Editor’s note: This essay is paired with another found here. Both are on the subject of Justification in light of the quarter-century anniversary of Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.
First, in today’s context, justification suffers on several counts. It is, in large measure, an inert doctrine. In mainline circles, in Anglican churches in particular, even among those with a self-consciously evangelical slant, it is rarely the topic of preaching or teaching. If one considers the topics of most interest, e.g., identity, spirituality, social and political engagement, technology, abuse, the environment, etc., on one side or the other of contemporary cultural debate, we are awash in what amounts to doctrines of sanctification. May their flowers bloom! But a corresponding interest in its theological counterpart is harder to find. Here we can applaud the witness of Mockingbird on the American scene, with its unique vibe.
Second, in other cases, it is hard, even for scholars, to recognize justification. I have no quarrel with efforts toward a fuller, more embodied anthropology, nor in emphasizing the relational and enacted dimensions of forgiveness, nor of love in action that comprise a more robust doctrine of sanctification. Consider Greg Jones’ book on grace and practice, Embodying Forgiveness (1995) or Ched Myers and Elaine Enns’ study of restorative justice and peacemaking in the New Testament, Ambassadors of Reconciliation (2009). But these valuable critiques and trends should not be misunderstood as sufficient accounts of, nor as challenges to, justification.
Thirdly, some find in justification only a Reformation battle cry, a relic of an unfortunately eristic and polemical bygone era. We can certainly agree that there was then a tendency for the warring sides to speak past one another. It is at this point that we have the advantage of a better ecumenical understanding of the doctrine than in past generations. Justification is now seen more clearly in conversation, first with Roman Catholic, and then with Orthodox, colleagues. We mean to commend these newer insights, which enhance our understanding of the doctrine. In so doing they bring into focus justification’s core claim, the divine priority and agency in salvation, that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). These themes of the priority and agency of grace for salvation lie at justification’s heart.
The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches, signed in Augsburg in 1999, insists that “when Lutherans emphasize the unique significance of this criterion, they do not deny the interrelation and significance of all truths of faith.” Likewise “when Catholics see themselves as bound by several criteria [of doctrine], they do not deny the special function of the message of justification.” While Roman Catholics and Lutherans have distinctive emphases, the declaration insists that they share what matters most, that “there is nothing prior to the free gift of faith and that all God’s saving gifts come through Christ alone” (see section 18 of the declaration).
One of the theologians involved in the declaration was my Doktorvater, Yale’s George Lindbeck, a self-described “Wittgensteinian Thomist Lutheran.” One can see his fingerprints on the work, especially on the insistence that difference does not necessarily mean contradiction, that Thomas had a comprehensive theology of grace, and that the implied metaphor of a grammar makes room for different semantic expressions. A more biblical way of making the same point would be that built into justification is the nature of Christ’s work, at once “finished” and eschatological. So Paul can tell us that we are already buried with Christ in his death, and then exhort us still “not to let sin reign in [our] mortal bodies” (Rom. 6:2, 12). We strive for what is already real and already given to us in Christ. Justification is a doctrinal expression of the “already,” though it assumes the “not yet” in the dialectical structure of the good news for all Christians.
The second recent contribution to our understanding comes with Orthodox theology in view. The Finnish Lutherans saw how his description of justification as being indwelt by faith itself approached a Patristic doctrine of theosis, that doctrine articulated by Athanasius and others as God sharing in our humanity that we might share in his divinity; our sin and death is swallowed up in his holiness and life. Here too a different way of describing God’s saving work in us here and now was allowable, so long as God’s priority and agency were maintained. Justification is patent of a description quite different from the usual, more forensic account. Carl Bratten and Robert Jenson offered a helpful introduction to the Finish Lutheran perspective in their Union with Christ (1998).
These newer perspectives help us to see that justification exists in a single ecology with sanctification. The former says God takes the initiative, the latter that his work has real effect in us and the world. They complement one another in giving an account of God’s saving work in Christ. Likewise both in concert attest that God’s Word, addressed to us, has the power to speak us righteous.[1]
But if this is true, why should justification have its special role of testing our structures, projects, and self-understanding? The answer is that we in our sinfulness are easily obsessed with our powers and activities. For the supposedly best of reasons we list toward making it about us. The testing function of justification is an antidote to this, in light of a duly realistic theological anthropology. It is always so, no less in our time, at once Promethean and self-obsessively neurotic.
But why foreground this particular medieval-Reformation doctrine, particularly, for this testing purpose? Justification points to Christ, who in his uniqueness and this final victory is really the theme around which everything rises and falls, in the Church no less than the believer. Soteriology flows from Christology. There are various ways to say this: that his work is “once and for all” (even the word ephapax being incomparable), that his resurrection was an “eschatological” event, that he is the “telos of the Law” (Rom. 10:4), that “to know him is to know his benefits’ (Philip Melanchthon), etc. If justification points specifically to God’s priority and agency, which are Christ’s, then justification is, with respect to us, shorthand for the Christological edge in any and all theology.
So what exactly is the relationship between justification and sanctification in the Christian life? The declaration states that they are non-contradictory and complementary, even as they affirm different aspects of the same “grammar” of salvation. Justification is not only prior temporally but also logically, since God’s agency is always prior, though this is also true in cooperative grace in the sense that there too the human will is the result of grace. Another way to describe the relationship is to say that justification comes from outside of us, while sanctification describes God’s work within us. But his works are always one. For this reason, justification reminds us that “faith comes from hearing” (Rom. 10:16), and metaphors of growth prevail in accounts of sanctification, but they describe aspects of the agency of the one Jesus Christ.
If the two doctrines should stand in such a relation to one another, requiring each other, then there is a kind of ecology between them. Justification naturally leads to the bearing of the fruits of the Spirit, agree the Lutherans, and even those fruits presuppose God’s grace, concur the Catholics. Obviously there is a relationship in which they do not stand, namely that of works being required for justification. The Western tradition’s clear rejection of Pelagianism makes this clear, even if it is not clear when and in whose writings that heresy is to be found. At the very least our original sinfulness predisposes us to depend on ourselves, overtly or covertly, and for this reason alone we still require justification as the test of other doctrines, especially novelties. This is no less true in our age, when the besetting error is to suppose ourselves to be our own creators (Charles Taylor being a prime expositor of this view), or perhaps to hide our guilt in our machines. But that last point is for another day, I hope soon.
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[1] As an aside, Paul Avis makes the point that Newman had limited knowledge of Luther’s view. (See his Anglicanism and the Christian Church (London: T&T Clark, 1989). Newman’s understanding of justification may turn out, when carefully read, to be closer to this fuller account of the doctrine than one might suppose.
The Rt. Rev. George Sumner, Ph.D. is the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas. Ordained in Tanzania in 1981, he served in cross-cultural ministry in Navajoland, led parishes in New England, and from 1999-2015 was Principal of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. He is the author or co-author of several books, including The First and The Last: The Claim of Jesus and The Claims of Other Religions (Eerdmans, 2004) and a commentary on Esther and Daniel (Brazos, 2013).
