on Lutheran teachings,
Lutherhaus "This one and firm rock, which we call the doctrine of justification," insisted Luther, "is the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of all godliness."
Lutherans tend to follow Luther in this matter. For the Lutheran
tradition, the doctrine of
salvation by
grace alone through
faith alone in
Christ alone is the
material principle upon which all other teachings rest. Luther came to understand justification as being entirely the work of God. Against the teaching of his day that the believers are made righteous through the infusion of God's grace into the soul, Luther asserted that Christians receive that righteousness entirely from outside themselves; that righteousness not only comes from Christ, it actually
is the righteousness of Christ, and remains outside of us but is merely imputed to us (rather than infused into us) through faith. "That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law," said Luther. "Faith is that which brings the
Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ". Thus faith, for Luther, is a gift from God, and ". . .a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it." This faith grasps Christ's righteousness and appropriates it for itself in the believer's heart. Luther's study and research led him to question the contemporary usage of terms such as
penance and
righteousness in the Roman Catholic Church. He became convinced that the church had lost sight of what he saw as several of the central truths of Christianity — the most important being the doctrine of
justification by faith alone. He began to teach that
salvation is a gift of God's
grace through
Christ received by
faith alone. As a result of his lectures on the
Psalms and
Paul the Apostle's
Epistle to the Romans, from 1513–1516, Luther "achieved an
exegetical breakthrough, an insight into the all-encompassing grace of God and all-sufficient merit of Christ." It was particularly in connection with Romans 1:17 "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith, to faith: as it is written: 'The just shall live by faith.'" Luther came to one of his most important understandings, that the "righteousness of God" was not God's active, harsh, punishing wrath demanding that a person keep God's law perfectly in order to be saved, but rather Luther came to believe that God's righteousness is something that God gives to a person as a gift, freely, through Christ. "Luther emerged from his tremendous struggle with a firmer trust in God and love for him. The doctrine of salvation by God's grace alone, received as a gift through faith and without dependence on human merit, was the measure by which he judged the religious practices and official teachings of the church of his day and found them wanting." Mannermaa's student Olli-Pekka Vainio has argued that Luther and other Lutherans in the sixteenth century (especially theologians who later wrote the Formula of Concord) continued to define justification as participation in Christ rather than simply forensic imputation. Vainio concludes that the Lutheran doctrine of justification can deny merit to human actions, "only if the new life given to the sinner is construed as participation in the divine Life in Christ. . . . The faith that has Christ as its object, and which apprehends Him and His merit, making Him present as the form of faith, is reckoned as righteousness". The Finnish approach argues that it is due to a much later interpretation of Luther that he is popularly known as centering his doctrine of human salvation in the belief that people are saved by the imputation to them of a righteousness not their own, Christ's own ("alien") righteousness. This is known as the theological doctrine of forensic justification. Rather, the Finnish School asserts that Luther's doctrine of salvation was similar to that of Eastern Orthodoxy, theosis (divinization). The Finnish language is deliberately borrowed from the Greek Orthodox tradition, and thus it reveals the intention and context of this theological enterprise: it is an attempt by Lutherans to find common ground with Orthodoxy, an attempt launched amid the East-West détente of the 1970s, but taking greater impetus in a post-1989 world as such dialogue appears much more urgent for churches around the Baltic. The New Finnish Interpretation has been challenged because it ignores Luther's roots and theological development in Western Christendom, and it characterizes Luther's teaching on
Justification as based on Jesus Christ's righteousness which indwells the believer rather than his righteousness as imputed to the believer. Kolb and Arand (2008) argue that, "These views ignore the radically different metaphysical base of Luther's understanding and that of the Eastern church, and they ignore Luther's understanding of the dynamic, re-creative nature of God's Word." In the anthology
Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther the topic of Osiandrianism is addressed because the Finnish School is perceived as a repristination of
Andreas Osiander's doctrine of salvation through Christ's indwelling the believer with his divine nature. ==Law and Gospel==