Justification by (fill in the blank).
My sermon was based on the premise that justification is not just a Christian concern, but an innate human concern. All people operate out of a desire for justification — to be declared in the right, to be innocent, to be validated, to be vindicated. A great deal of human behavior is explained if we remember this truth about human nature. Justification is an inescapable concept. The problem is that there is only one way to be truly justified — the Christian way, by faith in Jesus. This is why non-Christian humanity so often operates out of insecurity and arrogance — it is rooted in an attempt at some form of self-justification. But sometimes Christians fail to live as the justified people we are, and this causes us problems too.
Why did ancient pagans offer sacrifice, including human sacrifice? They knew something was wrong; they knew the gods needed to be propitiated; they offered sacrifice in the hope of being justified. But the sacrifices really never brought about that justified status, which is why the sacrifices had to be repeated endlessly. Think of the Aztecs sacrificing virgins, hoping each one would hold off the wrath of the gods for at least little while. Ancient societies would often uses a scapegoating mechanism, hoisting all the sins of the community onto one person or one group to bear them away and restore peace to society for at least a while. (It’s all in Girard, man.) Of course, there’s only one scapegoat who actually takes away the guilt of the people — Jesus.
Think about the modern environmental movement (which must be distinguished from proper stewardship of the creation). It largely works off of a justification paradigm. People feel guilty about having children who will gobble up the planet’s resources. They think they will be in the right if they just recycle enough. People who have a vague sense of their guilt are told they can be made righteous by adopting radical environmentalism; their sense of guilt makes it easy to steer and manipulate them them into supporting a radical (and stupid) cause. Or think about so much social media activity which is really just a form of justification by virtue signaling. If I hold the right “luxury beliefs” (as Rob Henderson has helpfully named them), I will be in the right group and will be justified, no matter what else I do. For most non-Christians today, justification operates mainly on the horizontal rather than vertical level (much as it seemed to for the Pharisees in the gospels) — it is mainly about being justified in the eye of society since that is the only court they truly acknowledge or care about.
I once heard a prominent theologian say that we could eliminate most pastoral counseling situations in the church if people knew Westminster Larger Catechism questions 70, 75, and 77 on justification, sanctification, and how they differ. I think there is some truth in that claim. Many of our emotional problems and insecurities stem from getting justification and sanctification mixed up. There is also truth in this line from Dustin Messer: “The devil wants us to be legalists when we’re thinking about our justification and antinomians when we’re thinking about our sanctification.”
Here’s another example of man’s drive to justify himself: Oliver Burkeman has written, “The upper ranks of corporate life are dominated by insecure overachievers: people who are driven by a deep sense of inadequacy and are not having any fun, even though they’ve supposedly won this very competitive race.” Some people practically work themselves to death in their quest for justification. Of course working hard is a virtue. But we should not work hard (or overachieve) out of an insecurity, that is, a desire, to vindicate ourselves or validate ourselves.
Consider this quote from David Lettermanon on how a desire for justification motivated his quest for success: “Every night you’re trying to prove your self-worth. It’s like meeting your girlfriend’s family for the first time. You want to be the absolute best, wittiest, smartest, most charming, best-smelling version of yourself. If I can make people enjoy the experience and have a higher regard for me when I’m finished, it makes me feel like an entire person. If I’ve come short of that, I’m not happy. How things go for me every night is how I feel about myself for the next 24 hours. Because I’m not playing a character—I’m trying to give you the best version of myself.”
Another area where the doctrine of justification helps us navigate and push back against the errors of the modern world is identity politics, particularly racial identity politics. In the book of Galatians, Peter falls into a form of identity politics, which amounts to justification by race. He stopped having table fellowship with Gentiles believers and limited his fellowship to Jewish believers. Paul confronted him to his face because this was a denial of the gospel. The Galatian heresy was basically an ancient form of critical race theory. In the letter, Paul opposes racial identity politics in a number of ways — with baptism, with the Supper, with the promises made to Abraham, and (of course) with the doctrine of justification apart from works of the law. Peter’s act of table segregation was a denial of the gospel precisely because the gospel aims to bring us all together at the same table through faith in Jesus. This does not eradicate different cultures or natural/creational distinctions. But it does relativize non-moral cultural differences. We must be careful to not abstract the argument in Galatians from its redemptive-historical context. The issues in Galatians are analogous to but not identical to those the Reformers faced with Rome in the 16th century. Likewise, the ethnic issues in Galatians are not identical to the black/white racial issues in American history. But there are certainly applications. The bottom line is that justification by faith should prevent any Christians from ever falling into a racial or ethnic identity politics.
The two books I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon were The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Phillip Rieff and Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier. A good summary of the Rieff book can be found in Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. The therapeutic turn has made feelings into an authority. All feelings must be validated. Feelings trump objective reality. This turn inward has proven to be disastrous. The Shrier book is new but full of important data, particularly for parents to know as they seek to raise children in our highly therapeutic culture. Shrier’s book unpacks the problems with so-called “gentle parenting” (which as has obviously backfired by proiducing lots of non-gentle and very narcissitic children) and argues a lot of therapy does more harm than good (“Therapy can hijack our normal processes of resilience, interrupting our psyche’s ability to heal itself,” p. 9).
If you are interested in more on this topic, I preached three sermons on Luke 18:9-14 that dealt with some of these themes (especially the third one). The sermons are from July, 2017 and can be found on our sermon page; here are some accompanying notes. If you are interested in how the teaching in the sermon relates to the Bible’s teaching on a final judgment according to works (or what has been called “final/future justification”), check out this, this, and this. Know that fact that we are presently justified by Christ does not make us antinomians. It does not make us lax. It does not make us morally lazy. Just the opposite; knowing we are accepted fills us with love and gratitude, which in turn gets expressed in obedience. He who is forgiven much loves much (cf. Luke 7:47). This does not make our gratitude the power that drives sanctification. Sanctification, like justification, flows out of our union with Christ. But it does mean that if we are justified in the present, there will be fruits and evidence of that new status in our lives.
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