“But justification does not refer to this renewing and sanctifying grace of God. It is one of the primary errors of the Romish Church that it regards justification as the infusion of grace, as renewal and sanctification whereby we are made holy. And the seriousness of the Romish error is not so much that it has confused justification and renewal but that it has confused these two distinct acts of God’s grace and eliminated from the message of the gospel the great truth of free and full justification by grace. That is why Luther endured such travail of soul as long as he was governed by Romish distortion, and the reason why he came to enjoy such exultant joy and confident assurance was that he had been emancipated from the chains by which Rome had bound him; he found the great truth that justification is something entirely different from what Rome had taught.”
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Professor John Murray, a native of Scotland, studied at Princeton Theological Seminary under J. Gresham Machen and Geerhardus Vos.
He taught systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary from 1930 to 1966, and was an early trustee of the Banner of Truth. Besides the material in the four-volume Collected Writings, his primary published works are a commentary on Romans, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, Principles of Conduct, The Imputation of Adam's Sin, Baptism, and Divorce.