The thing which makes sin hateful, is that by which it deserves punishment; which is but the expression of hatred. And that which renders virtue lovely, is the same with that on the account of which it is fit to receive praise and reward; which are but the expressions of esteem and love. But that which makes vice hateful, is its hateful nature; and that which renders virtue lovely, is its amiable nature. It is a certain beauty or deformity that are inherent in that good or evil will, which is the soul of virtue and vice (and not in the occasion of it), which is their worthiness of esteem or disesteem, praise, or dispraise, according to the common sense of mankind.
- Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, Part IV, Section 1)
This article will be discussing the Anti-Augustinian interpretation of the Protestant doctrine of justification. I'll use the term "Protestant" to refer to people to hold this view.
It's difficult to figure out what the point of sanctification is in the Protestant viewpoint. Protestants emphasize it as if it were very important, but it's hard to see why, considering that they believe that we are constituted entirely righteous before God and his moral law solely by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, without any input from God's work within us in our sanctification.
As Jonathan Edwards points out in our opening quotation, righteousness is nothing other than the beauty of a morally good will, a will that loves God and its neighbor (as love is the fulfillment of the law and thus the very essence of righteousness). So when God imputes righteousness to us in justification, in the Protestant view, he is accounting us to have a morally beautiful will. Protestants believe that this imputation makes us righteous, even apart from any consideration of God's work within us. Our having a morally beautiful will by God's accounting, in their view, is held to be a completely different thing from having a morally beautiful will in our actual inward condition. By means of this act of imputation, even without actually changing our will to make it morally beautiful, God credits moral beauty to it and comes to consider it morally beautiful. This is justification. He also does indeed change us inwardly, but this is held to have nothing to do with justification or the grounds by which we are accepted by God as having a morally beautiful will. (And, according to the Protestant view, the moral beauty God works into us inwardly is not actually morally beautiful to God at all, on account that it is mixed with our remaining sinfulness and the sins from our past. It is like pixie stick dust mixed within a pile of vomit--the whole thing is worthy only of being thrown out.)
Since we have a morally beautiful will by imputation, God is entirely pleased with us and accepts us as fully righteous. We are therefore worthy of the reward of the righteous, for, as Edwards puts it, "that which renders virtue lovely, is the same with that on the account of which it is fit to receive praise and reward; which are but the expressions of esteem and love." Thus, our righteousness by imputation gives us a right to be rewarded with eternal life, as God grants us the happiness that naturally follows righteousness (just as misery and punishment naturally follow sin).
So what could possibly be the point of sanctification in such a system? What could it possibly contribute? What is sanctification? It is God's making us holy. What is holiness in this context? It is moral virtue, or righteousness. Sanctification is God making us inwardly righteous. But once we have imputation, sanctification seems redundant. By imputation, we already have a complete righteousness. We already have moral virtue, a morally beautiful heart, a heart that loves God and its neighbor. Granted, we have it only by imputation and not actually inwardly; but, in the Protestant view, God finds that entirely acceptable. His moral law--that is, his love of moral beauty and his hatred of moral ugliness--is entirely satisfied with our imputed righteousness. So, if God is entirely satisfied and finds us totally morally pleasing because of the imputation alone, sanctification can add nothing, because sanctification would simply be a second helping of the same thing--moral beauty. But justification gives us complete and perfect righteousness, so there is no room for any more. God's attitude towards us cannot possibly improve from a state of complete satisfaction, pleasure, and acceptance. So it would seem he would not care at all if we are sanctified or not.
Well, if God is completely satisfied and doesn't need our sanctification to find us completely morally acceptable, is there any other purpose sanctification might serve? It's hard to see what it would be. Again, all that sanctification does is give us righteousness. But that's exactly what justification does as well. So whatever sanctification could possibly do for us, justification must be able to do just as well at least. If all I want is a bathtub full of water, and by some means I've already got that, then if you come along later and try to give me more water for my tub, I'm going to thank you kindly and decline your gift as unnecessary.
Well, someone might say, perhaps God doesn't care if we are sanctified or not, but perhaps sanctification is necessary to make us happy in heaven. After all, without sanctification, we don't love God, and if we don't love God, we can't be happy enjoying God forever. So perhaps the purpose of sanctification is to make us fit for heaven by giving us the ability to enjoy it. The problem with this is that it forgets what we've already established--that sanctification has no more to give than justification does. We need love to God to be happy in the enjoyment of God, that is true. But justification gives us total love to God, because that's what righteousness is--love to God and neighbor. Sure, justification gives us love to God only by imputation and not in our actual inward condition, but God fully accepts this as completely genuine and real. He sees us as really having, by imputation, real love to God. That's why he's totally morally pleased with the justified, without any input from any inward sanctification. So if we need love to God to be happy, well, justification again gives us everything we need, and sanctification ends up having nothing new to offer. Happiness is a necessary and intrinsic consequence and effect of love for God, just as misery is a necessary and intrinsic consequence and effect of rejection of God. When it comes to God, there is no ultimate distinction between a "natural consequence" and a "moral consequence," for God is the source of all reality and the one from whom flows the whole plan of history. And he does nothing without his will, for he is a simple being (that is, a non-compound being, a being without parts), and we cannot ultimately separate his will from any of his activity. God does all he does willingly. So misery is equally both a natural consequence of sin and a punishment for sin, and happiness is equally both a natural consequence of righteousness and a reward for righteousness. There can be, then, no ultimate distinction between having a right to happiness and having a natural tendency to happiness. Love to God--which, again, is what righteousness essentially is--has both a right and a natural tendency to happiness, for God finds it supremely good and beautiful and worthy of praise and reward. So, on the Protestant view, if I am justified--if I have imputed righteousness, or imputed love to God, which God regards as completely real and completely mine, even though it is external to me rather than internal within me--I have everything I need to be fully and eternally happy, without any input at all from sanctification. Indeed, if sanctification has any power to enable me to be happy, it would be because of the intrinsic connection between love to God, which sanctification would bring, and happiness. But, again, justification has already given us this love to God, so there is nothing left for sanctification to contribute.
So it does indeed seem that sanctification is entirely pointless within the Protestant system. Protestants insist on it as important, but there doesn't seem to be any logical reason why it would be.
Now, if this whole line of reasoning, and the conclusion it reaches, seems absurd, of course the problem is with the starting assumption of the whole argument--the assumption of the truth of the Protestant doctrine of justification, and particularly the idea that imputation alone, without any input from sanctification, gives us a real righteousness that God counts as fully real and fully ours. But of course this is absurd, for if righteousness is nothing more nor less than a morally beautiful heart or will that loves God and its neighbor, well, this is not the sort of thing that can be possessed as merely an external commodity. It is, by definition and in its very essence, an inward thing, something that can only exist inwardly. I cannot have a morally beautiful heart by a merely external imputation; I can only have a morally beautiful heart by actually having a morally beautiful heart--and that is what sanctification gives me. To say I can have moral beauty merely by external imputation is just as absurd as to say I can have physical beauty by merely external imputation. "I'm beautiful!" I cry. "Sure, my actual face is just as ugly as ever, but now I have a truly beautiful face, because God has imputed a physically beautiful face to me, with no input from any actual change in my face!" This is, of course, ridiculous. But it is just as ridiculous to talk of God making my heart morally beautiful--that is, making me righteous--merely by imputing to me a morally beautiful heart without actually making my actual heart morally beautiful. If we define "justification" to refer to "that which actually makes me righteous in God's sight," then justification can be nothing other than sanctification. They are one and the same thing. Righteousness just is sanctification, and it cannot be anything else. So the Protestant doctrine of justification is fundamentally wrong.
Before we close, it is worth noting that although this form of the Protestant doctrine of justification is illogical and absurd, there is another form it might take that avoids these problems. I call this other version the "Pro-Augustinian" interpretation of the Protestant doctrine of justification. In this view, the same Protestant language is used, distinguishing justification from sanctification, imputation from infusion, but the underlying meaning is quite different. Pro-Augustinian Protestants will say, along with Anti-Augustinian Protestants, that we are justified entirely by the imputed righteousness of Christ, and that sanctification follows this as its fruit. But, drawing from the rest of our discussion above, we can spell out the meaning of this in this way: In justification, God imputes to us the righteousness of Christ. That is, he counts the morally good heart of Christ to be ours. In principle, this gives us all we need to be right with God, for all God wants from us is a morally good heart. But, by itself, imputation is insufficient, because it is only a promise. It takes sanctification to provide the fulfillment of the promise. Imputation is God's declaration that Christ's morally beautiful heart belongs to us, but sanctification is God's actually delivering that morally beautiful heart to us. Imputation is like purchasing a book on Amazon. Sanctification is like actually getting the book in the mail. The purchase, in principle, gives you what you want, but only because it implies that the book will actually be delivered. The purchase by itself, without the delivery, is nothing but a promise of that which is not yet fulfilled. The delivery is the fulfillment. So we need both, just as we need both justification (imputation) and sanctification (inward change). (The Anti-Augustinian view would be like purchasing a book on Amazon and receiving a statement saying "The book is now yours!" and being satisfied with that by itself without needing the book to ever be actually delivered.)
The Pro-Augustinian interpretation of the Protestant doctrine agrees in substance with the Catholic view of justification. They differ mostly in semantics. Catholics include both the imputation component and the infusion component under the single heading of "justification" while Pro-Augustinian Protestants use the term "justification" to refer only to the imputation component and "sanctification" to refer to the infusion component. The Anti-Augustinian view, on the other hand, is the view the Catholic Church condemned at the Council of Trent.
For more, see here, here, and here.
Published on Wednesday within the Octave of Easter. Christ is risen! Alleluia!
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