In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Justification and Sanctification Justification and sanctification must be grasped as a dynamic unity in the light of God's eschatological act that brings new life from death. "Progress" in sanctification is not immanent moral progress but the coming of the kingdom of God among us through the power of unconditional justification. Growth is growth in grace. Sanctifica­ tion cannot be separated from, or more than, justification. Sanc­ tification occurs when unconditional justification begins to take the person away from sin, not just to take sin away from the person. There is death to the old, and rebirth to the new in heart, mind, and soul. Justification sola gratia sets free from works and just so inspires spontaneity and naturalness in doing truly good works. THE SEPARATION OF SANCTIFICATION FROM JUSTIFICATION "Are we to continue to sin that grace may abound?" The question obviously makes people nervous. To that degree also the answer is likely not to be grasped: "By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?" (Rom. 6:1-2). Justification means the end of law and of thinking according to law. It means the death of the old and the resurrection of the new in faith. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must con­ sider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. . . . But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obe­ dient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you 425 1 1 / CHRISTIAN LIFE once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members torighteousnessfor sanctification. (Rom. 6:6-11, 17-19) If we are unable fully to grasp the identification of justification by faith with death and resurrection, we will encounter nothing but difficulty in relating justification and sanctification. We will always be struggling and tinkering with the system of law, trying to make it work by all sorts of theological fine tuning. Something of that sort seems to have occurred after the Reformation. Justification by faith as imputed righteousness was accepted and became the talisman of the new movement, but death and resurrection, the end of the law, was not. We need not tarry here to ask why.1 Broadly, what happened was that after the Reformation, Protestants again attempted just what could not be done: to synthesize justification by faith with thinking "after the fashion of Aristotle," with thinking according to the scheme of progress under the law. What resulted was a theology which carries within itself a profound in­ ner contradiction.2 Again, either one or the other (the righteousness which comes by faith or thinking "after the fashion of Aristotle") has to give way. Again, history shows the former to be most often the loser. The law once again takes its place as the structural backbone of the dogmatic system.3 Once that occurs, two things immediately follow for dogmatics which try nevertheless to be Protestant and evangelical. First, justification must be de­ fined as an absolutely forensic declaration. Second, it must be antiseptically removed from all contamination by the subsequently necessary idea of prog­ ress in sanctification on the other. Justification must be understood as ab­ solutely forensic, that is, as a sheer decree acquitting the guilty party. Thus the following: "Justification denotes that act by which the sinner, who is responsible for guilt and liable to punishment . . . , but who believes in Christ, is pronounced just by God the judge." This act occurs at the instant in which the merit of Christ is appropriated by faith, and can properly be designated a forensic or judicial act, since God in it, as if in a civil court, pronounces a judgment upon man, which assigns to him...

Share