Justification

Warning this is good but long. Many will find it hard to read. Print it out, get a glass of wine and comfy chair and read slowly.

Justification - Mike Horton

You may also enjoy: Reformation
Which I've mentioned before.


Some clips from the article..

Who Needs Justification?


God justifies the wicked. That's pretty radical. It is more radical than the claim that God heals the morally sick or gives grace to those who are willing to cooperate with it or that he rewards those who try to do their best. We don't even have to deny justification outright. It's just irrelevant when we stop asking the most important question. Having trouble with the marriage or kids? Sure. Not living up to our expectations? Doesn't everybody? Not really getting the most out of life and need some fresh advice? I'm all ears. But we don't care about being "sinners in the hands of an angry God" if we have never encountered a holy God. And if we do not sense a great need, we do not cry out for a great Savior.

"Deeds, not creeds!" has a long pedigree in the movement's history.

Americans are "pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps" kind of people anyway. That is what accounts in part for the enormous vitality of American business and industry. However, it also became a religion. Those who worked their way from rags to riches could hardly be told that before God at least they were helpless sinners who needed to be rescued. In today's climate, American Protestantism on the left and the right is committed to Finney's legacy, whether it knows it or not. It can be recognized in the "social gospel" of the left and in the moralistic jeremiads of the right; in the "how-to" pragmatism of the church growth movement and the vast self-help literature and preaching that have become the diet in the Christian subculture; and in the therapeutic obsession with inner spirituality and social activism that one finds in the Emergent movement. Even if the gospel is formally affirmed, it becomes a tool for engineering personal and public life (salvation-by-works) rather than an announcement that God's just wrath toward us has been satisfied and his unmerited favor has been freely bestowed in Jesus Christ.

I say all of this with deep regret at having to say it, because it is the worst thing that can ever be said of a church. Paul spoke sharply to the Corinthians concerning their immorality, but he never questioned whether it was a church. However, when the Galatian church was confusing the gospel of God's free justification in Christ through faith alone, he warned them that they were on the verge of being cut off-excommunicated, "anathema."

While Roman Catholics and Protestants used to debate how those born in original sin are saved by grace, these theological categories themselves are becoming replaced across the Roman Catholic-Protestant and liberal-evangelical divides with therapeutic, pragmatic, and consumerist categories that seem to render gospel-speech itself irrelevant. The question "How can I be accepted by a holy God?" is replaced with the quest for self-fulfillment, self-respect, self-esteem, and self-effort. And there are plenty of preachers who will cater to our narcissism, dressing our wound as though it were not serious and telling us how we can have our best life now.

I've been there also having in the past worked through several pragmatic series, Horton's article opens some challenging questions about how to pursue truth.