Justification by faith: old news
Here’s google results for the four candidates (President and VP of each major party) and the phrase justification by faith: Barack Obama and Joe Biden vs John McCain and Sarah Palin.
The news cycle is such that it was Sarah Palin’s name who had the most relevant hits related to Justification. The second search result for Sarah Palin justification by faith, at the time of this writing, turned up with links to Time magazine articles, actually about justification! At first you get excited that the doctrine of justification has some bearing on current political events. But you realize quickly that they’re items linking to articles from 1963 and the other plops you into the midst of one from 1967!
One presumes it was a trick of the Google spiders (an interesting case study in ambient findability, perhaps?) that Palin’s name shows up in the margins of these articles because by the time of this writing, she was the name most prominent in the news cycle out of the whole quadrangle of November4 aspirants. Her nomination to the vice presidency was the most current item, and therefore dominated the dynamically generated links to current events in the navigation around these old articles.
I suppose that means Obama, Biden, McCain, and the doctrine of justification, are ALL old news. Old enough to hardly merit a mention, even on the window dressing of Time’s pages. The doctrine of justification apparently had its heyday for Time almost fifty years ago.
I note that Martin Marty got a mention in the ‘67 article:
American Christianity, charges Lutheran Theologian Martin Marty, has fallen back on precisely the kind of spiritual error that the Reformation was designed to combat. The typical parishioner, adds Marty’s colleague at the University of Chicago, Theologian Brian Gerrish, feels that he has “done something that puts God in his debt if he puts down a nice thick carpet in the chancel hall—a sort of afterlife insurance policy.” Some laymen feel that all too many clerics are trying to earn what Marty calls “Brownie Points” by engaging in secular crusades—picketing against Viet Nam or for civil rights.
The scanner that transcribed the 1963 article was pretty funny because Karl Barth became Karl Earth, which is not quite how I see the old fella. It was all very exciting at the time because it seems there was a Luther revival that had gained steam over the previous decades. I suppose this is some of the earlier stuff leading toward the Joint Declaration.
In any case, justification is hard to find in the news, and one wonders how much it’s on the candidates’ minds. Ever.