1. One of the most common reproaches is that "the Protestant
Philip Schaff
is the possession of God; consequently in itself of beatifying nature, in itself the assurance of salvation. To be united to God in Christ is to be saved. But faith is the consciousness of this communion. As nothing makes a man living but life, nothing makes him joyful or loving but joy or love, so he can be made blessed only by faith, which is the same thing with blessedness itself.*
At the same time to be sure, since faith is at one time large and strong, as Luther says, at another small and weak, this assurance of justification must naturally rise and fall in the same way.t
Before passing over to the formal principle, it may be well, in view of the immense importance of the Protestant doctrine of justification, to notice the most acute and weighty objections that have been urged against it on the part of Roman Catholic and pseudo-Protestant, or rationalistic opposers.
1. One of the most common reproaches is that "the Protestant theory of justification encourages a thoughtless reliance on grace and neglect of good works." Here, however, the curse turns into a blessing. For the same reproach was brought against the doctrine of the apostle Paul?; and it serves to show consequently that * This assurance of salvation, as secured to us by faith, is proclaimed in the loftiest style by the old church psalmody, and by Luther himself in a thousand places, as for instance in his sermon on the gosp. D. 20. p. trin.?6 where among other things he says: "If death make onset, so have I Christ; he is my life. If sin make onset, so have I Christ; he is my righteousness. If hell and damnation make onset, so have I Christ; he is my salvation. Set in upon me thus what may, still I have Christ; him J can hold forward as my shield, so that nothing can do me harm." Calvin's Jnstit., III, 2, 16—In summa: vere fidelis non est, nisi qui solida persuasione Deum sibi propitium benevolumque patrem esse persuasus, de ejus benignitate omnia sibi pollicetur; nisi qui divinae erga se benevolentiae promissionibus fretus, indubitatam salutis expectationem praesumit.
+ Calvin's Instit., III, 2, 17: Nos certe dum fidem docemus esse debere certam ac securam, non certitudinem aliquam imaginamur, quae nulla tangatur dubitatione, nec securitatem, quae nulla sollicitudine impetatur; quin potius dicimus, perpetuum esse fidelibus certamen cum sua ipsorum diffdentia.
Tantum abest ut eorum conscientias in placida aliqua quiete collocemus, quae nullis omnino turbis interpelletur.
+ Romans 3:8: "We be slanderously reported, and some affirm that we say, Let us do evil, that good may come." Romans 5:10 compared with 6:1; Galatians 5:13. When Peter says in his 2d Epistle, 3:16, that there are some things in the epistles of Paul hard to understand, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest to their own destruction, he has the doctrine of justification mainly in his eye.
The Principle of Protestantism we agree with him. As he could triumphantly point such calumniators to the moral exhortations contained in all his epistles and also to his own life, so do we with like confidence hold up to our opponents our symbolical books and the lives of the Reformers themselves, whose moral earnestness and untiring practical activity were such as to cast all their contemporaries into the shade.
2. "It is not possible that God, who is truth itself, can declare a man to be righteous, and treat him as such, when he is not such in fact." The mere treatment involves no difficulty. Even in the sphere of the natural life, God treats us better than we deserve, causing the sun to shine, and giving rain, for the benefit of the ungodly as well as of the good and pious. The nature of grace, which falls, it is true, beyond the range of abstract justice, consists always in this, that the offender is released from merited punishment, and put into the positive enjoyment of freedom; that being thus subdued and humbled, he may be led to pursue a better life.
Love also in general, of which grace is only a particular modification, shows in its highest utterances the very same character, without which it could never be exercised toward an enemy.
When some unfortunate has fallen into the water, the philanthropist stops not to inquire, even if it be his own enemy, whether he is worthy of being rescued, but plunges at once into the stream, and by his noble, self-forgetting conduct wins the heart of him whose life he saves.
The whole difficulty then in the case before us must turn, not upon God's treatment of the believer, but upon the idea of his declaring a man to be what he is not in fact. If, however, practice and judgment are to be saved from irreconcilable contradiction with each other, the first must involve here the supposition again of the second. When God is represented by the apostle as having loved men while they were yet sinners, it does not mean that he loved them as sinners, which would be to have loved sin itself in them, whereas this is always his abomination; but he loved them as creatures, who were capable of redemption, and in this view worthy of being loved. He loved the divine nature which was in them potentially, having reality indeed only in his own purpose, but destined, through the manifestation of his grace
and love, to actualize itself and become real subjectively also in man himself.
Men are declared righteous then by God, not so far as they are sinners, but so far only as they are in Christ, and have thus in this objective way the principle of righteousness in fact; and this justifying act becomes itself the occasion, by which the principle is actualized in its subject, having creative force, quickening the dead, and calling into existence that which had no existence before. The justifying grace of God does not stand over against the convicted sinner in an abstract form, but passes over to him through the medium of faith, sets him in its own element, and thus lodges in his person a life germ altogether new, in which is comprehended from the start the entire growth of holiness. So Abraham was called a father of many nations, before he was so actually. Ideally, however, in the divine plan he was such in the fullest sense.
God, before whom the dimensions of time all give way in the same vast eternity, looks upon men in their inmost nature as rooted in Christ, with whom they are brought into living union by faith. For the relation of Christ to humanity is not outward, but inward and essential. He is the second Adam, the spiritual head of the race, the true center of all its individual personalities, in which only the idea of the whole is fully realized and made complete. This whole objection then proceeds upon a perfectly abstract conception of the doctrine of justification, which admits the thought of a judgment in the divine mind that is not at the same time creative; and only against such a conception of the case can it be allowed to have any force.
Many of the Lutheran theologians did indeed lean toward this extreme, in their anti-Pelagian zeal; but it was not so with the Reformed. They always acknowledged the true element here in the catholic doctrine, without sanctioning its Pelagianistic trait.*
* Comp. particularly the whole 11th chapter of the third book of Calvin's Institutes; for example, § 6, where this agreement and difference are both very clearly stated: Sicut non potest decerpi Christus in partes, ita inseparabilia esse haec duo, quae simul et conjunctim in ipso percipimus, justitiam et sanctificationem.
Quoscunque ergo in gratiam recipit Deus, simul spiritu adoptionis donat, cujus virtute eos reformat ad suam imaginem. Verum, Si solis claritas non potest a calore separari, an ideo dicemus luce calefieri terram,