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

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

I hardly need to repeat the traditional Protestant elaboration, that good works follow this faith necessarily. The faith which justifies is never alone, but is active in love since Christ himself is present in it (Gal 2:20-21; 5:6, 22-24). The issue at stake is not whether faith has works, but whether faith must be supplemented by charity in order to effect justification. To put it in another way, the question is whether faith is the engine which drives love or love is the engine which drives faith. The differing ways in which Protestants and Roman Catholics have defined this relation depend in large measure on differing, underlying anthropologies, to which we shall turn shortly. From another perspective, this question is answered already from the NT understanding that faith is defined by its object, Christ, in whom God's promises have come to fulfillment. Faith has works because Christ and his saving work are present and active within it.

We may amply illustrate this relation from Jas 2:20-26, a passage which has long been at the center of the debate on justification. With Timo Laato, and against Trent, we may observe that faith and works do not stand in an additive relation to one another in this context.8 James feel free to say that a person is justified by works (Jas 2:23), just as Abraham and Rahab were justified by works, that is to say, by works alone (Jas 2:21, 25)! Of course, faith is not left out of consideration here. Faith worked within Abraham's works (Jas 2:22).9 It came to its own perfection in these works. The words of Scripture which reckoned righteousness to Abraham therefore came to their fulfillment, just as prophecy comes to fulfillment (Jas 2:23-24).10 There is much more to be said concerning the way in which James understands justification in this passage. Here I simply wish to underscore that according to the biblical understanding, including that of James, faith in Christ and his saving work has and produces its own works.

Thesis 2: There is a conceptual distinction in the biblical witness between the verdict of justification and the vindication which is associated with it, that is, between "forensic" and "effective" righteousness.

Since at least Ernst Kasemann's 1961 Oxford address on the "Righteousness of God in Paul's Thought," in which he interpreted the Pauline expression in terms of a "salvation-creating power," a growing number of biblical scholars have concluded that Paul's language embraces both "forensic" and "effective" justification.11 Nearly all the resistance to this interpretation of Paul came from the Bultmannian perspective and has largely subsided. We almost might say that this reading of Paul belongs to the so-called established results of biblical scholarship, to which almost everyone appeals without question or reflection. Obviously, if we accept this concept of a "meta-justification," we have set aside a fundamental point of disagreement between Protestant and Roman Catholic thought. It is fair to say, I think, that Kasemann's interpretation of Paul marks the movement of this question concerning the nature of justification from without to within the Protestant camp.