Reformation & Justification

The most important question any of us face is, How can I be right with God? The question assumes several things, of course. It assumes that we are not right with God and that we need to be. It assumes that we are sinners, that God is the judge, that we are accountable to him, that there is a final judgment, and so on. But given those assumptions, this is life’s most important question: How can we be right with God? In biblical terminology, the question is, How can we be justified ? “Justified” means “declared righteous.” It is a term that has legal connotations. It envisions a courtroom – in this case, a courtroom where God is the judge and we are the accused. Standing before God the judge the big question is, How can he declare us to be righteous? The question is complicated by the fact that God is a righteous judge – a just judge. We are unjust, unrighteous, and the question at issue is, How can he, the righteous judge declare us to be righteous when in fact we are unrighteous? It’s a tough question and a real problem.

Justification is declaring righteous. It is the pronouncement of the judge. It’s the atmosphere of the law court where God is pictured as the judge, we are the accused, and the verdict is rendered, and the verdict is “not guilty.” Righteous. He’s kept the law. That’s justification. It’s the courtroom atmosphere. Very important to keep that in mind as we go along.

All right, we have said that justification is God’s declarative judgment. It’s the declaration of the court. It’s the declaration of the judge pronouncing the accused to be righteous. That’s what justification is. It doesn’t mean he makes us righteous. We often deal with that subject under the topic of sanctification. Justification has to do with our legal standing before God. When God the judge looks at us and declares us—though accused, and though in fact sinful—he declares us to be righteous. As we saw in Romans 4 and verse 5, he justifies ungodly people.

If we’re justified by faith, we can’t brag about it. That’s what he’s saying here. In fact, he is saying here, not only does justification by faith maintain grace, but it also upholds the law. At the same time, justification by faith maintains that it is by grace, and at the same time upholds the law in its demands. And this is the axis of the gospel, if you will. On the one hand, it must be by grace. We cannot contribute anything. On the other hand, God’s just demands must be upheld. And Paul is saying here that justification by faith does both. It maintains grace, and it upholds the demands of the law, and therefore, it excludes boasting. At the end of saying, “I have been justified by faith alone,” I have nothing to brag about.

Now I want you to see how Paul reasons that way in Romans 4 verse 16. “That is why it depends”—this is Romans 4:16—”that is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace.” You see that? You see the logic? It depends on faith in order that the promise may rest on grace. It depends on faith, so that it may depend on grace. His point here has to do with the nature of saving faith. It’s by faith, so that it may be by grace. So faith is the suitable means because it’s consistent with grace. Faith is the suitable means because it maintains that Christ has done the work. It’s not a work. Faith is not a work for which we’ve been rewarded. God doesn’t look at us and say, “Well, they’re good believers. Let’s save them.” Faith is not a doing. Faith is just trusting in what God has done. And in that sense, faith both maintains grace and upholds God’s righteous demands that are met in the object of our faith, Jesus.

What we have here in verses 8 through 10 is what is summarized so well in the famous watchwords of the Reformation—the Latin phrases, the only Latin some of you may know, right? But you’ve heard these: Solus Christus , Christ alone; Sola Gratia , by grace alone; Sola Fide , by faith alone; Soli Deo Gloria , to God alone be the glory. And that, in essence, is what this passage is all about. Christ has done all of the work of salvation, and necessarily, then, it comes to us by grace alone. And if by grace alone, then by faith alone, so that in the end, God alone will be praised for it.

It’s not on the ground of our faith; it’s on the ground of Christ. But faith is the instrumental means of justification in that through faith, we receive Jesus, who is for us the righteousness that God requires. Now these are fine distinctions, but they’re very important. Because it’s important for us to understand that on one level you can say it is faith that saves, but on the narrowest level, it is Christ who saves, and we have Christ through faith. That’s an important distinction.

First, justification is everywhere said to be “by faith” ( pistei [simple dative of means] , ek pisteos, epi pistei, dia pisteos ; Rom. 1:16; 3:22, 26, 28, 30; 5:1; Gal. 2:16; Phil. 3:9; etc.). These expressions indicate plainly that faith is the instrumental (but not the meritorious) cause of justification. The meritorious cause of justification is the redemptive work of Christ. Faith is the means, the instrumental cause. Justification is by grace through faith.

This is very important to answer a question that’s commonly asked by Christians. You may be one who’s asked it: “I know that I’m a sinner. I know that I’m condemned without Jesus and I’m trusting in Jesus, but I wonder if my faith is strong enough.” You ever ask that? And you see, again, it’s the wrong question. The question is not: Is your faith strong enough? The question is: Is the one in whom you are trusting able to save? And a very strong faith in a weak Savior won’t do you anything. But even a weak faith in a strong Savior is all you need. The value of faith is its object.

But there is more. Because Christ is in our place, in justifying us God not only pardons our sins – he also declares us righteous. Justification is a positive declaration that, having examined the evidence, we are declared before the court to be, in fact, righteous. Justification declares that we have done all that we ought to have done, that before the law we have not sinned. How is that? At the cross there was a great exchange. Jesus Christ “the righteous” (1Jn.2:1) took our sin, and in exchange gave us his righteousness. This is the doctrine of imputation – our sin put on Christ’s account and his righteousness put on our account. God condemned Christ, his own Son, the sin-bearer, in our place, and now he accepts us as sons in his Son. He declares us righteous because of the righteousness of Christ given to us. Normally in a court proceeding a person is “justified” after it is shown that he has not broken the law, or when there is a lack of evidence that he has broken the law. In our case before God we have in fact broken the law – we are guilty, and the evidence is overwhelming. But to answer the problem Christ both takes our punishment and gives us the righteousness that the divine court requires. Necessarily, our justification entails imputation – the counting of Christ’s righteousness to be ours.

Again, it’s a bookkeeping term. Righteousness, the righteousness that we don’t have, is credited to us freely as a gift. So now suddenly this righteousness that we owe to God by our obedience, being under his law, is not something in the end we give to him. He doesn’t say, “Okay, you’ve done well, I’ll pronounce you righteous.” What he does is he gives us the righteousness he requires of us. And on that ground, he pronounces us righteous.

And so in order to justify us, God gave us his Son; he stood in our place; he made our sin his, and he made his righteousness ours. And because we have no less than the righteousness of Jesus Christ credited to our account, on the ground of the unassailable righteousness of Jesus, God declares us to be righteous. And he does so righteously.

So Abraham also was justified by faith and not by works. Now this is an important one for the Apostle Paul. In fact, many of the Jewish rabbis had argued that Abraham was justified by his faith or by his faithfulness and by his obedience and works. Paul pulls it out. What does Genesis say? Genesis—Moses tells us—Abraham was justified by faith. He believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. This is an important argument. If he can establish that even Abraham is justified by faith and not by works, well then surely everyone is justified only by faith and not by works.

There’s another thing startling here when he says God justifies the ungodly, and that is he’s talking about Abraham. You see that? How many of you refer to Abraham as ungodly? Now, to be sure here, his perspective is broader here, but Abraham is his proof text to demonstrate that God justifies the ungodly. So after all of this, Abraham believed God, but he in himself is still ungodly. And God justifies him by faith. Now that’s essential to Paul’s point here. Justification does not stem from so much of my obedience. It does not stem from obedience or law-keeping on our part, our good works of any kind. It is based on faith. Now it flies in the face of the rabbinic interpretations in Paul’s day. We have some of the rabbinic writings from the day, and they will deal with this justification of Abraham, but the approach is entirely different. “Abraham obeyed God. Of course he was justified. Look at Mount Moriah, Genesis 22. He obeyed God. He was justified.” Paul says no. He was justified by faith, proving that God justifies the ungodly.

So Luther discovered: I do not improve to the point where God finally accepts me. God just gives me Jesus. He declares me righteous by virtue of the fact that I have a perfect substitute. Luther’s mantra became the Latin Christus pro me : Christ for me. Christ for me. Christ for me. That is to say, it is not my pains that make up for my sins. It’s his pains that make up for my sins. It’s not my righteousness that I give to God. It is his righteousness he gives me by virtue of my association with Jesus simply by faith. And I have in him everything that God requires of me.

Luther’s famous affirmation—this became what characterizes the very heart of Reformation theology—is that we are simul justus et peccator . We are at the same time righteous and a sinner. How in the world can that be? I’ve not attained righteousness. I’ve not improved to the point that God accepts me. I’m a sinner—I’m peccator , a sinner. And yet I am righteous as well. How’s that? Because God views me now through my faith union with Jesus Christ. God sees me as in him and clothed with his righteousness. I am at the same time sinner and righteous. And in fact, he went on to say, we are semper iustus et peccator , always righteous and a sinner. As I am in myself, all I will ever be is a sinner. But standing before God in Jesus Christ, I’m righteous. What a liberating thought.

Few moments in the history of the church compare to what we have in the 16th-century Reformation: the championing of several doctrines of the faith, one that I’ve already mentioned, sola scriptura . Scripture alone—that is our guide, not the traditions of the church and not anything else, but Scripture itself is our guide, and it must be the sole standard by which we judge all matters of faith and practice. Another matter articulated in the Reformation was the individual priesthood of believers, rescuing men and women from the slavery to a religious system that left men and women looking to a priest or looking to a church for their access to God, and showing them that now the soul can have immediate access to God through Christ, our high priest. We are individual priests before God. But above everything else, and actually underlying everything else in the Reformation, is the recovery of the Christian gospel itself. In medieval Roman Catholic theology, the simple gospel of justification by grace through faith alone had been lost. And it was in the life experience of Martin Luther that that doctrine becomes highlighted through his own experience and through his own teaching. And it’s a story well worth repeating to sharpen understanding and our appreciation of this central doctrine of the faith: justification by grace through faith alone.

The last time we saw the experience of Martin Luther coming to understand, in his own experience, the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone. We saw it primarily in Romans chapter 1, verse 17, where Luther came to learn—which is expounded elsewhere in the New Testament many times over—that righteousness, in terms of our salvation, righteousness is not something we render to God. We don’t give him so much righteousness and then he rewards us for it. But in justification, righteousness is something God gives us. And he gives it to us freely in Jesus Christ, whom we embrace by faith alone. And this was the good news that the Reformation was beginning to preach. We saw it captured in Luther’s slogan, Christus pro me , Christ for me. It is not my works, it’s Jesus’ works that save. It’s not my pains, it’s his pains. It’s not my righteousness, it’s his righteousness. And all this God gives me, received by faith alone. And this was good news for sinners. And this was at the heart then of the Protestant Reformation.

Roman Catholic teaching—and this was the time of Martin Luther; it’s the same today—justification was not a legal acquittal from a judge, but an achieved condition on your part. It’s not a legal acquittal, and you get this distinction; it’s very important. It’s not a legal acquittal from the judge, pronouncing you righteous because of the righteousness of Christ imputed to you and considered to be yours, but rather justification in Roman Catholic theology is an achieved condition on your part. You’re recognized as righteous in the end because you yourself have accomplished a sufficient degree of righteousness that God then recognizes and pronounces you righteous then. So it’s not a legal declaration, but a personal assessment that God makes. If you are righteous, then you will be justified in Roman Catholic theology.

This became important, of course, at the time of the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church, in its theology still today, confuses justification with sanctification. Righteousness or justification—righteousness is something that is infused, infused at baptism. So you become righteous. You’re not declared righteous, you become righteous through the grace that is ministered through the waters of baptism. And then you improve that righteousness that has been given to you until finally you’re accepted before God. And so in the Roman Catholic view, my righteousness forms the ground of my justification before God. Reformers came along and said, “No, no, no, look at verse five. God justifies the ungodly.”

True religion is all about faith, and the Christian gospel is all about grace, and all about faith, and it’s all about Christ alone. But as it’s been said since the Reformation, the faith by which we are justified is not alone. It works. The faith by which we are justified is not alone. It works. And that in sum is what James is saying in this passage. And in fact, as we’ve already seen, that in fact is the theme of James’ letter. He’s writing to tell us that real faith has earmarks. There are ways you can tell if it’s genuine. You can tell it by a transformed life. And he brings up one practical example after another, and that’s the letter of James, to show how faith works.

Now, we’ve got to be careful how to understand this, though. James is not discounting faith. He’s not saying faith doesn’t matter. He’s not saying you can be saved by works alone. He’s discounting a certain kind of faith. And that is a kind of faith that has no works. A faith that doesn’t produce anything and doesn’t change the life. So he’s contrasting here a professed faith which is barren and therefore useless, with a genuine faith which produces works and therefore proves to be genuine. Genuine faith, he tells us, may be expressed with the mouth, of course, but it doesn’t stop there. Genuine faith shows itself in the rest of life.

Broadly speaking, Paul is dealing with—in the main, Paul is having to battle legalists, those who think you’re saved by your works. And Paul has to hammer away at salvation by grace alone, through faith alone. It is not by works. James is not dealing with the legalist, who thinks he’s saved by his works. He’s dealing with the antinomian, who thinks works don’t matter at all, and they have no place, and it has no bearing on my faith. Paul deals with that as well, and at that point they are agreed. In the main, they have different emphases, but again, they’re standing not face-to-face fighting each other, but back-to-back fighting off different enemies.

Is justification by grace through faith alone a new doctrine? Did the Reformers invent it? Did the early church have such a doctrine? Did the church fathers teach it? You have probably heard that justification by faith is not to be found in the patristics, but Thomas Oden wants to correct your thinking on this score. His Justification Reader is given to show that the apostolic doctrine of justification as commonly understood by all Protestants was indeed taught by the pre-European, pre-modern, pre-medieval – “classical” – exegetes of the church. Oden examines the writings of the outstanding figures of the church’s important first five centuries and gathers his findings under three primary headings: Part 1: Justification Part 2: By Grace Alone Part 3: By Faith Alone Oden demonstrates on all scores – salvation as rescue, justification as a declarative pronouncement of righteousness, substitution, the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, grace, faith – that the early church was not by any means bereft of this doctrine which in the medieval era was obscured and which the Reformers then recovered.

I am no expert on Augustine, but with that humble confession out in the open I will say that the book did leave me questioning whether Augustine truly shares the “common” doctrine of justification in its Reformed understanding. Specifically, I am not aware that Augustine taught a doctrine of alien righteousness imputed to the believing sinner. To be sure, Augustine was monergistic to the bone and could therefore speak of righteousness “from God” and believed in justification “by grace.” But, according to Augustine, is the righteousness that constitutes us “right” before God external or internal? Warfield insightfully observed that the Reformation was, in a sense, Augustine versus Augustine, and my suspicion is that this is a case in point. In this case I suspect, against Oden’s protest, that McGrath ( Iustitia Dei ) is right to say that Luther had to correct Augustine. At any rate, I would be curious to have someone demonstrate that Augustine did, in fact, understand and teach the imputation of the “alien” righteousness of Christ to the believing sinner as the ground of justification.