Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Another Example of a Defender of Forensic Justification Slipping Up and Speaking of Justification as Transformative


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)