Justification and Sanctification

Today we move on in consideration of Christian life to a theme that’s put in ancient theological language, justification and sanctification. Tomorrow we’ll talk about visions of images of the Christian life and then on Saturday Christian hope. Today we are concerned, I think, the heart of the Christian life, the Christian experience of salvation as justification and as sanctification. A case can be made that Christian salvation is the art of holding together in one unified Justification by grace through faith and sanctification by the power of God. Now, this problem was first articulated by Augustine, and it has ever since been a major problem of Christian life. Indeed, one can say that the problem, though not articulated theologically, has been there since the very beginning.

You move from the forgiveness of the Gospels to the sanctificationist theology of the apostolic fathers in a very quick order of one of 75, 50 to 75 years. The problem is perennial. Theology has to deal with issues in a certain chronological order because they come in a certain theological order. And if you’re writing a systematic theology, it’s amazing how similar the table of contents usually is to the chronological order with which these doctrines were articulated through Christian reflection in the life of the Christian community, showing that there is a certain logical pattern to the development of dogma in the Church. You had to settle the question of Jesus Christ, the question of God, the question of man before you could move to the question of salvation.

Here is the problem of holding together, in one Christian experience, justification by grace through faith and sanctification by the power of God. To put it another way, God’s grace has mercy that forgives us, and God’s grace as power that transforms us. Justification, sanctification, the Christian life as the forgiven life, Christian life as the transformed life. Now Augustine first faced this problem in the Pelagian crisis. Next to the Arian controversy about the person of Jesus Christ. The most serious doctrinal conflict in the history of the church was the one which took place between Pelagius and Augustine. Pelagius was a great hawk of a person who had come to Rome from Britain. He may have been a monk. In any case, he was an impressive human being.

He was large physically, he was attractive personally, and he had a message. He came into the context of a disintegrating society and he said to people, get a hold on yourselves. Pull life together. Arise above the mediocrity of society in Rome to the superiority of God’s elite. Augustine, I mean, Pelagius understood life very simply. For Augustine, I mean for Pelagius, they are the good people who know the will of God, who work hard, who obey the law, who accumulate possessions, and who go to heaven. And then there are bad people who do not work hard, who do not accumulate very much, and therefore do not give much away, who know the law but do not keep it, and who go to hell. Human life is very simple. There are the good people who know and do, and there are the bad people who do not know I mean, who do know, but do not do.

Now, proclaiming this ideal of Christian superiority, quite obviously, Pelagius is an elitist. And he understood the Christian Church in elitist terms. The Christian community is made up of the healthy, the vigorous, the advanced core of the Lord, who are out to remake the world in the image of Christ, a very elitist doctrine of the Church. Pelagius had amazing success. He did transform a great deal of the mediocre life of the Church in Rome and in Roman society in the first part of the fifth century. This was all very impressive. Now, when Augustine, who was a stodgy old theologian on the shores of Northern Africa, heard about Pelagius, he did not really condemn Pelagius point blank. He recognized that some of the Augustinians did, but Augustine understood what Pelagius was saying.

And Augustine’s comment concerning Pelagius was very astute, I think. He said, Pelagius has a zeal for righteousness, but without knowledge. He underestimates the complexity of the human situation. Augustine knew that the Christian life is not so simple as it appeared to Pelagius. He first of all knew that we are born, since Adam’s first sin, not into innocency, but into a situation where evil is already present, and this evil that is already present has become part of the structure of social existence so that to participate in history is to sin, and also penetrates our lives from the very beginning in those mysterious ways in which one person penetrates another person’s life. Therefore, it is complicated by the fact that none of us anymore is born into a situation of innocency.

And then secondly, Augustine said, the Christian life is complicated by the fact that evil is deeply enfrenched in our very being, and it is not easily overcome. In one of the most remarkable sentences in the whole Augustinian corpus, Augustine said, We sin in our pride, but we seldom sin proudly. We sin in our ignorance, in our anguish in the pain and agony of our life. And then Augustine also knew that if we overcome evil on one level of existence, we generally file victim to evil on another level of existence. Pelagius had had remarkable success with many of the noble ladies in Rome, and one of them wrote Augustine a letter suggesting he did not fully understand Pelagius, and in his reply to this noble lady, Augustine wrote a sentence which I hope I can quote here without being misunderstood.

He said that it was his observation that when noble ladies overcame the sin of lust they frequently fell victim to the sin of avarice. Now Peter Brown, the very great biographer of Augustine has said that Pelagius never said anything about human existence as profound as that. Augustine knew that the Christian life is more complicated than Pelagius thought. Another Pelagian has said that the sin of inherited wealth He said, the nobles around Rome have inherited a lot of wealth, and this is a problem, but he said the sin of inherited wealth is easily cured by baptism. Peter Brown observes that there’s probably never been a more optimistic statement in the history of the human race than that. Augustine rejected the notion of the church as a community of the moral and spiritual aristocracy.

He rejected the notion of the church as an elitist community. He insisted are that the Church is a healing institution, and the healing takes a long time. As Augustine put it, the Church is a community of convalescence. Now, when the Christian community stood apart from and observed Pelagius and Augustine, they finally declared that Pelagius was a heretic, and Augustine was a doctor of grace, a teacher of the Church. And all of us, I think, at least I haven’t run into any people, who ought not to be grateful that Augustine won. If you’re looking for a pastor, you better have an Augustinian rather than a Pelagian. I would not want a Pelagian as my pastor. The church needs the Pelagians. We need the Pelagians to keep us honest, but I would not want a Pelagian as my pastor, and I’m glad that in the history of the church, Augustine would declare the teacher of the church and Augustine and Pelagius the heretic.

Augustine knew that salvation was by grace alone. We are saved by the power of God. The power of of God that forgives and the power of God that transforms. But Augustine was not sure about faith alone. Augustine had an amazing optimism that once one has received grace about the possibilities of moral achievement, and therefore the Protestant Reformation latched down to Augustine as a teacher of grace, but medieval Catholicism latched down to Augustine as one who knew about the priority of grace, but who also left a place for human merit. And the result is that in medieval theology, justification, the Christian life as forgiveness, was always subordinated to the Christian life as sanctification, the Christian life as transformation. The medieval church knew that you had to be forgiven, but it also believed that beyond forgiveness there There was the possibility of moral achievement.

There was the possibility of merit. And this comes to expression particularly in the doctrine of the Church itself that evolved during the medieval period in which the Church came to think of itself as the elite, as the righteous, as the sanctified, culminating in the pope, one particular person, who at least in particular activities is exempt not only from the common limitations of all human beings in finiteness, limitations by time and space, but also exempt from the limitation of human sin. And therefore, you have a sanctificationist understanding, particularly of the elite, at least the elite within the Church. And to telescope a great deal, one can say, as Reinhold Niebuhr has carefully pointed out, in medieval theology, justification was subordinated Christian life as forgiveness became secondary to the Christian life as transformation, the Christian life as sanctification.

Now, this medieval solution of the problem in which forgiveness was subordinated to sanctification was rejected in the 16th century on the one hand by the Protestant Reformation because it was too optimistic, and on the other hand by the Renaissance because it was too pessimistic, rejected by the Protestant Reformation because it was too optimistic about the human situation, rejected by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment because it was too pessimistic about the human situation. Now, let us look first at the rejection of this medieval solution to the problem by Martin Luther. Martin Luther rejected the medieval solution because of two deeply personal experiences. And I will treat the second one first, chronologically the second one first.

Luther rejected the medieval solution because he had experienced the medieval solution in his relationship to the medieval Church in its presumption that it was righteous. Luther rejected it because of his experience with the sanctified, with the righteous. Persons who, without reservation, identified their own position with the position of the transcendent God. This was a very better experience for Luther. One of his decisive conclusions was that the rejection of the papacy, the rejection of the institutionalized church because it was involved in the common sinfulness of humanity. But Luther rejected the medieval solution for a second reason, his own personal experience. Luther was troubled with the question, how can a sinful person stand in the presence of a righteous God.

It was a 16th century way of putting the question, how can a sinful person stand in the presence of a righteous God? And he answered that question or he attempted to answer that question in the typical ways that medieval theology provided. The medieval theologian said, if you’re really serious about this business of being a Christian, You can become a religious. You can become a monk or a nun. Well Luther became a monk, and he tried to become a very good monk, and by every testimony he was a very good monk, an ideal monk. Yet Luther could always be aware of the limitations of his activity as a monk. He could always know that there is something beyond. Luther himself once said, if anybody ever got to heaven by a monkary, he should have gotten there.

And yet he could always imagine himself being a better monk than he was. He knew that he could never exhaust the possibilities of human life through the role of a monk. And then the medieval church said, if you’re really serious about this business of being a Christian, you can come and confess your sins. Luther came to his confessor, and he confessed and confessed until the confessor got tired of listening to him and said, if you’re going to continue to come and confess, go out and commit some real sins, murder, adultery, hatricide. I don’t come in confessing all these peccadillos. Well, what Luther knew was that we cannot even remember all of our sins. Therefore, we can never be sure that we’ve confessed all of our sins. The way of mysticism was not possible for Luther.

He had too profound an awareness of the goth that separates creator and creature, and in particular righteous God and sinful human being. And then there came that remarkable experience. And the Luther scholars who pour over the Luther texts very much as biblical scholars pour over the New Testament texts and the Old Testament texts until they’re not sure what any of them really say, have all kinds of confusion. They do not know whether Luther had this experience, for example, of forgiveness in the tour, of labeness. The Tower Room, which was his study, and I hope I can say this without being, but this is part of a serious scholarly activity in Luther’s circles, whether he He really came to this awareness in his study or in the outhouse, but in any case, he came to it.

And there’s also debate about whether he nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg or whether he mailed them to the Archbishop. Some Roman Catholic scholars think he’d been more dignified to have mailed them to the Archbishop Albert of Mainz, and that would have shown more respect for the Church. And now they’re attempting to rehabilitate Luther. They want Luther to be a good 16th century Catholic, at least as far as they can make him that. They say he nailed the theses to the Church doer. And then there are others on a less exciting sort of venture say that this experience did not come all of a sudden in 1512, 1513, but came over a period of time that really did not reach its fruition, even until after the 95 Theses. But, however it came, and wherever it came, studying the Bible, Psalms, and Romans in particular, Luther became profoundly aware that salvation cannot be earned.

We cannot obligate God to us. Salvation is freely given, and we can only accept it. It is a free gift, and therefore, as long as we are attempting to build up credit with God, as long as we are attempting to earn God’s favor, we are in wrong relationship with God, and out of this wrong relationship, relationship, all kinds of evil flow. It is just as though a child today were attempting to earn the love of a father or a mother. This child is in wrong relationship with the father or mother, and out of this wrong relationship, all kinds of trouble come. A parent’s love can only be accepted. It cannot be bought. It cannot be earned. It can only be freely given. For Luther, the Christian life is a life of gratitude. Out of this Christian experience of forgiveness, we praise God, exalt in His love and seek to do His will.

For Luther, the Christian life is an ethic of gratitude. I think Luther was a wire of two things that are fundamental, it seems to me, a Protestant understanding of human life and Christian existence. Number one, the human spirit has the power to transcend every human achievement. human spirit has the power to transcend every human achievement. Therefore, one of the most insidious heresies in our time is the Pelagian heresy, that human effort can complete life, that life can be fulfilled by human achievements, no matter how remarkable these achievements may be. And therefore, we have very unrealistic expectations about everything from careers. I am continually running into persons who believe that human life can be fulfilled if they can only we have a career, and you run into people who think that human life can be fulfilled if only you can have a successful marriage.

Therefore, we have very unrealistic expectations from such good and useful human activities as careers or as marriages. But Luther knew But Luther knew that human life cannot be fulfilled and exhausted by any human achievement. The human spirit, as Luther knew and his Reinhold Niebuhrs put so very clearly in our time, is transcended by a human spirit that always goes beyond. the biography of any successful person and the successful are frequently the most aware of the unfulfilled possibilities of their lives. One of my dear friends was Halford Luccock. He became a close friend of mine in his old age and long after I was a student at Yale where he didn’t have much of an opinion of graduate students. But anyone would have to say that Halford Luccock was one of the six or seven great preachers in the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

But I do not remember a conversation I had with Halford Luccock in his last years when he was not speaking about how he had not been a sufficiently good preacher, that he should have been a much better preacher, that he could have been a much better preacher, And it was a great sire to him that he had not done better with what the Lord had given him. Here is a person, you know, who was one of the six or seven certainly great preachers of the first half of the 20th century. Read the biography of any successful person. The human spirit transcends every human achievement, and therefore it is impossible to save ourselves by our own works. Augustine knew this in that remarkable statement with which he begins the confessions. Now, it’s made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.

In other words, God has made human life so that it is only fulfilled in God in no human achievement. And then secondly, not only the power of the human spirit, but secondly, Luther knew that we sin not simply in our worst deeds, but that we sin in our best deeds. We have to be forgiven, not simply our worst deeds. We have to be forgiven our best deeds, which are flawed, by our own self-interest. Therefore it has been said that Martin Luther is the point in the history of theological reflection when the Christian community has been most aware of the persistence of sin in the life of the redeemed. The Pope, the saint have to be forgiven just as a scoundrel has to be forgiven. There’s something profoundly true about this. Especially when you get to be 60 years of age, you begin to become aware of this, I think.

T.S. Eliot, in some lines that are very penetrating, anyone who’s older than some of you are, but for all of us, they have a great deal of validity. In the Four quartets, Eliot says, let me disclose the gifts reserved for age to set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the co-friction of expiring sense without enchantment, offering no promise but bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit as body and soul begin to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage at human folly, and the laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And this is the point that’s relevant to what I’m saying this morning. And last, the rending pain of reenactment of all that you have done and been. shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done are done to others harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.” You’re going to score that again, which once you took for exercise of virtue.

Now, in retrospect, what we regarded as our most virtuous acts are seen to have been flawed by our own self-interest. Therefore, the Christian life is the forgiveness of God, the mercy of God. Now, let us come to the second rejection of the medieval synthesis, the second rejection of the medieval synthesis by the Renaissance. Luther rejected the medieval synthesis because it was too pessimistic, I mean too optimistic. The Renaissance rejected the medieval synthesis because it was too pessimistic. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment are that point in our particular Western history when people have been most optimistic, most aware of the possibilities of human life and of human society, alive to the human potential, and to the potential of human history.

And this was an optimism that was not tempered by grace. What optimism the medievalists had was an optimism that was tempered by the grace of God. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment resolved that human beings could make progress, They could move toward utopia without benefit of grace. And secondly, this was an optimism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that had no awareness, as Luther did, of the persistence of sin, that is, of the emergence of sin in a new form on every new level of human achievement. For the Enlightenment and for the Renaissance insofar as human beings were sinful, sin was something that could be left behind. Luther knew that if you leave sin behind in one form, it will always emerge in a new form on every new level of human achievement.

And therefore, the problem of sin is not a problem of history that we can outgrow. The problem of sin is a human problem that emerges in every new historical situation. Well, here was the rejection of the classic Christian tradition by an optimism that was without grace and without any awareness of the persistence of sin on every new level of human achievement. Now, the sanctificationist principle was taken up within the Christian community in Protestantism by the left wing, by the Mennonites, for example, who were, in principle, sanctificationist. But our concern here, I think, ought to be primarily with John Calvin, who represents a different option from Martin Luther. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin reverses the logical order of theological doctrines and he treats repentance, which for Calvin was sanctification, prior to treating justification of forgiveness. logically, he should have treated justification, forgiveness, as prior to sanctification.

If you were coming at it in a purely logical way. But as a matter of emphasis, Calvin treats sanctification prior to justification or forgiveness as the twin benefits of our union with Christ. Now, Now, there’s no question that Calvin believed in justification, and that Calvin was very much aware that the good people sinned as well as the bad people sinned. He was a Protestant, and he was a Lutheran, and he never gave up Luther’s awareness, except in his own case sometimes. He forgot that John Calvin was a sinner when he was fighting battles, as all of us do. He forgot that he was a sinner. But Calvin was aware that we sin in our best deeds as well as our worst deeds as well as Luther. He believed that forgiveness was the principal hinge upon which Christian faith hangs.

And yet the emphasis in his theology is on sanctification. And there are several reasons for that. One is, Calvin’s experience is radically different from Luther’s. I do not think there is any evidence Calvin really went into those moments of anguish about being a center in the presence of God. Calvin came out of an entirely different background, trained as a humanist and a lawyer, and he was concerned with the purification of Christian faith. He was concerned with the fulfillment of the purposes of God in human history, as I shall talk about tomorrow somewhat, but he was concerned with hearing the Word of God. Certainly one of the key factors in Calvin’s conversion to Protestantism was his profound experience of the presence of God in Scripture.

I do not think that you can read that out of his reply to satellite, the autobiographical comments, and his preface to the Psalms commentary. Now, Justice Luther had the experience with forgiveness, so for Calvin, the decisive experience has to do with experiencing the Bible as the authoritative Word of God. And then, I think also, the fact that he was a lawyer. And my good friend Edward Dowey, who knows a great deal about Calvin, thinks this is not true. And he thinks the only thing Calvin learned in the study of law was an appreciation of the Italian Renaissance from his Italian Renaissance law professors. But it’s inconceivable to me that you could study law and be as interested in law as Calvin was without the law, the legal aspects of Christian faith, influencing the way you think about the Christian life.

And again, I’ll talk about that a little bit more tomorrow. Calvin not only wrote theology, but he wrote the laws, the civic laws for the city of Geneva. And this was a factor, it seems to me, in his interest here. One of the ways in which Calvin differed from Luther, and I’ll say this very briefly because I’ll talk about it again tomorrow. Luther, in the experience of forgiveness, said the Christian has no need for the law. We do not need the law. Now you need the law only to convince that you are sinner, but once you experience forgiveness, you know intuitively and spontaneously out of the experience of being forgiven what you ought to do. And therefore there is this profound awareness of forgiveness out of which one knows what it is to obey God.

Luther said, no one has to tell a person who loves another what to do to please the beloved. Out of the experience of love, one knows automatically, spontaneously what to do. Well, Calvin, in his most ecstatic moments, I don’t believe you could have even gotten Calvin to say that under the influence of drugs. That would be so contrary to anything Calvin could ever have thought. The law just had a much more significant way, a role. For Calvin, the principal use of the law is to stimulate and to guide Christians, and I think this is a personal as well as the theological difference with Luther. I was for a number of years on a discussion group between Lutherans and Calvinists are reformed, and the one thing that the reforms say that no Lutheran can say is that the primary use of the law is to stimulate and guide Christians.

No good Lutheran could ever say that. Of course, there was a historical difference, and the criticism was already being made, particularly by the Roman Catholics, that Luther’s emphasis upon the Christian life is forgiveness, was undermining, on the one hand, the life of the individual Christian and undermining, on the other hand, the Christian society, and that this This was subversive of the Christian order. Now this undermining of the Christian life and Christian society were very much concerns of Calvin, who was concerned about the sanctification, the transformation of the individual Christian. Calvin emphasized progress in the Christian life. much as God and all for it in our time, as that the most important thing you can know about human being is not so much where that person’s been in the past, but what that in person intends for the future.

So Calvin had this very great emphasis upon the believer’s intention for the future and a great emphasis upon making progress in the Christian life. One develops as a Christian. You’ll hear a great deal more about this from Professor Halvos next week, in which he relates the problem of character to sanctification, or at least that’s been one of the main themes of his writing up till now. And he admits that, with Calvin, there is a question of character that one accumulates in one’s own personal existence, this reliability, this consistency, this directional orientation to one’s life. One makes progress in the Christian life, in other words. For Calvin, the most common metaphor that he used for the Christian life was taken from the military.

Calvin was not a militarist, but it’s very interesting that by actual count, by far the most common metaphor that Calvin uses to describe the Christian is a military metaphor. The Christian is a soldier of the Lord, in conquest of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The Christian is in conquest of the turf within his own life, in conquest of the devil in is unlike. But more especially, the Christian is in conquest of the devil in society generally. Now, how much shall we make of this? I think one can say, as Reinhold Niebuhr says, that Calvin put together justification and sanctification better than they have ever been put together theoretically, in the history of the Christian community. And one finds that the Christian life is forgiveness, the Christian life is sanctification, put together with classic clarity in the larger catechism of the Westminster Confession of Faith.

In the larger catechism, the 77th question is, wherein do justification and sanctification differ? And the answer is, although justification be inseparably joined with sanctification, yet they differ in that God in justification imputed the righteousness of Christ. In sanctification, He infuses grace. The difference between an imputed righteousness attributed to us because the righteousness of Christ and infuse righteousness is with us and enable it to the exercise thereof in the farmer in justification sin is pardoned in the other it is subdued the wonder equally apply to all believers and free them from the revenge and wrath of God and that perfectly in this life, that they never fall into condemnation. The other is never equal in all. In other words, we are equally forgiven.

We are completely forgiven. We are totally forgiven. In this, we are all equal. But sanctification in this life is never perfect. It is never complete, it is never final, it is a continual growing to perfection, which if it is ever reached, is reached beyond death, not within the confines of this life. There is in Calvin a strong perfectionist tendency, as I think there always has been in the Christian community. Newton Flew, in his idea of perfection, says that in all Christian theology there is the idea of perfection and the attractiveness of perfection. But Calvin was too great a realist about human nature and therefore he limited perfection, qualified it, and perfection is what we hope for beyond this life. But there’s a pull. Calvin was tempted by the perfection.

Luther so far as I know was never tempted to be a perfectionist. Calvin was tempted to be a perfectionist, and that’s the reason he fought so vigorously against the Anabaptists. I fought against the Anabaptists, the Mennonites, for example, in a way different from the way in which he opposed his other enemies because he saw in the Mennonites something within his own theology. Theoretically, Calvin put together the Christian life is forgiveness, and the Christian life is sanctification remarkably well. But in the end, in practice, in principle he did it well. In practice, justification for Calvin is frequently subordinated to sanctification, and the Calvinists, as many of us in this room, no, fell victim, one to legalism, that is the definition of the Christian life in terms of laws, the fell victim to obscurantism, the identification, the premature identification of God’s will with a particular pattern of historical existence.

I still know the consternation that I experienced when I discovered that there were children who thought of themselves as Christians who believed that their parents were Christians and who simply assumed this who did not have their parents read to them the Christian observer stories on Sunday afternoon. I can remember when I thought that being a Christian always involved reading Christian observer stories and writing Mr. Converse on Sunday afternoon. And it came, I can still remember the shock I experienced for the child when I became aware that there were people who were ostensibly Christian who didn’t particularly engage in this practice. Now, the premature identification of the Christian life with a particular historical pattern. And then thirdly, the Calvinists have always had a tendency to become self-righteous, particularly as we define sin in terms of sensuality and minimize sin in terms of pride.

There are some sins that are cured simply by old age, and therefore it’s possible to become very self-righteous. And when you put self-righteousness and legalism, self-righteousness and legalism always in the end, as Eustace Percy, the biographer of John Knox, put it, are always in the brutal. And I think one has to say that this has been the sin of the Calvinist. The Lutherans had their problem. You don’t get away from the problem if you’re a Lutheran because the Lutherans have had the temptation to whileer in forgiveness and to be so aware that in the presence of God we all sinners as to forget that in the common affairs of life, politics, for instance, the differences between us sinners are sometimes very, very important. The Lutheran has the temptation not to make the kind of proximate, relative, discriminate judgments that are necessary for political action because of an awareness that both Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were like sinners.

And if either was saved, either was saved only by the grace of God, that they failed to know that between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, there were significant differences. Now, as one relates what I have said to individual Christian life, it means that in individual Christian life we have to strive for perfection without becoming subject to the illusion that we are perfect. We have to refuse to accommodate ourselves to the imperfections of an imperfect world without, on the other hand, becoming utopians. One can put this in so many different ways, and again, I’m running out of time, just have a few minutes, let me put it. Not many people I know today are worried about being guilty before God. That’s really not a very viable 16th century problem.

But everywhere in American society I know, people feel guilty. Parents are guilty that they have not been good parents. Professional people are guilty that they have not been sufficiently good lawyers, and maybe there are ministers who feel guilty that they have not been sufficiently good ministers. But in any case, in many areas, in American life today, there is this tremendous sense of guilt. Southerners feel guilty about the race problem, and this pathological sense of guilt is easily exploited by those who wish to exploit it. Vann Woodward has a very excellent article in the New Republic sometime back on the way the feeling of guilt can be exploited by self-interest groups in our society. The problem that Luther wrestled with is very pervasive.

I do not believe that one can live with serenity in our society as a parent, apart from justification by grace through faith. There may be a few religions who’ve gotten by with it, but their day is coming. And neither can you be a good parent without being sanctification, wanting to be a better parent than you are. I would say the same thing is true about a minister or a teacher. There is no way a minister can live with serenity and integrity apart from justification by faith. We know that we are saved not by the competency of our ministry but by the forgiveness of God. And yet on the other hand, we cannot be saved if we do not take seriously our obligation to be the very best minister we can in that particular situation. In personal life I do not think you can get away from holding together in an artful way the Christian experience of God’s grace is mercy for those parents, as professional people, as business people, as citizens, whatever, and the experience of God’s grace is power that transforms us.

Politically, this particular explication of justification and sanctification leads to a doctrine of Christian realism, which all of you will recognize as Niburian. Christian Realism is the attempt to work out a pattern of political action, social action, that moves between skepticism on the one hand and fanaticism on the other, between despair on the one hand utopianism on the other. Between the futility that says no problems, the futility that says there is no solution to the problems, to the optimism that believes our problems are solvable. Realism seeks to take seriously both human sin and human possibilities when undergirded by the grace of God. Christian Realism seeks to underestimate Neither, to underestimate, neither the capacities, the residual capacities for good in bad people, nor to underestimate the residual capacities for evil in good people.

Now, this means, I think, that there is no such thing as Christian politics, there is no such thing as Christian economics, there is no such thing as Christian social order. political, social, and economic activity is morally and theologically ambiguous. There is such a thing as Christians who are involved in political, social, and economic activity, but who are aware that their very involvement involves them in evil as well as good. What Christian faith does, it seems to me, for political activity is first of all bring to that, a sense of confession, the capacity for self-criticism. Paul Lehmann, in the summer session here a few years ago, talking about what he had learned from his teachers, said the thing that he had learned most from Reinhold Niebuhr was the importance of critical self-criticism, of critical self-criticism.

We must be especially cautious when we find or when we believe that God is on our side, when we support our own self-entries, or the interests of the particular group of which we belong in the name of the transcendent God. In actual fact, God is generally, certainly, on neither side of political, economic, and social disputes. God is on both sides generally in judgment as well as redemption and fulfillment. From the perspective of the Protestant Reformation, therefore, we must always beware of identifying our cause with the cause of the transcendent God. And this is done both by the left wing and the right wing of American politics. We’ve heard recently about Jerry Falwell identifying God with the Panama Canal Treaty and with various other activities, but the first person who told me that the Transcendent God had a position on the Panama Canal Treaty was not Jerry Falwell, but the moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and who did it with benevolent money.

As a Democrat, I was in favor of the Panama Canal Treaty, but I have no idea in the Heaven what the Lord God Almighty thinks about the Panama Canal Treaty, or whether he has any position at all. And I would like to have those who know what the Lord God thinks about the Panama Canal Treaty, tell me how they get this information. Or how we can possibly know. How can one know what ought to be done on the Panama Canal Treaty until one can see it long ways down in the future. We cannot adequately and finally judge events now until there is a final summing up of the situation in which those events take place. Take, I suppose, the event in our time which for many people has been the most clear, the Vietnam War. I would say that in the Church there was an amazing unanimity that God was against the participation of the United States in the Vietnam War.

I would like for those who think that to tell me how they are so sure. I am sure that God was active in the Vietnam War, but I cannot say for certain what God was doing in the Vietnam War. I am sure that God was on the side of life, and I am sure that God was on the side of love, and that God was on the side of human dignity. But when you begin to spell that out, I cannot be absolutely certain how God felt about the Vietnam War. And in a sense, we can never know what really took place in the Vietnam War until we read history a hundred years from now. there are serious revisions and the estimates of the validity of various positions. And who can say? God was on both sides. Therefore, I’d say the first thing that a Protestant, a Lutheran or Calvinist theology brings to political social action is the spirit of contrition and the awareness that my truth is never the truth.

It seems so easy to get into this, read the history of my home church. The pastor of the church in which I grew up as a boy, during the Revolutionary War, carried his gun to the pulpit so he could shoot a tori if one came around. Well, you know, I tend to be exhausted in this And to think that that was really great. But who can say for sure what side God was on in the Revolutionary War? God was on both sides, in judgment, in fulfillment, and in redemption. And certainly one cannot say apodictically today which side God was on. So therefore, it seems to me that what Christian realism brings is, first of all, a spirit of contrition and the awareness that one in political, social, and economic activity or ecclesiastical politics must be cautious about identifying his or her cause with that of the Transcendent God.

And the more the cause benefits us, the more we must be aware. I quote two statements from the neighbors. Reinhold Niebuhr once said, our causes are never as righteous as we think they are, and our participation in them is never as devoid of self-interest as we attempted to believe. And as Richard Niebuhr said, causes are not God, they all die. There is nothing in history that is more demonstrable than that. The fundamental human problem is that human beings as human beings are sinners. We have a strange romanticism about the poor, about the oppressed, as we once had about the noble savage. The fundamental And last problem, it’s not that people are oppressed. It’s not that they’re poor. And certainly, while to be cautious, I have a friend in Richmond who identifies the textile workers at J.P.

Stevens, I did recently in a conversation with the poor of the Bible. Well, it seems to me fantastic that you could identify textile workers at J.P. Stevens with the poor of the Bible. relatively, they are among the wealthy of the earth, and certainly they are not the poor of the Bible. But the problem is not that we are poor, not that we are oppressed. The problem is we are sinners. And the truthfulness and this concern about the powerful and the poor is that the powerful have far greater opportunity to sin than the poor or the oppressed. But when the poor and the oppressed get power, they seem to have the same proclivity to sin that the oppressors did. And failure to understand this leads to a rhetoric of love, of oppression, this rhetoric of oppression, and of love in the service of special interest groups.

I think we have to beware when the rhetoric of faith is used to advance self-entries. That changes. One of my predecessors at Union Seminary, whom some of you would know if I had called his name, some of my older colleagues used to say it was really a very difficult thing to get an argument with him because if you did, he had a tremendous skill to always turn that argument so, that if you opposed him, you were not a gentleman, you were not living according to Emily Post, and to oppose him really was not to be a gentleman. Well, you find the same thing true today, that a rhetoric of love, a rhetoric of justice, to give a concrete illustration. I was in several discussions of the mission conference, which some few of you will know, in our church.

And one of the persons whom I was debating with, I thought the mission conference failed on several scores that were debatable. And one of my opponents in that debate, who doesn’t live a million miles from here, and my colleague in a neighboring institution, always would start out his argument by saying, but of course, if you are not for justice, you are not for the mission report, which of course precluded debate in the self-righteous assumption that his position was just. Now, this is what it seems to me Luther and Calvin, the Protestant tradition warns us all against is this self-righteous assumption that we speak for God, that our position is just. Whenever I find a person who always wants me to go through the door first, and who always smiles, and who always talks about how he loves me, I know I’m about to be taken to the cleaners, and I know that theologically, as well as when I’m dealing with a second-hand car salesmen.

Therefore, we have to take seriously the persistence of sin and, in particular, the sin of self-interest. Now, one can argue that Christian realism may create its own illusions, and this is true. And certainly, Niebuhr was aware that Christian realism does create its own illusions. And therefore, when Christian realism is taken in a broad and general sense, it makes us satisfied with less than we can achieve. But Niebuhr was aware of this. Niebuhr always wanted to insist that you bring not simply the principle of contrition, but, as he said, the principle of love. The impossible possibility which stands in judgment upon every human activity. Number one, to encourage us to greater activity in behalf of the fulfillment and the embodiment of love and justice.

And secondly, which stands in judgment on us, reminding us that what we have done in embodying justice in our lives is far less than we could have done than we should have done. I think the main point is that there is a fundamental difference between people who are sanctificationists in principle and those who are justificationists in principle. Now, you can be a justificationist in principle, but not in fact. Now, the Roman Catholics up to Vatican II were certainly sanctificationists in principle, but in certain situations they were tolerant. Protestants were justificationists in principle, knowing that no person has the truth, knowing that no person’s position can be identified with that of the will of God, but frequently we Protestants in practice were sanctifications.

At least you have leverage on the sanctificationists in practice if they are, in principle, justifications. Well, I’ve already gone to the maximum time, but the point is that this business of putting together God’s grace as mercy and God’s grace as power relates to our individual life as well as to our corporate life in in society.