Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 74:2 (Fall 2012)
Article: Ambrosiaster On Justification By Faith Alone In His Commentaries On The Pauline Epistles
Author: Dongsun Cho

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WTJ 74:2 (Fall 2012) p. 277

Ambrosiaster On Justification By Faith Alone In His Commentaries On The Pauline Epistles

Dongsun Cho

Dongsun Cho is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Tex.

I. Introduction

Both Catholics and many Protestants have traditionally assumed that the idea of justification by faith alone was alien to the church fathers.1 In particular, Protestants such as T. F. Torrance and Maurice Wiles were skeptical about the continuity between first-century Christianity and second-century Christianity on justification by faith.2 Alister McGrath supposed that Augustine might be the first patristic writer who presented at least a meaningful discussion of the role of faith in justification.3 The difference between Catholics and Protestants in this assumption is that the former group sees sola fide as a theological invention of Lutherans and other sixteenth-century Protestants, and the latter takes it as the recovery of the Pauline doctrine of justification.

However, some Protestants have recently begun to realize that the doctrine of justification by faith alone had not been lost since the NT era. Thomas Oden refutes the argument that the church fathers completely forgot Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith alone, and shows how many church fathers faithfully held the evangelical doctrine of justification. He maintains that to speak of the sudden disappearance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone is “an intemperate idea” and “neglectful” “of many ancient consensus-bearing texts.”4 In a similar spirit, Daniel H. Williams asserts that “not only is such a view anachronistic and

WTJ 74:2 (Fall 2012) p. 278

tends to assume that there was (or is) a uniform definition of justification, but there is evidence that Latin theology before Augustine promulgated the tenets of unmerited grace” and “the imputation of the righteousness of God.”5 Nick Needham also attests to the stream of a patristic understanding of justification by faith alone by presenting “the evidence for justification language bearing a forensic meaning” and the equation of justification with “forgiveness, remission, pardon, or acquittal” in patristic literature.6

Refuting McGrath’s skepticism about a patristic tradition of sola fide, therefore, Oden, Williams, and Needham all confirm that many c...

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