Luke and Justification

In Luke 5 and 8, two stories are told that may shed some interesting light on the question of justification. In 5:17-26, men lower a man on a bed through the roof of a house so that Jesus can heal him. Verse 20 says “seeing their faith, Jesus said, ‘Man, your sins are forgiven you.’” Here, forgiveness is Jesus’ response to the faith that He discerns in the man. Jesus says something similar of the woman with the vial of perfume in 8:47: “her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much.” (The very next sentence seems to turn this around: “he who is forgiven little, loves little.”)

What we have in both passages is quite similar to what Genesis 15:6 (and Romans 4:3, 9, 22) says about the faith of Abraham: He believed the promise of God, and God reckoned that faith as righteousness. Forgiveness and justification is in these passages the divine response to human faith. This doesn’t go Pelagian, since faith itself is a gift, awakened by the word and trustworthy acts of God and by the Spirit’s witness. But these passages suggest a different relation of faith and forgiveness than that found in Protestant confessions. The sequence in these passages is not: God declares someone righteous, and they receive this verdict by faith. Rather, it is: God makes promises (or, in Luke, Jesus’ reputation for wonder-working spreads throughout the land), people respond with trust and belief, and God, seeing that trust, reckons them righteous and cleansed of all sin. It should also be noted that in the two Luke passages faith or love is displayed in actions — coming to Jesus for healing, showing devotion to Jesus.

Behind the two formulations are differences in theology proper. Without going into details, the traditional doctrine assumes a God who is transcendent and the initiator, but who does not in any real sense respond to His creatures. By contrast, the Lukan passages show that forgiveness is an act of an “interactive” God, one who is at work within the world and who really responds to the actions and attitudes of men.

The full truth is surely some combination of both: In one sense, God’s love and favor always precede human response; in another sense, forgiveness is God’s response to human love or faith (both are in Luke 8:47). God is both absolute initiator of all things, and really involved and responsive to us. John Frame would want me to say that God is responsive and involved because He is absolute initiator. But the Lukan passages raise (for me) the question of whether Protestants have held equally strongly to both sides of the biblical picture.