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Quod Ubique The Common Confession of the Universal Church

Layer 5 · 01

The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification

Lutheran–Roman Catholic Joint Commission

1999

The dialogue on the question that split the Western Church, conducted across four decades, ratified by two communions, received by four more, and declined by the confessional Lutheran bodies that hold Luther’s articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae as the article by which the Church stands and falls.

1. The Dialogue

The Lutheran–Roman Catholic dialogue on justification did not begin with the commission that produced JDDJ. It began in the long aftermath of the sixteenth-century anathemas, as the twentieth century discovered that neither tradition could any longer recognize in its partner the caricature against which its sixteenth-century polemic had been directed.

The international commission that produced the Joint Declaration traces its method to the 1972 Malta Report of the Lutheran–Roman Catholic Study Commission, which first proposed that the historic condemnations on justification might no longer apply to the partner communion’s actual teaching. The 1983 document Justification by Faith, produced by the U.S. Lutheran–Roman Catholic Dialogue under the co-chairmanship of George Anderson and T. Austin Murphy, gave the method its sharpest form: “a fundamental consensus on the gospel” coexisting with “differing emphases and theological elaborations.”

The 1986 German study Lehrverurteilungen — kirchentrennend? (The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do They Still Divide?), directed by Karl Lehmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, argued that the mutual condemnations of the Council of Trent and the Lutheran Confessions did not, in their original force, apply to the partner as each presently confessed. This was the immediate theological predecessor of the Joint Declaration.

The Joint Declaration itself was drafted between 1995 and 1997 under the leadership of Ishmael Noko (General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation) and Edward Idris Cassidy (President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity). It was signed on 31 October 1999 at Augsburg — the city of the Augsburg Confession, on the day of the Reformation.

The method is not fusion but what the Declaration calls differentiated consensus (§40): a consensus on the basic truths of justification that permits continuing different emphases in each tradition’s further elaboration. The method has been a subject of theological argument in its own right, and that argument has not subsided.

2. What Was Said Together

The signatories confessed jointly:

“By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works” (JDDJ §15).

The Declaration’s basic affirmation continues:

“Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works. In faith we together hold the conviction that justification is the work of the triune God” (§15).

On the sixteenth-century anathemas, the signatories stated:

“The teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent. The condemnations in the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration” (§41).

The Declaration then lists seven contested dimensions of justification — grace and human participation, the simul iustus et peccator, the law and the gospel, assurance of salvation, the good works of the justified, and two others — and for each offers a paragraph of Lutheran confession and a paragraph of Catholic confession, followed by a paragraph of common confession in which the differentiated consensus is named.

On the question of what this consensus does not accomplish, the Declaration is explicit:

“Nothing is thereby taken away from the seriousness of the condemnations related to the doctrine of justification. Some were not simply pointless. They remain for us ‘salutary warnings’ to which we must attend in our teaching and practice” (§42).

The Declaration is therefore not a claim of full theological agreement on justification. It is a claim that the mutual condemnations, as they were pronounced against positions the partner historically held, no longer apply to the partner as each now teaches — and that a basic common confession of grace, faith, and the Triune God can be received together.

Beneath this common confession lies a shared but under-articulated horizon: justification is the verdict of the Last Day pronounced now upon the one who trusts Christ — the eschatological acquittal spoken into the present by the Spirit in the power of the resurrection. The Declaration gestures at this frame (the Annex’s clarification that sin is not definitively eradicated until the eschaton) without developing it, though it is this eschatological horizon that most directly holds together what the signatories confessed in common and what they left bracketed.

3. Reception by Tradition Witnesses

From within the Roman Catholic tradition

Walter Kasper, the Catholic co-chair of the later dialogue commission, framed the Declaration as an exercise in what he called “ecumenical hermeneutics”: “No single formula can exhaustively express the full truth of justification. Differentiated consensus means that we recognize in the partner’s formula what we ourselves intend to confess, even while retaining our own language.”[∗]

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its 1998 Official Response to the Joint Declaration (issued under the prefecture of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger), accepted the Declaration’s basic affirmation but registered substantive qualifications. The CDF noted that “the major difficulties preventing an affirmation of total consensus between the parties on the theme of Justification” remain and specified them:

“According to the Catholic understanding, the interior renewal of the sinner through the reception of grace given through Baptism is a constitutive element of justification. The formula ‘at the same time righteous and sinner’ (simul iustus et peccator), as understood by Luther and the Reformed tradition, is not acceptable to the Catholic Church without further explication” (CDF Response, 1998).

The 1999 Annex to the Official Common Statement, drafted to address the CDF’s concerns, clarified that the simul formula, as received by the JDDJ, “does not mean that the sinfulness of the justified person is a continuing partial possession of the old Adam, but rather that sin is not definitively eradicated until the eschaton” — a qualification the CDF accepted as a precondition for the Declaration’s signing.

Joseph Ratzinger himself, in interviews given after signing, described the Declaration as “a milestone but not a conclusion”: “We have said together what the Gospel is. What remains to be said is what this means for the doctrine of the Church, the sacraments, and the ministry — questions on which the anathemas of the sixteenth century were inseparable from the anathemas on justification.”[∗]

The Catholic reception throughout has been clear on one point: Rome has received the Declaration without surrendering the Tridentine affirmation that interior renewal through sacramentally given grace is constitutive of justification — not merely consequent to it. The 1999 Annex clarified the simul iustus et peccator formula; it did not concede the formal cause question.

From within the Lutheran tradition — the signatories

Eberhard Jüngel, the Tübingen theologian whose own magnum opus Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (1999) appeared the same year as the Declaration, received the Declaration as genuine movement while naming what it had not done: “The Declaration has shown that the sixteenth-century condemnations no longer apply to the partner. It has not shown that the sixteenth-century controversies were themselves resolved. They were bracketed. This is a different thing.”[∗]

Wolfhart Pannenberg, who had co-directed the 1986 Lehrverurteilungen study, defended the Declaration against Lutheran critics in a 1999 Zeitwende essay: “The Lutheran objection that the Declaration has abandoned the forensic character of justification is a misreading. The Declaration says that we are accepted by God through Christ’s righteousness; it does not say that this acceptance is grounded in any interior quality of the justified person. The Catholic partners have signed this. The objection confuses the mode of reception with the substance of what is received.”

From within the Lutheran tradition — the confessional dissenters

The Declaration was not received by the confessional Lutheran communions that hold the Book of Concord as binding in its sixteenth-century form without the hermeneutic of “differentiated consensus.”

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, in its 1998 Council of Presidents Response, judged that “the Joint Declaration does not present the Biblical doctrine of justification, as confessed in the Lutheran Confessions, in a clear and unambiguous manner. The use of ‘differentiated consensus’ permits language that is acceptable to Rome only by virtue of being ambiguous about the very point on which the Reformation turned: whether the formal cause of justification is Christ’s righteousness imputed extra nos, or a righteousness infused in nobis.”

The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, in its 1998 Commission on Inter-Church Relations report, judged similarly: “What is left unsaid by the Joint Declaration is what must be said. The doctrine of justification is not a matter on which differentiated consensus is possible, because the doctrine defines what ‘the Gospel’ is. Where the Gospel is in dispute, differentiated consensus is ambiguity, and ambiguity on this point is the ambiguity of the Galatian church.”

Robert Preus, before his death in 1995, had anticipated the confessional objection in his Justification and Rome (1997): “The formal cause question — is the ground of God’s acceptance Christ’s righteousness reckoned, or Christ’s righteousness working in us? — cannot be finessed. The Reformation died over this question. To live again, it would have to be answered, not bracketed.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Synod adopted its own statement of rejection in 1999. Collectively, these three communions (LCMS, WELS, ELS) represent the confessional Lutheran tradition in North America as distinct from the ELCA, which is a member of the Lutheran World Federation and received the Declaration.

From within the Reformed tradition

The Reformed world’s reception has been cautious and delayed. The World Communion of Reformed Churches associated with JDDJ on 5 July 2017 through the Wittenberg Witness, a joint statement with the Lutheran World Federation. The association is qualified: the WCRC affirms the Declaration’s common confession of justification by grace through faith, while noting that “the Reformed tradition’s particular contribution to the doctrine of justification — the union with Christ framework developed from Calvin’s Institutes III — is not yet fully received in the Declaration’s formulation.” The WCRC statement, sourced to its Executive Committee minutes, characterizes the association as “an act of reception, not a declaration of completion.”

Michael Horton of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, writing in Modern Reformation in 2000, registered a sharper Reformed critique: “The Declaration’s method conflates agreement on that justification is by grace through faith with agreement on what justification is. The Reformed confessions, no less than the Lutheran, hold that the formal cause of justification is the imputed righteousness of Christ. That formal cause question is the question the Declaration brackets, and brackets it must remain until the question is actually answered.”

From within the Anglican tradition

The Anglican Consultative Council associated with JDDJ on 16 April 2016 through a statement that received the Declaration “as consonant with the Anglican understanding of justification as expressed in Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles.” The Anglican reception is framed as an act of fellowship with Lutherans and Catholics, not as a resolution of internal Anglican questions regarding the via media on this locus.

Oliver O’Donovan, in a 2000 Pro Ecclesia essay, observed: “The Anglican via media on justification has always permitted a range of formulations that the Joint Declaration now formally permits for Lutherans and Catholics as well. Anglicans have less to receive in the Declaration than to recognize — and the recognition itself is a form of reception.”

The Anglican house is not of one mind, however. The Evangelical Anglican tradition (J.I. Packer, Alister McGrath, the Church of England Evangelical Council) reads the Declaration from a forensic-clarity concern closer to the Reformed critique; the Anglo-Catholic tradition receives its Catholic-side formulations with greater comfort than its Reformed constituencies do. The ACC 2016 association holds these constituencies together by the Thirty-Nine Articles’ breadth, not by resolving their difference.

From within the Finnish Lutheran school

A distinctive contribution to the reception of the Declaration has come from the Finnish school of Luther research, particularly Tuomo Mannermaa, Simo Peura, and Risto Saarinen. In Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification (1979/2005) and subsequent works, Mannermaa argued that Luther himself taught a doctrine of real-ontic union with Christ (inhabitatio Christi) that is not reducible to either forensic imputation or infused grace as Trent framed the alternatives, and that this Lutheran tradition is closer to Orthodox theosis than to the Reformed forensic tradition. If the Mannermaa reading is correct, the Joint Declaration has achieved consensus on a question that was, in part, poorly posed by both sides in the sixteenth century.

The Finnish reading is contested within Lutheran scholarship. Risto Saarinen, reviewing the debate in Gott und die Sünde (1994), concludes that Mannermaa’s reading recovers a real dimension of Luther’s theology but does not displace the forensic dimension the confessional Lutheran tradition has rightly preserved.

It must be said plainly that Orthodox theosis, as received in the East from the Cappadocians through Maximus the Confessor to Palamas and into the contemporary patristic renewal, is not primarily a category useful for re-reading Luther. It is a distinct dogmatic architecture — participation in the divine energies, the incarnational logic of deification, the liturgical and sacramental mediation of union with God — that stands on its own integrity independent of any Western controversy over justification. The Finnish use of theosis is a Western conversation partner’s recovery; the Eastern reception of theosis is older, broader, and does not require the Declaration for its legitimacy.

From within the Orthodox tradition (observing, not signatory)

The Orthodox have no direct standing in the Declaration — they were not parties to the sixteenth-century controversies it addresses. John Zizioulas, in a 2000 address on ecumenical method, observed: “The Joint Declaration is a Western document resolving a Western dispute. The Orthodox receive it as witnesses. Its method — differentiated consensus — may or may not translate to the East–West faultlines where the disputed content is different. We shall see.”[∗]

4. Who Declined and Why

The Declaration was not signed by:

  • The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the confessional Lutheran communions affiliated with the International Lutheran Council. Stated reason (1998 Council of Presidents Response): the method of differentiated consensus permits ambiguity on the formal cause of justification, and ambiguity at this point is inconsistent with the Lutheran Confessions. The LCMS position is not merely that the method is ambiguous but that the Lutheran Confessions require formal-cause clarity as constitutive of the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae itself — the article by which the Church stands and falls cannot be held in bracketed form without standing or falling with it.

  • The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference. Stated reason (1998 CICR report): the Declaration’s language, while not formally heretical, does not preserve the clarity of the sola fide in a manner the Book of Concord requires.

  • The Presbyterian Church in America and other confessional Reformed denominations not affiliated with the WCRC. Stated reason (informal): the delayed Reformed association of 2017 addressed only the basic confession of grace through faith, not the formal cause question, and the confessional Reformed tradition holds that the formal cause is integral to the doctrine itself.

  • The Southern Baptist Convention and most Baptist bodies. Stated reason: outside the ecumenical framework in which the Declaration operates; the Baptist confessions were not parties to the sixteenth-century anathemas or their removal.

The Eastern Orthodox churches did not decline because they were not asked to sign. Their observing reception is noted in §3 above.

5. What This Document Did Not Settle

The Declaration itself names what it bracketed:

“Further clarification is required… on the issues of the Catholic teaching on the necessary cooperation of the justified with grace… the simul iustus et peccator as understood by Luther… the relation between the justification of the sinner and the Last Judgment” (§43, paraphrased from the pattern of bracketings noted throughout).

The formal cause of justification — whether the righteousness by which God accepts us is Christ’s righteousness imputed (Lutheran/Reformed) or the righteousness of God infused into us (Tridentine) — is the question the Declaration most clearly brackets. Both the CDF 1998 Response and the LCMS 1998 Response identified this as the bracketed question. The Declaration achieved differentiated consensus on the common confession of grace, faith, and Christ’s work while leaving the metaphysics of the formal cause unresolved.

The relation of justification to the doctrines of the Church, the sacraments, and the ministry was not addressed. Ratzinger named this as the next terrain. It has not yet been systematically entered by the commission that produced JDDJ.

The relation of justification to theosis, opened by the Finnish school, was not engaged by the Declaration directly. The Joint Commission acknowledged the Finnish contribution but did not attempt to integrate it. This remains open.

The question of whether the Reformation was necessary is not answered by the Declaration and was not meant to be. The Declaration says that the sixteenth-century anathemas no longer apply to the partner’s present teaching. It does not say that the anathemas were unjustified at the time, nor that the Reformation itself was avoidable. Both communions retained the right to judge their own history.

6. The Dialogue’s Present Phase

The Lutheran–Roman Catholic Commission on Unity continues to meet. Its post-1999 work has included The Apostolicity of the Church (2006) and From Conflict to Communion (2013), which was jointly received in preparation for the 2017 Reformation anniversary and included the common commemoration at Lund Cathedral on 31 October 2016.

The commission has not yet produced a sequel document on the ecclesial, sacramental, and ministerial questions Ratzinger identified as the next terrain. These questions — the nature of the Church, the number and theology of the sacraments, the ordained ministry, the papal office — lie in the territory Layer 4 of this corpus names as the remaining faultlines. Whether the method of differentiated consensus can bear weight at those points is the open question of the next generation of Lutheran–Roman Catholic dialogue.

The confessional Lutheran rejection of the Declaration has not softened since 1999. The LCMS’s 2017 Reformation 500 Response restated the 1998 position. The WELS’s 2017 statement likewise. The dialogue between these communions and the Roman Catholic Church continues on other terms — informal, theological, and without ratified instruments.

The Reformed association of 2017 is fresh, and its reception by confessional Reformed bodies is still under discussion.

7. For Further Study

  1. Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) — the Declaration itself, with the 1999 Annex to the Official Common Statement.
  2. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Response to the Joint Declaration (25 June 1998).
  3. Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, Council of Presidents Response to the Joint Declaration (15 December 1998).
  4. Karl Lehmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, eds., Lehrverurteilungen — kirchentrennend? (1986; ET The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do They Still Divide?, 1990).
  5. Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification (1979; ET 2005).
  6. Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (1999; ET 2001).
  7. Michael Root, The Last Things: Resurrection, Judgment, Life Everlasting (2021) — for the contemporary Lutheran reception of the Declaration in relation to eschatology.
  8. From Conflict to Communion: Lutheran–Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017 (2013).

See also: Layer 4, document 07 — “The Nature of Justification” — which treats the doctrinal faultline itself; Layer 3, document 04 — “Forensic and Transformative Salvation” — which treats the theological dimensions as legitimate diversity while naming the constitutive question as Layer 4.