Justification as Creation; Creation as Justification

I think we have rediscovered in recent years that our salvation is our new creation. We are picking up and emphasising all those NT and Isaianic images of creation when describing our redemption. This is great. Lets celebrate it.

However, somehow in the process there seems to be a desire to shift justification to one side as one metaphor among many. Drawn from the legal context justification can be preferably pushed aside to make way creation which is more fundamental.

Oswald Bayer will not buy into this because to him what God says is fundamental to everything. Justification is what God declares in grace over us, it is also what he declared in grace over the whole of creation.

justification is not simply an isolated topic, next to which other topics can exist; it has essential importance and is connected with every topic. Justification does not affect just my individual life, not even just the history of the world, but impacts the history of nature as well; if affects all things. It is thus not sufficient to speak of the article on justification solely as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae - as the article on which the church stands and falls. Instead, the meaning of justification must be taken seriously in its breadth, with ramifications that have application for a theology of creation and for ontology. In a prominent position in the Smalcald Articles Luther says: "One cannot go soft or give way on this article, for then heaven and earth would fall." "Without the article on justification the world is nothing but death and darkness."

(p. 98, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

God's word is 'the creative Word of God that justifies' (p.97, ibid). 'Creation is speech act' (p.103).

I should really comment more but I haven't got time. By the way, I have quoted Oswald Bayer before the fundamental nature of justification before.