Fully Justified?

A Review of Jonathan Grothe’s The Justification of the Ungodly: An Interpretation of Romans. Two volumes. Self-published: St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, 2005. US$ 56.99.

In the early 1990’s Concordia Publishing House undertook the massive task of publishing a scholarly commentary series on the entire Scriptures. By my count, twenty-two volumes covering twenty books of the Bible (or portions thereof) have been published, but the volume on Romans never appeared, even though it was to have been one of the flagship commentaries and its writer was the editor of the New Testament portion of the series. There never was any official explanation, but the scuttlebutt was that the editorial board (including the doctrinal review board) of Concordia Publishing House was deeply dissatisfied with portions of the commentary that had been submitted.

The commentary that could have been part of that series now appears as this two-volume self-published work. If this is the work that CPH declined, the reader can understand both why it raised a few eyebrows and why the author might rightly have taken umbrage at some of the criticism leveled against this work. It is fortunate that the author found a way to get this work into circulation, for it certainly deserves a wide reading and thoughtful consideration—and at the same time careful critique.

There are many good things one can say about Grothe’s grammatical analysis and insights into individual passages, but this review will focus on some of the broader points he makes. First, he understands that Paul wrote this letter not as an idle exercise in speculative theology, but as a missionary who needed the support of the Roman church in order for him to continue his Gentile mission work. To do this, he had to write to the Jewish Christians in Rome who had heard of him but may have been skeptical about what he was doing. He had to convince these readers that his gospel was in accordance with the Jewish canon and gave Torah its due respect. Moreover, he had to show that this gospel was indeed powerful to save people, as he was claiming it did. Paul also had to convince them to such a degree that these Jewish Christians would not only not hinder his mission work, but convince their counterparts in Jerusalem to cooperate with him fully. Thus, the Epistle to the Romans is not (pace Melanchthon) the result of some impulse on Paul’s part to write a complete systematic theology, but is an exercise in how to read Scripture and Israel’s history with an eye to the Messianic missions, particularly among the Gentiles.

Given his emphasis on this background to Romans, it is understandable that Grothe understands “law” to mean “Torah” fairly consistently throughout the epistle. While it has been customary for Christians—both before and after the Reformation—to distinguish between the moral, civil, and ceremonial aspects of the law, Grothe will have none of it. Torah is Torah. In Grothe’s estimation Paul does not accept one part of the Mosaic Law (e.g., the moral law), while rejecting other parts of it (e.g., the ceremonial law), but argues that all of Torah has been abolished by the death of Christ. This does not make Torah irrelevant. In fact, the Christian is able to look at Moses as having written a Torah of faith rather a Torah of works (Romans 3:27), as the argument about Abraham’s justification in Romans 4 proves. While many translations and commentators translate the word “law” in this passage as “principle,” Grothe demonstrates that one can understand it more naturally as Torah. One can then understand this passage as outlining a different hermeneutic than that of the traditional Judaism of Paul’s day, an emphasis that is further developed in Romans 4, 9, and 10, to name a few places. Convinced that Paul almost always means “Torah” rather than “moral law” or some other aspect of the law when he says “law,” Grothe develops this insight to be at once one of the greatest strengths of his commentary and one of its greatest weaknesses, as we will see later.

Grothe is concerned that Christians are too quick to salvage the law and put Christians back under it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way that most commentators view Romans 6-8 as a discourse on sanctification. To the contrary, argues Grothe, these chapters unfold the gospel’s power for salvation, even amid the ongoing battle against sin, and thus these chapters continue to unfold the justification of the ungodly. Thus, they are not so much an appeal for the believer’s sanctification, as C.E.B. Cranfield (among other expositors) suggests, but rather a defense against the slander that Paul’s gospel isn’t strong enough to save a rotten humanity.

Moreover, when Paul does finally get around to sanctification (Romans 12-16), Grothe argue that Paul views it primarily as a liturgical action, that is, as worship expressed in ordinary life. His exposition of chapters 12 and 13 in this light is worth the price of the two volumes alone, for he shows that the sacrificial concept of sanctification most visible in Romans 12:1-2 actually undergirds all a Christian’s actions with others, both inside and outside the house of faith.

Equally illuminating is his exposition of Romans 9. Commentators and dogmaticians alike have tended to assume that Romans 9:10-18 addresses Esau’s and Pharaoh’s eternal fate. But Grothe challenges that assumption. It is likely that the Pharaoh who opposed Moses is not among the number of those who are saved, but why should we assume the same about Esau? Paul is not speaking of eternal, unalterable conditions, but of the way in which God uses or rejects people in this life for the accomplishing of His goals. This interpretation accords well with Paul’s argument, especially in Romans 11, where Paul sees the (partial) Jewish rejection of Christ as something temporary and reversible—as well as something advantageous for God’s mission to the Gentiles.

Grothe’s exposition on these and other passages makes this commentary well worth reading. At the same time, the work is not without its faults. For one thing, there is precious little direct engagement of the scholarship of the New Perspective on Paul, the movement starting in the 1970’s that has challenged the “Lutheran” approach to Paul as a misreading of Paul’s intent. (“Lutheran” here includes more than those who subscribe to the Augsburg Confession; it refers to all influenced by the Protestant Reformation who assume that Paul’s theology was quintessentially concerned with justification by grace through faith in distinction to justification by works.) Grothe acknowledges that this recent scholarship on Paul warrants a new examination of Romans, but Grothe does little to engage it directly. Instead, he seems to assume that setting up a good, coherent Lutheran exposition of this epistle will suffice as a refutation to the New Perspective on Paul. To the extent that Grothe challenges other commentators, it is mainly older commentators (such as Cranfield) that he has in mind. The more recent commentators that he addresses (such as Käsemann) definitely do not come out of the New Perspective on Paul.

More troubling is the way that he handles two doctrinal issues: the third use of the law and church fellowship. In neither case is it absolutely clear that he falls into outright heresy, but he seems to be inviting misunderstanding at the very least. Because Grothe believes that “law” in Paul refers to “Torah” and that Paul does not distinguish between the moral, civil, and ceremonial laws, Grothe is adamant that Christians are not allowed back under the law, not even the moral law. At this point he comes dangerously close to denying a proper application of the third use of the law and thus falling under the damnamus of Article VI of the Formula of Concord. But just when the reader is ready to draw that conclusion, Grothe pulls back a little and explains that he is merely opposed to a Calvinistic misinterpretation of the third use of the law. His footnote 73 on page 759 quotes approvingly Jonathan Lange’s criticism of how the “third use” is often misused, noting that in the Formula of Concord “the law reproves, kills, and condemns the Christian, while in [Calvin’s] Institutes, the law only shakes, urges, and pinches the Christian.”

Grothe is correct to argue that preachers should avoid sermon outlines of (1.) second use of the law, (2.) gospel, and (3.) third use of the law. As Jonathan Lange has correctly explained at length (in the article Grothe cites), a preacher does not choose which way he will use the law. Rather the law has these functions all the time, and one cannot really tell one’s hearers, “Don’t think about the accusing aspect of the law as I preach this final section on sanctification now.” One might as well tell an audience, “As you listen to this song, remember that music has rhythm, melody, and harmony. This time, however, don’t hear the melody at all, but only the rhythm.” One can’t hear music—or the law—that selectively. A sounder approach is to realize that whenever one preaches the law, he is simultaneously damning sinners and outlining true godliness (as well as telling people how to behave in civil society). Thus, there is no need for a separate section where true godliness is outlined for believers. And if this is all that Grothe means, well and good.

But there is a larger question that has not been adequately addressed by those (including Grothe) who have a deep aversion to talking of the third use of the law. If the law is in no sense a moral guide and if the paraenesis of Paul’s epistles consists merely of injunctions flowing from the gospel, how do we prevent the gospel from becoming a new law? There was a strong legalistic streak in precisely those areas of Lutheranism that rejected the third use of the law in the 1960’s onwards. Granted, it was a liberal form of legalism, which may have clouded the ability of advocates and critics alike to see the potency of that legalism, but it was a real legalism, nonetheless. The gospel became less and less about the sinner’s justification before God; instead, a “second use of the gospel” came to predominate—where the gospel is less about God’s action on behalf of a sinner and more and more about God’s action in the justified. Ironically, such theologians talk incessantly about a gospel (rarely in the concrete, however, and certainly not in terms of vicarious atonement and other traditional constructs) and thus think themselves very evangelically-minded, all the while using this rather abstract gospel as the basis for moralizing on political and other issues.

I am not arguing that Grothe has fallen into this particular error. But given that he is less than clear on these matters—or rather does not unambiguously distance himself from such a misunderstanding of law and gospel—I can understand why a doctrinal review board may have found some of his comments troubling, especially when that board came from a denomination that still wakes up having nightmares about having nearly been hijacked by “gospel reductionism.”

The other area where Grothe surely touched a sensitive doctrinal nerve was in his discussion of fellowship. Much of what he says needs to be taken to heart. In fact, I dare say that his entire argument must be heard carefully—albeit often painfully and not uncritically—especially by clergy, who (Grothe argues) are too prone to shore up their own denominational prerogatives rather than seek a broader Christian unity. Grothe does not doubt that there are appropriate divides; Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other non-Trinitarians are clearly outside the pale of the church. But there are no half-brothers in the church, Grothe argues, and we need to start acknowledging that. He spends much of his exposition of chapters 14-16 on this topic, much more than perhaps the text itself would seem to warrant.

The big question, though, is this: what does this mean in practice? Here Grothe is less clear, largely intentionally. Is he advocating that all Trinitarian Christians be allowed to commune in confessional Lutheran churches—perhaps with the proviso that they accept the sacramental presence of Christ? He never says. To the extent that he offers a concrete proposal for action, he suggests that now might be a good time for Lutherans to revisit the status of the heirs of the a-creedal Radical Reformers, who were considered beyond the pale by the Lutheran Reformers. But lest he be accused of doctrinal indifferentism, he also insists that doctrine matters and that it is doctrine that must divide between those who are in and those who are outside the fellowship. After reading dozens of pages on this topic, the reader is left feeling that perhaps he is merely arguing against complacency in inheriting one’s ancestors’ feuds without examining whether or not a closer fellowship is possible with other Christians. Or maybe he is picking up the plea of the Wauwatosa theologians of the early 20th century Wisconsin Synod, who asked that we be charitable in our assumptions about those currently not in fellowship with us, especially when we see the one and only Holy Spirit creating the same Christian faith through the one and only Word in the midst of churches that do not share our confessional history.

If this is what he is aiming at, he has something to say. Every pastor who enters the ministry and every Christian who participates in the worship life of a particular church must not simply take up their ancestors’ feuds without thorough examination. No pastor ought to bind himself to a confession if he believes that its damnamus casts too wide a net. And thus he ought to not only examine the positive teachings of his church, but also consider whether he agrees that the doctrinal distinctions of that confession are not merely true but also necessary for Christian unity. I have argued elsewhere that the Lutheran Confessions get this exactly right, being neither too strict nor too loose in what they demand for Christian unity, but this is something each pastor and each generation of laity must conclude for themselves.

Again, I can see why this attitude touched a delicate nerve in the committee that reviewed this book. Our denomination was veering towards an ecumenical promiscuity in the 1960’s; had the trajectory continued, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (and its sister church, the Lutheran Church—Canada) would have been as been as vacuous in theology and promiscuous in church relations as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada). For a denomination breathing a sigh of relief that it didn’t go off the cliff, this plea of Grothe’s to get nearer the edge sounds a bit dangerous. And yet it is important for us to hear his warning against a mindless triumphalism and to heed his plea for Christian humility and charity, even while we hold true to our confession.

All in all, Grothe’s commentary is worth reading, even where it challenges us most. I understand why Concordia Publish House could not in truth say nihil obstat. However, I am glad to give it an imprimatur, even with a caution or two.