Thursday, June 29, 2023

Charles Lee Irons (Protestant) Conceding there being a Rupture between the Soteriology of the Patristics and the Reformers

  

First, I believe it is significant that the patristic and medieval tradition, especially among the Greek-speaking fathers, is nearly unanimous in taking δικαοσυνη as referring to the righteous status conferred on the believe as a gift and the genitive θεου as a genitive of source of author. If the fathers who were native Greek speakers did not see “covenant faithfulness” or iustitia salutifera in this Pauline lexeme, and rather interpreted δικαοσυνη in a manner more in line with its traditional meaning in extra-biblical Greek (i.e., as “righteous” or “a righteous status”), then there is good reason to doubt that correctness of the Hebraic/relational view.

 

Second, while the Reformers undeniably departed from the patristic and medieval tradition when they asserted that the righteousness from God is imputed rather than infused, they nevertheless operated within the same lexical and syntactical framework of patristic and medieval interpretation. (Charles Lee Irons, “ΔΙΚΑΙΟΣΥΝΗ ΘΕΟΥ: A Lexical Examination of the Covenant-Faithfulness Interpretation” [PhD Dissertation; Fuller Theological Seminary, May 2011], 12-13)

 

This is not to say that the church fathers held what would later be known as the Reformational understanding of justification. None of them made the sharp distinction between justification and sanctification that would later characterize the Reformation’s central insight. (Ibid., 25)

 

To be sure, there are important points of discontinuity between the Reformation and the patristic interpretational traditions. Arguably the most significant point of discontinuity is that the Reformation tradition treats “the righteousness of God” as the imputed righteousness of Christ, making a sharp distinction between justification as a purely forensic act, on the one hand, and the moral renewal and sanctification of the believer, on the other. (Ibid., 26)

 

In his anti-Pelagian treatise, “On the Spirit and the Letter,” Augustine made the following statement about Rom 3:21:

 

He does not say, the righteousness of man, or the righteousness of his own will, but the “righteousness of God,”—not that whereby He is Himself righteous, but that with which He endows man when He justifies the ungodly. (Augustine, De spiritu et littera 9.15. NPNF1 5.89)

 

Augustine’s interpretation was hugely influential throughout the medieval period, and even Luther, Calvin and the Reformation tradition followed the same general path, although they emphasized that the righteousness was given to humans by a forensic declaration rather than by the transformation of the new life in Christ. (Ibid., 278-79)