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January 6 - March 16, 2020
In repentance, we turn away from sin and toward God.
Justification is God’s work in justifying sinners—forgiving our sin and making us right with God.
Conflict about the doctrine of justification fueled the sixteenth-century debates that would lead to the Protestant Reformation.
“a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven.”[7]
“Every true Christian participates in the treasures of the Church, even without letters of indulgence,” and “this treasure is the Gospel of the glory and grace of God.”[8]
Through faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone are we justified, and the sola, the only, always implies “and not by our
works.”
The righteousness of Christ is imputed, reckoned, or credited to us and becomes the legal basis for our acquittal.
Luther’s idea of alien righteousness emphasizes a powerful biblical theme: salvation is by grace.
In fact, righteousness is foreign to who we are as sinners.
The foundation and presupposition of justification is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Righteousness, John Wesley would insist, is both imputed and imparted.
Salvation does not end with a magic moment, and grace ought never be used as a warrant for sin.
The teaching of justification by faith stands against the error of legalism or works righteousness, of a doomed Pelagianism in which we attempt to be our own saviors.
antinomianism, of acting as though God’s law has nothing to say to the Christian life, as if it doesn’t matter how we live.
The reality of justification by faith in no way diminishes the reality of abundant fruit. In fact, it produces the only fruit worth having.
Sanctification is impossible without justification.
his works do not make him good or wicked.[17]
the vast majority of Christians see sanctification as a process that fills the entire Christian life, and even an insistence that God sometimes gives sudden, dramatic gifts of sanctifying grace is not incompatible with a larger understanding of sanctification as a process.
There is wide Christian unity in the truth that, first, we have no power without the righteousness of Christ (2 Cor. 3:5) and, second, faith without works is dead (James 2:26). We are made more and more like Christ as our relationships with him deepen, as we learn to know and love him better, and as we partake in the means of grace that God offers us as tools for our sanctification.
These means of grace are legion: reading and studying the Scriptures, prayer, participation in the Lord’s Supper, Christian friendship and fellowship, singleness and marriage, caring for the poor and vulnerable, service, fasting, and so many more.
The Calvinist understanding of salvation focuses on the priority and sovereignty of God’s grace by emphasizing God as the sole agent of salvation.
The Arminian understanding focuses on God’s loving desire to be in saving relationship with humanity and sees this as connected to God’s opening up space for human agency,
along with divine grace, in...
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The Calvinist and Arminian theological views of salvation share a starting place: the Protestant doctrine of justification by grace.
We need to know the depth of sin to begin to understand the greatness of grace, and so John Wesley preaches, “By nature ye are wholly corrupted; by grace ye shall be wholly renewed.”[20] From this shared understanding, the Calvinist and Arminian traditions emphasize different concerns when addressing soteriology.
prevenient grace—a gift of grace from God that comes before us, preceding anything we do—was for all people, not only the elect.
Arminianism may be known popularly as a theology of human free will, but its emphases are more truly on the universal love of a gracious God, who reaches out to all in love, wanting to free and empower bound sinners and be in relationship with them.
The point of the doctrine is to emphasize our complete inability to save ourselves.
Calvinist soteriology is monergistic, meaning that God is the only actor in salvation.
Arminian soteriology is synergistic, meaning that God works together with human beings in the process of salvation.
Calvinist soteriology locates the basis for election in God’s sovereign will; Arminian soteriology locates that basis in God’s foreknowled...
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Calvinists tend to worry that Arminians are underestimating the enormity of sin and returning to the error of works righteousness. Arminians respond that grace empowers every part of salvation, that to claim that grace works with human freedom is no insult to grace and, more, is typical o...
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it is the sad case that many of us still live our daily lives in de facto Pelagianism, trying and failing to justify ourselves based on our own righteousness.
Or perhaps we harbor a sense of cold dread because of our repeated failures: failure to read the Bible regularly, failure to give to the poor, failure to love our enemies or even our families, failure upon failure.
Charles Finney (1792–1875), who insisted that turning to God is “the sinner’s own act”[23]
We could speculate that Pelagianism is one of the special temptations of Christians in the American context.
Where we value independence and treasure the narrative of the “self-made man,” we may need special practice in the doctrine of soteriology to help us unlearn the frantic habit of works righteousness and trust instead in the God of grace.
he says that “[Christ], indeed, assumed humanity, that we might become God.”[25]
theological tradition that is willing to speak of human deification in strong terms, that sees the work of Christ as drawing us into the very life of God.
Atonement involves a double movement: first, God comes to us, in incarnate unity with us, in order to, second, bring us to God, in unity with the divine life.
deification “has to do with human destiny, a destiny that finds its fulfillment in a face-to-face encounter with God, an encounter in which God takes the initiative by meeting us in the Incarnation.”[26]
Christus Victor (Christ the Victor) model of the atonement as “‘dramatic.’
In fear, we shrink back from the possibility that the Spirit might do something radically new in our lives, might call us to ministry in places we do not want to go or to love people we do not want to love.
The Nicene Creed recognizes the personal status of the Spirit—and the blessed truth that we can relate personally to the same Spirit—when it describes the Spirit in terms of eternal relationships with the Father and the Son.
and there is a lesson here about the need for Christians to listen to one another in making doctrinal proclamation.
God does not just have relationships; God is relationship.
Reinforcing the unity of being between Father and Son by a unity of love and joyful affirmation, the Holy Spirit is the exuberant, ecstatic carrier of the love of Father and Son to us. Borne by the Holy Spirit, the love of the Father for the Son is returned to the Father by the Son within the Trinity; so the triune God’s manifestation in the world is completed in Christ through the work of the Spirit who enables us to return the love of God shown in Christ through a life lived in gratitude and service to God’s cause.[4]
Because Jesus has won victory over sin, we are enabled to relate to the Spirit and the Father in ways that parallel Jesus’s relationships to them during his life on earth.
Feminizing the Spirit, by implication, further masculinizes the Father and the Son, and so calling the Spirit “she” inadvertently strengthens the idolatrous idea that God is a gendered being, like you and me. A feminized Spirit may also strengthen cultural stereotypes about what it means to be masculine or feminine in the first place.
