Grace - amazing grace - An edited extract | Brian Edwards (ISBN: 1903087554)

What did Paul mean when he wrote that Christ was 'delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification' (Romans 4.25)?

Since the time of the Reformation at least, there has been general agreement among evangelical Christians that justification refers to the declaration by God that, by the sin-bearing death and life-giving resurrection of Christ, the sinner is no longer guilty in God's sight.

The great issue at the time of the Reformation in the 16th century was the claim by the Reformers that Christ took all our guilt, sin and punishment upon himself at the cross. The result was described in the language of the law court: the guilt of the sinner was passed to the account of Christ, and the Father counted his Son as the guilty one instead. In exchange, the righteousness of Christ was passed to the account of the sinner and thus the just anger of God against sin was satisfied. The word to describe this satisfying of the righteous judgement of God is 'propitiation' - which is found in 1 John 2.2. The German reformer in the 16th century, Martin Luther, called this 'the wonderful exchange'. Justification was seen as a legal term in which the guilty sinner is declared 'not guilty' by God on the basis of Christ's death in place of the sinner - a substitute.

But that is all changing!

A new view today, represented by theologians Tom Wright and James Dunn, is that the Protestant Reformers got it wrong. As Wright understands it, in the first century the Jews had a narrow view that grace was confined to Israel. For the Jew, justification meant two things: membership of the covenant community of Israel - which was open only to Jews - and ultimate victory of Israel over her enemies. The key to understand justification, we are told, is chiefly about membership of the covenant community. In his letters, therefore, Paul's doctrine of justification was not primarily about a divine declaration of the 'not guilty' verdict through the sin bearing death of Christ, but about the fact that membership of the covenant community of God was now open to all.

Tom Wright and his fellow travellers believe that when Jesus died on the cross, he died as the representative of the whole Jewish nation, and the curse that he bore was the curse upon the Jewish nation for failing to be the light of the world. His resurrection therefore becomes the restoration after the curse of the exile. Wright claims that when Paul wrote in Galatians 3.13 that 'Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us', the 'us' is not non-Jews, but only the Jewish nation. Similarly the struggle against sin described by Paul in Romans 7.13-25 is not a personal experience but the struggle of Israel with the law. Thus Paul's letters to Rome and Galatia are not primarily about individual salvation, but about who are the people of God. Galatians was written to correct an over-zealous love of Judaism, and Romans was written to correct an over-zealous anti-Judaism. Rather than the term 'justified by faith', Wright prefers to see our justification - membership of the community of God - as the result of our belief that by his death and resurrection Christ fulfilled all that Israel failed to be; we are therefore 'justified by belief'. Paul's statement that 'a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ' (Galatians 2.16) apparently now means no more than that by the works of the law no one will be reckoned among God's people. This may be a pleasant thought, but it is hardly robust - and it meant a great deal more than this for the converted university graduate from Tarsus. We must let Paul himself shape our thinking.

Justification by faith according to Paul

The first three chapters of Paul's letter to the Christians at Rome is clearly a diagnosis of the personal guilt of everyone. His diagnosis is severe and universal, and his conclusion is that 'by the works of the law no human being will be justified in his [God's] sight' (3.20). There is nothing that we can do to save ourselves. This opens the way for Paul to launch into his great exposition of justification by faith alone. We will make it simple.

In order to open up his teaching of sin put to Christ's account and righteousness put to our account, Paul introduces a familiar concept: 'To the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due' (Romans 4.4). But Paul is about to dress up a very common word with a very special Christian meaning. The word for 'counted' is the Greek verb logizomai. It was a common word in finance and meant simply to reckon up or calculate. Whenever you do your own personal accounting that is what you are doing. In the first century the word was also used of passing money to someone's account - a direct debit - and the noun from this word was used for a finance office. But it was always a word that carried with it the idea of very careful reckoning. Unlike our phrase, 'l reckon', which has come to mean only 'I guess'.

Paul begins by employing the word in a normal, commonly used way. You count up the hours that a man works, you multiply it by the hourly rate and then you pay his wages. It is not a gift, he earned it. It is all very simple. But, Paul continues, there is a divine reckoning as well; except that the divine reckoning is wholly different. Here men have stacked up a great debt - whether ignorantly or knowingly makes no difference. What they need is someone to pass to their account sufficient funds to set them in the clear. The problem is that this debt is not money but wickedness - Christ-rejecting wickedness. It is one debt that finance companies can never cancel. People are Christ-rejecters and because of that there is a massive debit on their account and no amount of religious duty or change of direction could pay it off. At the very best, religious duty might be able to run up a little less debt in future. But the massive past debt still stays - and that is true of us all. So what is the solution?

The solution is grace - justifying grace - and this is what God does for those who place their trust in Jesus Christ and do not even try to earn their salvation: God reckons righteousness to their account. God can justify us by counting us as clean as Christ himself; he not only sets us free from the punishment our blame deserves, but counts us as no longer guilty of blame at all. But there is always a cost involved if one account is to be credited with the value of another, and the language of the Bible to describe this is vividly offensive: '[God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God' (2 Corinthians 5.21). What Paul wrote was quite literally: 'for us he was made sin'. Christ became all that we are, so that we could become what he was. The one who was perfectly sinless was counted as a Christ-rejecting rebel so that we might be counted as sinless as he was!

This is justifying grace in action. It is a wholly inadequate view of the cross to see Christ only as a representative of rebellious Israel, fulfilling the role that Israel so miserably failed to discharge. But it is equally not sufficient to say only that Christ was punished as our substitute, in our place; he suffered far more than that. Christ did not merely bear our punishment and die under the anger of God against sin; he took our guilt as his own by taking our sin as his own. And when Peter writes, 'He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree' (1 Peter 2.24), this is what he means. For Christ on Calvary, sin was not merely a burden to be born - it was a defilement to be felt.

This is God giving himself for us, to do what we could never do - to pay the penalty of Christ-rejecting sin.

Luther once expressed it like this: 'Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, just as I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what is mine and have given to me what is yours. You have taken upon yourself what you were not and have given to me what I was not.' This is precisely what Paul meant when he declared to the Christians at Corinth that God made Christ 'to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God' in order that he could become 'our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption' (2 Corinthians 5.21 and 1 Corinthians 1.30). We have none of this apart from what we have in Christ. And this Justification is final, for ever and complete. It can never be repeated any more than it can ever be undone. This is the reason for the strong note of total assurance that runs throughout the New Testament. Justification means not only that we are pardoned, but that in the sight of God it is as if the guilt was never ours!

Justification by faith alone in Christ alone, was the front line of the Reformation battle, and we must not allow what the Reformers fought and died for to be diluted by a desire for ecumenical peace or theological innovation. A little after the time of Martin Luther, the Swiss reformer John Calvin wrote of this doctrine of justification by faith: 'Wherever the knowledge of it is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished, religion abolished, the church destroyed and the hope of salvation utterly overthrown.' Calvin was right.

Grace - Amazing Grace by Brian Edwards is published by Day One Publications at £9.99. ISBN 1 90308 755 4.