Written by E.J. Hutchinson |
Sunday, August 7, 2022
“We always repeat, urge, and stuff people full of this topic about faith or Christian righteousness so that it would be preserved and accurately distinguished from the active righteousness of the law. (For from and in that teaching alone does the church come into and remain in existence.) Otherwise, we will not be able to preserve true theology, but rather we immediately become jurists, ceremonialists, legal eagles, papists; Christ is obscured, and no one in the church can be taught and encouraged rightly. Therefore, if we wish to be preachers and teachers of others, it is right that we take the greatest care over these matters, and skillfully maintain this distinction between the righteousness of the law and the righteousness of Christ.”

One might think that justification by faith alone is the easy way. In fact, just such a thing quite frequently has been thought. “What, you don’t even do anything? You wanna be a libertine or something?”
The objection has some force–but only when considered in general and in the abstract. It only has force, that is, when made a speculative morsel chewed by a mouth with no existential teeth.
“On the ground,” as it were, the situation is quite different. We humans like to be in control. We like to have something left to us to take care of. If there’s just something we can do–something to which we can point and say, “See? I did what I was told! I did good!”–we feel better, more assured. We like gold stars, pats on the back, a sense of achievement, of having done our bit.
For that reason, in particular and in the concrete there is nothing more difficult than believing that we are justified by faith alone. There is nothing more difficult than assenting to passive, rather than active, righteousness (that is, the righteousness of Christ rather than of ourselves) in relating to God.
Luther saw this, and it was one of his most important insights. Some deniers of justification by faith like to think of themselves as the mature ones, the purveyors of virtue, the upholders of Western Civilization, the builders of culture. In comes justification, out goes society, along with literature, the arts, and religion, to be replaced by licentiousness, barbarism, modernity (GASP).
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Written by E.J. Hutchinson |
Friday, July 22, 2022
For we are ever complaining and grumbling, refusing responsibility for our wrongs. Rather than owning up to original sin, we wish to see ourselves as its unfortunate victims and those who are most offended by it. And here is the paradox: in making himself a Satan, always accusing God and his brother, man attempts to make himself God, viz. the one whose righteousness and goodness has been offended by original sin.

In Er (He), a collection of notes from 1920, Franz Kafka makes the following remark:
Die Erbsünde, das alte Unrecht, das der Mensch begangen hat, besteht in dem Vorwurf, den der Mensch macht und von dem er nicht abläßt, daß ihm ein Unrecht geschehen ist, daß an ihm die Erbsünde begangen wurde.
The original sin, the old wrong that man committed, consists of the accusation that man makes and does not cease making: that a wrong has happened to him, that the original sin was committed against him.
(The translation is my own.)
This is, it seems to me, a very perceptive analysis.
In biblical terms, of course, it is not quite true that passing the buck was the original sin, which consisted of unbelief as manifested in eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Still, what happens almost instantly upon that transgression? Well, passing the buck: “The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate’” (Genesis 3:12).[1]
Why does Adam say this? The text does not specify, but one can speculate: he felt guilt; he felt shame; he wanted to save face; he wanted not to be at fault.
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