Up to about the year 1500,
the term “justification” was widely
understood to mean “to be made righteous.”
This interpretation, which had its origins in the writings of St. Augustine (or
Aurelius Augustinus. I recommend reading his autobiography, The Confessions. Awesome!), saw
justification as both an event and a process. The Reformation, however, saw
justification defined exclusively in forensic terms – that is, as an event, in
which sinners are declared to be righteous before God. Justification is then followed by sanctification, a process in which
believers are made righteous. In this passage, John Calvin provides a
classic articulation of this forensic notion of justification.
“To be justified in God’s sight is
to be reckoned as righteous in God’s judgement, and to be accepted on account
of that righteousness… The person
who is justified by faith is someone who, apart from the righteousness of
works, has taken hold of the righteousness of Christ through faith, and having
been clothed with it, appears in the
sight of God not as a sinner, but as a righteous person. Therefore
justification is to be understood simply as the acceptance by which God
receives us into his favour as righteous people. We say that it consists of the
remission of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ…
There is no doubt that we obtain justification in the sight of God only by the intercession of
the righteousness of Christ. This is equivalent to saying that believers
are not righteous in themselves, but on account of the communication of the
righteousness of Christ through imputation, something to be noted carefully… Our righteousness is not in us, but in
Christ. We possess it only because we participate in Christ; in fact, with
him, we possesses all his riches.”
THINK BIG.
START SMALL. GO DEEP.
References:
1) Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.xi.2, 23; in Johannis
Calvini: Opera Selecta, ed. P. Barth and W. Niesel, vol. 4 (Munich: Kaiser,
1931), 182.25-183.10; 206.17-32.
2) The Christian Theology Reader, edited by Alister E. McGrath
(Oxford: Blackwell), pg. 234-235
No comments:
Post a Comment