Justification
Justification
The two pictures we have so far considered have led us into the temple precincts (propitiation) and the market-place (redemption). The third image (justification) will take us into the lawcourt. For justification is the opposite of condemnation (e.g. Rom. 5:18; 8:34), and both are verdicts of a judge who pronounces the accused either guilty or not guilty. There is logic in the order in which we are reviewing these great words which describe the achievement of the cross. Propitiation inevitably comes first, because until the wrath of God is appeased (that is, until his love has found a way to avert his anger), there can be no salvation for human beings at all. Next, when we are ready to understand the meaning of salvation, we begin negatively with redemption, meaning our rescue at the high price of Christ’s blood from the grim captivity of sin and guilt. Justification is its positive counterpart. True, some scholars have denied this. Sanday and Headlam wrote that justification ‘is simply forgiveness, free forgiveness’,50 and more recently Jeremias has asserted that ‘justification is forgiveness, nothing but forgiveness’.51 The two concepts are surely complementary, however, not identical. Forgiveness remits our debts and cancels our liability to punishment; justification bestows on us a righteous standing before God.
The sixteenth-century Reformers, whom God enlightened to rediscover the biblical gospel of ‘justification by faith’, were convinced of its central importance. Luther called it ‘the principal article of all Christian doctrine, which maketh true Christians indeed’.52 And Cranmer wrote:
This faith the holy Scripture teacheth: this is the strong rock and foundation of Christian religion: this doctrine all old and ancient authors of Christ’s church do approve: this doctrine advanceth and setteth forth the true glory of Christ, and beateth down the vain glory of man: this whosoever denieth is not to be counted for a true Christian man...but for an adversary of Christ....53
Let me add a statement by some modern Anglican Evangelicals:
Justification by Faith appears to us, as it does to all evangelicals, to be the heart and hub, the paradigm and essence, of the whole economy of God’s saving grace. Like Atlas, it bears a world on its shoulders, the entire evangelical knowledge of God’s love in Christ towards sinners.54
Despite the paramount importance of this truth, there have been many objections to it. First, there are those who have a strong antipathy to legal categories in all talk about salvation, on the ground that they represent God as Judge and King, not as Father, and therefore cannot adequately portray either his personal dealings with us or our personal relationship with him. This objection would be sustained if justification were the only image of salvation. But its juridical flavour is balanced by the more personal imagery of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘adoption’ (in which God is Father, not Judge), which we shall consider next. Other critics, secondly, attempt to dismiss the doctrine as a Pauline idiosyncrasy, originating in his peculiarly forensic mind. We should not hesitate to dismiss this dismissal, however, since what is Pauline is apostolic and therefore authoritative. In any case the statement is false. The concept of justification was not invented by Paul. It goes back to Jesus, who said that the tax collector in his parable ‘went home justified before God’, rather than the Pharisee (Luke 18:14). Indeed, it goes further back still to the Old Testament, in which God’s righteous and suffering servant ‘will justify many’, because ‘he will bear their iniquities’ (Isa. 53:11).
Thirdly, we need to look at the reasons for the Roman Catholic rejection of the Reformers’ teaching on justification by faith. We might not unfairly sum up the Council of Trent’s doctrine under three headings which concern the nature of justification, what precedes and occasions it, and what follows it. First, the Council taught that justification takes place at baptism and includes both forgiveness and renewal. The baptized person is cleansed from all original and actual sins, and is simultaneously infused with a new and supernatural righteousness. Secondly, before baptism God’s prevenient grace predisposes people ‘to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and co-operating with that grace’. Thirdly, post-baptismal sins (if ‘mortal’, causing the loss of grace) are not included within the scope of justification. They have to be purged by contrition, confession and penance (also, if any remain at death, by purgatory), so that these and other post-baptismal good works may be said to ‘merit’ eternal life.55
The Protestant churches had good reason to be deeply disturbed by this teaching. At the same time, neither side was listening carefully to the other, and both were marked by the acrimonious and polemical spirit of their age. Today the basic issue, which is the way of salvation, remains crucial. Very much is at stake. Yet the atmosphere has changed. Also Hans Küng’s astonishing monograph on Karl Barth’s doctrine of justification56 has opened up fresh possibilities for dialogue. So has the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s.57
Hans Küng’s book is in two parts. Concerning the first, which expounds ‘Karl Barth’s Theology of Justification’, Barth himself wrote to Hans Küng: ‘You have fully and accurately reproduced my views as I myself understand them....You have me say what I actually do say and...I mean it in the way you have me say it’ (p. xvii). Concerning the second part, which offers ‘An Attempt at a Catholic Response’, and in its conclusion claims ‘a fundamental agreement between Catholic and Protestant theology, precisely in the theology of justification’ (p.271), Barth wrote: ‘If this is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, then I must certainly admit that my view of justification agrees with the Roman Catholic view, if only for the reason that the Roman Catholic teaching would then be most strikingly in accord with mine!’ He then asks how this agreement ‘could remain hidden so long and from so many’, and mischievously enquires whether Hans Küng discovered it before, during or after his reading of the Church Dogmatics (pp.xvii–xviii)!
Hans Küng certainly makes some remarkable statements, although perhaps it is a pity that his thesis seeks to demonstrate Trent’s accord with Barth, rather than with Luther for whom he appears to have less sympathy. In chapter 27 he defines grace according to Scripture as ‘graciousness’, God’s ‘favour’ or ‘generous kindness’. ‘The issue is not my having grace, but his being gracious’ (pp.189–190). In chapter 28 he writes that justification ‘must be defined as a declaring just by court order’, and that in the New Testament ‘the association with a juridical situation is never absent’ (p.200). Again, it is ‘a judicial event’, ‘a wonderfully gracious saving justice’ (pp.205–206). Then in chapter 31 Hans Küng strongly affirms the truth of sola fide (by faith alone), and says that Luther was entirely correct and orthodox to add the word ‘alone’ to the text of Romans 3:28, since it was ‘not Luther’s invention’, it had already appeared in several other translations, and Trent had not intended to contradict it (p.237). So ‘we have to acknowledge a fundamental agreement’, he writes, ‘in regard to the sola fides formula...Man is justified by God on the basis of faith alone’ (p.246). Moreover, ‘justification through “faith alone” bespeaks the complete incapacity and incompetence of man for any sort of self-justification’ (p.301). ‘Thus man is justified through God’s grace alone; man achieves nothing; there is no human activity. Rather man simply submits to the justification of God; he does not do works; he believes’ (p.240).
Professor Küng does not stop there, however. Despite his emphasis on the judicial nature of justification as a divine declaration, he insists that God’s Word is always efficacious, so that whatever God pronounces comes into being. Therefore, when God says ‘you are just’, ‘the sinner is just, really and truly, outwardly and inwardly, wholly and completely. His sins are forgiven, and man is just in his heart....In brief, God’s declaration of justice is...at the same time and in the same act a making just’ (p.204). Justification is ‘the single act which simultaneously declares just and makes just’ (p.210).
But there is a dangerous ambiguity here, especially in the rhetorical sentence about the justified sinner being ‘wholly and completely’ just. What does this imply?
If ‘just’ here means ‘forgiven, accepted, right with God’, then indeed we become immediately, wholly and completely what God declares us to be; we enjoy the righteous status which he has conferred upon us. This is the true meaning of ‘justification’.
If ‘just’ is used to signify ‘made new, made alive’, then again God’s creative word immediately makes us what he declares. This would be a misuse of the word ‘just’, however, for what is being described now is not justification, but regeneration.
If ‘just’ means ‘having a righteous character’ or ‘being conformed to the image of Christ’, then God’s declaration does not immediately secure it, but only initiates it. For this is not justification but sanctification, and is a continuous, lifelong process.
Even Hans Küng’s explanatory Excursus II, ‘Justification and Sanctification in the New Testament’, does not disclose unambiguously what he means by God ‘making’ the sinner ‘just’. He recognizes the problem that the language of ‘sanctification’ is used in the New Testament in two distinct senses. Sometimes it is almost a synonym for justification, because it denotes the holiness of our status, not our character. In this sense, at the very moment of our justification we become ‘saints’, for we have been ‘sanctified in Christ Jesus’, set apart to belong to the holy people of God.58 At other times ‘sanctification’ describes the process of growing in holiness and becoming Christlike.59
The confusion seems to arise because Hans Küng does not maintain this distinction consistently. He refers to justification and sanctification now as happening together instantaneously (‘God simultaneously justifies and sanctifies’, p.308) and now as being together capable of growth (Trent spoke of ‘the necessity of...growth in justification’, p.228). This is very misleading, however. In the debate about justification it would be wise to reserve the word sanctification for its distinctive meaning of ‘growing in holiness’. For then we can affirm that justification (God declaring us righteous through his Son’s death) is instantaneous and complete, admitting no degrees, while sanctification (God making us righteous through his Spirit’s indwelling), though begun the moment we are justified, is gradual and throughout this life incomplete, as we are being transformed into the likeness of Christ ‘from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Cor. 3:18, RSV).
In desiring a greater clarification at this point, I am not wishing to belittle Hans Küng’s tour de force. At the same time, more than half a century has passed since the publication of his book, and one is not conscious of any widespread proclamation in the Roman Catholic Church of the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone.
Risking the danger of oversimplification, one may say that Evangelicals and Roman Catholics together teach that God by his grace is the only Saviour of sinners, that self-salvation is impossible, and that the death of Jesus Christ as a propitiatory sacrifice is the ultimate ground of justification. But precisely what justification is, how it relates to other aspects of salvation, and how it takes place – these are areas of continuing and anxious debate.
Evangelicals feel the need to press Roman Catholics about sin, grace, faith and works. Roman Catholics are uncomfortable when we talk about ‘total depravity’ (that every part of our humanness has been twisted by the Fall), which lies behind our insistence on the need both for a radical salvation and for non-contributory grace. They find this a pessimistic view of the human condition, involving an inadequate doctrine of creation. They add that human beings have not lost their free will, and are therefore able to cooperate with grace and contribute to salvation. We, however, see the need to underline the New Testament antitheses regarding salvation. ‘It is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not of works, so that no-one can boast.’ ‘We...know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.’ Again, ‘he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy’.60 We cannot avoid the stark alternative which such texts put before us. Not works, but grace. Not law, but faith. Not our righteous deeds but his mercy. There is no co-operation here between God and us, only a choice between two mutually exclusive ways, his and ours. Moreover, the faith which justifies is emphatically not another work. No, to say ‘justification by faith’ is merely another way of saying ‘justification by Christ’. Faith has absolutely no value in itself; its value lies solely in its object. Faith is the eye that looks to Christ, the hand that lays hold of him, the mouth that drinks the water of life. And the more clearly we see the absolute adequacy of Jesus Christ’s divine-human person and sin-bearing death, the more incongruous does it appear that anybody could suppose that we have anything to offer. That is why justification by faith alone, to quote Cranmer again, ‘advances the true glory of Christ and beats down the vain glory of man’.
If we desire to press Roman Catholics on these points, however, we need also to respond to their pressures upon us. The chief might be a series of questions like the following. ‘Do you still insist that when God justifies sinners he “pronounces” but does not “make” them righteous? that justification is a legal declaration, not a moral transformation? that righteousness is “imputed” to us, but neither “infused” in us nor even “imparted” to us? that we put on Christ’s righteousness like a cloak, which conceals our continuing sinfulness? that justification, while changing our status, leaves our character and conduct unchanged? that every justified Christian, as the Reformers taught, is simul justus et peccator (at one and the same time a righteous person and a sinner)? If so, is not justification a legal fiction, even a giant hoax, a phoney transaction external to yourself, which leaves you inwardly unrenewed? Are you not claiming to be changed when in fact you are not changed? Is not your doctrine of “justification by faith alone” a thinly disguised free licence to go on sinning?’
These are searching questions. In one way or another, I have heard all of them asked. And there is no doubt that we Evangelicals, in our zeal to emphasize the utter freeness of salvation, have sometimes been incautious in our phraseology, and have given the impression that good works are of no importance. But then the apostle Paul could evidently be incautious too, since his critics flung exactly the same charge at him, which led him to cry: ‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase?’ (Rom. 6:1). His indignant riposte to his own rhetorical question was to remind his readers of their baptism. Did they not know that, when they were baptized into Christ Jesus, they were baptized into his death? Having thus died with him to sin, how could they possibly live in it any longer? (vv. 2–3).
What Paul was doing by this response was to show that justification is not the only image of salvation. It would be entirely mistaken to make the equation ‘salvation equals justification’. ‘Salvation’ is the comprehensive word, but it has many facets which are illustrated by different pictures, of which justification is only one. Redemption, as we have seen, is another, and bears witness to our radical deliverance from sin as well as guilt. Another is re-creation, so that ‘if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:17). Yet another is regeneration or new birth, which is the inward work of the Holy Spirit, who then remains as a gracious indwelling presence, transforming the believer into the image of Christ, which is the process of sanctification. All these belong together. Regeneration is not an aspect of justification, but both are aspects of salvation, and neither can take place without the other. Indeed, the great affirmation ‘he saved us’ is broken down into its component parts, which are ‘the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit’ on the one hand and being ‘justified by his grace’ on the other (Titus 3:5–7). The justifying work of the Son and the regenerating work of the Spirit cannot be separated. It is for this reason that good works of love follow justification and new birth as their necessary evidence. For salvation, which is never ‘by works’, is always ‘unto works’. Luther used to illustrate the correct order of events by reference to the tree and its fruit: ‘The tree must be first, and then the fruit. For the apples make not the tree, but the tree makes the apples. So faith first makes the person, who afterwards brings forth works.’61
Once we hold fast that the work of the Son for us and the work of the Spirit in us, that is to say, justification and regeneration, are inseparable twins, it is quite safe to go on insisting that justification is an external, legal declaration that the sinner has been put right with God, forgiven and reinstated. This is plain from the popular use of the word. As Leon Morris has pointed out, ‘when we speak of justifying an opinion or an action, we do not mean that we change or improve it. Rather we mean that we secure a verdict for it, we vindicate it’.62 Similarly, when Luke says that everybody, on hearing Jesus’ teaching, ‘justified God’, what he means is that they ‘acknowledged that God’s way was right’ (Luke 7:29).
The vocabulary of justification and condemnation occurs regularly in the Old Testament. Moses gave instructions to the Israelite judges that they were to decide cases referred to them, ‘acquitting (i.e. justifying) the innocent and condemning the guilty’ (Deut. 25:1). Everybody knew that Yahweh would never ‘acquit (justify) the guilty’ (Exod. 23:7), and that ‘acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent – the LORD detests them both’ (Prov. 17:15). The prophet Isaiah pronounced a fierce woe against magistrates who ‘acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent’ (5:23). To condemn the righteous and justify the unrighteous would be to turn the administration of justice on its head. It is against this background of accepted judicial practice that Paul must have shocked his Roman readers when he wrote that ‘God...justifies the wicked’ (Rom. 4:5). How could God conceivably do such a thing? It was outrageous that the Divine Judge should practise what – in the very same Greek words – he had forbidden human judges to do. Besides, how could the Righteous One declare the unrighteous righteous? The very thought was preposterous.
In order to summarize Paul’s defence of the divine justification of sinners, I will select four of his key phrases, which relate successively to justification’s source, ground, means and effects. First, the source of our justification is indicated in the expression justified by his grace (Rom. 3:24), that is, by his utterly undeserved favour. Since it is certain that ‘there is no-one righteous, not even one’ (Rom. 3:10), it is equally certain that no-one can declare himself to be righteous in God’s sight.63 Self-justification is a sheer impossibility (Rom. 3:20). Therefore, ‘it is God who justifies’ (Rom. 8:33); only he can. And he does it ‘freely’ (Rom. 3:24, dōrean, ‘as a free gift, gratis’), not because of any works of ours, but because of his own grace. In Tom Wright’s neat epigram, ‘no sin, no need for justification: no grace, no possibility of it’.64
Grace is one thing, however; justice is another. And justification has to do with justice. To say that we are ‘justified by his grace’ tells us the source of our justification, but says nothing about a righteous basis of it, without which God would contradict his own justice. So another key expression of Paul’s, which introduces us to the ground of our justification, is justified by his blood (Rom. 5:9). Justification is not a synonym for amnesty, which strictly is pardon without principle, a forgiveness which overlooks – even forgets (amnēstia is ‘forgetfulness’) – wrongdoing and declines to bring it to justice. No, justification is an act of justice, of gracious justice. Its synonym is ‘the righteousness of God’ (Rom. 1:17; 3:21), which might for the moment be explained as his ‘righteous way of righteoussing the unrighteous’. Dr J. I. Packer defines it as ‘God’s gracious work of bestowing upon guilty sinners a justified justification, acquitting them in the court of heaven without prejudice to his justice as their Judge’.65 When God justifies sinners, he is not declaring bad people to be good, or saying that they are not sinners after all; he is pronouncing them legally righteous, free from any liability to the broken law, because he himself in his Son has borne the penalty of their law-breaking. That is why Paul is able to bring together in a single sentence the concepts of justification, redemption and propitiation (Rom. 3:24–25). The reasons why we are ‘justified freely by God’s grace’ are that Christ Jesus paid the ransom-price and that God presented him as a propitiatory sacrifice. In other words, we are ‘justified by his blood’. There could be no justification without atonement.
Thirdly, the means of our justification is indicated in Paul’s favourite expression justified by faith.66 Grace and faith belong indissolubly to one another, since faith’s only function is to receive what grace freely offers. We are not, therefore, justified ‘by’ our faith, as we are justified ‘by’ God’s grace and ‘by’ Christ’s blood. God’s grace is the source and Christ’s blood the ground of our justification; faith is only the means by which we are united to Christ. As Richard Hooker put it with his usual precision: ‘God doth justify the believing man, yet not for the worthiness of his belief, but for his worthiness who is believed.’67
Further, if faith is only the means, it is also the only means. Although the word ‘only’ does not occur in the Greek of Romans 3:28, it was a right instinct of Luther’s, as we have seen, and indeed a correct translation, to render Paul’s expression ‘we maintain that a man is justified by faith only, apart from observing the law’. The point of his writing ‘by faith apart from works of law’ was to exclude law-works altogether, leaving faith as the sole means of justification. And Paul has already given his reason in the previous verse, namely to exclude boasting. For unless all human works, merits, co-operation and contributions are ruthlessly excluded, and Christ’s sin-bearing death is seen in its solitary glory as the only ground of our justification, boasting cannot be excluded. Cranmer saw this clearly: ‘This saying, that we be justified by faith only, freely, and without works, is spoken for to take away clearly all merit of our works, as being unable to deserve our justification at God’s hands,...and thereby wholly for to ascribe the merit and deserving of our justification unto Christ only and his most precious bloodshedding....And this form of speaking we use in the humbling of ourselves to God, and to give all the glory to our Saviour Christ, who is best worthy to have it.’68
Fourthly, what are the effects of our justification? I think we can deduce them from another, and sometimes neglected, Pauline expression, namely that we are justified in Christ.69 To say that we are justified ‘through Christ’ points to his historical death; to say that we are justified ‘in Christ’ points to the personal relationship with him which by faith we now enjoy. This simple fact makes it impossible for us to think of justification as a purely external transaction; it cannot be isolated from our union with Christ and all the benefits which this brings. The first is membership of the Messianic community of Jesus. If we are in Christ and therefore justified, we are also the children of God and the true (spiritual) descendants of Abraham. Further, no racial, social or sexual barrier can come between us. This is the theme of Galatians 3:26–29. Tom Wright is surely correct in his emphasis that ‘justification is not an individualist’s charter, but God’s declaration that we belong to the covenant community’.70 Secondly, this new community, to create which Christ gave himself on the cross, is to be ‘eager to do what is good’, and its members are to devote themselves to good works.71 So there is no ultimate conflict between Paul and James. They may have been using the verb ‘justify’ in different senses. They were certainly writing against different heresies, Paul against the self-righteous legalism of the Judaizers and James against the dead orthodoxy of the intellectualizers. Yet both teach that an authentic faith works, Paul stressing the faith that issues in works, and James the works that issue from faith.72
The new community of Jesus is an eschatological community which lives already in the new age he inaugurated. For justification is an eschatological event. It brings forward into the present the verdict which belongs to the last judgment. That is why the church is a community of hope, which looks with humble confidence into the future. To be sure, we can say with Paul that the law condemned us. But ‘there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’. Why not? Because God has done for us what the law could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of our sinful nature to be a sin offering, he actually condemned our sin in the human Jesus. It is only because he was condemned that we could be justified. What then have we to fear? ‘Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died – more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.’ That is why, once we have been justified, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.73