Creation and Justification

Oswald Bayer has a typically provocative essay in the Forde Festschrift , in which he explores the cosmic dimensions of justification by faith. A few highlights:

1) He points out that Luther’s explanation of the First Article of the creed already employs the language of justification: The Father provides for us “out of his pure, fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me” (Lutheran readers will, with lapsed Lutherans, say “This is most certainly true”). For the believer, all life is faith, including the daily round of seeking our bread: “Faith is not something attached to the human person. My very being is faith, that is, my trusting that life and what is necessary for me are given to me.” This also means that any “reward” or “repayment” we might expect from God has always already been given: “Already paid, the payment cannot be understood any more in the sense of a repayment. It is a gift that is unearned and granted.” In this context, Bayer cites Barth’s point that the First Article is not a piece of natural theology, the antechamber to theology. It is already Christian theology, already grounded in and reflecting the theology of justification.

In a Reformed context, this point raises some questions about the covenant of works. A meritorious construal of the covenant of works would, by Luther’s lights, be an attack on the doctrine of justification by faith (rather than, as some argue, the necessary foundation of justification). This also suggests (to me at least) one reason why recent probings of the covenant of works theology are so hotly debated. What is at stake is not only the structure of covenant theology (as conceived by many in the Reformed world), but the whole underlying, implicit, and often invisible structure of theology as a whole – that is, the two-story nature-grace structure that lies behind much covenant theology (certainly Klinean covenant theology). If Luther is correct that body, soul, limbs, senses, reason, food, clothing, house, family, property, and daily provision are all given “without any merit or worthiness in me”; if, that is, the structure of justification by faith (i.e., gift received in trust and gladness) is simply the structure of life, then there is no room for the sharp divisions that covenant theology sometimes operates with. And, certainly, there is no way that emphasizing the notion of “creation grace” is an abandonment of the Reformation, as Kline asserts. Justification by faith means gift is without merit, and for Luther this is a First Article and not merely a Second or Third Article affirmation.

2) Bayer also explores the implications of justification by faith for notions of selfhood, and particularly opposes justification by faith to the modern notion that we are self-constituted (Fichte: “You are here for action; your action, and your action alone, determines you worth”) and the postmodern fragmentation of the self. Despite the differences between modern Promethean and postmodern Petronian conceptions of the self, there is a fundamental continuity: “In both, the concept of ‘creation out of nothing,’ and thus an existence that is unearned and radically unmerited, appears to be totally meaningless, even nonsensical, absurd.” Bayer’s analysis might have benefitted here from recognition of the genuinely poetic nature of existence (in Milbank’s sense).

3) In discussing how justification by faith is an event of liberation, Bayer especially highlights the liberation of the sinner from fear of hell and judgment, and from the law. A crucial point, though, is this: “To be freed from judging or justifying oneself is the meaning of being justified by faith alone.” This applies not only to the self-justification of trying to earn God’s favor, but also to the self-justification of attempting to establish one’s self-conception by one’s own judgments – freedom from “judging . . . oneself.” We are who and what we are in the gaze and regard of another, not in our own. Which is a great comfort: For why should we think that our self-judgment will be any less poisoned by sin than our judgments of others? Why should we think that a God who is love will judge us with the same harshness with which we judge ourselves? Or that a holy God would judge us with the same leniency?