Trinitarian justification

In his commentary on the Song of Songs 4, Robert Jenson raises a question about the Bridegroom’s declaration that the Bride is “beautiful” and “without blemish.”  He links this to justification, but then notes the problems that often arise from exclusively forensic doctrines of justification, which he says lead to “unsustainable conceptual contortions.” It appears to be a game of divine pretense: “God says we are what he knows we are not .”

Are we left then with a Pelagian or semi-Pelagian answer?  Are we left with simply saying that God loves His bride because she is beautiful?  Paul, he argues, doesn’t allow that: Paul teaches that God “loves us precisely as sinners, as persons ugly by our own deed,” and thus we are beautiful by virtue of God’s sheer declaration of our beauty.

The resolution, Jenson argues, requires a fuller Trinitarian setting for justification:

“If the Creator were sheerly one thing,” he writes, “so that the Creator and the Creator’s word were two different things, then there would indeed always be a possible difference between what we are in ourselves as created by God and what we hear about ourselves in the gospel, between the beauty we ‘really’ do or do not have as creatures and the beauty attributed to us by the word of grace, ‘You are beautiful, my love.’”

According to the doctrine of the Trinity, though, God and Word are one God; God’s Word is with God and is God.  Thus, “we are created, and so exist and exist as what we are, by the very Speech of God that tells us we are good and beautiful and righteous.  And if we do not see ourselves as what God tells us we are and therefore really are, that is our error – an error that will be sure to retain its relative justification until the end, until we can see ourselves as what we truly are.”

That is to say: If the Word is God, and the Word is that by which we live, and the word of justification is the declaration of this Word, then that declaration is a declaration of what we in fact are.  Our being beautiful or just is not based on what we have already been, even though what we have already been is also the result of God’s speech.  It is based on the gracious declaration of love, “You are beautiful.”  But that declaration makes us such.

Jenson’s recognition of the “relative justification” for thinking otherwise is also crucial.  It’s an eschatological way of saying simul iustus et peccator .  In the between time, there appears to be grounds for our error, our sense that we are in fact not beautiful, not just.  But the Word says we are, and the Word is God, and that Word’s present declaration is the future declaration, the difference being only in our capacity to receive it and see its blinding truth.