October

October sees the fourth and final post on Tom Wright's new book on justification, and (as is appropriate) the draft of a short section on Calvin's treatment of justification which is to appear in the forthcoming book, Calvin at the Centre (OUP, November). Some of this material on Tom Wright's book will reappear in a rather different form in a paper 'Tom Wright and John Calvin on the Imputation of Righteousness', to be published ere long in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

Next month I might have a go at posting some more on imputation, an issue that arises from the Wright book, and of course a central feature of the Reformed understanding of reconciliation and redemption.

Readers who have not already had their fill of Calvin, and Helm on Calvin, might care to look at the Guardian's website, where I have been invited to post a series of eight short pieces on Calvin, one a week, beginning 28th September.

In Taking a Line, to be posted around the middle of October, I intend to have another glance at dynamic equivalence.

Justification

David F. Wright has this to say, in general, about why it is easy for the children of the Reformation both to read and yet to misread Augustine.

He cites Scripture at great length, and especially the Pauline Epistles, which establish for him salvation received by grace alone - the initiative is entirely God’s, who elects whom he wills, through faith apart from works performed in advance of reception, and faith itself the gift of God. That is to say, his anti-Pelagian writings in particular are replete with Pauline-inspired discussions of this kind, which do not call upon him to clarify repeatedly that justifico basically means "to make righteous", or to show his readers how he understands the gift of justification - of being jusitificati - in relation to this normal meaning. [1]

I believe that it is in such general terms as these that Calvin rather guardedly appropriates Augustine on justification. Augustine sees clearly that justification (however exactly understood) is by grace alone. This is repeatedly expressed in the Anti-Pelagian writings which were such a rich resource for the Reformers in establishing their views of the 'servitude' of the human will and the freeness and power of divine grace.

Accurate as this may be as a view of Augustine's position, Calvin does not quite see him this way, for there is not much evidence that he identifies Augustine as even toying with the idea of justification by faith in a declarative sense, even though, as we have seen, Augustine may have done so, perhaps committing himself to that view (without realizing it) in what he writes. After all, a person might not be as aware as others are of the logical implications of views that he holds.

We can reconstruct Calvin's view of Augustine on justification by considering two lines of evidence. First by noting a striking fact, that throughout his discussion of justification Calvin cites Augustine voluntarily (that is, he is not forced into a citation through the pressure of controversy) and almost wholly with approval. The second line of evidence is the reasons that he provides where he thinks that Augustine is defective.

Here are some of the places where Calvin records his approval of Augustine.

And lest you suppose that there is anything novel in what I say, Augustine has also taught us so to act [viz. To pay no regard to our works for justification]. "Christ”, says he, "will reign forever among his servants. This God has promised, God has spoken; if this is not enough, God has sworn. Therefore, as the promise stands firm, not in respect of our merits, but in respect of his mercy, no one ought to tremble in announcing that of which he cannot doubt”.[2]

Besides, if it is true, as John says, that there is no life without the Son of God (I John. 5.12), those who have no part in Christ, whoever they be, whatever they do or devise, are hastening on, during their whole career, to destruction and the judgment of eternal death. For this reason, Augustine says, ‘Our religion distinguishes the righteous from the wicked, by the law, not of works, but of faith, without which works which seem good are converted into sins’. [3]

The same thing is briefly but elegantly expressed by Augustine when he says, ‘I do not say to the Lord, Despise not the works of my hands; I have sought the Lord with my hands, and have not been deceived. But I commend not the works of my hands, for I fear that when thou examinest them thou wilt find more faults than merits. This only I say, this ask, this desire, Despise not the works of thy hands. See in me thy work, not mine. If thou sees mine, thou condemnest; if thou sees thine own, thou crownest . Whatever good works I have are of thee’. [4]

It is in this fairly regular way that Augustine (and to a lesser extent Bernard) are cited to in order to emphasise sola gratia. Sometimes the citations are for a positive purpose, sometimes negatively. Positively, that salvation is due only to the merits of Christ, and negatively, our own supposed 'merits' count for nothing as regards forgiveness and righteousness, no ground of boasting, because only the merits of Christ count, and God working his graces in us.

With this line of evidence Calvin sometimes contrasts Peter Lombard (whom he calls the 'Pythagoras' of the later Sophists) who, though he had Augustine 'so often in his mouth' failed in his blindness to see that Augustine ascribed to man not the least particle of praise because of good works; and also he contrasts him with the Schoolmen who teach that works have their value from divine 'accepting grace'.[5] And he is scathing about the 'schools of the Sorbonne'[6] to which he gives separate attention in his Antidote to the Articles Agreed Upon by the Faculty of Sacred Theology of Paris. [7]

Despite this widespread positive use of Augustine, there are two issues on which Calvin faults him. The first has to do with his use of the term 'merit'. Calvin includes Augustine in a general condemnation of the introduction of the word into discussions of human charactr and action. Nonetheless, Calvin says, Augustine used it circumspectly.

I admit it was used by ancient ecclesiastical writers, and I wish they had not by the abuse of one term furnished posterity with matter of heresy, although in some passages they themselves show that they had no wish to injure the truth. For Augustine says ‘Let human merits, which perished by Adam, here be silent, and let the grace of God reign by Jesus Christ’…. You see how he denies man the power of acting aright, and thus lays merit prostrate. [8]

The important point For Calvin here is obvious. Although Augustine and Bernard use the term ‘merit’ they do not reckon that the person who enjoys grace has himself merited it. The worth of the act is not due to an action of the person who performs it, but solely to divine grace.

Secondly, and more centrally, Calvin notes that for Augustine justificare connotes subjective renewal. Reviewing the way in which the biblical idea of justification had degenerated in the church, Calvin says, in the first instance about Lombard,

You see here that the chief office of divine grace in our justification he considers to be its directing us to good works by the agency of the Holy Spirit. He intended, no doubt, to follow the opinion of Augustine, but he follows it at a distance, and even wanders far from a true imitation of him, both obscuring what was clearly stated by Augustine, and making what in him was less pure more corrupt. The Schools have always gone from worse to worse, until at length, in their downward path, they have degenerated into a kind of Pelagianism. Even the sentiment of Augustine, or at least his mode of expressing it, cannot be entirely approved of. For although he is admirable in stripping man of all merit of righteousness, and transferring the whole praise of it to God, he classes the grace by which we are regenerated to newness of life under the head of sanctification. Scripture, when it treats of justification by faith, leads us in a very different direction. Turning away our view from our own works, it bids us look only to the mercy of God, and the perfection of Christ.[9]

That is, in Calvin’s view Augustine subsumes ‘grace’, that is, the grace of justification, under sanctification, subjective renewal. This is his account of Augustine’s doctrine of grace using Reformation conceptuality. Not that it is a meritorious consequence of renewal, for renewal is also the fruit of grace, but in Calvin’s view Augustine holds that a person is justified as he is being renewed, and inbeing renewed. Apart from anything else, Calvin wishes to make space for the Pauline assertion that God justifies the ungodly. On Augustine’s view of justification, God justifies the ungodly, but Calvin believes that he means something different (from the Reformers) by ‘justification’.

It is not unknown to me, that Augustine gives a different explanation; for he thinks that the righteousness of God is the grace of regeneration; and this grace he allows to be free, because God renews us, when unworthy, by his Spirit; and from this he excludes the works of the law, that is, those works, by which men of themselves endeavour, without renovation, to render God indebted to them.... But that the Apostle includes all works without exception, even those which the Lord produces in his own people, is evident from the context. [10]

He makes a similar point, though without mentioning Augustine, as follows

There is no controversy between us and the sounder Schoolmen as to the beginning of justification. They admit that the sinner, freely delivered from condemnation, obtains justification, and that by forgiveness of sins; but under the term justification they comprehend the renovation by which the Spirit forms us anew to the obedience of the Law; and in describing the righteousness of the regenerate man, maintain that being once reconciled to God by means of Christ, he is afterward deemed righteous by his good works, and is accepted in consideration of them.[11]

There is ambivalence here, a certain awkwardness. On the one hand, we must not entirely approve of Augustine's thinking, ‘or at least his mode of expressing it’. This suggests a mere verbal disagreement. On the other hand, the Bible's way of thinking is 'leads us in a very different direction'. What is it in Augustine’s way of expressing what he thinks that we may not approve of? It is not merely that Augustine uses the term ‘merit’, because that term can be given a good sense, even though (in Calvin’s eyes) it came in the medieval church to have a very bad sense. Augustine can hardly be blamed for that. Rather it is that he muffles the vital point that justification and sanctification are not only inseparable but also distinct. For in the Augustinian way of thinking, while there is agreement that justification involves freedom from condemnation through forgiveness and the provision of righteousness, and that faith is active in it, subjective renewal is included in it. It is this merging of the two that, in Calvin's view, eventually led to appealing to good works as meritorious, and to the idea of supererogation on which the scandalous medieval abuses relied. Justification and sanctification are inseparable and distinct.



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[1] Wright 59-60

[2] Inst. III.13.4. The quotation is from Augustine’s narration on Psalm 88, tract. 50.

[3] Inst. III.14.4. The Augustine quotation is from Against Two letters of the Pelagians, 3.5

[4] Inst. III.14.20. The quotation is from Augustine on Psalm 137. See also Inst. III.11.22, III.14.3, III.18.5, III.18.7.

[5] Inst. III.15.7 See also Calvin's further reference to 'accepting grace', Inst. III.14.12.

[6] Inst. III.15.7, III.18.9.

[7] Selected Works of John Calvin, Vol. I.

[8] Inst. III.15.2. The Augustine quotation is from The Predestination of the Saints. In the same section Calvin also makes a similar reference to Bernard.

[9] Inst. III.11.15-6.

[10] Comm. Rom. 3.22

[11] Inst. III.14.11

Wright and the Reformation

In the last post I attempted to show that while Wright thinks of justification using the concepts of substitution and imputation, one reason why he cannot commit himself to the Reformed doctrine of justification as the reckoning of Christ’s righteousness to the believer is that he grossly misunderstands it. He ridicules the view, but in fact he ridicules a caricature of the view. He thinks that the Reformed view is that in imputation Christ’s righteousness literally becomes mine, my moral condition, that I have Christ’s moral righteousness (in this sense) as mine. I offered a good bit of textual evidence to show that this is indeed Wright’s view. He may be making things up, but I want it to be clear that I am not.

It follows from the evidence provided in the book that according to the Bishop the Reformed doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, Piper’s view (if you like), because it is an imputation of moral righteousness, must be the imparting of a new character, and because it is Christ’s righteousness, an immaculate, perfect moral character.

But Piper makes it abundantly clear why he uses the phrase ‘moral righteousness’.

Now why have I brought in moral righteousness? Doesn’t that muddy the water? Isn’t justification the bestowing of a status of ‘righteousness’ not the declaration that one is morally righteous? I bring it in for two reasons. One reason is that in the context of Romans, the charge that has brought us into court is ‘None is righteous, no, not one’. (Rom.3.10) Which means: ‘No one does good , no even one’ (Rom.3.12) This is a statement about our moral condition.

The other reason is that God is omniscient, and so his findings always accord with reality. The status bestowed will always accord with whether the charge sticks. When the charge itself is ‘You have no moral righteousness before God’ (cf. Rom. 3:10-18), the finding of an omniscient judge in our favor must be: ‘You do indeed have a moral righteousness before God and therefore a status of acquittal in this court’. (The Future of Justification, 77)

But for some reason Wright cannot see it this way.

He cannot see that the righteousness in question is an alien righteousness which, when imputed, changes the person’s moral status., and that the righteousness required for justification is always alien. But it never ceases to be alien. And he cannot see that understood in this way the view is Pauline, in his understanding of Paul. (‘The thing that is created is not a moral character, nor an infusion of virtue, but a status’ (180)). It is the language of the law court; on that he and Piper are agreed. What is more, those who are imputed with Christ’s righteousness never leave the law-court! The verdict of the Lord , pronounced through the interposition of the Mediator, is eternally efficacious, its sound for ever rings in their ears! Like Paul, they seek to gain Christ, to be found in him, not having their own righteousness which comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. (Phil. 3 8,9.) But for some reason, whenever the term ‘moral’ occurs Wright regards this as denoting the subjective possession of a state, a virtue, not an imputed moral status. Otherwise why is it a ‘category mistake’?

So if the Reformers, to a man, rejected the Roman infusion view of righteousness, and to a man upheld the imputation of the alien righteousness of Christ, what was it that they were upholding but a change of status, the moral status that the vindicated Suffering Servant possesses?

For Wright it appears that, thinking of the ‘Augustinian tradition’ in the most generous terms, there have been three concepts of imputation, and consequently n three concepts of justification.

1. The view of the ‘Augustinian tradition’ which comes in two versions:
(a) The full-bloodied ‘infusion’ Roman Catholic view, (making righteous by impartation) (and
(b) The Reformation view if justification through the righteousness of Christ (receiving Christ’s own righteous character by imputation).
Both 1(a) and 1(b) are ‘legalistic’.
2. The Pauline view, recently discovered by himself and the other adherents to the ‘new perspective’ outlook, that righteousness is a ‘law court’ term according to which (because of Christ) a person is declared to be in the right, to be acquitted, to have a new status, and so to be vindicated. This is not ‘legalistic’. (I place inverted commas around the word as Wright does , though I’ve no idea what their significance is.)

But as far as the history of the concept of justification is concerned, this is a complete and utter dog’s breakfast. I believe that it is impossible, for Wright or for anyone else, to state 1(b) in a way that distinguishes it both from 1(a) and from 2.

I used to think that everyone knew that a part of the Reformation break with medieval Augustinianism was a decisive distinction between imputing and imparting, between justification and sanctification, between the change of status of a person and that person’s change of character. By faith only, a person has Christ’s righteousness reckoned to him. That is Reformation (and Pauline) justification. By faith in the promises of God, the justified believer is set on the path of inward renewal. That is sanctification. But for some reason, Wright completely misses this. The nearest he comes to it is in this passage, some of which was quoted in an earlier post:

The idea that what sinners need is for someone else’s ‘righteousness’ to be credited to their account simply muddles up the categories, importing with huge irony into the equation the idea that the same tradition worked so hard to eliminate, namely the suggestion that, after all, ‘righteousness’ here means ‘moral virtue’, ‘the merit acquired from lawkeeping’, or something like that. We don’t have any of that, said the Reformers, so we have to have some one else’s credited to us, and ‘justification’ can’t mean ‘being made righteous’, as though God first pumps a little bit of moral virtue into use and then generously regards the part as standing for the whole. (187)

This is the closest Wright gets to stating the Reformed view. (See also the reference to ‘extraneous righteousness’. (141))

Further, as we noted in the last Analysis, Wright believes that this view leads us back into the world of ‘legalism’; it does not sufficiently extricate us from mediaeval Augustinianism. With or without the inverted commas, the term ‘legalism’ is unclear in this connection. But in any case this won’t stand up as a criticism that Wright can sustain, because his own view of negative imputation, consisting of the pardon of sin on the basis of the work of the true Israelite, being ‘acquitted’, ‘forgiven’, ‘cleared’, (187) is already in that ‘legal’ world. If ‘legalism’ is a criticism of positive justification by the imputation of alien righteousness , then it is already a criticism of the negative imputation, justification by the non-imputation of sin, that Wright espouses. After all, the Bishop can hardly press for justification being a law-court term and then deny that it has anything to do with legality and illegality.

Summing Up

Earlier in this series of posts on Wright’s book I claimed that by its publication the ground between himself and those who, like John Piper, uphold the classic Reformed view had been narrowed. Here is the present position, as I see it.

There is common ground on the following three or four points: that Paul’s teaching on justification is God-centred, and that its axis is the Abrahamic covenant; that ‘justify’ ad ‘justification’ is law-court language, declaring a person to have the status of having been vindicated; that Christ is our substitute, and that in the act of substitution God fails to impute our own sins to us, pardoning them instead. Wright thinks of imputation in negative terms, the not-imputing of sin, rather than in positive terms, the imputation of righteousness. We shall return to this difference in a moment.

But then there are the differences, but (as I have said) narrowable differences. They are narrowable because they all involve only points of logic. These are (as I would put it):

1. Wright has an imperfect appreciation of God’s righteous character. This goes back to what Piper says about the meaning of ‘righteousness’, but it also embodies a logical point, that God’s righteousness must be a feature or property or attribute of who he is, rather that (solely) a feature of what he does. He is righteous, and so acts righteously.
2. Wright’s argument that the doctrine of imputation of righteousness as usually understood is ‘legalistic’ fails to convince. If the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness is ‘legalistic’, then so is his own view that imputation is negative, that it covers the non-imputation of the sins and trespasses of the believer. This also is a point of logic, that is, a question of the consistency or otherwise of Wright’s views. (This point might be pressed: How does the faithfulness of the faithful Israelite, Jesus Christ, become ours, negating our sins and trespasses, except through ‘positive’ imputation?)
3. There is misunderstanding (or at least a great deal of unclarity) on Wright’s part regarding the ‘category mistake’ of thinking of the imputation of righteousness as the imputation of moral character. To my knowledge no Reformed theologian has claimed what Wright appears to believe that at least some of them think. To suppose that such imputation ‘imparts’ a righteous character is to be guilty not so much of a category mistake as a straight logical incoherence. This is a final logical point.

On the Reformed view, Christ’s imputed righteousness is ‘alien’, external, the righteousness of another, and even when imputed, it will always remain alien. God justifies the ungodly as ungodly. The widely-used illustration, that Christ’s righteousness is credited to my account, is misleading. (If I’m credited, mustn’t Christ be debited?) To repeat, in the imputation of righteousness, nothing moves. Imputation is not an electronic moral transfer. Righteousness is not transmitted, transfused, or relocated in any way. (Any more than
if I receive free insurance cover I receive a transfusion of some mysterious substance called ‘insurance’.) The believer’s imputed righteousness remains inalienably Christ’s perfect righteousness. What is true is that by an act of the unspeakable mercy of God the believer is shielded by, or seen through, or covered by, the righteousness of another.

It this always-remaining-alien righteousness that is reckoned to the believer, and it is inseparably linked with the distinct blessing of subjective renewal, sanctification. Justification and sanctification - distinct and yet inseparable, as Calvin routinely says. So the Reformed view of imputation is that justification is a wholly extrinsic change, a change of status, that is, a change of relation, by itself no inward change, but carrying with it the sure prospect of such a change. Hence the language of Reformed popular piety: we are ‘clothed with’ Christ’s righteousness, it is ‘put on’, we are ‘sheltered’ by it. ‘Clothed with his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne’. Does Bishop Wright not know this?

So we have this bizarre outcome. While holding to a law-court view of justification Wright has at the same time failed to recognize that the Reformed view of Christ’s alien righteousness is also a law-court view. Because of this his historical analysis, such as it is, is flawed, and his exegetical tour de force of Paul’s view of justification is largely beside the point, for the Reformed outlook expresses its main claims: the law-court point, the central position of the Abrahamic covenant, and the counting of the believer as righteous for Christ’s sake.

This is where Wright’s competitiveness, his insistence of always having the last word, and his failure to provide a clear theological framework, or even to write clearly, saying what he means and what he does not mean by certain terms such as ‘moral righteousness’, and ‘legalistic’ and ‘impart’ and ‘infuse’, prove to be so frustrating. Had he been clearer and more focussed he could have said this:

‘Piper (and the entire Reformed tradition) and I agree on the meaning of reckon, count as, impute, the place of Abraham and Israel in the covenant, and the way that, according to Paul, to be a believer is to be a ‘real’ Jew, to be circumcised in the heart, to be Abraham’s seed. We agree that a person is justified now, and also at the Last Judgment, though we might differ over how these are related. We also agree on some other vital questions - on Christ as our substitute, and the removal of the guilt of through imputation, and why what is imputed justifies. I don’t like the idea of justification having a foundation, though I agree that it has a basis. But I utterly concur with the Reformed tradition that what is imputed cannot be moral righteousness, because one person’s moral state cannot literally become someone else’s. To suppose that it could be is a category mistake. We certainly differ over the content of such imputation, for whereas I think it involves only not reckoning sin, John Piper thinks that it also includes the reckoning of righteousness. We also differ, perhaps, over what counts as ‘legalistic’. It would certainly be good to think further about the remaining matters we differ on.’

And John Piper would agree!

As I have been stressing, all these matters of difference rest on points of logic. Little turns on the nuances of Pauline exegesis, but much turns on its good and necessary consequences. Were Wright to follow through the logic of his position then, I believe, it would approach even more closely to the classical Reformed view than it has already.