Paul S. Chung
Public Theology Reflection: Ted Peters and Discourse Clarification of Faith Alone
Prof. Ted Peters offers an insightful response to those who reject faith alone as the essence of the gospel message. Their argument: Luther’s teaching is wrong because it is not scriptural. To go beyond this critique, Peters provides an insight into synthesizing faith with the law of love.
Dennis Knapp, a columnist, argues that Faith Alone is not the gospel and, thus, Luther was wrong. Similarly, David Armstrong agrees with this: “So many Protestants want to define the gospel in the strict sense of ‘justification by faith alone,’ when the Bible itself is very explicit and clear that this is not the case at all.”
However, what exactly is meant by the term “the gospel”? I suggest that “the gospel” is the account of Jesus Christ written in the New Testament Gospels. This term carries special significance as the apostles and early church demonstrated through their commitment to inhabiting this gospel narrative in their own lives.
What, then, is the gospel message? Illustrated in the New Testament epistles, it could be simplified to the following: The righteous Jesus Christ dies for the unjust sinner to forgive sin and reconcile with God (1 Pet 3:18–22).
Along with this message, Ted Peters claims that faith is exclusive to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and therefore, Luther was correct. Thus, the Reformation term sola fides (by faith alone) is used to clarify Christian speech of grace and justice in public theology.
Does the gospel of Jesus Christ consist solely of faith, according to Scripture? The “gospel in miniature,” often cited in John 3:16, begins with the sentence: “Everyone who believes [πιστεὐων] in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” The verb πιστεύω is rendered as “believe” or to have “faith.” Thus, the gospel is inhabited through faith.
Conversely, Dennis Knapp is unconcerned about faith per se, claiming that faith is not scriptural on its own. Justification and salvation require more than just faith. However, “something more” implicitly means that humans work to please God, necessarily providing an extra foundation for obtaining God’s justification and redemption.
Knapp appears to distort faith solely in the forensic sense, without considering its effective dimension, which is based on the real presence of a living Jesus Christ within our faith and church.
This is characteristic of the Reformers’ teaching of justification “outside of us, for us, and within us,” which underlines a forensic–effective spectrum. Faith is active in love. Faith and Work: Paul and James
How does St. Paul speak? “But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith” (Gal 3: 25).
The word alone is not used in this context, but in Christ Jesus, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, God’s law. We are all God’s children through faith.
On the contrary, St. James appears to be a counter-example to St. Paul. “You see that faith was active along with his [Abraham’s] works, and faith was brought to completion by the works…You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (Jas 2:22, 24).
Faith actively initiates and completes acts of love. Is a hermeneutical circle necessary to resolve a conflict of interpretation (Paul Ricoeur)?
According to Ted Peters, St. Paul appears to distinguish between faith and love, but St. James conflates the two. However, Paul and James share the dynamic of faith. “The only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Well said. But what does it mean to say that faith is active in love?
St. Paul’s discourse of faith active in love is addressed to his Jewish-Christian community as the non-Jews in his setting interact with James’s language of justification by works.
Such internal communication demonstrates the epistemology of public theology, which considers the relationship between context, intercontext, and the ecumenical whole (One Holy Universal Apostolic Church).
The discourse clarification of faith and love accounts for Martin Luther’s work, an ardent follower of St. Paul, because “faith alone without works justifies, frees, and saves” (Luther, The Freedom of a Christian). Salvation is a gift of God’s grace given to us through the Holy Spirit for the cause of Jesus Christ.
Faith alone is Christ alone, period! It relates to the belief that one will receive a ‘categorical gift’ from above. We do not save ourselves by performing tremendous actions that satisfy God as a meritorious condition for salvation.
To be sure, faith alone saves, but it also abides in hope and love. But the greatest of these is love, which is agape (divine love, described in 1 Cor 13:13) rather than caritas (human love).
As Ted Peters goes on, faith entails true belief. This is represented in credo (I believe). If I believe true things, I have faith in them. Indeed, believing is active rather than passive. Next, faith manifests as trust because Jesus commands us to trust God. Trust, however, is an active process.
Luther claims that only the trust and faith of the heart may transform God into the genuine One if your faith and trust are correct. “If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true one. Conversely, where your trust is false and wrong, there you do not have the true God” (The First Commandment in the Large Catechism). Thus, this provides a convincing perspective on the active dimension of faith.
Luther’s position regarding the relationship of God and faith holds deep significance when considering God, money, and property, the latter of which may be the most common idol on earth. Faith in God as a matter of heart entails a critique of the idolatry of mammon in the Seventh Commandment: “You shall not steal” (Ex 20:15).
Thus, this active faith is effective as Christian discipleship in the critique of mammon toward common good justice.
Real Presence of Christ within Us
In addition to belief and trust, Ted Peters maintains that faith has a cardinal dimension: faith is the real presence of Christ. Through word and sacrament, the Holy Spirit presents Christ to us within our faith.
The Holy Spirit is responsible for the presence of Christ. This passive yet gracious component coincides with St. Paul’s elaboration. The Spirit creates fiducia (personal trust and reliance) as its gift within our hearts.
“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?” (2 Cor 13:5, NIV). It is the Spirit who lives in us. Thus, “your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power…The spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God...so we may understand what God has freely given us (1 Cor 2:5, 10–12, NIV).
At this point, St. James appears to concur with St. Paul: Do you believe that without reason, the Spirit God sent to reside in us envies intensely? God grants grace to the humble, not the proud (Jas 4:5-6). Is it not passive to allow us to reinterpret justification through deeds in connection with the law that grants freedom (Jas 2:12)?
Jesus Christ fulfilled the law: “It is finished” (Jn 19:30). Christ is the end (telos) of the law unto righteousness to everyone that believes (Rom 10:4). Righteousness proceeds from the faithfulness of God that we hold, affirm, and appropriate by faith rather than by the law.
The righteousness of God in Jesus Christ is the telos of the law because Jesus Christ is the goal of all our needs, longings, and endeavors.
The epistemology of public theology combines Paul’s discourse of faith alone with James’s language of the law. This provides freedom in terms of the interaction between context and intercontext for the ecumenical whole of Jesus Christ—who is truly present in our faith through the Holy Spirit.
God’s promises are “yes” in Christ, and in him, we say “amen” to God’s glory. It is God who makes us stand firm in Christ. God anointed us, imprinted his “seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come” (2 Cor 1:20–22).
Luther penetrates this dimension: “It [faith] takes hold of Christ in such a way that Christ is the object of faith, or rather not the object but, so to speak, the One who is present in the faith itself” (Luther, LW, 1955-1986, p. 26: 129).
Furthermore, a Christian’s freedom is predicated on union with Christ, in whom “a happy exchange” occurs between a human (who is burdened with sin, death, and damnation) and Christ (who is full of grace, life, and redemption). Christ and the soul became one flesh (Eph 5:31–32) (“The Freedom of a Christian,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 2nd ed., 397).
A Christian Freedom in Its Radical Side
Christian freedom understands the internal and external dimensions as central to public life. This implies communicative freedom (Wolfgang Huber), which is the basis for a relationship between individual and community, breaking through the prioritization of the one over and against the other.
According to Luther, “from faith thus flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a joyful, willing and free mind that serves one’s neighbour willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss”…“Hence as our heavenly father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbour through our body and our work, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another” (LW 31: 351).
Luther scholar Kirsi Stjerna makes it clear: “Justification by faith by grace is a free gift” (Stjerna 2021, 181). Genuine freedom stems from God’s grace, which is divine, overflowing love. It suggests freedom from reason or the heart turned in on itself.
Luther asserts that God’s love does not discover its object but rather creates it (Amor Dei non invenit, sed creat suum diligibile.)
This remark is relevant to a radical understanding of the gospel (viva vox evangelii, the living voice of the gospel). So, “the curses of the godless sometimes sound better in God’s ear than the hallelujahs of the pious" (LW 25:390, referenced in Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 160, Footnote 59).
To be sure, faith alone belongs to the gospel, which provides us with freedom and forgiveness of sin. “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17).
Freedom (as a gift) and forgiveness serve as the foundation for communicative freedom and restorative justice. These support Lutheran public theology in a unique way.
As a discipline, public theology is shaped by the biblical narratives of God’s freedom and grace and is grounded in the practices of the Christian community through faith, forgiveness of sin (restorative justice), hope, and love. These biblical narratives provide resources for immanent critique and emancipation.
As a result, public theology empowers people of faith to articulate a public voice for a prophetic diakonia, solidarity, and economic justice in our pluralistic culture and unjustly stratified society.
Public Theology and Faith in Prolepsis
A public theology is founded on the particularities of freedom and grace in the biblical narrative and the practices of the Christian faith while genuinely addressing issues with public significance such as distributive justice, reparative justice, and restorative justice.
First, the Holy Spirit gifts us with the presence of the living Christ. This passive component motivates us to forgive those who have wronged us while also activating us to aid those in need and distress. The Holy Spirit justifies and sanctifies us, as does the presence of Christ.
Instead, the gift of divine presence is first. It comes to us in our passivity, transforming us into God’s collaborators in the ministry of reconciliation and diakonia. Faith alone justifies. However, genuine faith is never alone. Love and hope accompany faith.
Again, God places the Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, ensuring what will come. This refers to the proleptic horizon of faith, which brings God’s promise into vivid reality through the future influence of hope. The prolepsis, in the biblical sense, is defined as the vivid reality of the resurrected presence of Jesus Christ.
Human hope, or prolepsis, is defined as participation in the anticipation of God’s coming kingdom through the presence of the Holy Spirit.
God is both the name of the promise and the fulfillment of that promise. The eschatological horizon transforms Christian faith into hope, indicating a future fulfillment of that faith. The deposit of the Holy Spirit emphasizes the awaited Messiah, anticipating Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.
At the same time, the apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and earth is linked with God and the Lamb of God (Rev 21-22). Was Luther wrong? No. Luther is ahead of us!