1. It is often said, and not without some reason, that the very word “justification” has today become repugnant to English congregations, and it is certain that in countless pulpits it is seldom if ever used. As a reaction from the passionate discussions and the wearisome technical disquisitions which once abounded, this disuse of the term is not unnatural. It must also be confessed that the Latinized term is itself repellent, and serves to hide the sequence of thought in Paul’s great argument, because it conceals the affinity of the word dikaioun (to justify) with the words dikaios (righteous) and dikaiosune (righteousness).
It would have been a great blessing to English readers if all these terms had been rendered in Anglo-Saxon, so preserving their relationship and avoiding the harshness and coldness of the Latin term. But, however strongly we may regret the original and now irreparable mistake of early translators, the word justify stands for an aspect of truth which cannot be neglected without loss, and whatever our feeling about its ecclesiastical misuse, the teaching of the New Testament on the subject will commend itself as simple, beautiful, and evidently true, and as a potent instrument for the furtherance of faith and righteousness.
We presume that there will be not a few who very seldom, indeed, think of themselves as justified, or as needing justification. In meditating on our spiritual necessities, or on our spiritual condition in general, the word justify, or justified, or justification rarely comes up. The word Christ comes up always. The word Saviour, too, and the word save, or saved, or salvation. And the word pardon, too, or pardoned, and the words peace and hope and holiness and joy and rest and heaven and the heavenly home. These words, and others somewhat akin, come up in troops before our minds when we think of our spiritual necessities and prospects. But it is, we presume, very different indeed as regards the words justify, justified, justification. [Note:J. Morison, Sheaves of Ministry, 306.]
2. To discover the meaning of justification it is necessary to examine and determine the sense in which the verb dikaioun and its passive dikaiousthai are used in Scripture.
(1) In the Old Testament the active voice is used by the LXX as the translation of the Hebrew hizdik in a judicial or “forensic” sense: to “do right to a person,” i.e. to do justice to his cause, and so to acquit (see Exo_23:7; Deu_25:1; 2Sa_15:4; 1Ki_8:32; 2Ch_6:23; Psa_82:3; Isa_5:23; Isa_1:8; Isa_53:11; Jer_3:11; Eze_16:51-52); in other words, its meaning is not to “make a person righteous,” but to “make him out righteous,” or to “treat him as righteous.” But in itself the word indicates nothing as to whether he is or is not righteous. So in the passive, a person is said to be “justified” when he is regarded as righteous, held “not guilty,” or acquitted (see Gen_44:16; Job_33:32; Psa_51:5; Psa_143:2; Isa_43:9; Isa_43:26; Isa_45:25).
(2) In the New Testament outside the Epistles of St. Paul the word is not of frequent occurrence, but wherever it is found (eleven times in all) its meaning is just the same. “Wisdom is justified by her works” (Mat_11:19; cf. Luk_7:35), i.e. not “made righteous,” but vindicated, proved to be righteous. In Mat_12:37 it is opposed to “condemned,” and thus is equivalent to “acquitted.” “By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” The lawyer, willing to justify himself, says: “And who is my neighbour?” where the meaning evidently is to vindicate himself, or make himself out to be righteous (Luk_10:29; cf. Luk_16:15). The publican “went down to his house justified rather than” the Pharisee (Luk_18:14).
These are representative instances, and establish the meaning of the word outside St. Paul’s writings. But as the phrase “to be justified by faith” is due to him, it becomes necessary to examine further into his usage of the word. It is employed in his Epistles altogether twenty-five times; and while in some cases it is unambiguous and must mean treat as righteous, and so (in the case of the guilty) pardon and acquit, in no single instance can the meaning of “make righteous” be established for it. This statement is one that can easily be verified, and therefore only a few examples need be cited. “To him that worketh, the reward is not reckoned as of grace, but as of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness” (Rom_4:4-5). “All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom_3:23-24). “With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgement: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing against myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord” (1Co_4:3-4). In 1Ti_3:16 the word is used of Christ, who was “manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit.”
From these examples the meaning of the word may be ascertained without difficulty. It is regularly employed of the sentence or verdict pronounced on a man by God, and does not in itself tell us whether the person over whom the sentence is pronounced is really righteous or not. When a man is justified he is “accounted righteous,” or regarded as righteous.
Justification is always the opposite, and exactly the opposite of condemnation. When we justify the conduct of any person, we do the opposite of condemning it; and when we condemn it, we do the opposite of justifying it. When we justify a person for his conduct, we do the opposite of condemning him. When we condemn him, we do the opposite of justifying him. When justifying or condemning a person’s conduct, we compare it with some rule or standard of right or wrong; and having made the comparison, we judge. If we judge it to be right, we justify it. If we judge it to be wrong, we condemn it. When justifying or condemning a person himself, we compare him with some ideal of a person in our mind, and having made the comparison, we judge accordingly, and hence either justify or condemn. We must either justify him or condemn him, or stand in doubt regarding him. We must judge him to be right and righteous, or judge him to be wrong and unrighteous; or else we must remain in doubt whether he is right and righteous on the one hand, or wrong and unrighteous on the other. [Note: J. Morison, Sheaves of Ministry, 307.]
3. Justification, then, is a verdict of acquittal. But a caveat must be entered against understanding this metaphor of the modern law court as though there were some legal reality corresponding to it in God’s dealings with men. To justify means to account or reckon as righteous. So far as the term goes, nothing is implied as to the reasons for which this takes place. A man may be actually righteous, or he may only be regarded for the purpose in hand as though he were righteous. In either case he is accepted as righteous.
The word “acceptance” may perhaps lead us better than any other to see how the term “justification” really does express the characteristic Christian experience. We speak of one person as being accepted by another. The members, for example, of an exclusive social circle agree to “accept” new recruits for their fellowship in consequence of their possession of certain qualifications, their cachet, as the phrase is. But in this instance or in that they may for reasons which are deemed sufficient tacitly forgo these qualifications. The man or woman in question is accepted in the particular coterie and admitted to whatever rights and privileges spring out of relationship with it. And the Epistle to the Ephesians speaks of Christians as “accepted in the beloved.” In virtue simply of their trust in Christ, their acceptance of what He has accomplished on their behalf, they find themselves “accepted” by God, admitted in one fellowship to those personal relations with the Father which carry with them the consecrating power of the indwelling Spirit. Now this acceptance is what St. Paul means in the earlier Epistles by justification.
The fact of justification is just as real whether it is a definite pronouncement on the part of God or whether it is implied in those new relations in which the believer finds himself as a consequence of his faith in Jesus. St. Paul believed, took it for true, was convinced that he had been brought into living, saving contact with God through the exalted Nazarene. He had obeyed the heavenly vision. He had been baptized into the fellowship of the Spirit, and was daily experiencing His power in reproducing in him the Divine holiness. Here was the assurance that he was risen to a new life in Christ. He was justified by faith. [Note: J. G. Simpson, What is the Gospel? 158.]
4. But what is the faith that justifies? An important light is thrown on this question by Rom_3:21-26, which may in one aspect be viewed as a definition or description of justifying faith. There faith is in the first place defined with reference to its personal object as the “faith of Christ,” which means not the faith that Jesus is the Christ, but rather faith in Christ as the embodiment of Divine grace. It is further indicated that that in Christ on which the eye of faith is chiefly fixed is the redemption achieved by His death, wherein the grace of God to the sinful manifests itself. According to this passage, therefore, the faith that justifies is not simply faith in God, or faith in God’s grace, or faith in the truth that Jesus is the Christ, but faith in Jesus as one who gave Himself to death for man’s redemption, and so became the channel through which God’s grace flows to sinners. Following out this idea of faith, justification might be defined as a judicial act, whereby God regards as righteous those who trust in His grace as manifested in the atoning death of Christ.
The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ. It is for all who believe. God set forth Christ in His blood, as a propitiation, through faith. The, man for whom the propitiation avails, the man who is justified by God, is he who can be characterized by his faith in Jesus. But what is faith? There is nowhere any definition of it in Paul, and it is idle to look for its meaning in the lexicon. It is obviously, in this passage, correlative to the propitiation; it is that which Christ in His character of propitiation appeals for and is designed to evoke in the hearts of sinful men. When the sinner stands before Christ on His cross, Christ a propitiation, bearing the sin of the world, what is he to do? What he sees there is the astounding truth that the last reality in the world is not, as he might have feared, sin, condemnation, estrangement, death, but a love which bears sin, taking it in all its dreadful reality upon itself, and, out of the very passion in which it does so, appealing to him. How is he to respond to this appeal?
Paul has no difficulty in answering: he must respond by faith. He must trust himself to such love instantly, unreservedly, for ever. He cannot negotiate with God about it. He cannot suggest that perhaps upon reconsideration something else might be found which would suit all parties better than sin-bearing love on the one side and the unconditional acceptance of it and surrender to it on the other. He cannot suggest that less than the propitiation might meet the demands of his case, and that he might be saved in a way which did not make him so deeply Christ’s debtor. He cannot qualify his indebtedness by the idea that a life of good works in future will enable him, at least to some extent, to clear scores with Christ, and to stand upon his own feet. There is a disproportion which makes them absurd and impious between all such ideas and Christ the propitiation, Christ in the love of God bearing the sin of the world. Once we see what that is, we see there is only one right thing to do with it: to trust it instantly, and to the uttermost. Of course we can turn away from it, and live—and die—in our sins. We can ignore it and harden our hearts against it, as we can against any appeal of any love. But that is wrong.
The only right thing to do is to trust it, to let go, to abandon ourselves to it, keeping nothing back. This is what Paul means by faith. And it is the whole of religion on the inner side, just as Christ the propitiation, or the sin-bearing love of God, is the whole of religion on the outer side—the whole, at all events, of the gospel, that is, of Christianity as the religion of redemption from sin. When a man believes in this sense, he does the only thing which it is right to do in the presence of Christ, and it puts him right with God. It really puts him right. There is nothing imaginary or fictitious about it. Sinner as he is, his whole being comes into a new relation to God through his faith, a relation in which there is no more condemnation. God justifies the ungodly man on the basis of his faith in Jesus, and there is nothing unreal about the justification. He proclaims and treats him as one who is right with Himself. And he is right with Himself. As long as he maintains the attitude of faith he remains right, nor is there any other attitude in which he can ever be right. Christ makes for ever the same appeal, which demands for ever the same response, and in that appeal and response Christianity, including the gospel message and the Christian life, is exhausted. [Note: J. Denney, The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, 162.]
St. Paul’s language is the product of his age and training; his meaning is catholic in its application and eternal in its truth. Let us take an illustration which will bring out this fact by the force of a complete external contrast. Generations of mothers, nurses and governesses, since the world began, have learned and verified the lesson that the wavering self-control of a child, which suffers complete breakdown if he is told “not to be a baby,” may be stimulated to further effort if he is told “to be a man.” Why? Because the mention of manhood makes appeal to the child’s faith, which is for him the substance of things hoped for. It is his proud belief that he is capable of manhood, and, when that faith is stirred, there is at least some chance that forgetting those things that are behind and reaching out to those things that are before, he will press toward the mark for the prize of that high calling (to him how pathetically high!) which he feels dimly to be his. All those who have had any experience of dealing with the young know well the need of responding to such faith. No method of treating a child is more effective for good, when wisely used, than the method of trusting him, or putting him on his honour—in other words, the method of treating him as the trustworthy man which he feels he has it in him to be. To a superficial view this method may seem to involve an element of fiction and make-believe born of a profounder insight into the truth. Even the weak-willed child has the germs of honour and manliness within him, and by giving him credit for his possibilities we make them actual; we do not, of course, put into him any alien virtue from without, but we elicit something which was really his, but needed our trust to draw it forth. Now in thus treating a child we do essentially justify him by his faith. He believes in his capacity for manliness, and therefore we treat him as a man in order that he may become one.
Not wholly otherwise, according to St. Paul’s doctrine, does the Heavenly Father justify all His human children. True, there is one important difference. The child’s faith, in the illustration we are taking, is a faith mainly in a power or capacity of his own, the Christian’s faith is a faith in Christ’s power to make His followers like to Himself. Yet ideally at least Christ’s manhood is ours also—at any rate, Christ has put it into our manhood to become one with His; and if we have the faith to reach out after that union, the Love of God, which knows our possibilities no less than our shortcomings, has no need of fiction in order to treat us as what in Christ we may become. For in Christ manhood has died to sin and for sin, and therefore the highest and strongest of all appeals can be made at once to any man whose faith will claim membership in Him—”Ye are dead; your life is hid with Christ in God; therefore seek those things which are above.” As St. Paul clearly perceived, the Law was powerless, because it made appeal to man on the ground of what he was not. It told him that he was a sinner in the same breath that it exhorted him to be a saint; just as our more modern ethics of evolution tell man that he is an ape, while they may, or may not, exhort him to be an angel. But the Gospel of the Atonement appeals to man on the ground of what he is: “You are in Christ, you are God’s adopted child, you are restored to fellowship; therefore behave yourself worthily of that gift.” Thus, in the old words of the woman of Tekoa, has God devised means whereby His banished be not outcast from Him. [Note: O. C. Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy, 106.]
5. Justification may be looked at as an experience within the believer; and the meaning of the experience is simply this: the believer, who because he has faith—the faith which is the gift of God, which is our life and which regenerates—is regenerate and a member of the Christian fellowship, and is able to do good works and actually does them, does not find his standing as a person justified in the sight of God, his righteousness, his assurance of pardon and salvation, in those good works which he really can do, but only in the mediatorial and perfectly righteous work of Christ which he has learned to appropriate in faith. His good works, however really good, are necessarily imperfect, and in this experience which we call Justification by Faith the believer compares his own imperfect good works with the perfect work of Christ, and recognizes that his pardon and salvation depend on that alone. This comparison quiets souls anxious about their salvation, and soothes pious consciences; and the sense of forgiveness which comes in this way is always experienced as a revelation of wonderful love.
This justification is called an act, and is contrasted with a work; but the contrast, though true, is apt to mislead through human analogies which will intrude. It is an act, but an act of God; and Divine acts are never done and done with, they are always continuous. Luther rings the changes upon this. He warns us against thinking that the act of forgiveness is all done in a single moment. The priestly absolution was the work of a moment, and had to be done over and over again; but the Divine pronouncement of pardon is continuous simply because it is God who makes it. He says: “For just as the sun shines and enlightens none the less brightly when I close my eyes, so this throne of grace, this forgiveness of sins, is always there, even though I fall. Just as I see the sun again when I open my eyes, so I have forgiveness and the sense of it once more when I look up and return to Christ. We are not to measure forgiveness as narrowly as fools dream.”
6. In the Protestant polemic with Roman Catholic doctrine, the conception of Justification by Faith is contrasted with that of Justification by Works; but the contrast is somewhat misleading. For the word “justification” is used in different meanings in the two phrases. The direct counterpart in Roman Catholic usage to the Reformation thought of Justification by Faith is the absolution pronounced by a priest; and here as always the Reformer appeals from man to God. The two conceptions belong to separate spheres of thought. The justification of which the mediaeval Christian had experience was the descending of an outward stream of forces upon him from the supersensible world, through the Incarnation, in the channels of ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration, sacraments, confession, and good works; it was something which came from his connexion with a supersensible organization which surrounded him. The justification by faith which Luther experienced within his soul was the personal experience of the believer standing in the continuous line of the Christian fellowship, who receives the assurance of the grace of God in his exercise of a personal faith—an experience which comes from appropriating the work of Christ which he is able to do by that faith which is the gift of God.
In the one case, the Protestant, justification is a personal experience which is complete in itself, and does not depend on any external machinery; in the other, the Medieval, it is a prolonged action of usages, sacraments, external machinery of all kinds, which by their combined effect are supposed to change a sinner gradually into a saint, righteous in the eyes of God. With the former, it is a continuous experience; with the latter, it cannot fail to be intermittent as the external means are actually employed or for a time laid aside.
7. There is a danger of laying too much stress on individual experience. This emphasis was a natural reaction against the dangerously mechanical and materialistic view of the Church and its Sacraments against which the Reformers protested. Personal salvation, personal and intimate relation with God, were truths which needed to be emphasized at a time when masses, pardons, and indulgences were freely bought and sold. The official Church had made light of living faith in a living God. It was natural that stress should be laid on the share that each individual soul must take in establishing its own relation with God. But the fact remains that Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for the Church, and that the Church is His Spouse and His Body. That the Church as a whole should be justified freely and only by faith in the merits of Jesus Christ, or that the Church should put off her filthy garments, and be clothed in the righteousness of Christ, is language which hardly presents any suggestion of difficulty to a devout mind familiar with Holy Scripture. Nor is there any real difficulty when the metaphors are translated into simple prose. That God should accept the whole body of His redeemed, not for any merit of its individual members, but simply for the perfect merits of Jesus Christ, is only natural when we think how sinful and imperfect is each several member of that great company.
From the same point of view is apparent the necessity of the sacraments which the doctrine of Justification by Faith is supposed to overlook. In the sacrament of initiation, in the sacrament of communion, it has pleased God to minister to each member of the Body all that belongs to the Body as a whole, sealing to each one those promises of life and grace without which there could be no Body of Christ at all. Nor is it conceivable that any single member can receive spiritual gifts mechanically, or otherwise than by a living faith in God and His Word. The sacraments are not substitutes for faith, or steps towards Justification, but a Divine provision for quickening, strengthening, and confirming faith.
It is in the restoration of a spiritual for a mechanical conception of the Church of Christ that the hope of better understanding of all Christian truth lies. The faith will not be seen in its true proportions, but will continue to be distorted, so long as individualism loses sight of the Body of Christ, or externalism magnifies the claims of the visible Church at the expense of personal faith in the living Christ, without which there is no membership of His Body. [Note: E. A. Knox, in Christian, Faith and Practice Papers, i.-iv., 209d.]
