Justification - Marquart, Section 4 - Just say "no" to Kokomo

Section 4 of Marquart’s essay is a direct response to some points made in a letter by “Mr. Darby.” In this section, KM defends several of Mr. Darby’s statements and expresses his agreement with Mr. Darby’s complaints. We begin with his first and perhaps biggest complaint: the Kokomo statements.

4. Defensible Theses of Mr. Larry Darby:

1. That the “Kokomo” notions about Judas and other inmates of hell being declared “innocent” and granted “the status of saints,” are an absurd and reprehensible travesty of Lutheran doctrine.

Note: I can’t provide here a complete history of what happened in Kokomo, IN, in 1979. There are several articles out there describing what happened, and I’ve only skimmed a few of them. I’m not even sure that KM was fully briefed on the situation. It seems that a group of members at that WELS congregation found themselves in disagreement with the way the WELS had been teaching Objective Justification, and so wrote up some extreme statements to characterize this doctrine, not because they believed the statements, but in order to point out how ridiculous they perceived the WELS teaching to be.

In other words, their assertion was: (1) these four statements accurately represent the doctrine of Objective Justification, (2) these four statements are obviously unscriptural, therefore (3) we reject the doctrine of Objective Justification.

As Marquart will point out, they ended up creating a straw man – a false characterization of the correct teaching of Objective Justification, even though – and this is important – even though some of their statements did indeed reflect the incorrect presentation of the doctrine by some WELS teachers in the past.

Here are the statements drafted by the Kokomo members:

1. Objectively speaking, without any reference to an individual sinner’s attitude toward Christ’s sacrifice, purely on the basis of God’s verdict, every sinner, whether he knows it or not, whether he believes it or not, has received the status of a saint.

2. After Christ’s intervention and through Christ’s intervention, God regards all sinners as guilt-free saints.

3. When God reconciled the world to Himself through Christ, He individually pronounced forgiveness on each individual sinner whether that sinner ever comes to faith or not.

4. At the time of the resurrection of Christ, God looked down in hell and declared Judas, the people destroyed in the flood, and all the ungodly, innocent, not guilty, and forgiven of all sin and gave unto them the status of saints.

Here’s Marquart’s evaluation of them:

It is mind-boggling that any Lutheran could ever have written such stuff, and Mr. Darby is completely right to denounce it as the mischievous nonsense which it is.

Thesis 3 is perhaps the least offensive, although in its context it is thoroughly misleading.

Thesis 1 confuses “objective” and “subjective” justification by saying of the former what may only be said of the latter, namely that sinners have “received” forgiveness. Objective justification means that forgiveness has been obtained for and is being offered to all in the Gospel—not that anybody has “received” it. The receiving can happen only through faith, sola fide. [emphasis added]

Thesis 2, that after Christ’s sacrifice “God regards all sinners as guilt-free saints” is simply false, St. Jn. 3:36; 1 Jn. 5:12.

And Thesis 4 about hell’s human denizens being pronounced innocent, given “the status of saints,” etc. is fantasy. An unbiblical logic has driven biblical language senseless: what can it possibly mean to have (or, worse, receive!) “the status of saints” in hell? The grace and forgiveness which Christ obtained for all, had been offered to the dead during their life-time, in the means of grace (St. Lk. 16:29; Heb. 9:27), but are in no way given to the godless in hell, where there is no Gospel, hence no forgiveness (Large Catechism, Creed, 56).

The trouble with these repulsive “Kokomo” statements is that they ignore the pivotal significance of the means of grace and thereby abandon the proper distinction of Law and Gospel. [emphasis added]

Apparently, the members who drafted the Kokomo Statements wrote letters to the entire synod complaining about the WELS doctrine (which they had formed into a caricature). This eventually resulted in some WELS theologians having to react to the Statements. Among them was Dr. Siegbert Becker, respected professor at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary. In his essay, he expressed his dislike for the terminology of the Statements, but felt constrained to defend them in principle as statements that could indeed be understood correctly. It is my understanding (and I could be wrong!) that the Kokomo members were eventually given the ultimatum of accepting their own Statements as the true biblical doctrine, or be excommunicated. If someone can confirm or correct that, let him do so.

I disagree with some of Dr. Becker’s exegetical conclusions in his essay, and I also disagree with his defense of the Kokomo Statements, half-hearted though it may have been. In my opinion, he made a grave mistake, one that has given a degree of credence to the Kokomo description of Justification over the last 30 years, and has only served to further confuse the issue and disseminate the caricature.

From what Marquart says below, it seems that he initially wrote some things in defense of Dr. Becker’s defense of the Kokomo Statements. Looking back, he regrets doing that:

In light of Mr. Darby’s citation of the late Dr. Siegbert Becker in support of the “Kokomo” theses (HD, p. 240), I now regret my editorial note (A Lively Legacy, p. 78) which attempted to shield Becker against criticism by Hardt on justification. However technically defensible my cavils may have been, the larger truth signaled by the “Kokomo” affair is that Hardt was right and I was wrong.

This is what Rev. Jon Buchholz had to say about the Kokomo Statements and Becker’s reaction in his essay presented to the WELS synod convention in 2005:

Each of these statements is so poorly crafted that it cannot be accepted—regardless of authorship. Dr. Siegbert Becker, in an essay to Chicago area pastors, rightly lamented the poor choice of words, but he upheld the statements on principle. I would like him to have said, “Throw them out and start over!” The Kokomo Statements should be roundly rejected by the WELS as an incongruous ecclesiological mishmash.

There’s no reason in the world to defend the Kokomo Statements, and every reason in the world to reject them and go back to a confessional Lutheran presentation of Justification:

“The Law of God condemns all mankind as unrighteous, for all have sinned. But God has provided another way for men to be judged by Him – not on the basis of our works, but on the basis of the works of Another Man. God, in his grace, has provided payment for the sins of all in the death of His Son, Jesus Christ, and has permitted the righteousness of Christ to stand in the place of the world’s unrighteousness, so that all may believe in Christ and be saved. In the Gospel, He holds out the promise of the free forgiveness of sins to all for the sake of Christ. To the poor sinners who believe God’s promise, the righteousness of Christ is imputed, and by faith alone in Christ, the unrighteous are counted as righteous before God – justified, forgiven, adopted, regenerated and saved.”

OK, the above is wordy and probably not concise enough for a formal doctrinal statement. It’s inferior to the wording we already have in the Confessions. But I’ll take it any day over the “repulsive Kokomo statements,” or any other statements that reflect the Kokomo caricature.

Some claim that the caricature IS the historical, prevalent teaching of Justification in the WELS. To the extent that such may be the case, my hope is that, as we move forward, we can return to the sound form of teaching found in our Lutheran Confessions, from which I fear we have strayed – in articulation at least, if not in actual belief. If, as Marquart states above, all that is meant by Objective Justification is that “forgiveness has been obtained for and is being offered to all in the Gospel — not that anybody has ‘received’ it,” then we should be careful to talk about it that way, without all the overstatements that often accompany it.