My views on the doctrine of justification, per se, have actually remained pretty consistent since at least 2000 or 2001, around twenty years ago. During my earlier Christian years, back during high school (early to mid 90s), I know I held a basically Augustinian doctrine of justification, which is basically the doctrine of the Catholic Church (as can be seen here and here). During college (1996-2000), after I became significantly influenced by Calvinism, I thought a lot about the doctrine of justification. I remember holding a view that I thought was faithful to the Reformed doctrine of justification but which took seriously the concerns of the Augustinian view, but I don't remember precisely what that view was or to what extent it really differed in substance from my earlier or my later Augustinianism.
But in 2000 or 2001, I remember very clearly coming to realize that the Augustinian view of justification was correct, and that this would bring me into conflict with the Reformed doctrine. At that time, we (my wife and first child) had recently moved to Utah and had joined the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I was a gung-ho Calvinist (at least in terms of the "doctrines of grace," though I disagreed with some other aspects of the Reformed system) and a staunch enemy of Arminianism. As I very strongly identified as a Calvinist and considered the Calvinist doctrines of grace to be expressive of what I felt was at the core of my theology and worldview, I was not particularly interested in disagreeing with Calvinists over the doctrine of justification, which is a very important doctrine and one which Calvinists often see as a lynchpin of their whole worldview (so much so as to basically consider any theology that doesn't hold to their doctrine on the subject not really fully Christian at all). Nevertheless, I was strongly convinced that the Augustinian view was correct and the Reformed doctrine wrong, and I was not going to pretend otherwise. I informed our pastor of my position, and he made some weak attempts to persuade me out of it, but no real conflict or rift arose out of the matter. I was a great fan of Martin Luther's book The Bondage of the Will, and I had noticed that Luther seemed to hold an Augustinian view of justification rather than the later merely-forensic Protestant view that later Lutherans and Reformed would accept. I read some other places in Luther which seemed to confirm me in this impression, so I was very interested to make use of Luther (and, of course, of St. Augustine) as an ally in my attempts to defend my position to my pastor as truly Christian and biblical and not inimical to the heart of the Reformed worldview overall (and even as a position more consistent with that very heart). During this time period, which lasted from 2000 or 2001 to 2003, I wrote a paper defending the Augustinian view and critiquing the Reformed view. I wrote the paper either in 2001 or 2002. I know it was completed by April of 2002. I gave it to my pastor to read. I am very grateful that I kept track of that paper, which I also published on my blog much later in 2015.
As I mentioned, I was very interested in avoiding a rift between myself and the Reformed world over such an important doctrine, and so I tried very hard to think of how I might make my position seem more palatable to Reformed sensibilities or even to reconcile the two positions. In the summer of 2003, I thought of a way to reconcile the positions. The Reformed view says that we are justified--made righteous before God--only by the righteousness of Christ imputed to us (credited to our account), while the Augustinian view says that we are justified by the righteousness of Christ being infused into us by the Holy Spirit, making us actually internally righteous. In the Reformed view, Christ satisfies for our sins and merits righteousness for us, and his satisfaction and righteousness become ours by a legal imputation which is complete and sufficient for justification apart from any internal moral transformation of the sinner (though the Reformed say that a person who is justified will be internally transformed as an accompaniment of justification). In the Catholic view, Christ satisfies for our sins and merits righteousness for us, and that satisfaction and righteousness become ours by the Holy Spirit infusing their virtue into our hearts, causing us to repent and turn from our sins and to love God and our neighbors. But I figured out a way that I could interpret the Reformed view to be consistent with the Augustinian view: I could think of "imputation" as Christ's righteousness being, as it were, "deeded over to us," made ours (much as one might sign a contract and thus come into possession of a house, or a car, etc.). Then, that righteousness is infused into us, making us actually righteous. Since the righteousness by which we are justified is Christ's originally and not ours, and becomes ours only by a gift of grace, we can only come into possession of it if God graciously transfers it to our ownership. So I took "imputation" to be God's transferring Christ's righteousness to our ownership, while I took internal sanctification by the Spirit to be God's applying that transferred righteousness to our lives and thus making us experientially what imputation makes us legally. Justification and sanctification, in this way of thinking, would be like the difference between coming to own a house and coming to actually move into the house. Or, to use a better analogy, it is as if, in order to get into some fancy club, one were required to wear a tuxedo. I don't own a tuxedo, but a friend gives me one freely. His decision to transfer the tuxedo to my possession would be the equivalent of justification, while my actually putting on the tuxedo would be the equivalent of sanctification. If I want to get into the club, I cannot simply legally own a tuxedo; I must be wearing it. But I can only wear it because it was "imputed" to me; that is, its ownership was legally transferred to me.
I felt that this way of reading the Reformed view was faithful to that view while also reconciling it with the Augustinian view. As I had previously interpreted the Reformed view, it seemed there was a rift because the Augustinians held that one becomes right before God by an actual inward transformation of the moral character while the Reformed held that one becomes right before God merely and solely by a legal imputation exclusive of inward moral transformation. But in this new interpretation, the gap seemed to be bridged. We could be said to have the legal basis to be right before God by mere imputation, because by imputation alone Christ's righteousness comes to be legally ours; but, in actual experience, we require that righteousness to be infused within us and transform us before we will be acceptable to God's moral view. The legal is not enough, because the legal would be merely a dead fiction unless what is legal also becomes experientially real. And yet the legal is fully sufficient, not experientially, but legally. The house does me no good experientially until I actually move into it, and yet the house is legally mine purely by the legal contract that deeds it over to me. Thus the Reformed concern that legal imputation alone be the legal basis of justification is preserved, and so is the Augustinian concern that our actually, experientially, being righteous in the sight of God be a product of our actual moral transformation.
So I felt from this time forward that I could consider the Reformed view my own and use the Reformed language to express it. I went on to become a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Occasionally, I would preach or lecture on the doctrine of justification, and in such sermons and lectures I would express my own theology on the subject (as I did, for example, in this sermon from somewhere around 2010). I always felt less hostile towards the Catholic doctrine of justification than most of my Reformed companions, because I knew that I myself could express my own doctrine in their Augustinian terms, even though I could also express it in Reformed terms. My reconciliation with the Reformed position did not come from any doctrinal change on my part from my Augustinian views, but only from my ability to interpret the Reformed view as consistent with the Augustinian view. (You can see here some documentation that illustrates what I thought about the Catholic doctrine of justification during this time period.) For most of this time period (2003-2015), I felt I totally agreed both with the substance and with the form of expression of the Catholic Augustinian view of justification per se (while disagreeing on some other matters related to the doctrine), and I sometimes felt annoyed that the Reformed had such an antipathy to the Catholic view that I could not freely express myself in Augustinian terms without setting off unnecessary alarm bells. Towards the very end of this period, perhaps from about 2014 to 2015, I began to think that maybe the Reformed had a point in objecting to the Augustinian terminology (but not the substance of the Augustinian view). Perhaps St. Augustine's language, by not clearly distinguishing between imputation and infusion, led to a misunderstanding in which people might think that they gained justification, not by a sheer act of God's mercy granting to us what is not our own, but by somehow earning it by cooperating with God's grace and doing good works. But I never thought that that was what St. Augustine or the faithful Augustinians who followed him, including many Catholics, really believed.
In 2015, I become convinced of the truth of Catholicism over against Protestantism. (You can read my whole narrative on this here.) Obviously, this led to a significant revival of my interest in the relationship between the Augustinian and the Protestant doctrines of justification. I found my old Augustinian paper and published it on my blog. Over the past few years, I've written several articles on the doctrine of justification. Justification posed no problem for me in becoming Catholic, for obvious reasons. I had already had for decades an Augustinian view on the subject. My views on the nature of justification, per se, didn't have to change at all in substance. And now I could speak with less constraint about my views regarding the Augustinian form of the doctrine and examine more publicly and directly in writing and dialogue the compatibility or lack thereof between the Catholic and the Reformed doctrines. I began to put forward two different interpretations of the Protestant doctrine of justification--the one I held to before I learned how I might reconcile the two positions, and the one that enabled me to find such a reconciliation. I eventually started calling the former interpretation the Anti-Augustinian view and the latter the Pro-Augustinian view. (I laid out the two positions and introduced this terminology for categorizing them in this article.) And I have been trying for some time to get my Reformed friends and acquaintances to dialogue with me about these subjects, wanting to see what they have to say about these two different interpretations of their doctrine, although, for some reason, I have found generally what appears to be a lack of interest in doing so. I do not know if this comes from their thinking me disingenuous in raising the issue, as if I was pretending to want to dialogue only in order to try to convert them to Catholicism (this is false), if they are reluctant to engage with this subject because they are unsure themselves what to think about it, if they are simply very busy (which is understandable!), etc.
My interest in dialoguing with Reformed people on this subject has increased over the past year or so, because I have increasingly been coming to suspect that my so-called Pro-Augustinian interpretation of the Protestant position is not really consistent with the original meaning of the Protestant language and with how Reformed poeple have typically understood their own position. I am beginning to think that, when I developed this interpretation back in 2003, rather than coming up with a legitimate interpretation of the Reformed view that allowed me to reconcile it with the Augustinian view as I thought I was doing, all I did was figure out how to express the Augustinian view--which, in substance, is contrary to the Reformed view, as I had previously thought--in Reformed language, thus hiding what would be fundamentally objectionable to the Reformed mind if it was understood what I really meant by what I was saying. But I am still uncertain on this point. I also suspect that there is perhaps some greater nuance here: While the Augustinian view might be at odds in substance with the Reformed view, perhaps Reformed people hold a genuine mix of Augustinian and Reformed ideas in their thinking--not taking the Reformed view fully to its logical conclusion but watering it down a bit with Augustinian ways of thinking. Perhaps it is this Augustinian element in the Reformed psyche that has made it easier for me to see the Reformed view and the Augustinian view as reconcilable, even if, strictly speaking in terms of the doctrines themselves taken to their logical conclusions, they are not. But, again, I am not entirely certain on these points. I feel I would benefit greatly from some real, substantial dialogue with Reformed people on this subject.
ADDENDUM 1/13/22: I recently came across an email conversation I had back in 2001 with a Latter-day Saint friend in which I was trying to explain to him certain aspects of classical Christian theology. In that email, among other things, I articulate my view at that time of the doctrine of justification and the difference between the Protestant and the Augustinian doctrines. Here is a snippet from that email, dated 4/29/01:
Let me explain a little more cleary how works fit into salvation in my theology and in the theology of most Evangelicals (including BSF'ers). First of all, you mention that you know Christians have some concept of reward that nobody has as yet been able to quantify for you. Well, let me do a little long-needed quantifying :). There are two different understandings of the reward issue which are connected with two different doctrines of justification, the Augustinian doctrine and the Protestant doctrine. I am an Augustinian, while almost all Evangelicals hold the Protestant view. The Protestant view is this: We cannot earn God's favor by our works, either before or after being converted by God's grace, for two reasons: 1. Our works in this life are mixed with sin and therefore are judged insufficient by God's standards and merit his condemnation rather than his favor, and 2. Even if we could do perfect works (and we will in heaven), they would not pass God's judgement for reward because they are judged in the context of all of our works. So if you sin once, you have forever lost all possibility of earning God's reward by your works, because the sin destroys the perfection of your slate, and perfection is the only thing God accepts. So how do works fit in? Well, those who are regenerated by God's grace have a new heart put within them which causes them to do good works. That doesn't mean that good works just "happen" to us without our will, because the new heart produces good works in us by giving us a new will which desires to do good works and therefore does them. The impartation of a holy character within us which drives us to obey God always accompanies the forgiveness of our sins; you never have one without the other. Not only this, but God, having forgiven our sins, now gives our good works a gratuitous estimate. In otherwords, while truly speaking, our good works do not deserve God's reward, yet they are seen outside of the context of our sins (because they are forgiven) and thus they are gratuitously estimated and granted the reward due to perfectly good works. This is how works fit in in traditional Protestantism.
Now for Augustinianism (my view): Augustinians hold, like the Protestants, that we can do nothing to earn God's favor, because we are sinners by nature. However, Augustinians equate justification with sanctification. That is, we believe that God justifies us, makes us worthy of God's favor, not by simply gratuitously estmating our works in light of forgiveness, but by giving us a new heart which truly is worthy of God's favor. We believe that, by God's grace, we are given new hearts to do God's will (in this we say the same as the Protestant view), and that the righteousness which flows from our new heart IN FACT does merit God's approval and favor (in this we are different). This does not give us a ground for boasting, because while we do gain God's approval by our righteousness, yet this righteousness was not produced from us or from our will but is totally the gift of God's unmerited favor. It is like if someone puts their money in your bankrupt account, you really do have money in your account, it is your money, you can really buy things with it, and yet it is not there because you produced it by earning it but because someone gave it to you as a gift. So ultimately it is not your money but your friends, and you do not attribute it to yourself but to your friend. Also, while the regenerate do have a new, righteous heart, yet our nature is not perfectly renewed in this life. We still have the remnant of the old sinful nature with which we wrestle all of our lives, so we cry out in groaning like Paul in Romans 7. But the God who began his work in us when we were yet dead in sin will not be stopped by remaining imperfections (however ugly, and they are that!) but will complete what he has begun, and this is our hope. We do not please God perfectly in this life, but we are going in the right direction and this pleases him, and he will someday complete his work in us and make us spotless images of his perfect Son. And he will then have a perfect delight in his reflection in us to all eternity as we delight perfectly in him. If this discussion raises any more questions, do not hesitate to ask. It is hard to be thorough and completely clear in this context.
My father was also involved in this conversation, and in a reply email to me (same date) he had this to say about my comments on justification:
That's a really good response. One thing that I haven't been quite aware of, though, I guess, is the distinction that you are making with the "Augustinian" vs. "Protestant" positions on justification. The "Augustinian" position, as you describe it, sounds a lot like the traditional Catholic position, as I understand it. I thought you probably did not agree with that, or at least didn't agree completely. And in this context, I assume that Calvin probably held the "Protestant" position, or at least something close to it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
ADDENDUM 6/30/22: A few days ago, I found an old CD which turned out to contain, among other things, a collection of documents I wrote up back in 2003 while I was coming to the conclusion that the gap between the Augustinian and the Reformed doctrines of justification could be bridged. The writings document my attempt to process this question from the beginning, where I seem skeptical that the gap could be bridged, to the end, where I was just about ready to conclude that it could be. See here for those documents and my commentary on them.
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