by Chris Alexion, Copyright March 24, 2006, all rights reserved. 320 views
The Reformers taught that justification is an act of God whereby He pardons sinners and declares them righteous because of what Christ has done for them, through the instrumentality of faith alone. Roman Catholics have never liked this, insisting that justification must consist in an inward change in the sinner. This insistence has now become a stock objection to the Protestant doctrine. According to one Catholic writer, the Protestant view means that
our "justification" can no longer be conceived as a real change in us; it will have to become a sheer declaration on God's part, e.g. a declaration that, thanks to the work of Christ, He will henceforth consider us as just, even though we remain inwardly the sinners we always were. Hence, the Protestant doctrine of "forensic" or "extrinsic" justification. Now watch what happens to our own act of faith: it ceases to be the foundational act of an interior renewal and becomes a mere requirement, devoid of any salvific power in its own right, which God arbitrarily sets as the condition on which He will declare us just.
Note first how close Rome comes to begging the question with this pejorative terminology–"sheer declaration." "Sinners we always were." "Mere requirement." "Arbitrary" conditions. To describe the Protestant view in such terms is either to begin by assuming it's wrong or to misunderstand it entirely. But is the Reformed doctrine of imputed righteousness really a legal wordplay, an Oz-like travesty run by a lever-puller behind a curtain? Charles Hodge responds thus:
The Protestant doctrine does not suppose that God regards any person or thing as being other than he or it really is. When He pronounces the ungodly to be just, the word is taken in different senses. He does not pronounce the unholy to be holy, but simply declares that the demands of justice have been ratified on behalf of those who have no righteousness of their own.
Or consider commentator Robert Haldane: "To justify signifies not to treat men as if they were just or righteous, though they are not so, but because they are in truth righteous by imputation, really righteous, the law having been fulfilled in them, Romans 8:4." The objection that the Protestant view undermines the holiness of God is simply not watertight.
The Reformers never meant to deny the necessity of the "interior renewal." Though they distinguished between justification and sanctification, they never separated them. The point was to emphasize that Christ alone, apart from human works, is the basis of our justification. Roger Wagner, in an article from Antithesis, sums it up well:
All this is to say that the death of Christ is insufficient for salvation, and must be supplemented by human effort. All the talk of grace (as in "sanctifying grace")–and the Romanist is careful to emphasize that human effort must be begun and continue by the grace of God–is irrelevant to this foundational question of the sufficiency of Christ and His redemptive accomplishment. Having faith in the finished work of Christ on the Day of Judgment is simply not enough, and no amount of Romanist rhetoric can negate that basic, tragic reality.