Is justification by faith the centre of Paul's Gospel? 3
In this little mini-series I have been outlining D A Campbell's criticism of attempts to make the doctrine of justification by faith the theological centre of Paul's Gospel. In Campbell's view, placing JF at the centre of Paul's theology causes many other key elements of Pauline theology to be dragged and pulled out of shape, or even completely distorted. One such distortion that certain understandings of justification by faith have caused is to ideas to do with God's justice. This post will outline Campbell's critique of what he sees as gross distortions of divine justice caused by many Protestant expressions of justification by faith.Justification and the Justice of God
According to Campbell, the JF model struggles from the outset becuase it is wholeheartedly commited to placing the justice of God at the centre of the Gospel, and even more than that it focuses mainly on the retributive justice of God. With this as its primary emphasis, it throws many other of the divine attributes out of kilter:
"By orienting the model's first phase to God's retributive justice, the model in fact commits the entire theological programme to this basal understanding of the divine nature; if all else fails or does not unfold, God will still, at bottom, be retributively just. It follows from this that any different attributes - for example, mercy - must in effect be super-added to God's existing nature. They are accidental or occasional qualities, while the divine justice lies beneath them permanently. Indeed, they can only be exercised when the divine justice has been satisfied."
This criticism of some JF models and their corollaries such as penal substitution are not new, and are often dealt with by somehow viewing the cross as a means of resolving two conflicting attitudes in the Godhead, such as God's justice (which must punish sin) and God's mercy (which wants to forgive sinners). John Stott's The Cross of Christ would be a good example of this. Yet ultimately the JF model still requires that at the most basic level it is God's retributive justice that is constant, while his saving love is arbitrary. If this is what Paul thinks about atonement, he does not really articulate this idea to any great extent. Furthermore, if it were not actually the case that God's core attribute is his tendency to be retributively just, most of the evangelical expressions of JF would collapse:
"It is hard to see, then, how a God constrained by a fundamentally retributive attitude could act in a consistently and fundamentally gracious and loving fashion. These are, at bottom, different Gods." (166)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this also calls many aspects of the JF model of atonement into question, since what we see at Calvary is an accomodation of the divine love to the divine justice. Grace and love are made to fit within the retributive parameters that the JF model is already committed to, and not vice-versa. Apart from an appropriation of the benefits of the cross by believers, other humans will encounter only God's justice, will his love and mercy remain elusive.
Since the JF model has a strong emphasis on retributive justice punishing human sin, it tends towards seeing Calvary and the atonement as being chiefly punitive. Campbell quite simply suggests that no mechanism of punishment-avoidance is necessary, and that God quite freely choose to forgive sinners purely out of his own graciousness:
"Such a God can presumably just forgive that sin, and get on with the task of restoring humanity from Sin's alienating ravages. There is no need to set up some elaborate mechanism whereby punishment is meted out on that sin appropriately but the sinner is not destroyed [...] the cross would be fundamentally transformative, as against a punitive event. But the prospective JF model excludes this possibility." (167)
Finally, the final justice of God on judgment day also becomes somewhat clouded when interpreted and developed through the theological precommitments of a JF-centric soteriology:
"This fundamentally just God holds everyone accountable on the Last Day for any failure to perform good deeds. If this was to be a just scenario, however, then human beings would have to be capable of performing good deeds (as well as avoiding bad ones) [...] but the JF model also holds that people are actually incapable of doing good deeds indefinitely, and of avoiding the bad. People are fundamentally fallen and corrupt by nature [...] And this raises an awkward question. It does not seem fundamentally just in retributive terms to hold people accountable for something that they could not avoid instrinsically." (167)
This is an important and legitimate point raised by Campbell. The incapability of humanity to correctly perceive God or to do what is right (this is not the same thing as "works" in the Pauline sense, I think) and to do only evil may appear to have Pauline support (Rom 3:12), but Paul may not necessarily share the view of many of his interpreters - namely that the innate human tendency to do only evil will only be met with the retributive justice of God at the final judgment (consider Rom 2:7).
Furthermore the inability of human beings to do good (or "earn their way to heaven", to use a profoundly unbiblical and theologically confusing term) is an essential component of the JF model, yet it seems remarkably at odds with the JF emphasis on divine justice if at the same time if it insists that the punishment of human beings for sins of which they are helplessly and innately guilty is fair and just. The JF commitments to the centrality of divine retributive justice and to the impossibilty of human beings ever doing good may seem, in the final event, to depict a God who is "arbitrary, inaccurate, and at times also rather appalling" (167), and certainly one who is different to the God we find revealed in Paul's own writings.
Mike Bird has also written a good post on the Gospel and Justification here. The next post in this series will briefly consider some of the issues that JF raises for some questions in atonement.