Thomas Oden's Justification Reader aspires to demonstrate a broad consensus on the doctrine of justification, spanning the entire history of the church and all branches of the Christian faith: East and West, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Reformational and Pentecostal. As a "reader," the book intends to provide a transparent catalogue of common church teaching with quotations from Lactantius to Luther, Chrysostom to Calvin, while giving confessional documents their due. These are lofty goals, and the ecumenical reach of this book may exceed its grasp. Yet a lay reader can pick up this volume and learn two very important things: both the basic outlines of the doctrine of justification, and the strong support this doctrine enjoys over twenty centuries of church history. For this, Oden deserves much credit.
Indeed, no one is a better guide to the patristic witness to justification. Choice quotations are selected from a vast corpus of ancient literature to illustrate broad agreement among Eastern and Western fathers in three areas: Justification, Grace Alone, and Faith Alone. These citations reflect a breadth of reading beyond the capabilities of both lay readers and scholars and often bring to light previously untranslated texts. Given Oden's work as general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, it is not surprising to find that many of these quotes come from biblical commentaries. This bears out his claim that patristic justification teaching, though not necessarily "grasped in a full and perfect way," was "an ecumenical teaching, taught wherever Paul's letters were rightly taught and commented upon seriously"-a judgment with which the reformers concur.
In attempting to produce a work accessible to laymen, however, Oden has knowingly opened himself up to criticism from many corners. The task he attempts is vast in scale: both to present the classic Christian view of salvation, and to show its substantial support across millennia and traditions-all in only 168 pages! The layout of the book-it has copious paragraph headings and a nine-page table of contents-is unhelpful in bringing clarity to a very densely packed argument. Further, Oden does not distinguish between his two tasks of defining the doctrine and demonstrating its consensus. To be fair, both tasks appear to be necessarily interwoven for him, but this results in an often confusing argument.
The density of the argumentation also tends to minimize the "reader" component. Because the snippets are brief, the distinctive voice of each source is almost always lost. Those resistant to Oden's argument can claim with good cause that editor's voice dominates this consensual conversation. For instance, it begs credulity when he asserts that Origen grasped God's merciful disposition toward the ungodly "just as clearly as" Luther (52). Luther's central claim in this regard was that God justified sinners while they yet remained ungodly, i.e., that those justified were therefore at the same time sinner and saint-simul justus et peccator. The two texts Oden elicits from Origen merely suggest that God showed favor to us even before we were saved, when we were still "ungodly": "We were ungodly before we turned to God, and Christ died for us before we believed;" "By saying that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, Paul gives us hope that we will be saved through him, much more so now that we are cleansed from sin and justified against the wrath which remains for sinners." Luther's simul justus et peccator is lacking in these quotes, which rather imply precisely the equation between "justifying" and "cleansing from sin" that Luther opposed.
A more basic problem with this book is its general approach to doctrinal development. According to Oden, Reformation debates over justification helpfully rescued the patristic consensus on justification from medieval scholastic distortions. But the nature of this aid unhelpfully added a polemical element to the church's teaching that has led to five centuries of disunity. Oden believes that since he can demonstrate fundamental agreement between these two traditions, there is no good reason to sustain Reformation polemics. Because the Reformation agrees with the fathers on justification, it could not possibly have added anything to the church's understanding of justification that we can't do without today.
Yet, it is possible to agree with Oden that the reformers recovered a patristic consensus on justification and still draw a different conclusion. If this recovery also clarified church teaching and removed genuinely harmful ambiguities in order to forestall repeating the medieval error, it cannot merely be bypassed as a troublesome polemical episode in church history. The reformers themselves clearly affirmed their own continuity with the fathers, yet were compelled to say more than the fathers on justification because of the errors they saw around them. There is a patristic parallel in the doctrine of the Trinity. Fourth-century trinitarianism does not disagree with the preexisting consensus, but it says more in trying to rule out an erroneous interpretation of this consensus. Since he rules out similar progress with regard to justification, Oden is left arguing against those who affirm it as necessary to the church's well-being, including the reformers themselves. The result is one where modern ecumenical aims trump the sixteenth-century judgments of both Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians. While The Justification Reader strengthens the Protestant claim to unoriginality, it weakens their claims for the doctrine of the standing and falling church.
