AgLiving06 said:FTACo88-FDT24dad said:AgLiving06 said:FTACo88-FDT24dad said:
The doctrine of the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer and the imputation of the believer's sin to Christ through the exchange of faith alone, that uniquely Protestant doctrine is an invention of Martin Luther and has no precedent in the tradition whatsoever at all for ~1500 years. That is the conclusion not just of Catholic historians, but of Protestant historians like Alastair McGrath in his two-volume work, Eustitia Dei, The History of the Doctrine of Justification, which confirms that Luther's interpretation of justification is a complete theological novelty.
At the other end, if you want to look at Matthew J. Thomas' book, Paul's Works of the Law in Second-Century Reception, it's a great analysis of how the very earliest Christians understood Paul's statement that we are not justified by works of the law, and it's quite clear they did not mean what Luther meant by that phrase. Modern biblical scholarship, including much Protestant biblical scholarship comes to the same conclusion. Christer Stendahl, James Dunn, and in particular, NT. Wright. Wright's book, simply titled Justification speaks to this.
This isn't accurate.
McGrath does not claim imputation language is an invention of Luther. He acknowledges that the church has historically employed imputation language, particularly in the context of Romans. It's unavoidable.
He does say that Luther's specific formulation, emphasizing forensic justification over alternatives, lacks a firm historical grounding. I don't think anybody denies this.
But that's a different discussion.
Your statement mischaracterizes what I said. I never said McGrath said what you say I said about imputation language. The first sentence in my post is a characterization of the soteriological economics of sola fide, not something I attribute to McGrath. I said that McGrath states " that Luther's interpretation of justification is a complete theological novelty." And so it is.
But more fundamentally the point is that the idea of justification invented and promoted by Luther and adopted by all his progeny does not appear in the Christian lexicon until the early 1500s. You believe something that no orthodox Christian believed until Luther discovered it.
Why would that be surprising though? If the standard is we throw out anything that gets refined later, there's a ton on the Roman Catholic side that goes by the wayside.
As we see throughout history, doctrine gets clarified and refined as issues arise. We don't often have the foresight to miss all the future arguments.
As we seem to agree, imputed righteousness is certainly in Scripture and the Church Fathers. We should all be able to accept that imputed righteousness as it relates to Christ is correct doctrine.
The clarification or development by Luther of an existing doctrine takes place in response to the errors of Rome. Is it new? Yes, because it's responding to theological claims that the historical church did not have to deal with or address. Does that make this a problem? No because at the end of the day, the question is not "what did the church fathers believe", but instead "What does Scripture say."
And as posted above, the Scripture is quite clear in imputed righteousness and it's role in our salvation.
There's nothing clarifying about a novelty. It was a complete theological novum.
And it is so clear that no one thought to propose it for 1,500 . I think you should just own it and admit that what you believe wasn't believed or taught by anyone for 1,500 years.