McCormack on Justification

Bruce McCormack?s article on justification, alluded to in an earlier post, is quite good. He rightly points out that ?the term ?justification?Ehas its home in the judicial sphere,?Ebut equally rightly points out that God?s judgments are different from human judgments: ?God?s verdict differs in that it creates the reality it declares. God?s declaration, in other words, is itself constitutive of that which is declared. God?s word is always effective. When it goes forth, it never returns to Him void. So a judicial act for God is never merely judicial; it is itself transformative.?EFaith thus does not ?receive the divine verdict?Ebut ?is itself produced by that verdict. Imputation is itself regenerative.?EHe cites Calvin’s statement that “whomever . . . God receives into his grace, on them he at the same time bestows the gift of the spirit of adoption . . . , by whose power he remakes them in his own image,” and concludes that Calvin teaches that justification is here “logically prior to regeneration.” It is through the verdict of the divine Judge that the sinner is enabled to believe and through that verdict that the sinner is constituted as righteous.

This enables McCormack to deflect the charge that Protestant doctrines of justification are based on a legal fiction, the “accounting” of someone righteous who is manifest not so. But to further respond to the charge, McCormack also places imputation and justification in the framework of election and eschatology. Because God eternally decided to enter into covenant partnership with “the human race” (hmm), “the decision registered in the divine imputation is not a novum, but the manifestation of the eternal decision of the triune God to redeem God’s people on the basis of Christ’s work.” Eschatologically, “the regeration, which flows from justification as its consequence, is the initiation of a work that is completed only in the eschaton, only in the glorification of the saints. Hence, God’s pronouncement of a sinner as innocent takes place with a view toward the final purification of the sinner in the eschaton. And that has to mean that God does not simply clothe us in Christ’s righteousness in advance of the completion of his work but does so with a view towards that consummation.”

All this may make it sound as if McCormack is trying to split the difference between Protestant and Catholic views on justification, but he is definitely attempting to work with the materials provided by Protestant theology. Rather than confusing the “external” verdict with the “internal” nature, he is challenging the whole paradigm that would treat the “essence” of man as something other than God’s naming and declaration concerning him. How, he asks, do we characterize the continuous “me” that endures through all the changes of my life? What is my enduring “essence”? He argues that it is crucial to attempt a theological account of human essence, so as to avoid becoming wedding to a particular (and changing) philosophical account. His theological account is grounded in election and justification: “What is the unchanging ‘essence’ of the human? The ‘essence,’ I would argue, is not to be found in some kind of metaphysical substratum, something ‘beneath’ the empirical, psychological self. Indeed, the ‘essence’ of the human is not to be found ‘in us’ at all. The ‘essence’ of the human ?Ethe ‘essence’ of every individual human ?Elies in the divine act of relating to that individual in the covenant of grace.” God writes our names in the book of life, and in doing that “God was granting us an identity that was fixed and unassailable when none of us existed yet. That God does this at all is indicative of the fact that it is he who holds our ‘personal identity’ in his hands, who makes us to be who we are ?Eboth as a ‘race’ of human beings and as individual members of it.”

Thus, our essence is what God chose us to be before entering into covenant with us. Ultimately, this “essence” is realized eschatologically, as we are conformed to Chirst: “Only in Christ do we see the perfect conjoining of human ‘essence’ (defined as that which we were chosen to be) and human existence . . . . In us, ‘essence’ and existence (or ‘nature’) tend to fall apart and will continue to do so until the final consummation. But in those moments in which we respond to God’s call in faith and obedience, in those moments in which our lived existence is brought into conformity to Christ’s ?Eour existence conforms to our ‘essence.’” Or, put another way, “we are what we truly are (and what we will be in the eschaton) in those moments when our humanity is conformed on the level of lived existence to the humanity inaugurated in time by Christ’s life of obedience. We are what we will be through correspondence.”

Justification fits into this paradigm: “Justification . . . is itself regenerative. The faith and obedience by mean of which my humanity conforms to the humanity of Jesus Christ is the effect of the divine declaration given in the justification of the ungodly. Nothing could make clearer the fact that, at its heart, forensicism is deeply ontological. At the very root of forensic thinking lies the recognition that human being is the function of a decision which gives rise to a willed relation. Human being is the function of a decision God made in eternity past in his electing grace. And it is a function of the decision God makes in time in justifying the ungodly.”

Justification is for McCormack a trinitarian act: “The Father pronounces the verdict registered in justification on the basis of the Son’s righteousness in the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the Holy Spirit is the power of the divine declaration which gives rise to faith and obedience.”

This is all very fine, but I have some questions about McCormack’s treatment of Calvin. He raises questions about the compatibility of Calvin’s strictly forensic notion of justification and his emphasis on union with Christ. As McCormack puts it in a set of class lectures (generously supplied to me by Scott Collins-Jones), Calvin creates problems by talking about justification and sanctification as the “double grace of our union with Christ”: “If justification is what Calvin says it is, if it is (as he insists) a forensic act which is carried out by means of imputation, then union with Christ could not possibly precede it. For if union with Christ did precede justification, then we would be giving a very different answer to the question of how the righteousness of Christ is made to be our own than the answer given by Luther and Calvin. No longer would Christ’s righteousness be made ours by an act of positive imputation; it would be made ours by some kind of ‘participation’ in Christ Himself. To the extent that imputation still had a role to play, it would only be the negative role of insisting upon the non-imputation of sin due to our union with Christ. But the role played in positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness would have been suppressed and, finally, eliminated. And to just that extent, the entire problem that Luther was trying to solve would have come back with renewed force. The temptation to find the basis of the divine declaration in what God does in us rather than in the alien righteousness of Christ alone would be virtually inescapable. And with that turning away from Christ alone as the basis of our justification to the work of God in us as the basis, we would have turned out attention (ever so subtly, at first) to ourselves.”

He states the problem starkly: “EITHER uni

on with Christ is itself the consequence of the declarative act of God in justification (it being understood that the declarative Word of God is creative in the absolute sense, that it never returns to God void but always produces what it declares to that union with Christ is produced by God’s justification of the sinner) OR union with Christ precedes justification and justification is seen to flow from that union as its proximate cause. If we answer the dogmatic question in favor of the first option, then Calvin’s order of presentation is wrong and must be corrected. If, on the other hand, we answer in favor of the second, we abandon the Protestant understanding of justification.”

McCormack considers some options for “getting Calvin off the hook,” but finally concludes that Calvin is simply inconsistent. In the Reformed confessions, he argues, the Protestant understanding of justification was upheld and the emphasis on union with Christ suppressed, thus resolving the contradiction in Calvin: “There is no Reformed confession that sets forth a distinct locus on union with Christ and none that treats union with Christ above and prior to the locus of justification.”

Let me start a response with this last point. Though it is true that union with Christ does not have a separate locus in the Westminster tradition, it is not quite true that union with Christ is not treated as prior to justification. Shorter Catechism question 30 says that the “redemption purchased by Christ” is applied to us by the Spirit who “unites us to Christ in our effectual calling.” Question 32 makes it clear that justification, along with adoption and sanctification, are among the benefits that come to believers who are effectually called. Thus, the sequence is: effectual calling unites to Christ, and those who are united to Christ in effectual calling are justified and adopted. The Larger Catechism has the same sequence in questions 66-70. Question 69 is more explicit even than the Shorter Catechism: “The communion in grace which the members of the invisible church have with Christ” includes “partaking of the virtue of his mediation,” which results in justification, adoption and sanctification, all of which are described as manifesting “their union with him.”

On McCormack’s other criticisms: I don’t see that imputation and union with Christ are incompatible notions. God might “account” someone righteous, positively “imputing” Christ’s righteousness to him, because of his real participation in Christ. I’m inclined to think that Calvin’s “inconsistency” arises partly because the line between Protestant and non-Protestant views of justification has been misplaced. Though “imputation” became the crux of the Protestant doctrine, it was not necessarily so; Luther, for instance, could talk about Christ Himself as the righteousness that indwells the believing soul and shares His righteousness with the believer (“Freedom of a Christian”). This is not imputation, and the righteousness that Luther talks about is a righteousness “in us.” But this is clearly not a Catholic doctrine, since the righteousness is “alien” and is not based on anything the human being has done. I’d suggest that the line between Catholic and Protestant views had more to do with conceptions of grace; Catholics had constructed an elaborate machinery of created grace and habits of grace, while Protestants insisted that grace was nothing but the favor of God expressed in His self-gift to His people. I admit that this is not always evident in Protestant polemics and teaching, but it helps to account for “eccentric” views of righteousness in Luther and the “inconsistencies” in Calvin.

Yet, the problem of order remains, and this is a central point of McCormack’s criticisms: Does the declaration of justification follow on the fact of union with Christ; or does the declaration of justification effect the union with Christ? Perhaps we can bring election into play here, arguing that the declaration effects a union in time, but also is based on an eternal choice of the sinner “in Christ” before the foundation of the world. But that would mean that the decree of justification would effect the union IN TIME.

I don’t know that the question of logical order is resolvable, but I think that McCormack is right to attempt a resolution as he does, in the direction of an effective, transformative declaration in justification. This too is a challenge to much Protestant soteriology, but it seems a sensible challenge. It seems exactly right to resolve the question of order by emphasizing that justification is not merely a verdict but a verdict that effects the vindication of the sinner.