In order to understand the Reformed position on justification and sanctification it is necessary to bear in mind two factors. The first is that, with Augustine, the Reformers held that the effect of the Fall was to render Adam and his posterity both guilty before God and morally polluted. Salvation, therefore, has to meet both the need for pardon, acceptance before God and personal renovation. The second is that salvation is by divine grace alone, and this grace is efficacious (or effective) in securing the salvation of those for whom it is intended. Grace is not a general influence which a person must make effective by his own free will. Grace is irresistible, necessary and sufficient for salvation. Let us turn to a consideration of the two concepts, justification and sanctification. Each corresponds respectively to that divine act necessary to remove guilt and pollution.

The Reformers' View⤒🔗

The Reformers never tired of stressing that justification is a forensic concept, a term of the lawcourts. It is, for them, the declaration by God of the changed status of the sinner. Whereas in Adam he was guilty, now in Christ he is pardoned and righteous. That change of status is achieved solely by virtue of what Christ has done. He has made atonement, and all who are 'in him' by divine election, though guilty, are pardoned and declared righteous, because Christ has satisfied divine justice by the sacrifice of himself.

It is only by understanding justification in this way, the Reformers held, that justice can be done to Paul's claim that in Christ, God justifies the ungodly (Romans 4:5). It is as ungodly, both in objective fact, and in the belief of the one who savingly trusts Christ, that the needy one comes to Christ to receive his pardon and righteousness, a righteousness which is imputed to him. In their eyes a true view of justification should at least make the Apostle Paul's question, 'Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?' (Romans 6:1) an intelligible, even if a rhetorical question, to ask.

Justification does not alter a person's character, only his status before God. But how is that gift of grace to be personally appropriated? The Reformers' answer was: 'By faith alone'. It is by faith alone in Christ alone that the merits of Christ become personally appropriated.

Here are some representative statements of this position:

We believe that all our justification rests upon the remission of our sins, in which also is our only blessedness, as saith the Psalmist (Psalm 32:2). We therefore reject all other means of justification before God, and without claiming any virtue or merits, we rest simply in the obedience of Jesus Christ, which is imputed to us as much to blot out all our sins as to make us find grace and favour in the sight of God.The French Confession of Faith, 1559

...Humbling ourselves before him, and acknowledging ourselves to be such as we really are, without presuming to trust in any thing in ourselves, or in any merit of ours, relying and resting upon the obedience of Christ crucified alone, which becomes ours when we believe in him.The Belgic Confession of Faith, 1561

But because we receive this justification, not through any works, but through faith in the mercy of God and in Christ, we therefore teach and believe with the apostle that sinful man is justified by faith alone in Christ, not by the law or any works.The Second Helvetic Confession, 1566

Through faith in Christ, therefore, Christ's righteousness becomes our righteousness and all that he has becomes ours; rather, he himself becomes ours. Therefore the Apostle calls it 'the righteousness of God' in Romans 1:17: for in the gospel 'the righteousness of God is revealed...; as it is written, the righteous shall live by his faith'. Finally, in the same epistle, chapter 3:28, such a faith is called 'the righteousness of God'. 'We hold that a man is justified by faith'. This is an infinite righteousness, and one that swallows up all sins in a moment, for it is impossible that sin should exist in Christ ... This righteousness is primary; it is the basis, the cause, the source of all our own actual righteousness. For this is the righteousness given in place of the original righteousness lost in Adam.Martin Luther, Sermon, 'Two Kinds of Righteousness'

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort.XXXIX Articles of Religion, Art. XI

It is extremely important that we should see what the Reformers' doctrine was. Two important conclusions follow from these statements. The first is that although justification is by faith alone, the 'by' is an instrumental 'by'. The ground of justification is not faith. That would be absurd. The ground of justification is Christ.

We say that, properly speaking, God alone justifies; then we transfer the same function to Christ because he was given to us for righteousness. We compare faith to a kind of vessel; for unless we come empty and with the mouth of our soul open to seek Christ's grace, we are not capable of receiving Christ. From this it is to be inferred that, in teaching that before his righteousness is received Christ is received in faith, we do not take the power of justifying away from Christ.Calvin, Institutes, III.xi.7

So faith is the instrument by which what Christ has objectively done is made personal to the believer. There is a particular appropriateness about the act of faith for this role, for faith is trustful reliance upon another. And how could such reliance itself be meritorious or virtuous so as to secure justification? Readers of the Anglican Homilies are familiar with the same point. The Homily of Salvation reads:

The true understanding of this doctrine, We be justified freely by Faith without works, or, We be justified by faith in Christ only, is not; that this our own act to believe in Christ, or this our faith in Christ which is within us, doth justify us and deserve our justification unto us (for that were to count ourselves to be justified by some act or virtue that is within ourselves): but the true understanding and meaning thereof is that, although we hear God's word and believe it; although we have faith, hope, charity, repentance, dread and fear of God, within us; and do never so many works thereunto; yet we must renounce the merit of all our said virtues ... and trust only in God's mercy and that sacrifice which our High Priest and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Son of God, once offered for us upon the cross.

Only Christ's atonement is sufficient for righteousness. It is here that, I believe, the Reformers part company with both the mediaeval and the counter-Reformation churches and with all who fall under their sway. It is this difference, rather than a reaction against mediaeval ecclesiastical abuses, that was the essential conflict of the Reformation. And it is so still to this present day.

The Mediaeval Theory←⤒🔗

It is characteristic of the mediaeval system, of the Counter-Reformation and the doctrine of the nineteenth century divine such as John Henry Newman (in his Lectures on justification), that justification is grounded on a personal change. The Canons of the Council of Trent state:

Justification ... is not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man, through the voluntary reception of the grace, and of the gifts, whereby man of unjust becomes just, and of an enemy a friend.Decree of justification, Ch. XII

The Reformers objected to this because it compromises the sufficiency of the work of Christ for justification; it requires a person to establish his own righteousness, and hence points in the direction of salvation by works and not salvation by grace. So the good works that are excluded in justification by faith alone are works of any kind, not merely the works performed with the intention of gaining justification by them.

In the contrast between the righteousness of the law and of the gospel, which Paul elsewhere introduces, all works are excluded, whatever title may grace them (Galatians 3:11-12). For he teaches that this is the righteousness of the law, that he who has fulfilled what the law commands should obtain salvation. But this is the righteousness of faith, to believe that Christ died and rose again.Calvin, Institutes, III.xi.14

The Reformers believed that there is a clear moral and spiritual difference between a person who believes that he needs to be virtuous in order to attain justification, and one who believes that he needs to be virtuous in order to give evidence of the reality of his justification. The one attitude has a tendency to produce a moralistic Christianity, in which baptised men and women expect nothing more from the church than, in imitation of Christ, and with the help of the Holy Communion, to be urged to be good. This is a type of piety dangerously close to that possessed by those described by Paul as 'going about to establish their own righteousness' (Romans 10:3).

Although they were second to none in their praise for St Augustine as a theological thinker, the Reformers found the seeds of confusion between justification and sanctification in him. For Augustine teaches in some places of his writings that man is justified by an inherent righteousness infused by the grace of God. For example:

God justifies the ungodly not only by remitting the sins he commits, but also by giving him inward love, which causes him to depart from evil, and makes him holy through the Spirit.Opus imperfectum contra Julianum, II:clxv

John Calvin was quick to detect this, and to warn against it:

The schools have gone continually from bad to worse until, in headlong ruin, they have plunged into all sorts of Pelagianism. For that matter, Augustine's view, or at any rate his manner of stating it, we must not entirely accept. For even though he admirably deprives man of all credit for righteousness and transfers it to God's grace, he still subsumes grace under sanctification, by which we are reborn in newness of life through the Spirit.Institutes, III. xi.15

It should also be said, however, that there are many more places in Augustine where justification and sanctification are clearly distinguished, for example, in the following passage when writing about James and Paul on justification:

For, since James commemorates those good works of Abraham which accompanied his faith, he sufficiently shows: that the Apostle Paul did not so teach, by the example of Abraham, that a man is justified through faith without works, as that a person might thence deem good works not to appertain to him; but rather this, that no one, by the merits of his antecedent good works, should suppose himself to attain to the gift of justification, which justification is in faith.

Handling Augustine somewhat more tenderly, some have claimed that though there is a looseness of terminology in Augustine, sometimes 'justification' being used as the equivalent of 'absolution' and sometimes of 'sanctification', he never makes personal righteousness the ground of justification.

The second point is that though justification is concerned with a change in status, and though faith does not justify, but is only the instrument, nevertheless faith is the act of a sanctified person. One might say it is the most basic act of such a person. Although faith does not justify, a person must, in order to have the faith that appropriates justification, already be in a regenerated state, since the faith that secures justification is not a natural capacity or disposition but a divine gift. It is itself the fruit of Christ's redemption. I shall return to this important point later when considering the relation between justification and sanctification. Suffice to say, for the moment, that James Hogg could only have written his grotesque parody of Scottish Calvinistic piety (The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1824) by ignoring the inseparable connection between justifying faith and other sanctifying graces.

Perhaps the Reformers have been mistakenly taken to argue that because faith alone justifies, the faith that justifies must be alone. But they do not argue this, and it would be unscriptural as well as logically fallacious to do so. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) puts the point with its accustomed succinctness:

Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification yet it is not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied by other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.XI:2

Because of their insistence on the appropriation of justification by faith alone, the Reformers held that the sacrament of baptism could not justify and could not even be necessary for justification. If it were, then, once again, justification would not be by faith alone. To rely upon the fact that one was baptised as the ground of justification was, for the Reformers, every bit as much a work as trusting for justification to any other deed, such as keeping the moral law or circumcision, and equally misguided and inefficacious.

It was the channeling of divine grace exclusively through the sacraments, and particularly through the sacrament of baptism, that led Augustine, with understandable logic, to conclude that all unbaptised infants were destined for damnation. While, according to Augustine, not all the baptised will be saved, nevertheless only the baptised will be. It is as well to emphasise that Augustine was not led to this conclusion by his theology of grace, but by his sacramentalism. Because the Reformers tied salvation to grace alone through faith alone, and not to grace sacramentally administered, no such erroneous conclusion follows in their teachings. It is grace that saves through faith. That said, there is no reason to think that God may not save all those dying in infancy as well as those who, though adult, are mentally incapacitated. The Westminster Confession puts it in these terms:

Elect infants, dying in infancy, are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, where and how he pleaseth. So also are all other elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the word.X:3

The Reformers held, with Augustine, that infants, because they are fallen in sin, and have hearts that are estranged from God, need salvation. Not only is actual sin damnable, but original sin also. But, unlike Augustine, the Reformers and the Reformed tradition do not restrict salvation to the baptised. In the case of infants, they tie salvation to God's electing love, and the only question is whether that electing love extends to all those dying in infancy as a class, or only to some of them.

While justification is a once-for-all status change, sanctification is a progressive, life-long, character change. There is definitive, once-for-all character to sanctification in that a person who is regenerated is set apart to God. He is now a saint. Yet the renovation of character, the production of saintliness, is a progressive, gradual, life-time process, the chief agent in which is the Word of God applied to mind and conscience by the Holy Spirit. So, as Luther asserted in the quotation given earlier, justification is primary, and sanctification is secondary and ancillary. By the process of sanctification the character of the believer begins to catch up with that status which he has in Christ as a justified sinner.