Lutheran Quote of the Day: Köberle on "Subjective Grace"

I was interested to find out that the terminology,"obective grace" and "subjective grace," has a history (some of which I agree with, some of which I don't). You know...I just make this trash up, lol.

Here is a quote from Adolf Köberle's seminal work, The Quest for Holiness, reaffirming some of the points in my post, "Hey! Lets Keep It Forensic in Here!". Namely, he states that the experience of grace in the reception of faith (subjective justification) is not dependent on the subject's experience but on the objective Word of revelation. Therefore he want's us to affirm that we should not be suspicious of "subjective grace" (though he doesn't use this terminology) as it finds it's basis outside of ourselves in the objective promises of God.

"For the faith that becomes active in apprehension and emotion does not desire to derive its strength from itself. The "experience" of grace does not put itself confidently into God's place, as it were the actual donor and mediator of grace; it does not depend on its own consciousness; it does not come out of some wellspring of inner nature. It is something purely receptive, begotten and animated by the reality of the divine gift that is apprehended by faith. For this reason we cannot offhand reject the idea of an "experience" of faith as something suspicious and unevangelical, so long as the subjective experience we possess does not come out of some "little paradise of our own domain of the soul," but is begotten and mediated through an objective word of revelation that is accepted by faith."

-The Quest for Holiness, trans. John C. Mattes (Minneapolis, Minn: Augsburg Publishing House, 1938), 78.