What Does 'Saint and Sinner at the Same Time' Mean?

Simul iustus et peccator—Latin for “at the same time righteous and sinner”—is Luther’s way of describing the true, and initially puzzling, condition of every Christian. It means that a believer is, simultaneously and completely, both things at once: fully righteous and still a sinner. Not partly one and partly the other, not righteous on good days and sinful on bad ones, but 100% of each, at the same time, in two different respects.

How can both be fully true? Because they are true in different ways. In himself—looking at his own heart, desires, and daily performance—the Christian remains a genuine sinner, and will until he dies. Paul, an apostle, described his own ongoing war: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… Wretched man that I am!” (Romans 7:19, 24). That struggle is not a sign of a defective Christian; it is the normal condition of a real one, the flesh and the Spirit at war (Galatians 5:17). But in Christ—looking at his standing before God, clothed in Christ’s righteousness credited to him by faith—the very same Christian is completely righteous, holy, and accepted. God “counts righteousness apart from works” and “will not count his sin” (Romans 4:6-8). Both descriptions are entirely accurate, viewed from the two angles.

This one truth is extraordinarily freeing, because it steers between two errors that torment sincere believers. On one side is despair: “I keep sinning, so I must not really be a Christian; God must be finished with me.” Simul answers: your ongoing sin does not cancel your righteousness in Christ, because that righteousness never depended on your performance in the first place—it is Christ’s, given to you. On the other side is pretending: the pressure to act as though you’ve basically arrived, to hide your struggles, to perform holiness you don’t feel. Simul answers: you don’t have to pretend—“if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8), and you can be brutally honest about your sin precisely because your standing rests on Christ, not on being sin-free.

So the phrase lets you hold two things together that your feelings want to force apart. You can look squarely at your real, unfinished sinfulness without panic—and you can rest in your real, complete righteousness in Christ without pretense. You are worse than you feared and more loved than you hoped, at the very same time. That is not a contradiction to be solved but the actual shape of the Christian life this side of heaven: a forgiven sinner, fully righteous in Christ, still fighting, and held secure the whole way home.