LutheranTheology.com

Part 13

The Means of Grace

According to Walther, the right doctrine of justification includes first of all the doctrine of the complete redemption of all men through Christ — that is, the doctrine that through Christ the forgiveness of sins is already present for all men; indeed, that in Christ’s death and resurrection all men have already in fact been absolved, or justified, from their sins. This we sought to set forth in the last article.

But the right doctrine of justification further includes also

the right doctrine of the means of grace,

that is to say, if the doctrine of justification is to remain pure, it must also be taught that God conveys and appropriates to men the forgiveness of sins which is acquired for them by Christ and which is present for them in no other way than through the Word of the Gospel and the Sacraments. The right doctrine of justification stands and falls with the right doctrine of the means of grace.

Therefore, Walther first of all impresses it upon us that the Word of the Gospel, as it comes to men in the preaching of the Gospel and in the Sacraments, has a twofold power: not only an effective power (vis effectiva, operativa) which works faith and everything that must take place within a man, but also an imparting power (vis collativa) which actually imparts and delivers what the words declare, just as they read.

The Word and Sacraments are the hand of God which conveys to us what Christ has acquired for us and brought with Him out of the grave. Therefore when we speak of the power and efficacy of the means of grace we mean that the Word and Sacraments are not merely an announcement and proclamation, nor merely a power that produces faith, but are a giving, imparting, and sealing of the very goods that they announce and proclaim.1

The matter therefore stands thus: the forgiveness of sins, or justification, is now present for men in the means of grace, and must there be apprehended by faith. Accordingly, the man who has been crushed by the Law should not be instructed to first, as it were, draw the forgiveness of sins down from heaven by praying and wrestling, but he is simply to be called to faith in the grace that God has brought down from heaven and offers to all sinners in the Word and Sacraments. Here once again, the paths of the Lutheran Church and the sects diverge. Walther was accustomed to explain this in connection with St. Paul’s treatment of the jailer at Philippi (Acts 16:30, 31):

The enthusiasts say to a man whose heart the Law has struck: “You are indeed terrified over your sins, and God’s grace must help you, but do not now lay hold on it too quickly. First go into your closet, and pray and wrestle with God until you have worked your way through to a feeling of grace; then you may believe that you have grace.” That, however, is a godless way of dealing with souls. This method can drive souls to despair, but not to a true certainty of their salvation. Therefore one should speak to the sinner thus: “Do you confess that you are a sinner, and are you terrified from the heart that you lie under God’s wrath? If that is how it is with you, then believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.” So the Apostle said to the jailer. And consider: He says this to a man who was just about to murder himself by his own hand, and who was now in anguish over his sins and asked, “What must I do to be saved?” What would a Methodist have answered? He would probably have said: “This will not happen quickly. Try to pray and wrestle; but it may take a long time before grace breaks through to you, and before you realize that God has accepted you.” Paul was simply no Methodist; we see that in his conduct toward the prison guard, the jailer. And why could the Apostle speak so with the jailer? Because he knew that the Word (of the Gospel) is the means of grace by which he bestows both life and salvation.2

Of course Walther constantly reminds us that we must not speak as though we were outrightly opposed to the feeling of grace and to praying for grace. With respect to the latter he says: “It would be terrible to speak against prayer in any way; for we know that God has commanded it and has promised that He will hear us; but it is just as terrible to imagine that prayer is a means of grace. I indeed can and should call upon God in prayer for grace, but prayer itself cannot impart, give, or bring grace.” The forgiveness of sins takes place through the Word of the Gospel. “We pray for the forgiveness of sins, not so much to obtain it without means but in order to strengthen our faith in it.”

With respect to the feeling of grace Walther says:

Far be it from us to deny that the Spirit of grace also causes Himself to be felt in the sinner’s heart, provided a man does not wantonly resist His working. But it is a frightful thing when one confuses this feeling, which the enthusiasts stir up by their praying and wrestling, with grace itself. At best — for quite often this feeling is produced by a very different sort of cause, and not by the Holy Spirit — what the enthusiasts call grace is an effect of grace worked by the Holy Spirit. Grace (by which we become righteous and are saved) is something outside us, not within us. … Therefore, when a poor sinner comes to a Lutheran preacher and says: “Where shall I find grace? I now understand that I am a poor, lost, and condemned sinner,” the Lutheran preacher answers: “Take comfort in the grace of God. But remember that this grace is in the Gospel and in the Holy Sacraments. Believe what God has said to you there, and take comfort in the grace that is given you therewith. Take comfort in your Baptism and in the fact that grace has already been given to you there. Make use of absolution, go to the Holy Supper, for it is there that God offers, conveys, gives, and seals to you grace and the forgiveness of all your sins.”3

How, then, does the enthusiasts’ denial of the means of grace affect the doctrine of justification? The sects, Walther says, believe they have a great advantage over the Lutheran Church because they direct people into their own hearts, instead of to the means of grace. “But among all the errors that form a wall of division between the sects and the Lutheran Church, the greatest and most ruinous is their false doctrine of the power of the Word,” their denial of the imparting power of the means of grace.4 Whoever denies the imparting power of the Word and Sacraments, and directs the poor sinner who is seeking grace to prayer, to the feeling of grace, to the new heart, etc., instead of to the means of grace, falsifies the doctrine of justification in all its parts; he denies that a sinner becomes righteous and is saved by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith.

First, the concept of justifying and saving grace is falsified. For whoever bases forgiveness on feelings, or so-called experiences, instead of on the Word, calls these experiences — or the particular processes and feelings in the soul and in the mind — the grace of God, whereas Holy Scripture (when it speaks of the cause of justification and of salvation) understands grace to be that which (for Christ’s sake) is in God’s heart: God’s favor, mercy, and love, which is expressed in the Word and is now to be believed; the former, by contrast, it calls a gift.5

Second, the practice of the enthusiasts also falsifies the “for Christ’s sake.” For when they direct the sinner who seeks grace to prayer instead of to the means of grace, so that he may win grace for himself by prayer, they do nothing else than deny the fact that God is already gracious to all sinners for the sake of Christ’s work of reconciliation and that He promises this to sinners in the Gospel. When someone teaches men to seek Christ in themselves instead of in the Word, and will not comfort the sinner until he feels grace and has become a new man, that is the same as “making oneself a false Christ and rejecting the Christ who hung upon the cross and who gives Himself to us in the Gospel.”6 Thus what the crucified Christ has already acquired for us, men would afterward still have to win for themselves. Man’s doing is set in the place of Christ’s Word. “To point to feelings instead of to the Word is therefore not only perverse, but also an entirely different religion from the biblical one.”

Third, the concept of faith is also falsified. To believe means to trust God’s promise in the Gospel. But how do men do this? “The only question they normally ask is: Do you have Christ in your heart? Do you feel Him working in it? If the answer is yes, then and only then can they have comfort and hope, and only then are men willing to believe, just as, e.g., a Methodist gives certain comfort to no one until he says that he feels Christ in his heart. But what they recognize as faith is not faith at all, but a pure delusion or, at best, a fruit of faith.” Indeed, Walther says of that form of Christianity which refuses to believe God on the basis of His mere Word, but only when a man feels grace within himself and believes he can be certain of it through his own efforts that this “in truth means nothing else than to make shipwreck concerning the faith, and yet this is praised as the highest humility and piety.”7

If the doctrine of justification is falsified in all its parts by denying the means of grace, then the ruinous consequence of this falsification does not fail to follow, namely, uncertainty concerning grace, or justification. Walther says:

This is the greatest grace, that God has bound forgiveness specifically to the Word, since otherwise no one could know with certainty whether God were really speaking to him — just as, indeed, the sects cannot know with certainty where the things they experience on the anxious bench come from.8
…
The sects are indeed different from the papist in this, that they will eventually be certain of their state of grace.9 Yet they end up right back at the papists’ concept of justification, because they do not base their certainty upon the eternally abiding Word but upon their own wavering feelings; and therefore they must either be hypocrites or must often lament that they have lost Christ. This is why they strive to excite their feelings by all sorts of means, and why it often happens that this or that man will boast of his conversion today, and yet soon must step comfortless to the anxious bench once more.10

No. God in His mercy has provided for sinners in a completely different way. God has not said: Grace has indeed been earned, but now it is up to you to see that you receive it; rather, God has provided for sinners in such a way that “even the greatest sinner, who is already standing on the gallows ladder, can be certain that he, too, will be justified before God.” God has placed His grace into the Word and Sacraments, from which faith can and should draw it at any time.11

Thus Walther explains from every angle: if the doctrine of justification is to remain pure and the sinner is to enjoy the comfort it offers, we must not deviate from this, that God bestows and imparts to men the grace, or forgiveness of sins, that is present for all men through Christ in no other way than through the means of grace which He ordained. But Walther also reminds us that this correct position is to be firmly held not only against the enthusiasts but also against ourselves. “To the enthusiasts, anyone who still relies upon the Word for the forgiveness of sins is considered to be an unconverted man, and they only call him converted who boasts of so-called experiences and relies on them.”12 But we too still lie sick in that same hospital. According to his natural bent, “man in general will find his redemption not in something outside himself, but solely within himself.”13 Much of the spiritual struggle which believers experience is caused by nothing other than this, that they judge God’s disposition toward them not by God’s promise of grace in the Word and Sacraments, but by their own subjective condition. Men continue to act this way even where the true doctrine is proclaimed.

Our Church does indeed teach in her confessional writings and through her faithful witnesses that God cares for us so faithfully that the grace acquired by Christ is also bestowed upon us, namely through the Word and Sacraments … but how, alas, has this Reformed error made its way into our Church among so very many! Why else would men, here and there in our congregations, resist the practice of Sunday confession and absolution after the sermon, since, if they believed that the absolution imparted the forgiveness of sins, they would gladly run a hundred thousand miles to get it? … (Further:) Many such people indeed say: “If God Himself said to me that my sins are forgiven me, like He said it to the man sick of the palsy, then I would believe it; but what good can it do me when the preacher who does not know my condition says it, since he probably thinks I am more penitent than I am?” Where does this come from, if not from the fact that men do not believe that Christ has acquired everything … and that He has placed forgiveness into the Word that we bear?14
Many people avoid going to confession and to the Holy Supper for a long time because they do not consider themselves fit for it; eventually, they decide to go anyway, so as not to cause offense, or because they are afraid of appearing before God as someone who despises Him. But then they hear the absolution with doubt. Why? Because they base absolution on their own qualities, instead of holding fast in faith to the objective validity of absolution.

So we ourselves are “in many ways papists without a pope,” in that we seek to earn forgiveness through our own repentance instead of laying hold of it freely, by faith.

Therefore, if the Christian wishes to establish himself in the right doctrine of justification, he must, against the doctrine and practice not only of the enthusiasts but also of his own natural heart, constantly accustom himself to ground his faith upon the objective means of grace. Otherwise, he will ground his state of grace upon his own subjective condition — that is, upon his own worthiness and his own works. Therefore, Walther also reminds all Lutheran preachers never to lose sight of this point. On the one hand, the preacher must guard against the self-deception by which someone with an impenitent heart takes mere head-knowledge for saving faith. On the other hand, he must direct those who are truly terrified before God’s wrath not to their own hearts but directly to the promise of the Gospel. Walther says:

Christianity is faith in the message of the Gospel which Christ has committed to His Church. A preacher must therefore so instruct his hearers that they say: Here it stands: “He that believeth and is baptized” etc. “This is a faithful saying” etc. “Christ is the propitiation” etc. “Him that cometh to me” etc. “Where sin abounded” etc. “Come unto me, all ye” etc. “But to him that worketh not, but believeth” etc. It is bad enough that all Christians afflicted by this sickness, that they want to feel first and then to believe; but it is dreadful when this is also preached.
The characteristic mark of our dear Evangelical Lutheran Church is her objectivity — that is, that all her doctrines aim at drawing men away from seeking salvation in themselves, namely, in their own ability, willing, doing, and condition, and at bringing men to seek salvation outside themselves; whereas the Characteristicum [characteristic mark] of all other churches is subjectivity, in that all of them aim at instructing men to build their salvation upon themselves.

But that is precisely what happens when the biblical doctrine of the means of grace is denied.

How strictly Walther firmly held that the forgiveness of sins, or justification, takes place through the Word of the Gospel came to light regarding a point which was brought up in the controversy over the doctrine of the election of grace at the 1880 Chicago Pastoral Conference, and which has recently come up again with the Ohio group. A representative of the theory that the election of grace took place in view of faith asserted — in order to find an analogy in justification for his doctrine — that subjective justification is a special judicial act of God which takes place after a man has laid hold in faith of the forgiveness of sins expressed in the Word. Over against this Walther said, among other things: “When I believe in Christ, I have righteousness and salvation. It is already pronounced mine. It is not true that, when I have appropriated this objective righteousness to myself through faith, a new act is added. The act has taken place. Through faith I already have righteousness. God does not have to pronounce it to me afterward in some special additional way.” When the man in question thereupon said, “I must confess: until now, I did not known that this is what subjective justification is. I have always considered subjective justification to be a special forensic act of God,” Walther replied that the laying hold of righteousness by faith and the imputation of it on God’s part are simultaneous. “As soon as I believe, I have what faith lays hold of. Why? Because God has judicially declared it to me through His Word … As soon as I believe, God has judicially forgiven me my sins. The Word is the hand of God that holds out the gift; faith, my hand, receives what God’s hand gives me.”15

What Walther means to emphasize here is this, that even the so-called subjective justification — that is, the verdict which God pronounces in subjective justification upon the one who believes in Christ — is not to be sought outside the Word. Lately this has been used as a pretext to accuse us of denying subjective justification entirely. But that is an unjust accusation. As earnestly as Walther, on the one hand, teaches that the general justification of all men is present in Christ’s death and resurrection, and that what God does in subjective justification is only a repetition of that justification already actually pronounced, so, on the other hand, does he sharply distinguish subjective from general justification and describe subjective justification as an act that first occurs when the sinner believes. In explanation of the Twelfth Thesis on justification, Walther says in the Report from the First Synodical Conference, p. 68:

The intent of this thesis is to show that, although we teach that the forgiveness of sins has been acquired for all men and that, as regards the acquisition, righteousness and salvation are present for all men; and although we teach, secondly, that in the Word and Sacraments this treasure is also offered and presented to all, we nevertheless do not deny that when the individual accepts this treasure, God holds him in and through Christ to be one who has this righteousness, and that in that same hour he is, so to speak, inscribed in the book of life, and that this is the justification which in churchly usage is called simply the justification of a poor sinner, because there each individual stands before God in judgment and is absolved by Him in his own person. This actus forensis, that is, forensic act, runs through the whole life of a man; for ever anew God declares man free from sin, death, and judgment.

But this judicial verdict of God, by which God grants righteousness to the believing sinner, is not a verdict that must still be sought outside the Word of promise, without means in God, and which would be added to the Word of the Gospel; rather, it is the Word of the Gospel itself. Justification, as Walther impresses again and again, is an act that indeed takes place in God’s heart and not in the heart of man, but it is in God’s heart insofar as it lies revealed in the Word of the Gospel. Faith, therefore, which lays hold of the Word of the Gospel, thereby lays hold of God’s verdict, or judicial imputation. It is in this sense that Walther says, “As soon as I believe, God has judicially forgiven me,” and that he rejects the notion that justification is a special forensic act which follows only upon the believing apprehension of the Word of promise. One and the same Word of the Gospel offers forgiveness, works faith, and declares the believer righteous.

It is of the utmost importance to firmly hold to this, and it is also of great practical interest for the spiritual life. At Chicago Walther remarked in passing that whoever waits for “a new judicial act of God” outside the Word of the Gospel that lies before us — e.g., outside the word “Whoever believes in Christ shall have forgiveness of sins” — thereby makes justification uncertain for himself.16 And that is indeed the case. The sinner who in this way seeks righteousness before God is thereby essentially thrown back to the position of the enthusiasts. If it were the case that a new judicial verdict had to be added to the verdict that lies before us in the Word of the Gospel, and thus such a verdict lay outside the Word, then no one could become certain of the verdict of justification from the Word. In considering the question of whether God justifies him, the sinner would then be dependent on a conclusion drawn from his own subjective condition as a believer. In the question, Does God justify me? he would have to look not to God’s heart as it is revealed in the Gospel, but into his own heart. Justification, then, would also no longer take place by faith; for “faith” exists only in relation to a verdict that is pronounced in the Word of the Gospel; a new act of God outside the Word could not be an object of faith. Faith always requires the Word as its correlate. Thus it is evident that maintaining the integrity of the doctrine of justification also requires that the judicial verdict of justification not be sought in a new act outside the Word of the Gospel.

Footnotes

  1. Bericht der ersten Synodalconferenz, pp. 48–57. — Especially at length also in a lecture of April 20, 1877.
  2. Ibid., p. 52.
  3. Ibid., p. 49.
  4. Lecture of April 20, 1877.
  5. Die luth. Lehre von der Rechtfertigung. Ein Referat [The Lutheran Doctrine of Justification: An Essay], etc., pp. 85, 86.
  6. Ibid., pp. 86, 87 f.
  7. Ibid., pp. 84, 87.
  8. Ibid., p. 84.
  9. The papists, as is well known, declare it a culpable presumption if the ordinary Christian would be certain of his state of grace.
  10. Ibid., p. 78 f.
  11. Westl. Bericht 1875 [Report of the Western District], p. 21. ↩
  12. Referat, p. 85.
  13. Ibid., p. 81.
  14. Ibid., pp. 83, 84.
  15. Verhandlungen [Proceedings], etc., pp. 45, 46.
  16. Verhandlungen der Allgem. Pastoralconferenz zu Chicago 1880 [Proceedings of the General Pastoral Conference at Chicago, 1880], p. 47. Dr. Walther: “How can I know this? I must hold to this: God has said it. I do not wait for a new judicial act of God.”