Justification By Faith Quotes

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

The line between faith and fanaticism is a constantly shifting one,” Dr. Poblocki said. “When does belief become justification? When does right become rationale and crusade become crime?

Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.

No man that ever lived, not John Calvin himself, ever asserted either original sin, or justification by faith, in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done.

I'm afraid that in the United States of America today the prevailing doctrine of justification is not justification by faith alone. It is not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in our culture today is justification by death. All one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die.

the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable…. This is the genuine meaning of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of ‘justification by faith

Before there could be any permanent reformation the people must be led to feel their utter inability in themselves to render obedience to God.

To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say “Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?” And they hesitate. And then I say, “What’s the matter? Why are you hesitating?” And so often people say, “I don’t feel like I’m good enough yet. I don’t think I’m ready to say I’m a Christian now.” And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it. It sounds very modest to say, “Well, I don’t think I’ good enough,” but it’s a very denial of the faith. The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and saying, “I’m not good enough; Oh, I’m not good enough,” you are denying God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you’re better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you thought you were. You will be up and down forever. How can I put it plainly? It doesn’t matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell. It does not matter if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin. It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God at all. You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world.

Nationalism is form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of "their own people," to the exclusion of other human beings.

If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.

Self-justification is the enemy of repentance.

To defend something is always to discredit it. Let a man have a warehouse full of gold, let him be willing to give away a ducat to every one of the poor - but let him also be stupid enough to begin this charitable undertaking of his with a defence in which he offers three good reasons in justification; and it will almost come to the point of people finding it doubtful whether indeed he is doing something good. But now for Christianity. Yes, the person who defends that has never believed in it. If he does believe, then the enthusiasm of faith is not a defence, no, it is the assault and the victory; a believer is a victor.

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line...To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes and in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth -- disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.

In desperate attempt to give meaning to life, many turn to religion, because a struggle in the name of a faith is always a justification for some grand action that could transform the world. ‘We are doing God’s work,’ they tell themselves. And they become devout followers, then evangelists and, finally, fanatics. They don’t understand that religion was created in order to share the mystery and to worship, not to oppress or convert others. The great manifestation of the miracle of God is life. Tonight, I will weep for you, O Jerusalem, because that understanding of the Divine Unity is about to disappear for the next one thousand years.

The immoral woman in Luke 7 has the faith to anticipate Christ's forgiveness. She can act in love with no words to justify.

You are a human being before any label, handicap, disease or disorder. You are entitled to dignity. This is the human race's one religion that unites us, yet it is our hatred and lack of tolerance that distorts our faith to a place of justification. This justification will always be in the oppressor's benefit.

The accusation of misandry is a mechanism for silencing women, a way of silencing the anger – sometimes violent but always legitimate – of the oppressed standing up to their oppressors. Taking offence at misandry, claiming it’s merely a form of sexism like any other, and no less unacceptable (as if sexism were genuinely reviled), is a bad-faith way of sweeping under the carpet the mechanisms that make sexist oppression a systemic phenomenon buoyed throughout history by culture and authority. It’s to allege that a woman who hates men is as dangerous as a man who hates women – and that there’s no rational justification for what she feels, be it dislike, distrust or disdain. Because, obviously, no man has ever hurt a woman in the whole course of human history. Or rather, no men have ever hurt any women.

Silence is one of the deepest disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justification. One of the fruits of silence is the freedom to let God be our justifier. We don’t need to straighten others out.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

... toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult.

If man claims to adapt the liturgy to his era, to transform it to suit the circumstances, divine worship dies. The development of some liturgical symbols is necessary sometimes; however, if man goes so far as to confuse the temporal and the eternal, he turns his back on the essential justification for the liturgy.

But this doctrine has been much abused.” So has that of justification by faith. But that is no reason for giving up either this or any other scriptural doctrine. “When you wash your child,” as one speaks, “throw away the water; but do not throw away the child.

Although it should be avoided, you can break promises to people if you have to—because you can explain circumstances and make reasonable justifications and compromises with people. Dogs take you at your word—that’s a lot to live up to—and I, for one, do not want to be the kind of person who reneges on a good-faith deal with a dog.

Being by his faith replaced afresh in paradise and created anew, he (the believer)does not need works for his justification, but that he may not be idle, but that he may exercise his own body and preserve it. His works are to be done freely, with the sole object of pleasing God.

There is no other qualification for being forgiven of your sins. The old covenant was based on justification by works (obedience to the Ten Commandments).You had to perform to be forgiven. But the new covenant of grace is based entirely on justification by faith (believing in Jesus Christ).

We shall be judged according to our works – this is why we are exhorted to do good works. The Bible assuredly knows nothing of those qualms about good works, by which we only try to excuse ourselves and justify our evil works. The Bible never draws the antithesis between faith and good works so sharply as to maintain that good works undermine faith. No, it is evil works rather than good works which hinder and destroy faith. Grace and active obedience are complementary. There is no faith without good works, and no good works apart from faith.

It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.

In a desperate attempt to give meaning to life, many turn to religion, because a struggle in the name of a faith is always a justification for some grand action that could transform the world. “We are doing God’s work,” they tell themselves. And they become devout followers, then evangelists, and finally, fanatics. They don’t understand that religion was created in order to share the mystery and to worship, not to oppress or convert others. The greatest manifestation of the miracle of God is life.

Justification by grace through faith' is the theologian's learned phrase for what Chesterton once called 'the furious love of G-d.' He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only G-d man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods- the gods of human manufacturing- despise sinners, but the Father of (Yeshua) loves all, no matter what they do.

There’s my Duchess. Before I go, I’m going to tell you something about trust. It goes like this: It’s best if you decide to be true to the relationship rather than being true to the person. Because when the person lets you down (and he/she will!), you’ll say to yourself, “All bets are off!” And you’ll feel free to break a trust or breach privacy or be disloyal in big or small ways. It’s a justification. If you commit to the relationship, you’re being faithful to that. Same with friendship. That’s what I endeavor to do.—PJ

It was only by faith in Christ that they could secure pardon of sin and receive strength to obey God's law. They must cease to rely upon their own efforts for salvation, they must trust wholly in the merits of the promised Saviour, if they would be accepted of God.

A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification - though the very longevity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity... Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has as yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage and disorder of its absence. (pg.115-116, "The Body and the Earth")

Justification is by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone.

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.

The use of means for the obtaining of peace is ours; the bestowing of it is God's prerogative.

Jewish-Christian fanatics moved in, who perverted Paul's Gospel of man's free justification by faith in Christ Jesus.

Martin Luther described the doctrine of justification by faith as articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae—the article of faith that decides whether the church is standing or falling.

Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time. Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.

Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the nature of imperfect men cannot ultimately co-exist with the nature of a perfect God; and that the hope of each man is now desperately found in God's sending of Christ.

In the end, the final justification of the materialist is not reason, as he so fondly thinks, but mere belief. For it is only by an act of simple faith that he accepts the testimony of sense-experience.

In the meantime, prominent British pastor John R. W. Stott, who acknowledged that suffering is “the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith,” has reached his own conclusion: I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. . . . In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ . . . is God’s only self-justification in such a world’ as ours.25

Faith is not the ground or basis upon which we are justified, but the means, the "instrument," by which we are united to Christ, in whom our justification, our "right-wising" with God, has been accomplished.

Our faith works because we love, and we love because he has first loved us. Our faith is then emboldened by this responsive love; we've been loved, we've been assured of our justification; our Father speaks of our sanctification as if it had already occurred. By faith, then, we can courageously pursue growth into our true identity.

Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians. It is linked to opposition to gay rights and gun control, to support for harsher punishments for criminals, to justifications for the use of excessive force against black Americans in law enforcement situations, and to traditionalist gender ideology.

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

We have also set up for them an edifying project for a continuous mitigation of their own tyranny, ascribing to them an unshakeable faith in the triumph of virtue, as well as in the moral justification of their crimes. These are the theories of well-meaning children who see everything in black or white, dream of nothing but angels or demons, and have no idea of the incredible number of hypocritical masks of every color and shape and size which men use to conceal their features when they have passed the age of devotion to ideals and have abandoned themselves unrestrainedly to their egotistic desires

Justice is often born in the quiet and ordinary moments long before it's seen by anyone else. Sometimes it's as simple and as difficult as listening, as learning, as laying down our excuses or justifications or disguises, as forgiveness, as choosing the hard daily work of restoration, as staying resolutely alive when everyone else is numbing themselves against it.

The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.

THERE HAS BEEN A SILENT DIVORCE IN THE CHURCH, SPEAKING generally, between the Word and the Spirit. When there is a divorce, sometimes the children stay with the mother, sometimes with the father. In this divorce you have those on the Word side and those on the Spirit side. What is the difference? Those on the Word side stress earnestly contending for the faith once delivered to the saints, expository preaching, sound theology, rediscovering the doctrines of the Reformation—justification by faith, sovereignty of God. Until we get back to the Word, the honor of God’s name will not be restored. What is wrong with this emphasis? Nothing. It is exactly right, in my opinion. Those on the Spirit side stress getting back to the Book of Acts, signs, wonders, and miracles, gifts of the Holy Spirit—with places being shaken at prayer meetings, get in Peter’s shadow and you are healed, lie to the Holy Spirit and you are struck dead. Until we recover the power of the Spirit, the honor of God’s name will not be restored. What is wrong with this emphasis? Nothing. It is exactly right, in my opinion. The problem is, neither will learn from the other. But if these two would come together, the simultaneous combination would mean spontaneous combustion. And if Smith Wigglesworth’s prophecy got it right, the world will be turned upside down again.

It was odd, how many common features they all had. Most claimed ultimate authority, denouncing other faiths. Most taught of an afterlife, but could offer no proof. Most taught about a god or gods, yet—again—had little justification for their teachings. And every single one of them was riddled with inconsistencies and logical fallacies. How did men believe in something that preached love on one hand, yet taught destruction of unbelievers on the other? How did one rationalize belief with no proof? How could they honestly expect him to have faith in something that taught of miracles and wonders in the far past, but carefully gave excuses for why such things didn’t occur in the present day?

That this network is complex explains much about our faith. It explains why people with higher activity in their frontal lobes will be drawn to apologetics or theology—they want to know how God works. On the other hand, people with higher activity in their limbic systems will know God through feelings and have little concern with rational justifications for God’s existence. They know God because they feel God. Either

Expressed in theological terms, “In justification our own works have no place at all, and simple faith in Christ is the one thing needful. In sanctification our own works are of vast importance and God bids us fight, and watch, and pray, and strive, and take pains, and labour.”34

When I say theologically mature, I mean just this: formed by the Bible, proudly Trinitarian, grounded in justification by grace through faith, dedicated to the person of Jesus Christ, convinced of his incarnation as Son of God, recognizing his death on the Cross as redemption from sin for the whole world, boldly convinced of the truth of the Resurrection, and committed to a worldwide mission of witness in Christ's name.

If God truly exists, especially as a living personal being, are not revelational considerations more significant than our own inner feelings and outer perceptual probings? And if divine revelation—a possibility still to be considered—provides an authoritative basis for religious faith, does not an insistent reduction of all knowledge to empirical factors become a prideful—that is, worldly wise—justification of unbelief in a transcendent revelation? If there be a God, he could scarcely desire from human beings a commitment only to empirical tentativeness about his reality.

For the doctrine of justification by faith is like Atlas: it bears a world on its shoulders, the entire evangelical knowledge of saving grace. The doctrines of election, of effectual calling, regeneration, and repentance, of adoption, of prayer, of the church, the ministry, and the sacraments, have all to be interpreted and understood in the light of justification by faith. …when justification falls, all true knowledge of the grace of God in human life fall with it, and then, as Luther said, the church itself falls… When Atlas falls, everything that rested on his shoulders comes crashing down too.

He (Knox) handles the doctrines of election and justification as causes for bright joy in believers. 'Your imperfections shall have no power to damn you,' he writes to Mrs. Bowes, 'for Christ's perfection is reputed to be yours by faith, which you have in his blood.' 'God has received already at the hands of His only Son all that is due for our sins, and so cannot his justice require or crave any more of us, other satisfaction or recompense for our sins.

The simple justification for the elders and their work was Christ’s detailed prescription in Matthew’s Gospel for how Christians should deal with sinners among the faithful: first private admonition, then progressively more formal reprimands, and finally, if repentance was not forthcoming, expulsion from the community.

I have no desire, as some appear to have, to play down the value of our Reformation heritage: but I believe we are most faithful to the Reformers when we go back to the New Testament and see whether we can understand it even better than they did. (The Great Acquittal: Justification by Faith and Current Christian Thought, 1980)

With all these considerations in view, the order in the application of redemption is found to be, calling, regeneration, faith and repentance, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance, glorification. When this order is carefully weighed we find that there is a logic which evinces and brings into clear focus the governing principle of salvation in all of its aspects, the grace of God in its sovereignty and efficacy. Salvation is of the Lord in its application as well as in its conception and accomplishment.

May good prevail, and justify my deed.

But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard to pervert.

Whoever believed in Jesus Christ, shall be justified by faith in Son of God.

Our faith in Christ does not free us from works but from false opinions concerning works, that is, from the foolish presumption that justification is acquired by works.

Just as the sin of Adam was imputed to all people, so also the obedience of Christ has been imputed to believers. Adam

The false gospel of self-justification is a great enemy of the Christian faith because so many have been misled to believe that it is Christianity.

For Christians, then, Christ’s justification, given with his resurrection, becomes theirs.

Do not think that you first have to look at the total plan and progress of the world, if you are to know what actions will now make sense, and where they will lead!

God has designed things to exalt his Son at the cross, and any gospel that does not center on the cross of Jesus Christ is not truly God-centered in a real sense.

Islamists regularly invoke them as a justification for attacks upon infidels and apostates.

we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification

The task of education is to lead people out of darkness into light, out of the cave and its shadows and into the noonday sun.

If you have a kind of ideology, however bizarre, it gives a gang direction and justification for whatever it does. It is not just a war. It becomes a holy war.

My friends, I do not believe it is preaching Christ and him crucified, to give people a batch of philosophy every Sunday morning and evening, and neglect the truths of this Holy Book. I do not believe it is preaching Christ and him crucified, to leave out the main cardinal doctrines of the Word of God, and preach a religion which is all a mist and a haze, without any definite truths whatever. I take it that man does not preach Christ and him crucified, who can get through a sermon without mentioning Christ's name once; nor does that man preach Christ and him crucified, who leaves out the Holy Spirit's work, who never says a word about the Holy Ghost, so that indeed the hearers might say, "We do not so much as know whether there be a Holy Ghost." And I have my own private opinion, that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and him crucified, unless you preach what now-a-days is called Calvinism. I have my own ideas, and those I always state boldly. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism. Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else. I do not believe we can preach the gospel, if we do not preach justification by faith without works; not unless we preach the sovereignty of God in his dispensation of grace; nor unless we exalt the electing, unchangeable, eternal, immutable, conquering love of Jehovah; nor, I think, can we preach the gospel, unless we base it upon the peculiar redemption which Christ made for his elect and chosen people; nor can I comprehend a gospel which lets saints fall away after they are called, and suffers the children of God to be burned in the fires of damnation, after having believed. Such a gospel I abhor. The gospel of the Bible is not such a gospel as that. We preach Christ and him crucified in a different fashion, and to all gainsayers we reply, "We have not so learned Christ.

Even Martin Luther’s needed “justification by faith” sent us on a five-hundred-year battle for the private soul of the individual.* Thus leaving us with almost no care for the earth, society, the outsider, or the full Body of Christ. This is surely one reason why Christianity found itself incapable of critiquing social calamities like Nazism, slavery, and Western consumerism.

Justification is by faith alone, but it isn’t a faith that is alone, for true faith produces good works. Still, good works are not the ground or cause of salvation; they are the fruit of one’s faith. The perfect righteousness of Christ is imputed to believers, so that their righteousness is not inherent but is theirs because they are united to Jesus Christ.76 At the final judgment God will declare publicly what was already the case in the lives of believers, i.e., that they are righteous by faith, and their works will verify (but will not be the foundation of) that declaration.

I have often behaved badly and I have often behaved foolishly; but, as it happens, I find that on the whole, the things that I have been most blamed for are exactly the things I would do again to-morrow if I had the chance. The things I regret are, generally speaking, the occasional compromises and the (infrequent) runnings away from high attitudes which I failed to carry through to their ends. In short, what I regret in my life is just that part of it which worldly wisdom applauds… A thing does not become right because the world says it is right, any more than it becomes wrong because the world says it is wrong. One can act only according to one’s lights and if one is in good faith, one may hope that in the long run justification will result, even if not in this world or in one’s own lifetime.

Paul says the fulfillment of this promised blessing for the Gentiles is in their having experienced the Spirit as a living and dynamic reality. The blessing of Abraham, therefore, is not simply “justification by faith.” Rather, it refers to the life of the future now available to Jew and Gentile alike, achieved through the death of Christ but applied through the dynamic ministry of the Spirit—and all of this by faith.

All the world, every creature. He put no difference between men in this respect, though you meet with them in the likeness of beasts, and devils never so wicked, never so abominable; as long as they are creatures, reach out the cup of salvation to them, if they will drink; open the treasures of grace to them, if they will receive them; agree with them for nothing but faith for justification, and profession of it for their salvation.

The article of justification is fragile. Not in itself, of course, but in us. I know how quickly a person can forfeit the joy of the Gospel. I know in what slippery places even those stand who seem to have a good footing in the matters of faith. In the midst of the conflict when we should be consoling ourselves with the Gospel, the Law rears up and begins to rage all over our conscience. I say the Gospel is frail because we are frail.

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them “religious”; otherwise, they are likely to be called “mad,” “psychotic,” or “delusional

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them “religious”; otherwise, they are likely to be called “mad,” “psychotic,” or “delusional.

Ever since Luther, this letter has been read as a definitive statement of Paul’s groundbreaking doctrine of justification by faith. But recent scholarship has shown that Luther’s interpretation does not correspond to Paul’s thinking at all, and that far from being central to Paul’s thought, this topic is mentioned only in Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans for “the specific and limited purpose of defending the right of gentile converts to be full heirs of the promises to Israel.

The author compares the struggles of Martin Luther with the prevailing doctrine that a little genuine effort on our part results in a disproportionate reward of God's righteousness with a blind man who would be given $1 million – if only he could see.

The law is not made for a righteous man" (1 Tim. i. 9). This is that Christian liberty, our faith, the effect of which is, not that we should be careless or lead a bad life, but that no one should need the law or works for justification and salvation.

The secular progressive movement in America has been successful in removing all vestiges of faith in God from the public square. The very fact that people hesitate to say “Merry Christmas” to strangers lets you know just how successful they have been. Why are they so determined to remove God from our lives? They recognize that if we have no higher authority to answer to than man, we become gods unto ourselves and get to determine our own behavior. In their world, “If it feels good, do it.” They can justify anything based on their ideology because in their opinion, there is no higher authority other than themselves to overrule them. They have a visceral reaction to the mention of God’s word, because it tears at the fabric of their justification system.

Those who respond in trust or faith to the faith of Christ are moved into Christ, into the sphere of his life. In that sphere, and there alone, is justification to be found. Simultaneously, those who move into Christ find that Christ has moved into them, so to speak.

We say that justification is effective without works, not that faith is without works. For that faith which lacks fruit is not an efficacious but a reigned faith...It is one thing that faith justifies without works; it is another thing that faith exists without works.

Our faith in Christ does not free us from works but from false opinions concerning works, that is, from the foolish presumption that justification is acquired by works. Faith redeems, corrects, and preserves our consciences so that we know that righteousness does not consist in works, although works neither can nor ought to be wanting; just as we cannot be without food and drink and all the works of this mortal body, yet our righteousness is not in them, but in faith; and yet those works of the body are not to be despised or neglected on that account.

Predestination therefore, as it regards the thing itself, is the Decree of the good pleasure of God in Christ, by which He resolved within Himself from all eternity, to justify, adopt, and endow with everlasting life, to the praise of His own glorious grace, believers on whom He had decreed to bestow faith.

You can know the doctrine of justification by faith and take your stand with Luther and the Reformation, and be blind inwardly. For it is not the body of truth that enlightens; it is the Spirit of truth that enlightens. If you are willing to obey the Lord Jesus He will illuminate your spirit, inwardly enlighten you, and the truth you have known will now be known spiritually and power will begin to flow up and out and you will find yourself changed, marvellously changed. In that great day of Christ's coming all that will matter is whether or not I have been inwardly illuminated. Inwardly regenerated. Inwardly purified. Do I know Jesus?

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad’, ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional’... Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.

For the word of God cannot be received and honoured by any works, but by faith alone. Hence it is clear that as the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works. For if it could be justified by any other means, it would have no need of the word, nor consequently of faith.

The ongoing function of God’s law is not to serve as a standard to be met for justification but as a guide for Christian living. Thus, according to the Confession of Faith: True believers be not under the law as a covenant of works to be thereby justified or condemned yet it is of great use to them as well as to others as a rule of life.34

Just as Luther proclaimed the centrality and sufficiency of faith for justification, so he accentuated with new power the role of faith in the reception of the sacraments. He declared that a sacrament apart from faith is empty; in reference to baptism he said: “Unless faith is present, or comes to life in baptism, the ceremony is of no avail.”7

The doctrine of justification by faith—a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort—has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be "received" without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is "saved," but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.

Believing in the gospel isn’t optional. It is imperative, for those who don’t put their trust in Jesus will face eschatological humiliation (Rom 9:33; 10:11). Conversely, believers are the children of Abraham (Gal 3:6; cf. 3:8) and therefore the children of God (3:26). They belong to God’s family and are members of the true Israel of God (6:16). Those

Thus, though we ought boldly to resist those teachers of tradition, and though the laws of the pontiffs, by which they make aggressions on the people of God, deserve sharp reproof, yet we must spare the timid crowd, who are held captive by the laws of those impious tyrants, till they are set free. Fight vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep. And this you may do by inveighing against the laws and lawgivers, and yet at the same time observing these laws with the weak, lest they be offended, until they shall themselves recognise the tyranny, and understand their own liberty. If you wish to use your liberty, do it secretly, as Paul says, "Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God" (Rom. xiv. 22). But take care not to use it in the presence of the weak. On the other hand, in the presence of tyrants and obstinate opposers, use your liberty in their despite, and with the utmost pertinacity, that they too may understand that they are tyrants, and their laws useless for justification, nay that they had no right to establish such laws.

For that very reason we must be careful not to transform clemency into a more generalized rule of justification. That is why (among other reasons) "the thief on the cross" is such a bogus argument for faith-only salvation. Not only was water baptism physically impossible at that moment, but what we were witnessing in that incident was clemency, not justification.

Thus while the ground of justification is the death of Christ, the means by which justification becomes efficacious to the individual is faith.29 Justification is a gift bestowed to be received by faith (Rom. 3:24, 25). Faith means acceptance of this work of God in Christ, complete reliance upon it, and an utter abandonment of one’s own works as the grounds of justification

In our day, most of popular evangelicalism has little realization of the wonders of justification by perfect righteousness. Without any covenantal moorings and by seeking to avoid speaking of God as angry with sinners, modern evangelicals have little left to say about justification except to focus on one's faith, one's very personal, individualistic relationship with Christ.

Asceticism is the denial of the will to live; and the transition from the Old Testament to the New, from the dominion of Law to that of Faith, from justification by works to redemption through the Mediator, from the domain of sin and death to eternal life in Christ, means, when taken in its real sense, the transition from the merely moral virtues to the denial of the will to live.

Manifest in this trade (commercial sale of indulgences via bankers) at the same time was a pernicious tendency in the Roman Catholic system, for the trade in indulgences was not an excess or an abuse but the direct consequence of the nomistic degradation of the gospel. That the Reformation started with Luther’s protest against this traffic in indulgences proves its religious origin and evangelical character. At issue here was nothing less than the essential character of the gospel, the core of Christianity, the nature of true piety. And Luther was the man who, guided by experience in the life of his own soul, again made people understand the original and true meaning of the gospel of Christ. Like the “righteousness of God,” so the term “penitence” had been for him one of the most bitter words of Holy Scripture. But when from Romans 1:17 he learned to know a “righteousness by faith,” he also learned “the true manner of penitence.” He then understood that the repentance demanded in Matthew 4:17 had nothing to do with the works of satisfaction required in the Roman institution of confession, but consisted in “a change of mind in true interior contrition” and with all its benefits was itself a fruit of grace. In the first seven of his ninety-five theses and further in his sermon on “Indulgences and Grace” (February 1518), the sermon on “Penitence” (March 1518), and the sermon on the “Sacrament of Penance” (1519), he set forth this meaning of repentance or conversion and developed the glorious thought that the most important part of penitence consists not in private confession (which cannot be found in Scripture) nor in satisfaction (for God forgives sins freely) but in true sorrow over sin, in a solemn resolve to bear the cross of Christ, in a new life, and in the word of absolution, that is, the word of the grace of God in Christ. The penitent arrives at forgiveness of sins, not by making amends (satisfaction) and priestly absolution, but by trusting the word of God, by believing in God’s grace. It is not the sacrament but faith that justifies. In that way Luther came to again put sin and grace in the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The forgiveness of sins, that is, justification, does not depend on repentance, which always remains incomplete, but rests in God’s promise and becomes ours by faith alone.

And even in the open air the stench of whiskey was appalling. To this fiendish poison, I am certain, the greater part of the squalor I saw is due. Many of these vermin were obviously not foreigners—I counted at least five American countenances in which a certain vanished decency half showed through the red whiskey bloating. Then I reflected upon the power of wine, and marveled how self-respecting persons can imbibe such stuff, or permit it to be served upon their tables. It is the deadliest enemy with which humanity is faced. Not all the European wars could produce a tenth of the havock occasioned among men by the wretched fluid which responsible governments allow to be sold openly. Looking upon that mob of sodden brutes, my mind’s eye pictured a scene of different kind; a table bedecked with spotless linen and glistening silver, surrounded by gentlemen immaculate in evening attire—and in the reddening faces of those gentlemen I could trace the same lines which appeared in full development of the beasts of the crowd. Truly, the effects of liquor are universal, and the shamelessness of man unbounded. How can reform be wrought in the crowd, when supposedly respectable boards groan beneath the goblets of rare old vintages? Is mankind asleep, that its enemy is thus entertained as a bosom friend? But a week or two ago, at a parade held in honour of the returning Rhode Island National Guard, the Chief Executive of this State, Mr. Robert Livingston Beeckman, prominent in New York, Newport, and Providence society, appeared in such an intoxicated condition that he could scarce guide his mount, or retain his seat in the saddle, and he the guardian of the liberties and interests of that Colony carved by the faith, hope, and labour of Roger Williams from the wilderness of savage New-England! I am perhaps an extremist on the subject of prohibition, but I can see no justification whatsoever for the tolerance of such a degrading demon as drink.

Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.

Lutheran ideology unleashed libido to achieve its political and ecclesial ends, and Luther, like Hugh Hefner, discovered that the only way to make use of libido effectively was to create for his contemporaries an escape from the guilt that accompanied its satisfaction. The sixteenth-century equivalent of the Playboy Philosophy was justification by faith alone, culminating in the doctrine of the enslaved will. De Servo Arbitrio, it should be remembered, was published in the same year that Luther married. Luther, in creating his doctrine of the enslaved will, became the first modern man, and Lutheranism became the first modern ideology. Its primary attraction to the hordes of apostate priests and nuns who flocked to Wittenberg to follow him lay in its ability to rationalize sexual license and broken vows.

The churches (even the gospel churches) are worldly in spirit, morally anemic, on the defensive, imitating instead of initiating and in a wretched state generally because for two full generations they have been told that justification is no more than a “not guilty” verdict pronounced by the heavenly Father upon a sinner who can present the magic coin faith with the wondrous “open-ses-ame” engraved upon it.

Righteousness is not about right doing. Righteousness is about right believing. You are made righteous in God's eyes when you put your faith in Christ and His sacrifice for you. It is through Jesus' obedience that we have been made righteous and justified from all our sins. Justification is our Lord Jesus removing all the guilt and penalty of sin and proclaiming that we have been made righteous by His shed blood.

The real cause for Paul’s rejection of the ‘works of the law’ lies beyond both self-understanding and ethics. As we shall see, faith for Paul is the correlate to Christ’s cross and resurrection. It is obedience to the promise of God fulfilled in that event (see e.g. Rom. 4:13–25). One is justified not because of a mere inward disposition, but because of Christ in whom God has atoned for sin and effected a new creation.

My first mistake is to humanize God. My second mistake is to hold those wretched human characteristics up against all of the majestic things that I sense God should be. The blatant discrepancy which is certain to ensue then allows me to not only justify my rejection of Him, it grants me unbridled permission to discount His existence altogether. And that third and final mistake is without a doubt the most costly of all.

So it is a pathetic irony that in our time, with greater means than ever to proclaim the glories of the gospel to the ends of the earth, the church has now become confused as to whether preaching the gospel is even necessary. Embarrassed by the realities of sin and hell, fearful of offending the perishing by calling them to repent and confess Jesus as Lord, and desperate to save God from being responsible for anyone’s condemnation, we have raised questions about whether people even need to hear the gospel. After all, God loves you just the way you are, many will say. We have questions about the lordship of Christ and the doctrine of justification. We have confusion about the doctrine of imputation and about the nature of faith and repentance. Many wonder openly, is it even necessary to believe in Jesus Christ? Others are confident it is not.

What justification could a person possibly give themselves before handing over their very Will to the nebulous control of the Republic? Everyone over there must be facile. Blind. Cowards. Probably all three. We knew the truth, of course. Had been subjected to a hundred lectures dissecting why people submitted to the Hierarchy. Fear, naturally, played its part—but not always. Sometimes it was greed loosely masquerading as ambition. Sometimes it was misplaced faith that others would behave fairly and rightly. Or social pressure, the inevitable belief that the majority cannot be wrong. The reasons were complex and many-faceted and unavoidably varied from person to person. But we never mentioned those during our childish vents as we watched the sun set over the domain of our enemy. Easier to despise than understand. Easier to mock than empathise.

Is it by the instrumentality of faith we receive Christ as our justification, without the merit of any of our works? Well. But this same faith, if vital enough to embrace Christ is also vital enough to "work by love," "to purify or hearts." This then is the virtue of the free gospel, as a ministry of sanctification, that the very faith which embraces the gift becomes an inevitable and a divinely powerful principle of obedience.

In these pages we look at life in one day. We look at faith in small moments, spiritual formation in its molecular form—not because this is all that matters, but because the only life any of us live is in daily, pedestrian humanity. I like big ideas. I can get drunk on talk of justification, ecclesiology, pneumatology, Christology, and eschatology. But these big ideas are borne out—lived, believed, and enfleshed—in the small moments of our day,

Alongside this was the king who remained a conservative to his dying day. He never accepted the central Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, despite all Cranmer’s efforts to persuade him, especially in the revision of the Bishops’ Book; so he had lost his hold on purgatory while not finding his way to a coherent replacement doctrine on salvation.49 To see this is to make some sense at last of the apparently baffling twists of policy and inconsistencies in the king: he was caught between his lack of full belief in two mutually opposed ways of seeing the road to salvation. What did he have instead? A ragbag of emotional preferences. He cherished his beautiful personal rosary, which still exists; he maintained the mass in all its ancient Latin splendour and he left instructions in his will for a generous supply of requiems, in line with his new rationale for them in the King’s Book.

we shouldn’t attribute the power of justification to something formed in us that makes us pleasing to God. We must attribute it to faith, which takes hold of Christ the Savior and keeps him in our hearts. This faith justifies us apart from love and prior to love. We concede that we must also teach about good works and love. But we only teach these at the proper time and place—when the question deals with how we should live, not how we are justified.

the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).11 This has been assumed to be what Paul was saying in these letters. More specifically, when people express “faith” in this line of thought, they are assured that they are therefore forgiven and heaven-bound. This, it has been assumed, is what Paul meant by “justification.” One can see a low-grade version of this when young persons, moved by a sermon or perhaps by an apologetic argument, say a prayer of Christian commitment and are thereupon informed that they are now “justified by faith,” that they are therefore going to heaven, and that they must not try to supplement this pure, justifying “faith” either with moral effort or with religious ritual.

Your computer operates automatically in a default mode unless you deliberately tell it to do something else. So Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode. We habitually and instinctively look to other things besides God and his grace as our justification, hope, significance, and security. We believe the gospel at one level, but at deeper levels we do not. Human approval, professional success, power and influence, family and clan identity—all of these things serve as our heart’s “functional trust” rather than what Christ has done, and as a result we continue to be driven to a great degree by fear, anger, and a lack of self-control. You cannot change such things through mere will-power, through learning Biblical principles and trying to carry them out. We can only change permanently as

Mankind could point with pride to this fine flower of the human spirit--if it were not for one thing: namely that God is God and grace is grace. At this point begins the destruction of our illusions and of our cultural enthusiasm, the great destruction which God himself effects, and which the ancient myth of the tower of Babel typifies. 'And if by grace, then it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace.' Our way to the eternal is interrupted and we are plunged back into the depths from which we came, with out philosophy and art, our morality and religion. For another way now opens, the way of God to man, the way of revelation and grace, the way of Christ, the way of justification by faith alone. 'My ways are not your ways,' that is the answer now. It is not we who go to God, but God who comes to us. It is not religion that sets us right with God, for God alone can do this; it is his action on which we must depend.

Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence. This is a companion whose embrace of us does not strengthen or weaken depending on how clean or unclean, how attractive or revolting, how faithful or fickle, we presently are. The friendliness of his heart for us subjectively is as fixed and stable as is the declaration of his justification of us objectively.

No other religion has a God who serves His people rather than demanding service of them. This is why for Martin Luther justification was the chief article of the faith. Christ turned over our human expectations so that His glorious grace might be our faith and confession. God destroys our acquisitive holiness by giving us a perfect ransom that we cannot acquire. This ransom frees us from constantly seeking to put ourselves on top. We are free to be last, because Christ exalts us.

Any Justification that does not lead to Biblical sanctification and mortification of sinful desires is a false justification no matter how many Solas you attach to it”. “See that your chief study be about the heart, that there God’s image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.” ~ Richard Baxter Never forget that truth is more important to the church than peace ~ JC Ryle "Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.” ~ Francis Schaeffer I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. When faith and doctrine are concerned and endangered, neither love nor patience are in order...when these are concerned, (neither toleration nor mercy are in order, but only anger, dispute, and destruction - to be sure, only with the Word of God as our weapon. ~ Martin Luther “Truth must be spoken, however it be taken.” ~ John Trapp “Hard words, if they be true, are better than soft words if they be false.” – C.H. Spurgeon “Oh my brethren, Bold hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards” – CH Spurgeon “The Bible says Iron sharpens Iron, But if your words don't have any iron in them, you ain't sharpening anyone”. “Peace often comes as a result of conflict!” ~ Don P Mt 18:15-17 Rom 12:18 “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” ~ Martin Luther “The Scriptures argue and debate and dispute; they are full of polemics… We should always regret the necessity; but though we regret it and bemoan it, when we feel that a vital matter is at stake we must engage in argument. We must earnestly contend for the truth, and we are all called upon to do that by the New Testament.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Romans – Atonement and Justification) “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher “Truth bites and it stings and it has a blade on it.” ~ Paul Washer Soft words produce hard hearts. Show me a church where soft words are preached and I will show you a church of hard hearts. Jeremiah said that the word of God is a hammer that shatters. Hard Preaching produces soft hearts. ~ J. MacArthur Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified, prepare the soul for glory. ~ Richard Sibbes “Cowards never won heaven. Do not claim that you are begotten of God and have His royal blood running in your veins unless you can prove your lineage by this heroic spirit: to dare to be holy in spite of men and devils.” ~ William Gurnall

Thomas Jefferson's Letter to John Holmes on the Missouri Statehood Question – April 20, 1820 I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a State. This certainly is the exclusive right of every State, which nothing in the constitution has taken from them and given to the General Government. Could Congress, for example, say, that the non- freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other State? I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect. Th. Jefferson

Justification is not simply “forgiveness,” because a person could be forgiven and then go out and sin and become guilty. Once you have been “justified by faith” you can never be held guilty before God. Justification is also different from “pardon,” because a pardoned criminal still has a record. When the sinner is justified by faith, his past sins are remembered against him no more, and God no longer puts his sins on record (see Ps. 32:1–2; Rom. 4:1–8). Finally, God justifies sinners, not “good people.” Paul declared that God justifies “the ungodly” (Rom. 4:5). The reason most sinners are not justified is because they will not admit they are sinners! And sinners are the only kind of people Jesus Christ can save (Matt. 9:9–13; Luke 18:9–14). When Peter separated himself from the Gentiles, he was denying the truth of justification by faith, because he was saying, “We Jews are different from—and better than—the Gentiles.” Yet both Jews and Gentiles are sinners (Rom. 3:22–23) and can be saved only by faith in Christ.

The genius of the divine way of salvation by faith is that in it we are personally, actively united to Jesus Christ, but in a way that contributes nothing to His work. Faith is by definition noncontributory; it is the reception of Christ, not an addition to His finished work. B. B. Warfield finely puts it this way: It is not faith that saves, but faith in Jesus Christ.... It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or in the nature of faith, but in the object of faith.14 In this sense, even though we are actively involved in faith, we are passive with respect to the accomplishing of justification. In the deepest sense, then, it is by grace that we are saved through faith, and that (whether the grace, the faith, or the union of the two in justification) is the gift of God; it is not of works, lest anyone should boast (Eph. 2:8-9; notice the reiteration of the theme of non-boasting of Rom. 3:27).

Thomas Cranmer in his ‘Homily of Salvation’ explained that three things had to go together in our justification: on God’s part ‘his great mercy and grace’, on Christ’s part ‘the satisfaction of God’s justice’, and on our part ‘true and lively faith’. He concluded the first part of the homily: ‘It pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite mercy, without any our desert or deserving, to prepare for us the most precious jewels of Christ’s body and blood, whereby our ransom might be fully paid, the law fulfilled, and his justice fully satisfied.’15

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we carry forward the basic insight our fundamental relationship to the world is one of love. Christians say that “God is Love,” that God created the universe out of love. The source of God’s Creation is love, and our relationship to the possibility of meaning within this created world is in and through love. The Christian community is a reciprocal relationship among subjects who love and are loved. The subject maintains the meaning of God’s Creation by taking up a Christ-like love toward others. The appearance of meaning in the world—love’s product—is always a manifestation of the divine. Liberalism turns away from this entire tradition of thought, in party because of its association with religion, and in part because this tradition resists the analytic form of reason. For liberalism, religion is individualized and privatized, and thus it cannot be used in the explanation or justification of a public space. If it does invade the public, it threatens irrationality. But religion is no less an effort to understand the character of our experience, and even a secular philosophy must not ignore that experience. We cannot simply deny what we cannot place within our categories of analysis. (221)

It is true enough that sanctification follows justification, but justification never gets left behind. We will never stand before God on the basis of our own righteousness. We can stand before God only on the basis of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Once and forever, we are justified before God by the righteousness we have received by faith. To be sure, we are becoming more holy all the time. Having been justified, we are now becoming sanctifies. But we cannot use our obedience--aa imperfect as it is--to establish our righteousness before God. To put this another way, we cannot base our justification on our sanctification

It was G. K. Chesterton who kept alive the spirit of Kierkegaard and naïve Christianity in modern thought, as when he showed with such style that the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.46 There is no one more logical than the lunatic, more concerned with the minutiae of cause and effect. Madmen are the greatest reasoners we know, and that trait is one of the accompaniments of their undoing. All their vital processes are shrunken into the mind. What is the one thing they lack that sane men possess? The ability to be careless, to disregard appearances, to relax and laugh at the world. They can’t unbend, can’t gamble their whole existence, as did Pascal, on a fanciful wager. They can’t do what religion has always asked: to believe in a justification of their lives that seems absurd. The neurotic knows better: he is the absurd, but nothing else is absurd; it is “only too true.” But faith asks that man expand himself trustingly into the nonlogical, into the truly fantastic. This spiritual expansion is the one thing that modern man finds most difficult, precisely because he is constricted into himself and has nothing to lean on, no collective drama that makes fantasy seem real because it is lived and shared.

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are no hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades. Immunized against fear by the promise of a martyr's paradise, the authentic faith-head deserves a high place in the history of armaments, alongside the longbow, the warhorse, the tank and the cluster bomb. If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise. And they were taught that lesson not necessarily by extremist fanatics but by decent, gentle, mainstream religious instructors, who lined them up in their madrasa, sitting in rows, rhythmically nodding their innocent little head up and down while they learned every words of the holy book like demented parrots. Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Lo! my God, without merit on my part, of His pure and free mercy, has given to me (an unworthy, condemned, and contemptible creature) all the riches of justification and salvation in Christ. For such a Father then, who has overwhelmed me with these inestimable riches of His, why should I not freely, cheerfully, with my whole heart and with an eager will, do all that I know will be pleasing to Him, and acceptable in His sight? I will therefore give myself, as a sort of Christ, to my neighbor, as Christ has given Himself to me; and will do nothing in this life, except what I see will be needful, advantageous, and wholesome for my neighbor, since by faith I abound in all good things in Christ.

Turn to the most ancient and most modern philosophies: all of them lack a consciousness of the extent to which the will to truth itself needs a justification, here is a gap in every philosophy—where does it come from? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been lord over all philosophy, because truth was set as being, as god, as the highest authority itself, because truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this “allowed to be”?—From the very moment that faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, there is a new problem as well: that of the value of truth.—The will to truth needs a critique—let us hereby define our own task—the value of truth is tentatively to be called into question.

THREE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER JESUS DIED ON A ROMAN cross, the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians, who had once been persecuted by the empire, became the empire, and those who had once denied the sword took up the sword against their neighbors. Pagan temples were destroyed, their patrons forced to convert to Christianity or die. Christians whose ancestors had been martyred in gladiatorial combat now attended the games, cheering on the bloodshed. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. On July 15, 1099, Christian crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem, then occupied by Fatimite Arabs. They found a breach in the wall and took the city. Declaring “God wills it!” they killed every defender in their path and dashed the bodies of helpless babies against rocks. When they came upon a synagogue where many of the city’s Jews had taken refuge, they set fire to the building and burned the people inside alive. An eyewitness reported that at the Porch of Solomon, horses waded through blood. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Through a series of centuries-long inquisitions that swept across Europe, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them women accused of witchcraft, were tortured by religious leaders charged with protecting the church from heresy. Their instruments of torture, designed to slowly inflict pain by dismembering and dislocating the body, earned nicknames like the Breast Ripper, the Head Crusher, and the Judas Chair. Many were inscribed with the phrase Soli Deo Gloria, “Glory be only to God.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. In a book entitled On Jews and Their Lies, reformer Martin Luther encouraged civic leaders to burn down Jewish synagogues, expel the Jewish people from their lands, and murder those who continued to practice their faith within Christian territory. “The rulers must act like a good physician who when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow,” he wrote. Luther’s writings were later used by German officials as religious justification of the Holocaust. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

Sam Harris was not being overly cynical when he wrote, in The End of Faith: We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’; otherwise, they are likely to be called ‘mad’, ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional’ . . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. I

The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves. We have been repeatedly told, with some justification, that Asia lives in the past,—it is like a rich mausoleum which displays all its magnificence in trying to immortalize the dead. It was said of Asia that it could never move in the path of progress, its face was so inevitably turned backwards. We accepted this accusation, and came to believe it. In India, I know, a large section of our educated community, grown tired of feeling the humiliation of this charge against us, is trying all its resources of self-deception to turn it into a matter of boasting. But boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in itself.

Recondition your reactions to dominant people. Try to visualize yourself behaving in a firm manner, armed with well-prepared facts and evidence. Practice saying things like “Hold on a minute—I need to consider what you have just said.” Also practice saying “I’m not sure about that. It’s too important to make a snap decision now.” Don’t cave in for fear that someone might shout at you or have a tantrum. Have faith that your own abilities will work if you use them. Non-assertive people are often extremely strong in areas of process, detail, dependability, reliability, and working cooperatively with others. These capabilities all have the potential to undo a dominating personality who has no proper justification. Recognize your strengths and use them to defend and support your position.

We habitually and instinctively look to other things besides God and his grace as our justification, hope, significance, and security. We believe the gospel at one level, but at deeper levels we do not. Human approval, professional success, power and influence, family and clan identity—all of these things serve as our heart’s “functional trust” rather than what Christ has done, and as a result we continue to be driven to a great degree by fear, anger, and a lack of self-control. You cannot change such things through mere willpower, through learning Biblical principles and trying to carry them out. We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.

But such accounts as we have from the Romans were written in periods of panic, and the Roman could lie about his enemies with a freedom and vigour that must arouse the envy even of the modern propagandist. He could talk of Punic faith as a byword for perfidy while committing the most abominable treacheries against Carthage, and his railing accusations of systematic cruelty against this people or that were usually the prelude and excuse for some frightful massacre or enslavement or robbery on his own part. He had quite a Modern passion for self-justification. We must remember that these accounts of the savagery and frightfulness of the Huns came from a people whose chief amusement was gladiatorial shows, and whose chief method of dealing with insurrection and sedition was nailing the offender to a cross to die.

On January 30, 1750, Mayhew stood in the pulpit of Boston’s Old West Church and preached on the occasion of the 101st anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. His message from Romans 13, titled “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the High Powers,” became “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America.”2 When published, Mayhew’s sermon spread like electricity through the Colonies. John Adams, fourteen at the time, read it over and over “till the Substance of it, was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”3 Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism” for the American Revolution.4 Others have called it “the first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the crown.”5 In

It is characteristic of the faith of the Christian that through God’s grace and the merit of Jesus Christ he has become entirely justified and guiltless in God’s eyes, so that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8: 1 ). And it is characteristic of the prayer of the Christian to hold fast to this innocence and justification which has come to him, appealing to God’s word and thanking for it. So not only are we permitted, but directly obligated–provided we take God’s action to us at all seriously–to pray in all humiliation and certainty: “I was blameless before him and I kept myself from guilt” (Psalm 18:23); “If thou testest me thou wilt find no wickedness in me” (Psalm 17:3). With such a prayer we stand in the center of the New Testament, in the community of the cross of Jesus Christ.

I have difficulty in recognizing those hopeful innocents as ourselves. What justification did Sally have for her faith in me? What justification did I have for faith in myself? Why did all those Ellises and Langs, down to the remotest cousin, take us at our declared value—or more accurately, at the value that Sid and Charity declared for us? I suppose I know. To them we were no very special phenomenon—a young couple on their way up, just starting out. That family expected young people to be reasonably attractive socially, and gifted in some way. They had bred so many kinds of competence and so many examples of distinction that mediocrity would have surprised them more than accomplishment did. And they rather liked the fact that like Lyle Lister we came from nowhere. We corroborated some transcendental faith of theirs that the oversoul roof leaked on all alike.

Why didn’t we shout it from the rooftops? We reported the situation. I told you, we wrote internal reports. And we stayed silent and obeyed orders implicitly, because we were under Party discipline. I was a Communist. I don’t remember any of our staff being afraid for their own skin and refusing to travel to the Zone. And that was not because they were afraid of losing their Party card, but because of their faith. Above all, a belief that we were living in a fine and just society that put people first. Man was the measure of all things. For many people, the collapse of that faith ended in a heart attack or suicide. A bullet in the heart, as with Academician Legasov. Because when you lose that faith, when you are marooned without faith, you are no longer part of something, but complicit in it, and you no longer have any justification. That is how I understand what he did.

All the benefits we obtain in Christ are benefits of the covenant of grace. These are acquired first by Christ in all fullness in an objectively real way. Then they are applied by the Holy Spirit to believers. In this order, justification based on Christ’s objective atonement precedes the acts of repentance of believers and their lives of sanctification in which they grow in grace. For this reason the immediate work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration precedes faith, and since only those who are holy will gain eternal life, sanctification precedes perseverance in order. Another way of stating this is to say that Christ first restores our relationship to God, then renews us after God’s image, and finally preserves for us our heavenly inheritance. Another way is to say that we are called, justified, sanctified, and glorified. All this is from God, in Christ, through the power and working of the Holy Spirit. 

The blind faith of science is that empiricism is right and everything else – including rationalism – is wrong. Science makes no attempt to defend this position. It does not engage in any debate. No scientists enter into any discussion with philosophers. Science simply assumes the correctness of empiricism. It takes it as an absolute fact that empiricism is right, in no need of any kind of justification. Scientists, those that can be bothered to think about the basis of science at all (and there are very few such scientists – they nearly all belong to the Shut Up and Calculate gang) – will typically talk of science relying on falsification principles and verification principles. Unfortunately for scientists, the falsification principle can’t be falsified, hence is false in its own terms, and the verification principle can’t be verified, hence is false in its own terms. Hardly the basis of a coherent system!

The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God. The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies—except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

May 15 MORNING “All that believe are justified.” — Acts 13:39 THE believer in Christ receives a present justification. Faith does not produce this fruit by-and-by, but now. So far as justification is the result of faith, it is given to the soul in the moment when it closes with Christ, and accepts Him as its all in all. Are they who stand before the throne of God justified now? — so are we, as truly and as clearly justified as they who walk in white and sing melodious praises to celestial harps. The thief upon the cross was justified the moment that he turned the eye of faith to Jesus; and Paul, the aged, after years of service, was not more justified than was the thief with no service at all. We are to-day accepted in the Beloved, to-day absolved from sin, to-day acquitted at the bar of God. Oh! soul-transporting thought! There are some clusters of Eshcol’s vine which we shall not be able to gather till we enter heaven; but this is a bough which runneth over the wall. This is not as the corn of the land, which we can never eat till we cross the Jordan; but this is part of the manna in the wilderness, a portion of our daily nutriment with which God supplies us in our journeying to and fro. We are now — even now pardoned; even now are our sins put away; even now we stand in the sight of God accepted, as though we had never been guilty. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” There is not a sin in the Book of God, even now, against one of His people. Who dareth to lay anything to their charge? There is neither speck, nor spot, nor wrinkle, nor any such thing remaining upon any one believer in the matter of justification in the sight of the Judge of all the earth. Let present privilege awaken us to present duty, and now, while life lasts, let us spend and be spent for our sweet Lord Jesus.

If you say you are the chief of sinners, I answer that will be no hindrance to your salvation. Indeed it will not, if you lay hold on Christ by faith. Read the Evangelists, and see how kindly he behaved to his disciples, who had fled from and denied him. ‘Go, tell my brethren,’ says he. He did not say, ‘Go, tell those traitors,’ but, ‘Go, tell my brethren and Peter.’ It is as though he had said, ‘Go, tell my brethren in general, and Peter in particular, that I am risen. Oh, comfort his poor drooping heart. Tell him I am reconciled to him. Bid him weep no more so bitterly. For though with oaths and curses he thrice denied me, yet I have died for his sins; I have risen again for his justification: I freely forgive him all.” Thus slow to anger and of great kindness, was our all-merciful High Priest. And do you think he has changed his nature and forgets poor sinners, now he is exalted to the right hand of God? No; he is the same yesterday, today, and forever; and sitteth there only to make intercession for

At the heart of the Reformation message was a rejection of the power of individual believers, or of the church acting on their behalf, to affect God's judgment about who should be saved and who should be damned. Martin Luther had been convinced, like Augustine, of the powerlessness and unworthiness of fallen humanity, and struck by the force of God's mercy. Good works could not merit this mercy, or affect a sovereign God; instead individual sinners were entirely dependent on God's mercy and justified (saved) by faith alone. Jean Calvin, a generation later, developed more clearly the predestinarian implications - since some men were saved and some were damned, and since this had nothing to do with their own efforts, it must mean that God had created some men predestined for salvation (the elect). This seemed to imply that He must also have predestined other men for damnation (double predestination), a line of argument which led into dangerous territory. Some theologians, Calvin's close associate Beza among them, went further and argued that the entire course of human history was foreordained prior to Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden. These views (particularly the latter, 'supralapsarian' arguments) seemed to their opponents to suggest that God was the author of the sin, both in Eden and in those who were subsequently predestined for damnation. They also raised a question about Christ's sacrifice on the cross - had that been made to atone for the sins of all, or only of the elect? Because of these dangers many of those with strong predestinarian views were unsure about whether the doctrine should be openly preached. Clever theologians, like expensive lawyers, are adept at failing to push arguments too far and there were many respectable positions short of the one adopted by Beza. But predestination was for many Protestants a fundamental - retreat from this doctrine implied a role for free will expressed in works rather than justification by faith. It thus reopened the door to the corruptions of late-medieval Christianity.

In the first case, the religious association succumbs to destruction from within, its organism becomes subordinated to goals completely different from the original idea, and its theosophic and moral values fall prey to characteristic deformation, thereupon serving as a disguise for domination by pathological individuals. The religious idea then becomes both a justification for using force and sadism against non-believers, heretics, and sorcerers, and a conscience drug for people who put such inspirations into effect. Anyone criticizing such a state of affairs is condemned with paramoral indignation, allegedly in the name of the original idea and faith in God, but actually because he feels and thinks within the categories of normal people. Such a system retains the name of the original religion and many other specific names, swearing on the prophet’s beard while using this for its doubletalk. Something which was to be originally an aid in the comprehension of God’s truth now scourges nations with the sword of imperialism.

The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental. Mark relates that, having ‘called all the people unto him’, Jesus stated solemnly: ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.’89 This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man’s obedience to the Torah which creates God’s response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.

Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.

The veil of forgetfulness that divides eternity in two has its own powerful justifications. Philip Barlow, a modern religious scholar, has written eloquently of the surprising value of the veil: My impression is that, informed and animated by a thoughtful faith in a wider horizon, the veil quite properly funnels the bulk of our attention to the here and now: on the time, people, problems, and opportunities of this day, this moment. Despite glimpses of eternal purposes that come as gifts and hopes, my life unfolds in tremendous, all-but-complete ignorance of our mysterious universe. There is no proving God to others. Ultimate reality is not something we know; it is something in which we put our trust. . . . The veil is not a curse or cause for existential lament. It is necessary to our stage of progression as beings. While we search, listen, and pray for comfort and direction beyond our sphere, the veil—the necessary epistemic distance from this “beyond”—affords us freedom for independent action not possible if we could literally and readily see God smiling or frowning at each move. And freedom independently to discern and choose between good and evil (morality) and good and bad (quality) is at the core of our purpose, as the powerful mythos of Genesis suggests. The

Of course, historical scholarship on the New Testament is open to all, whether Jewish or Christian, atheist or agnostic. But the present debate about Paul and justification is taking place between people most of whom declare their allegiance to Scripture in general, and perhaps to Paul in particular, as the place where and the means by which the living God has spoken, and still speaks, with life-changing authority. This ought to mean, but does not always mean, that exegesis-close attention to the actual flow of the text, to the questions that it raises in itself and the answers it gives in and of itself-should remain the beginning and the end of the process. Systematize all you want in between-we all do it; there is nothing wrong with it and much to be said for it, particularly when it involves careful comparing of different treatments of similar topics in different contexts. But start with exegesis, and remind yourself that the end in view is not a tidy system, sitting in hard covers on a shelf where one may look up "correct answers," but the sermon, or the shared pastoral reading, or the scriptural word to a Synod or other formal church gathering, or indeed the life of witness to the love of God, through all of which the church is built up and energized for mission, the Christian is challenged, transformed and nurtured in the faith, and the unbeliever is confronted with the shocking but joyful news that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. That is letting Scripture be Scripture. Scripture, in other words, does not exist to give authoritative answers to questions other than those it addresses-not even to the questions which emerged from especially turbulent years such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is not to say that one cannot deduce from Scripture appropriate answers to such later questions, only that you have to be careful and recognize that that is indeed what you are doing.

In this desert everything begins to flower again. "The terrifying significance of an unpremeditated cry of joy cannot be understood while the long night of faith and reason endures." This night is drawing to a close, and a dawn will break which is not the dawn of revolution but of insurrection. Insurrection is, in itself, an asceticism which rejects all forms of consolation. The insurgent will not be in agreement with other men except in so far as, and as long as, their egotism coincides with his. His real life is led in solitude where he will assuage, without restraint, his appetite for existing, which is his only reason for existence. In this respect individualism reaches a climax. It is the negation of everything that denies the individual and the glorification of everything that exalts and ministers to the individual. What, according to Stirner, is good? "Everything of which I can make use." What am I, legitimately, authorized to do? "Everything of which I am capable." Once again, rebellion leads to the justification of crime. Stirner not only has attempted to justify crime (in this respect the terrorist forms of anarchy are directly descended from him), but is visibly intoxicated by the perspectives that he thus reveals. "To break with what is sacred, or rather to destroy the sacred, could become universal. It is not a new revolution that is approaching—but is not a powerful, proud, disrespectful, shameless, conscienceless crime swelling like a thundercloud on the horizon, and can you not see that the sky, heavy with foreboding, is growing dark and silent?" Here we can feel the somber joy of those who create an apocalypse in a garret. This bitter and imperious logic can no longer be held in check, except by an I which is determined to defeat every form of abstraction and which has itself become abstract and nameless through being isolated and cut off from its roots. There are no more crimes and no more imperfections, and therefore no more sinners. We are all perfect.

One cannot erase from a human being's soul those actions which his ancestors loved most and carried out most steadfastly: whether they were, for example, industrious savers attached to a writing table and money box, modest and bourgeois in their desires, as well as modest in their virtues, or whether they were accustomed to live giving orders from morning until night, fond of harsh entertainment and, along with that, perhaps of even harsher duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, they had at some time or other once sacrificed the old privileges of their birth and possessions in order to live entirely for their faith ― their "God" ― as men of an unrelenting and delicate conscience, which blushes when confronted with any compromise. It is in no way possible that a man does not possess in his body the characteristics and preferences of his parents and forefathers, no matter what appearance might say to the contrary. This is the problem of race. If we know something about the parents, then we may draw a conclusion about the child: some unpleasant excess or other, some lurking envy, a crude habit of self-justification ―as these three together have at all times made up the essential type of the rabble― something like that must be passed onto the child as surely as corrupt blood, and with the help of the best education and culture people will succeed only in deceiving others about such heredity. And nowadays what else does education and culture want! In our age, one very much of the people - I mean to say our uncouth age ―"education" and "culture" must basically be the art of deception― to mislead about the origin of the inherited rabble in one's body and soul. Today an educator who preached truthfulness above everything else and constantly shouted at his students "Be true! Be natural! Act as you really are!" ― even such a virtuous and true-hearted jackass would after some time learn to take hold of that furca [pitchfork] of Horace, in order to naturam expellere [drive out nature]. With what success? "Rabble" usque recurret [always returns].

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

God of unrighteousness (compare Romans 9:14). Therefore, Paul clarifies collective identity in Romans 9 just as he does in Romans 2–4. To defend God’s honor, Paul rebuffs Jewish presumption. God’s election of Israel doesn’t imply that he is partial to Jews based on ancestral birth. The Pentateuch itself undermines that assumption. Although Abraham already had Ishmael, God chose Isaac (Romans 9:7). Likewise, God elects the younger Jacob over Esau despite social convention (Romans 9:12). To clarify who are God’s people, Paul engages in what appears to be doublespeak. He previously argued that both Jews and Gentiles are reckoned as “Abraham’s offspring.” Similarly, Paul challenges typical notions of the term Israel in Romans 9:6-8. Christ redefines Paul’s understanding of Israel. What’s at stake? In Romans 9:14, Paul asks, “What shall we say then? Is there injustice [adikia] on God’s part?” He replies, “By no means!” Verses 15-18 offer support: For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then [ara oun] he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. God’s covenant promises depend on grace, not nationality or social position. This is Paul’s point in Romans 4:16 when speaking of justification: “That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.” God is not bound by external measures of justice/righteousness. Cultural norms do not constrain God either to save or condemn. Nor should we think God is only concerned for one expression of righteousness, whether “punitive,” “restorative,” or “covenantal” righteousness. The Creator does all things for his name’s sake. This includes raising up oppressive rulers like Pharaoh (Romans 9:17). Paul reinforces the point in Romans 9:22-24: What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for

I made a brief reference earlier to the first Evangelism Explosion diagnostic question: “Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you know for sure that if you were to die tonight you would go to heaven?” The second diagnostic question is this: “If you were to die tonight and stand before God, and God were to say to you, ‘Why should I let you into My heaven?’ what would you say?” Once, when my son was young, I asked him these two questions. I was delighted that he immediately answered the first question by saying “Yes.” But when I asked him the second question, he looked at me as if I had just posed the silliest question he had ever heard. He said, “Well, I would say, ‘Because I’m dead.’” What could be simpler? My son was being reared in a home committed to biblical theology, but not only had I failed to communicate justification by faith alone to him, he already had been captured by the pervasive view in our culture that everyone goes to heaven and that all you have to do to get there is to die.

The initial grace of justification—forgiveness of sins and becoming God’s sons and daughters—is freely bestowed on us by the Father. There is nothing we can do to earn it. But “staying in” covenant with God comes with great responsibility. We must be faithful to the covenant family life. We must never presume on our salvation, thinking we could never turn away from this gift. Cooperating with God’s grace, we must endeavor to grow and mature as God’s children, living ever more in imitation of Christ.

It can therefore be called ‘the righteousness of faith’ for this reason and no other—because faith is the only grace whose office it is to lay hold on Christ, and so to appropriate his righteousness for the justification of our souls.

was the day when this truth of unity in the body of Christ was proclaimed.  In the same manner as justification is by faith, and sanctification and healing come by faith, church membership is also by faith.  Christ admits every blood‑washed soul into his body.  By the same token, every sinner is excluded regardless of his affiliation with religious sects.  By Christ’s stripes we are healed; by his poverty we become rich; by his death we receive life; by the torn temple veil which is his flesh, we become one body in

God does not declare us righteous because we are ourselves righteous. And thank God that is true, because none of us would meet that standard! No, God declares us righteous because by faith, we are clothed with Christ’s righteous life. God saves us by pure grace, not because of anything we have done, but solely because of what Jesus has done for us.

Admittedly, it would be naive to expect a sixteenth century Jesuit, a "warrior" for Christ, to apologize for or to compromise his faith, and to that extent Ricci's rejection of Buddhism is consistent. Ricci, however, did compromise with Confucianism, and his justification of his faith was not free of cunning and deception.

We are enabled to grow in godliness by the resources of our union with Christ—our sanctification springs from the justification that is by faith. How does this work? How does faith in my justification lead to my sanctification; i.e., how does faith in my union with Christ promote godliness? The answer is that our union with Christ allows us to have two confidences that are the empowering mechanisms for godliness in the Christian life: 1) confidence that our status does not change; and, 2) confidence that our ability does change.

Our union with Christ provides resources for continuance in the Christian life, which is also to be lived by faith. What is this life of faith in which those who have union with Christ now live? It is the experience of godly living that is built upon (or springs from) the union with Christ that faith grasps. This is a vital concept to understand if we are to grow in holiness as God intends. Most Christians instinctively try to validate, or ground, our justification in our sanctification (i.e., we instinctively try to keep our justification in effect by our good behavior).

There are two consequences of basing our justification on how sanctified we have made our lives. First, we jeopardize our faith in our justification—since our lives are never as truly holy as God requires. Second, we unplug our sanctification from its power source, which is faith in our union with Christ rather than confidence in our works.

Key Themes All people are sinners and need to be saved from their sin (1:18–3:20; 5:12–19). The Mosaic law is good and holy, but only Christ can remove sin and overcome its power (2:12–29; 3:9–20; 5:20; 7:1–25; 9:30–10:8). Through the righteousness of God, sin is judged and salvation is provided (3:21–26; 5:12–19; 6:1–10; 7:1–6; 8:1–4). With the coming of Jesus Christ, a new age of redemptive history has begun (1:1–7; 3:21–26; 5:1–8:39). The atoning death of Jesus Christ is central to God’s plan of salvation (3:21–26; 4:23–25; 5:6–11, 15–19; 6:1–10; 7:4–6; 8:1–4). Justification is by faith alone (1:16–4:25; 9:30–10:21). Those who are in Christ Jesus have a sure hope of future glory (5:1–8:39). By the power of the Holy Spirit, those who have died with Christ live a new life (2:25–29; 6:1–7:6; 8:1–39). God is sovereign in salvation. He works all things according to his plan (9:1–11:36). God fulfills his promises to both Jews and Gentiles (1:18–4:25; 9:1–11:36; 14:1–15:13). Because of God’s grace, Christians should be morally pure, should show love to their neighbors, should be good citizens, and should welcome their fellow believers into fullest fellowship (12:1–15:7).

Question 5. Is the moral law which you say was the substance of the Old Covenant from Mount Sinai, done away to believers in the New Covenant as it was a rule of life, etc.? Answer. Doubtless it is done away to believers, and that, firstly, as it was a covenant from Mount Sinai, and secondly a ministry of Moses. 1. That it was and is done away to believers is evident, Romans 7:4-6, where the apostle said, Wherefore my brothers ye also are become dead to the law, etc. and But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held, etc. This was the moral law, for it was that law that discovered sin, even that sin forbidden in that moral law, Thou shall not covet. Ye are not under the law but under grace (chapter 6:14). That very law written on tablets of stone is said to be done away with (2 Cor. 3:7 & 11) and abolished (verse 13); and if any will say it is the ministration that is done away and not the rule, I say it must be done away as it was then a rule, without which the ministration could not cease. It was its being given as a rule that made it a ministration. Therefore I say, that it is done away, first as it was a covenant from Mount Sinai, so it is clear turned out and has no place in the gospel, even as Hagar, the Old Covenant in an allegory must be thrown out of Abraham's house (Gen. 21:10; Gal. 4:22-30): Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman. So that, when the free woman is come to be fruitful, the bondwoman with her son must be cast out. So likewise, Hebrews 12:18-24: We are not come to the mount that might not [ed: word absent in Scripture] be touched, that is, to Mount Sinai, but ye are come unto Mount Sion and to Jesus the mediator of the New Covenant, all of which demonstrates that the law as it was a covenant, from Mount Sinai, is done away to believers. 2. As it was a ministration by Moses, so it is done away with and abolished, and is not to be preached or received (as in the hand of Moses) as it was ministered forth, received and obeyed in the Old Covenant. For it was ministered then on life and death, and was (through man's weakness) a ministration of death and not of life. So that I understand all those expressions to relate to those particulars, when the Scripture says that the law is abolished and done away, that believers are dead to it, delivered from it, are not under it, and the bondwoman must be cast out with her son. And yet believers are not without law to God but under the law of Christ, yea and that under the moral law. But as given from Mount Zion, ministered forth in the hand of Christ, not in the hand of Moses, for if we take it from Moses we must be Moses' disciples. But if from Christ, as given forth in the gospel account, then we are Christ's disciples indeed, and receive it in power (from Christ, the minister and mediator) to live to God according to it, not for righteousness unto justification. But Jesus Christ having fulfilled all its righteousness, having born the curse for us. It is a rule of righteousness, of conversation to the honor of Him that has done all for us in point of justification to eternal life. And so it is become a law of love, a royal law of liberty to all that are by faith in the New Covenant, and a law to which every believer is duty bound to Jesus Christ, to own as His precious rule of life to honor Him by it, as it is given forth by Him in the gospel and not in any other way.

Let us not make the same mistakes that the Reformers made. They thoroughly reformed the gospel message of justification by faith but failed to reform some other doctrines. They threw out justification by the works of the law, but held on to sanctification by the law. They rejected the church’s authority over your soul, but hung on to the church’s authority over your conscience. They discarded priestcraft and substituted clericalism. They rejected the authority of church tradition (which taught Papal infallibility) but replaced it with man-made creeds that soon became as authoritative as Scripture. In reality they replaced a two-legged Pope with a paper Pope. They cried “Sola Scriptura,” while waving a creed in one hand and a sword in the other.

Christ is telling us: "Do not try to capture God. Live in wonder. Let your agnosticism be very very wide. Do not try to understand the infinite within the confines of finite experience." Invariably, however, that is precisely what we try to do by approaching God through the categories of human understanding rather than through the categories of faith, making God meet human expectations, metaphysical, psychological, or moral. We also do it by attempting to be our own justification rather than letting God give us righteousness. The purity of heart needed for contemplation breaks down and God eventually dies in our experience.

as children of God, we acknowledge the law’s authority as a rule for our lives, because we know that this is what our Father wants. If we sin, we confess our fault and ask our Father’s forgiveness on the basis of the family relationship, as Jesus taught us to do – ‘Father . . . forgive us our sins’ (Luke 11: 2, 4). The sins of God’s children do not destroy their justification or nullify their adoption, but they mar the children’s fellowship with their Father. ‘Be holy, for I am holy’ is our Father’s word to us, and it is no part of justifying faith to lose sight of the fact that God, the King, wants his royal children to live lives worthy of their paternity and position.

Her next point is that people really can’t stand to look closely at themselves and these patterns unless they understand justification by faith and union with Christ.

Isaiah's reminder that "God's ways are not our ways," God's reminder to Job that anyone who was not around when the foundations of the universe were being laid should be more filled with wonder and less with conclusions, and Paul's reminder that we can approach God only through faith and that we depend for life upon his justification rather than upon our own contain the seeds of Protestantism contemplation. Living those truths is contemplation.

although the name of Osiris was, as we shall by-and-by see, given to those who departed in the faith. "When the bodies of persons of distinction" [in Egypt], says Wilkinson, quoting Porphyry, "were embalmed, they took out in intestines and put them into a vessel, over which (after some other rites had been performed for the dead) one of the embalmers pronounced an invocation to the sun in behalf of the deceased." The formula, according to Euphantus, who translated it from the original into Greek, was as follows: "O thou Sun, our sovereign lord! and all ye Deities who have given life to man, receive me, and grant me an abode with the eternal gods. During the whole course of my life I have scrupulously worshipped the gods my father taught me to adore; I have ever honoured my parents, who begat this body; I have killed no one; I have not defrauded any, nor have I done any injury to any man." Thus the merits, the obedience, or the innocence of man was the grand plea. The doctrine of Rome in regard to the vital article of a sinner's justification is the very same.

The spiritual, political and economic situation in Europe was like a carefully built bonfire waiting to be lit, but the torch that set it burning was the spiritual crisis of Martin Luther. His struggle led eventually to the rediscovery of the doctrine of justification by faith. ... But what made the Reformation catch fire as an international movement of new life within the church was the reduplication of Luther's experience and insight among a number of Christian humanists who found this doctrine the key to their spiritual release and to their conceptual understanding of the needs in Western Christendom.

Why should I discuss it with you?” she said, turning her gaze on Sax. “It’s clear what you all think about this, we’ve gone over it many times before, and nothing I’ve said makes any difference to you. Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it— we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There’s simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see— as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.

For those who lead or minister, there are yet graver questions: What authority or basis do I have to baptize people who have not been brought to a clear decision to be a disciple of Christ? Dare I tell people, as “believers” without discipleship, that they are at peace with God and God with them? Where can I find justification for such a message? Perhaps most important: Do I as a minister have the faith to undertake the work of disciple-making? Is my first aim to make disciples? Or do I just run an operation?

Nietzsche writes, “The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed them; and the impudent garrulous talk about the ‘justification by faith’ and its supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church’s lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded.”144 Nietzsche was, indeed, a critic without parallel.

The radical nature of the divine imputation brings a death and resurrection […] begins to kindle the first beginnings of actual hope and love where before there had been only hypocrisy and despair. For then the great commandment, ‘Thou shalt love…’ begins to become a reality. It begins to sound not just as a demand, a law, but as a promise: ‘You shall love, you will love one day, for I love you unconditionally. One day the last barrier will fall and you will be mine completely! You can bet your life on it!

The idea is that we are “meritorious,” righteous before God, by both justification and infusion. Christ’s strength is infused, it fills us, and then we are enabled to do good works. This is salvation by cooperation. God works and God infuses us to do good works. Salvation is by faith and works, not by faith alone. Infusion is about cooperation. Imputation, on the other hand, is the work of one.

As tears filled my eyes, I asked further, ‘But, Lord, may such a great sinner as I am actually be accepted and saved by you?’ “And I heard Him say, ‘Whoever comes to me I will never cast away.’195 “Then I responded, ‘But, Lord, what is the appropriate way for me to come so that my faith is properly placed on you?’ “Then He said, ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.196 He is the end of the law for righteousness to all who believe.197 He died for our sins and rose again for our justification.198 He loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood.199 He is the mediator between God and us.200 He lives to make intercession for us.’201 “It was from all of this that I understood I must look for righteousness in the person of Jesus Christ and for satisfaction for my sins by His blood.

You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them. “At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational—that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps, and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence—that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages.

The contradictions (antilogia) found in Scripture are apparent, not real; they are to be understood only with respect to us who cannot comprehend and perceive the agreement everywhere, but not in the thing itself. And if the laws of legitimate contradiction are attended to (that opposites should agree with the same thing [tō autō], in the same respect [kata to auto], with reference to the same thing [pros to auto] and in the same time [tō autō chronō]), these various apparent contradictions (enantiophanē) in Scripture might be easily reconciled. For the discourse does not concern the same thing, as when James ascribes justification to works, which Paul denies to them. For the former speaks of declarative justification of the effect a posteriori, but the latter of justification of the cause, a priori. Thus Luke enjoins mercy, 'Be ye merciful' (Lk. 6:36) which Deuteronomy forbids, 'Thou shalt not pity' (Dt. 19:13). The former refers to private persons, the latter to magistrates. Or they are not said in the same respect, as when Matthew denies the presence of Christ in the world, 'Me ye have not always' (Mt. 26:11*); and yet it is promised, 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world' (Mt. 28:20). The former is said with regard to his human nature and bodily presence, but the latter with regard to his divine nature and spiritual presence. Or the statements are not made with reference to the same thing, as when something is said absolutely and another comparatively. 'Honor thy father' (Ex. 20:12); 'if any man hate not his father' (Lk. 14:26). The former must be understood absolutely, the latter comparatively for loving less and esteeming less than Christ. Or not in the same time, hence the expression 'distinguish times and you will reconcile Scripture.' Thus at one time circumcision is extolled as a great privilege of the Jews (Rom. 3:1*); at another it is spoken of as a worthless thing (Gal. 5:3). But the former refers to the Old Testament dispensation when it was an ordinary sacrament and a seal of the righteousness of faith, but the latter concerns the time of the gospel after the abrogation of the ceremonial law. At one time the apostles are sent to the Jews alone by a special mission before the passion of Christ and prohibited from going to the Gentiles ('Go not into the way of the Gentiles,' Mt. 10:5); at another they are sent to all nations by a general mission after the resurrection (Mk. 16:15).

The contradictions (antilogia) found in Scripture are apparent, not real; they are to be understood only with respect to us who cannot comprehend and perceive the agreement everywhere, but not in the thing itself. And if the laws of legitimate contradiction are attended to (that opposites should agree with the same thing [tō autō], in the same respect [kata to auto], with reference to the same thing [pros to auto] and in the same time [tō autō chronō]), these various apparent contradictions in Scripture might be easily reconciled. For the discourse does not concern the same thing, as when James ascribes justification to works, which Paul denies to them. For the former speaks of declarative justification of the effect a posteriori, but the latter of justification of the cause, a priori. Thus Luke enjoins mercy, 'Be ye merciful' (Lk. 6:36) which Deuteronomy forbids, 'Thou shalt not pity' (Dt. 19:13). The former refers to private persons, the latter to magistrates. Or they are not said in the same respect, as when Matthew denies the presence of Christ in the world, 'Me ye have not always' (Mt. 26:11*); and yet it is promised, 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world' (Mt. 28:20). The former is said with regard to his human nature and bodily presence, but the latter with regard to his divine nature and spiritual presence. Or the statements are not made with reference to the same thing, as when something is said absolutely and another comparatively. 'Honor thy father' (Ex. 20:12); 'if any man hate not his father' (Lk. 14:26). The former must be understood absolutely, the latter comparatively for loving less and esteeming less than Christ. Or not in the same time, hence the expression 'distinguish times and you will reconcile Scripture.' Thus at one time circumcision is extolled as a great privilege of the Jews (Rom. 3:1*); at another it is spoken of as a worthless thing (Gal. 5:3). But the former refers to the Old Testament dispensation when it was an ordinary sacrament and a seal of the righteousness of faith, but the latter concerns the time of the gospel after the abrogation of the ceremonial law. At one time the apostles are sent to the Jews alone by a special mission before the passion of Christ and prohibited from going to the Gentiles ('Go not into the way of the Gentiles,' Mt. 10:5); at another they are sent to all nations by a general mission after the resurrection (Mk. 16:15).

The contradictions (antilogia) found in Scripture are apparent, not real; they are to be understood only with respect to us who cannot comprehend and perceive the agreement everywhere, but not in the thing itself. And if the laws of legitimate contradiction are attended to (that opposites should agree with the same thing [tō autō], in the same respect [kata to auto], with reference to the same thing [pros to auto] and in the same time [tō autō chronō]), these various apparent contradictions in Scripture might be easily reconciled. For the discourse does not concern the same thing, as when James ascribes justification to works, which Paul denies to them. For the former speaks of declarative justification of the effect a posteriori, but the latter of justification of the cause, a priori. Thus Luke enjoins mercy, 'Be ye merciful' (Lk. 6:36) which Deuteronomy forbids, 'Thou shalt not pity' (Dt. 19:13). The former refers to private persons, the latter to magistrates. Or they are not said in the same respect, as when Matthew denies the presence of Christ in the world, 'Me ye have not always' (Mt. 26:11*); and yet it is promised, 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world' (Mt. 28:20). The former is said with regard to his human nature and bodily presence, but the latter with regard to his divine nature and spiritual presence. Or the statements are not made with reference to the same thing, as when something is said absolutely and another comparatively. 'Honor thy father' (Ex. 20:12); 'if any man hate not his father' (Lk. 14:26). The former must be understood absolutely, the latter comparatively for loving less and esteeming less than Christ. Or not in the same time, hence the expression 'distinguish times and you will reconcile Scripture.' Thus at one time circumcision is extolled as a great privilege of the Jews (Rom. 3:1*); at another it is spoken of as a worthless thing (Gal. 5:3). But the former refers to the Old Testament dispensation when it was an ordinary sacrament and a seal of the righteousness of faith, but the latter concerns the time of the gospel after the abrogation of the ceremonial law. At one time the apostles are sent to the Jews alone by a special mission before the passion of Christ and prohibited from going to the Gentiles ('Go not into the way of the Gentiles,' Mt. 10:5); at another they are sent to all nations by a general mission after the resurrection (Mk. 16:15).

Luther discovered as ‘justification by God’s word’ instead of ‘justification by faith’, because it is God’s word that justifies here, not our faith. Faith, thought Luther, is not some inner resource we must summon up; if it were, it would by his definition be sin! For him, the question ‘Have I got enough faith?’ completely misunderstands what faith is, by looking to and so relying on itself, rather than Christ. Faith is a passive thing, simply accepting, receiving, believing Christ—taking God seriously in what he promises in the gospel.

Wesley also found fault with their new method of encouraging people to claim perfection by faith (“The bidding them say, ‘I believe,’” as Wesley put it) with no other evidence, and then affirming that those people were perfected because they said they believed. Here they were taking Wesley's teaching a step further than he was willing to go, but in a direction that seemed logical. Wesley had long taught that the blessing of perfection comes by faith alone and does not depend on the preparation or worthiness of the recipient. So why could someone not believe to have received it without any further evidence, for why would faith need evidence? Wesley, however, was never willing to affirm this conclusion. Years later he expressed his position as follows (by “absolute decrees,” he means the idea that a man is predestined to believe or not believe, and can do nothing but wait and see): To say that every man can believe to justification or sanctification when he will is contrary to plain matter of fact. Everyone can confute it by his own experience. And yet if you deny that every man can believe if he will, you run full into absolute decrees. How will you untie this knot? I apprehend very easily. That every man may believe if he will I earnestly maintain, and yet that he can believe when he will I totally deny. But there will be always something in the matter which we cannot well comprehend or explain.

Revival occurs as a group of people who, on the whole, think they already know the gospel discover they do not really or fully know it, and by embracing the gospel they cross over into living faith. When this happens in any extensive way, an enormous release of energy occurs. The church stops basing its justification on its sanctification. The nonchurched see this and are attracted by the transformed life of the Christian community as it grows into its calling to be a sign of the kingdom, a beautiful alternative to a human society without Christ.

In justification, our own works have no place at all, and simple faith in Christ is the one thing needful. In sanctification, our own works are of great importance, and God instructs us to fight, watch, pray, strive, try, and work.

While Jesus does not directly charge his followers with fighting human foes (though there have been those who have found an implicit justification for such in the name of a righteous cause), many of the faith’s adherents have seen the gospel as a call to continue Christ’s cause by engaging in another kind of warfare — one waged on the spiritual plane. The Bible is full of references both to contest — what the ancient Greeks called agon — and to war. Individuals wrestle with God (both metaphorically and literally), and the apostle Paul refers to believers as “athletes” who must “train” their souls and run the race set before them. Believers are to gird themselves about with spiritual “armor,” and wield the “sword of the spirit” in battling unseen forces and directly confronting the conflict between good and evil.

Whenever and wherever the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith have prevailed in the Christian Church, and according to the degree of clearness with which they have been enforced, the practical duties of Christianity have flourished in the same proportion.

My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the "leap of faith" and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probabilistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying "leap of faith" generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within a few years.

Few things make us as vulnerable as admitting our mistakes, especially to someone we have every reason to think will be angry at us or, even worse, unreceptive or shut down. When we ask for forgiveness, there’s no place for defenses, for justifications. We have to make ourselves naked. At the same time, to forgive is an act of faith and trust. There’s little reason to expect that the transgression won’t happen again; once someone crosses a line, what’s the guarantee they won’t again? We live in a culture of avoidance; few of us have had models of forgiveness or were taught that feeling vulnerable and taking risks is a necessary part of intimacy. So, instead, we seek a kind of cheap grace.

It has been said, indeed, that the faith of the primitive Church was extremely simple, — that it was ‘a life rather than a creed,’ — that few, if any, of the doctrines of Scripture had as yet been developed and defined, — and that Theology had not then assumed a systematic form. This statement is true, so far as it is meant merely to affirm, that the articles of faith were less rigorously reasoned out, and often more vaguely stated, before they were subjected to the ordeal of controversial discussion; for this holds good of every age; but it is not true, if it be understood to imply, either that the primitive Church did not believe, in substance, the self-same doctrines which were afterwards defined, or that her members were incapable of giving a sufficient reason for the hope that was in them. The primitive Church was instructed by the ministry of the Apostles, and continued to be nourished by the Gospels and Epistles; she was the aggregate of all those individual churches, — at Rome, at Ephesus, at Corinth, at Philippi, at Colossae, at Thessalonica, — to whom Paul addressed his profound arguments, in the confident persuasion that they would be understood by those to whom he wrote; and the controversies with false teachers, which were expounded in his writings, were surely sufficient to give them clear and definite views of the doctrines of Grace. The doctrine of Justification, in particular, was so thoroughly discussed in the writings of the Apostles, and that, too, in the way of controversy both with Jews and Gentiles, that their immediate successors had no occasion to treat it as an undecided question; — they found it an established and unquestioned article of the common faith, and they assumed and applied it in all their writings, without thinking it necessary to enter into any formal explanation or proof of it.

Well, where does that leave us with regard to social action and practice? The answer is very far away. There still remains an enormous gap between what we have to grasp in order to ground moral action, to choose a course of action on moral grounds. An enormous gap between that and what we, in fact, understand about human nature and the human needs that derive from it, and the human rights that derive from it. Big gap. So, we are left where we were, with the need to make an intuitive leap and to posit some judgment about what real, intrinsic human nature is. In a sense, you're staking your faith in what you think or hope human beings may be. Now, if you take as your faith that of, say, the classical liberal doctrine, you will conclude that there is no justification, there's no moral justification for the commissar, the central committee, or the cultural or corporate manager, or any of the others who control and coerce us on species grounds. The actual classical liberal view, which is very different from what is known with its deep innatist roots, is very subversive and radical because it challenges the existence of any form of authority and requires that it be justified, which can rarely be done. It's not too surprising, I think, that the actual ideas of the Enlightenment have been subjected to such a broad-ranging attack. They are radical and subversive because of the faith that they express in human capacity, and human rights, and human needs, and their richness. And that's a deeply upsetting view from the point of view of any institutional structure which is concerned with control and manipulation, or any of the people who operate within those institutional structures. Well, if one takes this position, the next thing to do is to make the intuitive leap and turn to the concrete substantive questions of acting as a moral agent, choosing a course of action. And here what you do is seek out structures of authority and domination. Often we don't see them, so you have to try to find them even though they're there. Once you notice them, you see them and seek them out. Ask the question as to whether they, in fact, are legitimate for some contingent reason, say, self-defense or whatever argument is put forth. And if they fail that test, as they almost invariably do, to move forward to dismantle them, which means solidarity, organization, and so on. That's a hard task. But there are achievements. There are real achievements. For most of human history, for example, literal human slavery was considered legitimate. In fact, considered quite praiseworthy. It was for the benefit of these depraved creatures who shouldn't be left on their own. It's only a little tiny period of human history where this is considered a total obscenity. And the fact that it is considered a total obscenity is an achievement. In the 18th century, it was pointed out that wage slavery is fundamentally not very different from slavery. If people are compelled to rent themselves in order to survive, it's not very different than selling yourself in order to survive. That's an insight that has yet to be recovered, but it's a valid one. And, in fact, notice that it grows from these same conceptions of human nature. But, at least, literal human slavery would no longer be justified by, I suppose, almost anyone. That's an achievement. It's a moral achievement. It's a moral advance. Just in our own lifetimes, the questions of the legitimacy of sexist oppression have come to the fore. It's not like anybody noticed before, but there's been a sustained and committed effort to bring them to consciousness. And it's not long ago, anybody my age will know, that it's not long ago they just didn't see it, notice it. It was just part of the background. Now, at least you see it. The problems are there, but it's a moral advance that the problems are recognized to be there. There's some effort to come to terms with them.

The seven gates of the justice and mercy of God are exposed by Paul in Romans 3.9-31. for in Romans 3.9-20 the four gates in the courtroom of heaven are opened. 1. The first gate in Romans 3.9, the charge of entire world is presented by the law of God that we are under sin. 2. The second gate in Romans 3.10-18, the 14 counts of accusations are presented by the law of God. 3. The third gate in Romans 3.19A , the whole world is given the opportunity for defense. They are under the law. 4. The fourth gate in Romans 3.19B the entire world is found naked and hence guilty. The verdict is universal condemnation. This verdict satisfies the justice of God. 5. The fifth gate in Romans 3.21, 24, 25-26 Christ our advocate deposits in heaven the complete and perfect righteousness called the wedding garment by Matthew 22. When that is done God declares legal justification for the entire human race. That act satisfies the mercy of God. 6. The sixth gate in Romans 3.22, 23, 27-28, 31 heaven enters the world to watch those who shall accept to Wear the wedding garment of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Those who do so God declares justification by faith. This is our Title Deed for heaven. 7. The seventh gate in Romans 3.29-30 the redeemed of the Lord shall worship the God of the Jews and Gentiles both in this world and the world to come.

An appetite for faith may be to some extent its justification. Robin Blair-Crawford, actor, author.

Richard F. Lovelace develops this train of thought: Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many… have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification… drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude… Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons… Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger.

The 144,000 have the patience of the saints; they keep the commandments of God, and they also have the faith of Jesus. For them the doors of heaven will swing wide open. They enter as those who have a right to the tree of life, and with holy boldness they go with Jesus even into the presence of God. In this group God completes the demonstration of His power to save. The vilest sinners can be made fit companions for the saints in light. If these persons chosen from the last and weakest generation can endure the test given them, there is no excuse for the fall of Adam. He, in the fullness of strength, failed in the smallest test; these, in all the weakness of humanity, pass a test infinitely greater. Hence, God cannot be accused of requiring more of Adam than he could do. God is now looking for candidates for immortality. He is looking for men and women to make up the number required in the last demonstration. He wants converted, sanctified, dedicated people, such as will not boast of their attainments, but who in humility will follow in the Master's footsteps, exercise the faith He did, have the patience needed to finish the work, and at last enter with Him through the gates into the city.