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...