4 - 1998

Joint Declaration on Justification

Ecumenical Consideration in Connection with the "Joint Declaration"

by Heinz Ruegger

The Swiss Reformed theologian Heinz Ruegger doubts the seriousness of the debate. The author considers not the content itself but the dispute about the doctrine of justification to be antiquated, because it cannot be comprehended at all by the Christian congregations and it ignores essential aspects of ecumenical processes for finding consensus.

1. Appreciation

Let me say right away that I consider the "Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1997)" of the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (JD) within the framework of the traditional "doctrinal discussions oecumene" to be an impressive document. It appears to me remarkable that, as a fruit of various previous dialogues since the sixties, such a substantial "consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification" (JD par. 42) has successfully been reached.
This is particularly so when one recalls that for the Lutheran side nothing less than the heart of its identity was the subject. It is known that in such a situation people react - far beyond the purely factual dimension - especially sensitively and particularly concerned. Precisely because in this statement which has become possible such a central topic was discussed, this Declaration of the "common understanding of our justification through the grace of God in faith in Christ" (par. 5) gains a special symbolic importance.

It signalizes that the efforts toward ecumenical understanding have progressed so far that, even on points which earlier marked the deepest rifts of confessional division, weight-bearing bridges exist. It is good that "terrible controversies" can become "fruitful convergences".
Stop the ritual celebration of lamenting the ecumenical winter or the eternal know-it-all criticism of the lines of this ecumenical bridge's construction. Instead, use the bridge as it now stands, thankfully and cheerfully, so as to see what can develop out of busy bridge traffic.
The JD is impressive first because of its clear line of reasoning, its carefully constructed inner structure. Whoever reads ecumenical documents frequently knows that this is everything but a matter of course. Further, that the remaining differences between the partners in the discussions are soberly and realistically presented, and how this is done, is to be positively acknowledged.
The concerned question as to whether we non-Lutherans see the existing community between the Lutheran, United, and Methodist churches in Europe in the Leuenberg Church Fellowship endangered by the JD appears to me to be comprehensible only as a rhetorical one. How could we ever think that our fellowship with other Protestant churches could be thereby endangered because they for their part mark points of agreement with the Roman Catholic church and lift mutual condemnations? For us this can only be a reason for rejoicing.

2. The Present Controversy

The effect of an ecumenical consensus document like the JD depends upon how it is received. Formally, of course, this means that first the JD must be accepted by the churches involved according their own legal procedures. But even with an official church acceptance of the JD, the question would still be open as to what then concretely would change in the practical living of the relationship between the Lutheran and the Roman Catholic churches. And this depends on the question, to what one allows oneself to be moved by this ecumenical declaration.
It appears that first of all a majority for acceptance of the JD within German Lutheranism need to be won. This is particularly so since certain professors of theology have registered resistance, summoning up at the moment heavy guns, because for them the JD - to say it succinctly but accurately - is not Lutheran enough.
When Ingolf U. Dalferth, for example, criticises that the consensus on the basic truths of the doctrine of justification reached is no real agreement because no tangible consequences for other still controversial questions of doctrine can be derived from it and because confessionally divergent interpretations of the consensus reached in the JD still exist, queries are unavoidable. Were there not always, even within Lutheranism, differing interpretations of the common confessional foundations, even of the justification doctrine?
In short, whoever can first be glad about an agreement when the other party draws from what we can jointly declare the same conclusions for all possible further questions, will not go very far ecumenically and will be tripped up on the question of pluralism in his own confession.

3. Questions of Content

Naturally the JD raises a series of critical queries, queries which as far as I can see are almost all directed at both traditions. They deal with statements which belong to the consensus material and thus do not question the ecumenical strength of the text as a bridge between the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran churches. I wish to point to just a few points:

a)the way in which in Par. 8-9 the Old and New Testaments are compared;
b)the problematic teaching about baptism in the JD;
c)the understanding of sin in the JD.

Again, these queries are directed at both confessions, but seem to me no grounds to declare the JD for confessional reasons is "not acceptable". However, these thoughts lead me to fundamental questions about the way of the consensus-oekumene as represented in an exemplary fashion by the JD. I would now like to deal with these more closely.

4. The Relationship of Ecumenical Work to Reality

Reading the JD leaves with me, beside all the positive impressions mentioned, a problematic aftertaste. I cannot rid myself of the impression that here theological specialists in largely strange and, even for theologians, hardly still comprehensible categories of thought are giving answers to questions which most Christians today are not or no longer asking. Therefore it is to be feared that the explications of the JD will scarcely help the churches and today's Christians understand the gospel better, believe with more enthusiasm and witness more clearly.
Is it not time to first question dogmatic controversies of past eras as to whether they are still to be regarded as real questions, as genuine conflicts, as relevant problems for the faith and witness of Christian men and women today? Would it not be more appropriate to let the old controversies rest? They could be left for interested historians as a productive field for dissertations and theses in ecclesiastical and dogmatic history. Fulbert Steffensky was probably not entirely wrong when he remarked: "The main churches with their theological ecumenical problems are guardians of a belated consciousness. There are questions that are also solved by forgetting them."

5. The Status of the Doctrine of Justification

In the context of the whole biblical witness Lutheran theologians emphasize that the doctrine of justification deals with the "noble, most necessary and most distinguished article" of the whole Christian teaching. The most recent argument within German Lutheranism about the acceptability of the JD also was kindled by the question of the unique meaning of the justification doctrine as criterion and as "rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum".

The debate really does concern a genuine feature of traditional Lutheran identity. The Lutheran Reformation always concentrated (one could also say "limited") the normative aspect of the witness of Scripture (the sola scriptura) on that which "pushes Christ" (the sola Christus), and measured this witness of Christ again in a certain - conscious! - onesidedness and exclusivity by the criterion of the Pauline teaching about justification. The gospel was to be understood starting with this axiom, which had become so overwhelmingly great and liberating for Luther. What could not pass through this bottleneck was to be given no place in the constantly more finely differentiated branches of the Orthodox Lutheran understanding of faith. The Reformed branch of the Reformation took a somewhat different path here, in that it understood the sola scriptura more in the sense of a tota scriptura. To be sure, the danger of this approach lies in a certain tendency to a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible in the sense of a purely formal literal authority. The strength of this approach, which is in my experience still too little recognized, is not to be overlooked. It teaches us to hear the gospel in the whole complexity and the many voices of the biblical witnesses, of which we first really became aware since the rise of historical-critical biblical science.
In the framework of the complete biblical witness, the perspective given with the Pauline teaching about justification is only one among many different hermeneutical keys to the understanding of the gospel, and not even absolutely the most weighty.

6. The Problem of the Meaning of the Doctrine of Justification for the Present

The way in which certain Lutheran theologians even today still like to raise up the doctrine of justification as the center, even as the integrating crystallization point of the whole of church life, I consider to be an abtract postulate which massively contradicts Lutheran church reality itself.
I think much more that the individual search for a gracious God in its strongly forensic form, to which the Reformers found the central answer in the Pauline teaching on justification, is to a large extent no longer our primary religious question. Issues like the one about the existence and conceivability of God, about his relationship to non-Christian religions, the issue of theodicy in the face of Auschwitz and other places of horrors, or also the question of the sources of religious inspiration for active concern in the areas of justice, peace and the preservation of creation - they are all far more central and burning questions for us today than the one about a gracious God and how he credits my personal guilt to me or not.
Symptomatic for the problematic definition of the modern significance of the doctrine of justification are the discussions in connection with the Helsinki Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation in 1963. Hermann Deuser points out regarding them, "that a language about justification and the doctrine of justification which truly is concerned with our own time - and not only presents the own church tradition" - was not found because "the understanding of world, meaning and self of people who are not, in the narrower sense, formed by church and theology can no longer directly comprehend the contents and terminologies of the teaching on justification."

To sum up: I am firmly convinced that the doctrine of justification remains an important focus of the Christian message, but only as one among others. This much seems clear to me, that this front today, contrary to the situation in the 16th century, is not decisive for our being as church. To this extent the potential for the future of the JD as presented, in spite of all the uncontestable symbolic meaning for the removal of historical burdens, is limited.

7.Against the Narrowing of the Christian Understanding of Truth

With the ecumenical approach of the JD, an understanding of unity comes in view which presupposes "a consensus in basic truths", upon which basis, then, diverging theological developments can be viewed as legitimate and in any case present no cause for mutual doctrinal condemnations or for refusal of church communio (JD par. 5 + 40). This approach, which precisely agrees with that of the Leuenberg Concord, is central. Nonetheless, when reading the JD I cannot shake off the impression that the writers are ruled by the idea that the necessary consensus must consist of a relatively differentiated, intellectually conclusive system of doctrinal statements, without which church unity is impossible. This thinking at any rate lies strongly behind the Lutheran insistence that the doctrine of justification must be the one and only decisive criterion of all Christian doctrines. Tangible in the case of the present critics of the JD, it seems to me, is this monolithic-intellectual understanding of truth, which comes very much from axioms of Greek philosphy, and is very unlike Semitic-Jewish thinking.

I miss by both the authors and the critics of the JD that they take radically seriously what one can learn from the witness to God in the Bible, if one grants the Bible - in the sense of the Reformed principle of Scripture - normativeness in its canonical wholeness, normativeness precisely in its non-logically-harmonised, greatly differing experiences, expectations, images and theological designs, in, beside and against one another. In this respect the JD possibly still suffers from a deficit which generally is attached to the traditional approach of consensus oecumene.
For this reason it seems to me so important, that in view of the controversy which has woven itself about the funtion of the doctrine of justification as a criterion (JD par. 18) we get away from the widespread Lutheran position, and with and beyond the Catholics, recognize as legitimate, yes, as factually necessary, a number of criteria or hermeneutical approaches to the reality of the God to whom the Bible testifies. Along with Paul Schütz it can be said that it is "providence that the Bible is not a systema but a summa. It is typical of the wholeness of the Bible that it presents itself not in the precision of a system but in the approximation of the whole", which does not exclude, but rather includes contradiction.
First where a person can accept in great inner freedom this togetherness of different, logically not harmonisable theological statements, and recognises it as belonging to the essence of the Christian faith and of the Christian church, does a person move within an ecumenical paradigm which may be able to do justice both to the witness of the Bible in its canonical wholeness and diversity, as well as to the theologically and confessionally varied, highly developed reality of being the church today.

8. Summary

In the context of the traditional consensus oecumene in the spirit of Faith and Order, the JD represents a remarkable step forward, and I can only hope that on the Lutheran as well as on the Catholic side it will be officially ratified and received. Its meaning is more symbolic than doctrinally relevant for today's faith and proclamation. It is here that the weakness of this approach lies. It remains completely caught in the categories of thought and issues of the past.
Should the JD, for example in German Lutheranism, not win the necessary acceptance because of the criticism of certain professors and churchmen, it would be regrettable, in my view. This would at the same time have to be understood as a sign that the approach of the JD still remains caught too much in the ecumenical paradigms of its critics, namely in the assumption that even into abstract subtleties of doctrinal development, a basic consensus which is intellectually noncontradictory and logically compelling is demanded as a prerequisite for church communio. "God is love", says the first letter of John. And we should love God with our whole heart, with our whole soul and with all our mind - and our neighbors as ourselves. Everything depends on this. With this - and only with this - the church stands or falls.

If someone loves God with a mind whose contents are determined by a more Lutheran or by a more Tridentine understanding of justification, if someone understands our human dubiousness before God more from the Lutheran concept of simul justus et peccator or thinks more in Catholic categories of post-baptismal concupiscence (JD par. 29f), seems to me in the end to be fairly unimportant - as long as we in the one or other way of thinking (and above all, in the way in which we advocate them over against those who think and believe otherwise!) trust in God's love and express it. On the theological consensus depends little. If only God's love for us and for the whole world becomes noticeable in thousands of ways and is witnessed to by us churches in a credible, understandable way.
However much the JD is to be welcomed and its official acceptance is to be hoped for - an oecumene which wants to cope in our present context with the missionary task cannot avoid starting from quite different approaches as from the one which led to this Declaration.

Heinz Ruegger is Commissioner for ecumenical affairs of the Swiss Protestant Federation of Churches in Bern. First published in Una Sancta 1/98; reprinted in epd-Dokumentation 23/98. Strongly abridged translation.