The doctrine of justification according to the reformers was a church dividing issue, and truly it was the cause of separation between the Roman Catholic and Protestant. In recent years the discussion on the doctrine of justification has been revived,...
The doctrine of justification according to the reformers was a church dividing issue, and truly it was the cause of separation between the Roman Catholic and Protestant. In recent years the discussion on the doctrine of justification has been revived, and in fact it has become one of the most controversial issue in modern scholarship. Not only in the field of systematic theology but also in the biblical scholarship there is a renewed interest in this subject. The rise of the new perspective on Paul was a momentum to review the reformation`s doctrine of justification by faith, and in fact the Pauline studies as a whole. This thesis tries to identify, first of all, the central issue of the current discussion on the doctrine of justification, and attempts to suggest a way to understand the issue better. We first carried out a brief survey in order to identify the central argument of the Roman Catholic and Protestant respectively. The theological principle of the Roman Catholic`s development of the doctrine of justification was based on their anthropological interest. Whereas the reformers articulated their doctrine in the christological perspective, and saw justification basically as God`s forensic declaration of not guilty on account of the believers` faith in Christ. In the second half of the thesis, we briefly looked at the main argument of the New Perspective on Paul especially concerning theirdoctrine of justification. The pros and cons of their argument are weighted up, and we concluded that The NPP`s doctrine of justification somehow try to integrate the Catholic`s doctrine of justification with that ofthe reformers. Then after considering the main arguments of Catholic, Protestant and the NPP, we suggest that in order to understanding thedoctrine of justification more comprehensively and biblically we should understand the doctrine in the three perspectives of christology, anthropology and eschatology.