can we do about it? Or better, what can be done about it? There is only one answer to this, the real predicament in which human beings stand. You may know better and more attractive words, if you do by all means use them, but the real substance of the answer lies in this word: justification.
JUSTIFICATION
In essence, this is a perfectly simple idea, and what must be said about it can be said very quickly. The judgment is set, and you and I stand in the dock, with God himself upon the bench. We know well in our consciences that we are guilty, that whatever punishment the Judge has in mind will not be more than we deserve. And then, instead of the sentence everyone is expecting, there is a verdict of acquittal. If you take away the stage setting in the law court, this amounts to pretty much the same thing as forgiveness, but the background of justification requires, as the background of forgiveness would not do, that the seriousness of the offense is borne in mind. That is justification. It has often been misunderstood, and I think we shall understand it better, if we look at the misunderstandings.
First, it has sometimes been said that justification is not this process of acquittal, but means God’s work in actually making people good. When they have co-operated with God’s grace and become good, then they are justified. Now of course it is true that God does this; he does make people good. Incidentally, no one has said this more strongly than Luther. Do you remember his correction of Karlstadt’s revolutionary preaching at Wittenberg? What is faith if it does not issue in love? It is a pity that Wesley, judging Luther by Lutherans, got him wrong at this point. Perhaps by now he knows what it is to be judged by Wesleyans and does not like it! This, I repeat, is true enough, but it is not justification. If you want another theological label, it is sanctification, and important as that is, it is not the foundation of the Christian life. For one thing, it does not deal with the past, for another can we seriously think that we shall ever be good enough to deserve God’s love? No; the essence of justification is that it is something that God’s love does for us while we are still sinners.
Second, it is sometimes objected that justification by faith involves a legal fiction. It means either that God pretends we are good, when we are not; or that he pretends faith is goodness, which it is not. This is calling black, white and we have a strong and very proper conviction that that is something even God has no business doing. But this is no more true than the idea that justification means making people good. Justification is a creative divine act in the field of relations. See Romans 5.10–11. The parallel with reconciliation is very instructive. The Judge does not pretend that after all, the prisoner is a pretty decent fellow. On his own, he brings him into a proper relation with himself.
May I use an old illustration to bring this out? It is the story of a headmaster interviewing a boy who has done things he ought not. In his wisdom, he decides that he will not punish the boy, and the boy, with the strong sense of justice most boys have, rejects it—“I don’t want to be let off.” The headmaster replies, “I’m not letting you off, I’m taking you on.” When God justifies us, it means that he is taking us on, as his children, his servants. He restores the proper relation between himself and us.
But this illustration will take us a stage further. What I have just described could only be done by a good headmaster, exercising a positive creative influence in his school. A weak disciplinarian could not do it. Only a person who was a positive force for righteousness could do it. That is why, in this text, Paul does not speak of justification alone but adds through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.
THROUGH THE REDEMPTION THAT IS IN CHRIST JESUS
God’s verdict is not an off-hand pronouncement; it is the result of a mighty creative act. This is not the time to expound the Cross in detail. That needs a sermon in itself, or rather a few hundred sermons. But at least we can see in it a creative divine act, by which the moral balance of the world was changed, out of which sprung the possibility of a new relation with God. Let me say two things about it.
First, it shows, if I may put it so, that God in his school is a good disciplinarian. He pays us the compliment of taking our behavior seriously. He will never say of our sin, ‘That’s nothing, it doesn’t matter.’ I cannot subscribe to the certain narrow theories of the atonement which represent God as simply inflicting on Christ the punishment that was due to us, as if he must hit someone and didn’t mind whom he hit. Yet there is truth there; and the death of Jesus does mean that God’s doesn’t simply let our sin go by, but deals with it.
Second, the Cross shows that God acts in love, and love in the end is the only creative power we know. He loved us while we were still sinners; his was a love that sought only to give, not to get. And—see how all the ends tie up—when humans, however sinful they may be, respond in faith to love like that, God and humankind are reconciled. We are justified by grace through faith.
How easy, shallow, and perfunctory our religion is! How lightly we trifle with it! How scared we are of anything we can label ‘theology.” So long as we can be respectable and conventional, and God doesn’t trouble us too much, we are content enough. Can it possibly be that a film should shake us out of our sleep? Will it make a difference if we see a fellow human being wrestling for that real peace with God which alone can release us for the work of life? At least we shall be more sober and more steadfast Christians if we know that we are justified by faith; if we recall that someday we shall have to reckon up with God our Maker; and that the Son of God died that we might be restored to the divine family.
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“FAITH AND WORKS: WESLEY AND LUTHER”—Romans 5.1–11
[Preached four times from 5/29/88 at Elvet to sometime in 1993 at M.R.]
John Wesley had a problem, and he was too honest a man to pretend that it was not true. That is perhaps one difference between him and us. We are apt to sweep our personal problems under the carpet and hope that in due course they will disappear (and sometimes they do). Not Mr. Wesley. Before 1738 as well as after it, he was honest with himself; the problem would not go away. Even when he himself went to America, hoping, I suspect, not only (as he said) to convert the heathen Americans but to find a solution. There was no solution in America and he brought the problem home with him.
If you care to use Biblical language, it was the problem of faith and works; if you prefer, you can call it the problem of religion and ethics, but it was partly by thinking of it in these terms that Wesley got it wrong, and I prefer to avoid “religion,” as a word anyway. How do you come to terms with God, find peace with God, if we again may be biblical? By believing things, or doing things?
Wesley had tried that way of doing things. Few persons had done more. He emerged from the pious background of Epworth Rectory. Of course he would be ordained like his father, so he went to Oxford. Official Oxford was nothing like pious enough, so he found ways of making it more so, joined the Holy Club (previously founded by Charles, but led by John when he came back to Oxford in 1729) which met for study, devotion, and philanthropy. One’s first impression was that they were a crowd of quite insufferable young men; but why should they not have taken seriously what all Oxford professed to believe? And they visited the jail, and they gave sacrificially for the relief of the poor. And so it went on, across the Atlantic and back, another stream of good works.
Believing then: so far as this meant accepting the creeds there was no problem. Like a later figure in history, he would have signed not thirty-nine articles but forty if there had been another one. But was faith more than this? Some said it was, but Wesley was not impressed. It was later, I think, that he spoke of the “still brethren” the pietists3 who had fastened on the text “be still and know that I am God” and interpreted it to mean that one must not pray, receive communion, do good but just—be still. He did not trust that attitude; better surely to obey the commandments.
But what then did you do? I have continued a bit to make the point both clearly and briefly, but it was a desperately serious problem. Was there any way one could accept it with integrity? Put like that the question is one that faces many people today. Behind Wesley’s problem, we can see our own.
This was the point at which Luther came