Justification In Perspective

I recently ordered a book edited by Bruce McCormack, titled Justification In Perspective (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2006), after seeing it mentioned on James White's blog. The book arrived today, and I've read one chapter from it, the chapter that most interested me. It's the chapter on justification in the church fathers, and it's written by Nick Needham. He argues that concepts such as imputed righteousness, penal substitution, and justification through faith alone, including faith prior to baptism, are found in the church fathers. He doesn't cite every passage he could have cited, but he discusses many, including some I hadn't been familiar with previously. He also gives some examples (again, not as many as he could have) of other scholars supporting similar conclusions. He makes some significant qualifications that I don't think are made often enough, such as that the fathers widely disagreed among themselves on these issues, sometimes may not have been self-consistent, and sometimes spoke in hyperbolic terms. Often, critics of Protestantism will cite what a father said about the necessity of works, for example, then claim that all other passages in that father must be molded around that theme. But why can't we cite passages about the sufficiency of faith or some other such topic and use those passages as the centerpiece instead? Judgments have to be made case-by-case, and some of the fathers do seem to have been inconsistent, but I agree with Nick Needham that some of these Protestant concepts are found among the fathers. They're also found among some non-patristic sources of the patristic era, though Needham only discusses the fathers.

Other chapters in the book include one on justification in Augustine by David Wright, a chapter on justification at Regensburg and Trent by Anthony N.S. Lane, and one on New Perspectivism by N.T. Wright. I haven't read any of those other chapters yet. But I think that the book is worth getting for Needham's chapter alone. The other chapters surely have some good material as well. The book opens with the text of Charitie Bancroft's great hymn "Before The Throne Of God Above".