Bored Protestant

"For Arminius, because of the gracious estimation of God, he credits our faith as our righteousness. The righteousness of Christ is not imputed to believers, according to at least the later Arminius. He did not believe Christ’s righteousness could be imputed. In discussing justification, Arminius made use of the Latin term acceptilatio, which means a “formal release from an obligation.” Imperfect faith, then, is accepted by God’s gracious estimation as righteousness. Or to put it another way, the human act of faith is by grace counted as evangelical righteousness, as if it were the complete fulfillment of the whole law, even though it is not."   This interesting quote comes from Mark Jones book Faith. Hope. Love.: The Christ-Centered Way to Grow in Grace. But the surprising thing here is that he does not cite Arminius which is surprising since he is making the claim that this is the view of Arminius. But I will prove this has no validity at all by looking at Armin...

The doctrine of justification is one of the most important doctrines for protestantism. People will usually say that Justification is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls and they are not wrong to a certain extent. Since this is important since it deals with our salvation but justification is only one part of salvation. Wakefield excellently says "The sum of this salvation, so far as it regards a qualification for eternal life, consists in justification, regeneration, adoption, and sanctification."(1) So to talk about salvation is not only to talk about Justification but also talk about those doctrines such as sanctification. But for this post my goal is to explain the doctrine of justification by faith alone as explained by Wesleyan tradition pulling from the Samuel Wakefield since he does the best job of explaining and contrasting it with the Reformed view. And I will be pointing out the differences and agreements between our view and the Reformed view when it c...