I just started reading German “evangelical” (i.e. Lutheran) theologian Oswald Bayer’s little book Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification, published in the Lutheran Quarterly Series. In the first chapter Bayer makes a very interesting move by using “justification” as a kind of all-encompassing principle for understanding personal and social life, and even a kind of cosmological principle.
He says that, far from being an esoteric theological doctrine with no relation to life, the issue of “justification” is always a pressing concern. We are constantly being called upon to “justify” our actions, our character, even our very existence in the eyes of other people and ourselves. Likewise, social life can be seen as an ongoing struggle for recognition – even the struggles between nations and cultures. We can even think of the world of non-human nature as engaged in a struggle for justification, each thing striving to “justify” itself by persisting in existence (this reminds me somewhat of Spinoza’s “conatus” principle that “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in being”).
This leads Bayer to suggest that “person is a ‘forensic term’” (p. 4). That is, the questions about who I am at the deepest level are inextricably bound up with the judgments that others make and that I make:
Questions such as these relate to my inner being, not just to something external. They affect the core, not the shell. It is not true that judgment is an addition to being. What I am, I am in my judgment about myself, intertwined with the judgment of me made by others. (p. 4)
One can see straight away how this could have significant implications for understanding justification as God’s “imputation” to us of innocence and righteousness. I’m looking forward to seeing how Bayer spins out these implications.
A Thinking Reed 
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