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This article reexamines the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone in the light of traditional criticisms and misunderstandings, but also of recent developments such as agreed ecumenical statements and the "New Perspective" on Paul. Focusing on formulations of justification found in Anglican reformers such as Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker, the author argues that justification by grace through faith is a summary way of saying that salvation from sin is the work of Jesus Christ alone. Union with Christ takes place through faith, and, through this union, Christ's atoning work has two dimensions: forgiveness of sins (justification) and transformation (sanctification). Union with Christ is sacramentally mediated (through baptism and the eucharist), and has corporate and ecclesial implications, as union with Christ is also union with Christ's body, the church.
The Reformation doctrine of justification by faith is much misunderstood. Among Roman Catholics, there is the caricature of justification by faith as a "legal fiction," as if there were no such thing as a Protestant theology of either creation or sanctification. Similar to the accusation of "legal fiction" was the older criticism that justification by faith was an example of the tendency of late medieval Nominalism to reduce salvation to a matter of a divine voluntarist command, with no correlation to any notion of inherent goodness. For Luther, it was said, the Nominalist God could declare to be righteous someone who was actually sinful.1 That is, the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith was interpreted to mean that God declares to be good that which is really evil. However, the traditional Protestant doctrine is not that God declares evil to be good but that, on the basis of Jesus Christ's atoning work, God acquits the evildoer (whose actions are genuinely evil) because of the saving deeds of Christ (whose deeds are genuinely good). God does not declare the evildoer to be good, but rather to be acquitted (not guilty).
There have also been Catholic apologists who interpret Paul's doctrine of justification through the affirmation in the epistle of James that "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone" (James 2:24).2 Since Paul never uses the expression "by faith alone," Paul could not have been in agreement with the reformers without...