8 – The Reformed View

      Of all the early teachers of those Protestant Churches which are now Reformed in name or tradition, John Calvin stands supreme.  It is to his doctrine that we now turn.

 

John Calvin (1509–1564)1

      After a humanist training in the classics and law, Calvin experienced a change of direction in his life as he adopted the basic Lutheran insights concerning the gospel of Jesus Christ.  As Luther had sought for a gracious God, so Calvin, turning away from the corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church, began to search for a pure church.  French by birth, he became the chief pastor and reformer of Geneva, a small French-speaking republic in Switzerland.  Under his influence the city became a great center of theological study, Bible translation and reforming activity.

      By all accounts he was a remarkable, if austere, man.  His theological insights, his great ability as an exegete and commentator on the Bible, his linguistic ability in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, his precision of mind, his clear and pithy style and his total dedication to duty made him the most influential writer among all the Reformers.  For his doctrines of justification and sanctification, the most obvious as well as the best place to look is his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which first appeared in Latin in 1535 and reached its final edition in 1559.2  In Book Three, “The way in which we receive the grace of Christ: what benefits come to us from it, and what effects follow,” we find his teaching on justification.  It is easy to read and clear in its contents.  Many people have found that to read Calvin is actually easier than to read accounts of his teaching.

      Before looking at the teaching of the Institutes, it is helpful to note the Confession of Faith (1536) which was, if not written by, at least approved by Calvin.  This Confession was intended to serve as a basis of faith for all the citizens of Geneva.3  Sections 6–8 are as follows:

 

6.  Salvation in Jesus

      We confess then that it is Jesus Christ who is given to us by the Father, in order that in him we should recover all of which in ourselves we are deficient.  Now all that Jesus Christ has done and suffered for our redemption, we veritably hold without any doubt, as it is contained in the Creed, which is recited in the Church, that is to say: I believe in God the Father Almighty, and so on.

7.  Righteousness in Jesus

      Therefore we acknowledge the things which are consequently given to us by God in Jesus Christ: first, that being in our own natures enemies of God and subjects of his wrath and judgment, we are reconciled with him and received again in grace through the intercession of Jesus Christ, so that by his righteousness and guiltlessness we have remission of our sins, and by the shedding of his blood we are cleansed and purified from all our stains.

8.  Regeneration in Jesus

      Second, we acknowledge that by his Spirit we are regenerated into a new spiritual nature.  That is to say that the evil desires of our flesh are mortified by grace, so that they rule us no longer.  On the contrary, our will is rendered conformable to God’s will, to follow in his way and to seek what is pleasing to him.  Therefore we are by him delivered from the servitude of sin, under whose power we were of ourselves held captive, and by this deliverance we are made capable and able to do good works and not otherwise.

 

This is reasonably simple and straightforward.  However, in the light of what we shall note in the teaching of Calvin two points are worth making.  First, the order followed here is justification and then regeneration/sanctification, which is the way Melanchthon had begun to teach within Lutheranism.4  Secondly, the reference to “the intercession of Jesus Christ” is a theme which constantly appears in the Institutes in the discussion of justification.

      Having set the scene, we shall now look at the teaching of Calvin as it is found in the Institutes and summarize it under seven headings.

      1. Spiritual union with Christ is the way God the Father gives salvation to his elect.  God’s work of reconciliation was not completed at Easter or on Ascension Day.  It continued in the work of the Holy Sprit bringing Christ to the elect and the elect to Christ.5  “We must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us” (3:1:1).  And, “All that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him” (3:1:1).  By spiritual union or communion with Christ, Calvin was not thinking of the absorption of the human personality into Christ.  The teaching of Andreas Osiander of Königsberg, which included certain mystical speculations concerning union with Christ, caused Calvin to be more careful in the way he expressed his own understanding of spiritual union.  He emphasized that communion with Christ was in and by the Holy Spirit alone, the Spirit who may be called the Spirit of Christ because he bears the name and characteristics of Christ.  “Christ unites himself to us by the Spirit alone.  By the grace and power of the same Spirit we are made his members, to keep us under himself and in turn to possess him” (3:1:3).

      2. Faith is a gift of God and the principal work of the Holy Spirit in the elect.  Calvin held that “faith is the principal work of the Holy Spirit” and defined faith in this way: “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (3:2:7).  True faith originates in the secret work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart.  It knows and rests upon God’s gracious promises of salvation given in the gospel, and it includes the assurance of God’s love.  The Holy Spirit actually works in perfect harmony with the Word of God.  This means that faith is created either by the Holy Spirit, or by the Word of God in Scripture (and as preached) or by Word and Spirit together.  The mind absorbs the Word of God, which then enters the heart.  “For the Word of God is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart that it may be an invincible defense to withstand and drive off all the stratagems of temptation” (3:2:36).

      By faith the elect receive Christ.  “By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in Heaven instead of a judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life” (3:11:1).  Faith is merely an “instrument,” but rightly understood it is the only instrument by which the elect receive the grace of God.6

      3. Faith possesses Christ and enjoys, as the effects of this union, repentance and forgiveness of sins.  Calvin placed great emphasis on genuine repentance (or conversion) as a continuing process of growth in grace.  How he saw it in relation to forgiveness and justification is made clear when he writes: “Now, both repentance and forgiveness of sins – that is, newness of life and reconciliation – are conferred on us by Christ, and both are attained by us through faith.  As a consequence, reason and the order of teaching demand that I begin to discuss both at this point [i.e., Book 3:3:1].  However, our immediate transition will be from faith to repentance.  For when this topic is rightly understood, it will better appear how man is justified by faith alone, and simple pardon; nevertheless actual holiness of life, so to speak, is not separated from free imputation of righteousness.”  Thus Calvin’s method is to deal first with repentance (which includes regeneration and sanctification) and then turn to justification.  By adopting such a method he was able to insist that true faith issues in holiness of life, as well as being the instrumental cause of a saving relationship with God.

      4. Repentance not only follows faith but is born of faith.  Calvin defined repentance or conversion as “the true turning of our life to God, a turning that arises from a pure and earnest fear of him; and it consists in the mortification of our flesh and of the old man, and in the vivification of the Spirit” (3:3:5).  “Pure and earnest fear” of God arises from the knowledge that God is just, that I have grievously sinned against him and that I rightly deserve his punishment.  So even when I approach God in Jesus Christ I know that what I receive by pure grace is not what I truly deserve.

      Such fear is necessarily associated with mortification.  This is the process initiated and helped on by the Spirit of Christ as he uses the “sword of the Spirit,” which is the Word of God.  It includes ceasing to do evil, overcoming the sinful bias within human nature, renouncing the world, the flesh and the devil, casting off the “old man,” the continuous activity of self-denial and “taking up one’s cross.”  Such fear is also associated with vivification, which occurs as mortification proceeds.  This is the positive side and includes participating in the resurrection of Christ, putting on the new man, walking in the Spirit and being renewed according to the pattern of the image of God revealed in Christ.

      Mortification and vivification are two sides of one coin.  One can only truly occur in company with the other.  Each depends on the other, and both are what “a true turning to God” implies.  However, it has to be recognized that “this restoration does not take place in one moment or one day or one year; but through continual and sometimes slow advances God wipes out in his elect the corruptions of the flesh, cleanses them of guilt, consecrates them to himself as temples, renewing all their minds to true purity that they may practice repentance throughout their lives and know that this warfare will end only at death” (3:3:9).  Believers never achieve sinless perfection in this life, for while sin has lost its dominion in their lives it still dwells in them, ever ready to assert itself.  While Calvin taught that true repentance occurs in a child of God who fully participates in the life, worship and sacraments of the Church, he rejected the medieval and Roman doctrines of penance and auricular confession of sins.

      5. Faith receives and embraces the righteousness of God offered in the gospel and imputed to believers who are in union with Christ.  “Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith” (3:11:1).  Justification, wrote Calvin, is to be explained “simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men.  And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness” (3:11:2).  It is Christ in his work as high priest who is the One by whose presence and intercession in Heaven we are justified.  United to him by the Spirit in faith, God the Father counts his righteousness as ours, so that we are justified because of his obedience to God as our substitute when he was on earth.  Calvin held that we must lift up our minds to God’s judgment – seat so we may be firmly convinced of his free justification.  That he understood justification in a forensic manner is clear.  However, it is not his primary emphasis since the forensic metaphor is dependent on the spiritual union with Christ and on the reality of the heavenly intercession of Christ, the high priest. “You see that our righteousness is not in us but in Christ, that we possess it only because we are partakers in Christ; indeed, in him we possess all its riches” (3:11:23).

      Though Calvin refers to justification as the principal article of the Christian religion, he does not, like Luther, make it the central thrust of his whole theology and ethics.  In fact, it is difficult to find one center to the theology of Calvin.  Like Melanchthon (from whom he probably received the idea of forensic justification), Calvin was prepared to use some scholastic terminology in order to clarify his meaning.  So he summarized his position in this way: “The efficient cause of our salvation consists in God the Father’s love; the material cause in God the Son’s obedience; the instrumental cause in the Spirit’s illumination, that is, faith; the final cause, in the glory of God’s great generosity” (3:14:21).  Thus justification is by grace alone and by faith alone.  We are justified by an alien righteousness and not, as the Council of Trent taught, by an imparted and inherent righteousness.  Further, this alien righteousness is provided by the Son of God through what he achieved as our substitute in his human nature.  The righteousness of Christ imputed to us is not, as Osiander taught, his eternal righteousness as eternal Son, but his mediatorial righteousness as incarnate Son and Messiah.

      6. The good works of true believers are acceptable to God through Christ.  Calvin utterly rejected good works as the basis for acceptance in God’s heavenly court.  This rejection related to good works before and after conversion.  The reason is simple – only the mediatorial righteousness of Christ is acceptable to the Father.  However, Calvin had to face the fact that both the Old and New Testaments imply that God accepts the good works of his children, even though his children are not yet perfected.  As one of the greatest commentators in Holy Scripture, he accepted this fact and answered quite simply that the works are acceptable only because they are seen and received by God in the name of Jesus Christ.  “Because the godly, encompassed with mortal flesh, are still sinners, and their good works are as yet incomplete and redolent of vices of the flesh, he can be propitious neither to the former nor to the latter unless he embrace them in Christ rather than in themselves.  In this sense we are to understand those passages which attest that God is kind and merciful to the keepers of righteousness” (3:17:5).

      In a further explanation he wrote: “After forgiveness of sins is set forth, the good works that now follow are appraised otherwise than on their own merit.  For everything imperfect in them is covered by Christ’s perfection; every blemish or spot is cleansed away by his purity in order not to be brought in question at the divine judgment.  Therefore, after the guilt of transgressions that hinder man from bringing forth anything pleasing to God has been blotted out, and after the fault of imperfection, which habitually defiles even good works, is buried, the good works done by believers are accounted righteous, or, what is the same thing are reckoned as righteous” (3:17:8).

      Here is yet a further difference between Calvin and medieval (and Roman) theology.  Calvin will only allow that works are good because of their acceptance by God in the name of Christ.  Roman Catholic theology allows that since they proceed from imparted and inherent righteousness they are acceptable to God.

      7. Regeneration and forgiveness, sanctification and justification are inseparable in life, for both are blessings of union with Christ.  Already this point has been made.  However, it is so important that it needs emphasizing.  There is no justification in Heaven without regeneration on earth; there is no imputed righteousness in God’s tribunal without accompanying good works in the arena of daily life.  Responding to Osiander, Calvin wrote: “Yet we must bear in mind ... that the grace of justification is not separated from regeneration, although they are things distinct.  But because it is very well known by experience that the traces of sin always remain in the righteous, their justification must be very different from reformation into newness of life” (3:11:11).  While a conceptual distinction may be made and, for clarity, must be made, in real life the two sides belong inseparably together if there is to be genuine Christianity.

 

After Calvin

      Within the community of scholars who seek to understand and interpret the emergence and development of the Reformed faith (often called Calvinism), there is a difference of opinion as to the relationship of the teaching of Calvin to that of his “orthodox” successors.  The two extremes of this spectrum of difference may be stated as: (1) the conviction that a serious distortion of Calvin’s balanced insights especially occurred within federal theology with the result that (to use the theme of a book) Calvin (is) Against the Calvinists;7 and (2) that Theodore Beza (1519–1605), Calvin’s successor in Geneva, and later theologians merely developed Calvin’s system in a logical way as they faced controversies and problems he did not have to face.8

      This is not the place to discuss this question of difference of interpretation, but we must be aware of it as we notice the contents of certain Reformed Confessions of Faith, particular interests and insights of Reformed dogmaticians, and the influential Reformed theology taught at Princeton Seminary in the nineteenth century.  We must also be aware of the fact that existing alongside the mainstream of Reformed orthodoxy have been those who, from within the Reformed Churches/tradition, have offered significantly different accounts of justification.  Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) of the Netherlands, who gave his name to Arminianism, and Richard Baxter (1615–1691), the English Puritan whose theology was called Neonomianism by contemporaries, are famous examples.9  Also, the hyper-Calvinists of the eighteenth century presented a theology which was heavily determined by the doctrine of the eternal decrees of God, and thus they spoke of the eternal justification and adoption of the elect before they were born.10

      It is clear from a study of the Reformed tradition that there was agreement on the following beliefs: the meritorious cause of justification is the work of Christ as substitute of the elect; the formal cause, that by which God actually pronounces and accepts a sinner as righteous, is the righteousness of Christ, the mediator and high priest of the elect, who is in Heaven; and the instrumental cause, or the channel through which God actually achieved the justification of the sinner, is faith (faith that trusts God and expresses itself in faithfulness to him).  The consciousness that the Roman Church had taken a very different position on justification and sanctification and the fact that its theologians strongly defended that different position meant that, as with Lutheran orthodoxy, Calvinist/Reformed orthodoxy expressed its beliefs in a controversial situation.

 

Reformed Confessions

      There are many confessions of faith and catechisms produced by the Reformed Churches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Our attention will focus on only three – the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Confession.11

      The Belgic Confession (1561) was produced for the Reformed Church in the Netherlands.  Its author was Guido de Bres (Guy de Bray), who was executed on May 31, 1567.  The Confession has thirty-seven articles.  Article XX writes of God’s justice and mercy: “God therefore manifested his justice against his Son when he laid our iniquities upon him, and poured forth his mercy and goodness on us, who were guilty and worthy of damnation, out of mere and perfect love, giving his Son unto death for us and raising him for our justification, that through him we might obtain immortality and life eternal.”  Article XXI describes the satisfaction presented by Christ on the cross to appease the wrath of God.  Articles XXII–XXIV address our topic.

 

ART.  XXII

Of Our Justification Through Faith in Jesus Christ

      We believe that, to attain the true knowledge of this great mystery, the Holy Ghost kindleth in our hearts an upright faith, which embraces Jesus Christ with all his merits, appropriates him, and seeks nothing more besides him.  For it must needs follow, either that all things which are requisite to our salvation are not in Jesus Christ, or if all things are in him, that then those who possess Jesus Christ through faith have complete salvation in him.  Therefore, for any to assert that Christ is not sufficient, but that something more is required besides him, would be too gross a blasphemy; for hence it would follow that Christ was but half a Savior.  Therefore we justly say with Paul, that “we are justified by faith alone, or by faith without works.”  However, to speak more clearly, we do not mean that faith itself justifies us, for it is only an instrument with which we embrace Christ our Righteousness.  But Jesus Christ, imputing to us all his merits, and so many holy works, which he hath done for us and in our stead, is our Righteousness.  And faith is an instrument that keeps us in communion with him in all his benefits, which, when they become ours, are more than sufficient to acquit us of our sins.

 

ART.  XXIII

Our Justification Consists in the Forgiveness of Sin

and the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness

      We believe that our salvation consists in the remission of our sins for Jesus Christ’s sake, and that therein our righteousness before God is implied; as David and Paul teach us, declaring this to be the happiness of man, that God imputes righteousness to him without works.  And the same Apostle saith, that we are justified freely by his grace, through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ.  And therefore we always hold fast this foundation, ascribing all the glory to God, humbling ourselves before him, and acknowledging ourselves to be such as we really are, without presuming to trust in any thing in ourselves, or in any merit of ours, relying and resting upon the obedience of Christ crucified alone, which becomes ours when we believe in him.  This is sufficient to cover all our iniquities, and to give us confidence in approaching to God; freeing the conscience of fear, terror, and dread, without following the example of our first father, Adam, who, trembling, attempted to cover himself with fig-leaves.  ‘And, verily, if we should appear before God, relying on ourselves or on any other creature, though ever so little, we should, alas! be consumed.  And therefore every one must pray with David: “O Lord, enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.”

 

ART. XXIV

Of Man’s Sanctification and Good Works

      We believe that this true faith, being wrought in man by the hearing of the Word of God and the operation of the Holy Ghost, doth regenerate and make him a new man, causing him to live a new life, and freeing him from the bondage of sin.  Therefore it is so far from being true, that this justifying faith makes men remiss in a pious and holy life, that on the contrary without it they would never do anything out of love to God, but only out of self-love or fear of damnation.  Therefore it is impossible that this holy faith can be unfruitful in man: for we do not speak of a vain faith, but of such a faith as is called in Scripture “a faith that worketh by love,” which excites man to the practice of those works which God has commanded in his Word.  Which works, as they proceed from the good root of faith, are good and acceptable in the sight of God, forasmuch as they are all sanctified by his grace: howbeit they are of no account towards our justification.  For it is by faith in Christ that we are justified, even before we do good works, otherwise they could not be good works any more than the fruit of a tree can be good before the tree itself is good.

      Therefore we do good works, but not to merit by them (for what can we merit?) – nay, we are beholden to God for the good works we do, and not he to us, “since it is he that worketh in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”  Let us therefore attend to what is written: “When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say we are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.”

      In the meantime we do not deny that God rewards good works, but it is through his grace that he crowns his gifts.  Moreover, though we do good works, we do not found our salvation upon them; for we can do no work but what is polluted by our flesh, and also punishable; and although we could perform such works, still the remembrance of one sin is sufficient to make God reject them.  Thus, then, we should always be in doubt, tossed to and fro without any certainty, and our poor consciences would be continually vexed if they relied not on the merits of the suffering and death of our Savior.

 

      Concerning whether or not the doctrine is identical with that of Calvin, the answer must be both positive and negative.  Probably Calvin actually approved it when it was taken to Geneva to be shown to the pastors there.  However, we may note some differences.  First of all, justification is treated before sanctification and both follow the treatment of eternal election in Article XVI.  Here is a difference at least in methodology and is more in agreement with the method of Beza than of Calvin.  The latter discussed eternal election in the Institutes after justification.  Then, secondly, there appears to be a more positive value given the worth of good works performed by the Christian in the Confession than in Calvin’s treatment.

      The Heidelberg Catechism derives its name from Heidelberg, the major city of the Palatinate in Germany.  In 1562 the Elector, Frederic the Pious, directed that a catechism be prepared, and the task was given to Zacarias Ursinus, a professor of theology in the university.  After being approved by the faculty of theology, it was introduced into the churches and schools in 1563.  Soon afterwards it was translated into Dutch and so became an important doctrinal standard in both the German and Dutch Reformed Churches.

      Q. 60.  How are you righteous before God?

      A.  Only by true faith in Jesus Christ.  In spite of the fact that my conscience accuses me that I have grievously sinned against all the commandments of God, and have not kept any one of them, and that I am still ever prone to all that is evil, nevertheless, God, without any merit of my own, out of pure grace, grants me the benefits of the perfect expiation of Christ, imputing to me his righteousness and holiness as if I had never committed a single sin or had ever been sinful, having fulfilled myself all the obedience which Christ has carried out for me, if only I accept such favor with a trusting heart.

      Q. 61.  Why do you say that you are righteous by faith alone?

      A.  Not because I please God by virtue of the worthiness of my faith, but because the satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ alone are my righteousness before God, and because I can accept it and make it mine in no other way than by faith alone.

      Q. 62.  But why cannot our good works be our righteousness before God, or at least a part of it?

      A.  Because the righteousness which can stand before the judgment of God must be absolutely perfect and wholly in conformity with the divine Law.  But even our best works in this life are all imperfect and defiled with sin.

      Q. 63.  Will our good works merit nothing, even when it is Gods purpose to reward them in this life, and in the future life as well?

      A.  This reward is not given because of merit, but out of grace.

      Q. 64.  But does not this teaching make people careless and sinful?

      A.  No, for it is impossible for those who are ingrafted into Christ by true faith not to bring forth the fruit of gratitude.

      It is interesting to observe that the questions on justification and good works occur in the general section headed “The Holy Spirit” (for Lord’s Day 20–24).  The first answer (53) in this section describes the role of the Spirit in regeneration and in the creation of true faith.  Apart from this, the Catechism has no discussion of sanctification and likewise no discussion of election.

      Finally we turn to Britain for the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647).  This was produced by divines of the Church of England who wished to “purify” the Church in a Reformed direction and visited Scottish divines from the Reformed Church of Scotland.  Though produced in England, it was never adopted by the Church of England but has become the basic confession of the English-speaking Presbyterian Churches whose roots are associated with the Church of Scotland, which adopted it in 1648.

      The Confession reflects a federal theology and speaks of a covenant of works that God made with Adam and a covenant of grace made between members of the Holy Trinity in order to bring salvation to the elect.  It has a very strong emphasis on predestination and the decrees of God; all that is affirmed concerning the work of Christ, the gift of salvation and the Church is written in the light of this emphasis.

      Chapter X, entitled “Effectual Calling,” explains how all those who are predestinated unto life are called by the Word and Spirit out of sin into the grace of God.  Chapter XI is on justification, XII on adoption and XIII on sanctification.

 

Justification

      1.  Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness, but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves: it is the gift of God.

      2.  Faith, thus 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, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.

      3.  Christ, by his obedience and death, did fully discharge the debt of all those that are thus justified, and did make a proper, real, and full satisfaction to his Father’s justice in their behalf.  Yet, inasmuch as he was given by the Father for them, and his obedience and satisfaction accepted in their stead, and both freely, not for any thing in them, their justification is only of free grace; that both the exact justice and rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners.

      4.  God did, from all eternity, decree to justify all the elect; and Christ did, in the fullness of time, die for their sins, and rise again for their justification; nevertheless they are not justified until the Holy Spirit doth, in due time, actually apply Christ unto them.

      5.  God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified: and, although they can never fall from the state of justification, yet they may by their sins fall under God’s fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of his countenance restored unto them until they humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance.

      6.  The justification of believers under the Old Testament was, in all these respects, one and the same with the justification of believers under the New Testament.

 

Of Adoption

      1.  All those that are justified, God vouchsafeth, in and for his only Son, Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption: by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God; have his name put upon them; receive the Spirit of adoption; have access to the throne of grace with boldness; are enabled to cry Abba, Father; are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him as by a father; yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption, and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation.

 

Of Sanctification

      1.  They who are effectually called and regenerated, having a new heart and a new spirit created in them, are further sanctified, really and personally, through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, by his Word and Spirit dwelling in them: the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified; and they more and more quickened and strengthened, in all saving graces, to the practice of true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

      2.  This sanctification is throughout in the whole man, yet imperfect in this life: there abideth still some remnants of corruption in every part, whence ariseth a continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.

      3.  In which war, although the remaining corruption for a time may much prevail, yet, through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, the regenerate part doth overcome: and so the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

 

      The next three chapters look at saving faith, repentance unto life and good works.  In that God looks upon the believer “in his Son, he is pleased to accept and reward what is sincere, although accompanied with many weaknesses and imperfections.”

      The difference between the teaching of Calvin and the Confession lies in the areas of methodology and of emphasis.  The structural importance of federal theology, together with the fact that the doctrines of the eternal decrees and of limited atonement are placed before the discussion of calling, justification and sanctification, serve to give these latter doctrines a different flavor.  This is seen in the ordo salutis.  In Calvin’s teaching it is union with Christ-faith-regeneration (justification)/repentance/sanctification-glorification.  In the Westminster theology, it is effectual calling-regeneration-saving faith-justification-adoption-sanctification.  Further, while true faith in Calvin’s teaching is primarily personal knowledge of God as Savior and includes assurance of salvation and precedes repentance, in Westminster theology faith follows repentance and does not contain an assurance of salvation.12  Whether or not we are dealing with a distortion of Calvin’s original insights, or whether we are seeing the logical and systematic outworking in different circumstances of his teaching is difficult to judge.

      The concerns of the continental Reformed theologians (or Reformed dogmaticians/scholastic Calvinist divines) were much the same as those who gathered in Westminster Abbey, London.  They differ from Calvin both in their methodology and emphases.  They went in for precise logical distinctions and definitions (as did the Lutheran divines) as they sought to provide coherent theological systems and defend them against attack.13  The effect of such logical procedures was to drive a wedge between justification and sanctification in order to clearly distinguish imputed from inherent righteousness.  Another wedge that was used was to separate Christ from his merits, to think of Christ as shedding his merits and leaving them in the heavenly court so they could be used for forensic justification.  For example, Johannes Wollebius (1586–1629), professor in Basel, wrote in his Compendium Theologiae Christianae (1626) that “the expression ‘We are justified by faith’ is a metonymy and has the same meaning as ‘We are justified by the merit of Christ which is apprehended by faith’” (chap. 30).  Such teaching constantly had to face the charge of “legal fiction” by those who felt that justification was being removed from the area of real Christian experience.

      In part this charge was met by making a distinction between active and passive justification, and also in part by careful explanations of what forensic really meant.  Heppe claims that “the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ justification is immovably fixed in Reformed dogmatics.”14  Active justification is the actual execution (from the believer’s perspective in space-time) of the eternal decree of justification in which the believing sinner is absolved and declared righteous.  Passive justification is the later knowledge within the soul of the believer that he is in fact truly justified in Heaven.  It is related to the witness of the Spirit and the experience of the fruit of the Spirit.  It is also related to the daily experience of the forgiveness of sins which are confessed to God.

 

The Nineteenth Century

      The story of Reformed theology from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries is not particularly fascinating in terms of the exposition of the doctrines of salvation.  Traditional orthodoxy survived and possibly hardened its sinews as it responded to the Enlightenment.  The birth of foreign missions at the end of the eighteenth century also had its effect, making those holding orthodox views ask how their doctrine related to the practice of evangelism.

      In the nineteenth century there was within the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland and North America a significant school of thought which expressed a powerful allegiance to the theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith.  Princeton Seminary in the north and Columbia Seminary in the south of the USA, along with New College (under the control of the Free Church of Scotland) in Edinburgh, were important academic centers where Westminster Orthodoxy (or federal theology/high Calvinism) was expounded with great clarity in the context of the intellectual climate of the day.  In his Systematic Theology (three volumes, 1872, 1873) Charles Hodge (1797–1878) expounded the doctrines of justification and sanctification as found in the Westminster Confession and the Catechisms, making use of the famous exposition of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), America’s greatest philosopher-theologian, and also of the treatise of John Owen (1616–1683), the great English Congregationalist divine.15  In particular, he opposed Arminian and Romanist doctrines as he explained Reformed orthodoxy.  His son, Archibald A. Hodge (1823–1886) succeeded his father at Princeton in 1877.  His exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith, known as The Confession of Faith (1869), had already been published.  In this, his exposition of justification and sanctification is exceedingly clear.  Neither father nor son had any intention of deviating from the orthodoxy of the received Confession.  The only differences which can be detected are the following: (1) there is a heightening of the background of federal theology in the Princeton school, as (2) there is also, by the use of the Scottish common-sense philosophy, a supreme confidence that the Princeton doctrine is true and accords with genuine Christian experience.16

      In Scotland a professor of theology in New College, Edinburgh published his lectures on justification.  James Buchanan’s The Doctrine of Justification: An Outline of Its History in the Church and of Its Exposition from Scripture (1867, reprinted 1961) appeared partly as a response to the controversy over the doctrine of justification which had occurred in the Church of England earlier that century.  His aim was to show that the received Reformed doctrine was both taught in Scripture and recognized by the worthiest of divines over the centuries.  To achieve this aim, he had to show the errors of other viewpoints – Arminian, Socinian, Antinomian, Roman, etc. – and to make certain claims that few today would uphold (e.g., that the doctrine of forensic imputation was taught in the Church before the sixteenth century).

      While it is the case that many of the theologians within the old Reformed and Presbyterian denominations have felt the need to question the biblical basis of the received Reformed orthodoxy, it is also true that there remain large numbers in these denominations, and especially in the newer Reformed denominations, who confidently believe that the received orthodoxy is wholly in accord with Scripture and needs no reexamination.

 

Notes: Chapter 8

1.     Of the many books on Calvin, that by F. Wendel, Calvin, London, Fontana, 1963, is most helpful.

2.     The most recent translation of the Institutes is that by F. L. Battles in Volumes 20, 21 in the Library of Christian Classics (1961).

3.     The Confession (1536) is found in translation in Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century, ed. A. Cochrane, 1966.

4.     The same order is found in the Consensus Tigurinus (The Zurich Agreement) made between Geneva and Zurich in 1549.  It reads: “We are first accounted righteous ... and are then regenerated....”  The text is in Collectio Confessionum..., ed. H. A. Niemeyer, Leipzip, 1840, pp. 101ff.

5.     On the role of divine election in Calvin’s thought see op. cit., Wendel, Calvin, Chap. 4, Sec. 4.

6.     For the difference between medieval and Protestant definitions of faith, see Avery Dulles, S.J., “The Meaning of Faith...,” in The Faith That Does Justice, ed. J. C. Haughey, Mahway, N.J., Paulist Press, 1977, pp. 10ff.

7.     Holmes Rolston, John Calvin Versus the Westminster Confession, Atlanta, John Knox, 1977.

8.     For this argument see W. Cunningham, The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, Carlisle, Pa., Banner of Truth, 1979 and B. B. Warfield, Studies in Theology, 1932, p. 148.

9.     See further Carl Bangs, Arminius, 1971 and P. Toon, Puritans and Calvinism, 1973, Chap. 6.

10.   P. Toon, The Emergence of Hyper-Calvinism, 1967.

11.   The first two are in op. cit., Reformed Confessions, ed. A. Cochrane, and all three are in op cit., Creeds of Christendom, Vol. 3.

12.   See further R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, New York, London, Oxford, 1979 and the response to it from Paul Helm, Calvin and Calvinism, 1982.

13.   See the very useful collection of material in H. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, Grand Rapids, Baker, 1950, reissued 1978.  Reformed Dogmatics has selections from Johannes Wollebius, Gisbert Voetius and Francis Turretin.

14.   Op. cit., Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, pp. 555–558.

15.   J. Edwards, “Discourse on Justification by Faith Alone,” in Works, two volumes, Vol. 1, Carlisle, Pa., Banner of Truth, 1979, pp. 622ff.  Also, J. Owen, “The Doctrine of Justification by Faith,” in Works, twenty-four volumes, Vol. 5, Carlisle, Pa., Banner of Truth.

16.   See further S. E. A. Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” in Church History, Vol. 24, pp. 257ff.; and J. Vander Stelt, Philosophy and Scripture: A Study in Old Princeton and Westminster Theology, 1978.

 

9 – The Anglican Approach

      The Church of England experienced “a washing of her dirty face” in the sixteenth century.  At least this is how many of those sympathetic to the cause of Protestant reform described what happened to the national Church.  While preserving her episcopate and many of her traditional structures, she gained the monarch as her “supreme governor,” her own English liturgy and canon law, with a new Protestant Confession of Faith.  The Church of England received ideas from Lutheran Germany and from the Reformed Churches and adapted them to English conditions.  In these years of change (1529–1559) the national Church produced no great theologian to stand alongside Luther or Calvin; but in the person of her Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, she had a wise and sober leader.  He was chiefly responsible for the adaptation of those continental ideas which found their way into the doctrine and liturgy of the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion.

 

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556)1

      Cranmer’s doctrine of justification began and continued under the influence of Luther and Melanchthon, especially the latter.  In the discussions between English and Lutheran theologians in 1538 Cranmer was happy with their agreed statement on justification:

Sinners ... are justified not because of the worthiness or merit of their repentance or of any works or of their own merits, but freely for Christ’s sake through faith when they believe that they are received into grace and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who by his death made satisfaction for our sins.  God regards this faith as righteousness in his sight, Romans 3 & 4.

This is article 4 of the document known as The Thirteen Articles, a statement which Henry VIII never accepted as binding on the Church of England.2

      A few years later Cranmer was busy composing a sermon on justification, to be part of a collection of homilies to be read in parish churches.  In fact it was not published until 1547, when young Edward VI was king.  It is probable that Cranmer revised his original draft before the publication of the Homilies.  Cranmer’s homily came to have special doctrinal importance, as the later Articles of Religion referred to it for an authoritative exposition of justification.  In the light of this, it will be best to look at the Articles and then at the Homily.

      There are two sets of Articles to examine.  The first, for whose preparation Cranmer was chiefly responsible, appeared in 1553 at the end of the short reign of Edward VI.  It contained forty-two articles of religion.  The second, which came to be known as The Thirty-Nine Articles, was issued in 1563 and then again in 1571.  This set represented a minimal revision of the first.  In the revision Archbishop Parker made use of the Württemberg Confession (1552), a predominantly Lutheran document (but with minor Calvinist emphases) prepared for submission to the Council of Trent.3

      Article XI of the Forty-Two Articles (1553) reads:

Justification by only faith in Jesus Christ in that sense, as it is declared in the homily of justification, is a most certain and wholesome doctrine for Christian men.

The Latin has the famous phrase sola fidejustificatio ex sola fide Jesu Christi.  Obviously this is too brief to be really helpful, and for this reason reference to the homily is necessary.  What faith alone means is, however, partly brought out in Article XII which reads:

Works done before the grace of Christ and the inspiration of his Spirit are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the School authorities say) deserve grace of congruity; but because they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not, but they have the nature of sin.

This has more of a controversial flavor than Article XI, and it is aimed at a particular medieval understanding of merit.4  This Article was retained in 1563, not as XII but as XIII.

      Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) reads:

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 most largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

It appears that the original article was extended to making use of Article IV, Württemberg Confession (1552).  Then a new article is added (XII):

Albeit that good works which are the fruits of faith, and follow after justification, cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s judgment; yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith: insomuch that by them a lively faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by the fruit.

This teaching is aimed at emphasizing good works as proceeding from true faith, but without claiming that they are good in themselves (as the Council of Trent had affirmed in Canon 32).  Only in Christ are they acceptable to God.

      Obviously the Articles of 1553 and 1563 agree in their emphasis on justification by faith.  However, it will be observed that while those of 1553 contain no doctrine of forensic justification, those of 1563 do contain such a doctrine.  The Latin text reads: propter meritum Domini (on account of the merit of Christ), referring to the decision of the judge in the heavenly court.  This development is therefore much the same as that which occurred within Lutheranism from the Augsburg Confession (the influence of which is seen in the Forty-Two Articles) through the Apology to the Formula of Concord.  And, in that English theologians were much influenced by Lutheran divines, it is to be expected.

      Thus the question arises: Does the homily on justification (called the “Homily of Salvation” in the published Homilies) actually teach a doctrine of forensic imputation?5  The answer will emerge as we examine the contents of the homily.

      The primary purpose of the homily appears to be that of emphasizing and explaining that justification is by grace alone and by faith alone.  Grace is the unmerited mercy of God revealed and offered to sinners in and through Jesus Christ; faith, the true faith that grasps Christ, is itself the gift of God worked in us by the Spirit.  Thus justification is wholly the gift of God.

Because all men be sinners and offenders against God, and breakers of his law and commandments, therefore can no man by his own acts, works, and deeds, seem they never so good, be justified and made righteous before God; but every man of necessity is constrained to seek for another righteousness or justification, to be received at God’s own hands, that is to say, the remission, pardon, and forgiveness of his sins and trespasses in such things as he hath offended.  And this justification or righteousness, which we so receive by God’s mercy and Christ’s merits, embraced by faith, is taken, accepted, and allowed of God for our perfect and full justification.

      As Cranmer also explained:

It pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite mercy, without any our desert or deserving, to prepare for us the most precious jewels of Christ’s body and blood, whereby our ransom might be fully paid, the law fulfilled, and his justice fully satisfied.  So that Christ is now the righteousness of all them that truly do believe in him.  He for them paid their ransom by his death.  He for them fulfilled the law in his life.  So that now in him and by him every true Christian man may be called a fulfiller of the law; forasmuch as that which their infirmity lacketh Christ’s justice hath supplied.

It is probable that Cranmer’s reference to Christ fulfilling the law for those who believe is based on Melanchthon’s teaching.6

      Having made a special study of the early Fathers, both Greek and Latin, Cranmer went on to claim that such authors as Hilary, Ambrose, Basil and Augustine actually taught that salvation is wholly the gift of God and that our good works cannot save us.7  However, along with many others of his time, Cranmer held that the teaching of the Fathers had been corrupted in the medieval period so that a doctrine of salvation by works had emerged with the Church.  So he protested:

Justification is not the office of man, but of God.  For man cannot make himself righteous by his own works, neither in part, nor in the whole; for that were the greatest arrogancy and presumption of man that Antichrist could set up against God, to affirm that a man might by his own works take away and purge his own sins, and so justify himself.  But justification is the office of God only; and is not a thing which we render unto him, but which we receive of him; not which we give to him, but which we take of him, by his free mercy, and by the only merits of his most dearly beloved Son, our only Redeemer, Saviour, and Justifier, Jesus Christ.  So that the true understanding of this doctrine, We be justified freely by faith without works, or that we be justified by faith in Christ only, is not that this our own act, to believe in Christ, or this our faith in Christ, which is within us, doth justify us and deserve our justification unto us; for that were to count ourselves to be justified by some act or virtue that is within ourselves.  But the true understanding and meaning thereof is, that, although we hear God’s word and believe it, although we have faith, hope, charity, repentance, dread, and fear of God within us, and do never so many good works thereunto, yet we must renounce the merit of all our said virtues of faith, hope, charity, and all our other virtues and good deeds, which we either have done, shall do, or can do, as things that be far too weak and insufficient and unperfect to deserve remission of our sins and our justification; and therefore we must trust only in God’s mercy, and in that sacrifice which our High Priest and Saviour Christ Jesus, the Son of God, once offered for us upon the cross....

Here again, as in the Articles, we see the protest against merit and on behalf of the free grace of God.

      Like Luther, Cranmer believed that good works were necessary and that they proceed from the true believer quite naturally, since they are the fruit of the indwelling Spirit.  The results of the grace of God should “move us to render ourselves unto God wholly with all our will, hearts, might and power; to serve him in all good deeds, obeying his commandments during our lives; to seek in all things his glory and honor, not our sensual pleasures and vain-glory.”

      While there is a strong insistence on the imputation of the righteousness of Christ (in the manner that Luther and the early Melanchthon emphasized), the idea of this righteousness as forensic is absent.  The image of the heavenly courtroom is not used.  Justification thus means, first, forgiveness and acceptance; then, second, it means inner renewal with outer manifestations of renewal.  It would appear that for Cranmer justification is both acceptance with God through Christ and the actual process of being made righteous.  “Truth it is that our own works do not justify us, to speak properly of our justification; that is to say, our works do not merit or deserve remission of our sins, and make us, of unjust, just before God; but God of his mere mercy, through the only merits and deservings of his son Jesus Christ, doth justify us.”

      Cranmer’s doctrine is, therefore, to be distinguished from that of the Council of Trent in two areas.  First, he claims that the righteousness of justification is imputed, not infused.  And, second, he will have no doctrine of merit, not even for the good works of believers.  Positively his position owes much to Luther and Melanchthon.  It is well to remember that Article XI of 1563 was drafted by Archbishop Parker, and its reference to forensic righteousness need not be traced to Cranmer.

 

Richard Hooker (1554–1600)8

      After the brief interlude of Mary Tudor’s Roman Catholic reign (1553–1558), and until the English Civil War of the 1640s, it is fair to claim that English expositions of justification continued to affirm, against the teaching of the Council of Trent and its defenders, that the righteousness of justification is imputed not infused, extrinsic not intrinsic.  It is the righteousness of the only mediator, Jesus Christ, the Just One.  In fact, it is right to assert that the difference between the Anglican doctrine and Roman doctrine during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I was perceived to be by both sides the formal cause of justification,9 “formal” meaning that which makes a thing to be what it is, as heat makes a thing hot.  Thus, is it imputed or imparted righteousness?

      To illustrate what is often called the classic Anglican position, we can do no better than notice the views of Richard Hooker, author of the famous treatise Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and defender of classical Anglicanism against both Puritanism and Roman Catholicism.  In his collected Works is a sermon, “A Learned Discourse of Justification,” preached originally in 1586.10  From this we can ascertain his doctrine of justification and sanctification.

      Beginning with the assumption that all, including the Virgin Mary, are sinners and thus need a righteousness provided by God, he went on to declare how Christ is made the righteousness of men.

There is a glorifying righteousness of men in the world to come: and there is a justifying and a sanctifying righteousness here.  The righteousness, wherewith we shall be clothed in the world to come, is both perfect and inherent.  That whereby here we are justified is perfect, but not inherent.  That whereby we are sanctified, inherent, but not perfect.

Having declared his position in brief, he had to show where the differences between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism were to be located.

      Obviously there was some agreement between the Tridentine and Anglican positions.  In the technical language of the day, they agreed that the grace of God in Jesus Christ is the meritorious cause of justification.  God is the sole efficient cause of justification.  Yet, in Hooker’s words, “we disagree about the nature of the very essence of the medicine whereby Christ cureth our disease; about the manner of applying it; about the number and power of means, which God requireth of us for the effectual applying thereof to our soul’s comfort.”  Here he is referring to the medicine of infused, inherent righteousness, to its application primarily through sacraments (baptism and especially the sacrament of penance), and its association with doctrines of mortal and venial sin, of merit and of purgatory.  To him, it was “this maze the Church of Rome doth cause her followers to tread.”  It was his conviction that Rome had complicated and changed the relatively straightforward doctrine taught by St. Paul and St. James.

      Hooker clearly distinguished between the righteousness of justification and the righteousness of sanctification.

There are two kinds of Christian righteousness: the one without us, which we have by imputation; the other in us, which consisteth of faith, hope, charity, and other Christian virtues; and St. James doth prove that Abraham had not only the one, because the thing he believed was imputed unto him for righteousness; but also the other, because he offered up his son.  God giveth us both the one justice and the other: the one by accepting us for righteous in Christ; the other by working Christian righteousness in us.  The proper and most immediate efficient cause in us of this latter, is, the spirit of adoption which we have received into our hearts.

Thus the formal cause of justification (forgiveness of sins and acceptance by God) is the imputed righteousness of Christ, while the formal cause of sanctification (inner renewal of the heart leading to Christian living) is the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

      Having distinguished the root from what grows or develops from it (in terms of sanctifying righteousness) he went on carefully to distinguish two kinds of sanctifying righteousness, “habitual and actual.”

Habitual, that holiness wherewith our souls are inwardly endued, the same instant when first we begin to be the temples of the Holy Ghost; Actual, that holiness which afterward beautifieth all the parts and actions of our life, the holiness for which Enoch, Job, Zachary, Elizabeth, and other saints, are in Scriptures so highly commended.

Here is the use of Aristotelian terminology to bring clarification to the nature of sanctifying righteousness.

      But how are justifying and sanctifying righteousness related?  Which is first given and received?  He answered:

that the Spirit, the virtues of the Spirit, the habitual justice, which is ingrafted, the external justice of Christ Jesus which is imputed, these we receive all at one and the same time; whensoever we have any of these, we have all; they go together.  Yet since no man is justified except he believe, and no man believeth except he have faith, and no man hath faith, unless he have received the Spirit of Adoption forasmuch as these do necessarily infer justification, but justification doth of necessity presuppose them; we must needs hold that imputed righteousness, in dignity being the chiefest, is notwithstanding in order the last of all these, but actual righteousness, which is the righteousness of good works, succeedeth all, followeth after all, both in order and in time.  Which thing being attentively marked, sheweth plainly how the faith of true believers cannot be divorced from hope and love; how faith is a part of sanctification, and yet unto justification necessary; how faith is perfected by good works, and yet no work of ours good without faith.

Here, it may be observed, there is a judicious marriage of the relationship with God in Christ and the relationship with the Church and world in love, both proceeding from grace.  He met the challenge of Tridentine Catholicism by claiming that for the Anglican, justifying righteousness and sanctifying righteousness belong together.  Further, he clearly taught the importance of the sacraments in relation to both – baptism as the sacrament of justifying righteousness and the Lord’s Supper as the sacrament of sanctifying righteousness.

      Hooker did not specifically state that the imputed righteousness is to be understood forensically.  However, other Anglican divines of this period did teach forensic imputation.  Further, while Hooker chose to speak of justifying and sanctifying righteousness, other Anglicans followed the more typically Protestant way of speaking of only justification and sanctification.  Both these tendencies are to be found in the sections “Of justification and Faith” and “Of Sanctification and Good Works” in the Articles of Religion agreed upon by the Archbishops and Bishops and the rest of the clergy of Ireland (1615).11

      Before describing the new doctrine of justification which emerged in the Church of England in the mid-seventeenth century, it is important to point out that the Anglican classical teaching on justification was held throughout the centuries by a significant number of Anglican clergy and people.  It was held quite strongly by those evangelicals of the nineteenth century who opposed the Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic movement.12  They certainly spoke of forensic imputation of Christ’s righteousness and clearly distinguished justification from sanctification.  However, though they sometimes referred to the “judicious Mr. Hooker,” more often they referred to Puritan and Nonconformist expositions.

      Evangelical teaching was given very clear expression in the writings of Bishop J. C. Ryle, a master of concise prose.13  Here is how he defined justification and sanctification in his book Holiness (1877), which has often been reprinted.

      (a) Justification is the reckoning and counting a man to be righteous for the sake of another, even Jesus Christ the Lord.  Sanctification is the actual making a man inwardly righteous, though it may be in a very feeble degree.

      (b) The righteousness we have by our justification is not our own, but the everlasting perfect righteousness of our great mediator Christ, imputed to us, and made our own by faith.  The righteousness we have by sanctification is our own righteousness, imparted, inherent, and wrought in us by the Holy Spirit, but mingled with much infirmity and imperfection.

      (c) In justification our own works have no place at all, and simple faith in Christ is the one thing needful.  In sanctification our own works are of vast importance, and God bids us fight, and watch, and pray, and strive, and take pains, and labor.

      (d) Justification is a finished and complete work, and a man is perfectly justified the moment he believes.  Sanctification is an imperfect work, comparatively, and will never be perfected until we reach Heaven.

      (e) Justification admits of no growth or increase: a man is as much justified the hour he first comes to Christ by faith as he will be to all eternity.  Sanctification is eminently a progressive work, and admits of continual growth and enlargement so long as a man lives.

      (f) Justification has special reference to our persons, our standing in God’s sight, and our deliverance from guilt.  Sanctification has special reference to our natures, and the moral renewal of our hearts.

      (g) Justification gives us our title to Heaven, and boldness to enter in.  Sanctification gives us our meetness for Heaven, and prepares us to enjoy it when we dwell there.

      (h) Justification is the act of God about us, and is not easily discerned by others.  Sanctification is the work of God within us, and cannot be hid in its outward manifestation from the eyes of men.

It is probably accurate to claim that the majority of evangelical Anglicans have continued to view the matter in this or a similar manner.  Where Ryle and twentieth-century evangelical Anglicans differ from Hooker (and from other classical Anglicans such as Lancelot Andrewes) is that the latter clearly expound the doctrine in an ecclesiological and sacramental context, whereas the former tend to see it in individualistic terms.

 

A New Anglican Doctrine of Justification

      Thomas Barlow, bishop of Lincoln from 1675 to 1691, who taught the classical Anglican doctrine of justification, noted that an alternative and, to his mind, erroneous teaching emerged around 1640 and gained momentum through the civil war and in the Protectorate before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.  To a curate in his diocese he wrote:14

Before the late unhappy Rebellion (at least all I have yet met with) such as Bishop Jewel, Hooker, Reynolds, Whittaker, Davenant, Field, Downham, John White, etc., do constantly prove, and vindicate the imputation of our blessed Saviour’s righteousness....  So that, in truth, it is only you, and some Neotericks, who (since the year 1640) deny such imputation ... to the prejudice of Truth, and the scandal of our Church and Religion.

Barlow well understood that behind the new doctrine lay a genuine concern to unite that which is believed with that which is done and lived and to bring together faith and genuine works of love.

Justification by faith alone (as expounded in the emotive context of a nation divided in its loyalties and then actually engaged in civil war) appeared to some devout Anglicans and at least several Puritans (notably Richard Baxter)15 to have become merely a verbal formula unproductive of holy and disciplined living.  The careless exposition of some soldiers in the army of Parliament together with the teaching of some of the separatists and sects seemed to confirm the fear that both doctrinal and practical antinomianism were gaining ground.

The new doctrine of justification, as taught by such men as Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Henry Hammond (1605–1660) and Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672), must be seen in this context of national disorder and the desire to relate faith to “holy living” (a phrase used by Taylor in two famous books).16  At the center of this doctrine is the denial that the formal cause of justification is the imputed righteousness of Christ and the insistence that where there is true justification from God there is also genuine repentance and pursuit of holy living in the one justified.

      The work of Jesus Christ as Savior of the world and specifically his mediatorial righteousness was seen as that without which there could not be any acceptance or justification of sinners.  The active and passive righteousness of the exalted Christ (arising from his perfect life and sacrificial, atoning death) was said to be the meritorious cause (not the formal cause) of justification.  The perfect righteousness of the One who sits at the Father’s right hand is not imputed to the believer; rather, it is because of this that justification can occur.  What God actually counts or reckons to the sinner as a righteousness acceptable to himself is the faith of the Christian.  This belief was based on Genesis 15:6 where it is said of Abraham, “He believed in the LORD; and he (God) counted it to him for righteousness.”  (Cf. Paul’s use of this text in Romans 4 and Galatians 3, together with James 2:23.)

      Faith was seen not as the faith which merely believes (for devils have such faith), but as a trust in God associated with repentance and turning away from sin.  True faith expressed itself in faithfulness to God and the way of Christ.  Seeing the beginnings of such genuine faith (which they insisted was the gift of God in that it was promoted by the work of the Holy Spirit within the soul of man), God reckoned or accounted such a sinner to be righteous in his sight; thus his sins were forgiven, and he was adopted into the family of God.  In this view there is no justification unless there is the beginning of true faith which expresses itself in new attitudes and works.  Thus justification was presented as both an event – God’s acceptance and forgiveness of the sinner – and as a process of realizing righteousness in holy living.  The possibility always remained that faithfulness to God would disappear and thus justification could be temporarily or finally lost.  (This aspect of their teaching led to the charge of Arminianism.)

      To those who held the classical Anglican position (e.g., Thomas Barlow) or the classic high Calvinist position (e.g., John Owen), this novel way of stating the doctrine of justification seemed to confuse the issues at stake between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as appearing to make justification dependent not ultimately on grace but on human initiative.  Further, it was argued that God was portrayed as accepting something imperfect – human faith – as the basis for justification.  How could a holy and righteous God do this?  Those who taught the new doctrine defended it on the ground that it harmonized the teaching of St. Paul and St. James and that it was productive of holy living.  They fully recognized that the human faith which was imputed by God for righteousness was not perfect faith, but they stressed that it was acceptable because of the meritorious faith and righteousness of Christ.  Further, they pointed out that the faith by which Abraham was justified was not perfect faith!

      Thus from the seventeenth century onwards there were within the Church of England (and later within Anglicanism) two differing doctrines of justification – both claiming to be faithful to the Scriptures and in accord with the formularies of the Church.  Even as evangelical Anglicans of the nineteenth century claimed to be teaching the classical Anglican position, the Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics of the same period claimed to be teaching that doctrine which was expounded by the later Caroline divines such as Jeremy Taylor and Herbert Thorndike.  It was the Anglo-Catholics who were responsible for the printing of the works of these seventeenth-century divines in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, even as it was the evangelicals who initiated the reprinting of the works of the sixteenth-century Protestant writers in the volumes of the Parker Society.17

 

Appendix

The Irish Anglican Articles of 1615

 

Of Iustification and Faith.

      34. We are accounted righteous before God, onely for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Iesus Christ, applied by faith; and not for our owne workes or merits.  And this righteousnes, which we so receiue of Gods mercie and Christs merits, imbraced by faith, is taken, accepted, and allowed of God, for our perfect and full iustification.

      35. Although this iustification be free vnto vs, yet it commeth not so freely vnto vs, that there is no ransome paid therefore at all.  God shewed his great mercie in deliuering vs from our former captiuitie, without requiring of any ransome to be payd, or amends to be made on our parts; which thing by vs had been vnpossible to be done.  And whereas all the world was not able of themselues to pay any part towards their ransome, it pleased our heavenly Father of his infinite mercie without any desert of ours, to prouide for vs the most precious merits of his owne Sonne, whereby our ransome might be fully payd, the lawe fulfilled, and his iustice fully satisfied.  So that Christ is now the righteousnes of all them that truely beleeue in him.  Hee for them payd their ransome by his death.  He for them fulfilled the lawe in his life; that now in him, and by him euerie true Christian man may be called a fulfiller of the lawe: forasmuch as that which our infirmitie was not able to effect, Christs iustice hath performed.  And thus the iustice and mercie of God doe embrace each other: the grace of God not shutting out the iustice of God in the matter of our iustification; but onely shutting out the iustice of man (that is to say, the iustice of our own workes) from being any cause of deseruing our iustification.

      36. When we say that we are iustified by Faith onely, we doe not meane that the said iustifying faith is alone in man, without true Repentance, Hope, Charity, and the feare of God (for such a faith is dead, and cannot iustifie), either do we meane, that this our act to beleeue in Christ, or this our faith in Christ, which is within vs, doth of it selfe iustifie vs, or deserue our iustification vnto vs, (for that were to account our selues to bee iustified by the venue or dignitie of some thing that is within our selues:) but the true vnderstanding and meaning thereof is that although we heare Gods word and beleeue it, although we haue Faith, Hope, Charitie, Repentance, and the feare of God within us, and adde never so many good workes thereunto: yet wee must renounce the merit of all our said venues, of Faith, Hope, Charitie, and all our other venues, and good deeds which we either haue done, shall doe, or can doe, as things that be farre too weake and vnperfect, and vnsufficient to deserue remission of our sinnes, and our iustification: and therefore we must trust onely in Gods mercie, and the merits of his most dearely beloued Sonne, our onely Redeemer, Sauiour, and Iustifier Iesus Christ.  Neuerthelesse, because Faith doth directly send vs to Christ for our iustification, and that by faith given vs of God wee embrace the promise of Gods mercie, and the remission of our sinnes, (which thing none other of our vertues or workes properly doth:) therefore the Scripture vseth to say, that Faith without workes; and the auncient fathers of the Church to the same purpose, that onely Faith doth iustifie vs.

      37. By iustifying Fatih wee vnderstand not onely the common beleefe of the Articles of Christian Religion, and the perswasion of the truth of Gods worde in generall: but also a particular application of the gratious promises of the Gospell, to the comfort of our owne soules: whereby we lay hold on Christ, with all his benefits, hauing an earnest trust and confidence in God, that he will be merciful vnto vs for his onely Sonnes sake.  So that a true beleever may bee certaine, by the assurance of faith, of the forgiuenesse of his sinnes, and of his euerlastíng salvation by Christ.

      38. A true liuely iustifying faith, and the sanctifying spirit of God, is not extinguished, nor vanisheth away in the regenerate, either finally or totally.

 

Of Sanctification and Good Workes.

      39. All that are iustified, are likewise sanctified: their faith being alwaies accompanied with true Repentance and good Workes.

      40. Repentance is a gift of God, whereby a godly sorrow is wrought in the heart of the faithfull, for offending God their mercifull Father by their former transgressions, together with a constant resolution for the time to come to c1eaue unto God, and to lead a new life.

      41. Albeit that good workes, which are the fruits of faith, and follow after iustification, cannot make satisfaction for our sinnes, and endure the seueritie of Gods iudgement: yet are they pleasing to God and accepted of him in Christ, and doe spring from a true and liuely faith, which by them is to be discerned, as a tree by the fruite.

      42. The workes which God would haue his people to walke in, are such as he hath commaunded in his holy Scripture, and not such workes as men haue deuised out of their own braine, of a blind zeale, and deuotion, without the warrant of the worde of God.

      43. The regenerate cannot fulfil the lawe of God perfectly in this life.  For in many things we offend all: and if we say, we haue no sinne, wee deceaue our selues, and the truth is not in vs.

      44. Not euerie heynous sinne willingly committed after baptisme, is sinne against the holy Ghost, and vnpardonable.  And therefore to such as fall into sinne after baptisme, place for repentance is not to be denied.

      45. Voluntary workes, besides ouer and aboue God’s commandements, which they call workes of Supererogation, cannot be taught without arrogancie and impietie.  For by them men doe declare that they doe not onely render vnto God as much as they are bound to doe, but that they doe more for his sake then of bounden duty is required.

 

Notes: Chapter 9

1.     For Cranmer, see J. G. Ridley, Cranmer, 1962 and A. E. Pollard, Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation, 1965.

2.     For general background see N. S. Tjernagel, Henry VIII and the Lutherans, 1965, where there is a translation of the Articles.  C. Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion, 1890, has the Latin text, pp. 259ff.

3.     See P. Schaff, A History of the Creeds of Christendom, Vol. 1, 1877, pp. 343ff., 627–629 for the relation of the two statements of faith.  There are also comments in E. Tyrell Green, The Thirty-nine Articles..., 1896, W. A. Curtis, A History of Creeds and Confessions of Faith, 1911 and Peter Hall, The Harmony of Protestant Confessions, 1844.

4.     It was held (e.g., by Gabriel Biel) that God was not bound to reward the sincere actions of unjustified sinners, but that it was fitting or congruous that he should do so.  Thus the expression “grace (or merit) of congruity.”  Appeal was often made to God’s acceptance of the prayers and alms of Cornelius before he truly believed (Acts 10:31).

5.     A further interesting question is, What doctrine of justification is presupposed and/or stated in the two Prayer Books drafted primarily by Cranmer and printed in 1549 and 1552?  There are many printings of the Homilies, but we lack a modem critical edition.  The “homily on salvation” has recently been printed in P. E. Hughes, Faith and Works: Cranmer and Hooker on Justification, 1982.

6.     This teaching of Melanchthon is found in the later editions of his Loci Communes.

7.     See Works of Thomas Cranmer, Vol. 2, Parker Society, 1846, pp. 203ff. for evidence of this special study.  The original is in Lambeth Palace Library.

8.     Hooker has been the subject of much study recently; see J. E. Booty, “Richard Hooker,” in The Spirit of Anglicanism, ed. W. J. Wolf, 1982.

9.     See further C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter, 1966.

10.   The sermon is to be found in the Keble edition of Hookers Works as well as in Vol. 1 of the Everyman edition of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.  See also op. cit., Hughes, Faith and Works, pp. 61ff.

11.   Ireland was under the English crown at this time. These  Articles apparently existed alongside the Thirty-nine Articles and were seen as an extension of their teaching.  They are printed in C. Hardwick, A History of the Articles of Religion, Appendix VI, 1884.

12.   For this controversy, see Evangelical Theology, 1833–1856, P. Toon, Atlanta, John Knox; Basing Stoke, England, Marshall Morgan and Scott, 1979.

13.   See P. Toon and M. Smout, John Charles Ryle, Swengel, Pa., Reiner, 1976.

14.   Cited by op. cit., Allison, The Rise of Moralism, p. 141, from Two Letters Written by the Rt. Rev Thomas Barlow, 1701.

15.   Richard Baxter wrote Aphorisms of Justification in 1649.  This caused controversy among Puritans.  See op. cit., Allison, The Rise of Moralism, p. 154 and op. cit., P. Toon, Puritans and Calvinism, pp. 85ff.

16.   Apart from Allison, see also J. W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660, 1969 and H. R. McAdoo, The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, 1949.

17.   P. Toon, “The Parker Society,”  Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Vol. XLVI, No. 3, 1977.

 

10 – The Wesleyan View

      Martin Luther and John Wesley invite comparison.  Both were intensely zealous in religious duty before they discovered that justification is by faith and not by religious achievement.  Each one experienced a great change in his life and ministry after his submission in faith to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Further, both Luther and Wesley had, and still have, a tremendous influence over thousands of people.  And each, in somewhat different ways, made justification by faith central to their understanding of Christian doctrine.  But there were differences.  Luther saw the corruption of human nature by sin to be more radical than did Wesley.  And conversely while Wesley believed that full sanctification was possible on earth, Luther believed that it was only attainable in the age to come.

      John Wesley (1703–1791) became a great evangelist, a brilliant organizer and a popular theologian.1  He was born into the family of a pious Church of England clergyman, and he died an ordained priest of the same Church.  But before his death he set in motion a movement which is now represented by the worldwide family of churches called Methodist.  Since these churches adopted as their theological basis certain of his writings, we shall concentrate in this chapter on the exposition of his teaching.  This has particular features which distinguish it from the various types of doctrine we have already encountered.  Further, in adapted or popular form, this teaching has been tremendously influential for thousands of “Arminian” Christians.

 

Faith and Good Works

      Following an intensely religious upbringing in the parsonage, Wesley went to Oxford University where eventually he was elected as a Fellow of Lincoln College.  His pilgrimage as a Christian was deeply influenced by the famous book Holy Living and Holy Dying by Jeremy Taylor, the Caroline divine.  The high ideal of duty presented by Taylor fired the mind of young Wesley, who resolved to dedicate himself wholly to God and seek to fulfill the law of Christ.  His dedication and self-denial was intensified when he later read The Imitation of Christ by Thomas á Kempis; from this he learned that God wants purity of heart as well as external obedience.  Further challenge came from William Law through his Christian Perfection and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.  From these books Wesley gained the conviction that it was possible by grace to achieve perfection as a Christian; this belief he held all his life.

      There was no stopping his zeal to perform deeds of mercy and to impose discipline of body for the good of the soul.  After involvement with the poor and needy of Oxford he set sail for Georgia, longing for a greater opportunity to do good and thereby help to save his soul.  Insofar as he had a doctrine of justification at this stage it was of the same kind as that taught by Jeremy Taylor and the prominent Anglican divines in the period after 1662 (see Chapter 9).  It involved the conviction that God will not declare righteous those who are not doing all within their power to be righteous.  Not faith alone, for that leads to antinomianism, but faith and works lead to holiness, he believed.  But he was a failure as a missionary in Georgia.  He had no good news and so had no success among either the white settlers or the native red Indians.

      Wesley’s own spiritual pilgrimage was so intense and so concerned, ultimately, with himself that he could not bring hope or faith to others.  It has been claimed that from 1720 to 1738 “self-love was at the very center of his life.  His neighbor and his neighbor’s needs, though they engaged by far the greater portion of his activity, had no significance in and of themselves, but were important only insofar as they contributed to his own salvation.”2  On February 1, 1738 he looked back on his unhappy time in Georgia and wrote in his journal:

Behold I gave all my goods to feed the poor... I have labored more abundantly than they all ... I have thrown up my friends, reputation, ease, country; I have put my life in my hand, wandering into strange lands; I have given my body to be devoured by the deep, parched up with heat, consumed with toil and weariness, or whatsoever God should please to bring upon me.  But does all this ... make me acceptable to God?  Does all I ever did or can know, say, give, do, or suffer, justify me in his sight?3

The answer to the last question was No, as he was soon fully to recognize.

 

Salvation by Faith

      A sense of failure in Georgia, together with a deep impression made upon him by the Moravians, led to a great change in Wesley’s view of Christianity.  The Moravians, Pietists who had their origin in Europe, sought to recall Lutheranism from mere doctrinal orthodoxy to a living faith in Jesus and a devotion to him.4  From the Moravians, Wesley gained insight into the need to trust in Jesus and in Jesus alone for salvation.  One of their number, Peter Böhler, told him: “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.”5

      For May 24, 1738 he recorded in his journal:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans.  About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.  I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.6

To call this a conversion to God is perhaps to misunderstand.  But certainly Wesley received a definite assurance of personal salvation on this occasion, and he recognized very clearly that faith, genuine faith, is the key to salvation and regeneration.

      The change in his thinking and approach to the quest for salvation is seen in the sermon he preached at Oxford on June 18, of the same year.  Let us note how he defined faith:

It acknowledges Christ’s death as the only sufficient means of redeeming man from eternal death, and his resurrection as the restoration of us all to life and immortality; inasmuch as he “was delivered for our sins and rose again for our justification.”  Christian faith is then, not only an assent to the whole gospel of Christ, but also a full reliance on the blood of Christ: a trust in the merits of his life, death, and resurrection; a recumbency upon him as our atonement and our life, as given for us, and living in us; and, in consequence hereof, a closing with him, and cleaving to him, as our “wisdom, sanctification, and redemption,” or, in one word, our salvation.7

And how, we ask, did he define salvation?  It is,

a salvation from sin, and the consequences of sin, both often expressed in the word justification; which, taken in the largest sense, implies a deliverance from guilt and punishment, by the atonement of Christ actually applied onto the soul of the sinner now believing on him, and a deliverance from the power of sin, through Christ formed in his heart.  So that he who is thus justified, or saved by faith, is indeed born again.  He is born again of the Spirit unto a new life ... until at length he comes unto “a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”8

By adopting the Pietist approach to salvation by faith, Wesley certainly turned away from the common contemporary Anglican way of describing justification in terms of faith and works.  He also turned towards the Reformed or Calvinist position, describing his own position as “within a hair’s breadth of Calvinism.”9  This description is not, as we shall see, entirely accurate.

 

Justification by Faith

      One of the standard sermons of Methodism is one entitled “Justification by Faith,” written by Wesley.10  Its contents represent a succinct summary of the Wesleyan doctrine.

      1.  The ground of justification.  Wesley never wrote a book on the atonement, but he held that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were the ground or basis for the justification of sinners.  He saw the first human beings as related to God in a covenant of works.  Adam, the father of the race, and Eve, his wife, were to obey God’s perfect law of love, and God was to give to them eternal life.  Adam chose to disobey the Lord, and sin entered into the world.  “His soul died, was separated from God; separate from whom the soul has no more life than the body has when separate from the soul.  His body likewise became corruptible and mortal, so that death took hold on this also.  And being already dead in spirit, dead to God, dead in sin, he hastened on to death everlasting; to the destruction both of body and soul, in the fire never to be quenched.”  Everything seemed lost, but the eternal Son of God became man and “another common Head of mankind, a second general Parent and Representative of the whole human race.”  He suffered in our place and made atonement for our sins.  “By the sacrifice for sin made by the second Adam, as the Representative of us all, God is so far reconciled to all the world, that he hath given them a new covenant; the plain condition whereof being once fulfilled, ‘there is no more condemnation’ for us, but ‘we are justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.’”  Unlike Luther and Calvin, Wesley was explicitly and dogmatically clear that Jesus Christ had died to make atonement for each and every human being in all times and places.

      2.  The nature of justification.  Justification does not mean to be made just and righteous, Wesley insisted.  Such a process is sanctification.  “The plain scriptural notion of justification is pardon, the forgiveness of sins.  It is the act of God the Father, whereby, for the sake of the propitiation made by the blood of his Son, he ‘sheweth forth his righteousness’ (or mercy) ‘by the remission of the sins that are past.’”  God does not impute or reckon sin to the condemnation of the believer.  “His sins, all his past sins, in thought, word, and deed, are covered, are blotted out, shall not be remembered or mentioned against him, any more than if they had not been.”  He is accepted in Christ and God looks upon him “as if he had never sinned.”

      We note here that Wesley did not include the idea of the imputation of the perfect righteousness of Christ to the believer as part of the Father’s declaration of justification.  Justification is only forgiveness and acceptance.  Probably the reason why he rejected this Lutheran and Calvinist emphasis was that he believed that it savoured of doctrinal antinomianism.  In the 1690s there had been a bitter controversy over the doctrine of grace, and by some this doctrine of imputed righteousness was seen as a way of escaping from the demands of the life of holiness.11  “Such a notion of justification,” wrote Wesley, “is neither reconcilable to reason nor Scripture.”

      3.  The identity of those who are justified.  Who are actually justified?  The answer is simple: “ungodly of every kind and degree and none but the ungodly.”  It is not the case (as Wesley earlier had held) that “a man must be sanctified, that is, holy, before he can be justified.”  But what about the many “good” people who do so many helpful and kind deeds?  These good works, said Wesley, may well be good and profitable to men, but it does not follow that they are profitable, strictly speaking, in the sight of God.  To make his meaning clear he set out this syllogism:

No works are good, which are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done:

But no works done before justification are done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done:

Therefore, no works done before justification are good.

Here, at least, it may be claimed that his teaching is in harmony with that of Luther.

      4.  How are the ungodly justified?  There is but one simple answer: faith.  “Justifying faith implies, not only a divine evidence or conviction that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself’ but a sure trust and confidence that Christ died for my sins, that he loved me, and gave himself for me.”  But why does God say, faith alone?  The short answer is, to eliminate pride.  “He that cometh unto God by this faith, must fix his eye singly on his own wickedness, on his guilt and helplessness, without having the least regard to any supposed good in himself, to any virtue or righteousness whatsoever.  He must come as a mere sinner, inwardly and outwardly, self-destroyed and self-condemned, bringing nothing to God but ungodliness only, pleading nothing of his own but sin and misery”

      Though Wesley was deeply conscious that saving faith is a gift of God, he held that it is available to all who hear the gospel.  While God acts in prevenient grace to offer salvation and to make the hearer able to respond, the decision to respond is that of the hearer.  The human will is not forced into faith; at most, it is persuaded into faith by the constraining love of God.

      It is because of Wesley’s insistence on the universality of Christ’s atonement and on the free decision of sinful man to believe in Christ that Wesleyan theology has often been classed as Arminian.  Of course it is not identical, but there are sufficient similarities for the teaching of Wesley to be coupled with that of Jacob Arminius.

 

The New Birth

      Wesley rightly held that it was most important to distinguish justification from regeneration.

Though it be allowed that justification and the new birth are, in point of time, inseparable from each other, yet they are easily distinguished, as being not the same, but things of a widely different nature.  Justification implies only a relative, the new birth a real, change. God in justifying us does something for us; in begetting us again, he does the work in us.  The former changes our outward relation to God so that of enemies we become children; by the latter our inmost souls are changed, so that of sinners we become saints.12

      From the time when he had read Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying at Oxford, Wesley had recognized that God calls the Christian to wholehearted commitment to a search for perfection in the love of God and human beings.  His discovery of the evangelical understanding of the new birth served, not to cancel his settled belief, but to give it new life and potency.  He saw the new birth as the placing and release within the heart of the believer of great spiritual power, bringing illumination, love, faith and hope.  Few writers, it may be observed, in the English language have exceeded Wesley in his powerful descriptions of the tremendous internal changes caused by being born of God.  For example, writing of the born-again person, he said:

His ears are now opened, and the voice of God no longer calls in vain.  He hears and obeys the heavenly calling; he knows the voice of his Shepherd.  All his spiritual senses being now awakened, he has a clear intercourse with the invisible world; and hence he knows more and more of the things which before it could not “enter into his heart to conceive.”  He now knows what the peace of God is; what is joy in the Holy Ghost; what the love of God which is shed abroad in the hearts of them that believe in him through Jesus Christ.  Thus the veil being removed which before intercepted the light and voice, the knowledge and love of God, he who is born of the Spirit dwelleth in love, “dwelleth in God, and God in him.”13  Sermons which portray regeneration in such a way are plentiful among his collected works.  He who reads these cannot but be very impressed by the intensity of Wesley’s view of the tremendous spiritual reality of the divine work of regeneration.

      Because he took the new birth so seriously he could not escape what seemed to him the clear implications of 1 John 3:9: “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.”  He would not concede that there were any qualifiers to be added to the pure words of God.  This verse was to be taken at its face value.  Sin meant “an actual, voluntary transgression of the law; of the revealed, written law of God; of any commandment of God, acknowledged to be such at the time that it is transgressed.”  And he maintained that,

“Whosoever is born of God” while he abideth in faith and love, and in the spirit of prayer and thanksgiving, not only doth not, but cannot, thus commit sin.  So long as he thus believeth in God through Christ, and loves him, and is pouring out his heart before him, he cannot voluntarily transgress any command of God, either by speaking or acting what he knows God hath forbidden, so long that seed which remaineth in him, that loving, praying thankful faith, compels him to refrain from whatsoever he knows to be an abomination in the sight of God.14

The key to “not committing sin” is not only being born of God, but also abiding in faith.

      Wesley was well aware that people who are born of God do commit sin, and he offered an interesting analysis of how this actually occurs in the born-again believer.

(1)  The divine seed of loving, conquering faith, remains in him that is born of God.  “He keepeth himself,” by the grace of God, and “cannot commit sin.”

(2)  A temptation arises; whether from the world, the flesh or the devil, it matters not.

(3)  The Spirit of God gives him warning that sin is near, and bids him more abundantly watch unto prayer.

(4)  He gives way, in some degree, to the temptation, which now begins to grow pleasing to him.

(5)  The Holy Spirit is grieved; his faith is weakened; and his love of God grows cold.

(6)  The Spirit reproves him more sharply and saith, “This is the way, walk thou in it.”

(7)  He turns away from the painful voice of God and listens to the pleasing voice of the tempter.

(8)  Evil desire begins and spreads in his soul, till faith and love vanish away; he is then capable of committing outward sin, the power of the Lord being departed from him.15

This quotation and the earlier discussion indicate that while the new birth does not free the believer from the possibility of falling completely from grace, it does, however, provide power over sin if he will make use of it and a new principle of goodness if he will implement it.

 

Perfection or Full Sanctification

      Even as a baby boy is born of its mother in a brief time but takes many years to grow to manhood, so a sinner is born of God in a brief moment but takes a long time to grow up into that spiritual manhood or maturity to which God calls him in Christ.  The state of perfect love, entire sanctification or Christian perfection is attainable on earth by the believer, taught Wesley.  He was deeply conscious that “without holiness no man can see the Lord.”  He saw full sanctification as “the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodist; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly he appeared to have raised us up.”16

      Wesley wrote The Plain Account of Christian Perfection,17 but the theme is found in many of his sermons, sometimes explicitly (e.g., as in “Christian Perfection”) and sometimes implicitly (e.g., as those on the Sermon on the Mount).  For Wesley, justification and regeneration signify a completed act of God.   In place of the traditional Protestant idea of growth (from regeneration) towards holiness – that is, a process prior to its attainment – he substituted a growth in holiness, subsequent to its attainment (in regeneration).  Thus Wesleyan ethics are ethics of realization rather than of aspiration.  Having rejected the doctrine of the imputation of the active righteousness of Christ to the believer, he looked to the believer in the power of the Spirit to grow in righteousness, given at the new birth.  He believed (both before and after his heart-warming experience) that final salvation includes moral attainment and personal purity as basic and essential elements.  Thus obedience to the law of God in life is absolutely necessary, and perfect love is the fulfillment of the law.  Full sanctification or Christian perfection is the end of growth in righteousness/holiness and constitutes the final condition for salvation and entrance into the presence of God through Christ.  It is purity of motive, a life wholly governed by the love of God.  In body and mind, however, the fully sanctified Christian is still finite and so is not infallible in knowledge and judgment; and he has no exemption from ignorance, bodily infirmity or temptation.

      Full sanctification is by faith and occurs after some time in the process of growth in holiness.  It is not always possible to pinpoint the moment, and it may well occur immediately before death.  But the evidence of its occurrence is the existence of perfect love in the heart.18  This state of perfection is not static but admits of growth in the intensity and scope of love.  As the state of justification/regeneration can be lost through lack of faith, so can the state of full sanctification where it is reached before the point of death.  No one is actually finally and fully saved until he enters into the presence of his Lord after death.

      In the history of Methodism (and groups which have developed from it) the doctrines of Wesley have not always been presented in the way he (and his brother Charles) expressed them.  In particular, the quest for “Christian perfection” has often been misunderstood and minimized through the presentation of “the second blessing” by which one enters into a state of perfect love and wholehearted commitment.19

 

Notes: Chapter 10

1.     Recent biographies of Wesley include those by Martin Schmidt, two volumes, 1962 and A. S. Wood, 1967.  Cf. F. Hillebrandt, Christianity According to the Wesleys, 1955.

2.     W. R. Cannon, The Theology of John Wesley, New York, 1946, p. 63.

3.     The Journal of John Wesley, ed. N. Curnосk, eight volumes, Vol. 1, London, 1938, see February 1, 1738.

4.     For pietism see F. E. Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism, Holland, 1965 and J. E. Hutton, A Short History of the Moravian Church, London, 1900.

5.     Op. cit., Journal, Vol. 1, under March 4, 1738.

6.     Ibid., under May 24, 1738.

7.     Sermons on Several Occasions, London, 1944, Sermon 1, pp. 3, 4.

8.     Ibid., p. 6.

9.     The Works of John Wesley, ed. T. Jackson, fourteen volumes, Vol. VIII, Grand Rapids, Baker; London, 1831, p. 284.

10.   Op. cit., Sermons, Sermon V, pp. 49–60.

11.   See op cit., Toon, Puritans and Calvinism, chap. 6 for the controversy.

12.   Op. cit., Sermons, Sermon XV, p. 174.

13.   Ibid., pp. 177, 178.

14.   Ibid., p. 178.

15.   Ibid., p. 182.

16.   Op. cit., Works of John Wesley, XIII, p. 9.  H. Lindstrom, Wesley and Sanctification, 1950 is very helpful.

17.   Ibid., Works, XI, pp. 366–449.

18.   This is well expressed in the hymns of Charles Wesley.  See “The Promise of Sanctification,” printed in op cit., J. Wesley, Sermons, pp. 477–480.

19.   See further D. W. Dayton, The American Holiness Movement: A Bibliographic Introduction, 1971 and H. V. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1972.  See also B. B. Warfield, Perfectionism, two volumes, Grand Rapids, Baker, 1931, 1932; R. N. Flew, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities, 1934; W. E. Sangster, The Path to Perfection, 1943 and The Pure in Heart, 1954; G. A. Turner, The Vision Which Transforms, 1965; C. Williams, John Wesley’s Theology Today, Nashville, Abingdon, 1972; and R. Brown, Evangelical Ideas of Perfection, Cambridge Ph.D. Thesis, 1964.

 

Part 3:  Contemporary

 

11 – Newman and Schmaus

      In this chapter we examine the teaching of two Roman Catholic theologians.  One lived and died in the last century, but his real influence within his Church has been this century.  The other has taught in Germany since the Second World War and represents a progressive conservative approach.  Both have written books on the topic of justification – the former in a written edition of lectures he delivered, and the other as the last volume in a six-volume series on Dogma.  The first is John Henry Newman, and the second is Michael Schmaus.  It would have been interesting to include Hans Küng, but he no longer represents an official Roman Catholic position; and further, his book on justification is in fact a comparative study of the teaching of the Council of Trent and of Karl Barth.

 

John Henry Newman

      Newman’s impact has come particularly in the period before and after the Second Vatican Council.  He entered the Church of Rome in 1845 after achieving prominence within the Church of England as a leader of the Tractarian movement.  The Pope made him a cardinal in 1879, but his theological methods differed from the dominant, scholastic methods of the theologians of his new Church.  He worked in the Anglican way, making much use of the Scriptures and the early Fathers; he used Aristotelian categories and looked to Thomas Aquinas as his guide.  So the mood within the Church of Rome had to change for Newman truly to be heard.1

      In 1837 Newman gave a course of lectures in the university church of St. Mary, Oxford, on the topic of justification.  He did this partly as a response to a challenge made in the pages of the Christian Observer, the monthly magazine of the evangelicals.  Was he a Protestant or papist?  Did he believe in justification by works?2  The lectures appeared in print as Lectures on Justification (1838).  At this stage in his pilgrimage, Newman held that neither the dogma of Trent nor the classic Protestant statements on justification were wholly correct.  Further, he had come to hold a very high view of regeneration through his study of the Greek Fathers, stressing the full presence of the living God in the soul of man.  At baptism this great gift enters into the Christian, he said.  He saw definite links between justification and regeneration.  In fact, he complained that “it is the fashion of the day to sever these two from one another, which God has joined, the seal and the impression, justification and renewal” (p. 202).  It was his conviction that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and other formularies of the Church of England supported the position he adopted.  He believed as he read both the letters of Paul and the treatises of St. Athanasius that justification was both a declaring and a making righteous of the believing sinner.  The external and the internal work of God must be kept together.3

      Justification as the glorious voice of the Lord declaring us to be righteous.  Basing himself on clear Old Testament teaching, Newman argued that the word which proceeds from God’s mouth does not return to him void, but accomplishes that which he pleases.  God said, “Let there be light” and there was light.  Jesus, the Word made flesh, called Lazarus from the grave and Lazarus rose from the dead.  Therefore when God “utters the command ‘Let the soul be just,’ it becomes just.”  “Justification is ‘the glorious Voice of the Lord’ declaring us to be righteous.”  That it is primarily a declaration, not a making, is sufficiently clear, Newman argued, from this one argument – that it is the justification of a sinner, of one who has been a sinner, “and the past cannot be reversed except by accounting it reversed.”

      Yet, as has already been indicated, it is not only a declaration about the past; it is also a declaration about the present.  Concerning the past, justification “supposes a judicial process, that is, an accuser, a judgment seat and a prisoner”; thus God “declares, acknowledges, and accepts us as holy.”  He recognizes us as his own and publicly repeals the sentence of wrath and penal statutes which lie against us.”

      The declaration about the present is related to the power of the Word of the Lord.  What is declared is brought into reality.  Righteousness is placed in the human heart, for “the Voice of the Lord is mighty in operation, the Voice of the Lord is a glorious Voice.”  The soul is actually made righteous.  Precisely how this is accomplished by the Lord we shall examine later.

      Here is Newman’s own summary of this theme of the voice of the Lord:

It appears that justification is an announcement or fiat of Almighty God breaking upon the gloom of our natural state as the Creative Word upon chaos; that is declares the soul righteous, and in that declaration, on the one hand, conveys pardon for its past sins, and on the other makes it actually righteous.  That it is a declaration, has been made evident from its including, as all allow, an amnesty for the past; for past sins are removable only by imputation of righteousness.  And that it involves an actual creation in righteousness has been argued from the analogy of Almighty God’s doings in Scripture, in which we find his words were represented as effective.4

So he who is justified becomes just, or he who is declared righteous is thereby actually made righteous.  Newman claimed that this teaching was in harmony with the Articles of Religion, numbers 11 and 13.

      In another lecture he said the following:

The great benefit of justification, as all will allow, is this one thing – the transference of the soul from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of Christ.  We may, if we will, divide this event into parts, and say that it is both pardon and renovation, but such a division is merely mental, and does not affect the transit (so to speak) itself, which is but one act.  If a man is saved from drowning, you may, if you will, say he is both rescued from the water and brought into atmospheric air; this is a discrimination in words not in things.  He cannot be brought out of the water, which he cannot breathe, except by entering the air which he can breathe.  In like manner, there is in fact no middle state between a state of wrath and a state of holiness.  In justifying, God takes away what is past, by bringing in what is new.  He takes us out of the fire by lifting us in his everlasting hands, and enwrapping us in his own glory.5

What God has joined, says Newman, let not theologians divide asunder.

      Justification as the presence of God in the soul.  Newman asked the question: What is the difference, the real difference, between a justified man and a nonjustified man?  He believed that the typical Protestant answer was an answer without real substance, for it referred only to thoughts in God’s mind.  As he put the matter:

If the only real difference between a justified man and a man unjustified, be Almighty God’s thoughts concerning him, then those who are justified are justified from eternity, for God sees the end from the beginning.  They are in a justified state even from the hour of their birth.6

Justification must be something real on earth!  To say that “our justification consists in union with Christ, or reconciliation with God, is an intelligible and fair answer,” but it still does not tell us what is meant by this union.  And this we surely need to know.

      If we say that faith is that which unites the soul to Christ, that faith is the reality which is acceptable to God in the heart of the sinner, then the question arises: What is it about such faith that makes it acceptable to God?  Why is it superior to unbelief?  The answer must be the grace of God.  By divine grace alone true faith exists and is acceptable to God.  So if Protestants were to give a real answer they must speak in terms of union with Christ, internal faith and the grace of God in the soul.  As matters stood, the traditional Protestant doctrine was “a system of words without ideas and of distinctions without arguments.”

      Newman believed that the traditional Roman Catholic answer was a real or meaningful answer, but nevertheless not a true answer.  This answer claims that justification is inherent righteousness, spiritual renovation.  It is the result of the grace of God in the soul, or the sanctifying effects of the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit.  Newman shared some of the disgust of Protestants at the way the grace of God was described in (popular?) contemporary Roman Catholicism.  He claimed that it “views or tends to view the influences of grace, not as the operations of a Living God, but as something to bargain about, and buy, and traffick with, as if religion were, not an approach to things above us, but a commerce with our equals concerning things we can master.”  No doubt he was thinking of the way the sacraments were described and received.  Nevertheless, inner renewal and spiritual renovation make sense and thus point to a real answer.

      Why was this answer incorrect?  A brief reply is that it referred to the results and not to the essence of justification, which is a heavenly gift.  Newman amassed biblical references (such as Romans 5:17, which refers to “the gift of righteousness”) in order to show that righteousness is a gift received in our hearts.  Then he summarized his thoughts in these words:

That the righteousness, on which we are called righteous, or are justified, that in which justification results or consists, which conveys or applies the great gospel privileges, that this justifying principle, though within us, as it must be, if it is to separate us from the world, yet is not of us or in us, not any quality or act of our minds, not faith, not renovation, not obedience, not any thing cognizable by man, but a certain divine gift in which all these qualifications are included.7

Newman argued that it was possible to define this divine gift more precisely.  “I mean,” he wrote, “the habitation in us of God the Father and the Word Incarnate through the Holy Ghost.”  To be justified is “to receive the Divine Presence within us and be made a Temple of the Holy Ghost.”  So we see how, for Newman, his high doctrine of regeneration is united with his doctrine of justification.  Regeneration, the indwelling of God in the human soul, is part of, the human side of, justification.  For what God declares in Heaven he truly effects on earth.

      Here is the heart of Newman’s theology of salvation.  Here is what made him rejoice – God himself living in our hearts.  He claimed that:

Whatever blessings in detail we ascribe to justification, are ascribed in Scripture to this sacred indwelling.  For instance, is justification remission of sins?  The gift of the Spirit conveys it, as is evident from the Scripture doctrine about baptism: “One baptism for the remission of sins.”  Is justification adoption into the family of God?  In like manner the Spirit is expressly called the Spirit of adoption, “the Spirit whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”  Is justification reconciliation with God?  St. Paul says, “Jesus Christ is in you, unless ye be reprobates.”  Is justification life?  The same apostle says, “Christ liveth in me.”  Is justification given to faith?  He also prays “that Christ may dwell in” Christians’ “hearts by faith.”  Does justification lead to holy obedience?  Our Lord assures us that “he that abideth in him and he in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.”  Is it through justification that we rejoice in hope of the glory of God?  In like manner “Christ in us” is said to be “the hope of glory.”  Christ then is our righteousness by dwelling in us by the Spirit; he justifies us by entering into us, he continues to justify us by remaining in us.  This is really and truly our justification, not faith, not holiness, not (much less) a mere imputation; but through God’s mercy the very Presence of Christ.8

So the God who declares the soul justified, is the same God who also inhabits the soul.  And the God who inhabits the soul is the God who was made man and who died for our sins and rose again for our justification.

      Protestants may accuse Newman of making regeneration a part of justification, but they cannot deny the beauty, the spiritual power of his doctrine.

      The place of baptism and faith as instruments of justification.  The instrumental cause of justification is the means by which, or the channel through which, God actually achieves the justification of the sinner.  Roman Catholics had traditionally spoken of baptism as the instrument through which grace was infused by the Spirit into the soul to achieve justification.  Protestants had spoken of saving faith in the hearts of the sinners, by which union with Christ and therefore justification were achieved.

      Newman accepted the statement of the eleventh Article that “we are justified by faith only” and the words from the Homily of the Passion for Good Friday that “the only mean and instrument of salvation required on our part is faith, that is to say, a sure trust and confidence in the mercies of God.”  He argued that true faith, living faith, could only be found in a heart which loved God and man.  So faith as the “only mean and instrument” is to be understood as the sole mean in contrast to other graces – e.g., hope, love and faithfulness.  A further clarification is necessary: it is the sole internal instrument, not the sole instrument of any kind.

      Newman had a high view of the sacraments, and it is not surprising to find him asserting that baptism is the external instrument.  “Baptism might be the hand of the giver and faith the hand of the receiver”; and “faith secures to the soul continually those gifts which baptism primarily conveys.”

      We must note that Newman was addressing himself to a situation in which infant baptism was the norm.  So he could say:

Faith, then, being the appointed representative of baptism, derives its authority and virtue from that which it represents.  It is justifying because of baptism; it is the faith of the baptized, of the regenerate, that is, of the justified.9

Thus faith is always, when considered as an instrument, secondary to baptism.  Newman actually believed that this was also true with respect to adult conversion to Christianity.  He quoted such texts as “Be baptized every one of you for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38) and noted the close connection in the New Testament between baptism and forgiveness of sins.  Newman held that faith was different in quality before and after baptism, for baptism changed faith from a condition into an instrument, from a “mere forerunner into its accredited representative.”  Faith “is renewed in knowledge when Christ is imparted as a Spirit.”  Newman saw proof of this power in the description of the faith of the jailer in Acts.

      Newman was ready to accept that “by faith alone” is a “lively mode of speech [figurative] for saying that we are justified neither by faith, nor by works, but by God only.”  He found this usage in Melanchthon, the Homilies, Bishop Bull and others, but he believed that “it was more adapted for the schools, than for the taste of a people like the English at the present day.”

      Here is Newman’s summary of the relationship between faith, the sacraments, love and obedience:

Reserving to baptism our new birth, and to the Eucharist the ultimate springs of the new life, and to love what may be called its plastic power, and to obedience its being the atmosphere in which faith breathes, still the divinity appointed or (in other words) the mysterious virtue of faith remains.  It alone coalesces with the sacraments, brings them into effect, dissolves (as it were) their outward case, and through them unites the soul to God.10

So faith both develops and sanctifies other graces, like salt in food or incense on sacrifices.

      Newman was thus able to reconcile the seeming differences between the teaching of St. Paul and St. James.  His view was that “Justification comes through the sacraments; is received by faith; consists in God’s inward presence and lives in obedience.”11

      Newman reissued his lectures in 1874 when he was a respected Roman Catholic.  The material is precisely the same, except for the addition of a new preface of about a thousand words and fourteen brief notes placed in square brackets at the bottom of appropriate pages (e.g., pages 31, 73, 101, etc.).

      In the preface, written at the Oratory in Birmingham, he stated: “Unless the author held in substance in 1874 what he published in 1838 he would not at this time be reprinting what he wrote as an Anglican; certainly not with so little added by way of safeguard.”

      The “little ... by way of safeguard” primarily concerned two views which he had expressed in 1838 and 1840 as being at variance with traditional Roman Catholicism and which he now realized (looking at the matter from within rather than from without) were not truly at variance.  First, he had given the impression that there was more than one formal cause of the justified state.  Now he admitted that there was one formal cause and that was the inward, divine gift.  However, he placed himself on the side of the early Fathers by claiming that he had not written with the precision of the logicians and schoolmen but in the orthodox and yet less precise language of men such as Athanasius and Augustine.  Therefore, what he had written was not truly at variance with Tridentine Catholicism.  Secondly, he had allowed that one possible formal cause was the presence of the Lord in the soul of man.  His defense here was to claim that he wrote in the same way as did the great mystical theologian, Dominikus Schramm (1722–1797) of Bavaria.  Again, he was not attempting to be a logician but a follower of the early Fathers, and he had thus not been in error.

      It is obvious that Newman was at variance only with the scholastic exposition of Tridentine Catholicism, because his mind did not easily work in the logical categories of scholasticism but in the warm devotional categories of the Fathers and mystics.  This feature of his thought began in his Anglican period.

 

Michael Schmaus

      In Justification and the Last Things (1977) Schmaus presents an attractive and at times sophisticated explanation of the official Roman Catholic teaching on justification.  He finds the dogma of the Council of Trent satisfactory, except at a few points where he is ready to make criticism.

      It perhaps needs emphasizing that while he makes much use of Scripture, he does so under the umbrella of a definition of justification as the process of making just or righteous.  There is no exegesis of the New Testament passages in which justification is the central or subsidiary theme (e.g., from Romans or Galatians).  The traditional medieval understanding of justificare as “to make righteous/just” is taken for granted.  No attempt is made to explain the weight of biblical scholarship which sees the forensic meaning as prominent in the New Testament usage of dikaioō.  In other words, he works from the definition given at Trent: “Justification is not only the remission of sins, but sanctification and renovation of the interior man through the voluntary reception of grace and gifts, whereby a man becomes just instead of unjust and a friend instead of an enemy, that he may be an heir in the hope of life everlasting.”

      Further, though he supplies some explanation of the Aristotelian categories used at Trent he makes no effort to show what the Roman Catholic doctrine would look like if it were presented in different conceptual categories.  He appears content to affirm that the theology of Trent was basically metaphysical and that the theology of the major Protestant confessions was biblical and existential in character.

      Grace and freedom.  He maintains that justification is only possible through divine grace, which is wholly the gift of God and in no way can be merited.  In traditional terms, the “meritorious cause” is the sacrificial death and glorious resurrection of the incarnate Son of God, and the “efficient cause” is the action of the merciful God who washes and sanctifies, who pardons and purifies his people.  So he can see truth in the Reformation slogan of sola gratia (by grace alone).  The phrase expresses a legitimate concern in that it makes clear that it is God who always takes the initiative in his saving movement towards sinners.  In eternity God decided on his plan of salvation; the eternal Son became man and died for the world; the Holy Spirit entered the Church and world in Christ’s name to make effective what the Savior had done.  Yet, while salvation proceeds wholly from grace, to say “grace alone„ can be misleading.  “God’s initiative only reaches its goal, is only intended to reach its goal if man allows himself to be grasped by God’s grace.”12  However, the process in which God takes the initiative and man freely responds defies any concise explanation.  It certainly happens, but it is impossible to describe it fully or accurately.

      Further, grace is given not to make sinners painfully aware of their wretchedness, but rather to release for them the potentialities inherent in becoming a child of God.  Schmaus, in common with other Roman Catholic theologians, views Reformation theology as emphasizing too much the sinfulness, weakness and depravity of human nature; Schmaus and friends think especially of the stress on human depravity in the teaching of Luther’s The Bondage of the Will (1525).

      Concerning faith, Schmaus happily accepts such statements as these from the Decree on Justification of the Council of Trent: “Faith, unless hope and charity be added thereto, neither unites man perfectly with Christ, nor makes him a living member of his body” (chap. 7).  And, “Faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification” (chap. 8).  Faith, he writes, “is the first step towards Christ, no more, no less.”  It is also “a living force which gives birth to all the other attitudes mentioned by the Council – hope, love, repentance, confidence – and continues to support them.”13

      Faith is certainly not an activity by which the sinner makes himself worthy of justification.  Rather, “faith makes one receptive to the justification effected by God.”  It is not faith and works but faith as the root and source of good works.  Understood in this way, the traditional Roman Catholic concept of faith need not be opposed to the “by faith alone” of the Protestant Reformers, at least not if the Protestant view of faith is something like this: “faith is the total living process of unconditioned and confident self-abandonment to God and to his promise.  Penance, love and hope and a ready obedience are included in the total living process.”

      Misunderstanding has occurred, says Schmaus, because the doctrinal expression of the Decree of Trent tends towards the metaphysical, whereas that of the Reformers is more existential.  One important source of the theology of the Council was the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, who defined faith as an act of assent to God’s revelation on the part of the intellect commanded by the will.  If this may be called an intellectualist definition of faith, then that of the Protestants may be called fiducial and existential, for it emphasizes trust with commitment.  Yet as Schmaus sees it, “The Council of Trent begins by giving a definition of the essence of faith only to turn itself immediately to the exercise of faith in the existential order.”14  That is, beginning from an intellectualistic view of faith, it then describes how faith expresses itself through love and hope in the Christian life in the process of justification or being made righteous.  In contrast, the Protestant explanation of faith starts with the very exercise of faith itself; and starting there, it is impossible to see how faith could actually be exercised without the other elements of faithfulness, love, obedience and hope being present.  Perhaps the bishops at Trent were aware of the dangers if the Protestant doctrine of sola fide were interpreted metaphysically (the normal Roman Catholic way of interpreting it?) instead of being placed and set within a dynamic, existential framework of reference.

      Grace as the saving union with God.  The purpose of grace is to bring sinners into saving union with God, into participation in the new covenant, and into the kingdom of God.  This means that the Spirit indwells God’s people.  Schmaus does not want to encourage a static idea of union with God.  He writes, “The state of justification consists in this, that it is always in the process of being created: God gives himself to man through Christ in the Spirit in an uninterrupted act.  God’s giving of grace to the person is a continuous act analagous to his continuing act of creation.”15  This self-communication by the tri-personal God has for its ultimate purpose the eternal union of men with God.  Justification begins with the forgiveness of sins, includes interior renewal, and is completed with the ultimate redemption of the whole person in the resurrection of the body.

      The forgiveness of sins by God the Father through Christ includes the remission of guilt together with the removal of the state of sinfulness (understood metaphysically) before God.  This does not mean that the tendency to sin (or the disorderly inclination called concupiscence) is removed.  Rather, in a metaphysical sense the forgiven person is not a sinner but a child of God.  Therefore, it can be claimed only in a concrete, existential and historical sense that a Christian is simultaneously both just/righteous and a sinner.  In an ontological, metaphysical sense he is only just and not a sinner.

      Schmaus explains that “although the Council strongly emphasized the metaphysical reality of the forgiveness of sin, it did not reject the idea of justification which the Reformers had so much at heart.  What it did deny was the statement that man is justified only through the imputation of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.  The Council’s definition implies that the man justified by God is declared just, but that this declaration at the same time actually creates the state of justification.”16  Justification is a sovereign act of God and is more than a mere juridical sentence, as if it were made in a human court of law.  This act of God is more than a forensic act, for what is declares it puts into action.  Such is the nature of the word of God Almighty!  (Here it may be asked whether Schmaus is reading too much into the words of the Decree.  Certainly what he says has become Roman Catholic teaching and, as we noted, is clearly portrayed in Newman’s teaching.)

      However, our author is ready to concede that the Council mistakenly emphasized the effects of the divine action (= forgiveness of sin and transformation of man) as identical with the divine act itself.  It would have been better had the heavenly declaration of the Heavenly Father together with the inner renewal wrought by the Holy Spirit (two separate aspects of the one act of God) been clearly distinguished from the results of this unified act of God (the results being forgiveness and renewal).

      Schmaus is also at pains to point out that much confusion has arisen in the understanding of the Decree by not maintaining a careful distinction between the efficient and formal causes of justification.  “With regard to efficient causality,” he writes, “there is no difference between the Council of Trent and Luther....  The difference lies in the area of formal cause.... If Aristotelian philosophy is regarded as an unsuitable instrument for theology, then the doctrine of formal cause is inaccessible.”17  In defending the Tridentine position Schmaus speaks of righteousness as “deriving from without” and being “so implanted in a man as to belong to him not as a possession like material goods he can dispose of according to his wishes, but as an assured gift bestowed in a continuous act of grace for which he is responsible.”18  He admits that the doctrine of a formal cause does not explain how inner renewal comes about; it only describes the metaphysical structure, stating in what it consists.  Thus the precise connection between inner renewal and the forgiveness of sins was not fixed by the Council, and different theological interpretations (developing from the Aristotelian categories) are possible and have been offered.

      Justification – the personal, existential aspect.  In his saving communication with human beings, God brings healing.  This involves a change both in a man’s metaphysical essence and in his human faculties.  The latter has been described in terms of the infusion of the virtues – both the theological (faith, hope and love) and the moral (wisdom, fortitude, justice and prudence).  Working from this traditional base, Schmaus carefully examines the theological virtues from a biblical perspective.  He says little about the moral virtues, seeing them as “powers enabling a man, in Christ and with Christ, to do justice to the demands of real-life situations in the spirit of love.”  The point he is making is that justification is a real making just and that this real justice may be explained in terms of the virtues as they develop in the Christian.

      Schmaus also briefly explains his conviction that “the belief in the regeneration of the justified man reached its theological completion in the teaching of the seven gifts of the Spirit.”  These are based on the Latin text of Isaiah 11:2, which speaks of the spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and fortitude, of knowledge and piety and fear of the Lord.  “Today,” he remarks, “there is a general acceptance by systematic theology of the ideas proposed by Aquinas: that the gifts of the Spirit effect a special interior relationship with God, preparing the heart to experience the divine impulses not as alien or threatening but as familiar and satsifying, so that he will respond to them with alacrity and joy.”19  That is, the gifts of the Spirit produce a delicate receptivity to the divine presence, so that by his leading the Christian does what is right.

      But is it possible to be certain that one is justified?  Schmaus is aware that the contents of the Decree can be interpreted both as portraying the theology of the Reformers in an unfair manner and as not emphasizing a right approach to Christian assurance.  He sees the teaching of the Council as an attack upon Pharisaism, false confidence, self-reliance, self-satisfaction and the belief that a person can possess God as an object, using him like a practical possession.  He is ready to concede that there is such a thing as Christian certainty of justification, but he insists that it needs to be carefully explained.  “We can have no such certainty as that which we possess in our assent in faith to the truths of revelation, because in the state of justification the personal, existential element always enters in.  Nor can we have the kind of certainty we have of the highest metaphysical and mathematical principles, or of things observable by the senses: the kind of certainty we have is in accordance with the object.  We can, however, have the kind of certainty about justification which has its place in human relations.  This certainty, termed ‘moral’ certainty by scholastic philosophy and theology, has its basis in human reliability and faithfulness.  It is sufficient and necessary for the conduct of human life.  It consists in this – that in man’s moral behavior one counts on his dependability and faithfulness.”20  This kind of certainty can reach such an intensity that there is little or no room for rational doubt.  We may add that Protestant teaching appears to be of a different kind and related more to the inner illumination of the Spirit than to the concept of moral certainty.

      Schmaus also asks, Are there gradations in justification?  If justification is only extrinsic, as Protestants maintain, then is it exactly the same in nature and intensity for every believer?  If justification is also intrinsic, as Trent maintained, then although in essence the justice imparted to the soul is the same, it differs from one person to the next in grades of intensity and depth.  If it is allowed that justification is a process, then there must be growth and Christians must be at different stages of the process of growth.

      Another vexing question is, Can the state of justification be lost?  Schmaus rightly recognizes that there is in the New Testament a tension between the indicative and the imperative of salvation.  The new life given by God is certainly a gift, but it must be maintained, in some sense, by the person who receives it.  The Reformers held that justification could not be lost because it was pronounced by God, as judge, concerning those whom he had elected unto eternal life from eternity.  This, in Schmaus’s view, is to stress the indicative so much as not to be able to sufficiently emphasize the imperative of salvation.  The Council, taking the biblical emphasis on the imperative seriously, taught that justification as a state could be lost through mortal sin or through abandonment of faith.  In the Tridentine teaching the idea of eternal predestination does not function as it does in Luther’s or Calvin’s teaching.  Only those who persevere to the end and actually enter Heaven are the elect.  A Christian does not cooperate with divine grace because he is one of the elect (as in Luther/Calvin), but rather, using his free will in a responsible way with God’s help, he becomes one of the elect by completing the process of justification, assisted by divine grace.

      The fruit of justification.  Purposing to show that the person in the process of justification is called to be active not only in pursuit of personal holiness but also in the pursuit of justice in the world, Schmaus moves out from the traditional scholastic categories.  He shows that the life of God in the human heart should affect personal relationships and should motivate and direct participation of the individual and the church community in the life of both natural (e.g., the family) and established (e.g., the town or city) communities to which they belong.  At the level of personal encounter, there will be a practical recognition of the value and dignity of the human person.  At the level of participation in human society, Schmaus follows the general principles and suggestions of Vatican II as set forth in such documents as The Church in the Modern World and Religious Freedom.

      From the attempt to speak in modern terms of the involvement of the justified in the modern world, Schmaus reverts to traditional categories to explain the concept of merit.  By God’s help, the Christian does all kinds of good works and then is rewarded for these by the God grace with the gift of eternal life.  “Man can produce acts worthy of salvation because, and insofar as, God produces them through him.  Only in the creative power of God can man be creative.  In the works of a man possessed and ruled by God, the prime actor is God: and hence it is of God’s own works that we say they are ‘meritorious.’  They participate in the value, the dignity, and the majesty of God, and are in no way impaired by the fact that God works through human weakness or that human imperfection is found in them.”21

      This view of merit is called de condigno (deserved merit).  It “points up the fact that man is a wayfarer, always living in the present with an orientation towards the future....  But it is God himself who will bring man’s efforts to completion” (p. 145).  We may note that in this matter of merit, even when explained in the most careful way, there still appears to be a great gulf between Roman Catholic and Protestant teaching.

      We are left wondering what shape and content a theology of justification would take if it were presented by Schmaus without reference to scholastic categories.  What he has done is to interpret Trent in the most favorable way, bearing in mind the insights of modern biblical theology.  In contrast, an author like the Brazilian Leonardo Boff seeks to state old categories in modern shape.  He attempts to do this with “grace” in his stimulating Liberating Grace (1979) where, regrettably, he makes little use of the idea of justification.22

 

Notes: Chapter 11

1.     The proof that Newman has been heard is seen in the ever continuing list of books about him that are published, by the moves to have him beatified and canonized, and by the number of times he is cited in recent Roman Catholic literature.

2.     For the background to this, see op. cit., P. Toon, Evangelical Theology Chaps. 1, 5.

3.     See further T. L. Sheridаn, Newman on Justification, 1977.

4.     John Henry Newman, Justification, 1838, p. 90.

5.     Ibid., p. 112.

6.     Ibid., p. 145.

7.     Ibid., p. 159.

8.     Ibid., p. 166.

9.     Ibid., p. 260.

10.   Ibid., p. 271.

11.   Ibid., p. 318.

12.   Michael Schmaus, Justification and the Last Things, p. 22.

13.   Ibid., p. 34.

14.   Ibid.

15.   Ibid., p. 35.

16.   Ibid., p. 63.

17.   Ibid., p. 72.

18.   Ibid., p. 73.

19.   Ibid., p. 110.

20.   Ibid., p. 115.

21.   Ibid., p. 141.

22.   In The Experience and Language of Grace, Mahwah, N. J., Paulist Press; Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1979, R. Haight, S. J. looks at liberation theology as well as at the views of Karl Rahner.  The latter has an article, “Questions of Controversial Theology on Justification,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. IV, New York, Crossroad, 1966.  See also Edward Schillebeeckx, “The Tгindentine Decree of Justification,” in Concilium, Vol. 5, 1965.

 

12 – Tillich and Berkouwer

      To say the least, there has been a scarcity of serious theological works devoted to justification written by English-speaking Protestant theologians in modern times.  The reason for this great gap in English theological literature could be a general lack of interest in the topic among theologians.  This itself could reflect a general feeling in the Christian community that the doctrine apparently does not have relevance for many twentieth-century Western Christians.  An apparent lack of interest among systematic theologians and in the churches does not mean that there is no interest among professional students of the New Testament.  There has been a sustained interest in the theology of the Apostle Paul, in the theme of righteousness/justice in the Bible, and in the letters of Paul to Galatia and Rome.  It is perhaps true to say that much of this scholarly work has been produced in response to literature that comes from professors in German universities.

      In Germany there has been and there is today much more interest in the theme of justification than in either Britain or the USA.  This is due to three important factors: the seemingly never-ending study of the life and teaching of Martin Luther; the impact of dialectical or crisis theology (associated particularly with the name of Karl Barth); and debate or dialogue with Roman Catholics.  Much of the scholarly biblical study has been done, for example, in response to questions generated by Luther studies.  In the 1980s, with the advent of ecumenical, theological discussion, there are many signs in both Germany and Holland of scholars working together to bridge the gulf that has long existed between Roman Catholic and Protestant interpretations of the Bible.

      Happily, in Britain and the USA we also have reached the stage where justification is beginning to be studied by groups of theologians and scholars from different backgrounds.  In America a commission of Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians has since 1965 produced reports of its discussions in six volumes.  In 1984 the last of these, devoted to justification, will be ready.  This has been a long time in the making and should represent an important milestone in interconfessional dialogue.  Also, the new International Roman Catholic/Anglican Theological Commission which began work in 1983 had on its agenda, as a major item, the topic of justification.  So the way is open for a major breakthrough of understanding between Protestants and Catholics at a point where their differences have appeared impossible to reconcile.

      In the light of these very recent developments, it is not easy to choose two examples of recent Protestant presentations of justification.  Karl Barth would seem to be an obvious choice since he is so famous and his influence has been enormous.  But his thought is not easy to present accurately in a short compass.  Furthermore, the well-known study, Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection (1964) is readily available.  After much thought I have chosen Gerrit Cornelius Berkouwer of Holland, most of whose works have appeared in English, and Paul Tillich of Germany, who lived the second half of his life in America.1

 

Paul Tillich

      Born and educated in Germany, he was ordained in 1912 into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brandenburg.  He was professor, first at Marburg (where he encountered existentialism through the teaching of Martin Heidegger), then at Dresden and finally at Frankfurt-am-Main.  In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he was removed from his post.  So, at the age of forty-seven, he began a new career in America, teaching at Union Seminary, New York, until 1954.  Afterwards he lectured first at Harvard and then at the University of Chicago.  His magnum opus was his Systematic Theology in three volumes; many people, however, found his printed sermons the easiest way to appreciate what he was seeking to say.2

      Tillich was both a philosopher and a theologian.  He made use of existentialist philosophy and was committed to the Christian religion.  In conscious opposition to the method of Karl Barth, which presented theology in terms of a movement from God to man, Tillich began with man in his cultural setting in the Western world.  He believed that Barth’s method was to present God throwing a stone from Heaven that no one was able to catch.  A better method, he thought, was to begin with the questions being asked by Western human beings and then to show how, in the Christian revelation, there was an answer.  This is the method of correlation, and it involves the recognition that the way the question is posed and the way the answer from divine revelation is stated are conditioned by the cultural and intellectual climate in which this process occurs.  So Tillich is able to use an existentialist philosophy both to state and to answer the questions.

      The norm of systematic theology.  As a Lutheran, Tillich was well aware that justification by faith had been called the material norm of theology since the sixteenth century.  This means that justification by faith was seen as the primary principle by which the authoritative Scriptures were to be interpreted.  Justification was the hermeneutical key to open the treasures of grace in God’s revelation recorded in the Bible.  But is the norm of yesterday a valid norm for today?

      Tillich saw the human situation around him in terms of “disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair in all realms of life.”  Thus the question was not, “How may I find a merciful God and how may I receive forgiveness?”  It was more like, “How may I find meaning in a meaningless world?”  Therefore the norm of theology has to be “a reality in which the self-estrangement of our existence is overcome, a reality of reconciliation and reunion, of creativity, meaning and hope.”  And such a reality is “New Being.”  The concept of “New Being” was developed by Tillich from the idea of new creation in Paul’s letters.  Jesus the Christ is presented as the One in whom the “New Being” is seen and made available.  So “the material norm of systematic theology today is the New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our ultimate concern.”

      This “New Being” is a pivotal concept in Tillich’s system, and it is not easy to explain it in a few lines.  It is God’s power which liberates and transforms human beings so that they actually participate in God’s new creation.  As he wrote in his book New Being (1955): “Reconciliation, reunion, resurrection – this is the New Creation, the New Being, the New State of things....  A New State of things has appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here” (p. 24).  Jesus, as the Christ, presents a perfect transparency into new creation, New Being, and he is the key to salvation.

      The experience of New Being within the sphere of the Church of God can be described as the experience of the New Being as creating (= regeneration), of the New Being as paradox (= justification) and of the New Being as process (= sanctification).  For Tillich, experience means “the state of being grasped by the Spiritual Presence” or the divine Spirit which is in man.  The Spiritual Presence is normally made known to man through the ministry of the Word and of the sacraments.  Through the Spiritual Presence the human spirit rises into successful transcendence, being delivered from the estrangement, ambiguities and irrationalities of life.

      The experience of the New Being as creation (regeneration).  For Tillich, the Johannine expression “new birth” and the Pauline phrase “new creation” were biblical precedents to the more abstract concept of the New Being.  They all point to the same reality – that is, the event in which the divine Spirit takes hold of the personal life through the creation of faith.  So regeneration must go before justification.  This initial participation in the New Being is the first element in the actualization of the “Spiritual Community” (Church).  Tillich commented:

If this is accepted the question is often asked: If the Spiritual Presence must grasp me and create faith in me, what can I do in order to reach such faith?  I cannot force the Spirit upon myself; so what can I do but wait without acting?  Sometimes this question is asked without seriousness, in an attitude of dialectical aggression, and does not really require an answer.  No answer can be given to him who asks in this way, because every answer would tell him something he should do or be; it would contradict the faith for which he asks.  If, however, the question – What can I do in order to experience the New Being? – is asked with existential seriousness, the answer is implied in the question, for existential seriousness is evidence of the impact of the Spiritual Presence upon an individual.  He who is ultimately concerned about the state of estrangement and about the possibility of reunion with the ground and aim of his being is already in the grip of the Spiritual Presence.  In this situation the question, What shall I do to receive the divine Spirit? is meaningless because the real answer is already given and any further answer would distort it.3

So the position is that the person who asks with “ultimate concern” should be told that the fact of his ultimate concern implies the answer: he is already under the impact and influence of the Spiritual Presence.

      The experience of the New Being as paradox (justification).  Tillich first gained the insight that a man is justified by grace through faith (not only as a sinner but even as a doubter) when he was a student at Halle in 1905 listening to Martin Kähler.  In the light of two world wars he became painfully aware that the Protestant doctrine of justification was not readily understood even by Protestants.  “The idea is strange to the man of today and even to Protestant people in the churches: indeed, as I have over and over again had the opportunity to learn, it is so strange to modern man that there is scarcely any way of making it intelligible to him.”  Despite this problem of communication, Tillich did seek to interpret the New Testament teaching in terms of the New Being.

      Before offering his own interpretation Tillich dealt with three “semantic problems.”  First, the expression “justification by faith.”  The use of it, he believed, had led to a devastating confusion.  “Faith, in this phrase, has been understood as the cause of God’s justifying act, which means that the moral and ritual works of Catholic teaching are replaced by the intellectual work of accepting a doctrine.”  So he proposed that the expression should be, “justification by grace through faith.”

      In the second place, the term “justification” cannot have the meaning for us that it had for Paul’s time since we do not share his cultural setting.  So “it should be replaced in the practice of teaching and preaching by the term ‘acceptance,’ in the sense that we are accepted by God, although being unacceptable according to the criteria of law ... and that we are asked to accept this acceptance.”  Such terminology is itself acceptable by people, he believed, for whom the Old and New Testament phrasing has lost all meaning, although there is a most serious existential meaning for them in the reality to which this phrasing points.

      Thirdly, he pointed out the limitations of the expression, “forgiveness of sins” to express the paradoxical character of the experience of the New Being.  One of these had to do with the picture behind the idea of forgiveness, that of the debtor and the one to whom he is in debt.  In all human relations the one who forgives has the need himself to be forgiven, but with God this is not the case.  Another limitation had to do with the fact that while a man forgives a particular offense (debt/ sin) God forgives sin, the act of separation from God and the resistance to union with him.  Thus he concluded that Paul’s use of justification was a more satisfactory way of presenting the way in which the New Being is experienced, for it relates forgiveness to justice and to Christ.  Further, it makes clear the unconditional character of the divine act in which God declares him who is unjust to be just.

      Luther’s paradox, simul justus, simul peccator, points to this unconditional divine declaration and highlights the truth that God accepts the undeserving.  Tillich perceived in both Paul and Luther a profound psychological insight into the relationship of the sinner who knows himself to be unacceptable to God, who accepts the unacceptable.  He wrote: “This surrender of one’s own goodness occurs in him who accepts the divine acceptance of himself, the unacceptable.  The courage to surrender one’s own goodness to God is the central element in the courage of faith.  In it the paradox of the New Being is experienced, the ambiguity of good and evil is conquered, unambiguous life has taken hold of man through the impact of the Spiritual Presence.”  Tillich also pointed to the picture of Jesus, the Crucified One.  Here there is God’s acceptance of the unacceptable and God’s participation in man’s estrangement.

      Tillich set himself to answer a question which Paul and Luther had not faced and which Augustine and the Apostle John had only partially recognized.  How is faith, justifying faith, related to radical doubt (the existential doubt concerning the meaning of life itself)?  He wrote:

The first part of every answer to this problem must be negative: God as the truth and the source of meaning cannot be reached by intellectual work, as he cannot be reached by moral work.  The question, “What can I do to overcome radical doubt and the feeling of meaninglessness?” cannot be answered, because every answer would justify the question, which implies that something can be done.  But the paradox of the New Being is that nothing can be done by man who is in the situation in which he asks the question.  One can only say, while rejecting the form of the questions, that the seriousness of despair in which the question is asked is itself the answer.  This is in the line of Augustine’s argument, that in the situation of doubt the truth from which one feels separated is present insofar as in every doubt the formal affirmation of truth is presupposed.  But the analogous affirmation of meaning within meaninglessness is also related to the paradox of justification.  It is the problem of the justification, not of the sinner, but of him who doubts, which has led to this solution.  Since in the predicament of doubt and meaninglessness God as the source of the justifying act has disappeared, the only thing left (in which God reappears without being recognized) is the ultimate honesty of doubt and the unconditional seriousness of the despair about meaning.4

This is the way that Tillich believed the people of Western society could be told that they are accepted with respect to the ultimate meaning of their lives, although unacceptable in view of the doubt and meaninglessness which has taken hold of them.  God is actually present to them in the seriousness of their existential despair.

      The experience of the New Being as process (sanctification).  Tillich expressed reservations about the Lutheran, Calvinist and Wesleyan ways of describing sanctification, even though he perceived good points in each of them.  They did not speak to modern man.  He proposed instead “four principles which united religious and secular traditions and which in their totality create an indefinite but yet distinguishable image of the Christian life.”

      (1)  Increasing awareness.  This is the principle “according to which man in the process of sanctification becomes increasingly aware of his actual situation and the forces struggling around him and his humanity, but also becomes aware of the answers to the questions implied in this situation.”  These forces include both the demonic and the divine.  Such an awareness “includes sensitivity towards the demands of one’s own growth, toward the hidden hopes and disappointments within others, toward the voiceless voice of a concrete situation, toward the grades of authenticity in the life of the spirit in others and oneself.”5

      (2)  Increasing freedom.  This is the principle of freedom from the law as commandment.  It is a difficult process, and maturity in it is very rare.  “Freedom from the law is the power to judge the given situation in the light of the Spiritual Presence and to decide upon adequate action, which is often in seeming contradiction to the law.”  Further, “mature freedom from the law implies the power of resisting the forces which try to destroy such freedom from inside the personal self and from its social surroundings.”6  The danger that this freedom may turn out to be anarchy or willfulness is overcome when the power of the Spiritual Presence is at work.

      (3)  Increasing relatedness.  This principle acts as a balance to the second.  “The principle of increasing freedom cannot be imagined without the courage to risk a wrong decision on the basis of faith, and the principle of increasing relatedness cannot be imagined without the reuniting power of agape to overcome self-seclusion fragmentarily.”  Relatedness implies the awareness of others and the freedom to relate to them by overcoming one’s own and their self-seclusion.  But relatedness also has to be towards the Spiritual Presence because the vertical dimension (relation to God) is needed for the horizontal dimension (relation to self and others) to be actualized and meaningful.  So, “as the process of sanctification approaches a more mature self-relatedness, the individual is more spontaneous, more self-affirming, without self-elevation or self-humiliations.”7

      (4)  Increasing transcendence. Sanctification is not possible, Tillich tells us, without a continuous transcendence of oneself in the direction of the ultimate – in other words, without participation in the holy.  However, it is a mistake to think that this participation only occurs in the distinctly religious or churchy situation.

The self-transcendence which belongs to the principles of sanctification is actual in every act in which the impact of the Spiritual Presence is experienced.  This can be in prayer or meditation in total privacy, in the exchange of Spiritual experiences with others, in communications on a secular basis, in the experience of creative works of man’s spirit, in the midst of labour or rest, in private counseling, in church services.  It is like the breathing-in of another air, an elevation above average existence.  It is the most important thing in the process of Spiritual maturity.  Perhaps one can say that with increasing maturity in the process of sanctification the transcendence becomes more definite and its expressions more indefinite.  Participation in communal devotion may decrease and the religious symbols connected with it may become less important, while the state of being ultimately concerned may become more manifest and the devotion to the ground and aim of our being more intensive.8

Tillich believed that the awareness of the need for the experience of transcendence was a characteristic of Western society after the Second World War.  People looked to Christianity for concrete symbols of self-transcendence.

      Tillich did not think that perfection was possible in the life of the Christian.  He recognized that there would always be ups and downs, but there could be and should be movement towards maturity.

      We must recognize that Tillich’s proposals on justification and sanctification are part of a total systematic presentation.  These particular proposals stand or fall, not on their own merit alone, but on the merit of the foundations of the system as a whole – and these are too complex to study here.9  However, if we judge that his theological system is, in the last analysis, a failure, it is still possible to claim that some of his warnings and suggestions have value.  In particular, he causes us to ask these questions: Can justification, presented in the Protestant Confessions and tradition as heavily forensic, ever be a powerful symbol for Western Christian people again?  Are we more concerned by life’s meaninglessness than by a consciousness of sinning against God, the judge?  Is the model of acceptance a better model than that of justification?  These are questions worth pondering.

 

G. C. Berkouwer

      Berkouwer is a good example of a modern-day Calvinist theologian.10  He became professor of dogmatics at the Free University of Amsterdam at the end of the Second World War and introduced a new mood into the theology of the Reformed Church.  He certainly taught his theology as a faithful son of his denomination and as one who heartily accepted its confessions of faith (Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort).  This does not mean that he did his theology in a seventeenth-century manner.  He greatly admired Calvin, and, like the reformer of Geneva, his theology is composed of biblical exegesis, explanation of the confessional heritage, answering contemporary questions and seeking to be faithful to Christ.

      This methodology is seen in his Studies in Dogmatics (eighteen volumes).  Three volumes are relevant to our inquiry.  They are Faith and Justification (Dutch 1949, English 1954), Faith and Sanctification (1949, 1952) and Faith and Perseverance (1949, 1958).  As one who stood in a particular dogmatic tradition, Berkouwer was always conscious of particular questions which had exercised the minds of the major Reformed/Lutheran dogmaticians of Europe in days past.  So it is not surprising that his book on justification begins with a discussion of the ordo salutis.

      The “ordo salutis.”  Aware of modern theology’s criticisms of attempts to produce an ordo salutis, Berkouwer accepted much of the censure but also attempted to make a positive suggestion.  He knew that “the origin of the ordo salutis was closely connected with a virulent defense of the gospel....  The analysis of the application of salvation to man was part of a criticism of those who underestimated the influences of sin on the human soul and who minimized the perversion of human nature.”11  He recognized that the order had often overshadowed the salvation, and so he could write: “Though it may satisfy an appetite for logical construction, the order of salvation can be given no independent significance.”  It had to be related to genuine Christian piety.

      He admired the approach of Calvin and commended the expression “way of salvation” as more biblical than “order.”  “Sometimes generations of Christians have lost the joy of the gospel by having gone amiss on the way of salvation.  This is why it is perpetually necessary for the Church to reflect on ... the way of salvation.  The purpose of her reflection is not to refine and praise the logical systematization.  It is to cut off every way in which Christ is not confessed exclusively as the Way12  Therefore his approach to justification and sanctification and all aspects of soteriology is determined by his desire to make the way of salvation sue to Christ and as clear as possible.  In effect this means he has little or no discussion, in the traditional sense, of the ordo salutis in logical terms.

      The “sola fide” and “sola gratia.”  Berkouwer’s examination of the confessional documents of his denomination shows that he accepted wholeheartedly their teaching on justification.  “A single theme plays through all three documents, The Belgic Confession, The Heidelberg Catechism and The Canons of Dort – the theme of sola fide.  And this is the heart of the Reformed confession.  The various and varied expressions are religiously simple and transparent.  The fathers understood that justification through faith alone was the confession preeminent, the confession sine qua non.”13  And to confess sola fide is also to confess sola gratia.

      But were the basic Lutheran confessions in agreement with the Reformed?  Did Luther teach a different approach or did Melanchthon confuse the matter?  Berkouwer believed that in confession of sola fide, the two traditions of the Reformation in their early years were one.  Thus he rejected the contention (often made on the Continent in the 1930s and 1940s) that Lutheran doctrine is basically synthetic and Calvinist belief is analytical concerning justification by faith.  Synthetic justification was used to describe the view that justification is a declarative judgment of God as judge, made solely on the basis of Christ’s saving work, and made only to faith.  In contrast, analytical justification was used to describe the view that the declarative judgment of God was made primarily on the basis that the believer would be faithful to the end, as he lived as a Christian with the aid of the grace of God.  Berkouwer held that the Augsburg Confession and the Apology for it were at one in teaching a common doctrine of justification sola fide and sola gratia; this teaching in no way made sanctification a condition of justification.

      The Protestant confession of sola fide is a warning sign along the path of the history of the Church.  But sola fide

carries no guarantee against the deceits of the human heart.  No formula is a security for the glory of God.  Sola fide makes sense only in the act of true faith.  But the confessions of the Reformation are plain.  They tell of grace without the works of the law; they witness against the glory, the elevation, and the trustworthiness of man.  They whisper of the comfort of God’s redemption, but in such a way as to suggest the danger of making man’s comfort the alpha and omega of Christianity.  The warning is needed, for we would undoubtedly enjoy making of the doctrine of justification a projection of our own wishes and desires, a postulate of our own distress.  But sola fide points the other way, towards God’s elective love in Jesus Christ who takes priority over all human desires.  This is why sola fide is theocentric, and therefore soteriological.  For the grace of God that bringeth salvation has appeared to all men (Titus 2:11).  This description of grace concludes with the expectation of the glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13).  Sola fide!  Soli Deo Gloria!14

Berkouwer saw a beautiful correspondence between the comfort of the sola fide and the objectivity of the Soli Deo Gloria.  They belong together, as they were united in the life of Abraham: “He did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God” (Rom. 4:20).

      The Reformation and an overdependence upon the letters of Paul?  Berkouwer faced the old question, “Did the Reformers establish a specifically Pauline gospel?”  He admitted that “it is undeniable ... that Paul’s letters played a peculiarly significant role in the Reformation.  In reading the sermons of the Reformation era one almost hears the voice of St. Paul.”15  Yet he maintained that the Reformation was concerned with the whole of Scripture, but the particular conditions of the Church in Europe in the early sixteenth century made the teaching of Paul a key by which to unlock the treasures in the rest of Scripture.  He repeated the common Protestant view that there is a remarkable correspondence “between Paul’s struggle against Judaism in both its gross and its refined work-righteousness and the Reformation struggle against human merit.”  He went on to affirm that “it was the gospel that reached its climax in Paul’s preaching which roused itself in the Reformation and shook off the shackles of the contrition and attrition technique, the system of penance, and the idea of merit which kept it bound during much of the Middle Ages.”16  But the doctrine of sola fide and sola gratia is not merely Pauline and is not one-sided.  It is presupposed and taught throughout all the New Testament.  If Luther did sometimes talk as though Paul’s letters were the only genuine parts of the New Testament, it has to be remembered that Calvin preached through all the books of the Bible, and the churches of the Reformation were committed to all the Scriptures and to the wholeness of the gospel of grace in all the parts.

      Paul’s sharp antithesis of righteousness through faith and not by works must be maintained but has been misunderstood.  Faith can never be a work, a kind of attitude or mental state which I bring to God in contrast to external achievements in terms of good works.  It is the absence of anything meritorious in myself as I look to the cross of Christ.  It is fiducia, trusting faith.  And it is not the ground of justification but the instrument (the channel or means) of justification.  The instrumental function of faith is to point and look to Christ alone.

      To think of faith as a kind of subjective righteousness produced in me by the external righteousness of Christ is also to misunderstand.  The “faith” reckoned for righteousness (Gen. 15:6) to which Paul (Rom. 4:3, 9, 22) makes reference is not a subjective righteousness.  “It was reckoned unto him for righteousness” is an abbreviation meaning that God reckons his own righteousness (poured out in Christ) to the person who looks to him in faith and on that basis pardons and accepts him.  “We are prohibited from abstracting a ‘subjective righteousness’ from the imputed righteousness of Christ, since it is precisely his righteousness with which faith is concerned.  Imputation of the righteousness of Christ does not mean that God takes due note of and makes proper response to a subjective righteousness possessed by Abraham and all believers.  It is the act of his grace in Christ.”17

      Only in the forensic concept of justification, taught by Paul and set out in the Protestant confessions, does the sola fide/sola gratia theme find its purest expression.  Therefore the synthetic character of justification must be emphasized as the authentic approach.  In the mid-1940s Berkouwer was conscious of powerful attempts to advance the analytical understanding, and he felt obliged to emphasize the traditional, Reformed, synthetic understanding.  In its defense and commendation of the forensic understanding, the Reformation pointed mankind to the free grace of God and thereby did not endanger but rescued commitment to holy living from misunderstanding and neglect.  (To the relation of justification and sanctification we shall return below.)

      Possible challenges to the “sola fide” understanding.  Does not Scripture teach that we shall be judged according to our works?  Berkouwer replied in the affirmative but went on to make a distinction between “works of the law” and “works of faith.”  He saw “works” as giving form to faith in real-life situations.  The actual doing of the will of God is proof that faith is genuine.  So judgment according to works is not an analytical ethical judgment but an infallible perception of works in their relation to faith.  As the Protestant confessions declare, good works arise from faith and aim at the glory of God.  Thus it is only the works of the law and not the works of faith which actually threaten the sola fide understanding of salvation.  True faith is related to freedom, and freedom is related to the guidance and fruit of the Spirit.

      Secondly; does not Scripture teach that there will be a future reward for works done here on earth?  Berkouwer faced this question very conscious of traditional Protestant opposition to the Roman Catholic doctrine of merit and reward.  Perhaps it may be said that he was so wrapped up in this traditional battle that his answer here was less convincing than with regard to judgment according to works.  He held that the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1–16) illuminated the relation of faith and rewards.  The generosity of God, as here illustrated, cannot be fitted into any strict system of justice and merit.  Thus all understanding of merit and reward must be conditioned by the priority of God’s grace and mercy.  Talk of merit and reward can suggest that God has an obligation to deliver compensation for human claims.  At this point the gospel of grace is no more.  He quoted Calvin with approval: “It appears beyond all doubt that the Lord rewards the works of believers with those blessings which he had already given them before their works were thought of, and while he had no reason for his beneficence but his own mercy” (Institutes, 111.18.2.).

      Rewards do not enter as a new phenomenon alongside divine mercy, for it is through God’s mercy that rewards make sense.  “The confession of God’s mercy is so broad and profound that it does not cramp the Christian hope for reward: it establishes it and gives it meaning.  Rewards and sola fide–sola gratia go well together.  It is he who has understood the significance of sola fide who is able to speak meaningfully of the relation between the works of faith and reward: he is guarded against the deceit of the human heart which threatens ever to substitute for this relation, grounded in God’s mercy, a correlation arranged outside the divine mercy, and through which the religion of faith in God’s sovereign grace is seriously endangered.”18  This is fine, but Berkouwer did not really face the question as to whether Christians are given greater or less rewards, no rewards or some rewards, insofar as they have allowed the divine mercy to work in and through them.

      Thirdly, is it not the case that St. James teaches the doctrine of justification by works and not by faith?  There is no need for us to follow Berkouwer’s exegesis of James 2, for he deals with it in a familiar Protestant manner.  He concludes by stating: “James’ point is this – true faith is not dead, empty or fruitless.  It is experienced in the daily reality of life.  Be James’s letter directed against whom it may, it is not aimed at Paul.”  He continued, “That this whole James vs. Paul affair could have arisen at all is only ascribable to a failure to distinguish between works of the law and the works of faith.”19  He regretted Luther’s widely publicized rejection of the letter of James and claimed that rightly understood this letter is a powerful call to true faith which results in works of faith.

      Justification and sanctification.  To establish the right connection between justification and sanctification is very important, claimed Berkouwer.  It is not a transition from theory to practice or from the sphere of faith to that of the practicalities of reality.  “The moment sanctification is ejected from the temple of faith, and hence of justification, that moment justification by faith has become an initial stage on the pilgrim’s journey, a supply-station which later becomes a pleasant memory!”20  The real connection between the two is sola fide.  This will become clear as we note how Berkouwer understood sanctification.

      The people of Israel may be described both as being sanctified by God and therefore to be sanctified.  The relation between God’s sanctification of Israel and the self-sanctification of Israel is not one of competition or of cooperation.  It is that of the divine initiative, setting apart and calling for the people to live as those set apart, followed by the response of Israel (a response always dependent on divine grace).  This is a harmonious correlation and is also seen in the New Testament.  The sanctification of the Church and of the believer are an implication of the sanctification that is already a fact in Christ by God’s mercy.  He is our sanctification.  Berkouwer opposed the attempt to state that in the relation of “already sanctified in Christ” and “yet to be sanctified” there is an antinomy (a paradox or contradiction).  The possibility of an antinomy is dispelled by the simple fact that the sanctification of the believer is a corollary of his faith.  Self-sanctification is the response of the man of faith to the call of God.  It is not the cooperation of the believer with God but the continuing obedience of faith to the word of God.  Rightly understood, sola fide does not result in antinomianism – “let us sin that grace may abound” – but in joyful submission to the will of God.  Sola fide is the glue that binds together sanctification and justification.  It is also that which challenges the concept of grace, merit and reward which is found in the decrees and canons of the Council of Trent.

      The nature of sanctification.  After a fair statement of John Wesley’s teaching on perfection and a commendation of his insistence on the sola fide in justification, Berkouwer found his doctrine of perfectionism to have illicit relations with synergism (= the “working together” of the human will and the grace of God) and with nomism (= legal rigorism).  Further, Wesley (and all perfectionists) misunderstood the significance of sola fide for the whole of the Christian life and experience.  Berkouwer accepted the teaching of the Heidelberg Catechism at Day 44.  The answer to the question, “Can those who are converted to God perfectly keep the commands?” is, “No; but even the holiest men, while in this life, have only small beginnings of this obedience; yet so, that with a sincere resolution they begin to live, not only according to some, but all the commands of God.”  He held that this position was the right way of understanding Romans 7:14–25, always a critical passage in the discussion of sin in the heart of the believer.  The believer is constantly in a battle against sin, and this battle has no ending in this life.  To see God more clearly is to see one’s sin more clearly.  “To speak of the Church is to speak of the struggle to remain children of God in communion with him and to live gratefully in virtue of the forgiveness of sins.  The life of sanctification proceeds in weakness, temptation and exposure to the powers of darkness....  Perfectionism is a premature seizure of the glory that will be: an anticipation leading irrevocably to nomism.”21

      Much of Berkouwer’s discussion of the origin and progress of sanctification is done in dialogue with the views of his illustrious predecessors Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) and Hermann Bavinck (1854–1921).  So it is not always very helpful or illuminating for the Anglo-Saxon reader.  But Berkouwer is insistent that “any view of regeneration, faith, and sanctification, must be weighed and tested by the criterion of whether it does justice to the forgiveness of sins as the only ground and source of sanctification.”22  He saw this truth clearly written into the Belgic Confession (Article 24), which states that it is faith which regenerates man and causes him to live a new life.  Sola fide is central in all thinking about justification, regeneration (birth from above) and sanctification (the progress in love of God and man).

      “Process” suggests an evolutionary development, and sanctification is not like that.  “Progress” also is not a perfect word, for the “progress” or “process” or sanctification is to be compared with no other progress or process, says Berkouwer.  So often analogies and metaphors have done violence to its special, unique character.  “For progress in sanctification never meant working out one’s own salvation under one’s own auspices; on the contrary, it meant working out one’s own salvation with a rising sense of dependence on God’s grace.”23  The latter is increased, said Berkouwer, by a right understanding and use of both the “imitation of Christ” and the “holy law of God” – themes which he carefully expounds.

      “Sola fide” and the perseverance of the saints.  We cannot delve deeply into Berkouwer’s study of perseverance, except to note that he has an illuminating study of the controversy of Calvinists with Remonstrants (Arminians), Roman Catholics, and Lutherans, and that the position he adopts is based on his confessions of faith.  But he is insistent that sola fide is significant for the understanding of perseverance.  “One can tread the road of perseverance only in faith, and the doctrine of perseverance is possible only in this faith.  That is because this faith is oriented to the faithfulness of God, apart from which any talk about our perseverance becomes mere gibberish.  Indeed, the doctrine of perseverance finds its only possibility and meaning in the faithfulness of God.”24

      It is probably true to claim that Berkouwer shows the clearest insight of any recent theologian into the function of sola fide in salvation.  For this reason alone he is worth reading carefully.  In that his exposition is so faithful to the Reformed confessions (interpreted according to the intention of their original authors) his writings tend to make the Reformed faith come alive for those who belong to its tradition rather than making converts to it.  If Barth may be called an original thinker, Berkouwer may be called an interpreter of the original thinking of the fathers of the Calvinistic churches.

 

Notes: Chapter 12

1.     Others whom I considered included Emil Brunner (see his Dogmatics), He1mut Thielecke (see his Theological Ethics and The Evangelical Faith), Reinhold Niebuhr (see his Nature and Destiny of Man) and T. F. Torrаnce (see his Theology in Reconstruction).

2.     For Tillich’s life and theology, see W. and M. Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought, New York, Harper & Row; London, Coins, 1977.  See also A. J. McKelway, The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich, 1964.

3.     Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, three volumes, Vol. 3, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1973–1976, p. 237.

4.     Ibid., p. 242.

5.     Ibid., p. 246.

6.     Ibid., p. 247.

7.     Ibid., p. 249.

8.     Ibid., p. 251.

9.     See David H. Freeman, Tillich, Phillippsburg, N. J., Presbyterian & Reformed, 1962 for a critical study of his view of God.

10.   See J. C. DeMoor, Towards a Biblically Theological Method A Structural Analysis and a Further Elaboration of Dr. G. C. Berkouwer’s Hermeneutic-Dogmatic Method, Kampen, Holland, 1980.

11.   See Berkouwer’s Studies in Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 3: Faith and Justification, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1954, pp. 26, 27.

12.   Ibid., p. 36.

13.   Ibid., p. 47.

14.   Ibid., p. 56.

15.   Ibid., p. 62.

16.   Ibid., p. 72.

17.   Ibid., p. 85.

18.   Ibid., p. 129.

19.   Ibid., pp. 137, 138.

20.   Op. cit., Vol. 1: Faith and Sanctification, 1952, p. 21.

21.   Ibid., pp. 66, 67.

22.   Ibid., p. 96.

23.   Ibid., p. 112.

24.   Op. cit., Berkouwer, Vol. 6: Faith and Perseverance, 1958, p. 79.

 

13 – Conclusion

      What is likely to happen in the near future is a general consensus among biblical scholars of all kinds as to the meaning of righteousness and justification in the Bible, especially in the Pauline letters.  In the light of centuries of disagreement this will be a great step forward.  It will not, however, be the end of the road.  Exegesis, we recall, is only the first part of hermeneutics!

      As Christians living in the latter part of the twentieth century, we have to ask whether we can see how what Paul taught the Galatian and Roman churches nineteen centuries ago as “Word of God” can also for us today be “Word of God.”  The oft-quoted observation of Tillich that justification by faith is so strange to modern man that there is scarcely any way of making it intelligible to him must be noted.  We have to ask ourselves: What form should the message of justification take today so that the meaning intended (by the Holy Spirit through Paul) originally as Word of God is the meaning conveyed by us today?  Obviously if we simply translate the findings of modern biblical theology into modern language, we are not interpreting.  People are going to read their own understanding of law, justice, law courts and so on into the words we use.  Thereby they will probably miss the meaning.  Is it possible, we may also ask, to develop a forensic concept of righteousness/justification today without someone telling us that it is a legal fiction?  Is there a way of doing it which does not leave the impression that justification is “just as if I had never sinned”?  Is there a way of presenting it which goes further than ideas of “acquittal” (= “case dismissed” or “not guilty”) and which truly leads into the richer idea of “judged to be, and actually set in, a right relationship with God”?  I have met little serious discussion of such matters.

      Obviously any teaching about justification has to be closely connected with our estimate of Jesus Christ – his person and his work.  It may be suggested here that the doctrine of justification by faith has lost ground (and become unintelligible?) in the churches partly because it has often been tightly bound to a penal, substitutionary doctrine of the atonement (with the emphasis on penal).  Many Christians find it hard to accept this particular theory, preferring some other – e.g., Christ as victor over death, sin, Satan – or holding to several theories.  The point is that if justification is inextricably tied to one particular theory of the atonement, then it can only be a viable way of talking about our relationship to God for those who find that theory satisfying or compelling.

      Also, we may note, explanations of justification have to be closely integrated into our understanding of what is the good news, the gospel of God.  Sometimes, regrettably, justification is presented as if it were the actual good news instead of the explanation of why the good news is the power of God unto salvation.  Preachers call upon people to “get right with God” in much the same way as they tell people “You must be born again.”  The fact of the matter is, of course, that no one can himself set his relationship with God right, and no one can cause the divine Spirit to enter his heart.  The gospel is about Jesus, the Christ, Savior and Lord, and about the kingdom of God.  Justification is the explanation of God’s saving activity which makes the gospel into good news.

      The meaning of sanctification in the Bible is much less a problem than righteousness.  Here we may say that there is a general consensus in the scholarly world.  There is division of opinion, though, in the interpretation of the theme for today – in particular over the question of “the second blessing” and related points.  But this debate assumes that God’s call to all Christians is that they grow in genuine love for God and for their fellow human beings.  Here it is necessary to state that sanctification has to be closely related to our estimate of Christ, to the way in which we understand and proclaim the good news, and finally and especially to the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church and individual.

      My own view is that if we are to continue to use the concepts of justification and sanctification, we need to present them alongside each other as two complementary metaphors – or better, two contemporary theological models.  By model I mean an illustrative analogy.  A model can be simple – e.g., God as King, judge, Father – or complex – e.g., God as Trinity.  A model is a thought-pattern which functions in a specific way, asking us to focus on one area of reality (relationship with God) by thinking about it in terms of another area of reality (a human situation or relationship).  Justification connects to our relationship with God and is based on the word of the judge in the Jewish law court; sanctification deals with our standing on God’s side and is based on the principle of holiness in the Temple of Jerusalem.

      Instead of speaking of justification followed by sanctification, or justification expressed in sanctification, or justification including sanctification, I suggest that we see justification and sanctification as complementary models whose truth should not be pressed into a logical or chronological relationship.  Each of the two can stand on its own, but the two together give a more rounded picture of our relationship with God.

 

Justification

      This pictures God as judge declaring that the believer is in a right relationship with himself (who is also Creator, Savior and Father).  The judge makes such a declaration because of (a) what he as Savior has done for the human race, and (b) the fact that the believer comes to him only as believer, offering no self-justification or excuses for sin, but longing only for divine mercy.  In terms of trinitarian belief we may say that God the Father declares the sinner to be in a right relationship with himself because he judges the sinner as believer to be united to the incarnate Son (who died and rose again for sinners), and because the sinner has been brought to such belief through the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the world.  The meaning may be set out in four statements:

The way of self-justification cannot ultimately be successful.

God’s justification is the only sure way of justification for sinners.

God’s justification in and through Christ alone is wholly free, and therefore only faith can receive it.

God’s justification brings inner freedom from the need for self-justification and releases the believer to love the neighbor for the sake of Christ.

This needs a little expansion.

      One way of seeing the nature and effects of sin in human beings is in terms of the principle of self-justification.  Have you noticed how often human beings engage in self-justification?  A child will justify itself to his mother or teacher because he or she hates to be blamed – whether guilty or not guilty.  A man or woman will use many words each day justifying himself, his existence, his actions, his past life and his general approach to life.  Sometimes strict justice requires some self-justification – e.g., when talking to one’s psychiatrist or doctor.  But most of the time self-justification is necessary only for the sake of the human ego and identity – in order that he or she may feel accepted by others in the society in which he lives and works.  Further, the craving for self-justification often leads to acute anxiety – a common problem in the Western world.

      Religious people are not exempt from the tendency to self-justification and the anxiety this can cause.  To believe in God does not of itself bring relief from this syndrome.  So many Christian people do really believe that their good acts of kindness and concern for others commend their persons to God.  They really believe that their regular attendance at worship and/or their financial support of the church (understood as building or people), their support of good causes, their readiness to help people in all kinds of need and much other activity beside, make them, however partially, acceptable to God.  They think that their service to others places them in a right relationship with their Creator.  Their service for others is not their problem!  It is the belief that such service contributes to their justification.  A key phrase in the story of the Pharisee and tax-collector is that the former was “willing to justify himself.”

      The point is that before God the judge there is no possible justification through presenting who I am and what I have achieved.  The person who truly believes is the person who does not even find the willingness (within his faith) to present any self-justification to God.  This is not to say that the Christian will not be tempted or will not ever lapse into the offering of his achievements to God in terms of self-justification.  Rather, it is to say that when the Christian is motivated by genuine faith he will offer absolutely nothing to God but instead will rely entirely on what God offers him in Christ.

      God justifies the ungodly and the unrighteous, for only such can be justified.  Those who are whole, or think themselves whole, have no immediate need of a physician, said Jesus.  Faith cannot arise in the heart of the person who persists in self-justification.  Faith is the absence of self-justification, or at least the recognition that self-justification will not avail with Almighty God.  To believe in him is to trust wholly in him as the God of mercy.

      It was the principle of self-justification in the leaders of Judaism that forced Jesus onto the cross of Calvary on that dark Friday.  They needed to prove that they were in the right, that they had the right interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, that they expected to be justified at the last day on account of their adherence to the Law of Moses.  Jesus, we may say, died to absorb their and our self-justification into God’s mercy without in any way impairing God’s justice.  He covered it with his cleansing blood.  God vindicated him as the Just One, as the One who did not deserve to die but who died for others and who died in our place.  God justified Jesus by the resurrection from the dead.  In his vindication and justification of Jesus, God acted justly; and because Jesus died and rose as the Second Adam, the Representative Man, God made full provision in him to justify all those who would be united to this same Jesus in faith by the Holy Spirit.

      God’s clear verdict of justification satisfies the craving of the human heart for justification.  The declaratory word of the Lord resounds in the hearts of those who believe, telling them that they are accepted, they do belong, they have meaning, and they are in a right relationship with their Creator and Redeemer.  In Christ they are justified, and so there is no further need for any more self-justification before God or the world.  They are free, set free from the bondage of the need for self-justification, in order to be able to serve others gladly and lovingly without wanting or desiring any recognition or reward.  The word of the Lord who is judge is a powerful and efficacious word, for what it declares it also creates in the human heart.

      It is at this point that the model of justification ceases to function as far as this life on earth is concerned (and so leaves open the use of other models to describe the Christian life).  It does, however, return to tell what happens at the last day, for the declaration of a right relationship now is made in anticipation of that declaration being made at the last Great Assize.  Thus justification is also a word of hope.

 

Sanctification

      The basic picture here is of the Jerusalem Temple filled with worshipers set apart for God.  We see the Lord in his eternal purity and apartness separating a people from the world, in order that they should draw near to him in worship and reflect his purity.  “Be holy, for I am holy,” says the Lord.  In terms of trinitarian belief, we may say that God the Father calls and sets apart a people and puts them on his side.  He does this through the work of the incarnate Son and by the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  The meaning may be set out in four statements.

The way of self-sanctification cannot ultimately be successful.

God’s sanctification is the only sure way of sanctification.

God’s sanctification in and through Christ is wholly free, and only faith can receive it.

God’s sanctification of our lives in space-time by the Holy Spirit requires the obedience of faith, dedication and commitment.

This needs a little expansion.

      Self-sanctification is perhaps less common in the West than it was; it is, however, no less real.  In those parts of the world where Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are dominant or prominent, the principle of self-sanctification is a common feature of religious practice.  Much the same was true, we are told, in the Christian world in the medieval centuries.  Religious people engage in self-sanctification when they work on the assumption that their religious duties – e.g., fasting, prayers, bodily discipline – can actually make them holy and thereby set them on God’s side.  Contemporary Christians engage in it when they think that because, for example, they read the Bible and pray every day they are thereby in some sense holy in God’s sight and estimation.

      God has provided complete sanctification in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.  He is the One who was, is, and will be forever entirely consecrated to and set apart for God.  Since he is our representative at the Father’s side, having first purged our sin, we are sanctified in him.  In him we sit at the right hand of the Father in Heaven.  Therefore, through him we offer our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to the Father.  Further, the Holy Spirit, bearing the name and characteristics of the exalted Jesus, actually works within us to make us in heart and life like Christ.  Thus we are sanctified in Christ by the Father, and we are being sanctified by the Holy Spirit for the glory of the Father.  The latter process is identical in principle but different in operation in the different personalities who by grace make up “the temple of the Holy Spirit,” “the household of faith,” “the body of Christ” and “the church of God.”

      Sanctification is a fuller description of the Christian’s relationship to God than justification, for it not only implies but also relates explicitly to the moral life of the believing community.  And again it has reference to the last day, for on that occasion the Church of God will be presented as sanctified by Christ through the Holy Spirit.

 

Epilogue

      It would be possible to describe that which God achieves through the gospel without reference to justification and sanctification.  Other models could be used to highlight the position of the believer in relation to his Creator and Redeemer.  There is the Pauline theme of reconciliation which has all kinds of possibilities for being a powerful contemporary theological model.  Then there are the various Johannine pictures – e.g., the vine and the branches – and the general theme in the Gospels of forgiveness or remission of sin.

      In Protestant theology over the centuries, the basic model of justification has been enriched or expanded by incorporation into it of other models – e.g., of forgiveness and adoption.  Likewise, the model of sanctification has been expanded or modified by the incorporation of such models as “born of God” and “the leading of the Spirit.”  This is a viable method as long as we realize what we are doing and why.

      I tend to think of the various theologies of the New Testament – the Matthean, Markan, Lukan, Johannine, Pauline, Petrine, etc. – as the seven colors of the rainbow.  Each color is independent and quite able to stand alone with integrity.  Yet together all make the rainbow.  There are individual theologies in the New Testament, and each one has its own particular metaphors, symbols and models, together with others which occur in more than one of the books.  All the theologies together, all the books, constitute the Word of God, the New Testament.  So what we find there is a collection or cluster of models which describe the relationship of the Christian and the Church to God – sanctification, justification, reconciliation, forgiveness, regeneration and so on.  Each of these highlights one or another aspect of our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us.  All together they illumine the mystery of salvation, a reality which is not amenable to final, literal description.  Contemporary theology can take one or more of these biblical models and interpret it/them in a way that makes sense in the modern world.  Or it can learn from that which all or most highlight and illuminate and then on the basis of this knowledge construct modern-day models which serve to highlight the same kind of meaning for today.

      It will be very interesting to note whether the theme of justification once again becomes a powerful theological model in the churches for describing the relationship of God to the believer and the believer to God.

 

Bibliography

Biblical

Betz, H. D., Commentary on Galations (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1979).

Brown, Colin, ed., Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Exeter & Grand Rapids: Paternoster & Zondervan, 1977).

Cranfield, C. E. B., Commentary on Romans (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1979).

Guthrie, Donald, Theology of the New Testament (Leicester & Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1981).

Käsemann, Ernst, Commentary on Romans (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980).

Reumann, John, Righteousness in the New Testament (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1983).

Ridderbos, Hermann, Paul. An Outline of His Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).

Sanders, E. P, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1977).

Zeisler, J. A., The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (Cambridge: University Press, 1970).

 

Historical and Contemporary

1. Primary

Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars edition, Vol. 30 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971).

Augustine of Hippo, “On the Spirit and the Letter,” in Augustine’s Later Works, J. Burnaby, ed. (Philadephia: Westminster Press, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. 8, 1980).

Berkouwer, G. C. B., Faith and Justification (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954).

Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, Library of Christian Classics, Vols. 20, 21, 1980).

Cochrane, Arthur, ed., Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (Philadephia: Westminster Press, 1966).

Heppe, Heinrich, ed., Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978).

Luther, Martin, Three Reformation Treatises (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1960).

Newman, J. H., Lectures on Justification (London: Rivingtons, 1838).

Schaff, P., ed., Creeds of Christendom (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977).

Schmaus, Michael, Dogma 6: Justification (London: Sheed & Ward, 1977).

Tappert, T. C. ed., The Book of Concord (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1959)

Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, Vol. 3. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

Wesley, John, Forty-four Sermons (London: Epworth Press, 1956).

 

2. Secondary

Althaus, Paul, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966).

Bonner, Gerald, St Augustine of Hippo (London: SCM Press, 1960).

Cannon, W. R., The Theology of John Wesley (New York: Abingdon, 1946).

Haight, Roger, The Experience and Language of Grace (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979).

Kelly, J.N.D., Early Christian Doctrines (London: A & C Black, 1978).

Wendel, Francois: Calvin (London and New York: Wm. Collins and Harper & Row, 1963).

 

Previous Section    Toon Home