It is rather
common for Protestant apologists who believe in forensic justification and
imputation to “slip up” and speak of transformative
justification (e.g., The
Infusion of Righteousness at Justification and Reformed Theological
Inconsistency)
In a recent
work on the atonement, David L. Allen wrote the following about δικαιοσύνη and δικαιοω, further evidencing how
Protestants, in an attempt to defend their theology, end up revealing the real
truth of the nature of justification:
The noun “righteousness” or its verbal form “to make righteous; to justify” occurs
seven times in [Rom 3:21-26] . . . Christ does not become a propitiation only
when people believe in Him. He is the propitiation for all sin and all sinners,
whether believers or unbelievers (1 John 2:2). The only conditionality concerns
the application of the atonement to an individual sinner, and that condition is
clearly stated to be faith in Christ. As all are sinners, so all may be made righteous.
(David L Allen, The Atonement: A
Biblical, Theological, and Historical Study of the Cross of Christ [Nashville:
B&H Academic, 2019], 77, 87, emphasis added)
