This thread asks: on what ground is a person counted righteous by God?
⭐ Remember one thing first, because the whole thread grows out of it — the divide starts from one word read in two ways. The Latin iustificare (to justify) can be read either way, and both readings are good grammar. Augustine and those who followed him read it as to make righteous: justification is God truly pouring righteousness into the sinner, so that he really becomes righteous — it is a process. Luther and those who followed him read it as to declare righteous: justification is God declaring that the sinner's relationship with him is right, while the righteousness always remains Christ's — it is a verdict. A thousand years of division began with how this one word should be read.
⚠ Compare thread 3, which comes before this one; it has two things of the same kind. The Latin rendering of Romans 5:12, in him, held up the Western doctrine of original sin; and what Augustine and Pelagius each called free will were two different definitions. This thread records two more cases of its own: Georg Major, as we put it, stumbled not over theology but over how he built a sentence; and Menno misread Luther when he attacked him, while others who read Menno did not necessarily read him right either. ⭐ A good part of the divisions in the history of doctrine are, first of all, problems of language and impression — this module has now recorded it five times.
⚠ Before reading, know three more things.
First, this thread has two verdicts, not one: Session VI of the Council of Trent in 1547, and the Lutheran Formula of Concord in 1577. Each verdict is binding on its own side, and neither recognizes the other.
Second, the three great quarrels over justification in the 16th century were all fought inside the Lutheran church (the Antinomian Controversy, the Majoristic Controversy and the Osiandrian Controversy), while the great quarrels inside the Reformed church were fought over predestination — because justification is the center of Lutheran theology, not of Reformed theology. A church only really fights when its own most important pillar is touched.
Third, ⚠ in the sources this site uses, justification as a contested question basically begins in the 16th century; before that it has only two points, Augustine and Aquinas. We do not pretend that this thread has an unbroken line running down from the apostles.
⚠ Finally, this thread has no closing point. It was not ended by a verdict; it was bypassed. In 1675 Pietism moved the whole question somewhere else: from is righteousness imputed or infused? to is this question still the main thing? And moving it settled nothing: from Menno (16th century) to Spener (17th century) to Wesley (18th century), the same charge was made three times, which shows that both sides of this thread were there all along.
⚠ There is a gap we must admit to readers: the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by Catholics and Lutherans in 1999, is the closest this thread has come to a real closing point in four hundred and fifty years — but the three sources this site now uses were all written before it or did not get to include it, so this module has no node for it for now. We do not pretend that this thread stops in 1791.
⭐ The two sides were fighting over the two ends of the same thing: in whom, in the end, does the righteousness lie?
What the infusion view (Augustine — Aquinas — Trent) fears: if righteousness is only declared, with no real change inside the person, then a person could be saved and go on doing evil as before.
What the imputation view (Luther — Calvin — Cranmer) fears: if a person must first really become righteous before being counted righteous, then salvation depends on what the person has become, and the conscience never has peace.
⚠ But please do not read this thread as two camps. There are at least four positions: besides the two above, Osiander said that righteousness is the divine nature of Christ dwelling within (neither infused nor imputed), and the Anabaptist side, Menno's, would not accept justification being spoken of as a legal matter at all.
⭐ And both sides answered the same counter-question, so once justified, may I go on sinning as before? Calvin, as González sums it up, said that the justified Christian seeks to show the fruits of justification; Cranmer said, as Olson gives his words, that a faith without good works is a dead, devilish, false and counterfeit faith; and Article IV of the Formula of Concord rejected both extremes — it says neither “That good works are necessary to salvation” nor “That good works are detrimental to salvation”. ⚠ The disagreement is real, but no side ever held that one may go on sinning as before.
⭐ A hundred and fifty years later, the two sides still feared the same two things: Pietism feared that justification would become empty words that do not change a person; Lutheran orthodoxy feared that the conscience would again be held hostage by its own performance. What is truly stable on this thread is not the answer but these two fears.