Confession, Confessionalization, and Post-Confessional History

The emergence of this permanently factionalized state of intra-Christian conflict in Western Christendom has been described by historians in the last generation as a process of Konfessionsbildung, or “confession-formation,” a process running parallel in Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic contexts and affecting not only the ecclesiastical, but also the political and social spheres of life. Each confessional church quickly came to view itself as a universal confessio catholica, vested with divine authority as the exclusive mouthpiece of revealed truth and entrusted with the task of safeguarding the doctrine, ritual, and discipline of its members.Footnote ⁴ This task involved not only specifying the content of Christian teaching with ever increasing precision, but doing so as to highlight theological differences with rival confessions.

More recently, this notion of Konfessionsbildung has been incorporated into a broader category, that of Konfessionalisierung, or “confessionalization,” a concept including not only the formation of distinct and opposing ecclesiastical identities, but also describing the relationships which developed between these confessional churches and the emerging nation-states of early modern Europe.Footnote ⁵ Confessionalization is thus presented as a fundamental social process running parallel to the rise of the modern state and the formation in early modern society of disciplined subjects, beginning as a symbiotic relationship between church and state, but ending with the monopolization of religious life by the latter.Footnote ⁶

The “confessionalization thesis” has generated an impressive body of scholarship aimed at reevaluating, among other things, the place of religion in macro-historical descriptions of the social, political, and cultural development of early modern Europe. Not all historians are convinced that this paradigm has quite the explanatory power urged by some of its most vocal proponents;Footnote ⁷ nevertheless, it seems clear that this trend has at the very least secured a prominent place for the role of religion in early modern European history, even as it has challenged the privileged place of the Reformation in accounting for the origins of European modernity. As Heinz Schilling explains:

This renewed focus on religion has not come without certain ironies, however. With all the attention given to Konfessionsbildung, Konfessionalisierung, and Konfessionalismus, the central term in metonymic relation to which all these concepts stand is often overlooked: confession. While it is now almost universally acknowledged that confessionalism—“salvation within, perdition without,” in one critic's snappy phraseFootnote ⁹ —played a central role in the social and political history of early modern Europe, relatively little heed has been paid either to the intellectual history of the confessions themselves or to the effects of this process on theology and exegesis. This ought not to be viewed as a failing of the confessionalization thesis itself, a paradigm which has, from the beginning, been presented as a conceptual model for understanding the social and cultural history of early modern Europe.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the implications of this approach for intellectual history—and for the history of Christian doctrine in particular—have yet to be fully explored.Footnote ¹¹

At one level, of course, it might seem strange to suggest that the intellectual history of the confessions themselves has not been sufficiently examined. After all, the confessional theology of none of the three traditions has ever wanted for careful, even loving, historical attention. Each of the three Groβkonfessionen took significant pains to document and to narrate its respective history with the goal of justifying its very existence and discrediting that of its opponents. Much of this work maintained exceedingly high standards of documentation and evidence—the fruit, no doubt, of an awareness on the part of these historians that their labors would be scrutinized in agonizing detail by unfriendly eyes—and for this they remain indispensible for our knowledge of the period. Yet for better and for worse, this historiographic tradition has played a central role in the formation of the modern historical consciousness.Footnote ¹²

Indeed, one might even say that the confessional historians of the late-sixteenth century did their work too well. Perhaps more than any other field in the discipline of church history, Reformation studies remains the most closely tied to this confessional historiographic tradition.Footnote ¹³ “This is not to say,” one critic explains, “that modern scholars are apologists for particular Christian confessions as they often were in the past, but rather that the confessional dynamics of the Reformation continue to structure the questions we ask and the sorts of answers we find satisfactory.”Footnote ¹⁴ This problem is particularly acute in the present inquiry, not only because the doctrine of justification lies so close to the heart of confessional identity—in the sixteenth century as well as today—but also because when studying the phenomenon of confessionalization, confessionalism itself is the object of our study. It thus cannot serve as the lens through which we approach the material. This is not to suggest, of course, that confessionally-committed historians cannot do good work on this question—they have and continue to do so.Footnote ¹⁵ What I do mean to suggest, however, is that an approach to intellectual history which takes seriously the confessionalization of theological discourse will inevitably relativize its subject matter to a certain extent, insofar as it moves beyond simply representing the views of individual historical figures and attempts to explain why certain discursive patterns take the shapes they do. This sort of inquiry need not foreclose on the ultimate truth or legitimacy of any of the discourses in view—indeed, it must not. As Brad Gregory has so forcefully argued, “The point is precisely not to relativize competing faith claims themselves, but to let each resonate fully, creating a formal relativism of competing absolutisms.”Footnote ¹⁶ I prefer to think of such an approach as a useful heuristic discipline, rather than as an act of final, metaphysical closure on the questions in view. After all, if one is going to resurrect the dead and let them speak, one cannot always just tell them to sit down and shut up when one is finished with them. But rather than defend this assertion at length, it will perhaps be more helpful to explain more fully how the sort of “post-confessional” approach I have in mind might look. Since I cannot improve on the description recently offered by Philip Benedict, I will reproduce it here in full:

The burden of this essay will be to argue, contrary to widely held opinion, that not all of the essential features of the Protestant doctrine of justification were “fixed from the start,” but rather that they “came to be defined over time in dialogue and dispute” with opponents both within and without the Protestant confessions themselves. Before proceeding, however, it is necessary to give due consideration to what the best recent confessional scholarship has to say on the matter.

▪Status Quaestionis: The Hamm Proposal

The most impressive attempt in recent scholarship to identify a coherent pattern of theorizing among the Protestant reformers on this central matter of debate comes from Berndt Hamm, Professor of Modern Church History at the theological faculty of the University of Erlangen.Footnote ¹⁸ Hamm's work is uniformly characterized by careful scrutiny of the relevant primary sources, methodological sophistication, and even-handed judgment. I have thus chosen his widely-cited essay as a point of departure in order to critique the traditional view in its strongest form. Even though I shall conclude that Hamm's proposal ultimately proves inadequate, his essay is deeply instructive not only in its mature historical-theological reflection, but also in illustrating the difficulty of the problem as it has hitherto been construed.

Hamm himself certainly recognizes the difficulty of the question he is posing: “I am not asking,” he writes, “‘What is the Lutheran doctrine of justification?‘ but ‘What is the Reformation doctrine of justification?‘”Footnote ¹⁹ For Hamm, there is a coherent set of core convictions which all four of the major Protestant reformers—Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin—hold in common against their Catholic opponents, a thesis which militates against two current trends in Reformation scholarship. The first, and for our purposes the most significant, is a historicizing trend highlighting the variegation and particularity of individual reformers and localized movements at the expense of unifying criteria. Hamm opines that “Reformation historians in recent decades have encouraged an awareness of the diversity of currents in the Reformation to such an extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain a grasp on those features that are common to the Reformation as a whole, and to define their content precisely.”Footnote ²⁰ On the other hand, “enthusiastic ecumenists” have sought to divert the force of Luther's critique of scholastic soteriology away from the “fully catholic” position, represented perhaps by some of the more Augustinian versions of Thomism, by describing it as an attack on the “Ockham-infested doctrine of the late Middle Ages.”Footnote ²¹

Corresponding to these two foils, Hamm sets out two criteria for ascertaining this reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre. The first seeks to identify the “objective common ground” held by the reformers in comparison with late medieval theology, an approach with both positive and negative aspects. Since this criterion is so central to Hamm's proposal, I will quote it here in full:

The problem with this approach, however, is that Hamm assumes in advance what he is setting out to prove. Such an approach might make better sense if we were characterizing the thought of a figure in general terms, but I see no patent absurdity in maintaining that certain currents within a figure's thought might be more or less in keeping with the reformatorische Lehre on any given point—or better yet, that there is no monolithic, uncontested reformatorische Lehre, but rather a range of options which are held by figures widely regarded as “reformational.” Indeed, when it comes to other more hotly contested matters within Protestant circles, such as the Lord's Supper, this is precisely what we observe.Footnote ²³ The same may or may not be true of any supposed reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre, but this is a conclusion which can only be drawn a posteriori on the basis of a careful examination of the sources.Footnote ²⁴ It cannot serve as a criterion for establishing such conclusions in advance.

Hamm's second criterion for ascertaining the reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre is less problematic, though it may require some adjustments to be more useful. This criterion, Hamm explains, is based on an assessment of “what the theological exponents of Catholicism in the sixteenth century thought of the doctrine. What features of the doctrine were perceived as ‘mold-breaking’ and what features (in their eyes) could be integrated?”Footnote ²⁵ This criterion guards against the excesses of ecumenical air-brushing by forcing us to compare Reformation teaching not only against the Scotist-Occamist theologians, the traditional villains of ecumenical historiography, but also against the more robustly Augustinian figures who wrestled seriously with Reformation ideas on their own terms, figures such as Johannes von Staupitz, Johannes Gropper, Gasparo Contarini, and Girolamo Seripando.

This is a salutary observation, yet I am not sure how consistently Hamm's analysis has been guided by it. He makes no mention, for example, of the fact that at Regensburg in 1541 Philipp Melanchthon and Martin Bucer, two reformers of unimpeachably Protestant credentials, reached an agreement with, among others, Johannes Gropper and Gasparo Contarini on a compromise formula for the doctrine of justification.Footnote ²⁶ Were Melanchthon and Bucer departing from the reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre insofar as they found common ground with these Catholics? Luther certainly seems to have thought so.Footnote ²⁷ But Hamm has already avowed that it is “pointless” to draw these lines in such a way as to exclude major reformers such as Melanchthon. It would seem, then, that the line between reformatisch and unreformatisch runs straight through the likes even of Melanchthon, one of Hamm's four representatives of Reformation thought. But to entertain this suggestion is to run smack into one of the oldest and most bitterly contested debates in Reformation scholarship, the question of whether Melanchthon corrupted Luther's gospel or simply developed its core assertions with greater consistency and precision.Footnote ²⁸ Hamm wisely avoids embroiling himself in this fruitless controversy, yet the problem remains: what sort of index do we have in judging when an ostensibly reformational figure, such as Melanchthon, strays from the authentic reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre if such a figure himself is one of the primary yardsticks for establishing the doctrine in the first place?

It might be argued that Hamm's use of this criterion is designed to provide just this. Whenever we find Catholic thinkers responding favorably to a Protestant proposal—in Hamm's words, whenever they are capable of integrating it—then we may safely conclude that because this new teaching does not “break the mold,” it must not be genuinely reformational. There are two distinct advantages to this approach. First, using Catholic reaction as a criterion for establishing the reformational view allows us to bring into sharp relief the precise profile of the issues at stake by discerning where specific Reformation formulations touch a raw nerve with Catholics. Reformation scholarship has, for far too long, examined its chief figures and ideas in isolation from contemporaneous developments within the Catholic world, and Hamm is quite right to insist that any approach to this question must be comparative. Second, comparative criteria allow us to avoid centering our definition on one figure. The traditional response to the question of how we understand the willingness of Melanchthon and Bucer to compromise with the Catholics on the article of justification has simply been to assert that this represented a departure from the teaching of Luther. As Hamm correctly points out, however, this leaves us with at best a Lutheran doctrine of justification, not a Reformation doctrine.

This criterion is not without problems, however, when deployed apart from a careful assessment of the shifting and fluid contexts which shaped the Reformation debates well past the middle of the century. The most significant of these is the assumption that genuinely reformational theology was always defined in opposition to Catholic thought. This, it seems to me, is far from self-evident. Nor would it have been so to most of the first-generation Protestant reformers, who saw themselves quite consciously as working for reform and renewal within the Catholic Church, not for schism.Footnote ²⁹

Yet Hamm's observations here cannot be dismissed so easily. Granted that the first-generation reformers were in no hurry to leave the church into which they had been baptized, what emerged during their battle to reform the church “in head and members” was a genuinely new conception of human salvation, divorced from the Catholic sacrament of penance and centered on the notion of justification by faith alone. This soteriological fault-line between Catholic and Protestant would eventually become one of the clearest boundary markers defining confessional identity in early modern Europe. Yet any attempt to trace out the contours of the Protestant position in the first few decades of the Reformation must bear in mind two important features of the Catholic reaction: its doctrinal fluidity and its focus on practice.

Eventually it was recognized by both Protestants and Catholics that this new Rechtfertigungslehre could not be accommodated within the existing theology and practice of the Roman Catholic church. Yet when exactly did this recognition occur? We have already noted the willingness of front-rank Protestant and Catholic theologians to seek compromise on this issue at Regensburg in 1541; a second colloquy at Regensburg in 1546 continued the discussion, though without any further progress.Footnote ³⁰ At the Council of Trent, beginning in 1545, the condemnation of the Protestant schism as a whole may have been a foregone conclusion, but it was still by no means obvious which aspects of the doctrine of justification would be condemned and which might yet be assimilated. In part, the difficulty was caused by the absence of an authoritative katholische Rechtfertigungslehre against which to measure the reformatorische. Footnote ³¹ This was one of the major problems the Council of Trent was expected to solve. That it did so by firmly and comprehensively rejecting core Protestant teachings should not blind us to the fluidity of the situation within the Catholic context up to and including the Tridentine debates in the late 1540s. Not until the promulgation of the canons of Session VI in January of 1547—roughly three decades after Luther's initial “Reformation breakthrough”—do we have an authoritative index of Catholic teaching against which to measure Reformation doctrine.Footnote ³² To return to Hamm's metaphor, Reformation theology did not “break the mold” of medieval Catholic doctrine because prior to 1547 there was no mold to break.

This does not mean, however, that early Catholic responses to evangelical teaching can safely be ignored. There may not have been an orthodox doctrine of justification prior to the Council of Trent, but there most certainly was an orthodox practice of justification.Footnote ³³ That practice, as we have already noted, centered on the sacrament of penance. Even “moderate” Catholic reformers, such as Contarini, who thought that at least some of the Protestant reformers' concerns could be integrated into authentic Catholic theorizing about the sacrament, ultimately regarded the “Lutheran disease” as a grave threat to the well-being of Christendom because it diverted Christians away from the only God-ordained means by which post-baptismal sin could be forgiven and the penitent sinner returned to a state of grace.Footnote ³⁴ Catholic reactions to the evangelical proclamation of reconciliation apart from this sacramental orthopraxy ranged from the baffled hostility of a John Eck to the pastoral suavitas of a Jacopo Sadoleto. Yet by and large, the Catholic response to the evangelical challenge in the first decades of the conflagration centered on a defense of traditional Catholic practices (such as penance and indulgences) and the authority structures which legitimated those practices, rather than a defense of a clearly received and demarcated soteriological doctrine.Footnote ³⁵

The reformers, however, were on the offensive. Those figures who identified most closely with Luther's protest movement singled out certain aspects of traditional Catholic practice and the assumptions which undergirded it for sustained criticism, and the nature of their writings, focusing as they do on specific grievances, often gives a certain sharpness to many of their formulations. This should not blind us, however, to the fact that among themselves there still existed wide divergences in how salvation was interpreted scripturally and theorized systematically. The first-generation reformers were generally at their most lucid—and unified—in explaining what justification was not: it was not a reward for human merit (de congruo or otherwise); it was not a result of the believer's cooperation with the gift of grace; it was not regulated by the church's sacrament of penance. Indeed, the vaunted sola of Reformation theology—sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, and even sola scriptura—are all negative assertions; that is, they seek to isolate certain key terms from specific theological contexts in which they had become embedded.Footnote ³⁶ Thus, they function not so much as summaries of Protestant belief but as rallying cries against specific Catholic teachings or practices. They constitute, in other words, a “rhetoric of dissent,” rather than a fully-orbed theological or ideological program.

Eventually the Roman Catholic church got around to defining the doctrine of justification in precise terms specifically aimed to exclude any rapprochement with their opponents.Footnote ³⁷ And so, of course, did the Protestants. During the late-1550s and early 1560s, a whole raft of confessional statements were issued by Protestant churches which defined justification in terms far more comprehensive and precise than the those of the first-generation reformers. I will examine anon in some detail the distance between these first- and second-generation confessional statements on the matter of justification, but first I must conclude our engagement with Hamm's proposal by examining the eleven characteristics he advances in describing what he takes to be the reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre. Although I have rejected Hamm's first criterion for establishing this construct and suggested major qualifications to the second, his work in synthesizing the views of the major reformers on this issue cannot be ignored.

In tracing the profile of his reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre, Hamm suggests ten points at which this “evangelical factor can first be clearly perceived in historical terms.” They are, in summary form:Footnote ³⁸

1. 1. The Unconditionally Given Acceptance of Mankind

2. 2. Radical Sin

3. 3. Grace Preceding Perfect Righteousness

4. 4. Simul Iustus et Peccator

5. 5. The Eschatological Final Validity of Justification

6. 6. The Certainty of Salvation

7. 7. Freedom and the Absence of Freedom

8. 8. By Faith Alone

9. 9. The Bond between Faith and the Biblical Word

10. 10. Breaking the Mold: The Contrast with Medieval Theology

11. 11. The Evangelical Understanding of the Person

Space will not allow a detailed engagement with each of these points here, and in any event, I have very little in the way of substantive critique to make concerning Hamm's elaboration of most of these theses. What is claimed concerning the reformers' views on these issues is, in my view, generally correct (with a few significant exceptions, explained below). Two important questions remain, however: to what extent do these characteristics constitute a fully-developed and coherent Rechtfertigungslehre, and when exactly does it emerge?

A careful reading of Hamm's theses will reveal that several are really just variations, or restatements, of a common principle, while others are tangential to the question in view. Theses 2, 7, 9, and 11 relate justification to the reformers' doctrines of sin, scripture, and theological anthropology. These are not irrelevant considerations, to be sure, but they set the context for the evangelical notion of justification rather than telling us what justification actually is. Theses 1, 5, and 6 are all variations on a common theme: granted the “unconditionally given acceptance of mankind” (die bedingungslos geschenkte Annahme des Menschen) in justification (1),Footnote ³⁹ the final validity of God's initial pronouncement at the eschaton cannot be doubted (5).Footnote ⁴⁰ The logical corollary of this position, of course, is the assurance of salvation (6). Thesis 4 introduces Luther's famous phrase, simul iustus et peccator, referring to the simultaneous persistence of both sin and righteousness throughout the believer's life. Thesis 8 introduces the sola fide principle, by which it is affirmed that “the sole grounds and cause of justification reside in God's mercy in Jesus Christ, not any morality inherent in man and manifesting itself in works.”Footnote ⁴¹ If we restrict our focus to justification proper, setting aside for the time being such related but tangential matters as sin, scripture, and anthropology, we may summarize Hamm's findings to this point as follows:

Hamm argues that these characteristics represent common ground held by each of the four reformers he surveys against the backdrop of late medieval Catholic theology, a judgment I regard as more or less correct. Given the existential nature of the concerns clustered around (a), it seems to me altogether plausible that Luther's protest, beginning in 1517, against the sacramental regulation of justification in Catholic orthopraxy acted as a sort of lightning rod for reforming dissent, rallying opposition against the existing religious order around the slogan sola fide and proclaiming a Gospel aimed at providing relief for consciences troubled by the abiding persistence of sin.Footnote ⁴²

Grant that the major Protestant reformers all read scripture and theorized salvation with regard to these three concerns; grant further that they did so more or less within the context of similar convictions regarding scripture, sin, and theological anthropology, as Hamm argues. It is still the case, however, that considerable diversity persisted in the ways in which Protestant theologians theorized justification, even as they did so from the context of an emerging “theological culture.”Footnote ⁴³ This is most readily apparent when we examine in greater detail the relationship of justification to grace and the ways in which justification interfaces in its objective aspect with the atonement and in its subjective aspect with regeneration. To this I now turn by way of engagement with Hamm's third thesis, “Grace Preceding Perfect Righteousness.”

Hamm proceeds to specify the reformatorische content of this notion of grace in a number of suggestive ways. First, he points out that the reformers dismiss the scholastic doctrine of gratia creata, the idea that saving grace is a created reality, or habit, in the soul. More to the point, however, Hamm argues that for the reformers, “a conceptual approach in terms of the relationship replaces the traditional qualitative and moral attitude. Sin remains real in ourselves, but outside ourselves (extra nos), in the relationship, that is to say, we are justified in the way in which we are seen by God (coram Deo).”Footnote ⁴⁴

Hamm makes two further claims regarding this relational view of justification. The first has to do with the relationship between the reformers' understanding of atonement and redemption, between the saving work of Christ on the cross and the application of that work to believers through faith. Writes Hamm: “The propitiatory righteousness of Jesus Christ acting vicariously for us is of fundamental importance. It alone is the cause of justification; it alone provides satisfaction and wins merit. The new relationship in which grace justifies us means that God sees man in the light of Christ's righteousness, and allows it to stand for the righteousness of sinners.”Footnote ⁴⁵

What Hamm is describing here comes to be summarized in the Protestant confessional symbols and in later scholasticism as the imputation of Christ's alien righteousness. “Luther,” he writes, “and Melanchthon and Calvin with him, expresses this understanding of justification in terms of the relations by speaking of the imputation to us of righteousness (reputatio, imputatio), and by describing the righteousness of Christ imputed to the sinner as a righteousness that is external and alien to mankind (iustitia aliena, externa).”Footnote ⁴⁶ As I shall argue below, this notion of the imputed righteousness of Christ is ubiquitous in both the Reformed confessions beginning in the late 1550s and in the Lutheran Formula of Concord in 1577. Hamm, however, detects the idea from an early stage in all four of his paradigmatic figures, though he concedes that they do not all use the same language consistently; more importantly, he regards this concept as integral to Reformation teaching.

Corollary to this notion of the iustitia Christi imputata, for Hamm, is another axiom which has long been regarded as a defining mark of the reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre, the sharp distinction between justification and regeneration. This iustitia aliena, which is imputed to the believer through faith, “is indeed truly given to us, but it never exists in us, only in the manner of its acceptance and of divine absolution.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Not only is God's acceptance of the sinner and his imputation of Christ's righteousness regarded as notionally distinct from the work of the Holy Spirit in renewing the believer, but, Hamm argues, the two “can never be congruent.” Justification stands in a causal relationship to the “partial renewal” which is effected by the Holy Spirit, and the believer's acceptance into a right relationship with God is never conditioned by it.

It is at these two points, the notion of the iustitia Christi imputata and the sharp distinction between justification and regeneration, that I believe Hamm's otherwise serviceable description of the reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre runs into serious difficulties. The problem is not that these terms and concepts are nowhere to be found in theologies of the Reformation period. The problem is rather that the precise profile Hamm is describing here does not emerge as a consensus position until much later than Hamm seems to allow, and even then it continues to exist in tension with other models well into the late decades of the sixteenth century—and perhaps even beyond. In other words, what Hamm has given us here is not a reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre; it is a konfessionelle Rechtfertigungslehre.

▪Termini a quo and ad quem: Emergence of the Confessional Model

By the end of the sixteenth century, Protestant theologians had developed a clear and consistent idiom for describing God's justification of the ungodly, the central concept in their doctrine of salvation.Footnote ⁴⁸ This konfessionelle Rechtfertigungslehre represented a clear consensus among Lutheran and Reformed theologians in opposition to their Roman Catholic opponents. It also represented an “advance” with regard to earlier models of justification among the first-generation reformers, this in at least two respects. First, justification came to be defined as a transaction involving two conceptually distinct aspects: forgiveness of sin and the imputation of Christ's alien righteousness. The former of these, the idea that justification involves the remission (or non-imputation) of sin, was never particularly controversial, in and of itself, in the debates of the Reformation era.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was the latter, the affirmation of the iustitia Christi imputata, which represented perhaps the most striking theological novum in Protestant teaching, particularly when it was claimed that this imputed righteousness was given independently of, and without subsequent reference to, the imparted righteousness which followed from regeneration. The second aspect of this konfessionelle Rechtfertigungslehre is thus a clear distinction between justification on the one hand and regeneration on the other.Footnote ⁵⁰

Between the years 1559 and 1566, a series of important confessional documents affirmed this model as the consensus view of the Reformed churches: the Confessio Gallica (1559), the Scots Confession (1560), the Confessio Belgica (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), and the Confessio Helvetica Posterior (1566). In 1577, this language of the imputed righteousness of Christ featured prominently in the Lutheran Formula of Concord. By the time of its “first codification,” then, Protestant theology had reached a cross-confessional consensus on the language of one of its most central soteriological affirmations, a consensus which would set the boundaries of orthodox teaching on the doctrine of justification for roughly the next two centuries.Footnote ⁵¹

Viewed from the vantage point of this consensus, however, early evangelical teaching on justification often appears inchoate and at times even contradictory. The first-generation reformers did not clearly and consistently distinguish justification from regeneration, as Hamm asserts.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, one of the most heated controversies prior to the first codification centered on Andreas Osiander's rejection of this very distinction.Footnote ⁵³ Moreover, these early figures use a wide range of language to describe their views and often appeal to very different biblical texts to justify them. Terms such as imputare and reputare gain prominence only gradually in these discussions, and their use evolves as the discourse becomes more precise. Furthermore, it is doubtful that the concept of imputed righteousness ever comes to occupy the dominant place even in Luther's view of justification that it manifestly holds in the language of both the Lutheran and Reformed confessions by the time of the first codification.Footnote ⁵⁴ One particularly well-known example from the later Luther will have to suffice for the present. In the 1545 preface to his collected Latin writings, Luther describes the moment early in his career, some thirty years earlier, when he first came to his new understanding of the iustitia Dei in Paul's letter to the Romans. Sometime after this, he explains, he read Augustine's De spiritu et littera and discovered, much to his delight, that this “new” insight into the righteousness of God could claim the sanction of an ancient and venerable Father of the Church. What follows is highly significant: “Although this was heretofore said imperfectly and he did not explain all things concerning imputation clearly, it nevertheless was pleasing that God's righteousness with which we are justified was taught.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This assessment of Augustine by Luther is important in two respects: On the one hand, it demonstrates that the language of imputation is important enough for Luther—the later Luther, that is—to elicit mild criticism of Augustine, with whom he is clearly in this context attempting to establish continuity. On the other hand, Luther still recognizes Augustine's work as supporting the key insight of his reformation Durchbruch. Footnote ⁵⁶ Augustine's view is “imperfect” and “unclear” at points, but for all that Luther still finds it “pleasing.”

By the time of Protestant theology's first codification, it is likely that many would have regarded the teaching of the first-generation reformers on this matter in a similar light: imperfect and unclear, but pleasing. The issue is thrown into clearest relief when we compare the statements on justification given in the major Lutheran and Reformed confessions earlier and later in the period. Comparing the confessional statements of the emerging Protestant churches seems to me a far better route to establishing the extent of any supposed reformatorische or konfessionelle Rechtfertigungslehre, precisely because these documents are consensus texts—that is, they do not simply represent the personal opinions of a handful of individual authors. Rather, these symbols won the assent, between them, of virtually all of those reformers and theologians whose opinions ought to count in determining what the extent of “reformational” teaching might be, at least among the intellectual leaders of the movement.

For our purposes here, I will be dividing these statements into two distinct groups, corresponding to two waves of creative confessional activity in different periods of the century (see p. 226). The first took place fairly early on in the Reformation, while the Lutheran movement was still establishing its theological identity in the Empire and the urban reformation was in full swing among the south German and the Swiss. These “first wave” confessions thus give us a good indicator not only of what sort of consensus existed across a wide range of first-generation reformers but also what sort of theological program the princes, magistrates, and city councilmen who declared for the Reformation during this period thought they were signing up for. The “second wave” came concurrent with the early stages of confessionalization in the aftermath of the Peace of Augsburg, and thus gives us a snapshot of how Protestant doctrine had coalesced into a form suitable for sustaining a territorial ecclesiastical establishment. What follows is not intended as an exhaustive treatment of the theology of these confessions; it simply represents a sampling of the most important confessional texts which reflect the continuing development of the Protestant consensus on the doctrine of justification.

Let us take the Confessio Augustana (CA) as a point of departure for the Lutheran tradition.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1530, Melanchthon and his colleagues were content to summarize their teaching on justification with a very brief statement which sticks closely to the syntax of the biblical text:

Aside from its brevity, what most impresses about this article in relation to later formulations is the way in which the mode of justification is described in language closely following the biblical syntax: in both the CA and in Gen 15:6 (and its NT quotations in Rom 4:3, 22, Gal 3:6, Jas 2:23), faith is the thing being “reckoned,” and iustitia is an indirect object in a prepositional phrase—ad iustitiam/pro iustitia. Two observations are in order. First, as has often been noted, this article is capable of sustaining a wide range of interpretations, from the purely forensic to a view of justification as involving both the acceptance and the transformation of the sinner.Footnote ⁵⁹ The language is clearly forensic, but because the key formulation simply repeats the biblical syntax, no explicit foreclosure is made on a traditional Augustinian reading of justification as a transformative process concurrent with acceptatio Divina.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, what CA Art. IV describes is a one-stage model of justification: Reception into grace results in the forgiveness of sins, and this forgiveness of sins is tantamount to an imputation of righteousness.Footnote ⁶⁰ This judgment takes place “on account of Christ” (propter Christum), but there is no suggestion of a “transfer” of righteousness or of merit from Christ to the believer—indeed, the concept of merit is conspicuously absent here.Footnote ⁶¹ This is not to suggest that the reformers equate justification with forgiveness of sins in a flat, one-dimensional way. In other contexts, both Luther and Melanchthon tend to describe salvation in broader terms, encompassing both the remission of sins and the believer's reception of Christ's righteousness. For example, in his 1528 treatise Vom Abendmal Christi, Luther describes salvation in terms reminiscent of the later confessional position, when he writes that Christ “gave himself and bestowed all his works, sufferings, wisdom, and righteousness, and reconciled us to the Father.”Footnote ⁶² So also, Melanchthon occasionally uses language in his Apology of the Augsburg Confession which seems at times to anticipate the later confessional formulations.Footnote ⁶³

This is not to say that justification has a narrower sense for the earlier reformers than it does for the later confessional theologians—in fact, their language can be quite expansive, particularly when discussing the matter under the heading of other loci. The salient point, however, is that notions of positive imputation remain peripheral in theological discourse and wholly absent from confessional formulations. When forced to describe succinctly what it is that justification accomplishes, the early texts consistently focus on the idea of non-imputation of sin. This may simply reflect an assumption that one who has been forgiven is ipso facto righteous in the sight of God, as the language of Ps 32:2/Rom 4:8 might seem to imply: “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.” Or it may be that forgiveness is viewed as standing in synecdoche for all the benefits which justification conveys. Whatever the precise relationship, remission of sin and imputation of righteousness are viewed as parallel terms, as the following definition of justification from Melanchthon's 1556 Enarratio on Romans seems to suggest:

Compare this early Lutheran formulation with Article III of the Epitome of the Formula of Concord (FC):

This is only one affirmation in a much larger set of theses and antitheses, a set which not only continues the Lutheran polemic against Catholics views of salvation but also addresses itself to a number of intra-Lutheran debates as well.Footnote ⁶⁶ The FC statement on justification contrasts with CA not only in size, but also in substance; this in two important respects. First, where CA preserves the syntax of the foundational biblical text, Gen 15:6, FC does not: now the “righteousness of Christ's obedience” is the thing being reckoned, not faith, and “we” are the recipients of something clearly external. Thus, the iustitia by which we are saved has been promoted from an indirect to a direct object. Second, this imputation of Christ's righteousness appears as an aspect conceptually distinct from forgiveness of sins. I am not suggesting that these are chronologically distinct stages or that they are ever thought of as happening independently from one another, simply that later descriptions of justification, such as we see here in FC, tend consistently to rely on just this sort of two-fold construction in affirming both a non-imputation of sin and the positive imputation of Christ's righteousness.Footnote ⁶⁷ These observations may seem like overly-subtle points of grammatical nit-picking, but I would suggest that this departure from biblical syntax marks an important point of transition in the development of the doctrine. Hurling Bible verses at one another simply was not getting the job done. The shift to a two-stage model reflects the realization that the debate was fundamentally an argument over the meaning of the biblical terms themselves, and this realization demanded a model which could explain, rather than simply restate, the key passages to which both sides appealed.

Nor is this only the case in the Lutheran tradition. A similar comparison of early and late confessions in the Reformed tradition demonstrates a parallel pattern of development from a one-stage model of justification as non-imputation of sin with no distinction made between justification and regeneration to a purely forensic, two-stage model. Zwingli's Sixty-Seven Articles, possibly the first formalized statement of faith in what would become the Reformed tradition, makes no mention whatever of justification.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the following decade, however, a whole series of confessional statements poured from the pens of south-German and Swiss reformers. In 1528 Berthold Haller and Francis Kolb issued Ten Theses on behalf of canton Bern, a statement which met with the warm approval and Zwingli and the Zurich reformers. The text on salvation reads: “Christ is our only wisdom, righteousness, redemption, and payment for the sins of the whole world. Hence it is a denial of Christ when we acknowledge another merit for salvation and satisfaction for sin.”Footnote ⁶⁹

The first Reformed confessional statement to make explicit use of the term justification is the Confessio Tetrapolitana of 1530:

This text, a joint effort by Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito, makes no mention of imputation—either negative or positive—and the proof-texts assembled for the doctrine do not even reference the NT usage of Gen 15:6 so crucial for the later Protestant confessions. The characteristic Protestant insistence on sola fide is clearly on display, but its use here nicely illustrates the point made earlier that these sola-terms are primarily negative—that is, they are aimed at denying the necessity of works or merit for justification. Likewise with the First Confession of Basel (1534), based on a prior text by Johannes Oecolampadius and edited by his successor, Oswald Myconius:

The Confessio Helvetica Posterior (1536), the work of a committee of evangelical luminaries, including Heinrich Bullinger, Leo Jud, Kaspar Megander, Simon Grynaeus, Myconius, Bucer, and Capito, explains “How Christ's grace and merit are communicated to us” in Article 12 as follows:

Nowhere in any of these statements is a distinction even hinted at between justification and regeneration. Nor is there any mention of imputation, either in the early-Lutheran sense of fides imputata pro iustitia or in the later orthodox sense of iustitia Christi imputata. This becomes all the more plain when we compare these early formulations with the second wave of Reformed confessions, beginning in 1559.

The Confessio Gallica, written by Calvin in cooperation with Théodore de Béze and Pierre Viret, begins its definition of justification in Art. 18 in fine Melanchthonian form: “We believe that all our justification rests upon the remission of our sins, in which also is our only blessedness, as the Psalmist says” (Ps 32:1). The statement then draws a conclusion regarding the imputation of Christ's merit which is not found anywhere in the Lutheran confessional texts in use at the time: “We therefore reject all other means of justification before God, and without claiming any virtue or merit, we rest simply in the obedience of Jesus Christ, which is imputed (allouée) to us as much to blot out all our sins as to make us find grace and favor in the sight of God.”Footnote ⁷³ This is not quite a two-stage model, in that the non-imputation of sins and the imputation of Christ's righteousness are not distinguished; rather, the iustitia Christi functions here in two distinct ways, to “blot out all our sins” and to “make us find grace and favor in the sight of God.” And if there is any remaining doubt that this imputation excludes any notion of merit communicated through regeneration, it is removed in Art. 22: “Moreover, although God works in us for our salvation, and renews our hearts, determining us to that which is good, yet we confess that the good works which we do proceed from his Spirit, and can not be accounted to us for justification.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The Confessio Belgica (1561), like the French Confession, begins its discussion of justification in Article 23 with reference to Psalm 33 and Romans 4: “We believe that our blessedness lies in the forgiveness of our sins because of Jesus Christ, and that in it our righteousness before God is contained, as David and Paul teach us when they declare that man blessed to whom God grants (imputata) righteousness apart from works.”Footnote ⁷⁵ No explicit mention is made of the iustitia Christi imputata; rather, iustitia coram Deo is “contained” (contineri) in the forgiveness of sins. The emerging confessional position is hinted at in the previous article, however, when it is denied that faith itself (ipsam fidem) justifies; rather, faith is the instrument by which we grasp Christ, who is our righteousness. The idea that Christ himself is our righteousness, expressed in the language of 1 Cor 1:30, Christus, iustitia nostra, becomes a favorite way of summarizing justification for many of the reformers and confessional theologians. The expression is biblical, however, and therefore not new. The challenge for Protestant theologians was to describe in a convincing manner how, exactly, Christ is our righteousness and to do so in a way which set their teaching apart from that of their Catholic opponents.Footnote ⁷⁶ This was done by appealing to what amounts to a Protestant version of the treasury of merits: “Jesus Christ is our righteousness in making available (imputans) to us all his merits and all the holy works he has done for us and in our place. And faith is the instrument that keeps us in communion with him and with all his benefits.”Footnote ⁷⁷ With the further differentiation between justification and sanctification in Art. 24, all of the pieces of the confessional doctrine are clearly in place, if not succinctly stated.

The two documents which bear clearest testimony to the emergence of a konfessionelle Rechtfertigungslehre are the Confessio Helvetica Posterior (1562) and the Heidelberg Catechism (1563). The Second Helvetic Confession, initially written as a personal statement of faith by Heinrich Bullinger beginning in 1561 and presented to the Imperial Assembly in 1566, is regarded by many as the most comprehensive and influential Reformed confession of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Second Helvetic, interestingly, departs from the common practice of most of the previous Protestant confessions in not centering the discussion of justification on Ps 32:2/Rom 4:8: “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.” This is because, for Bullinger, justification is more than simply forgiveness of sins; it involves a positive aspect which is consistently set parallel to forgiveness: “to justify means to remit sins, to absolve from guilt and punishment, to receive into favor, and to pronounce a man just.”Footnote ⁷⁹ To underscore the dual nature of this action, however, Bullinger devotes an entire paragraph to defining the nature of this imputativa iustitia:

This two-fold formula—non imputans nobis peccata, sed imputans [Christi] nobis iustitiam—represents the key formulation for what I am here describing as the konfessionelle Rechtfertigungslehre. Footnote ⁸¹ It appears with equal clarity in the Heidelberg Catechism the following year: