Justification in Modern Scholarship: Some New Interpretations
Justification in Modern Scholarship: Some New Interpretations
⤒🔗
Hans Kung←⤒🔗
This Protestant-Catholic dialogue got under way in the nineteen sixties, mainly through the efforts of the German Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, who wrote a book on justification in which he states that the difference between Rome and the Reformation is not nearly as great as former generations have thought. Kung acknowledges that Luther taught that when God justifies a sinner He declares him righteous rather than making him righteous, and that Trent insisted that in justification God first makes the sinner righteous and then declares him righteous. But for Kung this is mainly a matter of semantics. Look, he says, Protestants speak of declaring just which results in making just, and Catholics speak of making just which presupposes declaring just. Is it not time to stop about imaginary differences?
Kung is a liberal Roman Catholic, so liberal in fact that Rome has disciplined him by barring him from his teaching position at the University of Tubingen. Yet he has had an enormous influence on theologians both Catholics and Protestants.
James Dunn and Tom Wright←⤒🔗
What should concern us most, however, is that it is not only liberal or neo-orthodox scholars who are looking for a compromise with Rome on this and other doctrines. In recent years there has also been a development among Reformed and Evangelical scholars in the same direction. Some very influential theologians have written and lectured on justification in such a way that it is clear they are distancing themselves from the position of Luther and other leaders of the Protestant Reformation. Among these scholars are two men who have caused quite a stir in evangelical circles by what they have written on justification. Their names are James Dunn and Tom Wright, both of them British New Testament scholars of renown.
According to Dunn and Wright, Protestants have always misread the apostle Paul and his teaching on justification. This is mainly due to a misunderstanding of Judaism. We have supposedly manufactured a false Paul by manufacturing a false Judaism for him to oppose. This misinterpretation is based on two wrong assumptions. The first one is that before his conversion Paul was struggling with a guilt-ridden conscience from which he was only delivered following a dramatic conversion experience near Damascus. The second false assumption is that Judaism represented a legalistic religion of works-righteousness which Paul opposed with all his might because he saw it as a serious threat to his gospel of salvation by grace alone and faith alone. In Dunn's view, what Paul opposed in Judaism was not Jewish reliance on works for acceptance with God, but their ethnic pride and exclusiveness.
They looked upon the Torah as a charter of automatic national privilege and felt superior to all other peoples. "Works of the law," therefore, should not be seen as legalistic works performed in order to earn divine approval and salvation. Rather, says Dunn, they must be viewed as "badges" of Jewish identity. They served as "boundary markers" whereby Israel was kept separate from other nations. Examples of such "badges" are the Sabbath, circumcision and the kosher laws, which provided test cases of covenant loyalty. Consequently, the righteousness condemned by Paul in Romans 2:17ff, 10:1ff and Philippians 3, etc. is not self-righteousness, (i.e., legalism or works-righteousness to merit salvation) but "national and ethnic righteousness."
Justification According to the Revisionists←⤒🔗
So what is justification? It has nothing to do with legalism as classic Protestantism, beginning with Luther, has asserted, but it must be seen as Paul's answer to Jewish national and ethnic pride. Justification by faith, says Dunn, simply declares that the way is now open to all, not just Jews, to become members of the family of God. Only if the doctrine of justification is interpreted in this way does it have relevance for today. It is precisely because this interpretation has been lost sight of by Protestant theologians that Germany, the country of Luther, could provide fertile ground for Nazism whose main tenet was racial superiority (the master race). Similarly, it is no accident that apartheid developed in Calvinist South Africa and that in Great Britain Christianity was confused with Victorian values and that Puritan New England produced the civil religion called the American way of life.
It is clear that Dunn and his disciples emphasise the relational aspects of justification. For them justification is all about restored relationships and belonging to the right group. Justification means being part of the community of the faithful. God's righteousness refers to His faithfulness to His covenant. His people's righteousness consists in the covenant members' status, which God confers on them by grace. Justification means God's declaration that all who believe the Gospel are members of the covenant family. There is no need for a theology of imputed or imparted righteousness. Paul's argument in Romans and Galatians is not so much about how an individual is put right with God, as about who belongs to the covenant community.
Galatians was written to convince converted pagans that they have nothing to gain by becoming Jews physically, while the epistle to the Romans was written to convince Christians from a mixed background that they inherit all the blessings of Israel and to warn them not to lapse into anti-Semitism.
It is clear that for Dunn and many other New Testament scholars the term "righteousness" has taken on a different meaning than it has for classic Reformed theology. Increasingly, righteousness is seen as a relational concept and associated with the covenant. It is concerned with activity and behaviour that should arise out of that relationship. Righteousness is covenant loyalty, covenant behaviour and activity which befits the covenant. What is emphasised by these scholars is the horizontal rather than the vertical dimension of the Gospel. The implication seems to be that being a member of the covenant in good standing presupposes a proper relationship with God and His Law, a notion with which we are only too familiar in the Reformed community!
Background to the New Interpretation of Justification←⤒🔗
The background to all of this is the widespread reaction to Western individualism. Man is increasingly being defined as a social being living in community. This has led to a radical redefinition of justification. In Wright's words, "justification is not an individualists charter, but Gods declaration that we belong to the covenant community".
Closely related to this is the modern preoccupation with social justice expressed in such movements as liberation theology. Accordingly, Dunn believes that Luther's doctrine of justification by faith, if it is to speak to today's generation, must be firmly tied to the concept of social justice so as to bring out the Biblical notion that the justice of God has national and social outworkings.
Evaluation←⤒🔗
What are we to make of this new interpretation of justification? While we can benefit from the insights of modern scholarship, we should not allow ourselves to be distracted from the great central truths of the Bible rediscovered during the Reformation. Dunn and Wright remind us of the Reformation doctrine of sofa Scriptura which stresses that Biblical truth takes precedence over human tradition. But they use this observation to suggest that we must unlearn what has been the received interpretation of the Pauline language and in its place accept the new. We agree, of course, that all our traditions must be brought to the bar of God's infallible Word, but that is a different thing from accepting the latest results of biblical scholarship.
Is it wise to start "unlearning" our understanding of Paul on this or any other Biblical truth at a time when Christianity is more tentative and mixed up than ever before? In an age when nothing seems to be sacrosanct and so many traditional views of the Scripture text are being challenged and twisted, often in the interests of the latest secular fads (e.g. feminism and the gay agenda), we need to be very sure before turning away from the Reformers' understanding of Paul's teaching on justification. Besides, our Protestant forefathers suffered great hardships and were burnt at the stake for their understanding of justification. As someone has written, "Salvation was more highly valued and damnation more feared than it is today. It mattered enormously which was the road to one and which to the other."
At the heart of the controversy is the proper Biblical interpretation of the verb "to justify." While most scholars agree that its basic meaning is "to acquit," "to vindicate or "to declare righteous" rather than "to make righteous," there is an ongoing attempt to include the latter meaning in the text as well.
For instance, Kung and others have put forward the notion that when God declares someone righteous, his powerful word creates what he declares – a view suggested first by Cardinal Newman in the nineteenth century. This view is untenable. Its absurdity can be demonstrated by considering the opposite of the divine act of justification, namely condemnation. No one would think of suggesting that when God declares someone guilty his powerful word creates him or her sinners.
Justification is Confused with Regeneration and Renewal←⤒🔗
These revisionists are now telling us that the verb "to justify" may be more accurately defined as "to declare someone to be a covenant member." This offers a convenient way out for Rome to save face and allows the traditions of Trent and the Reformation to exist side by side. The strong covenant emphasis appeals to many in the Reformed constituency (especially the neo-Calvinists) and at the same time it enables Rome to read into the definition of justification all its unbiblical notions. Justification is again becoming, in various subtle ways, an all-embracing word and is being confused with regeneration, renewal or sanctification.
The Reformation understanding of justification brought people back to the biblical emphasis on the sinner's righteous status before God. With this modern approach it is the sinner's acceptance in the covenant community that stands central. In this connection it is significant that Wright insists that justification should be considered in the context of ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church), rather than soteriology (the doctrine of salvation). There may be some truth in his allegation that certain branches of Protestantism have fostered an individualistic, anti-church mentality. But today the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction.
Rome, of course, welcomes this new emphasis on the church and the covenant community as the context in which justification takes place. But while Scripture does teach that faith is normally exercised in the context of the congregation, it does not allow the individual's standing before God to take second place. Paul could testify to the Galatians that his faith was in Christ "who loved me and gave himself for me" (emphasis mine, CP). The official church and covenant community of Jesus' day looked up to the Pharisees and despised and excommunicated the publicans. Jesus showed, however, that the repentant and ostracised tax collector went home justified, whereas the self-righteous Pharisee was not in a justified state. Similarly, the church excommunicated and burnt many of the Reformers who nevertheless were assured that they were right with God. The individual's standing before God is primary and any interpretation that weakens that emphasis must be rejected.
Reformational Understanding of Justification is Rejected←⤒🔗
The current trend to de-emphasise the personal nature of justification in favour of focusing on social justice poses a serious threat to the reformational understanding of this doctrine. There is no conflict, of course, between the individual's standing before God and a concern for others. However, to reverse the order and to put all the emphasis on social justice at the expense of the individual's status before God amounts to turning our backs on the very article from which all true justice flows. God justifies sinners by punishing His own Son for transgressions committed against His holy Law.
This last point reveals another weakness in the revisionist interpretation of justification. Sin is not treated with the seriousness it deserves and repentance is hardly mentioned in their writings. Luther's quest for a guilt-free conscience before a holy and righteous God is dismissed as a Western preoccupation. Ours is an age that has all but rejected absolute standards of right and wrong and thinks lightly of sin.
God's Righteousness is the Norm←⤒🔗
But the Scriptural concept of righteousness includes more than social justice, equality of the races and equal opportunity for men and women. It is based on the idea of fixed norms or standards. God is the ultimate standard. Righteousness, as an attribute of God, provides the absolute norm and is expressed not only in God's covenantal love and faithfulness, but in his written law (Rom. 7:12). Before that law all are guilty. The tenth commandment shows that God insists we keep not only the letter but also the spirit of His law. What matters is not merely outward conformity but the inward attitude of the heart. The ministry of John the Baptist and Jesus, like the prophets of old, disturbed those who thought that everything was well concerning their standing before God.
Like Trent, the revisionist position on justification has no place for the "righteousness of Christ." In Wright's view there is no need for a verb such as "to impute" to describe how righteousness is transferred from one to the other. But the apostle Paul does refer to Christ as "our righteousness" in 1 Corinthians 1:30 and justification is described in Romans as both the non-imputation of sin and the imputation of righteousness. 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us that Christ was made sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. This is the great exchange so precious to the Reformers and to everyone who relies on Jesus for salvation.
Wright rejects Luther's famous statement that justification by faith alone is the article by which the Church stands or falls. He contends that there are other articles, such as the trinity, that have a better claim to that distinction. But justification, which was central for Paul, as well as for the Reformers, brings us to the very heart of the Gospel. Although we are not justified by believing in the doctrine of justification but by faith in Christ, it is in Christ whose blood and righteousness alone are the ground on which God justifies guilty sinners, that we trust.
Christ Alone is our Righteousness←⤒🔗
In conclusion, the situation today shows a remarkable similarity to that of the late medieval period. Long-held and cherished views are being questioned. Uncertainty over terminology prevails. ignorance characterizes the occupants of the pew. Popular opinion is against theological precision. Ours is an age of relativism, existentialism, mindless enthusiasm and ecumenism.
What is the answer? Some suggest that compromise and revision are required if Christianity is to survive the onslaughts of secularism. But surely there is a better way. It is to come to God as lost sinners seeking justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to God's glory alone and to revel in this most comforting truth every moment of our life until faith is changed into sight. As Luther said to his friend and fellow monk Spenlein in 1516, prior to his controversy with Rome:
Therefore, my dear Friar, learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to praise him and, despairing of yourself, say, 'Lord Jesus, Thou art my righteousness, just as I am Thy sin. Thou hast taken upon Thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is Thine. Thou hast taken upon Thyself what Thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not.' Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will not wish to be looked upon as a sinner, or to be one. Accordingly you will find peace only in Him and only when you despair of yourself and your own works. Besides, you will learn from Him that just as He has received you, so He has made your sins His own and has made His righteousness yours.
Add new comment