Rome accused us, by teaching this doctrine of imputation, of making justification a “legal fiction.” In response we confess that no, it is Rome who teaches a doctrine of legal fiction because it is they who teach that God accepts our imperfect efforts toward justification. We confess Christ’s righteousness is real, that he made a “proper” and “real” and “full” satisfaction to God’s justice for us. This is in contrast to the Roman doctrine that we make partial “satisfaction” to God’s justice by acts of penance and by the memorial, propitiatory sacrifice of the mass.

It’s hard to remember where I last saw an actual shell game. It might have been at the Nebraska State Fair or it might have been at some amusement park. It doesn’t matter. The fellow behind the table shows you three empty cups and one bean. He tips the cups end up and covers the bean with one of them and challenges one of the onlookers to keep track of the bean as he moves the cups around. It seems easy enough. Three cups, two hands, one bean. How difficult can it be? The fellow behind the table  wins every time. It’s sleight of hand, the essence of which is to call attention to another cup, to distract attention away from the cup with the bean. So it can be in theology and history. Some times it is easy to follow the wrong cup, to lose, the bean, as it were.

One of the figurative shell games that writers sometimes play is to suggest problems that do not actually exist. The name for this move is red herring. In mysteries a red herring is a ostensible clue or an event that does not lead toward the solution of the mystery. It is designed to mislead direct focus away from the solution so that the author can spring the resolution on us at the end as a surprise.

During the controversy over the self-described Federal Vision movement the proponents of this corruption of the gospel regularly argued that it does not really matter what one believes about the doctrine of justification because, after all, what really matters is that one believes in Jesus (and, in the FV scheme, cooperates sufficiently with grace to retain what was said to have been given in baptism: temporary election, temporary union with Christ, temporary justification, temporary adoption etc.). It is not the doctrine of justification, they say, that justifies but rather it is Jesus who justifies.

Of course this is true and it is a good example of a shell game or a red herring because no confessional Protestant has ever argued and no confessional Protestant has ever confessed that sinners are justified by a doctrine. Their claim proves too much. On the basis of their logic we may ask why the Federal Visionists proposed a new doctrine of justification? On their logic there should never have been a Reformation in the first place and perhaps that is the goal of this sort of rhetoric, to call into question the validity of the Reformation?

Of course, what is at issue is how we should understand Scripture and what we should teach and confess about the doctrine of justification. The Reformed have always taught and confessed that the ground of our free acceptance with God is the righteousness of Christ, which is outside of us (extra nos), which  he accomplished for us (pro nobis), and which is imputed to us. We teach and confess that his righteousness is received through faith alone  (sola fide) defined as “resting” and “trusting” and “leaning” on Christ and his righteousness alone for justification. That is the truth.

Is it the case that not every justified person fully understands this truth fully? Probably. The confessional Protestants never said that those Patristic (c. 100–500 AD) and medieval (c. 500–1500 AD) Christians were not justified because they did not formulate the doctrine of justification in the same detail as the confessional Protestants. We have always understood that the articulation of doctrine develops. We were more precise on the doctrines of Christ and the Trinity in the 4th century (et seq.) than we were in earlier centuries because we faced threats to the biblical and Christian doctrines that needed to be repudiated. Those challenges forced us to clarify our doctrine.

By the time of theDefinition of Chalcedon (451) and the Athanasian Creed (7th century) the Western church, at least, had agreed on a quite detailed set of propositions to which all Christian were required to assent. There are objective boundaries within which one’s confession must fall in order to be a Christian. There are objective boundaries within which one’s doctrine must fall in order to be Reformed and Presbyterian.

So it is with the doctrine of justification. In response to a series of largely medieval errors,  in controversy with the Roman communion, and through internal dialogue, the Protestant Reformation achieved an advanced degree of precision in the doctrine of justification. By the middle of the 17th century, about 126 years after Luther had developed the basics of the Reformation doctrine of justification,  the orthodox Reformed theologians were teaching a quite precise doctrine of justification and nowhere is that precision more evident than in the Westminster Larger Catechism (1647).¹

Q. 70. What is justification?

A. Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardoneth all their sins, accepteth and accounteth their persons righteous in his sight; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.

The divines were precise in their definition of justification because this was the material question of the Reformation: how are we right with God? Rome confessed at Trent (session 6, 1547) that justification is progressive sanctification, a process that begins at baptism and is not ordinarily consummated in this life. Further, Rome declared that ordinarily it is sheer presumption to say, in this life, “I am justified.” For Rome, justification is by grace and cooperation with grace and she declared (and declares) that anyone who contradicts that teaching is eternally condemned (anathema). So, for Rome, justification is wrought in us by grace. For Rome, the ground of justification is our inherent righteousness. The instrument is baptism.

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