Was Luther’s Justification by Grace sola- against Holiness?

---Did Luther downplay, deny, deride or ignore “the holiness without which no

one shall see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14)?

---Anglican pastor Phillip L. Anderas studied it in his dissertation and answered

no.

---He explained that Luther was not loose on holiness as many scholars are

thinking.

---Luther in 1510 started to have an interest about Augustine.

---In 1514 he made an “Augustinian turn”.

---The Augustinian turn is that in the doctrine of sin, grace and holiness, he

scooped up what he could get from Augustine and warmed it up to his own style

and kept to it until his death in 1546.

---Luther was interested in the period of Augustine’s life from 420 AD and

onwards.

---Luther made his doctrine of salvation (sin, grace and holiness) a mixture of

Augustinian Catholicism and evangelicalism. That was between 1535-1546.

---There were continuities and discontinuities of Augustine’s doctrine in Luther

and between 1518-1521 there was a “breakthrough”.

---Anderas said that he believed in a theology of progressive renewal in holiness

which is balanced with a reality of residual sin on one side of the balance and

the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ on the other.

---But is it biblical? My answer is no. It is experientially.

---Luther said that.

“Luther appeals immediately not to Scripture, but to experience: “For Experientia testifies, that in whatsoever we work well, this concupiscentia ad malum is left behind (relinquitur), and no one is clean from it”. Oops. Not Bible but experience.

---What Anderas 2015 did is to analyze Luther in periods.

---He wanted to focus on the later mature Luther so he started looking at the Smalcald Articles (Dec. 1536/Jan.-Feb. 1537—1538).

---Hold your chair: they were written intended for an ecumenical Council of the Church. See Wikipaedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalcald_Articles

---Catholic and Protestant politicians met but because of kidney problems, Luther could not attend.

---So Philip Melanchton decided not to read the ecumenical purposed paper and thus wrote an attack on the pope and his supremacy instead.

---Was the kidney attack divine intervention? Was Melanchton’s writing also in that line?

---Questions were asked during these times about the law and grace:

Is there a need in the Christian life for the preaching of the Law?

Should pastors proclaim the Law, such as the demands of the Decalogue, from the pulpit in the Christian congregation?

Does the Law play a role in the Christian’s life of repentance? 

---Agricola and other teachers were teaching that one should not preach the law because it will make the members legalists.

---Luther called them “antinomians” = “Against law people”.

---In 1528 Phillip Melanchton taught that the law should be preached in order to understand what sin is.

---Johannes Agricola objected and became an antinomian.

---Agricola argued that it was the sacrifice of Christ that one should preach and this should turn people away from sin and lead to repentance.

---It was quiet for a while and in 1537 Agricola distributed tractates of his view around anonymously.

---Agricola said that the Holy Spirit operates not through the Law only through the gospel. We do not need law-preaching, only gospel-preaching.

---When one repent of sin, Agricola said, it is not because you violated the law but because you hurt a Man called Christ. Nice.

---Luther answer in disputes with Agricola, that it is not a case of either Christ or the Law but both Christ and the Law. Very nice.

“[Since] the saints in this life do not entirely leave the old man and feel the Law in their members rebelling against the Law of their mind and bringing it into captivity (cf. Rom. 7:23), the Law must not be removed from the Church, but must be retained and faithfully driven home.”

Again Luther writes, “To be sure, man is to be led to repentance through the cross and suffering of Christ. But it does not follow from there that the Law is totally useless, inefficacious, nothing, and to be removed completely. Quite the contrary, we rather come to repentance through the knowledge of the Law as well as through the knowledge of Christ’s cross or of salvation.”

---During this dispute, Luther brought in the citations of Augustine on the simul.

---What is Augustine’s simul? Augustine (as accepted by Luther’s) held to simul is simul iustus et peccator. Meaning: At the same time saint and sinner. Oops.

---Same time saint and same time sinner.

---Does the Bible teach that we are at the same time Righteous and Sinner? No.

---Jesus said to the woman in adultery in John 8: “Go and do your best not to sin but run to Me when you do”.Correct?

---Go and sin no more. No more? Was Jesus joking with her?

---Augustine and Luther would say yes because not biblically, but experientially they think that one remains a sinner because the brain keeps feeling miserable.

---Why? Augustine said there is before conversion original sin in us inherited from Adam based on a mistranslation of the Itala and Vulgate of Romans 5:12.

---After conversion, said Augustine, there is an “opium peccatum” in us. An addicted sin chemical that causes all to remain sinful.

---Slightly different than Augustine, Luther said that after conversion the original sin is pulled apart but particles remain.

---Luther felt that God left it there in us so that we should constantly be reminded to seek Christ for forgiveness.

---Luther said that there should not be sinful acts in the person because there has to be a fight against these particles that remain.

---At this point I leave the Anglican Anderas behind and go forward with my own discussion.

---Adventist pioneers used various descriptions to explain the sin in a person: sinful propensities, tendency to sin, evil habits, sinful habits, weakness of the flesh, the old man. Ellen White too.

---Ellen White differed from Luther, Calvin and Wesley that “original sin” whether opium of sin, whether particles of sin in us, if they reflect habits or tendencies, they have to be given up before the Door of Mercy closes and Christ completes His meditorial work of Atonement.

---It is for me such that what remains after true conversion in the converted person, or reconverted person later, who overcame all acts and habits of evil, that the scars of sin remain in the cognitive part of the brain as memory pop-ups by Satan.

---Ellen White says Satan continues to accuse us in the mind and we should not pay attention to him. Provided…

---If a sinner does not pay attention to the accusing in the mind, then the person may be a Schizophrenic. A double life person. Double minded.

---But a Christian does not need to pay attention to the accusing in the mind unless there are still victims out there as a result of the past actions.

---If the Christian has approached the victims of his actions to explain and express her/his story, then still the accusing mind should be avoided for Christ forgives in full.

---Luther said that one cannot have acts of sin and claim to have true faith. He does not believe in cheap gospel. That is what holiness is for him.

---This is what Adventism is all about.

---Cheap gospel Lutherans are eclectic Luther.

---Cheap gospel Adventists are eclectic Ellen White.

---Are you? If your pastor is not preaching the overcoming messages of the Bible, there is not a proper feeding of the hungry sheep in the church. Correct?

---Luther, Calvin, Arminius, Wesley and Ellen White said the same messages here. Amazing. Is it not?

---Luther on holiness now.

---Luther said there are evil passions of sin that remain in a converted person. The law unmasked them. It is peccatum and truly sin and require confession of 1 John 1:8.

---God forgives it out of mercy to all who acknowledge and confess and hate it and plead to be healed from it.

---Luther feels that it is an error to think that these evil passions can be healed through works. Only grace will do it.

---Luther said “As “sin” brought forth its ‘fruit’ in peccata actualia (actual sins), so this inner righteousness—received as a gift by grace, renovating the heart, and thus reversing its affective propensities—brings forth its fruits in good works: opera autem sunt potius fructus Iustitiȩ. (see Anderas at footnote 846 mentioning the works of Augustine and Luther. WA 56.271.13, cf. LW 25.259).

---This is Luther’s view of holiness. This is what Ellen White also taught.

---Are we talking past each other with our terms and jargon different? Make me wonder.

 Source:

Phillip L. Anderas, Renovatio: Martin Luther’s Augustinian Theology of

Holiness. A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School.

Marquette University Phd, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, December 2015.

Downloaded from the internet at

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1614&context=

dissertations_mu