Justification by Faith: A Matter of Life and Death

"If we can begin to wrap our minds around (justification by faith) perhaps we can be grasped by the radicality, the audaciousness, the explosiveness of the confessional point. When God imputes righteousness he makes us sinners at the same time. He makes it quite plain that we do not have righteousness in ourselves and never will. By declaring us righteous unilaterally, unconditionally for Christ's sake, he at the same time unmasks sin and unfaith. By forgiving sin, sin is revealed and attacked at the root in its totality: our unfaith, rebellion, and blindness, our unwillingness to move out of the legal prison, our refusal of life. God's justification, you see, is fully as opposed to human righteousness and pretense as it is to human unrighteousness. It cuts both ways, both at the ungodly and the super-godly. The battle is not against sin merely as 'moral' fault but against sin as 'spiritual' fault, against our supposed 'intrinsic righteousness,' pretense and hypocrisy, our supposed movement and progress, our substitution of fiction for truth. The totality of the justifying act reveals the totality of sin. Imputed righteousness makes it plain that all such 'piety' is just as sinful, indeed even more sinful, than out-and-out godlessness and denial of grace altogether. Only faith in the flat-out judgment of God is equipped to do battle with human sin. One can only be still and listen to the judge. That is the only salvation from both despair and presumption, immorality and super-morality. In the light of the creative, unconditional divine act it becomes clear not just that we have sinned and fallen short of the law, but precisely that 'all have sinned and fallen short of the glory [precisely the glory] of God' and all he has created. By speaking unconditionally, the Creator is doing again a new thing." - Gerhard Forde