A Point of No Return?

The Joint Declaration and the Future of Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue

Presuppositions of the Joint Declaration

When surveying the decades of Lutheran-Catholic dialogue following the Second Vatican Council, one is struck that many of its positive achievements were already anticipated in the first phase of conversations that led to the Malta report (1972). In the wake of the Vatican Council the dialogue partners showed the prophetic courage to reformulate their common Christian faith in the light of recent theological insights and historical and ecumenical developments. Even on the once insurmountable issue of justification, a traditional point of severely polemical disagreement, a sensational consensus seemed to be emerging:

   Catholic theologians emphasize in reference to justification that God's
   gift of salvation for the believer is unconditional as far as human
   accomplishments are concerned. Lutheran theologians emphasize that the
   event of justification is not limited to individual forgiveness of sins,
   and they do not see in it a purely external declaration of the
   justification of the sinner. Rather the righteousness of God actualized in
   the Christ event is conveyed to the sinner through the message of
   justification as an encompassing reality basic to the new life of the
   believer. In this sense justification can be understood as expressing the
   totality of the event of salvation (paras 26-27).(1)

Malta was certainly aware of the Lutherans' more comprehensive understanding of the doctrine of justification as a hermeneutical principle and criterion of truth, with implications for all other doctrinal matters, especially in ecclesiology, to which Roman Catholics would not necessarily adhere. Critical observers of the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue have consistently returned to this concern ever since, but what Catholics and Lutherans disagree about today does not really seem to be the doctrine of justification in the narrow sense of the term. On this the authors of the Malta report correctly recorded the state of affairs, as did the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue commission in the USA about 15 years later, in highlighting in their common statement the agreement achieved during twenty years of conversation:

   We emphatically agree that the good news of what God has done for us in
   Jesus Christ is the source and centre of all Christian life and of the
   existence and work of the church. In view of this agreement, we have found
   it helpful to keep in mind in our reflections an affirmation which both
   Catholics and Lutherans can wholeheartedly accept: our entire hope of
   justification and salvation rests on Christ Jesus and on the gospel whereby
   the good news of God's merciful action in Christ is made known; we do not
   place our ultimate trust in anything other than God's promise and saving
   work in Christ. This excludes ultimate reliance on our faith, virtues or
   merits, even though we acknowledge God working in these by grace alone
   (sola gratia). In brief, hope and trust for salvation are gifts of the
   Holy Spirit and finally rest solely on God in Christ (para. 4).(2)

And after a very detailed theological argumentation the US Catholics and Lutherans could make the following far-reaching declaration:

   We are grateful at this time to be able to confess together what our
   Catholic and Lutheran ancestors tried to affirm as they responded in
   different ways to the biblical message of justification. A fundamental
   consensus on the gospel is necessary to give credibility to our previous
   agreed statements on baptism, on the eucharist and on forms of church
   authority. We believe that we have reached such a consensus (para. 164).

This affirmed what was already germinating, though cautiously and without precise contours, in the Malta report. However, the classical question of justification did not cease to cause trouble, as the report from the third phase of the international conversations, "Church and Justification" (1994), demonstrates.(3) Apart from everything else in this statement (which talks far more about the church than about justification by faith), it is said that the agreement regarding justification is far greater than any remaining divergences. It also becomes clear that the criteriological and hermeneutical access to justification is in no way the private property of Lutherans.

My point here is not to enter into a critical analysis of this report as a whole, but simply to draw attention to the fact that Lutherans and Catholics today agree about justification by faith both as a soteriological locus and as a comprehensive perspective on dogmatics:

   Catholics and Lutherans together testify to the salvation that is bestowed
   only in Christ and by grace alone and is received in faith (para. 4).

      In dealing with the relationship between the doctrine of justification
   and the understanding of the church, it is important to note which
   perspective on justification is employed. It is not primarily a matter of
   how the saving event can be rightly described and how God communicates his
   righteousness to the sinner. This indeed stands at the centre of the
   Reformation arguments but, as such, has no immediate critical implications
   for ecclesiology. These emerge only when -- as happened especially in the
   Lutheran Reformation -- justification is seen both as centre and criterion
   of all theology. Therefore the doctrine of the church must correspond to
   justification as criterion ... Everything which is believed and taught
   regarding the nature of the church, the means of grace and the ordained
   ecclesial ministry must be grounded in the salvation-event itself and bear
   the mark of justification-faith as reception and appropriation of that
   event (paras 167-68).