Listen to John Piper discuss what he believes about justification (3 min).
[The following is an edited transcript of the audio.]
Bob Allen: There’s a crisis that you see now in something N. T. Wright has been putting out there. Help us now to understand: Where is it that you feel like he’s made a wrong turn?
John Piper: Let me back up just a minute, if I can, to the bigger issue of justification before we go to his take on it. Just a word or two, because a lot of folks listening to this aren’t even sure what the term means.
This is my interpretation. Later we’ll get at whether he agrees with this. In the New Testament, justification is the moment or the event when you put your faith in Jesus Christ and at that moment God is no longer against you—he’s for you, and he counts you as acceptable, forgiven, righteous, obedient because of your union with Christ. You are perfectly acceptable to God and he is totally on your side.
At that moment you are declared and constituted just, even though you’re ungodly. Romans 4:4 talks about the justification of the ungodly, and Romans 3: 28 says that “we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”
So that’s the general gist of the doctrine, and I regard it as a matter of life and death. Luther regarded it as the doctrine the whole church hangs on. It’s the moment and means by which we pass from being under the enmity of God to being under the favor of God, from being utterly unrighteous and damnable to being counted righteous in Christ by God so that he’s our father and he’s totally for us.
There’s what’s at stake—How do you move from being on the wrong side of God to the right side of God?
Paul said, “We were by nature children of wrath.” We Christians—even we elect Christians—were by nature children of wrath. And now we’re not under wrath anymore. Something happened.
This is the third question in a 7-part interview that John Piper did in preparation for his forthcoming book The Future of Justification.