Luther on Justification

Robert Jenson has a brief but very challenging comment on Luther’s views on justification in the Fall 2003 issue of the Westminster Theological Journal (which, incidentally, under the editorship of Peter Enns is promising to be a lively forum of debate). Responding to Carl Trueman ‘s critique of the new Finnish interpretation of Luther (associated especially with Tuomo Mannermaa), Jenson turns to a brief outline of “imputation” in Luther’s Galatians commentary. He makes the initial point that it is “a mistake in reading Luther to think that when he wrote of imputation he had always the very same thing in mind. And it compounds the error if we suppose that what he always had in mind is what Melanchthon taught Protestantism to mean by the word.”

Positively, he interprets Luther’s usage in a passage cited by Trueman: ” Definimus ergo hunc esse Christianum, non qui non habit aut sentit peccatum, sed cui illud a Deo propter fidem in Christum non imputatur .” Jenson interprets the passages as follows: “AUT is surely epexegetical: to ‘have’ sin is justifiably to apprehend myself as a sinner. God, on the other hand, does not impute sin to the Christian. By no means does ‘impute’ here have to denote the act of judicial discretion. To impute or not to impute something is to make a judgment, and most judgments, also in court, are judgments of fact. In the present passage, the contrast is between God’s judgment and the sinner’s: I judge myself a sinner, God judges otherwise. The basis of my judgment is what I can tell about myself, the facts available to me apart from hearing the gospel. The basis of God’s judgment is Christ’s relation to the believer.”

Christ indwells the believer, Jenson says, but this fact is not visible to the believer. And God’s judgment rests on this fact: “God judges the sinner righteous because in ontic fact the sinner and Christ make one moral subject, in whom Christ’s divine righteousness overwhelms the sinner’s unrighteousness, relegating it to the past tense of the old Adam, even though the sinner cannot sense this.”

Then the key passage: “God judges the believer righteous. The believer judges himself unrighteous. One or the other judgment has to be straightforwardly RIGHT, in the sense of setting the terms in which the other judgment is to be evaluated; then the other judgment, if it is justified, must be explained as in those terms right quoddamodo (‘in a certain way’), as the scholastics said. The Melanchtonian doctrine takes our judgment as setting the terms, within which God’s judgment ‘in the forum of heaven’ must be understood as a sheer judicial exercise of discretion. Luther’s doctrine does more or less the opposite: it is God’s judgment which is simply right and sets the terms, within which our judgment must be taken as a judgment of law ‘in the forum of the world.’ Surely Luther is right and majority Protestantism wrong.”

Surely, too, there is more to say. I wonder if majority Protestantism, and particularly Reformed theology, is as divergent from Luther as Jenson suggests. But the key point ?Ethat God’s judgment of the sinner determines what is actually the case and is a judgment based on FACT ?Eseems exactly right. And it is perfectly compatible with a Reformed view of justification that sees God’s judgment not as a legal fiction but as a pronouncement on the sinner who is “in Christ” and with whom, as Luther says elsewhere, Christ the good Husband gives all He has to His bride, including His righteousness.