Friday, February 26, 2010

All by God

Justification by faith, then, is a death-and-resurrection experience. Three important theological comments on this contention must be stressed.

First, justification is not in any sense a self-generated experience. The passive voice—”I have been crucified with Christ”—implies an external agent, a divinely initiated action. As Paul says in Gal 3:1-5, he “exhibited” Christ crucified, the Galatians received the Spirit, and they responded with “faith.” This can only mean that the Spirit somehow effected the Galatians' experience of co-crucifixion and co-resurrection. We cannot here solve the mystery of divine initiative and human response, but we must rule out any semi-Pelagian or Pelagian interpretation of faith (and specifically co-crucifixion and co-resurrection) as something that initates or effects one's own salvation.

Second, justification is not a private experience but a public and corporate one...

Third, justification is an experience of both death and resurrection, and both must be stressed. But the resurrection to new life it incorporates is a resurrection to an ongoing state of crucifixion: I “have been” crucified means I “still am” crucified. Therefore, justification by faith must be understood first and foremost as a participatory crucifixion that is, paradoxically, life-giving (cf. 2 Cor 4:7-15).——Inhabiting the Cruciform God, pp. 69-70

<idle musing>
I really like this: "justification is not in any sense a self-generated experience." It is all God from beginning to end. I like to say that you can tell a lot about a person by whom they have as the subject of their sentences...
</idle musing>

No comments: