Justification

2. The Drive to Be Justified

We are justified by grace:

Ellul, Subversion, 160.

There is no other modern book of theology that says for me what I think than Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity. Perhaps it is because both Ellul was and I am politically minded cynics and both of us have read the same Bible. One could object to the last sentence in this quotation on the basis of 1 Corinthians 11:28.

The worst possible injury is done to us. We are dispossessed of grandeur, autonomy, and the faculty of justice. Someone (in our anger God becomes a someone) justifies us from outside. A sovereign prince grants grace to subjects who are prostrate before him in filth and abjection that they cannot cast off on their own. We cannot give ourselves this righteousness. We cannot even say of what it consists. We cannot appropriate either the virtue of righteousness or the glory of justifying ourselves (a glory that is so important that many tales and legends finally come to a climax in it, as the hero triumphs through a thousand tests and then at the last receives the supreme reward that he has won, that always corresponds to either absolute love or absolute purity, that is, the righteousness obtained at the cost of so many trials in a conquest that is strictly anti-Christian, the quest for the Grail and the Lancelot cycle being a mere parody of revelation). The declaration that we are justified by grace, by the sovereign love of God manifested in the death of Jesus, dispossesses us of something that we regard as essential, namely, that we should fashion our own righteousness.
To come to the point of putting ourselves in God's hands for justification goes against the grain and causes us to bristle.... The one condition for coming to the eucharist is the admission that we are not worthy.

Ellul goes on after this to speak of Nietzsche as "a natural human being taking seriously what the Bible and as energetically as possible rejecting it as unacceptable." Both Nietzsche and we Christians don't like what the Bible says. It's just that he knew what the Bible says (though he gave it too much credit for shaping Western culture).
We have a need to be justified that is as fundamental to being human as our need to eat and breathe. It is part of who we are. Pursuing justification is much of what we do. It might be placed on some sort of Maslow scale of needs somewhere near behind food, air, and water. It is a need to consider oneself right and has to be understood ultimately as a rejection of God's judgment and God's grace. It is, looking back to the first section of this discussion of justification, a constant attempt to substitute "justification" in the the first sense for "justification" in the second sense, our righteousness for God's (Romans 10:3).

Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word, 65, 133, 138, 140, 164.

William Stringfellow is particularly helpful on understanding this as he mentions many different ways in which we seek to fulfill this drive to be justified: bearing pain, good works, good words, "relevance," churchly pageantry, "moralistic conduct, dogmatic conformity, charitable enterprise, daily work, or burnt offerings."

Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word, 65
(from The Ambiguity of Pain).

The pursuit of justification by any means--moralistic conduct, dogmatic conformity, charitable enterprise, daily work, or burnt offerings--is, in the biblical perspective, the essence of human vanity in its denial of God's freedom to affirm life without contingency, dependency, or equivocation. Such notions of justification refute God's capability of love....

Stringfellow is writing against the implied atheism of some liberal Protestantism (see particularly Keeper of the Word, 138), but what he says could be directed as easily against evangelicals, whether we think of conscious theological statements or the social mores of theologically informed or uninformed evangelicals. Yes, us too. Stringfellow also sees the idea that God blesses the righteous (which has a very tenuous place in the Bible) as making wealth itself a measure of this false justification (Keeper of the Word, 245-50 = Dissenter in a Great Society, 40-47). And the U.S.'s self-image as a nation shown by its success to be justified shapes much of our political rhetoric and government policies (Keeper of the Word, 227-32 = Politics of Spirituality, 52-56, 62-65). All this just illustrates the far reach of the drive for justification.