What Does the Church Teach About Justification?

From Saint Luke 18, the Holy Gospel for Trinity XI...

The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican is Our Lord's personal way of demonstrating to us how it is that we must come to God - in living colour, it highlights how the Christian, redeemed in Christ, purchased by His Sacrifice, and incorporated into His Body by Baptism, is to accept the free gift of communion and life with God in Jesus Christ. How are we justified? How does God condescend to make us holy and righteous before Him? Does God really care about us, so much as to make us His own children? The Cross and Empty Tomb give a resounding ‘yes’ to these questions, the most important ever asked.

The Pharisee: An observer of the Old Testament Law, he is truly righteous, holy, seemingly living-up to God’s revealed standard in the Mosaic Covenant. He is not a bad person, but really quite good, at least according to the expectation of the rules of Israel. Yet he remains unjustified, because he cannot be justified by following external rules and the rites and ceremonies of the Old Covenant. He tries to work His way into heaven, to merit his eternal life by his outward observance of rules and regulations. He tries to come near to God by perfectly following the Old Law. This isn’t enough. There is only pride and self-exaltation in his heart. He exalts himself above the publican next to him, and is not justified is his own conceit.

The Publican: He recognises his inability to prove himself worthy before God. He humbles himself in repentance and faith; he acknowledges his unworthiness and sin. He is radically, totally dependent upon God and God alone for forgiveness. In his humility, he sees himself as God sees him, and turns to God in love and with the desire for forgiveness.

‘The one went away justified, the other did not.’

Our Lord's teaching lays the foundation for the famous instruction of St Paul in the New Testament regarding how we come to be united to God, how we become members of God’s divine Family the Church, and are made members of Christ and His Body:

Justification is being ‘made right’ before God: God saves and redeems us by His grace, by the grace of God alone as His divine initiative, apart from our own observation of ceremonial law or our own personal merit: St Paul says we are ‘justified by Faith apart from the works of the Law’,’ (Romans 3.28) that is, apart from the Old Testament ceremonial system. God's grace infused into us as a free act of God towards us makes us righteous.

Now the instrumental and initial means of our justification, our union with Christ, is Baptism, the sign that accomplishes what it mystically symbolises: Romans 6.3f,

‘Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptised into Jesus Christ were baptised into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by Baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.’

Faith: Faith is God’s divinely-given Gift placed into our hearts by the Holy Ghost. We are justified by the theological virtue of Faith, the Holy Ghost within us, not by the Old Testament Law. And Faith is the fruit of the Holy Ghost, an infused and supernatural virtue, transmitted to us by God’s own working in His own Act - Baptism. Hence, we are justified by Faith because we are justified by grace. Faith itself is God’s personal gift to us, given to us apart from our own act of the will, our mental assent, or our own deserving! But the everlasting gift of faith is not alone; it must work with Hope and Love in order to produce salvation in us. The three theological virtues cannot be isolated from one another. We must co-operate with God's grace to enable His gifts to work in us toward that for which these are given: ‘These three abide, faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love’ (1 Corinthians 13).

‘Faith working by love’ (Galatians 5.6)
‘If I have faith enough to move mountains, but have not charity, I am nothing’ (1 Corinthians 13)
‘We are not justified by Faith alone’ (St James 2.23)

Justification: We are infused with the very Life of the Blessed Trinity and made by supernatural grace, by the power of the Holy Ghost, the children of God, adopted sons and daughters of God; we are made partakers of God’s own nature - transformed and transfigured into the Likeness of Christ (II St Peter 1.4). By His own free act of grace, Jesus Christ vindicates us, sets us free, and give us a new existence of love and life. Jesus does what he declares. He declares us justified - and makes us justified by His grace. Justification is both imputed and infused, imputed and imparted.

Christ in His free and unmerited love forgives us, heals us, restores our nature - and not only this, but Jesus Christ reproduces His life in us. We become one in Christ, one with Christ, ‘little Christs’ to borrow Saint Cyril of Jerusalem’s favourite description of our status.

Justification is absolutely not only a legal, forensic, extrinsic declaration that God has simply forgiven us, not having really changed us from the inside out. When Christ justifies us by His divine grace, the Gift of the Life of God Himself, in Holy Baptism and in the sacramental life, He makes us righteous, He changes our nature, He regenerates and renews us in Himself to be sharers in the New Creation of the New Man, the New Life of Christ. We become partakers of the New Creation as members of the New Humanity, the redeemed humanity of the Church, whose Head is the Second Adam, the Lord from Heaven. Justification is ontological, sacramental, incarnational.

We are insistently not ‘dung hills covered in snow’ as Dr Luther charged. God does not ignore our sinful condition and with a legal fiction merely declare us to be righteous. He makes us godlike by His own grace: we become by grace what God is by nature, what the Church calls theosis. We are men and women re-created by sovereign grace into the Icons of Christ! ‘Behold, if any be in Christ, he is a new creature. The old has passed away, behold all things are made new...’

Justified by God’s supernaturally-infused Life, the grace of the Holy Spirit, His own ineffable Gift, man can be intrinsically, internally, really, essentially made new. The Christian is re-created and made into the Image of Jesus; we come to shed our old nature and put on the human nature of the Incarnate Word in the mysteries of the sacramental life. Jesus Christ is the Great Sacrament, who gives us Himself in His appointed sacramental manner. God assumed our human nature to raise it up and to make it new, to glorify it and bring it Life, God’s life.

We are summoned by God to be His children, adopted by His grace and filled with His Spirit; we are not called God’s slaves, God’s minions, God’s subservient serfs. We are named His children, His sons and daughters, Heirs of God and Co-Heirs of Christ in His Kingdom. We do not earn a wage or salary - we are freely given an inheritance with the Saints in light.

Saint Augustine of Hippo describes our justification in Christ as God’s ‘most excellent work of love and His greatest miracle.’ As he writes: ‘the justification of the wicked is a greater work than the creation of heaven and earth because heaven and earth will pass away but the justification and salvation of God’s people will never pass away....’

Christ has humbled Himself, even unto the death of the Cross, so that we, who were not worthy to be called God’s slaves, should be made His sons and His heirs in His own eternal Family bond, the communion of the Holy Trinity. If we humble ourselves, and receive God’s amazing gift of grace, the Christ-life reproduced in our lives, we shall indeed be exalted to heaven - to be with Christ, to reign with Him, and to extol His wondrous glory forever.