. The reformers replied that God’s declaration is more real than human historical “reality” because the declaration that one’s sins are forgiven is a divine promise – it is the last judgment ahead of time. God’s verdict that we are righteous because our sins are forgiven is said to be more “real” than the present “actuality” of our sins. We can trust God’s promise or verdict, in contrast to having to depend on our own successful “actualization” of righteousness with the help of divine power: our “actualization” will always leave us in doubt, no matter how many good works we perform. Hence, “justification by faith apart from works.”

It should be noted that “apart from works” is intended to modify “justification” and not “faith.” This frequently has been misunderstood by Lutherans as well as others to infer that the doctrine of justification leaves no role for works in the life of the believer. The point is that when it comes to justification before God, only the gift of faith is pertinent. But when it comes to life on God’s earth in relation to God’s creatures, good works are commanded for all people—not for righteousness before God but for the good of one’s neighbors here and now.

It seems to be mostly dissident conservatives, says Nat Hentoff (link via Conservative Green):

My respect continues to increase for the conservative defenders of our most fundamental liberties. A founder of the conservative movement, Paul Weyrich — chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation — exemplifies this force when he writes: “Because of the War on Terrorism, America may be on the verge of becoming a national security state.” Mr. Weyrich continues: “That means citizens will allow the state to do almost anything it wants so long as it justifies its actions in terms of ‘national security.’ In effect, the Constitution and the rule of law itself go out the window, along with our liberties.”

There is also Bob Barr, with whom I once joined at a conference of the American Conservative Union to criticize sections of the Patriot Act. With customary clarity, he now states: “We believe in traditional conservative values, like accountability… To date, for example, the Justice Department has failed to disclose how many U.S. citizens’ homes, businesses or records have been secretly searched under the Patriot Act provisions, such as Section 213 (‘the sneak and peek’ provision), or even how many National Security Letter searches (without any judicial supervision) have been executed.”

[…]

These James Otises of our time are in sharp contrast to such critics of the administration as bumptious show-boaters Al Franken, Michael Moore and the exclamatory, one-dimensional TV commercials of MoveOn.org. Meanwhile, the most visible leaders of the opposition Democratic Party — Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean — do not seriously and persistently address the erosion of our civil liberties with the penetrating insistence of conservative libertarians.

Also see this piece by Ivan Eland.

It’s interesting that Thanksgiving is the only secular holiday in the American calendar that has explicitly religious overtones (we might say that holidays like 4th of July and Memorial Day have implicit religious overtones, but that’s another matter). That is, Thanksgiving implies Someone to whom we give thanks, but it’s not an explicitly Christian holiday like Christmas or Easter (i.e. it isn’t part of the liturgical calendar, is not tied to any event in sacred history, is not shared by the universal church, etc.).

While the original Puritan thanksgiving feast was a religious event rooted in a very specific Christian tradition, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1863 (although many individual states had their own Thanksgiving holidays prior to that). In the early years of the Republic, days of thanksgiving were proclaimed in response to particular events, including military victories (by Presidents Washington and Madison).

President Lincoln’s proclamation of a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 was prompted by gratitude for the blessings the country enjoyed even in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war. It’s noteworthy that Lincoln spoke of it in terms that are difficult to imagine coming from any contemporary U.S. politician:

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

Nowadays politicians trip over each other to proclaim the innate goodness and downright wonderfulness of the American people. Can you imagine any politician today encouraging us to adopt a spirit of “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience”?

Christians have good reasons to be suspicious of civil religion, but the version articulated by Lincoln is remarkably robust compared to anemic pleas for posting the Ten Commandments in a court house or ritual invocations of “God Bless America.” The God invoked by Lincoln is not the laissez-faire God of the deists, but a mysterious providence whose will can’t be straightforwardly identified with any human cause.

It would be a pretty radical thing to do for some public figure to suggest that we not only give thanks for all our blessings, but actually engage in self-examination to see where we have been “perverse and disobedient,” individually and as a nation. Not that I particularly want politicians to assume the mantle of the preacher, but it would be a refreshing change from the feel-goodism of so much civil religion that seeks to merely put a stamp of divine approval on the American Way of Life.

Israeli archaeologists say they have discovered what may be the oldest Christian church in the Holy Land on the grounds of a prison near the biblical site of Armageddon.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority said the ruins were believed to date back to the third or fourth century and include references to Jesus and images of fish, an ancient Christian symbol.

“This is a very ancient structure, maybe the oldest in our area,” Yotam Tepper, head archaeologist on the dig, said Saturday.

The dig took place during the last 18 months at the Megiddo Prison in Israel’s Galilee region, with the most significant discoveries taking place in the last two weeks, Tepper said. Scholars say Megiddo may be the New Testament’s Armageddon, the site of a final war between good and evil.

Tepper said the discovery could reveal more about an important period of Christianity, which was banned until the fourth century. “Normally, we have from this period in our region historical evidence from literature, not archaeological evidence,” he said. “There is no structure you can compare it to. It is a very unique find.”

Channel Two television, which first reported the story, broadcast pictures of a detailed and well-preserved mosaic bearing the name of Jesus Christ in ancient Greek and images of fish.

Pietro Sambi, the Vatican’s ambassador to Israel, praised the find as a “great discovery.” He said that while “Christians are convinced of the history of Jesus Christ,” it is important to have archaeological proof of a church dedicated to him.

(From the Philadelphia Inquirer)

As an early birthday present my lovely wife gave me Dressed in Black: A Tribute to Johnny Cash, which features cover versions of mostly early songs by a variety of what you might call neo-traditionalist country artists like Robbie Fulks and Hank Williams III. It’s really excellent.

And, as it happens, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line opens on November 18th, which I’m pretty excited about too. (See the trailer here.)

Even though I think I have every single track scattered among half a dozen or so CDs and cassettes (yes, Virginia, we used to have these things called cassette tapes), I’m pretty tempted by this. Everything is remastered, and I have to admit that the production on State of Euphoria in particular is pretty crummy. And I had forgotten all about that great cover version of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.”

New contributor at Right Reason, Christopher Tollefsen, offers an intriguing argument that (a certain kind of) opposition to abortion has nothing to do with conservatism per se and, in fact, might be best seen as a legacy of modernity and liberalism

Tollefsen suggests that “conservative” arguments against abortion, such as those that rely on tradition or emphasize the value of having children and families, don’t get at what’s really wrong with the practice, namely that it commits an injustice against a human being. But the idea that individual human beings are intrinsically deserving of protection from harm is in many ways a liberal notion (though one with a Christian pedigree):

It is true, however, and I think important, that abortion is linked with a host of bad social consequences, though it is also true that such consequences are not all recognized as bad. These consequences should be seen as symptoms and signs of the deeper wrong of widespread feticide. As deep a pathology as the widespread acceptance and practice of abortion must, I should think, corrupt any number of the practices, institutions, and attitudes that surround it. It is clear, for example, that it has made it very difficult for candidates to the Supreme Court to speak openly and honestly on certain matters. But it is important to get the order of explanation right here – abortion is not bad because of its consequences. Rather, it has bad consequences because it is bad.

But our ability to recognize the particular evil of abortion – that it is a killing of human beings, and wrong for that reason – seems to me modern, and even liberal. For the view that all human beings are owed equal respect just as persons is arguably a consequence of the Enlightenment’s appropriation of what was otherwise a primarily Christian viewpoint, not widely shared outside the Christian world. And the biological evidence that allows us to see that abortion is a killing of human beings, rather than an offense against human life more abstractly, or against the good of marriage, is evidence only available to us in the last century. It has always been possible to see, with right reason, that abortion is gravely wrong; but recognition of the true nature of that wrong has deepened in these two ways in the modern era. Being pro-life for the right reasons is not really a matter of being conservative.

The ensuing comment thread is also full of good discussion.

I’m generally sympathetic to the line of thought Tollefsen discusses here. If you think that all human beings deserve, simply in virtue of being human, protection from unjust harm, then I find it impossible to see how you can draw a non-abritrary line after which a fetus comes to deserve protection other than at conception itself. In other words, I can’t see any good grounds for exempting fetuses from the general rule that human beings have a right to life.

Obviously that doesn’t settle the issue of what laws are desirable or feasible regarding abortion, since not everyone perceives it as a gravely immoral act. Effective laws, it seems to me, require a certain degree of underlying moral consensus. And ironically, the absence of such a consensus may also be a legacy of modern liberalism.

Camassia is talking about Original Sin and children, and points to some of the difficulties many people have with the idea that children are capable of evil. Whatever we may think about his doctrine of Original Sin, I think Augustine was closer to the truth than many moderns in seeing that children are capable of consciously choosing evil.

In fact, I suspect many of us have observed, in ourselves or others, the ability of children to be cruel in a way that is somewhat shocking. I remember with shame times as a kid when I picked on or made fun of someone else, for no discernible reason other than that I could. (And I was not exactly one of the “cool kids,” shocking as that may sound, so you’d think I would be more sensitive to taunting others.)

Of course, there are at least two questions surrounding the issue of Original Sin – the question of an inherited or innate tendency to commit sin, and the question of an inherited guilt for sin. The Western tradition has generally held to both (with some exceptions), while the East seems to take the view that we inherit a propensity to sin, but not guilt.

For instance, here’s Bishop Kallistos Ware of the Orthodox Church:

For the Orthodox tradition, then, Adam’s original sin affects the human race in its entirety, and it has consequences both on the physical and the moral level: it, results not only in sickness and physical death, but in moral weakness and paralysis. But does it also imply an inherited guilt? Here Orthodoxy is more guarded. Original sin is not to be interpreted in juridical or quasi-biological terms, as if it were some physical ‘taint’ of guilt, transmitted through sexual intercourse. This picture, which normally passes for the Augustinian view, is unacceptable to Orthodoxy. The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider. It is here, in the solidarity of the human race, that we find an explanation for the apparent unjustness of the doctrine of original sin. Why, we ask, should the entire human race suffer because of Adam’s fall? Why should all be punished because of one man’s sin? The answer is that human beings, made in the image of the Trinitarian God, are interdependent and coinherent. No man is an island. We are ‘members one of another'(Eph. 4:25), and so any action, performed by any member of the human race, inevitably affects all the other members. Even though we are not, in the strict sense, guilty of the sins of others, yet we are somehow always involved.

Orthodoxy has sometimes been accused by Western theologians of having a quasi-Pelagian view of sin, while the Western tradition has been criticized for embracing a morally objectionable notion of inherited guilt. Whatever the accuracy of those criticisms, both traditions agree that we need God’s grace to move from sin to blessedness, and deny that we are capable of living morally acceptable lives independently of God. I think this may be why both the West and the East have insisted on infant baptism (and in the East infant communion) – they both realize that we are helpless to do good without God’s grace and need all the help we can get.

Turns out Paul’s Letter to the Romans is, well, hard to understand. I read it, and it’s like the words are just bouncing off my brain.

Can any readers recommend a good commentary or other secondary literature? I’m thinking something substantial, but not so scholarly that it requires facility in three or four ancient languages (and preferably clocks in at under 300 pages or so).

Any suggestions?

Millinerd has an excellent post that almost exactly matches my take on “postmodernism”:

DesCartes’ all-or-nothing philosophy thought that any knowledge not based on absolute certainty was worthless. And because Descartes thought he could establish such certainty, the light switch of absolute knowledge was flipped on… yielding the Enlightenment. Postmodernists swing to the opposite pole, claiming that because Descartes was wrong (which he was) the only possible solution is to turn the light of knowledge completely off.

Funny, in summer months in the Ford Focus when I turn on the air conditioner full-blast my wife says “You know, there is a middle setting.”And she’s right. The espistemological light does not have to be on or off. There’s a dimmer switch, called humility, that can carefully consider our claims to knowledge without putting us completely in the dark. Sure there are those who continue to claim absolute Cartesian knowledge is a possibility. They give rise to postmodernists who insist on no knowledge (except of course for the startlingly ambitious claim to know that we have no knowledge). Between them are those who neither claim purely objective knowledge nor deny it completely.

Read the rest.