Justification: Faith, Works, and the Reformation Debate
How Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Wesleyan, and Orthodox readers answer: how is a sinner made right with God?
Few questions have divided Western Christianity more sharply than this one: how does a guilty human being come to stand righteous before a holy God? The technical name for the answer is justification, and the debate over its meaning lit the fuse of the sixteenth-century Reformation. Yet the question is older than Wittenberg. Paul wrestles with it across Romans and Galatians; Augustine and Pelagius fought over it in the fifth century; and the Eastern churches frame the whole matter in language that the Western combatants barely used. The stakes are not academic. If justification describes the very mechanism by which a person passes from condemnation to acceptance, then getting it wrong is not a footnote but a misdirection at the heart of the gospel — which is precisely why the Reformers called it articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, the article by which the church stands or falls.
By the end of this lesson
- **Define** justification and explain why the Reformers called it the article by which the church stands or falls.
- **Distinguish** imputed righteousness from infused righteousness and tie each to the confession that teaches it (Westminster and the Formula of Concord versus the Council of Trent).
- **Reconcile** the apparent conflict between Romans 3:21-28 and James 2:14-26 by attending to the senses of the verb 'to justify.'
- **Compare** the Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Wesleyan, and Eastern Orthodox accounts of how a sinner is made right with God, fairly and side by side.
- **Evaluate** the significance of the 1999 Joint Declaration and the New Perspective on Paul for the contemporary debate.
Scripture
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