|
Quotes on the topic of Justification We have made every attempt to cite the
precise source and location
"Justification is not only the forgiveness of sins, but the bestowal of a positive righteousness that derives from beyond us, and which we have through union with Christ. It is a perpetual living in Christ, from a centre and source beyond us. To be justified is to be lifted up above and beyond ourselves to live out of the risen and ascended Christ, and not out of ourselves." (Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction. ... Pgs. 151,152) "When the Protestant doctrine of justification is formulated only in terms of forensic imputation of righteousness or the non-imputation of sins in such a way as to avoid saying that to justify is to "make righteous", it is the resurrection that is being by-passed. ...justification is empty and unreal, merely a judicial transaction, unless the doctrine of justification bears in its heart a relation of real union with Christ. Apart from such a union with Him through the power of His Spirit, Christ would remain, as it were, inert or idle. We require an active relation to Christ as our righteousness, an active and an actual sharing in His righteousness. This is possible only through the resurrection; - when we approach justification in this light we see that it is a creative event in which our regeneration or renewal is already included within it." (Torrance, Thomas F. - Space, Time and Resurrection. "Justification by faith is a dynamic, ongoing action in the divine-human relationship. This important concept is so completely foreign to most evangelical circles today... Most evangelicals think of justification by faith as a final, once-in-a-lifetime act. Justification is not static, it is dynamic and ongoing. As we constantly believe, God constantly justifies. Justification is no mere initiatory action in the soteriological process - no mere filling station along the way..." (Robert D. Brinsmead - "The Dynamic, Ongoing Nature of Justification by Faith"; Present Truth periodical, 6/75 - "The essential feature of the Reformation doctrine of justification is that a deliberate and systematic distinction is made between justification and regeneration. Although it must be emphasized that the distinction is purely notional, in that it is impossible to separate the two with the context of the ordo salutis, the essential point is that a notional distinction is made where none had been acknowledged before in the history of Christian doctrine. A fundamental discontinuity was introduced into the western theological tradition where none had ever existed, or ever been contemplated, before. The Reformation understanding of the nature of justification as opposed to its mode must therefore be regarded as a genuine theological novum." (Alister McGrath - Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. Vol. I. .....Pg. 186) "Justification is not merely an externally pasted-on "as if." Man is not only called just but he is just. He is a new man not just outwardly but inwardly, not just partially but totally, not just negatively but positively. That is an indisputable presupposition." Hans Kung - Justification. ....Pg. 230) "Justification is the content of the Word of grace that God directs to us, a Word that is mighty, living and active. When God declared by His Word that we are righteous, we are righteous, for His Word makes it so. It is not an empty Word but one that fulfils what it declares" Thomas F. Torrance - Cheap and Costly Grace, Pg. 29) "Justification means not simply the non-imputation of our sins through the pardon of Christ, but positive sharing in his divine-human righteousness. We are saved, therefore, not only by the death of Christ which He suffered for our sakes, but by his life which he lived in our flesh for our sakes and which God raised from the dead that we may share in it through the power of the Spirit." Thomas F. Torrance. Theology in Reconstruction. .. Pg. 155) "The imagination that the merits of Christ's life my be sundered from his life itself, and conveyed over to his people under this abstract form, on the ground of a merely outward legal constitution, is unscriptural and contrary to all reason at the same time. The legal union, to be of any force for the imputation that is here required, must be a life union. In the very act of our justification, by which the righteousness of Christ is accounted to be ours, it becomes ours in fact by our actual insertion into Christ himself. He is joined to us mystically by the power of the Holy Spirit, and becomes in this way the principle of a new creation within us, which from the very start includes in itself potentially, all that belongs to it already in his own person. ...We need holiness as well as pardon. ...The obedience by which we are constituted righteous in both forms (declaration and participation), is found to be at last His obedience, and not ours, except as we derive it from His person. ...The active obedience of Christ, regarded as vicarious, has no meaning whatever, except on the basis of such a real life union between Him and His people. John W. Nevins - The Mystical Presence. ... Pgs. 192,193 "The very pronouncement (of justification) does, in point of fact, have the effect of making a man something he was not before. Justification carries life with it. It puts life into the man who receives it. It is life. (cf. Rom. 5:18, "justification of life"). ...justification and the producing of life were, in the apostle's mind, virtually synonymous." (James S. Stewart - A Man in Christ. ... Pg. 258) "It was apparently impossible for Protestant theology...to agree that God could put something in man that became in fact his own, and that at the same time the gift remained the possession of the giver. Or else...that even after the intervention of grace man could ever belong to God; it would seem as if man could only belong to him in ceasing to have a distinct existence, in being annihilated. That amounts to saying that there can be no real relation between God and man." (Louis Bouyer - Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, .... Pg. 151)
|
