What are the main beliefs of the Lutheran Confessions?

Justification

For Lutherans, the central teaching of the Bible and therefore the Christian faith is the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone. In order to understand this, let’s quickly define some terms.

To justify is to declare righteous or innocent. So when God judges us to be innocent of sin and declares that we possess the righteousness necessary to inherit eternal life, God has justified us.

Grace is the unmerited favor of God. To best understand grace, think of it as the inverse of mercy. God has mercy on us when He doesn’t give us the condemnation we deserve. God gives us grace, then, when He gives us what we don’t deserve, namely forgiveness and eternal life.

Faith, specifically Christian faith, is belief in Christ and His salvation. To believe in Christ is to trust that Christ Jesus, true God and true man, forgave your sins with His death on the cross and won eternal life for you with His resurrection.

So when we say that we are justified by grace alone through faith alone, what does this mean? Let’s break it up into sections.

By saying that we are justified by grace alone, we mean that God has justified us because of His grace alone. God hasn’t declared us righteous because we earned that declaration by keeping the Ten Commandments. We most certainly have not. Rather, God has declared us righteous because His grace moved Him to treat us as we didn’t deserve by sending Christ to forgive our sins and give us His perfect keeping of the Ten Commandments. So when God accomplished our salvation in the cross and the empty tomb, He did it by grace alone.

Likewise, when we say that we are justified through faith alone, we mean that the way we come to possess God’s saving grace is through believing and not by works. God is not like a jailer who says, “out of my own grace, I made a key that will unlock your jail cell and set you free, but now you have to earn the right for me to place the key into your hands, so good luck with that, Captain Sinfulpants.” Rather, just as God accomplishes our salvation without our good works, so He gives that salvation to us apart from our works. The saving God grace of is received through faith. It becomes our own possession when we believe, something that St Paul teaches very clearly in Romans 3-5 and Ephesians 2, among other places.

It’s probably worth noting here that, when Lutherans talk about how we’re justified through faith, we don’t mean this in the same way that many Protestants do. For many Protestants, saying “we’re justified through faith and not by works” means “God doesn’t reward us with salvation for doing a bunch of good works. God rewards us with salvation just for doing one work—choosing to believe in Him!” Lutherans reject this understanding of faith as it’s contrary to passages like John 1:12-13, which says that we have the right to become children of God not by our own will, but by the will of God, and 1 Corinthians 12:3 which says “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”

So instead of teaching that faith is something we create in our hearts from our own free will, we teach that, prior to conversion, we are incapable of believing, unable to make a decision for Jesus, and entirely unwilling to welcome Jesus into our hearts. Therefore, when we do believe in Christ, this is not of ourselves, but a gift of the Holy Spirit who created this faith in our hearts, as Ephesians 2:8-9 states. For Lutherans, the faith we need in order to be saved is given to us by God Himself, which means that both aspects of justification, both by grace and through faith, are accomplished entirely by God Himself.