Paul's Concept of Justification

God's Gift of a Right Relationship

Moore

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498202831
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

The Greek family of words characterizing the doctrine of "justification by faith" (as it is known in English) is most prominent in the writings of the Apostle Paul. It was this doctrine that lay at the heart of the sixteenth-century Reformation; Martin Luther and his followers considered it to be at the very center of the gospel.Protestants came to understand "justification" differently from the Catholic Church they had left. Instead of the Catholic "realist" view, in which God makes a sinner righteous, they came to a "forensic" understanding, by which God, as judge, declares a sinner righteous. During the nineteenth century a third, "relational" view began to emerge: it viewed "justification" as God's gift of a right relationship to a sinner. This monograph examines Paul's concept from three perspectives: the New Testament data; the way the doctrine has developed historically; and how the doctrine has been expressed in English translations of the Scriptures. The author concludes that it is the relational view that most accurately depicts Paul's concept of "justification."

1

Introduction

By its very definition, religion is concerned with how human beings relate to the divine, the divine usually being understood as a divine being (or beings). In the Christian religion the means by which such a relationship is formed between God and humankind has often been expressed by the doctrine commonly referred to as “justification by faith.”

In the historical development of Christianity the doctrine of “justification” came into prominence early in the sixteenth century with the advent of the religious phenomenon in Western Europe known as the Reformation. For the first time a major rift developed in the Western church that was to prove permanent. The doctrinal issue dividing the Roman Catholic Church from the emerging Protestant churches was “justification.” Even today, notwithstanding increasing rapprochement between the Roman Catholic and Lutheran communions, significant differences remain over this issue.

The term “justification” is derived from the family of words that characterize the expression of the doctrine in the New Testament. Throughout this study we will refer to this family as the δ-family (delta-family). The three most prominent members of this word-family are the noun δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosune), the verb δικαιοῦν (dikaioun), and the adjective δίκαιος (dikaios).

In treatments of the doctrine of “justification,” the term “justification” is sometimes applied in a very broad sense, so that any material that touches on the concepts fundamental to the doctrine are included, even if the language characterizing “justification” in the New Testament (i.e., the δ-family) is not present.1 In this book the term is applied more precisely, referring only to those passages where the δ-family is present.

1.1 “Justification” in Paul

Defined in the way just described, the doctrine of “justification” is almost exclusively a doctrine of the Apostle Paul. He expounds “justification” in three of his letters. In order of importance they are Romans, Galatians, and Philippians. However, in the present work these letters will be treated in what is generally regarded as their order of composition, namely, Galatians, Romans, and Philippians. In addition, there are significant echoes of “justification” language in the two Corinthian letters (1 Cor 6:11; 2 Cor 3:9; 5:21). We have now accounted for five of the seven letters whose Pauline authorship is widely regarded as authentic: only 1 Thessalonians and Philemon lack any use of “justification” language. In the case of Philemon this is hardly surprising due to its brevity and the personal nature of the issues Paul is addressing; Philemon contains theological principles rather than theological exposition. Among the six letters whose Pauline authorship is widely disputed, the Letter to Titus has a significant passage utilizing the δ-family.2

Early in the days when the Christian faith was being shaped, the author of 2 Peter wrote:

15 . . . regard the Lord’s patience as salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote to you in accordance with the wisdom granted to him, 16 as he also speaks about these matters in all his letters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, things that the uneducated and unstable will twist, just as they do the rest of the Scriptures also—to their own destruction!3

Among the things Paul wrote that are “hard to understand” the doctrine of “justification” has proved, over the last two millennia, one of the most intractable. From the earliest post-apostolic writings and through the next two millennia, we find that the apostle’s doctrine of “justification” is frequently ignored or seriously misrepresented.

1.2 Development of the Doctrine of “Justification” in the Western Church

In the early centuries of the development of Christianity, the Roman Empire was divided (on the basis of language) into East and West, the East being predominantly Greek-speaking, the West Latin-speaking. In church life the differences went beyond language to embrace different ways of understanding and practising the Christian faith. East and West developed different models of salvation and different understandings and estimates of the doctrine of “justification.”

In the West, which is the focus of this monograph, the doctrine of “justification” did not feature prominently at all until late in the fourth century, when the North African church father, Augustine of Hippo Regius (354–430), began to give grace (Latin gratia) a prominent place in his theology. In the opening decades of the following century he employed a grace-based theology against the claims of the monk Pelagius and his followers.

The views of Augustine were enormously influential during the Middle Ages and among the Reformers, and even today exercise a powerful influence, although their source is not always recognized.

Fundamental to the view of “justification” held by Augustine and his heirs in the Middle Ages was the understanding that the verb iustificare (standing for Paul’s δικαιοῦν in the Greek) meant “to make righteous.” “Justification” was seen as the process by which a person becomes—ideally—increasingly righteous during their lifetime. The “righteousness” involved is a moral righteousness. This view is often referred to as the realist view of “justification”: a person becomes righteous in reality. In Augustine and in the Middle Ages, a person became righteous only because God, through his grace, took the initiative and supplied the means making it possible. The necessity of grace marked off the orthodox view of “justification” from those views which accorded grace a lesser role. Formally it was described as “anti-Pelagian.” This term is derived from Pelagius, a contemporary of Augustine. Augustine vehemently opposed Pelagius, claiming he had a defective view of human nature, especially in assuming that a person is capable of taking the first steps towards salvation without the aid of God’s grace.

In spite of its anti-Pelagian stance, the actual practices of the Western church at times belied the formal reliance on divine grace. The practice of selling indulgences provides just one example. Associated with the elaborate system of penance prevailing at that time, it provided the spark which ignited the sixteenth-century Reformation that was soon to affect the whole of the Western church and ultimately to make its impact felt universally.

Behind the opposition to the sale of indulgences was a profoundly spiritual movement which was impatient with artifice and called for a return to the original sources of Christianity, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. With the catchcry of sola scriptura there was a repudiation of the ecclesiastical traditions which had grown up alongside the Bible and a demand that the Scriptures be the touchstone for all matters of faith and conduct.

One of the streams contributing to the new way of thinking was the Renaissance, with its veneration for the ancient world. The revival of the Greek language was a direct consequence of the Renaissance, and made the original language in which the New Testament writings were composed more readily available again to the Latin-speaking West.

It was inevitable that these developments would impact on the theology of the Reformers. Very quickly an alternative view of “justification” surfaced, and over the next decade or so it was elaborated to the point where certain features would become permanent in the emerging Protestant articulation of “justification.”

The foundation stone for the Protestant doctrine was a different understanding of the verb δικαιοῦν (Latin: iustificare) in the key Greek word-family. Instead of “make righteous,” the Reformers held its meaning to be “declare righteous.” In time the Reformers made a separation between the divine act of “justification” and the process of sanctification. In “justification” a person was declared righteous, in sanctification a person became righteous in reality (i.e., in a moral sense).

The theological rationale for “justification” developed on the Protestant side can be summed up as follows:

What did Paul mean by justification? The term is a legal or forensic one. It refers to the acquittal of an accused person in a court of law. In Paul’s mind, a sinner is charged with breaking the law of God (Romans 3:10, 19, 23). The penalty is death (6:24). The justice of God demands that the penalty be paid. Ho...