a dash of mortality
The fifth sermon in Bullinger’s first decade of sermons dealt with the power (virtue) of faith. Faith isn’t inert; faith has power. Faith isn’t bare information; faith actually does something. Bullinger’s purpose in taking a whole sermon to describe the power of faith is to clear the ground for the topic of his sixth sermon: ‘that the faithful are justified by faith without the law and works’.
Justification was one of the most significant battlegrounds of the Protestant Reformation. It wasn’t that the church previously hadn’t taught on justification, it had. The problem is that justification from Augustine onwards became complicated. Augustine looked at justification as more or less a summary term for the whole of redemption, being right with God. He taught that justification was progressive. His basis for this in scripture isn’t hard to see. One grows in one’s Christian faith and Christian life. The Apostles, especially the Apostle Paul, connect justification with faith throughout their writings. Growth in grace and growth in faith are scripturally commanded for Christians.
Augustine’s emphasis on growth in justification was not that man was in the driver’s seat for his own salvation; he’d written extensively against the Pelagians for believing exactly that. Augustine also had a big view of his own sin. Read his Confessions for a brilliant meditation on the extent of God’s grace through redemption as shown in his own life. But in his doctrine of progressive justification Augustine set the stage for a battle that would be fought over a thousand years after his own life.
By the late Middle Ages, Augustine’s understanding of progressive justification was more or less the norm for the church. If you look at a theologian such as Thomas Aquinas you can see that his use of justification is very different to how Protestants today use the term, and yet there is something very compelling about Thomas on justification. Thomas’ emphasis on growth in the Christian life and in Christian character (he calls it virtue) is far superior to anything that exists today in Protestantism. If Thomas seems to have lost justification in his doctrine; we seem to have lost sanctification in ours.
With a stroke of genius, the Reformed Scholastics (Protestant churchmen who used the scholastic method and purged it of Roman Catholic doctrine while still keeping what was valuable in historic catholic theology) took the doctrine of progressive justification and separated it into two distinct but inseparable doctrines: justification and sanctification. Justification deals with man’s state before God; it’s a legal issue, and it’s pretty black and white: one is either justified or one is not. It’s entirely a work of God through Jesus, and it’s static. Justification cannot be changed. Sanctification deals with man’s nature through a work of the Holy Spirit; it’s also something man actually participates in. Sanctification is progressive. One can either grow in sanctification or weaken one’s sanctification.
Augustine simply confused two things together as one, and his confusion persists in the Catholic Church to this day. Early in the Reformation these two doctrines were separated (with better explanations two or three generations into the Reformation).
Bullinger is a second-generation Reformer and is thoroughly Protestant, but he still gets justification a bit muddled. In his sixth sermon he uses the terms ‘sanctification’ and ‘adoption’ in connection with justification in a way that’s confusing if not actually unhelpful. Personally, I take great encouragement from this. Even a massive light like Henry Bullinger could get a few things wrong from time to time. And it seems he clarified his theology a few years later in the Second Helvetic Confession where justification is kept separate from the language of sanctification and adoption. Nice to know some of the greats were mere mortals too.
What is valuable in Bullinger’s sermon is his emphasis on justification by faith apart from works. This is what was wrong with Augustine’s (and Thomas’) handling of the doctrine: if my justification before God is progressive and I can either grow in it or shrink in it, then I have something to offer God in my own salvation. Augustine (and Thomas) would have argued passionately against this view, but that is the necessary consequence of his argument. Bullinger urges his listeners to look at justification as something that God alone can do, and he does it through creating faith in his people (see his fourth sermon, on faith).
Opening up the scriptures from Romans, Galatians, Isaiah, and many more passages, Bullinger explains that Jesus bore not only a generic punishment for sin on the cross for the whole world, he actually suffered in the place of actual men and women who would trust in Christ for salvation. Jesus suffered and died to make atonement, to bear the actual sentence of death against actual sinners.
This teaches that by the pain of Christ our punishment is taken away. Look what pain, penalty, punishment, or correction was due to us, and the very same thing was laid on the Lord himself. For that cause was the Lord wounded and received stripes; with them he healed us. But he would not have healed us at all if we still needed to look for wounds, stripes, and strokes, that is to say, punishment, for our sins. The death of Christ, therefore, is a full satisfaction for our sins.
Bullinger points to what believers do suffer in this life. Are these to be seen as God’s punishment? No, for ‘those afflictions, however patiently they are suffered by the faithful, they do not wash sins away nor can they make satisfaction for sin.’ He urges believers to look to 1 Peter 5.12-13 and remember that earthly afflictions are a participation in Christ, thus reminding us that our sorrows here in this life have a purpose. Even in clarifying doctrine Bullinger is first and foremost a pastor shepherding his sheep.
But how do believers receive this justification? How are the benefits of Christ received by those who trust in him? By faith. Walking through a powerful tour of the New Testament, Bullinger shows that from Adam onward man’s works cannot provide satisfaction for sin or earn merit with God. We are sinners, Jew and Gentile alike. Justification must be God’s free gift, otherwise man can claim to have earned his forgiveness. Good works come as a necessary consequence of faith and are the fruit of justification, but our good works are themselves no part of our justification. Against the Roman Catholic claim that a Protestant understanding of justification would undermine the necessity of good works for believers, Bullinger replies:
Yet for all this we acknowledge that we are created according to the doctrine of Paul for good works; to those good works, I say, which God has before ordained, which he in his word has appointed and requires us to walk in. And even though we do walk in these good works and are even to become rich in good works, we still do not attribute to our good works our justification. According to the doctrine of the gospel, we humble ourselves under the hand of him that says, ‘so you also, when you have done all things commanded you, say, “we are unprofitable servants; we have done no more than we ought to do.”’
He finishes his sermon with the comment, ‘the hour is past a good while ago, and no man is able in many hours to declare the whole effect of faith as substantially as it requires.’ More encouragement for pastorally-focused but long-winded preachers today, that in God’s word are depths we can never sound. Especially as relates to our justification.
Next, the first article of the Apostles’ Creed
