A Lutheran Churchman: Kenneth Howes on "The Means of Grace"

Kenneth Howes
Presentation to LMS-USA Convention
June 20, 2009
The Means of Grace

It is the most fundamental principle of the Reformation that we are saved by God's grace. We cannot in any way merit it ourselves. Further, it is plain that we receive this grace by faith. These things are true, but they do not answer the question of how God brings this grace to us. The mystics would place it on their prayers, devotions and meditations. Indeed, Luther's formula of oratio, tentatio, meditatio, is not to be undervalued. However, these things are indeed useless once decoupled from the Word of God. Our confessions condemn those who would say that without the external Word, we can attain God's grace through our own preparations.

The Bible is of course full of examples of God's immediate grace. The miracles and theophanies of both testaments tell that God can bring His blessings directly. His own voice called to Samuel. He converted St. Paul by knocking him senseless and appearing to him as a vision. He parted the Red Sea and made the sun to stand still for Joshua's victory. Innumerable times He healed the sick and even raised the dead.

Among us, however, this is not how our faith is created and strengthened. Martin Luther may have been chased into the ministry by the terrors of a thunderstorm, but it was not in that storm that he received the grace of understanding the Gospel. Rather, it was when he read St. Paul's letter to the Romans in the tower of the Black Cloister in Wittenberg. By the way, it is well to remember as we discuss the means of grace that they do not always come to us in what might be called dignified places—the Word can speak to us in the Wittenberg cloaca, in a prison or on a battlefield.

For our salvation, God works through means. The Holy Spirit does not simply enter us and change us without detectable means. Rather, He comes to us and gives us faith through what we can sense. We cannot be sure of things internal to us; there is no certainty in ourselves. Rather, we can hear and see His Gospel and believe in it. We can see, feel, and, in the case of the Communion, taste, His Sacraments and believe them. Faith clings to those things that it has seen and heard. Luther says that it is madness “to separate faith, and that to which faith clings and is bound, though it be something external. Ya, it shall and must be something external, that it may be apprehended by the senses and understood and thereby be brought into the heart, as indeed the entire Gospel is an external,, verbal preaching.”

The efficacy of the Word is something promised in both Testaments. God told Isaiah, “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” Christ tells us that it is His Word by which we are freed; that it is the Spirit that is life—and it is in His Word that the Spirit is to be found. St. Peter recognizes the power of the word as he says to Jesus, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

St. Paul declares the Gospel to be “the power of salvation.” He tells us that we shall be saved when we confess that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead, and tells us that we come to believe only from hearing the Word, which we cannot hear if no one preaches it. The Gospel, then, as it is communicated, is a means of grace; through it, people come to believe, and by believing, they are saved.
The Sacraments also carry with them the promise of salvation. Jesus says “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” That statement explains why, in the Great Commission, Jesus first tells the apostles to baptize all nations and then to teach them. In baptism, we are baptized into Christ's death and raised to new life in Him. St. Peter writes that “Baptism now saves you.” Baptism, too, then, is a means by which God's grace comes to us. It is much more than Law--an “ordinance” which God has commanded us; it is a gift through which He delivers His salvation to us.

Likewise the Communion is expressly stated to be a means by which we receive forgiveness. Jesus says, speaking of the wine in the Supper, “This is the blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Jesus cannot be speaking of the blood He would shed on the cross, for He tells them in the present tense to drink it, that it is His blood. The Sacrament gave to them His body and blood before ever he was crucified. St. Paul makes clear that what we are doing is participating in that body and blood, the same body and blood given at that supper on the night in which He was betrayed. We are therefore also sharing in the promise that His body and blood are given and shed for the remission of our sins. It, then, is also a means by which God's grace comes to us. We see that it has been so from the first. At Emmaus, the disciples did not recognize Him until they had received the bread that He gave them.

Just as God has not simply willed it that we never be hungry or thirst, but rather created food and water for us, He did not simply will that we be saved, but did and made those things that would save us. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone, and the Word is how we come to the faith by which we receive His grace, and in His grace, eternal life. The Sacraments are not separate from the Word. Rather, they are visible elements to which the Word has been joined. Luther cites with approval St. Augustine's explanation that “Accedat Verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum.” When the Word joins the element, it is made a Sacrament. So in receiving the Sacraments, we receive the Gospel in a physical form; their operation is not otherwise than that of the Gospel as we hear or read it.

Reformed theology often suggests that our salvation comes to us without means, by a direct and immediate action of the Holy Spirit. As the Reformed dogmatician Hodge writes about Zwingli, “it is true that Zwingle (sic) has ever been regarded as holding the lowest doctrine concerning the sacraments of any of the Reformers. They were to him no more means of grace than the rainbow or the heaps of stone on the banks of the Jordan. By their significancy and by association, they might suggest truth and awaken feeling, but they were not channels of divine communication.” Hodge, while admitting that grace is somehow associated with the Sacraments, insists nonetheless that the Holy Spirit's grace acts immediately.

The problem with Reformed teaching on the efficacy of the means of grace is the same as the problem with Roman works-righteousness. Both leave one uncertain and dependent on a feeling. How do you know you have eternal life? The Roman can only hope that his good works are good enough. Indeed, the Council of Trent condemns those who are certain of their salvation, and insists that we must doubt our salvation. Yet, as Pieper says, doubt is the opposite of faith—where one is, the other is not.

There is what is sometimes called a felicitous inconsistency in the Reformed teaching. Calvin stated that it was the internal (or “secret”) testimony of the Holy Spirit that made Scripture credible. However, he also says that the Sacraments, “sustain, nourish, confirm and increase our faith.” The 20th century Reformed dogmatician Louis Berkhof says that the Sacraments are “instruments not of common but of special grace, the grace that removes sins and renews the sinner in conformity with the image of God.”

God's grace is a gift, something He gives us. As the Missouri systematician Norman Nagel often used to say in his lectures, “You cannot gift yourself.” Someone else must bring this grace to you. We need to be led to Christ; we cannot bring ourselves to Him, notwithstanding the beloved Reformed hymn in which we sing “O Lamb of God, I come, I come.” We cannot even render that little bit of cooperation in our own salvation. We are like the blind man whose friends led him to Jesus to be healed. Nothing internal to us can save us.

Our apprehension of the redemption that Jesus accomplished for us comes, and must come, through something external to us—as Luther repeatedly said, the external Word. Without it, our “blind reason...gropes about and...cannot think of Christ and faith.” Hence prayer, though it is vital, is not a means of grace, contrary to the writing of Presbyterian theologian James Montgomery Boice. Those holding that view confuse the order form with the delivery invoice. Prayer is how we ask for God's grace; it is us speaking to God. The Word, both by itself and joined to elements, is God speaking to us. Yet that is the mistake of the Enthusiasts, especially the Pentecostals.

Whatever Spirit is speaking when one of the Pentecostals or other charismatics falls on the floor and starts babbling is not the Holy Spirit. The gift of tongues as it came at the first Pentecost was given that the hearers, not all of whom spoke Aramaic, could understand the Apostles' preaching. The Scripture knows nothing of “private devotional languages” or “holy laughter” of people in convulsions. These are the spirits Christ cast out, not the Holy Spirit whom He has sent. One Pentecostal told me with great excitement about how someone at his church had spoken in a tongue none could understand at the time and that from the recording it was determined that this was ancient Babylonian. I asked him, “Oh, really? And what spirit did the Babylonians worship?” The same would apply to those who reportedly spoke Canaanite under these fits. No one today speaks those languages; this is not the Spirit sent to spread the Gospel, but an evil spirit formerly worshipped by those cultures. That is the problem with laying yourself open generally for a spirit to enter in. You have no control which spirit that is. Instead, we have established venues through which the Holy Spirit, and no other spirit, works.

The Holy Spirit comes to us through the Gospel as we receive it and through the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The Augsburg Confession explains, “That we may attain such faith, God installed the office of preaching, and given the Gospel and Sacraments, through which he, as by means, gives the Holy Ghost, who effects faith where and when he will, in those who hear the Gospel, which teaches that through Christ's merit, not through our merit, have a gracious God when we believe that.”

The office of ministry, then, exists to give us these gifts of the Gospel and Sacraments. For that purpose the ministry was created. Some would go from that article to say that the Bible, when we read it ourselves, is not a means of grace, that it is only when we hear preaching of the Gospel by an ordained pastor that we have the Spirit working in us. Such was the teaching of J.A.A. Grabau in the mid-19th century. Advocates of this position point to the comment by Luther that the church is “a mouth house not a pen house.” Luther took the view that preaching was a much more powerful form of communication than was writing. At a time when literacy was still rare, he was probably right.

The view that the Word read is not a means of grace, however, is not maintained in the Confessions or in the writings of the later dogmaticians. The Formula of Concord says, “...and God wants by this means, and not otherwise, namely through his holy Word, when one hears or reads it, and uses the Sacraments according to his Word, to call men to eternal salvation, to draw them to himself, to convert them, give them new birth and sanctify them.” The explanation of those who would deny that the written Word privately read is a means of grace that the passage should be translated “when one hears the Word preached or read,” will not stand up as a matter of German grammar.

Subsequent dogmatic writings have almost uniformly upheld this understanding.

Johann Gerhard writes:

Because there is no real distinction between the written and unwritten Word of God, therefore we claim that those honor-giving praises about the efficacy and fruit of the Word are deservedly pertinent also to Holy Scripture. Just as the Word does not cease being divine because it is written, so also it does not cease being effective for conversion or an instrument of salvation. Likewise, that fact that Rom. 10:17 says “faith comes from hearing” does not mean that we must take this exclusively so we oppose the hearing of the spoken Word to the reading of the written Word. Rather, we must take this inclusively so we claim that God is effective for faith and salvation through both the hearing and reading of his Word because the Word is and remains the same, whether it is preached and heard or written and read.

Gerhard's view is seconded by numerous other dogmaticians such as David Hollaz and Franz Pieper. This position is buttressed by St. John's comment that “these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” That is an express statement that through the written Word faith may be worked, and through faith, grace. The further effort by some to say, “Oh, but how many read and do not believe?” These same people rely on AC V; have they not read in that article that the Holy Spirit works when and where he wishes. How many hear and do not believe? Jesus Himself spoke and many did not believe; when what He said was too hard to grasp or accept, they went away. There is no more certainty in preaching than in reading.

As Gerhard says, there is really no difference. When we read the Scriptures, this is not our own private preparations. We receive through reading their words, the preaching of St. John, St. Paul and all the other prophets, apostles and evangelists. The book that is then in our hands is external to us; the words of St. John, St. Paul or Isaiah are not our own words, something occurring to us internally. The read Word IS just as surely as oral preaching the external Word to which we can cling. If anything, we can cling to it more surely than to preaching because we can read the Scriptures again, but the sermon is subject to the weaknesses of our memory. Further, whereas preaching is sometimes heterodox, the Scriptures are never heterodox.

The operation of the Sacraments as means of grace is slightly different in its mode, yet not different in effect from the operation of the preached and read Word. Instead of language, the Word comes to us in the physical elements of the water of Baptism or the bread and wine of Communion. Accedat Verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum, says St. Augustine. The Holy Spirit joins the Word to the water of baptism, so that it is not just ordinary water but water alive in the Word, which makes the water, as Luther calls it, “the divine laver of regeneration.”

The Reformed, in their post-Reformation writings, attack the teaching of baptismal regeneration. They insist that baptism is Law. We do it because we have been commanded to do it. Of itself it accomplishes nothing but merely signifies the effect of conversion. This was not Calvin's teaching. Calvin wrote that “it is beyond any question that we put on Christ in baptism, and that we are baptized for this end—that we may be one with him.” He writes further that “by baptism we are admitted into a participation of (Christ's) grace.”

So the Reformed have abandoned their own founder's teaching. Baptismal regeneration, then, must be understood to have been the teaching of the Reformation and its rejection to have been a later distortion of the teaching of Baptism by the Reformed churches that would rob baptism of its grace and turn it from Gospel into Law.

On the other side, the Romans say that Baptism works regeneration ex opere operato. It may be that the idea of ex opere operato began not as what it is today but as a way of rejecting Donatism—that the worthiness of the minister had nothing to do with the effect of the Sacraments. Whether or not that is so, the Roman teaching as it exists is, as to Baptism, that since the infant cannot yet have faith, Baptism works entirely by what is done, with faith only to follow. In practical terms, the theological impact of the ex opere operato is not that grave in Baptism, since the point of baptismal regeneration is not lost; it is catastrophic in Communion.

In the sacrament of Holy Communion, Christ's Body and Blood are joined to the elements of bread and wine. Again, it is well established that this is a joinder, not a magical transformation. Our confessions affirm that we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine—not instead of the bread and wine as the Romans teach, and not in some inchoate way separate from the bread and wine as the more moderate Reformed would teach. The radical rejection of Sacramental operation by some writers in the Reformed tradition.

Lewis Sperry Chafer's mammoth 8-volume systematics devotes all of a half page (if one counts the title) to the Lord's Supper. He tells us that the Communion is, instead of a gift of Christ's Body and Blood as a means of our salvation, our testimony to God of our trust in Him and His promise of salvation. He refers to our teaching, together with that of the Romans, as a great perversion of the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. For him it is not even an ordinance but something we may do from time to time as “a testimony of the heart to God” at times and places of our choosing. Plainly, Chafer's theology is a world away from both the Scriptural and the traditional testimonies of the Sacrament. There is no grace of any form received by us in the Communion according to that concept.

For the purposes of this presentation, however, let us assume as a given of Lutheran, Roman and moderate Reformed theology alike (Anglicanism is subsumed in those three categories because that tradition includes people teaching all three sorts of theology) that we in some manner receive Christ's Body and Blood in the Communion, and lay aside for a moment the question of the manner of that reception, the question which is relevant to this presentation remains. What is communicated to us in the Communion through His Body and Blood, and why do we celebrate the Sacrament?

Our theology teaches us that Communion, like the Gospel and Baptism, was instituted as a means through which our sins are forgiven and we are fed and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, working through that Body and Blood. That body was given, and that blood was shed for us for the forgiveness of all our sins. When Jesus refers to the Sacrament as “the blood of the new covenant” or, as St. Luke says it even more strongly, and as St. Paul reports it, “the New Testament in my blood,” we are told that this Sacrament is itself the Gospel, which we are physically ingesting. This Sacrament is nothing less than our salvation itself coming to us in an inexorable form, for our salvation if we believe, for our damnation if we do not.
The Romans understand part of it, as they say “to receive communion is to receive Christ himself who has offered himself for us.” If one does not pay attention, it seems that their teaching is correct. Then, however, they say that “the Eucharist strengthens our charity, which tends to be weakened in daily life, and this living charity wipes away venial sins” and “By the same charity that it enkindles in us, the Eucharist preserves us from future mortal sins.” In other words, for all their talk about the Eucharist as sacrifice, they miss the point of the one sacrifice that has occurred, and they miss the point of the Eucharist itself.

This comes from a misunderstanding of what God's grace is. That grace is that He is, for Christ's sake, favorably disposed toward us, takes our faith as righteousness, and remembers our sins no more. His grace is not simply a grant of a disposition and character within us that enables us to earn salvation for ourselves; that makes our salvation and the forgiveness of our sins the result of our own works of love. St. Paul tells us that if we have earned it, it is not grace. The Romans, then, make of the Mass a good work by which we earn the strength to do other good works by which we save ourselves. It is then no more grace, and the Communion is not, in their theology, a means of grace after all. We do not even have to get into the various other Roman abuses of the Sacrament, such as parading it around town in a golden cage in front of statues of the Virgin or having services at which one comes not to receive the Sacrament but to pray and bow before it like an idol. One very specific distortion of the celebration of the Sacrament comes from the idea that the good works by which we can save ourselves can also save others. This is the fundamental theological error from which the sale of indulgences and private masses flowed. That the Communion can be that good work is made possible by their teaching of ex opere operato, which turns a gift of God's grace into a magical incantation muttered by the priest. It is then not God's work but the priest's, to be applied as the priest wishes.

The Reformed are all over the place on grace in the Communion. At one moment they are saying that in the Communion we receive the forgiveness of sins and spiritual strengthening; at another they say that in the Communion we receive a token of forgiveness and strengthening accomplished extraneously to the Sacrament; at yet others, they say that this is something done entirely as an act of obedience—we do it not because God is giving us something through it but because He has ordered us to do it.

Again like the Romans, the Reformed have taken a gift of God, something that is Gospel, and have turned it into Law. They want to have grace in the Communion; they understand that our salvation is not by our works; yet somehow it all turns to works in the end for them, as they do these things not because of the promise, of which they have at best a blurred view—one can argue that those who hold the radical Chafer view have lost even that--but because of the command.

Auricular confession has been substantially abolished by the Reformed. Whether or not one classifies it as a Sacrament (it is not so listed in the Catechisms or Augsburg Confession, but is so listed in the Apology), there is no question that there is a promise of grace in absolution. Jesus has promised that the Church's absolution on earth will also be absolution in heaven, and that its withholding of that absolution will likewise be withheld in heaven. The Romans' absolution, however, is no absolution at all. Penances are imposed; for those who have not rendered sufficient satisfaction, purgatory awaits. That is at best a very strange sort of grace.

Our absolution is really an absolution. Absolution is granted, and it is just what it says; it is absolute. Our pastors say “I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Ghost,” and they are forgiven. There is no more penalty, no more punishment. Christ has made satisfaction in full for all our sins. That was accomplished once for all on Calvary.

These things—the Word and Sacraments are not Law. They are Gospel. They are God's good gifts to us through which He gives us an even greater gift, salvation itself. We must turn neither to the right nor to the left from the Gospel. Whether we turn toward Rome or toward the Reformed, we will turn the Gospel into Law. We dare not do that. God keep us from it and grant us, through the means He has appointed, His grace. Amen.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 2003).

James Montgomery Boice, Foundations of the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986).

John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles to the Romans, tr. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005).

John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, tr. John Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005).

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, tr. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008).

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000).

Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology, vol. VII (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1993).

Martin Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent, vol. II, tr. Fred Kramer (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1978)

Concordia Triglotta, ed. F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921).

Johann Gerhard, Theological Commonplaces: On the Nature of Theology and Scripture, tr. Richard J. Dinda (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006).

Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. III (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003).

Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann, Companion Volume (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1959).

Kurt Marquart, Anatomy of an Explosion (Ft. Wayne: Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 1977)

Martin Marty, Luther (New York: Viking, 2004).

Dennis Ngien, “Theology of Preaching in Martin Luther,” Themelios vol. 28, no. 2 (Spring 2003), 29, available http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/luther_ngien.pdf, accessed May 27, 2009.

Franz Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, vol. III, tr. J.T. Mueller (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1954).

Robert D. Preus and Wilbert H. Rosin, ed., A Contemporary Look at the Formula of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1978).

Writings quoted without further reference in above materials

St. Augustine, Treatise on the Gospel of St. John.

David Hollaz, Examen theologicum acroamaticum.