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.

Wauwawhat? (Part Four)

I have a life besides that of a blogger—including that of parish pastor and adjunct professor. The latter really caught up with me this past month as I was forced to spend much time preparing to use a new textbook in my Latin class and had to let my blogging slide. Your patience is appreciated. Here are my long awaited comments on Köhler’s article.

Köhler’s article "Legalism Among Us" (originally titled "Gesetzlich Wesen unter uns") appeared in installments in 1914 and 1915 in the Theologische Quartalschrift and was translated and printed in The Wauwatosa Theology 2:229-282; the pagination in this blog will refer to the latter. Köhler makes four arguments: “Legalism among Christians consists in that they take the motives and forms of their actions from the law instead of letting them flow from the gospel” (p. 229). “This behavior manifests itself in the Lutheran church chiefly and principally in bravado of orthodoxy” (p. 229). “Where these factors gain the upper hand in every phase of ongoing church life and become a condition to the point of style, the decline sets in, evident externally when we adopt all kinds of unhealthy traits copied from the sectarian churches” (p. 230). The only antidote is repentance “brought about when again we search more deeply into the gospel and cling to it all the more incessantly” (p. 230).


Köhler is not arguing that the confessional Lutherans of his day were teaching a salvation by works. It is not that kind of a crass legalism, but rather a more subtle kind, one where the law rather than the gospel motivates Christian behavior. Köhler notes that this legalism appears in more than one form. Among the Reformed and the Pietists the legalism appears as a stress upon sanctification, but among Lutherans it often comes in the form of “bragging about orthodoxy” (p. 239). Köhler is not opposed to orthodox teaching, but he knows that the goal of orthodox teaching is not itself, but to preach faith in Christ (pp. 239-240). When orthodoxy becomes more of an intellectual exercise used to congratulate its adherents than to lead to a genuine life of repentance and faith, it makes people factious and more eager to dispute over words rather than facts (p. 239). The result is intellectualism, which turns “the words of Scripture, especially of the gospel, into a law for which one demands rational assent” (p. 241, emphasis in the original) and an unhealthy traditionalism that elevates an inherited system above the Scriptures. While the legalism of the Reformed usually leads to doctrinal indifferentism in that they stress godly living over doctrine, legalism among Lutherans tends toward sectarianism (p. 247).

He has much to say about the way that legalism was shaping late 19th and early 20th century Lutheranism that I cannot fully explore in this essay: on giving (p. 277), on administration (p. 269-279), and dialogue with other Christians (pp. 248-249, 279-281). But rather than summarize more of the essay, I would rather have you read it on your own so that I can devote the rest of this blog to considering its ongoing relevance.

Köhler keenly saw that people tend to fall into legalism in those matters that they are most concerned about. Those who stress godly living will be tempted to become legalistic about sanctification. Those who stress the pure teaching of God’s Word will be tempted to become legalistic about orthodoxy. There is nothing wrong with sanctification or orthodoxy. In fact, we should have more of both. But legalism introduces bravado rather than the substance. To underscore the bravado, those who are doing the boasting will have to do everything they can to distinguish themselves from the great unwashed. For those who stress sanctification, it will mean inventing all sorts of rules (e.g., no card playing). For those who stress orthodoxy, it will mean an unthinking traditionalism removed from the Scriptures. Ironically, though, legalists end up with less than they had hoped to gain. Sanctification-based legalists in the end are less sanctified; they don’t play cards, but they bicker and lack the other virtues. Orthodoxy-based legalists in the end are less orthodox; they don’t exactly teach false doctrine, but they know the Homiletisches Real-Lexikon better than they know the Scriptures and they use their knowledge to find fault with others rather than to teach the faith.

Köhler also noted how often the church lurches from one legalism to another without recovering the gospel. In effect that is what happened to the Missouri Synod in the middle of the twentieth century, as some of its theologians argued against its parochialism. If previously the synod had been legalistic about being orthodox, many became legalistic about being unorthodox. In fact, I know several pastors whose theological thinking goes no further than “I’m for whatever most undercuts traditional morality or articles of faith and will call anyone who differs from me a legalist.” Of course, that is a legalism all of its own—a blind unthinking anti-traditionalism that, unlike the legalism of orthodoxy, doesn’t even have the virtue of teaching God’s truth.

The clash between the orthodox and the anti-orthodox came to a head in the Missouri Synod in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Perhaps one reason that some of the issues still smolder a half century later is because we have not confronted the issue of legalism head on. There are still some people for whom sound doctrine is a giant game of “gotcha” rather than a reveling in the mercy and love of God as revealed in Scripture. And those people keep others from taking doctrine seriously. Perhaps as we work on the Koinonia Project to bring about a deeper unity in synod, we can all do what Köhler rightly recognized as the only antidote to legalism: digging deeply into the gospel and clinging to it for all its worth.

Wauwawhat? (Part Three)

The Wauwatosa theologians not only revived biblical studies among confessional Lutherans, they also warned of the forms legalism could take in Lutheran circles. I will devote my next blog (the final one in the series) to paying final tribute to J.P. Köhler by looking in detail at an article he wrote against legalism and commenting on its continued relevance. But in today's blog I will talk about legalism inside and outside of Wauwatosa. As Köhler stated so well, legalism consists of deriving the power of the Christian life from the law rather than the gospel. Although confessional Lutherans might seem to be immune to legalism because we believe that we are saved by trusting in Christ rather than by doing the works of the law, there is an insidious means by which legalism can creep back into the church: preserving sound doctrine (noble task though it is) substitutes for believing it; in other words, we are tempted to become proud of our work of preserving orthodoxy rather than cherish the teaching God has given us. Moreover, Köhler argues, we can easily fall into legalism by overemphasizing a particular structure or style of organization for the church or by preaching a sanctification empowered by the law rather than the gospel.


Köhler’s words spoke to a confessional Lutheranism of the early 20th century that was often orthodox but had lost its first love (Rev. 2:4). Orthodoxy had become a game of “gotcha” rather than a reveling in the truth that our merciful God had revealed to us. There was also a rather dour attitude towards life in general that revealed itself in all sorts of prohibitions from going to the movies to installing lightning rods on barns. “For them, life was meant to be endured,” quipped one person about people of that generation. The joy of the gospel wasn’t there.

Köhler’s words were welcome, but unfortunately the Wauwatosa theology was not able to escape a legalism of its own. Köhler’s words in “Legalism among Us” are a candid but loving admonition to the Wisconsin and Missouri Synods. However, there was a torrent in Wisconsin of the 1920’s of what can only be called legalistic anti-legalistic writings, as writer after writer (from the renowned exegete August Pieper to elementary school teachers) wrote scathing denunciations of the Wisconsin Synod. The Synod had wanted merely to see the prisoners in the Bastille set free, but it got Jacobin terror instead.

Three incidents in particular stand out. Two school teachers denounced their pastor as a false prophet for not condemning what they considered vices. A college faculty and its governing board disagreed over the proper discipline for a couple dozen students. A parish pastor wrote a ham-handed attack on life in the Wisconsin Synod, complaining about everything from confirmation instruction to synod structure. In each instance the advocates of Wauwatosa were on the more rigorist side of the question and operated with little charity towards their opponents.

As a result the era of the Wauwatosa theology came to a formal end. Köhler left the presidency of the seminary in 1930 (and the Wisconsin Synod in 1933) and lived somewhat reclusively for his last twenty years. A handful of congregations left the Wisconsin Synod to form the Protes’tant Conference, unusually punctuated in more than one sense. That conference publishes the journal Faith-Life, which tends to have insightful articles by Köhler, less than useful (and perhaps less than truthful) encomiums to Köhler’s great musical and artistic abilities, and scathing denunciations involving personalities and events long forgotten. When I went through a stack of Faith-Life issues about twenty years, one article in particular stuck in my mind. It described how Köhler had criticized August Pieper out of the blue by saying at a dinner, “Pieper, du bist Pommer!” (“Pieper, you are a Pomeranian!”) This had taken place long before Pieper and Köhler parted company. Now one cannot read very much of Faith-Life without realizing that its writers deem August Pieper to be the Darth Vader of the Wisconsin Synod—the formerly noble knight who went over to the dark side. But there was no explanation as to why Köhler had made the remark, what it meant, and whether it was justified. If the reader didn’t instantly understand and assent, it was proof positive that the reader was hopelessly in error.

This is a negative legacy left by the Wauwatosa theologians, one that mars an otherwise positive inheritance. I would urge that the experience teaches us that those who rail against a particular form of legalism should be wary lest they fall into another form of that same vice.

Wauwawhat? (Part Two)

In my last post I noted that I sympathize with the goals of the Wauwatosa school. It sought to restore the primacy of exegesis even when doing systematic theology. It did not so much seek to overturn the conclusions of Missouri’s systematic theology as to add depth to it by making sure that it was not making use of a facile interpretation of a biblical passage but that it fully understood the context. But even as I praise it, I must say that to some degree that its more recent advocates have done injustice to the state of affairs in which Wauwatosa developed. Ironically I find myself having less trouble with the Wauwatosa theology itself than some of its would-be heirs, just as those of the Wauwatosa school objected less to the 19th century C.F.W. Walther than to his heirs in the early 20th century.


Most discussions of the Wauwatosa theology fail to consider the whole context of education in the early twentieth century. For one thing, the history given in the first volume of Northwestern Publishing House’s collected works of the Wauwatosa school is a little misleading. It correctly chronicles how much time the seminarians at the Missouri Synod’s Saint Louis seminary devoted to mastering the Latin of the Baier-Walther Compendium, but it fails to recognize that most Missouri Synod pastors were not trained there in the synod’s first sixty years or so, but at its practical seminary (which migrated from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Saint Louis to Springfield, Illinois, and would eventually return to Fort Wayne) and its pre-seminary partner schools in Germany. It was only in the early twentieth century that the synod thought it might be better if more of its ministers were given the highly academic training of Saint Louis than the more practical training of Springfield. To accomplish that, though, the Missouri Synod realized that it would have to drop some of its practices (such as the heavy use of Latin in the classroom) that proved too big of an obstacle to all but the best students.

And thus it is easier to understand the reason that the Wauwatosa school declined to copy Missouri’s model of education in its entirety. While the Missouri Synod still retained a more practical route of training for its ministers, the Wisconsin had only one option: six years of Gymnasium (the equivalent of a boarding high school and junior college) followed by seminary. Thus, it made little sense to foster a seminary curriculum that even the larger Missouri Synod found too impractical for most of its pastors and was revising even for its more academically minded students. And yet the histories gloss over this reason for why the Wauwatosa seminary developed the way it did.

In addition, the histories of the Wauwatosa theology seem blissfully ignorant of the larger picture of educational trends in the late nineteenth century. A mere state away from Wauwatosa was Augsburg College, which under the tutelage of Georg Sverdrup and the Lutheran Free Church sought both a more exegetical approach to theology and a broader cultural education than the traditional model provided, enamored as it was with Greco-Roman antiquity. And yet the late Leigh Jordahl in his doctoral dissertation argues that Wauwatosa was one of a kind in breaking from the Latin theological model. (Jordahl, trained in Norwegian-American circles, ought to have known better.) On a more global scale there was an intense debate on the direction education should go. Was academic specialization to be preferred to the teaching of a common curriculum? Should education be founded on practical truth rather than abstract theory? Indeed, was anything that was not in some way practical untrue? Was it possible to speed up learning by presenting abstractions (e.g., by giving entire paradigms of grammatical forms at once) rather than by having students learn more intuitively?

None of this lessens the value of the Wauwatosa theology. But it seems ironic that those who love Wauwatosa’s emphasis on understanding historical context seem to have overlooked some of the historical context of Wauwatosa.