Justification

The Greek verb is dikaioo, and it belongs to a family with dikaiosyne, righteousness, and dikaios, righteous or just. English hides the family, because we translate one branch with Latin words, justify and justice, and another with Anglo-Saxon words, righteous and righteousness. A reader in Greek hears one root where an English reader hears two, which is worth knowing every time a preacher builds a point on the difference between being just and being righteous.

The texts everyone works from are Romans 3 to 5 and Galatians 2 to 3, with Philippians 3 close behind. Romans 3:20 shuts one door: 'Therefore no one will be justified in His sight by works of the law. For the law merely brings awareness of sin.' Romans 3:23-24 opens another: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are 'justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus'. Romans 4:4-5 sharpens it: 'Now the wages of the worker are not credited as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness.' Romans 5:1 states the result: 'Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Galatians 2:16 says the same thing three times in one verse, which is the sort of thing a man does when he is angry. One phrase in these texts is partly settled by the BSB's English before anyone looks at the Greek. At Romans 3:22 and 3:26, Galatians 2:16 and Philippians 3:9 the BSB prints 'faith in Jesus Christ', 'faith in Jesus', 'faith in Christ', with no footnote. The Greek in several of these places is pistis Christou or the like, literally 'faith of Christ', which can mean our faith directed at Christ or Christ's own faithfulness. Richard Hays and N. T. Wright argue for Christ's faithfulness, pointing out that Romans 4:16 speaks of 'the faith of Abraham', where the genitive plainly means Abraham's own faith, and that Galatians 2:16 would repeat itself if both phrases meant our believing, since the verse goes on to say 'we, too, have believed in Christ Jesus'. Douglas Moo and Thomas Schreiner argue for faith in Christ, on the ground that the surrounding clauses are about the response of believers ('to all who believe' in Romans 3:22) and that this is the traditional reading of the phrase. Which is right changes whether these verses name Christ's own faithfulness or our trust as what justification is received through, and the BSB has chosen between them without a footnote.

Name the question precisely, because almost all the heat in this argument comes from people answering different questions. It is not whether salvation is by grace: every church treated in this lesson says it is, and says so in binding documents. It is not whether faith is necessary: every church says it is. The question is what God does in the act of justifying. Does he pronounce a verdict about a person's standing, leaving their moral condition to be dealt with by a distinct work, or does he begin a transformation of the person, of which the verdict is a recognition? And attached to that, a second question: is the righteousness on the basis of which the verdict is given Christ's own, credited to someone who does not possess it, or a righteousness really given to them and now theirs?

Two further things belong on the table before the positions are stated. The first is that the words justification and sanctification do not have fixed and universal meanings across the traditions, so a Protestant who hears a Catholic say that justification increases, and concludes that Rome teaches salvation by achievement, has made a translation error before he has made a theological one. Trent uses justification as a word for the whole movement from being an enemy of God to being his friend, which a Protestant would call justification and sanctification together. Much of what looks like flat contradiction between the two churches is two different maps using one word for different territory. Some of it is not, and the work of the next four sections is to find out which is which.

The second is that this is not an argument anybody chose to have for fun. Men were burned over it. The Western church broke over it, and has not reassembled. Luther called it the article by which the church stands or falls, or at any rate the phrase in that form comes from later Lutheran writers summarising him, and the sentiment is certainly his. If it turns out that the two sides were substantially agreed and separated over vocabulary, that is a catastrophe of a different kind, which is why the last section of this lesson will not tell you that they were.

The Protestant account, in one sentence: to justify is to declare righteous, not to make righteous; the sinner is declared righteous on the basis of a righteousness that is Christ's and is credited to them; this happens at once, entire and complete, received through faith alone; and the believer therefore stands before God as fully accepted while still, in themselves, a sinner. Each clause is argued from texts, and the arguments are worth setting out rather than summarising.

First, the verb declares. The evidence is lexical and contextual together. In the Greek Old Testament, Deuteronomy 25:1 describes judges acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty; the verb is a courtroom act. Proverbs 17:15 in the KJV says, 'He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD' (the BSB renders the same Hebrew verb 'Acquitting the guilty'), which is incoherent unless justifying means declaring, since making a wicked man righteous would be a good deed rather than an abomination. Luke 7:29 in the KJV has the people who 'justified God' (the BSB has 'acknowledged God's justice'), and nobody makes God righteous. Romans 8:33 sets it inside a courtroom scene of charges and condemnation. Paul's own antonym for justify is condemn, at Romans 5:16 and 5:18 and 8:33-34, and condemning is plainly a verdict rather than a transformation. The conclusion drawn is that dikaioo in Paul's soteriological passages is declarative, and that Romans 4:5, where God justifies the ungodly, states the scandal that the position exists to preserve.

Second, the ground is a righteousness not our own. Paul says at Philippians 3:9 that he wants to be found in Christ, 'not having my own righteousness from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God on the basis of faith'. 2 Corinthians 5:21 states the exchange: 'God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.' Romans 5:19 puts it in the Adam and Christ frame: 'For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.' The argument from 5:19 is structural. However Adam's disobedience makes the many sinners, Christ's obedience makes the many righteous in the corresponding way; and since nobody supposes Adam's sin is infused into his descendants as a personal act they performed, the parallel suggests a reckoning rather than an infusion on the other side too. Luther called this an alien righteousness, iustitia aliena, in a sermon of 1519 on the two kinds of righteousness: alien because it is another's, and given to us from outside, as a bride receives her husband's goods.

Third, faith alone. The argument is not that faith is the one virtue God rewards, which would make faith a work and reintroduce the problem. It is that faith is the empty hand: it justifies not because of any quality in it but because of what it lays hold of. Romans 4 is the load-bearing chapter, with logizomai, to count or reckon (the BSB mostly renders it 'credited'), used eleven times, and with the contrast in 4:4-5 between wages due and a gift given. Romans 4:16 says the promise comes by faith 'so that it may rest on grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham's offspring', which makes the manner of receiving a function of the character of the gift. Melanchthon, defending the Augsburg Confession in 1531, glossed the verb forensically, as absolving a guilty person and pronouncing them righteous; the Westminster Confession, over a century later, says God justifies 'not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous', and 'not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone'.

Fourth, simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and a sinner. The phrase is from Luther's lectures on Romans in 1515 and 1516: the believer is a sinner in fact but righteous by the reckoning of a merciful God. It is not a licence and it is not a description of complacency. Its function is to explain how a Christian who examines their own life honestly and finds it wanting is not thereby discovering that they were never justified. Because the verdict rests on Christ's righteousness rather than on their own progress, the verdict does not fluctuate with the progress, and the believer can therefore look at their sin without panic. That pastoral consequence is not incidental to the doctrine; for Luther it was most of the point, and the account of his own struggle in the preface to the Latin edition of his works in 1545, where he describes finally understanding the righteousness of God as something God gives rather than something God demands, is the biography behind the theology.

Notice how far this account reaches beyond the two confessions usually quoted for it. The Anglican formularies teach it: Article 11 of the Thirty-nine Articles says we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of Christ by faith and not for our own works or deservings, and calls this a most wholesome doctrine. The Baptist tradition teaches it twice over, in the First London Confession of 1644, which predates Westminster and draws on the Separatist confession of 1596, and again in the Second London Confession of 1677 and 1689, which follows Westminster's wording closely. And John Wesley, who disagreed with the Reformed about almost everything in the previous lesson, taught it too: his 1765 sermon The Lord Our Righteousness affirms the imputation of Christ's righteousness in as many words. The Protestant account of justification is not the property of one wing of Protestantism, and a student who has been told that Arminians are soft on it has been misinformed about Wesley.

The hardest question put to this account. If the verdict is given entire at the start and does not depend on what follows, what prevents the doctrine from producing exactly the person Paul imagines in Romans 6:1, who continues in sin so that grace may increase? The answer given is the answer of the previous lesson: justification is never received on its own, because it is received in Christ, and the Christ who justifies also sanctifies. Calvin's version is that we are not justified without works yet not by works, since the Christ who is our righteousness cannot be divided. The Protestant account also has to answer James 2:24, which says a person is justified by works and not by faith alone, and the standard answers are set out in the Hermeneutics track rather than here. Note what is at stake in whether that answer works: if it does not, this account is in serious trouble, and its own best defenders have said so.

State this as a Catholic theologian states it, because the version most Protestants have heard is a summary of a polemic against it. The Decree on Justification was promulgated in the sixth session of the Council of Trent on 13 January 1547, in sixteen chapters followed by thirty-three canons. The chapters are the positive teaching and the canons are the condemnations; a reader who goes only to the canons will get the shape of the doctrine badly wrong, which is what has usually happened.

Begin where the decree begins. Chapter 5 says that in adults the beginning of justification is to be derived from the prevenient grace of God through Jesus Christ. Canon 1 anathematises anyone who says a person can be justified before God by their own works, whether done by nature or under the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ. Canon 3 anathematises anyone who says a person can believe, hope, love or repent as they ought without the prior inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So the first thing Trent does is condemn Pelagianism in its own name, and the charge that Catholicism teaches salvation by earning it is refuted by the council's own first canon. What Trent adds, in canon 4, is that the free will moved and excited by God is not merely passive like something inanimate, and really cooperates; and in canon 5, that free will is not extinguished by Adam's sin. That pair is the Catholic shape: grace always first, and a will that genuinely consents.

Now the substance. Chapter 7 names the single formal cause of justification as 'the justice of God, not that whereby He Himself is just, but that whereby He maketh us just'. That sentence is the crux of the whole dispute and it should be read slowly. Trent is saying that the righteousness on account of which a person is accepted is a righteousness God actually gives to them and which becomes theirs, poured into the heart with faith, hope and charity, rather than a righteousness remaining outside them and credited to their account. Canon 11 accordingly condemns anyone who says a person is 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'. Read the canon carefully: what is condemned is sole imputation to the exclusion of infused charity, not imputation as such, and Catholic theologians have pointed this out for four hundred years.

Chapter 8 explains what the council means by faith: we are said to be justified by faith because faith is 'the beginning of human salvation, the foundation, and the root of all Justification'. Trent does not deny that we are justified by faith; it denies a particular construal of alone. Canon 9 condemns anyone who says that by faith alone the sinner is justified 'in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will'. Canon 12 condemns anyone who says that justifying faith is nothing but confidence in the divine mercy, or that this confidence alone is what justifies. Those two canons are aimed with some precision, and the precision matters: a Protestant who holds that faith is a gift of God which is never alone, always accompanied by repentance and issuing in love, has to work out whether canon 9 is actually aimed at him.

Then the distinctive Catholic structure. Because justification is the making of a person just and not only the declaring of them so, it admits of degrees, and chapter 10 is headed on the increase of justification received. A justified person grows in the justice they have received, through faith working by charity, through the sacraments, and through good works, and canon 24 condemns anyone who says the justice received is not preserved and increased before God through good works but that works are merely fruits and signs. This is the doctrine of merit, set out in chapter 16, which says eternal life is proposed to those working well both as a grace mercifully promised and as a reward. Catholic theologians insist that the merit in question is always grace-enabled and never puts God in anyone's debt; the sentence the tradition uses to make the point is Augustine's, that when God crowns our merits he crowns nothing other than his own gifts, and it is quoted for this purpose in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Justification is also, on this account, losable, since mortal sin destroys the charity that was infused, and it is restored through the sacrament of penance, which chapter 14 calls a second plank after shipwreck.

The hardest question put to this account. If the righteousness on the basis of which I am accepted is a righteousness in me, and if it can increase and can be lost, how can Romans 5:1 say that we have peace with God, and how can any believer have settled confidence before God rather than a hope proportioned to their present condition? The answer given by Catholic theologians runs on two levels. On the level of the person, the ground of confidence is not one's own measure of charity but the mercy of God and the merits of Christ, in which the decree itself tells the believer to place a firm hope, and chapter 9's warning is aimed at a specific claim, namely that a person must believe with the certainty of faith that their own sins are forgiven, which Trent regards as a claim about oneself masquerading as an act of faith in God. On the level of the system, Catholic theologians answer that a righteousness which is really given is more, not less, than one merely reckoned, and that the Protestant account purchases its certainty by leaving the sinner unchanged in the very transaction that is supposed to save them. Whether that is a fair description of the Protestant account is precisely what is in dispute, and the last section will return to it.

In 1977 E. P. Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and the argument about justification acquired a new front, which is not the Catholic and Protestant front and does not map onto it. Sanders was not writing about Trent. He was writing about first-century Judaism, and his claim was historical: that the picture of Judaism as a religion of works-righteousness, in which anxious Jews tried to accumulate merit before a demanding God, does not match the Jewish literature of the period. What the sources show, he argued, is a pattern he named covenantal nomism: a person is in the covenant by God's gracious election, and obedience to the law is how one stays in and shows one belongs, not how one gets in. If that is right, then a reading of Paul in which his opponents are proto-Pelagians is a reading of a Judaism that did not exist. Sanders's own account of Paul is often forgotten in the noise: he held that Paul's thought is essentially participationist, being in Christ and dying with him, and that Paul's objection to Judaism was not that it was legalistic but, in his blunt summary, that it was not Christianity. That is not a Protestant-friendly conclusion, and it is not an attempt to be one.

James Dunn took the historical claim and drew a different exegetical conclusion. In the Manson Memorial Lecture of 1982, which gave the movement its name, he argued that if Judaism was not legalistic, then Paul's phrase works of the law cannot mean human moral effort in general. It means the specific observances that functioned as identity badges marking Israel off from the nations: circumcision, food laws, sabbath. Paul's target is therefore not self-righteousness but ethnic exclusivism, and the doctrine of justification by faith is the charter of a gospel for Gentiles. Dunn's evidence is contextual: in Galatians the sentence about works of the law is produced at a table, and in Romans 3:29 Paul's very next move after saying one is justified by faith apart from works of the law is to ask whether God is the God of Jews only.

N. T. Wright shares the historical premise and builds something larger and different, and he should not be filed as Dunn with a mitre. On Wright's account the righteousness of God in Romans is God's own covenant faithfulness, his determination to put the world right through Israel and through Israel's Messiah. Justification is God's declaration, in the present, that a person is a member of the covenant family, made on the basis of faith and anticipating the verdict of the last day; it is therefore an ecclesiological doctrine as much as a soteriological one, which is why Paul reaches for it when he is arguing about who may eat with whom. Wright denies that Christ's righteousness is imputed to believers as a transferred substance, arguing that righteousness is a status conferred by a court rather than a commodity that can cross the courtroom, and that what Paul actually says is that believers are in the Messiah and therefore share the verdict passed on him at his resurrection. He also teaches a future justification 'on the basis of the whole life lived', appealing to Romans 2:6-16 and 2 Corinthians 5:10. He differs from Sanders in holding Paul coherent rather than inconsistent, and in reading the whole through Israel's story of exile and return; he differs from Dunn in putting far more weight on eschatology and far less on boundary markers as such. Wright has said in print that there are almost as many new perspective positions as there are writers holding one, and a student who treats the movement as a single thesis will get every part of the debate wrong.

The criticisms are serious, they come from technically equipped people, and they are not all the same criticism. D. A. Carson, Peter O'Brien and Mark Seifrid edited two volumes under the title Justification and Variegated Nomism, in 2001 and 2004, whose burden is in the word variegated: the Second Temple sources are far more diverse than one pattern can describe, and covenantal nomism, stretched to cover everything, ends up describing nothing in particular. Simon Gathercole, in Where Is Boasting? in 2002, worked through the Jewish material and argued that final vindication according to works, and boasting in obedience, are genuinely present in the sources, so that Paul's polemic has a target after all. Stephen Westerholm, in Perspectives Old and New on Paul in 2004, conceded a great deal to Sanders about Judaism while arguing that the Lutheran Paul is nevertheless closer to the real Paul than the new perspective allows, chiefly because Paul's argument in Romans 1 to 3 concludes that nobody is righteous rather than that Gentiles have been unfairly excluded. His book is unusually generous to its opponents, and it is widely recommended, by scholars on both sides of the argument, as a place where a student can watch one person handle both cases. John Piper, in The Future of Justification in 2007, focused on Wright specifically, arguing that denying the imputation of Christ's righteousness removes the ground of the believer's standing, and that a future justification on the basis of the whole life lived makes works the basis rather than the evidence of the verdict. Mark Seifrid, in Christ, Our Righteousness in 2000, attacked the lexical foundation directly, arguing that the righteousness of God in Paul is not adequately rendered as covenant faithfulness and that the term's Old Testament background is broader than the covenant framework allows. Douglas Moo and Thomas Schreiner argue the case verse by verse in their Romans commentaries, holding that works of the law in Romans 3:20 cannot be confined to identity markers, since Paul's conclusion there is about every mouth being stopped. Taken together the critics are not making one objection but four: about the Jewish sources, about the lexicon, about the exegesis of Romans 1 to 3, and about the theological consequence for a believer's standing.

The replies are also serious and belong here. Wright answered Piper directly in Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision in 2009, arguing that his critics have read him through a systematic grid rather than through Paul's argument, that he affirms as strongly as anyone that the believer's standing rests entirely on Christ's death and resurrection and not on their own achievement, and that the future verdict he describes is given in accordance with a life that the Spirit has produced, which is Paul's own teaching in Romans 8 and not an intrusion. Dunn has repeatedly said that he never meant works of the law to be confined to boundary markers, only that boundary markers are where the phrase does its work in the letters, and his collected essays of 2005 open with a long retrospective answering his critics point by point; a student who wants the new perspective's own account of the whole argument, as a counterweight to Westerholm's survey, will find it there. Sanders's answer to the charge about variegation is that covenantal nomism was offered as a pattern with acknowledged variation inside it rather than as a uniform creed, and his defenders observe that the two Variegated Nomism volumes concede a good deal of his reading of the Jewish sources while disputing how much of the field it covers. Wright makes the same observation more sharply, that his critics have largely accepted the historical result and then gone on arguing as though they had not. And the discussion has moved on: John Barclay's Paul and the Gift, in 2015, argued that ancient and modern writers mean different things by grace, distinguishing several ways a gift can be perfected, and that Paul's distinctive claim is that God's gift is incongruous, given without regard to the worth of the recipient, without being unconditional in the sense of expecting nothing afterwards. Barclay's book has been received with something close to relief by people on both sides, which is a sign that the older framing had become a trap.

What a student should take from this. The new perspective is not a Catholic position and it is not a liberal position; Wright is a conservative Anglican who believes in the bodily resurrection and in scripture's authority, and Gathercole and Westerholm are not defending Trent. The historical question about Second Temple Judaism and the theological question about what justification is are separable, and a great deal of confusion comes from treating them as one. And the honest summary of where the argument stands is that the crude picture of Judaism as a merit-accounting religion has not survived, that covenantal nomism as a total description has not survived either, and that what Paul's phrase works of the law covers remains genuinely disputed among people who have read all the sources.

The Eastern churches watched the sixteenth-century argument from outside and have never been persuaded that it was framed correctly. The observation Orthodox theologians make most often is that justification is a minor category in the Greek fathers and a major one in the Latin West, and that the reason is not that the East neglected scripture but that the West inherited a set of questions about guilt, satisfaction and legal standing which shaped what it looked for. Where the West asks how a guilty person can be acquitted, the East asks how a dying person can be made alive, and the second question generates a different doctrinal architecture in which deification rather than acquittal is the organising idea. Three modern Orthodox writers make versions of this point and it is worth knowing which book to open for each. Georges Florovsky argued in The Ways of Russian Theology, published in Russian in 1937, that Russian theology had fallen into a Western captivity by adopting first Latin and then Protestant questions, and his programme of a return to the fathers, the neo-patristic synthesis he set out in the 1930s, was framed as the cure. John Meyendorff's Byzantine Theology of 1974 gives the doctrinal version, describing Eastern soteriology as organised around death, corruption and deification, and noting the absence from it of the Anselmian framework of satisfaction that structures the Western debate. Kallistos Ware makes the point at an introductory level in The Orthodox Church of 1963 and The Orthodox Way of 1979, which are where most English readers first meet it. The polemical edge is unmistakable in all three: on this view the Reformation was a family quarrel between two parties who already agreed on a juridical framing the East had never adopted.

That should not be turned into the claim that the East has no doctrine of justification, which is false and which Orthodox writers themselves do not say. The vocabulary is in scripture and therefore in the tradition's liturgy and its confessions; the Confession of Dositheus, adopted at Jerusalem in 1672, uses the language of being justified and discusses faith and works at length, in the course of rejecting a Calvinising confession that had been circulated under an Orthodox patriarch's name. What Orthodox theology declines is the isolation of justification as a separate moment to be analysed on its own and made the criterion of everything else. The believer is forgiven, adopted, healed and gradually transfigured, and these are described as aspects of one movement into the life of God rather than as distinct acts requiring a sequence. It is also worth recording that not every Orthodox theologian is content with the standard contrast; some hold that it flatters the East by comparing its liturgy with the West's textbooks, and that the juridical material in the fathers is more substantial than the contrast allows.

The place to test that is the commentary tradition, since the Greek fathers did have to preach Romans. John Chrysostom's homilies on Romans, usually placed in his Antiochene years in the 390s though the dating of parts of his preaching is disputed, handle Romans 3 and 4 at length and do not flinch from the language of the courtroom: he speaks of God pronouncing the sinner righteous, marvels that the verdict falls on a man who has done nothing to deserve it, and drives home that the ungodly are justified. What he does not do is turn that into a distinct doctrinal locus organising everything else, and he moves without apology into the language of adoption, of the Spirit, and of becoming what Christ is. Theodoret of Cyrus reads the chapters in much the same register. That pattern is the honest description of the East on this subject: the forensic material is there and is preached, and it is not made the hinge. You will notice that the Orthodox material here rests on far less technical apparatus than the two sections before it, with no equivalent of Trent's numbered chapters and canons or of the Reformation's confessional articles. That thinness is itself a report rather than a slight, because the tradition being described has not produced a comparable body of technical argument on this particular question and does not think it should have to. Modern Orthodox writers have engaged the Western debate in bilateral dialogues, particularly with the Lutherans from the 1970s onwards, and the most common conclusion from their side is that the two Western positions are nearer each other than either is to the Eastern account of what salvation is.

The hardest question put to this account, since every other position in this lesson has had to answer one. If Paul gives the better part of Romans 3 to 5 and of Galatians 2 to 3 to the question of how a guilty person comes to be reckoned righteous, and sustains courtroom vocabulary all the way through it, then is it not the Eastern framework rather than the Western one that is bringing its own interests to the text? A tradition that treats a long and deliberate Pauline argument as one voice among many owes some account of why Paul spent that much ink on it, and of what a reader is to do with the eleven reckonings of Romans 4 if reckoning is not the organising idea there. The Orthodox answer has two parts. The first denies the premise: they do not treat it as peripheral, they preach it, as Chrysostom shows, and what they decline is the elevation of one of Paul's images above adoption, new creation, ransom, reconciliation and participation, for which they hold that Paul himself gives no warrant. The second is a counter-question, and it is not a polite one: they ask what recommended making justification the criterion of everything else, given that the tradition which did so is the one that broke apart over it. Neither answer will satisfy a reader who takes Romans to be a treatise on the mechanism of acceptance, and that is the honest state of the disagreement.

Then, in the West, something genuinely unexpected happened. On 31 October 1999, in Augsburg, the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. It states a common confession that we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit by grace alone, through faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part. It then takes seven contested topics in turn, including human powerlessness, the sinfulness of the justified, law and gospel, assurance, and good works and merit, and in each case states what Lutherans and Catholics together confess before setting out how each explicates it differently. Its two central claims are that a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification exists between the two, and that the doctrinal condemnations of the sixteenth century do not apply to the teaching of the other party as it is presented in the Declaration.

Be exact about what that does and does not accomplish, because both overstatement and dismissal are common. It does not repeal Trent's canons; it says they do not strike the Lutheran teaching as the Declaration states it, which leaves open what they strike elsewhere. It does not claim that the two churches now say the same thing, since the whole structure of the document is common statement followed by differing explication. It does not touch the doctrines of the church, the ministry, the sacraments or authority, which the text says remain to be worked through and which are why the two communions are still not in communion. And it did not go through without resistance. The Vatican issued a Response in 1998 raising difficulties, particularly about the formula simul iustus et peccator and about whether concupiscence in the baptised is truly sin, and an Annex had to be negotiated before the signing could proceed. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the churches of the International Lutheran Council rejected the Declaration and continue to reject it, holding that the consensus is verbal. Critics on the Catholic side argued that the difficulties had been managed rather than resolved. Against that, the agreement has since been formally associated with by the World Methodist Council in 2006, by the Anglican Communion through its Consultative Council in 2016, and by the World Communion of Reformed Churches in 2017, so five world communions now stand in some relation to it. No Orthodox church is a party to it, and no Orthodox church has been asked to be.

This lesson is not going to resolve what the church has not. What can be said honestly is a short list and you should be able to give it from memory. It is settled that every tradition here condemns the view that a person can begin their own salvation, and that anyone who tells you otherwise about any of them is wrong. It is settled that faith is necessary and that grace is prior. It is not settled whether the righteousness on account of which God accepts a sinner is credited or infused, which is the sentence in Trent's chapter 7 and the sentence in the Westminster Confession's chapter 11 set against each other, and no amount of goodwill has yet dissolved that difference. It is not settled whether the Declaration's consensus is a real convergence or an agreement to describe a disagreement politely; serious people say both. And it is not settled what Paul's phrase works of the law meant to the man who wrote it. You now know where each of those questions is argued, who the main voices are, and what each position costs its holder. That is the state of the discipline, and a teacher who offers you more than that is selling something.