The Meaning of Protestant Theology: Phillip Cary

Hence the teaching that Luther wants every child to learn about the Holy Spirit is first, “I believe that by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him,” but then, “the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and preserved me in the true faith.” The immense logical subtlety of these words from Luther’s Small Catechism should not be passed over. The reason Christian faith is never something to make a decision about is that it is always something that I should believe I already have, because I have received it from the Holy Spirit, who is promised to all the baptized—and I have no right not to believe God’s promise. If I am a child growing up in a good Lutheran household, baptized as an infant and learning my catechism, I will not be told to make a decision for Christ but taught, in the words of the catechism, to “believe that . . . I cannot believe” as well as to believe the words that follow, which are in the present perfect tense, signifying what has already been done: “But the Holy Spirit has . . . preserved me in the true faith.” I have no decision to make, because I have no right to deny what the Holy Spirit has already done in me and for me, just as Christ promised. Of course in my heart and in my deeds I often do deny it, and that is my sin.

Luther’s shift to a law/Gospel framework does not mean that God merely says we are righteous outwardly, as if the Gospel were a kind of declaration or announcement that made no inward change in us. Rather, what it signifies outwardly becomes inwardly ours through faith. Luther’s teaching must therefore be distinguished from the later Protestant doctrine of forensic justification—called “forensic” because it uses the language and concepts of the courtroom (one of the meanings of the Latin word forum, from which we get the word “forensic”).

I think this is the way I’ve thought of it

Unlike the purely forensic doctrine, he thinks of justification as something that makes us inwardly new persons, precisely because faith in the Gospel brings Christ into our hearts.

how Christ comes to us in the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:5). This passage is also the text for Luther’s sermon on the first Sunday of Advent, which begins his Church Postil, the book of sermons he composed for church use in 1521. This is the season leading up to Christmas,

I found the book on Google Books.

emphasizes in Freedom of a Christian,38 her neighbors have need of her righteousness and good works, which is why God commands the tree to bear fruit, so that she might serve her neighbor in works of love. So “proper righteousness” is an external and relatively superficial thing, the outward good works that are useful indeed to her neighbor but make no real change in the depth of her heart, where it is Christ who dwells within her by faith alone and changes everything.

What this means is that the alien righteousness does the work of an infused virtue, in the medieval Augustinian sense: it is a divine gift that comes to us from outside our own soul and its powers but makes its home deep within us and changes us from the inside out, so that we have true faith, hope, and love. 

perfection of our union with Christ incarnate through faith in his word. That union is from first to last the knowledge of a human being who is God in person, known by believing the Gospel that tells us the story of who he is, in which he promises to give himself to us as our Beloved. 

On what basis then does reason judge that the Christian Scriptures really are a divine revelation? Locke’s recourse was to use miracles to authenticate claims of revelation. They are the credentials God gives to those who deliver his message, and thus serve as “the foundation on which the believers of any divine revelation must ultimately base their faith.”25 The miracles of Jesus and the apostles, … is a proper basis for revealed religion. It was an ill-fated recourse. 

Such was the angst of Rob Woolbright during that same period. I used to see him more back then.  

Protestant theologians, who were not used to thinking of themselves as belonging to a tradition of interpretation. It became very difficult to sustain the sense of transparency in their reading of Scripture that could once have been taken for granted—their sense that they were simply explaining what Scripture said without adding any interpretation of their own. 

Evangelicals still think this way.  

This is why it’s so important to hear the word of God properly preached and to take it into our hearts, so that faith, hope, and love may take shape there. For our culture contains all sorts of voices that want to shape the voices in our hearts. That’s what mass media and consumerism are all about. 

Where will I get this preaching  

old quote that relates –

“In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics. But because of this, the person and work of Jesus Christ must, for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness.”

[Fire and Rose Blog 121507]

another quote

There might be more than one plausible metaphysics for this. Luther is undogmatic, indeed rather uninterested, in exactly which metaphysical account of the presence of Christ is best, so long as it is clear that wherever the right hand of God is, there is Christ Jesus in the fullness of his humanity, including his body and blood. As we have seen, that is why Christ’s flesh is unlike all other human flesh: incorruptible, indivisible, hidden from sight, and perceptible by faith alone.

still because it is also nowhere, as has been said, you can actually grasp it nowhere, unless for your benefit it binds itself to you and summons you to a definite place. This God’s right hand does, however, when it enters into the humanity of Christ and dwells there. There you surely find it, otherwise you will run back and forth throughout all creation, groping here and groping there yet never finding, even though it is actually there; for it is not there for you.119 Christ’s flesh is unique, breaking every metaphysical framework in which our reasoning seeks to place it, whether Augustine’s Platonism, or the Ptolemaic astronomy of Luther’s day, or our modern science, or the ancient Near Eastern cosmology of the Bible itself. Only faith finds it, hearing Christ’s own word as he promises us: This is my body, given for you.