As the California Limited sped southward through the long, flat San Joaquin Valley, Thomas O Roark struggled to stay awake. One moment he was scrunching around in the unrelenting mohair seat, his head bumping against the mahogany window frame, trying to get comfortable; the next he was sitting up massaging the bullet wound in his leg, attempting to ease the pain. When the train lurched through a switch block, he rubbed his eyes awake and leaned forward to stare through the window, streaked with rivulets of moisture and partially blackened by smoke blown back from the big Baldwin...

The Greek family of words characterizing the doctrine of ""justification by faith"" (as it is known in English) is most prominent in the writings of the Apostle Paul. It was this doctrine that lay at the heart of the sixteenth-century Reformation; Martin Luther and his followers considered it to be at the very center of the gospel.
Protestants came to understand ""justification"" differently from the Catholic Church they had left. Instead of the Catholic ""realist"" view, in which God makes a sinner righteous, they came to a ""forensic"" understanding, by which God, as judge, declares a...