Lutheran “Deliverdict”

In the Husbands and Treier volume, Robert Kolb discusses various contemporary Lutheran theologians who are attempting to bring Luther to bear on contemporary theology and life. He focuses attention on Gerhard Forde, Wilfried Harle, Oswald Bayer, and a few others.

His discussion of the claim that “Justification is God’s killing and his making alive” is illuminating: “these Lutheran expositors of justification make specific Luther’s expression of the biblical teaching of justification in terms of dying and rising . . . . Employing Paul’s baptismal terminology in Romans 6, Luther taught that the Word of the Lord brings sinners into the death and burial that sin necessitates, and then raises them through the Word of life that comes as a gift from the cross in the sacrificed and risen Lord Jesus Christ . . . . In his Justification by Faith Forde called for a return to Luther’s death-life language, not discarding the legal metaphor of judgment and pardon by any means, but enriching it as Luther did with the Pauline description of justification as the death of the sinner and the resurrection of the new creature in Christ, the reborn child of God . . . . salvation is not a repair job, not a smaller or larger alteration or improvement. Justification is rebirth. Sinners disappear from God’s sight, and we stand before him as his new creatures, his own children. That God’s Word – as in Genesis, so in absolution – actually creates new reality is the key to Forde’s analysis. Thus, Forde breaks through the long-standing debate about whether justification is ‘forensic’ or ‘effective.’ ‘The absolutely forensic character of justification renders it effective – justification actually kills and makes alive. It is, to be sure, “not only” forensic, but that is the case only because the more forensic it is, the more effective it is!’ For ‘the death inflicted by the justifying word which reduces us to nothing is the real death, the true spiritual death, the death of sin, the death of all defiance against the God who “will have mercy on whom He will have mercy.”’ God’s mercy “is the death knell of the old and the harbinger of the absolutely new . . . the unconditional word, the promise, the declaration of justification is that which makes new, that which puts the old to rest and grants newness of life . . . . God’s Word creates reality, and God’s word of forgiveness creates the identity of being God’s child, an identity which brings with it expectations of performance of God’s will.”