If justification is by faith alone, how can we apply James 2:24, which says a person is justified by what he does, not his faith alone?

That question is not critical only today, but it was in the eye of the storm we call the Protestant Reformation that swept through and divided the Christian church in the sixteenth century. Martin Luther declared his position: Justification is by faith alone, our works add nothing to our justification whatsoever, and we have no merit to offer God that in any way enhances our justification. This created the worst schism in the history of Christendom.

In refusing to accept Luther’s view, the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated him, then responded to the outbreak of the Protestant movement with a major church council, the Council of Trent, which was part of the so-called Counter-Reformation and took place in the middle of the sixteenth century. The sixth session of Trent, at which the canons and decrees on justification and faith were spelled out, specifically appealed to James 2:24 to rebuke the Protestants who said that they were justified by faith alone: “You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.” How could James say it any more clearly? It would seem that that text would blow Luther out of the water forever.

Of course, Martin Luther was very much aware that this verse was in the book of James. Luther was reading Romans, where Paul makes it very clear that it’s not through the works of the law that any man is justified and that we are justified by faith and only through faith. What do we have here? Some scholars say we have an irreconcilable conflict between Paul and James, that James was written after Paul, and James tried to correct Paul. Others say that Paul wrote Romans after James and he was trying to correct James.

I’m convinced that we don’t really have a conflict here. What James is saying is this: If a person says he has faith, but he gives no outward evidence of that faith through righteous works, his faith will not justify him. Martin Luther, John Calvin, or John Knox would absolutely agree with James. We are not saved by a profession of faith or by a claim to faith. That faith has to be genuine before the merit of Christ will be imputed to anybody. You can’t just say you have faith. True faith will absolutely and necessarily yield the fruits of obedience and the works of righteousness. Luther was saying that those works don’t add to that person’s justification at the judgment seat of God. But they do justify his claim to faith before the eyes of man. James is saying, not that a man is justified before God by his works, but that his claim to faith is shown to be genuine as he demonstrates the evidence of that claim of faith through his works.

—Dr. R.C. Sproul

Via: Ligonier Ministries Blog

This is a wonderful explanation of Justification by Faith Alone from Pastor Allistair Begg, founder of Truth for Life.

Via: Tim Phillips

The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals recently posted a video on their Facebook page of Dr. R.C. Sproul responding to a question about justification by faith or by perfect obedience. Here is the audio version of his response which is just terrific. It is vintage Sproul…

This is a transcript of Dr. Sproul’s response:

Here is a question, that in the asking of it, violates one of the most basic informal fallacies of logic: the fallacy of the false dilemma – or sometimes called the “either/or” fallacy. The question goes as follows: considering the lack of depth in much of the Church’s preaching today, please answer and expand on the meaning of this question: are we saved by faith, or by a life of perfect obedience.

Yes. We are saved by faith, and we are saved by faith in a life of perfect obedience.

The central issue in the sixteenth century between the protestant reformers – it was the issue then, it is the issue now – was the issue of what is the ground or the basis of our justification. And the Roman Catholic Church then, and now, teaches that the only way God will ever declare a person just is if that person has righteousness inhering, the latin inherens according to Trent, in his person. The person can’t have inherent righteousness without the assistance of grace, without the assistance of faith, and without the assistance of Christ. But, with the assistance of those things, by the human cooperation with those acts of grace, the person must come to the place where they are inherently righteous before God will ever declare them just.

That, to me, demolishes the good news altogether. And if that doctrine of Rome is true, I promise you I will sleep in tomorrow morning and will never glance again at the Christian faith because it is a doctrine that leaves me without hope. There is not enough time in eternity, for me in purgatory, to reach a level of pure inherent righteousness.

Thanks be to God for the gospel that tells us the righteousness by which we are justified is a righteousness that Luther called an “alien” righteousness. A righteousness that is extra nos – outside of us. It is the righteousness achieved by Jesus, and by Jesus alone, in His life of perfect active obedience.

So, the way in which I am saved and you are saved is by having faith or trusting in Christ’s righteousness. Justification by faith alone is merely shorthand for the doctrine of justification by Christ alone.

The only righteousness that will stand the scrutiny of God on the day of judgement is a perfect righteousness – and the only person who has ever achieved that is Christ.

Without the clothing of His righteousness I am without hope and without a gospel.

—Dr. R.C. Sproul

I discovered the following quote by John Owen while spending some time tonight reading about justification and imputation. Dr. Owen made the following statement regarding the doctrine of justification in a chapter titled “Imputation, and the Nature of It.”

yet is it so fallen out in our days that nothing in religion is more maligned, more reproached, more despised, than the imputation of righteousness unto us, or an imputed righteousness.

—John Owen
The Doctrine of Justification by Faith Through the Imputation of the Righteousness of Christ Explained, Confirmed, and Vindicated

While that quote is very applicable to the times in which we live, it is actually from a book published in 1677. Here is a photo of that text from the Google Books edition of Volume 5 from the Complete Works of John Owen.

The notion that there is enough inherent goodness and righteousness in man to please God sounds very appealing to a pragmatic culture like ours – but it is not biblical. When people try to take credit, even partial credit, for the grounds of their salvation, they rob Christ of His glory and diminish His perfectly obedient life and atoning sacrificial death.

These were the closing remarks from John Piper’s presentation at T4G 2010 and they merit repeating:

Give Christ all his glory in the work of salvation, not just half of it. Half is the work of pardoning sin by becoming our wrath-absorbing punishment. But the other half is the work of providing our perfection by fulfilling everything that God required of us, and then imputing it to us.

Don’t rob the Lord of half his glory in bringing you to God. Christ is our pardon. Christ is our perfection. Therefore, knowing that Jesus and Paul preached the same gospel, let’s join Paul from the heart in saying:

I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

—Philippians 3:8-9

We can sing with the great hymn write Edward Mote, who in 1834 wrote the following words:

When He shall come with trumpet sound,
Oh, may I then in Him be found,
Clothed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne!
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand.

Amen. Hallelujah, what a Savior!

No man shall ever behold the glory of Christ by sight in heaven who does not, in some measure, behold it by faith in this world. Grace is a necessary preparation for glory and faith for sight.

—John Owen
The Glory of Christ

Via: Of First Importance

We have not been justified by our holiness or through our holiness but unto it so that we might grow in conformity to the image of Christ,

—Dr. R.C. Sproul
Romans: The Righteous Shall Live by Faith

Via: Twitter

Speaking of the reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone, this is my reading list for 2010. As I stated in the previous post, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about justification. I suppose that many people would wonder why anyone would bother reading such weighty books about theology when there are more light, practical, and “purpose driven” books available for the busy 21^st century christian. I don’t want to demean those types of books, they certainly have their place, but I personally find more food for my soul in deeper study.

• Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification by Dr. R.C. Sproul
• The Doctrine of Justification by James Buchanan
• The Doctrine of Justification by Faith by John Owen
• Justification by Francis Turretin
• The Future of Justification by Dr. John Piper
• Justified in Christ: God’s Plan for Us in Justification edited by K. Scott Oliphint
• Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine by John Fesko
• The Everlasting Righteousness by Horatius Bonar (PDF)

I would appreciate your prayers as I engage this topic. I am eager to learn, but a fine line sometimes exists between rigorous study and a purely academic pursuit of theology. It is possible to have an intellectual acknowledgement of the doctrine of justification by faith alone without actually possessing the faith that alone can save. I’m pretty sure that Dr. Sproul said that and it’s a message that I take to heart. Sola Fide — and Soli Deo Gloria!

I have been thinking and reading quite a bit lately about the reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone — sola fide. Martin Luther, the great German reformer believed that justification by faith alone is the doctrine by which the protestant church stand or falls. This evening I read the following quote from Martin Luther on Dr. Ray Ortlund’s website:

Since we are justified by faith alone, it is clear that the inner person cannot be justified, freed or saved by any external work or act, and such works, whatever they may be, have nothing to do with the inner person.  Therefore, only ungodliness and unbelief of the heart make a person a condemned servant of sin — this cannot be caused by any external work or act of sin.  It follows that it ought to be the primary goal of every Christian to put aside confidence in works and grow stronger in the belief that we are saved by faith alone.  Through this faith the Christian should increase in knowledge not of works but of Christ Jesus and the benefits of his death and resurrection.

—Martin Luther
The Freedom of the Christian

Horatius Bonar opened the first chapter of his book The Everlasting Righteousness with the following question: “How may I, a sinner, draw near to Him in whom there is no sin, and look upon His face in peace?” That is a question I fear that very few people today would ever stop to ponder. As Dr. R.C. Sproul stated at Together for the Gospel in 2006, the primary view of most modern evangelicals with regard to the doctrine of justification is that of “justification by death – all you have to do to be justified is to die – because everybody that dies goes to heaven.” My hope and prayer for myself, and for you, is that we would look away from ourselves and put our complete trust and faith in Jesus Christ — his perfect life and atoning death.

Via: Ray Ortlund

Our justification is the direct result of our believing the gospel; our knowledge of our own justification comes from believing God’s promise of justification to every one who believes these glad tidings. For there is not only the divine testimony, but there is the promise annexed to it, assuring eternal life to every one who receives that testimony. There is first, then, a believed gospel, and then there is a believed promise. The latter is the “appropriation,” as it is called; which, after all, is nothing but the acceptance of the promise which is everywhere coupled with the gospel message. The believed gospel saves; but it is the believed promise that assures us of this salvation.

…

Faith is not Christ, nor the cross of Christ. Faith is not the blood, nor the sacrifice; it is not the altar, nor the laver, nor the mercy-seat, nor the incense. It does not work, but accepts a work done ages ago; it does not wash, but leads us to the fountain opened for sin and uncleanness. It does not create; it merely links us to that new thing which was created when the “everlasting righteousness” was brought in (Daniel 9:24).

…

Though faith is not “the righteousness,” it is the tie between it and us. It realizes our present standing before God in the excellency of His own Son; and it tells us that our eternal standing, in the ages to come, is in the same excellency, and depends on the perpetuity of that righteousness which can never change. For never shall we put off that Christ whom we put on when we believed (Romans 12:14; Galatians 3:27). This divine raiment is “to everlasting.” It waxes not old, it cannot be rent, and its beauty fadeth not away.

—Horatius Bonar
The Everlasting Righteousness, Chapter 7

There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all. . . . This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ doesn’t cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be. It is always on His ‘blood and righteousness’ alone that we can rest.

—B.B. Warfield
Quoted by Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson in Counsel from the Cross

Via: Of First Importance