The goal of grace is to re-engage humanity in service to the glory of God and the life of the human community. To do this, the human pride that seeks to make ourselves or our nations the center of the universe must be shattered. This requires a humble acceptance of God’s verdict and our sinfulness and a reception of His offer of security, love, and forgiveness. This acceptance frees us from the burden of anxiety and so releases us for the adventure of love.
Here we consider this same event from God’s perspective. God offers power and grace, sanctification and justification, as the solution to human pride and misery. From God’s standpoint, the gifts given to faith are justification and sanctification. This is grace shown to man and power working in man. It is forgiveness and transformation, a new status and a new character. God forgives, and He transforms. For Niebuhr, it is important to see that God does both, and that these are two distinct gifts.
Justification
When someone believes in Christ, they achieve a perfect righteousness. However, this righteousness is not theirs internally. It is only theirs by imputation. “The Christ who is apprehended by faith, i.e., to whom the soul is obedient in principle, ‘imputes’ his righteousness to it. It is not an actual possession except ‘by faith’” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.103). “Impute” means to consider, to think, to reckon. God counts the righteousness of Christ as ours, so that God sees us as if we had never sinned nor been a sinner, indeed, as if we had accomplished what Christ Himself did.
Of course, this idea of full forgiveness for the sake of Christ has been offensive to “moralistic interpreters of Christian faith” (ibid., 2.104). However, this doctrine really holds together the key elements of the Christian faith:
The Pauline doctrine really contains the whole Christian conception of God’s relation to human history. It recognizes the sinful corruption in human life on every level of goodness. It knows that the pride of sin is greatest when men claim to have conquered sin completely. (“Not of works lest any man should boast.”) It proclaims no sentimentalized version of the divine mercy (ibid.).
It holds together the holiness of God and the sinfulness of men while opening a door to divine mercy that is full and free.
This solution is precisely what is needed for the healing of human beings and communities. We look outside ourselves for salvation. “The Reformation understands that therefore we are ‘justified by faith’ and ‘saved in hope’; that we must look forward to a completion of life which is not in our power and even beyond our comprehension” (ibid., 149). This is precisely what is needed for the healing of communities, a perspective in which “the sovereign source and end of both individual and communal existence are discerned, and where the limits are set against the idolatrous self-worship of both individuals and communities” (The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light, 85).
From the standpoint of the individual, it gives the precise thing needed in order to free us from anxiety and open us up to the adventure of love: security and acceptance. “This element of ‘grace’ may be defined as the ‘gift’ of security, without which the self is incapable of becoming free of preoccupation with its own security so that it might relate to others and achieve true fulfillment of the self” (Man’s Nature & His Communities, 108). In justification, we have a firm ground on which to stand. It enables us to receive acceptance and trust in God’s security so that we might be freed to live a life of serenity, creativity, and love.
Sanctification
It is important to note, however, that this virtue of love is not merely a psychological effect of justification. It is a gift of God. It is God’s power working in human beings. This is sanctification.
Niebuhr fixed on the term “crucified with Christ” in order to explain what sanctification is. He thought it appropriate because our pride needed to be “killed” rather than just modified. He says, “The self in this [sinful] state of preoccupation with itself must be ‘broken’ and ‘shattered’ or, in the Pauline phrase, ‘crucified.’ It cannot be saved merely by being enlightened” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2. 109). It is so important to note that without this shattering, the self “merely uses its wider perspective to bring more lives and interests under the dominion of its will-to-power” (ibid.). Instead, the self needs to be shattered. This means, “The self is shattered whenever it is confronted by the power and holiness of God and becomes genuinely conscious of the real source and centre of all life” (ibid.).
Even though the self is “crucified” in its prideful condition, this does not mean the complete elimination of the self. Paul says, “I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” This indicates, as Niebuhr says, that there is a new life that “is a power not our own” and “power beyond the self” (ibid., 115). It is God working in us.
That does not mean that our individuality is destroyed: “I live.” This reality “marks the contrast between Christian conceptions of fulfillment and mystic doctrines of salvation in which the final goal is the destruction of the self” (ibid., 2.112). The fact that the new life is the power of God but yet also the work of man is hard to understand. Niebuhr turned to Phil. 2:12–13 as a way of explaining this. It says , work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. Niebuhr comments, “This statement of the relation of divine grace to human freedom and responsibility does more justice to the complex facts involved than either purely deterministic or purely moralistic interpretations of conversion” (ibid., 2.117).
This sanctifying work, then, also leads us to new responsibility. It means, “self-love has been destroyed in principle in your life. See to it now that the new principle of devotion to God in Christ is actualized in your life” (ibid., 2.102). We lean into the work of God in our lives.
Conclusion
When God encounters man, God humbles him so that he might see his need for grace. When humans accept this evaluation of their condition, they are in a place to receive God’s gifts. God’s gifts are justification and sanctification, a new status and a new life. These create real and new possibilities for human existence. However, man’s apprehension of the former and experience of the other is always incomplete in this life. There is a new life, but it is always lacking something in this life. We turn to this important insight from Niebuhr in the next article.
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Note: this is part of a series on the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr. You can read an outline of the posts with links here.
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