Is Imputation Necessary for the Gospel?
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It is the difference between being not guilty and innocent. The difference between not convicted and a son. The penalty is paid for our sins, but that would merely place us in the same place as Adam. We are righteous because of the work of Christ. We don't need another Messiah, but have one Messiah who accomplished both in His finished work.
Puritanhead
Puritan Board Professor
And he rose again!
How sharp is the division between what we "get" from the active and passive obedience though?
Is not Christ's passive obedience reckoned to our account not merely to cleanse our guilt, but also as actual righteousness for our justification? Is it completely seperate from the idea of fulfiling the law in and of itself? It is obeying a command of the father after all.
I'm trying to recall where the idea originates that the 'passive obedience' is for covering sin, excluding from it any idea of righteousness itself.
Is not Christ's passive obedience reckoned to our account not merely to cleanse our guilt, but also as actual righteousness for our justification? Is it completely seperate from the idea of fulfiling the law in and of itself? It is obeying a command of the father after all.
I'm trying to recall where the idea originates that the 'passive obedience' is for covering sin, excluding from it any idea of righteousness itself.
See the strange thing to me is that the most worthy meritorious righteous act that Christ performed on my behalf is not his perfect tithing, his avoidance of lust, his proper use of righteous anger, and his honoring of his father and his mother.
It was his accepting the "one act of righteousness" of dying on the cross, performing an act at the father's demand that by the torah results in curse, not blessing. He followed a command for us that according to God's law brings curse.
Is this not the most meritorious thing Christ did in his earthy life? How, then do we claim that we are in absolute need of all the lesser righteous acts of Christ imputed to our account for our justifcation?
Not sure of the answer, but it seems odd to me.
It was his accepting the "one act of righteousness" of dying on the cross, performing an act at the father's demand that by the torah results in curse, not blessing. He followed a command for us that according to God's law brings curse.
Is this not the most meritorious thing Christ did in his earthy life? How, then do we claim that we are in absolute need of all the lesser righteous acts of Christ imputed to our account for our justifcation?
Not sure of the answer, but it seems odd to me.
Brian
Puritan Board Freshman
Pduggan,
Adam´s sin culminated in eating the fruit. However, this was not his first or only sin. He failed to drive the serpent from the garden. He didn´t protect and lovingly lead his wife in the face of error and temptation. He didn´t keep God´s command to subdue the garden, or to have dominion as man over the snake. He conspired with the woman to rebellion in eating and making clothes. He listened to the woman instead of God.
You cannot boil any one of these down to his disobedient act. What God required of him was a life of obedience and loving submission to his creator. What Adam offered was an untrusting trajectory of self-reliance and disbelieving wilfullness.
Similarly, Christ offered a life of obedience (if you were going to pick one act, I´d pick resurrection, by the way). As second Adam, he tended the garden from the serpent and laid His life down to protect His bride. Born under the law, He perfectly and faithfully kept every jot and tittle. The act God required of Him was a lifelong devotion to Torah. When God says, "œThis is My Son in whom I am pleased" He overarches all the patriarchs, David, the prophets, etc, and says "œTHIS IS THE ONE!"
Christ´s death did not procure ANY merit. It was required. When He imputed sin onto Himself, He deserved every ounce of God´s wrath. It produced no righteousness, whatsoever. He drank the cup to its dregs.
(It is true that it was merit-producing of Christ to submit to this. But technically, that is another issue.)
For the thread
The requirement for entrance into paradise and enjoying God as your God and living in His presence is 1000 merit points. It just so happens that correctly keeping the Law will pay you 1000 merit points down at the merit bank, which you can then bring and present to God.
Through your own various efforts at keeping the law, things haven´t been going very well. In all of your energetic law keeping, you notice you are not ever getting it right, and you keep getting dirty hands, and you always spill on your clothes. You curse in your frustration at vainly keeping the law, and just realize "“ whoops, there´s another mistake.
Every now and then you go to the merit bank to cash in on your earnings. This is a bit embarrassing, especially since your hands are dirty when you hand over the paperwork, and its embarrassing being seen in such filthy rags for clothes. However, what is even more discouraging is when the cute-looking teller comes back. She announces that your paperwork is pretty shoddy, and you end up owing the bank money. How disappointing.
Years go by at this vain process, and you manage to acquire yourself massive amounts of debt. Things are not getting better, and you are in way over your head.
Turns out, however, that this guy down the block "“ Jesus "“ is running a deal where He takes your bank PIN and takes all of your debt. What is more, He´ll put you as co-signee on His account. Rumor has it, and a quick look at the clean robes Jesus is wearing confirms, that this Jesus guy is quite good at Torah observance.
You know of a few people who have this certain theology that won´t allow them to take anything for free. Nevertheless, they do enjoy getting their debt reduced by making a visit to Jesus. However, they often have to come back, because no matter how often they start over fresh with no debt to the bank, its only a matter of time before they manage to accumulate a staggering amount of debt at their own vain attempts at righteousness.
You, however, are not so foolish, and gladly turn in your debt card to Jesus, who in return makes you joint-trust members on His bank account. You have the required merit points necessary to gain God, and all the glory of His presence.
With Paul, may we follow a righteousness not of law keeping, but a righteousness accumulated by faith.
For Christ,
BRIAN
Christ´s death was not the "œone act of righteousness."
Paul literally says of Adam "œas one disobedience (paraptomas "“ error, transgression)" in v. 18 and then in v. 19 "œone man´s disobedience (parakoes "“ inattention, mishear, disobedience)." Of Christ, Paul says "œone act of righteousness (dikaiomatos "“ equitable or just deed) and then in v. 19 "œthrough one understanding (hupakoes "“ correct listening, obedience)."
Adam´s sin culminated in eating the fruit. However, this was not his first or only sin. He failed to drive the serpent from the garden. He didn´t protect and lovingly lead his wife in the face of error and temptation. He didn´t keep God´s command to subdue the garden, or to have dominion as man over the snake. He conspired with the woman to rebellion in eating and making clothes. He listened to the woman instead of God.
You cannot boil any one of these down to his disobedient act. What God required of him was a life of obedience and loving submission to his creator. What Adam offered was an untrusting trajectory of self-reliance and disbelieving wilfullness.
Similarly, Christ offered a life of obedience (if you were going to pick one act, I´d pick resurrection, by the way). As second Adam, he tended the garden from the serpent and laid His life down to protect His bride. Born under the law, He perfectly and faithfully kept every jot and tittle. The act God required of Him was a lifelong devotion to Torah. When God says, "œThis is My Son in whom I am pleased" He overarches all the patriarchs, David, the prophets, etc, and says "œTHIS IS THE ONE!"
This kind of theology does not know what to do with Christmas. It just has to jump straight to Easter. You and I need Jesus to be a righteous baby for when we were babies, a righteous toddler for when we were toddlers, a righteous adolescent, teen, adult, etc. When Simeon saw baby Jesus, he could truly say "œNow mine eyes have seen salvation."
No.
Christ´s death did not procure ANY merit. It was required. When He imputed sin onto Himself, He deserved every ounce of God´s wrath. It produced no righteousness, whatsoever. He drank the cup to its dregs.
(It is true that it was merit-producing of Christ to submit to this. But technically, that is another issue.)
You´re right here to wonder this. While it is good and necessary to talk about these two distinctions, they are exegetically difficult to distinguish. However, their respective pay-offs, while completely harmonious and correlated, are vastly significant separately.
For the thread
The requirement for entrance into paradise and enjoying God as your God and living in His presence is 1000 merit points. It just so happens that correctly keeping the Law will pay you 1000 merit points down at the merit bank, which you can then bring and present to God.
Through your own various efforts at keeping the law, things haven´t been going very well. In all of your energetic law keeping, you notice you are not ever getting it right, and you keep getting dirty hands, and you always spill on your clothes. You curse in your frustration at vainly keeping the law, and just realize "“ whoops, there´s another mistake.
Every now and then you go to the merit bank to cash in on your earnings. This is a bit embarrassing, especially since your hands are dirty when you hand over the paperwork, and its embarrassing being seen in such filthy rags for clothes. However, what is even more discouraging is when the cute-looking teller comes back. She announces that your paperwork is pretty shoddy, and you end up owing the bank money. How disappointing.
Years go by at this vain process, and you manage to acquire yourself massive amounts of debt. Things are not getting better, and you are in way over your head.
Turns out, however, that this guy down the block "“ Jesus "“ is running a deal where He takes your bank PIN and takes all of your debt. What is more, He´ll put you as co-signee on His account. Rumor has it, and a quick look at the clean robes Jesus is wearing confirms, that this Jesus guy is quite good at Torah observance.
You know of a few people who have this certain theology that won´t allow them to take anything for free. Nevertheless, they do enjoy getting their debt reduced by making a visit to Jesus. However, they often have to come back, because no matter how often they start over fresh with no debt to the bank, its only a matter of time before they manage to accumulate a staggering amount of debt at their own vain attempts at righteousness.
You, however, are not so foolish, and gladly turn in your debt card to Jesus, who in return makes you joint-trust members on His bank account. You have the required merit points necessary to gain God, and all the glory of His presence.
With Paul, may we follow a righteousness not of law keeping, but a righteousness accumulated by faith.
For Christ,
BRIAN
That seems like a very strange way to put things.
Under the law, atoning sacrifices were still 'pleasing aromas' to God.
And of course, all torah obedience is 'required' and when you have done it all you are still an 'unprofitable servant' because you have done that which was not required. Heb 9:14 and 10:14 talk of the offering he made (his death on the cross) perfecting us, and how in his crucifiction he was offered 'without spot'.
And Romans 3:25 seems to speak of a propitatory righteousness that remits sins coming to us from his death and shed blood.
Even favoring the later developments of Reformed confessionalism like the Savoy moving to state
seems to indicate that we have something credited to our account that comes from the obedience of death on the cross.
His death was not passive obedience, you know! He was obedient even unto (all the way to) the point of death. He willfully, actively, and voluntarily laid down His life (so that He could take it up again). His death was the last act of His active obedience to God - so ALL of Christ's rightesouness is ACTIVE. And it is ALL necessary for our salvation. John 10:11-17.
EVERY particle of His righteousness (whatever terms we use to define it or delineate it) is imputed to us when we are justified. Without it all we have no savior and no salvation. We are without total holiness, and anything less than total holiness is unholy and unfit for fellowship with the Holy, Holy, Holy Father!
Phillip
EVERY particle of His righteousness (whatever terms we use to define it or delineate it) is imputed to us when we are justified. Without it all we have no savior and no salvation. We are without total holiness, and anything less than total holiness is unholy and unfit for fellowship with the Holy, Holy, Holy Father!
Phillip
Puritan Sailor
Puritan Board Doctor
Active refers to His intentionalperfect obedience to the law. He loved the law of God, and kept it perfectly, from the heart.
Passive, refers more to his submitting to the work of atonement, accepting the humiliation of his status on earth, being slain for sinners, and quenching the wrath of God, just as a lamb before the slaughter.
But His passive righteousness would be worthless without the active righteousness. The OT required perfection, as pictured by the sheep without blemish.
They are intertwined certainly in the consciousness of Jesus. He actively submitted to the humiliation. But the humiliation was required in order to satisfy God's wrath against us, while the active obeying of the law by Christ was required for God to declare us righteous, as if we perfectly kept the law on our own.
Puritanhead
Puritan Board Professor
This is about like a poll that asks "Is Christ the way, the truth and the life?"
turmeric
Megerator
Here's a question for those struggling with the necessity of Christ's active righteousness - and no, I wasn't smart enough to think of it myself - it's an R.C.Sproul thing. Here it is: If His active obedience wasn't necessary for our salvation, if all we needed was a pure sacrifice, why did He come as a baby, why didn't He just appear as a perfect sinless adult human, go straight to the Cross, rise again and leave?
That's not much of a point, as someone like that wouldn't be a natural human being, and wouldn't have a basis (natural descent)) for being a covenant head.
I mean, you could answer that point by saying that while the atonement is sufficient for our salvation, we also need the example of his holy life to imitate, so he comes with full natural human life.
But does the Torah require animals of X years of age because the worshipper needs the imputed life of X years of animal goodness?
But his being made "under the law" was also part of his humiliation. And when he died under the law, he also canceled the 'written code which was against us', because he suffered death (the penalty) under the law as our representative. If the written code is canceled, how is it that we need his obedience to it to be accepted?
Is the active submission to the humiliating death (called 'passive' obedience) then NOT something that is also imputed to us as our righteousness? The Savoy says it is, and I'm curious if anyone disagrees.
[Edited on 9-19-2005 by pduggan]
R. Scott Clark
Puritan Board Senior
This point speaks to those who think of Jesus death as his only passive obedience. It does not address, as someone has already noted, however, the question of Jesus' qualification to be our Savior.
This problem goes back, at least as far as Anselm's _Cur Deus Homo_ (Why the God-Man_; which we're reading [or re-reading] as part of a course in medieval theology this semester. Anselm wanted to defend God's honor and the incarnation and death of Jesus against Jewish/rationalist criticism that such is not "fitting" for God. As part of his case he argued that (e.g., 1.9-10) all human beings, sinful or not, federal representative or not, owe a life of obedience to God full stop. Therefore, as a true man, Jesus owed a life of obedience to God in order to qualify himself to be a Savior, therefore only his death on the cross is accepted "for us."
This was the basis for those among the Reformed (and a few Westminster) divines who rejected the imputation of the active obedience of Christ. The response was and is that Jesus did not need to qualify himself to become a Savior, because he was not born sinful (this is the point of the virgin conception) and, contrary to Anselm's assumption, it is the sinner who must satisfy God's law. The covenant of works, a version of which Anselm seems to have more less assumed without calling it that, is no longer a possible way of salvation after the fall. Anselm didn't account for this. Jesus did need to keep the covenant of works and the covenant of redemption, but not for himself, but for us.
Therefore Jesus was qualified from birth to serve as our second federal head (Rom 5; 1 Cor 15) and to carry the burden of God's wrath all his life (Heidelberg Catechism 37), to be born "under the law" (Gal 4:4).
Further, Jesus had (and has) his divine righteousness which was also, as it were, put to the service of our salvation. This also qualifies him to be a Savior ab initio (from the beginning). Thus, virtually all, but a handful rejected Anselm's assumptions in favor of the Reformed three- covenant, federalist (two-Adam) scheme and saw that Jesus obeyed not for himself, but for us and that his "whole obedience" (Abp Ussher's phrase) was for us and it was entirely active and passive, for us.
The confessional Reformed and Presbyterian world has accepted Anselm's argument for the substitutionary nature of Christ's death and the necessity of the incarnation (those are brilliant) but not his argument regarding what Jesus needed to do to qualify himself to be our Savior.
rsc
But Adam was not born sinful either, and the covenant of works was given for him to perform. As a true man, how does he avoid coming under the covenant of works for himself?
I've usually heard that Jesus obedience to the law was BOTH for us AND qualified him to be our savior, not that there would be an either/or here. So this seems new to me.
R. Scott Clark
Puritan Board Senior
I could live with this, though a little unhappily, as long as one includes the "for us" (pro nobis) which is at the heart of the biblical and Reformation gospel.
To say, however, that he owed obedience for himself is to follow Anselm where we should not follow him. Why did Jesus owe obedience for himself? Yes, he is true man and humans owe obedience to God by nature, but there are discontinuities between Jesus and Adam. The first Adam was created in righteousness and true holiness but he wasn't the God-Man. Jesus is.
If we follow Anselm (and this is where a lot of folk seem to want to go; any half-way house such as is proposed above is inherently unstable since it has within it competing views) then we cannot say with Q. 60 of the Heidelberg Catechism that, as a believer, it is as if I have kept all of God's law and have never broken any of them. In other words, there is never any positive righteousness.
This actually does not correspond with the covenant of works. Under the covenant of works, Adam was capable of meriting his reward. If Jesus gave what owed for himself, then he could not MERIT anything for us, and yet our understanding of Scripture is that indeed he merited positive righteousness to be imputed to us.
So why the concern? Folks want to put Jesus under the law for himself because they think it is unjust for God to punish for the same sin twice. This is, as I argue elsewhere, a rationalist argument.
The covenants of redemption and works function as they were constituted not according to some universally accessible (to God and man) principle of rationality.
In other words, contrary to those who argue that either the reward of the covenant of works or the punishment was disproportional (proponents of prelapsarian grace often appeal to the notion of disproportionality), God gets to determine what is and is not just. He himself is the standard of justice. We must measure justice by God's self-disclosure not by what seems just to us.
That is why the divines spoke of God's "voluntary condescension" and not "grace." The will of God, which is wholy just, holy, perfect in every respect, is the standard of measure.
This is all to respond to the implicit and explicit criticism by those opposed to the imputation of active obedience (not in your post) that "its not fair that Jesus didn't have to obey for himself."
rsc
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