Jeff Gunn, WELS Emerging Church Pastor:
"Second, receive Jesus’ forgiveness. When Jesus died on the cross, the entire world was forgiven. That means you. The person who repents of his sin can know beyond any shadow of a doubt that all sins are forgiven already through Jesus. Jesus will absorb your doubt and give you assurance that your sins too are fully forgiven."
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GJ - DP Buchholz teaches the same doctrine as Gunn, the only one that matters to the Wisconsin sect - Universal Objective Justification.
Here is Buchholz on the same topic. He gave an essay at the WELS convention and no one opposed his false doctrine. Here are some samples:
- In this great transaction that took place on the cross, God removed the guilt of the world’s sin and replaced it with the righteousness of Christ. [GJ - This is universal absolution, the basic tenet of the Kokomo Statements.]
- The truth that a person must be individually justified through faith does not undermine the general, once-for-all justification accomplished on Calvary. Some have wrongly supposed that Christ’s justifying work on Calvary was incomplete, and that faith is required to make justification complete. This is not a biblical understanding of justification. It nullifies Jesus’ declaration from the cross, “It is finished,” by saying that the justification of the world really isn’t finished, or that when Jesus said, “It is finished,” he meant something other than the justification of the world. It inserts an additional cause for man’s salvation beyond the grace of God and merits of Christ and includes faith as a cause of salvation. It redefines faith as something that brings about an effect and causes forgiveness and justification to take place. [GJ - This means that Jesus Himself issued the Brief Statement of 1932, 1900 years earlier. In other words, the Savior told the world that every single person, including Judas Iscariot, was forgiven.]
- “God has declared the entire world righteous.” This statement is true, as we understand it to mean that God has rendered a verdict of “not-guilty” toward the entire world. It is also true—and must be taught—that the righteousness of Christ now stands in place of the world’s sin; this is the whole point of what Jesus did for us at Calvary. However, once again we’re wresting a term out of its usual context. In Scripture the term “righteous” usually refers to believers. [GJ - Usually? No, only to believers.]
- The forgiveness acquired by Jesus for all at the cross gives us confessional Lutherans, among all the church bodies of the world, the highest motivation to share our Savior. In contrast to the “Jesus Saves” churches, we don’t preach a salvation that is incomplete and just waiting for the sinner to do something to complete the transaction. We proclaim boldly, “Jesus Saved,” past tense, finished, certain. [GJ - And he took Becker and the JP Meyer Kokomo Statements to task for being muddled? According to DP Buchholz, the world is already saved. That is Universalism, the last belch of UOJ. He is not alone in WELS/ELS in stating that the entire world is both forgiven and saved.]
