The Reformation Doctrine of
Justification: An Overview
The heart and soul of
Reformation
theology was its doctrine of justification--how an individual sinner
should
enter into fellowship with God. This doctrine, more than other,
distinguished
Luther and his followers from the medieval doctrines that had preceded
it. It also gave an underlying unity to the reformers, who soon found
ways
to disagree about nearly everything else. According to the historian of
theology, Berndt Hamm, this doctrine can be broken down to ten
propositions[1]:
1. The
Unconditionally Given Acceptance of Mankind
2. Radical Sin
3. Grace Preceding Perfect Righteousness
4. Simul iustus et peccator: At Once Just and
Sinner
5. The Eternal Validity of Justification
6. Certainty of Salvation
7. Freedom and the Absence of Freedom
8. By Faith Alone
9. Faith and the Biblical Word
10. The Evangelical Understanding of the Person
1. The Unconditionally Given
Acceptance of Mankind
This is the idea that the
forgiveness of sins and eternal life are
given unconditionally for Christ's sake and do not depend on the
worthiness
of the sinner. Rather than rest on the condition of the individual,
forgiveness
depends solely on the mercy of God and the righteousness of Christ
interceding
for the sinner. In the medieval Catholic theology, broadly speaking,
justification
never happened without cause in a human process of sanctification
(i.e.,
confession of sins, absolution, and penance) and with it the renewal of
human morality. Thus a human being obtains forgiveness as the reward of
good works and abstinence from mortal sin. These are the propositions
that
the reformers disputed: there can be no valid cause for man to be
justified
before God, they argued. God's acceptance of his creations is not
subject
to their actions or conditions. It is prior to all human reasons.
2. Radical Sin
Closely related to
unconditionality of acceptance is the idea that
human beings are utterly and radically sinful. This by itself was
hardly
new to the sixteenth century. Rather, the novelty of reformation
doctrine
was to redefine sinfulness from human condition to essence, impervious
to alteration by mere human remedies. Only the infusion of divine grace
has the power to restore the bond between God and humans, broken by
original
and mortal sin. Luther was particularly emphatic on this point, that
sin
was a innate tendency of all humans that defined the whole person until
death.
3. Grace Preceding Perfect
Righteousness
Divine grace is the
precise opposite of radical human sinfulness. Just
as sin defines the whole human, justifying grace is nothing other than
God himself and his mercy. God is not made in man, let alone earned,
but
is a new standing in the sight of God. As sinful beings, humans are
necessarily
guilty before God, grace can have no foundation based in them. Even if
humans could obey the law of God and
therefore owe nothing to divine
grace, as created beings they would still not be worthy or deserving of
grace. Why bestow grace, then? Here is where the righteousness of Jesus
Christ comes in: his intercession on behalf of humankind alone is
the cause of justification, it alone provides satisfaction for sin and
wins merit for the sinner. The righteousness that results from
justification
is, therefore, is wholly derivative: human beings acquire it only
through
Christ and never on their own merits. Grace, in short, precedes
righteousness.
Righteousness is "alien."
4. Simul iustus et peccator:
At
Once Just and Sinner
Behind the concept of
"alien righteousness" is a radical idea that
human beings, the saved as well as the damned, can inhabit several
states
of being simultaneously. It cannot be otherwise, given the doctrines of
acceptance, radical sin, and grace: Christians, according to the
reformers,
are both wholly sinful and righteous through faith. Their
righteousness
wrestles with sin, and liberates them from their sinful natures at
death.
But until then, humans who have faith are both sinful and righteous at
once. This idea is captured in Luther's phrase simul iustus et peccator--"a
just man and at the same time a sinner."
5. The Eternal Validity
of Justification
Since justification is
the unconditional acceptance of the sinner for
Christ's sake and not because of any quality in a human's life or
morals,
it is always to be found in God. For this reason, the doctrine of
justification
takes on eschatological meaning--i.e., it is placed in connection with
the final act of the divine plan, or eschaton. Medieval theology
had distinguished between justification (the day-to-day process of
removing
sin and acquiring merit through obedience to divine law) and
sanctification
(the future acceptance or rejection of human beings at the Last
Judgment).
Reformation theology brought these two together: because acceptance is
unconditional and justification dependent solely on eternal divine
grace,
the sinner has already
been accepted for
salvation in advance
of her/his renewal
through justification and despite the enduring power
of sin. Luther expressed this idea by saying that in the divine act of
justification, the sinner becomes "righteous and saved," that is
not righteous now and saved at some future date, but already the
recipient of righteousness and salvation in faith.
6. Certainty of Salvation
Salvation means the
unconditional, final, and irreversible acceptance
of the sinner. This unconditional quality makes it possible for the
reformers
to equate the certainty of salvation with the certainty of belief:
because the worthiness of the sinner is irrelevant to justification and
solely contingent on divine grace, the reformers argued, the sinner's
attention
is diverted away from contemplation of her/his own sinfulness and
toward
Jesus Christ, the sole source of salvation. According to the medieval
church,
Christians could not enjoy a subjective certainty of their own
salvation
because they could not know for certain whether they had truly and
fully
removed the barriers to justification. Luther and the other reformers,
by contrast, argued that because salvation is contingent solely on the
gift of faith, salvation is certain to all who believe.
7. Freedom and the Absence
of Freedom
Every reformation
doctrine of justification is about freedom, above
all freedom from all law, human as well as divine. As sinful beings,
humans
are unable to obey divine law on the strength of their own merits; to
be
human is to stand condemned for disobedience to the law. But because
justification
is given not according to human merit but according to divine grace,
the
believer is liberated from accusatory curse of disobedience to the law.
On the other hand, radical sin robs humans of the will to do anything
but
sin, and in that sense humans are "free" only to sin. Humans have no
moral
autonomy. Only when human this freedom is taken away by faith do humans
acquire the capacity to what is right and just. Once again, the
unconditional
gift of grace precedes human action.
8. By Faith Alone
The reformers insisted
that salvation happened by faith alone.
But doesn't that introduce an element of conditionality? Doesn't this
mean
that salvation is contingent, after all, on whether humans believe or
not?
For the reformers, faith is not something people do, it is something
they receive. Faith, in their eyes, is not
spiritual action but
purely a receptive mode. This is not simply because faith is a gift of
the Holy Spirit, but because the very nature of faith means that the
sinner's
attention is directed away from her/his inward state of sinfulness and
toward the righteousness of Christ. In this sense, faith is the effect
of grace acting on the soul. But this is another way of saying that
salvation
is not contingent on human qualities but on unconditional divine grace.
Salvation "by faith alone" is a paraphrase of unconditional divine
acceptance.
9. Faith and the Biblical
Word
If everything hinges on
faith, and faith is a passive mode, how do
humans get it? In a word: from the Bible, directly or indirectly. Just
as faith meant taking the sinner out of herself, the reformers argued
that
the source of faith was also objective and located externally in the
Bible.
This is the theological foundation of Reformation scripturalism: only
in
the Bible did faith have a firm foothold, hence conscience was bound
solely
to the word of God and free from all the words of men. Humans, after
all,
are wholly sinful; the only reliable source of faith is divine. It is
the
word of God that takes the sinner out of himself, that situates the
sinner
in the continuous flow of unconditional divine grace. When the
reformers
argued that humans receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life through
the Bible, they meant to describe a dynamic relationship.
10. The Evangelical
Understanding
of the Person
Behind this understanding
of justification and salvation lies a new
view of the person. The medieval theology of justification understood
the
human person before God as a subject, reasonable and in voluntary
possession
of herself, with qualities deriving from her essence and an autonomous
morality manifest in good works. To the reformers, justification
entails
a radical break with the innate qualities of the sinner: the person is
accepted not because of this quality or that, but in spite of human
qualities.
The person is accepted solely and simply as she is.
Note: this
summary is adapted from Berndt Hamm, "Was ist reformatorische
Rechtfertigungslehre?,"
Zeitschrift
für Theologie und Kirche 83 (1986): 1-38; printed in English
translation
as "What was the Reformation Doctrine of Justification," in C. Scott
Dixon,
ed., The German Reformation: The Essential Readings (Oxford:
Blackwell,
1999), 53-90.
Return to 441 Homepage