Doctrines
Justification
Also Known As Justification by faith · being made righteous
Salvation and Liberation
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Origin 1517 to 1999
This was the doctrine on which, in Luther's phrase, the church stands or falls, and the material heart of the Reformation. The Reformers taught justification as a forensic act: God declares the sinner righteous on account of Christ, the righteousness imputed rather than infused, received through faith alone. Trent replied that justification is a real making-righteous by grace poured into the soul, inseparable from a renewal that faith, hope and love bring to fruition, and it anathematised justification by faith alone as the Reformers meant it. The positions attach to the Grace entry, which carries them together with the 1999 Joint Declaration between Lutherans and Catholics that reframed, without dissolving, the old condemnations.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account Held ByCentral to Christian soteriology in every tradition in some form; Lutheran and broader Protestant theology holds justification by faith alone, the article Luther held the church stands or falls by, while Roman Catholic teaching, defined at Trent, holds faith joined with grace and works, a difference the 1999 Joint Declaration records as a differentiated consensus. 2 Status
Status Within the TraditionDefined and binding within this tradition 3Tradition: Roman Catholicism Sourced to the subject's own accountDefined at Trent, Session 6, 1547, against the Reformation account Status Within the TraditionDefined and binding within this tradition 1Tradition: Lutheranism Sourced to the subject's own accountThe article by which the church stands or falls. The 1999 Joint Declaration records a differentiated consensus with Rome The Claim
The ClaimJustification, the doctrine of how a sinner comes to be accounted righteous before God, became a central point of division at the Reformation, with Martin Luther's teaching of justification by faith alone contrasted against the Catholic understanding of faith joined with works and grace. 2 Learn More
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.
Trent's Anathemas, and the Consensus of 1999
The sixteenth-century bodies drew the lines sharply. Calvin, in the Institutes, set out justification as God's free acceptance grounded in an imputed, not an infused, righteousness. The Council of Trent, in its Decree on Justification of 1547, taught justification as a true interior renewal through infused grace, involving faith, hope and charity and capable of increase, and attached canons anathematizing the doctrine of justification by faith alone as the Reformers meant it. For four centuries this stood as a defining and mutually condemning difference.
The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed in 1999 by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, proposed a "differentiated consensus": a common confession that sinners are justified by grace through faith in Christ, within which the language of imputation and of transformation could be read as complementary rather than contradictory. Critics on both sides have questioned whether the deep difference was resolved or only bracketed. The atlas records the imputed-versus-infused distinction as a genuine and still-argued divide, and the 1999 agreement as the most serious attempt to state what the two sides share.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Affirmed By
Reconciliation: affirmed Belief -> contested Doctrine concept (Justification).
Belongs to Tradition
Justification by faith alone, a forensic declaration of righteousness on the ground of Christ's imputed righteousness, is confessional doctrine per the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XI, Of Justification, 1646.
Article XI holds that we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. The Church of Ireland keeps the Thirty-Nine Articles in its constitution, so the Article binds here in a way it does not across the Communion as a whole.
The Heidelberg Catechism teaches that God grants and credits to the believer the perfect satisfaction, righteousness and holiness of Christ, as if the believer had never sinned, received by a believing heart alone. The Belgic Confession says the same in its article on justification.
The fourth article of the Augsburg Confession holds that men cannot be justified by their own strength, merits or works, but are justified freely for Christ's sake through faith. This church confesses that book, and its churchwide assembly approved the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1997, two years before it was signed.
Justification by faith alone, apart from the works of the law, is confessed as the article on which the church stands or falls, per the Augsburg Confession, Article IV, Of Justification.
Justification by faith is affirmed in Wesley's sermon of that name as the founding Reformation doctrine Methodism holds in common with the wider Protestant tradition.
Justification by faith alone, on the ground of Christ's imputed righteousness, is confessional doctrine per the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XI.
Related To
The doctrine of justification supplies the forensic vocabulary the penal account works in, and the two are habitually taught together in the Reformed standards.
Sources
1. Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification
Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 1999The differentiated consensus of 1999the holders' own accountView the Source 2. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine
3. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent
Council of Trent, 1563The Decree on Justification, Session 6, 1547the holders' own accountView the Source The Augsburg Confession
The Sermons of John Wesley
The Westminster Confession of Faith
Westminster Assembly, 1646Chapter XI, Of Justificationthe holders' own accountView the Source The Heidelberg Catechism
Zacharias Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus (traditional attribution), Elector Frederick III of the Palatinate, Heidelberg, 1563View the Source The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
Institutes of the Christian Religion
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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