In a presentation, "Justification by Faith Alone: Sola Fide Debated and Defended," R.C. Sproul (author of works such as Chosen by God) attempts to defend forensic justification with the following comment (beginning at the 2:10 mark):
Part of the problem of the doctrine of justification and the distinction that goes between historic Protestantism--Reformation--and Roman Catholic thought has to do with the very simple meaning of the word "justification" itself. The English word "justification" is derived from the Latin term "iustificare" which etymologically and originally meant, literally, "to make righteous." And so the early Latin fathers who studied the Bible out of the Latin Vulgate rather than out of the Greek New Testament developed their doctrine of justification based on their understanding of the legal system of the Roman empire which used the word "iustificare," meaning "to make righteous." And so, as the Church developed that doctrine, the idea of justification came to address the question of how is an unrighteous person, such as a fallen sinner, able to be made righteous?
This comment, and subsequent comments in the presentation, shows that Sproul is attempting to follow Alister McGrath and others who have claimed that iustificare was a mistranslation of the δικαι- word group. As another Reformed apologist, Michael Horton, argued in the 1995 CURE Debate on justification:
As Oxford theologian Alister McGrath observes, the best example of the errors in the Latin Vulgate, corrected in tail end of the Renaissance, concerns its translation of the Greek word “dikaiosune,” which means “to declare righteous.” It is a legal term, a verdict. But the Latin Vulgate had translated “dikaiosune” with the Latin word iustificare, which means “to make righteous.” Erasmus and a host of classical scholars recognized that the Greek text required an understanding of justification that referred to a change in status rather than to a change in behavior or mode of being. Again, Erasmus had no doctrinal stake in this matter. He was not only a loyal son of the Roman church; he had engaged in heated polemics with Luther over free will. Nevertheless, he was Europe’s leading authority on the classical languages and could not overlook the glaring mistranslations. For this reason it has been said that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.
One Catholic apologist responded to Horton (and Sproul’s) erroneous comments on this issue:
No Protestant has ever proved that dikaiosune is exclusively, or even preponderantly, a legal term. More specifically, there is no verse of Scripture that classifies dikaiosune as a legal term. Protestants claim that Paul is borrowing the meaning of dikaiosune from the Roman law court. Unfortunately for them, Paul never cites the Roman law court, or any legal terminology in vogue in the Roman legal system during that time, when he uses dikaiosune or its derivatives in the NT. Paul uses the model of the biblical Covenant as his one and only framework to explain justification, not the Roman law court.
A biblical covenant is the combination of a personal and legal bond between two parties, much like a marriage is today between a man and his wife. When a covenant is broken, the personal and legal ties either deteriorate or are dissolved. To be restored as a viable covenant, both the personal and the legal must be restored, simultaneously. Catholic baptism does just that, since it infuses the individual with God’s grace and thus makes him personally pleasing to God; and this infusion is also an indelible mark which gives him legal status as God’s adopted child (Council of Trent, Ses. 6, Ch 4). Law courts do not have any room for, let alone accept, the personal dimensions of biblical covenants.
In fact, if Protestants insist on making justification solely a juridical enterprise, then this begs the question, for we must then inquire what “faith” is doing in a judicial proceeding? “Faith” is a volitional act of the will to put personal trust in the other member of the covenant for the mutual benefit of both. In a court of law, neither the judge nor the jury cares whether the defendant exhibits personal faith in the judge or the jury. Rather, defendants are determined to be innocent or guilty. If the former, they are set free; if the latter, they are punished. If the defendant is determined innocent and set free, it makes no difference if the defendant says, “but I don’t believe in the judge or the jury, and I refuse to be ordered by this court.” At that, the judge will promptly call the bailiff to have the defendant removed from the court, for it does not matter to the judge what the defendant personally believes about him.
Moreover, if Protestants insist that NT Justification is based on the juridical system of the Roman law court, this becomes a problem since there is no known Roman law (or Jewish law) that allows an innocent victim to take the legal punishment of an accused criminal so that the accused can go free. Dr. Horton’s colleague,Alister McGrath, tried to find such a connection in Roman private law, but the only thing he found was a concept called acceptiliation, which, according to McGrath, refers to the dissolution of an obligation by a verbal decree on the part of the one to whom the debt was due, without any form of payment having been exchanged (Iustitia Dei, II, p. 45). But this does not fit the Protestant concept of Atonement and Imputation, since the theory claims that Christ actually paid the debt, not merely let the culprit go free without anyone making a payment to the one owed. Thus, as it stands, there is no legal precedent for the forensic atonement used in Protestant soteriology.
This issue brings up another major difference between the Protestant and Catholic views of the Atonement. Luther and Calvin believed that, since justification was a purely legal enterprise, this meant that Christ had to suffer the equivalent of the legal punishment of the elect in order to redeem them. In other words, Christ had to suffer the precise punishment they would have sustained in Hell, whatever that punishment is.
Although no Father or medieval theologian had ever entertained the idea that the statement in the Apostles Creed that Christ descended into hell meant more than a release of detained saints, the Reformers saw in the descent an opportunity to buttress their forensic understanding of justification. They interpreted the descent as the infliction of the torments of hell on Christ in order to make a full legal payment for sin. Nicolas of Cusa (1400-1464) and Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) were the first to introduce the idea that Christ sustained agony in the descent into hell. Martin Luther held that Christ, as God and man, literally entered hell to sustain God’s wrath, suffering the tortures of the damned.
John Calvin used these concepts and was the first to produce the full-blown interpretation that Christ assumed the legal guilt of the sin for the elect and was justly punished with the torments of eternal damnation. He writes:
” But we must seek a surer explanation, apart from the Creed, of Christ’s descent into hell…If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual. No—it was expedient at the same time for him to undergo the severity of God’s vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment. For this reason, he must also grapple hand to hand with the armies of hell and the dread of everlasting death….By these words he means that Christ was put in place of evildoers as surety and pledge—submitting himself even as the accused—to bear and suffer all the punishments that they ought to have sustained…No wonder, then, if he is said to have descended into hell, for he suffered the death that God in his wrath had inflicted upon the wicked!” INT 2:16:10.
Suffice it to say, this is a thoroughly unbiblical understanding of the Atonement. Christ did not suffer the equivalent of an eternity in Hell. He suffered and died only, and this was sufficient to appease the wrath of God so that grace could be offered to mankind.
For more information on this, see my book Not By Bread Alone, “The Nature of Christ’s Sacrifice,” pages 37-56, and “Appendix 5, A Critique of Protestant Views of Penal Substitution,” pages 333-342.
As for Dr. Horton’s contention, ala Alister McGrath, that
“…the best example of the errors in the Latin Vulgate, corrected in tail end of the Renaissance, concerns its translation of the Greek word ‘dikaiosune,’ which means ‘to declare righteous.’ It is a legal term, a verdict. But the Latin Vulgate had translated ‘dikaiosune’ with the Latin word iustificare, which means ‘to make righteous,’”
it can be easily shown that McGrath is the one in error here. Here is an excerpt from my book Not By Faith Alone which deals with McGrath’s assertion:
In his work, Iustitia Dei, McGrath maintains that in Augustine’s translations, his Latin meanings were not faithful to the Hebrew meanings. This echoes the assertion of the German Lutheran, Martin Chemnitz(1522-1586), a student of Melanchthon, who said that Augustine misrepresented the Greek word dikaioun to refer to “making righteous” instead of “declaring righteous.” McGrath cites Chemnitz’s view on page 29, and elsewhere in the book attempts to show through the etymology and usage of the Hebrew that tsedaqahis a more general word than the Latin iustificare.
Hence, McGrath says Augustine’s Latin translation missed the “soteriological overtones” associated with the Hebrew tsedaqah (p. 8). McGrath says these kinds of problems were further complicated by the Greek word dikaiosune which was also limited in scope due to its Aristotelian origins. To support this position, McGrath cites several usages of the Greek eleemosune (“mercy, alms”) by the LXX to translate the nountsedaqah rather than the normal insertion of dikaiosune. McGrath also cites the anomalies of where LXX uses dikaiosune to translate tsedaqah in Lev. 19:36; Deut. 25:15; and Ezk. 45:10; in these instances the Hebrew merely carries the sense of “accurate” not, as translated, “just.”
In another example, McGrath cites the translation in Deut. 33:19 which should be “correct sacrifices” instead of “righteous sacrifices.” Similarly, McGrath sees a weakness in dikaiosune to translate the general scope of the Hebrew verb tsadaq. He cites the LXX translation of Isaiah 5:22-23 and 43:26 as proof. As a result, McGrath is of the opinion that the semantic range of the root dikaioun was expanded to accommodate tsedaqah. McGrath suggests that the difficulty comes to the fore when the “post-classical” Latin term iustificare is used to translate the “expanded” forms of the dikaioo derivatives.
More importantly, McGrath also asserts that Greeks and Latins had decisively different ideas of the concept of merit, and that this was the main cause for the Latin church’s emphasis on merit and the prevalence of merit in medieval theology. According to McGrath, in Greek culture merit was only a matter of “estimation” which is not inherent in its object, i.e., considering an entity to be something that it is not in itself. McGrath asserts that merit, in the Latin culture, refers to the quality inherent in the object or person.
Representative of these two meanings, according to McGrath, is the Greek passive axiousthai (“to deem worthy”) and the Latin equivalent, mereri. The Greek word that would have denoted “inherent merit” ismeroma, from which the Latin meritum is derived. McGrath’s conclusion: the disjunction betweenaxiousthai and mereri is similar to the disjunction between dikaiosune and iustificare. Hence the Greek word has the primary sense of being considered righteous, whereas the Latin word denotes being righteous or the reason one is considered righteous.
All in all, McGrath concludes that the initial transference of a Hebrew concept, to a Greek concept, to a Latin concept, led to a fundamental alteration in the concepts of justification and righteousness as the gospel spread from Palestine to the Western world (p. 15). Unfortunately, McGrath’s linguistic analysis and conclusion appear to read into history what his theology dictates.
Despite the anomalies that always occur in translating a word from one language to another, it is a matter of certain faith that inspired Scripture, which translates Hebrew text into Greek text, cannot err, and does not envision the problem McGrath proposes. First, without reservation, the New Testament authors use thedikaioo cognates to translate the Hebrew and Septuagint cognates. These translations occur in many non-justification contexts (i.e., “non-imputation” contexts).
For example, in 2 Cor. 9:9 Paul cites a quotation from Psalm 112:9 and uses the Greek dikaiosune to translate the Hebrew feminine noun tsadaqah (which the LXX also translates as dikaiosune). The context of 2 Cor. 9:9-10 concerns liberal giving, both of God and men, to those in need.
Thus, contrary to McGrath’s thesis, dikaiosune is understood as that which is inherent within both God and man due to the good they have done. Similarly, Hebrews 1:9 uses dikaiosune to translate the Hebrew male noun tsadaq in Psalm 45:7 (of which the LXX uses dikaiosune) and speaks of the inherent righteousness of Christ. (The relevance of the LXX may be even more significant here since Hebrews 1:6 is quoted by Paul directly from the LXX).
In addition, 1 Peter 3:12 uses dikaioo to translate the Hebrew adjective tsadeek of Psalm 34:15 (of which the LXX uses dikaious). The context of 1 Peter 3:12 regards righteous individuals as inherently righteous, for it is they who “turn from evil to do good” and “seek peace and pursue it.” Similarly, Hebrews 11:7 usesdikaiosune to describe the righteousness of Noah, translating the Hebrew adjective tsadeek in Genesis 7:1 which refers to God seeing Noah as inherently righteous for his goodness in the midst of the wicked people of his day.
We should also add that Scripture does not support McGrath’s assessment of the Greek word axioo to refer only to the estimation of an individual rather than his merit (which he distinguishes from the Latin notion of merit that gives the individual the “right” of the third party estimation, i.e., because he is deserving of it). The New Testament uses axioo not only in considering someone worthy but also in recognizing someone worthy because he is actually worthy. For example, Hebrews 3:3 uses axioo in reference to Christ’s worthiness: “Jesus has been counted worthy of greater honor than Moses…” This is a common usage ofaxioo and its cognates in the New Testament (cf., 1 Thess. 1:11; 1 Tim. 5:17; Col 1:10; et al).
Thus we see that Dr. Horton relies on faulty information in the analysis of Alister McGrath.
Protestant apologists such as Sproul are fond of referring to the original languages of the Bible in an attempt to present themselves as something they are clearly not—informed about the issues. “A little Greek is a dangerous thing” is proven true, as is, in the case of iustificare and Sproul’s mishandling of the term, “A little Latin is a dangerous thing” too. Of course, there is a deeper reason than ignorance of Greek and Latin that drives Sproul's heretical theology; it is that, as a Calvinist, his "God" is an impotent deity who cannot allow genuine free-will among humans to accomplish His goals. Notice the following confession from Sproul himself:
If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled. Perhaps that one maverick molecule will lay waste all the grand and glorious plans that God has made and promised to us. If a grain of sand in the kidney of Oliver Cromwell changed the course of English history, so our maverick molecule could change the course of all redemption history. Maybe that one molecule will be the thing that prevents Christ from returning. (R.C. Sproul, Chosen by God [rev ed.: Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1986], 16).
Compare and contrast with the following text:
Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; Turn ye unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord. (Zech 1:3; cf. 3:7; Mal 3:7; John 6:40, etc).
The Hebrew term translated as “turn” is שׁוב; the LXX translates it as επιστρεφω; both these terms in the Hebrew OT and LXX refers to turning back to God/repentance. (e.g., 1 Kgs 8:33, 35) as well as Yahweh turning back to His people/averting His wrath against sin (e.g., Zech 1:16). In this verse, and many other texts, God turning back to His people is contingent upon his people turning back to Him, not vice versa, showing that genuine free-will is part-and-parcel of the “salvation formula,” not mere compatibilist freedom. The conception of deity one finds with "Mormonism" is a potent deity who allows people to have genuine free-will to accept or reject the gospel, and yet will be victorious at the end of times; the Calvinist understanding of God is an impotent, blasphemous deity, who calls everyone to repentance and yet actively withholds the ability to all but a small few the ability to come to faith, and such is required so he can achieve his goals. One concept is a truly sovereign concept of God; the other is an anti-biblical blasphemy--I will let readers decide which one is which.