What the Reformation Teaches Us About the Pastoral Nature of Doctrine

How thinking about Protestant accounts of justification helps us overcome a mistaken modern divide between 'theology' and 'being pastoral'

“[D]espite our frequent boast about ‘not having to check your brain at the door,’ there is in fact a strong current of overt anti-intellectualism in The Episcopal Church, which often manifests itself as a prejudice against theology or doctrine as such.”

So writes Sewanee theology professor Robert MacSwain in the most recent issue of The Anglican Theological Review, reflecting on the experience of being a signatory and the principal organizer of a 2022 statement of Episcopal Church theologians which argued in favor of retaining baptism as a general requirement for receiving Holy Communion.¹ This statement caused something of an uproar, with responses accusing the theologians of being unpastoral, causing harm, erring by daring to arrogate to themselves the capacity to speak publicly on doctrinal matters, and so forth. As MacSwain tells it, commenters accused the signatories of crushing people’s faith in God, leaving priests feeling like they had made a mistake in their vocation, and participating in deep and profound evil. MacSwain’s entire article is worth reading (although I’m not satisfied with the picture he gives of ‘Protestant’ accounts of Holy Communion, which he seems to think tend to lead towards communion without baptism). But for now I want to stay with the basic point made in the quote, which seems to me irrefutable: for all that Episcopalians (or for that matter mainliners broadly) like to boast about our intellectualism in contrast to conservative Christians, we are often decidedly uninterested in serious thinking about matters of faith. In practice, ‘doctrine’ or ‘theology’ are frequently pitted against ‘lived experience’ and ‘being pastoral’ just as they were in this communion dispute – and doctrine and theology are found wanting.

This view that ‘doctrine’ and ‘being pastoral’ stand in opposition to each other, and thus the church must prioritize being pastoral, has its advantages. It allows mainline clergy who are increasingly uncomfortable with making truth-claims about God to justify their lives and salaries in secular terms as members of the ‘helping professions.’ It lets clergy and laity alike off the hook for utter disinterest in reading and reflecting upon Scripture (I have, for example, had clergy express bafflement to me that they would spend any time reading the Bible other than the time required for preparing for Sunday worship). It allows a very gratifying contrast between enlightened mainliners and their evangelical foils. But unfortunately, it is not ultimately compatible with the Christian faith. And to explain why, I think a particularly helpful place to go is the sixteenth century. So if you’ll pardon a somewhat abrupt shift in focus, I’d like to move from the twenty-first century to the sixteenth, where we will see an entirely different understanding of the relationship between doctrinal truth and pastoral comfort.

What we find in the sixteenth century among the Protestant Reformers is a bedrock commitment that doctrinal truth and pastoral comfort are not opposed but inseparably related. What blew up the sixteenth century Church in the West – what Martin Luther and his fellow evangelicals thought was important enough to live and die for – was the conviction that getting doctrine right was vital, not only for its own sake but because only true doctrine can truly console Christians. It’s important to be careful here. There are some today, frustrated with the contemporary mainline prioritization of ‘being pastoral’ over ‘being doctrinally correct,’ who take for granted the opposition between the two but argue that we should instead prioritize doctrinal correctness. In extreme cases, this can lead to glorying in the troubled consciences that certain construals of Christian doctrines can cause; a given doctrine’s offensiveness becomes evidence of its truth. But this isn’t what Luther et al are up to. No! They rejected entirely an opposition between true doctrine and genuine pastoral care, arguing that right doctrine was in fact the only way to salve Christians’ burdened consciences. It was precisely their deep concern with the pastoral effects of doctrine, for finding and sharing true consolation in Christ, that led them to hold and preach the Reformation understanding of the Gospel as the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls.

We see this with particular clarity in Luther himself. Writing near the end of his life, in the preface to the 1545 first volume of his Latin works, Luther describes the intertwining of the theological and the affective, the doctrinal and the pastoral, that led him to his Reformation breakthrough. Now it is worth saying here at the outset that Luther here is describing events twenty-five to thirty years beforehand. This is not a contemporaneous account of his theological development, and it is very likely that Luther compressed changes that happened over a period of time into a narrative which was, of course, necessarily told from the perspective of his mature theology. But these caveats notwithstanding, it remains an important text for exploring not just the mature Luther’s self-understanding but also (I would argue, anyway) the early Luther’s theological development. And what does Luther tell us? He tells us that he was tormented by Anfechtungen, by deep distress, particularly around the verse Romans 1:17, “the righteousness of God is revealed by it.” Luther interpreted the iustitia Dei (righteousness of God) as it was commonly used in late medieval soteriology, as describing God’s judgment at death on the basis of our own infused righteousness, and so struggled mightily with this verse. “I did not love – I hated! – the righteous God who punished sinners,” he wrote. Feeling that, despite his “irreproachable life as a monk,” he nonetheless failed to live up to God’s expectations, he “raged with a savage conscience that was in turmoil.” Luther had, we might say, a pastoral need: how could he find a gracious God? But note well! This need was not met by ‘reassurance’ that asserted that doctrine doesn’t really matter anyway, that it isn’t worth worrying about it. No: Luther “impertinently hammered at Paul over this passage” until at last something changed.

Whether it was the work of an instant or of a longer period of time, “by the mercy of God” (as he later put it) Luther came to understand Romans 1:17 differently. What Paul was describing there, Luther came to believe, was not God’s righteousness expressed in judgement of our own (God-infused) righteousness but God’s righteousness as a merciful gift by which we are accepted by no merit of our own but solely God’s goodness. The iustitia Dei, Luther believed, is not God’s judging action, nor the standard of our active righteousness by which God judges us, but “the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us through faith.” This is the belief that shattered medieval Christendom and transformed Europe and the world. Indeed, for all the valuable work on the influence of social, political, and economic factors on the Reformation, it seems to me irrefutable that it was at the core theological, that without Luther’s theology the sixteenth century would have looked vastly different. Luther’s Reformation breakthrough was that that human and divine agency are wholly disentangled in salvation, that our salvation is completely and entirely God’s work from beginning to end, received by faith. And once he realized this, he found the consolation for which he had longed: “At this point I felt that I had been completely born again and entered paradise itself through wide open doors.” It’s not that this experience of consolation was itself the proof of the correctness of Luther’s theology – he describes going to Augustine and above all back to the Scriptures to confirm this insight – but the two went inextricably together.

Luther uses a variety of language to describe this understanding of salvation, but I want to share two passages of which I am particularly fond. The first comes from the 1520 On Christian Liberty/The Freedom of a Christian. Luther here draws upon Ephesians to discuss the relationship between Christ and the soul as analogous to that between a bridegroom and bride, in which the bride can be confident that the groom takes on her debts and gives her his benefits. He is worth quoting at length because of the text’s extraordinary beauty:

Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation; the soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith intervene and it will turn out that sins, death, and hell are Christ’s, but grace, life, and salvation are the soul’s. For if he is the groom, then he should simultaneously both accept the things belonging to the bride and impart to the bride those things that are his. For the one who gives his body and his very self to her, how does he not give his all? And the one who receives the body of the bride, how does he not take all that is hers?

This is truly the most delightful drama, involving not only communion but also a saving war, victory, salvation, and redemption. For Christ is God and a human being in one and the same person, who does not and cannot sin, die, or be damned; and his righteousness, life, and salvation are unconquerable, eternal, and all-powerful. When, I say, such a person shares in common and, indeed, takes as his own the sins, death, and hell of the bride on account of the wedding ring of faith, and when he regards them as if they were his own and as if he himself had sinned – suffering, dying, and descending into hell – then, as he conquers them all and as sin, death, and hell cannot devour him, they are devoured by him in an astounding duel. For his righteousness is superior to all sins, his life more powerful than death, and his salvation more invincible than hell.

So it happens that the faithful soul, through the wedding ring of its faith in Christ her bridegroom, is free from all sins, secure against death, protected from hell, and given the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of her bridegroom, Christ.

You can find similar themes in Luther’s “What to Expect in the Gospels,” written as an introduction to the 1521 Wartburg Postils. Particularly noteworthy here is the emphasis on Christ as a gift, a wholly free, wholly incongruous gift from God to us.  

Therefore you should grasp Christ, his words, works, and sufferings, in a twofold manner. First as an example that is presented to you, which you should follow and imitate. … However this is the smallest part of the gospel, on the basis of which it cannot yet even be called gospel. For on this level Christ is of no more help to you than some other saint. His life remains his own and does not as yet contribute anything to you. In short this mode does not make Christians but only hypocrites. You must grasp Christ at a much higher level. Even though this higher level has for a long time been the very best, the preaching of it has been something rare. The chief article and foundation of the gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift, as a present that God has given you and that is your own. This means that when you see or hear of Christ doing or suffering something, you do not doubt that Christ himself, with his deeds and suffering, belongs to you. On this you may depend as surely as if you had done it yourself; indeed as if you were Christ himself. See, this is what it means to have a proper grasp of the gospel, that is, of the overwhelming goodness of God, which neither prophet nor apostle nor angel was ever able fully to express, and which no heart could adequately fathom or marvel at. This is the great fire of the love of God for us, whereby the heart and conscience become happy, secure, and content. … So you see that the gospel is really not a book of laws and commandments which requires deeds of us, but a book of divine promises in which God promises, offers, and gives us all his possessions and benefits in Christ.

In both these passages, grasping the truth that our salvation consists in the free gift of Christ to us, without any works or merits of our own, leads to consolation. The soul married to Christ her bridegroom can live “with confidence.” The one who knows what to look for and expect in the Gospels will experience “the heart and conscience become happy, secure, and content.” Doctrine and pastoral implications belong together.

This marriage of doctrine and consolation in the teaching of salvation by divine agency alone is particularly characteristic of Luther’s writing and teaching. He takes pains over and over again to emphasize that the personal appropriation of the truths of Christianity is essential to faith – is, in fact, the content of faith. It is not enough to believe that Christ died to be a savior; you must believe that Christ died to be your savior – that everything Christ did and does is for you. As Luther puts it in his 1530 sermon for the afternoon of Christmas Day, “this is the chief article, which separates us from all the heathen, that you, O man, may not only learn that Christ, born of the virgin, is the Lord and Savior, but also accept the fact that he is your Lord and Savior.” Every Christian should hear herself addressed in Luke 2, when the angels proclaim that a savior is born for you. It is only this confidence that Christ is for you, that Christ is a gift for you and has taken on your sins and given you his righteousness, that brings the consolation that Luther sees as the work of the Gospel in the heart of the believer. And so small wonder that Luther worked so hard at producing texts for everyday Christians: the Small and Large Catechisms, instructions on prayer, hymns, and more: all this so that people could believe that Christ was really for them.

But this emphasis on the pastoral or consolatory implications of true doctrine is not only true of Luther! We should not assume, of course, that everyone who embraced the Reformation did so because of a similar experience to that of Luther, a similar desire for a gracious God. In fact, Ashley Null suggests that if Luther’s driving question is ‘where can I find a gracious God?’, Thomas Cranmer’s is the quite different question ‘how can I love God more than sin?’ But this too is a theological question with pastoral implications, of course. And more broadly, if consolation in face of the realization of the failure of self-justification before God is particularly emphasized in Lutheran circles, it is not only found there. Calvin, for all his reputation as a dour, dry dogmatician, is deeply interested in this question. In the Institutes III.ii, he deals extensively with the sort of faith that, because it provides assurance, can console the Christian believer amidst life’s uncertainties. For example, in III.ii.16, he sounds very much like Luther, saying, “here, indeed, is the chief hinge on which faith turns: that we do not regard the promises of mercy that God offers as true only outside ourselves, but not at all in us; rather that we make them ours by inwardly embracing them. Hence, at last is born that confidence which Paul elsewhere calls ‘peace.’” For us Anglicans, the Articles of Religion discuss justification by faith as a consoling belief – “a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort” (Art XI). The Homily on Salvation adds that justification by faith is “the strong rock and foundation of the Christian religion,” which gives us a “loving heart” by which we can serve God and neighbor.² And of course, the BCP Holy Communion service is (as I have written) a liturgy of comfort. Article XX of the Augsburg Confession speaks not only for the Lutherans, but for the Reformation as whole, when it argues for the importance of the proclamation of justification by faith in terms of its pastoral effects. Thus Art XX: “There was very great need to treat of, and renew, this doctrine of faith in Christ, to the end that anxious consciences should not be without consolation but that they might know that grace and forgiveness of sins and justification are apprehended by faith in Christ.” The very reason why the doctrine of justification by faith is so important to preach – worth risking imperial wrath to proclaim – is because it consoles anxious consciences. Theology and pastoral care belong together.

I fear that we have too often lost both the sense among the Reformers that doctrine and consolation belong together, and the specific doctrine that most clearly showed this relationship: justification by faith alone, which is to say, salvation by divine agency alone. Indeed, one of the things that has surprised me throughout my theological education is how shocked and not infrequently appalled future Protestant ministers are when they encounter this teaching, even people from churches with a less complicated relationship to the Reformation than my own Episcopal Church. It’s not that the doctrine is understood but rejected. Rather, in its uncompromising elimination of everything but God’s power and grace from our salvation, it is not even understood. Whether from the perspective of an evangelical decisionism that sees faith as a choice that we are able to make or from mainline softpedaling of traditional soteriology in favor of an emphasis on the social and political implications of Jesus’ teaching, the central teaching of the Reformation seems shocking. To give some personal examples, I have occasionally found myself in kerfuffles with people who take my commitment to salvation as God’s work to mean that I do not care about good works or justice. And I’ve heard the following many a time: did the Reformers really mean we contribute nothing to our salvation, that it’s entirely God’s work? Well, yes they did, and they argued that this was the doctrine upon which the church stood and fell.³ They did so because they believed it was true – and because they believed it was precisely this truth that brought consolation. Certainly it has done so for me.

Our churches are suffering from a separation between ‘theology’ and ‘pastoral care,’ ‘doctrine’ and ‘caring for people.’ It dominates mainline theological discourse and leads to a profound suspicion of thinking seriously about Christian faith and practice. I hope that this little romp through Reformation theology has shown what a strange divide this is, how foreign it is to the Christianity of the sixteenth century (and, it must be added, before and after the sixteenth century as well). The Reformers’ commitment to the consoling truth of justification by faith alone helps us see that this separation is not only strange but disastrous, and not only for theology but also for our care of our people. For if the Reformers are right about the consolation of the Gospel – and I think they are – then by separating doctrine and pastoral care, we miss out not only on true doctrine but also on genuine consolation. We have better pastoral care to offer than “none of this doctrine stuff is worth taking too seriously anyway, what matters is finding what beliefs and practices help you make it through life.” Instead, we have something like this to offer: “Whatever the world tells you, you don’t need to be accomplished or brilliant, to have the perfect politics or opinions or a perfectly-ordered life to be loved. You don’t need to earn your way into God’s favor. Hear the truth of the Gospel, the most important truth there is: God loves you and has chosen you to be his own, not because of who you are or what you have done but out of his sheer goodness. In Jesus Christ, the Father gave you his very Son as a gift, so that he could be your savior. He promises forgiveness of sins and eternal life to all who trust in Jesus Christ for salvation. He sets you free from the need to prove yourself worthy, sets you free to live a life of grateful thanksgiving by praising him and loving your neighbor. All this is most certainly true.”

1. Robert MacSwain, “Touching the Third (altar) Rail: Lessons Learned about Theological Discourse on Baptism and Eucharist in the Episcopal Church,” Anglican Theological Review 105:2 (Spring 2023): 194-210.

2. This homily was, of course, written by Cranmer. The focus on faith leading to a renewed heart lends credence to Null’s argument that Cranmer’s particular concern is a heart enflamed with love for God.

3. This, of course, raises the question of whether the Reformers were correct to see justification as the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls. I don’t have time to address this at great length, but I think the position is thoroughly defensible on exegetical grounds. An article that I have found deeply helpful on this question is Jonathan Linebaugh’s “The Grammar of the Gospel: Justification as a Theological Criterion in the Reformation and in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” which you can find both in his The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Eerdmans, 2022) or in the Scottish Journal of Society 71.3 (2018).