Justification
Justification
1. Considerations on the history of the doctrine.-Justification by faith formulates the distinctive principle of Protestantism. It has been a war-cry and word of passion, and embodies a spiritual and theological conflict. It claimed to be an advance on the Catholic idea, as more true to apostolic experience and more adequate to the sinners need. It is advisable at the outset to investigate this claim as preparatory to a dispassionate analysis of the apostolic doctrine. Justification is a complex conception. Neither in Luther nor in the Council of Trent are ambiguities and inconsistencies wanting. The combatants on both sides in subsequent controversy have in consequence easily fallen into serious misunderstandings. The vital current re-animating modern religious theory is disclosing the fact,* [Note: particularly inter multos alios Ritschl in his great work, Die christl. Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Vershnung, Bonn, 1870-74, i. and iii.] and producing a better-proportioned perspective. Rid of the war-dust, we see clearly the salient features of the main respective positions and their conspicuous divergences. What are these? It is a rich, fresh experience Luther describes in his finest statement of his faith. The Liberty of the Christian Man. It finds no commensurate exposition in the Lutheran or Reformed Confessions. Luther himself was no theologian; and his varying expressions are difficult to harmonize. But the tendency of his teaching is plain. [Note: For Luthers works consult the Erlangen ed., 1826ff.; H. Wace and C. A. Buchheim, Luthers Primary Works, London, 1896.] The character of Tridentine teaching is as plain. Luthers is aus einem Gusse (of one mould), born of an intense travail of soul. The Catholic, polemical in import and comprehensive of aspect, has in view efficient discipline of souls. Grace, according to Luther, is known in personal relationship with Christ (Com. on Gal 2:20); it is a sense of Gods favour; it saves from Gods wrath; it saves at once and wholly by Gods free mercy, is a complete and perfect thing, conditioned upon faith, bringing with it assurance of salvation (see Against Latomus). It is, in his own words, the favour of God not a quality of soul (ib. 489), identical with forgiveness, release from His wrath, enjoyment of His favour, a present status rather than a new character. To receive such grace is to be justified. The Council of Trent* [Note: The best ed. of the Decrees of Trent is that of A. L. Richer and F. Schulte, Leipzig, 1853.] defines its doctrine in reference to three questions: the manner of gaining justification, of maintaining it, and of regaining it when lost through mortal sin. The answers are that it is gained in baptism, through which are received not only remission of sins but sanctification and renewal of the inner man (sess. vi. ch. 7); it is maintained by performance of good works, keeping the commandments of God and the Church, resulting in an increase of justification (ch. 10); it is regained by penance and penitential satisfactions (ch. 14). That which truly justifies the heart is grace, which is daily created and poured into our hearts (J. Fischers Refutation of Luther, 1523). Grace on this view is a Divine substance, [Note: For the recent ideas of Catholic divines on justification see art. In CE.] ex opere operato imparted, increased by mans aid, dependent on faith and good works as co-ordinate in worth, all part and parcel of the same idea, the infusion of grace-the novel feature in Catholic dogma. Catholic dogma, equally with Protestant, safeguards the Divine initiative and the work of Christ, but neither the honour of Christ nor individual assurance, since, concerning the former, Christ, though His righteousness is available for our salvation, is not regarded as indwelling in us as our Righteousness; and, concerning the latter, the organized machinery of means of grace brings in all the elements of uncertainty, leaving the doctrine unsatisfactory in the most crucial point, Luthers is a purely religious conception, vastly deeper within its limits than the other, comprising not only pardon of sin and escape from the Divine wrath, but peace of conscience and assurance of salvation. Its weakest features are the idea of faith, which is limited to belief and trust in Christs satisfaction, apart from subjective appropriation of its experience through the indwelling Christ which faith makes possible, and the resulting unbridged chasm between justification and sanctification; and the lack of any really vital relation between the new status and the new character of the justified. [Note: For Luthers doctrinal position consult J. Kstlin. Life of Luther, Eng. tr., London, 1883, and T. M. Lindsay, Luther and the German Reformation, Edinburgh, 1900.] Judged by the standard of apostolic truth, both fall short. In the apostolic consciousness justification is more than merely Gods favour or pardon of sins: it is release from the power as well as guilt of sin, a new character, in principle at least, with the new status. Therein the Catholic opposition to Luther was justified. But the new character is erroneously regarded by Catholicism as the gradual transformation of human nature (which is sanctification), a process in this life always incomplete, and liable to be imperilled by stagnation and lapse. Nor are the Catholic formulae adequate to the profoundly spiritual and final representations in apostolic experience of the acts and operations of grace in the believing heart through the instrumentality of Christs Person and Spirit. This, however, is a deficiency only in theology; it is compensated for in actual religions practice in the Sacrifice of the Mass, where faith is more genially receptive and heartfelt devotion more warmly active in realizing the real presence of Christ in all His justifying force. The Mass is to the creed in the Roman system what, so to speak, Hebrews is to Romans* [Note: See 3, v. Hebrews.] in Pauline thought.
2. The problem of justification.-Justification is a religious problem, the answer to an interior inquiry of Christian experience. The OT cry, How is man just with God? is deepened in the NT: How is God gracious? and How are we sure of His grace? That again is the problem of fellowship with God-the most engrossing of modern quests. Of fellowship with God the very foundation and certainty is justification. In consequence modern spiritual philosophy is eagerly interested. It is better equipped to cope with the exquisitely delicate character of the inquiry than any past age. The modern idea of Divine immanence in Nature and man adds immeasurably to our perception of the nature of the human spirit, its workings, their relation to the Divine Spirit; and furnishes a key to the representation and reconstruction of inner soul-processes beyond the apparatus of the older theology. The mystical emotion is its highest form, and is no exceptional super-addition to mans nature; rather it is his natural consummation. It is not merely the secret action of the mind upon itself; while an inborn instinct, it comes to distinct form and growth from causes objective to itself, operating on it by the inworking of external and historical circumstance and the exercise and outworking of ethical faculty. Psychologically it is not of the ordinary emotive life; it is higher, inclusive of all the parts of human nature, gathering up into itself all those inner powers in whose interplay under its guidance and inspiration in one harmonious unity its life consists. In operation it is wholly personal, conscious, energetic, intensely individual. Into it enters the force of historic fact, out of it passes the power of moral life; but itself is a self inbreathing the one, out-breathing the other. The constitution of this self is the modern construction of justification. The life of that self is communion with God; justification is its origin and basis.
What is the origin?-the Divine graciousness [Note: This in the sense of grace Luther; cf. A. C. McGiffert, Prostestant Thought before Kant, London, 1911, p. 28.] (Luther) or Divine grace (Catholic); a reckoning righteous, or a making righteous [Note: The familiar contrast between Romanist and Protestant ideas.] by God? Neither of these alternatives standing solitary is to-day an intelligible concept applicable to the Divine or the human personality; nor is the one or the other a felt fact of religious experience, the ultimate test of every theory. These are otiose ideas, as useless as absolute ideas. God and His grace cannot be otiose. He speaks and it is done. His grace is at once, as grace, prescient and prevenient, operans and co-operans, sufficient and efficient, and cannot be defined in merely legal or logical terms, or, in fact, in anything short of that interpenetration of essence of Gods self or character [Note: The Only adequate phrase to denote the NT conception of the relation of the ransomed soul to its Redeemer.] with mans self or character, bestowing on mans its profoundest promise and potency; and instanter translating it into the status and character of life that is being sanctified after His image, and on His initiative. What Protestant thought clumsily encloses within two notions, justification and imputation,|| [Note: | Imputation is specially offensive to modern ethical sensitiveness; the sense of responsibility insists that each is himself, not another.] may be regarded under one more modern-development. Then, mans self is appreciated from the Divine standpoint, as God saw creation in its first being, not as it actually is in present attainment, nor as it will be in perfect fruition, but as it is ideally becoming when put upon the right basis and in the right atmosphere, the condition we find in the stature of a perfect man-Christ-the root and direction rather than the end or goal determining the judgment of its character. That appreciation is justification.
The faculty of self by whose exercise the new status and generation are attained is faith. By faith the Divine Life dwells in mans soul and Divine truth becomes power. Faith here is more than spiritual insight, it is spiritual grasp; more than a receptive force, it is also the bestowing fact, softening the harsh independence of these two realities. The truth is that every approach of God to man has a true tendency to create the faith without which the approach can never become a real entrance. Faith is mans welcome of Him, created in mans heart, as the face of a friend coming towards us reclaims us for his friendship. Faith again is more than assent or trust: it is the souls entrance into healthy relationship to Him who is its true life; an entrance fuller or weaker according to the souls capacity, and ever growing with the souls growth. Faith thus understood widens its mental and emotional constituents. God and man underneath all obscuring media are of like nature; God is the element of mans true life.* [Note: St. Augustine, Confessions, i. 1: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts restless till it find its rest in Thee.] God is unceasingly solicitous in seeking man, and, finding man reciprocate, apprehends him, but as Life apprehending life, or the ocean refreshing the tides eddy, or the tree quickening the branch. The term justification may be technically a juridical one, but that which it aims at expressing is in idea and fact a spiritual transaction unexpressible in forensic terms, not even conceivable as a process having acts and stages. It may better be compared to a gem [Note: the soul us pearl (Mat 13:46).] having many facets, simultaneous, not successive, and glowing in enhancing splendour with every further advance into light. This is the essence of the idea in believing experience. It is also the essence of the idea in the apostolic conscience-the love of God seeking the love of man and finding it. [Note: the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the perfect picture of justification.]
3. The apostolic doctrine of justification.-The apostolic doctrine is characterized by a singular originality, comprehensiveness, self-consistency, and spirituality. Its systematic statement is elaborate, developing itself consciously along three lines-experiential, historical, speculative. A careful analysis is necessary to separate its essential substance and abiding cogency from their first local form. Its originality is evident when compared with similar ideas in ethnic and Jewish religion; its comprehensive and self-consistent character by the exhibition of its contents; its spirituality by the demonstration of its purely religious validity; its permanent worth by the absoluteness with which it solves the religious problem of which avowedly it is an answer.
i. Originality.-The idea of justification does not originate with Christianity, although truly it comes to its full expression there. Wherever religion becomes personal in actual communion with God, it brings with itself inquiry as to the specific nature of the power known and felt and the peculiar character of its working in the soul. This we find occurring in religious history generally, and especially in Hebrew religion. Ethnic faiths for the most part are so lacking in belief in a personal God that the inquiry hardly anywhere attains more than rudimentary shape. Even in more advanced faiths the Divine personality is mingled with such unworthy elements that fruitful conceptions are rare. The indelible convictions won are only two: the gravity of the need, and the failure of provision to meet the need. A more positive impetus enters with Semitic religion, in whose religious observances the reception of the Divine life is increasingly the centre of attention. The growing consciousness of Divine force is mediated in the Hebrew spirit by sacrifice, prayer, wisdom, and prophetic inspiration; in the experience of suffering also very notably, as in Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah; in mystical union with the righteous spirit of the Law, as in the finer Psalms; and realized as pardon of sin (Psalms 32), life in Gods favour (Psalms 30), righteousness (Psalms 4, etc.), mercy, and salvation, covering all aspects of the souls state. The Law at its best (Psalms 119) was spirit and life, obedience to its precepts clothing the spirit and life of man with their imperishable energy, which is none other than that of God who gave them. Pre-Christian evolution deepened the conscience in at least three directions-the difficulty in the way of justification, the possibility of its accomplishment, the mode and means of its reality. The advent of Christ, the tout ensemble of His Person and Work as one organic influence, raised the whole problem in apostolic experience and thought to an incomparably richer plane, on which, while the difficulty is enlarged, the possibilities are matured and a final mode with adequate means provided. Here the centre of gravity is Christ and His own justification (1Ti 3:16, Hebrews 3, 5, 6): being manifest in the flesh, he was justified in the spirit. Wherein consists His being justified? The true answer is-in all that by which His higher origin was made known (His glory in St. John, manifested in words, works, resurrection [Joh 7:46 etc. Joh 2:11; Joh 3:2; Joh 14:11; cf. Mat 7:29, Rom 1:4, Act 2:36, etc.]; His high-priesthood[Hebrews 3, 5, 6]; His righteousness [Rom 10:4, 1Co 1:30, 2Co 5:21, Php 3:9, etc., in St. Paul]). It is a description drawn in contrast with the preceding phrase, manifest in the flesh and includes all by which He is proved to be the very Person He truly was.* [Note: His own use of the word justified (Luk 7:35).] This general proof is further specialized into the events of His Death and Resurrection, its ultimate and most impressive parts, which as such procured the redemption from sin through which we are justified (Rom 5:9; Rom 4:25, Hebrews 8, 9, 10). His own justification consisted in the accomplished fact of His perfect holiness and His risen life. It is ours after the same manner; only it is His righteousness that is mediated to us to become ours, and that in virtue of our union with Him by faith (Rom 3:22-26; Romans 5). The old distress of mans nature is irrevocably dissolved under the assured potency of the new condition in which it stands.
ii. Completeness.-The general meaning of justification is clear, nay simple; but the greatly simple is the organization of the complex. And the apostolic exposition is complex. It comprehends many elements, commands a variety of relations. It derives its material from the Apostles unique fellowship with the glorified Lord; and that experience, fundamentally the same in all, is varied by the diversity of individuality in each. Again, the reasoning of the apostles relates itself directly to immediate issues and is affected by the circumstances of the readers to whom it is addressed. Further, the intellectual equipment of the writers colours their statements. To all this we must add the fact that their doctrine had to establish itself on the successful displacement of two solutions already on the field, one of them strongly entrenched, viz. the ministration of the Law. The most systematic and dispassionate statement is given by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans, with which is to be associated the subsidiary matter (more or less disputatious) in Eph., 2 Cor., Gal., etc. Isolated references and aspects of the doctrine, more or less complete, are to be found in Acts, the General Epistles, and Hebrews. The relation of these to one another, and of them all to the Synoptic teaching of Jesus Himself, has to be adverted to.
(1) St. Paul.-Justification is by Gods grace (Rom 3:24; Rom 4:5, Eph 2:8, Tit 3:7), by mans faith (Act 13:39, Rom 5:1), by Christs Death (Rom 5:9), by His Resurrection (Rom 4:25). It is a justification of the ungodly (Rom 4:5, 2Co 5:19, etc.); it is not of works of the Law (Rom 3:20, Gal 3:11, etc.), not of the law written in the heart, the uncircumcision (Rom 2:15). It is not inconsistent with judgment by works (1Co 9:27, Php 3:8-14). It is for remission of sins (Rom 3:25), peace with God, access into grace and hope of glory (Rom 5:1-2), righteousness (Rom 4:22; Rom 4:24; Rom 5:17; Rom 3:22, 2Co 5:21, Php 3:9), for life (Rom 5:18 : a justification taking effect in life), which is through the body of Christ (Rom 7:4) and by His Spirit (Eph 2:18, Rom 5:15; Rom 8:2; Rom 8:4; Rom 8:6; Rom 8:10-11, etc.). To the foregoing add the corroborative statement in Romans 4 as to Abrahams justification. There are five points. Justification is by faith, not works (Rom 4:4-5), therefore by grace (Rom 4:16). Being by grace through faith, it came not through law but through promise (Rom 4:14; cf. Gal 3:18). It is not by circumcision or outward privilege (Rom 4:9-11); it leaves no room for boasting or self-righteous confidence (Rom 3:27, Rom 4:2). According to the Apostle, justification is not an act of man but an act of God. It issues from His holy Fatherly love and righteousness, which can have no possible relation to unrighteousness but that of wrath. It is fundamentally related to believing self-surrender and trust (faith) on mans part. It is manifested in the historical work of Jesus. Its force resides in God, the object of faith, as He in His righteousness and clemency appears in the Death and Life after Death of His Son, by whose life we are saved (Rom 5:10). This justification it not cogently interpreted as a reckoning righteous,* [Note: The meaning of the term, a Judicial word.] nor as a making righteous; it is more than the first, and other than the second. It includes the juridical features within the larger personal and spiritual, for there enter into it (a) grace and (b) faith, (c) Christs Spirit and (d) the believer in Christ, all in a plane of spirit and life. Here God cannot just be understood as a Judge acquitting a criminal; [Note: To Him as Judge the situation is a legal impasse out of which there is no legal way; recourse is had to the Divine clemency.] the culprit has his position completely reversed, and is advanced to the honours and privileges to which he would have been entitled by a perfect obedience. [Note: W. P. Paterson, Pauline Theology, London, 1903. p. 71.] He not only goes free from merited penalty; he is transferred in to a new freedom for righteous service, gains unrestricted admittance to the operations of grace, the right of sonship, with all the glorious future involved. All that future is here in its initial stage in germ, so that the whole is regarded as already in the potential possession of the believer, and God gives as God and Father, not after the manner of an earthly tribunal. The stress of the Pauline statement rests on the fact that he conceives the energies of the Spirit to be liberated for the believer by the justifying Death of Christ, and mediated to the believer by the present life of the Lord, the Spirit (2Co 3:17), to whom the believer is joined to form one spirit (1Co 6:17). It is a statement of spirit, not logic; experience and life, not legal forms. [Note: Paul uses metaphors, some drawn from juristic terminology, others from the ceremonial on the Great Day of Atonement. These metaphors are to be interpreted not in separation but in their combined cumulative effect, if the comprehensive character of his idea is to be maintained.]
The Apostle proceeds next to plead for its efficacy by contrasting it with two earlier attempts in the history of the race to restore mans righteousness-attempts which had miserably failed. There was first the working of the natural conscience in the Gentile world. There is a light of nature which offers knowledge sufficient to impress on men the fact that their just due to God is full obedience to His will. By their wilful disobedience that light that was in them had been turned to darkness, with the result not of heightening the possibilities of human nature, but rather of increasing its unrighteousness, in fellowship with the god of this world, the Devil; and now the world was lying in wickedness under Gods wrath (Rom 1:22; Rom 1:25; Rom 3:9-10, Gal 3:22, Eph 2:2), and, in the individual heart, earnestly endeavouring to keep from its contamination, the conflict proved the prepotency of sin (Romans 7). Then there was the moral conscience trained under the Law of Moses. It was designed to remedy the moral disaster of the natural conscience. Was it successful?-It had been most ineffectual. Law could not make alive (Gal 3:21) either in its precepts or in their sanctions. It might furnish an ideal of right and deepen the consciousness of sin, and it might educate to a higher type of virtue. It could also, on the contrary, incite to larger disobedience and to fresh vices. Its rigours working on sensitive souls tended to paralyze the will. But the only solution must lie in re-inforcement of the will. In Christ alone was that end won. He is the Wisdom and Power of God, to them who believe, ideal and motive force in one Spirit. Nothing short of the religious conscience renewed by Him could suffice. The religious conscience begins in one subjective act on mans part, the act of faith. It is preceded or accompanied by repentance, but it is itself the simple, childlike, submissive, enthusiastic, unconditional self-surrender of the mans whole being, intellect, affections, purpose, to the will of God in Christ.* [Note: We are not here concerned with the Rabbinic form of St. Pauls argumentation nor with the character of his judgment on Gentile and Jew, but only with his thought.]
(2) St. James.-The Epistle of St. James emphasizes two practical consequences of faith. (a) It works in the heart as a new law, obedience to the perfect, royal law of liberty (Jam 1:25; Jam 2:8). The point here is the contrast between the external compelling force of the older Law and the internal impelling force of the new, the word in the heart, able to save the soul (Jam 1:21). (b) It works in the conduct as good works. The controversy that has arisen over the supposed antagonism between St. Paul and St. James is barren, and need not detain us. Faith and works have two different connotations in the two instances. St. James means by faith not self-surrender so-much as mental assent, and by works not the legal deeds enjoined by the Law, but acts of mercy and kindness prompted by the law of love in the soul. The motive and interest of the two apostles differ; there is no room for opposition. Faith to St. James, as to St. Paul, is the pre-condition of good works, and the condition of acceptance with God. Like St. Paul also, he sees justifying energy active in the concrete circumstances of life-a man is blessed not through but in his deed. Further, there is no suggestion of merit in these good works of faith. The sub-apostolic age was not slow to materialize both the new law and the merit of works, but St. James is not responsible. [Note: For a different view of St. Jamess position, see Piepen-bring, Jsus et les Aptres.]
(3) St. Peter.-From the speeches (Acts 3) and First Epistle we gather three features. (a) In justification the pardon of sins and clearing of guilt are explicitly connected with Christs sufferings (Act 3:18 f., 1Pe 1:19; 1Pe 2:24); also, as the righteous suffering for the unrighteous, Christ brings us to God (1Pe 3:18). (b) The gift of grace is the result of Christs Resurrection (1Pe 1:21); it is the ground and guarantee of the new life and of the gift of strength to overcome Satan. (c) The coming of grace into the heart finds its necessary complement in the life of love for the brethren. In the Second Epistle both freedom from sins and the power to work the righteousness of God depend upon faith in and knowledge of Christ (2Pe 1:5; 2Pe 1:9). Knowledge here is akin to the Johannine idea-the inner personal apprehension of the saving Spirit of Christ.
(4) St. John.-The Epistles and Apocalypse do not share in the fullness of volume of mystical idealism pervading the Gospel. Yet the essential elements are here-the unity of life with God in Christ, the significance of Christs Person, Death, Resurrection, fellowship with Him in sonship. Especially emphatic is the writer on the two facts, that it is Gods love to sinners, not sinners love to God, that is the ground of faith and healing; that in sonship are to be included religious as well as moral ideals. In the Apocalypse the same ideas are central-but under sacrificial designations: Christs Sacrifice (the Lamb) and Resurrection (alive for evermore) are the source of the stream of life proceeding from the very essence of God which, received by man, is in him a life of uninterrupted sacrifice.
(5) Hebrews.-This Epistle is a continuation of the Pauline apologia for the gospel as against the claims of the Old Covenant. What is done in Romans for grace as against law is here done for Christs sacrifice as against Levitical offerings. Justification by faith is expounded in connexions different from those St. Paul and St. John have in view, and the exposition stands midway between theirs, filling up an evident lacuna. Some scholars assert that the problem is here less deeply discussed, justification being narrowed to forgiveness and faith to spiritual insight apart from spiritual grasp. That would be to leave Hamlet out of the play. The author has a definite aim, and, notwithstanding an obscuring vocabulary and analogies, elaborates it admirably. His aim is to demonstrate the accessibility of God through Christs sacrificial work. His demonstration puts in bold relief two aspects hitherto untouched in apostolic thought: (a) justification as a subjective fact as well as an objective act; (b) the principles of its mode. The justification of Christ (above, 3. i.) is constituted by His sinlessness, effected as a spiritual fact in His own experience. The justification of the sinner as a spiritual fact in his experience is effected after the same manner as in Christ, and by Christ: viz. in the purging of the conscience from dead works to serve the living God, and in resisting unto blood (Heb 9:14 ff.). These aspects are set forth in detail and give the book its character. In both Christ and the believer the inner experience is identical () through eternal Spirit (Heb 9:14) and () through their vital union: he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one (Heb 2:11). The word sanctify is used in this Epistle in its Hebraic sense of consecrate.* [Note: the NT use of saint-one or the covenant-people, the potentially holy-of whom moral qualifications are asserted not as a fact but as a duty. See F. J. A. Hort, The First Epistle of St. Peter, I. 1-11. 17, London, 1898, p. 70.] Just as in St. Paul the justified are accepted and become members of the Body of Christ, so in virtue of membership in the New Covenant, the believer, according to Hebrews, is set in right relation to God, receives forgiveness, cleansing of conscience, and is , even : by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified (Heb 10:14). The faculty in man rendering this possible is faith, whose full content it takes hope (Heb 6:19, Heb 7:19), obedience (Heb 5:8; Heb 5:11), as well as faith (Heb 11:1), to express. It is not merely spiritual perception of the unseen; it is rather the power of soul which makes the unseen future present, the unseen present visible, and by so doing unites us to Christ in His present and future plenitude (Heb 10:38-39), from whom flows the transforming influence creative of the graces of life which are never separated from faith nor faith from them.
The efficacy of His Sacrifice rests fundamentally on the majesty of His Person. His High-Priestly act is an expression of the eternal Spirit of the Divine love. By it He has destroyed every barrier of sin which lay between man and God. He has, as the sin-offering for humanity, freed all men potentially from the guilty consciousness of sin, and brought Christians to the heavenly rest of God. The emphasis is on what follows, viz.: the entering within the veil, less the surrender of His life than its presentation within the veil, implying that the love and merciful kindness of God, which were manifested in time and in the earthly ministry, are eternal and changeless principles perpetually operative on our behalf. This must ultimately be the ground of our acceptance and the assurance of our life in communion with Him. The benefits and efficacy of His perfect Sacrifice are conditioned by our attitude of faith and trust.
(6) The apostolic doctrine in relation to Christs teaching.-Is the apostolic teaching a necessary consequence of Christs self-witness? Yes; if certain considerations be kept in view. We see, e.g., that it was not drawn by conscious deduction. It is an original construction derived from life, from their experience of Christ revealing Himself in them (Gal 1:16), as Christs is from the manifold fruitfulness and insight of His own sublime Personality. Then we see it elaborated under stress of the Judaistic and Hellenistic environment of that age, in the endeavour to establish and justify itself in the intellectual atmosphere of the nascent Church-life. It was not possible to accomplish this with success except by a process which should display the hidden significance of what at first seemed so simple, and is so simple to simple hearts.* [Note: As, e.g., in Christs teaching.] That age, however, was not simple-hearted; [Note: , for a popular description, M. Arnolds Obermann.] it was a highly intellectual, profoundly perplexed, saddened age, sobbing its heart out in weakness; requiring accordingly the doctrine that would strengthen and comfort with effect to be in the mould of its own speculation and intuition. Christs teaching is a plain, positive statement on the practical religious plane, delivering itself as easily as the flow of the stream, in conflict only with the hindrances of indifference and want of faith. That attitude characterizes the General Epistles, which are close echoes of the Masters style, and directed to the same general consciousness of religion as His was. It is otherwise with the Pauline and Johannine Epistles: in them we have the underlying universal quality and principle of His teaching disclosed, beaten out inch by inch on the hard anvil of bitter controversy (Pauline); or reflecting the more lambent genius of the mystic (Johannine). The differences are great, but they are not oppositions, nor vitiations. The same facts are looked at and loved, by means of the same great powers of soul, and within the same great principles and convictions. [Note: , for an able vindication of this view of the relation of the apostolic doctrine to Christs, J. Denney, Jesus and the Gospel, London. 1908.] Nor must we forget that since Christs Person is the source of this inspiration and enlightenment, their statement is coloured throughout its whole extent by that all-pervading fact. It is a fact which leaves the writers free to be careless of superficial harmonizations, conscious as they are of the substantial unity below all apparent divergences and dissonances. That unity is impressive; its outlines strong and vivid. In contrast with Gentile wisdom and Jewish Law, which were both powerless to redeem men from sin, Christ stands out as Saviour. He is the answer to the age-long cry, How shall man be just with God? He is the new and living way of access into Gods presence (Heb 10:20), as He Himself claimed (Joh 14:6). By Him is proclaimed the forgiveness of sins (Act 13:38). He is exalted to give forgiveness (Act 5:31), and gives it (Eph 1:7, Col 1:14, etc.). He has broken down the wall of partition (Eph 2:14) and rent the veil of the Temple (Mat 27:51, Mar 15:38, Luk 23:45). He has effected so great salvation (Heb 2:3) in His own body on the tree (1Pe 2:24), by eternal Spirit (Heb 9:14), in Himself and for Himself, as the Author and Finisher of our faith, really, vitally, consciously, not with a dull sense of unintelligible burden, but wholly rationally, intensely spiritually, in an experience where the issues are of life and death, fought out in a fiery heat of thought and emotion, of deeply moving religious conscience. The apostolic consciousness has caught the rich impress of this travail of soul. It sets it forth for mankind in varying form and mode-the picture of the great and guiltless sorrow bearing the sins of the world, and, in bearing them, bearing them away. As the soul of the age was sobbing itself out, here a nobler soul shares the fellowship of its suffering and of all suffering, but not in weakness; for the pain is fully faced and taken up into conscious life, there to be transmuted into abiding life. Thus was Christ justified; thus are we.
iii. Spirituality and absoluteness.-Justification is a purely religious problem. The apostolic solution is purely religious. Its spirituality may be vindicated by reference to its source, its ground, its results.
(a) Grace the source.-Justification presupposes the election of grace (q.v. [Note: quod vide, which see.] ), to which is traced its unconditional freeness (Rom 3:24, Eph 1:7), its plenitude (Col 1:14, Rom 5:17, etc.), its Divine provision (1Jn 4:10, Rom 5:8; Rom 5:10). The riches and freeness of Gods grace are manifested in the redemption they provide. It is a manifestation in which there is nothing else than a free, unprompted, unsolicited expression of Gods own nature and love to mankind. It is conditioned by nothing in man but mans clamant need, by nothing in God but His own holy love. Men are not pardoned on account of their faith or by their faith. Pardon already is in Gods attitude toward them; what they have to do is to realize it by faith, and enjoy its blessing.* [Note: Theology even in its most dreary day never made faith the operative but simply the instrumental cause of justification.] Nor does God pardon because of Christs satisfaction. Christs sacrifice is the outcome of His forgiving mercy. It does not create or impel Gods love, it displays it (Rom 5:8; Rom 5:10). The Atonement, so far from being inconsistent with the Fatherhood of God, is its most distinct proof. Faith in Christs atoning love only makes more conspicuously clear Gods paternal love, for it is the marvellous way He took to struggle down through human experience to give us healing. This assured love of God is the living root of the justified life; [Note: Calvins Institutes, in which justification is related to predestination: comprehension of the divine purpose creating confidence in the elect (bk. iii. ch. 2).] in its amplitude all are pardoned it they would only realize it in actual standing. It is the cause also of confident and bold access to God (Eph 3:12, 1Jn 2:28; 1Jn 3:21) and the ceasing from confidence in the flesh (Php 3:3). Assurance of the Divine love in the forgiveness of sins already contained in it the whole idea of salvation, and holds together all the parts of the Divine life in their necessary nexus: the justification of the sinner before God and the principle of freedom for the consciousness of the justified subject himself in all his relations.* [Note: It is the permanent worth of Luthers doctrine to have set forth these two points with passionate cogency (The Liberty of the Christian Man).] In that principle lies securely embedded, along with our acceptance by God, our assurance of salvation. [Note: Not the same as assurance of the love of God.] Starting from God, who from eternity has been beforehand with us, held by His predestinating love, creating, calling, pardoning, we raise our fabric of life in continual growth for eternal glory (Rom 8:31-39). All along it is of Gods initiative, of grace; all along it is an appeal to faith; mans dependence is absolute.
(b) Christs mediation the ground.-Here the apostolic teaching assumes the form of a three-fold presentation; () Christs righteousness is made peace; () Christs blood is made obedience; () Christs life is made presence. The first in Pauline, the second that of Hebrews, the third Johannine-in such a way that, while each of the three has its predominant element as thus classified, we are not to suppose that each has no affinities with the others; on the contrary, the fullness of troth is in each, but ranged around the predominant element of each type.
() The new righteousness.-Christ is made unto us righteousness (1Co 1:30); he is our peace (Eph 2:13-16). The argument is in Rom 3:10; Rom 3:19-24, and proceeds by a winding course through the following chapters to the eighth. There are three kinds of righteousness: Gods righteousness, our own righteousness, and the righteousness of faith. Before Gods righteousness no man can stand. The attempt was made through His Law, given by Moses. The result was a self-righteousness that failed to bring peace between God and man for two reasons-firstly, the righteousness of the Law consisted in our own unaided obedience; and secondly, that self-righteousness was the condition of our acceptance with God. It contained all the elements of uncertainty of salvation. It was ineffectual. There is another righteousness never lost sight of under the Old Law, which has now appeared in Jesus Christ. By Him it is made ours. Presented in Him, it awakes in the sinner penitence and faith-a love of Christs holiness, a hatred of his own sinfulness; this by Gods grace. There is nothing in the self-righteousness of the righteousness of the Law to bridge the chasm between God and sin. The provision for that end is the very thing provided in Christ. How so? In Christ God gives His own righteousness, which is the end and meaning of all faith. He who receives it in initio receives it virtually in extenso; such is the mode of Gods gift of it. The condition of possible or future righteousness is the right attitude or intention of mind towards actual present unrighteousness. It is possible to justify or accept as right only that attitude which at the time is the nearest right possible for the person. In the initial moment of contrition, the only possible and right posture of the sinner is that consciousness of himself which could not be the beginning of his hatred of sin if it were not to the same extent the beginning of a love of holiness. Where this exists in truth and sincerity, even though it be but the beginning of an infinite process, it is possible and right to accept and treat as right that which as yet is only a first turning to and direction towards right (cf. 1Jn 1:8-10). Thus the righteousness of faith begins with our sense of sin and experience of impotence, and Gods loving acceptance of this repentance in us is the condition, starting-point, and earnest of a righteousness in us which is maintained and increased through Christs, in whom we see revealed all the presence and power of God in us, and in consequence all the power in ourselves necessary to its actual attainment and possession. Faith in Christ as our righteousness can justify us because it is based on the one condition in ourselves of becoming righteous-a loyal disposition-and the one power without ourselves to make us righteous-the righteousness of God. The grace of God in Christ makes the sinner righteous, by enabling him to make himself righteous. It starts the process by regarding and treating as righteous the penitent believer:* [Note: For a full discussion see DuBose, The Gospel according to St. Paul, chs. 6 end 7.] justifying freely through grace by faith.
() The new obedience.-He learned obedience by the things which he suffered; the obedience of faith (Heb 5:8, Rom 5:19; Rom 16:26, Heb 3:14; Heb 4:11; Heb 10:7; Heb 10:23-24; Heb 10:12). A. B. Bruce [Note: HDB, art. Hebrews, vol. ii. p. 333.] has made the invaluable suggestion that by the author of Hebrews the blood of Christ has been translated from body to spirit, and as such enters into heaven, and is available for our benefit. The blood of Christ, says St. John, is ever actively cleansing us from all sin (1Jn 1:7). That blood-spirit becomes to us the law of all life because it is the law of the Spirit of life itself (Rom 8:2). Obedience to that law clothes us with its power. How so?-Manifestly not simply as a general consequence of that which Christ has done for us, as if we found ourselves through the Atonement on the Cross under such changed relation to God as enables us to approach Him at will. That view is little distinguishable from the main position of Rationalism (Socinianism), whose central conviction is the assumption of a general order of Divine forgiveness independent of Christ, in accordance with which pardon is bestowed on the condition of the active obedience of faith. Ritschl [Note: Rechtfertigung und Vershnung, ch. viii.] has demonstrated the hollowness of this assumption. Both faith and obedience lose their peculiar quality: for faith becomes merely assent to past teaching or trust in past acts; and obedience, instead of being motived by faith in the sense of surrender to Christs spirit, is merely conformity to certain legal requirements. Nor is it enough to go a step further, and to conceive that Christ by His Death established a fund of merit of which we can on certain conditions make ourselves participants (Romanism). Scriptural figures of speech there are that seem to give some warrant to such a view of a spiritual reservoir of grace which waits only for our willingness to dive into it.
Faiths view of the High Priests intercession in heaven will correct such notions. Nay, the narrow notion of faith may become a snare to us. It is, we admit, the first condition in our conscious looking for the new spirit of life. But we must not confound the possession of the condition with the bestowal of the gift, or make our qualification to receive supersede the act of the Giver. Something far more effectual happens. As we invoke His intercession, we do not merely awake an ancient memory; we hear a living voice and see a living form, our Advocate and Comforter, against every accuser (Rom 8:33-34), and discern them reproduced in our hearts by His Spirit who maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered (Rom 8:26-27). It is God that justifieth. It is the Son risen for our justification.
() The new presence.-It is expedient that I go away; for I will send the Spirit (Joh 16:7, Act 1:8); Ye have an unction from the Holy One and know all things (1Jn 2:20; 1Jn 2:27); If our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God (1Jn 3:21); I saw in the midst of the Church the Son of man all glorious (Rev 1:13-18). St. John views the justified life as a new life in the deepest sense-not a doctrine merely for the mind to embrace; not an event simply to be remembered with faith; not the constitution only of a new order of spiritual relations for fallen man; but a new power into the very centre of human nature, the power of a new Divine principle. Because of this new principle it is a new creation, a new creation which indeed does not annihilate the old but transmutes it, and fulfils it-a process possible because the principle of the new is, if not continuous with the organic principle of the old, still consistent with that principle, the Logos being the cosmic counterpart of the Spirit. That new power, new principle, in the very centre of humanity is Spirit, presence. How so? By organic, living, universal development. Christs force was not intended to stop in the person of one man to be transferred soon after to heaven. Nor was it intended to be a fund or quantum to be applied subsequently in the way of outward imputation. It goes forth to heal and justify the world, not as something standing beyond itself and by a power external. He gathers humanity rather into His own Person, stretches over it the law of His own life, so that it holds in Him as its root. Into this new order of existence we are not transferred wholly at once. We are apprehended by Him, in the first place, only, as it were, at a single point. But this point is central. The new life lodges itself, as an efflux from Christ, in the inmost core of our personality-the inmost self (above, 2, Problem of justification). Here it becomes the principle or seed of our sanctification, conceived always not as a substance but as personal, a presence; Christ is in the soul as a magnetic centre (Joh 12:32), producing in its life continually an inward nisus in the direction antagonistic to sinful impulse, a process which, if continued, will at last carry all in the soul its own way, as the souls forces increasingly yield themselves in their totality to the totality of His Presence. The soul thus grows into His very nature. It is with reason that Schleiermacher speaks of the communication which Christ makes of Himself to believers as moulding the person (see Der christliche Glaube2, 1830-31, 140). The Presence of Christ is the ground of all proper Christian personality, the new man in Christ Jesus (Eph 2:15; Eph 4:24, Col 3:10). The end of the process is the higher justification (2Co 5:17), the fruition of that first justification which was but the beginning. It is a process which from beginning to end is only and wholly of Divine life.
(c) Christ-in-us the result.-The feud between faith and works is an old one. Certain points are clear. It is not a question of sinners being justified by works whether legal or good. The impenitent are never justified. It is not a question of believers being justified by good works only. By his works the believer will be judged. These are bald positions easily excluded. The crux of the controversy is that works to be good must spring from no motive other than the one proper motive, the new life in Christ. There are three alternatives: (1) Our own merit. We can go beyond the legal requirements so far that we are able to compensate for our wrongdoing. (2) Others merit. Others may compensate similarly for us, either by way of being our substitute or by way of transference of their supererogatory virtue to us. Both positions lose force in face of the Divine claims upon us and all men for the whole devotion of which we are capable at every moment; even then we are unprofitable servants. (3) Not of merit but of faith. By this it is not meant that we are justified because faith shows that we have altered our ways and that faith can complete itself in good works, or because faith has in it the germ of all that God approves; we are justified by faith, not on the ground of the holy life that may follow, but on the ground of Him who by faith is indwelling in our spirits and implants us in a new world of spiritual reality, where love (as He is love) alone is power. Love is the fulfilling of all law. In pre-Christian ages that principle might be in men like Abraham in unconscious operation and be credited to them for its worth. Similarly to-day in the world outside Christ. But implicitly or explicitly it must be present whenever this is so; good works are the outcome of character not of ordinances, of love not of law, and the character and love are of Christ in us. The apostles plainly conceive of Christ in this reference in an ascending scale of presence in the world. He is in the Cosmos as its principle. He is in humanity, of which He is the recapitulation. He is in the Christian body, of which He is head. Good works are good from the principle underlying them. It is that principle that justifies the doers of them. That principle is Christ. The Epistle to the Hebrews labours to show that Christ as Priest and Victim is perfect, eternal, final, from the fact that He is character, not ordinances. The Johannine Epistles are pregnant with the idea that Christ in the heart is Love. But character and love are pure Spirit. Its implanting into us for ever saves our good works from degenerating into a mere moral code, and furnishes us with a richer and more personal basis for our confidence in doing our goodness. Our virtues cannot be things without us: they must be self-determined; but, if my self is determined by Christ in me, we can truly say, and ought to say, of our good works, as of all else in our life, Not I, but Christ in me. This, further, we can say from the first, and with assurance. The confidence is secure in the implanted principle; it is not bound to the good works, which are themselves not independent but based on the principle. No doubt the real and vital relation of the Christian to Christ is invariably and inevitably accompanied by its practical sense and the actual experience of its living results in his quickened and risen self; but it is not the accompaniment, it is the relation itself, that is the ground of certainty. Ritschl* [Note: Ritschls is the most exhaustive and original discussion in modern theology of the doctrine or justification. No references can give any idea of its wealth. The distinctive features of his definition are only partly true to Lutheran tradition. They are as follows: (1) the identification of justification and forgiveness of sins; (2) the denial of any punishment of sin except the sinners separation from God; (3) the rejection of the ideas or the imputed righteousness or Christ and His substitutionary suffering; (4) the subordination of reconciliation to justification; (5) the ascription or justification to the Christian community; (6) the inclusion In the idea or justification of a reference to mans relation to the world.
The adequate reason of justification Ritschl maintains to be the fatherly love of God, not His judicial righteousness; the condition of its human appropriation is faith, which does not directly include love to man, but implies freedom from all law. This Justification in primarily attached to the community of Christians and only to individuals as members of it. The best exposition in English is A. E. Garvies Ritschlian Theology, Edinburgh, 1899, Good translations or vols. i. and iii. are now accessible, the former by J. Sutherland Black (Edinburgh, 1872), the latter by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (do. 1900).] is out of the true lineal descent of Reformed theology when he argues that the individual believer attains certainty of salvation only as in the exercise of his religious experience he reaches dominion over the world; he is back on the old plane of ordinances and works which incited Luthers polemic.
There Luther was on sure ground-true to his own experience, true to the apostolic mind. That mind conceived and solved the problem of justification with splendid invincible spirituality, as the act of God alone. In so doing it at the same time set its finality on the firmest foundation. If the idea of the union between the Divine and the human be true, and the actualization of it necessary to satisfy the deepest want of the human spirit, before it finds peace with God, all that the case can possibly demand is met in Christ, in whom it is met not in idea merely but in reality. In every part of His life He shows a power of love. He offers Himself through its force unreservedly to God. Equally He offers Himself through its force unreservedly to men, for the purpose of drawing them to God and uniting them among themselves and with God. He is a centre of love, Divine and human, intensely interwoven with power to embrace the whole of humanity and to influence it without exhaustion of His fullness. Such an exhibition has never been paralleled or approached. There is no room to think higher than this. It cannot be transcended.
Literature.-There is neither a good history of the doctrine nor a comprehensive discussion of the problems it raises. There are excellent article in Realencyklopdie fr protestantische Theologie und Kirche 3 and Catholic Encyclopedia , giving full statements of modern Protestant and Romanist ideas. The older books of Faber, Alex. Knox, Newman, simply confuse the issues. A thoroughly live investigation of the apostolic doctrine will be found in A. C McGiffert, Apostolic Age, Edinburgh, 1897; and of St. Pauls in Sanday Headlam, Com. on Romans 5 (International Critical Commentary , do. 1902). Interesting expositions are those of C. Gore, Romans, London, 1889-1900; A. E. Garvie, Studies of Paul and his Gospel, do. 1911; W. P. DuBose, The Gospel according to St. Paul, New York, 1907. Of older books still worth study; Andreas Osiander, De justificatione, 1550, and De unico mediatore Jesu Christio et justificatione fidei, 1551; Erskine of Linlathen, The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, Edinburgh, 1831. The Cunningham Lectures for 1866 by Jas. Buchanan furnish a full exposition of the Forensic Theory. The few brochures of the immediate present show the tendency of thought to be that argued for in the article-that justification meets two needs-the sense of alienation from God and the sense of weakness to do right-by substituting a loyal disposition for the performance of a legal code. On the more general problems of Pauline thought to which justification is related, the following are worth study: E. von Dobschtz, Probleme des apostolischen Zeitalters, Leipzig, 1904; M. Goguel, LAptre Paul et Jsus-Christ, Paris, 1904; A. Hausrath, Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte (Holtzmann and others).2, Leipzig, 1873-77, and Jesus und die neutest. Schriftsteller, Berlin, 1908-09; H. J. Holtzmann, Die Apostelgeschichte3, Tbingen, 1901, and Neutest, Theologie, do. 1911; C. Piepenbring, Jsus et les Aptres, Paris. 1911.
A. S. Martin.
Fuente: Dictionary of the Apostolic Church
JUSTIFICATION
A forensic term, and signifies the declaring or the pronouncing a person righteous according to law. It stands opposed to condemnation; and this is the idea of the word whenever it is used in an evangelical sense, Rom 5:18. Deu 25:1. Pro 17:15. Mat 12:37. It does not signify to make men holy, but the holding and declaring them so. It is defined by the assembly thus: “An act of God’s free grace, in which he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.” The doctrine of justification, says Mr. Booth, makes a very distinguished figure in that religion which is from above, and is a capital article of that faith which was once delivered to the saints. Far from being a merely speculative point, it spreads its influence through the whole body of divinity, runs through all Christian experience, and operates in every part of practical godliness. Such is its grand importance, that a mistake about it has a malignant efficacy, and is attended with a long train of dangerous consequences.
Nor can this appear strange, when it is considered, that the doctrine of justification is no other than the way of a sinner’s acceptance with God. Being of such peculiar moment, it is inseparably connected with many other evangelical truths, the harmony and beauty of which we cannot behold while this is misunderstood. It is, if any thing may be so called, an essential article, and certainly requires our most serious consideration. Justification, in a theological sense, is either legal or evangelical. If any person could be found that had never broken the divine law, he might be justified by it in a manner strictly legal. But in this way none of the human race can be justified, or stand acquitted before God. For all have sinned; there is none righteous; no, not one, Rom 3:1-31 : As sinners, they are under the sentence of death by his righteous law, and excluded from all hope and mercy. That justification, therefore, about which the Scriptures principally treat, and which reaches the case of a sinner, is not by a personal, but an imputed righteousness; a righteousness without the law, Rom 3:21. provided by grace, and revealed in the Gospel; for which reason, that obedience by which a sinner is justified, and his justification itself are called evangelical.
In this affair there is the most wonderful display of divine justice and boundless grace. Of divine justice, if we regard the meritorious cause and ground on which the Justifier proceeds in absolving the condemned sinner, and in pronouncing him righteous. Of boundless grace, if we consider the state and character of those persons to whom the blessing is granted. Justification may be farther distinguished as being either at the bar of God, and in the court of conscience; or in the sight of the world, and before our fellow-creatures. The former is by mere grace through faith; and the latter is by works. To justify is evidently a divine prerogative. It is God that justifieth, Rom 7: 33. That sovereign Being, against whom we have so greatly offended, whose law we have broken by ten thousand acts of rebellion against him, has, in the way of his own appointment, the sole right of acquitting the guilty, and of pronouncing them righteous. He appoints the way, provides the means, and imputes the righteousness; and all in perfect agreement with the demands of his offended law, and the rights of his violated justice.
But although this act is in some places of the infallible word more particularly appropriated personally to the Father, yet it is manifest that all the Three Persons are concerned in this grand affair, and each performs a distinct part in this particular, as also in the whole economy of salvation. The eternal Father is represented as appointing the way, and as giving his own Son to perform the conditions of our acceptance before him, Rom 8:32 : the divine Son as engaged to sustain the curse, and make the atonement; to fulfil the terms, and provide the righteousness by which we are justified, Tit 2:14 : and the Holy Spirit as revealing to sinners the perfection, suitableness, and freeness of the Saviour’s work, enabling them to receive it as exhibited in the Gospel of sovereign grace; and testifying to their consciences complete justification by it in the court of heaven, Joh 16:8; Joh 16:14. As to the objects of justification, the Scripture says, they are sinners, and ungodly. For thus runs the divine declaration: To him that worketh is the reward of justification, and of eternal life as connected with it; not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth
whom? the righteous? the holy? the eminently pious? nay, verily, but the ungodly; his faith, or that in which he believes, is counted unto him for righteousness, Rom 4:4-5. Gal 2:17. Here, then, we learn, that the subjects of justification, considered in themselves, are not only destitute of a perfect righteousness, but have performed no good works at all. They are denominated and considered as the ungodly, when the blessing is bestowed upon them. Not that we are to understand that such remain ungodly. “All, ” says Dr. Owen, “that are justified, were before ungodly: but al that are justified, are, at the same instant, made godly.” That the mere sinner, however, is the subject of justification, appears from hence. The Spirit of God, speaking in the Scripture, repeatedly declares that we are justified by grace. But grace stands in direct opposition to works. Whoever, therefore, is justified by grace, is considered as absolutely unworthy in that very instant when the blessing is vouchsafed to him, Rom 3:1-31. The person, therefore, that is justified, is accepted without any cause in himself.
Hence it appears, that if we regard the persons who are justified, and their state prior to the enjoyment of the immensely glorious privilege, divine grace appears, and reigns in all its glory. As to the way and manner in which sinners are justined, it may be observed that the Divine Being can acquit none without a complete righteousness. Justification, as before observed, is evidently a forensic term, and the thing intended by it a judicial act. So that, were a person to be justified without a righteousness, the judgment would not be according to truth; it would be a false and unrighteous sentence. That righteousness by which we are justified must be equal to the demands of that law according to which the Sovereign Judge proceeds in our justification. Many persons talk of conditions of justification (see article CONDITION;) but the only condition is that of perfect righteousness: this the law requires, nor does the Gospel substitute another. But where shall we find, or how shall we obtain a justifying righteousness? Shall we flee to the law for relief? Shall we apply with diligence and zeal to the performance of duty, in order to attain the desired end? The apostle positively affirms, that there is no acceptance with God by the works of the law; and the reasons are evident. Our righteousness is imperfect, and consequently cannot justify. If justification were by the works of men, it could not be by grace: it would not be a righteousness without works.
There would be no need of the righteousness of Christ; and, lastly, if justification were by the law, then boasting would be encouraged; whereas God’s design, in the whole scheme of salvation, is to exclude it, Rom 3:27. Eph 2:8-9. Nor is faith itself our righteousness, or that for the sake of which we are justified: for, though believers are said to be justified by faith, yet not for faith: faith can only be considered as the instrument, and not the cause. That faith is not our righteousness, is evident from the following considerations: No man’s faith is perfect; and, if it were, it would not be equal to the demands of the divine law. It could not, therefore, without an error in judgment, be accounted a complete righteousness. But the judgment of God, as before proved, is according to truth, and according to the rights of his law. That obedience by which a sinner is justified is called the righteousness of faith, righteousness by faith, and is represented as revealed to faith; consequently it cannot be faith itself. Faith, in the business of justification, stands opposed to all works; to him that worketh not, but believeth.
Now, if it were our justifying righteousness, to consider it in such a light would be highly improper. For in such a connection it falls under the consideration of a work; a condition, on the performance of which our acceptance with God is manifestly suspended. If faith itself be that on account of which we are accepted, then some believers are justified by a more, and some by a less perfect righteousness, in exact proportion to the strength or weakness of their faith. That which is the end of the law is our righteousness, which certainly is not faith, but the obedience of our exalted substitute, Rom 10:4. Were faith itself our justifying righteousness, we might depend upon it before God, and rejoice in it. So that according to this hypothesis, not Christ, but faith, is the capital thing; the object to which we must look, which is absurd. When the apostle says, “faith was imputed to him for righteousness, ” his main design was to prove that the eternal Sovereign justifies freely, without any cause in the creature. Nor is man’s obedience to the Gospel as to a new and milder law the matter of his justification before God.
It was a notion that some years ago obtained, that a relaxation of the law, and the severities of it, has been obtained by Christ; and a new law, a remedial law, a law of milder terms, has been introduced by him, which is the Gospel; the terms of which are faith, repentance, and obedience; and though these are imperfect, yet, being sincere, they are accepted of by God in the room of a perfect righteousness. But every part of this scheme is wrong, for the law is not relaxed, nor any of its severities abated; there is no alteration made in it, either with respect to its precepts or penalty: besides, the scheme is absurd, for it supposes that the law which a man is now under requires only an imperfect obedience: but an imperfect righteousness cannot answer its demands; for every law requires perfect obedience to its own precepts and prohibitions. Nor is a profession of religion, nor sincerity, nor good works, at all the ground of our acceptance with God, for all our righteousness is imperfect, and must therefore be entirely excluded. By grace, saith the apostle, ye are saved, not of works, lest any man should boast, Eph 2:8-9. Besides, the works of sanctification and justification are two distinct things: the one is a work of grace within men; the other an act of grace for or towards men: the one is imperfect, the other complete; the one carried on gradually, the other done at once.
See SANCTIFICATION. If, then, we cannot possibly be justified by any of our own performances, nor by faith itself, nor even by the graces of the Holy Spirit, where then shall we find a righteousness by which we can be justified? The Scripture furnishes us with an answer
“By Jesus Christ all that believe are justified from all things from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses, ” Act 13:38-39. “He was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification, ” Rom 4:25. “Being justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him, ” Rom 5:9. The spotless obedience, therefore, the bitter sufferings, and the accursed death of our heavenly Surety, constitute that very righteousness by which sinners are justified before God. That this righteousness is imputed to us, and that we are not justified by a personal righteousness, appears from the Scripture with superior evidence. “By the obedience of one shall many be made righteous, ” Rom 19. “He hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him, ” 2Co 5:21. “And he found in him, not having mine own righteousness which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ; the righteousness which is of God by faith, ” Php 3:8.
See also Jer 23:6. Dan 9:24. the whole of the 2nd chapter of Galatians.
See articles RECONCILLIATION, RIGHTEOUSNESS. As to the properties of justification:
1. It is an act of God’s free grace, without any merit whatever in the creature, Rom 3:24.
2. It is an act of justice as well as grace: the law being perfectly fulfilled in Christ, and divine justice satisfied, Rom 3:26. Psa 85:10.
3. It is an individual and instantaneous act done at once, admitting of no degrees, Joh 19:30.
4. It is irreversible, and an unalterable act, Mal 3:6. As to the time of justification, divines are not agreed. Some have distinguished it into decretive, virtual, and actual
1. Decretive, is God’s eternal purpose to justify sinners in time by Jesus Christ.
2. Virtual justification has a reference to the satisfaction made by Christ.
3. Actual, is, when we are enabled to believe in Christ, and by faith are united to him. Others say it is eternal, because his purpose respecting it was from everlasting: and that, as the Almighty viewed his people in Christ, they were, of consequence, justified in his sight. But it appears to me, that the principle on which the advocates for this doctrine have proceeded is wrong. They have confounded the design with the execution; for if this distinction be not kept up, the utmost perplexity will follow the consideration of every subject which relates to the decrees of God; nor shall we be able to form any clear ideas of his moral government whatever.
To say, as one does, that the eternal will of God to justify men is the justification of them, is not to the purpose; for, upon the same ground, we might as well say that the eternal will of God to convert and glorify his people is the real conversion and glorification of them. That it was eternally determined that there should be a people who should believe in Christ, and that his righteousness should be imputed to them, is not to be disputed; but to say that these things were really done from eternity (which we must say if we believe eternal justification, ) this would be absurd. It is more consistent to believe, that God more consistent to believe, that God from eternity laid the plan of justification; that this plan was executed by the life and death of Christ; and that the blessing is only manifested, received, and enjoyed, when we are regenerated; so that no man can say or has any reason to conclude, he is justified, until he believes in Christ, Rom 5:1. The effects or blessings of justification, are,
1. An entire freedom from all penal evils in this life, and that which is to come, 1Co 3:22.
2. Peace with God, Rom 5:1.
3. Access to God through Christ, Eph 3:12.
4. Acceptance with God, Eph 5:27.
5. Holy confidence and security under all the difficulties and troubles of the present state, 2Ti 1:12.
6. Finally, eternal salvation, Rom 8:30. Rom 5:18. Thus we have given as comprehensive a view of the doctrine of justification as the nature of this work will admit; a doctrine which is founded upon the sacred Scriptures; and which, so far from leading to licentiousness, as some suppose, is of all others the most replete with motives to love, dependence, and obedience, Rom 6:1-2. A doctrine which the primitive Christians held as constituting the very essence of their system; which our reformers considered as the most important point; which our venerable martyrs gloried in, and sealed with their blood; and which, as the church of England observes, is a “very wholesome doctrine, and full of comfort.”
See Dr. Owen on Justification; Rawlins on Justification; Edwards’s Sermon on ditto; Lime Street Aspasio, and Eleven Letters; Witherspoon’s Connexion between Justification and Holiness; Gill and Ridgley’s Div. but especially Booth’s Reign of Grace, to which I am indebted for great part of the above article.
Fuente: Theological Dictionary
justification
That process in the soul of a sinner by which he is transferred from the state of enmity with God to the friendship of God. As an act it is the gratuitous work of God alone; but in the adult cooperation, moral preparation, e.g., faith, contrition, etc., is required. As a habit it is the continued possession of sanctlfying grace. The removal of sin and the infusion of grace constitute one and the same act. Removal of original sin by Baptism is called first justification; forgiveness, in the Sacrament of Penance, of mortal sin committed after Baptism, is called second justification. By an act of Perfect contrition man can be justified before actual reception, but not without the desire, of the Sacrament.
Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary
Justification
(Latin justificatio; Greek dikaiosis.)
A biblio-ecclesiastical term; which denotes the transforming of the sinner from the state of unrighteousness to the state of holiness and sonship of God. Considered as an act (actus justificationis), justification is the work of God alone, presupposing, however, on the part of the adult the process of justification and the cooperation of his free will with God’s preventing and helping grace (gratia praeveniens et cooperans). Considered as a state or habit (habitus justificationis), it denotes the continued possession of a quality inherent in the soul, which theologians aptly term sanctifying grace. Since the sixteenth century great differences have existed between Protestants and Catholics regarding the true nature of justification. As the dogmatic side of the controversy has been fully explained in the article on GRACE, we shall here consider it more from an historical point of view.
I. THE PROTESTANT DOCTRINE ON JUSTIFICATION
The ideas on which the Reformers built their system of justification, except perhaps fiduciary faith, were by no means really original. They had been conceived long before either by heretics of the earlier centuries or by isolated Catholic theologians and had been quietly scattered as the seed of future heresies. It was especially the representatives of Antinomianism during the Apostolic times who welcomed the idea that faith alone suffices for justification, and that consequently the observance of the moral law is not necessary either as a prerequisite for obtaining justification or as a means for preserving it. For this reason St. Augustine (De fide et operibus, xiv) was of the opinion that the Apostles James, Peter, John, and Jude had directed their Epistles against the Antinomians of that time, who claimed to have taken their doctrines — so dangerous to morality — from the writings of St. Paul. Until quite recently, it was almost universally accepted that the epistle of St. James was written against the unwarranted conclusions drawn from the writings of St. Paul. Of late, however, Catholic exegetes have become more and more convinced that the Epistle in question, so remarkable for its insisting on the necessity of good works, neither aimed at correcting the false interpretations of St. Paul’s doctrine, nor had any relation to the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles. On the contrary, they believe that St. James had no other object than to emphasize the fact — already emphasized by St. Paul — that only such faith as is active in charity and good works (fides formata) possesses any power to justify man (cf. Galatians 5:6; 1 Corinthians 13:2), whilst faith devoid of charity and good works (fides informis) is a dead faith and in the eyes of God insufficient for justification (cf. James 2:17 sqq.). According to this apparently correct opinion, the Epistles of both Apostles treat of different subjects, neither with direct relation to the other. For St. James insists on the necessity of works of Christian charity, while St. Paul intends to show that neither the observance of the Jewish Law nor the merely natural good works of the pagans are of any value for obtaining the grace of justification (cf. Bartmann, “St. Paulus u. St. Jacobus und die Rechtertigung”, Freiburg, 1897).
Whether Victorinus, a neo-Platonist, already defended the doctrine of justification by faith alone, is immaterial to our discussion. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages there were a few Catholic theologians among the Nominalists (Occam, Durandus, Gabriel Biel), who went so far in exaggerating the value of good works in the matter of justification that the efficiency and dignity of Divine grace was unduly relegated to the background. Of late, Fathers Denifle and Weiss have shown that Martin Luther was acquainted almost exclusively with the theology of these Nominalists, which he naturally and justly found repugnant, and that the “Summa” of St. Thomas and the works of other great theologians were practically unknown to him. Even Ritschl (“Christliche Lehre von der Rechfertigung und Versohnung”, I, 3rd ed., Bonn, 1889, pp. 105, 117) admits that neither the Church in her official teaching nor the majority of her theologians ever sanctioned, much less adopted, the extreme views of the Nominalists. Nevertheless it was not a healthy reaction against Nominalism, but Luther’s own state of conscience that caused his change of views. Frightened, tormented, worn out by constant reflexions on his own sinfulness, he had finally found, even before 1517, relief and consolation only in the thought that man cannot overcome concupiscence, and that sin itself is a necessity. This thought naturally led him to a consideration of the fall of man and its consequences. Original sin has so completely destroyed our likeness to God and our moral faculties in the natural order, that our will has lost its freedom regarding works morally good or bad, and we are consequently condemned to commit sin in every action. Even what we consider good works are nothing but sin. Since, according to Luther, concupiscence, of which death alone shall free us, constitutes the essence of original sin, all our actions are corrupted by it. Concupiscence as an intrinsically evil disposition, has instilled its deadly poison into the soul, its faculties, and its action (cf. Mohler, “Symbolik”, sec. 6). But here we are forced to ask: If all our moral actions be the outcome of an internal necessity and constraint, how can Luther still speak of sin in the true meaning of the word? Does not original sin become identical with the “Evil Substance” of the Manichaeans, as later on Luther’s follower, Flacius Illyricus, quite logically admitted?
Against this dark and desolate background there stands out the more clearly the mercy of God, who for the sake of the Redeemer’s merits lovingly offers to despairing man a righteousness (justitia) already complete in itself, namely the exterior righteousness of God or of Christ. With the “arm of faith” the sinner eagerly reaches out for this righteousness and puts it on as a cloak of grace, covering and concealing therewith his misery and his sins. Thus on the part of God, justification is, as the Formulary of Concord (1577) avows, a mere external pronouncement of justification, a forensic absolution from sin and its eternal punishments. This absolution is based on Christ’s holiness which God imputes to man’s faith. Cf. Solid. Declar. III de fide justif., sec. xi: “The term justification in this instance means the declaring just, the freeing from sin and the eternal punishment of sin in consideration of the justice of Christ imputed to faith by God.”
What then is the part assigned to faith in justification? According to Luther (and Calvin also), the faith that justifies is not, as the Catholic Church teaches, a firm belief in God’s revealed truths and promises (fides theoretica, dogmatica), but is the infallible conviction (fides fiducialis, fiducia) that God for the sake of Christ will no longer impute to us our sins, but will consider and treat us, as if we were really just and holy, although in our inner selves we remain the same sinners as before. Cf. Solid. Declar. III, sec. 15: “Through the obedience of Christ by faith the just are so declared and reputed, although by reason of their corrupt nature they still are and remain, sinners as long as they bear this mortal body.” This so-called “fiduciary faith” is not a religious-moral preparation of the soul for sanctifying grace, nor a free act of cooperation on the part of the sinner; it is merely a means or spiritual instrument (instrumentum, organon leptikon) granted by God to assist the sinner in laying hold of the righteousness of God, thereby to cover his sins in a purely external manner as with a mantle. For this reason the Lutheran formularies of belief lay great stress on the doctrine that our entire righteousness does not intrinsically belong to us, but is something altogether exterior. Cf. Solid. Declar., sec. 48: “It is settled beyond question that our justice is to be sought wholly outside of ourselves and that it consists entirely in our Lord Jesus Christ.” The contrast between Protestant and Catholic doctrine here becomes very striking. For according to the teaching of the Catholic Church the righteousness and sanctity which justification confers, although given to us by God as efficient cause (causa efficiens) and merited by Christ as meritorious cause (causa meritoria), become an interior sanctifying quality or formal cause (causa formalis) in the soul itself, which it makes truly just and holy in the sight of God. In the Protestant system, however, remission of sin is no real forgiveness, no blotting out of guilt. Sin is merely cloaked and concealed by the imputed merits of Christ; God no longer imputes it, whilst in reality it continues under cover its miserable existence till the hour of death. Thus there exist in man side by side two hostile brothers as it were — the one just and the other unjust; the one a saint, the other a sinner; the one a child of God, the other a slave of Satan — and this without any prospect of a conciliation between the two. For, God by His merely judicial absolution from sin does not take away sin itself, but spreads over it as an outward mantle His own righteousness. The Lutheran (and Calvinistic) doctrine on justification reaches its climax in the assertion that “fiduciary faith”, as described above, is the only requisite for justification (sola fides justificat). As long as the sinner with the “arm of faith” firmly clings to Christ, he is and will ever remain regenerated, pleasing to God, the child of God and heir to heaven. Faith, which alone can justify, is also the only requisite and means of obtaining salvation. Neither repentance nor penance, neither love of God nor good works, nor any other virtue is required, though in the just they may either attend or follow as a result of justification. (Cf. Solid. Declar, sec. 23: “Indeed, neither contrition nor love nor any other virtue, but faith alone is the means by which we can reach forth and obtain the grace of God, the merit of Christ and the remission of sin.”) It is well known that Luther in his German translation of the Bible falsified Rom. iii, 28, by interpolating the word “alone” (by faith alone), and to his critics gave the famous answer: “Dr. Martin Luther wants it that way, and says, ‘Papist and ass are the same thing: sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas’.”
Since neither charity nor good works contribute anything towards justification — inasmuch as faith alone justifies — their absence subsequently cannot deprive the just man of anything whatever. There is only one thing that might possibly divest him of justification, namely, the loss of fiduciary faith or of faith in general. From this point of view we get a psychological explanation of numerous objectionable passages in Luther’s writings, against which even Protestant with deep moral sense, such as Hugo Grotius and George Bull, earnestly protested. Thus we find in one of Luther’s letters, written to Melancthon in 1521, the following sentence: “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ more strongly, who triumphed over sin, death, and the world; as long as we live here, we must sin.” Could anyone do more to degrade St. Paul’s concept of justification than Luther did in the following blasphemy: “If adultery could be committed in faith, it would not be a sin”? (Cf. Möhler, “Symbolik”, sec. 16). The doctrine of justification by faith alone was considered by Luther and his followers as an incontrovertible dogma, as the foundation rock of the Reformation, as an “article by which the Church must stand or fall” (articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesia), and which of itself would have been a sufficient cause for beginning the Reformation, as the Smalkaldic Articles emphatically declare. Thus we need not wonder when later on we see Lutheran theologians declaring that the Sola-Fides doctrine, as the principium materiale of Protestantism, deserves to be placed side by side with the doctrine of Sola-Scriptura (“Bible alone”, with the exclusion of Tradition) as its principium formale — two maxims in which the contrast between Protestant and Catholic teaching reaches its highest point. Since, however, neither maxim can be found in the Bible, every Catholic is forced to conclude that Protestantism from its very beginning and foundation is based on self-deception. We assert this of Protestantism in general; for the doctrine of justification as defended by the reformed Churches differs only in non-essentials from Lutheranism. The most important of these differences is to be found in Calvin’s system, which taught that only such as are predestined infallibly to eternal salvation obtain justification, whilst in those not predestined God produces a mere appearance of faith and righteousness, and this in order to punish them the more severely in hell (Cf. Mohler, “Symbolik”, sec.12).
From what has been said it is obvious that justification as understood by Protestants, presents the following qualities: its absolute certainty (certitudo), its equality in all (aequalitas), and finally the impossibility of ever losing it (inamissibilitas). For if it be essential to fiduciary faith that it infallibly assures the sinner of his own justification, it cannot mean anything but a firm conviction of the actual possession of grace. If, moreover, the sinner be justified, not by an interior righteousness capable of increase or decrease, but through God’s sanctity eternally the same, it is evident that all the just from the common mortal to the Apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary possess one and the same degree of righteousness and sanctity. Finally if, as Luther maintains, only the loss of faith (according to Calvin, not even that) can deprive us of justification, it follows that justification once obtained can never be lost.
Incidentally, we may here call attention to another significant fact, namely that it was Luther who laid the foundation for the separation of religion and morality. For, by stating that fiduciary faith alone suffices for obtaining both justification and eternal happiness, he minimized our moral faculties to such an extent that charity and good works no longer affect our relations with God. By this doctrine Luther opened a fundamental breach between religion and morality, between faith and law, and assigned to each its own distinct sphere of action in which each can attain its end independent of the other. Prof. Paulsen of Berlin was therefore justified in eulogizing Kant, who followed Luther in this matter, as the Philosopher of Protestantism”. (Cf. Mohler, “Symbolik”, sec. 25.)
The harshness, want of harmony, intrinsic improbability, and contradiction of Holy Writ contained in the system soon brought about a reaction in the very midst of Protestantism. Osiander (d. 1552), at once an enthusiastic admirer of Luther and an independent thinker, emphatically stated (in opposition to Luther and Calvin) that the justifying power of faith consists in a real, instrinsic union of Christ with the soul, an opinion for which, as being Catholic, he was censured freely. Butzer (d. 1551) likewise admits, in addition to an “imputed exterior righteousness”, the idea of an “inherent righteousness” as a partial factor in justification, thus meeting Catholicism half way. Luther’s most dangerous adversary, however, was his friend Melancthon, who, in his praiseworthy endeavour to smooth over by conciliatory modifications the interior difficulties of this discordant system, laid the foundation for the famous Synergisten-Streit (Synergist Dispute), which was so soon to become embittered. In general it was precisely the denial of man’s free will in the moral order, and of the impossibility of his full cooperation with Divine grace that repelled so many followers of Luther. No sooner had Pfeffinger in his book, “De libero arbitrio” (Leipzig, 1555) taken up defence of man’s free will than many theologians of Jena (e.g. Strigel) boldly attacked the Lutheran Klotz-Stock-und-Steintheorie (log-stick-and-stone theory), and tried to force from their adversaries the concession that man can cooperate with God’s grace. The theological quarrel soon proved very annoying to both parties and the desire for peace became universal. “The Half-Melanchtonians” had succeeded in smuggling Synergism into the “Book of Torgau” (1576); but before the “Formulary of Concord” was printed in the monastery of Bergen (near Magdeburg, 1557), the article in question was eliminated as heterodox and the harsh doctrine of Luther substituted in the symbols of the Lutheran Church. The new breach in the system by the Synergisten-Streit was enlarged by a counter movement that originated among the Pietists and Methodists, who were willing to admit the fallible assurance of salvation — given by fiduciary faith — only in case that that assurance was confirmed by internal experience. But what probably contributed most of all to the crumbling of the system was the rapid growth of Socinianism and Rationalism which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gained so many adherents among the Lutherans. Fiduciary faith was no longer considered a spiritual means to assist man in reaching out for the righteousness of God, but was identified with a disposition which is upright and pleasing to God. Latterly, A. Ritschl defined justification as the change in the consciousness of our relation to God and amplified this idea by the statement that the certainty of our salvation is further determined by the consciousness of our union with the Christian community. Schleiermacher and Hengstenberg deviated still father from the old doctrine. For they declared contrition and penance as also necessary for justification, thus “coming dangerously near the Catholic system”, as Derner expresses it (“Geschichte der protest. Theologie”, Munich, 1867, p.583). Finally the Lutheran Church of Scandinavia has in the course of time experienced a “quiet reformation”, inasmuch as it now, without being fully conscious of the fact, defends the Catholic doctrine on justification (cf. Krogh-Tonning, “Die Gnadenlehre und die stille Reformation”, Christiania, 1894). The strict orthodoxy of the Old Lutherans, e.g. in the Kingdom of Saxony and the State of Missouri, alone continues to cling tenaciously to a system, which otherwise would have slowly fallen into oblivion.
I. THE CATHOLIC DOCTRINE ON JUSTIFICATION
We have an authentic explanation of the Catholic doctrine in the famous “Decretum de justificatione” of the Sixth Session (13 Jan., 1547) of the Council of Trent, which in sixteen chapters (cf. Denzinger-Bannwart, “Enchir.”, nn.793-810) and thirty-three canons (l.c., 811-43) gives in the clearest manner all necessary information about the process, causes, effects, and qualities of justification.
(1) The Process of Justification (Processus justificationis)
Since justification as an application of the Redemption to the individual presupposes the fall of the entire human race, the Council of Trent quite logically begins with the fundamental statement that original sin has weakened and deflected, but not entirely destroyed or extinguished the freedom of the human will (Trent, sess. VI, cap. i: “Liberum arbitrium minime extinctum, viribus licet attenuatum et inclinatum”). Nevertheless, as the children of Adam were really corrupted by original sin, they could not of themselves arise from their fall nor shake off the bonds of sin, death, and Satan. Neither the natural faculties left in man, nor the observance of the Jewish Law could achieve this. Since God alone was able to free us from this great misery, He sent in His infinite love His only begotten Son Jesus Christ, Who by His bitter passion and death on the cross redeemed fallen man and thus became the Mediator between God and man. But if the grace of Redemption merited by Christ is to be appropriated by the individual, he must be “regenerated by God”, that is he must be justified. What then is meant by justification? Justification denotes that change or transformation in the soul by which man is transferred from the state of original sin, in which as a child of Adam he was born, to that of grace and Divine sonship through Jesus Christ, the second Adam, our Redeemer (l.c., cap.iv: “Justificatio impii. . . translatio ab eo statu, in quo homo nascitur filius primi Adae, in statum gratiae et adoptionis filiorum Dei per secundum Adam, Jesum Christum, Salvatorem nostrum”). In the New Law this justification cannot, according to Christ’s precept, be effected except at the fountain of regeneration, that is, by the baptism of water. While in Baptism infants are forthwith cleansed of the stain of original sin without any preparation on their part, the adult must pass through a moral preparation, which consists essentially in turning from sin and towards God. This entire process receives its first impulse from the supernatural grace of vocation (absolutely independent of man’s merits), and requires an intrinsic union of the Divine and human action, of grace and moral freedom of election, in such a manner, however, that the will can resist, and with full liberty reject the influence of grace (Trent, l.c., can.iv: “If any one should say that free will, moved and set in action by God, cannot cooperate by assenting to God’s call, nor dissent if it wish. . . let him be anathema”). By this decree the Council not only condemned the Protestant view that the will in the reception of grace remains merely passive, but also forestalled the Jansenistic heresy regarding the impossibility of resisting actual grace. With what little right heretics in defence of their doctrine appeal to St. Augustine, may be seen from the following brief extract from his writings: “He who made you without your doing does not without your action justify you. Without your knowing He made you, with your willing He justifies you, but it is He who justifies, that the justice be not your own” (Serm. clxix, c. xi, n.13). Regarding St. Augustine’s doctrine cf. J. Jausbach, “Die Ethik des hl. Augustinus”, II, Freiburg, 1909, pp. 208-58.
We now come to the different states in the process of justification. The Council of Trent assigns the first and most important place to faith, which is styled “the beginning, foundation and root of all justification” (Trent, l.c., cap.viii). Cardinal Pallavicini (Hist. Conc. Trid., VIII, iv, 18) tells us that all the bishops present at the council fully realized how important it was to explain St. Paul’s saying that man is justified through faith. Comparing Bible and Tradition they could not experience any serious difficulty in showing that fiduciary faith was an absolutely new invention and that the faith of justification was identical with a firm belief in the truths and promises of Divine revelation (l. c.: “illumque [Deum] tanquam omnis justitiae fontem diligere incipiunt”). The next step is a genuine sorrow for all sin with the resolution to begin a new life by receiving holy baptism and by observing the commandments of God. The process of justification is then brought to a close by the baptism of water, inasmuch as by the grace of this sacrament the catechumen is freed from sin (original and personal) and its punishments, and is made a child of God. The same process of justification is repeated in those who by mortal sin have lost their baptismal innocence; with this modification, however, that the Sacrament of Penance replaces baptism. Considering merely the psychological analysis of the conversion of sinners, as given by the council, it is at once evident that faith alone, whether fiduciary or dogmatic, cannot justify man (Trent, l. c., can. xii: “Si quis dixerit, fidem justificantem nihil aliud esse quam fiduciam divinae misericordiae, peccata remittentis propter Christum, vel eam fiduciam solam esse, qua justificamur, a.s.”). Since our Divine adoption and friendship with God is based on perfect love of God or charity (cf. Galatians 5:6; 1 Corinthians 13; James 2:17 sqq.), dead faith devoid of charity (fides informis) cannot possess any justifying power. Only such faith as is active in charity and good works (fides caritate formata) can justify man, and this even before the actual reception of baptism or penance, although not without a desire of the sacrament (cf. Trent, Sess. VI, cap. iv, xiv). But, not to close the gates of heaven against pagans and those non-Catholics, who without their fault do not know or do not recognize the Sacraments of Baptism and Penance, Catholic theologians unanimously hold that the desire to receive these sacraments is implicitly contained in the serious resolve to do all that God has commanded, even if His holy will should not become known in every detail.
(2) The Formal Cause of Justification
The Council of Trent decreed that the essence of active justification comprises not only forgiveness of sin, but also “sanctification and renovation of the interior man by means of the voluntary acceptation of sanctifying grace and other supernatural gifts” (Trent, l. c., cap. vii: “Non est sola peccatorum remissio, sed et sanctificatio et renovatio interioris hominis per voluntariam susceptionem gratiae et donorum”). In order to exclude the Protestant idea of a merely forensic absolution and exterior declaration of righteousness, special stress is laid on the fact that we are justified by God’s justice, not that whereby He himself is just but that whereby He makes us just, in so far as He bestows on us the gift of His grace which renovates the soul interiorly and adheres to it as the soul’s own holiness (Trent, l. c., cap. vii: “Unica formalis causa [justificationis] est justitia Dei, non qua ipse justus est, sed qua nos justos facit, qua videlicet ab eo donati, renovamur spiritu mentis nostrae: et non modo reputamur, sed vere justi nominamur et sumus, justitiam in nobis recipientes unusquisque suam”). This inner quality of righteousness and sanctity is universally termed “sanctifying (or habitual) grace”, and stands in marked contrast to an exterior, imputed sanctity, as well as to the idea of merely covering and concealing sin. By this, however, we do not assert that the “justitia Dei extra nos” is of no importance in the process of justification. For, even if it is not the formal cause of justification (causa formalis), it is nevertheless its true exemplar (causa exemplaris), inasmuch as the soul receives a sanctity in imitation of God’s own holiness. The Council of Trent (l. c. cap. vii), moreover, did not neglect to enumerate in detail the other causes of justification: the glory of God and of Christ as the final cause (causa finalis), the mercy of God as the efficient cause (causa efficiens), the Passion of Christ as the meritorious cause (causa meritoria), the reception of the Sacraments as the instrumental cause (causa instrumentalis). Thus each and every factor receives its full share and is assigned its proper place. Hence the Catholic doctrine on justification, in welcome contrast to the Protestant teaching, stands out as a reasonable, consistent, harmonious system. For further explanation of the nature of sanctifying grace, see SUPERNATURAL GRACE. Regarding the false doctrine of the Catholic theologian Hermes, cf. Kleutgen, “Theologie der Vorzeit”, II (2nd ed., Munster, 1872), 254-343.
According to the Council of Trent sanctifying grace is not merely a formal cause, but “the only formal cause” (unica causa formalis) of our justification. By this important decision the Council excluded the error of Butzer and some Catholic theologians (Gropper, Scripando, and Albert Pighius) who maintained that an additional “external favour of God” (favor Dei externus) belonged to the essence of justification. The same decree also effectually set aside the opinion of Peter Lombard, that the formal cause of justification (i.e. sanctifying grace) is nothing less than the Person of the Holy Ghost, Who is the hypostatic holiness and charity, or the uncreated grace (gratia increata). Since justification consists in an interior sanctity and renovation of spirit, its formal cause evidently must be a created grace (gratia creata), a permanent quality, a supernatural modification or accident (accidens) of the soul. Quite distinct from this is the question whether the personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost, although not required for justification (inasmuch as sanctifying grace alone suffices), be necessary as a prerequisite for Divine adoption. Several great theologians have answered in the affirmative, as for instance Lessius (“De summo bono”, II, i; “De perfect. moribusque divin.”, XII, ii); Petavius (“De Trinit.”, viii, 4 sqq.); Thomassin (“De Trinit.”, viii, 9 sqq.), and Hurter (“Compend. theol. dogmat.”, III, 6th ed., pp. 162 sqq.). The solution of the lively controversy on this point between Fr. Granderath (“Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie”, 1881, pp. 283 sqq.; 1883, 491 sqq., 593 sqq.; 1884, 545 sqq.) and Professor Scheeben (“Dogmatik”, II, sec. 169; “Katholik”, 1883, I, 142 sqq.; II, 561 sqq.; 1884, I, 18 sqq.; II, 465 sqq., 610 sqq.) seems to lie in the following distinction: the Divine adoption, inseparably connected with sanctifying grace, is not constituted by the personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost, but receives therefrom its full development and perfection.
(3) The Effects of Justification
The two elements of active justification, forgiveness of sin and sanctification, furnish at the same time the elements of habitual justification, freedom from sin and holiness. According to the Catholic doctrine, however, this freedom from sin and this sanctity are effected, not by two distinct and successive Divine acts, but by a single act of God. For, just as light dispels darkness, so the infusion of sanctifying grace eo ipso dispels from the soul original and mortal sin. (Cf. Trent, sess. VI, can. xi: “Si quis dixerit, homines justificari vel sola imputatione justitiae Christi, vel sola peccatorum remissione, exclusa gratia et caritate, quae in cordibus eorum per Spiritum Sanctum diffundatur atque illis inhaereat. . ., a.s.”) In considering the effects of justification it will be useful to compare the Catholic doctrine of real forgiveness of sin with the Protestant theory that sin is merely “covered” and not imputed. By declaring the grace of justification, or sanctifying grace, to be the only formal cause of justification, the Council of Trent intended to emphasize the fact that in possessing sanctifying grace we possess the whole essence of the state of justification with all its formal effects; that is, we possess freedom from sin and sanctity, and indeed freedom from sin by means of sanctity. Such a remission of sin could not consist in a mere covering or non-imputation of sins, which continue their existence out of view; it must necessarily consist in the real obliteration and annihilation of the guilt. This genuinely Biblical concept of justification forms such an essential element of Catholicism, that even Antonio Rosminis’s theory, standing half way between Protestantism and Catholicism, is quite irreconcilable with it. According to Rosmini, there are two categories of sin: such as God merely covers and does not impute (cf. Psalm 31:1); such as God really forgives and blots out. By the latter Rosmini understood deliberate sins of commission (culpae actuales et liberae), by the former indeliberate sins (peccata non libera), which “do no harm to those who are of the people of God”. This opinion was censured by the Holy Office (14 Dec., 1887), not only because without any reason it defended a twofold remission of sin, but also because it stamped indeliberate acts as sins (cf. Denzinger-Bannwart, “Enchir.”, n.1925).
Although it is a Catholic dogma that sanctifying grace and sin (original and mortal) do never exist simultaneously in the soul, there may be, nevertheless a diversity of opinion regarding the extent of this incompatibility, according as it is considered as either moral, physical, or metaphysical in character. According to the now universally rejected opinion of the Nominalists (Occam, Gabriel Biel) and the Scotists (Mastrius, Henno) the contrast between grace and sin is based on a free decree and acceptation of God, or in other words, the contrast is merely moral. This would logically imply in contradiction to the “unica causa formalis” of the Council of Trent, a twofold formal cause of justification (cf. Pohle, “Dogmatik”, II, 4th ed., Paderborn, 1909, p.512). Suarez (De gratia, VII, 20) and some of his followers in defending a physical contrast come nearer the truth. In their explanation grace and sin exclude each other with the same necessity as do fire and water, although in both cases God, by a miracle of his omnipotence, could suspend the general law and force the two hostile elements to exist peacefully side by side. This opinion might be safely accepted were sanctifying grace only a physical ornament of the soul. But since in reality it is an ethical form of sanctification by which even an infant in receiving baptism is necessarily made just and pleasing to God, there must be between the concepts of grace and of sin a metaphysical and absolute contradiction, which not even Divine omnipotence can alter and destroy. For this last opinion, defended by the Thomists and the majority of theologians, there is also a solid foundation in Holy Writ. For the contrast between grace and sin is as great as between light and darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14; Ephesians 5:8), between life and death (Romans 5:21; Colossians 2:13; 1 John 3:14), between God and idols, Christ and Belial (2 Corinthians 6:15 sqq.), etc. Thus it follows from Holy Writ that by the infusion of sanctifying grace sin is destroyed and blotted out of absolute necessity, and that the Protestant theory of “covering and not imputing sin” is both a philosophical and a theological impossibility. Besides the principal effect of justification, i.e. real obliteration of sin by means of sanctification, there is a whole series of other effects: beauty of the soul, friendship with God, and Divine adoption. In the article on GRACE these are described as formal effects of sanctifying grace. In the same article is given an explanation of the supernatural accompaniments — the three theological virtues, the moral virtues, the seven gifts, and the personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost. These, as freely bestowed gifts of God, cannot be regarded as formal effects of justification.
(4) The Qualities of Justification
We have seen that Protestants claim the following three qualities for justification: certainty, equality, the impossibility of ever losing it. Diametrically opposed to these qualities are those defended by the Council of Trent (sess. VI, cap. 9-11): uncertainty (incertitudo), inequality (inaequalitas), amissibility (ammisibilitas). Since these qualities of justification are also qualities of sanctifying grace, see GRACE.
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PROTESTANT BELIEFS: Clasen, Die christliche Heilsgewissheit (1907); Haring, Dikaiosyne Theou bei Paulus (1896); cf. Denifle, Die abendlandischen Schriftausleger uber justitia Dei u. justificatio (Mainz, 1905); Cremer, Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre (2nd ed., 1900); Nosgen, Der Schriftbeweis fur die evangelische Rechtfertigungslehre (1901); Schlatter, Der Glaube im N.T. (3rd ed., 1905); Feine, Das Gesetzesfreie Evangelium des Paulus (1899); Idem, Jesus Christus u. Paulus (1902); Clemen, Paulus, sein Leben u. Wirken (2 vols., 1904); Gottschick, Die Heilsgewissheit des evangelishen Christen in Zeitschr. fur Theol. u. Kritik (1903), 349 sqq.; Denifle, Luther u. Luthertum in der ersten Entwicklung, I (Mainz, 1904); Ihmels, Die Rechtfertigung allein durch den Glauben, unser fester Grund Rom gegenuber in Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift (1904), 618 sqq.; Denifle and Weiss, Luther u. Luthertum etc., II (Mainz). Cf. also Harnack, Dogmengesch., III (4th ed., Freiburg, 1909); Ihmels in Herzog and Jauck, Realencycl. fur protest. Theol., s.v. Rechtfertigung.
CATHOLIC TEACHING: Vega, De justificatione doctrina universa, LL. XV absolute tradita (Venice, 1548); Bellarmine, De justificatione impii in Opp. omnia, VI (Paris, 1873); Nussbaum, Die Lehre der kathol. Kirche uber die Rechtfertigung (Munich, 1837); Wieser, S. Pauli doctrina de justificatione (Trent, 1874); Mohler, Symbolik (2nd ed., Mainz, 1890), secs. x-xxvii; Einig in Kirchenlex., s.v. Rechtfertigung; Rademacher, Die ubernaturliche Lebensordnung nach der paulinischen u. johanneischen Theologie (Freiburg, 1903); Mausbach, Die Ethik des hl. Augustinus, II (Freiburg, 1900); Pohle, Dogmatik, II (4th ed., Paderborn, 1909), 484-5556; Hefner, Entstehungsgeach. des Trienter Rechtfertigungs-Dekretes (Paderborn, 1909); Prumbs, Die Stellung des Trid. Konz. zu der Frage nach dem Wesen der heilignachenden Gnade (Paderborn, 1910).
JOSEPH POHLE Transcribed by Terry Wilkinson
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VIIICopyright © 1910 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Justification
(some form of the verbs ), a forensic term equivalent to acquittal, and opposed to condemnation; in an apologetic sense it is often synonymous with vindication or freeing from unjust imputation of blame.
I. Dogmatic Statement. This term, in theological usage, is employed to designate the judicial act of God by which he pardons all the sins of the sinner who believes in Christ, receiving him into favor, and regarding him as relatively righteous, notwithstanding his past actual unrighteousness. Hence justification, and the remission or forgiveness of sin, relate to one and the same act of God, to one and the same privilege of his believing people (Act 13:38-39; Rom 4:5; Rom 4:8). So, also, “the justification of the ungodly,” the “covering of sins,” “not visiting for sin,” “not remembering sin,” and “imputing not inequity,” mean to pardon sin and to treat with favor, and express substantially the same thing which is designated by “imputing or counting faith for righteousness.” SEE PARDON.
Justification, then, is an act of God, not in or upon man, but for him and in his favor; an act which, abstractly considered, respects man only as its object, and translates him into another relative state; while sanctification respects man as its subject, and is a consequent of this act of God, and inseparably connected with it. SEE REGENERATION.
The originating cause of justification is the free grace and spontaneous love of God towards fallen man (Rom 15:3; Rom 15:24; Tit 2:11; Tit 3:4-5). Our Lord Jesus Christ is the sole meritorious cause of our justification, inasmuch as it is the result of his atonement for us. The sacrificial death of Christ is an expedient of infinite wisdom, by which the full claims of the law may be admitted, and yet the penalty avoided, because a moral compensation or equivalent has been provided by the sufferings of him who died in the sinner’s stead (Eph 1:7; Col 1:14; Rev 5:9). Thus, while it appears that our justification is, in its origin, an act of the highest grace, it is also, in its mode, an act most perfectly consistent with God’s essential righteousness, and demonstrative of his inviolable justice. It proceeds not on the principle of abolishing the law or its penalty, for that would have implied that the law was unduly rigorous either in its precepts or in its sanctions. SEE ATONEMENT.
Faith is the instrumental cause of justification, present faith in him who is able to save, faith actually existing and exercised. SEE FAITH. The atonement of Jesus is not accepted for us, to our individual justification, until we individually believe, nor after we cease to live by faith in him. SEE IMPUTATION.
The immediate results of justification are the restoration of amity and intercourse between the pardoned sinner and the pardoning God (Rom 5:1; Jam 2:23); the adoption of the persons justified into the family of God, and their consequent right to eternal life (Rom 8:17); and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (Act 2:38; Gal 3:14; Gal 4:6), producing tranquillity of conscience (Rom 8:15-16), power over sin (Rom 8:1) and a joyous hope of heaven (Rom 15:13; Gal 5:3). SEE SPIRIT, FRUITS OF.
We must not forget that the justification of a sinner does not in the least degree alter or diminish the evil nature and desert of sin. Though by an act of divine clemency the penalty is remitted, and the obligation to suffer that penalty is dissolved, still it is naturally due, though graciously remitted. Hence appear the propriety and duty of continuing to confess and lament even pardoned sin with a lowly and contrite heart (Eze 16:62). SEE PENITENCE.
II. History of the Doctrine.
1. The early Church Fathers and the Latin Church. Ecclesiastical science, from the beginning of its development, occupied itself with a discussion on the relation of faith to knowledge; but even those who attributed the greatest importance to the latter recognized faith as the foundation. A merely logical division into subjective and objective faiths and an intimation of a distinction between a historic and a rational faith (in Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata. 2, 454; Augustine, De Trinitate, 13, 2), were of little consequence. Two conceptions became prevailing: Faith as a general religious conviction, particularly as confidence in God, and the acceptance of the entire doctrine of the Church, fides catholica. The formula that faith alone without the works justifies is found in the full Pauline sense in Clemens Romanus (1 ad Corinthios. c. 32) and is sometimes used by Augustine polemically in order to defend the freedom of grace and the priority of faith. More generally it is used as an argument against the necessity of the Jewish law (Irenaeus, 4:25 Tertullian, adv. Marcell. 5, 3). The oecumenical synods were instrumental in gradually giving to the conception of fides catholica the new sense that salvation could be found only by adherence to ecclesiastical orthodoxy. But as a mere acceptance was possible without a really, Christian sentiment, and as the Pauline doctrine was misused by heretics in an antinomian sense, it was demanded that faith, be proved by works. Church discipline developed this idea with regard to the sins of the faithful, so as to demand a satisfaction through penances and good works (Augustine, Serm. 151, 12). It became, therefore, the doctrine of the Church that such faith alone works salvation as shows itself in acts of charity, while to merely external works faith or charity is opposed as something accessory. Pelagius assumed only a relative distinction between naturally good works and the good works that proceed from faith; in opposition to which Augustine insisted that the difference is absolute, and that without faith no good works at all are possible. As salvation was thought to be conditioned by works also, it was, even when it was represented as being merely an act of God, identified with sanctification. The importance attributed to abstention created gradually a distinction between commands and advices, and the belief that through the fulfilment of the latter a virtue greater than required would arise (Hermas, Pastor Simil. 3, 5, 3; Origen, In Epistolam, ad Romans 3; Ambrose, De Viduis, 4, 508).
2. The Greek Church. Little discussion and little controversy has occurred on this doctrine in the Greek Church. Faith and works together are regarded as the conditions of salvation. The words of James are referred to first, yet faith is declared to be the stock from which the good works come as the fruits. The description of faith proceeds from the definition in the Epistle to the Hebrews to the acceptance of the entire ecclesiastical tradition. Man is said to participate in the merit of the Mediator not only through faith, but also through good works. Among the latter are comprised the fulfilment of the commandments of God and of the Church, and, in particular, prayers, fastings, pilgrimages, and monastic life. They are considered useful and necessary not only as a means of promoting sanctification, but also as penances and satisfaction.
3. Doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. The Scholastics regarded faith as an acceptance of the supersensual as far as it belongs to religion, differing both from intuition and from knowledge; and although essentially of a theoretic character, yet conditioned by the consent of the will; which, however, in the description of faith, is reduced to a minimum. Originally only God is an object of faith, but mediately also the holy Scriptures; as a summary of the Biblical doctrines, the Apostles Creed, and, as its explication, the entire doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. As an accurate knowledge of the doctrines of the Church cannot be expected from every one, the subjective distinction was made between fides implicita and explicita; the former sufficient for the people, yet with the demand of a developed belief in some chief articles. There was, however, a difference of opinion on what these articles were, and even Thomas Aquinas wavered in his views. Faith may, even upon earth, partly become a science, and appears in this respect only as the popular form of religion. It is a condition of salvation, but becomes a virtue only when love, as animating principle [forma], pervades it [fides formata]; with a mere faith [informis] one may be damned. The fides formata includes the necessity of the good works for salvation, but they must be founded in pious sentiment. All other works not proceeding from faith, are dead though not entirely useless. The necessity of good works is fully carried out only by the inculcation of penance as satisfactiones, but with constant reference to a union of the soul with Christ, and the moral effect of the good works. Justification, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a movement from the state of injustice into the state of justice, in which the remission of sins is the main point, though it is conditioned by an infusion of grace which actually justifies men. As an act of God which establishes in man a new state [habitus], it is accomplished in a moment. Among the people the Pelagian views prevailed, that man, by merely outward works, had to gain his salvation, and the Church became, especially through the traffic in indulgences, a prey to the immoral and insipid worship of ceremonies. In opposition to this corruption, many of the pious Mystics pointed to the Pauline doctrine of faith.
4. Doctrine of the Reformers of the 16th Century and the old Protestant Dogmatics. The Reformation of the 16th century renewed the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith alone, emphasizing in the sense of Augustine, the entire helplessness of man, and made it the fundamental doctrine of the Reformed Church. This faith is represented as not merely an acceptance of historic facts, but is distinguished as fides specialis from the general religious conviction, arising amidst the terrors of conscience, and consisting in an entire despair of one’s own merit and a confident surrender to the mercy of God in the atoning death of Christ. Worked by God, it does not work as virtue or merit, but merely through the apprehension of the merit of Christ. Its necessity lies in the impossibility of becoming reconciled with God through one’s own power. Hence this reconciliation is impossible through good works, which are not necessary for salvation, though God rewards them, according to his promise, upon earth and in heaven; but, as a necessary consequence, the really good works will flow forth from faith freely and copiously. The opinion of Amsdorf, that good works are an obstacle to salvation, was regarded as an unfortunate expression, which may be taken in a true sense, though it is false if understood in a general sense. As man is unable to satisfy the law supererogatory works and a satisfaction through one’s own works are impossible. Justification through love is impossible, because man cannot love God truly amidst the terrors of conscience. Hence justification is a divine judicial act, which, through the apprehension of the justice of Christ, apprehended in faith, accepts the sinner as just, though he is not just. This strict distinction between justification and sanctification was maintained on the one hand against Scholasticism, which, through its Pelagian tendencies, seemed to offend against the honor of Christ, and to be unable to satisfy conscience, and on the other hand against Osiander, who regarded justification as being completed only in sanctification. The works even of the regenerated, according to the natural side, were regarded by the Reformers as sins. The Reformed theology in general agreed with the doctrine of justification as stated above, yet did not make it to the same extent the fundamental doctrine of the whole theology. According to Calvin, justification and sanctification took place at the same time. The dogmatic writers of the Lutheran Church distinguished in faith knowledge, assent, and, confidence, assigning the former two to the intellect, the latter to the will. From the fides generalis they distinguished the justifying faith (specialis seu salvifica), and rejected the division into fides informis et formata. As a distinguishing mark, they demanded from a true faith that it be efficient in charity. For works they took the Decalogue as a rule; a certain necessity of works was strictly limited. But, however firmly they clung in general to the conception of justification as something merely external (actus forensis) and foreign (imputatio justitiae Christi), some dogmatic writers held that justification had really changed something in man, and indeed presupposed it as changed. Hollaz pronounced this doctrine openly and incautiously, while Quenstedt designated these preceding acts as merely preparatory to conversion.
5. Doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation. The Council of Trent, in order to make a compromise with the Pauline formula, recognized faith as the beginning and the foundation of justification, but the full sense which Protestantism found in it was rejected. This faith is the general belief in divine revelation, though in transition to a special faith, yet a mere knowledge which still gives room to mortal sins. Justification is remission of sins and sanctification, through an infusion of the divine grace, in as far as the merit of Christ is not merely imputed, but communicated. It is given through grace, but as a permanent state it grows through the merit of good works according to the commandments of God and the Church, through which works the justified, always aided by the grace of God in Christ, have to render satisfaction for the temporal punishment of their sins and to deserve salvation. Not all the works done before justification are sins, and to the justified the fulfilment of the commandments of God is quite possible, although even the saints still commit small, venial sins. A further development of this doctrine is found in the writings of Bellarmine. He admits faith only as fides generalis, as a matter of the intellect, yet as a consent, not a knowledge. Though only the first among many preparations for justification a certain merit is ascribed to faith. The Council of Trent had rejected the imputation of the merits of Christ only as the exclusive ground of justification; Bellarmine rejected it altogether. He explicitly proclaimed the necessity of good works for salvation, though only a relative salvation. “The opera supererogationis, which were not mentioned at Trent, though they remained unchanged in tradition and practice, are further developed by Bellarmine. According to him, they go beyond nature, are not destined for all, and not commanded under penalties.
6. Modern Protestantism. Socinus denied any foreign imputation, also that of the merit of Christ. When supranaturalism in general declined, the points of difference from the Roman Catholic Church were frequently lost sight of Kant found in the doctrine of justification the relation of the always unsatisfactory reality of our moral development to the future perfection recognized in the intuition of God. De Wette declared it to be the highest moral confidence which is founded on the communion with Christ, and turns from an unhappy past to a better future. Modern mystics have often found fault with the Protestant doctrine as being too outward, and approached the doctrine of the Roman Church. The Hegelian School taught that justification is the reception of the subject into the spirit, i.e. the knowledge of the subject of his unity with the absolute spirit or, according to Strauss, with the concrete idea of mankind. According to Schleiermacher, it is the reception into the communion of life with both the archetypal and historical Christ, and the appropriation of his perfection. Justification and sanctification are to him only different sides of the carrying out of the same divine decree. Many of the recent dogmatic writers of Germany have again proclaimed this doctrine to be the essential principle of Protestantism, some (Dorner, Das Princip unserer Kirche, Kiel, 1841) taking justification in the sense of a new personality founded in Christ, others (Hundeshagen, Der deutsche Protestantismus. Frankft. 1847) in the sense that God, surveying the whole future development of the principle which communion with Christ establishes in the believer, views him as righteous. One of the last dogmatic manuals of the Reformed Church (Schweizer, 2, 523 sq.) distinguishes conversion and sanctification as the beginning and progress of a life of salvation, and assigns justification to the former. See Hase, Evangelische Dogmatik (Leipzic, 1850) p. 310 sq.; C.F. Baur, Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte (Stuttgart, 1847); Hahn, Das Bekenntniss der evangelischen Kirchengeschichte in seinem Verhaltniss zu dem der Romischen und Griechischen.
III. Literature. See, for Roman Cath. views, Mhler, Symbolism, ch. 3; Willett, Syn. Pap. 8, 67 sq.; Cramp, Text-book of Popery, ch. 5; Bossuet, Works, vol. 1 and 2 Stud. und Krit. 1867. vol. 2; D’Aubigne, Hist. Reformation, vol. 2; Forbes, Considerations, 1, 1; Nicene Creed; 1, 173; Hughes, Works, 1, 410. For Protestant views, see Buchanan, Justification (Edinb. 1867, 8vo; reviewed at length in Lond. Review, Oct. 1867, p. 179); Brit. and For. Evang. Rev. Oct. 1867, art. 6; Wesley, Works, 5, 255; 6, 106; Calvin, Instit. vol. 2; Cunningham, Reformers, p. 402; Planck, Hist. Prot. Theol. (see Index); Knapp, Theology (see Index); Wardlaw, System. Theology, 2, 67.8 sq.; Graves, Works, vol. 4; Monsell, 4, 232, 240; Waterland, Works, vol. 6; T. Goodwin, Works (see Index); Wilson, Apostol. Fathers (see Index); Martensen, Dogmatics, p. 390 sq.; Pye Smith, Introd. to Theol. (see Index); Burnet, On the 39 Articles (see Index); Carmich, Theol. of the Scriptures, vol. 2; Neander, Prot. and Cath. p. 131-146; Ch. Dog. 2, 66 sq.; Planting and Train. of Christian Church, vol. 2; Riggenbach, in the Stud. und Krit. 1863, 4:691; 1867, 1, 405, 2, 294; 1868, 2, 201; North Brit. Review, June, 1867; p. 191 sq.; Dr. Schaff, Protestantism, p. 54-57; Good Words, Jan. 1866 Heppe, Dogmatics, p. 392; Biblioth.-Sacra, 1863, p. 615; Bibl. Repos. 11, 448 Christ. Review, Oct. 1846; Jahrb. deutsch. Theol. 7, 516; Ware, Works, 3, 381; Journal of Sac. Lit. 21; 1869, 3, 545; Christian Monthly, 1845, Jan. p. 102; Feb., p. 231; New Englander (see Index); Hauck, Theolog. Jahresber. Jan. 1869, 59; 1867, p. 543; Bull. Theologique. 1, 25, 41; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev. July, 1868, p. 537; Brit. and For. Rev. Oct. 1868. p. 683, 692; Amer. Presbyt. Review, Jan. 1867. p. 69. 202; Evang. Quart. Rev. Oct. 1869, p. 48; British Quart. Rev. Jan. 1871, p. 144; Church Rev. Oct. 1870, p. 444, 462; Zeitschr. wissensch. Theol. 1871, 4.
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Justification
a forensic term, opposed to condemnation. As regards its nature, it is the judicial act of God, by which he pardons all the sins of those who believe in Christ, and accounts, accepts, and treats them as righteous in the eye of the law, i.e., as conformed to all its demands. In addition to the pardon (q.v.) of sin, justification declares that all the claims of the law are satisfied in respect of the justified. It is the act of a judge and not of a sovereign. The law is not relaxed or set aside, but is declared to be fulfilled in the strictest sense; and so the person justified is declared to be entitled to all the advantages and rewards arising from perfect obedience to the law (Rom. 5:1-10).
It proceeds on the imputing or crediting to the believer by God himself of the perfect righteousness, active and passive, of his Representative and Surety, Jesus Christ (Rom. 10:3-9). Justification is not the forgiveness of a man without righteousness, but a declaration that he possesses a righteousness which perfectly and for ever satisfies the law, namely, Christ’s righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 4:6-8).
The sole condition on which this righteousness is imputed or credited to the believer is faith in or on the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is called a “condition,” not because it possesses any merit, but only because it is the instrument, the only instrument by which the soul appropriates or apprehends Christ and his righteousness (Rom. 1:17; 3:25, 26; 4:20, 22; Phil. 3:8-11; Gal. 2:16).
The act of faith which thus secures our justification secures also at the same time our sanctification (q.v.); and thus the doctrine of justification by faith does not lead to licentiousness (Rom. 6:2-7). Good works, while not the ground, are the certain consequence of justification (6:14; 7:6). (See GALATIANS, EPISTLE TO.)
Fuente: Easton’s Bible Dictionary
Justification
Ide as Connected with the Word
The idea of justification appears to be in some measure legal or forensic rather than moral or psychological. It is frequently taken in Scripture to be the opposite of condemnation; and in some of its aspects it answers fairly to our word acquittal. But it has often been observed that human legal analogies are very inadequate for the purpose of representing the relation of the restored man to his God. Acquittal is the judicial declaration that an accused man is not guilty of a certain crime, so far as the law under which he has been tried is concerned. He may have committed the offence, but either it cannot be brought home to him by adequate testimony, or else the law under which he is tried has not provided for the charge laid against him. This, however, is a most imperfect representation of God’s work in justifying, as it leaves out of sight the fact that his law is perfect and applicable to all cases, also that no outside testimony of man’s guilt is necessary, because God is acquainted with the very secrets of the heart; and, what is still more important, it leaves out of sight the truth which is to be gathered from Scripture as a whole, that the process of Divine acquittal is so blended with the entrance of spiritual life into the person acquitted, that, though they are theoretically distinct, one cannot be fully stated or even comprehended without reference to the other. The controversy between the Church of Rome and various Protestant bodies has arisen, in part at least, from the complexity of the relationship which thus exists between God and man.
Another difficulty has arisen in England from the poverty of our language. We have no one word which can convey the idea of righteousness and that of justification, as they are set forth in Scripture in this case, as in many others, we see the wisdom of God in selecting Hebrew as the means of communication with his creatures, because here the ideas of righteousness, justification, and acquittal all cluster round one verbal root, and are seen to be parts of one whole.
The Hebrew word which expresses the being just or righteous is Tsadak (), which is supposed to convey originally an idea of straightness or stiffness (see chap. ix. 2.)
The verb is once used in the Hithpael or reflexive voice, namely, in Gen 44:16, ‘What shall we speak? or how shall we clear ourselves?’ as a matter of fact, Judah and his brethren were innocent, but he asked this question under the impression that they were guilty. It is once used in the Niphal or passive, viz in Dan 8:14, ‘Thus shall the sanctuary be cleansed.’ It appears here to be used in a secondary or derived sense. Five times it occurs in the Piel or intensive, viz.: in Job 32:2, ‘He justified his own soul rather than God;’ 33:32, ‘If thou hast anything to say, answer me: speak, for I desire to justify thee;’ Jer 3:11, ‘The backsliding Israel hath justified her soul more than treacherous Judah;’ Eze 16:51-52, ‘Thou hast multiplied thine abominations more than they, and hast justified thy sisters in all thine abominations which thou hast done. They are righteous in comparison with thee. Yea, be thou also confounded, and bear thy shame in that thou hast justified thy sisters.’ The conduct of the inhabitants of Judah had been so much worse than that of Samaria or Sodom that they caused these nations to appear or to be accounted righteous in comparison.
Tsadak is used twelve times in the Hiphil or causative voice: Exo 23:7, ‘I will not justify the wicked.’ this principle of the Divine action is laid down as an example to be imitated by the earthly judge in Deu 25:1, ‘Then shall they justify the righteous and condemn the wicked.’ 2Sa 15:4, ‘Oh that I were made judge in the land, that every man which hath any suit or cause might come to me, and I would do him justice!’ 1Ki 8:39, and 2Ch 6:23, ‘Condemning the wicked, to bring his way up on his head; and justifying the righteous, to give him according to his righteousness.’ this passage is important as giving a fulness of meaning to the word justification which otherwise might be missed. It is here not only acquittal, but the consequences of acquittal. Job 27:5, ‘God forbid that I should justify you.’ Psa 82:3, ‘Do justice to the afflicted and needy.’ Pro 17:15, ‘He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord.’ Isa 5:23, ‘Woe unto them . which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him.’ Isa 50:8, ‘He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me?’ Isa 53:11, ‘ by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; and it is he that shall bear their iniquities.’ this passage is usually explained as if ‘h is knowledge’ meant ‘the knowledge which others should have concerning him;’ but there is no necessity to fall back up on this explanation. The Messiah was to be ‘acquainted with grief;’ nay more, he was to bear man’s iniquities, and they became in some mysterious sense identified with Him. It was this which became the means of justifying many. [‘No man, except Christ, has ever yet been able rightly to discern the nature and extent of sin; because only one whose penetrating gaze can apprehend the whole of the glory and worth of which God created humanity capable, the whole tenor of its downward way, and the high end it may yet attain; none but Jesus has ever sounded the whole extent of the aberrations, degradations, and disorder of our race. He, however, has sounded all these depths, his heart has been pierced with adequate sorrow for all that dishonouring of God’s holy name, of which the beings, whose brother He became, were guilty; and consequently He has fully apprehended the righteous severity of Divine justice in connecting sin with death in its various forms. and because He has manifested the righteousness and justice of the Divine sentence, not in words only, but practically by his silent and holy endurance of its penalty, He has accomplished the purpose of Divine punishment, and has terminated it– on behalf of whom? on behalf of all those who by faith appropriate this his holy endurance of the Divine judgment as their own.’ –Essay on the Atonement, by Wolfgang Friedrich Gess.] Dan 12:3, ‘They that turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever and ever.’ Compare the teaching of the last verses of St. James’s Epistle.
It remains to notice the passages where the verb is used in the active voice. They are as follows:–Gen 38:26, ‘She hath been more righteous than I.’ Job 4:17, ‘Shall a mortal man be more just than God?’ Job 9:2, ‘How should man be just before God?’ Job 9:15, ‘Though I were righteous I would not answer.’ Job 9:20, ‘If I justify myself (lit. if I be righteous), my own mouth shall condemn me.’ Job 10:15, ‘If I be righteous, yet will I not lift up my head.’ Job 11:2, ‘Should a man full of talk be justified’ (lit. be righteous)? Job 13:18, ‘Behold now, I have ordered my cause; I know that I shall be justified’ (lit. that I am righteous). Job 15:14, ‘What is he that is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?’ Job 22:3, ‘ is it any pleasure to the Almighty that thou art righteous?’ Job 25:4, ‘How can man be justified (lit. righteous) with God?’ Job 33:12, ‘Behold in this thou art not just.’ Job 34:5, ‘Job hath said, I am righteous.’ Job 35:7, ‘If thou be righteous, what givest thou him ?’ Job 40:8, ‘Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?’ Psa 19:9, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.’ Psa 51:4, ‘That thou mightest be justified (lit. be righteous) when thou speakest, and clear when thou judges.’ Psa 143:2, ‘Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified’ (or righteous). Isa 43:9, ‘Let them bring forth their witnesses, that they may be justified (or righteous): or let them hear, and say, It is truth.’ Isa 43:26, ‘Declare thou, that thou mayest be justified’ (or righteous). Isa 45:25, ‘ in the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified’ (or righteous), and shall glory.’ Eze 16:59, ‘They are righteous in comparison with thee.’
The passages which have been cited above show that justification is a term applicable to something more than the discharge of an accused person uncondemned. as in our courts of law there are civil as well as criminal cases, so it was in old time; and a large number of the passages adduced seem to refer to trials of the former description, in which some question of property, right, or inheritance was under discussion between two parties. The judge, by justifying one of the parties, decided that the property in question was to be regarded as his. Applying this aspect of the matter to the justification of man in the sight of God, we gather from Scripture that whilst through sin man has forfeited legal claim to any right or inheritance which God might have to bestow up on his creatures, so through justification he is restored to his high position and regarded as an heir of God.
The adjective tsadik is almost always rendered , righteous, in the LXX, and the substantives tsedek and tsedakah generally , righteousness. The word , mercy, has been adopted in Isa 56:1, ‘My salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed’; also in Eze 18:19; Eze 18:21, where we read of man doing ‘what is lawful and right.’ The righteousness of the law was specially manifested in mercy, so that the Greek translators were right in point of fact, though incorrect in their rendering in these passages.
In several passages the LXX has adopted , a word which has passed from its original meaning as the feeling of mercy or pity to the active development of that feeling in eleemosynary acts, or alms-giving. this is the case in Deu 6:25, where our translation is, ‘It shall be our righteousness; if we observe to do all these commandments.’ Here the LXX, followed by the Vulgate and the translations made from it, say, ‘There shall be mercy for us if we observe,’ &c. The passage literally translated would be, ‘There shall be righteousness for us,’ &c. Perhaps the LXX has preserved the true meaning of the passage, and certainly it is in accordance with the general ten or of God’s Word. The same rendering is found in Deu 24:13; Psa 24:5; Psa 33:5; Psa 103:6; Isa 1:27; Isa 28:17; Isa 59:16; Dan 4:27; Dan 9:16.
The verb tsadak is rendered , to make righteous or to acquit, almost everywhere by the LXX; but the various voices in which the word is used were not capable of being accurately distinguished in the Greek. this difficulty has reappeared in at least one passage in the N.T in Rev 22:11, the words ‘He that is righteous let him be righteous still’ are, if literally rendered, ‘He that is righteous let him be justified still’–a rendering which was adopted by the Latin Vulgate, and is to be found in most, if not all, versions made from that venerable work this literal rendering is certainly very beautiful and instructive, though the usage of the LXX affords our translators some plea for departing from it. The R. V. has changed, but hardly improved, the rendering.
Righteousness in Relation to Justification
The nature of righteousness, or conformity to the Divine law of love, has been pointed out in chap. ix., but we must here notice its relationship with justification.
We read in Gen 15:6, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him (for) righteousness.’ in this passage three words enter up on the sacred pages for the first time–belief, righteousness, and reckoning or imputation –words which were destined to play a conspicuous part in Christian terminology. That element of Abraham’s feeling and conduct towards God which we usually call belief, faith, or faithfulness, [See chap. ix] was regarded by God as a re as on why he should be accepted as righteous or justified. Not only does all right action spring from belief in the Word of God, but also our Heavenly Father justifies or acquits those persons who exercise it. Abraham’s faith, according to the Hebrew text, ‘was reckoned unto him righteousness;’ but the LXX, followed by St. Paul, interprets this phrase as meaning ‘for’ (), not ‘ as () righteousness.’ [This important distinction, which has sometimes been neglected in controversy, has been observed in the Vulgate (ad justitiam); so Luther has ‘zr Gerechtigkeit;’ De Sacy, ‘ a” justic;’ D’Almeida, ‘p or justi.’ Beza made a mistake in putting pro justitiain Rom 4:3, &c.] It would follow that the passage does not teach us that Abraham’s faith was regarded or estimated by God as if it were righteousness–the one quality being taken for the other –but that owing to the fact that he had faith in the promises, God accepted him, acquitted him from the charge of sin, pronounced him righteous, and conferred on him an inheritance. Thus, as St. Paul says, Abraham was justified by faith ( ), i.e. owing to the fact that he had faith. The ground on God’s part, and the method of justification, are not touched by the word. It simply points to the aspect in which the Judge of all the earth regards the believer, and the way in which He deals with him.
It is not a little remarkable that the privilege thus granted to Abraham was accorded to another person in exactly the same terms, but apparently on a different ground in Psa 106:30-31, we read, ‘Then stood up Phine has and executed judgment: and the plague was stayed. and that was counted unto him for [The Hebrew preposition for () is inserted here, justifying the interpretation of the LXX in the passage previously discussed.] righteousness unto all generations for evermore.’ When we turn to the history (Num 25:1-18.) on which these verses are a comment, we find that Phine has was zealous for God’s sake against those who were committing whoredom and idolatry, going so far as to slay ‘a prince of a chief house among the Simeonites,’ together with the daughter of the ‘head over a people and of a chief house in Midian.’ What was it that prompted him to this bold and decided action, which atoned for the sins of the people? The prophet Malachi answers, speaking in God’s name, ‘He feared me, and was afraid before my name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips’ (Mal 2:5-6). He ‘said unto his father and to his mother, I have not seen him; neither did he acknowledge his brethren, nor knew his own children’ (Deu 33:9). He had respect to the unseen God, and despised the fear of man and the ties of kindred; in other words, he had faith, and his deed is of a class with many of those which are recorded in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. It was his conviction of the truth of God’s Word that caused him to be loyal when a whole nation seemed to be drifting into carnality and idolatry; and so ‘it was reckoned to him for righteousness.’
The second passage in which the substantive occurs is Gen 18:19, where God says of Abraham, ‘I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment.’ Here justice (i.e. righteousness) seems to mark a course of action in conformity with the gr and principle of right, the loving God with all one’s heart, and one’s neighbour as oneself. this righteousness was not absolute, i.e. suc has would commend Abraham to God as a rightful claimant of the inheritance of sonship, because, in that case, he would not have been said to have been justified by faith; it was therefore relative, and was the result of his faith in God (see Rom 4:2-4, and compare 2Sa 22:21).
Jacob appeals to this relative and practical principle in Gen 30:33, with reference to his dealings with Laban (whether fairly or not), where he says, ‘So shall my righteousness answer for me in time to come, when it shall come for my hire before thy face.’ He implies that he had been honest, and more than honest; that he had borne losses which might fairly have gone to the account of Laban. this righteousness is something more than what we ordinarily mean by the word justice; it is not the doing to others as they have done to us, but the doing to them what we would like them to do to us if our respective positions were changed. It exceeds ‘the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees,’ which consisted in doing good either where a return was to be expected, or where the object was to make a fair show before men.
Another noteworthy passage is Deu 9:4-6, where the people of Israel were guarded in the plainest terms from the supposition that they were being brought into Canaan for their own righteousness. They were thus trained in the idea that the inheritance was not to be regarded as a reward for human merit, but was to be received as a gift from the covenant-keeping God.
The expression, ‘O God of my righteousness,’ which is occasionally found in the Psalms, e.g. Psa 4:1, has been diversely explained. Some critics suppose that it means, ‘O God, who art my righteous judge;’ others, ‘O God, who justifies me.’ [De Sacy renders, ‘Dieu, qui est le principe de ma justice.’] But perhaps its explanation is more simple. as ‘the temple of God’s holiness,’ in Psa 138:2, signifies ‘God’s holy temple,’ so the phrase ‘God of my righteousness’ may mean ‘my righteous God,’ whilst it is in harmony with the doctrine that God possesses in fulness Himself that righteousness which He bestows on man.
In Deu 33:19, and Psa 4:5, we read, ‘offer the sacrifices of righteousness.’ this cannot signify ‘substitute righteousness for sacrifices,’ but rather ‘offer righteous sacrifices,’ i.e. do not let your sacrifices be formal or impure, but bring them in a right spirit, in loving conformity with God’s law. The form of the expression is exactly parallel to that which the A. V. translates ‘just balances’ (lit. balances of righteousness) in Lev 19:36, Job 31:6, and Eze 45:10. That this is the right interpretation of the passage may be confirmed from a reference to Psa 51:19, where, after saying, ‘Thou desires not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering,’ and again, ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise,’ the Psalmist looks forward to a state of things when sacrifices should be once more acceptable, ‘Build thou the walls of Jerusalem; then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings: then shall they offer young bullocks up on thine altar.’ Compare Mat 3:3, where we are told that the angel of the covenant ‘shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.’ in all these passages the spirit of the offerers rather than the nature of the offering is described by the qualifying word ‘righteousness.’
In some passages in which God’s righteousness is appealed to, it appears that its merciful aspect, as referred to so often by the LXX, is in the Psalmist’s mind. Thus he says, ‘Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness’ (Psa 5:8); ‘Deliver me, in thy righteousness’ (Psa 31:1) in these passages the writer throws himself up on the revealed character of God as containing something more than abstract justice; there is in Him an element of pity for the suffering, and of mercy for the fallen; there must be, for these principles have found expression in the law which He has prescribed for men’s dealings with one another.
In Pro 10:2 (‘Righteousness delivereth from death’) we have one of a class of passages very common in the O.T., pointing to the blessings which as a matter of fact follow from conformity to the will of God. When the prophet Ezekiel says (18:20), ‘The righteousness of the righteous shall be up on him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be up on him,’ he teaches that a man is dealt with by God according to his own personal character and course of action, and that he must not delude himself with the idea that he can possess any hereditary immunity from evil.
Lastly, we read, in Mal 4:2, of a Being who is described as the Sun of Righteousness, who should rise with healing in his wings for them that fear the name of God. Just as the material sun in the heavens gives forth light and heat, and becomes a centre of attraction for all other bodies that come with in its sphere, so from the Messiah there was to issue healing power which should become an efficient remedy for all spiritual diseases and for physical corruption.
Teaching on Justification and Righteousness
Turning now from the O.T. to the N.T., it is noticeable that the word ‘righteousness’ is rare in the Gospels. St. Mark never employs it; St. Luke only once (four times in the Acts); St. John, twice; and St. Matthew, eight times at most in the Epistles of St. Paul the word is used sixty-six times, and in various senses.
(i.) There is one absolute and eternal standard of right, which is of the essence of the nature of God, so that we say whatever He does must be right, because Right is summed up in Him. [The question is sometimes asked, is a thing right because God does it? or does He do it because it is right? this is a metaphysical query far beyond the limits of the present work. Suffice it to say that if God has done a thing, it is certain to be right; and if a thing is certainly wrong, we may be sure that God does not approve of it. God and right, the Law-giver and the law, are, so far as we can understand, not two, but one.] With respect to this element in the character of God, St. Paul speaks of our own righteousness commending God’s righteousness (Rom 3:5). this is the only passage in St. Paul’s Epistles in which the words are put in the order, ; in all the others he–no doubt with a purpose –wrote, .
(ii.) If we could obtain a thorough conformity with this Divine standard by the spiritual observance of the various principles and precepts contained in the law, we should be righteous even as He is righteous; but in this sense ‘There is none righteous, no, not one’ (Rom 3:10).
(iii.) Nevertheless, some have sought to establish their own righteousness by attempting to fulfil the letter of the law of Moses. this was the case with many of the Jews (Rom 10:3); and it had been the aim of St. Paul himself in his early days; so far, in fact, had he succeeded that he could say, ‘ as touching the righteousness which is of the law,’ I was ‘blameless,’ i.e. no fault could be found in me by those who measured me by the letter of the law (Php 3:6). Yet when the commandments contained in the law were opened out to him in their application to the thoughts of his heart, [A student of Luther’s works will probably be led to the conclusion that there was no point in which he was more strong, more clear, and more excellent than in the application of the law of God to the whole man instead of confining it to external actions and so-called religious observances.] he found that sin, though repressed, was not conquered: ‘S in revived, and I died’ (Rom 7:9).
(iv.) One Being, however, has partaken of human nature, of whom God could say, in the full meaning of the words, ‘Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity’ (Heb 1:9). Jesus Christ is emphatically called ‘the righteous one’ (Act 22:14; 1Jn 2:1). He, in human nature, lived up to the perfect standard of the Divine law, so that his righteousness was of the same complexion and character as the righteousness of God.
(v.) But Jesus Christ has become righteousness unto us (1Co 1:30). Hence we read of those ‘who receive the gift of righteousness’ (Rom 5:17).
(vi.) this gift is made available to us–so far as God’s part is concerned– by Christ’s atoning death up on the cross. God made Him, who knew not sin, to be sin (i.e. dealt with Him as sin should be dealt with), that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2Co 5:21).
(vii.) The gift of God’s righteousness is available to us–so far as our part is concerned–through faith. We must yield to it (Rom 10:3). It is conferred ‘up on all them that believe.’ They are then ‘freely justified by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God has set fort has a mercy-seat or propitiation, through faith in his blood’ (Rom 3:22; Rom 3:24-25). Hence it is called the righteousness of faith.
(viii.) Thus, by the term ‘the righteousness of God,’ St. Paul generally implies that righteousness which comes up to God’s standard, and which flows from God to man when he rests on Christ crucified as his ground of pardon, and is united with Christ risen as the spring of his spiritual life.
(ix.) Lastly, the possession of it necessarily leads a man into practical conformity with the will of God, because it sets his heart in the right direction, and makes him a partaker of the Divine life which flows into him through the agency of the Holy Spirit of God. The Christian becomes in a practical sense ‘the righteousness of God in Christ’ (2Co 5:21); being made free from sin, he is made servant to righteousness (Rom 6:18); and he who has been hungering and thirsting after righteousness is filled out of the fulness which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The word righteous or just () is almost always taken in the N.T. to represent that upright and merciful character in conformity with law which we have already met with in the O.T.; and this is the case whether the word is applied to God, the righteous Judge, to Jesus Christ ‘the holy one and the just,’ or to those who shall rise at ‘the resurrection of the just.’
In the opening of the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul takes as his text the words of Habakkuk (Hab 2:4), ‘a righteous man shall live by faith.’ From this passage he teaches that Divine life is not granted to a righteous man as a reward for his justice and obedience to the law of Moses, but it accrues to him by virtue of that faithfulness whereby he takes hold of Christ, and thus avails himself of the grace and righteousness of God in this sense also are we to understand the words ‘ by the obedience of one many shall be constituted righteous’ (Rom 5:19); it is not their own obedience which causeth them to be righteous in God’s sight, but through the work of Christ, who was ‘obedient unto (or, up to) death,’ they are accounted righteous before God.
Little needs to be added concerning the N.T. usage of the word justify. We have seen that it signifies a decision in a person’s favour, and that it involves a consequent freedom from penalty, and a claim to an inheritance. St. Paul sums up the whole matter very tersely in his speech at Antioch, where alone the word occurs in the Acts (Act 13:39): ‘Be it known unto you that through this (Jesus) is remission of sins proclaimed to you; and every one who believes in him is justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified under the law of Moses.’ Neither charge nor penalty exists for the believer. He is now justified in [It is often hard to give an exact rendering to the preposition (in), especially in St. Paul’s Epistles. It marks position, relationship, or union. The expression ‘ in Christ’ usually signifies ‘ by virtue of union with Christ by faith.’] Christ’s blood (Rom 5:9). his faith in the sacrifice of Christ is of such a nature as to identify him with Christ in his death to sin, [Christ died to sin once. He was crucified by sinners, and slain by wicked hands. The sin which slew Him was the sin of the world, summed up in one act . of intense hatred of God and of goodness. He was constituted ‘accursed’ under the law of Moses, not by wrong-doing, but by being fastened to a cross, and was further identified with sinners by being crucified between two thieves. All this was foreordained. He endured the cross and despised the shame because Hs knew that He, the innocent, was dying for a guilty world by the will of God.] and thus ‘he that is dead (i.e. dead in this sense with Christ) is justified from sin’ (Rom 6:7, margin).
We see that to be justified, to be recounted righteous, and to have the gift of the righteousness of God, are three aspects of one and the same thing, and set forth most forcibly some of the benefits which we obtain through faith in Christ’s offering of Himself.
Fuente: Synonyms of the Old Testament
Justification
(See IMPUTE.) “The just shall live by faith” (Hab 2:4) is thrice quoted by Paul:
(1) Rom 1:17, where the emphasis is on “just,” the gospel plan of saving men sets forth “the righteousness (justice) of God” as excluding the righteousness of man, Gentile and Jew alike (Rom 1:17 ff; Romans 2; Rom 3:25).
(2) Gal 3:11, etc., where the emphasis is on “faith” as distinguished front works, either distinct from or combined with faith, in the act of justification, this is by faith alone.
(3) Heb 10:38-39, where the emphasis is on “live”; as in the first instance in the matter of justification, so throughout, spiritual life is continued only by faith as opposed to “drawing back.”
Again, the gratuitousness of God’s gift of justification is brought out by comparing Rom 3:24, “being justified freely (doorean) by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” with Joh 15:25, “they hated ME without a cause” (doorean). As gratuitous as was man’s hatred, so gratuitous is God’s love justifying believers through Christ. Man had every cause to love, yet he hated, God; God had every cause given by man to hate, yet He loves, man. The Hebrew tsadaquw, Greek dikaioo, expresses, not to infuse righteousness into but to impute it to, man; to change his relation to God legally or forensically, not in the first instance to change his character. “Justification” is no more an infusion of righteousness than “condemnation,” its opposite, is an infusion of wickedness, as is proved by Deu 25:1, “the judges shall justify the righteous and condemn the wicked,” Pro 17:15; Isa 5:23; Psa 143:2, which shows that by inherent righteousness no man could be justified.
In 40 Old Testament passages the Hebrew is used in the forensic sense, Isa 53:11, “by His knowledge shall My righteous Servant justify many” is no exception, for the mode of His justifying them follows, “He shall bear their iniquities.” So in Dan 12:3 ministers “justify” or “turn to righteousness” their converts instrumentally, i.e. bring them to God who justifies them. In Dan 8:14, margin, “the sanctuary shall be justified” means “shall be vindicated from profanation,” shall stand in a relation of right before God which it had not done before its cleansing. Similarly the Greek verb means not to make righteous or pure, but to count righteous before God. Opposed to katakrinoo, “to condemn”, Rom 8:33-34; “who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth; who is he that condemneth?” Also Rom 5:16; Luk 18:14. Mat 11:19 means like Dan 8:14, “wisdom is vindicated from the condemnation” east on her by “this generation.”
Also Mat 12:37; Luk 7:29, the publicans “justified God”; i.e. vindicated His righteousness, showed they counted Him righteous in His “counsel” by accepting the gospel; opposed to the Pharisees who “rejected” it, to their own condemnation (Rom 2:13). Before man’s bar, ordinarily, the righteousness on account of which he is justified or counted righteous is his own; before God’s bar, the righteousness on account of which he is justified is Christ’s, which is God’s (2Pe 1:1). Therefore pardon accompanies justification before God’s bar, but pardon would be scorned by one innocent and therefore justified before man’s bar. Again, acquittal before man is not always accompanied with justification; but the sinner pardoned before God is always justified also. In 1Jo 3:7, “he that doeth righteousness is righteous even as He is righteous”; not his doing righteousness makes him righteous, but shows that he is so, i.e. justified by the righteousness of God in Christ (Rom 10:3-10).
A man “deceives” himself if he think himself “righteous,” and yet does not righteousness, for “doing righteousness” is the sure fruit and proof of “being righteous,” i.e. of having the only principle of true righteousness and the only mean of justification, faith. Paul’s epistle to Romans proves Jew and Gentile guilty of breaking God’s universal law, therefore incapable of being justified by their own righteousness, i.e. obedience to the law. “By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified in God’s sight; but now (under the gospel) the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe; for there is no difference, for all have sinned,” etc. (Rom 3:20-23). Still plainer is Rom 4:3-8 “to hint that worketh not but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith (i.e. not as a merit, but Christ’s merit apprehended by faith: Eph 2:5; Eph 2:8-10) is counted for righteousness.
David describeth the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works (as man has no righteousness of his own the ‘righteousness imputed’ to him can only be the righteousness of God in Christ) … blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.” The justified man is not only acquitted as innocent but regarded as having perfectly obeyed the law in the person of Christ. There is to him both the non-imputation of sin and the imputation of righteousness. “Being justified by God’s grace he is made heir according to the hope of eternal life” (Tit 3:7; Rom 5:18-19). Christ is “of God made unto us righteousness,” so that to believers He is “the Lord our righteousness” (1Co 1:30; Jer 23:6). Faith is the instrument or receptive mean of justification (Rom 3:28; Gal 2:16; Gal 3:8).
We are justified judicially by God (Rom 8:33), meritoriously by Christ (Isa 53:11; Rom 5:19), instrumentally or mediately by faith (Rom 5:1), evidentially by works. This is the sense of James (Jam 2:14-26), otherwise James could no more be reconciled with himself than with Paul, for he quotes the same instance and the same scripture, “Abraham believed God and it (his faith) was counted to him for righteousness,” as Paul does. (See JAMES; FAITH.) Luther called the doctrine of justification by faith only “the article (test) of a standing or falling church.” Justin Martyr in the second century (Ep. ad Diog.) writes: “what else could cover our sins but His righteousness? in whom could we transgressors be justified but only in the Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable contrivance! that the transgressions of many should be hidden in one righteous Person and the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors.” (2Co 5:21).
The Church of England Homily says: “faith doth not shut out repentance, hope, love, and the fear of God in every man justified, but it shutteth them out from the office of justifying.” So: “faith, receiving and resting on Christ and His righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification, yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces.” (Westminster Confession xi. 1-2). Rome makes justification the infusion of righteousness by God’s Spirit and the rewarding of the good works done under His influence, at the day of judgment. This confounds justification with sanctification whereas Romans 5 and Romans 6 carefully distinguish them, and makes it a continuous process not completed until the judgment, whereas Scripture makes it completed on believing (Rom 5:1-9; Rom 8:1; Joh 5:24).
Fuente: Fausset’s Bible Dictionary
JUSTIFICATION
The English words justification and righteousness are different parts of the same word in the original languages of the Bible. This applies to the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New (see also RIGHTEOUSNESS).
Meaning of justify in the Bible
Most commonly the Bible uses the word justify in what might be called a legal sense. The picture is that of a courtroom where the righteous person is the one whom the judge declares to be right. The person is justified. In other words, to justify means to declare righteous, to declare to be in the right, to vindicate. It is the opposite of to condemn, which means to declare guilty, to declare to be in the wrong (Deu 25:1; Job 13:18; Isa 50:7-8; Mat 12:37; Luk 18:14; Rom 8:33).
Those who try to show that they are in the right are said to be trying to justify themselves. They are trying to declare themselves righteous (Job 32:2; Luk 10:28-29; Luk 16:14-15). They may even go to the extent of condemning God in order to justify themselves, declaring God to be wrong and themselves to be right (Job 40:8). It is in this sense of declaring someone to be right or wrong that the Bible may speak of God as being justified. People acknowledge that he is in the right and that his judgments are correct (Psa 51:4; Luk 7:29; Rom 3:4; cf. Rev 16:5).
Some may argue that to justify means to make righteous (cf. Rom 5:19 RSV), but if such is the case it is important to understand what is meant by being made righteous. People are not made righteous in the sense that a piece of metal placed in a fire is made hot. They are made righteous only in the sense of being declared righteous. They are put in a right relationship with God (Rom 5:19 GNB). The word has to do with a legal pronouncement, not with changing people from one thing to another by placing some new moral power within them (Rom 4:1-3; Rom 5:17-19; Php 3:9).
Just as condemn does not mean make wicked, so justify does not mean make good. Nevertheless, one result of the justification of believers is that their lives are changed so that righteousness (in the sense of right behaviour), not sin, becomes the chief characteristic (Php 3:9-10; Jam 2:17-23; 1Pe 2:24; 1Jn 3:7; see SANCTIFICATION).
Justification by faith
The fullest explanation of justification is in the writings of Paul. There the teaching centres on Gods great act of salvation by which he declares repentant sinners righteous before him. Instead of having the status of those who are guilty and condemned, sinners now have the status of those who are right with God. God brings them into a right relationship with himself, giving them a right standing before him (Rom 5:1-2; Rom 8:33).
This is entirely an act of Gods grace, for no one can have a right standing before God on the basis of personal good deeds. Even a persons best efforts to keep the law will not help. Since all are sinners and under Gods condemnation, there is nothing anyone can do to gain acceptance with God (Psa 143:2; Rom 3:28; Rom 9:31-32; Gal 2:16). God accepts people not because of anything they do, but solely because of his mercy (Isa 55:7; Mic 7:18; Rom 3:24; Eph 2:8).
However, this gracious work of justification takes place only in those who trust in God. It is through faith that people are justified; more specifically, through faith in Jesus Christ. Christ has done the work and they accept the benefits of that work by faith (Rom 1:17; Rom 3:22; Rom 3:28; Rom 4:2-5; Rom 5:1; Gal 2:16; Gal 3:11; see FAITH; GRACE).
The basis of Gods merciful act of justification is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Rom 3:24-25; Rom 4:23-25; Rom 5:9; Rom 5:17-19; Gal 2:21). God now sees believers as in Christ and therefore he declares them righteous. And those whom God declares righteous are righteous not in the sense that they are perfect people who cannot sin any more, but in the sense that God gives them a righteousness that is not their own, the righteousness of Christ. God accepts believing sinners because of what Christ has done. Jesus Christ becomes, as it were, their righteousness (1Co 1:30; 2Pe 1:1).
Justification and substitution
Although the word justification tells us that God declares sinners righteous, it does not tell us the hidden mysteries of divine activity that make it possible for God to do this. The mysteries of Gods will and the wonders of his salvation are in some ways beyond human understanding. But since justification is concerned with the processes of law, a further illustration from the law court may suggest the way God has worked.
In this courtroom scene, God is the judge and sinners are on trial (Rom 2:2; Rom 2:5-6; Rom 3:23). God loves them and wants to forgive them (1Jn 4:16; 2Pe 3:9), but his love requires that he act justly (i.e. righteously). If a judge acquitted the guilty merely because they were people he liked, he would be unjust. He might claim to be loving, but his love would be no more than an irrational emotion divorced from moral justice and righteousness. True love, by contrast, is so zealous for the other persons well-being that it reacts in anger against all that is wrong (cf. Heb 12:6).
God is love and wants to forgive sinners, but because he is a God of love he cannot ignore sin or treat it as if it does not matter. His act of forgiveness, if it is based on love, will involve his dealing with sin.
Being a God of love, God must punish sin, but at the same time (being a God of love) he provides a way whereby sinners need not suffer the punishment themselves. He has done this by taking human form in the person of Jesus Christ, living with sinners as a fellow human being in their world, and then, without himself being a sinner, taking sins punishment on their behalf (Rom 3:24; Rom 5:9; 2Co 5:18). God is both the judge and the one against whom people have sinned, but at the same time he is the one who bears the penalty of their sin. He forgives sinners only at great cost to himself (Joh 3:16; 2Co 8:9; see SACRIFICE).
Jesus died in the place of, or as the substitute for, guilty sinners (1Pe 2:24). Whereas Adams sin brought death, Christs death brings life (Rom 5:15; Rom 5:18). Being fully human, Jesus could be a substitute for his fellow human beings, but only because he was sinless and completely obedient. He fulfilled all Gods righteous requirements under the law (Mat 3:15; Php 2:8; 1Pe 2:22; 1Jn 3:5). One who broke Gods law would be under condemnation himself and could not take the place others (Gal 3:10). Jesus, however, kept Gods law perfectly. He was absolutely righteous in the fullest moral sense of the word, and so was able to bear the laws punishment on behalf of those who had broken it (Gal 3:11-13; Gal 4:4-5).
When he died, the sinless Jesus suffered the punishment that sin deserved. He bore our sins (1Pe 2:24). Because of the death of Christ, God can now forgive repentant sinners and accept them as righteous before him. Believers are now in a right relationship with God, because Christ is in a right relationship with God (2Co 5:21). Gods justice and Gods mercy operate in harmony, because both are outworkings of his love. His justice is satisfied in seeing sin punished, and his mercy flows out in seeing sin forgiven. In his love God justifies guilty but repentant sinners, yet he does so justly and righteously (Rom 3:26; Rom 4:5; see also PROPITIATION).
Justification and forgiveness
Gods forgiveness is more than what people usually mean when they talk of forgiveness. It is more than merely the removal of hostility or the ignoring of wrongdoing. When God forgives sinners, he also justifies them, bringing them into a right relation with himself (Rom 5:6-11). God not only removes condemnation, he also gives righteousness (Rom 4:6-8; Rom 4:22; Rom 5:17; Rom 5:19; 2Co 5:19; 2Co 5:21; Php 3:9). Forgiveness is something that believers continue to be in need of because they are still likely to sin (Mat 6:12); justification is a once-for-all act, a declaration by God that he accepts them in his Son (Rom 5:1-2).
The forgiveness that believers need day by day is concerned not with the basic work of justification, but with their daily enjoyment of fellowship with God. Although the penalty of sin has been paid, the evil effects of sin are still in the world and believers cannot escape them. Their failures may disappoint themselves and God, but as they confess those failures they are assured of Gods forgiveness (1Jn 1:7; 1Jn 1:9; see CONFESSION; FORGIVENESS). Their justification, however, is never in question.
Christs death deals with sins penalty for all believers, whether they belong to generations past, present or future. In like manner it deals with the penalty for all the sins of each individual believer, whether those sins be in the past, present or future Rom 3:22-26; Heb 9:15).
Fuente: Bridgeway Bible Dictionary
Justification
I.Biblical doctrine.
1.The OT and Pharisaic doctrines.
2.The Pauline doctrine.
II.Historical.
1.The Catholic doctrine.
2.The Protestant doctrine.
3.Modern theories.
III.Constructive treatment.
I. Biblical doctrine
1. The OT and Pharisaic doctrines.The doctrine of justification through faith in Christ owes its origin to St. Paul, and is the outcome of two factors, his Jewish training on the one hand, and his Christian experience on the other. The idea of justification itself was derived by the Apostle from the Rabbinic theology, whose doctrine of justification by the works of the Law is at once the antithesis and the necessary background of his own. The Rabbinic doctrine again rested upon an OT basis. We can trace the development of the idea of righteousness before God in the prophets, who from the first judge Israel by the standard of the absolutely righteous demands of Jahweh. In the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel the idea is brought into connexion with the individual (Jer 20:12, Hab 1:4; Hab 1:13; Hab 2:4, Eze 3:20-21; Eze 18:19 ff; Eze 33:12 ff.). Further, this age being also that of the development of the Law, whose authors aimed at embodying the demands of Jahweh in a practical form, we find the idea connected with the fulfilment either of the Law as a whole (Deu 6:25), or of a single commandment contained in it (Deu 24:13). Finally, in the post-exilic period the idea receives a great development. God is characterized as the righteous Judge (Psa 9:7-8; Psa 50:6; Psa 94:2; Psa 96:10; Psa 96:13 etc.), whose righteousness results in the punishment of sinners (Psa 1:5-6, Psa 9:16, Psa 11:5-6 etc.). The actual positive recognition of the righteousness of the righteous is said in Psa 62:12 to depend on the Divine grace; the latter term, however, is practically synonymous with righteousness in its beneficent aspect (Psa 33:5, Psa 36:6-7, Psa 48:9-10, Psa 145:17). Sinners God can justify so far as they are at bottom righteous (Job 33:26). But the godless He may not justify (Psa 69:27). The general idea is, further, that the recognition of righteousness by God is manifested by outward good fortune; just as His displeasure is shown by outward calamity (Isa 65:13-14, Mal 4:2-3, Psa 37:19-20 etc.; cf. Wellhausen, IJG [Note: JG Israelitische und Jdische Geschichte.] 5 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] p. 220, n. [Note: note.] 1). In the later post-exilic literature, however, the idea that the righteous is always rewarded and the wicked always punished in this life, is abandoned, and there appears the conception that the final justification or condemnation takes place after death (Job 19:25-26, Dan 12:2-3). This conception is henceforth predominant, as in the Pharisaic theology, to which we now turn.
The Pharisaic conception of the relation of man to God was purely legal, and based upon the idea of the Law as a contract between God and man. The idea of grace which qualifies the legalism of the OT sinks altogether into the background. The Pharisaic doctrine implies that the Divine demands expressed in the Law can be satisfied, and that the fulfilment of them gives a claim to reward. It is the recognition of this claim that is now meant by justification. The conception is further carried out into detail in that the Law is regarded atomically as the sum of the commandments it contains (cf., however, Deu 6:25). Every act of obedience is entered by God in the heavenly books, as is also every act of transgression. The decision is according to the preponderance. If this is on the side of the good, the Divine sentence of justification follows, which consists in the declaration that the man is righteous. The account is finally made up at death (Weber, Jud. Theol.2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] 1897, p. 277 ff.).
It will be apparent that the whole idea, both in the OT and still more distinctly in the Pharisaic theology, is forensic. With this, again, agrees the derivation of the group of technical terms used in the OT in connexion with the idea of justification ( righteousness, righteous, justify). This group has almost universally a forensic sense. The words are so used secularly, and are therefore naturally applied with this meaning in religion (Smend, Alttest. Religionsgeschichte2, 1899, p. 388 f.). In the LXX the equivalents are , , . On the constant forensic use of in the LXX (OT and Apocr.), also in the pseudepigraphic books, see Sanday-Headlam, Romans in Internat. Crit. Com. p. 31. In Talmudic theology is replaced by innocence, and by ; also appears for , but the latter is maintained in use along with it (Weber, p. 277 f.).
It is finally to be observed that, both in the OT and in the Rabbinic theology, righteousness before God and justification, whether looked for from the Divine grace or on the ground of human merit, are religious ideas. Righteousness is not sought for its own sake, as a moralist might seek it, but always as the condition of acceptance with God, and the blessings which flow from this, in this world or the next. It is at this point that the Pauline conception of justification by faith links itself on to the older theologies. What St. Paul has in view is always the question of acceptance with God, and his doctrine is the answer of his Christian experience to a problem set in the terms of the Pharisaic theology.
2. The Pauline doctrine.There is no doubt that St. Pauls idea of justification is essentially the same as the Pharisaic, and, like it, forensic. In the fundamental passage Rom 3:19 ff. the whole setting is forensic. Note the words , (Rom 3:19); . (Rom 3:20). Mankind is arraigned before the judgment-bar of God, and the justification which follows must be forensic. So in Rom 4:5 justification is connected with imputation, a distinctly legal conception: = is reckoned, i.e. in the heavenly account-books. See, further, Sanday-Headlam, i.e. p. 30, who decide on general philological grounds that means to pronounce righteous: It has relation to a verdict pronounced by a judge. It cannot mean to make righteous. So far, then, St. Paul is in agreement with the Pharisees. But the deeper insight of his conscience will not allow him to suppose that God can be satisfied with a mere preponderance of performance over transgression. For him to attain righteousness by the works of the Law would involve the complete fulfilment of it. But this is impossible; for all are sinners (Rom 3:23). Hence St. Paul concludes that by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in Gods sight (Rom 3:20).
Here is the point where St. Paul introduces his doctrine, based on his own personal experience, of a new method of justification (Rom 3:21 ff.), of which the principle on Gods side is grace (). i.e. the free unmerited love of God (Rom 3:24), and on mans side faith (Rom 1:17, Rom 4:5). As proceeding from the Divine grace, justification by faith is totally opposed to justification by works, which depends on merit (Rom 4:4). Instead of attaining a righteousness by his own efforts, the believer submissively receives a righteousness which is wholly of God, and His gift (Rom 5:17, Rom 10:3, Php 3:9). This casts light upon the Pauline conception of faith. It is the method by which the grace of God is subjectively appropriated. In so far as the believer, instead of acting on his own initiative, allows himself to be determined by God (Rom 10:3), faith is a species of obedience; thus St. Paul speaks of the obedience of faith (Rom 1:5). But as correlative to grace, or the free love of God, faith is psychologically trust, a believing on God (Rom 4:24).
The revelation of the Divine grace which awakens faith takes place, according to St. Paul, in the Person of Christ (2Co 5:19) and in His work, more especially in His death, but also in His resurrection. Christs death was the work of the Divine grace in that God ordained it as an expiatory sacrifice for sin, Christ dying instead of sinners, that in the act of justification He might not appear indulgent of sin (Rom 3:25; cf. 2Co 5:21, Rom 5:8). Christs resurrection is also included in the revelation by which Gods grace to sinners is made known (Rom 4:25; Rom 8:34; Rom 10:9, 1Co 15:17), but St. Paul does not define its exact place in it. In fact, Christs resurrection, as the object of faith, is hardly separable from the Risen Christ. It is Gods act by which He presents Christ alive, in spite of His death (Rom 4:24; Rom 10:9), as the object of faith.
It is to be observed, finally, that justification requires for its complete explanation both sides of the correlation, grace and faith, which in St. Pauls mind are associated in the closest possible manner. Thus he speaks of the revelation of the righteousness of God through faith (Rom 1:17, Rom 3:22): the whole is really one idea. Only thus can we explain the remarkable interchange of language which the Apostle uses with respect to the two sides of the correlation. Justification is generally associated more closely with faith, or the subjective side (Rom 3:26, Rom 5:1). But in 2Co 5:19 St. Paul says that God was in Christ, not imputing to men their trespasses, which last phrase is synonymous with justifying men; so that here justification is associated with the objective side, or the revelation of grace (cf. Rom 3:24). So also in Rom 5:16, if be rightly translated sentence of justification (so Sanday-Headlam, l.c. p. 141), then St. Paul here represents this sentence as falling once for all at the death of Christ. On the other hand, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ belongs to the objective side of the correlation; yet St. Paul speaks of Christ in Rom 3:25 as propitiatory through faith in His blood. Evidently, then, grace and faith are so organically related that the one implies the other, and is properly understood only through its correlative.
We must now return to the form in which St. Paul has expressed his doctrine of justification. It is, as we have seen, determined by his Pharisaic training, and is that of a forensic judgment. But the form is all that the Apostle has in common with the Pharisaic idea. The judgment of justification in his conception is extra-judicial, i.e. God has regard in it to considerations outside the Law. The righteousness of faith is apart from law ( , Rom 3:21). The Law as such takes account only of merit, as St. Paul himself testifies: He that doeth them shall live in them (Gal 3:12). But the Divine sentence of justification takes account of faith, which is a consideration beyond the purview of the Law: The law is not of faith (ib.). In fact, in justification the Law is transcended by grace, which reckons faith for righteousness (Rom 4:4-5). St. Paul does not mean that faith is a work, and that grace simply reckons the work of faith instead of the works of the Law. This would be, after all, half legalism. With the Apostle, as we have seen, faith is not a work, but a receiving; not a second principle of justification over against grace, but simply the reflex of Divine grace in man. Grace therefore sees in faith simply this reflex of itself, and in justifying the sinner by faith in reality justifies on the ground of itself (cf. Isa 43:25).
What, then, is the essential point in the Pauline presentation of justification as forensic? It is, to use philosophic language, that justification is a synthetic, not an analytic judgment. It is not based on anything in the believernot even on his faith, which comes into view only so far as the Divine grace is reflected in it. In justification God justifies the ungodly (Rom 4:5): the words are evidently chosen by St. Paul with a clear sense of the paradox involved, as the deliberate opposition of language to the OT shows (cf. Exo 23:7, Deu 25:1, Pro 17:15, Isa 5:23). God does not, in justification, recognize the presence of any attribute in the sinner; on the contrary, He adds to him an attribute while he is still a sinner, viz. that of righteousness. It is evident that the paradoxical character of this doctrine created misunderstanding even in St. Pauls time (Rom 3:8; cf. Rom 6:1); and it has done so ever since. The paradox, however, resolves itself at once as soon as we remember that it is righteousness, not in the ethical, but in the religious sense, as the condition of acceptance with God, which is meant. The OT taught that righteousness was the condition of acceptance with God; the Pharisees sharpened this into the doctrine that the performance of the Law was the condition. St. Pauls language is determined by this form in which he found the problem of acceptance with God stated; his meaning simply is that God accepts the sinner on the ground of His mere grace, apart from all question of merit. It is consequently only another, though less difficult, expression for the same act of the Divine judgment when St. Paul speaks of adoption (, Gal 4:5), or the reception of the sinner into the position of a child of God (Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. ii. p. 134). Adoption is also formally a judicial act, and really a synthetic act of the Divine judgment. The possible objection to this identification of justification and adoption, viz. that justification is the act of God as Judge, but adoption His act as Father, falls to the ground as soon as it is remembered that justification is really an extra-judicial judgment, proceeding from the Divine grace (Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , iii., English translation p. 86 ff.).
Finally, we get still further light on St. Pauls meaning as to justification from the fact that in Rom 4:7 he introduces, as synonymous with the imputation of righteousness or justification, the OT idea of the forgiveness of sins (cf. also Eph 1:7), which links his teaching on at once to that of Christ Himself; and it appears that the Pauline conceptions of justification and adoption are simply the equivalent of the Fatherly forgiveness taught by Jesus (Kaftan, Dogmatik 3, 4, p. 523). The idea that forgiveness is something merely negative, while justification conveys a positive status, turns on an inadequate conception of the Biblical idea of forgiveness.
So far we have considered justification as a Divine operation; it now remains to consider its practical issues, when it takes effect in the admission of the sinner to fellowship with God. Faith now conies into view, not simply as the reflexion of grace, but in its psychological nature as trust, including the submission of the will to God; and the practical effects of justification appear as the unfolding of this trust in its various aspects. The first of these is the sense of present peace with God (Rom 5:1), or the consciousness of acceptance with Him. Here appears a strong contrast with the Pharisaic theology, which, teaching not the justification of the sinner, but only of him who has kept the precepts, defers justification till the hour of death, and consequently demands in the present a condition of anxious fear lest in the end justification should not be attained (Weber, l.c. pp. 284, 334 ff.; cf. Rom 8:15). Along with present peace goes patience in all present suffering (Rom 5:2-3; Rom 5:5), in the belief that it is Divinely ordered for the best ends (Rom 8:28), while there is at the same time a consciousness of the Divine love (Rom 5:5, Rom 8:35-39). Here appears a contrast to the OT point of view, from which temporal sufferings appeared as signs of the Divine displeasure. This contrast is strikingly brought out by comparing St. Pauls triumphant use of the quotation in Rom 8:36 with its original despondent meaning in Psa 44:22. While St. Paul finds it impossible that persecution should separate the believer from the love of God, the Psalmist sees in it a proof that God has cast off His people (cf. Psa 44:9). Finally, there is no fear of final punishment (Rom 5:9), but rather a joyful hope, nay certainty, of ultimate salvation (Rom 5:2; Rom 5:10, Rom 6:23, Rom 8:30; Rom 8:38-39). The sum of all these things, in fact the whole consequence of justification, St. Paul expresses by saying that, for the believer, There is now no condemnation (Rom 8:1), or that he is not under law, but under grace (Rom 6:15). From this point of view the work of Christ appears as a redemption from the curse of the Law. Christ, in His death, bore its curse, and its power is therefore at an end (Gal 3:13). St. Paul refers in this passage to the Jewish Law, as the antithesis with Gal 3:14 shows: Christ redeemed us [Jews] from the curse of the law that upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus. But his idea of freedom from the Law is not to be limited to freedom from the Jewish Law. Though, historically, this special case was of the greatest importance, St. Paul means that the Christian religion is a religion not of law, but of grace. He also expresses the same idea in terms of the parallel conception of adoption, by saying that the believer has received, in place of the spirit of bondage, leading to fear, the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father (Rom 8:15).
The doctrine of the Epistle of James on justification, whether the author has the Pauline doctrine or abuses of it in view or not [on the critical question connected with the Epistle see Moffatt, Historical NT2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , p. 576, for a good statement of the alternatives; also Sanday-Headlam, Romans, p. 104; and W. Patrick, James the Lords Brother], raises an important problem in connexion with it. It is to be noted, first, that the idea of faith in the Epistle is quite different from St. Pauls. When the author teaches that justification is not by faith only, but by works also, the faith he has in view is a mere intellectual assent to Christian truth, especially to the doctrine of the Divine unity (Jam 2:19). Further, his idea of works is not that of meritorious performance deserving reward, but of practical morality. He solves the problem of justification in reality by going back behind the legalism of the Pharisees, and behind the Law altogether, to the position of the OT prophets, in so far as they demanded practical righteousness as the condition of acceptance with God. His doctrine and St. Pauls, therefore, touch nowhere except in language; in thought they are altogether apart. At the same time, the Epistle of James serves forcibly to raise the question, which St. Pauls doctrine is always liable to provoke, viz. what safeguard it offers, while satisfying the religious needs of man, for his moral interests. Reference has already been made to the passage in which St. Paul speaks of opposition to his teaching; it was its apparent antinomianism that provoked this opposition (Rom 3:8; cf. Rom 6:1).
We have thus to return to St. Paul, and ask how he met this difficulty. He does it by opening a new line of argument, in which he presents a fresh view of the death and resurrection of Christ, where these acts appear in the ethical sense of a death to sin and a resurrection to a new life unto God (Rom 6:10), and where, further, Christ in His death and resurrection appears as inclusive of all for whom He died (2Co 5:14). In correspondence with this view, faith also takes on a new significance. It is still a receptivity and an obedience; but as that which it receives is different, it appears with new powers, as establishing a mystic union with Christ in His death and resurrection, the outward symbol of which is baptism (Gal 2:20, Rom 6:1-6, Col 2:11), from which union St. Paul draws the ethical consequence, that the believer being dead with Christ to sin, and alive with Him to God, should live accordingly (Rom 6:4; Rom 6:11-13, Col 3:1; Col 3:5). A parallel line of argument presents the view of the Risen Christ as the Spirit (2Co 3:17), and faith correspondingly as involving the endowment of the Spirit (Gal 3:2, cf. Rom 8:1-11), by which the believer is transformed into the likeness of Christ (2Co 3:18). But again, the possession of the Spirit demands a life according to the Spirit (Gal 5:25, Rom 8:12-13). Along these lines, then, St. Paul makes provision for Christian morality. He presents, as we see, his total thought on the salvation of the individual through the work of Christ in two hemispheresthe former doctrine of justification and this further doctrine which corresponds to the ecclesiastical doctrines of regeneration and sanctification. St. Paul passes continually from the one hemisphere to the other in a way that shows that he feels them to be vitally related; and there are not wanting points of contact between them, amongst which we may note especially the fact that the idea of faith is common to both hemispheres, as is also that of the Spirit, who appears in connexion with justification and adoption as diffusing the consciousness of the love of God (Rom 5:5) and as witnessing to our adoption (8:16), as well as in connexion with regeneration and sanctification as the potency of the new life. Further, there is a cycle of passages in which there appears a tendency to the unification of the two hemispheres of thought, by making justification conditional on regeneration and sanctification, and thus still future aod the object of effort (Rom 8:17, Gal 2:17, 1Co 4:4; 1Co 9:24; 1Co 9:27, Php 3:10; Php 3:14). See on the whole subject Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. ii. p. 137 ff. In the main, however, St. Paul keeps the two hemispheres apart. Holtzmann (p. 137, n. [Note: note.] 1) quotes Pfleiderer, who, using another figure, speaks of the two streams which unite in Paulinism in one bed, without, however, inwardly blending.
II. Historical
1. The Catholic doctrine.St. Pauls doctrine of justification remained after his death in practical abeyance, until it was revived at the Reformation. There is little trace of it in the NT outside of his own Epistles (i.e. of the specific Pauline form of the doctrine of forgiveness). Only uncertain echoes of it are found in the post-Apostolic age, and under the rgime of Catholicism, both ancient and mediaeval, it remained practically a dead letter. Common Catholicism, in fact, returned substantially to the Pharisaic doctrine of salvation by merit, against which St. Paul had fought, with its accompanying atmosphere of fear of coming short at last. According to Gregory the Great, who is here typical, assurance is the mother of indolence, and the fear of Divine judgment is the only fit attitude for the Christian till his last day on earth (Harnack, Dogmengeschichte3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , iii. p. 250, n. [Note: note.] 1). In such an atmosphere the words of the Pauline vocabulary necessarily lost their original meaning, and took on a new significance. Faith came to mean, not trust, but intellectual assent to revealed truth; grace, not the unmerited love of God, but the Holy Spirit, as sacramentally communicated or infused (so Tertullian; see Loofs, Leitfaden, p. 104). It was the work of Augustine to create a new doctrine of justification by the combination of these ideas. First he interpreted the word justification itself to mean not a declaring righteous, but a making righteous; what else is justificati than justi facti? (de Sp. ct Litt. 26, 45). Then, further, he combined the idea of justification in this sense with that of infused grace. Augustine teaches that it is this infused grace which justifies or makes righteous by renewing the nature. He is able thus, with St. Paul, to conceive righteousness as a gift; the gift, however, is not of forensic, but of inherent righteousness. This idea of justification by infused grace, it is to be noted, lacks that immediate and necessary connexion with the work of Christ which lies at the base of the Pauline doctrine. Augustine, indeed, regards the forgiveness of sins as an effect of grace, parallel with the renewal of the nature; but faith is not brought into the connexion. The idea of faith remains with Augustine simply the common Catholic idea of assent to revealed truth; so that faith is no more than a presupposition of salvation. Only as it is completed by hope and love through the infusion of grace, is it Christian and saving faith (Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte, i. 276). It is obvious how far Augustine is here from St. Paul, though he constantly uses the Apostles formula justification by faith (Seeberg, p. 277). The climax of his departure from Pauline doctrine, however, is reached when the idea of merit is drawn into the scheme. The combination is thus effected. Grace alone renders merit possible. God in His condescension accepts as meritorious the works which are really His own gifts: what are called our merits are His gifts (de Trinitate, xiii. 10, 14).
In Western Catholicism the doctrine of justification remains substantially that of Augustine. The Roman Catholic doctrine was finally formulated in opposition to Protestantism at the Council of Trent. It is necessary to refer to two points only. The first is that, in the Middle Ages, Duns Scotus taught a modification of the Augustinian doctrine, which makes still wider room for the idea of merit. He avails himself of a distinction already found in Thomas Aquinas between merit of congruity (meritum de congruo) and condign merit (meritum de condigno).The former is based upon the idea of the Divine equity, to which it is congruous to reward every one who works according to his power after the excellency of the Divine power. The latter is based on the idea of strict justice, which rewards according to desert (Seeberg, l.e. ii. 105). According to Duns, the first grace itself can he merited de congruo by attrition, i.e. such repentance as is possible without grace. The second point to be observed is that the Council of Trent draws a natural consequence from the Augustinian idea of justification, by teaching that justification is progressive, and can and ought to receive continual increment (Sess. vi. cap. x.).
The great contrast between the Catholic doctrine and that of St. Paul is obvious at the first glance. A second look, however, might suggest that perhaps the contrast was not so great after all. For the Catholic doctrine of justification corresponds, though by no means exactly, to St. Pauls doctrine of regeneration and sanctification. It might, therefore, appear as if the difference were really one of language. Nevertheless, in the end the contrast remains unmitigated by this seeming possibility of reconciliation; as Ritschl has acutely observed (op. cit.3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] iii. 36). Catholicism still remains in opposition to St. Pauls idea of justification. What the Apostle calls justification, viz. acceptance with God, including the assurance of eternal life (Rom 5:10; Rom 6:23; Rom 8:30; Rom 8:33; Rom 8:39), Catholic doctrine includes under the conception of hope. So Conc. Trid. Sess. vi. cap. xiii.: Christians ought to fear, knowing that they are regenerated unto the hope of glory, and not yet unto glory. No one, indeed, can be absolutely certain even of present grace (cap. ix.). It is true that within Catholicism the practical attitude of trust for salvation to the Divine mercy alone, apart from all merits, and the consequent sense of assurance, are to be found, as to some extent in Augustine (Harnack, op. cit. iii. p. 85 f.), but preeminently in Bernard of Clairvaux. In this attitude is the true harbinger of the return to St. Paul at the Reformation (Ritschl, op. cit.3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] i. 109 ff.). But we are now concerned with the Catholic doctrine, not with an attitude maintained in spite of it.
2. The Protestant doctrine.With the Reformation we have a return to the Pauline idea of justification. The absolutely fundamental character for the Christian religion of the Pauline conception is firmly seized. As is well known, Luther called justification by faith the article of a standing and falling Church. The Protestant doctrine, however, assumes a special form, in antithesis to the interim Catholic development, and St. Pauls formula is sharpened into the still more definite shape justification by faith alone.
We have to note, first of all, a reversion to the original Pauline ideas of grace, faith, and justification. Luther, indeed, especially in his earlier period, remained somewhat entangled with the Catholic conception of the last, making the term include both a forensic and a real justification. This, however, was merely a matter of terminology, and has only a historical significance. Practically Luther held the Pauline view: the emphasis with him falls on the forensic aspect of justification. Moreover, the somewhat confused terminology of Luther was corrected by Melanchthon, who says decidedly that justification with the Hebrews was a forensic word, and opposes the idea of a real justification (Loci Theologici: De gratia et justificatione).
The Protestant theology, further, like St. Paul, found the revelation of the Divine grace in Christ, and His work for sinners. Here, however, a considerable development takes place, based upon the mediaeval development of the doctrine of the Atonement due to Anselm. The latter had viewed the death of Christ in the first place as a satisfaction to Gods honour, which liberated Him from the necessity of punishing sinners, and in the second place as a merit or work of supererogatory obedience, which could be made available for His followers. The Protestant theology accepted both these ideas, but with such modifications as made it possible to combine them with the forensic idea of justification. The death of Christ was viewed not as a satisfaction to Gods honour, but to the penal sanctions of His Law. To this was added His active obedience to the Law in His life as a satisfaction to its positive requirements. The whole was summed up as Christs active and passive obedience or merit, and regarded as a provision of the Divine grace with a view to the justification of sinners. Justification consists in the gracious imputation of this twofold merit or obedience to the sinner on the sole condition of faith, so that he becomes not only guiltless before the Law, but also totally free from its claims. This conception is common to both the Lutheran and the Reformed Churches. It did not grow up all at once; but the roots of it can be traced in the earlier Reformers, and it finally established itself firmly in both Churches. It is completely stated in the Formula of Concord (pars ii. Solida Declaratio, iii. 14, 15).
The change from the Pauline doctrine is marked by the alteration of his formula, the imputation of faith for righteousness, into that of the imputation of Christs righteousness. It is not merely one of language. The conception of Christs death as a satisfaction to the penal sanctions of the Divine law, on the ground of which God forgives sinners, may, indeed, be accepted as a natural interpretation of the Pauline conception of Christs death as an expiatory sacrifice for sin, if this conception is to be translated into terms of law. Whether, however, such translation is desirable, is questionable; as we saw that the forensic point of view is only formally and not materially regulative for the Pauline conception of justification. Thus, instead of seeking to translate related conceptions into legal terminology, we ought rather to seek such an explanation (or, if need be, modification) of them as accords with the material element in St. Pauls idea of justification, viz. that it is entirely the work of grace, apart from law. The Protestant theology, in fact, misinterprets Paul by taking his legal phraseology as essential, and seeking to systematize his whole view of justification and its presuppositions under legal ideas. The attempt of the Protestant doctors to conceive the whole process of salvation in legal forms, made them introduce into theology a number of axioms which are in no way part of the Christian view of the world. Such an axiom is that all sin must he punished; whereas the Christian religion teaches that it can be forgiven, and forgiveness and punishment are mutually exclusive (cf. W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, p. 330). Another axiom is that the punishment of sin may he transferred from one person to another; whereas the very essence of the idea of punishment is its connexion with guilt. The vicarious suffering of the innocent for the guilty is not punishment. A third axiom is that merit may similarly be transferred from one person to another; whereas the moral result of a life, which is what is meant, is personal, and while it may result in the good of others, cannot possibly be separated from the person of its author, and treated as a commercial asset. That the Protestant doctors had to hase their theology on axioms like these, plainly shows that they were on the wrong line in attempting to translate the doctrine of salvation into legal terms. We may no doubt recognize behind the forms of the Protestant theology the intention to show that the Divine grace itself is the grace of a Holy and a Righteous God. But the immediate identification of the Divine Righteousness with its expression in law is fatal to a full and complete view of grace. St. Paul might have taught a better conception of law as a temporary and preparatory manifestation of the Divine righteousness, whose end is fulfilled in a higher way by grace (Gal 3:24).
This defect in the view of the revelation of the Divine grace in Christ does not, however, prevent the Protestant theology from being true in the main to the Pauline conception of justification. Over against Catholicism, Protestant theology teaches justification by Gods grace appropriated by faith alone, and apart from all question of human merit. Moreover, in the total view the emphasis, at any rate with the earlier Reformers, does not fall on the supposed legal forms of the Divine revelation in Christ, but on the idea of grace itself. A remarkable proof of this is to be found in the fact that in Melanchthons Loci Theologici there is no locus devoted to the doctrine of Christs satisfaction. Even so late as Gerhard in the early part of the 17th cent., the doctrine is treated by him simply as a part of the locus de justificatione.
After this critical excursus we return to the Protestant theology itself, in order next to describe the positions by which it further defined its conception of justification as over against Catholicism. As regards what the Catholics call justification, but the Protestants regeneration, it is taught that the latter is the necessary accompaniment and logical (the later Lutheran theology says, temporal) consequence of justification. Its objective principle is the gift of the Holy Spirit, its subjective manifestation the activity of faith in good works.
On some further points the two Evangelical Churches diverge not only from Catholicism, but from one another. The first of these has to do with the question of assurance. The Lutherans teach that the believers consciousness of justification is in itself an immediate certainty of the reality of justification, operated by the Holy Ghost (fides divina). Where, however, doubt enters, recourse must be had to the Word and the Sacraments, that the Holy Ghost, who works through the Word, may rekindle faith. The Reformed theologians teach that the guarantee of the reality of justification is Gods eternal predestination to salvation, which manifests itself subjectively in perseverance in the state of grace. Hence the assurance of justification cannot be gathered directly from faith itself, but by a reference to its evidence in its fruits (syllogismus practicus). [See Lipsius, Dogmatik3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , p. 675 f.].
The second difference between the Protestant Churches is that the Lutherans make the moment of justification, alike in earth and heaven, the moment when saving faith comes into being. The Reformed, on the other hand, regard justification as accomplished in the resurrection of Christ for the whole Church as His mystical body (justificatio activa), but as regards individual believers based on the decree of justification, which accompanies their eternal election, and realized when saving faith arises (justificatio passiva). It is to be noted that the objective justification, which is accomplished for believers in Christs resurrection, depends only upon their ideal incorporation in His mystical body. The Reformed doctrine does not therefore, as has sometimes been said, make justification dependent on regeneration. Christs resurrection is regarded as the acceptance of His satisfaction, made for believers, and thus as ideally their justification in Him (cf. Lipsius, Dogmatik, p. 677 f.; Ritschl, op. cit.3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] i. 293 ff.).
The third difference is as to the doctrine of perseverance. The Lutherans teach that a man may fall from faith, and thus from grace, but that he may regain his position by renewed repentance and faith. On the contrary, the Reformed teach that the members of Christs body cannot fall, but must persevere in faith to the end. A faith that does not endure, is not real faith; and the consciousness of justification it may bring is only self-deception (Lipsius, p. 679).
Reference must now be made to certain views within Protestantism which deviate from the orthodox conception. The first of these is that of Osiander, who, attaching himself to many expressions in the teaching of Luther, attempted once more to teach a real justification, and yet avoid introducing the Catholic conception of salvation by merit. In opposition to the idea of justification by the mere external imputation of Christs righteousness, he taught that the essential ground of justification is Christs righteousness as really communicated to us; though at the same time he regards this indwelling righteousness of Christ not as our own, but as an alien righteousness, and in so far as an imputed righteousness (Lipsius, p. 668).
Another line of thought is opened by the Socinian theology. A criticism of the legal forms of the ecclesiastical doctrine of reconciliation leads to the complete rejection of it. Socinus, however, retains a doctrine of justification by faith, regarded as including not only trust in God as revealed by Christ, but consequent obedience to His will. There is no justification by works without faith; but, on the other hand, works are not merely the fruit of faith, but its execution and perfection, and in so far the works which follow faith justify (Socinus, de Fide et Operibus, Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 1656, tom. i. p. 623). But as works done in faith are not perfect, justification is also said to be by faith in opposition to works, because the mercy of God imputes righteousness to the believer (de Jesu Christo Servatore, p. iv, c. 11). In other words, faith is here considered as the principle of active righteousness, and the doctrine of justification comes to mean that God judges not by the outward work, but by the inward disposition. This conclusion is distinctly drawn by the Rationalism of the German Illumination (Lipsius, p. 684).
3. Modern theories.The most important forms in which the doctrine of justification has been stated in modern theology, so far as that does not simply repeat older points of view, owe their origin chiefly to Kant and Schleiermacher, particularly the latter. Kant took up the subject where it had been left by the Illumination, but in view of his deeper ethics stated it as an ethico-religious problem, viz. how a man conscious of guilt could obtain power to live a new life. The solution is to be found in the conception of faith in the ideal. On the one hand, this appears as the principle of a good life; on the other, it affords the principle of acceptance with God, in so far as God judges men by the ideal they follow, though their realization of it may be imperfect. The Kantian theologian Tieftrunk further pointed out that from a psychological point of view the operation of the Divine grace is absolutely necessary, if a man, in spite of his consciousness of guilt, is to be able joyfully to fulfil the moral law; so that it is required from the point of view of the law itself, in so far as it looks for fulfilment (Lipsius, p. 685; Ritschl3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , i. p. 429 ff.).
The defect of the Kantian conception, from the point of view of the Christian religion, is its lack of organic connexion with the historical revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In the system of Schleiermacher, however, the fundamental character for Christianity of this revelation is fully recognized, while at the same time, instead of a return to the standpoint of the older Protestant dogmatics, there is introduced a new and fruitful theological principle. Schleiermacher demands that all conceptions concerning Divine operations shall be verified by their correspondence with Christian experience, not indeed the experience of an individual, but of the Christian community as a whole (Der christliche Glaube5 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , i. 30. p. 162).
From this point of view Schleiermacher treats justification. He begins with the Christian consciousness of redemption and reconciliation through Christ. The Redeemer receives believers into the power of His God-consciousness, and this is His redeeming activity (ii. 100. p. 94). The Redeemer receives believers into the fellowship of His undisturbed happiness, and this is His reconciling activity (ii. 101. p. 102). Schleiermacher thus views the work of Christ through the total impression of His character and life. Only as a part of the latter do His sufferings come into question (ii. 101. 4, p. 108). In accordance with this groundwork follow a the doctrine of justification. Justification and conversion are the two inseparable parts of regeneration or assumption into union with Christ. Assumption into union with Christ is, viewed as an altered relation of man to God, his justification; viewed as an altered form of life, his conversion (ii. 107. p. 165). Justification is by faith, and includes the forgiveness of sins and adoption into Divine sonship (ii. 109. p. 190). All these things flow naturally and inseparably from union with Christ, which alters alike the will and the contemplative consciousness. In particular, the consciousness of forgiveness follows from the fact that the new man in Christ has no relation to the sins of the old man or their penalties. Present suffering he regards simply as evil, not as punishment, and of future suffering he has no fear (ii. 109. 2, p. 193). Finally, when passing over from our own consciousness we view justification as a Divine act, it is not to be separated from the effective working of Christ in conversion. The Divine act of justification, moreover, is one with the sending of Christ into the world. There is no declaratory act apart from this: only figuratively can such he spoken of. As regards the justification of the individual, the case is simply that the one Divine decree of justification in Christ is realized in successive points of time. Finally, faith is not to be described as the instrumental cause, or the of justification. We bring nothing to the Divine grace in Christ but our mere receptivity (ii. 109. 3, p. 195 f.). Faith is awakened wholly by the operation of Christ (ii. 108. 6, p. 186).
The influence of the Reformed theology is plainly visible in the position of Schleiermacher, that justification is, as a Divine act, to be viewed as realized first of all in Christ, and then successively in believers. Compare what is said above, also Turretin (Inst. Theol. Elcncticae, Loc. xvi. Qu. ix. 12), who says that justification is one from the point of view of God, though from our point of view it appears in successive acts, viz. Gods eternal decree of justification, the realization of it in Christs work, the application of it in experience, and the declaration of it at the last day. But, further, the correspondence of this point of view with the tendency previously noted in St. Paul to bring the objective and subjective sides of justification into close and indeed inseparable relation, may also be remarked. Schleiermacher, however, brings the principle which underlies this tendency to clear consciousness, and bases on it his theological method, for which, as we saw, the continuity of Divine operation and human experience is fundamental.
Schleiermachers doctrine of justification has been differently understood. Most theologians have considered that he means to make justification conditional on a real union with Christ (cf. Lipsius, p. 686 ff.). Ritschl, however, thinks that only an ideal union is referred to (iii.3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] p. 559). Two different developments, therefore, have taken place, starting from either view of Schleiermachers position.
In the first place, one of the commonest views in modern theology makes justification dependent on a real union with Christ, breaking down the sharp distinction between justification and regeneration, and treating them simply as aspects of the same process. Faith, on this view, is to be regarded in justification not simply as the reflex of Divine grace, but as comprehending the spiritual content of union with Christ, and of the gift of the Spirit, which is the basis of the ethical life of the Christian. Hence this view of justification is claimed to be ethical; justification according to it being a recognition of what really is in the believer his new life, as well pleasing to God. A reconciliation with the forensic view is found in the Kantian thought that God judges by the ideal; so that justification appears as a prophetic judgment, which sees in the first germ of the new life its whole fruit.
This view is closely akin to Osianders. It has undoubtedly points of contact with the broader use of the word faith in St. Paul, who, as Pfleiderer points out, often uses it as practically equivalent to the whole of Christianity (Urchristenthum2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , i. p. 250; cf. 1Co 12:9 f., 1Co 16:13). It is further along the line developed in the cycle of passages like Rom 8:17, Gal 2:17, 1Co 4:4; 1Co 9:24; 1Co 9:27, Php 3:10-14, as previously explained. But it does not represent St. Pauls main line of thought with respect to justification, and the objection to it further is that in the end it bases justification either upon the imperfect realization of Christ in us, or, in so far as the imperfection is counterbalanced by a reference to the ideal, upon what is still future, thus resembling the Catholic view. This view does not, therefore, meet the religious need of a firm and unshakable ground of trust as to acceptance with God.
In opposition to it, therefore, Ritschl develops the doctrine of Schleiermacher along the other line, which he takes to be its real meaning, giving in his theology also prominence to a conception which with Schleiermacher is in the backgroundthat of revelation. The idea of justification is consequently construed directly through the idea of the Divine grace as revealed in Christ, and faith is thought of as of a piece with this revelation and the realization of it in human lives. Justification is thus in the first instance through grace, but by faith. Ritschls way of expressing this is by saying that justification is the act of God as Father, and further that the sentence of justification falls in the first instance on the religious community founded by Christ as a whole, to which God imputes the position towards Him of Christ its Founder, and on individuals as by faith in the Gospel they attach themselves to this community; justification thus becoming effective for them. Faith is simply obedience to God and trust in the revelation of His grace in Christ. Its functions are religious, not moral (iii.3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] p. 139: cf. also p. 70). As regards the effects of justification, the comprehensive description of them is that it is the acceptance of sinners into fellowship with God, in which their salvation is to be realized and carried out into eternal life. In particular, the consciousness of guilt is removed, in so far as the element of mistrust of God, which is the essence of it, is removed (p. 85). Assurance of justification can be obtained only by the exercise of faith in patience or lordship over the world. Finally, the course of moral action is conditioned by justification; but the direct aim of the latter is not the product of moral action, but the bestowal of eternal life, which is realized here and now in lordship over the world (pp. 192, 534 f., 670).
III. Constructive treatment.It appears to the present writer that a correct modern interpretation of the Pauline conception of justification must move generally along the lines suggested by Ritschl. Perhaps it may be necessary to observe that such an interpretation is required, and that it is not sufficient simply to rest in the Pauline statement as it stands. In the first place, we have seen that St. Paul suggests more than one point of view, and we have to settle which is to be regarded as determinative. Then, again, there are gaps in the Pauline presentation which require to be filled up, especially in view of the points raised by later theological controversies. Finally, the Pauline theology is only one among the early Christian presentations of the Christian salvation, and it is necessary in some points to modify his conceptions in order to do justice to other NT points of view, especially those presented in the Gospels. We proceed, then, to present the doctrine of justification along the general lines of Ritschl, but with regard also to the treatment of other theologians, who have, as it seems to the writer, dealt more satisfactorily than Ritschl with particular points. Reference is made particularly to Ritschls own followers, Kaftan and Hring, but also to Lipsius and Khler, and finally to W. N. Clarke.
Instead of beginning with St. Pauls technical term justification, we shall first make use of its material equivalent, the idea of forgiveness, having already established our right to do this. We thus, as Kaftan says (Dogmatik3, 4 [Note: , 4 designates the particular edition of the work referred] , p. 523), present the issue in a simpler and less equivocal form, with the advantage also of keeping before the mind the connexions of the subject in the teaching of Jesus. What Paul calls grace is to Jesus the Fatherly forgiving love of God.
We begin, then, with the analysis of forgiveness as a Divine act, and consider, after Paul, first the objective side of this actrevelation,and then the subjective sidefaith, by which the revelation is appropriated and forgiveness fully realized. The revelation of forgiveness is in Jesus Christ, His Person and Work; not merely, however, as St. Paul teaches, in His death and resurrection, but as the Gospels clearly show, and as Schleiermacher, after them recognized, in His whole life, including these culminating acts. Forgiveness is revealed by the whole of Christs activity as well as by His sufferings. In fact, His sufferings reveal forgiveness because of the activity expressed in the endurance of them. Jesus further makes this revelation as the unique and perfect representative of God in the world, absolutely one with the Father in thought and feeling; so that by every word and deed and by His whole attitude He incarnates God in the world, to do which is His earthly mission and vocation.
The Fatherly forgiveness of God, which Jesus reveals, is no mere good-natured indulgence; on the contrary, the Father is the Holy Father, the Righteous Father (Joh 17:11; Joh 17:25), and His forgiveness is holy and righteous forgiveness. Jesus guarantees this by His revelation not only of the Divine forgiveness, but also of the Divine holiness in its stern condemnation of sin. A holy hatred of sin is evident in His whole attitude.
But, finally, Jesus reveals the holy forgiving love of God not only in these two separate moments, but in its entirety, by His bearing in love the sins of men upon His soul. We can explain His sorrow over Jerusalem only as the pain of One who, full of love to men, felt their sin as the heaviest burden. We can explain the agony in Gethsemane and the cry of desolation on the cross only along the same lines, as caused by the pressure of the sin of the world upon the loving heart of the Saviour. In this bearing of sin, however, Jesus was still revealing the attitude of God towards sinners. The fact that the burden of sin upon His soul broke in upon the peace and bliss of His personal communion with the Father, makes no difference as to this point. Christs actual communion with the Father had to be maintained, indeed, by an act of supreme self-surrender (Mar 14:36), or of faith, unaided by any evidence of the Divine presence (Mar 15:34). It was necessary that the holy love of God should come to complete self-expression in the world, which could only be by the revelation of the depth of suffering caused to sinless love by sin; and this revelation could not be made except by the Revealer proceeding along a path which brought upon His human spirit the sense of separation from God. This path was, however, not a new one; it was I but the continuation, to the end of the path, of Christs vocation as Revealer of God. To reveal the holy love of God in a world of sin could have but one issue, that which it historically had, viz. to rouse up the opposition of sin, as much to the love as to the holiness (Luk 15:2), to the uttermost. The final act of self-surrender and faith, therefore, by which Jesus gave Himself to the death at the hands of sinners, which was inevitable, if He persevered in His vocation, was simply the climax of the self-surrender and faith by which as man He gave Himself at every moment to the work of His vocation. The whole revelation of God made by Jesus being a revelation within humanity, was made at every point by the offering up of the human will of Jesus to the Father. His whole life and death together constituted a sacrifice, which He offered up to God as the necessary means of the revelation in the world of His holy love. And this He did for the sake of men, that they might come to know the holy forgiveness of the Father.
Such, then, would seem to be the necessary restatement of the Pauline doctrine of the revelation of the grace of God in Christ in view of the historical statements of the Gospels. To complete it, however, it is necessary to add that the function of the resurrection is to make the historical revelation permanent and abiding, by presenting Christ as the perpetual object of faith. This leads to the next point, which is that of the doctrine of faith, or the subjective appropriation of the revelation. There St. Pauls conception of faith as in the first place, on the side of the will, a species of obedience or submission to God, remains fundamental. It is in essential agreement, it may be observed, with the teaching of Jesus Himself, in which , or turning to God, is made the subjective principle of forgiveness. But in order that the subjective appropriation may correspond in all points with the objective revelation, faith must not be limited psychologically to trust, but must include penitence also, in this way appearing as the proper correlative of both the love and the holiness of forgiveness. When the revelation of forgiveness in Christ awakens this faith in the heart, then the Divine act of forgiveness is completed, and forgiveness is fully realized.
We turn next to forgiveness as an experience, where St. Paul gives ample guidance, and all that is necessary is to explain some points in reference to the problems raised by later theologians. The first practical effect of justification is peace with God, or the removal of the consciousness of guilt which separated the sinner from God. This is removed by the appropriation of the Divine forgiveness, which is realized as the removal of guilt. Nor does conscience offer any obstacle to the realization of the removal of guilt in the consciousness of the believer; since the holiness of the Divine forgiveness is assured by the very revelation which brings the knowledge of it. In fact, the penitence which accompanies trust in the Divine forgiveness as the result of the revelation in Christ, is an inward appropriation of the Divine condemnation of sin. Thus there is peace with God as the result of faith, and that upon the sure and certain basis of the knowledge of Gods holy love, in which both the conscience and the heart find rest.
Forgiveness is also realized as the remission of the penalties of sin. The chief penalty of sin is eternal death, or separation from God. But further, of physical evils some are clearly the effects of sin; and the rest, to the sinner conscious of separation from God, also tend to appear as the tokens of His displeasure. Forgiveness removes the fear of eternal death by the establishment of communion with God; while, so far as physical evils are concerned, though the consequences of former sins may continue to abound, yet all these appear no longer as tokens of Gods displeasure, but as fatherly chastisements, so that the believers communion with God remains unbroken by them. Finally, the positive expression of the whole experience is that the believer enjoys the privilege of Divine sonship, and has, in his communion with God, here and now, the gift of eternal life; while his trust in God enables him confidently to leave to Him the maintenance of this privilege in the future. The negative statement of this experience is that the standing of the believer with God is not on terms of law or merit. In other words, to sum up the whole matter, the Christian religion is not a religion of law but a religion of grace. This is the real meaning of the article of justification by faith, which shows at once why it is so fundamental for Christianity, and why it is so necessary to maintain that justification is by faith alone.
We have now reached the end of the exposition of the subject-matter of the doctrine; some necessary questions, however, remain to be discussed. The first is formal. With what point in time is the Divine act of justification to be connected? If the exposition above has been followed, it will be seen that the question is one of definition. Forgiveness is revealed in Christ, and realized in faith. We may, therefore, connect the Divine act more particularly with the death of Christ as the climax of the revelation, as Kaftan does (Dogmatik3. 4 [Note: 4 designates the particular edition of the work referred] , p. 523), which is, perhaps, most logical; or we may, with Lipsius (Dogmatik, p. 696), connect it with the awakening of faith in the sense that then God by His Spirit speaks pardon to the soul. The one is the justificatio activa, the other the justificatio passiva of Reformed theology; each is simply an aspect of one process.
The next question is that of assurance. The new of Lipsius here seems most in accordance with the spirit of Paul, viz. that when faith becomes uncertain, there remains to us nothing but ever to return anew in believing trust to the objective message of grace, which meets us in the gospel or in the historical revelation in Christ, till the lost consciousness of salvation revives again.
There remains the most difficult question of all, as Lipsius calls it, the master question of theology (Dogmatik, p. 699), viz. the question of the relation of justification to regeneration and the Christian life. The Pauline answer to this question is, as we have seen, that the same Divine revelation in Christ by which forgiveness is revealed, is also the revelation of an ethical ideal as an energizing spirit; and that, as faith receives the revelation of grace in forgiveness, so it receives also at the same time the revelation of the ideal as a quickening influence upon the life. It is still an act of obedience or submission to God, but, in this latter aspect, the act of obedience or submission to the Christian ideal, or the reception of the Spirit of Christ as the principle of life. It is one and the same revelation in both cases, and one and the same faith or receptivity in both cases. Justification and regeneration are therefore vitally connected, and it is impossible to experience one without the other. Nevertheless Christian theology is compelled to treat them as separate articles, in order to do justice to each. In spite of the oneness of the revelation in Christ, and of the faith of the Christian, it remains true that justification has its ground simply in the Divine grace, and that faith comes into view in the matter, not in its general reference to the Christian life as a whole, but as it reflects the Divine revelation of Gods holy forgiveness.
Literature.Only a representative selection can be given. It falls into three divisions, corresponding to those of the article. First, however, must be named a work covering all three divisions, viz. Ritschls great work, Rechtfertigung und Vershnung3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 3 vols. 1889 [English translation (Justification and Reconciliation) of 1st vol. from 1st ed. 1872, of 3rd vol. from 3rd ed. 1902].
I. Biblical Theology.(a) Art. Justification in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , vol. ii.: R. Smend, Alttest. Religionsgeschichte2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1899; Weber, Jd. Theol.2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] 1897; Bousset, Religion des Judenthums im Neutest. Zeitalter, 1903.(b) The various NT Theologies, especially that of Holtzmann, 1897; the general works on Paulinism; further, Mngoz, Le pch el la rdemption daprs St. Paul, 1882; Riggenbach, Die Rechtfertigungslehre des Apostels Paulus, 1897; H. Cremer, Die paulin. Rechtfertigungslehre2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1900; the Comm. on St. Pauls Epistles, esp. Sanday-Headlam, Romans, 1895.
II. History of the Doctrine.(a) The general works on the History of Doctrine, esp. Seeberg, Dogmengesch. 18951898; Baur, Lehre von der Versohnung, 1838.(b) The Catholic doctrine: Aquinas, Summa Theologica [many editions]; Canones et Dccreta Concilii Tridentini, ed. Tauchnitz, 1846; Mohler, Symbolik8 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1872 [also in English translation ]; Newman, Lectures on Justification6 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1892.(c) The Protestant doctrine: the various Symbols of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches, esp. Formula Concordiae, 1589, and Berlin, 1857. () Lutheran: Kstlin, Luthers Theologie2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1901; Th. Harnack, Luthers Theologie, 18621886; Melanchthon, Loci Theologici, 1561, Erlangen, 1828; Gerhard, Loci Theologici, 16101625, also ed. by Frank, 1885; Frank, System der Christlichen Wahrheit3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1894. () Reformed: Calvin, Inst. Relig. Christ. 1559, and Edin. 1874; Turretin, Inst. Theol. Elenctic, 1688, and Edin. 1847; Owen, On Justification, 1677, and Edin. 1851; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1872.(d) The Socinian criticism: Faustus Socinus, de Jesu Christo Servatore, in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 1656.
III. Modern Theories.Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793; Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1830; Rothe, Theol. Ethik2 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 18671871; Dorner, System der Christlichen Glaubenslehre, 18791881 [also English translation System of Christian Doctrine, 18801883]; Lipsius, Dogmatik3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1893; Khler, Die Wissenschaft der Christlichen Lehre3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1905; Kaftan, Dogmatik3. 4 [Note: 4 designates the particular edition of the work referred] , 1901; W. N. Clarke, Outline of Christian Theology, 1903; Stevens, The Christian Doctrine of Salvation, 1905.
Robert S. Franks.
Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels
Justification
jus-ti-fi-kashu (, cedhek, verb , cadhek; Septuagint and New Testament , dikaoma, , dikaosis, verb , dikaioo, justification to justify, in a legal sense, the declaring just or righteous. In Biblical literature, , dikaioun, without denying the real righteousness of a person, is used invariably or almost invariably in a declarative or forensic sense. See Simon, HDB, II, 826; Thayer, Grimm, and Cremer under the respective words):
I.THE WRITINGS OF PAUL
1.Universality of Sin
2.Perfection of the Law of God
3.Life, Work and Death of the Atoning Saviour
(1)Paul’s Own Experience
(2)The Resurrection Connected with the Death
(3)Faith, Not Works, the Means of Justification
(4)Baptism Also Eliminated
(5)Elements of Justification
(a)Forgiveness of Sins
(b)Declaring or Approving as Righteous
(6)Justification Has to Do with the Individual
II.THE OTHER NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS
1.The Synoptic Gospels
2.John’s Writings
3.1 Peter and Hebrews
4.Epistle of James
III.THE OLD TESTAMENT
IV.LATER DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE
1.Apostolic and Early Church Fathers
2.Council of Trent
3.Luther
4.Schleiermacher
5.Meaning and Message to the Modern Man
LITERATURE
I. The Writings of Paul.
1. The Universality of Sin:
In this article reference will first be made to the writings of Paul, where justification receives its classic expression, and from there as a center, the other New Testament writers, and finally the Old Testament, will be drawn in. According to Paul, justification rests on the following presuppositions:
The universality of sin. All men are not only born in sin (Eph 2:3), but they have committed many actual transgressions, which render them liable to condemnation. Paul proves this by an appeal to the Old Testament witnesses (Rom 3:9 ff), as well as by universal experience, both of the heathen (Rom 1:18-32) and Jews (Rom 2:17-28; Rom 3:9).
2. Perfection of the Law of God:
The perfection of the Law of God and the necessity of its perfect observance, if justification is to come by it (Rom 3:10). The modern notion of God as a good-natured, more or less nonchalant ruler, to whom perfect holiness is not inexorable, was not that of Paul. If one had indeed kept the law, God could not hold him guilty (Rom 2:13), but such an obedience never existed. Paul had no trouble with the law as such. Those who have tried to find a difference here between Galatians and Romans have failed. The reminder that the law was ordained by angels (Gal 3:19) does not mean that it was not also given by God. It might be reckoned in a sense among the elements of the world (kosmos), Gal 4:3), as it is an essential part of an ordered universe, but that does not at all mean that it is not also holy, right and good (Rom 7:12). It was added, of course, on account of transgressions (Gal 3:19), for it is only a world of intelligent, free spirits capable of sin which needs it, and its high and beautiful sanctions make the sin seem all the more sinful (Rom 7:13).
3. Life, Work and Death of the Atoning Savior:
It was fundamental in Paul’s thinking that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures (1Co 15:3). In due season He died for the ungodly (Rom 5:6); while we were yet sinners He died for us (Rom 5:8); we are justified in His blood (Rom 5:9), and it is through Him that we are saved from the wrath (Rom 5:9). While we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son (Rom 5:10), being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God set forth as a propitiation (Rom 3:24, Rom 3:25). There is no reconciliation, no justification, except through and by and for Christ.
(1) Paul’s Own Experience.
Paul’s own experience cannot be left out of the account. He lived through the doctrine, as well as found it through illumination of the Spirit in the Old Testament. It was not that he had only outwardly kept the law. He had been jealous for it, and had been blameless in every requirement of its righteousness (Phi 3:6). What was borne in upon him was how little such blamelessness could stand before the absolute standard of God. Just how far he was shaken with doubts of this kind we cannot say with certainty; but it seems impossible to conceive the Damascus conversion scene in the case of such an upright man and strenuous zealot without supposing a psychological preparation, without supposing doubts as to whether his fulfilling of the law enabled him to stand before God. Now, for a Pharisaically educated man like himself, there was no way of overcoming these doubts but in a renewed struggle for his own righteousness shown in the fiery zeal of his Damascus journey, pressing on even in the blazing light of noonday. This conversion broke down his philosophy of life, his Lebensgewissheit, his assurance of salvation through works of the law done never so conscientiously and perfectly. The revelation of the glorified Christ, with the assurance that He, the God-sent Messiah, was the very one whom he was persecuting, destroyed his dependence on his own righteousness, a righteousness which had led him to such shocking consequences. Although this was for him an individual experience, yet it had universal applications. It showed him that there was an inherent weakness in the law through flesh, that is, through the whole physical, psychical and spiritual nature of man considered as sinful, as working only on this lower plane, and that the law needed bracing and illuminating by the Son, who, though sent in the likeness of the flesh of sin, yet (as an offering) for sin condemned sin and cast it out (Rom 8:3), to the end that the law might be fulfilled in those who through Him walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit (Rom 8:4). That was the glory of the new righteousness thus revealed. If the law had been able to do that, to give life, Christ need not have come, righteousness would have been by the law (Gal 3:21). But the facts show that the law was not thus able, neither the law written on the heart given to all, nor the law given to Moses (Rom 1:18 through 3:19). Therefore every mouth is stopped, and all flesh is silent before God. On the ground of law-keeping, what the modern man would call morality, our hope of salvation has been shattered. The law has spoken its judgment against us (Gal 3:10). It cannot therefore lead us to righteousness and life, nor was that its supreme intention: it was a pedagogue or tutor (paidagogos) to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith (Gal 3:24; see Ihmels in RE3, 16, 483-84). What made Paul to differ from his companions in the faith was that his own bitter experience under the revelation of Christ had led him to these facts.
(2) The Resurrection Connected with the Death.
It was remarked above that the ground of justification according to Paul is the work of Christ. This means especially. His death as a sacrifice, in which, as Ritschl well says (Rechtfertigung und Versohnung, 3. Aufl., 1899, II 157), the apostles saw exercised the whole power of His redemption. But that death cannot be separated from His resurrection, which first awakened them to a knowledge of its decisive worth for salvation, as well as finally confirmed their faith in Jesus as the Son of God. The objective salvation, says Ritschl (p. 158), which was connected with the sacrificial death of Christ and which continued on for the church, was made secure by this, that it was asserted also as an attribute of the resurrected one, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). But this last expression is not to be interpreted with literal preciseness, as though Paul intended to distinguish between the forgiveness of sins as brought about by the death, and justification, by the resurrection, for both forgiveness and justification are identified in Rom 4:6-8. It was the resurrection which gave Christians their assurance concerning Christ (Act 17:31); by that resurrection He has been exalted to the right hand of God, where He maketh intercession for His people (Rom 8:34), which mediatorship is founded upon His death – the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8 m; compare Greek text).
B. Weiss well says: It was by the certainty of the exaltation of Christ to Messianic sovereignty brought about by the resurrection that Paul attained to faith in the saving significance of His death, and not conversely. Accordingly, the assurance that God cannot condemn us is owing primarily to the death of Christ, but still more to His resurrection and exaltation to God’s right hand (Rom 8:34), inasmuch as these first prove that His death was the death of the mediator of salvation, who has redeemed us from condemnation…. The objective atonement was accomplished by the death of Christ, but the appropriation of it in justification is possible only if we believe in the saving significance of His death, and we can attain to faith in that only as it is sealed by the resurrection (Biblical Theology of the New Testament, I, 436-37).
(3) Faith, Not Works, the Means of Justification.
The means or condition of justification is faith (Rom 3:22, Rom 3:25, Rom 3:26, Rom 3:28, etc.) which rests upon the pure grace of God and is itself, therefore, His gift (Eph 2:8). This making faith the only instrument of justification is not arbitrary, but because, being the receptive attitude of the soul, it is in the nature of the case the only avenue through which Divine blessing can come. The gifts of God are not against the laws of the soul which He has made, but rather are in and through those laws. Faith is the hand outstretched to the Divine Giver, who, though He sends rain without our consent, does not give salvation except through an appropriate spiritual response. This faith is not simply belief in historical facts, though this is presupposed as to the atoning death (Rom 3:25), and the resurrection (Rom 10:9) of Jesus, but is a real heart reception of the gift (Rom 10:10), and is therefore able to bring peace in our relation to God (Rom 5:1). The object of this faith is Jesus Christ (Rom 3:22, etc.), through whom only comes the gift of righteousness and the reigning in life (Rom 5:17), not Mary, not angels, not doctrine, not the church, but Jesus only. This, to be sure, does not exclude God the Father as an object of faith, as the redeeming act of Christ is itself the work of God (2Co 5:19), whose love expressed itself toward us in this way (Rom 5:8). Faith in the only one God is always presupposed (1Co 8:6), but it was the apostolic custom rather to refer repentance to God and faith to Christ (Act 20:21). But the oneness of God the Father and Christ the Son in a work of salvation is the best guaranty of the Divinity of the latter, both as an objective fact and as an inner experience of the Christian.
The justification being by faith, it is not by works or by love, or by both in one. It cannot be by the former, because they are lacking either in time or amount or quality, nor could they be accepted in any case until they spring from a heart renewed, for which faith is the necessary presupposition. It cannot be by the latter, for it exists only where the Spirit has shed it abroad in the heart (Rom 5:5), the indispensable prerequisite for receiving which is faith. This does not mean that the crown of Christianity is not love, for it is (1Co 13:13); it means only that the root is faith. Nor can love be foisted in as a partial condition of justification on the strength of the word often quoted for that purpose, faith working through love (Gal 5:6). The apostle is speaking here only of those who are already in Christ, and he says that over against the Galatian believers bringing in a lot of legal observances, the only availing thing is not circumcision or its lack, but faith energizing through love. Here the interest is, as Ritschl says (II, 343), in the kingdom of God, but justification proper has reference to the sinner in relation to God and Christ. See the excellent remarks of Bruce, Paul’s Conception of Christianity, 1894, 226-27. At the same time this text reveals the tremendous ethical religious force abiding in faith, according to Paul. It reminds us of the great sentence of Luther in his preface to the Epistles to the Romans, where he says: Faith is a Divine work within us which changes and renews us in God according to Joh 1:13, ‘who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.’ This destroys the old Adam and makes new creatures of us in heart, will, disposition, and all our powers. Oh, faith is a living, active, jealous, mighty thing, inasmuch as it cannot possibly remain unproductive of good works (Werke, Erl. Ausg., 63, 124-25).
(4) Baptism also Eliminated.
Not only are good works and love removed as conditions or means of justification of the sinner, but baptism is also eliminated. According to Paul, it is the office of baptism not to justify, but to cleanse, that is, symbolically to set forth and seal the washing away of sin and the entrance into the new life by a dramatic act of burial, which for the subject and all witnesses would mark a never-to-be-forgotten era in the history of the believer. Baptism, says Weiss (I, 454), presupposes faith in Him as the one whom the church designates as Lord, and also binds to adherence to Him which excludes every dependence upon any other, inasmuch as He has acquired a claim upon their devotion by the saving deed of His self-surrender on the cross. So important was baptism in the religious atmosphere at that time that hyperbolical expressions were used to express its cleansing and illuminating office, but these need not mislead us. We must interpret them according to the fundamental conceptions of Christianity as a religion of the Spirit, not of magic nor of material media. Baptism pointed to a complete parting with the old life by previous renewal through faith in Christ, which renewal baptism in its turn sealed and announced in a climax of self-dedication to him, and this, while symbolically and in contemporary parlance of both Jew and Gentile called a new birth, was probably often actually so in the psychological experience of the baptized. But while justification is often attributed to faith, it is never to baptism.
(5) Elements of Justification.
What are the elements of this justification? There are two:
(a) Forgiveness of Sins
Forgiveness of sins (Rom 4:5-8; compare Act 13:38, Act 13:39). With this are connected peace and reconciliation (Rom 5:1, Rom 5:9, Rom 5:10; compare Rom 10:11).
(b) The Declaring or Approving as Righteous
The declaring or approving as righteous or just (Rom 3:21-30; Rom 4:2-9, Rom 4:22; Rom 5:1, Rom 5:9-11, Rom 5:16-21, etc.). C.F. Schmid is perfectly right when he says that Paul (and James) always uses dikaioun in the sense of esteeming and pronouncing and treating as righteous, both according to the measure of the law (Rom 2:13; Rom 3:20) and also according to grace (Biblical Theology of the New Testament, 1870, 497). The word is a forensic one, and Godet goes so far as to say that the word is never used in all Greek literature for making righteous (Commentary on Romans, English translation, I, 157, American edition, 95). This is shown further by the fact that it is the ungodly who are justified (Rom 4:5), and that the justification is a reckoning or imputation (logzesthai) of righteousness (Rom 4:6, Rom 4:22), not an infusing or making righteous. The contrast of to justify is not to be a sinner but is to accuse or to condemn (Rom 8:33, Rom 8:14), and the, contrast of justification is condemnation (Rom 5:18). Besides, it is not the infusing of a new life, of a new holiness, which is counted for righteousness, but it is faith which is so counted (Rom 4:5; Phi 3:9). That upon which God looks when He justifies is not the righteousness He has imparted or is to impart, but the atonement He has made in Christ. It is one of the truest paradoxes of Christianity that unless a righteous life follows, there has been no justification, while the justification itself is for the sake of Christ alone through faith alone. It is a status, rather than a character, says Stevens (The Pauline Theology, 1892, 265); it bears the stamp of a legal rather than of an ethical conception, and he refers to the elaborate and convincing proof of the forensic character of Paul’s doctrine of justification, in Morison, Exposition of Romans, chapter III, 163-200. An interesting illustration of how further study may correct a wrong impression is given by Lipsius, who, in his Die Paulinische Rechfertigungslehre, 1853, maintained that righteousness or justification meant not exclusively an objectively given external relation to God, but always at the same time a real inner condition of righteousness (p. 10), whereas in his Lehrbuch der evangelisch-protestantischen Dogmatik, 1876, 3. Aufl., 1893, he makes the righteousness of God properly an objective gift of grace, not simply in the sense in which the Old Testament just one judged his position of salvation as a gift of grace, but as a righteousness specially reckoned and adjudicated by way of grace and acknowledged before the judgment (or court, Gericht) of God (Rom 4:6; compare Rom 4:1-8, Rom 4:11; Rom 3:23; Gal 3:6). This is always the meaning of dikaioun, dikaiousthai, or dikaiosis in Paul. It consists in the not-reckoning of sins, etc. (p. 658). Of course justification is only a part of the process of salvation, which includes regeneration and sanctification, but these are one thing and justification is another.
(6) Justification Has to Do with the Individual.
Finally it is asked whether justification in Paul’s mind has to do with the individual believer or with the society or Christian congregation. Ritschl (II, 217 f) and Sanday-Headlam (The Epistle to the Rom, 122-23) say the latter; Weiss (I, 442), the former. It is indeed true that Paul refers to the church as purchased with Christ’s blood (Act 20:28, or God’s blood, according to the two oldest manuscripts and ancient authorities; compare Eph 5:25), and he uses the pronoun we as those who have received redemption, etc. (Col 1:14; Eph 2:18); but it is evident on the other hand that faith is an individual matter, a thing first between man and his God, and only after a man has been united to Christ by faith can he enter into a spiritual fellowship with fellow-believers. Therefore the subject of justification must be in the first place the individual, and only in the second place and by consequence the society. Besides, those justified are not the cleansed and sanctified members of churches, but the ungodly (Rom 4:5).
As to the argument from baptism urged by Sanday-Headlam, it must be said that Paul always conceives of baptism as taking place in the Christian community with believers and for believers, that that for and to which they are baptized is not justification, but the death and resurrection of Christ (Rom 6:3, Rom 6:4), and that the righteousness of God has been manifested not through baptism but through faith in Jesus Christ unto all that believe (Rom 3:22), being justified freely, not through baptism, but through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus (Rom 3:24). With Paul baptism has always a mystical significance as symbolizing and externally actualizing union with the death of the Lord, and would be both impossible and impertinent in the case of those not already believers in Christ and thus inwardly united to His society.
II. The Other New Testament Writings.
So much for Paul. Let us now take a glance at the other New Testament books. It is a commonplace of theology that is called modern or critical, that Paul and not Jesus is the founder of Christianity as we know it, that the doctrines of the Divinity of Christ, atonement, justification, etc., are Paul’s work, and not his Master’s. There is truth in this. It was part of the humiliation of Christ as well as His pedagogical method to live, teach and act under the conditions of His time and country, on the background of Palestine of 30 AD; and it was specially His method to do His work and not His disciples’, to live a life of love and light, to die for the sins of the world, and then go back to the Father that the Holy Spirit might come and lead His followers into all truth. A full statement of the doctrines of Christianity on His part would have been premature (Joh 16:12), would have been pedagogically unwise, if not worthless. First the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear (Mar 4:28). It would also have been spiritually and philosophically impossible, for Christianity was not a set of teachings by Christ – but a religion springing out of His life, death, resurrection, ascension, intercession, mediatorial activity in history through the Spirit who works in His disciples and on the world through and by that life, death, etc. The only question is whether the apostles were true to the spirit and content of His teachings in its moral and religious outlines. And especially in this matter of justification, a teaching by Christ is not to be looked for, because it is the very peculiarity of it that its middle point is the exalted Lord, who has become the mediator of salvation by His death and resurrection. Did the Pauline doctrine fit into the concrete situation made by the facts of Christ mentioned above, and was it the necessary consequence of His self-witness? Let us look into the Synoptic Gospels.
1. The Snyoptic Gospels:
So far is it from being true, as Harnack says (What Is Christianity? 2nd edition, revised, New York, 1901, 68), that the whole of Jesus’ message may be reduced to these two heads: God as Father, and the human soul so ennobled that it can and does unite with Him, that an essential part of His message is omitted, namely, that salvation is bound up in His (Christ’s) own person. (The reader is asked to verify the references for himself, as space will not allow quotation.) See Mat 10:37-39; Mat 16:24-27. Confession of Him (not simply of the Father) determines acknowledgment above (Mat 10:32), where judgment is rendered according to our attitude to Him in His unfortunate ones Mat 25:35 ff). No sooner was His person rightly estimated than He began to unfold the necessity of His death and resurrection (Mat 16:21). The evening before that death occurred, He brings out its significance, perpetuates the lesson in the institution of the Supper (Mar 14:24), and reenforces it after His resurrection (Luk 24:26). Paul himself could hardly have expressed the fact of the atonement through Christ’s death more decisively than Mat 20:28; Mat 26:28. With this foundation, could the Christian doctrine of salvation take any other course than that it actually did take? Instead of referring men to the Father, Christ forgives sins Himself (Mat 9:2-6), and He reckons all men as needing this forgiveness (Mat 6:12). While the time had not arrived for the Pauline doctrine of righteousness, Jesus prepared the way for it, negatively, in demanding a humble sense of sin (Mat 5:3), inner fitness and perfection (Mat 5:6, Mat 5:8, Mat 5:20, Mat 5:48), and positively in requiring recourse to Him by those who felt the burden of their sins (Mat 11:28), to Him who was the rest-giver, and not simply to God the Father, a passage of which Rom 5:1 is an echo. For it was specially to those to whom, as to the awakened Paul, the law brought condemnation that He came, came to heal and to save (Mar 2:17; Mat 9:13; Luk 15:7). It was for sinners and to sinners that He came (Luk 15:2; Luk 7:39; Luk 19:7; Mat 11:19), just as Paul understood; and the way for their salvation was not better law-keeping, but trusting prayer in the confession of sin (Luk 18:13), really equivalent to faith, the humble heart and a hunger for righteousness (= faith). See Mat 5:3, Mat 5:6. He who brings most of himself, of his own pride and works, is the least likely to obtain the kingdom of heaven (Mat 18:3, Mat 18:1; Mar 10:14). Not only entrance, but the final reward itself is of grace (Mat 19:30; 20:1-16), a parable in the true spirit of Paul, and in anticipation of whose message was the promise of Paradise to the penitent robber (Luk 23:43). At the very beginning the message sounded out, Repent ye, and believe in the gospel (Mar 1:15), the gospel which was summed up in Christ, who would gather the people, not directly to God the Father, but to Himself (Mat 23:37). All this means justification through that faith in Himself, in His Divine-human manifestation (Mat 16:13-16), of which faith He expresses Himself with anxiety in Luk 18:8, and the presence of which he greeted with joy in Mat 8:10. Ihmels is right therefore in holding (RE3, XVI, 490) that Paul’s proclamation was continuous with the self-witness of Jesus, which conversely pointed as a consequence to the witness of Paul.
2. John’s Writings:
Justification by faith is not more implicit in John’s Gospel than in the first three; it is only more explicit (Joh 3:14-16). Eternal life is the blessing secured, but this of course is only possible to one not under condemnation (Joh 3:36). The new Sonship of God came also in the wake of the same faith (Joh 1:12). The Epistles of John vary from Paul in word rather than in substance. The atoning work of Jesus is still in the background; walking in the light is not conceivable in those under condemnation and without faith; and the confession of sins that leads to forgiveness seems only another name for the justification that brings peace (1Jo 1:9, 1Jo 1:10; compare 1Jo 2:1, 1Jo 2:2). Everything is, as with Paul (Eph 2:7; Tit 3:4), led back to the love of God (1Jo 3:1), who sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1Jo 4:10).
3. 1 Peter and Hebrews:
Seeberg’s point that the Pauline doctrine of justification is not found in any other New Testament writer (History of Doctrine, I, 48) is true when you emphasize the word doctrine. Paul gave it full scientific treatment, the others presuppose the fact, but do not unfold the doctrine. Peter’s Repent ye, and be baptized … in the name of Jesus Christ (Act 2:38) is meaningless unless faith were exercised in Christ. It is He in whom, though we see Him not, yet believing, we rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable (1Pe 1:8), receiving the end of our faith, the salvation of our souls (1Pe 1:9). It is only, however, through the precious blood as of a lamb without blemish, even that of Christ (1Pe 1:19), and is only through Him that we are believers in God (1Pe 1:21). The familiar expression, Come to Jesus, which simply means have faith in Jesus for justification and salvation, goes back to Peter (1Pe 2:4). The Epistle to the Hebrews has other interests to look after, but it does not deny faith, but rather exhorts us to draw near with a true heart in fullness of faith (Heb 10:22), which it lays at the foundation of all true religion, thinking and achievement (Hebrews 11). The writer can give no better exhortation than to look unto Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith (Heb 12:2), an exhortation in the true spirit of Paul, whose gospel of faith for justification is also summed up in Heb 4:16.
4. Epistle of James:
We come lastly to the core of the matter in regard to New Testament representations of justification – the famous passage in Jam 2:14-26, which at first sight seems a direct blow at Paul. Here we are met by the interesting question of the date of James. As we cannot enter into this (see JAMES, EPISTLE OF), what we say must be independent of this question. A careful look at this vigorous and most valuable letter (valuable in its own place, which is not that of Paul’s letters, in comparison with which it is a right strawy epistle, as Luther truthfully said (Erl. Ausg., 63, 115; see also pp. 156-57), in saying which he did not mean to reject it as useless (straw has most important uses), but as giving the doctrine of salvation, for which we must look to Paul) will show us that contradiction on the part of James to Paul is apparent and not real.
(1) In this section James uses the word faith simply for intellectual belief in God, and especially in the unity of God (Jam 2:19; see also context), whereas Paul uses it for a saving trust in Christ. As Feine well says (Theol. d. New Testament, Leipzig, 2 1911, 660-63), for Paul faith is the appropriation of the life-power of the heavenly Christ. Therefore he knows no faith which does not bring forth good works corresponding to it. What does not come from faith is sin. For James faith is subordination of man to the heavenly Christ (Jam 2:1), or it is theoretic acknowledgment of one God (Jam 2:19). Justification is for James a speaking just of him who is righteous, an analytical judgment. (Feine also says that James did not understand Paul, but he did not fight him. It was left to Luther through his deep religious experience first to understand Paul’s doctrine of justification.) (2) James uses the word works as meaning practical morality, going back behind legalism, behind Pharisaism, to the position of the Old Testament prophets, whereas Paul uses the word as meritorious action deserving reward. (3) When James is thinking of a deeper view, faith stands central in Christianity (Jam 1:3, Jam 1:6; Jam 2:1; Jam 5:15). (4) Paul also on his part is as anxious as James vitally to connect Christianity and good works through faith (1Th 1:3; Gal 5:6; 1Co 13:2; Rom 2:6, Rom 2:7; see Mayor, The Epistle of James, 1892, lxxxviii ff; Franks, in DCG, I, 919-20; Findlay in HDB, 1-vol edition, 511). (5) The whole argument of James is bent on preserving a real practical Christianity that is not content with words merely (Jam 2:15-16), but shows itself in deeds. He is not trying to show, as Paul, how men get rid of their guilt and become Christians, but how they prove the reality of their profession after they receive the faith. He is not only writing to Christians, as of course Paul was, but he was writing to them as Christians (my brethren, Jam 2:14), as already justified and standing on the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ (Jam 2:1), whereas Paul was thinking of men, Gentile and Jew, shivering in their guilt before the Eternal Justice, and asking, How can we get peace with God? There is not, says Beyschlag (New Testament Theology, Edinburgh, 1895, I, 367-68), an objective conflict between the Pauline and Jacobean doctrines; both forms of teaching exist peacefully beside each other. James thought of justification in the simple and most natural sense of justificatio justi, as the Divine recognition of an actually righteous man, and he thought of it as the final judgment of God upon a man who is to stand in the last judgment and become a partaker of the final soteria (‘salvation’). Paul also demands as a requisite for this last judgment and the final soteria right works, the love that fulfills the law and the perfected sanctification, but he (except in Rom 2:13) does not apply the expression dikaiousthai (‘to be justified’) to the final judgment of God, which recognizes this righteousness of life as actual. He applies it rather to that first sentence of God with which He graciously receives the believing sinner returning to Him, and takes him into fellowship with Himself. Beyschlag rightly insists that James undoubtedly taught with the first apostles that whoever believes in Christ and is baptized receives the forgiveness of sins (Act 2:38; Act 3:19; Act 10:43), and that he would not have contested the Pauline idea of justification by grace on account of faith, insisting only that works must follow. Theologically, the chief if not the only difference is that James has not yet made the cross of Christ the center of his point of view, while the atonement was fundamental with all Paul’s thinking. See, further, JAMES, EPISTLE OF.
III. The Old Testament.
A word in conclusion as to the Old Testament. All the New Testament writers built on the Old Testament. That there should be a cleft or contradiction between the Old Testament and what we call the New Testament would have been to them inconceivable. But they realized that that was the early dawn, while they lived in the light of day. Abraham believed in Yahweh; and He reckoned it to him for righteousness (Gen 15:6; Rom 4:3). Who does not keep all parts of the law all the time is condemned (Deu 27:26 Septuagint; Gal 3:10; compare Psa 14:1-7; Psa 143:2; Rom 3:20; see Rom 3:9-20, and the references to the Old Testament in the American Standard Revised Version). The prophets insisted upon the practical works of righteousness – What doth Yahweh require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Mic 6:8). No religious attitude or services could take the place of uprightness of life. This does not mean that the Old Testament writers understood that men were justified simply by their good deeds, for it was always believed that underneath all was the mercy and lovingkindness of God, whose forgiving grace was toward the broken and contrite spirit, the iniquities of whom were to be carried by the Servant of Yahweh, who shall justify many (Psa 103:8-13; Psa 85:10; Isa 57:15; Isa 53:11, and many other passages).
IV. Later Development of the Doctrine.
1. Apostolic and Early Church Fathers:
A brief statement now on the development of the doctrine in the Christian church. It is humiliating to confess that the witness immediately after the apostles (the apostolic Fathers) did not reach the serene heights of Paul, or even the lower levels of his brethren. There are passages which remind one of him, but one feels at once that the atmosphere is different. Christianity is conceived as a new law rather than as a gospel of the grace of God. We cannot go into the reasons for this: suffice it to say that in GentileChristendom the presuppositions for that gospel failed, and the New Testament writings were not yet in the consciousness of the church to the extent that they dominated her thinking. The fine passage in Clement of Rome (97 AD, chapter xxxii: They all therefore (i.e. Abraham and other early saints) were glorified and magnified, not through themselves or their own works or the righteous doings which they wrought, but through His (God’s) will. And so we, having been called through His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified through ourselves or through our own wisdom or understanding or piety or works which we wrought in holiness of heart, but through faith, whereby the Almighty God justified all men that ever have been from the beginning; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.) is not at all on a paragraph with his whole Epistle, as he coordinates faith with other virtues in chapter xxxv, makes hospitality and godliness the saving virtues for Lot in chapter xi, couples hospitality and faith together as equal for Rahab in chapter xii, and represents forgiveness of sins through keeping commandments and love in chapter l. Ignatius (about 110-15 AD) speaks in one place about Jesus Christ dying for us, that believing on His death we might escape death (Tral. 2), but with him the real saving things are love, concord, obedience to bishops, and the indwelling God = Christ, though he has also the excellent passage: None of these things is hidden from you if ye be perfect in your faith and love toward Jesus Christ, for these things are the beginning and end of life – faith is the beginning and love the end, and the two being found in unit are God, while all things else follow in their train unto true nobility (Eph 14). The so-called Barnabas (date uncertain) puts the death of Christ Jesus at the foundation of salvation, which is expressed by the remission of sins through His blood (Eph 5), the kingdom of Jesus being on the cross, so that they who set their hope on Him shall live forever (Eph 8), while at the time even believers are not yet justified (Eph 4), for which finally a whole series of works of light must be done and works of darkness avoided (Eph 19). The Shepherd of Hermas and the Ancient Homily = 2 Clem are even more moralistic, where with whatever praise of faith we have the beginning of merit. The same legalistic tone sounds through that invaluable little roll found by Bryennios in 1873 and first published by him in Constantinople in December, 1883, The Teaching (Didache) of the Twelve Apostles. That Catholic trend went forward till it is almost full-fledged as early as Tertullian (fl. 200 AD) and Cyprian (250 AD). See a full statement in my Cyprian, 1906, 146 ff. And thus it continued until – as far as our outline is concerned – it struck Augustine, bishop of Hippo (396 ff), who in a masterly and living way united, so far as they could be united, the Pauline thoughts of sin, grace, and justification with the regular Catholic legalism. His book, De Spiritu et Litera (412 AD), was largely after Paul’s own heart, and the Reformers hailed it with joy. But the Catholic elements he still kept, as for instance, that in justification a good concupiscence and a good-will are infused, that justification grows, that our merits must be taken into the account even though they are God’s merits, that the faith which justifies is a faith which works by love, that faith is the holding true what God (and the church) says, though occasionally a deeper view of faith is seen, and that works are emphasized, as in De fide et operibus, in a Catholic fashion. With profound and thoroughly Christian thoughts, Augustine had not so worked himself clear of his Catholic inheritance that he could reproduce Paul purely. He made a bridge by which we could go either back to Paul or forward to Aquinas. As Harnack well says, Augustine experienced, on the one hand, the last revival in the ancient church of the principle that faith alone saves, and, on the other, he silenced that principle for a thousand years. The very Catholic theologian who stood nearest to that principle overcame it (Zeitschrift f. Theol. u. Kirche, 1891, 177). His misunderstanding of Paul’s faith that worketh through love had momentous consequences.
2. Council of Trent:
Those consequences are best seen in the decrees of the Council of Trent (Session 6, 1547), to which we now turn, and which are the definite and final crystallization of the medieval development, so far as that development was Catholic. (1) Justification is a translation from a natural state to a state of grace. With this works prevenient grace, awakening and assisting, and with this in his man cooperates and prepares himself for justification. This cooperation has the merit of congruity, though the first call comes before any merit. (2) Faith is an element in justification. Receiving faith by hearing, they of free will draw near to God, believing those things to be true which have been Divinely revealed and promised. Faith as a living trust in a personal Saviour for salvation is lacking. Among the truths believed is the mercy of God and that He wishes to justify the sinner in Christ. (3) This faith begets love to Christ and hatred to sin, which are elements also of the justifying process. (4) Now follows justification itself, which is not a bare remission of sins, but also sanctification and renewal of the inner man through the voluntary reception of grace and of gifts. (5) But this renewal must take place through baptism, which, to the prepared adult, both gives and seals all the graces of salvation, forgiveness, cleansing, faith, hope and love. (6) Justification is preserved by obeying the commandments and by good works, which also increase it. (7) In case it is lost – and it can be lost, not by venial, but by mortal sin and by unbelief – it can be regained by the sacrament of penance. (8) To get it, to keep or regain it, it is also necessary to believe the doctrines as thus laid down and to be laid down by this Council (see the decrees in any edition, or in Mirbt, Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums, 2. Aufl., 206-16, or in Buckley’s or in Waterworth’s translations, and for an admirable and objective summary see Seeberg, History of Doctrine, II, 433-38).
3. Luther:
Recent researches in Luther’s early writings have shown that almost from the beginning of his earnest study of religious questions, he mounted up to Paul’s view of justification by faith alone (Loofs, DG, 4. Aufl., 1906, 696-98). Faith is the trust in the mercy of God through Christ, and justification is the declaring righteous for His sake, which is followed by a real making righteous. From the beginning to the end of his life as a religious teacher these are the elements of his doctrine. Speaking of 1513-15, Loofs says (p. 697): Upon these equations (to justify = to forgive, grace = mercy of the non-imputing God, faith = trust in His mercy) as the regulators of his religious self-judgment, Luther’s piety rests, and corresponding to them his view of Christianity, and even later (than 1513-15); and he adds that to reckon as righteous (reputari justum) must not be understood with Luther as an opposition to make righteous, for his to be justified without merits in the sense of to forgive (absolvi) is at the same time the beginning of a new life: remissio peccati…ipsa resurrectio. His constantly and firmly held view, even more deeply understood later than in 1513-15, that ‘to be justified without merit’ = ‘to be resurrected (to be born again)’ = ‘to be sanctified’ is a pregnant formulation of his Christianity. So much being said, it is not necessary to draw out Luther’s doctrine further, who in this respect rediscovered Christianity as a religion, but it will suffice to refer to the Histories of Doctrine (Seeberg gives a full and brilliant exposition), to Kostlin, Luthers Theologie, 2. Aufl., 1901 (see Index under the word Rechtfertigung, and I, 349), and especially to Thieme, Die sittliche Triebkraft des Glaubens: eine Untersuchung zu Luthers Theologie, 1895, 103-314.
From Luther and the other reformers the New Testament doctrine went over to the Protestant churches without essential modification, and has remained their nominal testimony until the present. A classic expression of it, which may be taken as representing evangelical Christendom, is the 11th of the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England: We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings: wherefore that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine and very full of comfort; as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification. It is true that at one time Wesley’s opponents accused him of departing from this doctrine, especially on account of his famous Minute of 1770, but this was due to a radical misunderstanding of that Minute, for to the last he held staunchly Paul’s doctrine (for proof see my article in Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1906, 171-75).
4. Schleiermacher:
A new point of view was brought into modern theology by Schleiermacher, who starts from the fundamental fact of Christian experience that we have redemption and reconciliation with Christ, which fact becomes ours by union with Christ through faith. This union brings justification with other blessings, but justification is not considered as even in thought a separate act based on Christ’s death, but as part of a great whole of salvation, historically realized step by step in Christ. The trend of his teaching is to break down the distinction between justification and regeneration, as they are simply different aspects of union with Christ.
Ritschl carried forward this thought by emphasizing the grace of the heavenly Father mediated in the first instance through the Son to the Christian community, to which God imputes the position toward him of Christ its founder, and in the second instance to individuals as by faith in the Gospel they attach themselves to this community. Faith is simply obedience to God and trust in the revelation of his grace in Christ. This brings sinners into fellowship with God which means eternal life, which is here and now realized, as the Fourth Gospel points out, in lordship over the world (compare Franks in DCG, I, 922-23). The judicial or forensic aspect of justification so thoroughly in-wrought in Paul’s thought is denied by Ritschl. In whatsoever way we view the matter, he says, the attitude of God in the act of justification cannot be conceived as that of a judge (Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, English translation, 1900, 90). W.N. Clarke agrees with Schleiermacher in eliminating justification as a separate element in the work of salvation, and harks back to the Catholic view in making it dependent on the new life and subsequent to it (Christian Theology, 407-8). No book has had as much influence in destroying the New Testament conception of justification among English-speaking readers as that of J. H. Newman, Lectures on Justification, 1838, 3rd edition, 1874, which contains some of the finest passages in religious literature (pp. 270-73, 302, 338-39), but which was so sympathetic to the Catholic view that the author had nothing essential to retract when he joined Rome in 1845. Whether we say we are justified by faith, or by works, or by sacraments, all these but mean this one doctrine that we are justified by grace which is given through sacraments, impetrated by faith, manifested in works (p. 303).
5. Meaning and Message to the Modern Man:
Lastly, has the New Testament conception of justification by faith any message to the modern man, or is it, as Lagarde held, dead in the Protestant churches, something which went overboard with the old doctrine of the Trinity and of Atonement? After an able historical, survey, Holl concludes (Die Rechtfertigungslehre im Licht der Geschichte d. Protestantismus, Tubingen, 1906, 40-42) that there are two principles thoroughly congenial to modern thought which favor this doctrine, namely, that of the sanctity and importance of personality, the I that stands face to face with God, responsible to Him alone; and second, the restoration of the Reformation-thought of an all-working God. Whoever feels the pressure of these two principles, for him the question of justification becomes a living one. The standard on which he must measure himself is the Absolute God, and who can stand in this judgment? Not simply on account of single acts, but with his ‘I’ and even with his good-willing. For that is just the curse which rests upon a man that his ‘I’ is the thing with which alone he wills and can seek God, and that it is this very ‘I’ which by its willfulness, vanity and self-love poisons all his willing. Accordingly, it remains true, what the Reformers said, that man is entirely corrupt, and that he can do no otherwise than to despair when the majesty of God dawns upon him (p. 41). There is, then, no other solution than the venture of faith that the same God who crushes our self-deceit lifts up with His sovereign grace, that we live through Him and before Him. Luther is right that religiously we can find no hold except on the Divine act of grace, which through faith in the Divine love and power working in us and for us ever makes us new in Christ. To give up the doctrine of justification, says Holl rightly (p. 42), is to give up conscious personal religion. Holl writes as a liberal, and he quotes a stronger liberal still, Treitschke, as saying that in the 19th century it was the orthodox preachers who proclaimed this doctrine, who built better than the liberals. Nor, says Holl in another book (Was hat die Rechtfertigungslehre dem modernen Menschen zu sagen? Tubingen, 1907, 26), can anyone who has experienced justification as an inner transformation be misled into moral unconcern. A moral ideal becomes his, much stronger and more compelling than worldly ethics. The new attitude toward God constituted by justification impels to an unending movement in the service of God and man. The doctrine has not had its day. It is a part of the eternal gospel. As long as sinful man has to do with an all-holy God, the experience of Paul, Luther and Wesley becomes in a sense normative for the race.
Literature.
Besides the books mentioned in the text, the following on justification itself may be consulted (those marked with a star are Protestant, those with a dagger are Catholic or High Church Anglican): Goodwin, new edition, with preface by Wesley, 1807; Junkins, 1839; Hare, new edition, 1839 (1st edition with preface by Jackson, 1817); Kerwick,t 1841; Heurtley, 1846 (Bampton Lectures for 1845); McIlvaine, 1861, 3rd edition, 1868 (Righteousness of Faith, important); Buchanan, 1867 (important); Body, 1870; Bunyan, new edition, 1873; Harkey, 1875; Davies, 1878; Sadler, 1888; and Holden, 1901. Besides these, Laurence, Bampton Lectures for 1804, sermon 6; Drummond, Apostolic Teaching and Christ’s Teaching (see index); Schlatter, New Testament Theology, 2 volumes, 1909-10; the various systematic Theologies; Theologies of the New Testament, and Commentaries may be consulted; also Menegoz, Die Rechtfertigungslehre nach Paulus und nach Jakobus, 1903; Kuhl, Die Stellung des Jakobusbriefes z. alttest. Gesetz u. z. Paulinischen Rechtfertigungslehre, 1905.
Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
Justification
The word occurs but twice in the N.T., namely, Rom 4:25 and Rom 5:18. In the former passage it appears to be the equivalent in meaning of faith being imputed to the believer for righteousness, that is, of the believer being accounted righteous. Hence the word ‘justification’ may be said to be the estimation formed in God’s mind of the believer in view of that order of things of which Christ risen is the Head. Such estimation has its expression in Christ Himself, and its consequences are seen in Rom. 5.
The question as to how a righteous God can justify a sinner is raised and answered in Romans 3. It is difficult to conceive a subject more momentous for every human being. What is set forth in the gospel at the outset is the vindication of God in righteousness as regards sin by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, where, in God’s infinite grace to sinners, the question of sin and its judgement has been raised between Himself and the spotless Sin-bearer and settled to His glory. Of Him it is said, “Whom God hath set forth a mercy-seat, through faith in his blood, . . . . for the showing forth of his righteousness in the present time, so that he should be just and justify him that is of the faith of Jesus.” It is then in the blood of Jesus that God’s judgement of sin is seen, and it is on this righteous basis that He can justify all who believe in Him.
Justification of life (Rom 5:18) is the righteous bearing into life which is toward all through the one accomplished righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ even to death, in contrast with the bearing of the one offence of Adam which brought in death and condemnation upon all. What has been effected by the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounds in the scope of it, over all that has been brought in by the one man Adam. In the death of Christ there is seen the complete judgement and removal out of the sight of God both of the sins and of the man who sinned, believers having, through the Lord Jesus Christ raised from the dead, a new Head, in whom they live for God.
There is another aspect of justification referred to in the Epistle of James (James 2), where it is entirely a question of what appears before men. “Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works.”
Fuente: Concise Bible Dictionary
Justification
General references
Gen 15:6; Rom 4:3; Psa 32:2; Psa 71:16; Psa 89:16; Isa 42:21; Isa 45:24-25; Isa 46:12-13; Isa 50:8; Isa 51:5-6; Isa 53:11; Isa 54:17; Isa 56:1; Isa 61:10; Jer 23:6; Zec 3:4; Joh 5:24; Act 13:39; Rom 1:16-17; Hab 2:4; Gal 3:11; Rom 2:13; Rom 3:21-22; Rom 3:24-26; Rom 3:28; Rom 3:30; Rom 4:5-25; Rom 5:1; Rom 5:9; Rom 5:11-21; Rom 6:22; Rom 7:1-25; Rom 8:1; Rom 8:30-31; Rom 8:33-34; Rom 9:30-32; Rom 10:1-21; 1Co 1:30; 1Co 6:11; 2Co 5:19; 2Co 5:21; Gal 2:14-21; Gal 3:8-9; Gal 3:6; Gal 3:21-22; Gal 3:24; Gal 4:21-31; Gal 5:4-6; Eph 6:14; Phi 3:8-9; Col 2:13-14; Tit 3:7; Heb 11:4; Heb 11:7; Jas 2:20-23; Jas 2:26 Adoption; Forgiveness; Regeneration; Sanctification; Sin, Confession of; Sin, Forgiveness of
Fuente: Nave’s Topical Bible
Justification
Justification. A term used to imply the declaring or accounting of a person just or righteous before God. If any one were free from sin, if he perfectly obeyed God’s commandments, he would really be just, not exposed to the penalty of transgression. Rom 2:13. But mankind, as sinful, are not just in this sense, and cannot be so treated. Psa 143:2; Rom 3:19-20; Rom 3:23; 1Jn 1:8. If, then, they are to be freed from the condemnation of sin, if they are to be dealt with as those not amenable to God’s law, it must be not by the establishment of their innocence, but by the remission of their guilt. And it was for this that the Lord Jesus Christ came into the world, and offered himself a sacrifice for sin, that men might be delivered from the condemnation into which their sins had cast them. Rom 3:24-25; 2Co 5:21; 1Jn 1:7; 1Jn 2:2. The Scripture therefore teaches that we are justified by faith in Christ. Rom 3:28; Gal 2:16. This doctrine is thus expressed in the eleventh article of the Anglican church: “We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort.” The originating cause of justification is God’s free grace and loving pity for a fallen world. Joh 3:16; Rom 6:8; Eph 2:4-8. The meritorious cause is the sinless life and sacrificial death of Christ, Rom 4:25, for the virtue of which God could without moral fault, or detriment to justice, remit sin. The instrumental cause is faith, whereby we receive the atonement, accepting God’s mercy on the terms on which he offers it. Rom 3:30; Rom 5:11. Those who are so justified are at peace with God, and have all the advantages of such a state of reconciliation. Rom 5:1-2. Justified men desire and endeavor to walk in holiness of life. Rom 8:1. Gratitude for the mercy received will incline them to do that which is well pleasing in God’s sight. They feel that they have been purchased to be his, and must glorify him in their body and their spirit. 1Co 6:20. This will be their mark, the token, the proof that they are no longer enemies, but friends; not sentenced culprits, but beloved children. Should any not so walk and act, they cannot be God’s children. Such a faith as theirs, a faith which worketh not by love, is empty and useless. Jam 2:17; Jam 2:26. Abraham’s obedience was the proof that he possessed that faith which was counted to him for righteousness. Of justification, then, it may be briefly said that1, its source is the grace of God; 2, its ground the mediatorial work of Christ; 3, faith the way by which we receive it; and, 4, the holy life of a believer the evidence of its possession; or, yet more briefly, it is originally by grace, meritoriously by Christ, instrumentally by faith, evidentially by good works.
Fuente: People’s Dictionary of the Bible
JUSTIFICATION
(1) By Faith
Gen 15:6; Act 13:39; Rom 3:28; Rom 5:1; Rom 5:18; Rom 9:30; 1Co 6:11
Gal 3:24
–SEE Faith (3), FAITH
Salvation (3), SALVATION
Grace (3), GRACE, DIVINE
(2) Of Self Impossible
Job 9:2; Job 25:4; Psa 143:2; Jer 2:22; Eze 14:14; Rom 3:20; Gal 5:4
–SEE Good Works, WORK AND WORKERS, RELIGIOUS
Grace, GRACE, DIVINE
Self-condemnation, SELF-CONDEMNATION
Who can Stand? SELF-JUSTIFICATION
–of Self Attempted. SEE Excuses, SELF-JUSTIFICATION
& SELF-JUSTIFICATION
Fuente: Thompson Chain-Reference Bible
Justification
in common language, signifies a vindication from any charge which affects the moral character; but in theology it is used for the acceptance of one, by God, who is, and confesses himself to be, guilty. To justify a sinner, says Mr. Bunting, in an able sermon on this important subject, is to account and consider him relatively righteous; and to deal with him as such, notwithstanding his past actual unrighteousness, by clearing, absolving, discharging, and releasing him from various penal evils, and especially from the wrath of God, and the liability to eternal death, which, by that past unrighteousness, he had deserved; and by accepting him as if just, and admitting him to the state, the privileges, and the rewards of righteousness. Hence it appears that justification, and the remission or forgiveness of sin, are substantially the same thing. These expressions relate to one and the same act of God, to one and the same privilege of his believing people. Accordingly, St. Paul clearly uses justification and forgiveness as synonymous terms, when he says, Be it known unto you, therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: and by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses, Act 13:38-39. Also in the following passage: To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin, Rom 4:5-8. Here, the justification of the ungodly, the counting or imputation of righteousness, the forgiveness of iniquity, and the covering and non- imputation of sin, are phrases which have all, perhaps, their various shades of meaning, but which express the very same blessing under different views. But (1.) the justification of a sinner does not in the least degree alter or diminish the evil nature and desert of sin. For we know it is God, the holy God, that justifieth. And he can never regard sin, on any consideration, or under any circumstances, with less than perfect and infinite hatred. Sin, therefore, is not changed in its nature, so as to be made less exceedingly sinful, or less worthy of wrath, by the pardon of the sinner. The penalty is remitted, and the obligation to suffer that penalty is dissolved; but it is still naturally due, though graciously remitted. Hence appear the propriety and duty of continuing to confess and lament even pardoned sin with a lowly and contrite heart. Though released from its penal consequences by an act of divine clemency, we should still remember that the dust of self abasement is our proper place before God, and should temper our exultation in his mercy by an humbling recollection of our natural liability to his wrath. I will establish my covenant with thee, and thou shalt know that I am the Lord: that thou mayest remember, and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord God, Eze 16:62-63.
(2.) The account which has been given of justification, if correct, sufficiently points out the error of many of the Roman Catholic divines, and of some mystic theologians, who seem to suppose that to be justified is to be, not reckoned righteous, but actually made righteous, by the infusion of a sanctifying influence, producing a positive and inherent conformity to the moral image of God. This notion confounds the two distinct though kindred blessings of justification and regeneration. The former, in its Scriptural sense, is an act of God, not in or upon man, but for him, and in his favour; an act which, abstractedly considered, to use the words of Dr. Barrow, respects man only as its object, and translates him into another relative state. The inherent principle of righteousness is a consequent of this act of God; connected with it, but not formally of it.
(3.) The justification extends to all past sins; that is, to all guilt contracted previously to that time at which the act of justification takes place. In respect of this, it is, while it remains in force, a most full, perfect, and entire absolution from wrath. All manner of sin is then forgiven. The pardon which is granted is a justification, not merely from some things, from many things, from most things, but from all things, Act 13:39. God does not justify us, or pardon our innumerable offences, by degrees, but at once. As by the law of works he is cursed, who continueth not in all things which that law enjoined, so he who is truly absolved by the Gospel is cleared from all and every thing which before stood against him; and there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. Well may that Gospel which reveals and offers such a benefit be termed a great salvation!
(4.) Another remark, which it may not be unnecessary to make, is, that justification, however effectual to our release from past guilt, does not terminate our state of probation. It is not irreversible, any more than eternal. As he who is now justified was once condemned, so he may in future come again into condemnation, by relapsing into sin and unbelief, although at present accepted in the Beloved. Thus Adam, before transgression, was in a state of favour: but as he had not then fulfilled, to the end of his probation, the righteousness of that law under which he was placed, his ultimate and final acceptance was not absolutely certain. His privilege, as one accepted of God, might be forfeited, and was actually forfeited, by his subsequent sin. Now, our own justification or pardon only places us, as to this point, in similar circumstances. Though ever so clearly and fully forgiven, we are yet on our trial for eternity, and should look to ourselves, that we lose not the things which we have gained. That justification may for our sin be reversed, appears from our Lord’s parable of the two debtors, in which one who had obtained the blessing of forgiveness is represented as incurring the forfeiture of it by the indulgence of an unforgiving spirit toward his fellow servant, Mat 18:23-35. Let us therefore watch and pray, that we enter not into temptation.
2. The immediate results of justification are (1.) The restoration of amity and intercourse between the pardoned sinner and the pardoning God. For, being justified by faith, we have peace with God, and, consequently, unforbidden access to him. The matter and ground of God’s controversy with us being then removed by his act of gracious absolution, we become the objects of his friendship. Abraham believed God, and it was imputed to him for righteousness; and he was immediately called the friend of God, Jam 2:23; and so are all those who are similarly justified. This reconciliation, however, does not extend to their instant and absolute deliverance from all those evils which transgression has entailed on man. They are still liable, for a season, to affliction and pain, to temporal suffering and mortality. These are portions of the original curse from which their justification does not as yet release them. But it entitles them to such supports under all remaining trouble, and to such promises of a sanctifying influence with it, as will, if embraced, turn the curse into a blessing. Whom the Lord loveth, he may still chasten, and in very faithfulness afflict them. But these are acts of salutary discipline, rather than of vindictive displeasure. His friendship, not his righteous hostility is the principle from which they all proceed; and the salvation, not the destruction, of the sufferer is the end to which they are all directed.
(2.) Another immediate result of justification is the adoption of the persons justified into the family of God, and their consequent right to eternal life of body and soul. God condescends to become not only their Friend, but their Father; they are the objects not merely of his amicable regard, but of his paternal tenderness. And, admitted to the relation of children, they become entitled to the children’s inheritance; for, if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together, Rom 8:17.
(3.) With these results of justification is inseparably connected another, of the utmost value and importance; namely, the habitual indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith, Gal 3:13-14. Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, Gal 4:6. With the remission of sins, St. Peter also connects, as an immediate result, as a distinct but yet a simultaneous blessing, the gift of the Holy Ghost,
Act 2:38. And in the fifth verse of this chapter, the Holy Ghost is said to be given to those who are justified by faith. Of this indwelling the immediate effects are, (i.) Tranquillity of conscience. For he testifies and manifests to those in whom he dwells their free justification and gracious adoption. The spirit which such persons have received is not the spirit of bondage to fear, but the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God,
Rom 8:15-16.
(ii.) Power over sin; a prevailing desire and ability to walk before God in holy obedience. No sooner is the Holy Spirit enthroned in the heart, than he begins to make all things new. In his genuine work, purity is always connected with consolation. Those to whom he witnesses their freedom from condemnation he also enables to walk, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit, Rom 8:1.
(iii.) A joyous hope of heaven. Their title results from the fact of their adoption; their power to rejoice in hope, from the Spirit’s testimony of that fact. We, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness by faith,
and abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost, Gal 5:5; Rom 15:13.
3. To have a complete view of the method by which justification and all its consequent blessings are attained, we must consider the originating, the meritorious, and the instrumental cause of justification.
(1.) The originating cause is the grace, the free, undeserved, and spontaneous love of God toward fallen man. He remembered and pitied us in our low estate; for his mercy endureth for ever. After that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. The grace of God bringeth salvation, Tit 2:11; Tit 3:4-5. We are justified freely by his grace; Rom 3:24. But God is wise, and holy, and just, as well as merciful and gracious. And his wisdom determined, that, in order to reconcile the designs of his mercy toward sinners with the claims of his purity and justice, those designs should be accomplished only through the intervention of a divine Redeemer. We are justified through our Lord Jesus Christ, Rom 1:5.
(2.) Our Lord Jesus Christ is the sole meritorious cause of our justification. All he did and all he suffered in his mediatorial character may be said to have contributed to this great purpose. For what he did, in obedience to the precepts of the law, and what he suffered, in satisfaction of its penalty, taken together, constitute that mediatorial righteousness, for the sake of which the Father is ever well pleased in him. Now, in this mediatorial righteousness all who are justified have a saving interest. It is not meant that it is personally, imputed to them in its formal nature or distinct acts; for against any such imputation there lie insuperable objections both from reason and from Scripture. But the collective merit and moral effects of all which the Mediator did and suffered are so reckoned to our account when we are justified, that, for the sake of Christ and in consideration of his obedience unto death, we are released from guilt, and accepted of God.
From this statement of the meritorious cause of justification, it appears that while our pardon is, in its origin, an act of the highest grace, it is also, in its mode, an act most perfectly consistent with God’s essential righteousness, and demonstrative of his inviolable justice. It proceeds not on the principle of abolishing the law or its penalty; for that would have implied that the law was unduly rigorous, either in its precepts or in its sanctions. But it rests on the ground that the law has been magnified and vindicated, and that its penalty, or sufferings, which where fully equivalent to that penalty in a moral view, when the dignity of the sufferer is considered, have been sustained by our voluntary Substitute. Thus grace reigns through righteousness, not at the expense of righteousness. Now, the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus; whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; to declare, I say, at this time his righteousness; that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus,
Rom 3:21-26.
(3.) As to the instrumental cause of justification, the merit of the blood of Jesus does not operate necessarily so as to produce our pardon as an immediate and unavoidable effect, but through the instrumentality of faith. The faith by which we are justified is present faith, faith actually existing and exercised. We are not justified by to-morrow’s faith foreseen; for that would lead to the Antinomian notion of justification from eternity, a notion which to mention is to confute. We are not justified by yesterday’s faith recorded or remembered; for that would imply the opinion that justification is irreversible. The justification offered in the Scriptures is a justification upon believing, in which we are never savingly interested until we believe, and which continues in force only so long as we continue to believe. On all unbelievers the wrath of God abides. The atonement of Jesus was indeed accepted, as from him, at the time when it was offered; but it is not accepted, as for us, to our individual justification, until we individually believe, nor after we cease to believe. The OBJECT of justifying faith may be inferred from what has been before said, as to the originating and meritorious causes of justification. It has respect, in general, to all that Christ is set forth in the Gospel as doing or suffering, by the gracious appointment of the Father, in order to our redemption and pardon. But it has respect, in particular, to the atoning sacrifice of Christ, as exhibited by divine authority in the Scriptures, and as attested to be acceptable and sufficient by his resurrection from the dead, and by his mediatorial exaltation at the right hand of God.
The acts or exercises of this faith seem to be three; or rather, that faith which is required in order to our justification is a complex act of the mind, which includes three distinct but concurrent exertions of its powers. It includes, (1.) The assent of the understanding to the truth of the testimony of God in the Gospel; and especially to that part of it which concerns the design and efficacy of the death of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin.
(2.) The consent of the will and affections to this plan of salvation; such an approbation and choice of it as imply a renunciation of every other refuge, and a steady and decided preference of this. Unbelief is called a disallowing of the foundation laid in Zion; whereas faith includes a hearty allowance of it, and a thankful acquiescence in God’s revealed method of forgiveness.
(3.) From this assent of the enlightened understanding, and consent of the rectified will, to the evangelical testimony concerning Christ crucified, results the third thing, which is supposed to be implied in justifying faith; namely, actual trust in the Saviour, and personal apprehension of his merits. When, under the promised leading and influence of the Holy Ghost, the penitent sinner thus confidently relies and individually lays hold on Christ, then the work of justifying faith is complete; then, and not till then, he is immediately justified. On the whole, it may be said that the faith to which the privilege of justification is annexed, is such a belief of the Gospel, by the power of the Spirit of God, as leads us to come to Christ, to receive Christ, to trust in Christ, and to commit the keeping of our souls into his hands, in humble confidence of his ability and his willingness to save us.
The grand doctrine of the Reformation was that of justification by faith, and was therefore held by all the Lutheran and Reformed churches. The Papists assert that man’s inherent righteousness is the meritorious cause of his justification: many Protestant divines have endeavoured to unite the two, and have held that men are justified by faith and good works; and others have equally departed from the opinions of the earliest reformers on the subject of justification, in representing it as resulting from the imputation of Christ’s active and passive righteousness to those that believe, instead of confining the imputation to the moral consequence and effect of both. In other words, that which is reckoned to us in our justification for righteousness is our faith in Christ’s merits, and that not because of any intrinsic value in faith; but only for the sake of those merits.
In a mere moral sense man’s sin or righteousness is imputed to him, when he is considered as actually the doer of sinful or of righteous acts. A man’s sin or righteousness is imputed to him in its legal consequence, under a government of rewards and punishments; and then to impute sin or righteousness signifies, in a legal sense, to reckon and to account it, to acquit or condemn, and forthwith to punish, or to exempt from punishment. Thus Shimei entreats David, that he would not impute folly to him, that is, that he would not punish his folly. In this sense, too, David speaks of the blessedness of the man whose transgression is forgiven,
and to whom the Lord imputeth not sin, that is, whom he forgives, so that the legal consequence of his sin shall not fall upon him. This non- imputation of sin, to a sinner, is expressly called the imputation of righteousness, without works; the imputation of righteousness is, then, the non-punishment, or the pardon of sin; and if this passage be read in its connection, it will also be seen, that by imputing faith for righteousness, the Apostle means precisely the same thing: But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness; even as David also describeth the man to whom God imputeth righteousness without works, saying, Blessed is the man whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not sin. This quotation form David would have been nothing to the Apostle’s purpose, unless he had understood the forgiveness of sins, and the imputation of righteousness, and the non- imputation of sin, to signify the same thing as counting faith for righteousness, with only this difference, that the introduction of the term faith marks the manner in which the forgiveness of sin is obtained. To have faith imputed for righteousness, is nothing more than to be justified by faith, which is also called by St. Paul, being made righteous, that is, being placed by an act of free forgiveness, through faith in Christ, in the condition of righteous men, in this respect, that the penalty of the law does not lie against them, and that they are the acknowledged objects of the divine favour. See FAITH.