Predestination

Objective Justification is another name for the atonement, right? No. They are not the same. How did so-called “objective justification” arise in the Missouri Synod and WELS? How does it compare to the old teaching of justification?

“Note how often faith is mentioned in the epistles. Two of Paul’s epistles – Romans and Galatians – were expressly written to prove that men are justified by faith… The letter to the Hebrews devotes a whole chapter – the 11th – to a panegyric on the heroes of faith… faith is the outstanding doctrine of the New Testament, and therefore should take precedence of a doctrine like election, which is treated more incidentally.

A Summary of the Christian Faith brings Hutter’s classic Compendium into a readable and easily accessible form. Henry Eyster Jacobs writes: “The book is not a mere compilation, but the matured expression of the convictions of the author, from the time when, as a child he was introduced to many of the problems treated, to the present.

"A decade has fully passed since the outbreak of the eventful controversy which has divided the Lutherans of North America into two camps. Dr. Walther showed already in the years of 1864—70, a leaning to the Calvinistic doctrines… The controversy itself broke out first in the year 1872, when Lehre und Wehre, the organ of the Missourians, (p.

“[Missouri’s] new doctrine would have us believe that there is saving grace only for the few embraced in God’s purpose of election.” “We shall, by the grace of God, be neither enticed nor driven into such folly, but shall abide by the old and well established doctrine of the Church, that God desires with equal sincerity the salvation of all men, and that He saves, and has elected unto salvation, all those who do not obstinately resist the saving work of the Spirit.

Justified and saved by grace alone, for Christ’s sake, through faith — that is the kernel of the whole Gospel. This is the fundamental article of the Christian faith and upholds the entire system of Christian doctrine as well as the church itself.

“On November 16, 1881, 12 pastors and teachers, 4 representatives of congregations, and 9 guests met at Blue Island, Illinois to discuss the new doctrine of predestination the Missouri Synod had begun to teach at that time.

“This article [justification by faith] is, as it were, the fortress and chief bulwark of the whole Christian doctrine and religion. If this article remains inviolate, the perversions of the other articles will cease of themselves.

Towards the end of his life, C. F. W. Walther brought forth a teaching of election which many Missouri and other American Lutherans could not reconcile with the Scriptures or the Lutheran Confessions.