http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/sola-fide-the-reformed-doctrine-of-justification/?utm_source=StandFirm&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=link
Sola Fide: The Reformed Doctrine of Justification
by J.I. Packer
“The confession of divine justification touches man’s life at its heart, at the point of its relationship to God. It defines the preaching of the Church, the existence and progress of the life of faith, the root of human security, and man’s perspective for the future.”1 So wrote G. C. Berkhouwer of the doctrine of justification by faith set forth by Paul and reapprehended with decisive clarity at the Reformation; and in so writing he showed himself a true heir of the Reformers. For his statement is no more, just as it is no less, than a straightforward spelling out of what Luther had meant when he called justification by faith articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae-the point of belief which determines (not politically or financially, but theologically and spiritually) whether the Church stands or falls.
With Luther, the Reformers saw all Scripture as being, in the last analysis, either law or gospel—meaning by “law” all that exposes our ruin through sin and by “gospel” everything that displays our restoration by grace through faith—and the heart of the biblical gospel was to them God’s free gift of righteousness and justification. Here was the sum and substance of that sola fide—sola gratia—solo Christo—Sola Scriptura—soli Deo gloria which was the sustained theme of their proclamation, polemics, praises and prayers. And to their minds (note well!) proclamation, polemics, praise, and prayer belonged together, just as did the five Latin slogans linked above as epitomizing their message. Justification by faith, by grace, by Christ, through Scripture, to the glory of God was to them a single topic, just as a fugue with several voices is a single piece. This justification was to them not theological speculation but a religious reality, apprehended through prayer by revelation from God via the Bible. It was a gift given as part of God’s total work of love in saving us, a work which leads us to know God and ourselves as both really are—something which the unbelieving world does not know. And to declare and defend God’s justification publicly as the only way of life for any man was at once an act of confessing their faith, of glorifying their God by proclaiming his wonderful work, and of urging others to approach him in penitent and hopeful trust just as they did themselves.
So, where Rome had taught a piecemeal salvation, to be gained by stages through working a sacramental treadmill, the Reformers now proclaimed a unitary salvation, to be received in its entirety here and now by self-abandoning faith in God’s promise, and in the God and the Christ of that promise, as set forth in the pages of the Bible. Thus the rediscovery of the gospel brought a rediscovery of evangelism, the task of summoning non-believers to faith. Rome had said, God’s grace is great, for through Christ’s cross and his Church salvation is possible for all who will work and suffer for it; so come to church, and toil! But the Reformers said, God’s grace is greater, for through Christ’s cross and his Spirit salvation, full and free, with its unlimited guarantee of eternal joy, is given once and forever to all who believe; so come to Christ, and trust and take!
It was this conflict with the mediaeval message that occasioned the fivefold “only” in the slogans quoted above. Salvation, said the Reformers, is by faith (man’s total trust) only, without our being obliged to work for it; it is by grace (God’s free favor) only, without our having to earn or deserve it first; it is by Christ the God-man only, without there being need or room for any other mediatoral agent, whether priest, saint, or virgin; it is by Scripture only, without regard to such unbiblical and unfounded extras as the doctrines of purgatory and of pilgrimages, the relic-cult and papal indulgences as devices for shortening one’s stay there; and praise for salvation is due to God only, without any credit for his acceptance of us being taken to ourselves. The Reformers made these points against unreformed Rome, but they were well aware that in making them they were fighting over again Paul’s battle in Romans and Galatians against works, and in Colossians against unauthentic traditions, and the battle fought in Hebrews against trust in any priesthood or mediation other than that of Christ. And (note again!) they were equally well aware that the gospel of the five “onlies” would always be contrary to natural human thinking, upsetting to natural human pride, and an object of hostility to Satan, so that destructive interpretations of justification by faith in terms of justification by works (as by the Judaizers of Paul’s day, and the Pelagians of Augustine’s, and the Church of Rome both before and after the Reformation, and the Arminians within the Reformed fold, and Bishop Bull among later Anglicans) were only to be expected. So Luther anticipated that after his death the truth of justification would come under fresh attack and theology would develop in a way tending to submerge it once more in error and incomprehension; and throughout the century following Luther’s death Reformed theologians, with Socinian and other rationalists in their eye, were constantly stressing how radically opposed to each other are the “gospel mystery” of justification and the religion of the natural man. For justification by works is, in truth, the natural religion of mankind, and has been since the Fall, so that, as Robert Traill, the Scottish Puritan, wrote in 1692, “all the ignorant people that know nothing of either law or gospel,” “all proud secure sinners,” “all formalists,” and “all the zealous devout people in a natural religion,” line up together as “utter enemies to the gospel.” That trio of theological relatives—Pelagianism, Arminianism, and Romanism—appear to Traill as bastard offspring of natural religion fertilized by the gospel. So he continued: “The principles of Arminianism are the natural dictates of a carnal mind, which is enmity both to the law of God, and to the gospel of Christ; and, next to the dead sea of Popery (into which also this stream runs), have, since Pelagius to this day, been the greatest plague of the Church of Christ, and it is like will be till his second coming.”2—a point of view entirely in line with that of Luther and his reforming contemporaries a century and a half before. And all study of non-Christian faiths since the time of Luther and Traill has confirmed their biblically based conviction that salvation by self-effort IS a principle that the fallen human mind takes for granted.
It has been common since Melanchthon to speak of justification by faith as the material principle of the Reformation, corresponding to biblical authority as its formal principle. That is right. Of all the Reformers’ many biblical elucidations, the rediscovery of justification as a present reality, and of the nature of the faith which secures it, was undoubtedly the most formative and fundamental. For the doctrine of justification by faith is like Atlas. It bears a whole world on its shoulders, the entire evangelical knowledge of God the Saviour. The doctrines of election, of effectual calling, regeneration, and repentance, of adoption, of prayer, of the Church, the ministry, and the sacraments, are all to be interpreted and understood in the light of justification by faith, for this is how the Bible views them. Thus, we are taught that God elected men from eternity in order that in due time they might be justified through faith in Christ (Rom. 8:29f.). He renews their hearts under the Word, and draws them to Christ by effectual calling, in order that he might justify them upon their believing. Their adoption as God’s sons follows upon their justification; it is, indeed, no more than the positive outworking of God’s justifying sentence. Their practice of prayer, of daily repentance, and of good works springs from their knowledge of justifying grace (cf. Luke 18:9-14; Eph. 2:8-10). The Church is to be thought of as the congregation of the faithful, the fellowship of justified sinners, and the preaching of the Word and ministration of the sacraments are to be understood as means of grace because through them God evokes and sustains the faith that justifies. A right view of these things is possible only where there is a proper grasp of justification; so that, when justification falls, true knowledge of God’s grace, in human life falls with it. When Atlas loses his footing, everything that rested on his shoulders collapses too.
A study of the expositions of justification in the works of the Reformers and the church confessions produced under their leadership in Germany, France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Britain reveals such unanimity that the material may be generalized about as a single whole. The main points stressed are these:
1. The need of justification. The biblical frame of reference, within which alone justification can be understood and apart from which it remains, in the strictest sense, unintelligible, is created, said the Reformers, by two realities: human sin, which is universal, and divine judgment, which is inescapable. The basic fact is that the God who made us intends to take account of us, measuring us by his own standards, and from his imminent inquisition nothing can shield us. All stand naked and open before the searcher of hearts, and all must prepare to meet their God. But that being so, all hope is gone; for, being morally and spiritually perverse throughout, we are forced to recognize that in God’s eyes we are hopelessly and helplessly guilty, justly subject to his condemning sentence and to that judicial rejection which the Bible calls his wrath. The pride which prompts us to rail at this judgment as unjust is itself part of the perversity which makes it just. Anyone who knows anything of his own inner corruption and of the holiness of his Judge will find Luther’s question, “How may I find a gracious God?,” rising in his heart unbidden but to this question the unaided human mind can find no answer. To persons convicted of sin, efforts for self-justification appear as the abortive products of self-ignorance; those who have become realistic about themselves see clearly that there is no road that way. Luther in the monastery sought perfect contrition (sorrow for sin, out of love for God), without which, so the theology of his day told him, there was no forgiveness. No man ever worked harder than Luther to make himself love God, but he could not do it. When, later, Luther said that Romans was written to “magnify sin,”3 what he meant was that Romans aims to induce a realistic awareness of moral and spiritual inability, and so create the self-despair which is the anteroom of faith in Christ.
When the Reformers insisted that the law must prepare for the gospel, this was what they meant. Conviction of sin, springing from God-given self-knowledge, is, they said, a necessary precondition for understanding justification, for it alone makes faith possible. The Augsburg Confession of 1531 states: “… this whole doctrine [of justification] must be related to the conflict of an alarmed conscience, and without that conflict it cannot be grasped. So persons lacking this experience, and profane men, are bad judges of this matter.”4 Calvin makes the same point in lnstitutio IILxii, a chapter on the theme that justification must be studied in the solemnizing light of God’s judgment-seat.5 And John Owen preserves this perspective when at the start of his classic treatise, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith(1677), he writes:
And again:
Luther would have graduated Owen summa cum laude for that.
2. The meaning of justification. What justification is, said the Reformers, must be learned from Paul, its great New Testament expositor, who sees it clearly and precisely as a judicial act of God pardoning and forgiving our sins, accepting us as righteous, and instating us as his sons. Following Augustine, who studied the Bible in Latin and was partly misled by the fact that justificare, the Latin for Paul’s κ, naturally means “make righteous,” the Mediaevals had defined justification as pardon plus inner renewal, as the Council of Trent was also to do; but the Reformers saw that the Pauline meaning of κ, is strictly forensic. So, Calvin defines justification as “acceptance, whereby God receives us into his favour and regards us as righteous; and we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.”7 Justification is decisive for eternity, being in effect the judgment of the last day brought forward. Its source is God’s grace, his initiative in free and sovereign love, and its ground is the merit and satisfaction that is, the obedient sin-bearing death-of Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Son.8
Behind Calvin’s phrase, “the imputation of the righteousness of Christ,” lies the characteristic “Christ-and-his-people” Christology which was the center of reference-the hub of the wheel, we might say-of the Reformers’ entire doctrine of grace. The concern of this Christology, as of the New Testament Christology which molded it, is soteriological, and its key-thought is participation through exchange. This idea is spelled out as follows. The Son of God came down from heaven in order to bring us to share with him the glory to which he has now returned. By incarnation he entered into solidarity with us, becoming through his Father’s appointment the last Adam, the second head of the race, acting on our behalf in relation to God. As man, he submitted to the great and decisive exchange set forth in II Corinthians 5: 21: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” “This,” said Luther, “is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners, wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s, and the righteousness of Christ is not Christ’s but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it, and fill us with it; and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them. So that now the righteousness of Christ is ours not only objectively (as they term it) but formally also”—that is, it is not only an ontological reality, “there” for our benefit in some general sense, but actually imparts to us the “form,” i.e., the characteristic, of being righteous in God’s sight.9 Our sins were reckoned (imputed) to Christ, so that he bore God’s judgment on them, and in virtue of this his righteousness is reckoned ours, so that we are pardoned, accepted, and given a righteous man’s status for his sake. Christians in themselves are sinners who never fully meet the law’s demands; nonetheless, says Luther, “they are righteous because they believe in Christ, whose righteousness covers them and is imputed to them.10 On this basis, despite all the shortcomings of which they are conscious, believers may be sure of eternal salvation, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And this, said the Reformers, is what it means to know Christ; for we do not know him, however much else we may know about him, till we see him as Christ pro nobis, dying, rising, and reigning for us as our gracious Saviour.
For the rest, see: http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/sola-fide-the-reformed-doctrine-of-justification/?utm_source=StandFirm&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=link
With Luther, the Reformers saw all Scripture as being, in the last analysis, either law or gospel—meaning by “law” all that exposes our ruin through sin and by “gospel” everything that displays our restoration by grace through faith—and the heart of the biblical gospel was to them God’s free gift of righteousness and justification. Here was the sum and substance of that sola fide—sola gratia—solo Christo—Sola Scriptura—soli Deo gloria which was the sustained theme of their proclamation, polemics, praises and prayers. And to their minds (note well!) proclamation, polemics, praise, and prayer belonged together, just as did the five Latin slogans linked above as epitomizing their message. Justification by faith, by grace, by Christ, through Scripture, to the glory of God was to them a single topic, just as a fugue with several voices is a single piece. This justification was to them not theological speculation but a religious reality, apprehended through prayer by revelation from God via the Bible. It was a gift given as part of God’s total work of love in saving us, a work which leads us to know God and ourselves as both really are—something which the unbelieving world does not know. And to declare and defend God’s justification publicly as the only way of life for any man was at once an act of confessing their faith, of glorifying their God by proclaiming his wonderful work, and of urging others to approach him in penitent and hopeful trust just as they did themselves.
So, where Rome had taught a piecemeal salvation, to be gained by stages through working a sacramental treadmill, the Reformers now proclaimed a unitary salvation, to be received in its entirety here and now by self-abandoning faith in God’s promise, and in the God and the Christ of that promise, as set forth in the pages of the Bible. Thus the rediscovery of the gospel brought a rediscovery of evangelism, the task of summoning non-believers to faith. Rome had said, God’s grace is great, for through Christ’s cross and his Church salvation is possible for all who will work and suffer for it; so come to church, and toil! But the Reformers said, God’s grace is greater, for through Christ’s cross and his Spirit salvation, full and free, with its unlimited guarantee of eternal joy, is given once and forever to all who believe; so come to Christ, and trust and take!
It was this conflict with the mediaeval message that occasioned the fivefold “only” in the slogans quoted above. Salvation, said the Reformers, is by faith (man’s total trust) only, without our being obliged to work for it; it is by grace (God’s free favor) only, without our having to earn or deserve it first; it is by Christ the God-man only, without there being need or room for any other mediatoral agent, whether priest, saint, or virgin; it is by Scripture only, without regard to such unbiblical and unfounded extras as the doctrines of purgatory and of pilgrimages, the relic-cult and papal indulgences as devices for shortening one’s stay there; and praise for salvation is due to God only, without any credit for his acceptance of us being taken to ourselves. The Reformers made these points against unreformed Rome, but they were well aware that in making them they were fighting over again Paul’s battle in Romans and Galatians against works, and in Colossians against unauthentic traditions, and the battle fought in Hebrews against trust in any priesthood or mediation other than that of Christ. And (note again!) they were equally well aware that the gospel of the five “onlies” would always be contrary to natural human thinking, upsetting to natural human pride, and an object of hostility to Satan, so that destructive interpretations of justification by faith in terms of justification by works (as by the Judaizers of Paul’s day, and the Pelagians of Augustine’s, and the Church of Rome both before and after the Reformation, and the Arminians within the Reformed fold, and Bishop Bull among later Anglicans) were only to be expected. So Luther anticipated that after his death the truth of justification would come under fresh attack and theology would develop in a way tending to submerge it once more in error and incomprehension; and throughout the century following Luther’s death Reformed theologians, with Socinian and other rationalists in their eye, were constantly stressing how radically opposed to each other are the “gospel mystery” of justification and the religion of the natural man. For justification by works is, in truth, the natural religion of mankind, and has been since the Fall, so that, as Robert Traill, the Scottish Puritan, wrote in 1692, “all the ignorant people that know nothing of either law or gospel,” “all proud secure sinners,” “all formalists,” and “all the zealous devout people in a natural religion,” line up together as “utter enemies to the gospel.” That trio of theological relatives—Pelagianism, Arminianism, and Romanism—appear to Traill as bastard offspring of natural religion fertilized by the gospel. So he continued: “The principles of Arminianism are the natural dictates of a carnal mind, which is enmity both to the law of God, and to the gospel of Christ; and, next to the dead sea of Popery (into which also this stream runs), have, since Pelagius to this day, been the greatest plague of the Church of Christ, and it is like will be till his second coming.”2—a point of view entirely in line with that of Luther and his reforming contemporaries a century and a half before. And all study of non-Christian faiths since the time of Luther and Traill has confirmed their biblically based conviction that salvation by self-effort IS a principle that the fallen human mind takes for granted.
It has been common since Melanchthon to speak of justification by faith as the material principle of the Reformation, corresponding to biblical authority as its formal principle. That is right. Of all the Reformers’ many biblical elucidations, the rediscovery of justification as a present reality, and of the nature of the faith which secures it, was undoubtedly the most formative and fundamental. For the doctrine of justification by faith is like Atlas. It bears a whole world on its shoulders, the entire evangelical knowledge of God the Saviour. The doctrines of election, of effectual calling, regeneration, and repentance, of adoption, of prayer, of the Church, the ministry, and the sacraments, are all to be interpreted and understood in the light of justification by faith, for this is how the Bible views them. Thus, we are taught that God elected men from eternity in order that in due time they might be justified through faith in Christ (Rom. 8:29f.). He renews their hearts under the Word, and draws them to Christ by effectual calling, in order that he might justify them upon their believing. Their adoption as God’s sons follows upon their justification; it is, indeed, no more than the positive outworking of God’s justifying sentence. Their practice of prayer, of daily repentance, and of good works springs from their knowledge of justifying grace (cf. Luke 18:9-14; Eph. 2:8-10). The Church is to be thought of as the congregation of the faithful, the fellowship of justified sinners, and the preaching of the Word and ministration of the sacraments are to be understood as means of grace because through them God evokes and sustains the faith that justifies. A right view of these things is possible only where there is a proper grasp of justification; so that, when justification falls, true knowledge of God’s grace, in human life falls with it. When Atlas loses his footing, everything that rested on his shoulders collapses too.
II
1. The need of justification. The biblical frame of reference, within which alone justification can be understood and apart from which it remains, in the strictest sense, unintelligible, is created, said the Reformers, by two realities: human sin, which is universal, and divine judgment, which is inescapable. The basic fact is that the God who made us intends to take account of us, measuring us by his own standards, and from his imminent inquisition nothing can shield us. All stand naked and open before the searcher of hearts, and all must prepare to meet their God. But that being so, all hope is gone; for, being morally and spiritually perverse throughout, we are forced to recognize that in God’s eyes we are hopelessly and helplessly guilty, justly subject to his condemning sentence and to that judicial rejection which the Bible calls his wrath. The pride which prompts us to rail at this judgment as unjust is itself part of the perversity which makes it just. Anyone who knows anything of his own inner corruption and of the holiness of his Judge will find Luther’s question, “How may I find a gracious God?,” rising in his heart unbidden but to this question the unaided human mind can find no answer. To persons convicted of sin, efforts for self-justification appear as the abortive products of self-ignorance; those who have become realistic about themselves see clearly that there is no road that way. Luther in the monastery sought perfect contrition (sorrow for sin, out of love for God), without which, so the theology of his day told him, there was no forgiveness. No man ever worked harder than Luther to make himself love God, but he could not do it. When, later, Luther said that Romans was written to “magnify sin,”3 what he meant was that Romans aims to induce a realistic awareness of moral and spiritual inability, and so create the self-despair which is the anteroom of faith in Christ.
When the Reformers insisted that the law must prepare for the gospel, this was what they meant. Conviction of sin, springing from God-given self-knowledge, is, they said, a necessary precondition for understanding justification, for it alone makes faith possible. The Augsburg Confession of 1531 states: “… this whole doctrine [of justification] must be related to the conflict of an alarmed conscience, and without that conflict it cannot be grasped. So persons lacking this experience, and profane men, are bad judges of this matter.”4 Calvin makes the same point in lnstitutio IILxii, a chapter on the theme that justification must be studied in the solemnizing light of God’s judgment-seat.5 And John Owen preserves this perspective when at the start of his classic treatise, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith(1677), he writes:
The first inquiry … is after the proper relief of the conscience of a sinner pressed and perplexed with a sense of the guilt of sin. For justification is the way and means, whereby such a person doth obtain acceptance before God …. And nothing is pleadable in this cause, but what a man would speak unto his own conscience in that state, or into the conscience of another, when he is anxious under that inquiry.
It is the practical direction of the consciences of men, in their application unto God by Jesus Christ, for deliverance from the curse due unto the apostate state, and peace with him, with the influence of the way thereof unto universal gospel obedience, that is alone to be designed in the handling of this doctrine. And therefore, unto him that would treat of it in a due manner, it is required that he … not dare to propose that unto others which he doth not abide by himself, in the most intimate recesses of his mind, under his nearest approaches unto God, in his surprisals with dangers, in deep afflictions, in his preparations for death, and most humble contemplations of the infinite distance between God and him. Other notions … not seasoned with these ingredients … are insipid and useless.6
2. The meaning of justification. What justification is, said the Reformers, must be learned from Paul, its great New Testament expositor, who sees it clearly and precisely as a judicial act of God pardoning and forgiving our sins, accepting us as righteous, and instating us as his sons. Following Augustine, who studied the Bible in Latin and was partly misled by the fact that justificare, the Latin for Paul’s κ, naturally means “make righteous,” the Mediaevals had defined justification as pardon plus inner renewal, as the Council of Trent was also to do; but the Reformers saw that the Pauline meaning of κ, is strictly forensic. So, Calvin defines justification as “acceptance, whereby God receives us into his favour and regards us as righteous; and we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.”7 Justification is decisive for eternity, being in effect the judgment of the last day brought forward. Its source is God’s grace, his initiative in free and sovereign love, and its ground is the merit and satisfaction that is, the obedient sin-bearing death-of Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Son.8
Behind Calvin’s phrase, “the imputation of the righteousness of Christ,” lies the characteristic “Christ-and-his-people” Christology which was the center of reference-the hub of the wheel, we might say-of the Reformers’ entire doctrine of grace. The concern of this Christology, as of the New Testament Christology which molded it, is soteriological, and its key-thought is participation through exchange. This idea is spelled out as follows. The Son of God came down from heaven in order to bring us to share with him the glory to which he has now returned. By incarnation he entered into solidarity with us, becoming through his Father’s appointment the last Adam, the second head of the race, acting on our behalf in relation to God. As man, he submitted to the great and decisive exchange set forth in II Corinthians 5: 21: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” “This,” said Luther, “is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners, wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s, and the righteousness of Christ is not Christ’s but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it, and fill us with it; and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them. So that now the righteousness of Christ is ours not only objectively (as they term it) but formally also”—that is, it is not only an ontological reality, “there” for our benefit in some general sense, but actually imparts to us the “form,” i.e., the characteristic, of being righteous in God’s sight.9 Our sins were reckoned (imputed) to Christ, so that he bore God’s judgment on them, and in virtue of this his righteousness is reckoned ours, so that we are pardoned, accepted, and given a righteous man’s status for his sake. Christians in themselves are sinners who never fully meet the law’s demands; nonetheless, says Luther, “they are righteous because they believe in Christ, whose righteousness covers them and is imputed to them.10 On this basis, despite all the shortcomings of which they are conscious, believers may be sure of eternal salvation, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And this, said the Reformers, is what it means to know Christ; for we do not know him, however much else we may know about him, till we see him as Christ pro nobis, dying, rising, and reigning for us as our gracious Saviour.
For the rest, see: http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/sola-fide-the-reformed-doctrine-of-justification/?utm_source=StandFirm&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=link
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