The Multivocity of “Justification”

Robert Jenson argues in Unbaptized God that debates about justification regularly fail to notice the multivocal character of the word. Everyone knows that we have different views of justification, but we all believe that they are different “forms of teaching within the same locus of theology, that is, they are different answers or different ways of answering the same question” (22). This, he argues, is a confusion and a source of further confusions.

What are the loci of “justification”? Jenson enumerates three: “the apostle Paul’s question, ‘How does God establish his righteousness among us?’ together with his and others’ labor to answer it.” Then there is the Augustinian effort “to describe the process of individual salvation, to lay out the factors and steps of the soul’s movement from the state of sin to the state of justice.” Finally, there is the “hermeneutic” or “metatheological” use: “This doctrine describes nothing at all, neither God’s justice nor the process of becoming just. It is instead an instruction to those who would audibly or visibly speak the gospel, a rule for preachers, teachers, liturgists and confessors. This instruction may be formulated: So speak of Christ and of hearers’ actual and promised righteousness, whether in audible or visible words, whether by discourse or practice, that what you say solicits no lesser response than faith – or offense” (22-23).

Paul’s theology is a matter of dispute, but that dispute “is not between the confessions. Long sections in dialogue documents [of ecumenical discussions] of Pauline exegesis about justification rarely contribute to the consensus achieved in them” (23). The Augustinian question does not really divide Protestants and Catholics either. Some Protestants polemicized “against particular late medieval and Tridentine accounts of the movements from sin to righteousness and have proposed their own replacements,” while others dispensed with the notion of process entirely. Further, “when Protestants do produce descriptions f the salvation-process, these do not notably differ from those currently approved by Roman Catholic theologians and available, if not dominant, at the time of the Reformation” (23).

Even the third locus of justification is no longer disputed. When the question is clearly asks whether the gospel ought to be preached and enacted to elicit faith or offense – and not, say, energetic efforts at self-salvation – both Protestants and Catholics answer in the affirmative. It isn’t the only critical doctrine, but it has played a unique role in challenging “the nearest and dearest temptations of any governing establishment, also in the church” (24).

The distinctions are not so clean as Jenson makes them appear. Many evangelical Protestants, after all, think the confessional doctrine of justification just is a summary of Paul, so any perspective on Paul – new, fresh, re-re-freshed – that does not conform to the confessions is heretical. Still, the distinctions should be made, and debates on justification would be clearer all round if they were kept in view.