Anthony Rogers: Justification By Faith

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Reform Rookie podcast. My name is Anthony Vigneault, and I'm your Reform Rookie host, bringing you all things Reform this evening. The goal of this podcast is to take the deep, rich truths of the Reform tradition and help you see the beauty in them and the joy you'll experience in understanding them better.

Understanding these truths will help us better know the God of the scriptures and help us better to appreciate his plan of salvation. I'm really excited tonight because my guest is Anthony Rogers. He's an accomplished theologian and a debater who defends the Christian faith against Muslims, Unitarians, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox opponents.

He has an extensive and excellent YouTube channel with over 250 videos where you can see his teachings and debates. And today, with him, I'm looking forward to going over justification by faith alone.

That's based on the debate he just did against an Eastern Orthodox opponent by the name of Serafin. So, with that, welcome, Tony. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Oh, my pleasure. Was there anything I missed? Do you want to tell people where they can find you online?

I'm all over the place, I guess. I have stuff, material, written material on the answeringislam .org website. I wrote for Answering Islam for many years. I also wrote many things with David Wood on the blog answeringmuslims .com.

I did videos with David on his Acts 17 Apologetics YouTube channel for many years when I was in seminary. That channel is now defunct. For those that watched David, you know that he got fed up with YouTube and decided to take down all his videos and give the channel over to Hatun Tash of DCCI Ministries.

Those videos, though, are still floating around out there. There's a lot of stuff. I can't keep track of where it's all at now. People downloaded videos and put them up, and they've taken articles I've written and they've put them up in places.

I've written stuff for various periodicals, Reformed magazines, Reformed theological journals, like the Puritan Reformed Theological Journal, and things like that. So I've got a bunch of stuff out there, but the main place people can find me now is on my YouTube page.

Great, excellent. So was Islam something that you were interested in as a Christian? Was that something that drew you to it, that you wanted to defend Christianity against Islam? Were you in a situation where you had to do that?

Yeah, so I was converted. The quick story on my conversion, which coincides with my confrontation with Muslims and becoming interested in evangelism to Muslims, the quick version is I was converted at 18 in 1993 in prison.

I ran on the streets of Southern California, eventually got in legal trouble, went to prison for stealing a car, was there for two and a half years. It's there that I heard the gospel. I was overjoyed coming to know Christ and learning that my sins were forgiven.

And I had this immediate desire to tell everybody about Christ, but I quickly learned not everyone shared my enthusiasm. They weren't as excited to hear as I was to tell the grace of Christ. And so people began to push back against what I was saying.

And so it was a pretty hostile context, both verbally as well as physically, potentially. And so I had to learn how to defend it. And I wanted to defend it because I didn't want anybody to leave a conversation I was in with some kind of an excuse.

I didn't want to feel like I had failed to properly present the truths of the gospel in opposition to what other people were holding to. And so I started to learn about Islam, both Orthodox Islam and various heretical offshoots of Islam.

Of course, the whole religion of Islam is heretical from a Christian standpoint, but even from a Muslim standpoint, there are heretical offshoots like the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters and the Nations of Gods and Earth and so forth.

So I started learning about these groups, and not only those groups, but definitely Islam because of the context I was in. There were a lot of people that looked to Islam as their way of pacifying their own conscience without actually experiencing a real inward renovation of the heart.

Sure, sure.

So as you're defending Islam, did you come to a knowledge of the doctrines of grace? Was that beforehand? How did that work out?

Conversion, Scripture Reading, and the Doctrines of Grace

So it all, for me, kind of just coincided. It's hard to separate out all these things because it was all in this period of time. So what happened, first I went to jail. That's where you're still going to court.

You're not yet convicted and put in the population, the general population of those convicted. So I was in jail, and providentially, a devil worshiper was my cellmate. But ironically, or unexpectedly rather, this guy was actually a pretty cordial fellow.

However, he had all sorts of antipathy for the truth of Scripture, the God of the Bible, the Christ of the Bible, and all that. And so he had this ax to grind. I wasn't expressing any interest in Christianity, but he had this ax to grind and wanted to tell me why he hated the God of the Bible and why I should too, and so forth.

And along the way, I was saying things like, I don't think you're telling me the straight scoop. I think you're just making things up. This doesn't sound plausible. And so he actually told me how to get a Bible because he wanted to show me where all these things were that he was talking about.

So I filled out what's called a kite. That's where you request something. And I got a Bible, and he couldn't show me any of the stuff that he was talking about. And the few things that maybe looked a little bit like what he was talking about actually appeared in a different light, I noticed.

And he kind of gave up his quest to convince me of his particular positions. But I'm there with a lot of time on my hands. So I thought, well, why don't I just read this thing? And I started to read it more for entertainment than anything else.

But while I was reading it, I read over and over again of how God has all of heaven and earth at his disposal, how he is able to do as he pleases and does do as he pleases. And that includes judging sinners.

So, for example, banishing our first parents from the garden, consequent upon their one act of disobedience, merely reaching forth and taking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God exiled them from his presence.

Then I read of how God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah by sending fire down out of heaven. I read of stories like this, Nadab and Abihu, fire shooting out of his presence because they brought unauthorized fire before him.

And I realized the God of scripture is holy and has all of heaven and earth at his disposal. I am at his mercy. He could destroy me any moment he desired to, but for whatever reason chose not to. And I was really bothered by this because I knew I deserved judgment.

There was no question in my mind that I was a sinner before him. And so as I'm reading scripture, I'm also reading those parts of scripture that speak quite explicitly to the fact that God chooses whom he will draw out of that fallen lump of humanity.

He chooses those upon whom he will set his love. And I read the Bible through several times in this context at a very quick pace. Like I say, I had all kinds of time at my disposal. So I'm reading through it and I would get to passages like John 6, Ephesians 1, Romans 9.

And not only those texts that are, you know, the locus classicus of certain doctrines related to the reformed faith, but certainly those texts. And I knew when I was coming up to them that I was about to get into these sections that made me a bit uncomfortable.

Now, understand at the time I was not yet converted, but I was in some sense convicted. I realized that I was a sinner, but I didn't understand the gospel yet. And so as I'm reading these passages, I wanted to get through them as quickly as I could because I didn't want to stop and really think about them.

But what really got me was in John 6, when Jesus delivers his great church shrinkage seminar, right? This is where he starts out with the multitudes, the 5 ,000 plus people. And by the end of it, the multitudes have left because they're offended.

Jesus said they don't have any life in them unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood, by which he meant coming to him in faith. He explains what he means by eating his flesh and drinking his blood in the context.

It means coming to him, believing in him, trusting in him and trusting themselves to.

Him.

And this was offensive to them because it suggested that in themselves they were dead and apart from Christ, they had no life. And so they were offended and they walked away. And then Peter brings up that this is offensive.

And then Jesus said, you can't even come to me for life unless the father who sent me draws you. And so it's as if Jesus is upping the ante. And he also, or furthermore, said to Peter, do you want to leave also?

And Peter's response, I just remember it was like, to me, it was like the gates of heaven being opened as others have expressed their own conversion in various places in scripture. You know, Luther pointed to Romans 1 16 through 18 or 1 16 through 17.

Others point to different places, but Peter responded, Lord, where shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. And so for me, I didn't have this false alternative that I think many people have who have been introduced to a different way of reinterpreting the scriptures.

You have those who will try and reduce or water down or otherwise falsify what Christ is saying and make it sound more like you have something more to do with the process than is actually allowed in scripture.

And, you know, so what I understood is that here's this Christ, this sovereign Christ who calls whom he wills, saves whom he wills, and brings whom he wills to himself. And I thought these are my alternatives.

Either I believe in Christ and his sovereignty, or I reject him and his sovereignty. It wasn't like I could believe in Jesus and not believe in his sovereignty. I could believe in Jesus and not think that I came to him because I was graciously drawn or effectually called or something along those lines.

So when I understood the gospel, I understood it as this package deal. I understood it as, you know, you're accepting Christ and what he taught, not Christ and only the things that you find comfortable or palatable and so forth.

Amen.

Yeah.

We have to come to Jesus on his terms, not ours. You know, he's the offended party. We're the ones who need to humble ourselves. So yeah, that's amazing that you just read the scriptures. And through the scriptures themselves, you recognize that, you know, there's an elect group of people that the Father gives to the Son in eternity past, and he draws them to Jesus.

I see that as a betrothal language. You know, he's giving a bride to his son, and his son, in love for his bride, is willing to die on their behalf. And the Holy Spirit draws them and walks them down the aisle in preparation for the wedding supper of the Lamb.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you mentioned how I came to these ideas just by reading the Bible. That's why, you know, I hear a lot of people, when they want to attack Reformed theology, they'll make much of the fact that it's sometimes called Calvinism.

And sometimes they'll try and besmirch the character of Calvin. Any number of things along those lines, people will drum up. But for me, they're always ineffective, because I just look back to the fact that I was convinced of these things long before I knew there was a person named Calvin.

Like I said, I didn't have anybody telling me anything about Arminius or Calvin. I'm just reading the Bible, and it was clear to me, Jesus in John 6, Paul in Ephesians 1, and in Romans 9 -11, they're clearly teaching divine sovereignty, unconditional election, irresistible grace, and so forth.

And so I didn't think that there was this other alternative. And I like the way you describe what's going on in John 6 with the whole betrothal idea, because as well, the truth of particular redemption is involved in this, because when you think about it, the idea that God loves His church, if that's not referring to a special love, then I don't know how we're supposed to be comforted by the statements of Scripture that God loves us.

Because we know that there are certain people that are in hell, certain people that are alive now that will be in hell, and certain people who will be alive who will go to hell. And if God loves them in the same sense that He loves everybody else, I'm not sure why I should derive comfort from statements of Scripture like that.

But Scripture specifically says that Christ loves His bride. Any man who loves another woman with the same kind of love that he loves his own wife is not really a good husband, is he? And I don't think any wife is going to be ultimately comforted knowing that her husband has this indiscriminate love for every woman out there, and not a special love for her.

But Scripture speaks of God having a special love for His people, and of Christ dying for His bride, giving Himself for her purification.

Excellent.

You know, the other thing that comes to mind when people say, well, God loves everyone the same, and I say to them, okay, if God loves everyone the same, then it's not God's love for you that saves you, it's your love for God that saves you.

Because He's done the same thing for both parties. So the deciding factor would be your love for Him. That's really what saves you, is because you love Him. But the Scriptures are obviously replete against that.

It's only because of God's illuminating Spirit bringing you to life and changing the desires of your heart that you would ever even consider coming to Christ. It's a death march. It's a dying to self.

Yes.

So, you know, and it's similar to marriage, right? Marriage is the sanctification ministry. It's dying to yourself and giving yourself over to the other person for their benefit. So with that, what I wanted to discuss with you or have you go through is the Reformed Doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone.

Now this was obviously a big thing in the Reformation. This was the material cause of the Reformation. The formal cause was Sola Scriptura. So if you could just break down what justification by faith alone means, and then we'll start pulling it apart and going through some Scriptures to walk people through it.

Justification as a Legal Declaration Based on Christ’s Righteousness

Yeah, so the basic idea is that man, by virtue of the fall, became guilty and corrupt. We became guilty, meaning liable to punishment. As a result of sinning against God, breaking His law, His judicial wrath is justly disposed against us.

And because of that, then, we need to be delivered from our guilt and also our corruption. But in justification, God is dealing with our guilt. In sanctification and glorification, He's dealing with our corruption.

But justification deals with that legal issue of guilt or culpability, which makes us liable to divine punishment and wrath. And so what Scripture teaches with respect to this is that Christ became incarnate.

He took upon Himself our nature. He became the second or last Adam and represented us in His perfect life as well as in His atoning.

Death.

By His death, He endured the judgment due to us that now provides the grounds for God to remove our sin or remit our sin or absolve us of guilt and thus deliver us from liability to punishment. And because of Christ's perfect life, which He lived in perfect obedience to the law of God, God now is able to view us not only as guiltless, but as righteous, as having satisfied the demands of God's perfect righteousness.

And so that, according to Scripture, is imputed to us. God doesn't impute our sin. He imputed it to Christ. He died for it. And God, on the other hand, imputes Christ's righteousness to us and reckons us as though we were righteous, as though we had kept His whole law.

And by virtue of that, we have a claim, a right, or a title to eternal life. And so that's justification in a nutshell. And we say it's received through faith alone, through the God-given gift of faith, the Spirit-wrought gift of faith, we receive or lay hold of Christ and His righteousness and the forgiveness that is in Him.

And so we distinguish this from sanctification, which is the ongoing work of the Spirit who morally renovates us, spiritually regenerates and renews us and conforms us to the image of Christ.

Do we actually become more righteous in sanctification?

So, first of all, objectively before God, it's always important to keep these distinctions. We are objectively and completely righteous before Him. In sanctification, it's interesting, we often use the word sanctification to refer to the process that follows upon our act of believing.

But Scripture more often than not uses the term sanctification to refer to what God does at the beginning of the Christian life. When a person believes in Christ, he's justified, but God also sets that person aside and consecrates that person to Himself.

And so that's why Scripture will refer to people even before they look very like they've made much progress. It'll refer to them as saints or holy ones. It's the same basic term, various forms of it, that's used to refer to sanctified, sanctifying, sanctification.

That term is the same one from which we get saints. And so technically, the term sanctified refers to that initial setting apart of a person at the beginning of the Christian life. But we also use it to refer to the process that follows from that, which Scripture ordinarily speaks of in terms of mortification, where our inborn activity or proclivity towards sin is being killed off, because we still have the remaining vestiges of our sinful nature, and those inclinations have to be killed off.

And so this is usually referred to as mortification or putting off sin, or where Jesus talks about cutting off something. He's talking about these desires towards sin. And then on the positive side, it speaks of being conformed to the image of Christ.

And so if that's what one means by becoming more righteous, then I would say yes. In sanctification, one is mortifying sinful desires and putting off the deeds of the flesh and is growing in their conformity to Christ.

But somebody might mean something else. This is why I hesitate. Somebody might mean something else by the idea of becoming more righteous. And so I guess it would depend what they mean by more righteous.

Right.

I'm trying to understand the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox position, which would say that justification by faith alone is a legal fiction. You're pronouncing me righteous, but I'm not really righteous.

So how does that work?

Yeah, well, it's only fictitious if the righteousness of Christ is fictitious. Scripture speaks of Christ as the righteous one. And it's clear that it refers to the righteousness of His doing and dying.

It refers not to the essential righteousness that has always been inherently and natively His as the eternal Son or Word, but refers to the righteousness of Christ as the God-man, the incarnate Son, actively discharging the duties of God's law.

That's what Scripture says Christ came to do and did do. And that is what Scripture speaks of being imputed to us. And that righteousness is real. It's really imputed to us. It's really received through faith.

And it really is the grounds upon which God can, not fictitiously, but properly regard us as righteous. If you have a bank account and I put money into it, because Scripture not only uses the language of legal terminology, but very close to this financial terminology, communicates the same idea, it speaks of things being credited.

Another word for imputation is credit or reckon. If I put money into your bank account, even though you haven't earned it, it's still reflected in your bank account that you have this money, and it doesn't make any sense for somebody to say, oh, well, that's a banking fiction, right?

It's a banking fiction to say you have this money because really it's his money. No, it's his money reckoned or credited to you. And so it's really yours. It's really in your account. You can really spend it.

You can really rely on it. And so it's only a fiction if Scripture doesn't tell us that it's Christ's righteousness that God takes into account in reckoning us righteous.

So one of the things that Seraphim, the Eastern Orthodox guy, was talking about was, is it ontological righteousness? In other words, is it an actual righteousness in us, or is it just, like you said, forensic?

Yeah, that conflates those two things that I was talking about. I mentioned that in the fall, we became guilty and corrupt. So our legal status before God was that of guilty sinners who deserve his judgment.

And our inward condition is one of corruption. We are inclined towards sin. We are sinful by nature. And those two things are both being dealt with in the broader range of what Scripture is talking about when it mentioned salvation.

But justification deals with that legal objective problem that we have before the bar of God's justice. And so it's not as if we're saying that God doesn't inwardly transform us. We're just saying that's not justification.

That's not the basis of our confidence before God. That's not the basis of our forgiveness or the absolution of guilt or things like that. It's not the basis upon which God promises us eternal life. This is something that's dealt with in sanctification, where God not only forgives our sins and imputes righteousness, but also pours forth his spirit into our hearts and conforms us into the image of Christ.

That indeed is a process. And it's something in which we're growing and so forth. But it's not the grounds of forgiveness. It's not even really accurate to say, as we sometimes might say when addressing the errors of Rome in the East, it's not even that they're conflating these two things.

They're basically denying this one and putting this one in its place and saying this covers the whole gamut of our problem. And so it just erases. It'd be like saying the persons of the Trinity are not really distinct persons and just getting rid of one or two of the persons.

So each person is fully God. And so you might still have the illusion of still having God in that scenario. But according to Scripture, you don't have any person of the Trinity if you deny any one of the Trinity, any member of the Trinity.

And so I'm saying that they really just get rid of justification and they want sanctification to cover everything. And it's just not how Scripture presents it.

Right.

Wouldn't justification on a Roman Catholic view happen at the end after your sanctification? Like that's when you're deemed innocent because you now have your own righteousness, even if it was a gift given to you by Jesus because of your efforts, which is really not grace.

The problem is when they talk about justification, they think that justification refers to a process that begins with God infusing righteousness into you. And they believe that the official Trent answer, that the answer of the Council of Trent, the tridentine answer to this issue is that when God infuses righteousness, the person literally becomes without sin.

It's not just forgiven of sin, but sin is expelled from the soul. And so you're brought into this state of grace. It doesn't refer to the disposition of God toward you, his good favor toward you. It refers to a state that you're entering into and now are enabled by this infusion to live holy lives.

When you sin, you've now reintroduced sin into your being, and that needs to be expelled again through their sacramental system. And you need to be in effect, it's like a bucket or a bathtub, you might think of it.

Imagine water being poured into it. That's grace, but there's a leak in the tub. And so you need to put more water into it all the time. Well, that's the Roman system. God has poured grace into you. It's viewed as a substance rather than in his good favor.

And when you sin, the bathtub is leaking out and you need more being poured in. Now, if you commit a mortal sin, now something more drastic has to happen. You need to be re-justified. You need to be given the bathtub and the water all over again, I guess, in that scenario.

I'm sorry, somebody doesn't know I'm recording over here. I'm assuming you can edit this part out. Are you able to edit things out?

I can, yeah, sure. I really didn't hear anything from your side anyway.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, no worries. Was it a person?

Yeah, yeah.

Somebody came into the office here and I forgot to tell them I was recording. So salvation justification is viewed in that way like a bathtub, and it gets these leaks and needs to be refilled. And so it's not until the end of that process that you can say that you came out on the other side, I guess, with a full bathtub of water.

That's kind of the Roman system. And of course, part of what's going into that water is being supplied not only by you, but also by the saints, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, angels, other saints that have gone on.

Is that what they call the treasury of merit?

Yeah, the treasury of merit. So a Roman Catholic can't know that he's actually pulling it off until the end. That's why there can't be any assurance in that system, because it is contingent on all of this.

It's contingent on them continually refilling the bathtub.

Right.

So ultimately, it depends on the human being and their performance.

Right.

Right, which is scary. That's not good news. That's not good news. So the question I would have to ask is, with this treasury of merit, was the merit of Jesus not enough to cover the sins of everyone who have faith in Him and are working for their own righteousness?

Yeah, I mean, that's the obvious question. If Christ's righteousness, if His merit is part of the equation, what need is there of this other righteousness that Rome talks about, that of Mary and the saints?

They would talk about it as a common treasury, Christ and that of the saints. But it's almost like somebody talking about adding to infinity. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And Roman Catholics will give divergent answers, because Rome has no clear answer to that.

They just know that they don't want to say that it's Christ alone, as the Reformed have always said.

Right, right.

It's always Christ plus Mary, grace plus, works plus, that kind of stuff. So they're going to go to, obviously, James 2 and say, well, it's not by faith alone. How do you combat that with regards to justification?

James 2, Romans 4, and Justification Before God and Before Men

Yeah, so first of all, a legitimate hermeneutical approach seeks to look at the testimony of all of Scripture and not try to make all of Scripture agree with your or somebody else's interpretation of a solo text.

Right, Rome wants to select out of James's epistle, right? James wrote one epistle, five chapters, and there's one verse in James, in particular, that they think contradicts the notion of justification sola fide.

Whereas on the other side, we have the testimony of Paul's letters, Romans, Galatians, where he's actually dealing with this in a sustained way. And in Romans, Paul's giving us his didactic teaching on the topic, and it's the closest thing we have in the New Testament to a systematic theology.

And there, he's very clear that it's by faith alone. And in Galatians, Paul's defending the gospel against Judaizers who are attacking it. So we have a sustained, systematic defense of the doctrine in Romans, or presentation of the doctrine in Romans, and a sustained defense of it in Galatians.

So those are the primary places we ought to be looking to determine what the teaching of Scripture is on this. When we go to the epistle of James, then we already know, it's sort of like, when you look at texts about the deity of Christ, there are texts that somebody might bring up that we might puzzle over, how does this square with the overall teaching of Scripture?

But the one thing we know is that Scripture has an overall teaching. And so if we don't understand how this text relates to that, then it's our understanding of that text, rather than the witness of all of Scripture that has to be adjusted.

But James 2 is actually very easy. It's unfortunate, but most of our English translations just don't pay attention to the grammar here. Some do, but in James 2 .24, it doesn't literally say faith alone.

If that were the case, the word alone would have to be an adjective modifying the word faith. The way it's normally translated, it says something like, you see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

So in that English sentence, the word alone is being treated as an adjective that modifies the word faith. But in Greek, it's not an adjective, it's an adverb, and it's pointing back to something earlier in the sentence.

And so the way it should be understood is James saying, you see that a man is justified by works and not only justified by faith. So he has two ideas or two justifications in view. If you read the context of James, he's talking about Abraham, whom we already know is justified by faith rather than by works before God.

Paul taught us that. And James quotes the same passage that Paul does from Genesis 15. But James's point in James 2 is those who say they have faith are merely mouthing this claim, and it's without true substance if there's not action that demonstrates or vindicates it.

And so James has primarily in view the necessity of works to demonstrate or justify us before men. I mean, in fact, this might help to sort of bring it into focus. In Romans 4, Paul makes it clear that there's actually two different ways we can think of a person being justified.

In Romans 4, Paul says, if Abraham was justified by works, then he has something to boast about, but not before God. So note the distinction. Before God, this is not true. This is an impossibility, right?

And then Paul says, for what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness, right? And so this is where Paul also says, to the man who does not work, but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness.

So Paul's making it very clear that he's talking about justification before God. James, without contradicting Paul, is emphasizing the fact that those who have faith, if they don't also have works, then their claim to faith is bogus, right?

That they're making a claim to have faith, but it's without any demonstrable, palpable demonstration, right? There's no way to verify this. And so if you go back in James 2, and I'm sort of working backwards here in a sense, but if you go back in the context of James 2, you'll notice that James says two things.

In James 2, he says, in verse 22, I'm just pulling it up real quick. In James 2, 22, it says, you see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected. And the scripture was fulfilled, which says, and Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and he was called the friend of God.

Now, in Greek, another technical point about Greek here, when you have two chi's, two conjunctions, meaning and, the first one is and, and the second one means and also, right? So in Greek, what this literally says is, the scripture and the scripture was fulfilled, which says Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, and also he was called the friend of God.

So you have two things in view here in James, Abraham being justified in Genesis 15, through faith before God, but then also to something later that caused men to refer to Abraham as the friend of God.

Now, what is it that would have led people to identify Abraham as God's friend? Well, obviously, among other things, but I think chiefly, Abraham's act of obedience when he offered up Isaac on the altar, which is what James is actually talking about in the context, it was that act that people looked to and realized that Abraham had real faith, that act proved Abraham's faith.

And so people after the time of Abraham counted Abraham as God's friend, like Jesus says, you're my friend if you do what I command. So Abraham's obedience became the supreme demonstration of his faith and the proof that he was a friend of God.