Great post. I've always been baffled when universal justification advocates use
1 Timothy 3:16 as a proof passage. This passage has never been interpreted by the universal Church as the Christ being justified in the same way as we sinners need to be, yet this passage is essential to the philosophy that the world was justified "in Christ." Novel indeed.
I think Chemnitz sums up the catholic meaning well when he says:
"This is the forensic or legal meaning of this word. But just as is the case in all languages, words are transferred from the specific to the general. Thus 'justify' is sometimes used to approve, testify to, recognize, acknowledge, confess, and celebrate the fact that someone is righteous—granting, conferring, and attributing praise to his righteousness.
Luke 7:29: 'The people and the publicans justified God, but the Pharisees spurned the counsel of God.'
Luke 16:15: 'You justify yourselves before men.'
Luke 10:29: 'The scribe, wanting to justify himself …'
Jer. 3:11 and
Ezek. 16:51: 'You have justified your sisters.'
1 Tim. 3:16: 'He was manifested in the flesh and justified in the Spirit,' that is, the humility of His flesh offended many, and He was crucified as a misleader and a seditious man; but because of His divine works and the sending of the Spirit, He was declared and approved as the Son of God and the Messiah." (Loci Theologici [CPH], p.478)
I guess Chemnitz forgot the true meaning of the passage, namely, that Christ was absolved of all our sins and so the world stands righteous and sinless before God's eyes now. Chemnitz would never be able to serve on the faculty of WLS or the Concordias.
How about John Cassian (c.360 – 435)? Could he serve on the faculties of those seminaries?
"And so as for your assertions that He was justified by the Spirit...and that He was taken up by the Spirit into heaven, they are all blasphemous and wild: not because we are to believe that in all these things which He Himself did, the unity and cooperation of the Spirit was wanting— since the Godhead is never wanting to Itself, and the power of the Trinity was ever present in the Saviour's works— but because you will have it that the Holy Ghost gave assistance to the Lord Jesus Christ as if He had been feeble and powerless; and that He granted those things to Him, which He was unable to procure for Himself. ...For to begin with this assertion of yours that the Spirit filled with righteousness (justitia) what was created, and your attempts to prove this by the evidence of the Apostle, where he says that He appeared in the flesh, was justified in the Spirit, you make each statement in an unsound sense and wild spirit. For you make this assertion; viz., that you will have it that He was filled with righteousness by the Spirit, in order to show how He was void of righteousness, as you assert that the being filled with it was given to Him." (On the Incarnation, Book VII, Ch. XVIII)
John Cassian was right, what need does the Christ have to be absolved in any way like us? He was and is sinless. To say He needed to be justified in the same way we are justified is to assert that He was lacking righteousness. It's essentially a Trinitarian heresy -- that not all three persons were equally righteous.
The passage means as it has always meant, that Jesus was proven to be the Christ as opposed to just being a man. Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (c. 300 - 368) explains:
"For the Apostle leaves no doubt that all must confess that the hidden secret of our salvation...[is]...the mystery of great godliness, and a mystery no longer kept from our eyes, but manifested in the flesh; no longer weak through the nature of flesh, but justified in the Spirit. And so by the justification of the Spirit is removed from our faith the idea of fleshly weakness;..." (On the Trinity, Book XI)
