Justification

Returning to our building blocks series on vocabulary, today we are going to tackle one of the most important terms in all of Christian theology.  Raise your hand if you have ever heard this term in a sermon at church.  Really?

Justification.  From Webster, justification is the act of proving or showing one to be just, right, or reasonable.  Let’s not spend any time considering the obvious breakdown in terms of man, but instead, let’s think of these ideas from the perspective of God.  On the Last Day, we will quite literally face a trial.  There will be a judge.  The charge is sin and the penalty is eternal damnation.  What is just?  God’s view of justice, we have seen is perfect obedience to His will.  What is right or righteous?  What can we say about the righteousness of God?  This perfect righteousness has been attained by one Man only.  Is this reasonable?  When the writer of the rulebook says that these are the rules, I’d say it is perfectly reasonable as well.  Justification is the means by which people may obtain perfect righteousness before God on Judgment Day.  Let’s break it down again by groups.

Pelagian.  Remember that this groups starts from the denial of original sin.  Therefore, Adam is a bad example and Jesus is a good example.  That is why the question “What would Jesus do?” is appropriate in this context.  There is no imputation of Christ’s righteousness.  All of our efforts in our life time become the grounds for our justification.  We will be judged based upon our own actions, thoughts and omissions.  Our lives will be on display and we will be judged.  This is clearly fair.  No one will deny that this is the most fair system.  I have two questions: is it the most Biblical system, and do you really want fair?

Semipelagian.  This group starts with original sin that is subsequently cleansed for all of mankind by the work of Jesus Christ on the Cross.  Our righteousness is still based upon our own efforts in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone.  At Judgment, we will be able to say that we got a good start with a clean slate.  But the righteousness of Jesus is not imputed to us beyond the moment of our birth.  From then on, we are back to “What would Jesus Do?” as our road map to Salvation.  Once again, this is fair to us, though not so much to Jesus who had to die to give us that fresh start.  Therefore, God designed a system that was fair to the creature, but not to Himself.  Really?  That’s what we want to believe?

Arminianism.  We are entering the realm of prevenient grace, yet again.  At the moment we receive prevenient grace, and cooperate with God by believing and having faith, we are justified.  The trouble is in the issue of maintaining that justification.  The rest of our lives involves our vocabulary word for the next post, sanctification.  Even though there is a prevenient grace that precedes our response, this is still a synergistic system of justification.  Justification is by grace through faith, but not by grace alone through faith alone.

Roman Catholicism.  In order to understand the Roman Catholic view of justification, we need to start with something very similar to the Arminian view of justification, and then add the Arminian view of sanctification, to get a combined justification and sanctification that is the full Roman Catholic definition of justification.  In other words, Rome has no use for sanctification; to Rome, it is all part of the same thing.  This is not an altogether unhelpful concept as it is at least honest.  But because the first part is as a result as the input of prevenient grace, the second part which we view as sanctification is pure works, albeit within the context of the infusion of regular dosed inputs of grace.  There is no way to be clear on this topic in one paragraph, so if this seems confusing, it is because the terms are not the same in this system.

Reformed and Calvinism.  We are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone to the glory of God alone as testified in scripture alone.  Every part of that sentence has historical references and is worthy of conversation.  We will be going through each of the five solas in the near future.  The bottom line is that this is a system of monergism; God does it all.  Our justification before God on the Last Day is based solely upon the imputed righteousness of Christ to us, with absolutely no contribution of our own merits.  Our faith that brings this righteousness to us is solely a gift from God through the power of the Holy Spirit, having no input of cooperation from us whatever.  We don’t think about any aspect of the Law as capable of contributing to justification, only as defining the terms required for justification.  We do not presume to elevate ourselves to a position capable of contributing anything worthwhile to the efforts of Jesus on the cross; it is all to the Glory of God alone, not to us.

This was intended as a brief overview of the basic positions, a reference point.  In one sermon this past week, I heard a basically Arminian definition of justification articulated, without ever using the Biblical term justification, followed by thirty minutes of rambling explanation that sounded semipelagian or Pelagian in the amount of effort required for justification.  This illustrates two important points.  The reason that we don’t have the vocabulary any longer is that even when discuss the topics, we don’t hear the Biblical words used.  This leads to imprecision and a muddying of waters that I believe is intentional.  Second, the exegesis that passes for scholarly and Biblical most often fails to view these definitions in light of the redemptive historical narrative.  There is a metanarrative that has been lost as well as the vocabulary of the faith.  The two are intertwined and essential to mutual understanding.

In our next vocabulary post, we will attempt to unravel the key distinctives of sanctification.

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