If our first edition of Forde Friday was a trip down memory lane to his most popular book, here we move to a deep cut few are aware exists. In the late 1970s, theologians Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson lamented that all of the theology books they used in the classroom were imported from Europe. Seeking to correct this imbalance, they enlisted the help of Forde and others from the same generation to write a multi-volume book of dogmatics together. Forde would write two of the twelve chapters: “The Person of Christ” and “The Christian Life.”
Forde’s (and Luther’s by extension) notion of the Christian life is perhaps the most radical implication of justification by faith alone. Because justification is not a process of getting better and better, the same is true of sanctification. We are or are not righteous just as one has or does not have faith. The life we have after becoming a Christian (commonly called “sanctification”) is not separate or even distinct from why we became a Christian in the first place (i.e., justification).
You and I don’t get better with age. We don’t even become who we already are. We are neither wine nor machines. For Forde, there is no progressive notion of the Christian life at all. Instead, we just are: forgiven, righteous, and already processing a lively faith that does good works.
The following is a selection from “Justification and Sanctification” that was first published in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 2. (edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson), p. 433–438, emphasis added.
Thinking “in the fashion of Aristotle” according to human notions of progress leads to an entirely false notion of sanctification. The human notion of progress it presupposes always remains intact. The question then is how much one can accomplish according to the scheme either with or without what was called “infused grace”: how far up the ladder of progress one could get. When, in order to exalt the supposed power of such grace, it was simply asserted that concupiscence is removed in some fashion or other, the discourse tended to lapse into fiction and lose touch with the way things are. In this scheme, grace becomes a theological abstraction added only to make the scheme “Christian,” merely an added help in the scheme of what human powers properly should accomplish. But that is just pious sublimation of natural desire, the sanctified self-centeredness which Luther knew all too well did not lead to actual love of God. The scheme leads only to hypocrisy or despair. One either deceives oneself into thinking concupiscence is actually gone or despairs if one is honest enough to admit it is not.
Faith, however, born of the imputation of total righteousness, begets the beginnings of honesty as well. Such faith sees the truth of the human condition, the reality and totality of human sin, and has no need to indulge in fictions. It will see that concupiscence indeed remains and that it is sin but that God nevertheless does business with sinners. Such faith will see the fantastic magnitude of the divine act and thereby begin to hope that one day concupiscence will be gone. Such faith will begin, at least, to love the God who comes all the way to die for sinners. Such faith will begin to hate sin and to hope for that righteousness it knows it can never attain by any human power with or without “infused grace.” Only imputed righteousness grasped by faith leads to such beginnings. Faith which in the light of imputed righteousness sees the truth about sin, will cry to God “out of the depths”: “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me …,” and actually begin to “hunger and thirst after righteousness.”
When Luther speaks in this vein, he speaks of actual affections (love, hope, hatred of sin, etc.) and not about theological abstractions. The unconditional nature of the divine imputation which sets the totus iustus over against the totus peccator kindles the first beginnings of actual hope and love for God and God’s righteousness; whereas before there had been only hypocrisy or despair. There is no contradiction for Luther between the simul and the partim, once the divine imputation has destroyed all thinking “after the fashion of Aristotle.” If justification is unconditional and total, it explodes into love and good works. If not, it simply leaves the self to contend with its own righteousness and despair.
What sort of progress or growth is here envisaged? Is the transitus in the life of the Christian no longer simply an oscillation between two wholes? Under the impulse of the imputed righteousness, does one gradually improve, so that “nonimputation” covers what is left? Does one not, after all, return to point zero every time one begins again? Could one perhaps apply the popular slogan “Become what you already are” and see the Christian life as a gradual process of catching up to the totus iustus? Does one set of accomplishments form the basis for the next — as with the steps of the mystical way? Does one attain a certain approximation of the goal?
Such a scheme might suggest itself on first glance. But many go wrong here. If there were growth of that sort, progressive sanctification would mean progressive emancipation from the divine imputation. The more one progresses, the less grace one would need. […]
We cannot understand what Luther means by growth or progress in sanctification unless all ordinary human perceptions of progress are reversed, are stood on their heads. The progress Luther has in mind is not our movement toward the goal but the goal’s movement in on us. Imputed righteousness is eschatological in character; a battle is joined in which the totus iustus moves against the totus peccator. The “progress” is the coming of the kingdom of God among us. That is why complete sanctification is always the same as justification and cannot be something more added to it or separated from it. Complete sanctification is not the goal but the source of all good works. The way is not from the partial to the whole, but from the whole to the partial. Good works do not make a person good, but a good person does good works — as the famous maxim has it. Imputed righteousness is not a legal fiction but the “power of God unto salvation” which attacks sin as a total state and will eventually reduce it to nothing. It is always as a whole that it attacks, as unconditional, freely given, absolute gift. It attacks its opposite in the form of both hypocrisy and despair. The good works that result are not building blocks in the progress of the Christian; they are the fruit of the whole, the “good tree.”
Expulsion of sin is therefore quite the opposite of a morally conceivable process of sanctification. In the latter process the person remains more or less constant, and only the properties are changed. The person is the “substance” in scholastic terms, whose “accidents” are altered. One supposedly “puts off sin” as though one were peeling paint from a wall or taking heat from water. The entire picture must be reversed: The person is taken away from sin. The heart, mind, soul, affections — that which constitutes the person in the biblical sense — are taken away from the lust either for vice or for becoming a virtuous self. Imputed righteousness, precisely because it is unconditional, does not offer a new paint job. It does not merely “take sin away” and leave the moral person intact. It begins to take the person away from sin. There is a death and new life involved, which proceeds according to no immanent moral scheme. […]
In this view, justification and sanctification are a dynamic unity. Sanctification is what happens when the unconditional and eschatological event of justification breaks into one’s life. Sanctification is what happens when one acts out of faith in the gift of total and complete righteousness, when one simply takes God at God’s word. Faith issues in good works — that is, neither in laxity and vice, nor in rigorism and the lust to be a virtuous person — done for the sake of the other.
This opens up a new view of the Christian life. The movement is always from faith to works. One cannot measure Christian existence by works, concluding back from the works to one’s status before God. Every attempt to do that is a mistake. Not only does it lead to hypocrisy or despair for the individual, it also destroys all possibility of seeing the goodness of our works. It is the devil’s art, Luther says, to spoil precisely the goodness of our works. This happens when one puts works before faith, or concludes from works to the status of the Christian. For then “under the law” we will only come to the conclusion that we have not done much, that absolutes are too hard to reach, and that everything is in vain. Trying to base one’s life on works, one will lose even them.
Being Christian means to find one’s being in faith, in simply hearing the unconditional proclamation of the righteousness that is not in works. Such a position will be attacked by both the vicious and the virtuous, by the sub-Christian and the super-Christian. But if one is going to be saved from both vice and virtue, there is no other way. Hearing the divine declaration alone will set free over against works. And we must be free. The movement from faith to works must be a movement of freedom.
