Through the advent, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the forgiveness of God and justification of sinners has come to those who repent and believe the gospel.
That brings me to continue my summary of Calvin’s doctrine of justification by faith. Christ was born so we would be put right with God. Amazing is it not? God himself in his self-giving in his Son put us right with him so he could be our Father.
1. Andreas Osiander (1498-1552), a German guy thought and wrote about justification, but Calvin thougth it was wrong so he took him on. Basically Osiander taught that the sinner is justified by Christ by becoming essentially one with him ontologically; having Christ’s essence mixed, co-mingled with the sinner.
Calvin defines the idea this way, “He (Osiander) pretends that we are substantially righteous in God by the infusion both of his essence and of his quality... Then he throws in a mixture of substances by which God ‘transfusing himself into us, as it were,’ makes us part of himself” (Pg., 730,731).
2. Now it is very true that the justified sinner partakes of Christ’s nature, possesses the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, is a member of Christ and has Christ as his Head; in short he is in union with Christ. But a distinction must be made. By faith we receive the righteousness of Christ’s Person, not His very essence.
3. Osiander also asserted that if the sinner does not receive the essence of Christ, a sinner’s nature will remain corrupt and sinful vices will grow. Osiander was mistaken and many still are on this point. Why, by failing to realize that righteousness and sanctification are “jointly inseparable” (Pg., 732).
For Calvin, the goal of justification was sanctification. Calvin is very clear that there is no justification without sanctification. Karl Barth explains that for Calvin, "It is certainly not in virtue of our holiness that we enter into fellowship with God. We have to stand in this already if, engulfed by His holiness, we are to follow where He calls. But it belongs to His glory that this should take place, for there can be no consortium between Him and our iniquity. We cannot, therefore, glory in God without—and this is for Calvin the basic act of penitence and the new life—renouncing all self-glorying and thus beginning to live to God’s glory. Thus the righteousness of God calls for symmetry, a consensus, which must be actualized in the obedience of the believer. It calls for a confirmation of our adoption to divine sonship. For this reason the one grace of God is necessarily sanctifying grace as well." Church Dogmatics Vol.4. Pt.2. Pg 506.
Calvin when on to say too, that there is no sanctification without justification. After all as Calvin said, "Repentance cannot exist without true faith." For how can a man truly repent before God if he does not know he belongs to God, and how can he know he belongs to God until has been grasped by God's grace? “Whomever, therefore, God receives into grace, on them he at the same time bestows the spirit of adoption (Rom. 8:15), by whose power he remakes them to his own image” (Pg., 732).
4. What about faith itself? Does it of itself possess the power to justify? No. Why? “For if faith justified of itself or through some intrinsic power, so to speak, as it is always weak and imperfect it would effect this only in part; thus the righteousness that conferred a fragment of salvation upon us would be defective” (Pg., 733).
5. Properly speaking it is God through Christ who justifies and faith is “a kind of vessel” (Pg., 733); the instrumental cause of justification.
6. Now about union with Jesus Christ. This justification which is wrought by God, through the Person and work of Christ brings with it a mystical union with Christ, but not a union with him in his essence. Calvin explains this union in these words. “Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed...because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body, because he deigns to make us one with him. For this reason, we glory that we have fellowship of righteousness with him” (Pg., 737). We rejoice, not that we are him (we are not united to him in his essence), but that we are his brothers, his joint heirs, his servants, God’s sons, and part of the Temple of God in Christ.
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