ABSTRACT: Reformers like John Calvin quoted Augustine more than any other author outside Scripture. They celebrated, among other qualities, how he championed the truth that God saves sinners not on the basis of their works but by his grace. When it came to the doctrine of justification by faith, however, the Reformers did not find the clarity they wanted in the great church father. Augustine never offers a systematic treatment of the meaning of justification, and a careful reading of his works reveals ambiguities in his treatment of the doctrine. Nevertheless, he speaks of justification mainly in terms of God making sinners righteous rather than declaring sinners righteous. To the Reformers, then, his way of expressing the doctrine obscured, even if it did not deny, Christ’s righteousness as the sole ground of a sinner’s justification before God.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, we asked Zach Howard, assistant professor of theology and humanities at Bethlehem College & Seminary, to explore Augustine’s doctrine of justification.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) championed the truth that God saves sinners not on the basis of their works, but by his grace alone. Even faith in God is itself a gift from God, Augustine frequently observed, citing Paul’s question in 1 Corinthians 4:7: “What do you have that you did not receive?”1 The Reformers saw this same biblical doctrine of salvation by grace alone and, with Augustine as a patristic champion, sought to recover and proclaim it against false teaching and practices in their own day. Indeed, Augustine provided so much rich theological insight that Reformers like John Calvin quoted Augustine more than any other author outside the biblical text.2

Nevertheless, Calvin and most other Reformers did not cite Augustine when they proclaimed the related doctrine of justification by faith alone. They celebrated with Augustine that the method by which God justifies man is through the gift of faith, not through the merit of works, from texts like Galatians 2:16 and Romans 3:20. But when it came to describing the meaning of justification from a text like Romans 4:5 — God “justifies the ungodly” — and distinguishing it from the process of sanctification, Augustine and Reformers like Calvin thought differently. For many readers of Calvin or Luther or later Protestant theologians, this may come as a surprise given the central place of justification in Scripture and Augustine’s significance for Reformed soteriology. This essay, therefore, seeks to answer a question that naturally follows: How did Augustine understand the meaning of justification?

“Augustine never systematically stated what he thought justification by faith means.”

There is a significant challenge to answering this question. While the Pelagian controversy that dominated the last twenty years of Augustine’s life echoed in sixteenth-century theological debates, there was no similar crisis around the meaning of justification by faith in Augustine’s day. So, perhaps because there was no crisis driving his theological reflections on the meaning of justification, Augustine never systematically stated what he thought justification by faith means. Rather, his view emerges in response to questions on related controversies of his day and in his preaching on relevant biblical texts. This challenge makes it important to begin by situating Augustine’s understanding of justification within his wider theological reflection on salvation.

Describing Augustine’s View

Augustine’s enduring influence on Christian theology is largely due to the unified vision of salvation he articulated throughout his ministry. More than any of his post-biblical predecessors, Augustine integrated the biblical witness to defend and explain what it means that God through Christ saves sinners. Augustine performed like a choir director, conducting a chorus of biblical voices to harmonize around the truth that God saves sinners not on the basis of their works but by grace through faith in Christ — and that such faith results in a life of good works culminating in unmediated communion with God when Christ returns.3 Our aim is to listen carefully to notes sounding the theme of justification within that larger choir. We will see that Augustine imagined the meaning of justification in at least the following three ways: as a healing of man’s broken nature, as a transformation of the ungodly, and as both an event and a process.

Justification as Healing Man’s Nature

How Augustine understands original sin guides his interpretation for how man can be justified before God. Interpreting Romans 5:9, Augustine writes, “Because they were clothed with the flesh of [Adam] who sinned in his will, they contract from him the responsibility for sin . . . just as children who put on Christ . . . receive from Him a participation in justice.”4 Original sin is not just the act of Adam and Eve’s first sin in the garden, but it is also the result that mankind’s nature is corrupted.5 As a polluted body of water infects everything downstream, so Adam’s sin corrupts all of mankind. For Augustine, then, original sin corrupts man’s very nature such that all mankind is guilty before God even before they choose to commit any specific sins on their own.

“Augustine integrated the biblical witness to defend and explain what it means that God through Christ saves sinners.”

This problem of original sin frames the solution of justification. For Augustine, justification must address not just specific sinful acts by individual people but also the essential corruption of human nature. If justification is about restoring a right relationship with God, Augustine understood such a right relationship as possible only by a change in human nature brought about by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Justice before God must include not just a change in status (as in “not forgiven” to “forgiven”) but primarily a change in nature (from diseased to healed).

One of Augustine’s favorite analogies for describing this reality is Christ as the doctor and us as his patients. When man recognizes that he cannot heal himself — that he cannot justify himself — he turns to the divine doctor, placing complete trust in him to heal his disease. The doctor removes the original cause of the disease and then prescribes medicine to bring about a full recovery. Justification for Augustine is faith in the doctor such that you turn to him for medical intervention, and it is also faith in the doctor such that you follow his prescription for a full recovery.6

Therefore, when Augustine describes God’s act of justification as a gracious gift rather than an earned reward, he identifies the act of justification with the gift of the Holy Spirit, who heals man’s will.7 “[Christians] have been gratuitously justified by his grace (Romans 3:24). . . . The law shows that our will is weak so that grace may heal our will and so that a healthy will may fulfill the law, without being subject to the law or in need of the law.”8 Augustine imagines the meaning of justification as a healing of man’s will — and the rest of his nature — so that he may love God and neighbor, which is what it means to fulfill the law.9 This healing begins with the forgiveness of sins yet continues throughout a Christian’s earthly life. And the healing is miraculous because the patient is not just sick but spiritually dead.10 Thus, for man to be right with God — to be iustus — God must change not only man’s legal status but also man’s nature by healing his will.

Justification as Making the Ungodly Righteous

That Augustine believes God’s solution requires that man’s nature be transformed is not surprising. His every articulation of salvation casts the solution ultimately as transformative since Scripture teaches that we are “being transformed into [Christ’s] image” (2 Corinthians 3:18). What is surprising for modern Protestants is that Augustine associates such a transformation specifically with the term justification and not salvation more generally. Nonetheless, he does so for a specific linguistic and exegetical reason: he understood the Latin term used for justification in the Bible to mean “made righteous,” not “declared righteous.”

Augustine’s Old Latin Bible translated the Greek term dikaioō as iustifico, and he took this term literally.11 “Relying strictly upon the Latin translation,” one scholar explains, “Augustine misunderstood Paul to be saying that the person who was unjust was made to be just.”12 Commenting on Romans 4:5, Augustine explains this understanding of iustificatio in his The Spirit & the Letter: “What does ‘justified’ mean other than ‘made righteous,’ just as ‘he justifies the ungodly’ means ‘he makes a righteous person out of an ungodly person’?”13 Augustine’s misunderstanding of Paul’s term dikaioō leads him to interpret justification in primarily a transformative sense (as God making the ungodly righteous) rather than a declarative sense (God acquitting the ungodly).

Yet later in the same section from The Spirit & the Letter, Augustine acknowledges a different meaning for justified — namely, “counted righteous.”14 He offers an alternative reading of justified this way: “It is certainly true that they will be justified in the sense that they will be regarded as righteous, that they will be counted as righteous. In that sense scripture says of a certain man, But wanting to justify himself (Luke 10:29), that is, wanting to be regarded and counted as righteous.” Augustine then makes a comparison to how readers understood the word sanctify to mean both “make holy” (what God does to us) and “declare holy” (what we say to God in Matthew 6:9). His point in the comparison is that the word sanctify can connote both make and declare. So too can the word justify mean both make and declare. Yet in this passage and elsewhere, he does not elaborate on why this distinction matters, develop its implications, or connect it to other passages in Scripture.

It is appropriate to conclude, then, that although Augustine allows for a declarative sense of justification, his primary understanding of justification is that God makes the ungodly person righteous by healing his nature. And this raises a question: If Augustine means by justification “made righteous,” and to be “made righteous” requires an inner transformation that occurs over time, then, according to Augustine, is man not fully right before God until he is fully remade in Christ’s image?

Justification as Event and Process

One way to answer that question is to describe Augustine’s view of justification as both an event and a process.15 We see both event language and process language in how Augustine distinguishes between the beginning of faith and the progress we make in faith.16 Augustine makes such a distinction frequently.17 In his exposition on Psalm 67, for instance, Augustine reminds his listeners of “the priority of faith over works”: “In the absence of good works a godless person is justified by faith [per fidem iustificatur], as the apostle says: When someone believes in him who justifies the ungodly, that faith is reckoned as justice to the believer (Romans 4:5), so that afterward faith may begin to work through love of choice.”18 Augustine carefully distinguishes works as the grounds of being justified from works that follow being justified. This is not a passing sentence, either: it defines Augustine’s entire paragraph such that he describes the life of a Christian as a journey of faith working through love in order to make the point that “this journey begins from faith.”19

A second example comes from a sermon on Romans 8:30–31, where Augustine declares, “We have been justified; but this justice can grow, as we make progress.”20 By justified, Augustine understands Paul to mean that we have been “already established in the condition of justification.” Such a condition occurs “by receiving the forgiveness of sins in the washing of regeneration, by receiving the Holy Spirit, by making progress day by day” (alluding to Titus 3:5). Justification is a condition we already have, yet also a condition in which we can make progress day by day. In other words, for Augustine, we can have justice and grow in justice.

Simply put, Augustine did not limit the term justification to a declarative event. Justification means that, by faith, we have begun a journey to God, and we will not be fully righteous or have complete justice until that day we meet God face-to-face. The journey begins with the forgiveness of sins and receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, who heals man’s will such that he is able to love God even as he continues to fight sin. The journey metaphor allows Augustine to maintain the inseparable relationship he sees between the faith at the beginning and the faith along the way. It is the same faith. When he says that the faith that justifies is the faith that works through love (Galatians 5:6), Augustine is seeking to maintain a relationship between the faith that receives forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit and the faith that makes progress day by day by growing in love for God and neighbor. Therefore, to be justified by faith is to receive God’s forgiveness — indeed, to receive God himself in the person of the Holy Spirit — and yet it also means to grow in love for God from that moment onward. This is faith that works through love.

Assessing Augustine’s View

The fundamental difference between Augustine’s view of justification and the later Reformers’ view is twofold. First, Augustine understands the meaning of justification more broadly in that it refers not only to the event of God forgiving the sinner but also to the process of God transforming the sinner into the image of Christ. In contrast, the Reformers limit justification to the declarative sense and emphasize its distinction from sanctification. Second, with the term justification, Augustine focuses on the need for man to be transformed, while the Reformers emphasize the need for man to be pardoned. To be “just” for Augustine means to no longer “be a sinner” by the complete healing of man’s nature.21 To be “just” for the Reformers means to be seen as righteous in God’s sight based on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.

What should we then do with these differences between what Augustine and the Reformers meant by the term justification? We can first learn from how Reformers like Calvin interacted with Augustine and then consider the way Augustine himself addressed concerns raised in his own day.

Calvin’s Assessment of Augustine on Justification

When writing on justification, Calvin repeatedly quotes or cites Augustine to celebrate his insistence that we are saved by grace through faith, and not because of the merit of our works.22 Despite such agreement, Calvin acknowledges where Augustine differs from Scripture on justification. In his extended section on justification by faith in the Institutes, Calvin recounts how medieval “Schoolmen” like Peter Lombard (about 1100–1160) appear to follow Augustine on grace but misunderstand him. Calvin then argues,

Even the sentiment of Augustine [on justification], or at least his mode of expressing it, cannot be entirely approved of. For although he is admirable in stripping man of all merit of righteousness, and transferring the whole praise of it to God, yet he classes the grace by which we are regenerated to newness of life under the head of sanctification. Scripture, when it treats of justification by faith, leads us in a very different direction. Turning away our view from our own works, it bids us look only to the mercy of God, and the perfection of Christ.23

Calvin cannot approve of Augustine’s “mode of expressing” justification because it does not properly distinguish between justification and sanctification. He notes in his commentary on Romans that “it is not unknown to me, that Augustine gives a different explanation; for he thinks that the righteousness of God is the grace of regeneration.”24 In other words, Augustine’s explanation of justification combines the grace by which we are declared righteous before God (what Calvin calls justification) and the grace by which we are made righteous for God (what Calvin calls sanctification). Calvin worries that this “mode of expressing” led to abuses in late medieval Christianity, such as the thinking that man needs to earn his salvation with works.

In distinguishing between the twofold grace of justification and sanctification, Calvin aimed to preserve the truth that the ground of man’s right relationship before God is not his new moral nature but Christ’s righteousness imputed to man’s account. Yet Calvin does not say that Augustine himself argues that way. Rather, he has been refuting a contemporary (Andreas Osiander) and a late medieval scholastic (Lombard) who had misunderstood Augustine, in Calvin’s judgment. Calvin, then, recognizes that Augustine’s “mode of expressing” justification had certain ambiguities that differed from how Scripture spoke of justification and allowed later thinkers like Lombard to wrongly appropriate him on justification.

Calvin’s assessment raises at least two questions for Augustine’s teaching on justification. What did he believe is the right way to describe how faith and works relate to our justification? And what did he think is the ground or basis of a restored relationship with God? These are good questions for Augustine — and questions he addresses when confronting two controversies in his day.

On the Inseparability of Faith and Love

Throughout his pastoral ministry, Augustine responded to the false teaching that you “could not reach eternal life without faith, but could do so without works.”25 Today, we might call this easy-believism or, more technically, antinomianism. Augustine condemned such a belief as misinterpreting Paul, specifically from 1 Corinthians 3:11–15, and advocated for an understanding of faith that is followed by works, or what he called “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). He argued that Peter, James, and Paul agreed that works are necessary for eternal life because they prove that genuine faith is present.

Therefore, when the apostle [Paul] says that he considers we are made just through faith without the works of the law (Romans 4:5), he does not mean that works of justice should be disdained once faith is accepted and professed but that everyone should know that he can be made just through faith even if he did not perform the works of the law before. They do not come beforehand, before the person is made just, but they follow afterwards, when the person has been made just.26

Augustine emphasizes here that the event of justification (the beginning of faith) cannot be separated from the result that follows (the progress of faith). So Augustine rejects “faith alone,” not in the sense that later Protestant Reformers taught it, but in the unbiblical version that motivated the apostle James to write, “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17). With James, Augustine calls such “faith,” which he styles as mere intellectual assent, the “faith of demons” because it has no accompanying obedience to Christ’s commands.

We can agree with Augustine that faith and works must go together in order for us to call anyone’s faith a “living faith.”27 Augustine echoes James and Peter and Paul in proclaiming this truth in his own day. But we are still left with another question: In what sense are works necessary for salvation? Do the works that follow faith contribute to our salvation in the sense that they make God our debtor and are in any way the basis of our salvation?

On God Crowning His Own Gifts

Augustine never conclusively states whether Christ’s righteousness is the sole ground of our justification before God.28 Even as we rightly acknowledge that Augustine does not primarily write about justification in a legal framework but rather one of virtue and therefore transformation, his “mode of expressing” justification — specifically how he understands justification to mean being made righteous — obscures on what basis God sees man as righteous. We must recognize this enduring ambiguity in Augustine’s articulation of justification.

Nonetheless, Augustine does offer clarity about the nature of works that follow faith. In an important letter summarizing the Pelagian controversy, Augustine describes the significance of a Christian’s good works as God crowning his own gifts. Augustine explains,

What merit, then, does a human being have before grace so that by that merit he may receive grace . . . since, when God crowns our merits, he only crowns his own gift? For, just as we have obtained mercy from the very beginning of faith, not because we were believers but in order that we might be believers, so in the end, when there will be eternal life, he will crown us, as scripture says, in compassion and mercy (Psalm 103:4). . . . Even eternal life itself . . . is given as recompense for preceding merits, but because the same merits to which it is given as recompense were not produced by us through our own abilities but were produced in us through grace, it too is called grace for no other reason than that it is given gratuitously, not because it is not given to our merits but because even the very merits to which it is given were given to us.29

“Everything man has is a gift from God, including the good works he does after the beginning of faith.”

Everything man has is a gift from God, including the good works he does after the beginning of faith. And these works God rewards not as our debtor because he gave the grace to complete them. God crowns his own gifts. Thus, even as Augustine does not explicitly identify the righteousness of Christ as the sole basis of our declarative justification before God, neither does he teach that man must earn salvation. This side of the Reformation, we might be tempted to make Augustine answer with greater clarity, but since no doctrinal controversy drove further theological reflection from him, we cannot expect an answer in those terms.

Reading Augustine on Justification for Today

As careful readers of Augustine today, we seek to understand him on his own terms and in his own time before we compare his scriptural exegesis and theological reasoning with later interpreters like Aquinas, Calvin, Edwards, and our contemporaries. And we do so for the sake of retrieving his insights for theological debate and practices today. Just as importantly, though, we carefully avoid making Augustine answer a particular question or problem that he simply did not anticipate or address.

We can celebrate with the Reformers how Augustine champions the truth that God graciously forgives sinners by grace without any preceding merit. We also can celebrate the way Augustine highlights and defends the inseparability of faith and love, or what Calvin would call the inseparability between Christ’s two graces of justification and sanctification. Even so, we recognize that Augustine’s way of expressing the meaning of justification obscures, even if it does not deny, the truth that by Christ’s righteousness alone is anyone counted righteous before God (Philippians 3:9).

We’ve all seen the tragic headlines. We’ve all been shocked by the news of yet another once-revered pastor tarnishing the name of Christ and disqualifying himself from the ministry. Not long ago, one such Christian leader famously preached, “Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay” — all while he was living in gross sin. How ironic that his own life proved his quote to be true.

I recently addressed a group of pastors regarding the theme of finishing strong, and I shared with them a quote from Donald Whitney’s now-classic sermon “The Almost Inevitable Ruin of Every Minister . . . and How to Avoid It.” Whitney preached,

Almost everyone knows someone who used to be in the ministry. Almost everyone knows someone who shouldn’t be in the ministry. And every minister knows another minister — if not several — he does not want to be like. . . . So I think it’s important to address the subject of the almost inevitable ruin of every minister . . . and how to avoid it.

Once, when a Southern Baptist denominational executive was on the Midwestern Seminary campus in the late 1990s, he asserted that statistics show that for every twenty men who enter the ministry, by the time those men reach age sixty-five, only one will still be in the ministry.

Paul rightly admonishes us, “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

How the Mighty Have Fallen

We easily fail to take heed. Isn’t that why Samson, the strong man, fell? Before his infamous defeat at the hands of his enemies, he tested God’s grace by sleeping with three different women who were from his enemy, the Philistines (Judges 14:1–20; 15:11–20; 16:1–3).

And didn’t David, Israel’s greatest king, similarly sin? While the Lord multiplied David’s victories in battle (2 Samuel 5:10; 6:2), David ignored God’s admonition and multiplied wives to himself (Deuteronomy 17:17). And when kings and soldiers all went out to battle (2 Samuel 11:1), the emboldened king stayed home, saw another man’s wife bathing, and decided to take her (2 Samuel 11:2–5).

And what about Solomon, to whom God appeared not once, but twice (1 Kings 3:5; 9:2)? God gave him unmatched wisdom and wealth (1 Kings 3:1–15). How did Solomon respond? Instead of trusting God, he pursued political marriages to protect his kingdom and flagrantly married a thousand women. And what happened? When he was old, he yielded to his pagan wives and turned from God. He bowed in idolatry to worship their idols (1 Kings 11:3–10).

“The strongest man in the Bible and its greatest and wisest kings scandalously fell because of their pride.”

If the strongest of men and the greatest and wisest of kings scandalously fell because of their pride, what lesson does that teach us? We can all scandalously fall too. Rightly did John Owen say, “He who walketh humbly walketh safely.”

What can we do to guard ourselves against falling? We can start by listening to our Lord Jesus and praying the prayer he taught us to pray. We can earnestly plead with the Father to “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13).

Indispensable Means of Grace

Prayer is not a convenient luxury that we can casually employ when we feel like it. We are at war, and war demands spiritual countermeasures to protect ourselves against spiritual attacks (Ephesians 6:10–12), the world’s enticements (1 John 2:15–17), and the corruptibility of our own flesh (Colossians 3:5). Prayer and praying correctly is, therefore, an indispensable means of grace in our daily war.

But to heed Jesus’s instructions, we first need to understand them and apply them correctly. In calling us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” Jesus is not suggesting that the Father never tests believers (Genesis 22:1), and neither is he suggesting that the Father himself tempts us to sin (James 1:13). Rather, Jesus’s instruction should be understood as a general appeal for the Father’s protection. In praying, “Lead us not into temptation,” we are asking the Father to guard our faith so we don’t fall before the deceitfulness of sin.

“I can connect the times when I have struggled and strayed to dry spiritual seasons of weak or absent prayer.”

I’ve followed Jesus now for almost forty years, and without fail, I can connect the times when I have struggled and strayed to dry spiritual seasons of weak or absent prayer. Dear saints, let’s regularly pray, “Father, protect us from temptation.”

Formidable Foe

Jesus makes it clear that we are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against a powerful and evil spiritual enemy. When Jesus teaches us to pray, “and deliver us from evil,” he is likely referring to Satan in particular. Most English translations either mark that in a footnote or translate Jesus’s words with the definite article: “and deliver us from the evil one.”

This title for Satan is fitting because he is, in the fullest sense, the personification of evil. He is our great enemy. He wants nothing less than to destroy us — our unity, our ministries, our testimonies. The Bible chronicles his schemes so that we will be aware of his temptations. To name but a few, he tempts us

to lie to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:3),
to engage in sexual sin (1 Corinthians 7:5),
to give up on our ministry goals (1 Thessalonians 2:18),
to be prideful in ministry (1 Timothy 3:6),
to turn from God and curse him in suffering (Job 1–2),
to let wolves infiltrate our church leadership (2 Corinthians 11:13–15), and
to believe and teach false gospels that damn souls (2 Corinthians 11:3).

Satan’s sword is covered with the blood of our faithful martyred brothers and sisters. He parades a horde of others who, through their fear of man over God, have apostatized from Christ. They have become his henchmen (John 8:44), enemies of the cross. Theirs will be a just eternal judgment when Jesus returns and destroys all of his enemies (2 Thessalonians 1:4–10).

More Powerful Savior

When Israel cried out for help against the Egyptians, God sent Moses to deliver them. When they needed to defeat their enemies in the land, God gave them Joshua. When they cried out for help against their enemies in Canaan, God raised up judges to save them. When they needed to secure the land, God gave them David. But God has given us a greater deliverer than Moses, Joshua, the judges, or David. God has sent us his only begotten Son — Jesus. And Jesus came “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8; Acts 10:38).

However strong your temptations, Jesus can set you free if you abide in him (John 8:31–32). Praying connects us to our Lord, and he empowers us to overcome our besetting sins. With Christ, we can do everything that he wants us to do (Philippians 4:13). We can bear holy fruit in keeping with the Spirit (John 15:5).

Well did Martin Luther lead us to sing:

Did we in our own strength confide,     Our striving would be losing,Were not the right Man on our side,     The Man of God’s own choosing.You ask who that may be?     Christ Jesus, it is he;Lord Sabaoth his name,     From age to age the same;And he must win the battle.

God hears our cries for help. He answers our humble acknowledgments that we need him to win our battles, and he answers by giving us Jesus. He is our defense (1 John 2:1).

So before you turn to your own strength and resources, before you give up your fight, and before you yield to the weight of temptation and sin, pray. Pray more fervently. Pray more accurately. Pray with more faith. But by all means, pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and trust that our God will answer you with favor.

Audio Transcript

Happy Friday, everyone. If you have listened for a while, you know we don’t delve into social and legal and political issues on the podcast very often, for various reasons that have been explained over the years. And that means attempts by APJ listeners to get us into that conversation, and whether or not the church should legislate sin, must get creative. And they do get creative — even resorting to hypotheticals, as in the case of today’s question, the most recent creative attempt.

And it comes to us from an anonymous man, a regular listener who writes this: “Pastor John, hello! I often wrestle with the question over what role our government should play in outlawing sin. Specifically, I would like to ask you a hypothetical question here. If you were an influential pastor-theologian back in 1913 America, would you have supported Christian temperance organizations and lent your voice to Prohibition?”

I will try to answer this question honestly, but I confess at the very beginning that this question leads into complex issues of church-state relations, where I do not have as many answers as I would like to have. But I will take you as far as I can, and then you can go further.

World Without Drunkenness

The question of whether I would have supported Prohibition in 1913 might mean, Would I have supported it with all the cultural assumptions I may have shared as a child of my times in that day, and without any of the hindsight that I now have? It might mean that, or the question might mean, Given everything I know now, would I have supported Prohibition if I could get in a time machine and go back?

Now, the answer to the first question is that I don’t know. Nobody knows. You don’t know who you would be. What would you be like? It would’ve been relatively easy to see that a world without drunkenness would be a vastly better world than the one we live in, or the one they lived in back in 1913. And I can imagine myself being persuaded that the benefits of sobriety in families and workplaces would justify taking away some legitimate pleasures that both the Bible and culture would ordinarily allow.

This is the sort of limitation on people’s pleasures and freedoms that we have embraced with regard to smoking, for example. When I was a boy, it would’ve been absolutely unthinkable to tell a person that he could not smoke in an airplane, or in the office where he works, or in a restaurant. Unthinkable. Rebellion everywhere — “Mandates! Mandates!” But little by little, society as a whole has become so persuaded that smoking is dangerous to our health, and so unpleasant to most people, that we are willing for governments and institutions to mandate the prohibition of smoking in most workplaces, and restaurants, and theaters, and transportation.

Now, I like these limitations. I like them so much that it’s easy for me to imagine supporting something like Prohibition for similar reasons. So I don’t know what I would have done in 1913.

Two Problems with Prohibition

But if the question means, “Given everything I know now, would I have supported Prohibition if a time machine could take me back?” the answer is no. I wouldn’t.

“The Bible does not require teetotalism. It prohibits drunkenness. It warns about the dangers of alcohol.”

First, because the Bible does not require teetotalism. It prohibits drunkenness. It warns about the dangers of alcohol. “In the end it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, and your heart utter perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast” (Proverbs 23:32–34).

That’s a great picture. But there’s no prohibition in the Bible. I think a very strong case can be made for total abstinence in our world as a matter of wisdom for oneself, but not as a requirement for others, except maybe in some limited institutional expectations. This is mainly a matter of conscience.

The second reason I would not get in my time machine and go back and vote for Prohibition is that it didn’t work. It had unintended consequences that may have been as destructive as the previous abuse of alcohol itself. And this is because, unlike the limitations on smoking in our day, the long-term societal support was simply not there. It seemed like it was there, because it takes a lot of people to get an amendment to the constitution passed in 1919. But by 1933, the adequate support had disintegrated, and it was reversed.

Guidelines for the Church-State Relationship

Now here’s where the issues are raised, like the one our friend asked in his question: What role should our government play in outlawing sin? That’s part of his question. That’s where it’s all leading, which gets us into the weeds here. I think a more precise way to ask the question is this: How does the state decide what actions should be outlawed that Christians regard as sin? And you’ll see in a minute why I think that’s a better question.

So here are my guidelines — four guidelines for wrestling with the question about the relationship between the revealed will of Christ in Scripture and the law-making power of the state, enforceable with the sword.

First, the church today — the people of Christ on this side of the cross, unlike Israel in the Old Testament — are not a geopolitical entity. The church is not a nation-state. Therefore, the Old Testament legal stipulations — with their punishments like capital punishment for idolatry or cursing one’s parents — are not simply brought over and implemented in the church. The church excommunicates unrepentant idolaters; it doesn’t execute them.

Second, this does not mean that those sins are less grievous or less worthy of capital punishment. It means that the church hands over that judgment to Christ at his coming. There will be a perfect reckoning from the judge of the universe. Christ will settle all accounts. That ultimate reckoning is not the job of church leaders.

“The entire history of Christendom-by-force, from Constantine to the Puritans, was misguided.”

Third, Christian faith, and all the heart obedience of faith that flows from it, cannot be coerced by the sword — that is, by the state. The entire history of Christendom-by-force, from Constantine to the Puritans, was misguided. Any arrangement of church-state relations that sanctions state penalties to promote true heart faith and the heart obedience of faith will eventually corrupt the church.

Fourth and finally, Jesus said in John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not of this world.” Now, the inference I draw from that statement and other aspects of the New Testament is that Christ, in this age, does not sanction the use of the sword to punish those who disobey him. This means that the state, to whom God has given the sword, according to Romans 13, should not seek to compel obedience to Christ.

Purpose of the Sword

Now, listen carefully, because I’m going to make some distinctions here that are fine. I’ll leave a lot of questions unanswered, but I think these distinctions really help. Obeying a law that Christ would approve is not the same as obeying Christ, and disobeying a law that Christ would approve is not the same as disobeying Christ.

A person who doesn’t even believe that Christ existed can obey a law that Christ approves. Therefore, punishment for disobeying a law that Christ approves is not the same as punishment for disobeying Christ. I don’t think the state should ever punish a person for disobeying Christ. I think that is the prerogative of church discipline, and I think the most severe form of church discipline is excommunication, not death.

There is a difference between saying that Christ wills that a person be punished by the state for breaking a law Christ approves, and saying that Christ wills that a person be punished by the state for disobeying him. The former is right; the latter is wrong.

Christ does will that a person be punished by the state for breaking a law that he approves, but Christ does not will that a person be punished by the state for disobeying Christ. All of which implies that Christians should consult Christ in his word when thinking through what sins should be prohibited by law, because the use of the sword to enforce Christ-approved laws is not the same as using the sword to enforce obedience to Christ.