Justified in the Spirit: Creation, Redemption, and the Triune God

by Frank D. Macchia

Overview

Historically, the premise of justification by grace through faith has been debated according to Protestant and Catholic understandings. It has, therefore, been limited to the question of whether justification is the reception of forgiveness by faith along or the personal transformation that occurs as we cooperate with grace. Though some recent ecumenical discussions have sought to link to the two, the results have been largely imprecise.

Here Frank D. Macchia seeks not so much to link Protestant and Catholic views as to set them both within a larger framework — the Spirit of Life as the realm of God’s favor. The resulting pneumatological theology of justification by faith is broadly Trinitarian, ecclesiological, and eschatological in orientation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802837493
Publisher:	Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Publication date:	07/26/2010
Series:	Pentecostal Manifestos (PM)
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Frank D. Macchia is professor of Christian theology at Vanguard University, Costa Mesa, California, and associate director of the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies at Bangor University, Wales (UK). His other books include The Spirit-Baptized Church: A Dogmatic Inquiry, Justified in the Spirit: Creation, Redemption, and the Triune God, and the Two Horizons Commentary volume on Revelation.

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Justified in the Spirit

Creation, Redemption, and the Triune God

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By Frank D. Macchia

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2010 Frank D. Macchia
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-3749-3

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Chapter One

Introduction

Framing the Issue of Justification and the Spirit

"All the works of God end in the presence of the Spirit." This statement by Jürgen Moltmann represents the assumption from which this book proceeds. And this insight applies as much to justification as to sanctification and glorification. At its essence, "justification" refers fundamentally to the gift of righteousness (or "just relation") that is granted to the sinner, what might be called a "rightwising" or "righteousing" of flesh. This gift of righteousness involves God's self-justification as the faithful Creator and covenant partner to creation; but it also involves the participation of the creature, for the kingdom of God is "righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit" (Rom. 14:17). Seen from the lens of the Spirit, this right relationship is a mutual indwelling that has communion and the "swallowing up" of mortality by life as its substance (2 Cor. 5:4). It is based on the self-giving embrace of the triune God and is manifested in new birth, witness, and, ultimately, resurrection. There is no lens through which to view salvation that is not realized and perfected in the presence of the Spirit and that does not, therefore, also begin there for the sinful creature.

I refer here not merely to the presence of the Spirit as realized now in the context of the Christian life, community, and witness. I refer also and especially to the eschatological fulfillment of the Spirit's indwelling in the resurrection of the dead and the communion of saints in the fullness of God's presence. One might be said to rise from the dead in the fullness of the Spirit, for the resurrection is, according to Paul, the ultimate in pneumatic existence (1 Cor. 15:44-46), in which mortality is "swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:4) or baptized in the Spirit. This connection between pneumatic and resurrected existence is why the indwelling of the Spirit in this age is the "down payment" and guarantee of the immortal existence of resurrection in the new age (Eph. 1:14; Rom. 8:11; 2 Cor. 5:5).

My point here is that there can be no justification apart from the fullness of life in the Spirit, for Paul says that we were created for this very purpose of bearing the Spirit:

For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. (2 Cor. 5:4-5)

Genesis notes that humanity became a living soul through the breath of God's Spirit (Gen. 2:7). We were made to bear the Spirit in the pneumatic existence of the Son and in communion with God. Things cannot be made right for creation unless we are granted the fulfillment of this very life for which we were created. When Paul wrote of the "justification that brings life" (Rom. 5:18), he was referring to the life of the Spirit and of the resurrection as essential to the just relationship for which we were created.

To be justified in the Spirit ultimately means being justified in Spirit possession, resurrection, glorification, and the ultimate communion of love given in the Spirit's presence (Rom. 5:5; 8:30). If we are to have any hope of a Trinitarian understanding of salvation that gathers up and integrates all soteriological categories, we must not exclude the Spirit from the substance of any of them. I refer here to the very substance of justification as a divine act and a creaturely gift in the world. The Spirit must be allowed to leave its impress on the gift of justification, mainly because the Spirit has left this same impress on the risen (justified) Christ (Rom. 1:4; 4:25), for Jesus "appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit"(1 Tim. 3:16). There is no justice for creation in Christ apart from the Spirit's presence.

It is interesting to read the history of justification theology in the light of the Spirit, since both Catholic and Protestant traditions have been ambivalent about the role of the Spirit in justification. They both have — in different ways — tended to keep the Spirit at arm's length from the substance of justification; yet they have also assumed at points a more intimate connection, which would later dominate some of the most interesting recent ecumenical efforts at rapprochement.

Many traditional Protestants describing justification, if they mention the Spirit at all, have the Spirit function from the outside, inspiring faith in the gospel but not at work as the very substance of justification itself. In fact, the emphasis has been on imputed righteousness, or the act of transferring Christ's righteous status to those who do not deserve it. The prominent image is one of a law court and is often termed "forensic." The metaphor is commonly explained so as to highlight our breaking of the law and the subsequent judgment of condemnation that we deserve. As the heavenly Father, God justly levels precisely this judgment against us; but as our advocate, Christ stands in our place as the mediator necessary to redeem us. Christ makes adequate payment on our behalf by the sacrifice of his life and his perfect fulfillment of the law. God as judge is then happily compelled to acquit those who trust in Christ, canceling their sin and removing its condemnation.

This metaphor contains enough truth to be compelling. It shows that justification is about a divine judgment that is based on the sacrifice of the cross and involves pardon for sin. Furthermore, it shows that justification is fundamentally a right relationship that is based on the merciful act of another. Indeed, "when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly" (Rom. 5:6). Nonetheless, there is much that is missing that can serve — and has served — to distort the total picture. God the Father, in this metaphor, seems to be a relatively passive spectator who happily accepts Christ's advocacy but had nothing fundamentally at stake in its outcome and played no active role in it. Even if the Father's sending Jesus as the advocate is somehow included, the Spirit is entirely absent. The Spirit in this story is, at best, reduced to the instrumental function of communicating the declaration of freedom to the criminal's soul or inspiring trust in the judge (or the advocate). If the sacrifice of Christ as the advocate were a Trinitarian event that had anything to do with the resurrection or with Pentecost, one would not know it from the telling of this story. One would also not know from this story that our sin is not the mere breaking of a commandment but our deeper alienation from life. There are such serious theological gaps in this metaphor that it obscures as much as it clarifies.

Even if one highlights the legal overtones of justification, the Spirit cannot be excluded as a major player in the drama. After all, the Spirit is an advocate, too (John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7), and a witness to what God has done through Christ (John 15:26). The court scene is incomplete without its transformation through the Spirit into a circle of divine advocacy and witness, life and communion that mercifully draw in the condemned sinner, who is alienated from life. Since the gift of justice through God's offer of life and communion faces opposition in the world, justification through Christ and the Spirit involves witness and vindication. The judgment enacted pardons by engulfing the condemned in the ultimate victory of life, vindicating God and the repentant sinner over against the opposing forces of alienation and death.

This development of the court scene would cause it to look very unlike any legal setting familiar to us. If developed further, it bursts the entire metaphor to pieces. Perhaps this is the point. No metaphor of legal exchange or process can ultimately capture justification in the Spirit: the Spirit is an abundant and overflowing gift that ultimately defies legal explanations. The very fact that God plays the role of judge, advocate, and witness in this "trial" should tell us that this is not the kind of trial that we can identify with anything familiar to human experience. The fact that justification brings life in the midst of death (Rom. 5:18) tells us that here we are dealing with something that transcends a mere legal acquittal. Justification in Scripture has legal overtones but cannot adequately be grasped by any legal metaphor. Righteousness is not imputed; it is accessed or participated in through faith and by the life of the Spirit.

The traditional Protestant defender of forensic justification might protest at this point that the Spirit is only properly substantial to salvation under the rubric of new birth and sanctification. This is because the inclusion of the Spirit as essential to justification bases our favor with God in significant part on the quality of the creature's spiritual or ethical life. We could respond to this protest in a number of ways. First, one cannot collapse the Spirit into the quality of the believer's spiritual or ethical life. This subjective understanding of pneumatology, which identifies the Spirit with the enlightened religious consciousness or with moral progress, is precisely what is wrong with the Protestant soteriology that dominated the modern era prior to Barth and left an influence even beyond him. The gift of the indwelling Spirit is also quite objective to the believer in the sense that the Spirit proceeds from the heavenly Father to win God's favor for us in the Christ event and to communicate this favor to us in a divine embrace that is integral to — but also distinct from — our transformed responses. The indwelling Spirit bears witness to our spirits within a divine embrace that then allows the Spirit to also witness through us or through the new life imparted to us (Rom. 8:15-16). There are thus both objective and subjective elements to the Spirit's justification of life.

Our transformed witness participates in the Spirit's witness to righteousness and may be said to "incarnate" justification in history; but our witness to divine justice cannot be simply identified with the Spirit's in an unqualified sense. Only in the resurrection can we speak of perfection and fullness of life and witness in the Spirit. Therefore, the Spirit's transformation of the creature through resurrection/glorification cannot be reduced to any penultimate schema of moral or spiritual progress. We are speaking here about the divine victory over alienation and death in the resurrection from the dead. This liberty and transformation granted by the justifying Spirit in the immortal existence of the risen body is outside the reach of flesh, even its most noble intentions and accomplishments this side of eternity, for "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable" (1 Cor. 15:50). Paul's intentions concerning the law were good, but he was still "unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin" (Rom.7:14) and in need of liberation "from this body of death" (Rom. 7:24). Only the first fruits of the Spirit gave Paul the foretaste of the liberty involved in the immortal existence yet to come (Rom. 8:23). Paul did not work his way to the new birth (a nonsensical thought), and even the good works inspired by the Spirit could not produce the resurrection from the dead. Basing justification in part on the Spirit's embrace, even its immediate effect in the new birth and in its ultimate fulfillment in the resurrection, does not base it on our accomplishments — spiritual or otherwise. We can no more win justification by works than we can raise ourselves from the dead.

Second, not only can we not collapse the Spirit into the subjective life of the believer; we cannot separate the cross from its goal in the impartation of life. Though the cross is indeed an event of reconciliation in its own right, it also mediates reconciliation through the resurrection and Pentecost by mediating the Spirit. As the Pentecostal pioneer Frank Ewart wrote, "Calvary unlocked the flow of God's love, which is God's very nature, into the hearts of his creatures." The Spirit blasphemed at the cross is the hidden advocate of creation present within the experience of abandonment and death suffered by the Son in his self-giving for creation. This is the Spirit that empowered Christ's self-sacrifice on the cross (Heb. 9:14), raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 1:4), and was poured by Christ onto creation to impart God's favor and to continue to advocate for — and witness to — divine justice in the world. One cannot, therefore, separate the cross from the resurrection and Pentecost along the lines of justification and sanctification. These events represent a seamless mediation of the Spirit, the mediation of life and justice in communion with God. Grace is not a divine disposition but an abundantly poured-out gift of divine self-giving to the sinner. The right relationship is not a distant agreement but an intimate communion of love involving a mutual indwelling.

The "rightwising" of sinful flesh occurs for the one-sidedly forensic metaphor described above only as the distant Judge's declaration to be believed. To be sure, this declaration is thought to have many rich consequences, but none of these has anything essentially to do with justification itself. Without justification in the Spirit we could end up neglecting the insight into the cross as the mediation of the Spirit or into the Christ of the cross as the single seed that produces "many seeds" by dying (John 12:24) or who draws people in by being lifted up to a shameful death (John 12:30). Neglected is the resurrection of the second Adam as the "life-giving spirit" (1 Cor. 15:45), who is elected to be the "firstborn among many brothers" (Rom. 8:29). Unclear would be the seamless flow from the cross to Pentecost as the means by which the Spirit is mediated to sinful flesh, and the powerless are both embraced and pardoned by the divine presence, the divine embrace (Rom. 5:5-6). In short, the prominent New Testament description of Jesus as the baptizer in the Spirit is missing from a one-sided forensic justification theology based only on the cross. Therefore, absent from the essence of justification is the eschatological reach of the Spirit-empowered witness to God's justice in the world or its fulfillment in the resurrection and glorification of flesh in Christ's image. Neglected is the communal dimension of justification among the radically "other" and the many.

Third, rather than justification and sanctification representing two thoroughly distinct stages or dimensions in one's salvation, they are to be viewed as two overlapping and mutually complementary lenses through which to view the entire rightwising of creation. How indeed can one eliminate from justification the advocacy and witness of the Spirit to and through the community of the faithful throughout history and in eschatological fulfillment? Neither can we view the gift of the Spirit as a mere addendum to justification nor a collateral gift only logically connected to justification by Christ. All soteriological categories occur in Christ and in the Spirit, or "in the name of Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God"(1 Cor. 6:11). In fact, throughout the pages that follow I will propose that divine koinonia, or the mutual indwelling of God as Father, Son, and Spirit, is the most fruitful context for qualifying the rigid distinction that has existed more broadly in the West between creation, justification, and sanctification.

Allow me to shift gears at this point and speak of the typically Catholic metaphor of justification. Inspired early on especially by Augustine in the fifth century, the traditional Catholic metaphor has been more oriented to the infirmary than the courtroom when it comes to justification. The infirmary is not an image entirely foreign to Luther, to be sure, but it dominates the Latin West prior to the Reformation. The focus here is not on condemned criminals who are acquitted; rather, it is on persons critically wounded in sin against the Lord of creation, but who are mercifully taken up by the Lord and gradually brought back to health. Under Aquinas in the thirteenth century (and under the influence of Aristotelian anthropology as well as a church prominently concerned with penance), this image took on a strongly moral direction, so that the process of healing was understood predominantly in the context of moral formation. The ethically misguided soul is healed by grace in order to bring forth the fruit of justice. This is the prominent image of justification in the Catholic West.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Justified in the Spirit by Frank D. Macchia Copyright © 2010 by Frank D. Macchia. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Part 1 Reaching for the Spirit Contrasting Models of Justification

1 Introduction 3

Framing the Issue of Justification and the Spirit

2 Imparted Righteousness 15

The Catholic View of Justification

3 Imputed Righteousness 38

The Protestant View of Justification

4 Justification and Spirit Baptism 75

The Exploration of a Pentecostal Metaphor

Part 2 Justification for Us The Basis of Justification

5 The Promise of the Spirit 103

Justifying Righteousness in the Old Testament

6 Apart from Us 131

Justification and the Spirit-Indwelt Christ

7 Embracing Us 186

Justification and Spirit Baptism

Part 3 Justification Among Us The Eschatological Fulfillment of Justification

8 Participation 221

By the Spirit through Faith

9 The Spirit and the Other 258

The Justified Community

10 The Embrace of the Spirit 293

Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Justification

11 Justified in the Spirit 313

A Concluding Reflection

Bibliography 319

Author Index 334

Subject Index 337

Scripture Index 339

Editorial Reviews

It is a necessary and new perspective to see the justification of the sinner embraced by the life-giving Spirit. Frank Macchia’s book is a great step forward toward a full Trinitarian concept of salvation. . . . A rich book full of solutions to old theological problems.”
— Jürgen Moltmann
University of Tübingen

“Argues persuasively that Christian teaching about the Spirit (pneumatology) has much to offer to a correct understanding of justification. . . . We have here a book of singular consequence.”
— William G. Rusch
Yale Divinity School

“A noted systematician and ecumenist, Macchia gleans from his own Pentecostal tradition in his intriguing revisioning and reorientation of the major soteriological concept of justification by faith.”
— Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen
Fuller Theological Seminary
University of Helsinki

“With Macchia’s Justified in the Spirit Pentecostal systematic theology has come of age. . . . Catholics and Protestants will no longer be able to attribute a secondary role to the Spirit, while Pentecostals will discover the hidden treasures that their movement signifies.”
— Ralph Del Colle
Marquette University

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