§ 6. The Kingdom of God likewise is a directly religious conception. This is clear when we consider the phrase as it stood originally—Sovereignty of God. For this combination of words distinctly expresses an operation of God directed towards men. The conception contains two different things. The Kingdom of God is the summum bonum which God realises in men; and at the same time it is their common task, for it is only through the rendering of obedience on man’s part that God’s sovereignty possesses continuous existence. These two meanings are interdependent. Here, however, we have the reason why the conception of the Kingdom of God has the appearance of being a religious conception of a different order from justification and reconciliation. In these operations of God upon sinners, so far as they have already been elucidated, no room is left for a corresponding self-determined activity on the part of man. On the other hand, the moral action demanded by the Kingdom of God or the Sovereignty of God, and therefore itself a part of the latter conception, is committed to men as God’s independent and responsible subjects. The range and the character of the separate tasks, which make up the total task of the Kingdom of God, are of such a kind that we have to devote definite attention and continuous purpose to their separate fulfilment, and to the ties which bind them together. In this respect the conception of the Kingdom of God differs in a peculiar way from those other operations of Divine grace. The question remains whether this diversity in nature amongst the chief ideas of Christianity does not put an obstacle in the way of our vindicating the general Christian view, and whether the definition I have given of this religion (p. 13) can surmount the difficulty.

In our desire to get rid of the appearance of contradiction, it is possible some may revert to the fact that the two sets of ideas occupy different planes, inasmuch as justification and reconciliation concern men as sinners, while the Kingdom of God concerns them as reconciled. Such a statement, however, is not quite exact. For it would imply that at the moment of justification, which logically precedes the call to the Kingdom of God, the predication of sin loses its validity altogether. But this is not the case; for the meaning of justification is that it encompasses the whole life of the Christian, and in this constitutive sense forms likewise a continual reminder of sin and guilt, and thus emphasises the necessity for its own continued existence (p. 7). If what this means is that, as a direct result of justification, the presence of sin is felt so long as a Christian lives, then the call to participate independently in the Kingdom of God arises simultaneously. But in that case the proposed solution of the difficulty is inadequate.

Two lines of thought have been employed to establish the homogeneity of these two sets of ideas. In the first place, human activity, conceived as independent,—be its aim salvation or good works,—is subordinated to the grace of God, or included in God’s operation upon men. Certain apostolic expressions point in this direction. Paul (Phil. ii. 12, 13) summons every man to work out his own salvation with fear and trembling; because He who works in believers, both to will and to do, is God. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (xiii. 21) expresses the wish that God would make his readers perfect in every good work to do His will, while He Himself works in them that which is well-pleasing to Him through Jesus Christ. John (1 John ii. 5, iv. 12) sees in the exercise of love on the part of Christians the real consummation of the love of God to us, i.e. its complete revelation (vol. ii. p. 374). This consummation, therefore, would not take place if God’s action extended only so far as to give believers the mere potentiality of exercising love. Later teaching also has adhered to this religious estimate of moral action in Christianity. In Catholic theology the validity of the conception of the merits of believers, which depends on their being voluntary, is ultimately counterbalanced by the proposition that all merit is but an effect of grace, understood in its full significance (vol. i. pp. 108, 111). In the same way in Lutheran theology the moral activity of believers is included, as an effect of regeneratio, under the gracious operation of God; and the same thought is still further emphasised by Calvin by his conception of perseverantia gratiae. Now, the leading statements of the apostles have never been interpreted in these systems of theology as giving a mechanical explanation of the process in question, and as thus requiring us to abandon the idea of human self-determination formerly admitted. The theology of Calvinism itself stipulates for the reality of human freedom, in contradistinction from nature as such, under the operations of Divine grace. That is to say, the psychological fact is kept in view throughout, that even the operations of Divine grace merely stimulate man to appropriate them in the way which is peculiar to himself. We may ask, consequently, what cognitive interest is satisfied by the thought that one who is working out his own salvation by his own effort, regards God as the author of his purpose and his self-activity? What suggests this twofold way of looking at the matter? I think it is suggested by the claims both of the individual case and of the moral order of the world as a whole. The occupation of the individual in his life’s task, his performance of duty, and his formation of character, demand the form of independence and responsibility. This always stands out in the forefront, however definitely he leans on Divine grace. But if, in his own estimation of himself, he merges himself in the whole which his activity serves, if he spends his life upon a service which can only be understood in the light of that whole, and which he has come by without being able to urge the existence of previous purpose due to himself, then the judgment expressed by Paul is the true standard of the humility which befits a Christian.

On the other hand, a closer examination of the conception of justification reveals the fact that this Divine operation does not imply the occurrence of any mechanical process in man. For part of the significance of its relation to faith is, that this self-active faculty in man, without regard to which justification cannot be fully understood, is included under this Divine operation; part, that justification, as calling forth the reaction of faith in man, is in this sense a property of the believer, and continues to be the motive of the religious demeanour which it behoves him to adopt. In both relations, therefore, the conceptions of the Kingdom of God and justification are homogeneous. This holds true in so far as, for one thing, both notions express operations of Divine grace; and, for another, the results of these operations manifest themselves solely in activities which exhibit the form of personal independence. They offer, therefore, really no obstacle to their being linked together in a complete view of Christianity. But in Dogmatics this alternating use of the two principles cannot be avoided. Dogmatics comprehends all religious processes in man under the category of Divine grace, that is, it looks at them from the standpoint of God. But it is, of course, impossible so thoroughly to maintain this standpoint in our experience, as thereby to obtain complete knowledge of the operations of grace. For the standpoint of our knowledge lies in formal opposition to God. Only for an instant can we transfer ourselves to the Divine standpoint. A theology, therefore, which consisted of nothing but propositions of this stamp could never be understood, and would be composed of words which really did not express knowledge on our part. If what is wanted is to write theology on the plan not merely of a narrative of the great deeds done by God, but of a system representing the salvation He has wrought out, then we must exhibit the operations of God—justification, regeneration, the communication of the Holy Spirit, the bestowal of blessedness in the summum bonum—in such a way as shall involve an analysis of the corresponding voluntary activities in which man appropriates the operations of God. This method has been already adopted by Schleiermacher. Now those who are strangers to the work of theology urge against this method, that what they are concerned about is the objective bearing of theological doctrines and not the interpretation of them as reflected in the subject, and that this method renders the whole matter uncertain. Such a view is at variance with the right theory of knowledge; for in knowledge we observe and explain even the objects of sense-perception, not as they are in themselves, but as we perceive them. If what is intended in Dogmatics is merely to describe objectively Divine operations, that means the abandonment of the attempt to understand their practical bearing. For apart from voluntary activity, through which we receive and utilise for our own blessedness the operations of God, we have no means of understanding objective dogmas as religious truths. Objective knowledge in this region is disinterested knowledge. Such knowledge, it is true, is quite in place in natural science; but in theology, however coolly we may sketch out its formal relations, we have to do with spiritual processes of such a kind that our salvation depends on them. Merely objective delineation, therefore, far from exhausting theological cognition, does the work in a most inadequate fashion. Whoever thinks that the method to be followed in this book is such as to evaporate the truths of Christianity and expose them to the perils of doubt, betrays in the last resort the paucity of his religious experience, and especially his ignorance of the fact that the more objectively the truths of Christianity are handed down in narrative form, the closer at hand will doubt be found.

§ . 7. Justification, reconciliation, the promise and the task of the Kingdom of God, dominate any view of Christianity that is complete. The outstanding ethical character of this religion comes out in the fact that the summum bonum—the Kingdom of God—is promised only as the ground of blessedness, while at the same time it is the task to which Christians are called. Now the teleological relation of justification to this aim may be understood either directly or indirectly. In other words, either we may interpret justification as the bestowal of ability to perform those moral offices towards men which make up the task of the Kingdom of God; and here the relation would be direct. Or we may interpret justification as the restoration of the religious relation to God which the sinner neither has nor of himself can attain; and this would mean his being endowed with an independent valuable quality which, while manifesting itself in its own peculiar functions, would stand related to moral activity towards men only as a conditio sine qua non. Those interpretations are held respectively by the Catholic and the Evangelical Church. The controversy between the theologians of the two Churches turns on the question which of the two meanings is valid. True, as the controversy is usually carried on by the spokesmen of Catholicism, they generally show themselves ignorant of the fact that on the two sides different implications—which respectively prove Christianity to be a religion and a moral life—are associated with the same terms. For the Roman doctrine of justification professes to state the causes and the means through which a sinner becomes actively righteous; that is, it professes to explain how one who believes in Christ is made capable of his moral vocation. Consequently it likewise maintains the co-operation of human freedom with grace. On the other hand, the Reformed doctrine of justification professes to provide reasons why, to a Christian who has been regenerated, there is secured, in spite of the permanent imperfection of his moral achievement, communion with God, salvation, and blessedness, or in other words the actual realisation of that religious character which Christianity aims at; and why he is able to exercise that character by trust in God in all the situations of life (vol. i. pp. 142, 181). Accordingly, it looks as if the controversy between the two great Western Confessions could be brought to a close, if only the one were to see that the other applies the same term to different problems, or if we could expect either to alter its dogmatic phraseology. For the difficulty seems to lie merely in the Catholic error of supposing that we, with our different interpretation of justification, mean to get at the same fact as the Catholics express by their conception. Now, as we acknowledge under the rubric of regeneration and sanctification what the Catholics call justification, the Catholic rubric of “ making righteous ” (Gerechtmachung) might perhaps be accepted for the former, and our conception of justification be replaced by the rubric of reconciliation or restoration to God. Such a change in phraseology would allay the controversy, if it really were a verbal one. But a readjustment of the kind described would only make it more evident that a real discrepancy exists. For what we call justification or reconciliation, what we understand as the religious character of the individual’s life and as radically independent of moral activity, and what we are able, therefore, to show at work in definite religious functions, Catholic doctrine includes under the conception of hope. This function, however, is placed subsequent to the functions of faith and love, in the exercise of which iustificatio is attained. The Catholic system is primarily arranged so as to explain the moral activity of the Christian life. Since this activity properly arises from the effort put forth by the free will in harmony with gratia co-operans, so likewise hope, which may in an imperfect degree precede love, attains the perfection of its nature because we most confidently set our hope in those whom we know as friends. Now the essential object of hope is eternal blessedness. But in this highest object it embraces every operation of the omnipotence and compassion of God, in other words, the evidences of His providence.² On the other hand, the Evangelical conception of justification is intended to explain the religious character of the individual’s life. That character includes the certainty of eternal life; and instead of dependence on the world through sin has obtained freedom over the world and trust in God’s providence, and therefore forms the precondition of the discharge of moral tasks. This method of formulating the contrast between the two Confessions shows that that contrast is qualitative. At the same time, it proves that the saving operations of God can only be understood from the corresponding independent functions of those who receive them. This law, indeed, is stated in such general terms that as yet it does not embrace the grounds which condition the opposition between the religious independence of the Evangelical Christian and the dependence of the Catholic. Nevertheless, this practical version of the contrast between the two Confessions leads to a peculiar limitation of the problem presented to theology in the conception of justification. The Divine operation which it expresses must be interpreted as being such that the religious appropriation of it guarantees to the believer an independence which specifically distinguishes his position from the dependence which is imposed by Catholicism.

If the opposition between the Confessions, which attaches to the controversy about the conception of justification, extends so far as this, then the divergence from the doctrine of the Reformation which Döllinger³ perceives in certain formulae, used by Evangelical theologians, gives but little prospect of reunion between the Churches. For those Evangelical theologians who interpret justification as an analytical judgment upon the value of subjective faith, will hardly agree to those conclusions which, in the Catholic system, are bound up with the conception of “ making righteous ” (Gerechtmachung). Their apparent approximation to the Catholic form of doctrine is to be accounted for partly by Pietism and partly by dialectical difficulties attending the old Lutheran view of justification as a synthetic judgment regarding the individual sinner, and that, too, a judgment conditional on the sinner’s faith, which springs out of regeneration (vol. i. pp. 304, 550). These difficulties, however, must and can be removed by another form of statement.

§ 8. Justification, as understood by the Evangelical Church, signifies in general the act of God which gives to believers in Christ their peculiar religious character. The Divine operation on the believer, indicated in this conception, is a positive one. Yet not only does Paul, to whom we owe this terminology, interchange at will the positive term—justification—with one which has a negative ring—the forgiveness of sins; but in the discourses of Christ (with the exception of Luke xviii. 14) we meet with the latter form alone. This is due to the fact that it rests directly on Old Testament modes of thought, while the conception coined by Paul is designed to oppose the Pharisaic perversion of the idea of active righteousness (vol. ii. p. 308). It was possible for Jesus, like the men of the Old Testament, to rest satisfied with the negative term, inasmuch as they alike employed it in estimating sinful phenomena in the life of the people of Israel. For however much the sins of the Israelites, for which forgiveness is either expected or bestowed, are regarded as ipso facto disturbing their proper fellowship with God, yet the actual continuance of that fellowship for the people of Israel, according to the terms of the Old Covenant, is taken for granted both by Old Testament witnesses and by Christ. On the other hand, Paul was directly led to construct the positive conception of justification; for he opposes it to his view of the total sin of humanity, in which he on principle disregards the fact that, in the community constituted by the Mosaic law, the Jews possessed a form (though inferior) of fellowship with Divine grace. For while, in particular cases, he can hardly divest his mind of the impression he had of the advantages possessed by the Israelites over the heathen in virtue of their having the law (Rom. ii. 17–20, iii. 1, 2, ix. 4, 5), yet these advantages are ignored in his decisive utterances about the sin of the human race, and about the function of the law in multiplying sin. Since Paul, therefore, finds justification through Christ foreshadowed, not in the legal community of Israel, but only in the promise connected with Abraham and in the sayings of later prophets, and since he sees in justification a saving operation of God on the totality of mankind which is counteractive of universal sin, he prefers the conception which is unquestionably positive, and only employs the term “forgiveness of sins,” which he borrows from the Old Testament, to clear up the meaning of his own.

Now the fact that the Reformers used these two conceptions by turns, and expressly ascribed to them complete equivalence and identical scope, is explained by the influence of their situation within the Church as the sphere of positive fellowship with Divine grace. When contrasted with this organisation of grace, even the sinfulness of men within the Church, however severely he judged it, appeared to Luther exceptional, so that he found the negative expression clear enough for describing the counteractive force. Yet the positive expression “justification” was recommended, not merely by Paul’s usage of it, but also by its antithetical relation to universal sin; and so the Reformers did not scruple to treat both terms as synonymous even in this connection. For while, to begin with, they steadfastly kept the positive grace of God in sight as the basis of the whole saving dispensation, and asserted in consequence that the relation established by grace constitutes the acknowledged standing of Christians before God, it seemed to them all one whether grace, in the form of justification, stood opposed to man’s general state of unrighteousness, or, in the form of the forgiveness of sins, served to remove the derangement of Christians’ gracious fellowship with God. The attempt to distinguish the two conceptions appeared in Dogmatics for the first time after there had been elaborated the idea of the justice of God and of the law as the original dispensation determining the relation between men and God; and thereupon grace retired into the position of a Divine dispensation which is merely relative. Not until the circumstances had thus changed do we find the forgiveness of sins discriminated as the negative, and justification as the positive effect. Nevertheless, side by side with this later view, there reasserted itself from time to time the contention of the Reformers, that the two expressions differ only verbaliter, while in respect of the fact which they denote they are identical (vol. i. p. 279). Historical reasons therefore demand that our definition of the idea of justification should base itself on the assumption that justification is synonymous with forgiveness of sins.

§ 9. Now orthodox theologians of the Lutheran as well as the Reformed school understand by forgiveness of sins the remission of those penalties which according to Divine justice necessarily follow sins. Now, since the same theologians regard the whole human race in every single instance as so sunk in sin that all particular actual transgressions of the commandments of God can add nothing to the guilt which descends from our first parent to all his posterity, the forgiveness of sins through Christ is taken to signify the removal of the penalties which our first parent brought on himself and his race. They believe that a mere reference to this hereditary connection entirely exempts them from the task of proving emancipation from penalties a fact in the life of believing and justified persons. What we must rather investigate is the connections of punishment in the doctrine of sin which is premised, and there we discover what immunity from penalties signifies for believers. The old theologians take the conception of guilt as a consequence of sin into consideration only in so far as it expresses the objective liability of sinners to suffer penalties (vol. i. p. 407). The latter are then described and divided into various categories. The penalties of sin, which ensue if they are not averted by the forgiveness of Christ, are, according to Hollatz, partly temporal and partly eternal, partly positive (sive sensus) and partly privative (sive damni), partly personal and partly public and common. The middle classification embraces the whole series of painful evils, and death in its threefold sense, as bodily, spiritual, and eternal. Hollatz⁴ remarks about this customary division, that it is not logical; that for one thing bodily and spiritual death as phenomena in time are together opposed to eternal death; that eternal death, again, must be conceived as the continuation of spiritual death; and, finally, that bodily death is only a result of the separation of the soul from the body, and not a privation in itself as spiritual death is. It would, he thinks, be advisable to include bodily death among the evils of the earthly life, over against which stands spiritual and eternal death as poena damni. This is the view taken by Wendelin⁵ when he divides punishment into temporal and eternal death, and the former again into bodily death, inclusive of every ill, and spiritual death, which embraces bondage to the devil, the world, and sin.

Nevertheless, if we try to discover from these theologians what the conception is which all these different phenomena of punishment exemplify, we shall hardly find it anywhere developed purposely and completely. It is true that so far as the relation to God of punishment for sin is concerned, it is conceived of as His counteractive to sin, demanded by His retributory justice, and necessary to His honour. But we also want to know what it is for men, and under what common characteristic all the various penal phenomena may be grouped. No one belonging to the old Lutheran school has directed his attention to this problem. Instead, Baier⁶ offers us an even more detailed account, de morte seu damnatione aeterna and de morte temporali. It is only in Reformed theologians and the later Lutherans, Hollatz, Buddeus, and Fresenius, that suggestions of varied range occur which serve to determine the meaning of the whole series of ideas. They amount to this, that punishment of sin, in so far as it is conceived as a permanent consequence of sin, and is not annulled by redemption, expresses the separation of sinners from God, the suspension of man’s proper fellowship with Him.⁷ The statements quoted from these theologians all more or less explicitly start from the Biblical view that the proper welfare and common good of men lies in the presence of God; and in contrast therewith it is rightly inferred that the greatest evil which follows sin as its consequence is the ultimate withdrawal of His presence. Supposing, then, that no other difficulty exists, it is in keeping with the facts to define the forgiveness of sins—as consisting in the removal of the total penalty attached to original sin—as that operation of God which restores sinners, separated as such from Him, to the presence of God and their proper fellowship with Him. And this operation on God’s part, too, would take place despite the fact that those who have been brought back out of a state of separation from God are sinners by their own action and hereditary nature. This definition of forgiveness, it is true, was not arrived at by any of the old theologians. Nevertheless, the interpretation we have given of the remission of sins is in harmony with their suggestions regarding the punishment of sin.

And yet, of the theologians referred to, none but Rodolf and Heidegger, properly speaking, are tied to this conclusion. This is due to their identifying the conception of separation from God with death in its general sense as punishment for sin. The others put that interpretation solely on the privative penalties of spiritual and eternal death (poena damni), not on bodily death and the equivalent evils of our earthly life (poena sensus). There is, however, no doubt that the identification of forgiveness with remission of punishment primarily implies the removal of evils, which, indeed, are not to be described as bodily, in the sense that they do not concern the spirit at all, but which are always marked by sensible excitations, and thereby differentiated from the privative or purely ideal character of the other species of punishment for sin. The intense longing for forgiveness which we find in the Psalms regularly includes, as has been shown (vol. ii. p. 58), an expectation of the deliverance of the nation from political servitude. Thus the demand of the righteous, that God would acknowledge their righteousness as such, always includes the condition that they shall be spared the evils of persecution. So far as these evils excite pain, they pertain to their feeling for the honour of the nation, or of individual righteous persons; but in this connection they are also invariably bound up with external circumstances. The view which the old theologians take of poena sensus is undoubtedly determined by these experiences and impressions, so that the division of positive penal evils into outward and inward, which we find, e.g. in Heidegger (x. 83), neither gives a correct representation of the facts of the case, nor harmonises with the necessary psychology of the subject. Accordingly, the various evils of the earthly life, those which are individual as well as those which are common, in which an outward stimulus communicated through the senses is bound up with a feeling of pain at the contraction of life, are interpreted by most of the old theologians as punishment for sin, in such a way as to contrast it with the privative poena damni, ideal separation from God. And although Heidegger and Rodolf subsume the former species under the latter, instead of opposing them, and thus exalt separatio a Deo to the rank of a generic conception, including all punishments for sin, they have certainly not earned the right to do so by proof. Therefore the above-mentioned definition of forgiveness or remission of punishment, which makes it consist in the removal of the sinner’s separation from God, and which has been maintained as following from their view, cannot yet be affirmed to be such as would express the mind of Protestant orthodoxy as a whole.

In the old theology, however, though the manifold evils of earth and bodily death are regarded as penalties for sin, yet this estimate is everywhere accompanied by a peculiar reservation. The leaders of the old school, while making this affirmation regarding earthly evils, lay down the principle that while these evils have the significance of punishment for sinners who remain such, on the other hand, for the redeemed, reconciled, believing, and pious, they possess the value of chastisement and trial.⁸ To emphasise the importance of this distinction, let me add that it was not won at the first onset. For Melanchthon, who devotes his attention to the subject in a division of the third edition of the Loci theologici,—that is, in what is clearly a supplementary way,—has not yet arrived at the necessary demarcation. He distinguishes four kinds of sufferings (calamitates), τιμωρίαι, δοκιμασίαι, μαρτύριον, λύτρον. Of these the last term applies exclusively to Christ. The first applies to believers and unbelievers alike; it is differentiated, by the Divine purpose to incite to repentance, from punishment as mere retribution, yet comes under the principle of Divine wrath.⁹ Next, however, this element of Divine wrath is expressly abandoned and replaced by paterna castigatio piorum, Alting and Wendelin using, for believers, alternately the terms τιμωρία and παιδεία, and differentiating from them δοκιμασία and μαρτύριον. Finally, later writers, Cocceius, Heidegger, Baier, Hollatz, have, in the first place, the term παιδεία, while they expressly reserve τιμωρία for punishment as retribution, a species which does not apply to believers. The evils, therefore, which come upon believers are not inconsistent with their state of salvation, but are the progressive instruments and marks of its attainment. Definite transgressions on the part of believers, it is true, give occasion for chastisements (or educative penalties). Nevertheless, these evils must be put down as relative goods from the point of view of salvation, because God’s guiding purpose is to induce repentance by their means. Those evils which serve to test believers may be viewed in the same light with all the more certainty that they are not occasioned by distinct instances of sin. Finally, affliction in the form of martyrdom, as direct testimony to the standing in salvation of those upon whom it falls, contributes in the fullest sense to their honour. And it is simply as an inference from the conception of fatherly chastisement and of the abrogation of the penal significance of all earthly ills, so far as concerns the person of the quondam sinner, that certain of the Reformed divines deny even to bodily death a penal character in the case of believers.¹⁰ Finally, light is thrown on the distinction of castigatio piorum from poena by the fact that the Evangelicals repudiate the Catholic doctrine of “satisfactions” in the sacrament of penance. This doctrine, as found in the decree of the fourteenth session of the Tridentine Synod, cap. viii., aims at showing that the “satisfactions” which priests impose in the sacrament of penance serve “non tantum ad novae vitae custodiam et infirmitatis medicamentum, sed etiam ad praeteritorum peccatorum vindictam et castigationem”; and the 13th Canon adds: “pro peccatis quoad poenam temporalem deo per Christi merita satisfieri poenis ab eo inflictis et patienter toleratis vel a sacerdote iniunctis.” Accordingly, those evils which are to be considered consequences of sin are still viewed as of a penal character, even for such as are reconciled through the sacrament of penance, inasmuch as they are either borne with patience or have their place supplied by Church exercises prescribed by the priest. In opposition to this, Calvin and Chemnitz¹¹ bring forward that very distinction between the punishment of unbelievers and the chastisement of the pious, according to which no evil has for the latter the significance of punishment such as would legally counterbalance their sin.

§ 10. The older theology rested satisfied with the conclusion that earthly evils, including death, as consequences of sin, have for those sinners who remain so the value of punishment, but for those who are reconciled the value of means of education and of trial. Both conclusions, the one as well as the other, were drawn from Holy Scripture, and no need was felt for knowledge which should advance beyond this standard. Both cases were, as Divine ordinances, viewed as subordinate to the universal end of the Divine glory; for the rest, the question was not raised whether any other relation than that of opposition obtains between the two affirmations, and whether it is possible to observe, in the domain to which they belong, still other analogous but divergent bonds of connection. Nevertheless, an investigation of this kind, advancing beyond Scripture proof, is necessary, in order to test the correctness and the completeness of the above two propositions. These propositions, now, are unlike in form, and heterogeneous in their ruling principles. Earthly evils are conceived as punishments for sin, without any stress being laid on the consideration whether those who are punished feel and acknowledge them as punishments or not. For the guilt of sin (reatus) is understood as meaning merely the obligatio ad poenam imposed by the legislator and judge, not the subjective acknowledgment of the righteousness of the punishment. On the other hand, earthly evils are interpreted as educative penalties, because the reconciled sinners necessarily view them in the same sense as that in which God inflicts them. In their ruling principles the two propositions are heterogeneous. For the view which regards evils as means of education and trial is governed by the idea of the Divine love, or the highest moral end; the view which regards them as punishment denotes a simple legal procedure. For every end is determined as a moral end by the fact that it must likewise be conceived as a means to other ends which concern men. Those evils which, as consequences of sin, are inflicted on the reconciled, are conceived as being in themselves divinely purposed, but also and predominantly as means of their education; thus they are given the form of moral ends. On the other hand, the interpretation of evils as punishments carries with it the implication that, on the principle of retribution, they are an end in themselves. In this sense, too, it is considered a matter of indifference whether the penal value of evils is acknowledged by those who are punished or not; in the same sense, the only point of importance is the objective congruity between the degree of evil and the sin. Both features are characteristic of the judicial punishment of the single crime. For, considered in this limited range, punishment ranks as an end in itself, inasmuch as it is measured by the gravity of the crime, and has nothing to do with the question whether it is recognised by the punished person as punishment, or is felt as an untoward accident or a wrong. The older theology, moreover, treats those two so heterogeneous propositions in such a way that the judicial punishment of sin by God appears the rule, the moral education of the reconciled by suffering the exception. That is the sole relationship to one another in which the two propositions are placed.

But for that reason this form of doctrine, if it is to do justice to the problems which it recognises, requires both to be supplemented and to be limited from its own point of view. The statement that it is of no consequence whether or not the penal value of evils is acknowledged by the persons punished, and whether or not with their offence they join a sense of its unworthiness, cannot hold good to such an extent that conversion and the estimating of evils as means of education become unthinkable. For the reconciled, in whose experience and judgment evils are means of education and trial, move out of the circle of sinners upon whom evils are inflicted as punishments. Now, although in the traditional representation the relation of the two propositions is of such a kind that the penal value of evils for sinners forms the rule, and their educative value for them the exception, yet from the general character of theology we may deduce another relation between them. For all theological propositions have for their aim the explanation of the phenomena of the Christian life. Accordingly, the universal judgment affirming the penal value of evils was formed because the reconciled, in whose experience evils prove themselves means of education and trial, formerly stood, as members of the fellowship of sin, under the doom of punishment, and not only remember this but likewise gauge the worth of their present status of salvation by contrast with their former state of punishment. Now it is a rule that the change brought about by reconciliation does not rend the personality in sunder, as is betokened by the fact that the earlier and later states are combined in a single self-consciousness. Now it is essential for the status of reconciliation that the evils which are inflicted by God for our education and trial should be known by us as such, and therefore the transition from the earlier stage to the later cannot be correctly conceived, unless at the former there has existed a manifestation of self-consciousness appropriate to it. That is, one who is later reconciled must, in the status of sin, have been conscious of the penal value of evils, if later he is to be conscious of their saving worth. Without this the identity of the person at both stages is not assured. Thus, even if we had to suppose that the status of sin in general is not accompanied by a consciousness of guilt, there would at least, in order to explain the transition to reconciliation, have to be conceived a middle stage, at which those who are later reconciled manifest their tendency towards this goal by their consciousness of guilt in the status of sin. And the older theologians do assume this middle stage. But it is only in the doctrine of poenitentia that they have made it valid. Now, if their general view of the penal state of sinners is correct, namely, that in the reatus as obligatio ad poenam there is absolutely no question of subjective consciousness of guilt, then between this proposition and the estimation of evils by the reconciled as means of education, there would fall to be considered the third case, that by those sinners who attain to reconciliation, evils are previously recognised as punishments, through their consciousness of guilt. Only so do we exhaustively cover the whole domain, and mediate a connection between the two other contrary cases.

For the present purpose this demonstration, as understood in the older Dogmatics, is enough to prove that, if the forgiveness of sins is likewise remission of penalty, those sinners who experience remission of penalty must previously be conceived as persons who trace back their punishments to their guilt through the consciousness of guilt, in which the right of punishment is acknowledged. Now the time has not yet come for inquiring what right Christian theology has to take for granted, as the supreme rule of the Divine world-order, the recompensing of human actions by rewards and punishments, thus explaining the world-order on the analogy of the State or civil society. While admitting here, provisionally and dialectically, the correctness of this theological view as a whole, I wish to show that in this very circle the exclusion of the consciousness of guilt from the necessary characteristics of human guilt against God is untenable, and that the merely objective interpretation of these characteristics does not harmonise with other necessary aspects of this general view. In this connection I first of all recall the fact that the conception of punishment and guilt which is before us is borrowed from the judicial punishment of the single crime. The meaning of this is that that conception does not exhaust the significance of punishment for civil society or the State. Certainly it is of no consequence to the judge who, in the name of the State, exercises the power to punish, whether or not those who are punished acknowledge their punishment as just, and whether or not they are conscious of their crime as guilt. But, as a whole, it is not a matter of no consequence to the State how its power to punish is regarded by its citizens, especially by the victims of punishment themselves. Civil society exists at all only through the moral disposition of its members in favour of law in general, and of the existing legislation as a whole. If this disposition is shaken by the revolutionary temper of the citizens, so that either the existent form of the State, or the form of the State in general, ceases to be regarded as binding, the danger of the situation comes out especially in this, that civil punishments are not regarded as being such, but as arbitrary acts of violence. From the relatively moral peculiarity of character belonging to civil society, therefore, it follows that it has to aim at punishments inflicted by the State being acknowledged by the punished parties’ consciousness of guilt. Now, if fellowship between God and man is to be conceived as taking the form of civil society, it follows that the hitherto current theological interpretation of evils as punishments for sin is incomplete. The guilt of sinners ought not to be conceived merely as an objective obligatio ad poenam, but must also embrace the feature of subjective consciousness of guilt, through which sinners, who are under God’s legal power, acknowledge His power to punish. If, on the contrary, sinners regularly accept the punishments inflicted by God as aimless accidents, or even as wrongs done by God to them, then the permanent legal fellowship between God and sinners would become confused and insecure, and thus the view of the world defended by the older theologians would collapse. But there is a second circumstance which, in the traditional theology, works counter to the above interpretation of guilt. It is just by the status of universal human sin that theologians prove the validity of the legal fellowship of God with men. But this necessarily implies that the sinners who experience at God’s hand nothing but punishment, acknowledge it to be right. For otherwise the Divine legal order would not be valid for them. This part of Dogmatics is under the influence of the models of pre-Christian religions in which the State is directly assumed as the sphere and the standard of men’s relation to God, and in which, accordingly, there are called forth lively expressions of guilt against the gods. But, further, this part of Dogmatics is so framed as to prepare the mind for understanding redemption through Christ; therefore, to the universal fact of sin is appended the universal need of redemption, the fact of which can only be proved from a lively feeling of guilt. From these considerations the accompanying interpretation of guilt, as a merely objective relationship, is unsatisfactory even for the older Dogmatics itself.

That this conception should be supplemented by the inclusion of the consciousness of guilt as a normal feature is rendered necessary, secondly, by the consideration that for sinners as sinners punishment is not to be exhausted by earthly evils and natural death; these inflictions, on the contrary, are to find their continuation and consummation in spiritual and eternal death. By spiritual death is meant that hardening of the sinful will which leaves no prospect of conversion to good. Such a condition is conceivable only if we presuppose that the consciousness of guilt, which as a rule accompanies sin, and under certain circumstances makes conversion possible, is crushed out. Nevertheless this process contains no guarantee that with a heightened degree of sin altogether the consciousness of guilt will entirely disappear. It is at work, without doubt, in the unhappiness and despair of lost men, and that it is entirely awanting in the hardened, is improbable. If, then, in orthodox theology it is assumed that those who are condemned to eternal punishment recognise its justice,¹² it is inconsistent to deny altogether to the hardened that consciousness of guilt, without which they cannot acknowledge their state of punishment before God. If it be said that this knowledge of the damned is the effect of their condemnation, and permits us to draw no conclusion regarding phenomena of deep-dyed sin in this world, yet the feeling of guilt in which that knowledge takes its rise cannot be awakened where it has once been wholly eradicated. But if this is to be regarded as being the rule with the hardened, then the above assertion of Baier becomes all the more uncertain. At least the view of the world-order —based on the double retribution of God—which in the older theology is assumed as a self-evident truth, takes the appearance of a questionable hypothesis, unless it be admitted that even the hardened normally possess ultimately so much feeling of guilt as to glorify God’s justice in their punishment.

This inquiry was set on foot in order to discover whether Rodolf and Heidegger had good reason for subsuming under the idea of separation from God not only the poena damni, the privative and purely ideal punishments of spiritual and eternal death, but also the poena sensus, while elsewhere these classes of punishment were opposed to one another under the categories of the positive and the privative, the sensible and the spiritual. Since we have seen that the penal state of sinners is not conceivable at all apart from the varied relations of its elements to the consciousness of guilt, and especially apart from the fact that the evils of the earthly life can be understood as punishment only when viewed in the light of the consciousness of guilt, the question is what, in this connection, is meant by consciousness of guilt. We must not anticipate a complete definition of it. But it always finds its immediate expression in removal from the person whom we know ourselves to have offended. Thus, in relation to God, it is ever a form of the separation of sinners from God, as contrasted with the universal destination of men for fellowship with God. If on this there depends the estimation of earthly evils as punishments, then these evils likewise come to stand under the principle of that separation of our life from God which runs counter to the destination of man. Thus, then, the view put forward by the theologians named above is confirmed. All kinds of punishment for sin are the expression of a separation of sinners from God which is counter to their ideal destiny. If, therefore, forgiveness of sins is the removal of the penal state of sinners, it follows that it brings back those who are separated from God by sin into nearness or fellowship with God. It is to be defined, then, as the removal of the separation which, in consequence of sin, has entered in between man and God.

§ 11. Among the relations which go to make up the separation of sinners from God, the rest are overtopped by the consciousness of guilt, partly as a condition of the varied gradations of punishment, partly in so far as it is not an objective attribute, but a subjective function of the sinner. We ought therefore rather to transpose “the removal of the separation of sinners from God” into the removal of the consciousness of guilt. In so far as God is conceived as its Author, it is, of course, to be understood as running counter to the process which takes place in hardening. Now, from the ethical standpoint which we owe to Kant, Tieftrunk contended for the interpretation of forgiveness as liberation from the consciousness of offence (vol. i. pp. 436, 466). The discovery of the consciousness of guilt as the consequence and the test of the freedom of the will and the absolute validity of the moral law, coinciding with the inexplicable fact of the radical strain of evil in man, enabled this disciple of Kant to perceive clearly the rule of common moral knowledge—that, if an injured benefactor remits to his thankless beneficiary outward penalties, but, nevertheless, consistently repudiates him with undiminishing contempt, such a species of pardon is simply worth nothing. In making this the measure of his claim upon the Christian meaning of the forgiveness of sins, he surrendered the contention that with forgiveness there is bound up a direct liberation from the penalties (evils) incurred in the status of sin, which work on in accordance with the universal Divine world-order. Accordingly, he likewise proves his agreement with the Christian estimate of evils upheld by the orthodox, by concluding that the amended person, who wins pardon and has attained to a love for the law, will gladly bear the punishments which he has merited. Even if this conception stops short of the precision of the Christian view of evils which continue to act, and drags in the fact of moral improvement in a strange fashion, yet even this theory witnesses to the truth of the result arrived at above. For as the consciousness of guilt, not suppressed yet also not relieved, is a precondition of evils being viewed as punishments, so there follows, from the removal by God of the consciousness of guilt, the reversal of our judgment about them, and the sense that they are relative blessings which we homologate.

The dialectic transformation of the earlier established conception of forgiveness into this conception of Tieftrunk, overleaps the distinction which served to draw Töllner away from the traditional form of doctrine (vol. i. p. 398), and around which there revolve the reflections of the Aufklärung theologians. In the process of the historical development of theology it is significant, indeed, that a distinction was drawn by Töllner between guilt and the obligation to endure punishment, and that, besides the discharge of the latter by the suffering of Christ, a special act of grace on God’s part was insisted on for the former. For here there first appears an impulse to an ethical criticism of the problem of reconciliation, a problem which could not be exhaustively treated with legal conceptions. But this stimulus remained ineffectual, because it apprehended the moral idea of guilt merely objectively, without respect to the consciousness of guilt. For this reason Töllner himself could find no sure determination of the relation between the conceptions of guilt and punishment which he had distinguished, and Eberhard arrived at the idea that the aim of punishment is to convince men of their offence (vol. i. p. 403). This statement is incorrect and intrinsically obscure. If punishment, as has been indicated, is to be understood as a legal method of dealing with the single criminal, then the judge who imposes the punishment has, as a judge, nothing to do with the moral impression made by the punishment upon the person punished. Nor does the result in any way answer to the definition of punishment as stated. The conjunction of ideas which Eberhard has formed, however, confuses two domains of life, the legal and the moral. For the guilt of which punishment is to convince men, is not limited to these features of the case through which the judge arrives at his verdict of guilty. The judge has to confine himself to ascertaining whether the criminal is the cause of the given illegal action, as tested by his cognisable intention and his cognisable purpose. But if the criminal is to be made aware of his guilt through his punishment, this means that he is to interpret his act and its intention from the whole bearing of his conduct, from his general responsibility for himself, in other words, he is to interpret it as a datum of moral unworthiness. These elements of the situation converge in the feeling of guilt. Hence it follows just as distinctly that even moral guilt can never be completely conceived without the element of the feeling of guilt, but also that a judicial punishment may perhaps, under special circumstances, awaken or intensify the feeling of guilt in a condemned man, though this consummation cannot be proved to be the purpose of judicial punishment. He who has the true feeling of guilt will necessarily understand and acknowledge the punishment he has incurred; the opposite holds good only in accidental cases.

If we abstract from the connection between punishment and guilt, we shall find it impossible to form a complete, universal, and practically applicable conception of moral guilt without the element of the feeling of guilt. If we think ourselves into the case when “thy brother sinneth against thee,” the ascertainment of this case is intended to move the other, by the awakening of his feeling of guilt, to acknowledge the offence he has committed. For that this is the character of his action can only be made out through a united and consentient judgment. If the other will not confess to having offended in his action, even though his attitude be due to obstinacy or a lack of sensibility, the accusing judgment of the injured person does not suffice definitively to subsume the case in question under the idea of guilt. We should be justified in finding anticipatively in the accusation a judgment affirming the guilt of the other only provided we ascertain that through negligence or wickedness he has disabled or suppressed his feeling of guilt. But even in this case our judgment has regard indirectly to the element of the feeling of guilt. Without this the assertion of the moral guilt of another is always uncertain. But what is wanted cannot be that we should form a conception of moral guilt so little determinate that it can never be used with any certainty, or only at the risk of filling with pride the man who finds such a conception satisfactory.

§ 12. If forgiveness, according to Töllner, is to be conceived as the removal by God of the guilt of man, it is certain that the conception of guilt is intended to be understood in the moral sense. For, as has been shown, even the acknowledgment of the punishment they have suffered by those who are punished, has its basis solely in their consciousness of moral guilt. All the more certainly is it the removal by God of moral guilt that is denoted in the Christian use of the term, because the religious-moral goal of the Kingdom of God forms the standard of our conception of sin and guilt. But moral guilt will necessarily come into consideration here along with the element of the feeling of guilt, since unless it is distinctly presupposed the forgiveness of guilt cannot be thought as operating on the guilty. For if, in the contrast between existent guilt and its forgiveness, the identity of the person in whom both are realised is to be preserved, then the guilty who receive forgiveness of their guilt must be distinguished first by their clear consciousness of their guilt and by a lively feeling of pain about it. Conversely, the removal of the consciousness of guilt must likewise be so interpreted that it includes the removal of real guilt. For were this not so, even hardening might be conceived as a species of forgiveness. But this is absurd, for hardening denotes that situation of the sinner which is farthest removed from forgiveness.

Guilt, in the moral sense, expresses the disturbance of the proper reciprocal relation between the moral law and freedom, which follows from the law-transgressing abuse of freedom, and as such is marked by the accompanying pain of the feeling of guilt. Guilt is thus that permanent contradiction between the objective and the subjective factor of the moral will which is produced by the abuse of freedom in non-fulfilment of the law, and the unworthiness of which is expressed for the moral subject in his consciousness of guilt. Guilt can be the expression of such a contradiction only provided that, even subsequent to a transgression of the law, both the law and freedom continue to operate, the former as expressing the extent of ends which ought to be realised by the subject, and which therefore necessarily have an attraction for freedom, while freedom is present in the feeling of pain at its having missed its proper direction towards the law. Now, in the Christian view of the world, God is conceived as the Author and the active Representative of the moral law, because the final end which He desires to realise in the world must be realised just through the human race, and because the moral law represents the system of ends which are the means to the common final end. In the Christian sense, therefore, guilt denotes that contradiction of God on which the individual as well as the totality of mankind has entered through the non-fulfilment of the moral law, and which is recognised as present through the consciousness of guilt in which the individual feels with pain the unworthiness of his own sin as well as his share in the guilt of all. By this statement the provisional explanation of the consciousness of guilt as expressive of that separation of men from God which enters in instead of their proper fellowship, is completed and clarified. The form of the idea of space, which lies at the foundation of the previous theory, is filled out by an expression of the logically defective relationship existing between the two factors which ought to be in harmony with one another.

But the contradiction of God and our own moral destiny which is expressed in the conception of guilt, and is felt with pain in the consciousness of guilt, is by this concomitant circumstance marked as a real disturbance of human nature. Duns Scotus (vol. i. p. 100) has asserted that, inasmuch as guilt is an ideal relation, it is nothing real, and therefore the forgiveness of sins is nothing real either, but the colourless presupposition of our being made righteous through grace. For even sin, he argues, destroys nothing good which exists, but only something which ought to exist; accordingly, even guilt denotes not a real defect in the soul, but a defect in the relation of the soul to its proper destiny. But in this verdict no notice is taken of the witness given by the consciousness of guilt, the outcome of which is entirely of a contrary kind. It does not make use of the distinction laid down by Duns. Rather does it feel the logical contradiction of the will to God, which is contained in guilt, as a real contradiction, and as a real defect of will. For the logical contradiction, of which we are guilty in an act of objective knowledge, betokens the fact that we have taken a wrong path in knowledge. But in our knowledge of things according to their peculiar final end we come upon existing contradictions between individual mediating members and the end of the whole. This fact makes itself apparent especially in evil as an effect of the will, since the essence of the will, or its freedom, consists in its working the good as its final end. If this is baulked by the production of evil, the accompanying consciousness of guilt attests both the lasting validity for the will of the good final end, and also the real injury which freedom has sustained through the production of evil. Thus in the domain of the will, sin, as the disturbance of the ideal relation of the will to its final end, or to God as representing that end in the world-order, is a real contradiction.

§ 13. How is forgiveness, as the removal of guilt by God, thinkable? In the Old Testament there is to be found the idea, significant in this connection, that God is willing to remember transgressions no more (Jer. xxxi. 34; Isa. xliii. 25), or to hide them from His sight and no more regard them (vol. ii. p. 195). But the important point is that in the Divine act of forgiveness there is expressed an ideal relation, since likewise the real significance of sin clings to the subversal of the ideal relation of the will to its final end. The Old Testament figures, that God covers sin, veils it, blots it out, puts it away, express the ideal aspect of the fact, that He renders it inoperative in relation to Himself. Now this type of representation works on likewise in the ecclesiastical tradition, even though it be with limited range, alongside of the interpretation of forgiveness as the remission of penalty. This is the case, for instance, in the formula of the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 56, where it is said that ” God will never more remember my sins, nor even the sinful nature with which I have to struggle all my life long.” The validity of this idea, however, comes into collision with Löffler’s objection (vol. i. p. 408), that the thought of forgiveness, as expressive of an altered disposition, is incompatible with the immutability of God, and the forgiveness of sins incompatible with His truthfulness, which prohibits His regarding the guilty as innocent, or one who in details is guilty as innocent in general. It is incompetent for this objection as yet to bring into play the argument from the immutability of God. But the second argument was supplemented on the subjective side by Döderlein and Knapp (vol. i. p. 425), for they reason to the effect that even the sinner’s conscience will always testify to him that he has sinned. Thus the removal of guilt and of the consciousness of guilt would be in contradiction with the validity of the law of truth for God and for the sinner’s conscience.

The importance which the idea of Divine forgiveness has in Christianity is as far as possible from demanding such an eradication of the consciousness of guilt as would collide with truth. Rather is it impossible to esteem the forgiveness of sins the basis of the Christian religion, unless the memory of that contradiction of sin to God which is expressed in the consciousness of guilt continues to operate. On the contrary, it is actually acknowledged that forgiveness itself keeps awake the memory of sin and its unworthiness. One who could so understand the forgiveness of sins as to forget and consequently to deny his previous sins, would make God a liar (1 John i. 10)—in other words, would eviscerate the promise of forgiveness of its meaning. Nor does any contradiction arise from the fact that, in virtue of forgiveness, the consciousness of guilt is removed, and the feeling of pain thereat rendered inoperative for the future and the present, while the memory of the guilt is preserved, and the recollection of the pain previously felt likewise held fast. It is even possible that this recollection itself may call forth pain directly; but even that leads to no contradiction. For these echoes of pain at sin committed fill other parts of time than does the pleasure arising from forgiveness received, and in the oscillation of feeling to both sides the pleasure surpasses the pain in strength. Thus forgiveness must not be construed as the eradication of the feeling of guilt altogether, but as its removal in a certain aspect. On the other hand, it ought not to be maintained that God can forget the transgression of man if He chooses. For the will of God cannot be thought of as operative in any direction whatsoever which might seem to place Him in contradiction to the knowledge of the truth. This formula, borrowed from the Old Testament, appears, even in the older theologians, for the most part in the modified form that God is willing not to impute, not to estimate, the guilt of man (non reputare). This expresses the truth that the fact of man’s transgression is preserved in God’s memory, while the will of God renders invalid an aspect of that offence which of itself it asserts in the system of things. The question thus is to discover the aspect of guilt which God thus renders inoperative by His intention to forgive sin.

To this end it must be recalled that the discourses of Jesus (Mark xi. 25; Luke xi. 4; cf. Col. iii. 13) represent God’s forgiveness as altogether of the same nature as pardon among men. Now the latter is not at all a truth-controverting denial of the fact of an injury; it rather includes veraciously the recollection of the injury, although the degree of retentiveness which belongs to the human mind admits of our losing the memory of an injury altogether. Pardon rather is an act of will by which there is cancelled that aspect of an injury received which interrupts intercourse between the injured person and the offender. An injury is any action which either entirely destroys a man’s honour, or diminishes or impairs it. A man’s honour is his standing as an independent moral entity in moral society. The normal consequence of an injury is the cessation of intercourse, the severance of moral fellowship between the injured person and the offender. For the injured person repels the author of the action which has violated his honour. None but men of no honour are accustomed to let mutual injuries pass without any consequence of this kind. Now pardon is possible provided the injured person is really a man of honour, whose honour has unjustly been offended. In that case pardon is the expression of the honourable man’s intention to resume intercourse, by the cancelling of which he has upheld his honour against the unjust offender—in other words, to resume moral fellowship with the other. That to this end the offender must have perceived and confessed his wrong and thus besought pardon, is provided for in the simplest injunction given by Christ regarding pardon (Luke xvii. 3, 4).

But we ought not to interchange the conception of pardon with the right of the magistrate to condone. For the latter has reference to civil society, and is manifested in the remission or abridgment of a penalty inflicted with the force of law. A crime leads to the annulment of civil society so far as concerns the will of the criminal himself, but not universally; and punishment does not imply that thereby civil society, as such, is reconstituted for the criminal. Rather would the infliction of a punishment by the power of the State be unintelligible unless, despite the subjective breach of civil society, it were so far indissoluble as not to be dissolved by a State mandate of punishment, e.g. by a decree of banishment. Thus, from the side of the State’s power, punishment is really an action of the civil society of which the criminal still remains a member. Thus condonation cannot mean that one who, by his crime, has left civil society altogether, is again received into it. It means rather that judicial cognisance by itself, or a lesser degree of punishment than it has imposed, suffices to give expression to the civil fellowship existing between the State and the criminal. Thence it follows that the analogy between moral pardon and State condonation is only a remote one. The former excludes all punishment, the latter merely modifies quantitatively the punishment which has already been expressed in the penal sentence; the former is the independent resumption of interrupted moral fellowship, the latter presupposes that the existing civil fellowship is really preserved by the penal sentence. Influenced by their interest in the universal and public significance of Divine forgiveness, orthodox theologians have compared Divine forgiveness to the State-power’s right of condonation (vol. i. pp. 267, 337); and they believed that the path they took in this connection was all the safer that the remission of the penalties of sin was assumed to be the content of the conception in question. But not only has that confused mixture of heterogeneous principles lost the support which is to be found in this preconception, but it can no longer hold its ground at all against the distinction, expounded above, between moral pardon and State condonation.

On the other hand, the moral explanation of pardon harmonises with all the indications regarding the direct operation of the Divine forgiveness of sins which the writings of the New Testament attach to the sacrificial death of Christ. It has been proved that the forgiveness of sins and the bringing of men to God are both deduced in the same sense from the sacrificial value of the death of Christ (vol. ii. p. 213). Paul especially uses as equivalent the two propositions that one is justified by faith, and that one has reached in Christ the relation of peace with God (vol. ii. p. 342). If, therefore, the forgiveness of sins is interpreted after the analogy of human pardon, it is as far as possible from signifying such a removal of the guilt of sin and of man’s consciousness of guilt as might come to be incompatible with truth. The forgiveness of sins as pardon, rather, merely renders inoperative that result of guilt and the consciousness of guilt which would manifest itself in the abolition of moral fellowship between God and man, in their separation or mutual alienation. God, in forgiving or pardoning sins, exercises His will in the direction of not permitting the contradiction—expressed in guilt—in which sinners stand to Him, to hinder that fellowship of men with Him which He intends on higher grounds. And so far as this intention works determinatively upon sinners, it does not, indeed, free them altogether from the consciousness of guilt, but from that mistrust which, as an affection of the consciousness of guilt, naturally separates the injured man from the offender. Granted, too, that the recipient of guilt incurs no new guilt, his recollection of his transgression, with its indirect excitation of pain, will form a guarantee that the presupposed fact of guilt is not unveraciously negatived by pardon. Thus the definition of forgiveness which Steudel brings forward (vol. i. p. 543) is confirmed, namely, that guilt, which indeed cannot be forgotten, and therefore cannot altogether be annihilated, at least forms no restriction upon our re-established relation to God.¹³

§ 14. This definition, it is true, is not taken account of by such theologians as think that a distinction should be made between the forgiveness of sins and justification, as between something negative and something positive. If we had to conceive the forgiveness of sins merely as the negation of the guilty state or penal state, then the idea of it certainly could not claim to be of decisive importance for the existence of the Christian religion. For this end we should rather have to set up a conception of positive content. Duns Scotus (vol. i. p. 100) offers for consideration the question whether God may not forgive sins through His boundless perfection of power, and in doing so omit the bestowal of habitual grace. He decides against the hypothesis, possible as it is from God’s point of view, on the ground that One, who through pardon of an injury is no longer an enemy, is not yet a friend, but is neutral. The forgiveness of sins, he says, is not the expression of any positive result of the well-pleasingness of a person to God; to this end there must be brought in, in addition, the idea of making righteous (Gerechtmachung). The same consideration is at the bottom of the distinction made by Lutherans and Reformed between the forgiveness of sins and justification (vol. i. p. 279). Even Schleiermacher expresses himself to the same effect (§ 109, 1). But as justification is no longer construed as equivalent to making righteous, but shares in common with the forgiveness of sins the form of a Divine judgment, those who take logic strictly come to the conclusion that justification precedes the forgiveness of sins. For a positive judgment is only apparently the supplement of the corresponding negative; in reality the negative presupposes it. Now justification carries with it the non-imputation of sins, because it is conceived as the imputation of righteousness—in other words, as the imputation of the righteousness which is contained in the twofold obedience of Christ for sinners who believe in Him.

This thought, characteristic of both orthodox schools, is not derived from Paul (vol. ii. p. 326); nor do Luther and Melanchthon give it the preference.¹⁴ The imputation of the righteousness of Christ as a formula for justification, moreover, occurs in Calvin,¹⁵ in whose Institutes it is to be found ever since the edition of 1539. Thereafter it is championed by the Lutherans and the Reformed, with the exception of Piscator and his followers. It is clear, too, that as a part of the theological system it forms a deduction from the presupposed legal world-order. It was assumed that the reciprocal relation between God and man is originally and necessarily bound to the standard of the law of good works. This principle likewise determines the conditions of redemption through Christ. For if men as sinners could not themselves fulfil the law, so as to answer to the righteousness of God and their own blessedness as their end, then Christ, the Founder of the order of grace, had to prove His congruity with the legal world-order by accomplishing in place of sinful humanity the righteousness which is due to the law, and bearing the punishment incurred by men, and both of these had to be imputed by God to each individual who was to be received into the new fellowship of grace with God. This is not yet the place for examining the leading thought of the significance of the law in this world-order. The question rather is, first, to ascertain the connection of thought which explains the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, and enables us to determine how the forgiveness of sins is related to this Divine act.

For the righteousness of Christ which is to be imputed to the believer is variously determined, according as there is ascribed to it the value of satisfaction for God or the value of merit on men’s behalf (vol. i. pp. 249, 282–286). As satisfaction for God the righteousness of Christ consists in His passive and active obedience. The former serves to execute and discharge the penal demands of the law upon sinners, the latter serves to satisfy and discharge the legal demands of the law upon men, which are based upon the fact that the fulfilment of the law is the originally ordained means to blessedness. As merit the righteousness of Christ consists in His obedience as a positive whole, which was maintained even in suffering unto death. The righteousness of Christ comes to be imputed to believers in both aspects. When this takes place under the category of satisfaction, there results for believers this negative predicate, that they are released from their penal obligations to the law, as also from their legal obligations to it—in other words, from the necessity of attaining blessedness through fulfilment of the law. Only through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ as merit does there follow the positive predicate of justification. Now, according to the presuppositions of this doctrine, Quenstedt is consistent in making the satisfaction-value of Christ’s righteousness logically precede its merit-value. For the relations of sinners’ guilty obligations to the law and men’s general legal obligations to it had first of all to be met, ere God’s order of grace could be put into operation. Now, if the imputation of the righteousness of Christ likewise follows in the same logical order, then the forgiveness of sins as remission of penalty and release from legal relations to God must precede, and justification as the reckoning to believers of the whole obedience of Christ must come after. But if, as a number of the older theologians demand, justification must logically precede the forgiveness of sins, this implies that the righteousness of Christ comes to be imputed, not as satisfaction, but as merit. For if the meritorious effect of the obedience of Christ, as formulated by Quenstedt, nos in statum benevolentiae divinae restituit, it follows that God imposes no more punishments upon believers, and no longer makes their attainment of the goal of blessedness at all dependent on their exercising a legal relationship to Himself.

These distinctions were not clearly realised by the older theologians, and therefore they did not view as a controversy involving the truth, the question whether forgiveness and justification follow in this or the reverse order, or whether, indeed, they are not synonyms. But if justification is once distinguished from the forgiveness of sins as something positive, if positive justification is the logically sufficient ground for the forgiveness of sins, and if, notwithstanding, positive justification can only be understood as the imputation of the merits of Christ, such an explanation cannot claim to differ in effect from the two diverse definitions of forgiveness we have discovered already. For these have themselves a thoroughly positive meaning. The forgiveness of sins as remission of penalties signifies the removal of that separation from God which has been brought about by sin. As separation is the negation of our proper fellowship with God, the removal of separation is to be construed as the positive re-establishment of the fellowship of sinners with God. This is the direct meaning of the definition of Steudel that, owing to the forgiveness of sins, guilt forms no hindrance to the relationship to God which has been established. Now, if through the imputation of the merits of Christ sinners are placed in such a status that God treats them with goodwill, such behaviour on God’s part is an expression of the permanent character of the proper fellowship of believers with God. And when, in consequence thereof, He forgives sins, i.e. remits penalties, the proof of it is to be found in the fact that the goodwill of God invalidates the penal significance of the evils which believers have to bear in consequence of their sin, of which the further consequence is that believers likewise do not fall under the penalties of spiritual and eternal death.

This argument, it is true, was not completely stated by any of the older theologians. They did not attempt any accurate or complete analysis of the idea of forgiveness, and therefore they always ascribed to it a merely negative effect, and thought that the only way of expressing a positive result was through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, whether this was added to the negative idea by way of supplement, or logically subordinated to it as its presupposition. Thus we must inquire, secondly, whether this positive idea of justification is thinkable. The objections raised to it by Faustus Socinus¹⁶ have reference to the twofold significance of the righteousness of Christ as penal satisfaction and as positive fulfilment of the law (iustitia), for he had before him an earlier stage in the development of the Reformers’ doctrine than is in view in the foregoing representation. But what he denotes by the imputatio iustitiae Christi has reference to the merit-value of the obedience of Christ, and his denial of the imputatio satisfactionis Christi is valid, not only as regards the bearing of the punishment imposed by the law, but also as regards the discharging of its legal claim on men in general. For in this connection he declares, founding on a principle of Roman law, that satisfaction and imputation mutually exclude each other. Imputation takes place in legal matters, he says, only where no service has previously been rendered; if, therefore, Christ has accomplished satisfaction, the matter is done with, and no imputation is required (vol. i. p. 328). But the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, he maintains, is absurd, since in other respects believers are bound to acquire righteousness of their own. This basal presupposition of Christianity is annulled by the hypothesis of an imputed righteousness.

Nevertheless this principle of private right does not touch the presupposition of the Reformation doctrine. On the contrary, if it is true that the original world-order consisted in a legal relationship between God and man, answering to the pattern of the State, then the cancelling of it, whether in general or in respect of penal demands, must be imputed to believers, i.e. they must be expressly regarded by God in such a way that the standard of the State and of criminal law no longer holds good for their relationship to Himself. Moreover, the imputation of the positive obedience (merit) of Christ is not at all intended by the orthodox to mean that thereby the acquisition of righteousness of their own by believers is excluded. It is regarded only as the precondition enabling God to enter at all into positive fellowship with them for their salvation, or of His bestowing upon them, along with justification, eternal life or the prospect of it. This conviction is common to both Confessions, and finds expression in symbolical documents on both sides;¹⁷ while, as against this, it is a matter of indifference, to begin with, how dogmatic theologians understand this connection. Now, that the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, in this limited reference, is unthinkable or unnecessary, Faustus has not proved, as indeed he has not directed his attention to the matter at all.

Nevertheless this argument too is devoid of intrinsic utility; nor has it any real basis in Paul’s typical circle of thought. For active righteousness, or obedience to the moral law, is so indubitably bound up with the personal intention and disposition of the acting subject, that we lose altogether the idea of determinate righteousness once we abstract from the subject by whom the righteousness has been produced. But this is the case when we conclude that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to others as though it were their own product. Thus this idea is altogether false, because it treats the personal moral lifework of a person as a thing which has no essential connection with its author, and may change its owner without having its essence and value altered.¹⁸ Moreover, it seems superfluous to conceive the imputation of the righteousness of Christ as a precondition of God’s admitting believers to religious fellowship with Himself, when such an assertion, if made a rule, takes for granted the position that God enters into no real fellowship in religion save with morally perfect men. For the present case there is thence drawn the conclusion that God, to attain this purpose of fellowship with believers, creates the moral perfection which in themselves they lack, through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.

The formula of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness can be extended so as to possess an excellent sense, if we interpret it in the light of other presuppositions than the system of legal relations employed for that purpose by the dogmatic theologians of the seventeenth century. If we take our bearings from the Gospel of John, the intention of Jesus is that His disciples should become one as the Father and the Son are in one another, or that they should become one in this fellowship of the Father and the Son; and that it should thereby be made known that the Father loves the Son, and the disciples as the Son; the love of the Father, however, is directed to the Son before the creation of the world (xvii. 21-24). The nature and the existence of the Son are founded in the love of God. But now to this we must add, on the other side, that Jesus maintains Himself in His existence by carrying on the work of God for the salvation of men (iv. 34). This is exactly equivalent to the truth that, by the execution of the commands or commissions of the Father, He maintains His position in the love of God (xv. 9, 10). Among these commissions, His willingness to lay down His life in the service of the community of disciples is a ground of the Father’s loving the Son (x. 17)—in other words, a condition of the continuance of the love of God as the basis of the unique character of Christ. Now, this is the material content of the righteousness of Christ—the execution of the work of God, the fulfilment of God’s commandments, the sacrifice of life in the service of the called community. But these services are not measured by universal law and an all-embracing rule of compensation, but first of all by the end aimed at, that Christ should maintain the unique position which, as Son, He has in the love of the Father, and then further by the end that the community of disciples should be effectively taken up into the love of the Father. How this result is mediated is not expressed in the Gospel of John. But we can supply it if we represent to ourselves the process through which the transference of love from one to another is possible. That can happen only through a resolve, in which there is included a judgment; this judgment, however, takes the form that the worth, which one individual has as the object of love, is imputed to those who in themselves lack this worth, but belong to the person who is the primary object of love. The position of Christ relative to God is imputed to His disciples when God, for Christ’s sake, takes them also up into His effective love. But Christ’s position relative to God also depends on His righteousness. Indirectly, therefore, Christ’s righteousness is imputed to His disciples that they may be taken up into the love of God, even as the roots of Christ’s being are there. But in this way the righteousness of Christ is not severed from His Person, and no prejudice is raised against our own practice of righteousness. And while the formula is made intelligible by these modifications, that very fact is proof of its previous obscurity. The point at issue is the imputation of the position relative to God which Christ likewise occupies through His practice of righteousness, to those who as His disciples belong to Him through faith, in order that they may be taken up effectively into the love of God. This thought, however, is not at all accurately expressed in the current formula, nor have those theologians who employ that formula, e.g. Calvin,¹⁹ succeeded in making its meaning clear.

§ 15. In this analysis of the formula of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, the position of Christ, relative to God, which is determinative for the idea of justification, is construed otherwise than is done by Melanchthon. As he sees in the promise of the forgiveness of sins the compassion of God acting as cause, he interprets the precondition here provided for by Christ (iustificare propter Christum) as coming under the conception of satisfaction as the placation of God (propitiatio, placatio dei). Apart from this, he employs for “justify” and “forgive” a series of synonyms, by which considerable light is cast upon the idea, and at the same time every semblance is removed of making it the chief point in justification to transfer the predicate of active righteousness—in other words, to assert an untruth and cast uncertainty upon the task of life. For Melanchthon makes reconciliation and acceptance or favour with God the equivalent of justification, as also acceptance as sons of God, and finally the opening of access to God.²⁰ The word reconciliare he uses in this connection only as applied to men who are brought back to God, but never as applied to God. The influence of Melanchthon’s view is still visible in Chemnitz.²¹ Moreover, the identity of the forgiveness of sins, justification, reconciliation, and admission to communion with God, receives really classical expression in Calvin,²² despite the fact that before and after the passage cited below he treats of that distinction between the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness which is discussed above. The influence of the combination of ideas before us at present is also to be seen in the founder of Lutheran dogmatism. Leonard Hutter unites with the conception of the imputed righteousness of Christ all the predicates which have been pointed out in the authorities just mentioned.²³

Now this conjunction of ideas has disappeared from the writings of the Lutheran theologians. They have not even kept in view that direct teleological relation of justification to the bestowal of eternal life which characterises the view originally taken of the subject (p. 69). They are satisfied with adducing this aspect, like all others, under the heading of the effects of justification, and that, too, with no other interest than that of registering the various statements of Scripture. Especially with Gerhard this list exhibits the most motley variety of subjective phenomena and objective determinations of relation, of heterogeneous and synonymous expressions, as though we were dealing with a rubbish-heap. Later writers reduce this multiplicity to a few rubrics, but they think they have done all that is required of them in enumerating them.²⁴ Under these circumstances the thought of justification comes to be isolated from all practical relations by Lutheran theologians, and condemned to barrenness. We have here again the phenomenon which I have characterised as the pervading feature of the Lutheran theology of that epoch (vol. i. p. 270), that in it no use is made of the conception of end, but all relations are represented under the category of efficient cause. But along with this formal inadequacy, there is still another circumstance to which is due the fading of the idea of justification among the Lutherans. From Aegidius Hunnius onwards this idea receives exposition only in polemical controversy first with the Tridentine, and then with the Socinian doctrine. Thus it is apprehended only in those aspects which are directly challenged by these opponents; all lying beyond these aspects hardly receives any consideration.

In the Reformed theology of the sixteenth century, also, we meet to begin with a limited and pedantic treatment of the idea of justification. In the seventeenth century, however, a series of dogmatic writers advance to a more living apprehension of it, which consists in this, that the conceptions of reconciliation and adoption are placed in reciprocal relationship to that of justification. To begin with, Amesius declares justification or forgiveness identical with reconciliation, inasmuch as these different expressions describe the same thing only in different aspects.²⁵ Adoption, it is true, he declares to be a result of justification, and denies that it signifies an element in it, on the ground that those adopted are not yet accounted righteous. To this distinction he clings, although he recognises in justification its direct relation to eternal life, and finds the same character expressed in Divine sonship. His view, indeed, is that thereby believers possess a double title to anticipation of the blessing of life eternal. These latter interpretations are adopted by Heidanus, but he oversteps the scheme to which his predecessor held, in that he takes justification and adoption to be the two parts of reconciliation, and attaches to them the saving effects, both positive and negative. Thus it is brought about that adoption no longer appears as an accident, but as the fulfilment of the idea of reconciliation.²⁶ A somewhat different formulation of the matter is to be found in the youngest representatives of the Reformed orthodoxy, Fr. Turretin, Rodolf, and Heidegger, as also in Schleiermacher. They distinguish as elements in justification the forgiveness of sins and the award of a right to eternal life or adoption.²⁷ In general this is the result of the eagerness with which the majority of Reformed theologians have maintained the direct reference of justification to eternal life. The combination of this aspect of it with the conception of Divine sonship then resulted from the fact that the objective aspect of the latter likewise is eternal life. Finally, no difficulty could arise from the form of the idea of justification, for acceptance as the children of God must be conceived as a synthetic judgment. Why, now, has this conjunction of ideas not been accorded recognition on all hands? In this connection an explanation given by Baier is very noteworthy. Baier²⁸ brings forward the fact that a minority of theologians extend the terminus ad quem iustificationis to the ius filiorum dei et haereditas vitae aeternae, while the majority see here effects of justification. Now he likewise concedes that it serves to recommend the former view that it is in formal agreement with the terminus a quo. For man is created with a destination to eternal life, but through sin this is converted into a destination to eternal death. Now if justification begins with the removal of this characteristic, it must be completed by the restoration of the original destiny. This, indeed, has been noticed by the majority of Reformed writers. Baier, however, decides against this formulation, because Scripture not infrequently represents the bestowal of Divine sonship as a new attribute over and above justification, and proves this by making it subordinate to regeneration.

If justification places sinners in a positive relationship of congruence towards God, and if the declaration that they are righteous is not to make their destination to active righteousness wear a semblance of superfluity, it must find its limit in that fellowship with God which is expressed, to begin with and in an indeterminate way, by nearness to God, and then, further, by the right of communion with God. Not only, however, does this open a prospect that all that is still attainable for the salvation of believers and in opposition to their sin, will result from this new and peculiar relation to God; but these results, up to the goal of eternal life, are included by intention in justification, as surely as justification determines the lasting and unvarying character of believers. If Lutheran theologians have been dull enough to close their minds to this directly teleological aspect of justification, it is for them to inquire how far they are in agreement with the Formula of Concord, which identifies the bestowal of blessedness with justification. But further, if the right to eternal life is the objective aspect of Divine sonship, which is proved to be an abiding attribute of believers just through the certainty of this right of inheritance, then adoption must coincide with justification. True, Heidegger brings out this difference between the two ideas, that in justification God appears as Judge, in adoption as Father; but the question arises whether this distinction can be maintained. A conclusion on this point can only be reached at a later stage, and therefore we shall not seek here to state finally the relation between adoption and justification (vide infra, § 18).

In any case the conception of reconciliation has a more general sense than adoption, and therefore stands nearer to justification. By Paul, too, who as the author of the idea of justification is altogether decisive for its further ramification, it is set in the closest relation to that idea. As has been remarked before (vol. ii. p. 342), Paul describes man’s peace with God as the specific effect of justification, while this effect directly coincides with reconciliation as the removal of man’s enmity to God. If we take account merely of this conjunction of ideas, we get the impression that the two conceptions are synonymous. Nevertheless, the conception of reconciliation has a wider range and greater definiteness than that of justification. For it expresses as an actual result the effect ever aimed at in justification or pardon, namely, that the person who is pardoned actually enters upon the relationship which is to be established. By the idea of justification sinners are merely passively determined, and it fails to inform us what stimulus is acted upon them by the Divine treatment of their case. On the other hand, the idea of reconciliation is expressive of the fact that those who formerly were engaged in active contradiction to God have, by pardon, been brought into a harmonious direction towards God, and first of all into agreement with the intention cherished by Him in acting thus. From this point of view we may count on it that the justification which is successfully dispensed by God finds its manifestation and response in definite functions of the persons reconciled.

True, both ideas express the divinely-initiated fellowship of men with God which is no longer obstructed by sin; but the sin which, to secure this end, is rendered inoperative is considered under the attributes of guilt or consciousness of guilt so far as it is related to justification or forgiveness, but in its essence as active contradiction to God so far as it is related to reconciliation. Thus even from this consideration it follows that the idea of reconciliation has a more comprehensive range than that of forgiveness. But it is in this wider scope that the matter must be apprehended, for unless the removal of guilt can be likewise conceived as the removal of the contradiction of the will to God, the former result would issue in a self-delusion on God’s part. Or if the removal of guilt must be thought only as God’s determination of relationship in regard to sinners, and not as the completion of a reciprocal harmony, then there is not proved to exist here any sufficient basis for a religion with moral aims. But now, that the thought of the removal of guilt should be supplemented by the thought of the removal of contradiction to God follows necessarily from the relation of the consciousness of guilt to both ideas. It has been proved above (p. 56) that the idea of guilt as an attribute of sin possesses validity only in virtue of the consciousness of guilt by which it is qualified. But this consciousness is also the subjective expression of the fact that sin is active contradiction to God. Further, it has been shown that the removal of guilt and the consciousness of guilt does not imply any unveracious denial of the existence of sin; that, rather, pain at the sin which has been committed is present in memory even after the reception of forgiveness. But the removal of guilt does signify that God cancels the effect of sin, which is to make fellowship with Him impossible; and that accordingly the consciousness of guilt has its mistrust of God, to Whom we know ourselves to be in contradiction, removed. Thus the removal of guilt, conceived as an actual result, includes this change in the consciousness of guilt—that in it there no longer works on that opposition of the will to God of which sin is the consummation. That is, even while pain at sin committed is preserved in the memory, the effective removal of guilt on God’s part, namely, its non-imputation as a ground of separation and alienation, appears in our newly-established confidence towards God as the counterpart of our still surviving opposition to Him. Justification or forgiveness, conceived as effective, thus is identical with reconciliation as expressive of mutual fellowship between God and man. If this denotes the basis of Christianity as a religion, the subjective functions of reconciliation will be directly religious. On the other hand, the functions of a moral kind, which spring from the independence of the will that is in harmony with God, must stand in a more remote relation to reconciliation with God, for they cannot be deduced without taking into account still other points of view.

§ 16. This conception of justification, which has been developed in essential agreement with the intention actuating the Lutheran and Reformed theologians, is, in form, a synthetic judgment. This quality answers to the fact that justification, in the sense meant here, must be thought as a resolve or act of the Divine will. For every act of the will moves analogously to the synthetic judgment; especially can a creative act of God’s will only be understood in this form. But such an act is conceived when God through the revelation in Christ receives those who are separated from Him by sin into fellowship with Himself, to the establishment of their salvation. Not even from the standpoint of Roman Catholicism can objection justly be raised to this position. For even if we interpret the act of deciding against sin as the real communication of the gratia gratum faciens, or as the material inspiration of love to God and men, yet this process, as a Divine act, can only be represented in the form that to the sinner whom God makes righteous there is added a predicate not already included in the conception “ sinner.” The opposition between the two forms of doctrine, therefore, in reality consists, not in the fact that the necessary form of the Evangelical conception of justification is altogether omitted in the Catholic mode of doctrine, but in the fact that the synthetic judgment on God’s part, in the Evangelical sense, is conceived, not as having as its content the moral change of the sinner, but merely as the ground of his relationship to God as altered by God’s will. The basis of this opposition, however, lies in this, that Catholic doctrine represents Christianity first and foremost as the form of a moral direction of the will set in opposition to sin, while Protestantism represents it first and foremost as the true religion, in contrast to the operation of sin as the ground of all irreligion and all false religion. But now Christianity in its genus is religion, in its species it is the perfect spiritual and moral religion. The Evangelical idea of justification, accordingly, is constructed so that in this special and peculiar relation of men to God the universal character of Christianity as a religion may attain expression. For that idea is in harmony with the desire to formulate Christianity as the true religion, in that the fellowship of men with God, in which lies their salvation, is made independent of sin, which is wont either to negate or falsify religion. On the other hand, the Catholic representation of making righteous (Gerechtmachung) as the decisive idea is wrong, for that idea is not modelled on the general conception of Christianity as a religion, but on its moral quality. And that to proceed in this way is also unpractical, may be seen from the fact that in Catholicism all possible falsifications of religion, the polytheistic and magical as well as the Pharisaic, enjoy official sanction, in spite of all pretended disclaimers.

The synthetic character of the judgment of justification is not denied even by the Socinians and Arminians, although these parties give the idea another reference than the Lutherans and the Reformed, and therefore also invest it with a different significance. They interpret justification and the remission of penalties as a judgment upon faith in Christ, in which is included active obedience to the law. Now as obedience, when compared with the law, is always imperfect, and does not of itself offer a basis for the predication of righteousness, and therefore, also, does not carry with it entire freedom from punishment, the judgment of God, that the believer is righteous, is not analytic. As the basis of the completion of salvation, of the remission of penalties, and of eternal life, therefore, it is synthetic, deduced solely from God’s free resolve of grace; nevertheless it is not to be looked for apart from the indispensable precondition of the moral obedience of faith.²⁹ This view, like that of the orthodox schools of the seventeenth century, is based upon the belief that the predicate of righteousness is properly attached to the faultless fulfilment of the law. If this is not to be looked for from believers, they must be invested with it by Divine judgment. Now, according to the Socinians and Arminians, this is done, not by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, but by a free Divine judgment, conditional upon the partial realisation of the obedience of faith. The decisive divergence between the two lies here, that the imputation of another’s righteousness instead of our own is construed by the orthodox as the precondition of the opening of saving fellowship with God, while by the other parties the imputation of our own imperfect righteousness as perfect is viewed as the precondition of the completion of salvation. Thus conceptions expressed by the same terms are of unequal value for the two groups, and therefore do not directly correspond to one another.

What really corresponds to the Reformation idea of justification in the Arminian doctrine is the idea of reconciliation, in so far as it precedes faith and conversion.³⁰ This preliminary reconciliation is, as a consequence of the priestly work of Christ and the reconciliation of God, distinguished from the complete reconciliation of men, which coincides with justification. The preliminary reconciliation consists in the establishment of the new covenant, under which God is prepared to forgive sins and to bestow eternal life on condition of the obedience of faith described, and under which He provides that the word of grace shall be proclaimed until this condition has been fulfilled by men. Now it might seem as though what is here expressed were the same as what we have shown to be the content of the Reformation idea of justification and reconciliation. For that willingness of God and the proclamation of it might perhaps convey the impression that according to the Divine intention the sins of believers were forgiven in advance. Nevertheless, such an interpretation must be put aside, for thereby the very essence of the promise would be misconstrued. The promise of the forgiveness of sins, it is held, is intended and is intelligible only on condition of the appropriate faith and active obedience. But the mere proclamation, conceived apart from this condition, would be no promise. Now this is really to introduce quite another connection of thought than is implied in the Reformation view of reconciliation or justification. As the latter is always implicite directed against the action of the consciousness of guilt in separating us from God, it must necessarily be conceived in such relations that the justified person recognises the change in his relation to God, or that he comes to be directed towards God as his positive end. Even if, to begin with, the individual functions through which this is done are left out of account, yet it cannot be doubted that in them there will be expressed the religious recognition of the fact that the believer specifically belongs to God—a fact which, as a result of justification, is included in the idea of justification, so certainly as reconciliation is the equivalent of that idea. But the Arminian view of the new covenant established by God describes merely a one-sided willingness on God’s part, the response to which on men’s side is left to their purely accidental resolution, and limits the invitation to take such a resolution to a proclamation which is addressed to their understanding. This interpretation of reconciliatio, however, not only falls short of the simple sense of the word, which denotes a reciprocal relationship, but even of the incontestable religious signification of the idea, the character of which is shown by its relation to the idea of the consciousness of guilt. At bottom this belief regarding the preliminary reconciliation as a result of the priestly office of Christ is expressed more openly and simply in the fundamental Socinian doctrine, that Christianity as a proclamation of commandments and promises altogether rests exclusively upon the prophetic office of Christ. If, therefore, the importance given to His priestly office by the Arminians seems almost like an accommodation, designed to conceal their Socinian tendency, conversely we may well suppose, with all the greater certainty, that the state of decomposition which this idea exhibits here is partly due to the orthodox theologians. Everywhere in the history of theology it appears that inaccurate and superficial forms of doctrine lead to the connections of thought which were originally intended being distorted or dissolved. Now, as orthodox theologians never clearly fixed the relation of justification or forgiveness to the consciousness of guilt, it became possible for the Arminians to form a conception of reconciliation without any relation to the fact of that consciousness, a conception which is entirely alien to the recognisable tendency of Reformation doctrine.

Another distortion of the idea of justification appears in the Pietistic hypothesis which, with manifold modifications, amounts to this, that justification is an analytic judgment upon the moral worth of faith, in so far as faith, as a result of conversion, includes the power of moral action.³¹ It is clear that this thought is very far removed from that which was laid down as in harmony with the tendency of the Reformation. The fact that it was possible for the one to be substituted for the other, is to be explained chiefly by the attention which the Pietists gave to their own struggles and efforts to attain subjective assurance of salvation. Originally, the thing aimed at in justification was to look away from one’s own states of mind, and to turn to the judgment which is pronounced in virtue of Christ’s mediation according to the free grace of God. It is therefore an inversion of the Reformation point of view when Pietism makes the moral power of faith the object which God invests with the value which moral conduct would possess when carried out. Besides this, justification, when so apprehended, is conceived as an accident of the effective moral change brought about by regeneration, and therefore does not denote that turning - point from the status of sin to the state of new life, which the Reformers desired to fix.

This comparison of the different explanations which have been given of justification is here intended only to show us where we are; for at this point we attempt neither a proof of the necessity of one definition, nor a refutation of other theories. The definition we have reached only claims to be thinkable, and to stand nearer than any other to the view held by the men of the New Testament and the Reformers.

1. Justification or the forgiveness of sins, as the religious expression of that operation of God upon men which is fundamental in Christianity, is the acceptance of sinners into that fellowship with God in which their salvation is to be realised and carried out into eternal life.

2. Justification is conceivable as the removal of guilt and the consciousness of guilt, in so far as in the latter that contradiction to God which is realised in sin and expressed in guilt, works on as mistrust, and brings about moral separation from God.

3. In so far as justification is viewed as effective, it must be conceived as reconciliation, of such a nature that while memory, indeed, preserves the pain felt at the sin which has been committed, yet at the same time the place of mistrust towards God is taken by the positive assent of the will to God and His saving purpose.

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← Introduction · Contents · Chapter II. The General Relations of Justification →

Footnotes

1. Bernhardus in Cant. Canticorum, 69, 8. Cf. Geschichte des Pietismus, i. p. 59. ↩

2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol. ii. 2 qu. 17, art. 8. ↩

3. Kirche und Kirchen, p. 429. ↩

4. Examen theologicum, ii. 2. 20, p. 504. ↩

5. Christianae theologiae libri duo, i. 9. 9, p. 204. ↩

6. Theol. posit. i. cap. 7, 8. ↩

7. Conf. Helv., post. 8: “Poenis subiicimur iustis, adeoque a deo abiecti essemus omnes, nisi nos reduxisset Christus liberator.” Amesius, Medulla, i. 16: “Consummatio mortis—est amissio boni infiniti. Spiritualis mortis consummatio est totalis ac finalis derelictio, qua homo separatur penitus a facie, praesentia vel favore dei.” Witsius, De oeconomia foederum dei, iii. 6. 5: “Mortui sumus in Adamo omnes, hoc est, a deo remotissime seiuncti, sive ut Paulus loquitur, alienati a vita dei.” Heidegger, Corp. theol., Loc. ix. 59: “Poena mortis nomine comprehensa … Est autem in universum mors separatio eorum, quae prima origine sua coniuncta fuerunt. Cum igitur homo integer a deo creatus et ipse cum dei sanctitate per imaginem dei actu coniunctus fuerit, … horum omnium separatio mortis nomen et omen habuit.” Rodolf, Catechesis Palat. p. 70: “Non mirum, omnes istos unius poenae, puta mortis, gradus id habere commune inter se, quod notionem privationis vel separationis animae totiusque hominis a bono, cuius possessio felicitatem affert, includant.” Hollatz, ii. 2. 20: “Mors spiritualis est separatio a gratioso dei consortio; aeterna est separatio a visione et fruitione dei beatifica.” Buddeus, ii. 3. 13: “Sequitur, damnatos omnibus istis, quae communionem cum deo consequuntur, destitui.” Fresenius, Rechtfertigung, iv. 7: “the ground of all punishment is separation from God.” ↩

8. Gerhard, Loci theol., Loc. x. 125 (tom. iv. p. 366): “Quamvis credentes originalis et aliorum peccatorum remissionem per Christum et propter Christum obtineant, nihilo tamen minus calamitatibus huius vitae et temporali morti manent obnoxii. Causae huius rei sunt, 1. ut peccatum in carne adhuc haerens mortificetur; 2. ut peccati gravitate agnita simus remissionis grata mente perpetuo memores; 3. ut exercitia fidei, patientiae et obedientiae in cruce nobis proponantur. Magnum interea discrimen est inter poenas impoenitentibus et incredulis, deo nondum reconciliatis debitas, et inter has paternas castigationes piis et reconciliatis impositas; illae enim procedunt ab irato iudice, hae vero a benignissimo patre; illae sunt initia aeternarum poenarum, hae vero cum hac vita desinunt.” Baier, ii. 1. 15, p. 426; Hollatz, ii. 2. 19, p. 503; Henr. Alting, i. 9, p. 138; Wendelin, i. 12. 2, p. 234; Coccejus, de foed. et test. dei, cap. xv. p. 608; Heidegger, Loc. x. 92, 94. ↩

9. C. R. xxi. p. 953: “Sunt opera iustitiae divinae, per quae vult deus commonefieri et nos et alios de sua iustitia… . Quamquam autem haec poenae sunt opera iustissimae irae dei, tamen exstant in ecclesia promissiones, quae affirmant, in hac ipsa ira deum tamen velle, ut ad filium mediatorem confugiamus.” ↩

10. Baier, iii. 5. 11, p. 672, states the principle: “Reatus peccatorum, licet non tollatur ab ipsis peccatis, quia hoc ipso, quod peccata sunt, poena quoque digna sunt, tollitur tamen ab homine peccatore.” More distinctly, Wendelin, p. 234: “Pertinet ad παιδείαν mors corporalis piorum, quae non est satisfactio pro peccato, sed peccati deo maximopere displicentis indicium et abolitio peccati, necessarium ingressus in gloriam antecedens.” Heidegger, p. 369: “Neque mors fidelium poena proprie dicta est, quia eorum, in quibus Christus est, corpus dicitur mortuum propter peccatum (Rom. viii. 10). Non enim corpus moritur propter peccatum vindicandum vel expiandum, sed deponendum et abolendum.” ↩

11. Institutio christ. relig. iii. 4, pp. 31, 32: “Ubicunque poena est ad ultionem, ibi maledictio et ira dei se exserit, quam semper a fidelibus continent. Castigatio contra et dei benedictio est et amoris habet testimonium, ut docet scriptura.” Examen conc. Trid. (Genev. 1641) p. 400: “Omnino statuendum est discrimen inter poenas et afflictiones, quae infliguntur impiis et quae imponuntur reconciliatis… . Tales igitur temporariae poenae, quas deus reconciliatis in hac vita imponit, nequaquam sunt ita interpretandae, quasi sint vel merita remissionis peccatorum vel compensationes poenae aeternae.” ↩

12. Baier, i. 7. 6: “Damnati poenarum, quibus affliguntur, meritum animo reputant.” ↩

13. This is not yet the place to inquire how the pardon of guilt in concreto is possible for God, and especially how it harmonises with His character as Law-giver and Representative of the law; this aspect of the conception we shall determine in § 17. ↩

14. In the Apology of the Augsburg Confession the formula occurs thrice, ix. 19, xii. 12; most clearly, iii. 184: “Iustificare significat reum absolvere et pronuntiare iustum, sed propter alienam iustitiam Christi, quae communicatur nobis per fidem. Itaque hoc loco iustitia nostra est imputatio alienae iustitiae.” ↩

15. In the edition of 1559, lib. iii. 11. 2: “Iustificabitur ille fide, qui Christi iustitiam per fidem apprehendit, qua vestitus in dei conspectu non ut peccator, sed tanquam iustus apparet. Ita nos iustificationem interpretamur acceptionem, qua nos deus in gratiam receptos pro iustis habet. Eamque in peccatorum remissione ac iustitiae Christi imputatione positam esse dicimus.” In the editions 1539–1550, cap. ii. (x.) § 2. C. R. xxix. p. 738. ↩

16. De Christo servatore, lib. iv. cap. 1–6. ↩

17. Apol. C. A. ii. 5: “Christus promittit remissionem peccatorum, iustificationem et vitam aeternam.” F. C. iii. p. 585: “Christo confidimus, quod propter solam ipsius obedientiam ex gratia remissionem peccatorum habeamus, sancti et iusti coram deo patre reputemur et aeternam salutem consequamur.” Catech. Pal. 59: “In Christo iustus sum et haeres vitae aeternae.” Conf. Helv., post. 15: “Sumus absoluti a peccatis, morte vel condemnatione, iusti denique (donati iustitia Christi) ac haeredes vitae aeternae.” ↩

18. Limborch, Theol. christ. vi. 4. 25: “Unius iustitia alteri imputari nequit. Tota enim iustitiae natura et laus in eo sita est, ut quis libere et alacri animo eam praestet; illam autem perire necesse est, quamprimum imputatur illi, qui eam non praestitit. Nec transferri potest ab uno ad alium, ne ipso quidem conceptu mentis, si verus ille conceptus sit futurus.” ↩

19. Inst. iii. 11. 23: “Hinc et illud conficitur, sola intercessione iustitiae Christi nos obtinere, ut coram deo iustificemur. Quod perinde valet, acsi diceretur, hominem non in se ipso iustum esse, sed quia Christi iustitia imputatione cum illo communicatur… . Vides, non in nobis, sed in Christo esse iustitiam nostram; nobis tantum eo iure competere, quia Christi sumus participes, siquidem omnes eius divitias cum ipso possidemus… . Quid aliud est, in Christi obedientia collocare nostram iustitiam (Rom. v. 19), nisi asserere, eo solo nos haberi iustos, quia Christi obedientia nobis accepta fertur, acsi nostra esset.” Edition of 1539, C. R. xxix. p. 745. ↩

20. Loci theol. C. R. xxi. p. 742: “Iustificatio significat remissionem peccatorum et reconciliationem seu acceptationem personae ad vitam aeternam… . Sumpsit Paulus verbum iustificandi ex consuetudine Hebraeorum pro remissione peccatorum et reconciliatione seu acceptatione… . Iustificari fide in Christum significat consequi remissionem et iustum hoc est acceptum reputari propter mediatorem filium dei.” Apol. C. A. ii. 86: “Sola fides iustificat, quia reconciliati reputantur iusti et filii dei”; iii. 20: “Per Christum acceditur ad patrem, et accepta remissione peccatorum vere iam statuimus, nos habere deum ” ; v. 37: “Per Christum habemus accessum ad deum.” ↩

21. Examen conc. Trid. (Genev. 1641) p. 158: “Scriptura docet quicquid divina iustitia ad iustificationem hoc est reconciliationem peccatoris requirit, a Christo pro nobis impletum esse.” P. 159: “Habet fides suum proprium obiectum, cuius respectu, merito et dignitate credens coram deo iustificetur, h. e. accipiat remissionem peccatorum, reconcilietur deo, accipiat adoptionem et acceptetur ad vitam aeternam.” P. 161: “Obiectum fidei iustificantis, cuius respectu et apprehensione iustificat, est gratuita promissio misericordiae dei remittentis peccata, adoptantis et acceptantis ad vitam aeternam propter Christum mediatorem.” ↩

22. Lib. iii. 11. 21 (1539, cap. vi. (x.) 12, 13. C. R. xxix. p. 744): “Nunc illud quam verum est excutiamus, quod in definitione dictum est, iustitiam fidei esse reconciliationem cum deo, quae sola peccatorum remissione constet. Audimus peccatum esse divisionem inter hominem et deum, vultus dei aversionem a peccatore (Ies. 59. 1): nec fieri aliter potest, quandoquidem alienum est ab eius iustitia, quicquam commercii habere cum peccato. Quem ergo dominus in coniunctionem recipit, eum dicitur iustificare, quia nec recipere in gratiam, nec sibi adiungere potest, quin ex peccatore iustum faciat. Istud addimus fieri per peccatorum remissionem. Nam si ab operibus aestimentur, quos sibi dominus reconciliavit, reperientur etiamnum revera peccatores, quos tamen peccato solutos purosque esse oportet. Constat itaque, quos deus amplectitur, non aliter fieri iustos, nisi quod abstersis peccatorum remissione maculis purificantur, ut talis iustitia uno verbo appellari queat peccatorum remissio.” § 22: “Iustitiam et reconciliationem Paulus promiscue nominat, ut alterum sub altero vicissim contineri intelligamus. Modum autem assequendae huius iustitiae docet, dum nobis delicta non imputantur.” ↩

23. Comp. Loc. theol. xii. 2: “Iustificatio est opus dei, quo hominem peccatorem, credentem in Christum ex mera gratia sive gratis a peccatis absolvit, eique peccatorum remissionem donat, iustitiamque Christi ita imputat, ut plenissime reconciliatus et in filium adoptatus a peccati reatu liberetur et aeternam beatitudinem consequatur.” ↩

24. Gerhard, Loc. xvii. 72. 8, tom. vii. p. 85. Baier, iii. 5. 14: “Effecta iustificationis sunt pax conscientiae cum deo, adoptio in filios dei, donatio spiritus sancti, sanctificatio et renovatio, spes vitae aeternae.” To the same effect Quenstedt, Hollatz.—Fresenius, Rechtfertigung, vii. 38: “The benefits bestowed upon one who possesses forgiveness of sins, consist in free access to God, the right of inward fellowship with God, the right of Divine sonship, and the claim to the eternal inheritance. All this becomes his in Christ, his Surety, Head, and Saviour, who Himself also has taken possession of such glory, and as the Head gives His members a share therein.” ↩

25. Medulla, i. 27. 22: “Absolutio a peccatis vario respectu sed eodem sensu dicitur remissio, redemtio et reconciliatio… . Quatenus status peccati consideratur ut inimicitia quaedam adversus deum, eatenus iustificatio dicitur reconciliatio.” ↩

26. Corp. theol. christ., Loc. xi. tom. ii. p. 299: “Reconciliationis nostrae duas partes facimus iustificationem et adoptionem… . Nam peccatorum remissionem iustificationis beneficio consequimur, eoque in gratiam recipimur. Verum quisquis in gratiam recipitur, simul adoptionis particeps et filii loco haberi cognoscitur. Et quidem haec adoptio sequitur iustificationem. Neque nempe adoptione iusti constituimur, sed iustificati exaltamur ad dignitatem et ius filiorum. Si filii, haeredes; si haeredes, etiam ius consequimur ad vitam… . Hinc fideles, duplici quasi titulo vitam aeternam possunt a deo petere et exspectant, titulo nempe redemtionis, quem habent ex iustificatione, et titulo quasi filiationis, quem habent ex adoptione.” ↩

27. Heidegger, Loc. xxii. 59: “Iustificatio remissionem peccatorum et vitae seu haereditatis adiudicationem complectitur.” 72: “Quae iuris vitae concessio realiter cum adoptione convenit, neque aliter ab hac distinguitur, quam quod vita aeterna in iustificatione ut debitum, in adoptione vero ut haereditas spectatur, et deus ibi iudicis, hic patris personam sustinet.” Rodolf, Cat. Pal. p. 334. Turretini, Theol. elenchtica, tom. ii. p. 719. Compend., ed. Riissen, p. 426. Schleiermacher, § 109: “That God justifies one who is converted involves that He forgives his sins and recognises him as a child of God.” ↩

28. Theol. posit. iii. 5. 4, 14, pp. 661, 677. ↩

29. Catech. Racov. 452: “ Per fidem in Christum consequimur iustificationem.” 453: “ Iustificatio est, cum nos deus pro iustis habet, quod ea ratione facit, cum nobis peccata remittit et nos vita aeterna donat.” 418: “ Fides est fiducia per Christum in deum. Hoc est ut non solum deo, verum et Christo confidamus, deinde et deo obtemperemus, non in iis solum, quae in lege per Mosen lata praecepit, et per Christum abrogata non sunt, verum etiam in omnibus, quae Christus legi addidit.” — Fausti Socini Theses de iustificatione, B. F. P. i. p. 603: “Deus ex pura sua gratia et misericordia nos iustificat… . Est obedientia quam Christo praestamus, licet nec efficiens, nec meritoria, tamen causa sine qua non iustificationis coram deo, atque aeternae salutis nostrae.”—The Arminians differ from this only in that they admit the validity of Christ’s work of satisfaction (vol. i. p. 342). Otherwise all the conditions of the doctrine are in harmony with the Socinian doctrine. Cf. Limborch, Theol. christ. vi. 4. 14—32. ↩

30. Cf. Limborch, iii. 23. ↩

31. Cf. vol. i. pp. 359, 362. Gesch. des Pietismus, i. pp. 129 f., 158; ii. p. 403 ff. ↩