COMMENT

Justification
by OSWALD BAYER

Ground and Center

The preaching of the justification of the sinner is the ground and

center of the church.This message can be summed up in the sentence:
"God is love" (i Jn 4:8 and 16). But Gods love is belittled when his
judgment is silenced. It is a serious fault in the church's preaching to
speak of peace with God without making it clear that prior to this
peace there was enmity and strife (Rom 5:10). God's love is never
self-evident and can never be taken for granted. For in his love God
speaks against himself, against the God who pronounces judgment
on me in the law.
In the law God confronts me with hard questions I cannot escape:
"Adam, Eve! Where are you? (Gen 3:9). Where is your brother?"
(Gen 4:9). Questions like these convict me. My "secret" sin (Ps 90:8)
that I am unaware of comes to light. I am found out, exposed, for
the first time: "You are the man!"— of death (2 Sam 12:7). I cannot
tell myself that. That must be said to me from outside, by another. All
the same, I am so convicted that, like David before Nathan the
prophet of God, I pass judgment on myself. The law that confronts
me from outside at the same time convicts me from within.
The gospel is an altogether different word. In the law God speaks
against me, but in the gospel he speaks for me. This "for me" is Jesus
Christ himself in whom the triune God promises and gives himself in
the "external word" with baptism and the Lord's Supper as well as with
every baptismal and communion sermon (Augsburg Confession,V).
In this experience of the promise of the forgiveness of sins, sinners
who have been condemned to death by the law are made new.

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Their identity remains outside themselves.They find it in another: in

him who took their place in a wondrous exchange or swap of human
sin and divine righteousness and who speaks for them.This event of
Christ's vicarious atoning death and the gift of himself bodily in the
sermon, the Lord's Supper and baptism—"for you!"— is the criterion
of truth in the church.
This criterion is compromised, however, if the reality of God's
love for the sinner loses its incredibility and becomes something self-
evident. That would amount to a serious misunderstanding of God's
judgment. It would also reflect a misunderstanding of the daily need
humans have to justify themselves before others. One accuses the
other and puts pressure on him to justify himself: to prove his right
to exist, to show that he is capable of achieving something, and that
he can make something of himself and in this way be able to justify
himself. Where God's judgment is suppressed and people speak only
of God's love in vague and general terms, the connections between
guilt and accusation remain. They are merely anonymous, formless,
and crude and can no longer be articulated in the language of the
church. So, on the one hand, because of guilt the church also arrived
at the proposition—correct in itself—that "God loves all people."
This however is so vague and general that it is a complete trivialisation
of God's love. On the other hand, the pressures of justification and
the experiences of the law common to everyday life remain
incomprehensible theologically.

Free To Be

However, it is precisely where we are under pressure to justify

ourselves and we feel the threats of the law in our everyday life that
God's justifying love encounters us. It shines through wherever we
step back from ourselves—in fact, we feel it most when we can laugh
at ourselves. It also comes out in self-forgetful work where we are
fully absorbed in what we are doing. Again, it is evident in con-
versation when we give ourselves completely to the other. God's
justifying love is especially powerful when it comes to us in the
middle of unfinished work that screams out at us—when we can
drop off to sleep, despite all the things we have to leave undone,
 JUSTIFICATION 339

"without any merit or worthiness on our part." "It is in vain that you
rise up early and go late to rest"—sitting at the desk, for example—
"eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives sleep to his beloved"
(Ps 127:2).
But it is not only as we enjoy our night's rest that we experience
the blessing of a life lived in the splendor of justification, but also as
we celebrate the Lord's day: when we pause from our God-given
work, as important and necessary as it is, and marvel that we really are
alive, that our life is not over, and that we are not left to ourselves.
Our hearts must not become closed in their defiance and
despondency. You may come out of your shell. We can follow this
call to come out of ourselves ifwe focus on God's work ofjustification.
We did not bring ourselves into the world; we were born.We do not
create the air and the breath that gives us life; air and breath are
given to us as gifts—every moment anew. We live in a world that has
been prepared for us and in time that has been given to us; we live
from the love of the other person, love that we do not deserve and
cannot compel. It happens, if it happens, freely—just as forgiveness,
if it happens, happens freely.

Return to the World

The justification of the sinner by faith alone was Luther's decisive

discovery in his search for a gracious God.Yet this distinctive feature
of Reformation theology seems to be no longer understandable to
the modern world. Luther's question:"How can I find a gracious God?"
seems to be a question that hardly anyone asks today People today
supposedly ask the more radical question: "Does God exist?" and, in
their quest for freedom,believe they can find the answer in themselves.
They overlook the fact that this quest only leads them deeper and
deeper into the compulsive need to justify themselves.They overlook
the fact that this road to self-discovery and self-justification is a dead-
end. And if they keep going down that road, they will fall into the
abyss because they cannot figure themselves out. This descent into hell
that comes with the desire for self-knowledge only leads to despair
and is very much akin to Luther's experience before his Reformation
breakthrough.
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This breakthrough is justification by the word of the cross that

brings liberation: As I am taken into the wondrous exchange where
God takes my place, I am free to look outside myself. I can step out
of the context of blame and accusation, leave behind the struggle for
mutual recognition, and turn to God and the whole creation. The
new creation that arises from the justification of the sinner embraces
the entire creation. It establishes a new access to the world, the return
to the world.

Translated by Jeffrey G Silcock from Oswald Bayer, "Rechtfertigung" in

Was gilt in der Kirche?, edited by Andreas Rossler (Stuttgart Quell-Verlag,
i994),PP.74-78-
 NOTES

The First Thanksgiving?

Even schoolchildren know that St. Augustine in Florida preceded

the Pilgrims m 1620 and their first Thanksgiving. But who knew
that preceding St. Augustine was another settlement of yet earlier
Protestant refugees, and that the very first Thanksgiving was
Lutheran? Well, "Lutheran."

Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians
sought a haven in which to worship freely.These French Calvmists, or Huguenots,
hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Catholics and Protestants that
had bloodied France since 1560.

Landing in balmy Florida m June of 1564, at what a French explorer had earlier
named the River of May (now the St Johns River near Jacksonville), the
French émigrés promptly held a service of "thanksgiving" Carrying the seeds
of the new colony, they also brought cannons to fortify the small, wooden
enclosure they named Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles IX.

In short order, these French pilgrims built houses, a mill and bakery, and
apparently even managed to press some grapes into a few casks of wine. At first,
relationships with the local Timucuans were friendly, and some of the French
settlers took native wives and soon acquired the habit of smoking a certain
local "herb " Food, wine, women — and tobacco by the sea, no less A veritable
Gallic paradise.

Except, that is, to the Spanish who had other visions for the New World. In
1565, King Philip II of Spam issued orders to "hang and burn the Lutherans"
(then a Spanish catchall term for Protestants) and dispatched Adm Pedro
Menéndez to wipe out these French heretics who had taken up residence on
land claimed by the Spanish — and who also had an annoying habit of attacking
Spanish treasure ships as they sailed by

Kenneth C. Davis, "A French Connection" The New York Times,

November 26, 2008. For more, see Davis' America's Hidden History:
Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims . . . (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).

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From the Luther Congress

"Luther as Teacher and Reformer of the University"
I2th International Congress for Luther Research in Helsinki, Finland, August
5-11, 2012
We invite all Luther researchers to attend the 2012 Luther Congress in Helsinki
Its program, including lectures and seminars, call for short presentations and
contact information, is now available at http://www.helsmki.fi/teol/pro/
Iuther20i2. If you are interested in getting an invitation, please contact the
local committee: 1lmar1.kar1m1es@hels1nk1.f1, or Luther Congress, Prof Risto
Saarinen, Faculty of Theology, P O Box 33, FI-00014 University of Helsinki.

Oportet Semper Ecclesiam Eruditam

Across our back cover runs Melanchthon's stern caution to the

church (Corpus Reformatorum 25, 795). Other voices may advise
"keeping it simple," but Lutheran Quarterly stands for a learned
foundation for the church's mission. Oportet semper ecclesiam eruditam,
warned Melanchthon, aut est valde squalide. "The church must always
be learned, or it will be exceedingly foul." Simplification has its
pedagogical place, but always "dumbing down" demeans the gospel
of the church.
 ^ s
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