Commenting on the anti-biblical nature of the Protestant understanding of forensic justification, Roman Catholic theologian Louis Bouyer noted the following:
Certainly, Isaias says that ‘all our justifications are like a soiled garment’, and Job, that God ‘finds fault even among the angels’. Nothing could express more strongly the reality of sin, not only as a transient act, but as a permanent state, causing a radical privation of justice in sinful man before God. The second of these texts mean, too, that even a creature untouched by sin is at an infinite distance from the holiness which is God’s and his alone. Yet none o this prevents the Bible from insisting with equal force on the ‘goodness’ inherent in every creature that comes from the hands of God, and that goodness which it recovers after sin, when moved and taken up by grace. No doubt Christ himself declared: ‘God alone is good’, but just as explicitly enjoins, ‘Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’; the supposition that he could have called men to this without giving them the means to respond is not worth considering.
The very condition of existence of the ‘new creature’ is the loving recognition of his actual and necessary dependence for everything upon God. But this, all the New Testament goes to show, does not mean that he has to remain in the state where sin has placed him, but that he must bear the image of the heavenly Adam as he did that of the earthly one; this amounts to saying that God reveals himself as Sovereign and alone Holy, not by leaving sinners to their powerlessness and sinfulness, but by rescuing them from it. The cry of faith, then, is not simply a perpetual contrasting of the holiness and greatness of God with the misery and sinfulness of man, but it is equally what St. Paul means when he says: ‘By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace in me has not been void’ (1 Cor. XV, 10). That this is not a casual utterance, but indicates something actually existing and, in some degree at least, capable of being estimated, appears from a passage which itself occurs in a context contrasting utterly the weakness of man, his radical impotence, with the omnipotence of God: ‘We labor, whether absent or present, to please him. For we must all be manifested before the judgement-seat of Christ, that everyone may receive according as he hath done, whether good or evil, while still in the body.’
The uneasiness felt by Protestant systems opposed to Catholicism is nowhere so evident than in the long controversy on the meaning in St. Paul of the word δικαιουν, to justify. All Protestant exegetes, anxious to safeguard the expressions used by Luther and Calvin, set out to show that it can only mean ‘to declare just’, not ‘to make just’; that is, it applies merely to extrinsic justice’, which has nothing real to correspond with it in the person justified. Nevertheless, modern scientific exegesis unanimously acknowledges that the word can only mean ‘to declare officially just someone who is so in reality’. even the idea of the Word of God creating what he says by the act of saying it—so well drawn out by Barth from the entire Bible—would be enough to show that God makes just whom he ‘declares just’, even if he were not to beforehand, by the very fact of his declaration, so the opposition set up is without meaning.
To sum up the question, if the Bible sets God’s holiness, his sovereign greatness, in an ‘inaccessible light’, it does not at all intend to deny him the act of creating, or recreating, anything real or of value outside himself. Rather, it does so to emphasise how much the first creation, still more the second, attest by their intrinsic reality and goodness and incomparable reality and goodness of him they manifest. The God of Calvinism and Barthism, it seems, keeps all his greatness only if his creatures return to nothingness. The God of the Bible, on the contrary, shows his greatness in snatching them from it, not only, as St. John says, ‘that we are called, but really are, the sons of God’ (John III, 1) (Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism [trans. A.V. Littledale; Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1957], 147-48)
This mirrors what Robert Bellarmine correctly noted:
When God justifies the sinner by declaring him just, He also makes him just, for God’s judgment is according to truth” (De iustificatione, II, 3, as cited by Robert A. Sungenis, Not by Faith Alone: The Biblical Evidence for the Catholic Doctrine of Justification [2d ed, 2009], p. 312 n. 374)
Indeed, modern scholarship continues to support the transformative, not declarative merely, meaning of δικαιοω and other members of the δικαι- word group. In his seminal Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (trans. James D. Ernest; 3 vols.: Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 1994), 1:340-42, Ceslas Spicq wrote the following which agrees with what Schaff wrote:
Several times St. Paul uses dikaoō in its forensic OT sense, “declare or acknowledge to be just,” especially when he is quoting the OT, but it would be wrong to extend this meaning to all the texts. In the first place, this would be to forget that “verbs in –oō mean to make whatever the root indicates. Thus dikaoō should properly mean ‘make just.’ This meaning is not found in secular Greek for rather natural reasons.’”[86] In the second place, it would overlook the fact that St. Paul, as a converted Pharisee, perceived as no one else did the opposition between the new covenant and the old covenant, law and grace, circumcision and baptism, and perhaps especially the inefficacy of the old legal dispensation compared to the efficacy and realism of the dispensation of salvation centered on the cross of Jesus. The consequence is a radical change in ideas concerning righteousness/justification, as is seen in the frequent linking of the verb “justify” with faith in Christ and in the explicit contrast between justification and the works of the law; there is a different scheme or process for attributing justice/righteousness in the new covenant than in the old covenant. The apostle gives dikaoō a causative sense, as appears from Rom 3:24—“All have sinned and come short of the glory of God (cf. Rom 8:30; 2 Cor 3:18; 5:21); (henceforth) they are justified (present passive participle, dikaioumenoi) freely by his grace, through the redemption (apolytrōsis) that is in Jesus Christ.” God has shown his mercy, but not by pronouncing acquittal pure and simple; through Christ a price was paid, a ransom (lytron) with expiatory value (cf. verse 25: hilastērion), so that “sinners” have become just, have been made truly righteous.[87] Another clear text is Rom 3:26-“to show his justice/righteousness (his salvific action), so that (it might be established that) he himself is just and that he justifies (present active participle, dikaiounta) the one who has faith in Jesus”: the just God communicates his justice/righteousness and makes just.[88]
Notes for the Above
[86] M.J. LaGrange, La Justification selon saint Paul, Revue Biblique 1914, p. 121
[87] “The sacrifice of Christ has satisfied once and for all the demands for outward justice which God had deposited in the Law, and at the same time it has brought the positive gift of life and inward justice which the latter was unable to give” (P. Benoit, Exégèse et théologie, vol. 2 p. 39 n. 2); c. Rom 5:18—“justification gives life.” The best commentary is the Trinitarian baptismal text on the “bath of regeneration and renewal” (Titus 3:7), “so that having been justified by the grace of this (Jesus Christ) our Savior (ἵνα δικαιωθέντες τῇ ἐκείνου χάριτι), we might become . . . heirs . . . of eternal life”: the aorist passive participle denotes the present state of this new and internal righteousness that permits entry into heaven, where nothing impure may go in. C. H. Rosman, “Iusticicare (δικαιουν) est verbum causalitatis,” in Verbum Domini, 1941, pp. 144-147.
[88] Cf. Rom 4:5—“The one who has no works but who believes in the One who justifies (δικαιουντα) the ungodly, will have his faith counted as righteousness.” M.J. Legrange (on this verse) comments: “δικαιοω in the active cannot mean ‘forgive’: it has to be ‘declare just’ or ‘make just.’ That God should declare the ungodly righteous is a blasphemous proposition. But in addition, when would this declaration be made?” H.W. Heidland (TDNT, vol. 4, pp. 288-292) explains λογιζεσθαι: “Justification is not a fiction alongside the reality. If God counts faith as righteousness, man is wholly righteous in God’s eyes . . . He becomes a new creature through God’s λογιζεσθαι.”
For more, see, for e.g.:
Does LDS Theology Confuse the Relationship Between Justification and Sanctification?
Does LDS Theology Confuse the Relationship Between Justification and Sanctification?
Support this blog:
Paypal