Sola Fide is Self-Justification

“The most dangerous psychological mistake is the projection of the shadow on to others; this is the root of almost all conflicts.”1 -Carl Jung

“The article of justification is the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the judge over all kinds of doctrines; it preserves and governs all church doctrine and raises up our consciences before God. Without this article the world is utter death and darkness.”2 -Martin Luther

This is the first installment of a four part argument. I clarify this in depth in part II, but it´s worth mentioning at the outset: I am strictly critiquing the self-conscious functioning of the status of sola fide justification in the mind of the believer. I believe in baptismal regeneration and assume many good works will follow from faith and baptism regardless of confessional identity. Rather than being about the effect of the sacrament on the soul, this argument is primarily about the effect of the believer´s self-understanding on the flourishing of the regenerate soul and its ability to participate in the life of grace.

1. Form—is (1) the principle which determines something with its specific character or nature. It is thereby the principle of individuation of the thing as that specific type of thing and not another. Furthermore, epistemologically, form is (2) the principle by which something is known as being that sort of thing.

   1. Corollary Distinction: Absolute\Relative—i.e. Something exists absolutely if it exists simply of itself, like a plant or pencil, relatively when it has its existence through something else, like a leaf or an eraser.

   2. Corollary Definition: Evil is a privation of Good.

      Here is St Augustine: “When a cure is effected, the evils which were present (i.e., the sickness and the wounds) do not retreat and go elsewhere. Rather, they simply do not exist any more.”3

   3. This means that: Evil exists only Relative to Good, and Good is Absolute or self-subsistent. Pure Evil is a fiction, Evil only Exists as parasitic on some Good.

2. The Form of Projection is an instinctive, psychological act of self-defense whereby a (1) privational positive status—i.e. “not-that-evil-thing\person”—is ascribed to the self by the self on the basis of (2) a negative judgment of another. 4

   1. Carl Jung describes this as follows:

      “A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor.”5

   2. Projection generates a privationally “not-Evil” status whose existence is relative to an Evil Image of another which exists absolutely in the mind. And it has two primary markers: if (3) the Evil Image were to disappear, so would the justification for the subject´s possession of the “good“ status.

      1. Jung explains in his work “Civilization in Transition”:

         “We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior ‘soul’ has emigrated from one person to another.”6

   3. Neither does this status positively constitute the form or soul or act of the human in any positive way outside of the act of negation of the Evil-Image itself. The second marker is that (4) the function of the status is to free the “status“ from feelings or acts that threaten its existence.

      1. Sigmund Freud explains:

         “The most striking characteristic of symptom-formation in paranoia is the process which deserves the name of projection. An internal perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after undergoing a certain kind of distortion, enters consciousness in the form of an external perception. In the case of a delusion of persecution, the proposition ‘I hate him’ is transformed by projection into the proposition ‘He hates (persecutes) me’… Thus the proposition ‘I do not love him — I hate him’ is transformed by projection into the proposition ‘He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him’.”7

      In sum, the key metaphysical error with projection is to instinctively treat the privation of Evil as if it had some intrinsic ordering to or participation in the Good. Projection treats evil as if it were something Absolute or self-existing, and good as if it were relative to evil, as if it were a privation of Evil.

3. The Form of Justification per Sola Fide for Luther has this exact same structure, where we discover (1) a privational “good“ status granted—i.e. justification— in the absence of (2) something he takes to be evil—i.e. “works\law\threat-of-punishment“ whereby (3) the Evil Image is the individuating formal quality of the status, which functions to ensure that (4) the status is protected and cannot be invalidated by any other action or law. Let´s go through these:

   1. Justification takes the form of a privational “good“ status…:

      1. He writes in his Galatians commentary,

         “the doctrine of the gospel (which of all others is most sweet and full of most singular consolation) speaks nothing of our works or of the works of the law, but of the inscrutable mercy and love of God towards most wretched and miserable sinners.” 8

         With Luther, justification is external, forensic, and imputed righteousness in the soul—i.e. the form of justice does not take root in the soul with Luther´s justification, nor is the soul bound by law or works in obedience in order to be justified. The justified soul is, in contrast, “free“ from these constraints and the threat of punishment. Luther explains this in his Romans commentary:

         “Righteousness is not in us formally or habitually, as the sophists dream, but is outside us in Christ and imputed to us. We are righteous not because we possess an inherent quality or ontological change that makes us righteous in ourselves, but because God imputes Christ’s righteousness to us. Thus we are sinners in fact and in ourselves, but righteous by imputation and in Christ. This is the true righteousness of faith, which is not a biological or essential transformation but a divine reckoning.”9

         Thus the formal individuating condition is the belief that law or deeds could invalidate the status, which is the minimum possible form for any status and a most succinct summary of the sort of status won by projection.

   2. …based on an apparent Evil Image.

      1. The basis of the justification status in the Evil Image is perhaps most clearly formulated in Luther´s famous screed, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” He writes,

         “Hence it is a manifest and wicked error to offer or apply the mass for sins, for satisfactions, for the dead, or for any other purpose than thanksgiving and remembrance of the Lord’s passion. This error has produced those endless burdens of vows, religious works, satisfactions, pilgrimages, indulgences, and sects, by which the world has been so miserably oppressed that it can hardly breathe under the weight of them. For when once the mass is made a sacrifice and a work, then it must follow that it is offered for sins and for the dead, and thus the whole gospel is overthrown, Christ is denied, and faith is destroyed.”10

         The oppression, and Christ-denial, for Luther is to think that deeds or sacraments could have any connection to justice and punishment. This idea clearly gives shape to his justification dogma.

   3. The only formal normative claim that individuates faith as faith is the negation of the claim of law, good works, and the threat of possible punishments themselves.

      1. Luther writes, in his famous essay “The freedom of the Christian“ about the necessary separation between faith and works and law. Here, what was hithertofore understood as being complementary is separated by Luther and constitutes the basis of his theological discovery:

         “A Christian has no need of any work or law in order to be saved since through faith he is free from every law and does everything out of pure liberty and freely. It is clear, then, that a Christian has all that he needs in faith and needs no works to justify him; and if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law; and if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law.”11

4. This negation ensures that no action—besides denying the Evil Image—can cause one to lose the status.

   1. Luther writes in his Galatians commentary,

      “To mix Law and Gospel not only clouds the knowledge of grace, it cuts out Christ altogether. The words of Paul, ´and would pervert the gospel of Christ,´ also indicate how arrogant these false apostles were.”12

      According to Luther´s most extreme texts someone with faith who intentionally commits murder retains the justification status, but someone who thinks obedience is necessary to be justified would lose the status and connection to Jesus Christ at once. This was later clarified by Lutheran theologians that the act of murder wouldn´t itself cause one to lose the status by itself, but it would only be a sign that one didn´t really have faith and only thereby would one lose justification. Rather than exonerate Luther, this sort of argumentation only further exemplifies the issue at hand—i.e. actually being unjust doesn´t cause one to lose the status, only ceasing to believe or believe properly.

5. Summary: This places us in the curious metaphysical space, where the individuating aspect of the form is the absence of claim to manifest in the observable world, as law and works would require. Luther admits this formlessness himself in his Galatians commentary, writing:

   “The righteousness of faith is a hidden righteousness, a righteousness that is not seen by the eyes of the world, nor can it be proved by external works. It is a righteousness that is in the heart, before God, and is known only to God and the believer. The world sees only the outward man, the sinner, the weak, the afflicted; it cannot see the inward man renewed by faith. Therefore, the regenerate man appears no different outwardly from the unregenerate in many cases—both suffer, both sin, both die—but inwardly, by faith, the regenerate is righteous and free, while the unregenerate remains under the law and condemnation.” 13

   Thus the form of justifying faith, the principle by which the justification status can be known, is next to nothing—i.e. just the prohibition against believing in the normative claim of divine justice to punish evil action. In sum, we see the false inference here as well, for a status granting freedom from divine punishment does obviously not entail participation in justice at all. In fact, this expectation is what Luther excludes out of hand. Here, as with projection, Evil—understood as the threat of punishment for bad action—is something absolute—and the justification status ensure the good understood as the absence of evil only, not as a positive or formal participation in justice. So we turn to seek out what sort of matter is composed by the nearly formless form of Luther´s Justification status.

1. Matter—is (1) that which can receive the essence of a thing and that by which the essence is determined and thus (2) that which when absent its form cannot take shape.14 There aren´t iron baseball bats, or cold blooded cats. Thus specific matter has potency for specific types of form.

   1. Corollary Distinction: Real\Ideal—Real is something as it is. Ideal is something as it is in the mind.

      1. Evil, therefore, as a privation does not have real, positive existence at all. Evil can have positive existence as mis-recognized by the mind.

      2. Therefore we can see how, if it is impossible in reality, it is possible for the mind to mistake Evil for something self-existing and absolute, and to mistake good as the absence of Evil, just like what we see in projection and with Lutheran justification. The indicator of this is that when Evil disappears then “good” status does as well.15

   2. Corollary Definitions: Good and Evil are in Things, Truth and False are in the Mind. Truth consists in the conformity of a thing to the intellect, thus while the truth is founded upon a conformity to the thing, its completion is being known by and conforming to the intellect.16 On the contrary, the good has the notion of goodness not from the fact that it is known by the soul, but insofar as it is something outside the soul: St Thomas writes,

      “Therefore, the knowledge of the true occurs through the progression of the object to the subject, but the attainment of the good occurs through the progression of the subject to the object: Intellectual apprehension is according to a movement from things to the soul… but the operation of appetite is according to a movement from the soul to things.”17

      1. Consequence I: Only acts of the will can elevate the human organism, i.e. the reason Charity is more perfect than Faith: Charity elevates the soul to God, Faith lowers God to our paltry intellect.

      2. Consequence II: Only by thinking of and desiring the Good can the intellect and will unite and work together to elevate the human organism.

      3. Consequence III: A great temptation for the human is to think it can ascend by mind or knowledge at all—i.e. gnosticism—but most dangerously when it is deceived to think it can ascend by knowing or opposing Evil. Knowing Evil by itself introduces no possible connection with Good at all.

      4. Consequence IV: What is in principle excluded here is human perfection—i.e. a perfect good that exists, is contemplated, and is desired as something good, outside of mind or in reality, whereas “good” taken to be not-Evil takes something ideal and not real existence as absolute.

2. The Matter of Projection is the sensible experience of (1) the subconscious, unresolved negative contents of the self (fear, anxiety, anger) (2) finding an external outlet in a hook, and are then (3) are projected onto (4) an Evil image of another. 18

   1. These negative elements can be sins, fears, over-whelming desires, dread, momentary anger, whatever—projection is an infantile way to escape these by splitting and externalizing the bad elements, rather than integrating them into a realistic picture of the self. These constitute the real matter of projection.

   2. Projection usually finds some real point of contact or hook—i.e. a real flaw or hypocrisy on which to hang the negative image.

      1. Jung writes,

         “Not that these others are wholly without blame, for even the worst projection is at least hung on a hook, perhaps a very small one, but still a hook offered by the other person.”19

         The hook is what hangs the Evil Image. Perhaps someone acted greedy on one occasion, but then they are labelled by someone projecting for the rest of their lives as a greedy, narcissistic person, which they aren´t. But the place of connection is usually quite real and legitimate, while the Evil Image distorts reality altogether.

   3. Projection is a way whereby any negative feeling or action that threatens the self-identity can be dissociated from the self and attached to another. Projection externalizes these negative elements onto a Evil image of another. The accusation about being greedy—i.e. the Evil Image—in the last example has more to do with the specific fears, or anxiety of the projector than with the person on whom they are projected.

   4. The self preserves its self image by bifurcating or “splitting” the world into “not-evil” first-person self-consciousness and all that lies outside. The ideal world becomes “good” and the real world is subject to becoming “evil” when need be to preserve the ideal self-identity. A consequence is (i) a dissociative, unstable and solipsistic identity\status, and (ii) an unhealthy dependence on negative (i.e. Evil) external factors to prop up (i).

   5. A further consequence is that the self becomes a mirror of its own Evil Image through projection. By dissociating from and condemning the work of its own psyche rather than to integrate and take responsibility for these negative unconscious contents. Projection only serves to preserve and increase (1) the shadow-self, (2) the presence of negative unconscious phenomena, and (3) blindness to 1 and 2.

   6. Thus the real Matter of projection is the negative unconscious elements that cannot be integrated into the self. The Ideal Matter is the Evil Image of these contents projected onto another. Thus, the source of normativity is the presumed knowledge of Evil in the mind, instinctively playing the role of an absolute point of reference in order to generate the relative and privational “good“ status. This privational “good” status excludes perfection, i.e. a human being whose identity is rooted in objective good rather than subjectively perceived Evil.

3. Luther´s justification-status is made out of real, subconscious, unresolved negative contents…

   1. Luther suffered from scruples—i.e. a spiritual disease where one is oppressed by the reality of sin and struggles to accept or believe in forgiveness.20 His struggle with the weight of his sin and the fear or inevitability of God´s judgment led him to despair.

      1. Luther confesses in the intro to his collected works,

         “I hated that word, ‘justice of God,’ which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust. But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn’t be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners.” 21

   2. The real ground of the projection is this interior conflict—i.e. between Gospel and Law, between God´s Mercy and Justice—where grace and works, sin and forgiveness, cannot be integrated into the psyche.

      1. The previous quote continues:

         “In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, ‘Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?’ This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience…“22

4. …projected onto…

   1. The real hook for Luther seemed to be indulgences. And indulgences appear to mirror his theory of forensic justification.

      “Some two years ago I wrote a little book on indulgences, which I now deeply regret having published. For at the time I still clung to the Roman tyranny with great superstition and held that indulgences should not be altogether rejected, seeing they were approved by the common consent of men. Since then… I have come to see that they are nothing but a fraud of the Roman flatterers by which they rob people of their faith and fortunes.”23

   2. Other legit hooks were scandals and hypocritical devotions— all real abuses that presented as superficial ways to get into heaven without interior transformation. Yet Luther´s dogma of justification is a parody of the same. Luther says the justified believer…

      “ought to think: ‘Although I am an unworthy and condemned man, my God has given me in Christ all the riches of righteousness and salvation without any merit on my part, out of pure, free mercy, so that from now on I need nothing except faith which believes that this is true. But if I do not believe this, it is of no use to me, even though Christ were crucified a thousand times and all things that belong to Christ were given to me.’”24

      His doctrine of justification became a mirror of his own externalized psyche and took the form of a free, externally given indulgence that had little connection with piety and played the role of being an excuse for the absence of devotion.

5. …an evil image of another.

   1. Luther fixated on the evil of “works righteousness.” He regularly expresses his fury at this singular point:

      “I cannot get over the blindness of the Pope’s theologians. To imagine that the mighty forces of sin, death, and the curse can be vanquished by the righteousness of man’s paltry works, by fasting, pilgrimages, masses, vows, and such.”25

      Martin Luther, as an ex-monk-catholic-theologian, knew this quote was a gross misrepresentation of catholic teaching. Luther himself knew no good catholic could think the forces of sin and death are defeated without Jesus Christ. Yet, a trademark of projection is that it simplifies and obscures reality to meet the pathological psychological needs of the self. This distortion makes more sense as a psychological defense mechanism.

6. Summary: Thus, the negative image that constitutes the matter of the doctrine here looks like it is of pathological origin. The matter is what is taken to be Evil and the Matter does not transcend mind at all but instead is the projected Evil Image mistaken as something absolute. The sculptor is not better than his clay, and Luther´s clay was the privation of an evil projected Image about “works righteousness” out of fear of divine punishment, so he´s working with a little less than nothing. The only act of consequence or invalidation for Justification per sola fide, outside of losing faith itself, is to carry out good works out of fear of punishment. This mandatory presumption of justification is perhaps the most superficial possible form of “works righteousness” ever imagined. Yet in reality the real good work, an a work for which he was equally zealous as he was to list every sin in the confessional, is to hang the Evil image for Martin Luther, an image that justifies his life, dogma, and reform. Consider his condemnation of female religious life:

   “But how many, do you imagine, are the nuns in convents, where the daily word of God enters not, who joyously and with pleasure perform the divine service and maintain their state unforced? Verily, scarcely one in a thousand.” 26

   Martin Luther didn´t have the information to make such a claim. So few female convents in his day were even open to the public. Yet he regularly makes uncharitable overgeneralizations like this to self-justify, in order to secure the status, as is the case with projection. Thus, this very fear of punishment is the real matter and reason for Luther´s sola fide dogma itself. Only its imagined absence gives form to the dogma of Sola Fide and the status of being justified. And its the ideal ground, the Negative Image that free´s Luther from his fear of punishment, that separates both him and his dogma of justification from responsibility to law and the possibility of divine punishment. Thus, having examined the form and matter of the justification status for Luther, let´s turn to the final, and most crucial convergence: what or who is justification per sola fide for?

1. Teleos— we know some thing by feature of its form, we know its nature by virtue of its tendency towards an end. There is always a tight relationship between formality and finality, between the shape of something and that for which it is made. Thus the real End and ideal End (i.e. intention) of an action can—according to imprudence—vary widely. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, because our ideal intentions so often contradict the Ends to which our acts are really ordered.

   1. Corollary Distinction: Potency\Act—Potency is relative as ordered to Act. Act is the realization of the potential perfection of a thing.

      1. This means that: Good is a Potency for Evil, not vice versa. Anything caused by Evil is itself Evil. Good can never be discerned from or generated out of Evil as if a privation through absence itself could lead us to the knowledge or desire of its opposite.

      2. A Corollary Definition: Good is What All Things Desire, Evil what All things Avoid.27 All things tend by nature towards what is good for them, or at least toward what appears good.28 By this fact, it also holds that all things avoid evil. All things act according to a natural aptitude for what is fitting or contributes to its flourishing and a natural dissonance toward what is repugnant and destructive.29 We explain the movement of things, animals or humans with reference to good and evil. The form of a voluntary act for humans is the reason for action, and these reasons have two genera avoiding evil or pursuing good. Thus the morality—i.e. the goodness or badness of a human act—can be known by its reason or intention, which brings it in reference toward some desired end.

      3. Perfection therefore is found in Acting according to Desires for the Good, not in Avoiding Evil. Because avoiding Evil is never in itself good at all—i.e. Evil has no potency ordered toward any specific Act or Good, other than to reduce potency toward Act in general. If your only wish in life is to escape Hell, the further you get from hell the less clear it will be to you in what direction you should go. Opposing Evil is, therefore, only intrinsically good in relation to a Good preserved by the opposition or avoidance of Evil.

         1. Consequence III: To act to avoid evil without knowledge or intention to preserve the good is to be controlled by non-being.

            1. E.g., Thomas Hobbes defined “peace” as “the absence of war” in his Leviathan. In this case, war was absolute and peace was a privation of war or something relative. St Augustine, in contrast, defined peace as “the tranquility of order,” and war was the absence of this good. He thought Evil was always a privation of Good, whether real or ideal. Pursuing peace is principally about avoiding something Evil for Hobbes, i.e. War and for St Augustine its about pursuing something good, i.e. Order. And this is dangerous because: the absence of Evil is in reality not-Evil. Metaphysically, it is not necessarily Good. The threat of punishment haunts Luther´s justification status in the same way as Hobbes “war of all against all.” The existential peace Luther wins makes Jesus Christ Himself take the purely privational form of the absence of punishment rather than a positive person to whom the soul is now rightly ordered and to whom one is responsible and whom one loves.

      4. A further consequence: there are potencies that are understood as not being oriented towards a specific act. These sorts of potencies, like Evil, can exist ideally in the mind or be understood. Yet, to let these potencies justify action is to let oneself be controlled by non-being.

         1. e.g. consider the right to free speech. It is understood as a potency in the mind, but one that is not oriented toward any specific act in reality. Its only act is to oppose those who would infringe on the right. Free speech carves out neutral space in reality where any constriction of political speech would be evil. Thus what is to be avoided—laws prohibiting free speech — are imagined to be the cause of “good” ideally. These sorts of ideal potencies constitute the very foundation of modern political and economic life. And they work wonders. But they also aren´t obviously metaphysically good. They contradict a realist metaphysics of good and evil. Negative notions of freedom as the absence of constraint contrast with positive concepts of liberty as being a capacity for the Good. In this same way, rights-talk contrasts with duties, which are understood in mind as potency for a specific act, and thus duties increase this second sort of positive liberty.

         2. Luther´s justification status similarly creates a neutral space where all of ones actions, past present or future are free from the normative claim of God´s justice or punishment. The status is oriented towards the specific act of rebuking those who seek to infringe on the neutral zone of “free“ action, and otherwise to the non-specific justification as to why any specific evil deed will not be measured according to justice. Here the status as a potency is not ordered to any specific act at all.

      5. Avoiding Evil is the most common case where the ideal end for which we act often conflicts with the end of the act in reality. Here is where we are most likely to be deceived by a good intention. This is because avoiding evil tempts us to think what exists in the mind actually exists in reality, when in fact it is a privation. Yet, there is no magical bridge from the not-Evil to the Good. Few will deny that our biggest mistakes in life are made trying to avoid evil, or when we feel caught between two bad options. When this happens we cannot see how the Good itself can be operative in the dilemma at all, and allow our action to be solely coerced by the weight of evil or what we wish to avoid.

2. Projection tends towards the reinforcing an ideal positive status experienced sensibly as negative freedom from the evil image projected onto another.30 It is an extreme case of Evil producing “not-Evil” misrecognized as “Good” by the mind, and Act being ordered toward a “Potency” that establishes the scope of impunity as regards action for the self holding the status.

   1. Projection is an instinctive flight from reality—i.e. the real unconscious negative elements that cannot be integrated— and tends towards both (1) the preservation of a positive privational ideal self image, and, having destroyed all interior, principled means of preserving the self-image, (2) a dependency on negative external factors to re-confirm the ideal image.31

   2. Projection tends toward the sensible enjoyment of the self, falsely taken to be “good” because it is not the negative image. Because projection is instinctual, it is sensible knowledge—i.e. predicated on sensible difference. (Intellectual knowledge is based on similitude). The self wins freedom by a fraudulent inference, moving from sensible unknown to intellectual known—i.e. from interior knowledge of the other as Evil based on sensible appearance, to knowledge of oneself as Not-Evil taken to be “Good.”

   3. In sum, the form of a privational status won by projection tends toward increasing conflict with the Evil Image. To define oneself as not-Evil makes one´s identity contingent upon the knowledge of, and in the case of projection, the repeated experience of Evil. Projection thereby tends toward conflict, rather than peace. When one doubts the identity or feels lost, then conflict with the Evil Image provides the outlet for the unresolved anxiety regarding the privational status itself.

3. In Luther´s foundational work “The Freedom of the Christian,“ the shape of Christian liberty takes this same metaphysical character. He writes, “A Christian has no need of any work or law in order to be saved since through faith he is free from every law and does everything out of pure liberty and freely.”32

   1. Furthermore, Luther´s key insight comes as a sensible freedom from the shadow self—animated by a fear of God´s punishments—projected and negated.

      1. Luther experienced his discovery of distinctively Lutheran “faith” as a release valve for his scruples and anxiety about going to hell. The sensible enjoyment of Christian freedom is the sensible enjoyment of the self unencumbered from the claim of law or by the punishments of the lawgiver in eternity.

         “At last, by the mercy of God, as I meditated day and night on the meaning of ‘the righteousness of God,’ I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereby it became clear to me that the justice of God is the righteousness by which he makes us just through faith. Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scripture from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word ‘righteousness of God.’“ 33

   2. Luther´s love of God is contingent upon the status of justification not being subject to God´s justice, and\or his deeds past, present, and future being free from the claim of God´s justice. His paradise is a neutral space, a place where he can act with impunity, not a place ordered by God´s own justice and charity. He writes in his Galatians commentary that his delight is in this freedom from the possibility of justice:

      “The Law terrorizes the conscience. The Law reveals the wrath and judgment of God. The Gospel does not threaten. The Gospel brings consolation and peace. The Law shows us our sin and God’s wrath; the Gospel shows us Christ and God’s grace. Therefore the Law is a ministry of death, the Gospel a ministry of life. The Law accuses, the Gospel justifies. The Law terrifies, the Gospel comforts. The heart overflows with gladness, and leaps and dances for the joy it has found in God. This joy is the fruit of faith, the delight of the conscience set free from the curse of the Law, from sin, from death, and from the fear of eternal punishment.”34

   This is evident in that his own charity does not imitate that of Our Lord, where charity freely takes justice upon itself and also the justice due to others. In contrast, with sola fide the intellect comes to rest in faith alone, rather than faith formed by charity, which would at the same moment—and not sequentially differentiated as the account of forensic justification claims—lift the soul to God. Luther´s status precludes the charity of Jesus Christ conceptually, because it is a privational status—a freedom from punishment— whereby what is taken to be Evil in the mind is negated, rather than a status participating in and ordered to the summum bonum. Like other forms of projection the form of the privational status of sola fide justification tends toward a conflict with Evil as its telos. Our Lord seemed privy to the danger here when He taught on the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I tell you not to resist an evil person” (Matt 5:38-9).

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   Move to Part II of the argument below.

Part II deals with common objections in disputatio form and deepens the critique on an anthropological basis.

Final sections remain to be published.

The a priori conditions of the possibility of justification.

The essential shape of an edifying self-conception in the life of grace.

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