The doctrine of Justification, or, more accurately, of Rectification, is the doctrine that lay at the heart of the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe. The Reformers developed an understanding of the doctrine that differed markedly from the views of their Roman Catholic contemporaries. Basing their understanding on the Greek in which the original New Testament documents were composed, they popularized their views by making translations from the Greek into various European languages.

The translations produced in the English language drew on two word-families (righteousness/justify) to represent the single word-family at the heart of Paul's doctrine (d