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Charges that have been made for a century and a half, finally tested against the Book of Concord one proposition at a time.

The Charges

Anyone who has spent time in Lutheran theological conversation about atonement has heard the charges.

• Orthodoxy is too legal, too juridical.
• Orthodoxy got substitution wrong.
• Orthodoxy got satisfaction wrong.
• The promise without satisfaction is enough.

The dogmaticians of seventeenth century Lutheran Orthodoxy, the critics say, built a scholastic framework laid over a simpler Gospel. The Confessions, they say, left supple what Orthodoxy hardened or never used the vocabulary Orthodoxy later imposed.

The charges are made often and examined rarely. They have taken on the traits of mantra and truism. They are also, as this book insists, testable. The Book of Concord is a finite corpus. The Orthodox propositions can be stated one at a time. The comparison can be made item by item, passage by passage, instead of by impression.

How the book is built

The doctrine of vicarious satisfaction as Lutheran Orthodoxy taught it is set out here in thirty-five propositions under seven heads:

• the priestly office and its Old Testament antecedents
• why a satisfaction was necessary
• who alone could render it
• by what means
• on what terms
• what it yields
• whom the doctrine has been defended against

The sources are named and limited. Luther; the confessions; Quenstedt, Calov, and Hollaz in their precise formulation worked out against the Papists, Socinians, Calvinists, and Arminians; and Francis Pieper in the twentieth century.

Each proposition is then carried to the whole Book of Concord and put to it directly. The passages are gathered, a finding is stated, and every item reports what was not found as carefully as what was.

Readers who want to know how the confessional side of the comparison was assembled will find that answered too, in a note explaining why the doctrine has to be gathered at all. The Book of Concord contains no article on the atonement, no locus, no heading under which the doctrine can be simply looked up. That is a feature of what Book of Concord is, a collection of documents written across half a century for different occasions, arranged by chronology and standing rather than by topic.

What the correlation shows

The results are uneven. What emerges is a map with four terrains.

1. Some propositions the Confessions state in their own words: that both natures were necessary and necessary for different reasons, that the Law is satisfied and not abolished, that the reconciliation was accomplished before anyone believed.
2. Some they state in substance while using other terms. The word substitute never occurs in the Book of Concord, and in our stead occurs once, yet the relation itself is stated constantly in verbs: made a victim, bore the punishment, had our iniquities laid on him, paid what we owed.
3. Some propositions the Confessions supply with every premise and leave with the conclusion undrawn, which turns out to account for much of the disagreement about how the two bodies stand to one another.
4. Some they never take up, usually because in the occasions for their writing, the issues had not arisen.

In no item did the comparison find the Confessions teaching one thing and Orthodoxy another.

On the question that has carried the most weight in the modern dispute, the book lets Quenstedt speak for himself on Matthew 5:17. Scripture supplies the distinction about what becomes of God’s Law: katalusis is to abolish, overturn, rescind, and destroy, while plerōsis is the observance, perfection, and consummation. Under katalusis, four ways of ending the Law without fulfilling it are named and refused, among them altering its sense and rendering it ineffectual. Christ came for the second, plerōsis, not the first. To deny this is to rob Christ of his honor as Atoning Sacrifice and Propitiator and abandon conscience to a doctrine of despairing uncertainty.

Also in this volume

Full synoptic treatments of the atonement in the Confessions and in Lutheran Orthodoxy, each readable on its own. Two studies of confessional criteria that any doctrine of the atonement must meet, one on the honor of Christ and one on the conscience of the troubled sinner. Four essays answering the charges named above, each argued from the confessional documents alone so that a reader can check every step.

A companion volume

This book began as part of a case study of one Seminex theologian and grew large enough to stand on its own. The case study, Atonement in Seminex: Case Study of Robert W. Bertram, is also available. The harmony supplies the standard; the case study applies it to one man’s teaching. Either can be read alone, and they were written to be read together.