ABSTRACT
According to Matthias Schneckenburger, a nineteenth-century historian of doctrine, a lasting difference about the doctrine of justification by faith emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between the lutheran and Reformed traditions. Schneckenburger wrote: “Unlike the lutherans, who saw unio mystica as the effect and consequence of justification, the Reformed saw union with Christ as justification’s prior condition.”1 in other words, a difference existed about the ordo salutis. For the lutherans, one had first to be made righteous before one could enter into union with Christ, whereas for the Reformed union with Christ was itself the basis on which the believer became righteous before God. This was a logical not a temporal distinction about how to order justification in relation to mystical union, because in point of fact both took place simultaneously.
