Robert Jenson on Hearing the Gospel

The sentence "We are justified by faith" stipulates that the church's audible or visible promise of righteousness must be so structured rhetorically and logically that it accepts no lesser response than faith. If the gospel is rightly spoken to or enacted for me, it places me where I can finally say only "I believe, help my unbelief" or "Depart from me." The less drastic response of "works," that is, of deeds or virtues brought forward because they are thought appropriate to the gospel - as in themselves they may well be - does not as such break through my incurvature on myself. For unless this has otherwise been broken, my works, precisely as my actions and habits of action, are still "willingly" done within my antecedent rapture into myself. When the church's proclamation appropriately elicits the response of "works," this by itself shows that the gospel has been wrongly spoken.

I become ontically righteous as I hear the gospel - which is in itself true for me independently of my righteousness - and in hearing am formed by the rightousness that its narrative displays, that is, God's own righteousness of love. The believer "needs no works to become pious,... and so is liberated from all commands and laws" not because the believer is excused from obedience to God's commandments but because as the believer hearkens to the gospel he or she is already actually being formed to the very virtues God commands... As the soul is united with the gospel it hears, it is united with Christ whose word this gospel is, so that the two become one moral subject.

From Systematic Theology, volume 2.