Articulus stantis et cadentis?

Articulus stantis et cadentis? December 22, 2015

John Webster offers a subtle, careful assessment of the claim that justification is the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, the article of doctrine on which the church stands or falls (God Without Measure). Webster worries that this slogan can “distort exegetical or dogmatic proportion” (168).

That happens, he argues, when all theology “is determined by the forensic idiom of a legal dispute about divine honour and human worship,” which “rists not only narrowing the scope of the divine economy but also isolating the forensic from the context of election, covenant and eschatology within which it has to be understood” (166). He opposes the claim that justification has a “transcendent status,” not “so much a locus as the discrimen, a kind of first theology.” Justification isn’t suited to this “superordination to all other doctrines” (169).

Positively, Webster explores the “need to place the theology of justification within a larger trinitarian structure” (165). Soteriology is not fundamentally anthropology but theology, since “the works of God ad extra  . . . have their setting in and refer back to the opera Dei immanentia as their condition and ground” (162). Justification should be articulated in terms of a “double theological principle: (1) God’s saving history with creatures is to be conceived as the outworking of the divine missions in which the sending of the Son and the Spirit is the bodying forth of the Father’s eternal divine counsel, and not simply an intra-historical reality; (2) description of God’s saving history through a theology of divine missions must rest upon a theology of divine processions, in accordance with the principle missiones sequuntur processiones. The saving roles of the Son and the Spirit are grounded upon their processional roles in the inner life of the Godhead” (163).

In one section of the essay (170-4), Webster sketches the trinitarian theology of righteousness, a mini-dogmatics of righteousness, within which justification should be understood. It begins from the premise that the “triune God is in himself righteous.” His righteousness is “the peace and order of his perfect self-relation as Father, Son, and Spirit.” God “perfectly corresponds with himself, that is, perfectly fulfills his own will to be the one he is, and so perfectly enacts the law of his being.” Righteousness in the triune life is “the unbroken and fully realized harmony of God’s life and his will, in the eternal moments of paternity, filiation, and spiration which constitute his being” (179).

God is not only righteous in relation to Himself but in relation to creatures. The two relations are radically different: “the creature is not integral to God’s own life, but a recipient, a made reality. The creature ‘has’ life, but its life is not in se but ‘in’ the divine gift.” A creature is in a dependent relation such that it has “no being as a term apart from the relation to it of the other term.” This doesn’t make creaturely life formless, but rather “life in relation, life whose content is fellowship with the righteous God. . . . To live before the righteous God is to be summoned to live in righteous fellowship” (170-1).

Refusing that righteous order of fellowship is the essence of sin, and thus sin is a death wish, since creatures have no being apart from that fellowship. In response to human sin, “the righteous triune God interposes himself between the creature and its unrighteousness, thereby arresting its self-eradication.” The restoration of the creature to God depends on the prior reality of the Triune fellowship: “The Son’s mission is savingly effective only because its depth is his eternal sonship” (172). Coming to our aid isn’t a threat to God’s justice, but the opposite: “In so doing he recreates righteous fellowship. . . . God’s righteousness in se is made known ad extra not in delivering the creature over to the penalty of the law but in the supreme act of fellowship, in which he takes the creatures penalty upon himself” (173).

And it is in this context that Webster wishes to speak of justification. It is an alien righteousness, but this doesn’t mean it’s “foreign” or “fictional.” As he says, “The double ontological rule of creaturely being is: what we are, we are in God; and what we are in God, we are. There is no other manner in which creatures can have their being.” The realization of Christ’s work in us doesn’t depend on a work we do, but “through the Holy Spirit the fellowship which is secured by the Son’s submission to and fulfillment of the Father’s will becomes that in which the creature also participates. By the Spirit, the creature enters into the history of reconciliation, not as an initiator but surely as a participant., as one accounted righteous before God. Righteousness – life and activity in fellowship with God – is iustitia fidei imputata” (173).


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