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fisherman_carl
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I don’t think Luther taught “once saved always saved.”. Lutherans today don’t believe in it and think that one can fall away into sin.
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fisherman_carl
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Another thing. about Luther’s idea of faith that I learned from listening to a Scott Hahn interview. His idea of faith is that it comes from oneself, that we bring our own faith to the table and God justifies us based on that. John Calvin disagreed with that and said we can’t possibly generate a faith that could justify us. We need to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit first before we can have a faith that could justify. The Lutheran’s accused Calvin of letting Catholicism back in through the back door. Because what he in effect is saying is that God only justifies the one who is made righteous. That is the Catholic idea that God doesn’t just declare us to be righteous but that he makes what he declares come to pass. Just as He said ‘let there be light’ and there was light, when he declares us to be just he makes what he declares come to pass.
It is the idea that God couldn’t simply declare something to be something without actually making it that way. It would be a contradiction. That is God couldn’t declare a sinner to be just without actually making him that way, not just legally like a judge, but actually like a Father.
Luther described people as snow covered dung hills. In Germany they had piles of smelly dung in the farmers fields. But in the winter they are covered with white snow. That is how Luther saw God’s righteousness being applied to us. Christ’s righteousness covers us so God sees only Christ and not our smelly sins underneath. No matter what we do we will always just be snow covered dung hills.
The problem with this is it sets up an inaccurate view of God’s mercy. On the surface it may seem merciful but it is not enough. It is like giving a convicted killer who has a fast acting incurable disease a pardon from death row. Yes, he is free from the electric chair but he is still dying from an incurable disease. God is not just a judge in a court room, but he is a loving Father. So God effectively pardons our sin but also heals us of our disease and adopts us into his family. He heals us of our disease of sin and makes us truly righteous so that we will truly be a new creation, shining like true sons in His Family.
It is the idea that God couldn’t simply declare something to be something without actually making it that way. It would be a contradiction. That is God couldn’t declare a sinner to be just without actually making him that way, not just legally like a judge, but actually like a Father.
Luther described people as snow covered dung hills. In Germany they had piles of smelly dung in the farmers fields. But in the winter they are covered with white snow. That is how Luther saw God’s righteousness being applied to us. Christ’s righteousness covers us so God sees only Christ and not our smelly sins underneath. No matter what we do we will always just be snow covered dung hills.
The problem with this is it sets up an inaccurate view of God’s mercy. On the surface it may seem merciful but it is not enough. It is like giving a convicted killer who has a fast acting incurable disease a pardon from death row. Yes, he is free from the electric chair but he is still dying from an incurable disease. God is not just a judge in a court room, but he is a loving Father. So God effectively pardons our sin but also heals us of our disease and adopts us into his family. He heals us of our disease of sin and makes us truly righteous so that we will truly be a new creation, shining like true sons in His Family.
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TertiumQuid
Guest
Link? I’d be interested in hearing this. Thanks.Another thing. about Luther’s idea of faith that I learned from listening to a Scott Hahn interview.
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fisherman_carl
Guest
I got that from a CD set I purchased from Catholic Answers called, “Faith Alone Is it Justifiable.”Link? I’d be interested in hearing this. Thanks.
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TertiumQuid
Guest
I’d be interested in what you say Hahn attributes to Luther: “His idea of faith is that it comes from oneself, that we bring our own faith to the table and God justifies us based on that.”I got that from a CD set I purchased from Catholic Answers called, “Faith Alone Is it Justifiable.”
Luther states:
“For faith is a work of God, not of man, as Paul teaches [Eph. 2:8]. The other works he works through us and with our help, but this one alone he works in us and without our help.” (LW 36:62)
I think perhaps you’ve misunderstood what Hahn is saying, as I can’t believe he’d make such basic error in regard to Luther.
Regards, James
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fisherman_carl
Guest
Hi James, here is an actual transcript of this part of the discussion with Scott Hahn that I had written out previously. I’ve posted it here so that you can see what he means more fully.I think perhaps you’ve misunderstood what Hahn is saying, as I can’t believe he’d make such basic error in regard to Luther.
"In Protestantism justification is a legal (forensic term) to denote the acceptance of anyone as righteous in the sight of God. It is a legal declaration involving the legal imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us. They [Protestantism] deny that justification is more than legal, that is an actual infusion of Christ’s righteousness to us (which is the Catholic position). So in effect a person remains sinful even after they are justified so that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us legally but not imparted to us actually. God, in other words, justifies someone who is ungodly. Works don’t enter into the picture in regards to justification.
The classical protestant position clearly acknowledges the need for works but only after you are justified. So in other words faith alone (sola fide) leads to justification but after you are justified then works flow out of the justification.
There are some protestant positions that are rather extreme in their affirmation of faith alone. They are saying that not only are you justified by faith alone but you are also saved by faith alone. But that is not the historic protestant position. The historic protestant position is that justification is what marks the beginning of your spiritual life and its by faith alone and your consequent walk with Jesus Christ, called sanctification, involves works but they are works done out of gratitude for having being justified by faith alone.
There is considerable consensus amongst Protestants on this idea that justification is a legal declaration that God declares us to be just based on the work that Christ has done for us and that it is not to be understood as Christ’s righteousness being imparted to us or something he is in the process of doing to us.
Once you say that justification is based on faith alone you discover that the term faith alone is understood in two diametrically opposite ways, the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The Lutheran view was first as Luther really started the reformation and the Calvinist view came later. The majority of reformed evangelicals, the majority of bible Christians today, aren’t aware of the Lutheran view, the historic, the original view; they tend to follow the reformed or Calvinist view.
The Lutheran view of faith alone is that the word ‘sola’ or ‘alone’ is an adjective that modifies the word faith, so that you are justified by faith and faith by itself. The Calvinists view of ‘alone’ is different. Sola fide for the Calvinists is an adverb that modifies the word ‘justify’. So the Calvinist would say you are not justified by a faith that is alone rather you are only justified by faith.
Now that seems to be a very fine distinction but it was the distinction that led the Lutheran theologians like Mueller and Pauper and all the classical Lutheran theologians to say in effect that what the Calvinist is affirming is already half way back to Rome.
For the Lutherans our faith is what justifies us but our faith is what we ourselves contribute on our own power. The Calvinist say, oh no, you can’t generate on your own a faith that would justify. God has to regenerate you first. He has to send his Spirit down to you. He has to recreate you in order for you to exercise any faith that would possibly justify you. The Lutheran would say, oh no, you can’t say that God has to regenerate you or recreate you in order for you to exercise any faith that God would justify you with because once you say that that you’ve allowed the Catholic position back in through the back door. Because what you are in effect saying is that God only justifies the person he transforms and makes righteous and godly. So the Lutherans accused the Calvinists of kicking out the front door what they are bringing back through the back door.
The Calvinists were accused of bringing back the Catholic notion that God when declaring us to be just he doesn’t just declare it but does what he declares. Just as when God said ‘let there be light’, before he said it there was darkness, but once he said it ‘there was light’. God’s word does not return to him void. When God declares us to be just he makes us just. He does what he declares by declaring it. His word is the very power of creation and it’s also the very power of redemption. And so we would say with the Calvinists, yes, sola fide, in this limited sense where 'sola’ is an adverb, every Catholic could say that you are only justified by faith.
In fact St. Thomas Aquinas has the famous hymn Pange Lingua where we sing sola fide sufficet; only faith suffices because our own natural powers aren’t enough. God has to impart to us his Spirit and once he regenerates us through the holy Spirit he’s imparted to us his own life, he has infused to us Christ’s righteousness; he has given to us the holy Spirit and the result is we have a new principle of activity that comes from outside our nature, it comes from God himself and that is what we call faith and only that kind of faith justifies."
continued…
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fisherman_carl
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… continued
"Catholics would say that only if you have faith can you be justified. So in that limited sense we would say sola fide. But because the term sola fide is charged with ambiguity it invites misunderstanding. So the term should really be retired because the term can mean one thing to Lutherans and one thing to Calvinists and they both mean diametrically opposite things by it. So the phrase sola fide has become kind of a slogan or a battle cry but like most slogans it doesn’t really clarify, it just incites people’s passions.
And it also reinforces certain deep misunderstandings and suspicions on the part of non-Catholics and even more ex-Catholics who didn’t really know their faith until they left the church and then suddenly they act as though they are experts because they are sure of what they rejected.
The hardest people to really dialogue with sensitively are the people who have abandoned the faith they never really understood well from the inside. They might have gone through parochial school. They might have been altar servers. They might have been daily and weekly communicants and this sort of thing but so often they went through this legalistically the way some may have gone through the Presbyterian Church or others may have gone through the Baptist Church.
So it’s really important for us to take this phrase sola fide and say look, lets stop fighting over this and lets get down to the real issues. Because, there really isn’t consensus among non-Catholic, Protestant Christians. They are divided almost as much amongst themselves as they are from Catholics."
"Catholics would say that only if you have faith can you be justified. So in that limited sense we would say sola fide. But because the term sola fide is charged with ambiguity it invites misunderstanding. So the term should really be retired because the term can mean one thing to Lutherans and one thing to Calvinists and they both mean diametrically opposite things by it. So the phrase sola fide has become kind of a slogan or a battle cry but like most slogans it doesn’t really clarify, it just incites people’s passions.
And it also reinforces certain deep misunderstandings and suspicions on the part of non-Catholics and even more ex-Catholics who didn’t really know their faith until they left the church and then suddenly they act as though they are experts because they are sure of what they rejected.
The hardest people to really dialogue with sensitively are the people who have abandoned the faith they never really understood well from the inside. They might have gone through parochial school. They might have been altar servers. They might have been daily and weekly communicants and this sort of thing but so often they went through this legalistically the way some may have gone through the Presbyterian Church or others may have gone through the Baptist Church.
So it’s really important for us to take this phrase sola fide and say look, lets stop fighting over this and lets get down to the real issues. Because, there really isn’t consensus among non-Catholic, Protestant Christians. They are divided almost as much amongst themselves as they are from Catholics."
- Scott Hahn interview
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TertiumQuid
Guest
Hey, thanks so much. This must have certainly taken a great deal of time!Hi James, here is an actual transcript of this part of the discussion with Scott Hahn that I had written out previously. I’ve posted it here so that you can see what he means more fully.
I can’t speak on behalf of “Lutherans” (that is, historically what their theology has developed into). I can though speak on the theology of Luther in regard to this statement from Scott Hahn.For the Lutherans our faith is what justifies us but our faith is what we ourselves contribute on our own power. The Calvinist say, oh no, you can’t generate on your own a faith that would justify. God has to regenerate you first. He has to send his Spirit down to you. He has to recreate you in order for you to exercise any faith that would possibly justify you. The Lutheran would say, oh no, you can’t say that God has to regenerate you or recreate you in order for you to exercise any faith that God would justify you with because once you say that that you’ve allowed the Catholic position back in through the back door. Because what you are in effect saying is that God only justifies the person he transforms and makes righteous and godly. So the Lutherans accused the Calvinists of kicking out the front door what they are bringing back through the back door.
For Luther, humanity is enslaved to sin, unable to believe in God unless God first frees the sinner from this sin. Peppered throughout Luther’s writings is the notion that faith itself is the gift of God. That is, as Paul Althaus states, for Luther, “Faith is the work and gift of God. God justifies a man by giving him faith.” (The Theology of Martin Luther, p. 231). For statements that for Luther the will is enslaved and that mankind is unable to believe, see Luther’s writing against Erasmus, The Bondage of the Will. For explicit statements where Luther says faith is the gift of God. See for instance: LW 36:62; 3:104; 12:293, 379; 30:256; 32:235.
Regards, James Swan
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ahs
Guest
Yes, it is true, and quite longer than just a year.I have heard that Luther removed some of the NT books from his German bible for about a year before being persuaded to put them back in. Is this true?
From here:
newadvent.org/cathen/03274a.htm
…As for Protestantism, the Anglicans and Calvinists always kept the entire New Testament. But for over a century the followers of Luther excluded Hebrews, James, Jude, and Apocalypse, and even went further than their master by rejecting the three remaining deuterocanonicals, II Peter, II and III John. The trend of the seventeenth century Lutheran theologians was to class all these writings as of doubtful, or at least inferior, authority. But gradually the German Protestants familiarized themselves with the idea that the difference between the contested books of the New Testament and the rest was one of degree of certainty as to origin rather than of instrinsic character. The full recognition of these books by the Calvinists and Anglicans made it much more difficult for the Lutherans to exclude the New Testament deuteros than those of the Old. One of their writers of the seventeenth century allowed only a theoretic difference between the two classes, and in 1700 Bossuet could say that all Catholics and Protestants agreed on the New Testament canon. The only trace of opposition now remaining in German Protestant Bibles is in the order, Hebrews, coming with James, Jude, and Apocalypse at the end; the first not being included with the Pauline writings, while James and Jude are not ranked with the Catholic Epistles.
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TertiumQuid
Guest
This is just a quick follow-up. I’ve spent some time this morning looking through my library on this.For the Lutherans our faith is what justifies us but our faith is what we ourselves contribute on our own power.
I have to admit never having studied the differences on “faith alone” between Lutherans and Calvinists that Hahn refers to. If such a controversy between the two traditions has played out, I don’t recall reading about it. I will say this though, as far as I understand historic Lutheranism, regeneration is monergistic (“On the whole the Lutherans maintain, in opposition to Rome, the monergistic character of regeneration. They regard man as entirely passive in regeneration and incapable of contributing anything to it, though adults can resist it for a long time” (Louis Berkhoff, Systematic Theology, p. 477).
In his sermon on the Feast of the Presentation of the Infant Christ at the Temple (Luke 2), Luther explains what “first born” means. There are “two kinds of first born.” The first birth refers to mankind being born in sin and unbelief through Adam. Of the second “first birth” Luther states,
“The second type of first birth is faith which we attribute to God. It is the chief constituent of the whole Christian nature. Faith puts to death the old man. It makes new children which henceforth bring thoughts and goals in accordance with God’s. This first birth is God’s blessing and His own work. No one should take it upon himself, that is no one should understand faith as coming out of his own powers as many do. When they hear of faith they consider it as something they recieve by an act of their own will. In this way they credit themselves with what alone belongs to God since it is purely a divine work to have true faith. As Saint Paul says to the Ephesians [Ephesians 2], ‘By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is God’s gift, not of works, so that no one can boast’” The Festival Sermons of Martin Luther (Michigan: Mark V Publications, 2005), p. 238].
Interesting stuff. I greatly appreciate your transcription.
Regards, James Swan
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