Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification [Hardcover]

Combined from two volumes of the first edition, this second edition not only give you a comprehensive and continuous historical development of the Christian doctrine of justification, McGrath adds two more articles on his responses to "New Perspective on Paul" in recent Pauline scholarship and the recent agreement of Catholic church and Lutheran church on the understanding of "Justification" in this second edition. If you are interested in understanding more the rich meaning and implication of this crucial doctrine to Christian life both from the side of Catholics and Protestants, this book definitely meet your needs. It helps me a lot in making sound judgment on the issue whether there's really no fundamental difference between Karl Barth and the council of Trent (in general between Protestant tradition and Catholic Church) on the teaching of Christian doctrine of justification by faith, as Hans Kung had calimed that over thirty years ago.

This volume is one of those rare, indispensible works of historical theology that not only successfully delineates the history of a particular doctrine (that of Justification), but points to the weight of the debates that are its history (or, perhaps, histories) without any discernible polemic. That it relates to the Protestant Reformations goes without saying; that it contains a number of implications for ecumenism must, for some, be consciously remembered. This, the third edition, is a substantially re-written version of the two-volume first edition (the "second" edition contained the two volumes of the first in a single volume with no editorial changes). It comes across, then, very much as a potential work-in-progress; it does not seem strange, in reading the conclusion, to conceive of McGrath coming up with a fourth edition some years down the road - one that might, at the very least, smooth out some of the more disjointed facets of McGrath's 421 page narrative.

The book begins and ends in a historiographical context that is entirely appropriate for current debates about Justification: the state of current scholarship on the Bible, particularly St. Paul the Apostle. McGrath seems to concur with the thought of the most eminent of scholars that the Apostle not only never wrote a systematic work about justification, but that his doctrine seems to envision justification as three distinct, but related things: our past justification, our current state of being justified, and the promise of our future justification. Above all, it is in the context of evangelism to the Gentiles that the Apostle discusses "justification by faith"; to take this phrase and read into it late-medieval and Reformation-era debates is without warrant.

There is a danger in reading this book, for Justification is a doctrine that was not at the center of Christian reflection until the Protestant Reformations. When McGrath moves from St. Paul to St. Augustine, then, he discusses the place of justification within Augustine's work by labeling Augustine "the fountainhead". On the one hand, it makes sense to see Blessed Augustine as a fountainhead, for he truly is the father of all Western Christian thought; on the other hand, if McGrath means that Augustine is the fountainhead of the doctrine of justification, this contention is nowhere explained. Rather, it seems at odd with McGrath's statement that "the early Christian writers did not choose to express their soteriological convictions in terms of the concept of justification" (33).

Augustine appears to have held to the Apostle's teaching that we are justified by faith working through love (Gal. 5:6) and it is the centrality of love in Paul's own letters that is reproduced in Augustine's teaching on justification. However, unlike later medieval thinkers, Augustine's understanding of justification appears to be organically united with his understanding of the sacraments (especially baptism) and the nature of the Christian life as the path to deification (becoming by grace what God is by nature). McGrath is explicit that any understanding of Augustine's understanding of justification must note the centrality that deification holds in Augustine's thinking about the Christian life. Justification *is* deification for Augustine: the process of a past act, a present reality, and promise yet to come.

Ironically, the second chapter of the book (which is the longest at just over 150 pages) is titled "The Middle Ages: Consolidation". However, in reading this very long (and very dense) chapter, one gets a sense that the medieval era never reached any point of consolidation at all but that, as time went on, debates about justification became increasingly confined to academics in medieval universities and were conducted without reference to liturgy or Christian living - although the idea of extra-sacramental justification was by-and-large repudiated. Thus, justification appears to be a doctrine that developed in abstraction from the life of most Christians. This is in rather glaring contrast to a doctrine such as the Trinity, which was intimately tied up with evangelism, liturgy and the sacrament of baptism in the early Church. Justification, as the middle ages draws to a close, appears to be a doctrine without roots.

The Reformation continued the trend and, if anything, furthered it. Not only is justification finally divorced from the sacraments (whether or not one is justified in baptism appears to be anyone's guess), but the appeals by Protestants made to the Christian past during the Reformation debates are just plain wrong. Without even batting an eye, McGrath notes that the Protestant contention concerning justification as a legal fiction - that one is declared justified without being changed by God - was a complete novelty that had been explicitly repudiated by the early and medieval Church. He does a fine job surveying Luther's theology of justification - which is far more medieval than any of his Protestant counterparts (all of whom Luther considered heretics, save the developing Lutheran church) - and notes with approval the current work of the "Helsinki School" of Finnish Lutheran scholarship that has sought to readdress the anti-mystical tendencies of much Lutheran scholarship. This does not clear Luther from the charges of novelty, but it does present him as a more historically grounded figure than the other Reformers. In a thoroughly researched chapter, McGrath shows that the Council of Trent ultimately towed the line on this issue and held far closer to Augustine's and Paul's understandings of justification than any of the Protestant Reformers (or Catholic Reformers - it appears that "justification by faith alone" was actually in discussion among Catholics before it was brought to the fore by Luther!).

The history of Protestantism is touched upon in many ways by noting the various ways that Protestant groups looked at the question of justification. It is worth noting that Luther's contention would not only be blunted by Lutheranism, but that other Protestants would reject his understanding as entirely erroneous. It is here that McGrath most falters, however, by becoming intensely personal in his discussion of John Henry Newman's Lectures on Justification. McGrath is generous in his critiques of Newman's shortcomings (and cites Rowan Williams in support of his critiques), but repeatedly uses the personal pronoun "I" when discussing Newman's thoughts. Out of nowhere the reader suddenly becomes privy to what appears to be a long-standing personal wrestling that, even as it is conducted civilly, clearly reveals a tremendous level of personal engagement on McGrath's part. It's almost embarassing. And, it causes me to wonder whether or not at the end of the day, the polemic against Newman isn't a sign of McGrath's own spiritual wrestlings: the history of justification points to the validity of the Catholic view more than the Protestant view, yet McGrath in other writings is quite insistent on the validity of Protestantism. Newman, however, was a figure that tried to mediate between the two for a short time before ultimately deciding that Roman Catholicism was the true Church. Perhaps McGrath feels this same struggle? Regardless, his exploration of Newman's thoughts is unnecessarily personal and entirely out of place in this book.

There are other things to quibble with, such as McGrath's tendency to see the few areas of agreement between Lutherans and Calvinists in the 16th century concerning justification as "the orthodox doctrine of justification". Given the difficult history of this doctrine, naming these points of agreement feels more than a bit arbitrary. But, no book is perfect. Neither is any author. This dense tome stands, however, as a witness to ways in which Christians have, over the ages, in complete disagreement with one another, sought to attach a level of meaning to a word - "justification" - that points ultimately to the fact that our own failures are neither the beginning nor the ending of the Christian story. That such a history might be so magnanimously recorded by a first-rate historian such as Alister McGrath is more than enough of a reason to give thanks.

If you are used to reading McGrath's other works (I have read about 6 or 8 of his other books), this one will surprise you. While most of his books are lucid and concise, to the point of bordering on being simplistic at points, Iustitia Dei is downright dense. I'm in the habit of reading some fairly technical works of historical theology, but this is one of the most challenging I have encountered in some time.

This is the 3rd revision of McGrath's dissertation and is obviously meant to be his magum opus. It is truly complex and brilliant, and I frankly am undecided on what to think of most of it. It is worthy of a second read.

One challenge is that you can't just skip to your favorite or most familiar time period in church history (early church, late Scholasticism, Reformation) and hope to understand his arguments there. He builds his argument (and vocabulary) on prior discussions. It is not that he is needlessly obtuse, or writes poorly. The book is well-organized and he writes clearly enough. It is just that he assumes alot of the reader -- that you will recall most of all the prior discussion, that you can handle lots of technical (largely untranslated) Latin phrases, and that you have at least a graduate-school level background in historical theology.

In regards to his arguments: his characteristic moderation is evident everywhere. He goes to great pains to be fair to everyone discussed and to not advocate much for any school of thought or position. His goal seems to be to present the complex issues involved in an organized way, comparing and contrasting various competing camps. EVERY theological camp will find something here that strikes at cherished dogma. It is clear that NO camp (including my own) gets to make any tidy claims to absolute supremacy on the issue of justification.

In general, the ones who will be most unsettled from an honest read here will be the dogmatic Lutherans (who see Luther's particulars on justification as the Archimedian point around which all other doctrine all rotate, the "articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae") and the sort of Roman Catholics who have trouble dealing with historical development in doctrine. Probably the ones who will be least traumatized, but still challenged, will be the moderate Reformed types.

Some random points that interested me:
* It is beyond dispute: the emphasis placed on 'justification' and the orientation of all other doctrines around justification, was unique to the Reformation period. Other periods in church history, for example, gave less emphasis on justification by faith in favor of greater discussion of redemption, ransom, union with Christ, etc etc. NOT that the Reformation formulas on justification are wrong, just unusual and novel in their obsession and emphasis (growing from their context).
* Interesting discussions of alternate emphases: Orthodox emphasis on the economic condescension of the Son leading to humanity;s participation in the divine being -- expressed in the concept of deification (theosis) rather than justification. (see p. 3).
* the Middle Age theologians explored the image of justification as useful for articulating the Christian vision of reconciliation of humanity to God, without giving it the conceptual dominance that it gained during the 16th cent. Reformation.
* Catholics tried to refute the Reformation on its own terms by giving an alternate vision of justification, while still buying into the Reformation's centrality of the doctrine.
* Alot of the Church's understanding of 'justification' (starting with Augustine in the late 4th cent.) comes from the Vulgate trans. of the Bible, rather than the Greek and Hebrew. For example, the Latin terms iustitia and iustificatio allowed theologians to find in the cognate concept of justification a means of rationalizing the divine dispensation toward humanity in terms of 'justice.' But the Hebrew words these Latin terms came from were not cognates and had differing meanings.
Latin iustificatio (Eng. justification) sounds like the Latin iustitia (Eng. righteousness). But the Hebrew and Greek these are translated from are not cognates, just like the ENglish words aren't.
* The problems aren't just with Latin. Great discussion of the Hebrew terms sedeq and sedaqa, both of which are usually translated righteousness. Their similar sounds and uses make it seem like they are synoymns, but its not that simple. see p. 8ff.
* The oldest uses of sedaqa in the OT means something like 'victory.' God is understood to have acted 'righteously' by defending Israel. His act of judgment is retributive toward Israel's enemies, but slavific toward God's covenant people (p. 10).
* underlying iustitia Dei is the conceptual framework of teh covenant: when God and Israel mutually keep the covenant to each other, a state of righteousness exists, things are saddiq, 'as they should be.' (p. 10).
* VERY helpful (and complicated) discussion on the problem attending translated the OT into a 2nd language (whether Greek or modern English) illustrated by semantic field theory. Semantic field of a word is not merely its synonyms, but also its antonyms, homonyms, and homophones. Therefore it is much broader than the lexical field, which is very narrowly associated with the synonyms. Translation of a word into a different language inevitably involves a distortion of the original semantic field, so that certain nuances and associations in the original are lost in the translation. See pp. 13f. Realizing this makes translating the actual meaning of a biblicla word much more complicated. And one problem with the Vulgate was that it wasn't even a translation from OT Hebrew straight to Latin. It was OT Hebrew to LXX Greek to Latin! So the translation Jerome chose went something like this:
"righteousness" (Eng.) was sedaqa (Heb.) to dikaiosyne (Grk) to iustitia.
"to justify" (Eng.) went hasdiq (heb.) to dikaioun (Grk) to iustificare.

Note how Hebrew words sedaqa and hasdiq that start out very different end up as related words in teh Vulgate (iustitia and iustificare). From these Latin words Augustine and other formulate the doctrines of justification. See pp. 14-21.

* none of this is to discount the Church's teachings on justification! Just to acknowledge Paul's message is alot more complicated and difficult for us to other languages to understand than any of our camps probably realize. As McGrath shows -- the Church's past attempts to grasp Paul's concept justification is a ship at sea, rather than one which has entered its intellectual harbor. (p. 21).

* Karl Donfried, for example, famously tried to make sense of the various ways Paul talks about justification, and its relation to his other terms and doctrines, by this framework:
-justification: past event with present implications (sanctification)
- sanctification: present event, dependent on a past event (justification) with future implications (salvation)
- salvation: future event, already partially experienced in past event (justification) and present event (sanctification), and dependent on them.

But the neatness of this approach is inadequate. Within Paul's writings he speaks of justification as future as well as past (Rom. 2:13; 8:33; Gal. 5:4-5). the terms appears to sometimes relate to both the beginning of the Christian life and its final consummation. Likewise, sanctification can refer to a past event (I Cor. 6:11) or a future one (I Thess. 5:23). read p. 23 and your head will explode.

* McGrath organizes views on justification into 3 broad camps:
1. Justif. by faiuth as THE center to ALL Paul's conception of Xianity (Lutherans).
2. justif. by faith as a 'subsidiary crater' (liberal Albert Schweitzer) in Paul's overall presentation and understanding of the Gospel. So liberal Wrede argues that justif. was simply a polemical doctrine, designed to neutralize Judaism. Once neutralized, Paul moves on to other doctrines.
3. justif. by faith as one of a number of ways Paul conceptualizes what God has achieved for believers in and through Christ. Other images are not mutually exclusive of justif. by faith, but all are complementary. So justif. IS central in one sense (it infallibly describes the core of the Gospel) but less central in another sense (in that it is only one way, among others, of expressing this core). See esp. pp. 24-26 for a nice summary of this.

* Nice discussion of early New Perspectives on Paul, as given by EP Sanders, with its inherent problems. Sanders sees Judaism in Paul's day as 'covenantal nomism.' The law is a regarded as an expression of the covenant between God and Israel, and is intended to spell out what forms of human behavior are appropriate within the context of the covenant. Righteousness to Jews was behaviors consistent with the covenant. So, for Sanders, 'works of the law' were not means that Jews believed they entered the covenant (as Luther suggests) Jews thought, Sanders says, they already stood in the covenant. Works, Jews believed, were expressions that Jews already belonged to that covenant. So Sanders believes the Jews believed that 'works of the law' were not the basis of entering the covenant but of maintaining it.

Critics of Sanders note that Paul seemed to regard Xianity as far more than some kind of small shift within Judaism. Sanders held that both Paul and Judaism saw works as the means to continue in the covenant they had already entered. But Paul regard good works as evidential, rather than instrumental (see p. 29). Against Sanders, Paul regards works of the law as evidence that one is in the covenant, NOT as the MEANS to stay in that covenant.

* But Luther's soft antinominianism takes an exegetical and historical beating here too, as Paul taught we are to be doers and not hearers only of the law to be justified (Rom. 2:13). See p. 30.

* The discussion of the Early Church Fathers and lesser lights is interesting and impressive. McGrath makes arguments about the different emphases between Greek and Latin Fathers. But he discusses a dazzling number of these figures without giving us life dates or identifying which are Greek and which are Latin. He assumes the reader nows, but very few of even the best read will.

* McGrath showed me new ways of seeing how semi-Pelagian/Arminian views of free will in teh early church have pagan roots. He powerfully illustrates how so much if the language and ideas of self-determination in some Church Fathers are not demonstrated exegetically or Biblical-theologically, but philosophically from pagan thinkers in vogue at the time. He sees these inconsistencies worked out largely with Augustine's emphasis on election and grace. See pp. 34ff.
In this part of the discussion I found McGrath bolstering my Calvinism but shaking my catholicity! Basically, he shows that on this particular issue the Church Fathers were mostly pretty wrong exegetically and theologically and that their problems were worked out by a later theologian (Augustine) who permanently re-set the trajectory in a way the Church has largely found convincing in many quarters (for some periods, most quarters).
* Augustine, hero of the doctrines of election and grace, proto-Calvinist in that sense, also saw saving faith as "love of God" (rather than the tendency of some contemporary Calvinists to see it as almost simply "knowledge of God" or assent). "Sola Fides et Amore!!" Or maybe "Sola fides est amore!!" Here Augustine looks more like Calvin and even more like Edwards than some contemporary Calvinists. (See p. 45-47).
* According to McGrath, while Augustine does not deny forensic righteousness, he says salvation is bigger than just that concept (see p. 51).
* For examples of some showy trivia and unnecessary wordiness, in a work already necessarily wordy by its complexity, see pp. 55-60. McGrath stretches 3 paragraphs into 6 pages there, something he never does in any of his other books.
* Did you know that Peter Lombard's great Sentences is 80% just commentary and quotes from Augustine? Its not seen as an especially Augustinian gem because of the changes Lombard made and the spin he gave Augustine in his new Scholastic context.

I'm getting worn out just writing this. I've only used my notes on the first 20% of McGrath's book! There is alot of meat here. I wish there were short (2 paragraph) summaries at the end of each chapter.

Read this with a critical eye and you will not remain uninformed or unchanged.