1. THERE are many to whom the doctrine of Justification by Faith makes but little appeal nowadays. They regard it at best as an abstruse dogma which does not particularly interest them, and they are sometimes more than half inclined to pronounce it obsolete. Theological doctrines vary in attractiveness at different periods: they have their times of predominance and their times of comparative neglect. At the present day the attention of theologians is being largely concentrated on the problems that surround our Lord’s life, and one result is that the doctrinal teaching of St. Paul has, for the moment at any rate, receded into the background.
Has it ever occurred to you that Justification has lost its great place among us? Depend upon it, Luther was right in insisting on its supreme importance. It appears to me that I rarely use the word; and although it is quite true, as I think I have said in my lectures on the Ephesians, that Paul could make a great statement of the breadth and power of the Christian Redemption without using it, he had the conception for which the word stands wrought into the substance of his life and thought: I fear that I have been sparing of the word because I have not grasped the thing. It has come to me of late, with much vividness and force; I wonder whether it will remain and grow. It lies in immediate and vital contact with the Atonement. [Note: The Life of E. W. Dale of Birmingham 526.]
2. The truth of justification by faith is something more than the watchword of an extinct controversy emblazoned on the banners of the conquerors, but no longer able to wake echoes in the hearts of men. “The just by faith shall live.” That is still the law of life for all of us, and it will not fail. Still those who stand upon their watchtower and watch the signs of the heavens, will see the vision of that truth gleaming through the darkness, and will “write it on tables so that he that runs may read it.”
Still without that faith there is no true righteousness, and without the righteousness there is no true life. We need it in all its width and power, in all its variety of application, in its bearing upon our personal salvation, upon our growth in holiness, upon our hopes for others, upon the mysteries of the world’s evil. We must go back from the faith which, in the teaching of the Lutheran Reformers, assumed, in the very heat of their warfare against scholasticism, something of a scholastic character, to the wider teaching of St. Paul. We must unite with the experience and the faith of the apostle the experience and the faith of the prophet who was his forerunner.
We have met people who could get up no enthusiasm about justification by faith. It was a dogma to be accepted, but they saw in it nothing to exult about. That is because our theologians have been such bad teachers of theology. They smother us with words which they fail to make alive. For this is a doctrine to stir us when we do understand it. It made Luther’s blood leap in his veins. It meant for him that, after all the torture of ceremonial, fast and vigil to get himself right with God, he found the whole business centred in just trusting God. The formidable Being whose wrath he had been labouring to propitiate needed no efforts of that kind. He was already his friend. God meant good to him, had done so from the first. He was to do his best as a man in the world because God loved him and believed in him; believed in his possibility of being and doing something. That, for Luther and the rest of us, is the true saving faith. The life of faith means a faith on both sides. We believe in God, and God believes in us; believes in us as worth saving, as worth doing His best with, as having possibilities that make us worth all His care. [Note: J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 47.]
