Defining Our Terms

Matters of eternal significance were at stake during the Protestant Reformation.

They still are. The sticking point that was never able to be resolved then or now is the case of imputation. Rome has always rejected the idea that we are justified on the basis of an imputed righteousness, a righteousness that is not our own. Imputed righteousness. You may be hearing that term for the first time and wondering what it's all about. You might think that you're in for an ivory tower academic lecture of little importance to your life, but let me encourage you to stay with us. I'm Lee Webb, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind.

What Dr. R.C. Sproul is about to explain is vital to answering the question, what must I do to be saved? We've been looking at the posting of the 95 Theses by Luther in 1517 and consequently at the Roman Catholic understanding of justification. And in Luther's Theses, he brought into question the whole system of justification that was embraced by the Roman Catholic Church.

At this point, he still believed essentially in the Roman system, but questions were beginning to haunt him. And among them was the question of the treasury of merits. And the treasury of merits was critical to the whole concept of indulgences. We know how the indulgence controversy created a firestorm at the time because the way in which Johann Tetzel was selling the indulgences.

But the bigger question is, what's this whole thing of indulgences about, and where did it come from? Well, again, it developed gradually over the history of the Roman Catholic Church. It was based ultimately on the idea that Christ gave to Peter the keys to the kingdom, or the keys of the keys of the kingdom. And so the pope was seen as holding the office of the keys, and the keys of the kingdom included authority over the dispensing and distribution of indulgences.

Jesus said to his disciples, whoever sins you remit on earth will be remitted in heaven, and so on. Now, the treasury of merit became front and center in this whole idea of the sale of indulgences. And the treasury of merit is a treasury that contains an infinite amount of merit, which is at the power of the church to distribute to those who were lacking merit. Now, in the first place, the chief deposit to the treasury of merit was the merit of Christ. But it was not only the merit of Christ that was or is in the treasury because the concept of the treasury of merit still exists in the Roman communion. But in addition to the merit of Jesus was also the merits of Mary.

In addition to the merits of Mary were added the merits of the saints. Now, there are very few people historically in the Roman view who die and go directly to heaven. The overwhelming majority of people who die, die with impurities still on their soul, so they have to go to purgatory, have those impurities purged or cleansed before they can go to heaven. Again, purgatory is not hell. They don't go to hell and be punished. Purgatory is not a place of punishment. It's a place of cleansing, and it will ultimately, for all of those in purgatory, their ultimate destiny will indeed be heaven, but only after this purification process takes place. Now, the problem then is that people who are in purgatory don't have sufficient righteousness to get them directly to heaven.

Now, as I say, there are a handful of people historically who died with no impurities on their soul with sufficient merit to get them into heaven directly. But not only did they have sufficient merit themselves to go into heaven, but they had a third kind of merit that we haven't discussed yet. We've already looked at the distinction between condign merit and congruous merit with respect to the sacrament of penance. But in addition to condign merit and congruous merit was this third kind of merit, which was called super-erogatory merit, which is achieved by people producing works of super-erogation, not irrigation, but irrigation.

Super-erogatory works are those works that are so good, so meritorious, that they're beyond the call of duty. It's an excess or extra merit, which if you, for example, perform works of super-erogation, more works than you need to get into heaven, those extra merits or excess merit is then deposited into the treasury of merit. And it's from that treasury that the church, through the pope, has the power to apply merits to those who are lacking.

And so in that whole system of indulgences what was going on was that by the giving of alms, the purchasing of indulgences as it were, withdrawals were made from this treasury and applied to those who were lacking them in purgatory so that they could move ahead to heaven. Now, that concludes our basic overview of the Roman Catholic understanding of justification. I'll talk still further about it when we look at other contrasts between the Protestant view. But over against this Luther's cry, of course, was sola fide, justification is by faith alone. And we're going to spend a little bit of time looking at Paul's teaching of it in Romans, but just for an introduction to the Protestant view of justification by faith alone, I want to take some time to define the terms. First of all, the word justification itself. The word, the English word justification comes over from the Latin justificare, which literally meant to make just or to make righteous.

Now, one of the problems that produced this whole controversy historically was in the early centuries, the Latin fathers were not reading and developing their doctrine from the Greek, but rather from the Vulgate, from the Latin translation of the Bible. And when the Latin translation of the Bible speaks about justification, it uses the Latin justificare, which is drawn from the legal structure of the Roman system of law. And again, to make righteous means that here's a person who is not righteous, and the word to justify means that you make them righteous so that they become truly righteous in and of themselves. And so the system of justification that developed was the system of understanding how an unjust person is made just or righteous. Now, when we talk about the process of being made truly righteous, we're talking not about justification, but about sanctification. So we believe that first there's justification, and then what follows from justification is sanctification, where in the ancient Roman view, because of the use of that term justificare, actually sanctification was preceding justification because God wouldn't pronounce you just until you actually had become just.

But the Greek word dikaiosune does not mean to make righteous. It means to count or recognize or to reckon as righteous or to treat as righteous. And so the heart of the Reformation view is that while we are still unrighteous, we are declared to be righteous by God's applying to us the righteousness of Christ through imputation, which I'll also expand on later. And so when God looks at us, He sees that we are still sinful. But He nevertheless, once we have faith, He counts us or reckons us or declares us to be righteous. Now, Luther's motto to explain that is one you've maybe already heard, the Latin phrase simil justus et peccator.

And that was how he tried to define this state of affairs whereby when we are not righteous in ourselves, nevertheless in the sight of God, we are considered or counted to be righteous. The phrase simil justus et peccator means simil. We get the word simultaneous from that. And so the simil means at the same time, simil justus, at the same time, just or righteous, et.

Now, what's that? What does that mean? That's the past tense of the verb to eat, right? Et means simply and. Remember with Julius Caesar when he stabbed his final words, it's supposed to be et tu, brute. That means and you too, Brutus.

And so that simply means and. So simil justus et, at the same time, just and peccator, which means sinner. We talk about little sins as being peccadillos.

If we say somebody's pure, we say they're impeccable. And so that comes from the Latin word for sin. So Luther is saying, at the very same time, we are just and sinners. Now that sounds at the beginning as a contradiction. And what is the law of non-contradiction?

Something cannot be a and non-a at the same at the same time and in the same sense or in the same relationship. Now Luther is saying here, we are at the same time a and non-a, righteous and sinner, but not in the same relationship. In and of ourselves, we remain sinners, but we are righteous by virtue of the transfer of Christ's righteousness to ourselves, by virtue of the imputation of His righteousness. Now we said at the beginning of our study of the Roman view of justification that it starts at baptism with an infusion of grace. And so a justified person, according to Rome, is justified on the grounds of infused righteousness that then is possessed inherently by the believer. The Protestant view is that we are justified not by an infusion of righteousness but by an imputation of righteousness. Now you know, as I said earlier, at the time of the Reformation, there were all kinds of attempts to overcome this enormous catastrophic split within Christendom. And the final one at Regensburg came this close to healing the breach and solving the schism and resolving the theological dilemma. But the sticking point that was never able to be resolved then or now is the case of imputation. Rome has always rejected the idea that we are justified on the basis of an imputed righteousness, a righteousness that is not our own, a righteousness that Luther called an alienum eustizium, an alien righteousness, a righteousness that is extra nos, outside or a part of us, a righteousness that is counted for us but is not our own.

If time permits later on, we'll expand that a little bit more. But I'm just trying to give you the basic definition of justification by faith alone. The second word is the word by. That's a simple little term. And I mentioned before that it has to do with the dative of means. That if you if you ask Rome by what means are we justified, they would say the instrumental means by which we are justified is baptism. Remember when I said we started this thing that baptism begins that process of justification and it is the instrumental cause or the instrument by which a person is justified.

Now let me just take a minute to talk about this instrumental cause idea. One of the oldest questions of philosophy is the question of motion and of change. You might remember Heraclitus saying you never step into the same river twice because by the time you put your second foot in the river is moved, and you have changed only by being a few seconds older. But he says whatever is is changing. Change is the singular mark of creaturehood and affinity. And from Aristotle's perspective, change was a kind of motion. And so he examined that and he asked himself, are there different ways in which things change, different kinds of changes? Well, he says when he looks for change, he's looking for the cause of a change. And he said it would be simplistic to assume that causes are singular when in many cases a change is wrought by the application of several different things. And he used the classic illustration of a piece of art, a piece of sculpture, a statue that was being made in order to distinguish among various types of causes. And he would say the efficient cause, the main cause that brings the change to place, the chief efficient cause for creating a piece of sculpture is the sculptor.

He's the guy that's making all the changes. But there's also the material cause. And the material cause for the statue is the block of wood or the block of marble out of which the statue is made. And so he defines material causality as the matter out of which something is made or changes. When we talk about the creation of the universe, what would we say is the material cause?

Nothing, because there wasn't anything except no matter at least. But God is the efficient and sufficient cause of all of creation. He creates the world not out of a previous existing substance or matter. He creates it ex nihila. But the material cause is that out of which a thing is made. The efficient cause is the one who makes it. The formal cause is the idea or blueprint that the artist is using in order to create his subject. He doesn't just go chiseling away at that piece of marble with no idea in mind of how it's going to look when it's finished.

He has to have a form in his mind for it. And then the final cause would be the purpose for which something is made. In this case, maybe it is to just make the garden of the emperor more beautiful. And so Michelangelo creates a statue to enhance the beauty of the church or something.

That's its final cause. Well, the instrumental cause are the instruments that are used to bring about the change. And in the case of making a statue, the instrumental cause would be the hammer and the chisel, okay?

The things that are used by which the change takes place easy enough. So when Rome talks about baptism as the instrumental cause, it is the means or the instrument by which the person is changed into having this reception or infusion of grace. And the Reformers say, no, the sole instrumental cause of justification is faith. It's not baptism.

It's not penance. It's faith, which is the instrumental cause. By the way, though both Protestants and Catholics use the language and terminology of Aristotle's distinctions of causality, they also, both sides, added another specific cause, which they called the meritorious cause of justification.

And again, we get to the heart of the issue. On what basis does God ever declare a person just? For Rome, it's because they are just. For the Reformed understanding, the sole grounds for the justification of a believer is the righteousness of Christ. It's Christ's righteousness and His righteousness alone that justifies us. In fact, the phrase justification by faith alone is simple shorthand for justification by Christ alone.

All right. So in the Protestant doctrine, you have sola fide. It's by faith alone, not by faith plus works. It's by grace alone, sola grata. It's by grace, not merit. And it's by Christ alone, not by Christ plus me.

All right. And then we'll get to the third word in this formula, justification by faith alone, in our next session when we look at the meaning and significance of the kind of faith that justifies us. Understanding what salvation is and how it's accomplished is of utmost importance.

Without that knowledge, the gospel is obscured. That's why this week here on Renewing Your Mind, we're airing portions of Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Justified by Faith Alone. This topic is worthy of further study, and R.C.

spent more time in this series than we're able to air here this week. But when you contact us today with a donation of any amount, we will send you the ten-part series on two DVDs, plus a digital copy of the study guide. Dr. Sproul's classic book, Faith Alone, is an excellent treatment of this topic, and we'll include that in the bundle as well for your donation of any amount. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, or you can give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. Thank you for your faithful generosity to Ligonier Ministries.

This type of study is helpful to so many people, and without your gifts, we would not be able to produce series like this one. Several years ago, I sat down with Dr. Sproul and asked him about the importance of providing the historical background of the doctrine of justification, and here's what he had to say. When I teach in the seminary on the doctrine of justification, I always use as the backdrop the sixteenth-century crisis that was provoked by the teaching of Luther. And I said, if you really want to understand the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone and the Reformation recovery of that doctrine in the sixteenth century, I think it's important to understand it against the backdrop of the official teaching of the Roman Catholic communion about justification so that you can see the clear difference between what happened in the Middle Ages when the gospel went into obscurity and into darkness, and the motto of the Reformation being post tenebrous lux, out of the darkness light. That is, the light of the gospel was recovered with Luther and the magisterial Reformers at that time. But to get it clear in your mind, you have to see it in contrast to the Roman doctrine. And when people see what the Roman doctrine is and what the reaction of the Reformers was against that distortion, then they have a much clearer understanding. There's so much fuzziness and confusion today in our time about what the doctrine of justification by faith alone means and what the gospel means. And Dr. Sproul will continue to clear up the fuzziness and confusion tomorrow as we continue his series, Justified by Faith Alone. We hope you'll join us for the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.