Big ups to whoever can correctly identify the source of the following quotation:"But if 'righteousness,' within the lawcourt context, refers to the status of the vindicated person after the court has announced its verdict, we have undercut in a singe stroke the age-old problem highlighted in Augustine's interpretation of 'justify' as 'make righteous.' That always meant, for Augustine and his followers, that God, in justification, was actually transforming the character of the person, albeit in small, preliminary ways (by, for instance, implanting the beginnings of love and faith within them). The result was a subtle but crucial shifting of metaphors: the lawcourt scene is now replaced with a medical one, a kind of remedial spiritual surgery, involving a 'righteous implant' which, like an artificial heart, begins to enable the patient to do things previously impossible.
"But part of the point of Paul's own language, rightly stressed by those who have analyzed the verb dikaioo, 'to justify,' is that it does not denote an action which transforms someone so much as a declaration which grants them a status. It is the status of the person which is transformed by the action of 'justification,' not the character."
And as always, no Googling....
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