The ELS Webber Link to Marquart's UOJ Defense

 

dk has left a new comment on your post "SP Schroeder Noticed by LCMS Blog":

Howdy Professor,

If you have a chance I would greatly appreciate your insight into Marquart's claim about what he calls the "proper" view of UOJ.
He delineates between Kokomo and older views (Walther etc .)
Here is the paper in question:

http://www.angelfire.com/ny4/djw/lutherantheology.marquartjustification.html

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GJ - My wife and I were members of Trinity in Bridgeton, Missouri (St. Louis area) when Larry Darby began to challenge people about UOJ. Pastor Bischoff agreed with Larry at first, then made him Public Enemy Number 1. Once the issue was raised, the congregation was in turmoil, because UOJ is utter nonsense, no matter how it is presented. Larry went his own way, and I disagree with him about many matters. Nevertheless, he was always pleasant, generous, and kind-hearted.

Since then I have been called a Calvinist, Darby-ite, and a follower of WAM II. Otten banned me from Christian News--no loss--for daring to raise issues about UOJ. Trinity refused to give CN money until I was banned. Lately Otten said he agreed with the Synodical Conference rather than the Book of Concord. Take note, Lutherans, a true synodical Lutheran will always place a recent publication above the ruled norm, the Lutheran Confessions.

I am not going to parse the entire Marquart essay. He was in failing health, and his effort is a mixed up affair, from beginning to end. He does mention the efficacious Word and the Means of Grace, but his argument contradicts the Biblical doctrine of the Word.

Sig Becker and Jon Buchholz have both tried to rescue UOJ from its sordid past, without success. Marquart tried as well.

I imagine the Jay Webber posting is an attempt to shore up UOJ by using Marquart as an authority. Webber prefers kelming material to writing something original. I noticed that the ELS, while extending the Left Foot of Fellowship to congregations and pastors, linked Webber's quotes on the ministry. So what did that prove? I should correct college essays by linking them to the dictionary or Strunk-White.

Back to the essay itself -

The old Knapp claim is asserted by Marquart:

"Put without polemics then, the justification of the sinner means the declaration of justice by God who at the cross and in the resurrection of Jesus Christ declares all sinners free and just, and thereby makes them just, though this act can, for the Church, have its consequences in the individual only if the individual submits in faith to God’s verdict. . ."

Is that not Kokomo justification? Knapp justification?

Strangely, Marquart quoted the repudiation of his opinion and claimed it as a perfect OJ/SJ triumph:

Both the “objective” and the “subjective” aspects of the biblical understanding of justification are well captured in this balanced definition of the Formula of Concord, Art. III, 4:

Against both parties it was unanimously preached by the other teachers of the Augsburg Confession that Christ is our Righteousness not only according to the divine nature, and not only according to the human nature, but according to both natures, Who as God and Man has redeemed, justified, and saved us from our sins by His perfect obedience: so that the righteousness of faith is forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God, and that we are adopted as children of God for the sake of the sole obedience of Christ, which is imputed as righteousness to all who truly believe, only through faith, from pure grace, and they are absolved for the sake of the same from all their unrighteousness [my translation, as literal as I can make it].

Why on earth is the Catholic theologian Hans Kueng lifted up as an expert on this subject? I find that appalling. Count the Kueng references. Kueng was an enemy of papal infallibility, but that does not make him a Lutheran theologian. Kueng might as well have argued the theory that the sky is blue and water wet. Even then he would not be a Lutheran.

Marquart:

4.

Defensible Theses of Mr. Larry Darby:

1.

That the “Kokomo” notions about Judas and other inmates of hell being declared “innocent” and granted “the status of saints,” are an absurd and reprehensible travesty of Lutheran doctrine.

It is mind-boggling that any Lutheran could ever have written such stuff, and Mr. Darby is completely right to denounce it as the mischievous nonsense which it is.

But Marquart affirmed that very notion before, and cited the Formula of Concord to support his argument.

Here is another honker:

The trouble with these repulsive “Kokomo” statements is that they ignore the pivotal significance of the means of grace and thereby abandon the proper distinction of Law and Gospel. That, too, in essence is what was wrong with Samuel Huber’s proposal, early in the 17th century, of a notion of “universal justification,” which was duly rejected by representative Lutherans at the time. The story is told in detail by Dr. Tom Hardt of Sweden, in the 1985 Festschrift for Robert Preus, A Lively Legacy.7 Hardt is a meticulous scholar who demonstrates in detail the difference between the wrong sort of “objective justification,” as taught by Huber, and the right sort, as found in C.F.W. Walther’s Easter preaching and theology.

In light of Mr. Darby’s citation of the late Dr. Siegbert Becker in support of the “Kokomo” theses (HD, p. 240), I now regret my editorial note (A Lively Legacy, p. 78) which attempted to shield Becker against criticism by Hardt on justification. However technically defensible my cavils may have been, the larger truth signaled by the “Kokomo” affair is that Hardt was right and I was wrong.

Certain ELS and LCMS leaders worship, adore, and support Tom Hardt. The idea here is to return to the infallibility of Walther, who borrowed his scheme from the Pietists he associated with, whose position is found in the theology of Halle University's Knapp.

F. Schleiermacher

Wickedpedia has a good summary about him: "Schleiermacher was born in Breslau in the Prussian Province of Silesia, the son of a Prussian army chaplain in the Reformed Church. He was educated in a Moravian school at Niesky in Upper Lusatia, and at Barby near Halle. However, pietistic Moravian theology failed to satisfy his increasing doubts, and his father reluctantly gave him permission to enter the University of Halle, which had already abandoned pietism and adopted the rationalist spirit of Friedrich August Wolf and Johann Salomo Semler. As a theology student Schleiermacher pursued an independent course of reading and neglected the study of the Old Testament and Oriental languages. However, he did attend the lectures of Semler, where he became acquainted with the techniques of historical criticism of the New Testament, and of Johann Augustus Eberhard, from whom he acquired a love of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. At the same time he studied the writings of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and began to apply ideas from the Greek philosophers to a reconstruction of Kant's system."

Marquart on Schleiermacher:

Not to be discounted in the acculturating distortion of “objective justification” is the pervasive influence of Schleiermacher and his multitude of followers. Hoenecke put it like this:

According to Schleiermacher there is only a universal [allgemeinen] eternal decision [Ratschluss] of justification, which in turn is nothing else than the decision to send Christ, and in the end is nothing else than the decision to create the human race, insofar, that is, as only in Christ is human nature completed. In the decision of the Redemption is implied [liegt, lies] according to Schleiermacher already that mankind [die Menschen] are pleasing to God in His Son; there is no need for an individual temporal act of justification upon each individual [einzelnen] human being. It is necessary only that the individual human being become aware of this, that in God’s decision of the Redemption in Christ he has already been justified and made pleasing to God (III:355, my translation).

My Disagreements with Darby -

I disagree with Darby about the Atonement and the use of the Word. I am not sure where he was going with the Atonement or how he supported his ideas. He did get into his head the Schwaermer concept of verbatim quotations being the only Word of God. Evidence of that opinion can be found in certain TV evangelists who pepper their sermons with verbatim quotations and the citations thereof. Darby's approach to the Atonement and the Word are both departures from Scriptural, Confessional theology.

Conclusion -

Marquart has presented ideal unionistic theology, saying enough to appease the UOJ crowd and Walther worshipers while affirming the Means of Grace and the efficacy of the Word. He did not deal seriously with Luther or the Book of Concord, wandering all over the landscape instead.

Please accept the following as a rumor. If a rumor is old enough, it is history. See Suetonius and Herodotus on that score. I heard that Marquart initially opposed UOJ and changed his mind. He was a Robert Preus loyalist. The Preus brothers used UOJ to keep WAM II from becoming the Ft. Wayne president, and they really played dirty, sandbagging WAM with a papal letter sent everywhere by Jack Preus. Later, Robert got the same treatment from his brother Jack. That is the trouble with playing by Mafia rules.

I cannot say whether Marquart changed his mind or (that being so) he changed his mind for political reasons. Missouri is keen enough about itself to circle the Walther Memorial every time an issue comes up. No one is ever going to admit Walther or Pieper might have erred in their Human Natures.

Marquart was still alive when I finished Thy Strong Word. I sent it to him, but he did not acknowledge it. That was odd since we were on very good terms for many years. A UOJ opponent phoned him and found Marquart furious about TSW. When I saw Marquart at Ft. Wayne, he politely told me he received the book. I believe he also sent a postcard thanking me at about the same time. His comments and criticisms would have been welcome, but he never said or wrote anything.

A pall of silence fell upon the publication of TSW, and no one with any standing reviewed it. Otten refused to publish any positive comments about TSW in CN. If only I had been a Babtist or a member of a Bund!

To this day the entire corpus of criticism directed toward TSW can be summed up as - ad hominem and frigid silence.