Justification: Reformed and Catholic

David DeSilva's Galatians commentary and Justification

David DeSilva’s Galatians commentary has the exegetical depth you’d expect from the NICNT series, a great and thorough introduction, more than typical thoughts on pastoral application for each section, and is exceptionally lucid and clear in its writing and argumentation. As a commentary, it’s great. There are lots of pros, as I just mentioned, with some cons—I think DeSilva takes too dim a view of the historical reliability of Acts, for example, and he consistently refers to the Holy Spirit as “it” which I tend to think inappropriately depersonalizes the third person of the Trinity.

But when it comes to discussion on Galatians, the main hot-button issue is the nature of justification, so that’s what I want to focus on. “[W]e know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16).

It was surprising that DeSilva’s explanation of justification actually accords better with a typical Roman Catholic view than Reformed/Protestant,¹ at least as far as the topic is treated in Galatians (which, he suggests, is not necessarily the same way that it’s presented in Romans). 

I don’t mean to frame this as a criticism either. Full disclosure: I am Protestant, but actually my “issues” with Roman Catholicism have more to do with the claims of the papacy and worship practice than with disputes over the mechanics of justification.² So this isn’t me bashing DeSilva, calling him out as a crypto-Catholic, or anything like that. I just want to lay out what he says in an effort to help myself and anyone who reads this better understand the issues.

He argues (rightly) that justification is concerned with being found “righteous”—in alignment with God’s standard—at the last judgment. But a fundamental question at issue between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism is the basis on which the verdict of “righteous” is given. For Protestants, this basis has traditionally been understood to be *entirely* the perfect righteousness of Jesus himself, credited as ours because of the union we have with him from faith. For Roman Catholicism, the justifying verdict is given on the basis of the righteous life of believers themselves—the righteousness wrought in and worked out by them through God’s grace.

The difference can be seen by comparing a classic Protestant/Reformed statement on the doctrine and an official Roman Catholic statement.

So on the Protestant side, taken from the Westminster Confession (XI.1), we have this (emphasis mine):

“Those whom God effectually calleth, He also freely justifieth; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous, not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness, but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on Him and His righteousness by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.”

On the Catholic side, here is a statement from the Council of Trent (Canon XI):

“If any one saith, that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, whereby we are justified, is only the favor of God; let him be anathema.”

So you can see the difference. Does the verdict of justification on the last day owe anything to the actual righteousness wrought in believers that they act out in their lives, or is it only the righteousness of Christ himself, counted as theirs?

DeSilva is pretty open about where he falls on this question. “[C]ontrary to the notion of ‘imputed righteousness,’ one finds Paul promoting a view in which God brings into being within us the righteousness that Christ exhibited, changing us to become more like him” and this, DeSilva says, is “the righteousness that comes from God,” being “the product of God’s Spirit at work within us, bringing Christ to life within and through us.” It’s “on the basis of a life thus lived,” says DeSilva, that our final acquittal is rendered. DeSilva acknowledges the tension with standard Reformed theology but denies that the view he holds is “salvation by works,” saying that “monergism” vs. “synergism” is a dichotomy that doesn’t really aid understanding of what Paul is actually saying (pg. 221 and footnote 278).

Later, he says that Paul creates a “picture of justification as a transformative process rather than a forensic, declarative act. Paul is not talking about the goal as merely being declared righteous while not actually being righteous in God’s site” (pg. 422, emphasis his). He goes on to say that “Because this transformation depends entirely upon the action and empowerment of God’s Spirit, it remains fully justification on the basis of faith and on the basis of that which faith has received from God, namely, the promised Spirit” (pg. 423).

Now, my understanding of Roman Catholicism is that they would fully agree that the righteousness wrought in the believer is ultimately the product of God’s grace working in them by the Spirit. Catholics and Protestants agree that living faith is fundamental, that the fruit of faith is necessarily a righteous life, and that this is God’s grace at work in us. The difference is whether our acceptance as righteous before God is because of that work wrought in us, or solely because we are carried and covered by the work of Christ on our behalf.

Protestants criticize the Roman Catholic view for a couple of reasons. For one, they say that it provides grounds for boasting, as if the things that we do “earn” us salvation or merit in God’s sight. For another, they say that the Roman Catholic view undermines assurance of salvation since it puts the ball, so to speak, in our court and leaves us in anxiety about whether we are righteous enough. Then there are the exegetical arguments about what Paul actually is or is not saying.

I’ll be honest here, despite being a Protestant, I don’t find the typical criticisms compelling. It might be that a Roman Catholic view can lend itself to pride in oneself, but rightly understood I don’t think it should. In Roman Catholicism salvation is still seen as a free gift of grace provided by the work of Christ on our behalf. When it comes down to it, if righteous deeds are seen as grounds for boasting within Catholicism, it would be just as fair to say that faith is grounds for boasting within Protestantism. Faith is still something we do, after all. The common Protestant response to this, that faith is not a doing but simply a receiving, seems to me a bit disingenuous. Is “receiving” not still doing something? There are certainly issues with the Roman sacramental system and how it connects to all this as well, but my focus here is simply on the relation of faith, works, and justification, so I’ll leave that aside.³

As to assurance, one need only spend some time in a typical evangelical church to know that the Protestant doctrine does not provide automatic assurance. If Roman Catholics can’t have assurance because they don’t know if they’re righteous enough, Protestants can just as easily lack assurance because they aren’t sure their faith is real, or if their “fruit” is enough to be evidence of their faith’s genuineness. The Reformed doctrine provides assurance in theory (since salvation is based on the finished work of Christ for us), but in practice assurance just moves back a step to wondering if our faith in that work is genuine.

Exegetically, it’s pretty clear to me that in Galatians when Paul opposes “faith and works” he is not setting faith against righteous deeds generally. He is opposing faith in Christ to works of the Law. The issue was whether the Galatians would conform themselves to the Old Covenant, or whether they would embrace the New as fully sufficient, having fulfilled and superseded the Old. When Paul urges them to pursue justification by faith in Christ and not by works of the Law, he is saying that taking on the yoke of the Law will not result in their acquittal at judgment. For that, they should depend entirely on Christ, by faith, by which they receive the gift of the Spirit and the fruit that he will bear in them.

Does that mean the verdict of justification is rendered “on the basis of” that fruit? One issue is that Reformed Protestants want to emphasize that if God is going to pronounce someone “righteous,” that righteousness must be spotlessly perfect, or else God’s judgment would not be in accordance with truth—hence, it has to be on the basis of the perfect righteousness of Christ credited to us. That seems to me to make our technical definitions of terms supersede what the Bible actually says. Lots of characters in the Bible are called “righteous” (Zachariah and Elizabeth, for example), and we aren’t meant to take that to mean they are utterly sinless. If God pronounces a believer “righteous,” and the fruit of the Spirit in them is taken into account with that pronouncement, it doesn’t need to mean that God is somehow compromising his justice or truth.

We are justified by faith in Christ because he becomes our representative and because he gives us his Spirit. That means legally, we are bound to him and his righteousness is ours. It also means that experientially, the Spirit works in us to become more and more like him in character. So at the last day, God’s declaration of “justified” will have both realities in view.

The vital thing here is to emphasize that salvation should never be construed in terms of merit, in the sense that we put God in our debt and have “earned” something. None of God’s gifts are owed to us. Protestants are right that pride and boasting on our part are excluded. The Spirit does work in God’s people, and God recognizes that and pronounces accordingly. Protestants acknowledge this. You can’t really get around the Bible’s repeated assertion that judgment is “according to works” (Psalm 62:12, Romans 2:6). One can argue about whether “according to” differs from “on the basis of”—and there is a different nuance for sure. But here’s how Calvin put the terms of the dispute, and to me this is what’s most important:

”The dispute is not, whether good works ought to be performed by the pious, and whether they are accepted by God and rewarded by him, but whether, by their own worth, they reconcile us to God; whether we acquire eternal life at their price, whether they are compensations which are made to the justice of God, so as to take away guilt, and whether they are to be confided in as a ground of salvation.” (John Calvin, “The Necessity of Reforming the Church”)

To my mind, saying that the verdict of justification is based on our union with Christ and all that entails—including the gift of the Spirit and the fruit he bears in us—is not problematic, so long as the qualifications articulated above by Calvin are recognized. They are a more elaborate way of saying what Jesus says in Luke 17:10, “So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’”

1. I believe DeSilva is a Wesleyan.

2. In John Calvin’s treatise “The Necessity of Reforming the Church” he placed corruption of worship as the primary problem in the Roman church of his day, with the doctrine of justification following after that.

3. The sacramental issue is more serious for Roman Catholicism, to me, than the general issue of faith/works/justification. To whatever extent the sacraments are seen almost superstitiously as “infusions” or “boosters” of grace that contribute in some way to “righteousness fund” that builds credit with God, I think that whole framework is a huge problem.