Covenant Presbyterian Church

The heart of the gospel is imputation. The "impute" (logi>zomai) word-group has a range of meanings that include to reckon, count, calculate, take into account, or credit to one’s account. "Impute" is the word often used to describe the means by which the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ is given to us, a gift that involves a change of status before God and that is received through the instrument of Spirit-produced faith (Rom. 4:8,10,11,22,23,24; 5:13; James 2:23). Our Savior’s righteousness is imputed or credited to us; our sins are imputed or credited to him (2 Cor. 5:21). As a result of this "transaction," we are "reckoned" or "accounted" righteousness "on account of" or "for the sake of" his propitiatory sacrifice and sinless life. Thus, the New Testament says that he died for our sake (Rom. 4:24,25), for us (Rom. 5:8; 1 Thess. 5:10), and for (in place of) our sins (Gal. 1:4; 1 John 2:2; 4:10). Each of these phrases emphasizes the substitutionary nature of Christ’s death. He satisfied divine justice, the holy wrath of God, who can by no means leave the guilty unpunished (Ex. 34:7). The other side is that we are now righteousness for the sake of Christ. We, God’s elect, those who believe the gospel, are the righteousness of God in him (1 Cor. 1:30). Thus understood, transferred imputation, our sins to Christ and his righteousness to us, is the heart of the gospel; without it, there is no gospel.

Until now, that is. For a variety of reasons that are beyond my present purpose to analyze in detail, imputation has fallen upon hard times in broader Protestantism, even within some Reformed circles. Leading the popular charge against imputation is the Anglican theologian, N.T. Wright. Like many advocates of the so-called New Perspective on Paul, Wright maintains that Protestants have for too long interpreted Paul’s teaching too narrowly, too focused on justification, too tightly gripped in the duress of Luther’s conscience. This has led to a Protestant misreading of Paul’s theology, his understanding of the Jew-Gentile issue, and, more to the present point, the believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ. Viewing this relationship in legal terms, as God declaring sinners righteous based upon the imputed righteousness of Christ does not do justice, according to Wright, to Paul’s overall Christology. Wright sees the commonly recurring phrase "in Christ" as being a better center of Paul’s theology. He thus advocates a participational or vocational Christology. Legal interpretations of justification and imputation simply fail to do justice to the wide spectrum of benefits that we receive by virtue of the person and work of Christ.

Wright incorrectly views imputation and its attendant implications for justification as being too legal and impersonal to describe the believer’s relationship with Jesus Christ. Moreover, he leaves the question of the way whereby we receive the righteousness of Christ unsatisfactorily answered. If we reject imputation in favor of a participational Christology, several questions ensue. How do we participate in Christ? What does it means to be "in Christ?" What is the nature of our union with Christ? Are we absorbed into his personal nature? Is it an existential union of experience, sacramental efficacy, or moral imitation? Or should we return to a view of justifying righteousness that was met and rejected by the Reformers? The Lutheran theologian Osiander, for example, maintained that we receive Christ’s divine righteousness, thus denying the Creator-creature distinction as well as the unique mediatorial work and position of Christ. Wright is correct in his desire to do justice to the wide significance of the believer’s "in Christ" status. When we embrace Jesus Christ by faith, we receive everything he obtained for us by his life, death, and resurrection. But the question remains, "How?" By failing to give a biblical answer to this pressing question, Wright actually undermines the believer’s union with Christ, the believer’s saving participation in the benefits of Christ’s salvation, and his confidence in the all-sufficiency of Christ’s person and work.

Imputation is not a sterile substitute for a more personal understanding and participation in Jesus Christ. It is a necessary aspect of the way we receive the benefits of Christ. This is seen in several ways. First, the covenantal nature of God’s relationship with his creatures requires imputation. Said another way, imputation is inseparable from covenant. Consider, for example, our Confession’s profound statement of the relationship between the Creator and the creature in chapter 7, paragraph 1. Because of the distance between God the Creator and man the creature, man is unable to relate to God confidently, joyfully, and properly apart from the covenant relationship that God has ordained and voluntarily established between himself and man. You will note that the Confession is not referring to the alienating effects of sin. It is speaking generally about God’s relationship with man even apart from the moral gulf created by sin. While man is made in God’s image, he is still dust and ashes, unable to relate to his Maker apart from God’s initiative, his covenant initiative. This is not to depreciate man as a "little lower than the angels;" it is to rather emphasize and confess the incomparable majesty of God. He is higher than man and distinct from man in every conceivable way (Isa. 55:6). Thus, he has determined to draw near to us through the personal and legal aspects of a covenant.

That God relates to man by covenant and thus by imputation is seen from his relationship with Adam. Paul picks up this theme in Romans 5 where he draws a very tight analogy between Adam and Christ. God entered into a covenant with Adam as the head of the human race. This is sometimes and properly called a covenant of works, for Adam’s continuance in his created uprightness depended by God’s decree upon his personal and perpetual obedience to God’s command. It is entirely appropriate to speak of Adam’s pre-fall relationship with God as a covenant for it bears all the marks of a biblical covenant (parties, conditions, promises, and sanctions). It is also legitimate to speak of it as a covenant of works for strictly speaking Adam did not need saving grace. He simply needed to continue in the state in which God created him. He did not. This is where Paul’s analogy and theology of imputation comes to the forefront. As a result of Adam’s transgression, his guilt, pollution, and curse were imputed to the entire human race. The reason is simple. Adam was federally or covenantally related to everyone that descended from him by ordinary generation. What he received, we receive. His guilt is our guilt - by imputation. This imputation is legal and personal. All men by virtue of their representative connection to Adam became guilty before God, heirs of death, and enslaved to depravity. Paul’s analogy is not based upon a participational relationship with Adam, i.e., it is as if we sinned, or were there and sinned, or follow his bad example in our own lives. His sin and all its consequences were imputed to us. Thus, Paul’s theology of the fall and of sin is covenantal and imputational.

The second half of his analogy makes clear that the covenantal, representational principle holds true for our relationship with Jesus Christ, the second and greater Adam. As it was with Adam, so it is with Christ. Adam’s guilt was imputed to all men by virtue of their covenant solidarity with him. Christ’s righteousness is given to us similarly. His personal obedience to the will of his Father as our Mediator is that which makes us righteousness before God. This righteousness is ours upon the basis of covenant transference, or imputation. We do not become sinful because we follow Adam’s bad example or existentially participate in him. His guilt was credited to us. We do not become righteous because we follow Christ’s good example or existentially participate in him. His righteousness is credited to us. This is not to say that imputed righteousness is the only benefit we receive from Jesus Christ, but it is the way we receive the righteousness of Christ. Through Christ Jesus our status, legally, covenantally, and personally, is changed. We are no longer represented by Adam but by Christ. We are in covenant with him by the electing grace of our heavenly Father and the operating grace of the Holy Spirit.

Imputation thus presupposes several non-negotiable truths. First, even apart from sin, God has chosen to relate to men through the legal aspects of a covenant. We can escape these legalities only if we are willing to give up cardinal attributes of God: his justice, holiness, and righteousness, and in terms of revelation, his law. Second, one’s standing before God is inseparable from mediation. Before and after sin, God has man is unable to represent himself before God. God has always worked through covenant heads or mediators: Adam or Christ. Third, neither covenant nor mediation is impersonal or sterile. Men are personally connected with God through the mediator and covenant by which they are represented. Their lives and families are directly and personally impacted by their covenant relationship with God. Fourth, imputation is at the heart of God’s dealings with man. The imputation of Adam’s sin and guilt consigned the entire human race, collectively and individually, under the wrath and curse of God. The imputation of Christ’s righteousness and sacrifice brought God’s elect people into a new status, under a new covenant with a new representative. It is only as man’s legal standing before the law and justice of God is changed that he can personally enjoy fellowship with God and all the other blessings obtained for us by the work of the Mediator of the new covenant, Jesus Christ. Imputed righteousness, the fundamental gift of God to us through Jesus Christ, is the fountainhead from which all other blessings flow. This is not to depreciate adoption, sanctification, or glorification, or to impose an artificial chronology upon these blessings. Yet, they are distinguishable, and they cannot be received apart from a status change in the sight of God, a new covenant identify that is built upon the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ and received by faith alone.

Fifth, the rejection of imputation is tied to several faulty theological presuppositions. There is the failure, as Calvin movingly emphasized almost five hundred years ago, to face adequately the holiness and justice of God. He cannot leave the guilty unpunished. He cannot enjoy fellowship with men who are fundamentally lawbreakers. To do so would be to deny his character. While we need the existential or personal change that is accomplished by regeneration, adoption, and progressive sanctification, we need a more fundamental status or covenant change if we are to enjoy fellowship with him. Covenant imputation is the only divinely revealed way God has ordained to restore sinners to a right standing before him. Second, we struggle to accept the notion of mediation. We would represent ourselves before God, seizing from him by our own efforts what can only be received as a gift. Christ alone is the Mediator between God and man - not the church, not the sacraments, not our private prayers and efforts. And it is his obedience as our mediator, in our place, clothed in our nature, that obtains for us the righteousness God requires and apart from which there is no fellowship with him. Thus, the denial of imputation goes hand in hand with a denial of the central purpose of the Incarnation. It was not to absorb our persons into the essence of God or to set a good example for us. The Son of God took upon himself our nature in order to obey and suffer in our place, to make us righteous and to cleanse us of the guilt and pollution of sin. Third, imputation stresses the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ as nothing else does. Being made righteous before God is not a process in which we participate with God through our efforts, works, prayers, or self-improvement. It is a gift. It is received through the instrument of faith by which we rest upon Christ alone for righteousness before God.

Finally, implicit in the denial of imputation is a faulty view of the person of Jesus Christ. Wright should be commended for defending the historicity of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He emphasizes the real humanity of Jesus Christ. What seems to be lacking, however, is equal emphasis upon his full deity. Wright gives us a real historical Jesus but with insufficient attention to his deity, we are left with no explanation for the church’s worship of Jesus as God, the Son of God clothed in our flesh. And with this failure, not only does the Chalcedonian Christology suffer from neglect, but salvation becomes problematic. It is only as God and man, two nature sin one person, that Jesus Christ could and did obtain our salvation. We must have the righteousness of God, not simply the righteousness of a perfect man, but the righteousness of God himself. And this righteousness was obtained by Jesus Christ as God and man, our Mediator. It is not received by absorption into his divine nature or an existential participation in his human perfection. It is received by imputation. Upon this foundation our salvation is secure and our confidence in the sufficiency of Christ established. To give up imputation, in the final analysis, is to give up the unique person of Jesus Christ, as God and man, without confusion, composition, or conversion. This glorious Savior is our Mediator, our covenant head, Jehovah our righteousness.