Condiciones básicas para la reutilización de las aguas depuradas

Early on, in his first Loci¸ Melanchthon taught precisely how to understand the kind of reckoning or imputation that keeps faith from being another human characteristic, virtue or work. He said grace is Favor Dei—God’s favor, or reckoning. The Scholastics misused grace, as if it were a ‘‘quality in the nature of the soul.’’

So, faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians 13) became ‘‘theological virtues’’ added to Aristotle’s moral virtues, and thus all three were mistaken as powers of the soul.¹¹ Melanchthon suggested that it would have been better to translate hen (in Hebrew) and charis in Greek not by the Latin gratia, but favor. This means grace is in God (not you), but by it he favors you as in ‘‘Julius favors Curio,’’ mean-ing Julius is the favor with which he has befriended Curio, so Melanchthon suggested we should turn to Scripture and find that when it says ‘‘grace’’ it means the ‘‘favor in God with which he has befriended the saints.’’ But Melanchthon added quickly,

‘‘Those Aristotelian figments about qualities are tiresome.’’

Aristotle wanted everything to be a quality so that we could know for sure who owns what according to the law. But Melanchthon knew (at this early point in his teaching) that God’s mercy oper-ated differently than the legal scheme.

This means that the early Lutherans carefully distinguished favor (grace as God’s reckoning) and donum (the gifts of grace) as Paul did in Romans 5:15. Favor is Father and Son (the Father sending the Son, and the Son becoming a curse for us), and what they give is the Holy Spirit (donum). Lombard was closer to the truth than the bulk of the scholastics since for him the gift of grace is the Holy Spirit himself, not a quality given to us. Though it was not typical for medieval theologians to follow Lombard on this matter, the Lutherans knew they were not saying anything new—except for the crucial specification that this gift of the Holy Spirit is the preached word of the forgiveness of sins—entirely outside the law.

That was the great point of Paul’s argument concerning Abraham.

Grace is the favor of God with which he embraced Christ (and because of Christ all the saints). When God favors someone, he cannot help but pour out his gifts, sharing what he has, which is the Holy Spirit himself (not a possession of a substance in the soul).

The key problem with mixing up grace and some capacity of the soul, as Aquinas and later Protestants did, is that we fail to understand how the Gospel justifies by faith alone. Martin Bucer (1491–1551) argued against this Lutheran position in the Schwabach Articles (predecessor to the Augsburg Confession) saying ‘‘that it is not enough to be reckoned, but one must actually become righteous.’’¹² For Protestants like Bucer, righteousness must really be possessed to be real, but Melanchthon countered:

‘‘we are justified when, put to death by the law, we are made alive again by the word of grace promised in Christ.’’ Possession is nullified utterly by law in death, and does not return when we are made alive again. Instead, what faith grasps is a promise, but a promise is not legal property; it is a word that engenders hope because its veracity depends upon another. Our justification happens by a Christ who is not simply a new Moses, but a Christ who himself went through death for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification. So sinners like Abraham will be made exactly like Christ—put to death and only then raised from the dead—

not by any process of moral improvement that seeks in the end to be just in itself.

The righteousness is Christ’s, and always will be; sinners never possess it as a piece of distributed justice by which we can stand before God’s eternal wrath and be exonerated. Therefore, justifi-cation is not a single event upon which sanctifijustifi-cation is then built.

We return again and again to justification by Christ’s favor, and therefore there is no salvation without a preacher—whom we need daily. Melanchthon observed that papal theologians made faith into ‘‘the assent’’ to what is in Scripture. They assumed there is in all souls a neutral quality that could choose to go toward the good or the evil, assenting to Scripture’s command or not. Or worse, they inferred a nature created by grace that has within it the capacity for divinization in the supernatural life. Consequently scholastics like Biel (1420–1495) divided faith into ‘‘incomplete’’

(unformed faith needing love to complete it) and ‘‘complete’’ (or

‘‘acquired’’) faith that is loaned from the church on the principle that the church can be collectively trusted when individuals can-not; thus, to believe Christ you must first believe the church.

There is no neutral, natural quality of soul waiting to be taught how to make the right choices in life, or how to orient desire to

its proper goal. God’s wrath is total, and unrelenting, and no one escapes. There is no neutral territory for this imaginary ‘‘faith’’

as a virtue or act of humans. For the Lutherans, Christ is the only righteousness, and his righteousness is preached by a word of promise that says, ‘‘Your sins are forgiven.’’ How? ‘‘On my account (propter Christum).’’ Hearing this word makes faith, and this faith is reckoned or imputed as righteous, though there is no righteousness there by any measure of law—including the pres-ence of love as caritas. To call divine imputation (as a declared word) a ‘‘fiction’’ is to say that the only truth in life is law, and in turn that is to blaspheme the Gospel—to make Christ into a Moses and to make of Abraham the father by circumcision, not by faith.

The difficulty with holding Christ, faith, and imputation together is taken up in the next two chapters. The first problem is that sin is without repair, since it is all original—which remains even after justification, or baptism. The second is that justification of the ungodly begins with killing the ungodly—and this no one

‘‘believes.’’ Salvation goes through death, not around it. Promises of Christ like those given to Abraham are routinely rejected by unfaith because they are too good to be true for people in the legal scheme, and furthermore, they mean death before any resur-rection is ever felt. The only possible response to this conundrum is preaching that overthrows the voice of a troubled conscience, so Melanchthon concluded his argument with a word of comfort for those who say, ‘‘I believe that salvation was promised, but that it will come to others . . . But listen! These promises are made to you also, are they not?’’¹³ Only the Holy Spirit can overcome this bound will that fears the promise because it destroys the old person—and he does so by creating an entirely new will.

It was the second article of the Formula of Concord in which Lutherans distanced themselves from Melanchthon’s later experi-ments of returning to the term ‘‘assent’’ as a proper description of Abraham’s (or Peter’s or David’s or Paul’s) conversions from law to gospel. That term ‘‘assent,’’ and the attempts to find something salvageable in the natural human (like a ‘‘spark’’ or image of God that remains after wrath), were all identified as disasters for preach-ing that could not accept the radical nature of the conversion.

Conversion is not a change of mind, or feelings, or religions, or

even behavior; it is the most radical change possible—to die and be created new. To express this, the second generation Lutherans agreed that instead of saying that faith was ‘‘assent’’ to anything, one must stay with the story of Abraham to say ‘‘reckon’’ (or if need be, ‘‘impute’’)—just as Luther and Paul had taught:

We are not, as Aristotle believed, made righteous by the doing of just deeds . . . but rather, if I may say so, in becom-ing and bebecom-ing righteous people we do just deeds. First it is necessary that the person be changed, then the deeds will follow . . . the righteousness of Scripture depends upon the imputation of God more than on the essence of the thing itself . . . he alone is righteous . . . whom God wills to be considered righteous before him. Therefore . . . we are righteous only by the imputation of a merciful God through faith in his Word.¹⁴

Faith has nothing to do with free will—except that faith is given only after death and the annihilation of a free will’s desire. Faith is entirely the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit does not make new demands, but gives his own self. Thus ‘‘reckon’’ and ‘‘impute’’

have as their subject the Holy Spirit—not only once, but always so that faith never becomes the active possession of a Christian.

Reckoning means that an either/or has been reached (an argu-ment by sufficient division) as to how sinners become justified:

either it is works, or it is faith. Since reckoning is God’s grace, and grace is God’s favor (favor dei), then one has to agree with Paul that to one who works, her wages are simply due her, ‘‘But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness” (Romans 4:5 NRS). Reckoning is God’s act, given as a gift. But because gifts can be deserved (as at an award banquet), God’s gift is specifically made to justify the ungodly. Abraham was elected out of ungodliness, and given the promise gratis so that he is not only perfectly passive in receiving this, but perfectly undeserving, which is to say that he deserves nothing but death. This means, further, that the only kind of gift justification could possibly be is the forgiveness of sins, since no gift to the ungodly means anything other than this single matter of the forgiveness of sins. What good is reckoning to

one who lives? But to a dead person, the only thing that matters is getting a new life.

Reckoning, as the forgiveness of sins, has two ‘‘parts’’ or moments. One is reckoning (bestowing) faith to Abraham.

Abraham is not given an inner power, instead his faith is finally given the right thing to believe in—the promise of Christ.

With this he has everything that belongs to Christ—including the New Testament. The other part is shown by David, where forgive-ness of sin is given as not reckoning sin. David, the greatest of sinners and yet the man ‘‘after God’s own heart’’ (1 Sam 13:14), is taken up by Paul in addition to Abraham because the same word applies in the sinful king’s case: ‘‘Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not reckon his sin . . . who imputes no iniquity’’ (Psalm 32:1–2, translation altered).

For Paul, the whole law and prophets (Abraham and David) witness that no other righteousness exists before God than faith.

The law was given later than Abraham’s promise, but not to make anyone righteous. This reckoning and not reckoning is precisely the application of the communicatio idiomatum of Christ’s two natures, in which Christ takes your sin upon himself, and in its place puts his forgiveness—which is life now and eternal life to come. When Christ takes sin he no longer ‘‘imputes’’ it; indeed, he takes it out of you (exputes it). Then he reckons, or creates faith as righteous-ness since that faith trusts his promise of forgiverighteous-ness just as Abraham trusted God’s promise to him of the Seed—and this trust in the promise is reckoned as righteousness by God, period.