Justification, Volume 1

Michael Horton, Michael Allen, Scott R. Swain, Michael Allen, Scott R. Swain

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780310491606
• eBook ISBN: 9780310491620
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The first of a two-volume project delving into the doctrine of justification. Michael Horton seeks not simply to recover a clear message of its role in modern Reformed theology, but also to bring a fresh discovery of the gospel in a time when contemporary debates around justification have reignited.

The doctrine of justification stands at the center of our systematic reflection on the meaning of salvation and grace as well as our piety, mission, and life together. And yet, within mainline Protestant and evangelical theology, it's often taken for granted or left to gather dust in favor of modern concerns and self-renewal.

Volume 1 is an exercise in historical theology, exploring the doctrine of justification from the patristic era to the Reformation. This book:

• Provides a map for contemporary discussions of justification, identifying and engaging principal sources: Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Gabriel Biel, and the magisterial reformers.
• Studies the transformations of the doctrine through Aquinas, Scotus and the nominalists leading up to the era of the Reformation and the Council of Trent.
• Concludes by examining the hermeneutical and theological significance of the Reformers' understanding of the law and the gospel and the resultant covenantal scheme that became formative in Reformed theology.

Engaging and thorough, Justification will not only reenergize the reader—whether Protestant or Catholic—with a passion for understanding this essential and long-running doctrinal conversation, but also challenge anyone to engage critically with the history of the Church and the heart of the gospel.

CHAPTER 1

THE RIGHT TIME TO (RE)CONSIDER JUSTIFICATION

In response to the Black Death of 1348–50, the Church of England called for weeks of special prayers and fasting. However, in the 1980s, the church called for more government funding for medical research.¹ Drawing on this example, sociologist Steve Bruce explains, “Individualism, egalitarianism, liberal democracy, and science and technology all contribute to a general sense of self-importance, of freedom from fate.” Consequently, “In the world of the mainstream churches and in the cultic milieu of alternative spirituality people are now generally unwilling to subordinate themselves to an external authority.”²

It is an exaggeration to call the Middle Ages an age of faith, particularly when the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 felt obliged to require all Christians to attend church once a year. Yet to whatever extent it was filled with hypocrites and hucksters, in terms of a public horizon of meaning, there was a sense of belonging to a history that will be brought to its denouement by the return of Christ to raise the dead, judge the world, and deliver his elect. Even the maps were drawn to make one look up, with the earth’s landmasses and oceans congealing around the majestic God enthroned in Jerusalem at the center.³ For them, living in this present age is but a preparation for everlasting life or death. In that world, the question “How can a sinner be accepted by a holy God?” at least made sense on all sides.

But we occupy an age in which the shared horizon of meaning stops at the ceiling. We do not look up as if living in this world is but an intimation of something greater. Following Feuerbach, Friedrich Nietzsche announced that the upper world, with its hierarchy descending from God to the angels and the intelligent souls, had been wiped from the horizon of the modern consciousness. Proclaiming himself more the herald than the author, Nietzsche advocated an “inverted Platonism,” and Sigmund Freud demythologized the religious impulse as little more than a powerful neurosis.

Transcendence moved indoors. No longer inhabiting the highest place in the cosmos, the enchanted world came to occupy the deepest places of the self. There may be “transcendence” within this world. A baseball game or a ballet performance may bristle with intimations of the sacred. Cresting the summit of a glistening granite peak may fill one with an overwhelming sense of the sublime. Joining a march may exhilarate one’s soul by participating in something larger than oneself, the arc of history that bends toward justice. But these quasi-mystical moments occur within time, nature, history, and the self, rather than from eternity breaking into time. Is there a desire that cannot be satisfied with a smartphone?

Whatever important differences among themselves, the Protestant Reformers and their critics inhabited a world in which ferocious debates over guilt and grace made sense. They were quite literally life-and-death matters. Unlike the subconscious terrors of the Dadaists, the frightful visions of Hieronymus Bosch depicted real places of torment. The reliefs of The Last Judgment, with the sword protruding from Christ’s mouth, reminded worshipers as they entered that they stood on precarious ground, ready to be consumed by God’s wrath apart from the ministrations of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Surely in an age like ours, many imagine that our best hope in reaching secular neighbors is to persuade them that God somehow still fits somewhere in the immanent frame.⁴ There may be no heaven above us or hell below us, but God can help us have our best life now. The once-familiar warning that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb 9:27) may no longer have much purchase, but we may still be able to find divine empowerment for our life projects. Wherever God is and whatever God does, it is inside of us: inner peace, happiness, satisfaction, and comfort. And it is never threatening. How can the struggle to find a gracious God be relevant in an age when people are not gripped by a sense of God’s reality and presence, his holiness and majesty, which provoke the question in the first place?

I have no idea how many times I have heard or read contemporary theologians and pastors assert with solemn finality that Luther’s question “How can I find a gracious God?” is just not ours today. In addition, many New Testament scholars today argue that it was not the apostle Paul’s question either. Indeed, they argue, the broad swath of New Testament (especially Pauline) interpretation since the patristic era has failed to recognize that the principal question is not how individuals are “saved” but how to tell who belongs to the covenant community. In other words, it is more about ecclesiology than soteriology. Or, as other contemporary scholars suggest, the gospel is about liberation from the powers of darkness, especially oppressive political and economic systems, rather than about personal salvation. This is a way of moving God outdoors, as it were, but as the justifier of those on the right side of justice. Is there any justification for the ungodly? For a host of reasons, we have found the question itself quite beside the point.

Consequently, we can move on as if the question of justification, much less the arcane debates surrounding it, matters little to the average person today. Or can we? Is the move toward pure immanence actually motivated by a secret terror? Are we trying to secure ourselves against the indictments of our conscience, the nagging feeling that we cannot quite put our finger on? In other words, is not the effort to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness”—even to the point of idolatry or, for that matter, atheism—at bottom an effort to evade an objective and therefore condemning evaluating our life? The God who beholds “men’s depths and dregs,” had even “crept into my dirtiest corners,” said Nietzsche’s ugliest man. “On such a witness I would have revenge—or not live myself. The God who beheld everything, and also man: that God had to die! Man cannot endure it that such a witness should live.”⁵

But the price of this evasion is steep, even if only in existential terms. “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself,” Sartre asserted, and bears “the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.”⁶ That is an astonishing doctrine. Is it any wonder that we would rather be accountable for this burden to ourselves rather than to an external authority who has the power—and the right—to judge us? Is not such secularized Pelagianism (as if the heresy itself is not already secularized enough) the incubator of so many of our anxieties?

Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and pioneer in brain research, observes that the source of many neuroses in society today is a nagging sense of guilt without knowing its source.⁷ The anxiety is “a vague but persistent kind of self-condemnation related to the symbolic disharmonies I have described, a sense of having no outlet for his loyalties and no symbolic structure for his achievements.”⁸ I interpret this theologically as suggesting that there is no external law to measure oneself by or external gospel through which one becomes re-scripted “in Christ.” “Rather than being a feeling of evil or sinfulness,” he says, “it takes the form of a nagging sense of unworthiness all the more troublesome for its lack of clear origin.”⁹

But when has the question, “How can I be saved?” ever been a common question of the average person? Regardless of whether this was an urgent question of Jews of the Second Temple period (and it was, as I demonstrate in the second volume), evidently the preaching of Jesus and the apostles provoked the question as they exposed human guilt, corruption, and death and pointed to Golgotha and the empty tomb as its solution. Jesus upbraided the religious specialists for refusing him because they “trusted in themselves that they were righteous” and, consequently, missed the main point of their Scripture. Evidently, the apostle Paul did not find a ready audience for his message either, reporting that most Jews found it “a stumbling block” and most Greeks found it simply “foolishness.” Many of Pelagius’s auditors found it more relevant to discuss self-improvement rather than obsess with Augustine over salvation. In a letter to Cardinal Sadoleto, John Calvin offered a rebuke that nevertheless exuded genuine sympathy, even friendship. Those like Sadoleto, who cannot understand why so many people wrestle with the question of justification, are basically inexperienced in life, Calvin surmises.¹⁰ They have never had a serious crisis of conscience. Their spiritual development seems frozen on the verge of adolescence. In short, the burden has always been on the gospel to make itself relevant as people passed by shaking their heads or just ignoring it.

So I remain unmoved by dismissals of the Reformation’s formulation of justification and its broader quest as little more than the product of an early modern obsession with the self. “Tortured subjectivity” is what you get when “God is dead,” while you nevertheless feel a sense of guilt and despair that vaguely comes from somewhere other than your inner self or the people around you. Say whatever you like about the Protestant Reformers, but they were not obsessed with introspection. On the contrary, they were gripped by the experience of meeting a stranger, an other, to whom they were accountable. Luther didn’t fear an inner judgment but a real one on the great stage of history, with banners flying and a fight to the death. Whoever this God was, he was not manipulable by the subjective wants or wish-projections of mortals. One would never invent this sort of religion as therapy for self-improvement, self-empowerment, and tranquility of mind. And regardless, Luther would not have recognized such a religion, much less sympathize with it. If there are lingering doubts about that, I hope that this book lays them to rest.

I write this book with the conviction that it is always relevant to proclaim the justification of the ungodly, although we have a long way to go to explore what that means. God has not changed. Nor can God’s work in Christ be undone. Humanity still faces the same plight—a conscience that knows deep down we were meant for something that we cannot define, much less find our way to. It is always the right time to tell the story that God is always telling us. Its controversial status already points to the fact that, true or false, we are dealing with reality and not with our projection of God.

This is the first of a two-volume project. In the present volume I offer at least one version of the story as to how and why the Reformation happened, focusing entirely on the historical development. Luther did not rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of Christendom but from a very specific development and debate within it. Of course, there are myriad reasons for why the Reformation happened and not all of them doctrinal or even intellectual. But in an era when historians generally consider religion, much less theology, to be epiphenomenal to the real reasons (economic, political, social, etc.), we have to exercise some historical sympathy to comprehend an age in which doctrine could roil a whole civilization. My scope will be on that long-running doctrinal conversation about God, grace, and justification.

The second volume focuses entirely on the biblical-theological and exegetical issues in the light of contemporary debates about justification.

In both books, I do...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. The Right Time to (Re)consider Justification
• 2. “O Sweet Exchange!”: A Broader Lens for Discovering the Patristic Consensus
• 3. Justification In the Ancient Church
• 4. Justification, Penance, and the Metaphysics of Grace: Lombard and Aquinas
• 5. “Do What You Can”: Scotus and the Rise of Nominalism
• 6. The Road from Penance to Christ
• 7. The Reformers and the Great Exchange: Mystical Union
• 8. Reforming Justification
• 9. A New Direction: Word, Faith, and Works
• 10. Law and Gospel: A Tale of Two Covenants
• 11. The Triumph of Nominalism
• 12. Justification and the Christian Life
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Author Index