Iii. Justification And Substitution

II. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JUSTIFICATION

Some theologians make little of the forensic element in justification, and some exclude it altogether. Thus John Oman objects to the category of law and says: ‘We are justified because by faith we enter the world of a gracious God, out of which the old hard legal requirements, with the old hard boundaries of our personality and the old self-regarding claim of rights, have disappeared, a world which is the household of our Father where order and power and ultimate reality are of love and not of law.’⁵¹⁷ This is finely said, and nobody, surely, would dispute the description of the new life we enter by faith. But whether this is a description of what the New Testament understands by justification is another matter. The consequences of the atonement are many, and the blessed state of the believer may be indicated in many ways, of which Oman’s words point us to one, and that a very important one. But it is only by ignoring much scriptural evidence that this can be called justification, for, as the preceding examination should have made clear, justification is essentially a legal concept. It may well be that there are other spheres more important to Christianity than that of law, but that does not give us grounds for using the legal terminology to describe those other spheres. Justification is essentially concerned with the legal status of the believer, and we must leave descriptions of the new life for other categories.

We might urge a similar objection against the position which says, ‘To be justified, then, is not to have the consequences of sin condoned or even obliterated, but so to be reconciled to God in spite of sin, that we can face all evil with confident assurance of final victory over it, and by God’s succour transform all its consequences, whether the evil be natural or moral, the outcome of our own sin, or from necessary fellowship with others in His family’.⁵¹⁸ Again we may say that there is truth in what is being said, and that it is a very real part of the Christian faith that believers are reconciled to God, and that they rely on Him to give them victory over evil. But this is not what the Bible means when it speaks of justification. There seems little point in transferring the name justification’ from its proper sphere to some other which pleases the theologian better.

Similarly we protest against those views which see the essence of justification in the changed nature of the believer. W. Fearon Halliday comes near to this when he says: ‘it has not always been seen that no man can be justified before God unless his nature is so changed that the assent of God is the assent to a reality.‘⁵¹⁹ It is quite true that sanctification and justification should not be sundered, but rather kept in the closest of relations to one another. But this does not mean that we are to confuse the one with the other. If a man is truly justified by faith, then that faith will surely lead him in the power of God to a new life, and the one experience may well be held to imply the other. But that is not the same as saying that the two experiences are in essence the same. Though in practice they may go together, yet for purposes of discussion they may be considered separately, and justification is the name given in the Bible to the changed status, not the changed nature.

If we do not like the doctrine of justification it is more straightforward to abandon it altogether, rather than to retain the name while applying it to something other than the scriptural doctrine. This is what N. Berdyaev has done, asserting that justification is both impossible and unnecessary. ‘In reality grace can change man but not justify him, because it is the free action of divine power working upon human nature. For the rest, we may well ask is the justification of man necessary so far as God is concerned? It seems as if we are faced here with a juridical notion created by the limitations of human thought, which were incapable of accepting the divine truth of Christianity.‘⁵²⁰ Again he can say: ‘The meaning of the coming of Christ into the world lies in a real transfiguration of human nature, in the formation of a new type of spiritual man. ... In Christianity the central idea is that of transfiguration, not justification.’⁵²¹

But we can hold such views only if we give up altogether the attempt to ground our views on Scripture. There can be not the slightest doubt to anyone who has worked much with a concordance that justification is one of the very central truths of the New Testament. It is employed far more often than reconciliation and most other ways of interpreting Calvary. We may very fairly doubt, in view of the central place assigned by the New Testament to the death of Christ, whether even the change in man is thought of as often as justification. And even where the new life is thought of it is the consequence of the new standing before God which is justification. While we may welcome Berdyaev’s reminder that the power of the divine love operative within man is an integral part of the Christian way, we must decline it as a substitute for justification.

Justification, then, is a conception which is deeply rooted in the Scriptures, and it witnesses to the importance of law in the divine economy. This witness cannot be set aside by a facile appeal to the antithesis between law and love, because it is the very Scriptures which tell us that God is love that stress the place of law. But indeed it may be doubted whether the antithesis is a valid one. While it is true that there is a legalism which is far removed from love, and at times in the history of Christian doctrine it is some such legalism which has been posited of God, yet there is no inherent contradiction in affirming that God works by law and by love.⁵²² Indeed we cannot affirm that God is love in any meaningful sense unless we also say that God is law; for unless an element of law inheres in the divine nature we can have no guarantee that the love we see today will not be replaced by wrath tomorrow. It is perhaps a recognition of this truth, coupled with a realization of the legal significance of justification, which causes one so far removed from being a legalist as R. S. Franks to say: ‘God’s righteousness is His love considered as a law of conduct.‘⁵²³ So too, Denney says emphatically: ’It cannot be too often repeated that if the universal element, or law, be eliminated from personal relations, there is nothing intelligible left: no reason, no morality, no religion, no sin or righteousness or forgiveness, nothing to appeal to mind or conscience.’⁵²⁴

Now, if God is thus a God of law, this has two consequences of importance to our present inquiry. The first is that He will require men to live in accordance with His law; the second that His forgiveness can be only such as is consonant with the law of His holy nature.

Concerning the first, Scripture insists over and over that God demands that men should live in accordance with the law which He sets before them. Moreover, it is part of the very nature of law as we know it that it attaches penalties to the breaking of the law, and in this respect the scriptural law is no exception. Again and again we are told that God views the breaking of the law with the gravest displeasure, that His wrath is extended towards the sinner, and that none can expect immunity, for there is no respect of persons with Him. It is quite in accordance with Romans 6: 23 (and much other Scripture besides) when W. Milligan speaks of death as ‘the first demand of the Divine law upon the sinner’,⁵²⁵ or when B. F. Westcott says, ‘The particular act (i.e. of sin) calls for a proportionate reparation, the moral discipline of the debtor coinciding with the satisfaction due to the broken law’.⁵²⁶ Modern man may have largely lost sight of it, but the Bible insists that sin is followed by punishment, and that that punishment is more than the temporal consequences of sin.

So we come to our second point, that God’s forgiveness can be only such as is in accordance with the law of His own holy nature. We cannot expect God to make light of the moral demand when He deals with the situation posed by man’s sin. It would be no answer to the needs of the situation for the Creator to say, ‘It does not matter. I freely forgive’. P. T. Forsyth puts it strongly when he says that God ‘could not trifle with His own holiness. He could will nothing against His holy nature, and He could not abolish the judgment bound up with it. Nothing in the compass of the divine nature could enable Him to abolish a moral law, the law of holiness. That would be tampering with His own soul. It had to be dealt with. Is the law of God more loose than the law of society? Can it be taken liberties with, played with, and put aside at the impulse even of love? How little we should come to think of God’s love if that were possible.... God’s holy law is His own holy nature. His love is under the condition of eternal respect. It is quite unchangeable.’⁵²⁷ While we may be convinced from our knowledge of God as love that He will not leave man to be punished with the full rigour of the penalty prescribed, yet we must hold that His forgiveness will be such as to uphold and not such as to set at nought the moral law.

It is in this context that we must understand the biblical teaching on justification. Justification in itself, as we have seen, is a legal term indicating the process of declaring righteous, but in itself it does not say how this is to be done. There is an element of the paradoxical in the New Testament idea of the way in which, in fact, men’s justification is accomplished. For St. Paul can speak in Romans 4: 5 of ‘him that justifieth the ungodly’ (that acquitteth the guilty!). Nevertheless we are not to think of God as relaxing the moral law in order to accomplish this paradox, for it is categorically stated that He is δί 024

αιος in the very act of justification (Rom. 3: 26). This truth is repeated over and over again by P. T. Forsyth who insists that justification is the justification of God as well as that of man; and indeed the justification of God before it can be the justification of man. ‘We are bidden to recognise that God’s demand on man takes the lead of man’s demand on God. And both are overruled by God’s demand on God, God’s meeting His own demand. And we learn unwillingly that only God’s justification of man gives the secret of man’s justification of God.‘⁵²⁸ ‘We can only understand any justification of man as it is grounded in this justification - this self-justification - of God. The sinner could only be saved by something that thus damned the sin.‘⁵²⁹

This, then, is the significance of justification. It is not the only way of viewing the atoning work of Christ, and we must certainly give due consideration to other aspects if we are to have an adequate and balanced view of Christ’s great work for us. But we cannot do without justification with its insistence that part of what was done on Calvary concerned the inflexible law which is at the very basis of the being of God. That law was honoured in the process whereby forgiveness was wrought.⁵³⁰

III. JUSTIFICATION AND SUBSTITUTION

There is no inherent connection between justification and substitution, and there have been systems which included the one without the other. Thus Rabbinic Judaism, to name no other, was insistent that it is possible for a man to be justified before God because of his accumulation of merit, a form of justification in which there is no thought of substitution. But in the particular way in which Christ accomplished our justification it may well be held that there is a definitely substitutionary emphasis.

Among the older Protestant theologians this was almost taken for granted. Thus Calvin can say: ‘Our acquittal is in this - that the guilt which made us liable to punishment was transferred to the head of the Son of God (Is. liii: 12). We must specially remember this substitution in order that we may not be all our lives in trepidation and anxiety, as if the just vengeance, which the Son of God transferred to himself, were still impending over US.’⁵³¹ From a slightly different point of view James Morison speaks δι 007

αιόω as referring to ‘a judicial declaration of the reality of the substitutionary righteousness judicially found in the possession of believers’.⁵³² The very fact of man’s justification was held by such theologians to imply a process of substitution.

In later times this emphasis was lost, especially as men came to think of the essence of the atonement as consisting in salvation from the power rather than the penalty of sin. It became almost axiomatic that substitution could have no part in a right understanding of atonement, and the real meaning of the cross was sought elsewhere. ⁵³³ But more recently there are some writers who realize that this reaction is too extreme. Thus F. W. Camfield says that in the work of Christ ‘we are met by the reality of substitution’, and he goes on to affirm roundly ‘Justification and substitution stand or fall together’.⁵³⁴ Again, no less a person than Karl Barth suggests that we need to learn again what the Scriptures say about and mean by substitution,⁵³⁵ and he can say: ‘Yes, exactly in the depths of our misery He intercedes for us, and substitutes Himself for us, warding off the wages justly due us and suffering and making restitution what we could not suffer and where we could not make restitution .’⁵³⁶

These words last quoted look very much like an affirmation that there is a substitutionary process at work in the method of justification - the wages of our sin are averted by the substitution of the Christ, and He suffered what we could not suffer. This thought is to be found also in other writers. Thus H. Maurice Relton repeats over and over again that there is a substitutionary aspect to the atonement, and sums up much of his argument when he says: ‘We have seen that there is a real element of substitution in the Calvary Sacrifice.... We have suggested that it consists in His paying the debt of sin in a final agony of dereliction; a spiritual death, which is sin’s wages.’⁵³⁷ But this is only another way of saying that the Christian method of justification is one which is substitutionary. This is affirmed also by H. Wheeler Robinson when he equates justification with ‘the acquittal of the sinner through the (forensically) substituted bloodshedding of Christ’.⁵³⁸ We conclude this list of citations with one from A. Schlatter who comments on 2 Corinthians 5: 21 : ‘he suffers what God does to sin, and makes visible what happens when man has God against him.’⁵³⁹

This brief list of citations makes it clear that, while a substitutionary view of justification may not be widely popular today, at least it may not be dismissed as obscurantist. It still makes its appeal to minds both devout and profound. Admittedly when we have said ‘substitution’ we have not described justification, much less the atonement; for a full understanding of either much more is necessary. But what we maintain is that we cannot enter into such an understanding unless we lay hold on that aspect of the truth which is expressed by the word ‘substitution’. There is no condemnation now for them that are in Christ Jesus, and the reason for this may be stated, at least in one aspect, by saying that Christ bore our condemnation so that we bear it no more. But this is nothing less than to say that we are justified by a substitutionary process.

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