The Justifications Of Abraham

A reader writes:

I am having some trouble with an argument I have been
running into lately…

In response to numerous attempts by Catholics on a
message board to exegete James 2:24 a Protestant
seminary says:

"You are in gross error in your understanding of James
2:24. Your interpretation of James 2:24 CANNOT BE
CORRECT – because it places Abraham’s justification
before God AFTER his circumcision and Paul says in
Romans 4:10 that it was ‘NOT AFTER BUT BEFORE he was
circumcised’ that he was justified before God. The
offering of Isaac (which is what James 2 is
discussing) happened *long after* Abraham was
circumcized. Hence, you are misusing James 2:24. And
why are you misusing it – because your tradition tells
you what to find in Scripture, and lo and behold, you
find it – context means nothing. Let’s see if you can
offer a contextually sound defense of what you say…"

I am not sure how to answer this charge.  St. Paul
does, in fact, say "not after but before" – which
(while it may not prove that justification is a
one-time forensic declaration) *seems* to indicate
that St. James is eithr not using the word "justify"
as St. Paul does or he is contradicting St. Paul
(which both the Reformed and Catholic person must
reject), as it seems to create a chronology ("not
after but before") in which the Abraham’s
"justificion" in St. James *seemingly* cannot be the
same thing as the one in St. Paul…

I think I understand his argument… how can I answer
(in a satisfactory manner) it exegetically (i.e. a
"contextually sound defense")?

Your seminarian friend is presupposing that justification is an event that occurs only once in the life of the believer. This is a false assumption. Scripture does not indicate this. In fact, the case of Abraham demonstrates this quite clearly.

Begin by looking at Hebrews 11. In this chapter we read:

1: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped  for, the conviction of things not seen.
2: For by it the  men of old received divine approval.

This sets the context of the chapter as saving faith, the kind that receives divine approval. The chapter goes on to list a bunch of people who had this kind of faith, including Abraham:

8: By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a
place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not
knowing where he was to go.

Okay, so Abraham had faith of the kind this chapter is discussing (the kind that receives divine approval) when he went out from his homeland to journey to the promised land.

Now: When did that happen?

Genesis 12.

So Abraham already had divine approval in Genesis 12. But if that’s the case then he must have been justified at that point.

Now let’s more forward a bit in Genesis to chapter 14. What happens there? Abraham goes out and fights a battle and resues a bunch of people and afterward Melchizedek pronounces a blessing on him (14:19-20). This is more stuff sounding like Abraham is right with God (justified) at this point in his life. Also Abraham refuses to take anything from the king of Sodom, thus turning down any reward from the king of so wicked a place.

Then IMMEDIATELY when we turn the corner into chapter 15, with Abraham just having turned down a reward from the king of Sodom,  God declares:

1: . . . "Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your  reward shall be very great."

So Abraham is so right with God that God is promising him a really cool (i.e., great) reward for what he’s done and how he’s followed God and conducted himself in righteousness. Again: Abraham is justified at this point.

Then Abraham queries God what his reward will be because, no matter what God gives him, he has no son and so a slave will inherit it. He can’t pass on the reward that God plans to give him.

So God says:

5: . . . "Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be."
6: And he believed the LORD; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Now this (Gen. 15:6) is the verse that Paul uses in Romans 4:3 to say that Abraham was right with God (righteous/justified) before his circumcision in Gen. 17.

Fine.

But what kind of justification are we talking about here?

Protestant theology commonly conceives of justification as an event that occurs once in a person’s life, when he moves from a state of being unrighteous (not right with God) to a state of being righteous (right with God). If that’s what you interpret Genesis 15:6 as referring to then you’ve got a huge problem because the text gives us absolutely zero reason to think that Abraham only suddenly got right with God in Genesis 15:6. All the evidence is going the other way. He didn’t even get the promise of a multitude of descendants until God was wanting to reward him for having followed him so well. And he’d been following him well for years, for he left home to go to the promised land (AGAIN, trusting in a divine promise) back in Genesis 12, which Hebrews testifies was an act of faith of the kind that receives divine approval.

I mean, the alternative is saying that Abraham was this repropate guy in mortal sin who left his homeland trusting in God with the kind of faith that wins divine approval, yet for some reason God was really unhappy with him and didn’t give him divine approval. In fact, he was SO UNHAPPY with Abraham back in Genesis 12 that he had promised him a new homeland and that he would make him a blessing to everybody on earth. I mean, God must have been REALLY unhappy with Abraham back there since he promised to bless those who bless Abraham and curse those who curse him. Right? I know I’D think that God wsa unhappy with me if he told ME that.

And then Abraham deals magnanimously with his nephew Lot by letting Lot have the better pastureland in chapter 13 and then he rescues Lot’s butt in chapter 14 (putting his own life and those of his men at risk) and then Melchizedek pronounces a blessing on him and Abraham refuses to take a reward from the king of a wicked city and God is SO UNHAPPY with Abraham about all this that he promises him a really great reward–PLUS descendants who can inherit it–and it’s only when Abraham says "Yeah, okay, I guess I will have descendants" that God suddenly decides that Abraham is on his good side.

This is not a very plausible interpretation.

It is a much MORE plausible interpretation to say that Abraham was right with God (justified) no later than the time he left his homeland in faith, having trusted in the divine promises, and that he continued to act righteously in his dealings with others (or at least in many of them) so that God chose to give him a big reward and children he could leave it to. When Abraham believed that God would do what he said, that was yet another thing Abraham did that was righteous and so God, naturally, reckoned it as such.

Genesis 15:6 therefore does not refer to the time when Abraham passed from being unrighteous (unjustified) to being righteous (justified). It represents a continuing growth in his righteousness. He is more pleasing to God now than he was before because he has stayed faithful as he has walked with God.

This is problematic if your theology limits you to talking about justifcation only as a once-in-a-life event where you pass from unrighteousness to righteousness, with no potential for growth in righteousness. But it makes all the sense in the world if you acknowledge (as Catholic theology does) that justification is both something that happens at the begging of the Christian life to put you in a state of rightness with God and that you can then grow in righteousness.

Viewed from that perspective, it’s quite appropriate for Paul to point out that Abraham was right with God before he was circumcized, because he was. You DON’T NEED to be circumcized to be right with God, as Abraham’s case shows. He was right with God LONG before he got circumcized in Genesis 17. He was right with God no later than Genesis 12, and we have explicit testimony to his rightness with God in Genesis 15:6.

But suppose that, even though you are right with God and have been for years, God then asks you to get circumcized.

Whew! That’s a painful thing! You naturally want to avoid that pain. But–if that’s what God’s told you to do and you go ahead and do it–God’s going to reckon that you did a thing that was right (just).

("Right" and "just" are just different English translations of the same underlying word in Hebrew–as well as in Greek. "Justification" and "Righteousness" mean the same thing in biblical theology, as do "To justify" and "to make right." English has this crazy vocabularly that obscures the fact that we’re talking about the same underlying terms here, so I’m filling them in parenthetically.)

So you go ahead and get circumcized and God judges you righteous for doing it–for subordinating your natural desire to avoid pain to your desire to follow his will–and this represents one more stage in your growth in righteousness as you walk with God.

And that’s what James is talking about. He also is not talking about when Abraham first passed from unrighteousness to righteousness. Like Paul, he is talking about Abraham’s growth in righteousness (justice, justification).

Paul seizes on an earlier aspect of Abraham’s experience to show that you don’t need to be circumcized in order to be right with God (which is important to his gentile readers since–unlike Abraham–THEY have not been giving a divine command to be circumcized).

James seizes on a later aspect of Abraham’s experience to show the importance of more than intellectually assenting to the truths of theology but of actually obeying God–even when it’s painful. (Whis is important to his readers since some of them seem to have the idea that obeying God isn’t important, just acknowleding the truths of theology.)

In neither case, when they cite the story of Abraham, are they talking about the time when Abraham was first made right with God, because that happened years and years earlier–no later than Genesis 12.

Incidentally, in handling these passages the Catholic Church only cites James 2 in connection with growth in justification. Check Trent’s Decree on Justification and you’ll see what I mean. It mentions James 2 when talking about growth in righteousness–which is what James is talking about–but not in connection with how we first come to God and are justified at the beginning of the Christian life.

See my book The Salvation Controversy for more, as well as my other writings on the subject on the web (try Googling "Jimmy Akin" or "James Akin" together with "Abraham," "justification," etc.).