Justification: catholic Scripture’s challenge to Protestant tradition?

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)

It seems time that I got back to this meandering series of mine on the Anglican articles. We’ve reached the 11th, on justification. Written in the context of late mediaeval debates, it also plunges us into some very modern debates as well.

Here’s the article:

XI. Of the justification of Man
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, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

As far as I can tell, the homily referred to is this one, which begins with a short summary statement.

Because all men be sinners and offenders against GOD, and breakers of his law and commandments, therefore can no man by his own acts, works, & deeds (seem they never so good) be justified, and made righteous before GOD: but every man of necessity is constrained to seek for another righteousness or justification, to be received at GOD’S own hands, that is to say, the forgiveness of his sins and trespasses, in such things as he hath offended. And this justification or righteousness, which we so receive of GOD’S mercy and Christ’s merits. embraced by faith, is taken, accepted and allowed of GOD, for our perfect and full justification. For the more full understanding hereof, it is our parts and duties ever to remember the great mercy of GOD, how that (all the world being wrapped in sin by breaking of the Law) GOD sent his only son our Savior Christ into this world, to fulfill the Law for us, and by shedding of his most precious blood, to make a sacrifice and satisfaction, or (as it may be called) amends to his Father for our sins, to assuage his wrath and indignation conceived against us for the same.

In everything I say here, I run the risk that by summarizing as broadly as I do, I will oversimplify, but something like that needs to be done if I’m to make this a blog post rather than a book.

First, then I want to note one affirmation from the article, and one from the homily, that I think are important in the light of debates past and present. The article affirms that salvation is God’s work and not ours: that all is by grace, and through Christ. I personally see that affirmation in the Reformation tradition, in the Catholic Catechism, and in the writings of those like Bishop Tom Wright who argue for a new perspective on what justification meant in Paul’s writings.

Behind that affirmation lie disputes and among those many disputes, the question of exactly what aspects of God’s work of grace are referred to by the term justification, and what means of grace are included under that heading. Further, the homily clearly affirms that Christ’s work is fundamentally God’s initiative, and that there is no division of love, will, mercy and purpose between the Father and the Son in the work of salvation. Christ does not reconcile an estranged God to humanity, he comes from God, as God’s gift, to reconcile an estranged humanity to God. In that, the homily is much more careful and scriptural than some misguided or poorly articulated theories of atonement.

In the late medieval period, among other things, the church, or at least some theologians, seemed to develop an unhealthy concentration on the question: “How may I be saved / inherit eternal life.” I say unhealthy, because it seems to me that an obsession with our own souls is something that Jesus discouraged, in favour of a broader concern for God’s work with others. The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) is the clearest example of that: those who are obsessed with their own safety and salvation, the priest and the Levite, are those who are most like the lawyer who poses two questions, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbour?” (The latter question is equivalent to: “How much must I do to keep the law and gain eternal life?) The one who is careless of his own safety and salvation is the Samaritan, who knew the same Law concerning ritual purity, and the same dangers of bandits, yet still stopped to put another first. The parable is an effective expansion of Jesus’ saying: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:24).

This obsession led to complicated theories involving a treasury of merits: the sense that God treated all his people as one family, and that there was an accounting of good works and bad. (there’s a wonderfully sympathetic explanation of this economy in MacCulloch’s History of Christianity p555 ff) In theory Christ’s good work was central, but it was supplemented by the good deeds of the saints especially, as his faithful followers. As happens in a family or community with scarce resources, good deeds could be shared by those who needed their merit most, repentant sinners only too aware of their bad deeds, and especially those souls caught up in purgatory, not good enough to have made it straight to heaven, but baptized into the same family of the Church and penitent enough not to deserve final condemnation. In the best theology, Christ was still the fountain spring of all goodness, and the one who brought people that grace by which they could do good works in the first place. But in common practice and thinking Christ could be woefully obscured.

Against this the Reformers weighed in: they never actually abolish an idea of merit, but simply insist that Christ’s merit is infinite, and in no need of supplementing. There is no good deed that is independent of his merit, and which carries its own discrete merit. His merits suffice for all. So equally, there is no laborious process of accounting through purgatory. Those who are Christ’s, who put their trust in him and his merits, have more than sufficient for their salvation. Christ was put into centre place again, but in the process the Reformers let in the roots for individualism to gain ground. The question was now even more about me and my soul, and becoming divorced from the community of faith.

In the process of working through these questions, a fresh reading of Paul took centre stage. Luther, followed by other Reformers, appropriated Paul for the cause of his challenge to accepted teaching. Wherever he came across the phrase “works of the Law” he universalized it to “good works.” Then he equated the Judaisers and Jewish opponents of Paul to his “catholic” (at this point they were all, Luther included, Catholic) opponents. Finally (still in accounting terms) he read the whole of Paul’s language about justification as discussing that late mediaeval question: “How can I be saved from death and sin?” In doing so, he argued essentially that good works could not make us righteous and so acceptable to God: they could not change our sinful nature and status. But Christ’s sacrificial death was of such infinite goodness and merit, that it was sufficient to more than outweigh every human sin in the accounting scales. Therefore, if we put our faith in Christ as the one whose merit was sufficient, and as God’s gift to us, God would account us righteous even when we were not. This, he believed, was what Paul meant by justification. (Although in many respects the Reformers follow Anselm’s idea of satisfaction, by transposing it from its feudal setting to a law-court judgement of deeds, they lost the relational framework in favour of a juridical one)

That view, so baldly and badly summarized here, became among the churches of the Reformation, and so also in the rising field of Biblical scholarship, the default reading of Paul. Jews were dependent on seeking to please God by doing good deeds, Pelagians before Pelagius, and bad, merit-seeking, mediaeval Catholics to the last person. Christians were evangelicals: those who depended on God for salvation, and received God’s favour through grace, entirely derived from Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice alone, and Protestantism was Pauline Christianity. There were, more recently, in liberal circles, debates about whether Paul’s concept of justification by faith was the centre of his thought, or a more (very?) peripheral aspect of it. But no-one seriously questioned that what Luther said about justification was what Paul had said.

The context for a reappraisal of Paul was to a great extent created by the Holocaust. All sorts of people became increasingly aware of the ways in which so much of this Reformation picture of Paul was implicated in Christian anti-Semitism. At the same time, as ecumenism spread in the wake of Vatican II, many Protestants became aware that catholics were Christians too. Neither of these contextual shifts brought about a new reading of Paul, but they did mean that when one came along, it would find a more receptive audience than previous attempts at re-reading his work.

The first plank in the new reading of Paul was Stendahl’s seminal essay, ‘The Apostle Paul and the Intropsective Conscience of the West’ (see the summary review here). He argued persuasively that Paul simply didn’t share Luther’s concerns about finding salvation. Paul, as a good observant Jew was far from wondering how he could be free from sin and be saved. He was, rather, confident that he was one of God’s saved people. It was more than a decade later that the decisive foundation for a new reading of Paul was laid, by E.P. Sanders. In Paul and Palestinian Judaism he argued from a detailed examination of texts that the idea of a Judaism that sought to achieve salvation through doing the works of the Law was entirely alien to the Judaism Paul knew and was a Lutheran construction imposed wrongly on Second Temple Judaism. Jews, like Christians, knew that they were saved by God’s grace, and performed the works of the Law as a response to that grace. While some critiques of Sanders have since challenged this, I don’t think they have succeeded in overthrowing it, but have perhaps shown where it needs to be nuanced. That is, however, a hotly contested debate.

So if there were no salvation-by-merit earning Jews around, whom and what was Paul arguing against, and what did he mean by justification by faith? (Like every other summary in this post, this is a generalization that flattens out a great many differences.) For much Jewish thinking, in the final judgement, when God vindicated or justified his people, it would become clear to everyone that the people of the Law, the Jewish people, were indeed God’s chosen and righteous people, and their God was indeed the just creator God of all the earth. In the meantime, God’s people could be recognized by their observance of the Law, demonstrating their acceptance of his call and salvation, and their faithful worship of the one true God, while they waited in obedience for his vindication. So, when the Church started to accept pagans into fellowship, many assumed that they too should start observing the Law, the means by which God’s people demonstrated their obedience.

By contrast, Paul argued that Christ had first of all demonstrated complete obedience to the Law and fulfilled it, yet at the same time the Law had condemned Jesus. Where the Law had declared Jesus cursed, God in the resurrection had declared Jesus vindicated. This showed that the Law no longer was able to truly declare whom God would vindicate, because when God vindicated and justified Jesus he effectively over-ruled the Law. Accordingly, the new pattern of obedience is shown in Christ who was faithful even to death. Those who have faith in Christ trust the judgment of the resurrection over the judgement of the law, and therefore accept that the pattern and paradigm of a faithful life is to be found in the vindicated Jesus, not the now over-ruled law.

So pagans who join the people of God do not have to keep the Law to demonstrate their obedience, they have instead to follow Christ. Faith in Jesus as the truly faithful one is what marks out those whom God is calling and will vindicate, not observing the Law. This is confirmed by the experience of God’s Spirit, understood as anticipation of and participation in the life of God’s kingdom which properly follows the vindication of final judgement. So, on this reading, justification is not primarily about how an individual finds salvation, but about how the Church embraces people of every type, class and race on the same basis: not the Law given to one nation, but Christ the faithful one, the truly human one, our representative, given, chosen and anointed and vindicated by God.

Nothing in this reading contradicts the central affirmations of the article and homily I referred to earlier: the work of salvation is by God’s grace, and it is God’s work in and through Christ, reconciling us to God’s own self. At the same time, it profoundly alters the individualist stress of many earlier readings, and becomes most profoundly a teaching to challenge our divisions. Those who accept Christ as the locus of God’s saving power, the revelation of his vindicating justice, and the pattern of human obedience, must themselves accept all others who, however fallibly, also accept this same Christ.

For some, this new challenge to older readings has been wholly unwelcome. Realistically, it is still relatively early days for testing this theory out in the realm of doctrine rather than exegesis. In theory, at least, the churches of the Reformation remain committed to being always reformed in the light of scripture. In practice, when new readings of scripture are generated that challenge deep-seated and long-cherished understandings, that commitment is harder to maintain. Often denying tradition, some evangelicals are hard put to deal with the recognition that their reading of scripture is a tradition. But when there are seriously contested readings of scripture clashing with each other as these old and new perspectives clash, one will not go away just because it is unwanted.

Those of us who are persuaded that something more-or-less along the lines of the new perspective on Paul is a more satisfying and historically plausible understanding of Paul’s meaning need to work out how to engage more thoroughly with the doctrinal tradition. Nonetheless, if we take Paul’s commitment to justification seriously, it will be the wider doctrinal tradition of the whole Church that we must engage with, that of all those who accept Christ as the central and defining focus of God’s involvement with creation, and not just our own narrower and more partisan histories.

Tagged as: 39 articles, animals