“Justification by Faith on Trial”

Romans 9:30-10:13

November 2, 2003

I decided to interrupt our series in the Gospel of Matthew on this Reformation Sunday to address a growing threat to the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. If several years ago it remained on the far horizon, a cloud the size of man’s hand, it has very definitely grown larger and drawn nearer of late.

Text Comment

v.4 The word “end” in the phrase “Christ is the end of the law” can mean several different things. The Greek word telos that Paul uses here is very like the English word “end.” We use the word “end” in very different ways. We talk about things coming to an end, but we also talk about the end justifying the means, and so on. The phrase here in Rom. 10:4 might mean that Christ is the termination of the law, he brings the law to an end so that it is no more and Christians, therefore, are no longer obligated to obey it. Some Christians have thought that is Paul’s meaning, but the fact that he has already said earlier in Romans that his doctrine of justification by faith does not nullify the law but upholds the law and has several times in the argument of the letter upheld the authority of the law, makes that conclusion highly unlikely. The law of God is with us still. Others have taken “end” to mean “goal” or “purpose.” That is, the law of Moses, indeed the entire OT pointed to Christ and found its fulfillment in Christ. Paul here is concerned to show that Israel misunderstood the law and the proof of that is that she rejected Christ when he came among them, for the law pointed to Christ and its demands can be fulfilled only through faith in Christ. The second half of the sentence then confirms that interpretation: if Christ is the goal of the Law, then there is a status of righteousness for those who believe in him. The Jews were seeking a righteousness from keeping the Law but misunderstood the law and so did not see how it pointed to and led to Christ and how its demands could be fulfilled only in the righteousness that Christ gives to those who believe in him. [Cranfield, ii, 515-520]

v.6 Verse 5 and the verses that follow it are a contrast between two theories of how to obtain righteousness before God, that way chosen by the Jews, referred to in v. 30-32, the way of works, and, on the contrary, the way of faith in Christ. Paul is elaborating theologically now the point he made historically in vv. 30ff. viz. how by Israel’s obstinate determination to establish her own righteousness on the basis of her works she refused to accept God’s gift humbly, as the undeserved gift of his mercy.” [Cranfield, ii, 505] There are two answers to the question of how sinners may be put right with God: by their own effort and by the receiving of God’s gift. The former is the wrong answer because, as Paul is at pains to say earlier in Romans and elsewhere in his letters, sinners cannot satisfy the demands of God’s holy law by their own efforts, however zealous they may be to make the attempt. Through the law comes the knowledge of our sin, as he puts it in Rom. 3:21. Christ must make us righteous because we cannot make ourselves so.

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It may come as a surprise to some of you to learn that the doctrine of justification by faith, the theological inheritance of the Reformation churches, is coming under new attack from within Protestant evangelicalism. We might well have thought that the question of how sinners were put right with God, how they obtained the forgiveness of their sins, how they gained peace with God had been forever answered by the theologians of the Reformation, Luther and Calvin especially, and by their followers, perhaps especially the English Puritans of the 17th century.

You know our doctrine. Justification is the act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ, imputed to us and received by faith alone. In the Protestant doctrine of justification there is a direct line drawn between the cross and our forgiveness, between Christ’s life and our righteousness. What Jesus did is counted as if we had done it ourselves – both his perfectly obedient life and his suffering and death – it is reckoned to us when we believe in him. And so we are justified by God – forgiven and declared righteous in his sight – not for anything we have done or could do, but for what Christ did in our place. Faith is simply the hand by which we receive Christ’s gift for ourselves.

But no doctrine of the Word of God, especially no doctrine touching the heart of the gospel, will be left unmolested; not in the Devil’s world. And so we are finding new doubts being expressed about justification by faith and a new argument that Luther’s doctrine and Calvin’s and the doctrine of Protestant Christianity since the Reformation is not, after all, a faithful account of the Bible’s teaching. Now, you can be forgiven for not feeling that this needs to be taken all that seriously. After all, Paul’s teaching in Romans and Galatians has been worked over pretty thoroughly through the centuries. How likely is it that what Paul was so careful to teach was misunderstood? But, as with thinking in other fields of knowledge, it is not always the facts that determine where the currents of thought will flow.

In some ways, it is not at all surprising that the attack on justification should take its present form or that it should come at a time when tolerance has become the summum bonum, the ultimate virtue in Western society. Justification is a doctrine that divides: it divided Jews from Christians in the early days and it divides Protestants from Catholics today and those who are leading the attack on the doctrine are motivated by a desire to unify, to overcome those ancient divisions. The doctrine of justification by faith stands in the way of that unity because it very clearly seems to mean that the Jews got it completely wrong in the matter of salvation and so did the Roman Catholics because they both deny justification by faith alone. How can there be rapprochement between Jews and Christians, between Catholics and Protestants if the accusation remains that Judaism and Roman Catholicism lead men astray. But so long as Protestants remain convinced of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, they can never accept that Jews or Catholics are right about the way of salvation. This interest in ecumenism, in reconciliation between Judaism and Christianity and between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism is what is driving the new doubts about the Reformation doctrine of justification.

It is a movement, so far, primarily limited to Pauline studies, to the scholarship that is devoted to the writings of the Apostle Paul. This new movement in Pauline studies, it even has a name – it is called the “new perspective” – originated in a seminal book by a scholar named E.P. Sanders, published in 1977 and entitled Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sanders’ work came out about 6 months before I was to hand in my doctoral thesis at the University of Aberdeen and made it necessary for me to drop everything to study his large book and incorporate interaction with it into the dissertation. So, as you can imagine, I’ve never liked E.P. Sanders! Now Sanders is not an evangelical. He doesn’t think that Jesus actually rose from the dead, for example. But he has religious concerns and one of the greatest of them is Jewish/Christian reconciliation. He wants to repair the ancient breach between Judaism and Christianity. He believes that Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, and especially its corollary – that the Jews of the first century rejected the true way of salvation – was the cause of a great deal of Jewish persecution, including the terrible persecutions of Nazi Germany, and that the only way to lay to rest the historic antipathy between Christians and Jews is for Christians to abandon Luther’s understanding of Paul’s teaching. And we should do that, he says, for Luther was mistaken.

As Sanders tells the story, the Judaism of Paul’s day was not legalistic. It did not believe or teach that people earned their acceptance with God by their good works. In fact, Sanders argues that first century Judaism was as fully a religion of grace as was Pauline Christianity. In both Judaism of that time and in Paul’s teaching, Sanders says, people got into the circle of the saved by God’s grace and kept themselves in that circle by their works. Sanders calls the theology of first century Judaism “covenantal nomism” (that is obedience to the law within the covenant of grace) and he argues that Paul’s doctrine was just another form of “covenantal nomism.” Judaism and Pauline Christianity, in other words, were just variations on the same theme, two different ways of speaking of salvation by grace. The reason Paul left Judaism for Christianity was his personal encounter with Christ, but that encounter did not involve accepting a fundamentally different understanding of how sinners are saved.

Sanders book has been very influential. And a number of scholars have been persuaded by it – not I think so much because its arguments are that persuasive in themselves, but because, as is so often the case in scholarship, it was an idea whose time had come. And, as I say, that idea has now made its way into evangelical scholarship, especially and most influentially through the books of the English Bishop, N.T. Wright. Now, unlike E.P. Sanders, N.T. Wright is most assuredly an evangelical. He has just published an impressive 817 page book arguing again for the historicity of Christ’s resurrection. Wright is a weighty scholar and his new book has received important reviews in major American newspapers and journals.

Wright is not so much interested in Jewish/Christian dialogue and reconciliation as he is in Roman Catholic/Protestant dialogue. He knows that justification by faith is a doctrine that divides Protestants from Catholics and he wants to bridge that divide.

N.T. Wright has largely accepted Sanders’ account of first century Judaism. And so he also argues that Protestants have been guilty of a fundamental misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching about justification. In Wright’s view Paul had no quarrel with Jewish law-keeping except at those points where it interfered with the evangelization of the Gentiles, where it focused on Jewish identity-markers such as the Sabbath, circumcision, and dietary restrictions. In Wright’s view, Paul did not argue that the Jews obeyed the law according to a different theory of salvation or that the gospel was a repudiation of Jewish legalism and its theory of works-righteousness. The Jewish righteousness that Paul criticizes, says Wright, is not self-righteousness or works-righteousness, but national righteousness, a sense of their own special place in the kingdom of God that requires Gentiles to practice Jewish piety in order to be right with God. Luther held that Paul’s polemic against the Jewish view of law-keeping had to do with the wrong way and the right way for a sinner to be put right with a holy God. But in Wright’s view, Paul is not talking about that at all. He’s talking about how you know who is in and who is out. Wright puts it like this:

“Despite a long tradition to the contrary, the problem Paul addresses in Galatians is not the question of how precisely someone becomes a Christian, or attains to a relationship with God…. but the question of how you define the people of God: are they to be defined by the badges of the Jewish race, or in some other way?”

In other words, Paul was against the Jewish way of law-keeping only insofar as it kept the Gentiles from being recognized as true Christians – as the observance of Sabbath and circumcision laws did. Otherwise, he had no problem with the Jews and their understanding of the law and obedience to the law. He didn’t find in their law-keeping a legalistic principle against which he set the gospel’s principle of salvation by grace. He didn’t accuse the Jews of being legalistic or of trying to earn their righteousness before God by their own effort. You become a Christian by believing in Jesus Christ, says Wright. Period. In other words, there is nothing in Paul about Christ’s righteousness being imputed to us, nothing about our being justified on the basis of Christ’s righteousness and not our own. Justification does not answer the question: how can I be right with God? It answers the question: how can we tell who belongs to God’s covenant people? And Paul’s answer was that believing in Christ was all one needed to belong as opposed to the Jewish Christians who were insisting also on circumcision, observing the Saturday Sabbath, and keeping the regulations concerning clean and unclean foods. That was the issue and the only issue: who would be considered a Christian. The Jews were answering the question by saying that to be a Christian you also had to do these Jewish things and Paul said you didn’t. That is what justification is about; that is what Paul means by it. It had nothing to do with how sinners are put right with God.

Defining justification this way, as a question of identity and recognition rather than salvation itself, a way is found to shrink the gap that divides Roman Catholics from Protestants. Now justification does not have to do with salvation itself, in fact it concerns matters about which Roman Catholics and Protestants don’t even disagree. Voila, the Reformation split can be repaired and the Western church be one again!

I could say much more in describing the views of N.T. Wright and others who have embraced this “new perspective,” but it would be more confusing than helpful. So let me rather tell you what I think about this new attack on the doctrine of justification by faith as it has been understood since the Reformation, the new attack on what we have long believed was the doctrine by which the Bible explains how sinners can be put right with God and enter into fellowship with God, though God is holy and they are deeply sinful.

I. First, Sanders is wrong about first century Judaism.

First century Judaism was legalistic. It was not simple, undisguised, blatant legalism. It was not simple “pull-yourselves-up-by-your-own-bootstraps-legalism.” The rabbis talked about grace and about God’s mercy. You can find many such statements in the rabbis of the time. Sanders has collected them for us. But you can also find a great deal that you will never find in the Old Testament and never in the New Testament. Time after time the rabbis say things such as it was because Israel practiced circumcision that God divided the Red Sea for them or that God offered his covenant to all but only Israel accepted it or that all nations were offered God’s law but only Israel took up the offer and only because Israel was the only nation able to keep it! Other rabbis speak of an individual being judged according to the majority of his works, whether good or bad. In fact, though Sanders wants to call Judaism’s theology of salvation “covenantal nomism” he has to explain the fact that the term “covenant” almost disappears from Jewish writings in that period and, when it does appear, it has become simply a synonym for the law or some specific commandment of the law, usually circumcision. Sanders can only claim that the covenant – God’s relationship with his people established by his grace – is not mentioned because it is assumed. When one rabbi says, “God willed to allow Israel to earn merits, and therefore he gave them much Torah and commandments,” you know you have moved to different ground from that occupied by Moses and the prophets, and you know Paul would never have said such a thing! Not in a thousand years. The law of God provided for the justification of the righteous only; but fallen man is not righteous. To continue to trust one’s own law-keeping, as many Jews did in Paul’s day, and as he himself did before he came to Christ, is to beat a dead horse. As Paul says in Rom. 8:3, our sin made the law “weak.” No rabbi said that!

In regard to these statements that the exodus was earned by Israel’s obedience or that she was elected by God because he knew that she alone would keep his commandments, Sanders, in one of the most revealing sentences in his big book, can only say that there are not doctrines they are only explanatory devices. Well, if your explanation is that God chose you because of your obedience, you do not have the faith of Moses or the prophets and you certainly don’t have the faith of Jesus or Paul!

One of the interesting features of the new perspective on Paul is that it has been largely worked out without reference to the Gospels. The reason for that is that Sanders’ view of Judaism and N.T. Wright’s of Paul are on a collision course with the statements of Jesus himself and of the Gospel writers. It is perfectly clear that Jesus thought the Pharisees were legalists, were proud of their own righteousness, and were counting on their goodness for their peace with God. And is that not how Paul described himself before he became a follower of Jesus Christ? It was only when he realized the full extent of his sin and guilt that he abandoned his Pharisaical effort to earn his way to heaven. When the rich young ruler tells the Lord Jesus that he had kept all of the commandments from his youth, he was saying only what a great many Jews of that day would have said. That man possesses the ability to keep the commandments of God perfectly was believed so firmly by the rabbis that they spoke in all seriousness of people who had kept the law from A to Z. [Strack-Billerbeck, Kom., i, 814] We will find out in the Sermon on the Mount what a fatal misunderstanding that is.

There are many other evidences that first century Judaism practiced a religion of self-salvation. Not that there was no place for the mercy of God, there was. But the real difference, the difference between life and death was not made by God or the Messiah, but by the individual himself or herself, by obedience and by good works. For example by the first century, Judaism had almost completely lost the idea of atonement through substitute blood. It was a religion of self-salvation; it had no place for a Redeemer who would die for the sins of the world. That is a very great change from the religion of Moses! The covenant revealed at Sinai was founded on divine acts of redemption; but covenant in first century Judaism was nothing but the possibility of redemption through one’s own repentance and obedience, with God’s help thrown in. That is why Judaism went on without losing a beat when the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 and sacrifices came to an end.

What is more, Judaism’s legalism was inevitable once it permitted religious life and thought to be dominated by legal casuistry. The religious life had become the performance of a host of rules governing even the most minute aspects of life. Given the natural tendency of the human heart to externalism, it was inevitable that Judaism’s elaborate system of rules would produce an externalistic/legalistic understanding of man’s duty to God, that the state of the heart would become less important. Is that not precisely what Jesus says over and over again had happened to the Jews of his day.

It is not a slur on Judaism per se to say that it was legalistic in the time of the New Testament. The true covenantal faith of Israel had often descended into some corrupt theory of self-salvation, by ritual obedience or by moral virtue. The OT prophets are always protesting against this because it happened so often in their time! Israel’s failure was always to substitute her own works for true and living faith in God her Savior. And if that was the error of Judaism in the first century, the error against which both Jesus and Paul protested, well, it has been the error of the Christian church times without number ever since. She too has often substituted a living faith in God and Christ for an elaborate system of rules that govern her religious life. She too has become externalistic and legalistic. Ask the typical Protestant Christian today why he or she expects to go to heaven, and you are very likely to hear an explanation not unlike what a Jew might have said in the first century: I have been a good person, I haven’t killed anybody, I pay my taxes, I even go to church from time to time. I’ve done well enough. It is the natural heresy of the human heart to think that way about salvation.

You should be aware of the fact that, while Sanders new account of first century Judaism has been influential, many, if not most scholars have dismissed it as unsupported by the evidence. Sanders, in my view, has written a very impressive book that completely fails to prove his point and, in fact, provides more than enough evidence to disprove it in its own pages!

II. In the second place, N.T. Wright’s account of the teaching of Paul is wrong.

Like Sanders, Wright has to argue – always a dangerous thing to do – that Paul’s words don’t mean what they seem to mean, what they rather obviously seem to mean. Wright knows, of course, that no Greek dictionary defines “justify” as “to make or declare someone to belong to a group” or “righteousness” as “membership within a group.” He knows these words mean to declare righteous in a legal sense, that they are the language of the courtroom. He has to argue that all of that is just a figure of speech.

Of course, no one denies that Paul was concerned with Jewish Christian insistence that Gentiles practice circumcision and the like. It is obviously an issue. But, plainly and in Paul’s own express language, the issue is larger than that. It is: how does one become a Christian and how does one obtain a right relationship with God. The reason why Paul rejected Jewish Christian efforts to insist that Gentiles observe the most important obligations of Jewish piety – circumcision, the Sabbath, and the food laws – was precisely because that insistence betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of how sinners were saved.

And we say the same thing about Roman Catholic theology. We don’t deny, of course, that Catholics talk about God’s grace. They do, just as the Jews did and just as Israel did in the days of the prophets. But, at bottom, in Roman Catholicism, just as in Judaism, it is a person’s works, especially his religious works, that make the difference. If Judaism in the first century believed in “covenantal nomism” – the idea that one gets in by grace and stays in by works – and that salvation is, therefore, partly what God does and partly what we do, then Roman Catholicism is a covenantal nomism too. For it teaches the same thing. But Paul’s teaching was not covenantal nomism. It was that right standing and acceptance with God is possible only on the basis of the righteousness of another – not your own righteousness, but Christ’s – received by faith. “O foolish Galatians,” he writes, “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” “Having got in by grace are you now seeking to say in by works?” The question is rhetorical and the answer is an emphatic “No!”

Paul over and over again contrasts the keeping of the law with faith as two different principles of salvation. This is what we have in the text we read this morning and it is characteristic. The Jews sought to establish their own righteousness, that is they pursued righteousness as if it were by works instead of, as it is, by faith. And that was the message from the beginning, Paul goes on to say. Moses’ message was the same as his: believe in Jesus Christ and you will be saved. It is not a matter or your doing – going even up to heaven or down to hell (the Jews were very zealous, Paul says) – it is a matter of your trusting Christ and calling on his name. Why? Because you need a righteousness you don’t have and can’t produce and Christ and Christ alone, has such a righteousness to give you! The question is: where may I find righteousness by which to stand before a holy God? And the answer is: that righteousness comes from God through Jesus Christ; Christ is the goal of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.

With Sanders and with Wright, unfortunately, there is a real failure to take sin seriously, the same failure the Lord detected in the thinking of the Pharisees. Paul’s great argument in Romans 1-3, laying all men guilty and helpless before the judgment of God, Sanders dismisses as simply rhetorical flourish. But it is far from that. It is the argument upon which Paul rests the necessity of finding righteousness somewhere else than in ourselves, for, Paul argues, we don’t have any and can’t manufacture it.

Paul’s doctrine, the entire Bible’s doctrine is that when we believe in Jesus Christ all his righteousness becomes ours; and in that same instant the Spirit and the power of Christ erupt into our lives to begin a process of transformation which moves on relentlessly until we are at last like Jesus himself. Justification comes first and produces sanctification. Both are God’s work and God’s grace in us. But our status as the children of God, our peace in the prospect of God’s judgment, that rests on the righteousness of Jesus Christ – the life he lived in our place and the death he died in our place – that righteousness which became ours when we trusted in him.

What we are finding today in the new distaste for Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith is the age-old resistance of the human heart to a salvation that diminishes man’s place to zero and gives all the credit to God and to Jesus Christ, to the idea of having to stand before God entirely in someone else’s righteousness. As the Scottish theologian and pastor, John Brown of Wamphray wrote in the 17th century: “There is a corrupt bias in the heart of men by nature and a strong inclination to reject the gospel-doctrine of free justification, through faith in Christ; and to ascribe too much to themselves in that affair.” It is fair to say that men ascribing too much to themselves has also been the story of the church in the world from the Garden of Eden to the present day!

You tell me, you who have read the Bible for yourselves and applied it to your own hearts and lives: who has understood it rightly and well? The late President Sukarno, of Indonesia, wrote of his approaching death:

“I believe strongly in the hereafter. I also believe that there are invisible angels near me at all times. The angel at my right does the good deeds. When comes the day of reckoning, he’ll brag: ‘Here, Sukarno, are all of your good deeds. Look at them.’ Then the angel on the left will gloat: ‘Ah, [father], but your vices and dread sins, you will note, make a much longer list; and that being the case, I am afraid we have no choice but to send you to hell.’ I very much fear that if there is really a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord, and if he is going to have the say where I go, then, alas, I shall probably plunge straight to hell. I don’t dare hope where he will send me. I hope only that when my time comes, it will be over quickly.” [Cited from Brother Andrew’s The Ethics of Smuggling in Peter Barnes, “Tom Wright and Modern Evangelical Revisions of Justification by Faith,” BOT 443-444 (Aug-Sept 2000) 50-51]

That is the way the Jewish rabbis often spoke about salvation, though they were not so honestly pessimistic. Is that what the Bible purports to teach us? Or is it rather this.

David Dickson, the 17th century Scot, on his deathbed, when asked what he was doing, replied, “I am taking all my bad deeds and all my good deeds and throwing them into one bundle, and fleeing from both to Christ.”

You must choose: stand before God in yourself and with your life, your thoughts, words, and deeds to speak for you; or stand clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ himself, who lived and died for you, which righteousness became yours when you trusted in him. Christians make the latter choice. That is why they call us Christians.