A Response from Dr. Lane

On August 15th, I reviewed a published article by Jason Lane that appeared in a Festschrift for James Nestingen. His article deals with the atonement, and my review, “The Completed, Objective Reality of the Justification of the World By the Atonement: A Review Rebutting the Contrary,” took his article to task. He has responded, with the request that we publish his response here, and we have consented to do so. - BFE 

A Response to Dr. Eckardt’s 15 August 2022 Gottesblog Article

Jason D. Lane

My article “That I May Be His Own: The Necessary End of the Law” in Handing Over the Goods: Determined to Know Nothing But Jesus Christ and Him Crucified. A Festschrift in Honor of Dr. James A. Nestingen (1517 Publishing, 2018), has clearly raised concerns among theologians of our church. The article was intended to give thanks for Dr. Nestingen’s persistent emphasis on the absolution of the sinner: forgiveness won by Christ through His vicarious death and glorious resurrection and delivered to us in the preaching of the gospel. Yet the article has raised suspicions that I have reservations about fundamental Christian doctrines, such as Christ’s vicarious satisfaction and universal atonement for the sin of the world and objective justification. Dr. Burnell Eckardt’s publication on Gottesblog on 15 August 2022 claims that I have jettisoned traditional expressions of the atonement to establish a new way that denies the finished and full atonement of Christ for the sin of the whole world. Since it is a matter of eternal life for Christ’s church that her pastors and teachers be unwavering in their confession of Christ, His person and work, and since the critiques and inferences of Dr. Eckardt suggest that I waver on the central doctrine of the holy faith, I hope the following will not only alleviate concerns about my own confession of Christ, but also reaffirm for those in doubt that what I preach and teach conforms to the sound rule of faith taught in Holy Scripture and confessed in the Book of Concord, to which we Lutheran pastors and teachers have solemnly pledged ourselves.   

Dr. Eckardt’s critique falls into two related discussions: first, he thinks that I deny the vicarious satisfaction of Christ because I wrote that the necessity of our salvation in Christ does not fit into legal categories; second, he infers that I deny the atonement of Christ for all sin, because I teach that the benefits of Christ are received by faith and have their telos not in faith itself, but in the resurrection of the dead on the Last Day. The first concern about a denial of the vicarious satisfaction, and a good deal of his other related concerns, can be clarified easily, because they are based largely on misunderstandings of my argument. The second concern, that I deny universal justification, is an argument from silence. I believe it can be shown that Dr. Eckardt and I both “teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1), especially concerning Christ’s atoning sacrifice for sin and the doctrine of justification, even if we may come to disagree about certain nuances of particular theologians.

Certain issues that Dr. Eckardt raise were indeed misunderstandings. He suggests that I have rejected the vicarious satisfaction of Christ for some other view of the atonement. In the article I made no attempt to present a different view of the atonement as my own position, but sought to lay out the position of those who critique the doctrine as a purely legal transaction. I surveyed the position taken by recent detractors from the vicarious satisfaction of Christ, but did not intend that this would be read as my own position. Dr. Eckardt simply misunderstood my (albeit mild) critique of Forde and others, and I am willing to take some blame for that misunderstanding. The Festschrift article was written in honor of Dr. Nestingen. As a former colleague of Gerhard Forde, Nestingen knows well what Forde and others had written about the Anselmic “theory” of the atonement, which Forde argued had confined the atonement to a legal structure. In my article, Dr. Eckardt did not catch that I presented Aulen, Forde, Paulson, and Hopman not in support of my own position, but to present the frequently assumed position of those in the theological orbit around Forde. In the confines of a Festschrift article for Nestingen, I did not think it the place to take on all the critiques of Forde against Lutheran Orthodoxy—although, I admit in hindsight, I should have said much more. When I used language such as: “Thus far we have the typical reading of Anselm [from Aulen, Forde, Paulson, et. al.] on the atonement and the Lutheran orthodox view,” Dr. Eckardt believes I am in full agreement that Lutheran Orthodox theologians viewed the atonement in only legal ways. I am not. I bear the responsibility for not writing: “This is Forde’s typical and incomplete reading of Anselm and Lutheran Orthodoxy on the atonement.” But I did write that this view of Anslem proposed by Aulen, Forde, and others needs further examination. It was my intention to check Forde and others on Anslem (to say nothing of Lutheran Orthodoxy) and demonstrate that Anselm is more complicated than they would have us believe.

Concerning Dr. Eckardt’s observation that Anselm’s soteriology is not Luther’s, I agree, and he is the expert on that score. I am grateful for his work on Anselm and Luther, and I was not trying to present anything more on Anselm, except to correct the caricature of Anselm found among Forde and some of his students. The point is perhaps minor. Anselm doesn’t need our saving, and surely Anslem has the tendency of rationalizing theological topoi, which Dr. Eckardt has examined thoroughly in his dissertation. I was using Anselm to temper some of Nestingen’s colleagues who dismiss the vicarious satisfaction on the false assumption that Anselm’s view of the atonement of Christ is strictly legal and nothing else. Even Anselm, by God’s grace—and, yes, in weakness—recognized that God became man to make sinners who deserve eternal death His own forever and to have them find pleasures forevermore at God’s right hand, even if that came for Anselm through a false notion of meritorious satisfaction for temporal sins and an overtly rationalistic approach to the atonement. As Dr. Eckardt notes in his own work, one cannot understand Anselm’s meditation on the atonement without first considering his Chalcedonian confession of the incarnation.

The distinction that Anselm makes between two necessities and of which I wrote is not just another example of Anselm’s sola ratione methodology, which Dr. Eckardt describes in his dissertation. The two necessities are classic definitions concerning God’s transcendence over His creation and His revelation in Christ, all of which we find in our orthodox Lutheran fathers. Therefore, when Dr. Eckardt writes,

But Lane seems determined to show that even Anselm’s understanding of necessity was not what the traditional Lutheran scholars thought it was, and so he uses both Anselm and Luther to jettison the idea that their “legal” definition of the atonement is sufficient.

Dr. Eckardt demonstrates that he did not understand my argument. I am showing through Anselm that the distinction between antecedent and subsequent necessity guards Christians from speculation about things that God has not revealed and teaches us to rely on what is written. Again, I was not correcting traditional Lutherans, but Forde and others. I clearly did not write the article to criticize Nestingen’s potential misunderstandings of Lutheran Orthodoxy’s faithful teaching of the atonement, but rather tried to readjust, if even slightly through Anselm, the notion that the life, death, and resurrection of Christ comes down to being merely legal or, as some of Nestingen’s colleagues have hyperbolically put it, illegal or outlawed. The death of Christ is rooted in God’s love.

Dr. Eckardt also argued that I reject the law of God as an attribute of God. I understand his concern, since the summary of the law is love and since God Himself is love. Although God is love and the summary of the law is love, the law did not pour love into our hearts. The love of God is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us (Rom. 5:5; AC V). When I wrote, “God does not fit into a legal scheme,” I was not rejecting the law in which the righteous, unchanging will of God is revealed to His creation (FCSD V:17), but attempting, as did our Lutheran dogmaticians, to avoid attaching human modes of speech to a discussion of God’s essence. We cannot use the atonement to bind God to philosophical categories. Because Forde and others have used “the legal scheme” argument to detract from Christ’s vicarious satisfaction, I should have chosen a different term to avoid misunderstanding. The necessity of Christ’s passion and the necessity of preaching repentance and forgiveness from Luke 24 is known to be necessary due to God’s revelation and not to some divine logic that humans must decipher. He came as one under the law to redeem those under the law (Gal. 4), because He loves us. That’s what is revealed.

Christians should be hesitant, however, to use the word legal or law in a discussion of God’s essence, since we wind up saying things we are not permitted to say. Every Lutheran dogmatician of the seventeenth century sought to maintain God’s freedom and transcendence in their discussion of God. Robert Preus notes,

Lutheran theology makes no attempt to define God and His essence. To attempt any definition would place God within some genus or other, make Him univocally similar to His creatures and deny the infinite distinction (infinitum intervallum) between God and His creation. It must not be granted that God has something even analogous to a genus. (Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, II:46-47).

The caution against defining God and His essence agrees with Anselm’s insistence on an antecedent necessity. To the heart of what I have argued, Preus observes in his reading of the Lutheran fathers that one cannot define God, know Him as a loving Father, or the mystery of His will apart from His revelation in Christ and His word. Preus again writes regarding our description of God:

Divine revelation and the church as the recipient of revelation must be woven into the description of God. And the divine revelation is that God has sent His Son who came in the flesh, was crucified, and rose again for sinners. Every description of God must include this fact; it must first of all be a Trinitarian description, but it must also be an evangelical description which sets the church apart from every heathen opinion or fancy (Ibid, 48).

     I argued that there is a necessity of our salvation that has its genesis in God’s unmerited love and mercy for His fallen creation that depend neither on an inner obligation in God due to our own goodness (He owes it to us to sacrifice Himself for us) or because God has to restore His own honor (God is just and therefore has to restore His honor by dying in our place) because man’s sin has dishonored Him. Jesus became man, was handed over for our transgressions and crucified for our sin under Pontius Pilate because of God’s great love for His creation. This is the mystery of His will that Paul says is set forth in Christ (Ephesians 1). God’s love that created all things and His loving choice to send His Son into the world to save His creation is not to be confused with Forde’s language about the atonement that makes the death of Christ seem unnecessary and forgiveness as by fiat. This appears to be Dr. Eckardt’s primary concern. I share his concern wholeheartedly.

Dr. Eckardt suspects (based on that misunderstanding above) that I deny the vicarious satisfaction of Christ as the all-sufficient sacrifice for the world’s sin. He thinks it is my view that the death of Christ does not make full satisfaction of God’s wrath as substitution for the wages of sin, because the full atonement and payment for sins can only take place when the gospel of Christ is believed. It is not always the case that theologians who desire to emphasize the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins, by which the Holy Spirit is given (AC V), deny the source of that forgiveness (AC III-IV), namely, the death and resurrection of Christ and the declaration of righteousness to the whole world. Gerhard Forde and his students have made statements that rightly emphasize the power of the gospel that delivers the forgiveness of sins, but have at times obscured the merits of Christ as the basis and source of that forgiveness. Jack Kilcrease’s examination of Forde has been very helpful in this regard. He has been able to praise Forde for his important contributions to Lutheran theology, particularly proclaiming forgiveness to those crushed by the accusations of the law. Yet Kilcrease has also been able to demonstrate that Forde’s tendency to reduce the gospel down to a performative speech act inevitably ignores the basis of the promise. If I promise my son a new bike for his birthday, the promise depends on my having the bike to give him in reality. Thus, for Christ to promise us forgiveness, He must also have won forgiveness for us. If sins are forgiven in the words of absolution, Christ must have paid for those in reality and nailed them to the cross in fact. Without the fact of Christ’s atoning death, we are just playing religion. As C. S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, “We know nothing of religion here: we think only of Christ. We know nothing of speculation. Come and see. I will bring you to Eternal Fact, the Father of all other facthood.” Faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10), but the word that is proclaimed is that Christ has in fact done it: fulfilled the demands of the law, defeated sin, death, and the devil by His sacrificial death and by His glorious resurrection. Without the fact and the historical event, the sinner is left with pious speculation. Dr. Eckardt and I are of one mind on that issue. 

In summary, any teaching that leads us to deny the vicarious satisfaction of Christ, who was handed over for our sins and raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25), does not rightly know Jesus, our Mediator and Redeemer, who “poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors” (Isa. 53:12).

Dr. Eckardt’s second major critique concerns universal justification. He suspects that because I teach that God elected us in Christ and set forth the mystery of His will in Christ that I also deny universal justification. I find this way of thinking difficult in light of Ephesians 1 and FC XI, in which we are taught to confess that our election is a cause of our salvation, and that the mystery of God’s election is made known in Christ, the Book of Life, and through the preaching of His word. This is the subject matter of my article. The comfort of election is not in speculating whether I feel elected or whether I can speculate about God’s love by analyzing the loving character of His law or His divine attributes, but whether God has predestined us through His Son and paid to have us by His Son’s sacrificial death. Christ died for all, but many are called and few are chosen. A hallmark of Lutheran theology, in contrast with Calvinistic theology, is the absolute reliance on God’s revelation in Christ, the Holy Spirit’s testimony in Scripture and the Means of Grace. My article was not written as an apology to unbelievers nor was I attempting to set forth a complete study of soteriology. The article was directed toward the sinner in me who thinks of salvation as a statement of truth for the whole world, but not pro me. Election is a particularly comforting doctrine for Christians who doubt God’s love for them.

The notion that justification is not a reality until it is believed clearly contradicts Scripture when it teaches that “all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:23-24). Scripture teaches that the gospel is the good news of all that Jesus did for our salvation by His death and resurrection to reconcile the world to the Father. Scripture also teaches that this message is “the power of God for salvation” that is, the Holy Spirit’s own means to make us God’s children by grace, through faith. This latter point was the theological locus of my article.

In his final comments, Dr. Eckardt again misunderstands my argument that God’s work in us is not yet complete. To say that we are not yet what we will be is not a denial of the full satisfaction of Christ, but a confession of our eschatological hope. The good work that God has begun in us by faith, and even begun in us through the gift of His Spirit and holy living, He will bring to completion unto (ἄχρι) the Day of Christ (Phil. 1:6). What we now possess by faith in Christ will be fully realized when Christ returns on the Last Day. I agree completely with Luther’s distinction between redemption as fact and the proclamation of that fact. In the passage that Dr. Eckardt quotes from Luther’s 1 Timothy Lectures, Luther makes it clear that he is referring to his comments against Karlstadt in 1525 (Against the Heavenly Prophets). Karlstadt believed that by his meditation he could have access to the cross directly, without the word and sacraments. The fact that the redemption is preached and received by faith is what the Schwärmer don’t understand. Karlstadt never denied the merits of Christ’s death, as far as I know. But he did reject the means by which those merits were given. Luther elsewhere makes the distinction between the righteousness being complete, but not complete in us. Christ has done it and promised it, but the promise has not yet had its way with us fully until the resurrection. The discussion here is of eschatological hope. What is complete in time and complete by faith is not yet revealed fully in reality. There is nothing controversial about such a basic biblical teaching that what we are is not yet known.     

I am grateful for this discourse and hopeful that, through it, Christ is magnified among us.