“If we lose sight of the distinctiveness of justification as, according to Martin Luther, the mark of a standing or falling church, and allow it to become confused with sanctification, then the focus of faith is inclined to shift from Christ to self. This has been borne out in Catholicism historically as much as in neo-nomianism more recently.”

Fides sola est quae justificat; fides quae justificat non est sola. Latinisms can have a wonderful way of crystallising issues in theological reflection – so with this one: ‘It is faith alone that justifies; but faith that justifies is never alone!’ This isn’t just a statement about the alone-ness of faith as the means by which we receive God’s justifying grace, but something much more far-reaching. It highlights the crucial distinction we need to grasp as we try to understand what it means to be justified. Namely, that a person who is truly justified is never merely justified!

This may sound like theological hair-splitting, but actually it is tied in with one of the most vexed issues of Christian experience that goes back to the earliest days of the New Testament church and further back still. Because that is so, we are reminded that every pastoral problem has theological dimensions and every theological problem has pastoral implications and we dare not lose sight of either.

In a nutshell, it is the issue raised by the Galatian problem. Paul flags up the problem in his introduction to Galatians by pointing to ‘a different gospel’ that was in opposition to ‘the grace of Christ’ (1.6). He spells out the problem later on when he says,

We who are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Jesus Christ, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no-one will be justified’ (2.15-16).

These people, whose experience of salvation had begun through their being justified by faith in Jesus Christ, were now being misled into thinking that their new standing could only be sustained by observing the law. They were confused over the relationship between justification and sanctification: where the Christian life begins and how it goes on.

The Recurring Problem

It isn’t just that this confusion was a recurring problem in the New Testament churches (hence the careful and repeated strand of teaching in Romans, Ephesians and elsewhere), but that it has surfaced again and again during the history of the church.

As the Western Church descended into the dark ages of Mediaeval Catholicism, its whole understanding of salvation was warped almost beyond recognition by its blurring of the distinction between grace that is imputed and grace that is imparted. So even though in one sense the Roman Catholic Church could quite happily assent to the fact that it is ‘grace alone’ that saves, what Rome meant by that was quite different from its Protestant counterparts in the Reformation. For Catholicism (as with the Galatians), the grace that justifies was confused with the grace that sanctifies.

It would be wrong to pretend that this was and is a problem only for Roman Catholics both then and now. Sadly it has been and continues to be an all too pervasive problem for Protestant churches as well. From the theological Liberalism of the nineteenth century to the ‘Social Gospel’ of the early twentieth century, there was a wide-ranging belief that our standing before God was determined as much by what we do as by what or in whom we believe.

For our generation the issue has surfaced in the debates surrounding the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul propounded by E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright, the ‘Federal Vision’ theology of Auburn Avenue and Norman Shepherd’s neo-nomianism. All these debates converge most significantly in the two questions of how a person a person gets in to God’s family on the one hand and how they stay in on the other – the relationship between justification and sanctification.

The Root of the Issue

The reason for this recurring confusion highlights just how deep the roots of sin extend into our fallen human nature. There is something in all of us that wants to claim the merit for what we are and where we stand. Whether it be our well-meaning neighbour who says their hope of heaven rests in the fact they’ve tried their best and never done anyone any harm, or in ourselves when we subconsciously allow our enjoyment of communion with God to be performance-related. By nature we are self-justifying creatures.

The gospel strikes at the very heart of that notion. It tells us in no uncertain terms that ‘There is no-one righteous, not even one’ (Ro 3.10), ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Ro 3.23). Even ‘all our righteous acts are like filthy rags’ (Isa 64.6) and all this is true as much for those who are believers as for those who are still outside God’s family.

In practical terms this means there is an overwhelming temptation for all of us to look to self for the hope that God will accept us. It is the most fundamental pastoral problem a minister can ever address, because it has the profoundest implications for our eternal destiny. It will affect the way we deal with those who are seeking salvation and it will also affect the way we handle those who are troubled over assurance of salvation. There is something in them that points them in the wrong direction for answers; but there is something in the gospel that points them in an altogether different direction and that’s where we need clear understanding ourselves. The two great questions, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ and ‘How do I know I am saved?’ are the most important a minister will ever have to answer.

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