"The gift of salvation": Its failure to address the crux of justification

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 1999 by Seifrid, Mark

I. INTRODUCTION

In the fall of 1997, a group of evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics agreed upon a statement concerning the nature of salvation, which was subsequently published in First Things under the title, "The Gift of Salvation." A central aim of the discussions which led to this document was to find "firm agreement on the meaning of salvation, and especially the doctrine of justification" which had not been addressed in a 1994 statement known as "Evangelicals and Catholics Together."' The "Gift of Salvation" therefore takes its place alongside quite a number of recent attempts to find agreement between Catholics and Protestants on the doctrine of justification.2 It is difficult to assess what impact the statement might have, given the informal nature of the discussions which produced it, the variety of the participants in it, the confessional diversity of evangelical Protestants toward whom it is addressed, and the response of the Vatican to the "Joint Declaration" of Lutherans and Catholics released in July of 1998. Moreover, additional statements from participants to the discussions have appeared, describing something of the meaning of various aspects of the "Gift of Salvation."3

Despite the priority which we ought to allow to "authorial intent," confessional statements such as this one do come to have lives of their own. It therefore seems fair to treat the document as it stands for what it says or does not say. In doing so, I do not intend to focus entirely upon faults which in my view appear within the "Gift of Salvation." I wish rather to use the document to highlight some of the basic issues at stake in Protestant dialogue with Catholics. I shall therefore briefly consider the way in which the "Gift of Salvation" addresses the doctrine of justification, and then set out several positions which I regard as fundamental to the current discussion.

II. THE GIFT OF SALVATION

As is well known, the gratuity of salvation has never been a matter of debate between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Both have always affirmed that salvation is a gift. The question has been how grace operates in justification. Does "justification" signify the transformation of the sinner by the grace of God? Or does it represent an unmerited divine verdict in favor of the sinner from which good works follow? Unfortunately, the central statement of the "Gift of Salvation" on justification fuses the two ideas:

In justification, God, on the basis of Christ's righteousness alone, declares us to be no longer his rebellious enemies but his forgiven friends, and by virtue of his declaration it is so.4

Rather than a direct declaration of what justification is and how it takes place, we find here a description of what takes place "in" it. While it is entirely right to think of justification as an event, we surely require a more definite indication of its nature in a statement such as this. Particularly problematic is the way in which the relation between the cross and the "event" of justification is left undefined. Implicitly, the divine declaration stands one step removed from the cross, even if it is said to take place "on the basis of Christ's righteousness alone." In other words, God appears here as the creator who speaks, but it is not clear that he acts as the ruler and judge who has righteous wrath against humanity. An adequate statement concerning justification surely requires a more definite indication of the relationship between the event of justification and the event of the cross. Especially at this point the "Gift of Salvation" fails to address the crux of justification.

Given the indistinct locus of justification, it is not surprising that the topic of faith is separated from it and treated in a subsequent paragraph. The question at stake, however, is whether or not "justification" is defined without remainder by "faith," whether faith alone is, so to speak, the second locus of justification, a sort of mirror, which reflects the cross and resurrection within the human being.

Finally, the statement combines the pronouncement of forgiveness and the idea of an inherent righteousness into an indistinguishable whole: we are .no longer (God's) rebellious enemies but his forgiven friends." In speaking in this way, "the Gift of Salvation" says nothing, because it says everything. On the one hand, the reality of the new obedience in believers has never been in doubt in Protestant confessions. It only has been distinguished from the verdict of righteousness, as the fruit is distinguished from the root. On the other hand, we might happily read the statement in manner which conforms with the Tridentine decree, finding the sole formal cause of justification in the transformation of the human being. I find it hard to think that this effort to speak of an all-comprehensive "meta-justification" will not suffer the same fate that the Regensburg formula of "double justification" suffered in the sixteenth century. 5

As we have just indicated, the discussion of "faith" appears in the immediately following paragraph: