www.PresentTruthMag.com Proclaiming the Good News of the forgiveness of sin and eternal life by God’s unmerited grace alone through faith alone in the sinless life and atoning death of Jesus Christ our Lord alone. Sola Gratia…………Only By Grace Sola Fide………...…Only By Faith Solo Christo…….....Only By Christ Sola Scriptura……..Only By Scripture

Special Issue

Christ Our Righteousness

Editorial Introduction – page 2

Chapter 1: The Doctrine of Righteousness by Faith in the Reformation – page 3

Chapter 2: Current Efforts to Include Sanctification in the Article of Righteousness by Faith – page 11

Chapter 3: The Meaning of Righteousness in Scripture – page 13

Chapter 4: The Relation of Righteousness and Salvation – page 19

Chapter 5: Christ Our Righteousness – page 25

Chapter 6: Imputed Righteousness: The Rock of Offense – page 34

Chapter 7: Justification in Paul: Its Judicial Meaning – page 41

Chapter 8: The Eschatological Meaning of Justification – page 48

Chapter 9: Righteousness by Faith and Sanctification – page 54

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Christ Our Righteousness by Robert D. Brinsmead

Editorial Introduction

St. Paul's doctrine of righteousness by faith, which was powerfully revived in the Reformation, has suffered serious erosion in the contemporary church. In some places the doctrine of imputed righteousness has been lampooned as a legal fiction, as a pasted-on "as if" righteousness. Scholars have desperately sought ways to express the doctrine of righteousness by faith in a way which is more compatible to our modern religious sensibilities.

In a quite recent and significant monograph entitled The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul, J. A. Ziesler says, "More commonly today, the language of imputation is avoided, partly because of the difficulties to which it has led . . . " —Cambridge University Press), p.8. He goes on to propose a new synthesis between the Catholic and Protestant positions.

In current Luther studies there seems to be more interest in the young Augustinian Luther. This is significant because much of the theology of the young Luther is in harmony with the Augustine/Tridentine1 view of justification by faith. Some Roman Catholic scholars are making good capital of this – so much so that it is amusing to imagine that it may not be long before the rebel monk is proclaimed a Catholic saint!

The Pauline doctrine of righteousness by faith can only be preserved by eternal vigilance. If the Fathers one generation removed from Paul could show so little understanding of Paul's theology, what might be said of us who are many generations removed from the Reformers? If the powerful and revolutionary truth of righteousness by faith is going to live in the church, it must be rediscovered in every generation. Present Truth Magazine is dedicated to that objective.

In this issue of Present Truth Magazine we begin a series of articles on righteousness by faith. We will not only review our Reformation heritage, but we will discuss some of the major modifications and deviations which have been put forward. We will also review the genuine progress which has been made by Christian scholarship.

The Reformation doctrine of righteousness by faith is being revived in all sorts of surprising places, and we must add that it is meeting some stiff twenty-first century opposition. We hope to report on this soon and would like to receive reports from our readers on how the gospel emphasis is faring in their churches.

Come, let us reason together. R.D.B.

1 The theology of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent.

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Chapter 1

The Doctrine of Righteousness by

Faith in the Reformation

Luther has been described as "the first great, clear preacher of the righteousness of faith sent to the Christian church since the days of the apostle Paul." – Julius Koslin, The Theology of Luther, pp.77-78. Prior to Luther there were many great teachers in the church who advocated that the only way man could attain to righteousness was by the grace of God and through faith in Christ. But the best of them, even Augustine himself, had confounded the article of righteousness by faith with the renewal and life of new obedience which the Holy Spirit accomplishes in the life of the believer. There was no clear distinction between the righteousness which the believer has by faith and his own holiness of life. Justification and sanctification were confounded. Or to put this another way, gospel and law were not clearly distinguished.

True, the better teachers of the church did not slip into the terrible, overt kind of legalism which characterized most of "grass-roots" Catholicism. They even repudiated the more refined kind of legalism known as semi-Pelagianism. But it was their confusing righteousness by faith with the believer's holiness of life which inevitably corrupted the gospel and bore the bitter harvest of darkness, error, superstition and the other evils of the medieval religious system. We do not say these things for the sake of a mere academic, historical interest. If we fail to learn from the mistakes of the past, we are condemned to repeat them. As Luther so often warned, unless we diligently preserve the purity of the article of righteousness by faith, the darkness of the errors of the past will overtake us.

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Foremost among those who would lead us back to the darkness and bondage of pre-Reformation theology are some of the Luther scholars of this century. They tell us that Luther taught that justification means to make (personally) righteous and that justification is identified with the renewal which the Holy Spirit works in believers. Some tell us that it was Melanchthon and Protestant scholasticism, not Luther, which developed the concept of forensic justification.

Much of the debate hangs on the actual date of Luther's so-called "tower experience" – the time when he was given clear insight into the meaning of "the righteousness of God" (Rom. 1:17). Luther himself describes the enlightenment that came to him in the heated tower as he was pondering over the meaning of Romans 1:17. Before this, Luther was not the mature Protestant Reformer but the young evangelical Catholic.

In the preface to the Wittenberg edition of his works, written in 1545, Luther relates the "tower experience" and places it sometime near the end of 1518. That is quite late – a year after he had nailed The Ninety-Five Theses on the church door and only a little more than a year before he went to the Diet of Worms. We should also remember something else: Luther had a very critical opinion of his earlier works and doctrinal formulations. He wished them burned rather than published.

Before this "tower experience" Luther, as we said, was a young Catholic theologian. He had come a long way and had already learned many precious insights into Paul's gospel of Christ's righteousness. He had lashed out against the legalism and semi-Pelagianism of the schoolmen. He knew that no works can avail for salvation, but only Christ's righteousness which is by grace through faith. At this stage of his development Luther went back to Augustine and followed the great Latin Father. The righteousness of faith was understood as that which Christ works in us by His grace, and this was curiously mingled with the concept of imputed righteousness. But Luther's doctrine was sufficiently evangelical to cause him to challenge and stir the great medieval system.

Yet all this – his famous Lectures on Romans as well as The Ninety-Five Theses – was the work of Luther the young Catholic or Luther the Augustinian theologian. It was not yet Luther the Protestant Reformer.

But some of the Luther scholars of this century say that he must have been mistaken in giving such a late date to his "tower experience." They contend that he must have had a lapse of memory or something of that sort. And they insist that the "tower experience" came much earlier, perhaps even as early as 1512 or 1513 – at least before he gave those famous lectures on the book of Romans (1515-1516). What is at stake is this: If the "tower experience" did come earlier, then the real Protestant Luther did indeed teach that justification means being made righteous, and he did confound the righteousness of faith with the renewal and new obedience which the Holy Spirit works in the life of the believer. In other words, Luther was at heart a true Roman Catholic after all – for that is actually the real doctrine of refined Romanism.

We say "refined Romanism" because a number of Roman Catholics now tell us that the church of the sixteenth century had degenerated into semi-Pelagianism and that Luther was justified in rebelling against this decadent Catholicism. However, in order to meet the challenge of the Reformation, the church repudiated semi-Pelagianism as did Luther. And in the Council of Trent she reaffirmed the Augustinian concept of righteousness by faith.

Luther once said that if the Pope would teach the gospel of justification by faith, he would kiss his feet and carry him in his hands. 1 There are Catholic scholars who are now saying: "If only Luther had lived to see the church repudiate semi-Pelagianism in the Council of Trent and reaffirm justification by God's grace alone! He would have kissed the Pope's feet and carried him in his hands." 2 And there are some Lutheran scholars who practically agree with these sentiments. 1 See H. J. McSorIey, 'Luther, Trent, Vatican I & II," McCormick Quarterly 21, Nov., 1967, pp.95-104. 2 See ibid

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The startling point is this: The young Luther has been rediscovered, and most of the interest in modern Luther studies centers in the theology of the young Luther – the theology that Luther pleaded to have burned and buried. Why this great interest in the early Luther? Because it is this Luther which forms the bridge that unites Catholics and Protestants. The ghost of this Luther has now become the chief apostle of healing the wound of the sixteenth century. It is indeed astonishing that the Luther who broke through and out of the Roman system should now be enlisted as the main agent to bridge the gulf between Romanism and Protestantism.

How much, then, might be at stake in whether or not we accept Luther's own dating of his "tower experience"!

How did the mature Reformer, the real Protestant Luther, reflect the Augustinian (Catholic) view of justification by faith? Let us permit Luther to speak for himself on this point:

At first I devoured, not merely read, Augustine. But when the door was opened for me in Paul, so that I understood what justification by faith is, it was all over with Augustine. —Luther's Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), Vol.54, Table Talk.

The crucial point is: When was this door into Paul opened to Luther? Certainly not in 1515-1516 when he delivered his Lectures on Romans. In these we find him calling on "blessed Augustine" repeatedly. His final breakthrough had not yet come.

In 1518, probably near the end of the year (about the time when, according to Luther's own dating, he had the "tower experience"), Luther published his "Sermon on Threefold Righteousness." It is here that we find the first truly clear distinction between the righteousness of faith and the righteousness of life which is worked in the believer by the Holy Spirit. As Finnish scholar Saarnivaara says:

The conception of justification which Luther sets forth in this sermon is in perfect harmony with his Reformation doctrine. The basic idea of righteousness before God, as expressed in it, is no longer compatible with the Augustinian view. Luther quite definitely teaches that man is justified through the eternal righteousness of Christ and not through a renewal or becoming righteous through the working of grace. The emphasis is laid on the work of Christ for sinners.—Luther Discovers the Gospel (St. Louis: Concordia, 1951), pp.94-95.

Very soon after, Luther published another sermon in which he further revised and sharpened his thinking. This he entitled "Sermon on the Twofold Righteousness." It was apparently published early in 1519. It is here where we find that the metamorphosis of the Catholic to the Protestant Luther had finally taken place. Out of the old cocoon of Catholicism emerged Luther the full-fledged Protestant. And with him, in this final breakthrough, Protestantism was born.

Since it is in this "Sermon on the Twofold Righteousness" that we first identify the real Protestant doctrine of righteousness by faith, let us spend a little time noting its central thesis and its main thrust. 1

The first kind of righteousness Luther calls "alien righteousness" – “Christ's living, doing and speaking, his suffering and dying." He calls it an "infinite righteousness," "primary." It is what men receive "in baptism and whenever they are truly repentant" and is given "without our works by grace alone."

1 See Luther's Works, vol.31, pp.297-306.This passive righteousness of faith . . . which is the righteousness of grace, mercy and forgiveness of sin.

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The second kind of righteousness is what Luther calls "good works." “. . . this righteousness consists in love to one's neighbor, . . . in meekness and fear toward God. . . . this righteousness is the product of the righteousness of the first type, actually its fruit and consequence. . . . this righteousness follows the example of Christ."

It is especially to be noted that Luther does not belittle the necessity of the second righteousness. In its proper place he highly extols it. But he ascribes salvation wholly to the first righteousness.

These concepts may not seem so startling to us who take for granted a clear distinction between justification and sanctification (or to say this another way, between gospel and law). But the right distinction between gospel and law was regarded by Luther as the foundation of the Reformation. Often warning against thinking that this distinction is easy to maintain, he said that much grace and skill are required to make the distinction in practice.

There are a few points in Luther's "Sermon on the Twofold Righteousness" which are still a little fuzzy, but we must remember that the first Protestant had just hatched and started scratching. However, in the following years we find him polishing this concept of two-fold righteousness into a sharp instrument. His Commentary on Galatians, given in 1531, reflects his mature thinking. Dillenberger says, ". . . he considered the lectures of 1531... among the few works of his worth saving." — Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, p.99.

In his Commentary on Galatians, Luther expands and fills out his concept of twofold righteousness.

Number 1: Passive Righteousness 1

This is the righteousness proclaimed and offered to us in the gospel. Luther says that it is

. . . the righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness . . . which God through Christ, without works imputeth unto us . . . a mere passive righteousness . . .Therefore it seemeth good unto me to call this righteousness of faith or Christian righteousness, the passive righteousness [because it is entirely apart from all human efforts and works].—Ibid., p.101.

This passive righteousness of faith . . . which is the righteousness of grace, mercy and forgiveness of sin . . . — Ibid.

. . . by mere imputation. . . —Ibid.

. . . this righteousness is heavenly and passive: which we have not of ourselves, but receive it from heaven: which we work not, but apprehend it by faith. . . —Ibid., p.105.

In that righteousness and life [of Christ] I have no sin, no sting of conscience, no care of death . . . I have another righteousness and life above this life, which is Christ the Son of God, Who knoweth no sin nor death, but is righteousness and life eternal.—Ibid., pp.105-106.

Because this righteousness of faith is the righteousness of Christ, Luther in many places declares it to be a whole, eternal and an infinite righteousness which is given to the believer, not piecemeal or gradually, but instantaneously and altogether.

1 This term "passive righteousness" must not became confused with what later Protestant scholars came to call "passive obedience" when they referred to the two phases of Christ's work as "passive obedience" (death) and "active obedience" (life).

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There is one point that needs clarification. At times Luther will talk about this "alien righteousness" being "in us" (ibid., pp. 101,109). When he says this, he is not stepping back into the Augustinian/Roman Catholic formulation which confounds the work of Christ for us with His work in us. When Luther says that this alien righteousness is "in us," he does not mean "in us" as a quality (i.e., imparted or infused righteousness, as it has come to be called) but "in us" by faith. That is to say, it is seen and treasured by the heart. In the same fashion, Paul could tell the Philippian believers. " ". . . I have you in my heart. . . "(Phil. 1:7). To prove beyond all doubt that this is what Luther means, we cite his clarifying comments on Galatians:

Christian righteousness, therefore, as I have said, is the imputation of God for righteousness or unto righteousness, because of our faith in Christ, or for Christ's sake. When the popish schoolmen hear this strange and wonderful definition, which is unknown to reason, they laugh at it. For they imagine that righteousness is a certain quality poured into the soul, and afterwards spread into all the parts of man. They cannot put away the imaginations of reason, which teacheth that a right judgment, and a good will, or a good intent is true righteousness. This unspeakable gift therefore excelleth all reason, that God doth account and acknowledge him for righteous without any works, which embraceth his Son by faith alone, who was sent into the world, was born, suffered, and was crucified &c. for us.

This matter, as touching the words, is easy (to wit, that righteousness is not essentially in us, as the Papists reason out of Aristotle, but without us in the grace of God only and in his imputation . . .).—Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, tr. Philip S. Watson (Cambridge & London: James Clarke, 1953), p.227.

Number 2: Active Righteousness

. . . there is another righteousness called the righteousness of the law, or of the Ten Commandments, which Moses teacheth. This do we also teach after the doctrine of faith.—Quoted in Dillenberger, op. cit., p.100.

Luther says that this righteousness consists in

. . . our works, and may be wrought of us either by pure natural strength (as the sophisters term it) or else by the gift of God. For these kinds of righteousness are also the gift of God, like as other good things are which we do enjoy.—Ibid., p.101.

It should be carefully noted that Luther acknowledges that this active righteousness in the Christian is a gift of God. That is to say, the Holy Spirit is given to the Christian to work it in him. But Luther does not, because of this, call it "the righteousness of faith." That is absolutely a distinct gift and belongs to Number 1. Only the passive righteousness is called "the righteousness of faith."

Of this active righteousness Luther says, "I know I ought to have it, and also to fulfill it." His point is that it cannot atone for sin, satisfy justice or appease his own conscience. In this life it is always incomplete and imperfect because the flesh of man remains an imperfect channel of the Spirit. Therefore Luther says, "I cannot trust unto it, neither dare I set it against the judgment of God." In the matter of consolation of a troubled conscience which trembles before God's judgment seat, Luther says that he abandons trust in this active righteousness altogether and rests only in the passive righteousness of mercy, grace, forgiveness of sins and imputation (see ibid., p.102).

Yet active righteousness is "necessary," only it must be kept within "its bounds" (ibid., p.104). As Christians, we must be diligent to do good works, but we must also be diligent not to trust in them. To trust in active righteousness, even though it too is a gift of God (i.e., He gives strength to obey), is to fall from grace (see ibid., p.106).

Active righteousness is the fruit of passive righteousness (i.e., sanctification is the fruit of righteousness by faith). Luther describes how imputed righteousness works active righteousness in the believer.

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Says he:

I do good works, how and whensoever occasion is offered. If I be a minister of the Word, I preach, I comfort the broken-hearted, I administer the Sacraments. If I be an householder, I govern my house and my family, I bring up my children in the knowledge and fear of God. If I be a magistrate, the charge that is given me from above I diligently execute. If I be a servant, I do my master's business faithfully. To conclude: whosoever he be that is assuredly persuaded that Christ is his righteousness, doth not only cheerfully and gladly work well in his vocation, but also submitteth himself through love to the magistrates and to their laws, yea though they be severe, sharp and cruel, and (if necessity do so require) to all manner of burdens and dangers of this present life, because he knoweth that this is the will of God, and that this obedience pleaseth him.

Thus far as concerning the argument of this Epistle, whereof Paul intreateth, taking occasion of false teachers who had darkened this righteousness of faith among the Galatians, against whom he setteth himself in defending and commending his authority and office. —Ibid., p.109.

When we have thus taught faith in Christ, then do we teach also good works. Because thou hast laid hold of Christ by faith, through Whom thou art made righteous,1 begin now to work well. Love God and thy neighbour, call upon God, give thanks unto Him, praise Him, confess Him. Do good to thy neighbour and serve him: fulfill thine office. These are good works indeed, which flow out of this faith and this cheerfulness conceived in the heart, for that we have remission of sins freely in Christ . . . When sin is pardoned, and the conscience delivered from the burden and sting of sin, them may the Christian bear all things easily.—Ibid. pp.111-112.

The Proper Distinction in the Twofold Righteousness

This distinction between the righteousness of faith (justification) and the righteousness of the law (sanctification) was the foundation of Luther's doctrine. He insisted on maintaining the distinction for two reasons: for the glory of Christ and for the comfort of troubled consciences.

Salvation is based on the righteousness of faith. If we bring sanctification (active righteousness) into this article of righteousness by faith, we darken the glory of Christ because we fail to ascribe salvation to His doing and dying alone. Nothing pacifies God's wrath and saves us except that Christ “loved me, and gave Himself for Me" (Gal. 2:20). Compared with this inestimable price of His eternal and infinite righteousness, the active righteousness of all men, the sufferings of all the martyrs and the obedience of all the holy angels are nothing. Indeed, it would be better to throw all works – even those done by grace – down to hell rather than to put them in the room of this great righteousness of faith. 2

Then Luther looks at the human side of the coin. The proper distinction between the righteousness of faith and the righteousness of holy living (sanctification) is necessary for the comfort of a troubled conscience. Says Luther:

This is our divinity, whereby we teach how to put a difference between these two kinds of righteousness, active and passive . . . Both are necessary, but both must be kept within their bounds. —Quoted in Dillenberger, op. cit., p.102.

I am indeed a sinner as touching this present life and the righteousness thereof . . . But I have another righteousness and life above this life, which is Christ the Son of God, Who knoweth no sin, no death, but is righteousness and life eternal. —Ibid., p.106.

Therefore do we so earnestly set forth and so often repeat this doctrine of faith or Christian righteousness, that by this means it may be kept in continual exercise, and may be plainly discerned from the active

1 1n context Luther obviously means being made righteous imputatively, not subjectively as Rome teaches. 2 See Luther, op. cit., pp. 176-i 77.

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righteousness of the law. (For by this only doctrine the Church is built, and in this it consisteth.) Otherwise we shall never be able to hold the true divinity, but by and by we shall either become canonists, observers of ceremonies, observers of the law, or Papists, and Christ so darkened that none in the Church shall be either rightly taught or comforted. Wherefore, if we will be teachers and leaders of others, it behoveth us to have great care of these matters, and to mark well this distinction between the righteousness of the law and the righteousness of Christ. And this distinction is easy to be uttered in words, but in use and experience it is very hard, although it be never so diligently exercised and practised; for in the hour of death, or in other agonies of the conscience, these two sorts of righteousness do encounter more near together than thou wouldest wish or desire.

Wherefore I do admonish you, especially such as shall become instructors and guiders of consciences, and also every one apart, that ye exercise yourselves continually by study, by reading, by meditation of the Word and by prayer, that in the time of temptation ye may be able to instruct and comfort both your own consciences and others, and to bring them from the law to grace, from active and working righteousness to the passive and received righteousness, and, to conclude, from Moses to Christ. For the devil is wont, in affliction and in the conflict of conscience, by the law to make us afraid, and to lay against us the guilt of sin, our wicked life past, the wrath and judgment of God, hell and eternal death, that by this means he may drive us to desperation, make us bond-slaves to himself, and pluck us from Christ. Furthermore, he is wont to set against us those places of the Gospel, wherein Christ himself requireth works of us, and with plain words threateneth damnation to those who do them not. Now, if here we be not able to judge between these two kinds of righteousness, if we take not by faith hold of Christ sitting at the right hand of God, who maketh intercession unto the Father for us wretched sinners [Heb. 7:25], then are we under the law and not under grace, and Christ is no more a saviour, but a lawgiver. Then can there remain no more salvation, but a certain desperation and everlasting death must needs follow. —Ibid., pp.107-108.

The Formula of Concord

A few years after the death of Luther the Formula of Concord (1556) reiterated these basic Luther insights on double righteousness. In the Formula of Concord Luther's doctrine of righteousness by faith suffered no deterioration at the hands of his ardent followers. What the Formula lacked in the thunder and fire of Luther's language, it gained in a statement of greater precision and refinement. This is no surprise when we consider Luther's temperament as well as the lapse of time in which to sharpen the Protestant arguments. It is ridiculous to suggest, as some have done, that the Formula of Concord departed from Luther in its statement on righteousness by faith. Certainly it departed from the early Augustinian Luther, whom Luther himself repudiated. But if these early Lutherans were to be faulted in drawing up their statement, it would be in slavishly following their hero in almost everything.

The two sections of the Formula of Concord which concern us here are its declarations, "The righteousness of Faith Before God," and, "Of the Law and the Gospel." Here Luther's distinction between the two kinds of righteousness, or his distinction between the law and the gospel, is hailed as the brilliant light of the Reformation.

The righteousness of faith is declared to be our only righteousness before God. This righteousness consists in the obedience of the divine-human Christ in both life and death, by which He fulfilled and satisfied the law on behalf of poor, condemned sinners. God imputes this righteousness to all who believe the gospel, and by it they are justified and saved. Justification is a declaration or verdict of God that the sinner is acquitted and counted as righteous for the sake of the obedience and death of Jesus Christ.

Renewal, sanctification and the life of new obedience "succeeds the righteousness of faith." This is called "incipient righteousness" because it is never complete in this life due to the corruption of original sin, which inheres in the flesh of all saints. This righteousness consists in a life of active obedience to the law of God, which becomes the rule of life for the justified believer (see "Of the Third Use of the Law," Book of Concord, pp. 261-264). No one can "retain" justification if he despises God's law and the necessity of good works. The Holy Ghost indwells believers and enables them to live this life of new obedience. Nevertheless (and here is the vital point):

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. . . this indwelling of God is not the righteousness of faith which St. Paul calls the iustitiam Dei, that is, the righteousness of God, for the sake of which we are declared righteous before God; but it follows the preceding righteousness of faith, which is nothing else than the forgiveness of sins and the gracious adoption of the poor sinner, for the sake of Christ's obedience and merit alone. Ibid., pp.254-255.

The Formula of Concord declares that the two kinds of righteousness must not be mingled together so that they are both called "the righteousness of faith before God" (ibid., p.254).

. . . neither renewal, sanctification, virtues nor good works are . . . our righteousness before God, nor are they to be constituted or set up as a part or cause of our righteousness, or otherwise under any pretext, title, or name whatever in the article of justification as necessary and belonging thereto; but the righteousness of faith consists alone in the forgiveness of sins out of pure grace, for the sake of Christ's merit alone; which blessings are offered us in the promise of the Gospel, and are received, accepted, applied, and appropriated by faith alone.—Ibid., p.253.

Martin Chemnitz Answers the Council of Trent

Martin Chemnitz (sometimes called the second Martin of the Reformation) was one of the main spirits in drawing up the Formula of Concord. He lacked Luther's volcanic and dynamic

power of speech, but he was a careful, precise and thorough scholar. He had sat at the feet of Philipp Melanchthon. A few years after the Formula, he produced his very thorough Examination of the Council of Trent.

One of the main arguments between Rome and the Reformers was over the meaning of "the righteousness of faith" in Paul. According to the Papists:

. . . the righteousness of faith is said to consist in this, that it leads the regenerate to obedience and observance of those things which are written in the Law, so that the righteousness of faith is the obedience of the regenerate to the Law, when love, which embraces the whole Law, is infused into believers through the Holy Spirit.—Martin Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent (Concordia), p.528.

In reply to this Papal proposition, Chemnitz agrees "that the Holy Spirit writes the Law into the hearts of the regenerate, so that by faith, through the Holy Spirit, they begin to keep the Law." —Ibid., p.529. But following Luther, Chemnitz proves from Paul that this kind of righteousness is properly called "the righteousness of the law" (Rom. 8:4). It must not be confused with what Paul calls "the righteousness of faith." Says Chemnitz:

For the righteousness of the Law is that a man does the things that are written in the Law; but the righteousness of faith is by believing to appropriate to oneself what Christ has done for us. Therefore the works by which the regenerate do those things which are written in the Law, either before or after their renewal, belong to the righteousness of the Law, though some in one way, others in another. —Ibid., p.490.

Chemnitz therefore affirms, "The righteousness of the Law [sanctification] and the righteousness of faith are distinguished."—Ibid.

Calvin matches Chemnitz in definitiveness and maintains the same distinction between righteousness by faith and sanctification. As in a sound Christology (union but no fusion in Christ's two natures), Calvin beautifully argues for union without fusion, distinction without separation in the two kinds of righteousness. 1 In this central issue all branches of the Reformation were thoroughly united. They were implacably opposed to confusing "the righteousness of faith" with sanctification.

1 See John Calvin, Institutes, Bk. 3, chap. 11.

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Chapter 2 Current Efforts to Include

Sanctification in the Article

of Righteousness by Faith The purity of the doctrine of justification by faith can be maintained only by continual battle and eternal vigilance. If it is lost, said Luther over and over, all will be lost, and darkness, error and superstition will again triumph in the church.

Whether justify means to declare righteous or to make righteous, and whether the righteousness of faith includes what the Holy Spirit does in the believer, were issues of fierce debate between the Reformers and Rome. If Rome's error was the fusion of justification and sanctification, Protestantism, in making a distinction, was exposed to the danger of separating justification from sanctification. In the 1840's, Anglican churchman John Henry Newman wrestled with the problem. He came up with this solution: Justify means to declare righteous, said he. On this point Protestants are right. But then he

added, What God declares becomes fact. ("Let there be light: and there was light.") God's Word accomplishes what it declares. From this angle the Roman Catholics are right, Newman concluded. This was a synthesis of the Catholic and Protestant positions. The interesting (and vital) point to notice is that Rome can accept the synthesis and still be Rome, but Protestantism cannot accept the synthesis and still be Protestantism. Newman later became Cardinal Newman.

Only a few years ago Hans Kung (sometimes hailed as the new Luther within Catholicism) acknowledged that justify means to declare righteous. Yet according to Kung, that is not all it means. He has revived Newman's synthesis 1 In Kung justification turns out to be both a declaring just

and a making just.

The Australian Lutheran scholar, H. P. Hamann of Luther Seminary, protests against the current and widespread tendency among leading Protestant scholars of making "sanctification in one way or another, part of justification." He goes on to fault such eminent authors as C. H. Dodd, Vincent Taylor, James Stewart, Karl Holl and a number of German theologians such as E. Schlink, W. Dantine, H.

G. Pohlmann and Ernst Kasemann. 2 We could also add many more names. 3

1 See Hans Kung, Justification (Burns & Oats), pp.199-211. 2 See H. P. Hamann, "Sanctification," Lutheran Theological Journal, Dec., 1976. 3 See for example, R. D. Brinsmead, "The Legal and Moral Aspects of Salvation," Part 1, Present Truth Magazine, Volume 25 “The Primacy of Justification”, PDF version at the www.PresentTruthMag.com web site, p.18.

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But for all the dislike that many modern scholars have for the concept of forensic justification, they cannot get away from the forensic, judicial meaning of justify in Paul. Even the majority of Roman exegetes now admit that it means to declare righteous. Hans Kung is very forthright in his admission that on linguistic grounds justify must be declaratory.1

In The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul, J. A. Ziesler reviews the history of the debate down to the present and then makes this apt summary:

The debate about whether on a priori grounds dikaioo [justify] can mean 'declare righteous" must surely be regarded as closed. Not only is it clear that it does mean this in Biblical Greek, but the parallel with axioo, and the fact that in secular Greek there is only one place where it has been discovered to mean "make righteous," show that a declaratory force ought to be given to it unless there are strong reasons to the contrary.—J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (Cambridge University Press), p.48.

Yet Ziesler seems to be troubled by "the main-line Protestant view" because, he says, "there is no road from it to ethics." —Ibid., p.5. (That is Rome's main criticism too.) In his scholarly thesis, Ziesler obviously sets out to make a bridge from the Protestant declare righteous to ethics. He comes up with his own theory of a twofold righteousness. But it is not Luther's original Protestant concept of twofold righteousness which we have already discussed.

In his doctrine of faith Paul uses a verb (dikaioo – justify) and a noun (dikaiosune – righteousness). Ziesler points out that Protestants have tended to interpret the noun in the light of the verb (i.e., forensically), while Catholics have tended to interpret the verb in the light of the noun (i.e., ethically). But Ziesler sees a twofold righteousness here:

1. "Justification by faith" means a forensic or declaratory righteousness.

2. "Righteousness by faith" means becoming ethically righteous, "a new kind of man" (ibid., p.168). While Ziesler does not like the term "imparted righteousness" (ibid., p.170), he means the same thing (i.e., sanctification).

These two things, forensic and ethical righteousness, are what Ziesler calls "the twin doctrines of justification by faith and righteousness by faith."—Ibid., p. 171). He suggests that justification by faith (God's pronouncement) is the root, and righteousness by faith (inward renewal) is the fruit. Ziesler has set out to make a bridge between justification and ethics, but he has succeeded in making a bridge from Wittenberg to Rome. And that is the main point of his thesis. In his interpretation he says: ". . . we have some sort of reconciliation between Protestant and Catholic traditional exegesis."—Ibid. "We arrive at an exegesis which satisfies the concerns of both traditional Catholicism and traditional Protestantism."—Ibid., p. 212. 2

Is there any good reason for seeing a distinction between justification by faith and righteousness by faith in Paul? If so, what is the precise relationship between justification and righteousness by faith?

In our next chapter we will review the biblical meaning of the word righteousness and examine why Paul talks about salvation in terms of righteousness by faith.

1 See Kung, Op. Cit. 2 Ziesler also says that his formulation is a synthesis of Hebrew and Greek thinking. We are tempted to add that there was a similar synthesis between Hebrew anthropology (resurrection) and Greek anthropology (immortality of the soul) which became the essence of Catholic anthropology from Augustine on.

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Chapter 3

The Meaning of “Righteousness” in

Scripture Few would disagree with von Rad when he says, "There is absolutely no concept of the Old Testament with so central a significance for all relationship as that of sadaq [righteousness]."—Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1965), Vol.1, p.370. Richardson says, "Righteousness is for the Hebrews the fundamental character of God." —Alan Richardson, An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p.79.

Nearly a century ago Kautzsch concluded that the root meaning of righteousness in the Bible is conformity to a norm. This definition was followed by most scholars. It has been pointed out that in the Greek language the word basically means conformity to social custom, while in Hebrew it means conformity to the standard decreed by God.

More recently (especially since the work of H. Cremer of Germany) it has been pointed out that while the ethical meaning of righteousness is essentially Greek, the relational meaning is essentially Hebrew. Paul, it is said, reflects the Hebrew idea rather than the Greek. Most scholars now regard righteousness as fundamentally concerned with relationships. Some have taken this line of thought so far as to say that the meaning of righteousness is "not an ethical state" and "cannot mean basically 'conformity to a (moral) norm.' " – See The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G. Butterick (New York: Abingdon, 1962), Vol.4, pp.95, 99.

Then there are other scholars who have considered the biblical meaning of righteousness to be basically forensic (e.g., Wheeler Robinson, Bultmann, Ladd, Leon Morris). W. R. Smith follows this reasoning so far that he says, "Righteousness is to the Hebrew not so much a moral quality as a legal status."—Cited in David Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p.84.

We could continue illustrating how scholars sometimes contribute to confusion as much as to clarification. Everyone who follows the ordinary sense of words will somehow equate the English word righteousness with ethics, behavior and moral character. Imagine the layman's perplexity when he reads in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, for instance, that righteousness does not mean moral character and is not ethical at all. He might even give up altogether when he reads, "Righteousness as it is understood in the Old Testament is a thoroughly Hebraic concept, foreign to the Western mind and at variance with the common understanding of the term."—Ibid., Vol.4, p.80. We do not want to deny the value of Hebraic insights, but as we hope to demonstrate in this study, The Interpreter's Dictionary is getting way out of the ballpark. Against these comments in The Interpreter's Dictionary we could place the comments of the French scholar, Edmond Jacob, in his Theology of the Old Testament He acknowledges that we need to adjust our thought to the Hebraic use of the word righteousness, yet then he adds this caution: "But we must not allow an unbalanced reaction to send us to the opposite extreme and think of righteousness as something fundamentally different from what we understand by this term."—(New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p.94.

Righteousness is one of the great words of Scripture, and as with the Old Testament word kaphar, it is not easy to wrap up its meaning in one single word or even in one single concept. It has several shades of meaning generally combined, and according to the context, one aspect may be more conspicuous than the others.

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Of all the scholars that we have read on the meaning of righteousness in Scripture, J. A. Ziesler (The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972]) does as well as any. In fact, in our opinion he is outstanding in the early part of his book. 1 If a layman takes a concordance, he can also work through righteousness in the Bible and arrive at a fairly good picture of what is involved.

We may outline the meaning of righteousness in Scripture as follows:

1. Relational (Covenant)

The covenant between God and man is the basis of biblical religion. All divine-human relationships are based on covenant. Righteousness is one of the great words of the covenant. It is used in reference to God's covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15:6; 18:19). In Psalm 15 and Ezekiel 18 we have a description of a righteous man. The setting is the covenant relation between God and Israel. When one does what is expected of him as a covenant partner, he is righteous. Thus von Rad defines righteousness as "loyalty to the covenant."—Von Rad, op. cit., p.373.

Covenant is the biblical word for relationship. ". . . basically righteousness is a concept of relationship. He is righteous who has fulfilled the demands laid upon him by that relationship in which he stands." —George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p.440. Von Rad says that righteousness "is out and out a term of relationship." —Von Rad, op. cit., p.371. "Men's common life was also judged wholly from the point of view of faithfulness to a relationship."—Ibid. "Righteousness is loyalty to a relationship." —Ibid. This is illustrated by Saul and David in 1 Samuel 24:17 or by the story of Tamar in Genesis 38:26. Tamar, despite her behavior in seducing Judah, was more righteous than the patriarch because "she had shown loyalty to a relationship."—Ibid.

The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible says that righteousness is the "fulfillment of the demands of a relationship." It gives many instances and examples of this throughout the Bible. Our quarrel with The Interpreter's Dictionary is not for bringing out this valuable aspect but for trying to isolate this aspect from 1 We say this even though we must later take issue with Ziesler's interpretation of the Pauline expression "the righteousness of faith." Ziesler has written a very valuable book. His "Introduction" presents a superb summary of some aspects of the debate on justification.

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ethics and moral character. For if, in the interests of being true to Hebrew thought, one stresses the relational meaning of righteousness but goes so far as to say that it is not ethical and does not mean moral character, a person ends up with an abstract concept of relationship. And that is not Hebraic. It is as Grecian as an abstract "immortal soul." Hebrew thought is concrete, dynamic and holistic. Righteousness means a right relationship, but one that is expressed in actions of practical piety and moral rectitude.

The great advantage of the relational concept is that it lifts righteousness out of the realm of impersonal ethics and shows us that it is first and foremost a thing of the heart, an expression of a right personal relationship.

In the original creation man was set within a certain relationship to God and to the created order. There is a kind of hierarchical order here: God is the supreme Suzerain, man is placed under God's rule, and the whole created order is placed under the rule of man (Gen. 1:27-29; Ps. 8:3-8). Man therefore has a certain relationship to God, to his fellow humans (Eve stands at Adam's side – neither above nor beneath him) and to the animals and the created environment (all are subject to man as long as man remains subject to God). God is first, man is second, and things are last. (The same order appears in the Ten Commandments.) Since God has set man in a certain relationship to Himself and to the created order, man can be true man (i.e., righteous) only when he rightly relates to God, to his fellows and to the environment. Righteousness "is the standard not only for man's relationship with God, but also for his relationships to his fellows. . . . it is even the standard for man's relationship to the animals and to his natural environment."—Von Rad, op. cit, p.370. The cattle are included in the fourth word of the Decalogue (Ex. 20:10). "A righteous man regards the life of his beast" (Prov. 12:10).

When we consider all these relationships in the light of the Hebrew manner of concrete, dynamic thinking, we see that righteousness means living as man was meant to live in all the relationships of life. But evangelical piety has often reduced righteousness to an abstract heart-relationship with the Lord that transpires in the inner world of the "soul-box" – a private, inner experience which has very little to do with such concrete things as social justice and proper care of the body or the environment.

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2. Ethical (Law)

While agreeing with those scholars who say that righteousness is the "fulfillment of the demands of a relationship" (The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Vol.4, p.80), we cannot agree with those who say that righteousness is "not an ethical state."—Ibid., p.95. Ladd also seems to fall for this nonethical line of thought when he says, "It [righteousness] is not a word designating personal ethical character, but faithfulness to a relationship."—Ladd, op. cit, p.440.

The Hebrew thought pattern tends to be concrete, dynamic and holistic. It is just not possible to talk about a relationship in a biblical way without including actions, behavior, ethics, conduct and rectitude.1 Ziesler is justified in arguing for the ethical meaning of righteousness. It is, as he says, "the behaviour proper to 'the covenant.' "—Ziesler, op. cit., p.39. Leon Morris agrees that "'righteous' came to have ethical meaning and in many passages this is stressed." —Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, p.262.

The prophets of Israel repeatedly demand behavior consistent with the covenant – conduct which is fair, impartial, merciful and right. Righteousness is the opposite of evil and wickedness. It often has the plain meaning of doing right, of faithful conduct in obedience to God's law (see Gen. 6:9; Ps. 37:12; Isa. 51:7; Deut. 6:25; 2 Sam. 22:21, 25; Ezek. 18:19-21; Hosea 14:9; Isa. 58:8; Prov. 21:21; Ps. 112:6).

The New Testament often gives to righteousness this meaning of right conduct or Christian behavior. In Matthew 25:37, 46 it has the meaning of loving activity toward Christ's brethren. In Matthew 6:1 it means compassionate deeds. A similar meaning appears in 1 John 3:7, 10-17, where righteousness basically means brotherly love. In 1 Peter 2:24 and 3:14 it means acceptable or right conduct. James gives it this meaning, too. Of course, we must not forget Paul. In Romans 6:13, 16, 20, 1 Thessalonians 2:10 and Titus 2:12 Paul is obviously talking about righteousness of life or godly behavior. Aside from the distinctive Pauline formula "the righteousness of God," Dr. Shrenk points out that righteousness "is almost always used in the New Testament for the right conduct of man which follows the will of God and is pleasing to Him, for rectitude of life before God, for uprightness before His judgment." —Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964-1976), Vol 2, p.198.

We agree that the ethical idea may not be the primary meaning of righteousness. But we suggest that ethics and moral character cannot be separated from the realm of relationships any more than obedience to God's commandments can be separated from love in Deuteronomy – or anywhere else in the Bible for that matter. We may therefore combine (1) the relational and (2) the ethical and say that righteousness is right relationship reflected in right conduct.

Despite what The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible says, 'scholars generally agree that the basic idea [of righteousness] is conformity to a norm."—Ladd, op. cit., p.439; see Hill, op. cit, pp.83, 94; Shrenk in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol.2, p.185. Thus, in the Old Testament we find that the word righteous (or just) is applied to balances, weights, and measures (Lev. 19:36; Ezek. 45:10; Deut. 25:15). This obviously means conformity to a proper standard.

Among the Greeks the word righteousness often meant conformity to social custom, doing the right thing with reference to what was acceptable according to the traditions of society 2 – much the same as the situation in Western society today. But to the covenant people of the Bible, the norm was not social standard but the will of the

1 1t is ironical that when some scholars stress relationship apart from ethics in the interests of being Hebraic, they are never more Grecian. 2 See Hill, op. cit., p.99.

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Lord made known in His law. For this reason, righteousness in Scripture has the plain, concrete meaning of obedience to the law of God

And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the Lord our God, as He hath commanded us.—Deut. 6:25.

And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. —Luke 1:6.

Righteousness is "conformity to divine will" (Hill, op. cit., p. 103), and the righteous man is "the man who conforms to law."—Ibid., p.100. "It is fundamental that the Lord has set his law before men and that he expects them to walk therein." —Morris, op. cit, p.262. Shrenk says that even in the New Testament, righteousness is based on the Old Testament and retains the idea of conformity to "the norm of the divine will."—Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol.2, p. 185. In the Synoptics it often means "fidelity to the law" (Matt. 10:41; 13:17; 23:29; ibid., p. 189). Righteous can be used to describe "the disciple or the Christian as the one who truly fulfills the Law or the divine will."—Ibid., p.190.

We must not think that this idea of conformity to the law is only found outside Paul. In Romans 2:13 the righteous

is the one who as a doer of the Law will be declared righteous by the divine sentence . . . Not to be righteous means not to fulfill the Law because one is under sin . . . In 1 Thess 2:10 . . . Paul can use dikaios [righteous] in relation to the Christian life in the sense of the righteousness which corresponds to divine Law. —Ibid., pp.190-191.

In Romans 5:18-19 Paul uses the words righteousness and obedience interchangeably.

In the Reformation period the relation of righteousness to the law of God was given greater prominence than it is generally given today. For Luther and Calvin, the law was the norm of righteousness, the valid demand of God. Calvin, for instance, could say, "Righteousness consists in the observance of the law."—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. 2, chap. 17, sec. 5. Again he says: "The law of God contains perfect righteousness . . . We therefore willingly confess that perfect obedience to the law is righteousness."—Ibid., Bk. 3, chap. 17, sec. 7. Chemnitz likewise says:

. . . that norm of righteousness which is revealed in the Law is the eternal, immovable, and unchangeable will of God . . . it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than that one iota and one little dot of the Law should fall, which is not satisfied by the perfection that is owed.—Martin Chemnitz, Examination of the Council of Trent, Part 1, (St. Louis: Concordia, 1971), p.498.

3. Forensic

Whether or not a person's life and activity are loyal to the covenant relationship is ultimately determined by God, who is both Lawgiver and Judge (Ex. 23:7:1 Kings 8:32; etc.).

The idea of righteousness is often understood in a forensic context: the righteous man is he whom the judge declares to be free from guilt. It is the business of the judge to acquit the innocent and condemn the guilty (Deut. 25:1; see also 1 Kings 8:32). God is often pictured as the judge of men (Ps. 9:4; 33:5; Jer. 11:20). The verb appears almost exclusively in the forensic sense. He is righteous who is judged to be in the right (Exod. 23:7; Deut. 25:1), i.e., who in judgment through acquittal stands in a right relationship to the judge. The unrighteous man is he who is condemned. Some Old Testament scholars feel that this is the primary connotation of the term. "When applied to the conduct of God the concept is narrowed and almost exclusively employed in a forensic sense.—Ladd, op. cit., p.440.

Among the Jews there was manifested an intense desire to be found righteous before God, especially in the final judgment (see Hill, op. cit., p.139). Being righteous, therefore, meant being "in the right before God." —Ibid., p. 141. Right is settled by the Judge. "The righteous are those acquitted at the bar of justice."—Morris, op. cit, p.260. This is why some scholars say that righteousness in Scripture is fundamentally a legal status even though it may not be immediately apparent in a particular text. 1

1 Ziesler estimates that in the Old Testament the straightforward forensic and legal instances of righteousness only occur about 24.4% of all cases (Ziesler, op. cit, p.32).

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Summary

We may reduce the meaning of righteousness in Scripture to three main conceptual strands:

1. Relational or covenantal.

2. Ethical or law-keeping.

3. Forensic or being right in the verdict of God.

There is no need to play one of these aspects off against the others. They can all be supported by the evidence. One concept is not inimical to the others. In fact, seen together, they make a dynamic whole.

In the first place, righteousness is relational. Ethical conduct (keeping God's commandments) flows from a right relationship or, we could say, is the expression of a right relationship. It is important that we preserve this order, because the covenant union is the root, and correct behavior is the fruit. Once we understand this, it clears up a lot of misconceptions about the Old Testament religion, which is sometimes made to appear quite legalistic. Israel's obedience to the law was something which sprang from her covenant relationship, and not the other way around (see Ex. 20:1-2). No amount of law-keeping could establish her privileged covenant relationship with God.

As in creation, the divine-human relationship was wholly due to God's initiative or God's election. The relationship with God was not earned by obedience. It was a gracious donation by God. Israel could respond to her election by a grateful response of loyal and faithful obedience. The law, or covenant stipulations, constituted the content of that response. Law-keeping could only be meaningful when it expressed an existing relationship with God. It could never bring that relationship about. Outside of the covenant relationship, "obedience" to the law had no meaning and no validity whatsoever.

This is why later Judaism was a complete perversion of the revealed religion of Israel. The Jews came to think that their pious observance of the law could put God in their debt and establish their relationship with Him. They thought that this type of law-keeping would merit their acquittal on the day of judgment. We must not react against this kind of legalism by saying that God does not judge the deeds of men or that He is not concerned with whether or not they keep His law. This would not only fly in the face of the Old Testament, but it would also contradict the New Testament – even Paul himself, who teaches that there will be a final judgment according to works (Rom. 2:6-16).

God does judge and will judge the deeds of men, but deeds are not appraised by their own phenomenological value. The question to be decided is this: Are the deeds which pass the divine scrutiny expressive of the person's relationship with God? Do they demonstrate trust, gratefulness and loyalty to the covenant? If they do, then even the human party may appeal to his righteousness for vindication at the bar of God. This explains why the same psalmist who prayed, ". . . enter not into judgment with Thy servant: for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified" (Ps. 143:2), could also pray: "The Lord shall judge the people: judge me, 0 Lord, according to my righteousness, and according to mine integrity that is in me" (Ps. 7:8). "The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands hath He recompensed me" (Ps. 18:20). "Therefore hath the Lord recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in His eyesight" (Ps. 18:24).

If we have difficulty with what may appear to be a bold self-righteousness in these psalms, it is only because we have not understood the biblical realism of a righteousness which is first relational (gift), then ethical (grateful response), and finally forensic (judged as the right behavior in the eyes of the Lord). This righteousness has no degrees. A man is either righteous in God's eyes or wicked. There are no shades of gray. The concern is not whether the man or his deeds are ethically sinless but whether or not those deeds are evidence of his faith and loyalty to Jehovah. Although in the New Testament there is development and clarification of this concept of righteousness, throughout the Bible it is still the basic conception of a righteous man.1

1 When the word righteousness is applied to God, it means His covenant loyalty and His activity which expresses His unswerving fidelity to the covenant. Whether God punishes or forgives His people, the righteousness of God is revealed. As King and Judge, God's activity in judging, especially in judging the cause of His people, is often referred to by the word righteousness (Ps. 9:8; 50:6; Isa. 42:21; Jer. 11:20; Deut. 33:21: Ps. 99:4; 2 Chron. 12:6). while righteousness may very well apply to God's wrath which punishes, it is often associated with His saving acts (Isa. 51:5; 56:1; 45:8: Ps. 71:13-24). The righteousness of God is related to His law. The God of the Bible is the God of law. The law is the expression

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CHAPTER 4

The Relation of “Righteousness”

and “Salvation”

In both the Old and the New Testament the words righteousness and salvation are placed in the closest relationship. Here are a few examples:

My righteousness is near; My salvation is gone forth. Isa. 51:5.

For He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation. Isa. 59:17.

. . . My salvation is near to come, and My righteousness to be revealed. Isa. 56:1.

. . . the gospel . . . is . . . salvation. . . . For in it the righteousness of God is revealed . . . "He who through faith is righteous shall live [have salvation]." Rom. 1:16-17, RSV.

. . . that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. Rom. 5:21.

For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. Rom. 10:10.

It must be obvious that any teaching about salvation which is not related to righteousness does not do justice to the biblical teaching.

The Meaning of Salvation

We have already discussed the meaning of righteousness in Scripture. Now let us see what is embraced in the word salvation.

There is no doubt that Christians have often held a very Grecianized view of salvation. It is a hyper-spiritualized idea about saving a part of man – “the ghost within the machine." In the light of the Old Testament background it would have to be said that this reflects a very truncated view of both man and his salvation.

We need to go back to God's prototype kingdom in Eden. The simple hierarchical order is God, man and the created order. Man is made "a living soul." This "living soul" is not a part of man, much less "a ghost in the machine"; but as the Hebrew means, it is a living, breathing creature. That which constitutes man a creature of great worth is not inherent properties or some indestructible part of his nature but the simple fact that he has, by divine election (gift), a special relationship to God.

of His character. Rather than being unpredictable or capricious, "He can be relied upon to act according to law." -Morris, op. cit., p.255: see entire section, pp.253-258, for an excellent discussion on the righteousness of God and the law of God.

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It is this relationship which invests man with special value. His great value is relational, not ontological. Outside of this relation to God, man is only dust. He does not have life in himself as an inalienable right. Life is derivative. Man is not even made to operate on a battery principle but on a trolley-car principle – to have life and power only by continual connection with the Source of life and power. This relationship (covenant) with God invested man with great dignity and honor. He was God's representative, appointed to exercise dominion over the created order (Gen. 1:28-29; Ps. 8:3-8). Man was righteous in that all his relationships were right. He was subject to God's rule, while the created order in turn was subject to man's rule. Then came the fall. Sin disrupted man's relationship with God. When man was no longer subject to God's authority, the created order was no longer subject to man's authority. Many of the beasts became dangerous and vicious, while the earth itself was cursed to bring forth thorns and thistles (Gen. 3:18). Just as an ideal environment once mirrored man's ideal relationships, so now a disordered environment reflected man's disordered relationships. In the covenant which God made with the nation of Israel, we see again God's ideal kingdom shadowed forth. Here again was a picture of God's intention – a people of His choosing, under His rule and in the land (or place) of His choosing. We say "shadowed forth" because it was impossible for God's ideal to be realized through sinful Israel. Instead of ruling as God's representative on earth, Israel was often ruled by enemy powers. The curse was very much in evidence by such things as deadly serpents, ravaging beasts and barren deserts. The message of the prophets was twofold. On the one hand, it was their mournful task to pronounce judgments and curses on Israel for breaking the covenant. With a severed relationship with God, Israel could not expect to exercise her dominion but to experience destruction and desolation at the hand of marauding armies, famine, invading caterpillars, locusts or wild beasts. On the other hand, the prophets dreamed of a better day (Jer. 31:26). The day was coming when God would arise and accomplish His saving act. The prophets often used the imagery of an ideal land of Canaan or Eden itself to describe the salvation which God would bring. There would be a new covenant (relationship) with God; and as part and parcel of this salvation, all right relationships would be restored. Infants would play on the hole of

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asps, and little children would lead the beasts which are now dangerous and vicious. The deserts would blossom, and instead of yielding briars and burrs, they would be clothed in the verdure of Eden. Israel would dwell safely without threat of invading armies. Death itself would be overcome.

And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. And He will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from oft all faces; and the rebuke of His people shall He take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it.

And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us: this is the Lord; we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation. —Isa. 25:6-9.

For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in My people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.—Isa. 65:17-19.

And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them. And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, saith the Lord.—Isa. 65:21-25.

In these passages of Scripture, salvation does not mean a super-spiritualized inner salvation of man's incorporeal nature. Much less does it mean a flight of the soul from the inferior material world. All this is foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures. God made the whole man "a living soul," and what God loves and saves is this whole animated, breathing creature along with his whole environment. Salvation means a restoration of man to a right relationship with God, with his fellows and with the whole created order.

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The New Testament does not abandon this "materialistic" Hebrew view of salvation and opt instead for a "spiritualized" Grecian salvation. The Christian message of the resurrection is "materialistic" and Hebraic. Salvation is just as concrete and real in the New Testament as in the Old Testament. The last two chapters of John's Apocalypse take up the message of the Old Testament prophets and put their vision of salvation into a very realistic panorama of the new heavens and the new earth. There is also the New Jerusalem city, complete with river and tree of life.

If one is like Marcion and dismisses the Apocalypse as being "too Jewish," what about Romans 8? Is it any less Jewish? Here Paul speaks of adoption, justification, election and glory. These are all Jewish hopes. The inheritance of Romans 8 is just as "materialistic" as is the message of Revelation 20-22. Says Paul:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own wilt but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.—Rom. 8:19-25, RSV.

The New Testament, of course, differs from the Old Testament in one very important respect. It proclaims that in Jesus Christ the new age has arrived and the new creation is already a reality. The events of the last day have already been effected in Him. This means that we may already possess salvation – God's eschatological blessings – by faith. But we must emphasize that the present possession of salvation is only by faith. Its empirical realization is still future. In one important sense we are not saved yet and will not be saved until the last day (see Heb. 9:28; 1 Peter 1:3-13). This is why the New Testament talks about "the hope of salvation" (1 Thess. 5:8). Even though it transcends the possibility of adequate description, this salvation is tangible and as real as the body in which we live and the earth on which we walk. The inheritance of God's people (salvation) is not yet in actual possession. It is reserved in heaven (1 Peter 1:3-5) and is possessed in the now only by faith. ". . . faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1).

In many New Testament passages eternal life or life is used as a synonym for salvation (Rom. 1:16-17; 5:18, 21; 6:23; Matt. 19:17-25). It is both a present possession (by faith) and a future hope.

The Condition of Salvation

The relation between righteousness and salvation (life) may now be simply stated. Righteousness is the prerequisite or the condition of salvation. Man cannot be saved apart from the possession of righteousness. Salvation is based on righteousness.

The recurring premise of the Old Testament is that the righteous will live and the wicked will die:

Behold, all souls are Mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is Mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.

But if a man be just, and do that which is lawful and right, [and] . . . hath walked in My statutes, and hath kept My judgments, to deal truly; he is just, he shall surely live, saith the Lord God. . . .

When a righteous man turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and dieth in them; for his iniquity that he hath done shall he die. Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. —Ezek. 18:4-5, 9, 26-27.

Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in Thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and

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worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour. In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not. He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved. —Ps. 15.

Blessed are they that keep judgment, and he that doeth righteousness at all times.—Ps. 106:3.

If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. —Isa. 1:19-20.

In the light of these and many other scriptures, we may at least appreciate the Jew's passionate quest for a righteousness which would win a favorable verdict of Israel's Judge, especially on the final day.

We must not suppose that the New Testament presents another condition of salvation. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reiterated the Old Testament demand for righteousness. He declared, "For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:20). Jesus' argument with the Pharisees was not that they taught that righteousness was a prerequisite to enter the kingdom of the age to come. Nor was it because the Pharisees made the standard too high.

The real problem was that they (like all legalists) had compromised the standard to their own level. They even taught that a man would be saved if his good deeds outweighed his bad ones – as if fifty-one percent honesty could stand before a God of perfect and infinite justice. According to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, a righteousness which consists in perfect obedience to the law of God – to a degree that the Pharisees had never dreamed of, i.e., compliance in their secret desires and intents of the heart – is the condition for entering the kingdom of heaven.

In Jesus' confrontation with the rich young ruler, we see that entering the kingdom, receiving eternal life, entering into life and being saved are all the same thing. And what is the condition of salvation unto life eternal? Righteousness which consists in conformity to the law of God!

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And, behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And He said unto him, Why callest thou Me good? there is none good but One, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto Him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The young man saith unto Him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow Me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

Then said Jesus unto His disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. When His disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved?—Matt. 19:16-25.

Paul reiterates the same message in the book of Romans – yes, the book of Romans. In Romans 1:17 he introduces his theme by telling us that the one who is righteous (by faith) shall live (RSV). Let us forget about the "by faith" rider for the moment. The righteous, and none but the righteous, shall live. In Romans 2 the apostle drives this message home:

. . . [God] will render to every man according to his deeds: to them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: but unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; but glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile. . . . (for not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified . . . ) in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.—Rom. 2:6-10,13,16.

Paul is certainly reflecting the Old Testament here. Righteousness boils down to law-fulfillment. Shrenk comments, "The dikaios [righteous one] is the one who as doer of the Law will be declared righteous by divine sentence."—Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol.2, p.190. As surely as sin leads to death, even so does righteousness lead to life (Rom. 5:21). Only those who can satisfy the divine tribunal with a righteousness which meets its standard will be justified and receive the verdict of life. Righteousness, therefore, is the condition of salvation.1

Before we run off too prematurely and talk about salvation by grace, let us first see that the Old Testament passion for righteousness is not diminished or watered down in the New Testament. A salvation which does not honor the demand for righteousness can neither glorify God nor appease the sinner's conscience. God is not only committed to saving people, but He is committed to saving them justly. We dare not surrender this biblical insight. If the church teaches a salvation which is not based on righteousness, such a "salvation" can only be "another gospel" which has disastrous ethical consequences.

A "gospel" which does not uphold and honor the law can only produce people who, on a concrete level, know very little of what it means to live in a right relationship to God, to men and to the created order.2

Listen to what both Luther and Calvin said on this point. First Luther: ". . . the law must be fulfilled so that not a jot or tittle shall be lost, otherwise man will be condemned without hope . . . " —Luther's Works, American ed. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press; St. Louis: Concordia, 1955- ), Vol.31, p.348. Now Calvin: "For the Lord promises nothing except to perfect keepers of His law . . . " —John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. 3, chap. 17, sec. 1.

1 N. H. Snaith declares, "The fact of the matter is that God does not require righteousness at all, in any shape or shadow, as a condition of salvation." -N. H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (New York: Shocken Books, 1964), p. 164. But Bultmann, perhaps surprisingly for some, comes to the defense of the "old" faith at this point. He says, "Strictly speaking, [in Paul's theology] righteousness is the condition of receiving salvation or 'life.' "-Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1970), vol.2, p.270. 2 Ziesler (The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul) thinks that in the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith it is difficult to find a road from forensic justification to ethics. We would like to suggest that most of this difficulty disappears if righteousness is clearly taught as a condition of salvation. A way of salvation which honors the law will produce believers who honor the law in genuine righteousness of life.

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Only the right preaching of God's law with its valid demand for righteousness will make people sensible of their helplessness and prepare them to understand and appreciate the gospel. If man stands under a broken covenant (broken fellowship with God), his law-keeping has no meaning or value with God, because the only conduct which can be called righteousness is that which expresses a right relationship with God. Outside of that covenant fellowship all human conduct is no better than glittering sin. It can contribute absolutely nothing toward establishing a right relationship with God.

The right preaching of the law will not induce people to try to climb up to heaven by law-fulfillment. It will convince them that they have forfeited all claim on God. Outside of a right relationship with Him the law can only work wrath and be used by sin to subject man to sin's utter enslavement (Rom. 4:15; 7:8; 1 Cor. 15:56). The law is a good thing, but to use it in the wrong way is an appalling mistake.

CHAPTER 5

Christ Our

Righteousness For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, "He who through faith is righteous shall live."—Rom. 1:16-17, RSV.

We have found that righteousness is necessary for salvation, but it is beyond man's power of attainment. Paul introduces his gospel to the Romans by declaring, "He who through faith is righteous shall live.”1

What exactly is this righteousness of faith? How does it become available to sinners? How do they lay hold of it? How does God communicate it to them? What relation does it have to the justification of the believing sinner? These are the questions which we must now endeavor to answer.

The Righteousness of God

The first thing we must notice from Romans 1:16-17 is that the righteousness of faith is called "the righteousness of God." In Philippians 3:9 it is called "the righteousness which is of God by faith." It is called the righteousness of God because God provided it. The New International Version translates the Pauline expression dikaiosune Theou as "a righteousness from God."

1 Verse 17 literally reads, "The righteous by faith shall live." It is grammatically possible to say that "by faith" refers either to "righteous" or to "shall live." If the former, the Revised Standard Version, as quoted above, is correct – and also Luther's translation. If the "by faith" refers to "shall live," the Authorized Version’s "the just shall live by faith" is correct. Cranfield (The International Critical Commentary, Romans [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark]) argues convincingly for the first sense mainly on the ground of context and Paul's argument in Romans.

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When all men stood destitute of righteousness before God's judgment bar – when they stood before the law which demands perfect righteousness, red-faced, silent, guilty, empty-handed and with nothing to pay (Rom. 1:18-3:20) – God intervened. "But now [at the point of man's utter destitution] the

righteousness of God without the law is manifested . . ." (Rom. 3:21). This means that God fulfills His own demands. He not only gives salvation, but

He fulfills the conditions of salvation by providing for man the righteousness which the justice of God's law demands. That is good news indeed!

Recently Kaseman and others have proposed that "the righteousness of God" in Paul means the activity of God. This can be supported not only from the grammatical construction of Romans 1:17, but by a lot of Old Testament background, especially in the Psalms and Isaiah 40 to 66. In these Old Testament scriptures the righteousness of God often refers to the saving acts of God (see Isa. 51:5). These saving acts

were a manifestation of God's covenant loyalty and faithfulness – that is to say, His righteousness. But all these saving acts, like Israel's deliverance from Egypt and her release from Babylonian captivity, have been superseded by God's ultimate act of salvation which took place in the Christ event. It is quite fitting, therefore, to call God's redemptive act in Christ "the righteousness of God." 1

We suggest that the interpretation of "the righteousness of God" as "God's saving act" is not inimical to Luther's interpretation which says that the expression means "righteousness which God has provided." God's gracious act in the life, death and

resurrection of Christ provided a righteousness with which poor, destitute sinners could answer the claims of divine justice.

Whether we take "the righteousness of God" to mean the act of God or the provision of God, or both, one thing must be clear: Paul is talking about something objective, something entirely outside man's experience. The saving act took place once-and-for-all as a historical event in Palestine 2,000 years ago. The righteousness which God provided for our salvation is something He did entirely apart from any human help or participation. This is why Paul declares that it is "the righteousness of God apart from the

law" (Rom. 3:21) – meaning apart from any law-fulfillment on the part of the believer. This makes it clear that the believer's holiness of life (sanctification) is not included in "the righteousness of God." This righteousness is apart from all works, all law-keeping on man's part, whether done before grace or after grace. God alone has the honor of providing this garment of righteousness, quite apart from human devising – even sanctified devising. When God provided the wherewithal of salvation, we had absolutely no hand in it. 2 Just like Daniel's description of God's eschatological victory, this took place "without hand" (see Dan. 2:45; 8:25).

1 See R. D. Brinsmead, "The Righteousness of God," Present Truth Magazine, Volume 23 PDF version on the www.PresentTruthMag.com web site, where this meaning is more fully explained. 2 This cannot be said about sanctification or the holiness which the Spirit works in the believer. Some think they can smuggle sanctification into "the righteousness of faith" by saying, "It isn't I but God's grace at work in me." unless we are going to say that grace annihilates human individuality and responsibility, we must acknowledge that sanctification involves the believer's meaningful activity in cooperation with grace.

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We have already seen how righteousness is primarily concerned with relationships. Man's activity cannot establish a relationship (covenant) with God. The relationship (covenant) between God and man has to be established by an elective act of God. It has to be a given. This was even true in the case of sinless Adam. Establishing the covenant was God's act in which Adam made no contribution. He could only accept the donation or reject it. Much less could sinful Israel do anything to establish a relationship (covenant) with God. It was God's unmerited, electing love which chose Israel and put her in covenantal fellowship with Himself.

The act of God whereby He bridged the gulf between Himself and sinful man and provided the wherewithal of a right relationship with Himself is sola gratia, soli Deo gloria – solely by grace and solely to the glory of God. Says Moorehead in his Commentary on Romans:

The righteousness of God is never represented in Scripture as something wrought in the sinner by the grace and Spirit of God – the implantation of the principle of grace in the heart nor even the new nature. If the righteousness of God means partly a work of grace by the Spirit in the soul, partly a work of the sinner co-operating with grace, then the Reformation was a mistake and a blunder, and we ought to return to Romanism, for this is the one supreme point of difference touching the ground and nature of justification between Romanism and Protestantism. Rather, the righteousness of God is set forth as something objective to us, reckoned to us, set to our account, therefore not an internal work. —pp.87-88.

The Righteousness of Christ

The righteousness of faith is also called "the righteousness of One" or "the obedience of One" (Rom. 5: 18-19). This is because it is a righteousness which God has provided for us in Jesus Christ. Peter calls it "the righteousness of . . . Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 1:1).

When Romans explains for us that the righteousness of faith is the righteousness of Christ, this does not mean that it is a righteousness which Christ works in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Paul is talking exclusively about the righteousness of Christ's own Person. Romans 5:12-21 contrasts this righteousness with the disobedience of Adam. In this passage Paul is not contrasting the righteousness which Christ works in our hearts with the wickedness which the devil works in our hearts. Rather, he is talking about Adam's personal disobedience and Christ's personal obedience – and both were outside-of-me acts. Just as "one act of sin exposed the whole race of men to God's judgment and condemnation, so one act of perfect righteousness presents all men freely acquitted in the sight of God (Rom. 5:18, Phillips). Cranfield says that dikaioma of verse 18 undoubtedly means "one act of righteousness" in contrast to Adam's one act of disobedience. This means that Paul cannot possibly be talking about repeated acts of renewal and sanctification in the hearts of believers. The saving righteousness of Christ was a once-and-for-all, unrepeatable act which took place external to us.

The Old Testament bears explicit testimony to the righteousness of the coming Messiah (see for instance Isa. 53:9,11; 42:14; 50:4-7; 52:13; 11:2-5; Jer. 23:5-6; 33:16). This is fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, the One who fulfills all righteousness (see Matt. 3:15; Luke 23:41, 47; 4:34; 22:42; John 5:30; 17:4; Heb. 1:9; 4:15; 5:7-9; Phil. 2:5-9; Rom. 5:18-19).

We have seen how righteousness means (1) a right relationship to God, to man and to the created order-or covenant loyalty and faithfulness; (2) right conduct and behavior, rectitude expressive of right relationships-or obedience to the Ten Commandments; (3) being and doing that which will win God's approval. The righteousness of Christ is all that. As the true Son of man, Christ was the second and last Adam in right relationship to God, to man and to the created order. God's Edenic ideal was re-enacted in Jesus. Because He was subject to God, the created order was subject to Him. He was the Man in God's image, over the works of God's hands. In Him, the new Adam or Representative of man, God brought man into that ideal relationship to Himself and to all creation.

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Even in the wilderness the wild beasts were at peace with Him. Even the winds and the waves obeyed Him. Isaiah 40 to 66 depicts Christ's righteousness in terms of covenant faithfulness. As the "Servant of Yahweh," He personifies the new Israel who keeps covenant with God. The New Testament uses this Isianic servant motif. As Israel was called out of Egypt and tested in the wilderness, so Christ also is called out of Egypt (Matt. 2:15) and tested in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11). Whereas Israel murmured against God and broke her covenant vow, Christ passes over the same ground as God's new Israel. He is the righteous Servant who keeps covenant with God.

This righteousness of Christ certainly has ethical content. The conduct and character of Christ express His perfect relationship with God, with man and with the created order. In the aforementioned Old Testament passages is depicted a life without guile, without violence and without rebelliousness. It is a life full of God's Spirit, a life of humility, patient trust in God, zeal for God's glory, perfect submission to God's will and unflinching courage to finish the work which God gave Him to do.

Here is a life which fulfills the covenant stipulations, the Ten Commandments (Ex. 34:27-29; Deut. 4:13). Christ kept God's commandments (John 15:10). He fulfilled the law (Matt. 5:17). He was obedient (Phil. 2:5-9; Heb. 5:7-9). And this obedience of Jesus Christ to the law (will) of God is what constitutes His righteousness (see Rom. 5:18-19, where obedience is used as a synonym for righteousness). Says Calvin:

For if righteousness consists in the observance of the law, who will deny that Christ merited favor for us when, by taking that burden upon himself, he reconciled us to God as if we had kept the law."—Institutes, Bk. 2, chap. 17, sec. 5.

The obedience or righteousness of Christ was consummated in His death of the cross. He "became obedient unto [literally, until] death, even the death of the cross" (Phil. 2:8). The Formula of Concord is no doubt correct when it defines Christ's righteousness as His entire course of obedience from the manger to the cross. It includes His bitter sufferings and death. If we clearly grasp this point, we will soon see the folly of saying that the Pauline article of righteousness by faith is something wrought out in us. Christ's righteousness is Christ's act of atonement. This righteousness is a once-and-for-all act. It is absolutely unrepeatable and cannot be communicated to us in any way except by imputation.

There is another important aspect of Christ's righteousness that needs our closest attention. After the death of Luther, Osiander contended that Christ's righteousness was the righteousness of His divine nature. Others reacted by saying that it was the righteousness of His human nature. The Formula of Concord settled the issue for the Lutherans by affirming that, being the righteousness of the Person of Christ, it was at once divine and human. The Reformed stream of the Reformation followed this line of thought also. If we are to understand why Paul ascribes saving efficacy to Christ's righteousness, we need to see both aspects:

1. Vicarious Righteousness. Christ's righteousness could not save us unless it was truly vicarious – rendered to God in our place and on our behalf. And it could not be truly vicarious unless it was rendered to God in real human nature. Justice demands righteousness from man; therefore Christ's obedience had to be a genuine human obedience.

On the other hand, if Christ were not more than human, His obedience would not be vicarious, because He would have owed it to the law on His own behalf. As Lawgiver, He owed no obedience to the law. Obedience is the obligation of the creature, not the Creator. But Christ voluntarily assumed both our nature and our obligation so that in our stead He could do for us that which we could not do for ourselves (see Gal. 4:4-5).

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2. An Infinite Righteousness. Although this righteousness was lived out in the flesh-and-blood reality of Jesus of Nazareth, we must also consider that it was the obedience of an infinite Person. It is the Person of Christ which gives value to His work. Since His Person was infinite, His work was infinite, and therefore it has infinite value with God. If this were not so, it would be impossible that "the righteousness of One" could suffice to save a whole race of sinners. The character of Christ was infinitely perfect. He was filled with "all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. 2:9). According to the clear testimony of Philippians 2:5-8, His humiliation was infinite. His obedience was so glorious that it merited all honor and eternal blessedness (Phil. 2:9-10; Ps. 24). The righteousness which is of faith is both vicarious and infinite. Vicarious means that it was done for us and not in us. Infinite means that it cannot be reduced to an intra-human experience. It is a righteousness which mounts up to the throne of the Eternal. It is as big as God. It is big enough for all sinners to run under and find shelter, for it is a righteousness which is eternally pleasing in the sight of God, fully satisfactory for all the claims of divine justice.

Righteousness of life has its necessary place in the experience of the believer. But for salvation, the law of God requires a higher righteousness than any saint will ever live out. When Paul presents the saving righteousness of faith, he is talking about this higher righteousness – one that is both infinite and unrepeatable. It stands absolutely alone.

The Righteousness of Faith Alone

When Paul tells us in Romans 1:17 that the righteousness of God is "from faith to faith," he means that it is by faith from start to finish. It is as if he said that it is by faith and nothing but faith – sola fide, by faith alone. He backs this up by saying that it is a righteousness "without the law" (Rom. 3:21), "without the deeds of the law" (Rom. 3:28) and "without works" (Rom. 4:6).

It has been argued by all good Romanists and by all poor Protestants (in one way or another) that the renewal and sanctification of the believer must be included in this Pauline article of righteousness by faith. We will endeavor to show (1) that this does violence to the structure of the book of Romans and (2) that this is in direct opposition to Paul's line of argument in Romans.

The Structure of Romans

All are agreed that Romans 1:16-17 is Paul's introduction to the theme of his book. That theme is succinctly stated when the apostle says, ". . . as it is written, 'He who by faith is righteous shall live.' "It will be noticed that there are two clauses here:

1. Ho dikaios ek pisteos (righteous [ness] by faith)

2. Zesetal (shall live, or shall gain salvation)

Here we have (1) condition (righteousness – attained by faith) and (2) result (life).

Says Cranfield in this very fascinating comment on the structure of Romans:

1:18-4:25 expounds the meaning of ho dikaios ek pisteos [righteousness by faith], while 5:1-8:39 expounds the meaning of the promise, that the man who is righteous by faith zesetai [shall live] (that this interpretation is not forced upon the text, is confirmed, as Nygren has pointed out, by the facts that in Romans 1:18-4:25 pistis [faith] occurs twenty-nine times and pisteuein [believe] eight times, whereas in chapters 5 to 8 they occur only twice [and both of these occur in Romans 5:1, 2, which is the summary of the foregoing argument and transition into the next section] and once respectively, while in 1:18-4:25 zoe is found only once, zen not at all, and zoopolein once [the Greek words for life, live, and life-giving], whereas in 5:1-8:39 zen occurs twelve times, zoe twelve times, and zoopoiein once).—The International Critical Commentary, Romans, p. 102.

Furthermore, in this first section (Rom. 1:18-4:25), where faith and believe are used repeatedly, Paul often connects them with the word righteousness (see Rom. 3:21-22, 25; 4:3, 5-6, 9-13, 21-24). Throughout Romans 3 and 4 Paul is not talking about the believer's holiness of life but about righteousness being imputed.

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In the second section (Rom. 5-8) Paul swings his attention to the life that righteousness by faith brings to us. He talks about the life of the believer both here and in the hereafter. It is described as a new life, a Spirit-filled life, a glorified life and a holy life. Scholars generally acknowledge that Romans 6, 7 and 8 are talking about sanctification. In Romans 6 Paul even uses the word righteousness a number of times. Here he is referring to the believer's actual righteousness of life (see vv. 13, 16-20). But in this context he never uses the word faith. The apostle thereby makes a clear distinction between the righteousness of faith (chaps. 3-4) and the righteousness of life (chaps. 5-8). In Romans 8:4 the righteousness which is wrought in the believer by the Holy Spirit's indwelling is called "the righteousness of the law."

Another remarkable feature about the structure of Romans is that in the section where Paul is explaining the article of righteousness by faith, he makes no mention of the Spirit. But in the section where he deals with the believer's righteousness of life ("righteousness of the law," Rom. 8:4), The Spirit's indwelling is mentioned repeatedly. So the apostle makes a clear distinction between the righteousness of faith (a righteousness which was wrought out in Christ) and the righteousness of life (a righteousness wrought out in the believer by the Holy Spirit).

All this proves that the righteousness which is of faith is what is done for us, and righteousness of life is what is done in us. Here are root and fruit.

The Line of Argument in Romans

When we follow Paul's line of argument closely, we see that there are several powerful reasons for excluding sanctification from the righteousness which is by faith alone.

1. "Faith alone" is our acknowledgment that the righteousness which God has provided and made known to us in the gospel is all-sufficient. It has been wrought out, presented to God on our behalf, and accepted. Faith does not bring it into existence but confesses its existence. "Faith alone" means that the righteousness of God's provision is everything necessary for our salvation, and nothing remains to be added to that perfect and finished work. But when we come to talk about sanctification, this "faith alone" language would be most inappropriate. The righteousness of life is not yet complete in the best of saints, and much yet remains to be added to our spiritual attainments, as 2 Peter 1:5-8 testifies.

2. "Faith alone" means that the righteousness of God's provision is not seen (see Heb. 11:1). This righteousness is declared to us in the gospel and is only believed on and seen with the eye of faith. When the New Testament talks about sanctification, however, it talks about a righteousness which can be seen in loving deeds (see Matt. 5:16; 1 John 3:7-18; James 2:14-26; Rom. 12; Eph. 4-5; Titus 2:11-12). In this life we are righteous before God only by faith – meaning that we are not righteous before God by love, renewal or our lives of new obedience, for this inward work is only begun in us and will not be complete until glorification.

3. "By faith alone" means that the righteousness which God provided for our salvation is "without the law" "without the deeds of the law" and "without works" (Rom. 3:21, 28; 4:5-6). Here is a righteousness in which all our efforts, works, cooperation, participation and obedience are shut out. This is why Luther called it a passive righteousness.

It would be most inappropriate to talk about sanctification as being by faith alone. To be sure, living a life of holiness depends on faith, but not faith alone. J. M. Cramp, in his The Council of Trent, declared, "True Protestants never maintained the absurd position that we are sanctified by faith only."— (London: Religious Tract Society, 1840).

The business of living a holy life – what Luther called active righteousness – is not without meaningful human activity. The New Testament does not hesitate to speak of the necessity of human effort in cooperation with divine grace. The Christian life is often depicted as a battle, a march, a fight. We are not only told to pursue holiness, but we are warned that it will involve conflict and much tribulation. The Spirit is not given to do everything for us. We must not speak of the work of the Third Person of the Godhead in substitutionary terms. The Holy Spirit does not negate the need for responsible human effort. Rather, He enlists the human faculties in the great work of Christian sanctification.

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Once the Pauline article of righteousness by faith alone is allowed to spill over into sanctification, not only is the glorious gospel ruined, but sanctification is ruined too. It becomes poisoned with a sickly, dehumanizing view of sanctification which, if really carried out, would reduce a man to the level of a pious zombie who is just a suit or glove which Jesus wears. The sections of the New

Testament Epistles which deal with sanctification do not sound anything like Quietism. The apostles' doctrine has none of this

mystical sanctification by faith alone. In his well-known book, Holiness, Bishop J. C. Ryle makes a clear distinction between the

righteousness which we receive by faith only and sanctification. That justification is by faith alone he affirms; that sanctification is by faith alone he denies. . . . . not once," he says, "are we told that we are 'sanctified by faith without the deeds of the law.' "—(Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1956), p. ix; cf. p. viii. Ryle ends his book with an excellent section from the Puritan, Robert Traill, who makes the same clear distinction between the righteousness which is of faith and sanctification. Says Traill:

There is a work required of us – to be perfecting holiness in the fear of God (2 Cor. vii. 1). But we are nowhere required to be perfecting righteousness in the sight of God; for God hath brought in a perfect righteousness, in which we stand; but we are to take care, and to give diligence to perfect holiness in the fear of God.—Ibid., p.330.

4. "By faith alone" means that only faith is counted for righteousness.

For what saith the Scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. . . . But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works. . . .—Rom. 4:3, 5-6; see also vv. 20-24.

Faith alone is counted for righteousness – not love, hope, joy, peace, goodness or anything else. This is not because faith is a virtue that outshines all others. Faith is not our righteousness, nor does it have any special merit in itself. We must be careful at this point that we do not make faith run competition with the Saviour. He alone is our righteousness and salvation. In our place and in our name He lived that life of perfect righteousness necessary for entrance into eternal life. As our Substitute, He died on the cross to make satisfaction to the law for our sins. God was pleased to accept His work on our behalf and to impute it to us on condition 1 that we believe on Christ. As Shrenk says:

The assertion of faith as a condition is always closely linked with the most objective declarations concerning the dikaiosune Theou [righteousness of God]: R. 1:17, 3:22-28; 4; 5:1. The achievement and declaration of salvation are never separated from the appropriation of salvation, because the revealing action in question always stands in the “I -Thou” relationship. . . . The most objective thing that can be said, namely, hilasterion [propitiation], is followed at once by dia pisteos [by faith]. . . . —Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964-1976), Vol.2, p.206.

1 We are not unmindful of the difficulties attached to the word condition. We do not mean meritorious condition. That is perfect righteousness, and this condition of salvation has been met for us by Jesus Christ. We speak of faith merely as an instrumental condition.

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The relation between the objective act of redemption and the subjective appropriation of faith may be illustrated by an event in American history. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln declared a general emancipation of American slaves. When the individual slave heard and believed what Lincoln had done, he thereby applied it to himself and became personally free.

There are two sides to the transaction called righteousness by faith. (1) Faith (2) is counted for righteousness. On the human side there is faith; on the divine side there is imputation of righteousness.

Let us look first at the human side of the transaction. The poor, condemned sinner hears that God has already acted in Christ and provided for Him a perfect righteousness whereby he can stand in the judgment of God. He hears that Christ's sinless life, bitter sufferings and death were actually for him. Christ was his legal Substitute and Representative, and God is prepared to reckon Christ's life and death as his if he will only accept them. Now this poor, lost sinner is so helpless that he cannot of himself believe on Christ or come to Him. But God calls him by His Word, enlightens him by the Holy Spirit, and enables him to savingly believe. He cries out (to use Luther's moving words), "Mine are Christ's living, doing, and speaking, His suffering and dying, mine as much as if I had lived, done, spoken, suffered, and died as He did."

Let us now look at the divine side of the transaction. God "imputes righteousness without works" to this man. The righteousness He imputes is "the righteousness of One" or "the obedience of One" (Rom. 5:18-19). The word impute (logizomai) means to reckon or to account. It does not in itself change the object, but it changes the way the object is regarded. In this case it means that the believing sinner is credited with Christ's doing and dying. The believer stands before the bar of justice as if all those beautiful works and deeds were His own.

A young farmer was called to serve in the American Civil War. Because of hardship, another man volunteered to be his substitute and was accepted as such. The substitute served and lost his life. At a later date the young farmer was called up again. His reply was, "I have already served." However, the army would not accept his plea, so the young man appealed to the highest court in the land. The court ruled that the man was legally free. As far as the law and justice were concerned, he had served.

Is God's court any less just? On the grounds of Christ's imputed righteousness, God can justify the ungodly (Rom. 4:5) who believe on Christ. It is not a question of "how can He do that?" (see Rom. 3:26). In the verdict of the divine court, the believing sinner is justified (Rom. 3:24-28). This does not mean that he is made righteous, but it means that he is declared righteous.

Justification has to do with judicial categories. It is not something done in the sinner by the Holy Spirit, but it is simply a judgment, a decree, or a verdict of the Judge. That is the plain sense of what justify means wherever it is used in like contexts throughout the Bible (see Deut. 25:1; Matt. 12:36-37; Rom. 2:13; Prov. 17:15; 2 Chron. 6:23; 1 Kings 8:32; Luke 7:29).

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The Relation between Righteousness by Faith and Justification by Faith

We are now prepared to consider the precise relationship between the Pauline righteousness by faith and justification by faith.

In the first place, it would not be wrong to say that these two expressions are more or less synonymous. "Righteousness of [or by] faith" always appears in the context of justification by faith. In the Greek, righteousness is dikaiosune, and justification is dikaiosune – exactly the same. It could also be pointed out that whereas Galatians 3:21 has righteousness in the Authorized Version, the Revised Standard Version has justification. Translators substitute one word for the other in Romans 10:4, 10 and 8:10 (see AV, RSV, NEB, etc.).

Yet it might also not be wrong to argue for a technical difference. 1 After all, translators agree that dikaiosune should be translated as righteousness rather than justification in a number of passages, even when connected with faith. Righteousness means a right relationship which finds expression in right behavior. It means obedience to the law of God, a righteousness which is so flawless that it can be considered right in the eyes of God. The word justification does not have the same ethical content, because it is purely forensic.

The law demands a righteousness with ethical content, and this the sinner owes to the law, but he is incapable of rendering it. Yet by faith he can bring the righteousness of Christ – all that the law demands of him – and God places the obedience of Christ to the sinner's account. Having made him righteous by imputation, God justifies or declares him righteous.

Just as righteousness is the condition for salvation, so righteousness is the condition of being justified (Rom. 2:13). Justification is the verdict of the Judge that a man is saved and shall surely live (Rom. 5:9, 18; 1:17; 10:10). By faith the believing sinner attains to righteousness and can thereby stand approved in the judgment of God. Strictly speaking, then, being justified is the result of becoming righteous (imputatively) by faith. 2

Throughout this chapter we have followed a line of thought to show that the righteousness which is of faith does not refer to any subjective quality in us, nor does it refer to the Spirit's work in us, but it is entirely objective to us. It is first the righteousness of God – the righteousness of His provision. It is the righteousness of Christ – the deeds and acts of incarnate Deity. It is apprehended by faith alone – meaning that it is not seen or felt by us. It is a righteousness which comes "without the law," "without the deeds of the law" and "without works" – meaning that it cannot possibly be referring to the inward righteousness of sanctification. It is imputed righteousness – meaning that the righteousness done and found in Another is counted as ours. And finally, it is a righteousness which justifies and saves us to life eternal – meaning that with utmost simplicity we can say that we are saved solely by faith in the objective doing and dying of Jesus Christ.

1 This point is made by Ziesler (The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul [Cambridge University Press]), and we suggest that his argument is valid. 2 We are hereby deliberately contradicting Ziesler's main thesis wherein he proposes that righteousness by faith is the result of being justified. We maintain that Paul clearly teaches that we attain righteousness by faith and are on this account justified and saved. "He who by faith is righteous shall live" (i.e., gain God's verdict of acquittal).

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CHAPTER 6

Imputed Righteousness: The Rock of Offense But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. —Rom. 4:5.

Christianity is absolutely unique in that it proclaims the gospel of the God who justifies the ungodly. Many from within the church have tried to soften the blow of this scripture and to take away its force.

It was the Reformation which revived the Pauline message of God's grace – a grace which accepts the unacceptable. All Christians believe that Christ died for the ungodly. But many will not accept that God justifies – declares righteous at His tribunal – the man who in himself is not righteous but full of all sin.

Of course, this raises the question of the righteousness of God's verdict. After all, did not God instruct the judges of Israel that they should justify only the righteous and condemn the wicked? (Deut. 25:1). How is it that a Judge who is supremely just can justify the ungodly?

Paul's answer is in the doctrine of imputed righteousness. While it is true that the believer is every whit a sinner in himself – and will in this life continue to fall short of God's glory (Rom. 3:23) – God imputes to him the righteousness of Jesus. It is on this basis that God can declare him righteous and treat him as if he were actually righteous.

The Reformers did not hesitate to talk about this "as if" element of the divine jurisprudence. The doctrine of Christ's substitutionary work demands it. (He was treated as if He were a sinner.) The doctrine of imputed righteousness demands it. (The sinner is treated as if he were the One who lived that sinless life and died on the cross.) Listen to how boldly Luther and Calvin affirmed this "as if."

Luther: Therefore a man can with confidence boast in Christ and say: "Mine are Christ's living, doing, and speaking, his suffering and dying, mine as much as if I had lived, done, spoken, suffered, and died as he did." —Luther's Works, American ed. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press; St. Louis: Concordia, 1955- ), Vol.31, p.297.

This is the inevitable confession of a man who believes in substitution and imputation.

Calvin: For if righteousness consists in the observance of the law, who will deny that Christ merited favor for us when, by taking that burden upon himself, he reconciled us to God as if all had kept the law.—Institutes, Bk. 2, chap. 17, sec. 5.

We define justification as follows: the sinner received into communion with Christ, is reconciled to God by his grace. While cleansed by Christ's blood, he obtains forgiveness of sins, and clothed with Christ's righteousness as if it were his own he stands confident before the heavenly judgment seat. —Ibid., Bk. 3, chap. 17, sec. 8.

The "as if" is the inevitable result of believing in the gospel of salvation by substitution and imputation. Rome fought this concept bitterly. She maintained that God could not declare a man to be righteous unless he was personally righteous; otherwise God would appear to be a liar. 1 From that day to this, Roman Catholic scholars – whether Bellarmine, Newman or Hans Kung – will not accept what even Kung caricatures as "a pasted on 'as if' righteousness." The Reformation defenders replied that if Rome were correct, no one could be justified in this life, for no one is sinless or can be called righteous if the verdict has to rest on his own experience. 1 F. Pieper, in his Christian Dogmatics (St. Louis: Concordia, 1951), Volume 2, page 524, says: "It is characteristic of all good papists and poor Protestants to set up the principles that God can declare only such people righteous as are righteous in themselves. . . . It would [they say] be unethical for God to employ any other method of justification." On page 526, Pieper cites Osiander's objection, "God would not commit the injustice of declaring a man to be righteous in whom there is nothing whatever of true righteousness."

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The justification of the ungodly through the imputed righteousness of Christ does not mean that God's verdict is a fiction which is based on no reality. Before God, Christ's atonement is a reality which is all-sufficient. It does not need to be supplemented by any other reality. God's verdict of justification is not grounded on any reality within the believing sinner. This is the rock of offense on which Rome stumbled. But not only Rome. It is a rock of offense within Protestantism too. There is the continual temptation to ground God's verdict of justification on some reality within the believer. This really means injecting something of the subjective element of sanctification into justification, which immediately corrupts the doctrines of both justification and sanctification.

Attempts to Get Rid of the Offensive "As If"

1. The Subordination of Justification to Sanctification. At least earlier in his ministry, John Wesley had some real reservation about the Reformation understanding of imputed righteousness. in his Letters to Hervey he denied that Christ's righteousness was imputed, but merely said that faith was imputed for righteousness. Yet there is some evidence that Wesley later became fully reconciled to the Reformed doctrine of Christ's imputed righteousness. First, this is indicated in his sermon of 1765 called "The Lord Our Righteousness" (see Sermons on Several Occasions, Vol.1, pp. 169-177). And in the same year, Wesley wrote in a letter to John Newton: "I think on justification just as I have done any time these seven and twenty years, and just as Mr. Calvin does. In this respect I do not differ from him one hair's breadth."—Cited in Albert C. Outer, ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p.78.

Wesley's sermon on 'Justification by Faith," however, does show a shifting away from the Reformation position in one important respect. In this sermon Wesley refutes the Roman Catholic position that justify means to make righteous. He is clear that justification is what God does "for us." Wesley is not guilty of injecting sanctification into the article of justification. But at the same time, he denies the Reformation position which says that justify means to declare righteous. God cannot declare a person to be righteous if he is not personally righteous, says Wesley, adding, "Such a notion of justification is neither reconcilable to reason nor to Scripture."—Sermons, Vol.1, p.47. How does he therefore deal with Paul's statement that God justifies the ungodly? Wesley says that "the plain scriptural notion of justification is pardon, the forgiveness of sin."

To say that Romans 4:5 means that God "forgives the ungodly" avoids the whole problem of imputed righteousness, but it does so at the expense of having a very weak doctrine of justification. Justification only has the negative element of forgiveness left in it and is bereft of the positive element of being declared righteous before the tribunal of God. It becomes a very real temptation to put the sanctified life of the believer in the room of the imputed righteousness of Christ as that which obtains God's favorable verdict in the final day of judgment.

It does not help matters just to say that this sanctified life is made possible by God's grace. Niebuhr points out that the Wesleyan tendency is to subordinate justification to sanctification in such a way that salvation ultimately comes to rest on sanctification. To do this, says Niebuhr, is to land right back in the camp of Roman Catholic soteriology (see The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol.2). We do not say that Wesley does this. But he certainly opens the door to it, and many of his followers have moved in that direction.

Then there are others who may even admit that justify means to declare righteous, but imputed righteousness does not seem to be as real to them as does imparted righteousness. They confess that imputed righteousness is necessary for Christian beginners who have nothing else. But sanctification is seen by them as the higher stage of the soteriological process, and justification is very decidedly subordinated to it. They would not be so irreverent as to say this, but it seems that imputed righteousness is to them a sort of make-believe "abracadabra" righteousness that somehow gets you by until you can acquire the real internal righteousness of sanctification. They seem to say: "It would be a bit too presumptuous or too uncertain to rest on this invisible righteousness alone for salvation. At least the safest thing would be to have some of both – and the more of the second, the safer you would be."

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Of course, no one would express it as crudely as that, but how can we help suspecting that this is the way they feel when a little justification is swallowed up by an overwhelming preoccupation with inner experience?

One writer who represents this stream of thought is bold enough to say, "With the passage of time, we should require less emphasis on Christ's imputed righteousness and should actually possess more and more of imparted righteousness." —Don Hawley, Getting It All Together, p.35. Not surprisingly, this author's system winds up advocating that, in the final analysis, salvation is by character instead of by faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ. Or to put it another way, the writer really means that justification does not actually put a believer in possession of full salvation, but sanctification does. Here sanctification is not injected into the article of justification by faith, but justification is shorn of real saving efficacy, with the result that sanctification comes along, first to supplement it, and finally to supplant it altogether. All this is a far cry from the mighty Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, and it is a far cry from the Reformation.

2. Justification in Prospect of Future Righteousness. Early in this century, Luther scholar Karl Holl tried to get rid of the offensive "as if" by asserting that God justifies the believer because, being eternal, He sees what the believer will eventually become by Christ's renewing power. God acts like the sculptor and sees in the raw block of marble what He can make of it. Holl even asserted that this is what Luther actually taught.

More recently, James Stewart declares that God sees the new direction in which the sinner turns:

. . . his heart [if not his feet] is in the law of promise. . . . That is what God sees; and on the basis of this, God acts. . . . His [the sinner's] position may not have altered much, but his direction has been changed completely, and it is by direction, not position, that God judges. Once the sinner had his back to Christ; now his face is Christ-ward. This is faith, and it holds the potency of a glorious future. This is what God sees; and seeing it, God declares the man righteous. God "justifies" him. Is this a legal "fiction"? The question answers itself. There is nothing fictitious about it whatsoever. It is the deepest and most genuine of realities— A Man in Christ (New York: Harper & Bros.), pp.256-257.

This is not justification on account of what Jesus Christ has done and on the basis of His finished work alone. It shifts the ground of salvation from the vicarious righteousness of Christ to the personal righteousness which the believer will possess – one day.

Why is this done? At the end of the last century (1895), Sanday and Headlam, in their great commentary on Romans, proposed that the doctrine of justification by an imputed righteousness looks as if the Christian life had its beginning in a legal fiction. That is what Rome has always said. But it seemed that Sanday and Headlam's comment began a chain reaction to the supposed horror of a legal fiction. Protestant scholars started a stampede to get rid of this offensive "as if." Today it is hard to find a scholar who stands stiffly for the old doctrine of imputed righteousness. But what is done by way of an alternative? Justification ends up being based, in one way or another, on a reality within the believer. Justification is fused with sanctification. In grounding justification on an internal reality, different roads may be taken, but they all lead to Rome.

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While Holl and Stewart say that God's verdict of justification is based on a future righteousness within the believer, authors like C. H. Dodd and Vincent Taylor say it is based on what the believer has actually become in principle. Dodd says that the basis is not the believer's quantitative righteousness but his qualitative righteousness – his "attitude of mind and will." – The Meaning of Paul for Today (Collins: Fontana Books), p. 121. Taylor says:

He can be accepted by God as righteous, because, to the full extent of his present apprehension of the divine purpose for himself, and the world, an apprehension ever growing from this focal moment in rightness and insight, he has identified himself with that purpose. —-Forgiveness and Reconciliation (London: MacMillan, 1941), p.65.

N. H. Snaith repudiates the whole notion of imputed righteousness and grounds justification on the quality of faith in the believer (see The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament [New York: Schoken Books, 1964], p. 164). And even James Denney suggests that

...the distinction of imputed and infused righteousness is unreal. The man who believes in Christ the propitiation, who stakes his whole being on sin bearing love as the last reality in the universe – is not fictitiously regarded as right with God, he actually is right with God, and God treats him as such.—The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p.164.

Again Denney says:

When He pronounces the sinner dikaios [righteous] he is dikaios. . . . Now on virtue of his faith, he is all right with God, and there is henceforth no condemnation for him. Nor in all this is there anything unreal, anything akin to legal fiction.—Ibid., p.292.

The irony of all these formulations, designed to get rid of legal fiction, is that they end up with a real legal fiction. The fact of the matter is that even the believer is beset by many inner contradictions, as Romans 7:14-25 amply testifies. There is nothing in him – not even his best intentions – which is entirely free from the taint of original sin. His faith is not unmixed with the alloy of unbelief. ("Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.") If God pronounced him righteous on the basis of any reality in him, this would call the truth of God into serious question. Justification is a declaration that the believer possesses an absolute and perfect righteousness. It ought to be clear that such righteousness is not found in the believer's good intentions, his attitude, his faith or in anything within such a poor worm of a creature. He needs a far better righteousness than anything within him to stand in the tribunal of Almighty God. Such a righteousness is found nowhere else but in Jesus Christ, and therefore to base justification on any reality within the believer is a horrendous legal fiction.

3. Justification on the Basis of the Believer's Relationship with God. The most plausible way of bypassing the doctrine of justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ is to propose that justification means God's declaration that the believer is now in a right relationship with Himself. This line of reasoning uses so many right words, and says so many true things, that we need to be wide awake lest we embrace the counterfeit article while all the while thinking it is the genuine Pauline and Reformation article. The argument goes something like this:

Righteousness belongs to the language of relationships. God's grace brings the believing sinner into a right relationship with Himself. Justification is simply God's declaration that a right relationship exists. This is real righteousness. There is no "as if" about it, for it is purely relational. The problem of talking about imputed (fictional?) righteousness disappears, because if you talk about having a right relationship with God, the distinction between imputed and imparted righteousness is irrelevant.

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This is the line taken by Bultmann, Whiteby and many others. Ladd's otherwise excellent A New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974) falls for this argument too. Says Ladd:

A man's relationship to God is no fiction. God does not treat a sinner as though he were righteous; he is in fact righteous. Through Christ he has entered into a new relationship with God and is in fact righteous in terms of this relationship. —p. 445.

If we here pause to clear the air, we should have no trouble taking off the mask of this theory and showing that hiding beneath its plausible terminology is the principle of Roman Catholic justification. We will make three brief points.

1. Righteousness is certainly a relationship, and as we have already shown, it means having a right relationship with God, with man and with the whole created order.

2. We have also shown that righteousness is not a relationship in the abstract, but it is a living, dynamic thing which is expressed in concrete behavior. It has real ethical content. Thus the man who has a right relationship acts right toward God, toward his neighbors and toward the world around him.

3. Since God's justification is not piecemeal but is entire and absolutely perfect, it is a declaration that the believer has a perfect relationship with God, man and the world.

It ought to be clear that no believer has this perfect relationship existentially. If he had, then he would pray perfectly, praise God perfectly, and his heart would never wander in the slightest from loving God with the whole soul, mind and strength. Luther confessed that he never was able to say one Lord's prayer perfectly. He said that we should not doubt that our best and holiest duties are defiled with the secret vice of pride. God's declaration that perfect righteousness exists is not to be identified with our personal relationship to God. Let any man honestly look into his heart, and he will confess that his heart-relationship with God is far from what it should be or could be, and he must cry for forgiveness.

But does not the believer have a perfect righteousness? Yes, he has! Does not a perfect righteousness mean a perfect relationship? Yes, it does! How then does the believer have a perfect relationship? He has it by faith and by imputation. On his behalf, Christ has a perfect relationship to God, to man and to the whole created order. All that was lost in Adam is restored in Christ.

The relationship which Christ our Representative has with the Father on our behalf must be distinguished from our own heart-relationship with Christ, which the Bible calls faith (that is, faith-union with Christ). This is not the efficacious, meritorious union. Faith always points away from itself to rest for salvation on Christ's union with God.

It is often said that the most important thing in the Christian religion is the believer's heart-relationship with the Lord. But as important as that is, it is not the most important thing. The most important thing is Christ's relationship with God. This is the believer's guarantee of acceptance unto eternal life. Justification is based on this reality which is completely outside the believer. It is the righteousness or the relationship of Another. The believer is not accepted because of his faith – even though he will not be accepted without it. He is accepted because Another is accepted. He is declared righteous because Another is righteous on his behalf.

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The objections about legal fiction are really only a "red herring." Neither a good Catholic nor a good Protestant will say that God declares a person righteous without the existence of a real righteousness. As Chemnitz points out in his Examination of the Council of Trent (St. Louis: Concordia, 1971), the Reformation acknowledges that righteousness is necessary to secure God's verdict of justification. So let us not be diverted by the non-question as to whether a real righteousness must exist. That is not the issue. The issue is, Where does this righteousness reside? As Buchanan in his masterful treatise on The Doctrine of Justification (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1961) asks again and again, "Is this righteousness vicarious, or is it a personal righteousness in the believer?"

The Issue behind the Issue

What is behind all the efforts to rework the doctrine of justification – efforts which lead in one way or another to grounding God's justifying verdict, at least in part, on some reality within the believer? Back of them all is a dissatisfaction and uneasiness about the plain Pauline and Reformation doctrine of imputed righteousness. It is disappointing that even many good authors, who confess that salvation is based on an objective foundation, seem to be soft on the old doctrine of imputed righteousness. 1 Commenting on the current scene, Ziesler says:

More commonly today, the language of imputation is avoided, partly because of the difficulties to which it has led [legal fiction] and partly because its use in Romans 4 and Galatians 3 seems very much due to the exigencies of polemic. —The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul, p.8.

As we have pointed out, all this talk about legal fiction is a "red herring." So is the argument which says that we must make allowances for Paul's polemic against the Judaisers. The whole concept of imputation is tied to the biblical doctrine of a substitutionary atonement. These two things – imputation and the substitutionary atonement of Christ – stand together. An attack on one is an attack on the other.

The center of the apostolic message was that Christ died for our sins (1 Cor. 15:3), was made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13), suffered for the unjust (1 Peter 3:18) and gave His life "a ransom for [Greek, anti, meaning in the stead of] many" (Mark 10:45).

. . . God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them. . . . For He hath made Him [Christ] to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. —2 Cor. 5:19, 21.

God laid our sins on Jesus Christ by imputation. ". . . He was numbered with the transgressors . . . “(Isa. 53:12). This is how He was "made . . . to be sin for us." There was nothing in Him worthy of death. But having been made to be sin by imputation, He was condemned by the righteous judgment of God. In this sense it was right and proper that Christ should suffer the wrath of God. He had to be treated as if He were a sinner. It is on this same basis that God deals with the believing sinner. Having made him righteous by the imputed righteousness of Christ, God pronounces him just and treats him as if he were righteous. Those who repudiate imputed righteousness are really repudiating the central truth of the cross of Christ – that is, substitution.

But let us press this further in order to get back to the ultimate source of the problem. Why have many biblical scholars begun to look for the meaning of Christ's atonement elsewhere than in the concept of substitution? They talk about Christ's solidarity, identity or oneness with the race. Markus Barth gives an excellent presentation of Christ's representative role. But Barth cannot bring himself to acknowledge substitution. To many, the whole substitution-imputation concept is unreal or unnecessary.

They are critical of the typical "Fundamentalist" portrayal of Christ's substitutionary work – and often for some very good reasons, we must admit. For is it not all too true that some presentations of Christ's substitutionary atonement appear to be arbitrary, artificial and not wholly unlike a pagan appeasement? Why does not God simply forgive without having to be "bought off" by the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ?

1 Even Leon Morris (The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, pp.271-272. 282) is disappointingly weak on imputation.

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The atonement cannot be explained except by an appreciation of the binding claims of the law of God. The Ten Commandments are the words or the stipulations of the everlasting covenant (Ex. 34:27-29; Deut. 4:13 Rev. 11:19; 15:5). The covenant guarantees the blessing of life to the obedient and invokes the curse of death upon the disobedient. This law is the constitution of the universe. It cannot be changed, modified or relaxed. God must uphold the moral order of the universe. The law's demands must be honored by perfect fulfillment and by the most complete satisfaction for sin. If this appears rigidly severe, let it be understood that we are dealing with an exact and omnipotent justice which will not abdicate the rule of divine law. Ultimate stability and freedom are not found in weakening, much less abolishing, the law of God.

When we acknowledge that this "law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good" (Rom. 7:12), that it requires of us the most perfect and exact obedience, that its penalty for any default must be carried out, and that it would be easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one jot or tittle of this law not to be carried out, then we will bless God that means have been devised that a Substitute stand in our stead. We will bless God for His sinless life which met our obligation. We will thank grace that He was willing to make reparations for the damage done. We will know why God could not spare His own Son if He was to save us from eternal ruin (Rom. 8:32). The sufferings of Christ will impress upon us what a tremendous evil it is to transgress God's commandments.

We submit that such a view of the atonement shows us that there is no salvation other than by substitution and imputation. More than that, it is a salvation which will lead to a life of penitent, grateful submission to the law of God – apart from which all freedom is an illusion. It is not the Reformation doctrine of justification by Christ's imputed righteousness which is a cul-de-sac with no road from it to ethics. Rather, the blind alley is found in the theories of atonement that are not grounded on the moral necessities of the law of God.

We live in an age which has become notorious for its spirit of lawlessness. That spirit has permeated the church as well as the world. Multitudes of proposed Christians do not want to submit to the outside law of God any more than they want to submit to the outside righteousness of faith (Rom. 10:3). They want to live by some 'Spirit-ethic" (the uncertain voices within, "sanctified" human intuition) just as they want to be justified by some "real" righteousness within. But it is "the man of lawlessness" (2 Thess. 2:3-8, RSV) who opposes justification by faith by crying up the need for real inward righteousness while all the while his heart thinks to "change the times and the law" (Dan. 7:25, RSV).

In short, all this opposition to imputed righteousness stems from the spirit of rebellion against the law of God. Let the law of God be upheld and its claims urged home upon the conscience, and then Christ's substitutionary atonement stands, and troubled consciences will be glad to find shelter under His imputed righteousness.

God's verdict of justification, therefore, is grounded on the reality of the law of God and the cross of Christ. Those who want to ground it on their own reality dishonor the law and despise the all-sufficiency of the cross. All this is implicit in Paul's argument in Romans 3:21-31.

Then, in Romans 4, Paul presses his argument further against those who want to base God's justifying verdict on a reality within themselves.1 The God who justifies the ungodly (v.5) is the God who creates out of nothing and who raises the dead. Paul shows that this is the God in whom Abraham believed. When his own body was procreationally dead and Sarah's womb was dead, God pronounced him a father, saying, "I have made thee a father of many nations" (v.17). This was not said after Isaac was born but before Isaac was born (see Gen. 17:5). God's declaration that Abraham was a father was not based on a reality in Abraham. The God who creates out of nothing (Heb. 11:3) – not being dependent on any reality save the reality in His own Word, who is Jesus Christ – is the God "who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were" (Rom. 4:17). This assertion of Paul is a thunderbolt against those who say that a man has to be righteous before God can declare him righteous.

1 Logizomai (impute, account, reckon) is used 11 times in Romans 4.

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And when God raises the dead, He is not dependent upon some supposed immortality of the soul. 1 God's word calling the ungodly righteous and the barren woman a mother is, like election itself, not grounded even on the foreseen righteousness or fruitfulness of the human subject, but on the reality of Jesus Christ and His work alone. God finds in Jesus an adequate reason and justification for all His decrees.

To insist that we must be righteous before God by a righteousness within us is as foolish as thinking vain thoughts about surviving the disaster of death by our supposed immortality. Saying that the righteousness which we have within is by the grace of the Holy Spirit does not improve the situation. If anything, it makes our situation worse. It means that we use God's gift to steal His glory.

Chapter 7

Justification in Paul: Its Judicial Meaning

The judicial meaning of justification in Paul has been so adequately argued and established by the Protestant Reformation that we will not here labor to prove what has already been so well proven. We will simply state the case and spend some time in looking at its far-reaching implications.

The words justify, justified and justification are what are known as forensic or judicial words. They belong to the language of courts of law. Paul, of course, is quite at home using such words, because he is by training a lawyer and a judge. In an overwhelming number of instances throughout the Bible, justify, justified and justification appear in the setting of a judgment scene where cases are tried according to law (see Deut. 25:1; Prov. 17:15; Rom. 2:6-16; 8:31-34; Ps. 143:2; Matt. 12:36-37). Justification is the opposite of condemnation (Deut. 25:1; Rom. 8:33). It is the judgment, declaration, verdict or sentence of the Judge. Although the verdict may lead to profound changes in the life of the person upon whom it is pronounced, justification itself is not a moral change in the person. It means to declare righteous and not to make righteous (subjectively). 2

Justification which is by faith in Jesus changes our relation to God, but it is not in itself a change in our moral state. It is what God does for us and not what He does in us. It does not in itself constitute a change in us, but it constitutes a change in the way God regards us. It is by the imputation of Christ's righteousness to us and not by the infusion of His righteousness into us.

According to Paul, righteousness or justification by faith is God's method of saving sinners. It is not enough simply to say that God saves sinners by His grace. God is not only in the business of saving sinners, but He is in the business of saving them justly – that is, according to a way which is lawful and right. In the Bible, righteousness is everywhere laid down as a condition of salvation (see Rom. 1:16-17; 2:6-16; Matt. 19:17-20; Ps. 15; Ezek. 18). According to Paul's gospel, the sinner is saved by faith because by faith he receives the righteousness of God's provision, which entitles him to salvation. "He who by faith is righteous shall live [shall be saved]" (Rom. 1:17, RSV).

1 Thielicke is quite right when he observes that the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by infused righteousness and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul belong together. 2 It is correct to say that justification means to make righteous in the judicial sense only.

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It is not as if Paul moves from faith to salvation like this:

Rather, Paul moves from faith to righteousness and then from righteousness to salvation:

The apostle's great accent, therefore, falls on that righteousness which acquires for us God's verdict of salvation. This righteousness is called "the righteousness of God" because His grace provides it. It is called "the righteousness of One" because it consists solely in the obedience and blood of Jesus Christ. Gospel preaching is preaching about the mighty acts (righteousness) of incarnate God. Saving faith means that we put our faith in this righteousness of Jesus, which honors God's law (Rom. 3:31) and by this means brings us salvation.

When the Reformers revived these Pauline concepts of judicial salvation, it meant that, in preaching the gospel, they proclaimed the historical doing and dying of Christ as the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes. Their attention was riveted on a righteousness outside of the believer, and their testimony was to the vicarious experience of the God-man and not to their own subjective experience. The Reformers took pains to exclude the new birth, sanctification or any internal change from the article of justification. They did not do this in order to depreciate the necessity of moral renewal. But they realized that an infinitely higher work was necessary to reconcile sinners to God. For the glory of Christ and for the comfort of troubled consciences, they knew that our salvation has to be grounded on an objective work – a righteousness completely outside the experience of the believer. If the judicial nature of justification by faith is lost, then salvation becomes identified, in one way or another, with the believer's own subjective experience.

While in Luther and Calvin all the emphasis fell on the redemptive event that took place with Christ's death and resurrection, later under the influence of pietism, mysticism, and moralism, the emphasis shifted to the process of individual appropriation of the salvation given in Christ and to its mystical and moral effect in the life of believers. Accordingly, in the history of the interpretation of the epistles of Paul the center of gravity shifted more and more from the forensic to the pneumatic and ethical aspects of his preaching, and there arose an entirely different conception of the structures that lay at the foundation of this preaching. 1

The Modern Religious Scene

For the most part, Paul's gospel about salvation by the righteousness of faith has no real place in modern preaching. It has even been said that the Reformers' passionate concern about justification by faith does not even make sense to modern man. It is not that talk about salvation is lacking. The modern evangelical would be horrified if it were to be suggested that he did not believe in salvation by grace. And here is the problem: he is so confident about his belief in salvation by grace that it

does not occur to him that there may be a radical difference between the way he thinks about salvation and the way Paul

and the Reformers thought about it. It is sobering to reflect on how the early Fathers, one generation removed from Paul, knew so

little about justification by faith. Yet we are many generations removed from the Reformers. Unless the objective gospel is rediscovered afresh by every generation, it will surely be lost.

1 Harman Ridderbos. Paul: An Outline of His Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), p. 14.

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Paul and the Reformers who followed him thought of salvation principally in terms of justification by faith in an imputed righteousness. Modern evangelicalism thinks of salvation principally in terms of a new-birth experience. There is a marked difference in emphasis here. The center has shifted from that which is outside of man to that which is inside of man. This viewing of salvation chiefly in terms of a new-birth experience is more in harmony with classical Romanism than with genuine Protestantism. This is why good Romanists can look upon most modern forms of revivalism and Christian crusades with considerable favor – or in the words of Louis Bouyer, call them "a rediscovery of Catholicism." 1

Why are we today so inclined to bypass salvation by the righteousness of faith and opt instead for salvation by an internal experience?

The doctrine of justification by faith deals with the legal aspects of salvation. But modern man does not think in legal categories. Anybody with a scant knowledge of the Christian religion knows that legalism is a bad and ugly thing. No one wants to be a legalist! But this antipathy toward legalism has rubbed off onto the law itself so that any great interest in the legal categories of biblical thought has been suspected of legalism. For instance, the liberals have attacked the Christian doctrine of the substitutionary atonement of Christ as a legalistic concept. (It is true that the substitutionary atonement is a legal atonement – an atonement designed to make satisfaction to the claims of the divine law.) Also, the idea of living strictly by what the Bible says has been branded as legalism. So in the place of an atonement which honors God's law (Rom. 3:31) and leads the believer to a kind of life which also seeks to honor God's law, we have the "moral influence" theory of atonement and a "Spirit" (situation) ethic – which in the final analysis is the most pitiful kind of legalism indeed.

The doctrine of justification by an imputed righteousness seems too abstract for modern man. It sounds too academic at best and too legal at worst. (Isn't legalism bad?) The thought goes something like this: "Let's leave the nit-picking theologians to argue about the legal niceties of salvation. That has no vital relevance to our concrete situation. People can't see how a righteousness in heaven can help them very much. The essence of Christianity is transformation. It is not a legal religion. Christ changes lives. That's the real cash value of the gospel. Here is religion which can be seen and felt. When Christ is invited into people's lives, it's for real; it's dynamic. Then they can witness to something real – to their new-found peace and happiness. What difference does some legal transaction called justification by faith make, or an abstract reckoning of righteousness to our account in heaven (celestial bookkeeping), when we have a real, tangible experience of Christ in the heart?"

It is perhaps ironical that this age, which is conspicuous for its vast technological progress, is also conspicuous for its shallow thinking about man. This sort of preaching, which bypasses justification by faith in favor of the "gospel" of the changed life, is woefully shallow.

Its proponents may think they are making the gospel relevant to man's basic needs, but they are not. This whole approach to the Christian message is based on a twofold misunderstanding. It is based on a misunderstanding of God, and it is based on a misunderstanding of man.

1 See Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism (Cleveland: World, 1964), pp.186-197.

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The Misunderstanding of God

The God of Jesus and Paul is the God of the Old Testament. Righteousness is fundamental to His character and to all His dealings with men. Righteousness – uncompromising and perfect – is the condition of salvation. The law of God is an expression of His undeviating righteousness (Ps. 119). As Creator, Lawgiver and Judge, He makes His law known to man and expects them to walk in it. "The law must be fulfilled so that not a jot or tittle shall be lost, otherwise man will be condemned without hope." 1 "Perfect obedience to the law is righteousness." "Righteousness consists in the observance of the law." "For the Lord promises nothing except to perfect keepers of His law." 2

Let us make no mistake about it – the God of biblical revelation is the God of law. Law "is the way in which He administers His universe" (Morris). 3 It is true that He hates and curses legalism, but we must not confuse legalism with that which is properly legal. Legalism is not legal but illegal. The law demands perfect righteousness, and when the legalist offers his imperfect obedience to the law, he insults its divine splendor.

The God of the Bible sees to it that the honor of His law is maintained at all costs – even at the cost of Calvary. He will not overlook sin, which is lack of respect for His law. Sin arouses God's anger, and He must take action against it. If God were easygoing enough to pass over sin, might He not also overlook righteousness? But He sees to it that we live in a universe where justice is done and all debts will eventually be paid.

God's governance of the universe is depicted to us in the Bible in legal categories. God relates to man by way of a covenant. Covenant is a legal conception. It spells out the terms of the God-man relationship, provides legal

security, promises rewards for compliance with its terms, and sanctions against noncompliance. The

legal terms of God's covenant are always carried out to the letter. God's righteousness is His undeviating fidelity to

His covenant. Whatever God does, He will uphold the covenant and carry out all its promises and threats with immutable consistency.

1 Luther's Works, American ed. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press; St. Louis: Concordia, 1955-), Vol.31, pp.348-349. 2 John Calvin, Institutes, Bk. 3, chap. 17, sec. 7; Bk. 2, chap. 17, sec. 5; Bk. 3, chap. 17, sec. 1. 3 5ee Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, pp. 253-258, for an excellent section on the relation of God and His law.

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As Judge, God is pledged to call all men to His judgment seat and judge them according to His impartial law (Rom. 2:6-16; James 2:10-12). Whatever He does will be lawful – according to law.

This includes salvation itself. God does not save men by casting aside the stipulations of His covenant, but the law itself is honored in the way in which God saves the believing sinner (see Rom. 3:31). The propitiatory death of Jesus was a transaction related to the law of God. The word propitiation takes us back to the mercy seat or lid of the ark. On the Day of Atonement the blood of the sin offering was brought into the holy of holies and sprinkled on the lid of the ark, beneath which were the ten stipulations of the covenant. Even so did the blood of Jesus Christ make full satisfaction to the claims of the divine law on behalf of all who believe.

So God is not disinterested in His law. The great biblical words such as judge, judgment, covenant and righteousness should lead us to appreciate the genuine legal categories of biblical thought. And unless our thought follows these important legal categories, which are closely related to God's character and to all His dealings, there is no way that we can understand justification by faith. For justification is a great biblical word which belongs to these legal categories.

The modern scene has no time for law, and it has made for itself a god who does not care for law either. The current neglect of the biblical doctrine of justification by faith is based on a misunderstanding of God.

The Misunderstanding of Man

The failure of the modern scene to think in the legal categories of the Bible is also based on a misunderstanding of man. This is because our view of God determines our view of the creature who was made in the image of God.

As the creature of God, man is related to law (Rom. 3:19). Man cannot escape from the jurisdiction of law (the authority of God) any more than he can escape from his own creaturehood.

A serious reflection about human nature will show that human life is inextricably bound up with its relation to law. Every important human transaction is legal: business transactions, possession of property, citizenship, membership in various social groups. The most important intra-human transaction – marriage – is a legal arrangement. Love is not just based on a fluctuating human experience. Love is based on a legal covenant which guarantees security and reciprocal responsibility. True love must therefore be lawful, or it stands judged by a decent society as immoral.

Man's relationship with God is not just a matter of "falling in love with the Lord." The marriage covenant reflects the mode of the divine-human relationship. God's fellowship with man is based on a covenant which offers to the human party security and responsibility. Our union with God must be altogether a righteous union – a union which is lawful.

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Then consider the phenomenon of the human conscience. This has rightly been called "the moral judiciary of the soul." The conscience is related to the moral law. It takes hold of the law and either excuses us or accuses us. The conscience will not be satisfied or appeased unless justice is done. A man may stop doing wrong, but the conscience will not be satisfied by transformation. Conscience demands that the law be satisfied. The sinner has no rest because he is at war with himself. The conscience will not let him forgive himself.

There is in the human heart a passion to be in the right. That is why we all tend to justify ourselves. If we had no great passion to be in the right, we would not make excuses for our wrong behavior, rationalize, project our guilt (blame others), and indulge in repression, regression, masochism (self-punishment) and compensation. People spend an enormous amount of time and effort trying to justify themselves. Life itself becomes an attempt to justify one's existence. Why do people fight, argue and compete with each other? These exercises are generally done to achieve justification. Psychologists and psychiatrists call it the need for acceptance – self-acceptance, acceptance before God, or acceptance before others. The Bible gives the true reason for this. Man was made in God's image, and the essence of God's image is righteousness. The sinner is bereft of righteousness, and he feels naked and insecure. Until the Spirit of grace reveals God's way of putting him right with the law (justification), the sinner has to go on trying to justify himself.

The need to be justified (in the right) is the most basic human need. This means that man's most essential problem is related to the law. It is legal. Sin is primarily a matter of guilt. That is why Jesus spoke of sin as a debt (Matt. 6:12; 18:23-35). Debt is a legal problem. No amount of inner transformation pays the debt. The gulf between God and man cannot be bridged by having Christ or the Spirit come into the sinner's heart. The sinner cannot climb to heaven by his sanctification – even if that sanctification is wrought in him by God. If sin were only a matter of pollution, and man's only need transformation, then we could dispense with Christ's reconciling act, His atoning blood, the Mediator of the covenant, and His intercession of righteousness at God's right hand. But these are the distinctive, objective realities of the Christian religion. If we dispense with the law and the legal categories of the Bible, we dispense with the gospel of salvation objectively accomplished.

To summarize: Justification which is by faith is a judicial transaction related to God's law and to the divine jurisprudence. Unless it is seen that God is a God of law and man is a creature of law, the doctrine of justification makes absolutely no sense. And that is precisely the situation in altogether too much of the current religious scene.

Paul's Perception of the Divine-Human Problem

The apostle Paul clearly perceives the fundamental problem of the divine-human relationship. He has the necessary background for the evangelical faith: the Old Testament with its demand for a righteousness which fulfills the covenantal stipulations. It is important to see how Paul takes up the gospel in the book of Romans. Let us look at his leading words: righteousness, righteous judgment, judgment, judge, wrath, condemnation, justify, guilt, law. These are all legal words – words which fit in so naturally with a covenantal religion.

Paul does not zero in on the fundamental human problem as if it were a matter of pollution and the need of transformation. (That, of course, is a problem; but we insist that it is not the fundamental problem.) The basic human need is not met by preaching, "Are you happy? Have you a sense of purpose? Do you want a radiant experience which will put zip into your life? Is your business failing? Is your mother-in-law getting you down? Are you bothered by the pimple on your nose?" (How petty is so much of this "relevant," problem-oriented preaching which offers an Alka-Seltzer Jesus in the heart to end all troubles!) The fundamental human problem is that man is on the wrong side of the law, and he is cursed and condemned for his life of rebellion and disrespect toward its authority. There is no hope of getting right with God unless the sinner gets right with the law. How can its inexorable demands for righteousness be met? How can the debt owed the holy law be liquidated? True preaching will arraign the sinner before the bar of divine judgment and show him his predicament before the law. That

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predicament is guilt, and there is one sentence for it: the wages of sin is death. Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin (Rom. 6:23; Heb. 9:22). A way of salvation must be provided which will satisfy both divine and human justice. God's grace has provided the righteousness which His law demands. On the grounds of the propitiation made by Christ's blood, God can be just and the Justifier of the believing sinner (Rom. 3:24-26). This method of salvation honors the law (Rom. 3:31). It is the basis of a just and lasting peace

between God and man. Christ's obedience to the law is legally reckoned (imputed) to the believing sinner. He

stands before the law as one who has fulfilled all its demands. By this means the Judge can render His verdict that the sinner is righteous. This is a just verdict because it is according to law.

When the believing sinner realizes that God not only forgives him, but forgives him justly, his own conscience is "cleansed." The blood of Christ satisfies the human conscience. Justice has been done. The believing sinner has legally died with Christ (2 Cor. 5:14; Gal. 2:20). With this verdict of God's court, the sinner can silence the accusing of his conscience. He can forgive himself when he knows that God, who is greater than his heart, has forgiven him.

Some Further Implications

There are two further implications which arise from this message of salvation by the righteousness of faith:

1. It means that salvation is secured to us by that which has already happened, by that which is entirely outside the experience of the believer. If salvation is made to rest on the

believer's moral renewal, he can never stand before God with an easy conscience. Once the subjective element is introduced as the ground of acceptance with God, the believer is thrown into the terrors of a gnawing uncertainty. If the degree to which the believer is transformed and lives in new obedience never satisfies his own ideal, how can it satisfy the divine ideal?

The gospel of the righteousness of faith hits the sinner in the center of his existence because it shows him that nothing in his own existence can give him standing before God. He must in faith flee from his own acts, even his good and valid acts of repentance and holiness, and hide himself in the faithfulness of Another. To be righteous by faith means self-renunciation at the deepest level of existence – for the deepest level is the need to be in the right. To be accepted because of what Another is and what Another has done is to find our justification wholly apart from our own strivings. This is freedom indeed. It does not mean that we no longer toil and work and strive to be as successful as possible. But it means that we do not have to do this to justify our existence and give ultimate meaning to life. Christ has justified our right to live, and He has given our life its ultimate meaning. Our labor may now be a labor of love, because it is not done from the ulterior motive of securing our justification. We work from justification, not to it.

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2. If the law of God has been honored by the righteousness of faith, this must have profound ethical consequences in the lives of those who believe such a gospel. The same gospel which turns the sinner from his own righteousness to the righteousness of Another must also turn him from devising his own standard of conduct to the rule of life which Almighty God has decreed for all men. A salvation which honors God's law can only lead the believer in a kind of life which shows respect for the law of God. Justification by faith makes the law and the sinner friends (Rom. 8:7). If the church has become permissive in regard to sin, soft and flabby in regard to moral discipline, it is because she has neglected the doctrine of justification by faith. Where justification is exalted, so is the law of God – both as a schoolmaster to lead to Christ and as a rule of life for the believing community. Or to say this another way, justification is the mother of sanctification. The essential content of sanctification is a life gratefully submitted to the authority of God's law.

Justification is a judicial concept. A revival of the preaching of justification by faith is therefore possible only as there is a return to the legal categories of biblical revelation.

CHAPTER 8

The Eschatological Meaning of Justification

The material principle of the Reformation was justification by faith. The Reformers rescued this as the chief article of the Christian religion when they recovered its judicial meaning. Never since the apostle Paul had this doctrine been taught with such clarity in the church. The church had confused the righteousness of faith and the regenerate life of the believer. It was this synthesis between righteousness by faith and sanctification which was the heart of the medieval system with all its abominable fruits. But Luther broke this synthesis. Justification was clearly distinguished from regeneration.

The Reformers showed that justification is being declared righteous, not being made righteous. It concerns what was done for us and not what is done in us. It is by an extrinsic righteousness imputed to us and not by an intrinsic righteousness infused into us. The Reformation moreover affirmed the primacy, all-sufficiency and centrality of justification by faith: its primacy because the relational (legal) change takes precedence over the vital (moral) change: its all-sufficiency because it is a justification unto life eternal; its centrality because the glory of Christ's finished work is magnified and the comfort of troubled consciences is provided for in the preaching of forensic justification.

Protestantism has not always been successful in maintaining the primacy, all-sufficiency and centrality of justification by faith. The tendency has ever been to subordinate justification and to slip away from the objective focus of the Pauline gospel. The believer and his private experience have so often taken the spotlight from the awesome, infinite act of God in Jesus Christ.

As we have said, there is a need to go back to recover the great Reformation insight. But we must not only go back; we must also go forward. Justification is not only judicial; it is eschatological. The Reformation stopped short of a rounded-out eschatological consciousness. Because of this, the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith has been exposed to certain weaknesses – weaknesses which only time could highlight to us. We will point out two of these weaknesses.

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1. It has often been said, especially in the Reformed stream of thought, that justification is a once-and-for-all, nonrepeatable act. This final act, it has been said, is followed by sanctification. We might diagram this as follows below:

What inevitably happens in this way of viewing things is that justification becomes static. It becomes relegated (as far as the believing community is concerned) to a thing of the past. There is a tendency for it to become a warm memory. To be sure, it is something very relevant to begin the Christian life, but it slips away from the central place in the thinking of the existential moment. For all the strong points of Puritan theology, one has only to reflect on it in order to notice that sanctification tended to swallow up justification.

When this static justification is combined with a philosophical, rationalistic idea of election, as well as preoccupation with immortality of the soul, the great importance which the New Testament gives to eschatology begins to slip out of sight. It is even worse when this static justification is reduced to the more popular once-saved-always-saved-ism – which is Calvinism minus the perseverance of the saints. Here the biblical doctrine about the final judgment according to works is emptied of all meaning. In this line of thinking, the soul has received practically everything of significance quite apart from the final judgment and the last day. Such a loss of the Bible's emphasis on a final judgment according to works is often attended by disastrous ethical and moral consequences. In cutting much of the biblical tension between the now and the not yet, this type of theology cuts much of the tension of the biblical imperative to holiness.

2. Wesley did not like this aspect of Reformed thought, especially when the perseverance of the saints was shorn from it. Yet he did not opt for the Roman solution, which confounds justification with regeneration. He maintained the Reformation distinction between the righteousness of faith and sanctification. But Wesley weakened the Reformation doctrine of justification by reducing it to forgiveness for the sins of the past. Justification, said Wesley, does not mean being declared righteous on the grounds of Christ's having kept the law for us. It simply means forgiveness for past sins on account of Christ's meeting the penalty of the law for us. In Wesley's thought, this weakened version of justification was to be followed by the experience of sanctification.

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It should be noted that sanctification here tends to be regarded as a higher stage of the soteriological process. Since justification is only forgiveness of past sins, final salvation awaits the future verdict of the judgment. What happens here is that there is a tendency to have the believer's final salvation rest on sanctification. We might illustrate this scheme as shown in the diagram to the right:

This Wesleyan scheme, as history has amply demonstrated, lends itself to perfectionism – some rather implicit, some quite explicit. (Wesley realized that his perfectionism was only possible on the premise of the dualism of mortal body and immortal soul.)

The line of thought in point 1 means that there is no real need of the advent – at least the believing community can get along quite well without thinking too much about it. As A. J. Gordon once put it, many think far more about their going than about Christ's coming. The rationalistic view of election and the dualistic view of man privatizes salvation and lends itself to an individual eschatology at death rather than a corporate one at Christ's coming.

The line of thought in point 2 really means that the believing community is never ready for the advent. If being ready is based on sanctification, no one is ever convinced that he is ready for the Lord to come. Some go all the way and make the coming of Christ dependent on the believing community's being spiritually perfected (that is, sinless). But instead of hastening Christ's coming, this sort of program can only delay it. Who would have the nerve to pray in confidence, "Come, Lord Jesus," if only the perfect could stand when He appeared? There are some people who spend all their spiritual pilgrimage listening to preachers pulverize them with the imperative of getting ready for Jesus to come. And the sad fact is that they are always "getting ready" rather than "being ready."

As to which is worst – having no need of the advent or not being ready for the advent – we must leave the reader to judge. But if we are to escape from the horns of this dilemma, we must come to grips with the eschatological meaning of justification by faith.

Eschatology and the New Testament

The Old Testament looks forward to God's promised salvation at "the end of the age." God's act of intervention – His arraignment of the world in judgment, attended by His wrath on the wicked, the resurrection of the just and the deliverance of His people – are all anticipated at the end of the world.

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The New Testament shows us that the anticipated end of the world consists in two moments: the first and second comings of Christ. At the first coming of Christ the end of the world took place in principle. The Christ event is described as a last-day happening (Heb. 1:2; 9:26). In the Person of God's Messiah the kingdom of the future broke into history. In Him who was the new Head of the race, God arraigned the world in judgment and poured out His wrath against sin. By Him sin was put away at the end of the age (Heb. 9:26), death was abolished, and life and immortality were brought to light (2 Tim. 1:10). The long-looked-for act of salvation took place in the death and resurrection of Christ. All that God promised in the Old Testament by way of His eschatological salvation was fulfilled in Jesus Christ (Acts 13: 32-33; 2 Cor. 1:20). Eternal life – literally, the life of the age to come – was brought to us by Jesus Christ. All who believe are incorporated with Christ into the new eon; old things have passed away, and all things have become new (2 Cor. 5:17).

The New Testament community sees itself as living at the end of the age. The resurrection of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit are signs that the final resurrection and the Spirit's final work of glorification of all of God's people will be the next event. The parousia will only mean the visible manifestation of what has already taken place in Christ, or the open manifestation of what every believer already enjoys by faith alone.

The church of the New Testament, which lives in the moment between the two advents, is an eschatological community. She stands on tiptoe, waiting eagerly for Christ's return. The appearing of antichrists (false teachers) and the waning love of others who depart from the faith are all seen as signs of the last hour. Christ, the great High Priest, has gone into the sanctuary, having made His final offering for sin; and the believers are like the Israelites waiting for the high priest to come out of the holy of holies to bless the waiting congregation with salvation (Heb. 9:28). The New Testament church, being an eschatological community, is a pilgrim community. In this world she has no abiding city, but she seeks one to come. Like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, she lives in tents. We find no record of the building of churches and institutions by the apostolic church. She had no time. We need to understand that the books of the New Testament were written in this eschatological atmosphere. Many of the great words in Paul's Romans, for instance, are eschatological words – that is to say, they are words loaded with end-time significance. Salvation (Rom. 1:16) is what the prophets had promised at the end time (Isa. 25:9). It is the same with life, shall live and eternal life (Rom. 1:17; 5:10, 18-21; 6:23; 8:10-12). The righteousness of God now revealed in the gospel is that eschatological saving act of God which the prophets had promised (Isa. 56:1: Rom. 1:17). The words judgment, righteous judgment of God, and wrath are obviously eschatological (see Rom. 2:3-16; 5:9). So also are glory of God, glorified, Spirit and redemption (Rom. 5:2; 823-30).

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In the same way, we must consider what Paul means by justified and justification. These words are not only judicial (related to law), but eschatological (related to the end of the world). In a setting both judicial and eschatological, the apostle declares:

The doers of the law shall be justified . . . in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.—Rom. 2:13, 16.

We may place a passage by Jesus alongside of the above:

But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.—Matt. 12:36-37.

It was the expectation of the pious Jew that at the end of the age there would be a judgment day. Then God would justify the righteous and condemn the wicked. Justification was what would take place for the people of God on the day of judgment. The passages cited above show that in a certain sense Paul and Jesus shared that expectation. Justification is eschatological. It is the verdict of acquittal and approval which is rendered on the day of judgment.

The Biblical Doctrine of Judgment

Before we look further into the Pauline meaning of justification, let us consider what the Bible teaches us about the judgment.

1. The Bible teaches that there will be a final judgment of all according to works. Many of the parables of Jesus tell us this in the plainest possible way. Paul, the apostle of justification by faith, says more about a final judgment according to works than does any other apostle. Romans 2 is a classical example and is not, as some more liberal scholars have suggested, a hangover from Paul's Judaistic training. Justification by faith alone and a final judgment according to works are not inimical. They go well together in Paul's theology. All that men have done, including the lives of the righteous, must pass in review before God. Every secret thing will be brought into the judgment, whether good or evil (Eccl. 12:13-14). The Lord will not gloss over any piece of evidence. He will not hide the facts, even about His elect. The undeleted evidence will be brought to light. The standard of the judgment will be the law of God, the ten stipulations of the everlasting covenant (Rom. 2:13; James 2:10-12). The demand for righteousness will be rigorous and uncompromising. Those who have perfect righteousness will be justified; those who fall short will be condemned.

2. The New Testament teaches us that the judgment is imminent. The resurrection of Christ is the assurance of this (Acts 17:31). James reminds the believing community who are tempted to judge one another that "the Judge standeth before the door" (James 5:9). Peter could even say that "the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God" (1 Peter 4:17). Everywhere the "everlasting gospel" is announced, it declares, "The hour of His judgment is come" (Rev. 14:7).

If a person is to really appreciate what Paul means by his message of justification by faith, one must enter into the eschatological consciousness of the New Testament community and see himself standing in the very presence of God's final judgment. By faith he must enter this holy of holies and see himself before the ark of the testimony, as the Jews were summoned to meet with God on the day of Yom Kippur.

Justification: Future and Present

Justification, being the verdict of God's judgment seat, is yet future. Just as Paul can talk of "the hope of eternal life" and "the hope of salvation," so he can talk about "the hope of justification" which we yet wait for (Gal. 5:5). Hope pertains to what is future (Rom. 8:24-25). Paul waits for the crown of righteousness

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(justification) which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to him on the final day (2 Tim. 4:8). "The doers of the law [the righteous] shall be justified" (Rom. 2:13). This future (eschatological or final-judgment) dimension of justification is also evident in Romans 8:31-39. Says Shrenk:

In the full sense a man is judicially acquitted and declared righteous only when the retributive sentence of the last judgment has been pronounced in his favour as regards the whole of his life's work. . . . [Romans] 8:33 . . . obviously refers to the last judgment.1

We have seen that the men of the Old Testament and the pious rabbis believed in this future justification on the day of judgment. Now we must see wherein Paul radically breaks from traditional Judaism. He grants that only the righteous will receive the verdict of life, but he shows that such righteousness is impossible by man's work. Paul declares, "He who through faith is righteous shall live" (Rom. 1:17, RSV). By faith the sinner accepts the vicarious, God-pleasing righteousness of Jesus and therein finds a righteousness with which the law is well pleased. But that is not all. On the grounds that the future has already taken place in Jesus, the believer may grasp the verdict of the final judgment in the now by faith. Faith possesses the future (Heb. 11:1).

The divine justification which was accomplished at the cross, which is now believed and which is a continuing gift in the present, is to be expected as a consummated and definitive acquittal in the Last Day. 2

Justification is the verdict of the final judgment—God's ultimate verdict—possessed in the now by faith. The blessing is held only in faith, and it still hangs in hope. We must not destroy this tension between what is present in faith alone and what is future by empirical reality.

The Significance of Eschatological Justification

When justification is seen as God's eschatological (ultimate) verdict, it must always remain central. Justification is not a static event in our past experience. On the contrary, we are always moving toward it. Constantly we are reminded and we remind ourselves that we face the terrors of the great judgment. Faith anticipates and grasps in the now the verdict of acquittal so that we hasten toward that great day, crying, "Oh, happy judgment day!"

We repeat, Justification is not a thing that we pass and get behind us. As Barth rightly said, it is not like a filling station that we pass but once. As we hold to its eschatological implications, justification by faith can never become static but must remain the dynamic center of Christian existence, the continuous present. We are always sinners in our eyes, but we are always standing on God's justification and, perhaps more importantly, moving toward it. To be justified is a present-continuous miracle to the man who present-continuously believes, knowing that he who believes possesses all things, and he who does not believe possesses nothing. Such a life is only possible where the gospel of justification is continually heard and where God's verdict of acquittal is like those mercies which Jeremiah declared were new every morning – “great is Thy faithfulness" (Lam. 3:22-23).

1 G. Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964-1976), vol.2, pp.217-218. 2 Ibid., p.218.

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Here is every reason for ample encouragement and no reason for presumption. The day when God will actually, irrevocably pronounce His decree is before us, and this summons us to keep the faith.

Since justification is God's ultimate verdict, it can never be superseded, never subordinated by sanctification. Since it is God's ultimate verdict of life eternal, it meets our deepest need – the need to be in the right before the judgment bar of God. And because faith holds God's ultimate verdict, it frees its possessor to a life of true sanctification. This holy living is not participated in to impress the Judge or to score some points to help secure ones ultimate acceptance. True holiness is possible because faith frees us from the ulterior motive of trying to earn the verdict of eternal life.

Conclusion: A Renaissance of Justification by Faith

If we are to witness a renaissance of the teaching of justification by faith in our day, it will not come from communities which are soft and flabby through lack of the stern discipline of hearing God's law. Neither will it come from those who have no vital interest in eschatology but who dream that the day of the Lord is a long way off. It will be spear-headed by a community which, for a background, has two essential features:

1. It will take God's law, the absolute moral imperatives, and the legal categories of the Bible with radical seriousness.

2. It will have an eschatological consciousness like that of the New Testament church – not an eschatological consciousness which is directed to Palestine and to weird and wonderful events dreamed up by prophetic prognosticators, but an eschatological consciousness directed to the ark of the covenant and to God's mercy seat in heaven (Heb. 8:1-2; Rev. 11:19).

CHAPTER 9

Righteousness by Faith

and Sanctification "He who through faith is righteous shall live" (Rom. 1:17, RSV).

Righteousness (by faith) leads to life. Here are condition and result, root and fruit. These two things must be clearly distinguished,

and they must never be separated. In Romans 3 and 4 the apostle Paul spells out how the believing sinner may be righteous by faith in the substitutionary work of Jesus Christ. In Romans 5, 6, 7 and 8 he shows how faith-righteousness leads to life – life in the Spirit, a life of holiness and eternal glory.

The Christian church has always been beset by two evils: on the one hand, a failure to distinguish between faith-righteousness and holiness; and on the other hand, a failure to appreciate the inseparable unity of these two. All right theology must maintain union without fusion, distinction without separation.

Fusion of faith-righteousness with holiness was the great error of the medieval church. We have seen how Luther broke this synthesis

by putting the righteousness of faith outside of man, in heaven

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(calling it "passive" righteousness), and putting the righteousness of the believer's life on earth (calling it "active" righteousness). All the Reformers and all the great Reformation confessions adamantly excluded holiness of life from the Pauline article of righteousness by faith.

Rome considered the Reformation doctrine to be subversive to holiness. She was forever representing Protestantism as being against holiness in general, when it was only against holiness being included in the article of righteousness by faith before God. It is one thing to be against good works in general, but quite another thing to be against good works in the matter of the believer's righteousness before God. Yet Rome insisted that the Reformers' strictures against good works in the article of righteousness by faith meant that they were against good works in general. This was Rome's fundamental mistake.

When sanctification is injected into the article of righteousness by faith, this ruins both righteousness by faith and sanctification.

The Ruin of Righteousness by Faith That which is at stake in the purity of faith-righteousness is the glory of Christ and the comfort of troubled consciences.

1. The Glory of Christ. If sanctification (the holy life of the believer) is injected into the article of righteousness by faith, it no longer remains the infinite and finished righteousness of the God-man. It is no longer a righteousness in which the believer had no share, because despite all the pious-sounding talk about Christ's living out His life in the believer, the believer has a part in holy living. What inevitably happens here is that the believer has to share some of the glory of saving righteousness. It cannot be said too often or insisted upon too much that faith-righteousness is a vicarious righteousness. It is entirely outside the experience of the believer and is nothing which can be seen or felt. It is nothing but the doing and dying of the God-man. Adding anything to this substitutionary work and calling it our righteousness by faith before God is blasphemy.

2. The Comfort of Troubled Consciences. Sanctification includes the responsible activity of the believer along with the indwelling presence of the Spirit. Man at his best state is still a vessel of sinful flesh, and therefore to some extent he defiles and contaminates everything he touches. This is why the great evangelist, George Whitefield, used to say, "I cannot pray but I sin; I cannot preach to you but I sin." Everything, including the holy life of the believer, proceeds from the corrupt channel of humanity, and it is so defiled by the human taint that it could never be accepted of God except for the covering cloud of Christ's merit. How thankful we therefore ought to be that God has given us a righteousness which, being at God's right hand, is untouched by human activity – even sanctified activity! But when people are deceived on this point by injecting sanctification into the article of faith-righteousness, they can never stand before God with an easy conscience. In resting their confidence of salvation to life eternal partly on an internal work, they are thrown into terrible uncertainty and perhaps desperation. Luther was right when he called this system of salvation "the slaughterhouse of the conscience."

The Ruin of Sanctification

When sanctification is injected into the article of righteousness by faith, sanctification is ruined for two reasons:

1. Nothing is clearer in Paul than that the righteousness which is of faith is of faith alone, without the deeds of the law (Rom. 1:17; 3:21-22, 28; 4:5-6). It is quite proper to talk about "faith alone" and "without the deeds of the law" in the matter of faith-righteousness. But it is heresy to talk in the same way about sanctification. Living a holy life is not accomplished by faith alone. The responsible activity of the believer is required. Sanctification includes the whole life and the performance of all the duties of a believer. These tasks are not done without an effort, a fight, a battle, a race and a good deal of conflict. The "passive" (Luther) righteousness of faith is a substitutionary work – it was done for us without our doing anything. But the "active" (Luther) righteousness of good works requires believer participation, because the Holy Spirit's indwelling is not another substitutionary work.

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Man is both a creature and a person, and this dual aspect of man must be reckoned with in the doctrine of sanctification. Because man is a creature totally dependent on God, the Scriptures say that God sanctifies him by His indwelling power. But because man is also a person, the Scriptures also say that he must purify and sanctify himself (1 John 3:3; 2 Cor. 7:1). God does not act upon man as if he were only a thing. He does not live in the believer in such a way that He does the obeying and living of the victory-life for the believer. That would dehumanize man. God is just as interested in human freedom as in human salvation. He does not destroy human responsibility. He so acts upon the believer that the believer remains free in his activity in such a way that his acts of believing and obeying the law of God are truly his own. To confuse (fuse) the action of God and the action of the believer is actually a form of pantheism. Pantheism has to be the end result of injecting sanctification into the Pauline article of righteousness by faith.

Once we see that God deals with man not only as a creature but as a person, we will realize that salvation is the restoration of the true freedom, individuality and selfhood of man. It means that all of man's acts become genuinely his own acts even though he is at the same time completely dependent on the power of the indwelling Spirit. This is why the New Testament can quite fusslessly talk about the good works, work of faith, and loving deeds of believers. We run into all sorts of problems when we try to be more spiritual than the Bible. So to avoid a sickly Quietism or a dangerous form of pantheism, let us keep the clear distinction between the righteousness of faith alone and the righteousness of life.

2. Good works are only such when they are not done on one's own account. If sanctification is injected into the article of righteousness by faith, this means that we are saved partly by sanctification (that is, good works). Then the believer is forced to do good works to be saved. These works are then done for his own account; and being done with this ulterior motive, they cannot be "good works." If the works of the saints are to be truly good, the article of righteousness by faith must not be adulterated with the activity of the believer.

There are always two sides on which to fall off the straight path of truth. If fusion of the righteousness of faith with sanctification of life is Rome's special weakness, the separation of faith-righteousness from sanctification is the special temptation which has beset sections of the Protestant movement. While fusion of the two results in legalism, their separation leads to antinomianism. Much of Protestantism today is soft and flabby, permissive and lawless. This is what seems to trouble men like Ziesler.1 He suspects that there is no clear road from the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith to ethics. This is what leads him to propose a new synthesis between the righteousness of

faith and the sanctification of life. But we cannot accept this synthesis without giving up Luther's distinction between the law and the gospel.

Those who want to include sanctification in the Pauline article of righteousness by faith reason something like this: "Isn't the

gospel God's power for salvation? Isn't deliverance from the power and pollution of sin (sanctification) as necessary as deliverance from the guilt and condemnation of sin (justification)? Why confine the gospel to purely legal categories? Isn't God's work in us accomplished by divine power just as much as His work for us? Don't we also live the victorious life by faith alone?

1 J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul (New York. Cambridge University Press, 1972).

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Since the believer lives a righteous life by faith in Christ's indwelling power, why not call it "righteousness by faith"? This kind of argument really says: "Yours is a weak, truncated gospel which is confined merely to what is done external to man. Mine is a full-orbed gospel which is able to actually transform man internally and give him victory over sin." Those who are committed to this way of thinking imagine that witnessing for Christ means witnessing about the new-found love, peace and power in their lives. Celebrating the power of the gospel means celebrating their new life-styles.

The problem with this sort of thinking is not that it makes the power of the gospel too great. In actual fact, the power of the gospel ends up being belittled, because it is identified with the present life of the believer. The Holy Spirit’s potency to change lives here and now is not in question. But this sort of witnessing forces people to be hypocrites, to be less than honest about their own sin and weakness. The fact of the matter is that the best saints, including holy prophets, apostles and martyrs, make startling confessions about their own sinfulness and weakness (Eccl. 7:20; Ps. 143:2; Isa. 6:3-6; Rom. 7:14-25; James 3:2; 1 John 1:8). For all their sanctified attainments, the best of them are poor, mortal creatures who are still part and parcel of this present, sinful, dying age. Well may they rejoice as they contemplate their righteousness laid up for them in Christ. But at the same time, as they contemplate their own situation, they often exclaim, "Wretched man that I am!" (Rom. 7:24). If there is anything which marks the power of the Spirit in them, it is this: that being so sick, they believe they are whole in Christ; that dying, they believe they have eternal life in Him; that being so sinful, they believe they have perfect righteousness in their Representative at God's right hand. This sort of faith is the chief evidence of the Spirit's work.

The point is this: If the best saint is still encompassed with original sin and a thousand infirmities, if he is still a feeble, dying mortal, how can he be an exhibition of the full power of the gospel? We might well look one of these victory-life witnesses in the eye and say, "For all your splendid piety, you too are still a poor, sinful, dying wretch; and excuse me for saying so, but you don't look a whole lot different from anyone else [since the sons of God are not yet finally manifested – Rom. 8:19]. If you are number one exhibit of the extent of the power of your gospel, I'm not too impressed that it is so powerful after all!"

This raises the question: Does the new life (holiness) of the believer have any place at all in the total Christian witness? Is it ever legitimate to speak of the changed life through the indwelling power of the Spirit, of the love, peace and joy which abounds in the believer by the power of the Spirit? Yes, the subjective experience, when kept under the umbrella of the gospel, may have a legitimate place in the total Christian witness. Let us explain this by answering three questions: What is the gospel? What is justification by faith? What is the nature of Christian holiness?

What Is the Gospel?

To those who ask whether the gospel is the message of deliverance from the pollution of sin as well as deliverance from the guilt of sin, we must not only answer Yes, but we must go further. The gospel is the good news that God has in Christ delivered us from the guilt, power and presence of sin. In Christ, humanity has been rescued, restored and promoted so that it sits down glorified at God's right hand. In Colossians 2:15 Paul declares that Christ has not only wiped out our sins, but that He has utterly vanquished every power arrayed against us. Death, sin and Satan have all been alike defeated. All the promises of the Old Testament – promises about what God would do at the end of the world – have already been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The eschatological new creation has already taken place in Him; the life of the age to come has already broken into history in His person and work. The good news is also that Christ has won for us the gift of the Holy Spirit in all His fullness and eternal glory. If the death of Christ signifies the removal of all the curses of the covenant, the resurrection (and ascension) of Christ means that all the blessings of the covenant have already been secured for us by our Representative.

So let us be clear that the gospel is not just the announcement that a few blessings have been secured for us by Jesus Christ, but that absolutely all blessings have been won for humanity in and through Him.

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What Is Justification by Faith? As we have already argued, justification is a judicial word and is therefore a verdict of the divine court. It is also an eschatological verdict – meaning that it is the decision of the day of judgment which the believer possesses in the present by faith.

While the declaration of the Judge is either "I condemn him" or "I justify him," we must see what is at stake in the divine decree. It is more than a matter of a bare verdict. As Girdlestone points out, the question of inheritance is at stake in this matter of justification.1 While we must think of a court scene in the matter of justification, we must not think of the court scene only in terms of a lawbreaker in the dock. C. S. Lewis points out that if we follow the thinking of the psalmist, we must not think of the penitent believer as a prisoner in the dock, but we must think of him as the plaintiff who has a good case; and like a good Jew, he presses for heavy damages against the enemy. 2

Let us put it this way: Satan is our enemy. He has robbed us of our inheritance and has subjected us to cruel bondage and death. We have lost our fellowship with God, the presence of the Holy Spirit, clear minds, free wills, sanctified emotions, a strong body, a glorious environment and eternal glory. Satan, of course, argues that we have forfeited all right to these things because of our sins (see Zech. 3). Justification is a verdict in our favor on the grounds that Christ has taken away our sins and given us a perfect righteousness to stand before the law. Satan's case is quashed; and in the verdict of the court, the believer is not only forgiven, but he is given the inheritance. What is this inheritance? It is a life of purity and holiness, fellowship with God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, a life that measures with the life of God, a disease-free body and mind, a share in Christ's glory and a seat with Him on His throne. In short, God's justification is a "justification of life" (Rom. 5:18) – that is, a verdict of eternal life and glory. ("He who through faith is righteous shall live.") This is why Paul declares that the justified "rejoice in hope of the glory of God" (Rom. 5:2) and that "whom He justified, them He also glorified" (Rom. 8:30).

In this light, justification is not only a part of salvation, but it is full salvation; it gives us absolutely everything which God has to give. All aspects of salvation – deliverance from the power of sin, a holy life, deliverance from corruption to incorruption, the glorified body and a restored environment – are implicit in the verdict of justification and flow from it.

What Is the Nature of Christian Holiness?

A life of holiness on the part of the believer is not that which saves him either in whole or in part, but holiness is what the gospel of free justification saves the believer to. Holiness is part of the free salvation which we receive in the verdict of the Judge. It is just as much a part of salvation (inheritance) as is the redeemed body which will be bestowed on believers at the great resurrection.

Let us put it this way: Holiness is the King's highway, and only those who are justified have the right to walk this way of new obedience. Whether we read the Old Testament or the New Testament in this matter, the truth remains the same: obedience to the law of God has no relevance or significance except for those who have been elected to covenantal fellowship with God. A person who is not justified can only go through the motions of obedience, and he is an absolute stranger to holiness as far as God is concerned. But "he who through faith is righteous shall live – that is, he shall find the way of life and walk the way of holiness.

In this light, sanctification is not an optional extra for believers. Although they are not saved by it, they cannot be saved without it. Since holiness is what they are saved to, they know that a stranger to holiness is a stranger to salvation. "He who through faith is righteous shall live," but if a person is dead to holiness, it is clear that he is not righteous by faith. All who are righteous by faith live. However, a "dead" person or a dead church cannot be revived by preaching sanctification, but only by preaching the gospel of righteousness by faith. 1 Robert B. Girdlestone, Synonyms of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976). 2 C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Huntington, N.Y.: Fontana Books, 1958), pp.15-16.

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Now let us look more closely at the nature of Christian holiness. In Paul we see that it has three characteristics: it is eschatological, it is holistic, and it is corporate.

1. It Is Eschatological. We have already seen that justification in Paul is thoroughly eschatological (that is, it is the verdict of the final judgment received in the present by faith). The life which issues from the verdict of the Judge is also eschatological. When Paul says, "He who through faith is righteous shall live," it is clear that "shall live" refers to eternal life. He could just as truly have said, "He who through faith is righteous shall be saved." (In Matthew 19:16-25 the terms "eternal life," "life" and "saved" are used interchangeably.) Salvation, of course, is eschatological – it is what God has promised to bring His people at the last day (Isa. 25:9; Heb. 9:28). In Romans 5:9 Paul says, "Since, therefore, we are now justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved from the wrath of God" (RSV). The eschatological connotations here are self-evident.

In Romans, Paul moves from justification to glorification (Rom. 5:1-2; 8:30). That is to say, justification results in glorification because it is the Judge's verdict awarding the life of eternal glory to the penitent believer. This is the meaning of the introductory scripture, "He who through faith is righteous shall live." But in Romans 8, Paul moves from the future life of glory to the present life of holiness without even "changing gears" (see Rom. 8:9-25). This is a most important indication of the nature of Christian holiness. It means that sanctification is glorification begun in the here and now, while glorification is sanctification completed in the there and then. Holiness is the beginning of eternal life; it is the life of heaven begun in the present. Sanctification, therefore, is eschatological – it is the life of the age to come which is begun to be experienced. True, it is only the first fruits of the life of glory (Rom. 8:23), but it is nevertheless the beginnings of that life. It is the pledge and assurance that the "full payment" is about to be manifested, so much so that the New Testament community stands on tiptoe in anticipation of the great consummation.

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Thus, when Paul says, "He who through faith is righteous shall live," under the head "shall live" he includes both sanctification and glorification, because they are actually one.

Sanctification and glorification (the life of the new age) are especially identified with the work of the Holy Spirit. The outpouring of God's Spirit is eschatological. It is what the Old Testament promised would happen at the end of the world (see Joel 2). At Pentecost, Peter declared that this event was being fulfilled in the outpouring of the Spirit (Acts 2:16-20). Here was proof that the great day of God had drawn nigh. No wonder men were stirred and pricked in their hearts as they were confronted with the terrors of the day of judgment with their hands stained with the blood of God's Son! In Romans 8, Paul easily oscillates between talking about the Spirits work of changing the believer at the last day and the present indwelling of the Spirit by which the believer mortifies the deeds of the body. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether Paul is talking about future glorification by the Spirit or present sanctification by the Spirit (e.g., Rom. 8:10-11). All this means that the gift of the Spirit is eschatological: it is what is given to the believer in the verdict of justification. The Spirit resurrects the dead and transforms from corruption to incorruption, from mortality to immortality. Although the final manifestation of the Spirits power is yet future, the believing community already partakes of the "firstfruits" of glory in the Spirit's sanctifying presence. The New Testament church regards the present gift of the Spirit as the evidence that the full work of the Spirit in glorification is about to be manifested.

We might now point out in what sense the present experience of the believer may be included in the total Christian witness. It should be quite clear that the changed life of the Christian is not the gospel, because the gospel is the good news of a perfect and finished work—that is, God's awesome, infinite act of redemption in the Christ event. Neither is the changed life of the Christian the full manifestation of God's power, for it is evident that the saints are still encompassed with many infirmities and much remaining inbred sin. We submit that any believer who is enlightened about God's holiness and his own falling short of God's glory is going to be very reluctant about putting his own life forward as an exhibit of God's power. Besides, other sinners are generally helped and encouraged more by the believer's humbly

confessing his sinnerhood and expressing confidence in God's continued forgiveness than by a parade of super-piety.

A believer's life, however, should adorn the gospel and provide credible evidence that God does give a foretaste of the life of the age to come in present Christian experience. The believer may legitimately testify, "He who puts his

faith in the righteousness of Christ gains eternal life and begins to live as those

who are alive from the dead." Holiness is the legitimate fruit of the righteousness of faith and the proof that faith is the genuine article (James 2:14-18).

2. It Is Holistic. In chapter two of this series ("The Relation of Righteousness and Salvation") we pointed out that biblical salvation does not mean salvation of a part of man but the salvation of the whole man. To the men who wrote the Bible, man is an indivisible, dynamic whole. The idea that man is two entirely separate and distinct substances called "body" and "soul" is a Greek idea that has often been imported into the biblical text. When the Bible talks about "heart," "mind," "soul," "flesh," "body," it is not speaking of the parts of human nature in an analytical way. The Hebrews always conceived of life as a dynamic whole. Thus, these are terms which view human life from a variety of perspectives. God is seen as the Maker and Lover of the whole man. The Old Testament promises that on the last day, God will restore human life to perfect soundness. It will be restored to its proper relationship with God, with society and with the material world. The environment itself will be rescued from the general state of disruption caused by sin. The whole man will once again enjoy all of God's gifts in a restored community in fellowship with God. Salvation is often spoken of in quite materialistic terms.

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The New Testament does not abandon this Old Testament concept of salvation and opt for a "spiritualized" Grecian concept. (The apostle Paul was often in conflict with this super-spirituality of the Greeks, which depreciated the body and the material order.) New Testament salvation is just as "materialistic" as the Old Testament salvation. Christ came bodily to earth, went about doing good (which included healing sick bodies and feeding hungry people), shed His blood on a Roman cross, rose bodily from the grave, and ascended to heaven bearing the form and substance of human flesh. The salvation event has taken place in His work of atonement. We have it now by faith alone, but He will bring this salvation to us upon His return. This will include the resurrection body and a redeemed environment (Rom. 8:19-25).

Christian sanctification, being the first fruits or beginnings of this great salvation, must in the very nature of the case be holistic. We have often done damage to the Christian message by trying to be more spiritual than the New Testament. A lot of pietistic-type holiness sounds too much like the sanctification of the "soul-box"-a sort of mystical inward piety that has very little to do with concrete, daily existence. The medieval church, with her vast separation between sacred and secular, clergy and laity, higher nature and lower nature, has not been alone in being stuck in the mud of this "Grecian"-type piety.

Let us think of this whole matter of doing what the Bible calls "good works." (That is what sanctification is – good works. At any rate, that is what Luther so often called it.) Too frequently the idea obtains that "good works" are concerned with the performance of extraordinary works, or at least "spiritual"-type works. The medieval church moved good (spiritual) works away from the arena of ordinary life, which is largely occupied with eating, toiling for daily bread, marrying, building houses and doing menial tasks. Good works were especially associated with saying prayers, singing hymns, taking vows and forgoing such things as eating, marrying and engaging in daily toil.

Luther did much to restore biblical holiness by teaching that good works do not mean doing special things, but doing ordinary things in faith and gratitude to God. Man is a creature. God has made him to be a worker. Life is made up largely of doing very ordinary things. But it is very essential for a believer to know that the cheerful, creaturely performance of common tasks is well-pleasing to God. All such work is to be sanctified and viewed as a very sacred matter. It is necessary that this work be done in faith, for whatsoever is not of faith is sin. That is to say, a believer must say to himself: "God has made me to be a worker to help look after the created order and to serve my fellow men. I believe that doing these humble, creaturely tasks is well-pleasing to God. It is my appointed task, and I will therefore do this work with gratitude. God will accept my serving these people or looking after these animals or caring for this business enterprise as my faithful service to Jesus Christ."

It is this faith which makes ordinary work pleasing to God through Jesus Christ. It sometimes takes more faith to be a Christian as an accountant, a mechanic or a housewife than it does to be a gospel-preaching missionary. It is a sin of unbelief to suppose that doing ordinary, creaturely tasks is less the Lord's work than being on the forefront of evangelical witnessing.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Paul declares that sanctification embraces the whole man – spirit, soul and body. There is a family of words which belongs together: health, whole, wholesome, hale, holy. To be holy means to be healthy in the true sense of the word. It means to be a whole person. Dualism destroys man's wholeness. Therefore it is an unholy teaching and must bear unholy fruit. Too often we as Christians have acted as if the body and the environment did not matter in the Christian life. But on what grounds do we think that the good Lord, who made all things, is pleased when we overeat, under exercise and fail to avail ourselves of information on how to care for His creation over which He has made us stewards (see Gen. 1:29-30). The "social gospel" of liberalism is a predictable reaction to a dehumanizing, world-hating kind of spirituality which talks of saving souls as if God were only interested in saving some metaphysical aspect of human life.

Righteousness of faith always leads to righteousness of life. And righteousness (as we have already seen) means a right relationship in three dimensions: with God, with others and with the created order. Human life is set within a variety of relationships. Sanctification means the sanctification of all of them.

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3. It Is Communal. In the Bible, salvation is not only holistic, but it is especially the salvation of the community. This aspect of redemption has

often been overlooked. Holiness means not only to be whole in ourselves, but whole in our relationship with others.

God does not save people as so many separate islands in isolation from others. When God dealt with Adam, He dealt

with the covenantal head of the race; and when He gave us Christ, He gave Him as the new Head of the new race. The Old Testament speaks far more about the salvation of Israel, the covenantal community, than about the salvation of individuals. Individuals were certainly included in God's saving acts, but only individuals within the community which was the object of His supreme regard. Paul reminds his readers that "all Israel shall be saved" (Rom. 11:26). Israel is Jesus Christ and all those in Him. The new covenant is said to be made "with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah" (Heb. 8:8). Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it (Eph. 5:25). The New Jerusalem is the mother of every believer, and each believer belongs to that eschatological community which stands on tiptoe, waiting for the coming of the Lord (Gal. 4:26). All who are baptized are baptized or incorporated not only into Christ, but into His body (Gal. 3:27; 1 Cor. 12:13). There is no salvation apart from or outside the redeemed community.

So too, the consummation of salvation is corporate. ". . . apart from us they [who have died in faith] should not be made perfect (Heb. 11:40, RSV). The crown of righteousness will be given "at that day" to all who love Christ's appearing (2 Tim. 4:8).

The New Testament knows of no individual, private eschatology which takes place at death. The New Testament saints dwelt on Christ's coming,

not their going, as the "blessed hope." Salvation is eschatological, holistic and corporate.

This being so, it means that sanctification must be life within the redeemed community, the body of Christ. In this community all believers are priests, as Luther says, not for themselves but for others. Every spiritual gift of the Spirit (charismata) is given for the edification of the body, never for the edification of one's self.

If we look at Paul's exhortations to live holy lives, we will see that most of these passages are written in the context of life within the brotherhood of the believing community. For instance, the appeal for humility has special application to seeing our place as one member in the body – a member who equally shares the fruits of Christ's humiliation on our behalf. The exhortation to be long-suffering is in the face of living with redeemed sinners who are not always easy to live with. The command to forgive one another presupposes the sinnerhood of the congregation. The church, as Luther says, is an inn for the sick and for the convalescents. She is not the palace where the whole and the perfect live. The church is to be full of the forgiveness of sins. All must live by daily and continual forgiveness, and each must proclaim to his brother, "Your sins are forgiven." The church on earth, enfeebled and defective, is the object of God's supreme regard and is the environment ideally suited for the nurture and development of Christian character. (Concluded)