The emphasis which contemporary Protestantism places on justification as an image for understanding
the work of Christ has not come about in an ideological vacuum. Some historical background behind
the justification debate may be useful. During the Middle Ages justification, as a theological term,
generally came to mean the act whereby God pronounced an individual righteous. Since medieval
Catholicism was interested in the maturity and holiness of Christians, a tendency was to view
justification as happening at the end of the sanctification process. But since God was perceived as a
distant and angry judge in much of medieval piety, many religious people were terrified at the
prospects of purgatory and hell. They were anxious for assurance that God, indeed, regarded them as
righteous justified, and thereby exempt from punishment. This led to redoubled efforts to attain to
justification: prayer, fasting, works of charity, frequent participation in the sacraments, and ascetic
practices of various kinds. To a sensitive, introspective person the process was agonizing and the goal
seemed hopeless. The church's theology insisted that only as such acts were enabled by God's grace
did they contribute to justification. But to those who became Protestants, all this seemed to be an
attempt at salvation through
works. Furthermore the debate about justification dealt largely with the individual aspects of
salvation. It was fundamentally a question of when and how the individual was justified. The story of
Martin Luther's personal search for a gracious God is well known. When he finally realized that God's
righteousness was not that of a severe and angry judge, but of one who "through grace and sheer
mercy" justifies through faith, Luther felt himself "to be reborn and to have gone through open doors
into paradise.”
In reality, justification by faith meant for Luther and for others that justification comes at the beginning
of the sanctification process rather than at the end. So the good works of righteousness are seen as
the fruit which grows out of God's justifying love. The Reformers laid stress on the all-important
primacy of God's justifying action as something distinct from human response. Justification is first of all
something that God does apart from us for our salvation; that is, it is objective. Of course, people do
not benefit from justification unless they respond in faith. Faith, then, is subjective. So justification came
to be seen fundamentally as a forensic, or legally valid, declaration of God's acceptance.
Medieval Catholicism recognized that the biblical terms dikaiosune and dikaios usually refer to
character or activity which is righteous. Therefore the church held that God's justification has
something to do with producing actual righteousness of character. To justify, they held, meant actively
to make righteous.
Subsequently, Protestant orthodoxy responded by defining its view of justification more precisely and
distinguishing it more sharply from medieval Catholicism's understanding. Orthodox theologians, in
order to stress the primacy of God's righteousness and to disallow any tendency toward a salvation
by works, began to emphasize the imputed nature of humankind's righteousness. God declares us to
be righteous, not because we actually are, but because Christ's merits are
imputed to us. In Protestant orthodoxy sin is understood as transgression of the law, and Jesus' death
is viewed largely in terms of meeting the resulting legal demands of a divine moral law. In justification
God declares us to be legally innocent on the basis of Christ's substitutionary death. Christ's
righteousness is "all he became, did and suffered to satisfy the demands of divine justice, and merit for
his people the forgiveness of sin and the gift of eternal life" (Hodge, 1898.142). Since God accepts this
righteousness as a substitute for human righteousness, then when he looks at those who are in
Christ, he sees Christ's righteousness instead of their unrighteousness. In other words, Christ's
righteousness is imputed to them. Although Christians are not subjectively righteous, they are treated
by God as if they were righteous. By trusting in Christ through faith, individuals are declared
righteous; they are justified in a legal or forensic sense (Hodge, 1898:144-45).
Reformation and post-Reformation theology said a great deal about the forensic character of
justification. The term "forensic" was used only in a restricted sense to indicate that God's
righteousness was fully credited to humanity's account, avoiding any notion of real righteousness in
humankind. The Reformers and their successors made a distinction between declaring that a person is
righteous and making that person righteous. They intended to rule out any possibility of claiming
human merit. Justification meant that humankind was looked upon by God as if people had fulfilled
what the obedient Son of God, Jesus Christ, had done. So God simply gave righteousness to the
evildoer forensically by declaration, in spite of people's being dead in sin. According to this view,
justification is a legal fiction, i.e., it exists only in abstract formulation it is not concretely real (Sanday
and Headlam, 1902:367). Western Christianity has generally placed far more weight on the legal
metaphor of justification than did Paul, for instance, who is the chief articulator of this image in the
New Testament. Alongside the juridical metaphor, the apostle Paul used imagery from political, cultic,
social, familial, biological, technological, and athletic realms. These include liberation from Egypt (or the
ransoming of slaves), conflict and victory of Christ over his enemies, reconciliation, adoption, and
formation of the body. But in the church, while the doctrine of justification has even been made a test
of orthodoxy, other images have fallen into disuse.
The extraordinary development and popularity of the juridical image for understanding the work of
Christ in Christendom probably owes more to the Roman Empire and the legal practices of the
Justinian Code than it does to Paul and the source the Old Testament from which he drew the
juridical imagery which he used. The Western church has poured content into its understanding of the
juridical metaphor from the familiar spheres of Roman law (guilt, punishment, satisfaction, acquittal)
and Greek philosophy (abstract concept of universal moral law), while the apostles used the juridical
metaphor with Old Testament covenant concepts in mind.
The sacramental-penitential practice of medieval Catholicism as well as the solafideism of Protestant
orthodoxy have both found the juridical metaphor especially compatible for explaining the work of
Christ. This is not so much because of their biblicism, but because both were Constantinian in their
view of the church, and each in its own way offered a solution to the problem which occurs when the
church and society in general become coterminous. As frequently happens in a bipolar debate, many
have perceived only two alternatives for understanding justification. Either it is God's declaration of
acceptance after a long process of sanctification, or it is a forensic declaration of people's
righteousness as if they were
righteous which in reality is a legal fiction, since they are not. Inasmuch as we are able to take a fresh
look at the biblical material, we will discover another way to understand these terms and
consequently the possibility of enriching our
understanding of the saving work of Christ by way of the justification image. One way to throw light
on the meaning of justification is to reexamine the biblical meaning of dikaiosune in the light of its Old
Testament predecessor, tsedaqa.
How does this righteousness/right-wizing image correspond to traditional orthodox Protestant
understanding of justification by faith? First of all, it affirms the Protestant position in recognizing that
our justification results from a divine act performed apart from our acts and in spite of our rebellion
against God. God alone has proven himself faithful to us, as well as to himself as a covenant-keeping
God, while we have been utterly unfaithful. However, at other points this vision departs notably. We do
not conceive of God's act of justification primarily as one of declaring humankind to be just, i.e., of
imputing legal righteousness in a purely formal sense. While legal metaphors are used occasionally in
describing the death of Christ, this image, as it has been used in the church's tradition, has not taken
human sin and God's holiness with sufficient seriousness. Sin involves our transferring ultimate allegiance
from God to created things, faithless disobedience to the covenant-keeping God, and deceitful self-
centeredness and self-aggrandizement. In these attitudes and actions we have become enslaved to
fallen structures from which we cannot escape.
Orthodoxy has tended to reduce this state of affairs to a legal transgression; righteousness, God's
struggle to defeat the powers and establish his new creation (we see that tsedaqa in the Old
Testament was God's saving acts), tends to be reduced to a forensic declaration. While the traditional
view is not altogether inadequate, it provides the framework for reducing justification to the private
transaction between the individual and God, while overlooking the social and cosmic dimensions of sin and
righteousness. (Luther's intense personal struggle has left its indelible mark on Protestantism.)
The matter is not one of denying the validity of the personal aspects of justification. It is a question of
getting a vision of the fuller biblical perspective of righteousness. The entire life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus answers the question of whether God creates a people for himself, caring for
them, keeping his promises to them, in short, whether he is the God of the Bible. God's righteousness is
not merely the declaration which pardons the individual, but that power which establishes a whole new world,
the force which brought the kingdom of God into being. So when Paul writes in Romans of the revelation
of God's righteousness, his focus is on the historic saving acts of God in Jesus Christ. This vindicates
God in the face of human doubt and rebellion. Protestantism's fundamental claim that human efforts
can in no way earn the righteousness of God may be wholeheartedly affirmed. It comes to us as a gift.
It is a matter of accepting the fact
that God accepts us. But in spite of this, we may still question the value of justification as the major
technical term to understand the work of Christ. The verb dikaioo can just as well be translated "to
make righteous" as "to justify." Its relationship to dikaiosune (righteousness) and dikaios (righteous) is
evident. However, the verb has nearly always been translated "to justify," and dikaiosis has been
translated "justification." In doing this, Protestant theologians have often lost sight of the vital,
subjective implications of making righteous or right-wizing. They have undervalued the social and
cosmic implications of God's righteous saving acts. Traditional Protestantism has been able, relatively
easily, to divorce faith from the rest of life and action. As long as God's initiative and primacy in
humankind's salvation remains clear, it might be better to speak of "right-wizing," that is "setting right"
and "making righteous." God's righteousness is not merely a moral attribute or a legal
standard or a forensic declaration. It is primarily saving activity. It includes the life and
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ through which the powers were defeated and new life was
bestowed. The kind of faith which makes us righteous is the covenant faithfulness of God "who raised
from the dead Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 4:24; cf. 10:9-10). To be made righteous is to live in obedient
submission to the righteous God (Rom. 6:13). In the biblical perspective, justification and sanctification
are inseparable realities, and their separation in the interests of pastoral care or doctrinal logic in the
church's tradition may well be challenged on the authority of the biblical witness.