A dangerous and destructive understanding of ‘justification’ has captured a wide swath of biblical scholarship. Paul must be liberated from this prison by a participatory, resurrectional, transformational gospel. That is the thrust of this work. The authors engage the current malaise – which they name ‘justification theory’ (JT) – through brief interaction with Melanchthon, John Piper, the late J. D. G. Dunn and N.T. Wright. The opening argument is largely thematic and literally symbolic, with diagrams in most chapters. One theory is set over against another: ‘participation theory’ over against JT. Despite complaints about individualism, the argument and especially the diagrams are largely individualistic in orientation. The ‘liberation’ of Paul appears in the latter half of the work.
Campbell and DePue give their attention first to the failures of Philip Melanchthon, with whom they have two problems. The first is that Melanchthon concentrates on the entrance to the new life in justifying faith and makes the new life in ‘sanctification’ a second step. I share something of the authors’ discomfort with this Protestant ordo salutis and its effect on Christian preaching. Their second, more serious problem with Melanchthon is that he seems to them to make faith a contractual obligation, which once fulfilled brings one ‘in’ to salvation. This view cannot be applied unreservedly to Melanchthon. In Article 5 of the Augsburg Confession, he affirms that through the gospel and the sacraments, God gives the Holy Spirit, who works faith ‘when and where he wills’ in those who hear the gospel. In the Apology to Article 4 (‘Justification’), he rejects any thought that the reception of grace in its fullness is conditioned by any prior disposition within the human being. Faith is indeed a work of God in the human being. Admittedly, Melanchthon changed his mind. In the 1559 Loci, he understands the human being as having the freedom to assent to God’s word of grace. Yet even here God’s mercy is primary. It is not at all clear, then, that Melanchthon understood faith in contractual terms. Even in his later inclusion of human choice, all depends on the mercy of God promised in the gospel.
Their work might have improved considerably if they considered the questions with which Melanchthon was wrestling. In 1530, he still retained the transformative Augustinian understanding that comes very close to their own view. By 1534, he had moved to the forensic view that they reject. The authors are unaware of this shift and fail to reflect on its significance. Nor do they consider the challenge that Andreas Osiander’s later, transformative conception of justification – again much like theirs – presented to early Protestant theology and how it was, for better or for worse, resolved.
After Melanchthon comes John Piper and his The Future of Justification (Crossway, 2007), who appear as a prime example of the contractual conception of justification. Their critique is problematic in that Piper, standing as he does within a traditional Reformed theology, understands the elect to have been chosen as the objects of God’s saving love from all eternity in the Father’s covenant with the Son to redeem the elect. The covenant of grace fulfilled in Christ brings the Spirit and faith – followed by the fulfilment of the law in the elect. I regard this theology as highly problematic and share the authors’ concern that a legalistic conception of God emerges from it. However, it is entirely clear that Piper does not embrace a contractual conception of salvation.
The authors, who focus on Christ’s saving faith/faithfulness for us, do not, as far as I can see, take into account the call to faith and repentance, which according to the witness of the New Testament, especially the Gospels and Acts, constituted the message of the Baptist, Jesus and the apostles who followed. Although faith is the only true response of obedience – and includes the act of repentance that turns away from sin and the former self – it is not a condition in the usual sense. It is, according to the witness of the texts, the work of the gospel, the word of Christ which effects that for which it calls (Rom. 10:8-16). The sheep hear the voice of the good shepherd, and they follow him. As the sun shines by its very nature, the response of faith is present wherever the word performs its work. As Paul reminds the Corinthians, faith is the presence of Christ (2 Cor. 13:5). Participation in Christ takes place in the faith that is created by the word of the gospel.
The work also might have been improved by reflection on the debates concerning atonement, law and gospel that took place from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries. The conception of the atonement that they offer is redolent of J. C. K. von Hofmann. In some measure, it stands close to the thought of Albrecht Ritschl and in another way, to that of Karl Barth, whom they cite. The work could have profited from some discussion of the work of the late Gerhard Forde on law and gospel, and from Matt Becker’s work on Hofmann. We exegetes ignore the history of theology at the risk of a loss of depth of our work.
That is the case for the conceptions of sin, wrath and a final judgement as they appear in the discussion of Romans. Paul begins his argument with the gospel, not with the law. The lengthy announcement and elaboration of God’s wrath and the coming judgement proceeds from and ends in the announcement of God’s saving righteousness in Christ (Rom. 1:16-3:26). According to Paul, the law and its condemning work are known only in Christ. Outside of Christ one finds either presumption or despair: presumption as it is epitomised in Paul, the persecutor; despair in the outsiders in the Gospels, and the tax-collectors and sinners. The true goal of the law is found only in the crucified and risen Christ, ‘who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal. 2:20). It is not a mere ‘termination’ of the human being that is found in Christ. It is the judgement of the human being in Christ’s cross and the gift of life in his resurrection. The wrath that has sold us into sin (Rom. 7:14) does not bring a mere inability to always do all that is right. It has plunged the world into lies and deception, violence and murder, which in our time has become disastrously evident. According to Paul, we are all complicit in this evil (Rom. 3:9-18). God will not turn away from the oppressed forever. Indeed, God in Christ gave himself over to this deceit, violence and shedding of blood. Precisely here, in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has triumphed over evil, according to the apostle – a triumph to which God calls us (Rom. 12:19-21). We are called to a grace that is costly. It cost God his own Son (Bonhoeffer).
