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The following question has been crystallising in my mind of late: is righteousness a status God bestows or a property he acknowledges? This, it seems to me, is the issue which divides protestant / catholic belief. Protestants, particularly Reformed Evangelicals hold: not our righteousness is counted but Christ’s (see John Piper, Counted Righteous in Christ) because God justifies the ungodly as we read in Romans 4:
However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.
Rom 4:5
I would seem that if God calls a sinner a saint, then that is so. The reformed answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma is: Good is what God says is Good. We Christians may be bad people, but we’re good in God’s sight because of faith and that’s what counts. Thus, the flip side of our sins not being counted (forgiveness) is that Jesus life get’s booked to our account.
This conclusion is confirmed each time I read or hear an evangelical teaching. I listened to a preaching today by a good pastor from the south of England regarding Romans 4. His key exegetical points were that Paul is showing:
- You can’t earn entrance into heaven
- If you think you’re good, you’re not
- It is by grace through faith all the way (Eph 2:8)
He illustrated the second point from Luke 18:9-14 where a tax collector beats his breast in repentance after a Pharisee boasts his righteous deeds before God. Jesus says that the tax collector “went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted”.
This really sums up evangelical thinking: Only God is truly Good and only when he justifies a person are they righteous. God declares someone righteous not because they are in fact righteous but because they have faith. Righteousness is a status bestowed and not a property discovered.
Now, it’s obvious that we all sin and need forgiveness. But is this the model for the Final Judgement? Will we stand before Christ, who will judge our deeds (Mt 24, 2 Cor 10), and, when things look bad, we fall on our knees and plea for mercy? Why can’t non-Christians do this? Or will Christians simply not be present at this horrible Judgement Day?
Many evangelicals have concluded that there is no real judgement for believers (Rom 8:1). There is an Awards Ceremony for Christians and a Terrible Judgement for the rest. Our sins are paid for and ignored because we believed and we’re only here to get awarded for good service by God. Evangelicals say Christians escape judgement and receive forgiven because of faith.
The closest thing I can find in Jesus teaching about this doesn’t quite match. In Matthew 7 Jesus says “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” and in Matthew 6:14 “if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you”. Disciples are taught that they escape judgement and receive forgiven because they have forgiven and not judged.
| Forgiven | Not Judged | |
| Reformed Tradition | By Grace Through Faith on the Basis of the Cross | |
| Jesus | By Forgiving Others | By Not Judging Others |
In case it was unclear Jesus re-iterated (Mt 6:15): if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. What does that mean for any evangelicals who don’t forgive but “trust in the Blood”!?
My point is not simply the glaring gap between human tradition and Jesus teaching. Rather it’s that the evangelical teaching is a seemingly arbitrary formal deal (faith for forgiveness) whereas Jesus teaching is a logical real deal (reciprocal forgiveness). Evangelicals think God justifies and forgives on the basis of faith but Jesus teaches forgiveness on the basis of certain “works”. Secular people cannot follow our “justification by faith” doctrine but they really get “do unto others” and expect God to award good behaviour and “forgive us as we forgive others”. Are they seriously misled? I would say they’ve understood the Lord’s teaching better than us.
OK, we can debate about whether forgiveness is a “work” or not but I know that in many evangelical circles forgiveness, a virtue, will be classified as “good works”, as one of those good things we try to do to earn God’s approval. Is that really so bad? My English preacher used Galatians 5 to show that our good works are just like circumcision – they annul Christ’s work.
But Listen to Jesus:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
Matthew 5:43-45
The main point of this verse is that God is benevolent towards all humans, good or bad, and so should we be. But the tacit assumptions are revealing and not generally shared by evangelicals:
- Sonship is earned by loving people
- There are just and unjust people
Again, we can debate whether or not “earned” is the right word but I expect love and prayer to be exactly the types of “good works” evangelicals keep telling us won’t get us to heaven. Prayer is typically associated with a religious duty and we know the bad Pharisees made long prayers (Mt 6). Yet here we have Jesus saying: “Do this, so that you will be sons of God”.
Of course sonship is not technically the same as forgiven and justified. Theoretically you could be adopted as a son by God with or without forgiveness and justification. However, biblically, these things go together (John 1:12, 2 Cor 6:18, Mt 6:8) – the justified are God’s family. Evangelicals treat sonship and justification as applying to the same group of people and I concur. But this makes passages such as Mt 5:43-45 above difficult for evangelicals who believe that faith and grace are all that is required. Indeed many of Jesus sayings, particularly Mt 25:31-46 is practically unintelligible for the Sola Fide group.
Think of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). He came home in repentance, pleaing for mercy. His father basically “justified” him by calling him “son” although the man acknowledged he did not deserve it. The father gave the status of sonship at the same time as forgiveness because he repented and pled for salvation (not because of his “faith”). This is Initial Justification, God’s “Welcome Home” to the repentant sinner. This is the topic of Romans 3:21 onwards.
Imagine now the scene many years later when the father stands up to speak of his son. He speaks about the things his son really did, how he helped develop the business, assisted his family, saved that sheep and praised his faithfulness. Perhaps the father will gloss over the failings but he surely won’t praise the son for deeds he never did, imputing righteousness as evangelicals understand it.
I conclude, with N.T. Wright (see Justification) that our present status before God as a result of Initial Justification by Faith is an anticipation of the final judgement where there will be a Justification by Works and that Paul has made this perfectly clear in, the oft neglected, or twisted Romans 2.
But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. God “will give to each person according to what he has done.” To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; 10but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism.
All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.
Romans 2:5-13
I remember how visibly shocked an atheist friend of mine was when I told him that the core message of Christianity was NOT a moral one. Perhaps you are shocked and are sure that Christianity’s chief concern is our morality. Perhaps you are well past personal moral striving (self-righteousness) and into justification by faith but still sure that the whole point is our moral dilemma before God and that Jesus is the solution for our guilt as a result of our immorality. I hope to offer a glimmer of a much bigger plan which Jesus announced and is still being unveiled.
Consider the following syllogism:
- If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist
- Objective moral values exist
- Therefore, God exists
Nietzsche was an influential atheist who realised and made explicit the first premise and even went as far as predicting the disappearance of all values as belief in God subsided and the powerful dominated. The modern atheist will not go this far but will affirm premise 1 with the proviso that subjective moral values will see us through – “who needs religion to be good?”. As effective as subjective morality may turn out to be, the argument is not answered – the atheist who agrees with the first premise must demonstrate that objective moral values do not exist in order to cast a doubt on God’s existence. I have not found that atheists can deny premise 2 and have noticed a common misunderstanding which I would like to highlight:
The absence of agreement on a moral standard is not evidence of the absence of such a standard.
The typical atheist argument is as follows: if we look at different cultures we see a great diversity in moral practices. In some cultures polygamy is prohibited, in others it is the norm. Similarly, homicide is actually permissible in all cultures under varying circumstances (from abortion to infanticide, revenge murders, right up to self-defence and wars). Therefore, the atheist concludes, morality is not universal and therefore not objective.
This, I would argue, is to misconstrue the second premise which is not “morality is uniformly practiced”. The theist, who believes in objective moral values, is quite aware that the absolute morality they believe in is not practiced universally, even within their own culture, even by themselves. But that is not the issue. The theist is not saying: “my standard is the standard” but “there is a standard”. Indeed, the Christian would add “…of which we all fall short”.
So how do we reason that such a standard exists? By looking at how people behave when the moral standard is violated. Assuming no objective moral values existed you would expect someone when falsely accused or hurt to respond “I did not like that, but that’s just my personal preference”. In fact, the person will respond more like we would expect if objective moral values did exist: “Hey! You can’t do that! That’s not fair! That was wrong!”. No hint of personal preference there or sign that the unjust action might be right in the perpetrator’s frame of reference or culture. We do not let terrorists off the hook because that sort of behaviour is acceptable, even praiseworthy, in their culture.
If we look at other cultures we see that this principle is indeed universal. When someone is wronged in any culture they will appeal to a standard which is higher than any particular person or cultural norm. It may be culturally acceptable for a rich man to rape a woman in certain cultures but the woman (and possibly also the man) will still know that it is really wrong despite its popularity and the status quo. In doing so they do not appeal to personal preference but to a general, universal and objective law. It is this appeal to an objective reference which we expect the other person to acknowledge which will, in practice, reveal how we really think about and expect morality to operate – that is objectively.
Finally, the atheist is not justified in assuming that for something to be objective it must be universally acknowledged. There are a great many people today who still believe the earth is flat. Unanimous assent may be the atheists measure of objectivity but it amounts to nothing more than consensus. Since, by the atheist’s view there is nothing higher than man to judge, consensus among men is taken as objective. But this is not what objectivity means – objective means true independent of observer or subject – “objective” basically means True in the absolute sense. It is nonsense to appeal to man as the measure of all things much less to all men in establishing objectivity.
Objectivity is something we can strive for but not obtain as we are all subjects and consensus among subjects is at most what we can call intersubjective verifiability. Whilst reality is an instance of the objective (existing whether we acknowledge it or not) objectivity among humans is illusory – no one can say “I am objective” for it would be a subject saying “I am not subjective” or “I am not a subject”. Reality is always objective, but our ideas about it are not – we are not objective.
We thus see that objective morality does exist even if we cannot exactly stipulate and practice it perfectly. We are aware of the standard hovering over our heads or “written on our hearts” yet unable to fully grasp it. Nevertheless we know that some things really are wrong no matter how many people think otherwise and indirectly affirm a law-giver who is unswayed by culture, natural selection and personal preference. The big question is: “What is the nature of that law-giver?”…
