I appreciate Dr. Craig's work, but I want to give a little feedback on a comment he made recently with Trent Horn regarding justification and sanctification. Dr. Craig

rightly points out that many Catholic scholars agree that justification in the key Pauline

text refers to a legal declaration of righteousness by God and not an infusion of righteousness

into the person. But what Dr. Craig seems to fail to realize, however, is that we don't

approach the topic of justification

and systematic theology by doing a word study. It is true that for Paul, the concept being

employed is that of divine legal acquittal in a court of law framework. Paul isn't talking

about an infusion of grace when he writes the word justified, but that linguistic note about

how the word is being used

tells us nothing about what is going on within the person, nor about what God does to the

person when God declares them just. Declaring just and infusing justice are conceptually

distinct, and Paul is leaning on one concept rather than the other when the word justified

is employed. But Paul himself also explicitly tells us

that this legal declaration does not exist on its own, but depends on the existence of grace

and faith within the person. A person is declared just by grace through faith. He says so often.

So God must infuse faith into the person, and even if we were to define this faith

in the most unrighteous way possible, it is impossible to make infuse faith into something

less than infuse virtue. For even if justification depended only on an infused mental assent,

mental assent to God is intellectual virtue. Therefore, textually one cannot posit a mere legal acquittal apart from some sort of an infusion

of grace.

But what kind of faith is Paul talking about?

In systematic theology, we can distinguish between the faith that comes prior to

...