A Doozy from Forde

“The assertion of ‘justification by faith’ in the sixteenth-century Reformation can be understood only if it is clearly seen as a complete break with ‘justification by grace.’” So says Gerhard Forde.

Marc Kolden begins a brief essay in By Faith Alone , a Festschrift for Forde, with this quotation. He goes on to explain that “None of the Protestant or Catholic protagonists in the sixteenth century would have denied that justification is by grace or even by grace alone. The disagreement was over the meaning of grace, even though this was not always noticed. The reformers’ claim that justification before God is by faith alone is their proposal for the correct understanding of God’s gracious saving act in Jesus Christ.” If grace, for instance, is “some substance or power that God gives to people that enables them to think, believe, or behave virtuously in order to merit salvation, then faith is turned into a good work (that is, the grace-empowered ‘work’ of believing).”

By contrast, the Reformation sola fide offers a different conception of the nature of grace, which Kolden summarizes under three points: the basic gift of God in Christ is the forgiveness of sins; justification by faith is the formula that properly expresses how we become righteous; and this is worked out theologically through the distinction between law and promise, gospel and law. A couple of points of this discussion are intriguing.

First, Kolden notes that for Luther “forgiveness of sins” was broadly construed, including everything from the work of Christ to the eschatological reality of new creation. Luther wrote, “where there is forgiveness of sins there is also life and salvation,” apparently on the assumption that sins are the only obstacle between sinners and fellowship with God, which is life.

Second, he emphasizes that the pardon of sins is a truly life-changing gift of God: “When a sinner is pardoned, everything changes . . . . The sinner’s role in this is passive; that is, it happens to us, God acts on us. God is the actor, the pardoner, who changes everything. Divine forgiveness, therefore, is not one step in a cooperative process of becoming righteous (or right with God); rather, forgiveness is God’s undeserved gift that makes things right.”

Third, he highlights the eschatological character of justification, that justification by faith is the final judgment verdict passed before the final judgment. This, he suggests, was how the Reformers answered the charge that justification by faith is a legal fiction: No, “God’s declaration is more real than human historical ‘reality’ because the declaration that one’s sins are forgiven is a divine promise – it is the last judgment ahead of time. God’s verdict that we are righteous because our sins are forgiven is said to be more ‘real’ than the present ‘actuality’ of our sins.”

He claims that the law/gospel distinction should also be understood eschatologically. Gospel is promise, referring to “our ultimate and eternal standing with God,” while law governs this age. Since we are still in a sub-eschatological condition, we need the ordering and convicting work of the law, but our lives in this age under the law are shaped by the promise of a future inheritance. This is very intriguing on several counts. Does it mean that an already-not yet structure in eschatology necessarily implies some sort of law/gospel dialectic? And, what happens when the already is intensified, when, as in postmillennialism, there is a strong sense that the structures and realities of the already approximate the structures and realities of the not yet? Perhaps the various debates among the Reformed today are driven more by eschatological considerations than might appear on the surface