Friday, June 4, 2010

The Lion Of Princeton Teaching On The Difference Between Justification and Santification


What an amazing and clarifying quote from B.B. Warfield. Very clear and very precisely worded. We are justified by Faith and Faith alone. Our sanctification comes from the justification won by Christ on the Cross. The Cross and Jesus justifying us causes us to be Sanctified. Beautiful! So much Confusion about this in the church.
Dear Christian, if you have faith in Christ, you are Justified before The Father, Because of what Christ has done, and the work on the cross. Christ is interceding for you at the Right Hand of The Father, and has blessed you with every spiritual blessing (Eph 1:3). The will of God is your Sanctification (1 Thes 4:3). You cannot be Justified without faith, and you cannot be sanctified without being Justified. The original Post may be found HERE.
"There is no evidence presented here that the New Testament represents
sanctification as received immediately by faith. In point of fact there is no
direct statement to that effect in the New Testament. It is to Jellinghaus’*
credit that he does not adduce for it either Acts xv.9 or xxvi.18, which are
often made to do duty in this sense. His strong conviction that sanctification
is obtained directly and immediately by faith is a product not of his Scriptural
studies, but of his “mediating theology.” According to that theology, when we
receive Christ by faith we receive in Him all that He is to us at once; all the
benefits which we receive in Him are conceived as received immediately and
directly by the faith through which we are united with Him and become sharers in
all that He is. Justification and sanctification, for example, are thought of as
parallel products of faith. This is not, however, the New Testament
representation. According to its teaching, sanctification is not related to
faith directly and immediately, so that in believing in Jesus we receive both
justification and sanctification as parallel products of our faith; or either
the one or the other, according as our faith is directed to the one or the
other. Sanctification is related directly not to faith but to justification; and
as faith is the instrumental cause of justification, so is justification the
instrumental cause of sanctification. The vinculum which binds justification and
sanctification together is not that they are both effects of faith – so that he
who believes must have both – because faith is the prius of both alike. Nor is
it even that both are obtained in Christ, so that he who has Christ, who is made
to us both righteousness and sanctification, must have both because Christ is
the common source of both. It is true that he who has faith has and must have
both; and it is true that he who has Christ has and must have both. But they do
not come out of faith or from Christ in the same way. Justification comes
through faith; sanctification through justification, and only mediately, through
justification, through faith. So that the order is invariable, faith,
justification, sanctification; not arbitrarily, but in the nature of the case.
(B. B. Warfield, “The German Higher Life Movement,” in Perfectionism, vol. 1,
pp. 362-363)

*Theodore Jellinghaus was a German Lutheran missionary to India, and later a Lutheran pastor in the vicinity of Potsdam.

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