Like several other Reformed denominations, the RCUS has a study committee examining the Federal Vision theology, particularly as it pertains to justification, and part of that report focuses on my article, “Judge Me, O God.” I have a few comments on the report’s representation of my argument in that article.
1. The RCUS study committee challenges my claim that “[W]hile Protestant theology rightly understands ‘justification’ as ‘courtroom’ or ‘forensic’ language, it does not take sufficient account of the full biblical scope of the ‘forensic.’” The committee replies, “While the historic Protestant view vigorously maintains the distinction between justification and deliverance, to imply or state that it allows that one could be justified without also being delivered is simply untrue.”
It is certainly possible that I have overstated the contrast between the position I’m articulating and the traditional Protestant position. I agree with the RCUS report that Protestant theology has, normally, recognized that no one can be justified without also being delivered, that justification is necessarily followed by sanctification, and that this sanctification has a beginning in a deliverance from the power of sin.
At the same time, my exegetical point stands, and the historical-theological point as well. The Bible does use “judicial” language to describe both the declaration that we are righteous and the act of deliverance; at least in some Scriptures, there is no distinction at all - God’s judgment takes the form of a deliverance, which was the whole thrust of my argument. So, for the Bible “forensic” covers what the committee calls “justification” and what the committee calls “deliverance.” The committee wants to “vigorously maintain” a distinction that the Bible does not always make. As I noted in the article, Reformed theologians - such as Turretin - recognize that “justify” has a broader meaning in Scripture than it does in theology, but dismiss this broader usage from the formulation of the doctrine of justification. I think that’s methodologically flawed.
The committee, with much Protestant theology, says: Justification is inseparably connected with the distinct act of definitive sanctification. I am saying that the Bible often speaks in such a way as to identify justification with definitive sanctification. What are the systematic consequences of this difference? I’m not sure; perhaps not much. But I want to press the exegetical case and see where Scripture leads.
2. Examining my discussion of Genesis 15, the committee asks “Here we ask, what does Leithart mean by the term ‘covenantal justification’?” It answers, “The short answer is that ‘covenantal justification’ is basically a synonym for ‘“covenant faithfulness,”’ whether God’s or man’s.” From this, the committee concludes that I am proposing a “Rabbinic” view of justification: “We must conclude that Leithart’s doctrine of justification, by adding human faithfulness to our justification, and introducing progressive justification, is a perversion of the finished work of Christ, as well as the doctrine of once and for all, forensic justification.”
This gets my point badly wrong, and the quotations they provide to support this conclusion simply don’t do that. For instance, the report italicizes this comment: “Yahweh regards those who trust His promises and wait for justification as righteous, and they are the ones who will eventually receive God’s favorable judgment in a public way. Those who wait on the Lord to fulfill His promises, clinging to Him and His word and His tokens of favor, will be vindicated/justified.”
How this leads to the conclusion that I’m preaching justification by works is beyond me. Yahweh regards those as righteous - ie, He justifies - those who “trust His promises and wait for justification,” the latter term in context referring to God’s vindication in time and at the last judgment. Who will be justified? According to the quotation, it’s “those who wait on the Lord to fulfill His promises” and who cling “to Him and His word and His tokens of favor.” There is simply not a word here about justification through human works or human faithfulness.
More basically, the committee has quoted my definition of “righteous” as if it were my definition of “justification.” The committee attributes the following definition of “covenantal justification” to me: It “is basically a synonym for ‘“covenant faithfulness,”’ whether God’s or man’s.” They do not provide precise footnotes here, and I can’t find this particular language in my article. Neither can I find the phrase “covenantal justification” in the article. Perhaps I’ve missed something.
But if this is in the version of the article that the committee studied (and there have been several versions), it would be a definition of righteousness, and not a definition of justification. To say that God is righteous is to say that He is faithful to His covenant commitments to Israel; to say that a man is righteous is to say that he is faithful to his covenant obligations toward Yahweh.
But this is not a definition of justification. Justification is not an attribute or character trait, though it manifests God’s attributes. Justification is an act that either manifests righteousness or declares righteous. In justification, God and man are justified, but in different senses. When God keeps His promises by delivering His people, He vindicates/justifies Himself, demonstrating His own inherent faithfulness to all His obligations. When God justifies sinners, He declares that He considers them righteous, considers them as covenant-keepers, in spite of their actual failings. And, so the argument of my paper goes, when God justifies sinners, He does so by breaking the bonds of sin, raising them from the dead, justifying those in Christ in the way that He justified Christ Himself - by raising the dead to life.
3. The committee is not only mistaken, but dishonest in its claim, regarding my views of justification, that “The classic Reformation formula of ‘salvation by grace alone, through faith alone’ is replaced with ‘salvation by grace and covenant faithfulness of God and man.’”
The dishonesty is in the quotation marks at the end of the statement. Given the context, these are evidently to be taken as my own summary of my views. Nothing like this statement appears in the paper, and that’s because I don’t believe it.
The committee has no excuse for claiming that I’m teaching a kind of synergistic justification. In that very article, I critique Augustine and Thomas, and with them much traditional Roman Catholic soteriology, thusly: “Thomas’s doctrine in particular describes the inward movements of the sinner’s soul, so that justification is fundamentally a motus animi . To be sure, Thomas believed that the Divine Mover graciously initiated the motion of the soul, but still justification is not conceived primarily as an act of God; rather, it is a motion of the soul moved by God. Biblically, this gets things upside down: Paul insists, ‘It is God who justifies’ (Rom. 8:33). The subject of ‘justify’ is not animus but Deus. The Protestant confessions reflect the biblical teaching when they claim that justification is an ‘act of God’s free grace’ by which God pardons and forgives and counts us as righteous.”
Note: “The Protestant confessions reflect the biblical teaching” about justification by “free grace.”
Regarding the Reformation doctrine, I wrote (in the same article): “The Reformers did not merely adjust the medieval ordo salutis here and there, but instead changed the basic picture or root metaphor of justification; they did not merely move around the props, but changed the backdrops, the costuming, and the entire scene. Instead of expounding justification under the heading of moral transformation (Augustine) or through the metaphor of motion (Aquinas), the Reformation discerned that justification language belonged in the courtroom. Instead of being the End of a journey of return, God in the Protestant doctrine assumed the role of Judge; instead of playing out the story of the soul’s moral renewal, justification became the story of the guilty soul’s acquittal; instead of being the soul’s movement, justification became God’s pronouncement.”
And it’s clear from the article that, whatever my quibbles with Protestant formulations of justification, I agree completely with the Reformation on this foundational point.