By Faith Alone: Luther and the Doctrine of Justification

BY FAITH ALONE:

LUTHER AND THE DOCTRINE

OF JUSTIFICATION

There is perhaps no doctrine more closely associated with the teaching and legacy of Martin Luther than justification by faith alone. “The article of justification and of grace is the most delightful, and it alone makes a person a theologian and makes of a theologian a judge of the earth and of all affairs. Few there are, however, who have thought it through well and who teach it aright,” he said.

One might think, then, that it would be a fairly simple matter to summarize Luther’s views on justification. This task, however, has proven challenging for several reasons. First, Luther’s pen produced a prodigious harvest. One scholar has estimated that Luther, between 1516 and 1546, “wrote one or two treatises a ² Second, as one might expect of month, totaling about four hundred titles in all.” an author who published continuously for thirty years, Luther’s views on a host of issues developed, matured, and sometimes changed. One may not, then, simply choose at will a statement of Luther’s and pronounce it Luther’s definitive word on the subject. Third, Luther often wrote in a manner that resists systematization. His hyperbolic style and the occasional nature of many of his writings make it difficult to pinpoint Luther’s specific views on subjects even of great importance to him. Fourth, Luther did not think and write in a vacuum. He was a pastor and a churchman. Luther was both shaped by and a shaper of theological and ecclesiastical controversies in his day. The issues and combatants associated with these controversies helped spur Luther to greater theological clarity and depth, not least in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Fifth, developments after the death of Martin Luther in 1546 pose important questions regarding Luther’s views. For instance, did Calvin and the Reformed tradition link arms or part ways with Martin Luther on the doctrine of justification?

Full consideration of these questions is well beyond the scope of this essay. Even so, what can we say about Luther’s understanding of justification? By 1519, when he published his first series of lectures on Galatians, the fundamental components of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone were in place. Luther had emerged from the controversies launched by the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses with a recognizably Protestant doctrine of justification. In subsequent years, Luther would refine but never reject that doctrine.

And yet, this achievement notwithstanding, it would fall to the younger Genevan Reformer John Calvin to provide a more comprehensive and systematic formulation of the biblical doctrine of justification. Luther and Calvin stood shoulder to shoulder in advancing and defending this doctrine. Calvin, however, articulated—in a manner that Luther did not—the centrality and importance of union with Christ to the New Testament’s understanding of justification. It is Calvin’s grasp of this point that helps us understand more fully the relationship between one’s justification and one’s sanctification.

Both Luther and Calvin reflected on the doctrine in the fires of controversy. Controversy surrounding the doctrine of justification has, sadly, not been confined to the sixteenth century. The evangelical church faces a contemporary challenge to the doctrine of justification by faith alone in the form of what has been called the New Perspective on Paul. A renewed attentiveness to the way in which Luther and Calvin formulated and advocated the biblical doctrine in their day can only help the modern church to do the same in her day.

Luther and Justification

To appreciate Martin Luther’s arrival at the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone, one must first understand the doctrine of salvation that prevailed in the church of Luther’s youth. The historian Steven Ozment has well summarized how, for medievals, the way of salvation was fraught with uncertainty.

For medieval theologians the present life remained an anxious pilgrimage; man lived in unresolved suspense, fearing damnation and hoping for salvation, ever in need of confession and indulgence, discipline and consolation, saintly intercession and the self help of good works. Nothing seemed more impossible than this-worldly certitude of salvation; such was self-deception and presumption at best, seditious rejection of God’s church at worst. Saving faith was constantly developing faith, fides charitate formata, faith formed by continuous works of love and charity.

The medieval church taught that the believer’s justification would not be finally and definitively effected until the day of judgment. On that day, “faith formed by acts of charity (fides caritate formata) [would] receive eternal life as ⁶ While this system of salvation full or condign merit (meritum de condigno).” had a place for both faith and grace, it was not a wholly gracious system. One’s acceptance before God ultimately rested on one’s performance—what one did or did not do with the grace that God supplied. This teaching directly counters the Bible’s insistence that we are justified not by any work that we do, but solely on the basis of the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ (see Rom. 3:21–26, 4:4–5; Eph. 2:8–10; Titus 3:5). As Ozment observes above, medieval theology simply did not permit the ordinary Christian to arrive at an assurance of grace and salvation. People were furthermore dependent on the grace sacramentally dispensed by the church if they were to have any hope of becoming right with God.

Luther’s insight into the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone proved to be the Archimedean point of opposition to this medieval system of salvation and of the recovery of the Bible’s teaching on how the sinner is saved. Luther himself recognized the importance and centrality of justification to the Christian life. As he put it in the 1537 Smalcald Articles, “One cannot go soft or give way on this article, for then heaven and earth would fall.”

How, then, did Luther himself arrive at the biblical doctrine of justification? Near the end of his life, he relates the moment when justification literally dawned upon him. This so-called Tower Experience—Luther’s discovery from Romans 1:17 of the gift of justifying righteousness in the gospel—transported Luther. He said that he “felt” himself “to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.”

Luther himself hints that this insight was the fruit of much studied labor in the Scripture—“night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the ⁹ As Luther justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by faith.’” elsewhere mused, “I did not learn my theology all at once, but had to search deeper for it, where my temptations took me.”

What, then, was the path by which Luther arrived at the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone? Scholars have vigorously debated this question, but Luther’s steps may be traced by considering his lectures on the Psalms (1513– 14), his lectures on Romans (1515–16), and his first series of lectures on ¹¹ While there is no indication in his lectures on the Psalms that Galatians (1519).

Luther had made his discovery of the gift of righteousness, it is clear that Luther ¹² Human was grappling with the depth and reach of sin in the human heart. beings, Luther concluded, are not good people who do bad things. People are wicked by nature, enemies of God, and incapable of doing anything that could merit God’s favor.

Such insights indicated that Luther was deepening himself in “a more ¹⁴ It would thoroughly Augustinian position on original sin and predestination.” be in his lectures on Romans, however, that Luther would first evidence ¹⁵ Commenting on Romans awareness of the biblical doctrine of justification. 3:20, Luther denied that one’s deeds could justify him. “The fact is that neither the works which precede nor those which follow justify. How much less the works of the Law!… For we are not made righteous by doing righteous works, but rather we do righteous works by being righteous. Therefore grace alone ¹⁶ On the contrary, the righteousness that justifies a person is a justifies.” righteousness that has come from without, from God. Commenting on Romans 4:7, Luther argued that “we are righteous extrinsically when we are righteous solely by the reckoning of God and not of ourselves or of our own works. For his reckoning is not ours by reason of anything that is in us or in our own power. Therefore our righteousness is neither in us or [sic] in our power.”

Even so, there remained points that Luther had yet to clarify and would later clarify. The purely receptive character of faith in justification is absent from his ¹⁸ The good works that faith produces are not expressly lectures on Romans. excluded from the basis upon which a person is justified. Neither does Luther distinguish clearly the forensic grace of justification from the transforming grace of inward renewal, prompting at least one scholar to conclude that Luther during this period continued to see a person’s justification as at least partially grounded in his sanctification.

By the time that Luther delivered his first series of lectures on Galatians in 1519, however, what is widely known as Luther’s doctrine of justification was essentially in place. In a brief document written in 1518 (Acta Augustana), ²⁰ First, faith in justification is entirely receptive. Luther clarified two matters.

Faith does not contribute to the righteousness by which the sinner is justified. It receives the righteousness that God offers in the gospel. Second, justification is not a verdict that lies uncertainly in one’s future. It is the believer’s present and abiding possession. As Luther would argue in his lectures on Galatians, he who “trust[s] in the name of the Lord,” his “sins are forgiven, and righteousness is imputed to” him.

What is the “righteousness” that is imputed to the sinner for justification? In a sermon delivered the same year in which he delivered his first series of lectures on Galatians (1519), Luther argued that this righteousness is “alien righteousness, that is the righteousness of another, instilled from without,” the ²² This righteousness becomes the possession of the “righteousness of Christ.” sinner “through faith in Christ” and “without our works by grace alone.”

In this sermon, it is clear that Luther understands Christ’s righteousness chiefly in terms of Jesus’ sin-bearing death on the cross, and as “accomplish[ing] the same as that original righteousness [lost in Adam] would have accomplished; ²⁴ Luther was careful to distinguish this “alien rather, it accomplishes more.” righteousness” from what he termed “our proper righteousness,” that is, the fruit of grace in a justified believer, consisting in three things: “slaying the flesh and crucifying the desires with respect to the self,” “love to one’s neighbor,” and ²⁵ These two righteousnesses must be “meekness and fear toward God.” distinguished but never separated, for one’s proper righteousness is the “fruit and consequence” of one’s alien righteousness.

This transfer of righteousness from Christ to the sinner reflects a larger reality—Christ’s possession of the sinner, and the sinner’s possession of Christ. “Through faith in Christ, therefore, Christ’s righteousness becomes our righteousness and all that he has becomes ours; rather he himself becomes ours…. He who trusts in Christ exists in Christ; he is one with Christ, having the ²⁷ Justification, then, takes place in the context of a same righteousness as he.” mutual bond or union between Jesus Christ and the believer. But, for Luther, the sinner is not justified on the basis of this union. As R. Scott Clark notes, “It is clear that Luther did not have the Christian justified on the basis of anything else but Christ’s imputed righteousness.”

Events subsequent to 1519 saw Luther refining but not modifying this doctrine of justification by faith alone. In the last quarter-century of his life, Luther witnessed challenges to the doctrine from two different theological directions. The first challenge threatened justification as wholly gracious. Luther condemned a “formula of compromise which had been presented at Regensburg in 1541 as a basis of agreement between the Roman Catholics” and Lutherans. Luther categorically rejected any attempt to supplement the imputed righteousness of Christ for justification with the inward, renewing work of the Holy Spirit. Not even one’s good works, the necessary fruit of justifying faith, could serve to justify the sinner in any way.

The second challenge understood justification as militating against the law both as “the means to drive sinners to repent” and “as a guide for the ethical ³⁰ This challenge emerged from within Lutheranism, attempted to appeal to life.”

Luther’s own teachings for support, and was spurred by the Lutheran minister Johannes Agricola. For the “Antinomians,” as they came to be called, the gospel, not the law, was sufficient to drive men to repent and to direct one in righteous living. In 1539, Luther drafted and circulated a searing letter, Against theAntinomians, in which he rejected the Antinomians’ positions and upheld the law both as a means to repentance and as a rule of life. In this letter, Luther stressed that he was advancing the position that had always characterized his ³¹ In fact, one could not ministry, namely, that “the law… cannot be abolished.” “know what sin is,” or “what Christ is [and] what he did for us” apart from the ³² Luther was concerned to uphold justification as a doctrine that did not law. relax one’s obligation to obey the law of God.

How may we summarize Luther’s path to the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone, and his mature understanding of that doctrine? In the years leading up to the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, Luther came to embrace two convictions that would underlie his subsequent understanding of the Scripture’s teaching on salvation. The first is that human depravity has rendered people incapable of doing anything that could win favor and acceptance from God. The second is that the righteousness by which we are justified is a righteousness that comes from without, as the gracious gift of God. While these convictions informed Luther’s initial protest against indulgences, they did not come to maturation until after the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses. Luther would soon come to realize Scripture’s teaching that faith is entirely receptive in justification. Faith does not contribute anything to the imputed righteousness that it appropriates for the sinner’s justification. Neither does any part of the Christian’s renewal constitute the basis upon which he is justified. Justification is, therefore, not a verdict that lies uncertainly in one’s future. It is the believer’s present possession that abides into the future, and its sole ground is the imputed merits of Jesus Christ.

Calvin and Justification

Luther’s achievement in recovering the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone is nothing short of monumental. It was an achievement that Luther’s younger contemporary, John Calvin, appears to have recognized. In the only extant letter from Calvin to Luther, written in 1545, Calvin could address Luther as a “most distinguished minister of Christ, and my ever-honoured father.” Theologians in the Lutheran and Reformed traditions concur that Luther and Calvin were in fundamental agreement concerning the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Without rehearsing the specific details of that agreement, we may pose to Calvin a question that has arisen in our consideration of Luther’s doctrine of justification. How did Calvin relate justification and sanctification in such a way as to safeguard the biblical integrity of justification? The specific way in which Calvin addressed this question not only built upon but also advanced Luther’s recovery of the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone.

It is in book 3 of the Institutes of the Christian Religion(1559) that we find ³⁶ We may find Calvin’s fullest and most mature discussion of justification. answers to the question posed above by attending both to the structure and to the content of book 3. The book opens with an introductory chapter that serves as a seam stitching what Calvin has said in book 2 (“The Knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ”) with what Calvin will say in book 3 (“The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of Christ”). In 3.2, Calvin discusses the grace of faith, and, in 3.3–5, the grace of repentance. After a brief summary of the Christian life in 3.6–10, Calvin undertakes a discussion of justification in 3.11–18.

It is curious that Calvin defers consideration of justification (3.11ff.) until after his discussion of “repentance” or “regeneration” (3.3ff.). Given the importance of justification to the Protestant Reformers, and, as we shall see, its priority, for Calvin, to sanctification, one might have expected Calvin to have placed his discussion of justification nearer the beginning of book 3. Calvin explains his reasoning for this ordering at 3.11.1. He arranged the discussion of book 3 in the way that he did in order to stress “how little devoid of good works is the faith, through which alone we obtain free righteousness by the mercy of ³⁸ Calvin, then, had a “polemical” or rhetorical “strategy” in view. 39 He God.” wanted to stress not only the inseparability of justification and sanctification, but also the fact that “sanctifying faith, faith functioning for holy living, is the same faith that justifies.”

That the faith by which the sinner is justified is a faith that necessarily produces good works is not the only way in which Calvin demonstrates the fundamental inseparability of justification and sanctification. Calvin, at the beginning of book 3, situates the entirety of the application of redemption in the believer’s union with Christ.

How do we receive those benefits which the Father bestowed on his only begotten Son not for Christ’s own private use, but that he might enrich poor and needy men? First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us…. All that he possesses is nothing until we grow into one body with him.

This union with Christ, Calvin continues, is “obtain[ed]… by faith,” even as “the Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ effectually unites himself to us.” By the Spirit, through the faith that the Spirit gives to the sinner, a person is united with Christ. So united to Christ, he possesses Christ and all the benefits that Christ won for him.

In 3.11.1, Calvin also argues that the particular graces of justification and sanctification are both sourced in Jesus Christ. Through faith, one is united to Christ and, in union with Christ, he receives from Christ both justification and sanctification. Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith.

By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life. Of regeneration, indeed, the second of these gifts, I have said what seemed sufficient.

The believer’s union with Christ, then, is the fundamental principle that, for Calvin, demonstrates that justification and sanctification are inseparable but distinguishable.

For Calvin, however, these two benefits are not an undifferentiated and inchoate mass. Nor is Calvin indifferent to their order or relation. In what ways does Calvin distinguish justification and sanctification, and along what lines does he understand them to be distinct graces? In the passage quoted from 3.11.1 above, Calvin mentions “a double grace” (duplex gratia) that comes into the possession of an individual when by “faith” he “partak[es] of him (i.e., Christ).” As Muller has noted, Calvin does not expressly enumerate the first grace, but he does mention the “second,” namely, “regeneration,” of which Calvin has spoken in 3.3–5. Since, for Calvin, “regeneration” and “sanctification” are “virtual synonyms,” this “second” grace surely refers to the believer’s sanctification. What, then, is the identity of the first grace? It is the theme of Calvin’s immediately following sentences in 3.11.1, namely, “justification,” which Calvin earlier in 3.11.1 describes in terms of “being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness.”

Calvin, therefore, expressly distinguishes justification and sanctification. He not only says that these two graces are distinct, but he also explains how they are distinct. Sanctification is an inwardly transformative grace—“sanctified by Christ’s spirit,” we “cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.” Justification, however, is an exclusively forensic grace—by it, we are “reconciled to God” and look upon God not as “a Judge” but as “a gracious Father.” Calvin’s elaborate definition of justification in 3.11.2–4 serves to confirm and to elaborate his understanding of the exclusively legal and non-renovative character of this benefit.

Calvin, furthermore, argues that the forensic integrity of the grace of justification and a proper understanding of union with Christ go hand in hand. This line of argument surfaces especially in Calvin’s polemical interaction with the controversial Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander at 3.11.5–12. Calvin understood Osiander to teach that “we are substantially righteous in God by the ⁴⁶ In other words, “union with infusion both of his essence and of his quality.”

Christ is sharing in Christ’s essence, by which his righteousness, specifically the ⁴⁷ The believer’s righteousness of his divine nature, is communicated.” righteousness, Osiander argued, is an infused righteousness. This righteousness is the direct result of the believer’s participating in the divinity of Jesus Christ with whom he is united. For Calvin, Osiander’s doctrine compromised what Scripture teaches concerning both the union between Christ and the believer, and the righteousness that the believer receives from Christ.

That joining together of head and members, that indwelling of Christ in our hearts—in short, that mystical union—are accorded by us the highest degree of importance, so that Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed. We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body—in short, because he deigns to make us one with him. Thus is Osiander’s slander refuted, that by us faith is reckoned righteousness. As if we were to deprive Christ of his right when we say that by faith we come empty to him to make room for his grace in order that he alone may fill us! But Osiander, by spurning this spiritual bond, forces a gross mingling of Christ with believers.

Calvin resists any understanding of the believer’s union with Christ that compromises the personal integrity of either Christ or the believer united with Him. Why is it so important that the personal integrity of Christ and the believer be maintained? It is because it is in the context of such a union that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the sinner. As Richard Gaffin observes, such “a union… insures that justifying righteousness is his accomplishment, not theirs, ⁴⁹ Union with Christ, in other and is theirs solely by being imputed to them.” words, helps us understand two realities about our justification. First, the righteousness by which we are justified is solely the accomplishment of Jesus Christ, and in no way that of the sinner. Second, in union with Jesus Christ, all that Christ has accomplished comes into the full and lasting possession of the one united with Him. In the case of justification, Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the sinner and received by faith alone. Thus, the sinner, through faith in Christ, stands righteous in the sight of God, and does so entirely by the grace of God. The sinner’s works have no justifying efficacy whatsoever. It is Christ’s works, made over to the one united with Him, that justify the sinner.

For Calvin, then, union with Christ is the biblical teaching that helps us to understand the proper relation between justification and sanctification. Specifically, union with Christ in Calvin’s writings helped to bring clarity to two aspects of justification by faith alone that came under particular scrutiny at the time of the Protestant Reformation. First, union with Christ helps us understand the biblical integrity of the grace of justification. Justification is a benefit that comes into the possession of a person when, in union with Jesus Christ, he receives by faith alone the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. Second, union with Christ helps us understand that justification is inseparable from Christ and, therefore, from all the benefits that Christ has won for His people. There is no case of a justified person who is not also being sanctified. The faith by which we receive Christ and His righteousness for justification is no dead faith, but a living faith that works by love. This is not to say that we are in any way justified on the basis of the good works that are the necessary fruit of justifying faith. It is to say that justification and sanctification are both graces sourced in Jesus Christ and, therefore, as inseparable as Christ Himself is inseparable.

It is not that Martin Luther failed to grasp many of these insights. In his 1519 lecture on Galatians 2:21, Luther situates justification by faith alone in the context of a person’s union with Christ:

But he who believes in Christ and by the spirit of faith has become one with Him not only renders satisfaction now to all but also brings it about that they owe everything to him, since he has all things in common with Christ. His sins are no longer his; they are Christ’s…. Again Christ’s righteousness now belongs not only to Christ; it belongs to the Christian.

In a later lecture (1535) on Galatians 2:20, Luther underscored similar themes:

But so far as justification is concerned, Christ and I must be so closely attached that He lives in me and I in Him. What a marvelous way of speaking! Because He lives in me, whatever grace, righteousness, life, peace, and salvation there is in me is all Christ’s; nevertheless, it is mine as well, by the cementing and attachment that are through faith, by which we become as one body in the Spirit…. In this way Paul seeks to withdraw us completely from ourselves, from the Law, and from works, and to transplant us into Christ and faith in Christ, so that in the area of justification we look only at grace, and separate it far from the Law and from works, which belong far away.

By [faith]… you are so cemented to Christ that He and you are as one person, which cannot be separated but remains attached to Him forever and declares: “I am as Christ.” And Christ, in turn, says: “I am as that sinner who is attached to Me, and I to him. For by faith we are joined together into one flesh and one bone.”

The importance of this doctrine, as Luther asserts but does not elaborate, is that it refutes the medieval doctrine of “formed faith” (fides caritate formata) as ⁵³ Luther, in other words, understood the Scripture’s teaching that which justifies. on union with Christ not only as providing the context in which the Scripture speaks of the sinner’s justification, but also as safeguarding the forensic integrity of the grace of justification. Luther also hints here that he understands the grace of sanctification in the same framework of union with Christ: “There is a double life: my own, which is natural or animate; and an alien life, that of Christ in me…. Paul, living in himself, is utterly dead through the law but living in Christ, or rather with Christ living in him, he lives an alien life. Christ is speaking, ⁵⁴ The new life of the Christian, acting, and performing all actions in him.”

Luther reasons, is a life lived in the Christ who indwells every believer.

Calvin’s discussion of union with Christ in book 3 of the Institutes(1559) does not, therefore, represent a material departure from Luther’s understanding of justification. What, then, is Calvin’s accomplishment and advance over Luther? It is that Calvin both articulated and demonstrated, with systematic precision and comprehensiveness, union with Christ as the architectonic principle of the Bible’s teaching of the application of redemption. In doing so, he both stated and explained how union with Christ ensures the inseparability and the distinct character of the graces of justification and sanctification.

A ‘New Perspective’ on Justification?

In the last forty years, a substantial challenge to the Reformation’s doctrine of justification by faith alone has emerged from academic biblical scholarship. The New Perspective on Paul, as proponents have labeled it, contends that Luther and Calvin profoundly misunderstood Paul’s teaching of justification, especially in Galatians and Romans. The New Perspective has not remained confined to the academy but has made its way into the evangelical church. Some claim that the New Perspective offers a more biblically faithful account of justification in Paul than the Reformers had. What, then, do New Perspective proponents claim about justification in Paul? Can the Reformers’ doctrine be sustained as true to Paul?

New Perspective proponents argue that Paul has not been properly understood in his first-century Jewish context. When Paul speaks of “the works of the law,” they contend, he has in mind particularly those commands of the Jewish law that served to identify and mark out a Jew in distinction from a Gentile. This is the reason why, for instance, circumcision and table fellowship feature so prominently in Paul’s discussion of the law in Galatians. In the Christian church, proponents continue, Paul found himself locked in controversy with Judaizing opponents. The nub of the controversy did not concern how the sinner is accepted and accounted righteous. The controversy centered around how the Christian is to be identified before others. Justification in the present, therefore, does not concern how a sinner is forgiven and accounted righteous before God. It is primarily a declaration that one is a member of the people of God. To be “justified by faith and not by works of the law” does not mean that one is forgiven and accounted righteous before God on the sole basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, imputed to the sinner and received through faith alone. Instead, this phrase of Paul’s means that one is not declared to be a member of God’s people because of such identity markers drawn from the Jewish law as circumcision and the dietary laws. Rather, one is declared to be a member of God’s people because of the badge of faith in Christ.

For the New Perspective, justification is not Paul’s way of answering the question “What must I do to be saved?” It is the Apostle’s way of answering the question, “How may I identify a member of the people of God?” Its primary concern is not salvation but identity.

This is not to say that New Perspective proponents do not believe that Paul provides answers to the question how the sinner may be right with God. Whereas justification in the present primarily concerns how one is identified or marked out as a member of God’s people, justification in the future primarily concerns how one is saved. How is one said to be justified on the day of judgment? The verdict of justification, these proponents argue, rests upon two coordinate grounds. The first is the sacrifice of Christ on the cross for sin. The second is the transforming work of the Spirit in a person’s life. The work of Christ for us and the work of the Spirit in us combine to justify us on the last day.

The lines between the Reformation and the New Perspective are clear. The Reformation did not deny that justification had implications for the way in which the justified believer is identified and relates to other believers. It nevertheless did not primarily understand justification as referring to inclusion in the people of God. The Reformation did not deny that the justified believer will be “openly acknowledged and acquitted” in the presence of angels and men on the “day of ⁵⁶ It did forthrightly deny that a believer’s works were, are, or will be judgment.” even the partial basis of his justification. Because it understood that the sole ground of the sinner’s justification is the imputed righteousness of Christ, the Reformation forthrightly affirmed that justification is a present and definitive verdict, and that no justified person can “fall from the state of justification.”

One service the New Perspective has provided the church is to stir God’s people to reexamine for themselves the biblical foundation of justification by faith alone. Every generation of believers, standing on the shoulders of previous generations of believers, has the responsibility of appropriating and articulating the doctrine for itself. The circulation of error has frequently proven the occasion of that enterprise in the church. The New Perspective challenges the contemporary church to consider afresh the Scripture’s teaching about justification.

Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrines, in fact, are true to the Scripture. What does justification mean for Paul? It is the opposite of condemnation (see Rom. 5:16; 8:33–34). It is, therefore, a verdict that God renders in His courtroom. What, then, does it mean to be declared righteous? On what basis does God make such a declaration? The very heart of our “righteousness,” Paul explains in Romans 3:21–26, is the atoning, substitutionary, propitiatory death of Jesus Christ. That death is the crowning act of a lifetime of Jesus’ obedience for His people (Phil. 2:8). It is that perfect obedience, along with Jesus’ sacrificial death, that constitutes the sole basis upon which a person is justified (Rom. 5:19; 8:3–4).

What are the “works of the law” by which “no one will be justified” (Gal. 2:16)? Those works, Paul explains in Galatians 3:10, are the deeds that the law requires a person to perform. Failure to perform them leaves one under a “curse.” The whole range of human activity that Paul catalogs in Romans 3:10– 18 shows that “works of the law” (3:20) refers to the law’s demands that no sinner is able to meet perfectly (cf. Titus 3:5).

What is the “faith” by which one is justified (Gal. 2:16)? Paul is clear that we are not justified because of faith (much less because of the fruitful activity of faith), but through or by (means of) faith. That is to say, faith is the God provided instrument by which we receive Christ and His righteousness (Eph. 2:8–10; Phil. 1:29). In the matter of justification, Abraham did not “work” but “believ[ed] in him who justifies the ungodly” (Rom. 4:5). Abraham’s character did not factor into God’s justifying verdict of Abraham. Abraham, rather, trusted God and His promise of the descendant (Jesus) who would bring blessing to the world (see Gen. 12:1–3; 15:1–6).

For Paul, justification takes place in the context of union with Christ. Paul explicitly teaches this point at ² Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.” That is to say, for His people’s sake, our sins were laid upon Jesus at the cross. Jesus became the sin-bearer and paid the penalty due to us for sin. What’s more, “in him we… become the righteousness of God.” Paul says two things in that statement. First, we “become the righteousness of God” in just the same way that Jesus became “sin.” Jesus’ spotless righteousness is imputed to us. Second, this imputation happens in the context of an individual’s union with Christ (“in him”).

Union with Christ, for Paul, means that we possess Christ, even as He possesses us (see ¹ Cor. 6:12–20). In possessing Christ, we share in all the benefits that He won on our behalf. That includes not only justification but also sanctification. We are “in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). Justification (“righteousness”) and sanctification are distinct but inseparable benefits sourced in Jesus Christ, and received when one is united to Him by faith.

Conclusion

Martin Luther’s rediscovery of the doctrines of grace five hundred years ago was a remarkable achievement and an incalculable service to the church. Luther emerged from a concerted study of the Scripture with the dual conviction that the sinner is saved by grace alone and that this central truth had been profoundly obscured in the church of his day. As we have seen, Luther came to a more precise understanding and articulation of the doctrine of justification over a period of several years. It would fall to Calvin to articulate systematically and comprehensively the doctrine in its biblical fullness.

The doctrine of justification at the time of the Reformation was recovered and advanced in the flames of controversy—the medieval way of salvation that characterized church teaching throughout Luther’s and Calvin’s lives; the teaching of Agricola and the Roman Catholic–Lutheran dialogue at Regensburg in Luther’s later years; and the teaching of Osiander in Calvin’s later years. Challenges to the doctrine are nothing new. In our generation, the New Perspective on Paul challenges the evangelical church to articulate afresh the unchanging, biblical doctrine of justification. Luther and Calvin serve us well today in the twenty-first century. They do so, of course, in their bequeathal to us of the fruits of their study of the Scripture. But they also serve us in the example that they have left us.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone is a prized treasure in the church’s possession. That treasure may never be taken for granted. It is retained only through hard, patient, and persistent toil in the Word of God. But, they would surely insist, how could we possibly give anything less to the Savior who has given us nothing less than Himself?

Notes

Notes

1. WA, 25:375, quoted in What Luther Says, 704.

2. Lewis W. Spitz, introduction to “Preface to the Wittenberg Edition of Luther’s German Writings” in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, Vol. 1, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 5.

3. See the clear and perceptive treatment of R. Scott Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi: Alien or Proper to Luther’s Doctrine of Justification?”CTQ 70 (2006): 269–310, to whose historical analysis I am especially indebted.

4. For these lectures, see LW, Vol. 27: Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 5–6; Lectures onGalatians, 1519, Chapters 1–6, ed. Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 151–410. Compare, from the same year, Luther’s “Two Kinds of Righteousness,”LW, 31:297–306, repr. MartinLuther’s Basic Theological Writings, 119–125.

5. Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of LateMedieval and Reformation Europe(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 374.

6. Ibid., 233.

7. Book of Concord(2000), 301, quoted in Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: AContemporary Interpretation, 3rd German ed.; trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 98.

8. Quoted in Bainton, Here I Stand, 49. On the scholarly controversies surrounding the date and even the historicity of the event, see Lowell C. Green, “Faith, Righteousness, and Justification: New Light on Their Development Under Luther and Melanchthon”Sixteenth Century Journal 4/1 (1972): 65–86.

9. Quoted in Bainton, Here I Stand, 49.

10. WATR, 1:146, 12–14, as cited at Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 288.

11. For what follows, see broadly Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 289–94.

12. Julius Köstlin, The Theology of Luther in Its Historical Development and Inner Harmony, 2nd. German ed.; 2 vols.; trans. Charles E. Hay (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1897), 1:92.

13. See the summary at Reinhold Seeberg, The History of Doctrines(1895, 1898; repr. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1977), 2:229.

14. Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 289.

15. This is the judgment of Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 4:195. For a thorough analysis of these lectures from the vantage point of Luther’s understanding of justification, see Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:189–96.

16. LW, 25:242, quoted in Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:191.

17. Ibid., 25:257, as revised in Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 290.

18. Green, “Faith, Righteousness, and Justification,” 66.

19. Green, following Karl Holl, “Faith, Righteousness, and Justification,” 72–73.

20. On both which, see Green, “Faith, Righteousness, and Justification,” 73–77.

21. LW, 27:221 quoted in Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 292.

22. “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 119.

23. Ibid., 120.

24. bid., 119, 120.

25. Ibid., 120. Luther could also term these two righteousnesses as “passive” and “active,” respectively, on which see Köstlin, The Theology of Luther, 2:440.

26. “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” 121.

27. Ibid., 120.

28. Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 292.

29. Köstlin, The Theology of Luther, 2:447. For the controversy surrounding Regensburg, see the discussion of Ozment, The Age of Reform, 377–78, 405–6. For the way in which Luther, for similar reasons, had earlier and vigorously restated the Protestant doctrine in full fashion at the Disputations of 1536–37, see Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 298–306.

30. Lull and Russell, introduction to “Against the Antinomians” (1539), Martin Luther’s BasicTheological Writings, 176.

31. “Against the Antinomians,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 179.

32. Ibid.

33. For the way in which Luther understood the Ten Commandments to regulate the believer’s life, see his “Treatise on Good Works” (1520), in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, Vol. 2, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis, Fortress, 2007), 97–196.

34. The Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, vol. 4 , eds. Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet (repr. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1983), 440–42.

35. See, representatively, Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:200; J.L. Neve, Churches and Sects ofChristendom(rev. ed.; Blair, Neb.: Lutheran Publishing House, 1944), 286–87.

36. On the path by which Calvin’s published statements on justification in the first edition (1536) of the Institutes reached their final form in the last edition (1559), see the brief but illuminating discussion at Richard B. Gaffin Jr., “Justification and Union with Christ: Institutes 3.11–18,” in ed. David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback, A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes(Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 2009), 249–51.

37. I owe the foregoing outline and accompanying headings to Ford Lewis Battles, Analysis of theInstitutes of the Christian Religion of John Calvin(1980; repr. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 2001), 20–21.

38. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 3.11.1. Compare Calvin’s eloquent elaboration of this point at Institutes 2.16.19, where he concludes, “since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.”

39. Gaffin, “Justification and Union with Christ,” 255.

40. Ibid. As Gaffin also notes, “this does not mean that faith justifies because it sanctifies or as it functions in sanctification; the role of faith as the sole instrument in receiving justification, [Calvin] makes clear elsewhere, differs from its role in sanctification, ibid,” referencing 3.11.7; 3.11.17; 3.14.21; 3.18.8.

41. Calvin, Institutes, 3.1.1.

42. Ibid.

43. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.1.

44. So Richard Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order ofSalvation(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2012), 209.

45. For what follows, I am indebted to the discussion and analysis of Gaffin, “Justification and Union with Christ,” 266–69.

46. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.5, quoted in Gaffin, “Justification and Union with Christ,” 266.

47. Gaffin, “Justification and Union with Christ,” 266.

48. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.10.

49. Gaffin, “Justification and Union with Christ,” 268.

50. LW, 27:241, as quoted at Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi,” 292.

51. LW, 26:167–68.

52. Ibid., 26:168.

53. Ibid., 26:168–69. Luther’s closing comment is “I would like to treat this at greater length if I could.”

54. Ibid., 26:170.

55. For a brief introduction to the New Perspective, see my A Christian’s Pocket Guide to BeingMade Right with God: Understanding Justification(Fearn, Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2010). In what follows, I will be primarily interacting with the views of N.T. Wright and, to a lesser extent, James D.G. Dunn, New Perspective proponents who have gained a wide hearing within the evangelical church.

56. Westminster Larger Catechism 90.

57. Westminster Confession of Faith 11.5.