H. George Anderson (born March 10, 1932) was the second Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America from October 1995 to October 2001. Prior to his term as Presiding Bishop, he was the president of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and on the faculty of Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, serving as president from 1970 to 1982.
The "Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification" (JDDJ) is a document created and agreed to by the Catholic Church's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU) and the Lutheran World Federation in 1999 as a result of Catholic–Lutheran dialogue. It states that the churches now share "a common understanding of our justification by God's grace through faith in Christ." To the parties involved, this substantially resolves much of the 500-year-old conflict over the nature of justification which was at the root of the Protestant Reformation. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification teaches that "good works are a genuine response to God’s grace, not the cause of it".
Through the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, "the formal condemnations of both the Catholic and Lutheran Churches against one another" were rescinded. As a result of the same, Lutheran bishop H. George Anderson stated that "there is an increasing common faith" and that those joined in Lutheran-Catholic interdenominational marriages "share a common faith instead of coming at it from two separate traditions." Catholic brother Jeffrey Gros, the associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, held that Catholics and Lutherans should be thankful to God "for the grace they’ve received in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ" and that "We’ve learned, both through our scholarship and also through our face-to-face dialogue, that we believe this together". Gros noted that due to being in agreement on the doctrine of justification, the Catholic–Lutheran dialogue would lead to finding agreement on other theological issues.