Declared Righteous, or Made Righteous

Justification is the doctrine of how a sinner is put right with God, and the whole Reformation can be read as an argument over one distinction: whether the sinner is declared righteous by God's reckoning or made righteous by an inward change, or, as several traditions insist, both.

Two Pauline texts frame it. Romans 3-5 speaks of being "justified by faith apart from works of the law," language the Reformers read in a courtroom sense: God credits, or imputes, the righteousness of Christ to the believer, who is at once accounted righteous and still a sinner, Luther's simul iustus et peccator. The Epistle of James, insisting that "faith without works is dead" and that a person is "justified by works and not by faith alone" (James 2), is the text the Catholic tradition leans on to argue that justifying faith is faith formed by love and issuing in real transformation, so that justification names a process of being made just, not only a verdict.