Post Series

1—Introduction
2—Aquinas
3—Luther
4—Calvin
5—Wright
6—Conclusion

Considered to be the most significant contributor to the development of the Reformed doctrine of justification, ((McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 253.)) John Calvin declared in The Institutes of the Christian Religionthat justification “is the principle article of the Christian religion, so that each one may take greater pains and care to know it.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 318.)) Elsewhere, he described this doctrine as “the principle of the whole doctrine of salvation and of the foundation of all religion.” ((Wendel, Calvin, 256.)) For Calvin, answering our question is at the very heart of the Christian faith. While Calvin’s own theology on this issue followed in the theological tradition of Augustine, “Calvin is undoubtedly a disciple of the Lutheran evangelical movement…particularly of the teachings on justification;” ((Wübbenhorst, “Calvin’s Doctrine,” 99.)) he borrowed significantly from the “theologian of justification” himself, Martin Luther. ((Olson, Christian Theology, 410.)) As Wübbenhorst wonders, however, “Is Calvin’s doctrine Lutheran? Is it a turn of the wheel back toward something recognizably Catholic? Or is it a turn forward into something distinct and unanticipated, which we might call ‘Calvinistic’ or ‘Reformed’?” ((Wübbenhorst, “Calvin’s Doctrine,” 99.)) Rather than being purely Lutheran, Calvin’s doctrine revises and extends the arguments of the forerunner in order to protect it in the face of Catholic objections. Whereas Luther believed justification was simply an event—wrapping the concept of sanctification within justification itself—Calvin views it as both event and process involving both the moment at which a person’s sins are forgiven and declared righteous and the process by which a person becomes progressively righteous in Christ.

Justification Defined

In short, Calvin believed a person “is said to be justified before God who is counted righteous before God’s judgment and is acceptable to His righteousness.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 319.)) Calvin invokes legal imagery in defining justification: “As when some person who was wrongly accused, when he has been examined by the judge and absolved and declared innocent, we say that he is justified in righteousness; so we say that a person is justified before God who, being separated from the number of sinners, has God as witness and proof of his righteousness.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 319.)) More narrowly, Calvin interprets justification in this way: “the acceptance by which God receives us in grace and treats us as righteous, consisting 1) of the remission of sins and 2) the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.” ((As quoted of Calvin by McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 254.)) For Calvin, justification is the event at which God receives a person by grace and treats them as though they were righteous by forgiving their sins and imputing to them the righteousness of Christ. Taking his cues from Luther, and to some extent Philipp Melancthon, ((McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 239, 254.)) Calvin views justification forensically as both the event at which a person is declared righteous and process by which a person becomes righteous over time. Though there is a decisive moment at which a person becomes right with God, he or she also becomes progressively righteous and whole over time. Calvin outlines his understanding of this event and process in the Institutesin this way, “our Lord employs these steps in accomplishing our salvation: after we have been elected, He calls us; after we have been called He justifies us; after we have been justified He glorifies us.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 375.)) Fig. 4 represents Calvin’s understanding of the event and process of justification:

Before the justification event, the believer is separated from God by his or her sin, “and it turns God’s face away from the sinner…it does not fit at all with His righteousness to have an alliance with sin.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 324.)) In order to stand before God, who is righteous and sinless, He makes “a righteous person out of the sinner,” which is done by the remission and forgiveness of sins. ((Calvin, Institutes, 324.)) By freely forgiving us of our sins, “God reconciles us to Himself by means of the righteousness of Jesus Christ…and reckons us as righteous.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 341.)) Our ability to be reckoned as righteous is bound up with our remission of sins: “It is clear that those whom God receives in grace are not made righteous otherwise than by being purified, since their stains are wiped away by the forgiveness which God gives them, so that such righteousness can be called, in a word, forgiveness of sins.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 325.)) Forgiveness of sins and imputation of righteousness are two sides of the same answer to our question regarding justification. At this event the believer “appears before God’s face not as sinner but as righteous,” ((Calvin, Institutes, 319.)) a change that is status oriented.

Contrary to the Latin approach, which interpreted justification as an infusion of an inherent human righteousness, Calvin followed Luther in interpreting it in a forensics sense in that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to a believer ((McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 246.)) In exegeting 2 Cor. 5:21, Calvin argues that just as God does not impute to us our sins, so also is “righteousness imputed to a person without works…a person is not righteous of himself but because Christ’s righteousness is communicated to him by imputation.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 325.)) The second aspect of justification after remission of sins, then, is that “to us is imputed the righteousness which Jesus Christ has gained through His obedience unto death, and that thus ‘before the countenance of God we appear not as sinners but as though we were just.’ Thus God sees us in Christ and for His sake treats us as if we were righteousalthough we are not so in ourselves.” ((Niesel, Theology of Calvin, 131-132. (emphasis mine.) )) As with Luther, who departed from the Augustinian understanding of inherited righteousness by arguing for an “alien righteousness,” this is an important distinction between Calvin and Aquinas. ((Wübbenhorst, “Calvin’s Doctrine,” 100.))

In becoming right with God through justification, we are not actually righteous, but only declared so. In other words, only our status before God changes, not our state or nature. Calvin feared anything that might have led to deification of man in any sense. ((Wendel, Calvin, 259.)) Therefore, the righteousness of which we are attributed is the divine righteousness that Christ acquired for us through His obedience to God in His life and death, rather than us actually being righteous. ((Niesel, Theology of Calvin, 133.)) In contrast to his theological nemesis Andreas Osiander, who insisted that we are endowed with the actual eternal righteousness which Christ Himself possesses according to His divine nature, ((Niesel, Theology of Calvin, 134.)) Calvin argued Christ was not sent “to help us to obtain righteousness, but to be our righteousness…He is our righteousness.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 352.)) Humanity is not made righteous, but accepted as righteous on account of the righteousness of Christ. “We are righteous because Christ’s obedience is reckoned to us and received as payment as if it were ours. ((Calvin, Institutes, 326.)) The idea that we are righteous by “means of the righteousness of Jesus Christ” ((Calvin, Institutes, 341.)) is an idea Calvin shares with Luther. Like him, Calvin argues against the Thomistic, Catholic view that God infuses us with an inherent righteousness of ourselves, that our state and nature is re-ordered as righteous, rather than simply our status before God. And like Luther, Calvin maintains that this righteous status is obtains not by works but through faith; a sinner becomes right with God not through personal gumption and ingenuity, but by God’s unmerited grace through faith.

Role of Faith; Role of Merit

Justification by grace through faith is the hallmark argument of the Reformation, propagated first by Luther and later championed by Calvin. This is clear from Calvin’s explanation of the order of justification:

From the beginning God receives the sinner by His pure free goodness…Then He touches the sinner with a feeling of His goodness so that, distrusting everything he has, he may put the whole sum of his salvation in the mercy which God gives Him. That is the feeling of faith, by which a person enters into possession of his salvation. ((Calvin, Institutes, 320.))

It is clear that God makes the first movement out of His own “pure free goodness” to help the sinner become right with Himself. By His grace He touches the sinner through unmerited election, giving him the “feeling of faith,” the desire to grab ahold of Christ through faith in the first place. As Niesel describes, “it is not enough to point to faith as our ‘yes’ to Christ…We are not able in our own strength to establish a relationship with Him…this reality itself must seize upon us.” ((Niesel, Theology of Calvin, 122.)) Though we can confidently point to faith over against merit as the trigger for becoming right with God, we through our own desire do not grasp Christ through a “thing” called faith. Instead, it is the work of God in us by His own good pleasure; “He confers righteousness on us of His free generosity.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 333-334.)) By that generosity we are able to grasp Christ through faith, “faith justifies since it receives the righteousness offered in the gospel.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 321.)) Faith binds us to Him and incorporates us in His body, thus the saving significance of faith is the content to which that faith is placed: Jesus Christ. ((Niesel, Theology of Calvin, 123, 124.)) While God’s mercy effects our change in status and Christ’s righteousness is the substance of that change, faith is the instrument. ((Wübbenhorst, “Calvin’s Doctrine,” 109.))

Calvin joined Luther in upholding faith alone and rejecting any casual change wrought through meritorious works. We offer no solution to the conundrum on becoming right with God. “We should have no trust in our works, and we must ascribe no praise to them; the Christian soul should not consider the merit of works as a refuge for salvation, but wholly rest on the free promise of righteousness.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 345, 347.)) Instead, we are incorporated into Christ by faith and obtain salvation and righteousness because of Him and Him alone; righteousness is located in faith and not in works of merit, “because by faith we grasp Christ’s righteousness which alone reconciles us to God.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 353, 356.)) “In summary we must conclude that a person cannot ascribe a single drop of righteousness of himself without sacrilege, since by whatever he ascribes to himself he is diminishing and lowering the glory of God’s righteousness.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 333.)) His exegesis of Romans 2:11-13 confirms this view when he asserts that “no one is justified by works” and anyone who interprets the passage otherwise “for the purpose of building up justification by works deserves universal contempt.” ((Calvin, Romans, 47.)) By faith, then, a person is justified and enters into the grace of God at the beginning of their new life with Him, rather than at the end of their life by a movement of God through a person’s meritorious works, as was the case with Aquinas. ((Calvin, Institutes, 335.)) Contrary to Luther’s understanding of our answer to the question, however, there isn’t no place for works with the solution to our question.

Though a person does not become right with God through good works, “Good works do please God, and they are not useless to those who do them, but rather receive as reward the very full benefits of God.” ((Calvin, Institutes, 351.)) Calvin can say this because he believes a person becomes justified and sanctified at the same time, though they are distinct. He maintained that “‘justifying grace is not separated from regeneration;’ Christ justifies no one whom he does not sanctify at the same time.” ((Wendel, Calvin, 256.)) It must be made clear that sanctification is not the point of justification and remains logically distinct from it. ((Wendel, Calvin, 256.)) But God “enlightens us with his wisdom, he redeems us; when he redeems us, he justifies us; when he justifies us, he sanctifies us…he bestows both [justification and sanctification] together and never the one without the other.” ((Wendel, Calvin, 256-257.)) Once justified, the process of regeneration begins, having access to all the befits and graces of Christ acquired for us. Thus, Calvin believed in a justification of the sinner and the justified: the sinner’s status before God is as righteous in light of Christ; and the rightened sinner grows in righteousness through his works. ((Wendel, Calvin, 260.))

As with the first act of justification, the second is as equally dependent upon the grace of Christ. As Wendel suggests, “We have a good right to say that by faith alone not only is the man justified, but also his works.” ((Wendel, Calvin, 262.)) As Calvin writes, “works are pleasing to God when the person has been accepted by Him in His mercy…So the purification of the heart must precede so that the subsequent works we do may be pleasingly received by God.” These works, however, flow from an already righted constitution, rather than effective in righting that constitution itself. Perfection, however, is only granted to the faithful at the Last Judgment, rather than at some point along the way in this process. ((Niesel, Theology, 129.)) In the end, a person is definitively made right with God by grace through faith by receiving the declaration of the righteousness of Christ; the new believer is progressively rightened through good works that flow from and reflect that faith and right status in Jesus Christ