Acquiesce to Righteousness

Imparted righteousness, in Methodist theology, is what God does in Christ by the power
of the Holy Spirit after justification, working in the Christian to enable and empower the
process of sanctification (and, in Wesleyan thought, Christian perfection). John Wesley
believed that imparted righteousness worked in tandem with imputed righteousness.
Starting with Augustine, the Roman Catholic tradition has understood justification as the
entire process by which God forgives and then transforms Christians. Based on their
reading of the use of "justification" in Paul's letters, the Reformers took justification to
refer specifically to God's forgiveness and acceptance. The term "sanctification" was
used to refer to the lifelong process of transformation.
Thus the Roman Catholic term "justification" effectively includes both what Protestants
refer to as "justification" and "sanctification." This difference in definitions can result in
confusion, effectively exaggerating the disagreement. However the difference in
definitions reflects a difference in substance. In the Protestant concept, justification is a
status before God that is entirely the result of God's activity and that continues even
when humans sin.
Thus using different words for justification and sanctification reflects a distinction
between aspects of salvation that are entirely the result of God's activity, and those that
involve human cooperation. The Roman Catholic tradition uses a single term, in part,
because it does not recognize a distinction of this type. For the Roman Catholic
tradition, while everything originates with God, the entire process of justification requires
human cooperation, and serious sin compromises it.
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