Romans 3:24: “[T]hey are justified by his grace as a gift….”
This verse is used by some to justify a semi-Pelagian view of salvation: To be saved, the gift of faith must be received by responding in faith. Thus the believer has a crucial role in salvation.
Forde: This semi-Pelagian interpretation of Scripture is wrong:
The assertion of “justification by faith” in the sixteenth-century Reformation can be understood only if it is clearly seen as a complete break with ‘justification by grace,’ viewed according to the synthesis we have been describing, as a complete break with the attempt to view justification as a movement according to a given standard or law, either natural or revealed. For the reformers, justification is “solely” a divine act. It is a divine judgment. It is an imputation. It is unconditional. All legal and moral schemes are shattered. Such justification comes neither at the beginning nor at the end of a movement; rather, it establishes an entirely new situation. Since righteousness comes by imputation only, it is absolutely not a movement on our part, either with or without the aid of what was previously termed “grace.” The judgment can be heard and grasped only by faith. Indeed, the judgment creates and calls forth the faith that hears and grasps it. One will mistake the reformation point if one does not see that justification “by faith” is in the first instance precisely a polemic against justification “by grace” according to the medieval scheme. Grace would have to be completely redefined before the word could be safely used in a reformation sense.[1]
See also the footnote to the above paragraph:
The recent penchant for combining grace and faith into the formula “justification by grace through faith” is perhaps understandable given certain modern developments, but (in spite of words suggesting such a formula in the Augsburg Confession IV) it is strictly speaking at best redundant and at worst compounding a felony. When one misses the complete interdependence of grace and faith (grace is the gift of faith; faith alone lets grace be grace), one turns faith into a “subjective response” and can only then cover one’s tracks by saying, “Of course, it comes by grace!” Faith then simply takes the place once occupied by “works” or “merit” in the medieval system and all the problems repeat themselves. Given such misunderstanding it is clear that one cannot use the formula “justification by faith” today without careful work of reclamation. [2]
[1] Gerhard Forde, “Justification,” Church Dogmatics II:407. Italics in the original, bolding added.
[2] Forde, Church Dogmatics II: 407, footnote 7, on page 423. Italics in the original, bolding added.