[In the following essay, Morales evaluates the arguments of Newman's Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, and concludes by summarizing the basic tenets of Newman's thought on this subject.]

The doctrine on the Justification of sinners by God is one of the central aspects of the Christian Faith. It occupies a place of singular importance within the history of the religious opinions held by Newman, it has been one of the salient points at the center of disputes and discussions among Reformed and Catholic theologians, and it constitutes an obligatory topic within the current ecumenical dialogue.

While expounding on the fundamental lines of thought of John Henry Newman on the matter of Justification, we shall have to consider as well whether his ideas can contribute fully and clearly to appreciating the terms according to which the theological debate between the Catholic Church and the denominations arising from the Reform of the sixteenth century is being approached and developed at present.

The questions bearing on the topic of Justification are, along with the doctrine on the Church, the most decisive matters within Newman's long spiritual evolution. When he suggested in 1826 to Samuel Rickards the task of systematizing the theological opinions of traditional Anglican theologians, he expressed himself in this manner: “The leading doctrine to be discussed would be (I think) that of regeneration—for it is at the very root of the whole system. … It is connected with the doctrine of free will, original sin, justification, holiness, good works, election, education, the visible Church, etc.”¹

The doctrine on Justification is not to be set, according to Newman, within a merely theoretical framework. It represents in his life a matter of great existential repercussions, closely linked to the religious trajectory that, by means of High Church Anglicanism, led him away from the Calvinism of his youth toward the Roman Church. As is well known, the starting point of this process is to be found in the Evangelical positions that affirmed Justification only by faith to the exclusion of any other means, questioned regeneration through Baptism, separated Justification and sanctification, and denied, finally, all justifying value to good works.

Newman's gradual abandoning of these principles began as of 1822 and culminated around 1837, when he felt capable of elaborating a synthesis of his thought that would be part of the Anglican Via Media between Protestantism and Romanism. This Anglican synthesis had the intent of satisfactorily responding to all the debated points and of keeping in mind the valid aspects of the doctrine sustained by Protestants and Catholics.

Before examining in some depth the contents of the Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, written in 1838, it would seem convenient briefly to comment on some of the stages of the intellectual and religious process that gave rise to this work.

In 1820 we find a young Newman convinced that he had not received in Baptism any type of spiritual regeneration and that the needed interior change in order to enter the Kingdom of God had been produced in him through his 1817 conversion: “I believed that the inward conversion of which I was conscious … would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory.”² He also thought at the same time that whereas Justification is instantaneous, regeneration is progressive and gradual, and that the sacrament of Baptism is an accidental accessory of this regeneration that does not concede any type of clear title vis-à-vis eternal life.

In January of 1825 Newman's convictions had sufficiently become modified so as to enable him to write: “I must give up the doctrine of imputed righteousness and that of regeneration as apart from baptism.”³ There thus began a period in which Newman increasingly spoke of Baptism as a means of grace and Justification. Although he still doubted whether the sacrament was wholly sufficient, Baptism became overtly associated in his writings with the donation of the Holy Spirit, which regenerates. That is, Newman rejected the subjective criterion of the Evangelical conversion and embraced the objective criterion of the baptismal rite. Around this same time he declared that “good works are required … because they are the means, under God's grace, of strengthening and showing forth that holy principle which God implants in the heart”.⁴

As of 1830 Newman delved more deeply into the Anglo-Catholic vision, and, with the aid of the Greek Fathers, he discovered the great topic of the deification of Christians by means of uncreated grace. In his sermon entitled “Human Responsibility”, preached in January or February of 1835, Newman formulated for the first time one of the central ideas of the Lectures on Justification: “The grace of Regeneration … is a definite and complete gift conveyed, not gradually, but at once; and it is a state distinct from every other, consisting in the Sacred presence of the Spirit of Christ in soul and body”.⁵

The Lectures of 1838 are, according to Newman, one of the five constructive books written throughout his life.⁶ It was elaborated by Newman with great effort and with some doubts as to the validity of the viewpoints he was defending. “My book is now in press”, he wrote to his sister Jemima in January. “I am very anxious about the unity of the composition. … I should say for certain that nothing I have done has given me such anxious thoughts and so much time and labour. I have written it over, and recast parts, so often that I cannot count them.”⁷ At first the book was greeted with little reaction. The most interesting and keen-sighted response was a long and slightly unfavorable review written by the Anglican C. Lebas and published in the British Critic.⁸ The most favorable Catholic comment around that time is probably the one that appeared six years later in the Tübinger Theologische Quartalschrift.⁹

In 1840 a second edition was published. The third appeared much later, in 1874. It contained the same text without additions or modifications, but Newman included an advertisement of six pages and a total of sixteen notes¹⁰ in which he clarified nuances or in some cases completed affirmations in the first edition. New observations of greater importance refer to the so-called only formal cause of Justification and tend to include in the Lectures the teachings of the Council of Trent on this decisive point of Catholic doctrine.

The main finality of the Lectures of 1838 is to show that the doctrine of Justification by faith alone is not unreconcilable, except in its extreme versions, with Tractarian ideas that spoke of baptismal regeneration, emphasized the sacramental aspects of Justification, and attributed an essential role to charity and obedience in the latter.

But Newman goes beyond his primary intention and offers a relatively systematic treatise in which he takes a stand on all the salient points brought out by the topic of Justification, both in itself as well as within its general religious and theological framework. Needless to say, there are some excessively subtle lines of reasoning, theses that can be sustained only with difficulty, and paradoxical affirmations that border on contradiction. In spite of everything, the whole work provides a substantially valid synthesis, which we will now describe in its basic lines.

The most outstanding merit of this book lies, in my view, in the Trinitarian perspective that Newman adopts in consonance with Holy Scripture in order to develop the Christian doctrine of Justification and to solve some of its thorniest and most debated aspects. It can be seen that, over and beyond terminological discussions and simply controversial considerations, Newman comes face to face with a mystery of faith of which he has a true grasp, not a purely nominal one, which he tries to transmit.

Our author tries to discern and expose the role corresponding to each of the Divine Persons in the Justification and sanctification of man. Justification unequivocally appears as an exclusive action of God that, upon the basis of the merits and the saving grace of Christ, declares and truly makes sinful man to be just by means of the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit.

The theological analysis of the creating action of God the Father in the soul of the just man will allow Newman to examine and defend the declaratory aspects of Justification. The saving and atoning operation of the resurrected Christ, grasped and made part of themselves by believing men and women, provides the possibility of situating the role of faith and of reasoning out the correct meaning of the sola fides as an instrument of Justification. The gift of the Holy Spirit, which deifies man, finally explains why in Justification we can speak of the inherent sanctity of the justified person.

The Lectures are characterized by a strong polemical tone with regard to Luther's opinions as interpreted by Newman. His critique of the ideas of the German reformer is usually the starting point of the positive construction he offers. I do not believe it is necessary now to examine whether Newman's theological image of Luther faithfully responds to the view currently provided by sources and studies at our disposal. Although Newman's information may have contained some unprecise points and some debatable affirmations, it seems to respond to the Lutheran doctrine in its essential nature and reflects well, in any event, the central aspects of the Protestant and Evangelical Tradition on the topic of Justification.

Newman first of all refutes the distinction between deliverance from guilt and deliverance from sin, which are called Justification and renewal, respectively, by non-Catholics, and considered to be independent benefits. Newman states: “Now, in opposition to this, it may surely be maintained that Scripture blends them together as intimately as any system of theology can do. This distinction, so carefully made by many men at present, between being righteous and being holy, is not scriptural.”¹¹

Newman calls received doctrine to the teaching according to which Justification is something inherent and truly wrought in us. The doctrine of Luther, on the contrary, speaks of Justification that is external, reputed, nominal.¹² The Lutheran notion of Justification is therefore tantamount to a declaration, not a making, of righteousness on the part of God.

But Newman does not despise those aspects according to which Justification is, apart from divine justice wrought in us, a genuine declaration of justice on the part of God. This is not a concession to Luther or to the Evangelicals, as might seem to be the case, but rather an attempt to expose this doctrine in its entire biblical and religious scope.

“As Christ's justification did not supersede but implied His inherent righteousness,” writes Newman, “so is our Justification God's announcement, concurrent with His own deed so announced; yet in our case, preceding, not following.”¹³ The divine Justification of sinners therefore presents a judicial aspect, which is scriptural and which Newman wishes to incorporate within his synthesis. It “is a word of state and solemnity”¹⁴ whereby God repeals the sentence of wrath that lies against us.

It is not, however, an ordinary declaration because it is not man's word but rather the Word of God. We read in Newman:

This declaration is the cause of that being which before was not and henceforth is. … He declares a fact, and makes it a fact by declaring it. … God's word effects what it announces. … Then it appears that Justification is an announcement or fiat of Almighty God. Justification declares the soul righteous, and in that declaration, on the one hand conveys pardon for its past sins, and on the other makes it actually righteous.¹⁵

Principles of lucid biblical theology on the divine dabar, which includes word and deed, sustain these affirmations, which come in Newman to be tantamount to a de facto equivalence between Justification and renewal: “They are practically convertible terms.”¹⁶

Having come to this point, it has to be stressed that Newman does not completely renounce speaking of Justification as the beginning of sanctification and not as something absolutely coincidental with it. There is thus manifested an evident tension in the course of his reasonings, which seem to oscillate between two poles: the equivalence between Justification and regeneration, and gradualness in the fulfillment of the latter.

States Newman: “Justification tends to sanctity.”¹⁷ Later on he affirms: “Not that there is not abundant evil still remaining in us, but that Justification, coming to us in the power and ‘inspiration’ of the Spirit, so far dries up the fountain of bitterness and impurity, that we are forthwith released from God's wrath and damnation, and are enabled in our better deeds to please Him.”¹⁸ He continues, “By Grace we are gifted not with perfection, but with a principle hallowing and sweetening all that we are, all that we do religiously, sustaining, hiding, and (in a sense) pleading for what remains of sin in us.”¹⁹

We get the impression that Newman has begun a slight retreat with regard to the direct sanctifying capacity of Justification. This impression is strengthened when we read in another place: “In justifying, God takes away what is past, by bringing in what is new. But is it not plain that in its beginnings it [justification] will consist of scarcely anything but pardon? Because all that we have hitherto done is sinful in its nature, and has to be pardoned; but to be renewed is a work of time.”²⁰

It is obvious that our author is trying to compromise between the letter of Article XI (On the Justification of Man), which states, “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings”, and the affirmation of the justifying power of obedience shown in good works. In order to achieve this compromise, Newman has to attribute supernatural efficiency to the obedient and justified man, but at the same time he must establish a certain distance between Justification and regeneration, because experience tells him that the recently justified person still shows remnants of sinful habits that are capable of attenuating the efficiency of good works. For this he writes: “The justified are just, really just, in degree more or less, but really so far as this, that their obedience has in it a gracious quality, which the obedience of the unregenerated has not.”²¹

Close consideration of these texts makes it appear that Newman in fact opts for what the theology of the sixteenth century called the doctrine of double Justification, according to which in order to be true and complete our justice must be completed by that of Jesus Christ, which would come to make up for the deficiencies that the previous sinful condition always leaves in the justified individual.²² “Our righteousness is a resemblance”, he writes, “and therefore a partial communication or infusion into our hearts, of the superhuman righteousness of Christ, which is our true Justification. … He implants in part within us the very thing which in its fulness He imputes to us.”²³

In spite of the hesitations that are observed in this approach and that can be considered as one of the insufficient aspects of the Lectures, the Christological approach is full of excellent results in Newman's construction. In this sense we must mention the particular justifying efficiency that, drawing from a typically Pauline topic, he attributes to the Resurrection of our Lord, who “died for our sins and resurrected for our Justification”. Our author here shows himself clearly to be a pioneer of theses and developments that for the better would be adopted by future theology.

Righteousness is for Newman the fruit of our Lord's Resurrection: “He Himself was raised again and ‘justified’ by the Spirit; and what was wrought in Him is repeated in us who are His brethren. … What took place in Him as an Origin, is continued on the succession of those who inherit His fulness, and is the cause of its continuance.”²⁴

The most original and fertile aspect of the Lectures on Justification is, nonetheless, the decisive and unique role that Newman attributes to the Holy Spirit in the realization of the Justification of sinners. C. S. Dessain observes that “the East has always emphasized that the grace of Justification is a personal union with God, the result of our deification. In the West grace has tended to be thought of more as a remedy for sin and as a quality of the soul. Newman's emphasis, in his sermons and in his treatises, is on our deification and on the indwelling of the Holy Trinity that follows from it.”²⁵

It can be said, in effect, that Newman brings up to date an essentially Patristic topic and that he situates himself in the modern theological line, which goes from Petavius to Mathias Scheeben and focuses its attention not only upon created grace but rather also and above all upon the indwelling of the Holy Trinity in the justified soul.

The topic is raised by Newman in Lecture VI—“The Gift of Righteousness”—where he asks: What is the state of a justified man? Or in what does his Justification consist? Or, stated in other words, what is that object or thing, what is it in a man, that God seeing it there, therefore calls him righteous?²⁶

Newman responds that it is neither Christ's obedience imputed nor a new and spiritual principle imparted to us by the Holy Spirit. With this answer our author believes to have avoided the erroneous Protestant affirmation of extrinsic justice and what he calls the insufficient Roman stand on quality created in the soul and to have unified in practice the notions of Justification and regeneration.

After declaring that “justifying righteousness consists in the coming and presence of the Holy Spirit within us”,²⁷ Newman formulates his thesis in what comes to be one of the most important passages of the Lectures:

It is the Divine Presence that justifies us. … The word of Justification is the substantive living Word of God, entering the soul, illuminating it and cleansing it, as fire brightens and purifies material substances. He who justifies also sanctifies, because it is He. The first blessing runs into the second as its necessary limit; and the second, being rejected, carries with it the first. And the one cannot be separated from the other except in idea.²⁸

Uncreated grace seems to replace, in the conception reflected in the Lectures, created grace, and the Divine Presence thus directly plays the role of inherent justice.

Although these obscure points do not invalidate the fundamental basis of the theses on Inhabitation defended by Newman, later on he had to clarify nuances and in part rectify his opinions on the existing relationship between created and uncreated grace. We shall see to this later on.

We must finally examine the function that the Lectures attribute to faith within the process of Justification. It is evident that Newman denies the justifying capacity of faith alone in the Lutheran sense. The cause, properly said, of the Justification and regeneration of man is not faith but rather grace.

Our author, however, makes an effort to determine with the greatest precision possible the role played by faith in the Justification of sinners. He does not do so in order to remain faithful to a religious Tradition whose fundamental principles he had abandoned, nor is he urged to do so in a search for a compromise, but rather because he considers that faith in any event is a factor of great importance in the process of Justification.

Newman writes: “While when we reserve to Baptism our new birth, and to the Eucharist the hidden springs of the new life, and to love what may be called its plastic power, and to obedience its being the atmosphere in which faith breathes, still the divinely appointed or the mysterious virtue of Faith remains.”²⁹

Newman admits that “faith has an office for which we have not a word, as not having a definite idea”.³⁰ But he is willing tentatively to concretize his conception, and he describes faith first of all as the emblem of the image of grace, which saves us and redeems us. For Newman, faith typifies the free nature of our Justification and the decisive fact of our being saved exclusively by the mercy of God and on the overabundant merits of our Lord Jesus Christ. In this sense the word “faith” represents a true abstract principle much more than it does a concrete reality. Newman even comes to summarize his thought with the following words: “Salvation by faith only is but another way of saying salvation by grace only.”³¹

Our author knows in spite of all that the interdenominational discussions concerning faith as the supposed cause of Justification are not a mere lis de verbis, and that the Catholic doctrine on human merit and the positive role of good works does not whatsoever diminish the exceptional and unique importance of the merits of Christ and the fact that we are justified in the ultimate end by the pure grace of God.

Newman must then distinguish between faith and charity and assign to the former a role that is distinct from the properly justifying and sanctifying role of grace. The solution, for Newman, is found in conceiving faith as an internal condition and instrument of Justification. He states: “Before Baptism faith is not the instrument of Justification, but only one out of a number of qualifications necessary for being justified.”³² Faith is first a condition, and only after Baptism does it convert itself into an instrument of Justification. It is well understood that we are not dealing with an external instrument—such as Baptism—but rather with an internal instrument. Baptism and faith are at the same time instruments of Justification, but they are so, according to Newman, in a different sense: “Baptism might be the hand of the giver, and Faith the hand of the receiver.”³³

C. Lebas, a contemporary of Newman, was the first to manifest in writing in the British Critic some of the difficulties brought about by this explanation. Commenting upon some words that summarize it, namely, “the highest praise of faith before baptism, is, that it leads to it, and its highest efficacy, after, that it comes from baptism”, Lebas observes:

Why—if faith comes from baptism, surely it cannot have existed, even in the most imperfect condition, before baptism; and therefore, could have led to nothing! And yet, that it had some sort of existence before baptism, seems to be admitted by Mr. Newman, for he afterwards allows that faith must be, substantially, the same habit of mind, under all circumstances; otherwise it would not be called faith. So that we must presume his meaning to be, that faith, after all, does precede justification; but that it does not acquire any justifying dignity or power, till the process of justification has commenced; in short that although it is a necessary pre-requisite to justification, it has, in fact no justifying efficacy but what it derives from justification.

We cannot but reverentially hope, that there is something more of directness and simplicity in the divine counsels, than we are able to discover in the views here adopted and expounded by their interpreter.³⁴

Alongside the excessive subtlety and the petition of principle that Lebas politely denounces, it could also be objected from the Catholic viewpoint that the notion of instrument applied to faith has no precedent within Christian theological Tradition. If faith is an instrument of Justification, it must be so with respect to the principal divine cause. In what intelligible sense could faith be the instrument of God in man's Justification?

Newman himself felt the shakiness of his position and realized that the idea of faith as an internal instrument only with difficulty could be squared with the remaining aspects of his system. Only the desire to retain and keep for faith the important place it occupies in the New Testament stopped him from rapidly and expressedly abandoning his position. Yet while summarizing his theses at the end of the Lectures, Newman characterizes the role of faith in Justification in a slightly different and much less concrete manner. He states: “We are then justified by grace, which is given through Sacraments, impetrated by faith, manifested in works.”³⁵

It cannot, therefore, be maintained that the Lectures on Justification are Newman's last word on the topic.³⁶ Even if we keep in mind the notes introduced in the 1874 edition, which mainly refer to the formal cause, the book has to be completed by diverse texts and commentaries by Newman that are found in his writings and letters after 1838. Only then does Newman's true thinking on the matter appear. Without substantially modifying the approaches of the Lectures, Newman occasionally added abundant observations that get rid of the ambiguities and insufficiencies found in the doctrinal construction contained in the original work.

Some of these defects derive from the dialectic approach, which prompted the establishment of a forced symmetry between Protestantism and Romanism and which did not always allow the author clearly to express his points of view. This artificial methodology disappeared from all of Newman's statements on the subject from 1840 on, when he began to oppose Protestantism and Pelagianism instead of Protestantism and Romanism as incorrect extremes.³⁷ The new focus permitted him to formulate his thought with greater coherence.

The additions and clarifications carried out concerning the Lectures in a more or less implicit manner refer mainly to three points: (1) the relationship between Justification and sanctification, (2) the presence of iustitia inherens in justified man, and (3) the role of faith in the justifying process.

In my view, Newman succeeds in harmonizing a unitarian vision of Justification and sanctification with the idea that between the two there exists a healthy and necessary tension. He upholds the doctrine of the Council of Trent, according to which “Justification is a passing from the state in which man is born a son of the first parents to the state of grace and adoption as son of God”, and he understands at the same time that sanctification is a reality already present in the justified man, although of a markedly eschatological nature. A few lines from his Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations—written apropos of St. Philip Neri—express well Newman's thought in this regard. “Saint Philip”, he writes, “never lost his state of grace, from the day he was put into it, and proceeded from strength to strength, and from merit to merit, and from glory to glory, through the whole course of his long life.”³⁸

The Word made Flesh is the means chosen by God to regenerate our nature, so that the sanctification accompanying Justification is from the very beginning a stable reality—a state—in the justified person.³⁹ Says Newman: “The Divine Baptism, wherewith God visits us, penetrates through our whole soul and body. It leaves no part of us uncleansed, unsanctified. It claims the whole man for God.”⁴⁰

Although the Christian is holy from the moment baptismal grace penetrates within him, sanctification is also a process that unfolds throughout his life and never finds its end in this world. The many divine callings that span the Christian's existence are added onto the first great calling and are the origin of nonstop progress in the path toward salvation. Newman writes: “We are all in course of calling, on and on, from one thing to another, having no resting-place, but mounting towards our eternal rest, and obeying one command only to have another put upon us. He calls us again and again, in order to justify us again and again—and again and again, and more and more, to sanctify and glorify us.”⁴¹

The sanctification of Christian men and women is thus a fact already wrought in them from the moment of Justification, and it is at the same time a dynamic process that unfolds through time, because the spiritual perfection of the human creature requires continuous change in this life. To be perfect means in man many changes for the better during the course of his temporal existence.

Man's capacity for sin and offense is only comparable to his capacity for sanctity with the help of grace. “No degree of sin, however extreme, precludes the acquisition of any degree of holiness, however high. No sinner so great, but he may, through God's grace, become a saint ever so great.”⁴² Newman's ideas inevitably remind us of those of Gregory of Nyssa, for whom the coming closer to God knows no end in this life and consists of a permanent effort of approximation toward an infinite limit. In this effort there is constant passage—from glory to glory—from a certain stage of perfection to another, more elevated, stage.

Without diminishing the importance of man's direct sanctification through the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit, Newman increasingly dwells upon created grace as the cause of Justification. He begins to do so in a decisive sermon written in January of 1840,⁴³ insisting on the topic in his Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations of 1849, and definitely formulating it in different texts published during the 1860s.

Newman is concerned with maintaining, above any other affirmation, the idea that God is the unique, principal, and absolute cause of our Justification. But divine justice becomes really and truly ours not in a figurative, metaphorical, or external sense but in a real and proper sense. He writes:

This then is one of the first elements of Christian knowledge and a Christian spirit to refer all that is good in us, all that we have of spiritual life and righteousness, to Christ our Saviour; to believe that He works in us, or, to put the same thing more pointedly, to believe that saving truth, life, light, and holiness are not of us, though they must be in us.⁴⁴

Later on he writes: “While truth and righteousness are not of us, it is quite as certain that they are also in us if we be Christ's; not merely nominally given to us and imputed to us, but really implanted in us by the operation of the Blessed Spirit.”⁴⁵

The vocabulary used by Newman henceforth clearly suggests the idea of inherent justice, which he avoided in the Lectures. This inherent justice theologically implies the category of created grace, which certainly derives from the Divine Presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul but which is a quality or habit distinct from uncreated grace and proper to regenerated man. It is in him a permanent possession.⁴⁶ Our author writes: “When God, for Christ's sake, is about to restore any one to His favour, His first act of mercy is to impart to him a portion of His grace.”⁴⁷ Newman refers here to created grace.

Such an approach carries with it the literal acceptance of the Tridentine doctrine on the formal cause of Justification as a state of the soul⁴⁸ and the resulting rejection of any version of the doctrine of double Justification.⁴⁹

At the beginning of the 1840s Newman abandoned the notion of instrumentality in favor of a more sober opinion closer to the Patristic Tradition with regard to the role faith plays in Justification.⁵⁰ He says: “A man may have true faith and still not yet be justified; he may have a faith for Justification, yet the time of Justification not yet have arrived.”⁵¹ Faith, of course, keeps all its religious importance in the ideas of our author, but within the process of Justification it is, for him, more a symbol of the free nature of salvation than a decisive specific factor. It is evident, in any event, that it cannot be compared in importance to love. “Whereas faith is the essence of all religion, and of the Jewish inclusive, love is the great grace of Christianity.”⁵²

Newman now frequently speaks not only of faith in itself but also of true faith, to signify a fertile faith that is united to love and accompanied by good works. “No faith justifies but true faith,” says Charles Reding in Loss and Gain, “and true faith produces good works. In other words, I suppose faith, which is certain to be fruitful, or fruitful faith, justifies. This is very much like saying that faith and works are the joint means of Justification.”⁵³

Having reached this point, we must ask ourselves where Newman's pulse really is to be found when he writes and speaks on Justification throughout his life and must also see to what degree his ideas can contribute to the ecumenical dialogue of today.

We must bear in mind that non-Catholic Christian theology lacks a common stand on the topic of Justification. There does not exist, for example, complete agreement among Lutherans over whether Justification is a fundamental doctrine of faith. Whereas some attribute to it a historical and symbolic importance, others consider it the articulus stantis et cadentis Ecclesiae.

Many Protestants, along the lines of Albrecht Ritschl, vaguely consider that Justification is simply the forgiveness of sins and understand it as the acceptance of sinners into that fellowship with God within which their salvation will be effected and developed into eternal life.⁵⁴

Well known is the position held by R. Bultmann, for whom Justification is part of a process of self-understanding that occurs in man's conscience and in which he discovers himself to be forgiven by God through Jesus Christ after having admitted to being a sinner.

Karl Barth, finally, represents a position that places the divine revelation to sinful man at the point where Luther placed the divine Justification of sinful man, and he affirms that the articulus iustificationis is not central to the Christian proclamation.

Nonetheless, there would seem to exist today a certain consensus within the most representative Protestant theology on how man's Justification by God is to be understood. It is said that the human condition has been changed through the action of God in Jesus Christ. This divine action is considered as based upon grace alone. Although man is generally understood to be involved in his Justification in some manner, this theology emphasizes the priority of the divine action.⁵⁵

Catholics and Protestants are currently stressing different aspects of the doctrine. The former do not deny, as is logical, the primacy of grace, but they underline that grace is also manifested in the human cooperation and the interior transformation of the person. That is, the justice of God also becomes the justice of regenerated man, although he never possesses it as something properly his own independently from its source. Protestants usually insist, rather, on divine initiative and on the absolute and almost exclusive primacy of the action of God.

Within this framework it might be adequate to consider the declaration of the Mixed Roman Catholic—Lutheran Evangelical Commission on the Augsburg Confession (1530). It was drawn up in 1980 and reads as follows: “On the doctrine of Justification … an ample consensus is to be observed: only through the grace and through the faith that we have in the saving action of Christ, and not through our own merits, are we accepted by God and do we receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts and qualifies and impulses us toward good works.”⁵⁶

This is a text of great interest that—like others of a similar nature—must provoke legitimate hope in all Christians. I believe at the same time that if this declaration constitutes a point of arrival, it is also a point of departure, given the fact that the expressions used herein can be interpreted according to more than one meaning.

Newman's thought is very apt in order to contribute toward endowing the quoted words with the most correct meaning among the various possible interpretations. There are three basic ideas in the writings of our author that in my view represent the nucleus of his final doctrine on Justification and that are most relevant in this moment of interconfessional dialogue.

To state that God accepts us through grace must include the affirmation that justified man attains through divine mercy a justice that really belongs to him. It is not sufficient to speak of sola gratia if by so doing we are only indicating a free gift and not the existence of a quality created in the soul.⁵⁷ Newman clearly saw that Justification must not be held as an abstract idea but rather as something that really is wrought in justified man. This man needs to have his own justice. Otherwise, there would exist a dualistic anthropological stance, and we would be speaking of two men: an ideal justified man and, juxtaposed to him, another real, concrete, and sinful man. Man's unity requires inherent justice and not merely the free gift of justice.

God's generosity, second, allows us to offer him his own free gifts as if they were our own. Newman says:

Our salvation from first to last is the gift of God. It is true indeed that we merit eternal life by our works of obedience; but that those works are meritorious of such a reward, this takes place, not from their intrinsic worth, but from the free appointment and bountiful promise of God; and that we are able to do them at all, is the simple result of His grace.⁵⁸

The unique and overabundant merit of Christ makes our own merit possible, without eliminating it or separating it from his own. The liturgy of the Church expresses this idea very well when in the Preface of Holy Men and Women it addresses itself to God with the following words: “You are glorified in your saints, for their glory is the crowning of your gifts.”

It is necessary, finally, to affirm with no hesitation and with no ambiguity both man's freedom and his active part in the operation of his Justification. “It is the very triumph of God's grace”, Newman writes, “that He enters the heart of man, and persuades it, and prevails with it, while He changes it. He violates in nothing that original constitution of mind which He gave to man: He treats him as man; He leaves him the liberty of acting this way or that.”⁵⁹

Justification is an action of God, but it is at the same time an event that is wrought in man and through man himself. Newman resists the antihumanist conceptions that do not come seriously to consider either the human freedom or the human reality of Christ as the effective Mediator of salvation.

Notes

1. Letters and Diaries, vol. I, p. 310.

2. Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. M. J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 17. See Autobiographical Writings (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1957), p. 165.

3. Autobiographical Writings, p. 203.

4. Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), vol. I, no. 1, p. 9.

5. Ibid., vol. II, no. 26, p. 434.

6. “I have written in all (good or bad) 5 constructive books. My Prophetical Office (which has come to pieces)—Essay on Justification—Development of Doctrine—University Lectures (Dublin) and this Grammar of Assent. Each took me a great deal of time and tried me very much.” Letters and Diaries, vol. XXIV, p. 390.

7. Letters and Diaries, vol. VI, p. 186. On the seventeenth he communicated to John Bowden: “Then about my own work. … It is a terra incognita in our Church, and I am so afraid, not of saying things wrong so much, as queer and crotchety—and of misunderstanding other writers for really the Lutherans etc. as divines are so shallow and inconsequent.” Letters and Diaries, vol. IV, pp. 188-89.

8. July 1838, Letters and Diaries, vol. XXIV, pp. 82-119.

9. Tübinger Theologische Quartalschrift 26 (1844), pp. 417-57. After Newman's conversion, Döllinger did not hesitate in declaring on the Lectures: “It is in my estimation one of the best theological books published in this century.”

10. The notes appear in pp. 31, 73, 96, 101, 154, 186, 187, 190, 198, 201, 226, 236, 260, 343, 348-49, and 353.

11. Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1908), pp. 39-40.

12. Ibid., p. 62.

13. Ibid., p. 77.

14. Ibid., p. 73.

15. Ibid., pp. 78-79.

16. Ibid., p. 88.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., pp. 90-91.

19. Ibid., p. 91.

20. Ibid., p. 102.

21. Ibid., p. 91.

22. Ibid., pp. 156, 158, 160.

23. Ibid., pp. 92, 95.

24. Ibid., pp. 206-7.

25. Charles S. Dessain, “Cardinal Newman and the Eastern Tradition”, Downside Review 94 (1976), p. 95.

26. Lectures, pp. 130-31.

27. Ibid., p. 137.

28. Ibid., p. 154.

29. Ibid., pp. 236-37.

30. Ibid., p. 238.

31. Ibid., p. 283.

32. Ibid., p. 241.

33. Ibid., p. 226.

34. Letters and Diaries, vol. XXIV, p. 105.

35. Lectures, p. 303.

36. Thomas L. Sheridan holds the opposite opinion in his Newman et la justification (Paris: Desclée, 1968), p. 388.

37. See Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. V, no. 10, pp. 1037-38.

38. Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (London: Burns & Oates, 1876), p. 51.

39. “Our Lord, by becoming man, has found a way whereby to sanctify that nature, of which His manhood is the pattern specimen. He inhabits us personally, and this inhabitation is effected by the channel of the Sacraments.” Select Treatises of Saint Athanasius (London: Rivingtons, 1881), vol. II, p. 193.

40. Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (London: Rivingtons, 1879), p. 131.

41. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. VIII, no. 2, pp. 1569-70.

42. Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day, p. 17.

43. “Righteousness, not of us, but in us”, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. V, pp. 1032-40.

44. Ibid., p. 132.

45. Ibid., p. 136.

46. See The Via Media (London: Rivingtons, 1877), vol. II, p. 167.

47. Discourses, p. 170.

48. See Decree on Justification, chap. 7.

49. It is surprising that in 1874, in his Advertisement to the third edition of the Lectures, Newman should affirm that “their drift is to show that there is little difference but what is verbal in the various views of Justification, found whether among Catholics or Protestant divines” (Lectures, p. ix).

50. See Loss and Gain (London: Rivingtons, 1891), p. 137.

51. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. VI, no. 13, p. 1286.

52. Ibid., p. 1291.

53. Loss and Gain, p. 138.

54. See The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (Clifton, N.J.: Reference Books Publishers, 1966), pp. 35ff.

55. See A. McGrath, Iustitia Dei (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. II, pp. 189-90.

56. See Lutherische Welt-Information 12 (1980), pp. 3-7.

57. See W. Joest, Dogmatik (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck, 1980), vol. II, p. 454.

58. Discourses, p. 124.

59. Ibid., pp. 71-72.