Justice and Justification Chapter 5: Conclusion
Just before he converted to Catholicism, John Henry Newman argued that Christian doctrinal development was inevitable, famously asserting in his study of such development that, “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”[1] In contrasting corruptions with genuine developments, he argues that the principles of the original must be retained.[2] In this brief survey of the history of Christian ideas on justice and justification, I have shown that development with continuity exists from the Hebrew writings in the Old Testament, through the intertestamental and New Testament eras, and into the writings of the Greek Fathers. I have also shown that discontinuity exists when these ideas were translated into Latin, particularly in the writings of Augustine. Since, as McGrath notes, Western medieval theologians are all dependent on Augustine to greater or lesser extent, this discontinuity pervades Western thought.[3] Catholics hold explicitly to Augustine’s concept of justification as the process of becoming morally good and holy, as the Council of Trent codified.[4] Naturally, Luther’s background as an Augustinian monk means that such dependence continues into Protestant thought. Calvin acknowledges dependence on Augustine in his own work, and remarkably, he explicitly acknowledges discontinuity between Augustine and the other Fathers, claiming that the others were corrupted by pagan philosophy and incoherent in their soteriology (in a discussion on total depravity, but he doesn’t qualify the claim).[5] Clearly, Western thought continues to diverge from pre-Augustinian thinking on justice and justification.
In addressing disagreement among church fathers on an entirely different issue, De Young describes how we should view such controversy, outlining a method for finding the truth.
So the methodology that we’re about to use and that I think is correct and the way to approach this is, with an issue like this we’ve got the witness of the Old Testament, we’ve got the witness of the New Testament, we’ve got the witness of the Fathers. So if you’re going to take a position on an issue like this, any issue that’s like this where there’s disagreement, you need to present how your position takes into account all of the Old Testament data, all of the New Testament data, the patristic data that agrees with you, and explains the patristic data that doesn’t agree with you, meaning that explains these Fathers, who know Christ better than I do—whatever position you take on this one, for example, you’re going to have to say that some Fathers who know Christ far better than I do—know the Scriptures far better than I do, are more spiritual and more holy than I am, somehow got it wrong. If your view can’t explain that, then your view doesn’t work.[6]
This is precisely the approach that this thesis has taken in addressing this issue.
Summary
Chapter 2 outlined the Hebrew concept of justice. It surveyed Old Testament texts and explained that justice is the restoration of order in relationships; this applies both to relations between God and humans and between humans. The Torah is God’s teaching to his people of how to be thus aligned, and practically, justice means living out God’s intentions for his people in covenant relationship. This might simply mean repentance, and it might mean restitution. It might mean hurting someone to protect others, and if the one in the wrong who has broken the relationship is unrepentant, it might mean causing pain as a means of teaching the offender the error of his ways. However, punishment to “balance the scales” is not the primary objective. De Young asserts that while the concept of punishment certainly exists, this is primarily from the perspective of the recipient of corrective action to whom it feels like retribution, not from the perspective of God.[7] Chapter 2 went on to explain how this concept of justice was translated into Greek in the Septuagint and adopted by later Greek authors in intertestamental literature, repurposing Greek terms in a way unique to Jewish (and later Christian) theological discussion. Specifically, the dik- word group was used to describe the Old Testament ideas of both righteousness and justice. In legal terms, justification is the application of that justice, normally to save or relieve the oppressed.
Chapter 3 surveyed the use of the language of justice and justification in the New Testament. Jesus and the twelve use the dik- word group in a way that is consistent with the Septuagint, and they view justice primarily in terms of relief of oppression and righting wrongs. Judging according to one’s deeds is shown to simply be using the evidence to establish the character of a person as oppressor, as one who brings justice to the oppressed, or as one who is oppressed, not as a matter of merit. Paul’s usage then is shown to be consistent with this trend, especially in Romans. Specifically, Paul’s concept of legal justification in Romans is directly and explicitly tied to redemption, which means that Paul uses the term to describe God’s action through Christ in freeing his people from slavery to sin. Guilt and criminal law are not in view.
Chapter 4 surveyed the church fathers, explaining how the Greek fathers used terminology in ways consistent with the Septuagint and the New Testament. Despite anachronistic interpretations that attempt to apply Reformed or other theology to the text, these authors speak of God’s justice and justification in the life of the believer in terms of freedom from slavery and right ordering of relationships. On the other hand, Latin authors such as Tertullian introduced new terminology and with it new ideas. For Latin fathers who did not work much, or at all, with Greek or Hebrew texts, this transition necessarily changed certain definitions and ideas. In particular, Augustine defined justice in a way more consistent with Roman culture than with his predecessors in Jewish and Christian tradition, and his influence has pervaded Western thought from his day to the present, including both sides of the Reformation debates.
Frey opines that drawing hard contrasts between Hebrew justice and Greek justice is an oversimplification that leads to error in exegesis.[8] Broadly, this is applicable in terms of Eastern and Western thought as well, including Latin. Care is required, as the issue is far more complicated than this brief survey can treat comprehensively. Certainly, Augustine’s ideas were not foreign to the East and can be found occasionally in Greek writers, and not all Latin writers held slavishly to Augustinian thought. However, this does not mean that no contrast exists. Generalization can be useful in broad terms even if specifics require more nuance. In general, Augustine is indeed the source, or “fountainhead” of Western thought on justice and justification, and his ideas come from his use of Latin terms in discontinuity with earlier Greek writers.
If Augustine was the fountainhead of Western thought on justification, then one would expect the main river of thought originating in the scriptures and carried through the early church to continue to flow elsewhere. In fact, if this were not the case, if there was nowhere that anything other than the Western view of justice and justification is taught, then it would be the strongest possible proof against the claims of this thesis. If, however, that stream of thought is carried on consistently to the modern time in traditions less influenced by Augustine and the Latin language, then this is strong evidence that indeed Western thought is a product of the language issues involved and likely begins with the earliest Latin theologians who did not fluently speak or read the original languages of scripture, primarily Augustine. The latter is demonstrably the case, and the Eastern Orthodox Church is the most notable example.
In his commentary on Romans, Reardon describes justification in terms of union with Christ and thus as internal rather than external.[9] Christos Yannaras blames the differences in the theology between East and West on the “great misconception and distortion” perpetuated by Tertullian, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas in particular, specifically citing the legal concepts of the West.[10] De Young, though, makes the explicit claim that the atonement is the cancelling of human debt that resulted in slavery and that the legal decree in involved is a ruling of freedom for the slave. He notes that this is the view of early Christianity and that it is in contrast to the Western view.[11] De Young stated that the ideas presented in this thesis are consistent with Orthodox theology and teaching in broad terms (in conversation with the author—he has not reviewed the text in detail.)[12] Certainly, Orthodox theology has shifted in the direction of unity with Christ and Theosis, as McGrath notes, and does not discuss the term “justification” often.[13] De Young explains that this is precisely because Eastern theologians did not ask the same questions that led to other questions. Those initial questions were raised by Augustine, and the history of Western thought on the topic is largely debate over Augustine’s ideas and other ideas derived from his.[14] Thus, Orthodox thought differs from the West precisely because it rejects significant portions of Augustine’s teachings, primarily in the realm of justice, justification, and original sin. Newman’s criteria for genuine development is met in the Orthodox church, and the discontinuity he describes as corruption is demonstrated in Western thought.
Implications
Clearly, the implications of this thesis are far-reaching for Western Christianity. For the Catholic Church, if these conclusions are accepted, it means that Trent was wrong in affirming Augustine’s definitions, and that naturally has enormous effects in many other areas of doctrine, particularly for infallibility. In the Protestant Church, it means that the Reformers were right about the corruption of the Catholic Church in terms of trading in and assigning merit, but they asked the wrong questions. Rather than teaching that Christ’s merit imputed by God is the issue, they would have been better to ask what merit has to do with justice and justification in the first place. A true sola scriptura approach rather than a scripture-through-the Augustinian-lens approach might have led there, but the Latin tradition of thought was so pervasive that it was not overcome. In the tradition of those Reformers, then, a return to the perspective of scripture as written is in order.
This all promises to be a complicated matter. For the Catholic Church, if Trent is wrong, it means walking back centuries of teaching on the authority of the Church, no simple task. Does this mean that the Church does not authoritatively interpret scripture with the Pope in Peter’s seat with his keys? What about the rest of the councils and canon law? How does a priest pastor the flock without the backing of such absolute authority? What else is wrong? These are not questions with easy answers.
For Protestants, the matter is not significantly simpler, though mistakes may be a bit easier to acknowledge. Penal Substitutionary Atonement in various forms has been the primary lens used to interpret all of scripture for centuries. What is the impact on the rest of Protestant teaching if a different lens is used? Probably, many doctrinal disputes over details will be resolved, as the underlying issues will become moot. However, it will certainly mean that significant doctrinal revision will be required, no less than for the Catholic Church.
Does this mean that Penal Substitutionary Atonement must be rejected? What about all those people who came to Christ under this teaching? This is the most delicate kind of pastoral question raised in all of this, one not unlike Augustine’s concerns expressed to Jerome over changes to Latin biblical texts as a result of using Hebrew source texts. What will be the impact on the faith of the flock? That largely depends on how the matter is expressed. The idea that it is as if Christ took the punishment for the things that humans have done can be a helpful entry point in starting a conversation about the gospel, though it is less likely to resonate in a post-modern society dismissive of absolute values and ethics. While some might see taking another approach as giving in to the demands of culture and compromising the gospel, it is really freeing the gospel of the restrictions of a metaphor introduced by a previous culture. Additionally, shaping the message to fit the culture is entirely consistent with scripture, particularly Paul’s description of his own approach in 1 Corinthians 9. As a starting point for how to do this, Heiser’s approach that we need to be careful with terminology and back away from hateful, wrathful language is probably the most appropriate. Specifically, a focus on the character of God, Passover typology, and concentration on redemption language while retaining the very biblical idea of substitution seems to be a balanced approach.[15] Primarily, though, an understanding that it is faith in Christ that saves, not faith in a particular conceptualization of his work, will be critical to pastoral care while addressing these doctrinal issues. In the end, those who trust in Christ to save them from their sin and follow him faithfully will be saved even if they use a flawed metaphor to understand how that salvation works. God’s grace is sufficient to overcome human errors in teaching.
Finally, there is a bigger issue that must be addressed. The issue of justification may be one of many in which language and cultural issues have tainted or even corrupted the truth taught in scripture and passed down by the apostles as the deposit of faith once for all given to the saints. Förster brings up the issue in terms of the relationship between the Pharisees and Jesus, for example. De Young and Damick regularly raise various such issues on their podcast. Heiser asserts that Augustine got original sin wrong due to a Latin translation from a defective Greek manuscript.[16] Some of these are significant issues like the present one. Many of these are seemingly minor issues, but even minor deviations can add up to major discrepancies in perspective. However, even more significant anomalies may be present that have not been identified, and that is worthy of further study. The elephant in the room must be addressed, and in many cases, scholars, leaders, and churches don’t even know what they don’t know.
Somebody has to ask the question: What else are we still missing?
[1] Newman, John Henry, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1878), 8, https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/35110.
[2] Ibid., 178-185.
[3] A.E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 58.
[4] Council of Trent, “Decree Concerning Justification & Decree Concerning Reform” (January 13, 1547), chapter VII, https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/decree-concerning-justification–decree-concerning-reform-1496.
[5] John Calvin and Henry Beveridge, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 303-304.
[6] Stephen De Young and Andrew Stephen Damick, “A Land of Giants,” November 26, 2020, in Lord of Spirits, podcast, 2:32:07, https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits/land_of_giants#transcript.
[7] Stephen De Young, Interview by author via Zoom, November 11, 2022.
[8] Henning Graf Reventlow and Yair Hoffman, eds., Justice and Righteousness: Biblical Themes and their Influence (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1992), 94.
[9] Patrick Henry Reardon, Romans: An Orthodox Commentary (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 57.
[10] Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, trans. Keith Schram (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2006), 112.
[11] Stephen De Young, The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century, (Chesterton, IN: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2021), 132-144.
[12] Stephen De Young, Interview by author via Zoom, November 11, 2022.
[13] A.E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 37-38.
[14] Stephen De Young and Andrew Stephen Damick, “Pantheon and Pandeoneum IV: Asynchronous June 2022 Q&A,” June 23, 2022, in Lord of Spirits, podcast, 1:16:46, https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits/pantheon_and_pandemonium#transcript.
[15] Mike Heiser, “Some Random Thoughts About Substitutionary Atonement,” (blog), July 7, 2018, https://drmsh.com/random-thoughts-substitutionary-atonement/?fbclid=IwAR1vM1XNN4t51CxCKcEkBm8Fbfab9Kuj09pRQRjCtq97Tp14T4V_m1y5a6w.
[16] Michael S. Heiser, “Was Augustine WRONG due to a Faulty Translation?” December 5, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn2zUL0bCOU&ab_channel=Dr.MichaelS.Heiser.