Wednesday, 22 January 2014

On "Lutheran Evangelicals"

I ran across this article this morning. It may be a bit academic and "thick" to read but it says a lot. I especially liked this comment by the author, James R. Rogers:

The crucial shift is that, for the Lutherans, justification derives from Christ’s faithfulness—his trustworthiness—rather than from an act of mental will. This affects Lutheran preaching and Lutheran piety.
Consider the differing appeals made to a person weak in faith. The admonition derived from the standard Protestant view of sola fide is that the person weak in faith must try to believe harder. The admonition directs the person to look within to remedy his or her failure. In Lutheranism, the admonition comes from Jesus himself to me in particular, not to look inward to myself or my belief, but to look outward, away from myself, to Christ on the Cross. Trust in Christ comes not from an act of will, but rather simply reflects the fact that Jesus is trustworthy. Trust, or faith, comes not from within, but from the nature of God’s character revealed in Jesus on the Cross. As Paul puts it in the well-known passage in Romans, given that God “did not spare his own son, but delivered him over for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things?”
It is worth reading the entire article and it explains a lot about our history as Lutherans and our relationship to other Protestant bodies and their "spirituality."

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