works of law and works of grace

In a recent blog I argued that Christianity is all grace.  The OT Law, by contrast, was a covenant of works.   It did not function on the premise of grace or faith but human achieving.  Paul makes this crystal clear in Galatians.

Gal 3:10-14 (ESV)
For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us-for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”- so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.

And this is no isolated verse, though if it were it would be sufficient.  Other texts reveal the same teaching (Deut 27:26; Lev 18:5; Ezek 20:11; Roms 10:5; Lk 10:25-28). I underline this for many attempt to tell us, in the face of ample and clear biblical witness, that Law was a covenant of grace.  Emphatically, not so.

The simple fact is that the Mosaic Law was a covenant of works depending for its success on a righteousness achieved by man rather than a righteousness given by God; obedience brought blessing and life while disobedience brought curse and death.  It proved to be an abysmal failure leading ultimately to the curse of exile.  Thus, OT hope, realising the weakness of the OC, looked to a future when God himself would ‘work righteousness’ (Ps 103:6; Jer 51:10; Isa 33:5, 45:8) and ‘bring salvation’ (Isa 46:1).  This future salvation arrives of course in Messiah (Lk 1:67-80, 2:29-32, 19:9; Acts 13:23-51).  Today, is the day of salvation (2 Cor 6:2; 1 Pet 1:10).  Now is the realisation (at least in part) of the eschatological (end-time) salvation (1 Pet 1:10), righteousness (Roms 1:16-18), faith ( Gals 3:23, 25), and grace (Jn 1;17; 1 Pet 1:10; Tit 2:11) which the OT anticipated.  The Law may well have come through Moses but grace and truth comes through Jesus Christ (Jn 1:17).  Christianity is Christ and Christ is grace.

So stark and clear-cut is this contrast between old covenant law-works and new covenant gospel-grace that Paul can write:

Rom 4:4-5 (ESV)
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift [or, not counted as of grace] but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness

Rom 11:6 (ESV)
But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.

and again

2Tim 1:9 (ESV)
who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.

Law and Christ are different in principle.  Now it is just at this point that the question arises: does this mean that there are no ‘works’ that are expected (even demanded) of a Christian?  Has the gospel no obligations?  If God saves me by grace can I live as I like (Roms 6:1)?  Paul’s answer is ‘God forbid’  (Roms 6:2).

And it is as well we hear this apostolic consternation and denunciation and grasp it, for some Christians in their zeal to say that ‘works’ have no place in the Christian gospel go quite wrong at this point.  In their well-intentioned effort to maintain the biblical distinction between ‘law and grace” or ‘works and faith’ they teach ‘doing or works’  is always law and ‘done and faith’ are always gospel; works, they say, have nothing to do with gospel.  This, however well motivated, is a false dichotomy.  It is not the biblical paradigm.  Paul clearly expects the gospel to produce righteous living (Roms 6).  Paul’s opposition is not to ‘works’ per se, but to ‘law-works’.  And by ‘law-works’ he means specifically the ‘works’ of the Mosaic Covenant and more generally ‘works’ that rest on the same premise as this covenant.  And the premise is all important.  The ‘law-works’ Paul opposes are those that are undertaken as a means of gaining a righteousness before God that will merit eternal life.  The Mosaic Law offered life through righteousness achieved (this do and live).  And it did so by demanding obedience but offering no grace to obey.  It laid the responsibility firmly on unaided humanity, humanity ‘in the flesh’.

The Law ever assumes man in the flesh; life is not the starting point of the Law, it is the goal (Lev 18:5; Gals 3:10-14; Roms 7:14; Cf. Gals 3:3).  However, that which ‘promised life’ brought only death, for flesh, to which law was addressed, could not and would not obey (Roms 7:9-11) indeed the Law simply provoked flesh to sin all the more (Roms 7:5, 7-9).  Thus, Paul asserts:

Rom 3:20 (ESV)
For by works of the law no human being (better, ‘flesh’) will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Thus, the ‘works’ that Paul condemns and opposes are works that proceed on the basis of human nature seeking by its own righteousness to inherit (merit) eternal life.  Such are ‘the works of the law’.  When by my own ‘goodness’ I seek to gain a place in heaven, my ‘goodness’ is mere worthless ‘law-works’.  When I think I can ‘earn’ or ‘merit’  or ‘gain’ God’s favour by my own efforts, or believe I can somehow work my passage to heaven, I am attempting to ‘justify myself’ and  ‘trusting in myself’ before God.  I am looking for a way to put God in my debt (Roms 4:4).  And God will have none of it.  Quite apart from the futility of any efforts by me to achieve the righteousness God’s glory requires (Roms 3:23) God will simply not allow any man to have a basis for boasting before him (1 Cor 1:29; Roms 3:27; Phil 3:3).  And so we read:

Eph 2:8-10 (ESV)
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Yet, note carefully, this very text, which excludes all ‘works’ from salvation and insists instead that we are God’s ‘workmanship’ goes on toobserve that those saved by grace through faith are ‘created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them’.   ‘Good works’ are the very substance of the life that God has mapped out for those saved by grace.  And this text in Ephesians is by no means an isolated reference to the ‘good works’ of the believer.  Even if we limit our scan of the NT to the specific phrase ‘good works’ we find it is demanded and designated of Christians no less than twelve times (Acts 9:36; 1 Tim 2:10,5:10,5:25, 6:18; Tit 1:16, 2:7,14, 3:8,14; Hebs 10:24; 1 Pet 2:12).  Now, these are not ‘works’ that are dismissed and denounced but ‘works’ that are decreed and demanded.  In a word, these are not ‘law-works’ but ‘gospel-works’.  They are not ‘dead’ works of the flesh but the living fruit of the Spirit (Cf Acts 13:2).  They are ‘works of faith’ (Cf. Gals 5:6; 1 Thess 1:3; 2 Thess 1:11; Jas 2:18,22).  That is, they are ‘grace-works’ (2 Cor 9:8; Acts 14:28; Eph 3:7).  Once again Paul expresses clearly what ‘grace-works’ are:

1Cor 15:10 (ESV)
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

The differences between ‘works of the law’ and ‘works of grace’ now become obvious: law-works find their source in man whereas grace-works find their source in God; law-works base their hope in man whereas grace-works base their hope in God; law-works seek to gain life through works whereas grace-works express a life already possessed by grace; law-works have life as their goal while grace-works have life as their ground; law-works seek to earn salvation while grace-works seek to express salvation; law-works are our workings to impress God whereas grace-works are God working in us to please him.

The differences between the two are as wide as eternity.  One works for salvation and the other works from salvation.  In one the source is man and his arrogance and in the other the source is God and his grace.  One damns and the other saves.

Allow me, in conclusion, to make one final important observation.  We can only produce ‘grace-works’ if we stand entirely confident in our justification by grace through faith.  If our ‘works’ do not arise from the assurance that we are God’s children being simply the faith-response of gratitude to grace, then our ‘works’ will inevitably be law-works; if they not arise from the assurance of standing in grace then they must inevitably arise from an attempt to earn that standing.  To make the same point in another way: if we do not stand strong in our initial justification by grace through faith then our fitting justification by works (Jas 2), that is grace-works, will collapse into a  false justification by law (Gals 5:4) that is, law-works’; we will be ‘severed’ from grace (Gals 5:4)

Christianity is Christ and Christ is the gospel of grace.  Christianity is grace from first to last, including ‘grace-works’.

the obedient life of christ was not vicarious

I know we should not use the weakest expression of a position to criticise it.  I know it is easy to knock straw men.  The following example is both.  However, it is a view that I hear echoed regularly online; it may be a weak expression of a belief but it is certainly a prevalent one.  Here’s the quotation:

‘The believer is lukewarm, his/her Saviour was consumed by zeal. The believer is prayerless, but Christ continued all night in prayer to God. The believer is sluggish in obedience, but Christ delighted to do the will of the Father. All this and more – he is our peace, he is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption – when the law comes asking for obedience, believers can point to the Substitute in their law place.’

This is a belief founded on the view that the life of Christ is vicariously ours.  We are told that Christ’s active obedience to the law is our righteousness before God.  His death is not enough to declare us righteous, we also need an ‘active’ righteousness, a life lived.  I have tackled some of the better expressions of this position elsewhere in detail, here I am simply observing the absurdity of a popular expression of ‘imputed active obedience’.

I hope the absurdity of the quotation is obvious to all.  A Christian woman fails to dress modestly but Jesus dressed modestly on her behalf!  Is the corollary true?  I am not a good father and as Christ was never married he cannot have kept the law for me in this area.   The whole line of reasoning is monstrously inappropriate.  Christ’s life does not cover every situation believers over the ages have found themselves in an provide a corresponding ‘law-keeping’ for our ‘law-breaking’.  Yes indeed, Christ has glorified God in a life lived entirely in obedience.  Yes this life was necessary for our justification for the justifying death of Christ required a perfect sacrifice; the value of the death is in the life.  But it is not his life that atones but his death.  In the law the sacrifices that atoned were blood sacrifices.  Scripture could not be clearer:

Lev 17:11 (ESV)
For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.

Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.  Substitution lay in a death died not a life lived.  Consequently, we are said to be justified by Christ’s blood but never by his life (other than his life in resurrection which is something different).  The Law demands death for the law-breaker.  No amount of law-keeping by another can make a guilty man righteous.  Christ is my substitute by taking that death upon himself.  He took the curse of a broken law and so redeemed me from the law.  If I live now, I live on the other side of death in a resurrected Christ.  I stand in his righteous position before the Father.  It is a position that is beyond law and not answerable to law.

The great tragedy of this emphasis on IAO is that it takes atonement away from the cross and places it at the incarnation.  Notice how the writer finds his peace in Christ’s life rather than his death: ‘when the law comes asking for obedience, believers can point to the Substitute in their law place.’  The glory of the cross is occluded.  Yet in heaven the song of the redeemed is to the lamb, the one who has purchased men to God by his blood’.  It is at the cross that substitution takes place (Isa 53).  There redemption is accomplished (Roms 3).  It is Christ lifted up who draws all men to him.  The cross is the place of propitiation and where God’s righteousness in salvation is displayed (Roms 3).  It is in being justified by his blood we have peace with God (Roms 5:1).  We are reconciled to God through the death of his son (Roms 5:10; Col 1:10).  It is on the cross he suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he may bring us to God.  In the words of an old hymn concerning the cross:

Bearing shame and scoffing rude

In my place condemned he stood

Sealed my pardon with his blood

Hallelujah, what a Saviour.

 

The lesson for us all is – let the Bible speak and not theological constructs.  When we adopt constructs and then extrapolate on them, we end up with positions that are risible.  Moreover, it seems to be a rule that the construct eventually supplants the truth.

romans, and the righteousness of god (2)

Rom 1:16-17 (ESV)
I am not ashamed of the gospel… for in it the righteousness of God is revealed…

A world that is right is what is needed.  Creation groans eager to birth a world right in every way,  a new world suffused with righteousness where righteousness is the plumb-line (Isa 28:17),  flows like the waves of the sea (Isa 48:18), ​​​​​​​and like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24).   The yearning of the righteous is for a creation where the clouds rain down righteousness (Isa 45:8) and righteousness sprouts from the ground like a fruit (Isa 45:8), and where all the people are oaks of righteousness before the Lord (Isa 61:3).

But…  the reality is far from this.

Unrighteousness is the reigning paradigm.  Creation’s steward has despoiled it with unrighteousness and its fruits.  This anatomy of human unrighteousness Paul lays bare in Roms 1:18-3:20: absurd idolatry (1:18-22); unnatural sexuality (1:24-27); brutish behaviour (1: 28-31); permissive morality (1:32); and, perhaps worst of all, moral and religious hypocrisy, epitomised most clearly in the Jewish nation, God’s chosen people (2;1-29).

The Jewish nation believed themselves a cut above all other nations, and they were.  They were God’s chosen people.  They alone had been given God’s Law.  They were God’s chosen mouthpiece to the nations (2:17-20).  Yet Paul is unambiguous – they too have failed and failed abysmally (2:21,22).  The Law was of little value if they did not keep it; the unrighteousness of the supposedly righteous, is the greatest unrighteousness of all (2:23).

The conclusion is as inevitable as it is chilling; if  the most privileged nation on earth (Israel) was pervasively and incorrigibly unrighteous what hope had any other – every mouth is stopped and the whole world is guilty before God (3:20). Because of wilful unrighteousness, the wrath of God is announced from heaven and is inevitably coming (1:18, 2:5-11).  What humanity need fear is not its destructive self, nor even on-going tsunamis, earthquakes and famines awful though they may be, but the final, dreadful, terrifying cataclysmic judgement of a God whose patience has finally ended and who is determined to purge his creation of its moral filth, consigning the unrighteous to Gehenna, the eternal burnings.  Such righteous judgement is the only righteous way for a righteous God to act.

Or is it?  Is a vision of a righteous universe where all the people are ‘oaks of righteousness’ and ‘justice flows like rivers and righteousness like an ever-ending stream’ no more than a prophetic pipe dream?  Is it merely a Seer’s romantic fancy? Is God’s righteousness something we must inevitably fear for it means we must perish?  Thankfully, it is not.

The glory of the gospel is its declaration that God has found a way to be merciful in righteousness, a way to righteously declare the unrighteous, righteous,  a way to establish righteousness by saving not destroying.

The  previous post noted four points about this gospel righteousness implicit in Roms 1:17.  It is… eschatological righteousness … God’s righteousness… saving righteousness… and righteousness received by faith.  In Roms 3;21-26 Paul expands all four aspects.  In five key verses of compressed theology Paul explains the central elements of the saving righteousness of God.  Any attempt to understand what the Bible means by ‘righteousness of God’ must grapple with this text.  I shall comment on a number of its expressions hoping to unpack some of its meaning.

Rom 3:21-26 (ESV)
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it- the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

But now…

Paul’s ‘But now‘ signals a contrast.  The contrast is not simply a change in his exposition but more particularly a change in eras -  a change in God’s working in history.  The previous era of Law which condemned by exposing human unrighteousness  has given way to a new era of gospel which saves by exhibiting God’s righteousness.  The eschatological age of salvation-righteousness predicted by the OT prophets has now arrived.  As J R W Stott writes,

The ‘Now seems to have a threefold reference – logical (the developing argument), chronological (the present time), and eschatological (the new age has arrived).

Israel believed that its salvation and that of the world lay in the Law of God (2:17-20); in law-keeping lay righteousness and life.  It was a profound mistake.  The Law, even before it had properly embedded, was exposed as inadequate to establish righteousness.  Even as the tablets of the covenant were being given by God to Moses on Sinai, they were being broken on the plains below as the people worshipped an idolatrous golden calf (Ex 32).  This incident portended the future.  The Law would not keep the people from being just as depraved as the surrounding nations who had no such Law.  It was clear that the Law could not deliver righteousness or deliver from wrath, all it could do was expose sin.  As Paul writes,

Rom 3:19-20 (ESV)
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

If righteousness (and so life) was to be established then it would need to be from another source than humanity.  And so the prophetic voice, informed by the Lord, announced a righteousness sourced not in man but in God (3:21).  It anticipated a time when God himself would act in salvation and righteousness and establish both.  It spoke of the ‘good news’ of God’s coming saving righteousness, this saving righteousness Paul says has now arrived, or ‘been manifested‘.  (Of course, God’s saving righteousness always existed.  From Adam sinners were always justified by God’s righteousness received by faith, but now this righteousness is ‘revealed’, that is, the death of Christ has accomplished and exhibited it.  The gospel, once anticipated, has now been realised and fully revealed.)

righteousness of God apart from law (without law)…

We should reflect deeply on this expression.

• Paul does not say the Law is one example of God’s righteousness and the Gospel is another.  For Paul, the Law never reveals God’s righteousness, what it reveals (if kept) is man’s righteousness.  It is only and always the gospel that reveals ‘righteousness of God’.  We create a non-Pauline paradigm and so confusion when we speak of the Law as revealing God’s righteousness.  I repeat, for Paul, only the gospel does this.

• Paul does not say, ‘In the gospel righteousness is established not by you keeping the Law but by Jesus keeping the Law in your place and on your behalf’.  If this is what gospel righteousness is then here would have been the ideal and obvious place for Paul to have said so.  But he doesn’t.  Instead he insists on the opposite.  He states unequivocally, that the ‘righteousness of God’ has nothing to do with law-keeping.  Indeed, it has nothing to do with the Law.   It is righteousness ‘apart from law’ or ‘without law’, that is, it is righteousness different in premise and principle, and in fact belonging to a different period of redemptive history altogether.   This is a critical point to grasp for failure to appreciate this contributes to mistaken ideas in justification that plague much Evangelical thinking, particularly Reformed Evangelical thinking.  Gospel righteousness is not simply law-righteousness gained for me by another (IAO). It is not merely law-righteousness by another route, by the back door.   It is righteousness of a different kind, of a different epoch, and of a different source altogether.  This is precisely why Paul emphatically refers to this righteousness as... ‘righteousness of God apart from law’
  

• The old era of Law put the emphasis on human responsibility; it looked for righteousness in man.  The righteousness of Law was predicated on ‘do this and live’.  It promised life for righteous living.  Yet, though this was its promise it was not its intent.  God did not give the Law hoping to establish righteousness through fallen human beings but to prove conclusively the futility of such a route to righteousness; he gave it to expose sin (3:20).  Only when all human attempts at righteousness have been exposed as the abysmal and abject failure they are, establishing beyond doubt humanity’s incorrigible unrighteousness and moral bankruptcy (Roms 3:9-20), does God reveal the glory and grace of his own saving righteousness.  Only when it is  established in history that humanity cannot be the architect of its own salvation will God’s salvation-righteousness be revealed.  God will have it crystal clear that if there is to be a saving righteousness then it will be and must be his and not man’s, and that the only ‘righteousness’ celebrated and boasted eternally will be God’s; boasting and glorying in any other is anathema (2:23, 3:27, 4:1,2; 1 Cor 1:28-30).  The gospel reveals God’s righteousness and in it he is glorified and no other.

Of course humanity refuses to learn the lesson of Israel and the Law.  It still seeks to establish its own righteousness.  But it does so against the damning evidence of history.  If Israel failed under Law all have failed (3:20).  Humanity post-cross is pronounced ‘dead’ in trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1)  There is no hope in human righteousness; hope of averting God’s wrath (1:18) lies only in the gospel, in ‘righteousness of God’.

I would add one further comment here.  We should not confuse ‘God’s righteousness‘ and ‘Christ’s righteousness’.  When Romans speaks of ‘God’s righteousness‘ it means just that, ‘God’s‘ righteousness.  It does not mean the righteousness of Christ.  God’s saving righteousness of course intimately involves Christ as the text we are considering shows but we confuse Paul’s thought if we conflate Christ’s righteousness and God’s righteousness.  They are distinct and should be kept distinct.  That Paul means ‘God’s‘ righteousness is emphatic in the text.  Three times in five verses we read of  ‘God’s righteousness‘  (3: 21,22, 25. Cf. 1:17, 10:3; Phil 3:9; 2 Cor 5:21) and once of  ‘his righteousness’ , meaning God’s (3:26).

The text could hardly be more emphatic; in the gospel the eschatological age of salvation has dawned.  It is an age where God’s righteousness is the focus and no other (Cf 3:27).  When we have established that Paul’s focus is God’s righteousness, not man’s, not even Christ’s, we have established something profoundly important and we are thinking across the synapses of the gospel.

witnessed by the Law and prophets

I have already alluded to this expression above.  If there is discontinuity between the Law and the gospel (both different epochs based on different sources of righteousness) then there is also continuity.  The continuity lies in the predictive element of both the Law and the prophets (often a term that covers the whole of the OT).

How did the Law predict the gospel?  Principally and specifically, the gospel is predicted in the sacrificial system of the Law.   Thus the following verses speak of redemption, sacrifice and the mercy-seat as the means by which God’s righteousness is revealed and administered (22-25).  The prophets, as we have already seen, regularly anticipated the Age of Salvation when the righteousness of the Lord would be revealed (  E.g. Isa 46:13; 51:5,6,8).

And so, in 3:21 Paul begins to put in context the ‘righteousness of God‘.  In the verses which follow he unpacks the meaning of the expression.  We shall consider these verses in a further blog.  For now let me re-assert we have understood nothing of the rationale of the gospel if we have not grasped this fundamental truth – the gospel is nothing if it is not ‘righteousness of God’.

romans, and the righteousness of god (1)

Righteousness gets a bad press in life.  In fact, it is a word rarely used today (we may speak of justice, or right, but not righteousness).  If used or conceptualised it tends to suggest ideas of a moral uprightness devoid of love.  We connect it with assumed moral superiority; righteousness for us means self-righteousness.   Even in biblical times such impressions of righteousness were current.  That is why Paul says,

Rom 5:7-8 (ESV)
For one will scarcely die for a righteous person-though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die- but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

But righteousness is not a cold charity, it is all that is good and right.  Imagine a world where everyone does from the heart what is right in every situation.  Imagine fathers who always act just as a father should or husbands who always are proper husbands.  Think of leaders who are utterly responsible in their role as leaders.  Leaders who care passionately about true justice and the rights of those they lead.  Imagine all creation giving the Creator the glory and worship that are rightly his.

Righteousness is right-living flowing from hearts that love what is right and hate what is wrong.  It is behaviour (in motive, thought and action) totally consistent with what ought to be.   While righteousness requires a holy nature or heart it is probably better, at least in the strictest sense, not to speak of inherent or intrinsic righteousness.  Righteousness is always in reference to something.  In God, righteousness is all that is consistent with who he is in himself; in us, it is consistency with the demands of the created relationships  in which he has placed us.  I may be inherently holy (God is) but I am righteous if I do what is required of me (1 Jn 3:7).

And so, righteousness means a world where everyone is right and everyone receives his rights;  and so too, it is a vision of a world without guilt (for there is no wrong-doing) and without grief (for there is none and nothing to harm and none who deserve to be harmed).  Such a utopian world is the stuff of dreams. It is the kind of society that many labour to achieve but never do.  Men are always frustrated not simply by the unrighteousness of others but by the unrighteousness of their own lives. This is the anxiety of the human condition.  No matter how hard we try we cannot begin to come close to achieving the kind of personal righteousness far less societal righteousness that we know should exist.  We are stymied at every turn by endemic unrighteousness.  When we know what is right we so often simply don’t do it even at the most rudimentary and basic level.  The chaos and injustice of life is ample evidence of this even if we are unaware of our own hearts.  We cannot even achieve a modicum of personal or societal righteousness that may satisfy us as human beings and make for a fairer world, even less can we achieve the deep and radical righteousness of motive and action that would be heaven on earth and be pleasing to God.  There is none righteous, no not one.

Yet such a world will one day exist.  The Bible anticipates ‘a new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells’, or, ‘where righteousness is at home’ (2 Pet 3:13).  Romans is the primary book in the Bible that tells us how this cosmic and radically righteous creation will be achieved.  It reveals the basic building blocks on which it is founded.  In fact, the establishing of righteousness is the ‘good news’ that constitutes the Christian gospel.

In Romans 1 Paul introduces this gospel.  He describes it like this.

Rom 1:16-17 (ESV)
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

• the righteousness of God  is saving righteousness or gospel righteousness
  

The gospel is about ‘salvation (Roms 1:16) and it is in this context of ‘salvation’ that ‘righteousness of God” is revealed. God will of course be righteous in his final judgement on the wicked just as he has been righteous in all his judgements in history but this is not the righteousness referred to here.  Here it is saving righteousness, or gospel righteousness.  Of course, saving righteousness can only take place in the context of judging and overthrowing wickedness, nevertheless we should keep firmly in our minds the locus in which God’s righteousness is revealed in Romans, is saving (1:16).

We should note too it is gospel righteousness as opposed to legal righteousness, or law righteousness.  The Law of Sinai was a revelation of the righteousness that God required of man whereas the gospel is a revelation of righteousness that is all of God .  In Romans, law righteousness and gospel righteousness exist largely in contrast (Roms 3:21a) though the law does witness to gospel righteousness (Roms 3:21b).

• the righteousness of God is eschatological righteousness

The OT regularly anticipated a day when the saving righteousness of God would be revealed.  The prophets of Israel saw the sin and suffering of Israel and envisaged a future when idolatry, unfaithfulness, injustice, unrighteousness, oppression and all the entail of these would be no more.  They spoke of it as the day of salvation and righteousness. Some time ago I  posted tracing God’s righteousness in Isaiah.  Below are a few examples.

Isaiah speak of a time when the Lord would say,

Isa 45:8 (ESV)
“Shower, O heavens, from above, ​​​​​​​and let the clouds rain down righteousness; ​​​​​​​let the earth open, that salvation and righteousness may bear fruit; ​​​​​​​let the earth cause them both to sprout; ​​​​​​​I the Lord have created it.

Isa 46:12-13 (ESV)
“Listen to me, you stubborn of heart, ​​​​​​​you who are far from righteousness: ​​​ ​​​​​​​​I bring near my righteousness; it is not far off, ​​​​​​​and my salvation will not delay; ​​​​​​​I will put salvation in Zion, ​​​​​​​for Israel my glory.”

God’s salvation righteousness while first to Israel is not, however, limited to Israel, it is for all peoples.

Isa 51:5 (ESV)
My righteousness draws near, ​​​​​​​my salvation has gone out, ​​​​​​​and my arms will judge the peoples; ​​​​​​​the coastlands hope for me, ​​​​​​​and for my arm they wait.

And so when Paul says the righteousness of God  is now revealed (1:17) or manifested (3:21);  he is saying this End-Time salvation long anticipated has now arrived.

• the righteousness of God is exactly that, ‘righteousness of God’.

In each of the above Isaian references salvation and righteousness are accomplished by God.  He speaks of ‘my righteousness’ and ‘my salvation’.  This is critical to understanding the gospel.  The gospel is all about ‘righteousness of God’.  It is God’s righteousness in specific contrast to man’s righteousness.  The OT is the story of human unrighteousness in the fall and beyond.  From Adam’s sin the history of humanity has been desperate and despairing.  Humanity is incapable of righteousness. God proves this conclusively in the story of Israel.

Israel was chosen and privileged of God.  She was like a vine especially cultivated and cared for by God (Isa 5).  She is given God’s Law and promised life upon obedience (this do and live).  Such righteousness if achieved would be human righteousness, a righteousness of works, man’s righteousness.  However Israel did not keep the Law, indeed it was never God’s intention that she would.  God knew human righteousness was impossible.  The Law was really given not to effect human righteousness but to expose human unrighteousness; unrighteousness in fallen man in the most favourable of circumstances.  Israel failed utterly.  She proved to have a rebellious heart, and the Law which promised life and which Israel promised to obey only demonstrated this rebellion as it was repeatedly and pervasively flouted.  The law which promised life produced death.  Israel’s guilt, humanity tested under the most favourable conditions in a fallen world, served only to establish the guilt of the whole human race.  As Paul says in Roms 3

Rom 3:19-20 (ESV)
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Human righteousness by law had proved a complete failure.  If there was hope for the world it must lie outside of man and outside of the law; it must lie in God.  Humanity could not save itself, God must save it.  Humanity had no righteousness and could not make itself righteous, righteousness must be sourced in God.  In Isaiah 59 God says,

Isa 59:3-21 (ESV)
For your [Israel's] hands are defiled with blood ​​​​​​​and your fingers with iniquity; ​​​​​​​your lips have spoken lies; ​​​​​​​your tongue mutters wickedness. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​No one enters suit justly; ​​​​​​​no one goes to law honestly; ​​​​​​​they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies, ​​​​​​​they conceive mischief and give birth to iniquity. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​They hatch adders’ eggs; ​​​​​​​they weave the spider’s web; ​​​​​​​he who eats their eggs dies, ​​​​​​​and from one that is crushed a viper is hatched. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​Their webs will not serve as clothing; ​​​​​​​men will not cover themselves with what they make. ​​​​​​​Their works are works of iniquity, ​​​​​​​and deeds of violence are in their hands. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​Their feet run to evil, ​​​​​​​and they are swift to shed innocent blood; ​​​​​​​their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; ​​​​​​​desolation and destruction are in their highways. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​The way of peace they do not know, ​​​​​​​and there is no justice in their paths; ​​​​​​​they have made their roads crooked; ​​​​​​​no one who treads on them knows peace. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​Therefore justice is far from us, ​​​​​​​and righteousness does not overtake us; ​​​​​​​we hope for light, and behold, darkness, ​​​​​​​and for brightness, but we walk in gloom. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​We grope for the wall like the blind; ​​​​​​​we grope like those who have no eyes; ​​​​​​​we stumble at noon as in the twilight, ​​​​​​​among those in full vigor we are like dead men. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​We all growl like bears; ​​​​​​​we moan and moan like doves; ​​​​​​​we hope for justice, but there is none; ​​​​​​​for salvation, but it is far from us. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​For our transgressions are multiplied before you, ​​​​​​​and our sins testify against us; ​​​​​​​for our transgressions are with us, ​​​​​​​and we know our iniquities: ​​​ ​​​​​​​​transgressing, and denying the Lord, ​​​​​​​and turning back from following our God, ​​​​​​​speaking oppression and revolt, ​​​​​​​conceiving and uttering from the heart lying words. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​Justice is turned back, ​​​​​​​and righteousness stands far away; ​​​​​​​for truth has stumbled in the public squares, ​​​​​​​and uprightness cannot enter. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​Truth is lacking, ​​​​​​​and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.

The Lord saw it, and it displeased him ​​​​​​​that there was no justice. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​He saw that there was no man, ​​​​​​​and wondered that there was no one to intercede; ​​​​​​​then his own arm brought him salvation, ​​​​​​​and his righteousness upheld him. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​He put on righteousness as a breastplate, ​​​​​​​and a helmet of salvation on his head; ​​​​​​​he put on garments of vengeance for clothing, ​​​​​​​and wrapped himself in zeal as a cloak. According to their deeds, so will he repay, ​​​​​​​wrath to his adversaries, repayment to his enemies; ​​​​​​​to the coastlands he will render repayment. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​So they shall fear the name of the Lord from the west, ​​​​​​​and his glory from the rising of the sun; ​​​​​​​for he will come like a rushing stream, ​​​​​​​which the wind of the Lord drives. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​“And a Redeemer will come to Zion, ​​​​​​​to those in Jacob who turn from transgression,” declares the Lord. ​​​ “And as for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord: “My Spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring, or out of the mouth of your children’s offspring,” says the Lord, “from this time forth and forevermore.”

I have quoted the whole of this chapter for even a cursory reading reveals how heavily Paul draws from it in Roms 3-8.  The first paragraph establishes Israel’s unrighteousness.  Paul parallels it in thought and quotes it in terms in Roms 3:1-20.  There is no hope for Israel or humanity in personal righteousness.  Humanity has feet ‘swift to shed blood, innocent blood‘ (expressed most damningly in the blood of Messiah).  But precisely when ‘there is no man‘ and universal guilt is established (Roms 3:20) ‘then his own arm brought him salvation, ​​​​​​​and his righteousness upheld him. ​​​ ​​​​​​​​He put on righteousness as a breastplate, ​​​​​​​and a helmet of salvation on his head’. In the moment when hope is lost God works salvation.  He establishes righteousness, but it is not righteousness sourced in man and on the principle of law through works but righteousness sourced in God and upon the principle of grace through faith (Roms 3:21-30).

A Redeemer shall come to Zion (Cf.  Zech 9:9; Roms 3:24) bringing redemption not only for Israel but to the nations, ‘they shall fear the name of the Lord from the west, ​​​​​​​and his glory from the rising of the sun’ (Roms 3: 22, 29,30).  He shall come ‘like a rushing stream which the wind of the Lord drives‘ (stream and wind are both images of God’s powerful and refreshing Spirit of God) and the Spirit of God will be upon them and mouths that once ‘spoke lies… wickedness… lying words… where truth stumbled’ now overflow with the word of the Lord (Cf John 7:37-39; Acts 2:17,18; Roms 5:5, 7:6, 8:1-30, 10:5-13).

Righteousness is established, but we must underline again, it is ‘righteousness of God’ (an expression, though not an idea, exclusive to Romans save for 2 Cor 5:21).  Notice, in 1:17 there is no definite article.  It is not ‘the righteousness of God’ but ‘righteousness of God’.  It is an abstract term deliberately contrasting righteousness which has its source and value in man with righteousness which has its source and value in God.  It is emphatically ‘God’s righteousness and not man’s.  In the gospel God in grace acts ‘right’ and is seen to act ‘right’ in righting all that is wrong.  The gospel will achieve righteousness in our standing before God, in a life given by God, and ultimately in a new heavens and earth where righteousness will reign.  But it will be all  ‘of God’.  In God’s salvation man shall never have anything to boast about, all will be to the glory of God (Roms 4:2; 1 Cor 1:29-31). In the gospel it is emphatically ‘God’s’ righteousness that is revealed and God that is revealed as righteous; that is, it is not simply righteousness ‘from’ God, though it is this gloriously, but it is righteousness ‘of’ God.  In the gospel God not only vindicates but is vindicated.  The glory of the gospel is that it glorifies God’s righteousness.  God is true when every man is a liar; any boasting can only be in God (Roms 1:17).

Rom 3:27 (ESV)
Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law [principle] of faith.

For by grace we are saved through faith and that not of yourself it is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast (Eph 2).

• the righteousness of God is by faith

Rom 3:21-22 (ESV)
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it- the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

For our purposes at the moment there are only a few brief points to underline; God’s righteousness is embraced ‘by faith’.  Paul says it is ‘through faith for faith‘ or if you like gospel righteousness is received ‘on the principle of faith by people of faith‘.  Faith here we will see as Paul’s argument progresses is in explicit contrast to ‘works’ or attempts to be righteous by our own efforts.  Faith is simply the acknowledgement that it is all of God.

There are two corollaries:

• God’s saving righteousness is universal in scope

Unlike law it does not particularize the covenant people as Israel and those who have Law, rather it is for ‘everyone who believes’ (1:16), ‘to the Jew first and also to the Greek’.

• God’s saving righteousness starts with the individual

There is much emphasis today on the cosmic elements of salvation.  We are told that God intends to renew the whole of the Cosmos; he intends to create a new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells.    And this is gloriously true.  However, the only way into the new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells is to be declared personally righteous by faith.  All too often this cosmic salvation is presented in a way that denigrates and even denies individual salvation.  The requirement of ‘faith’ gives the lie to this view.  Faith is emphatically individual.

Thus from Roms 1:17 we can deduce that ‘righteousness of God’ is God’s righteous activity as he intervenes in history to vindicate and save. The unpacking of this takes place throughout the letter.  In a future blog we will consider 3:21-26.

murray and double imputation

All Protestant Christians believe in imputation.  That is, they believe we are constituted righteous by God on the basis of  the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ; righteousness is from without.  Many Reformed Christians, however,will not allow that it is simply the death of Christ that justifies; they insist Christ’s death only cancels our guilt it does not constitute us righteous.   Righteousness only comes through a law-keeping life imputed.  Hence the term ‘double imputation’.

John Murray, in his generally excellent book ‘Redemption Accomplished and Applied’ puts it like this:

The real use and purpose of the formula (active and passive obedience) is to emphasize the two distinct aspects of our Lord’s vicarious obedience. The truth expressed rests upon the recognition that the law of God has both penal sanctions and positive demands. It demands not only the full discharge of its precepts but also the infliction of penalty for all infractions and shortcomings. It is this twofold demand of the law of God which is taken into account when we speak of the active and passive obedience of Christ. Christ as the vicar of his people came under the curse and condemnation due to sin and he also fulfilled the law of God in all its positive requirements. In other words, he took care of the guilt of sin and perfectly fulfilled the demands of righteousness. He perfectly met both the penal and the preceptive requirements of God’s law. The passive obedience refers to the former and the active obedience to the latter.

Murray’s point is that a law-breaker will not be vindicated and righteous before the law simply by paying the broken law’s penalty he must add to that a life of perfect law obedience.  His argument is wrong on a number of levels that we can’t address now (not least his assumption that all are answerable to a covenant made only with Israel).  I want simply to ask two questions.

• How does this stack up with what you know of natural systems of justice?

Suppose you break the law and are sentenced to five years in prison.  At the end of the five years your sentence is over and you step outside of the prison a free man.  What is your status before the law?  Should someone accuse you again of the crime for which you were imprisoned what would the law say?  The answer is self-evident.  Before the law you are cleared.  You are righteous.  You have no guilt.  You do not need to go and earn the right to be part of society again.  Before the law a person is either guilty or righteous and there is no in-between.  A man whose sentence has been paid is not guilty before the law, he is righteous.

• How does the Bible say a law-breaker can be declared righteous?

As far as the Bible is concerned what law-breakers need is not someone to keep the law’s precepts on their behalf  but someone to bear the law’s penalty in their place; their need is not a surrogate life but a sacrificial and substitutionary death. The law promised life to those who kept it and death to those who broke it.  Law-breakers needed someone to undertake their death penalty.

There is simply no clause in the law allowing a sinless life to merit righteousness for a sinful life or  a law-keeper’s righteousness to be transferred to a law-breaker.   The only provision in the Law for sin lay in blood-sacrifice.  Forgiveness (which is tantamount to justification – a clean slate before the law) lay in sacrificial death.

Thus we read,

Heb 9:13-14 (ESV)
For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Heb 9:15 (ESV)
Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.

Heb 9:22 (ESV)
Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

Heb 10:10 (ESV)
And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Heb 10:14 (ESV)
For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

The blood of Christ completely purges, purifies, redeems, sanctifies, and forgives every transgression of the law. It is gloriously and completely efficacious.  No ‘added’ law-keeping righteousness is necessary to ‘top-up’ the cleansing/purifying/justifying value of the atoning death of Christ.  What Murray says sounds plausible but it isn’t biblical.

It’s good to read people like John Murray.  I have read a great deal he has written and benefitted from it.  However, it is important with Murray as with everyone else to bring their logic before the bar of Scripture.  What is clearly taught in Scripture hold on to, what is not, discard. 

imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (12)

The intention of the last couple of posts (here and here) on this topic has been to demonstrate that the Bible does not support the reformed construct of IAO.  We have seen that the OT  knows nothing of a law-keeping life lived on behalf of another.  In the OT, when the law is broken only a blood sacrifice can atone (Hebs 9:22).  The gospels tell the same story.  Jesus indeed keeps the Law, but his obedience to Law is not the emphasize of the gospels.  The gospels’ gospel’ is Christ introducing the Kingdom of God (eternal life in John’s gospel) through his saving mission demonstrated in liberating works and words, his ransoming death, and his subsequent resurrection. There is simply no hint in the gospels that integral to the ‘good news’ is a life of law-keeping obedience conferred on others.

What of the rest of the NT?

The emphasis thus far is entirely consistent.  In unison the music of the NT celebrates  the death (not the life) of Christ as the basis of atonement.  Justification, redemption, reconciliation and acceptance with God are always on the basis of death.  Below are most of the NT texts that unpack the basis of acceptance with God.  I ask simply that you scan these verses and with honesty and integrity judge whether what they unpack is acceptance with God based on a law-keeping life imputed to others.  I recommend you read through the whole of the NT with the express purpose of inquiring whether such a theory is evidently one the NT champions.  I submit any such honest inquiry, free of presuppositions, will leave the dogma of IAO dead in the water.  I believe you will find, as the following texts reveal, that acceptance is never based on the merit of Christ’s life  imputed (that is his life lived on earth) and always on the value of his vicarious death and our union with him in his death and his subsequent resurrection.

Acts

What do the early apostles preach?  They did not preach in Acts a developed theology of atonement but they did focus on the mission, death and resurrection of Christ.  Peter’s message is typical:

Acts 2:22-24,28 (ESV)
“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know- this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it… “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Notice, there is not a hint of vicarious law-keeping obedience, even to a Jewish audience.  The focus is squarely on messianic credentials of mighty works, the  designed death of Christ, his rejection by the people, and his subsequent resurrection.  Essentially the same message repeats itself in the early Acts (3:11-26; 4:7-12, 23-31; 5:29-31; 8:51-53).  In Ch 9 Philip meets a gentile (the Ethiopian eunuch) who is reading Isa 53 (the death of Christ) from which Peter preaches to him ‘the good news about Jesus’.  In Ch 10 the message Peter taught in Acts 2 is substantially repeated to Cornelius a gentile God-fearer (10:34-42).  The same message is taught by Paul (13:26-42).

Acts presents for belief a Messiah who has revealed his credentials in wonders and signs, who has died and risen again.  But what is entirely absent is a gospel of vicarious law-keeping righteousness.  The church of God has been purchased by blood (Acts 20:34-42) not law-works, even law-works by Christ.

Romans

Rom 3:21-26 (ESV)
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it- the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

I intend to consider this text in detail in a future post.  At the moment I want simply to note that God’s saving righteousness (and this is the key text in Romans and indeed the whole of Scripture on the topic) is located firmly in the redemptive and propitiatory death of Christ.  Of all places for Paul to have developed IAO this would be it, but there is not a scent; it is conspicuously absent. Note too, that the ‘righteousness’ discussed is specifically ‘God’s’ and not ‘Christ’s’.

Rom 4:24-25 (ESV)
…. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

Note again the focus on death.  Where justification is concerned in Romans, we are justified by grace (3:24), Christ’s blood (5:9), Christ’s resurrection (4:25), and our faith (5:1).  Never by his law-keeping life.

Rom 5:6-11 (ESV)
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person-though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die- but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

The death of Christ is again the focus of justification.  Notice ‘we shall be saved through his life‘.  On more than one occasion past reformed exegetes have employed this text in support of IAO (John Owen, defending IAO, interpreted it,  ‘we are saved by that perfect Obedience which in his life he yielded to the Law of God’).  It shows something of their desperation (or poor exegetical skills) for the expression clearly refers to Christ’s present life in resurrection not his life on earth.  Notice it is those already reconciled by his death who are saved by his life.  The expression is an evident allusion to ‘raised for our justification’ (4:25) and Christ’s present King-priest intercession at the right hand of God for his own (Roms 8:33,34)

Rom 5:18-19 (ESV)
Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Perhaps the favourite text used to ‘justify’ IAO.  Again, I hope to consider it more fully in a later post.  Note: a) the text must be considered in the context of all that has gone before and all that has gone before has located the death of Christ as the place of justification b) it is ‘one act of righteousness’ paralleling Adam’s ‘one trespass’.  The whole section parallels two acts not two lives c) one man’s ‘disobedience’ refers back to the ‘one trespass’ and ‘one man’ obedience’ refers back to the ‘one act of obedience’.  Whether your context is immediate or the whole of Romans the conclusion is the same; the propitiatory death of Christ is the place of ‘justification and life’.

Rom 8:3-4 (ESV)
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Condemned sin ‘in the flesh’.  Commentators agree ‘in the flesh’ is a reference to the condemnation of sin (not sins) in the death of Christ.  Christ’s death was the end of sin (as it was the end of Satan, death, and Law).

Rom 8:33-34 (ESV)
Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died-more than that, who was raised-who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

Notice the key twin focus of death and resurrection in the matter of justification.  Accusation and condemnation cannot stand before these and a God who has determined to justify in the light of these.  But no mention of a law-keeping life.

Corinthians

Paul begins and ends 1 Corinthians with a statement about his gospel.  In neither case is the focus the law-keeping life of Christ but his death and resurrection.

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

1Cor 15:3-6,11 (ESV)
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep… Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

In the Second letter we read

2Cor 5:18-21 (ESV)
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This text is of course one that some believe teaches Christ’s righteous life is imputed to us.  Now I intend to examine the four or five verses that it is said teach IAO in a later post but I simply point out two things at the moment.  One, the text says nothing about Christ being our righteousness rather it says we are in some sense, through Christ, God’s righteousness.  More of this later.  Two, and this is important, the focus of the text is the clearly the death of Christ.  It is his ‘made sin’ death, nothing more and nothing less that enables us to become ‘the righteousness of God in him’.  There is absolutely nothing here about imputed active law-keeping obedience.  It is a foreign idea that has to be imported into the text.

Galatians

Gal 1:3-5 (ESV)
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Gal 3:1 (ESV)
O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.

Gal 3:13-14 (ESV)
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us-for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”- so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.

Gal 4:4-5 (ESV)
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

Notice that the redemptive gospel focus is once again the cross and Christ’s death.  Note too how Jews (for Paul’s ‘we’ refers to Jewish believers) under the law are ‘redeemed’.  It is not by Christ’s keeping of the Law but by him bearing the curse of the Law.  Here again, in the very context of redemption from law, was a perfect opportunity for Paul to tell us that Christ lived a law-keeping life for us and it is necessary to our justification.  But there is no suggestion of such a thing; we are redeemed not through him keeping its commands but through him bearing its curse.  It is through cancelling the curse of the law in his sin-bearing death and redeeming us from law that the blessings of justification by faith promised to Abraham may be realized. Language could scarcely be clearer.

Ephesians

Eph 1:7 (ESV)
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,

Eph 2:12-16 (ESV)
remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

The comments made about many a text above could equally be said here.  Forgiveness, redemption, acceptance, reconciliation and peace are all through the blood of the cross.

Colossians

Col 1:19-22 (ESV)
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.  And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

Col 2:13-15 (ESV)
And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

Reconciliation and forgiveness of trespasses (broken laws) at the cross.  The ‘legal demands’ are met in full at the cross.  There is no life of law-keeping obedience simply a debt cancelled at the cross.

Pastorals

1Tim 2:5-7 (ESV)
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

Titus 2:13-14 (ESV)
waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Hebrews

Heb 2:14-15 (ESV)
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Heb 9:11-15 (ESV)
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.  Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.

Purification (cultic image tantamount to legal image of justification) is through blood-sacrifice.  Consciences are completely cleansed by Christ’s blood sacrifice.  Note carefully the final words: since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. Death redeems from all transgressions.  No ‘added’ life of law-keeping is required.

Heb 9:22-28 (ESV)
Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.  Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Heb 10:10-14 (ESV)
And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.  And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

Heb 10:19-20 (ESV)
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh,

Heb 13:10-12 (ESV)
We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.

The message of Hebrews is clear purification, definitive sanctification, perfection, acceptance are all accomplished in toto at the cross.

Peter

1Pet 1:18-20 (ESV)
knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you

1Pet 2:24 (ESV)
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

1Pet 3:18 (ESV)
For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,

John

1John 1:7 (ESV)
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

1John 2:1-2 (ESV)
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Revelation

Rev 5:9-10 (ESV)
And they sang a new song, saying, ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“Worthy are you to take the scroll ​​​​​​​and to open its seals, ​​​​​​​for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God ​​​​​​​from every tribe and language and people and nation, ​​​ ​​​​​​​​and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, ​​​​​​​and they shall reign on the earth.”

Rev 7:13-14 (ESV)
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?” I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Where are robes washed?  In the blood of the lamb.  What is the eternal song of heaven?  Worthy… for you were slain and by your blood you ransomed.  Of course we will consider eternally every aspect of what God in Christ has accomplished but the emphasis of the song of heaven is the worth of the ‘blood of the lamb’.

Machen’s dying note to John Murray is often lauded. ‘I am so thankful for the active obedience of Christ.  There is no hope without it’.  Formally of course Machen was right.  The obedience of Christ along with his incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, present session, second coming etc are all vital for salvation.  But that was not Machen’s point.  Machen in his dying moments was placing his trust in a life lived more than a death died.  In this light, these words of Machen so saluted are appalling.  He misses completely the thrust of the NT hope.  It is a hope unambiguously centred in the death and resurrection of Christ.

The doxology of Revelation is far more biblically balanced:

Rev 1:5-6 (ESV)

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood ​​​ and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (11)

I return after a few weeks gap to the topic of IAO.   NT Wright has a gripe with conservative evangelicals (among whom I firmly place myself).   His gripe is that too often we approach theology through thought categories of the C16,17 reformation rather than through those of the Bible.  Now I don’t always agree with Wright, but when it comes to the matter of justification and IAO, I believe he hits the nail on the head; IAO is a construct of the C16,17 more than it is a construct of the Bible.

Those who support the idea that the active obedience of Christ (his law-righteousness) is imputed to believers as their righteousness before God face a difficulty.  The difficulty is that the Bible (in my view) nowhere construes salvation righteousness in terms of IAO.  In the last post on this topic we argued that IAO is not part of the OT gospel paradigm.  We search the OT in vain for a principle, or a developing idea, or a framework, that teaches the righteous life of one person can be imputed to another.   Indeed the opposite is true; the basis for forgiveness lay in blood-sacrifice; a death died rather than a life lived is the OT basis of forgiveness and righteousness.   The NT commentary on the OT is this:

Heb 9:22 (ESV)
Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

In this post. I wish simply to observe that the IAO  paradigm is also absent from the gospels.  Unfortunately, when disproving IAO it is necessary to keep pointing to its absence.   This is the case with the gospels.  If IAO is integral to the gospel then it is missing from the gospels themselves.

Let me say, there is no question that Jesus was born as a Jew under the Law, nor that he kept the Law.  The Law revealed the life of righteousness and God’s Servant would not rest until he brought righteousness, not only to Israel but to the ends of the earth (Isa 42:1-4).  In his life, God’s Servant, the true Israel, would ‘magnify the Law and make it honourable (Isa 42:21) where the nation had brought only shame upon it.  Thus in his life Jesus undoubtedly displayed the glory of a life that fulfilled the law.  He jealously upholds the Law in his teaching.  No aspect however small of the law could be ignored until all it required was accomplished (Matt 5:17-20).

However, the relationship between Jesus and the Law (the new covenant and the old covenant) is a complex one.  While we note that Jesus at the fulness of time was born as a Jew under the Law, honoured it and insisted that others honour it (Matt 15:3,6; 22:38), yet, even in fulfilling it, he dismantled it.  There are questions about this that need not concern us here but they are incipient in the gospel records; for example, we are told that Jesus, contrary to the teaching of the Law, declared all foods clean (Mk 7:19) and when asked regarding divorce he pointed behind Law to creation itself juxtaposing ‘Moses said’ with ‘but I say’ (Matt 19: 8,9; Cf.  Matt 5-7).  The sabbath was the sign of the old covenant (Ezek 20:12-20) yet Jesus declared himself Lord of the sabbath (Matt 12:28).  By implication he is superior to the Law itself.  He is indicating his right to bring to an end the whole period of Law.  The temple (another symbol of the old covenant) will be replaced by the temple of his body for one greater than the temple had arrived (Matt 12:6).  New wine requires new wine-skins (Lk 5:33-38).  The Law comes through Moses but grace and truth through Jesus Christ (Jn 1:17).  In other words, the thrust of the gospels is not that Christ came to keep the old covenant but rather that he came to introduce the new covenant (Matt 26:28), not to focus on Law but  preach the gospel of the Kingdom (Mk 1:14,15).  I note this to obviate simplistic notions about Jesus and the Law that often intrude into discussions about IAO.

Our question is twofold:

• do the gospels emphasize the law-obedience of Jesus
• do the gospels teach that Christ’s obedience was vicarious

The answer to both questions is negative.

The gospels (particularly the gospel of John) emphasize the obedience of Jesus but it is rarely (if ever) construed in terms of law-obedience.  Jesus’ obedience is based on a higher obedience than merely law-obedience.  His obedience is the obedience of a Son to a Father.  He had come to do all that his Father had sent him to do.  His food was to do the will and accomplish the work of he who sent him (Jn 4:34).   As an obedient son the things he saw his Father do he emulated (Jn 5:19, 36).  The commandments he followed were not sourced in the Law but his Father… ‘For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment-what to say and what to speak.‘ (John 12:49).

The Law was a covenant of works.  It offered life to those who kept it (Lk 10: 25-28).  When his Jewish contemporaries ask him how they may earn eternal life they are thinking in terms of humanly achieved righteousness by law-keeping and he answers them on their own assumptions agreeing that life, at least theoretically, may be gained by perfect law-keeping  (Lk 18:18-20; 10:25-28).  Jesus however never speaks of ‘life’ as something he hopes to earn’ or achieve.  He comes with ‘life’ already his, granted from his Father (Jn 5: 26).  He had no need to gain life or ‘earn’ life, he had life in himself (Jn 5: 25,26).  He was the giver of life (Jn 1-4).  His obedience did not gain life it gained his father’s approval and kept him in the centre of his Father’s love (Jn 15:10).  His Father’s command was not that he obey so that he may gain life but that he obey in giving his life.  His charge was a charge to die, not live…

John 10:17-18 (ESV)
For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”

Unlike the command of the Law the commandment of the Father results in eternal life (Jn 12:49,50).  Jesus’ obedience in John’s gospel is described in terms of  life-giving ‘words’ and ‘works’ (miraculous signs  Jn 5:20).  These words and works that belong to the Father he has given to his Son (Jn 14:10).  These ‘salvation’ words and works are not what the Law demanded they are what the Father through the Son in grace supplies.  The Law did not reveal the Father’s glory (indeed it hid God’s glory behind a veil), it is Jesus who does this (Jn 1:14-18, 14:8-10).  And so in Jesus we find one who pleases the Father (Jn 8:28, 29), reveals the Father (Matt 11:27; Jn 1;14-18), and brings glory to the Father (Jn 12:28).  All of this he does, not through the power of the flesh by which Adam obeyed and which Law addressed (Roms 7:1-6), but by the power of the Spirit the hallmark of new covenant (Jn 1:32,33).  He did not keep the old covenant that he may win new covenant status.  He was ‘new covenant’.  He lived as ‘new covenant’ and died that we may share in his new covenant life and receive forgiveness of sins (Matt 26:28).   As Hebrews points out,

Heb 9:15 (ESV)
Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.

The gospels reveal many gospel threads.  Jesus is the King, the Son of David, who will inaugurate Kingdom of God (Matt 1).  By his life-giving liberating words and accompanying works he will overthrow the Kingdom of Satan (Lk 11:14-23; Jn 12:31).  He is Isaiah’s Servant who comes with new covenant power in salvation with “The Spirit of the Lord upon him, anointed to proclaim liberty to captives and oppressed, good news to the poor, and sight for the blind (Lk 4:18 etc).  He is the Son of Man who sows the good seed of God’s word (Matt 13:37) and has authority on earth to forgive sins (Matt 9:6).  Jesus is the true Vine, the one true Son, who would bring pleasure and joy to the heart of God (Jn 15).  We could go on. Yet, wherever we read in the gospels, and however carefully we scrutinize them, we will not find a hint  that the life of Christ or the obedience of Christ earns a righteousness that will be imputed to others. Not a trace of such a notion is to be found.  It is conspicuously absent.

On the one occasion when Jesus’ speaks plainly about the way a man may be righteous it is to make a stark contrast.  Righteousness he insists is not to be found in trusting one’s own works  (we may even say law-works) but in casting oneself entirely as a sinner on the mercy of God (Lk 18:9-14).

No, the salvation hope presented in the gospels is not in law-keeping, not even the law-keeping life of Christ; it is in the sacrificial death of Christ.  He had come to give his life a ransom for the many (Mk 10:45).  He is the good shepherd who will lay down his life for the sheep (Jn 10); the living bread whose ‘flesh’ is given for the world at the cross (Jn 6:48); the Son of Man lifted up that those who look may live (Jn 3:14); the seed that unless it dies abides alone but if it dies it produces much fruit (Jn 12:48); the sacrificial lamb of God who bears away the sin of the world (Jn 1:29); the temple who would be destroyed and in three days rebuilt (Jn 2:19); the one man who should die for the people (Jn 11:50-52); the stone the builders reject (Mk 12:10); the prophet who must perish at Jerusalem (Lk 13:33-35); the obedient Son who says, ‘the cup that the Father has given me to drink shall I not drink it’ (Jn 18:11); and the ‘new covenant’ mediator whose  poured out blood would bring forgiveness of sins (Lk 22:20; Matt 26:28)

He is all this and more… but he is not the law-keeping Israelite earning life to be imputed to others.  In the gospels as in the OT there is not a whiff of IAO.  The whole thrust of the gospels is opposed to it; Christ comes not to keep the old but introduce the new, and through death establish new and end the old.  Gospel is not Law achieved, it is something entirely new in power and nature, namely Christ.  Christ is not life merited by obedience but the life of the Father revealed and remitted (given) by grace.

IAO, as N T Wright says, is the brainchild of systematics not of Scripture.

do this and live

The Law, that is, the Sinai Covenant,  in the words of the NT, is ‘not of faith’ (Gals 3:11).  God’s covenant with Abraham relied on God’s promise for its fulfilment received simply by faith (Gals 3:17-19, 22).  Law, by contrast, depends on human ‘works’.  It is a covenant of works and so Paul  speaks regularly of ‘the works of the law’ (Gals 2:16; 3:2, 5, 10; Roms 3:20).  Law and promise are not merely two different covenants they are covenants based on two different principles (Gals 3:18).  Promise rests entirely on righteousness  and life gifted from God while Law depends on righteousness and life gained by man.  Promise requires only faith in the Promise-Maker; Law demands faith in self.    And so Paul juxtaposes ‘the works of the Law and the hearing of faith’ (Gals 3:2)

Despite the NT consistently and clearly presenting the Sinai Covenant as a works covenant many doubt that it is.  It is hard to understand why.  The evidence seems overwhelming.  For instance at the inception of the covenant we read,

Exod 19:1-8 (ESV)
On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”  So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. All the people answered together and said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.” And Moses reported the words of the people to the Lord.

The Lord makes clear that the covenant with all its promised blessing (you shall be my treasured possession…) depends on their obedience and faithfulness to the covenant laws.  Israel understood this, for the people rather too self-confidently affirm, ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do’.  The covenant depended on works; it was a covenant of ‘he who does shall live’.  That is precisely the point made in Lev 18.

Lev 18:1-5 (ESV)
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord.

The covenant did not assume obedience as the consequence or effect of life rather it promised it as the cause or means of life.  This law-works perspective of the covenant is repeated regularly through the OT.  When Moses repeats the covenant to the generation of Israel about to enter the Land we read,

Deut 4:1 (ESV)
“And now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the rules that I am teaching you, and do them, that you may live, and go in and take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you.

and again,

Deut 8:1 (ESV)
“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers.

Life, and life in the Promised Land depended on ‘doing’ the covenant commands.  Moreover, it depended, not in keeping them approximately, but completely.  They must be careful to do, ‘the whole commandment’. The curses of a broken covenant fall on those who fail to do ‘all‘ the commandments of the Lord (Ex 15:26; Lev 26:14,15; Deut 5:29; 6:2; 13:18; 27:26; Gals 3:10).

Ezekiel reiterates the covenant conditions to those of his day.  That life depends on obedience could scarcely be clearer.

Ezek 18:5-9 (ESV)
“If a man is righteous and does what is just and right- if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife or approach a woman in her time of menstrual impurity, does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, does not lend at interest or take any profit, withholds his hand from injustice, executes true justice between man and man, walks in my statutes, and keeps my rules by acting faithfully-he is righteous; he shall surely live, declares the Lord God.

Indeed, Ezekiel states a principle that Paul reiterates in the NT – that judgement (life or death) is according to works (Roms 2:6-10).

Ezek 18:21-24 (ESV)
“But if a wicked person turns away from all his sins that he has committed and keeps all my statutes and does what is just and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of the transgressions that he has committed shall be remembered against him; for the righteousness that he has done he shall live. Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live? But when a righteous person turns away from his righteousness and does injustice and does the same abominations that the wicked person does, shall he live? None of the righteous deeds that he has done shall be remembered; for the treachery of which he is guilty and the sin he has committed, for them he shall die.

In Ezekiel 20, the Lord tells how Israel had been warned in her infancy that God’s blessing depended on obedience – ‘if a person does them he shall live’ – yet Israel had disobeyed and God’s judgements had fallen on them in the wilderness – that generation did not enter the Land.  In Ezekiel’s day similar failure meant exile from the land; life in the land was contingent on obedience… this do and live.

Ezek 20:10-13 (ESV)
So I led them out of the land of Egypt and brought them into the wilderness. I gave them my statutes and made known to them my rules, by which, if a person does them, he shall live. Moreover, I gave them my Sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them. But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness. They did not walk in my statutes but rejected my rules, by which, if a person does them, he shall live; and my Sabbaths they greatly profaned. “Then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them in the wilderness, to make a full end of them. (Cf Ezek 20:21)

So unable are Israel to keep the covenant and thus gain life that Ezekiel foresees (as did Moses in Deut 30) a new covenant.  In this New Covenant God would allot by grace what Israel could not achieve by works.

Ezek 37:14 (ESV)
And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.”

The key point of the New Covenant is that any ‘doing’ that is required, God does it.

Sometimes it is suggested that the life promised in the OT is simply temporal life in the land and not eternal life.  In one sense, this mistake is understandable for the OT perspective on life and death is in the main physical and this-worldly.  However, by the NT, the understanding of life and death has considerably enlarged.  Life in its fulness is ‘eternal life‘ and likewise death, is ‘eternal death‘.  Jesus’ discussion with the lawyer who hoped to trip him makes this plain.

Luke 10:25-28 (ESV)
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

Notice the context.  It is clear the discussion is framed within the terms of the OT Sinian Covenant.  The lawyer is thinking of life earned through law-keeping.  He speaks in the language of the Law – ‘what must I do’. That he means ‘do‘ in the sense of law-keeping is clear, for Jesus asks what the Law requires and cites the Lev 18 text ‘do this and live’ (Cf. Matt 19:18).  Yet, the lawyer conceives this law-life not merely as temporal but as ‘eternal life’ (cf. Matt 19:16-25).

Furthermore, in the NT letters, when law-life and faith-life are contrasted, the contrast is not that one is temporal and the other eternal but that one is possible and the other impossible.  Righteousness and the ensuing life cannot be attained by Law for law-keeping is impossible.  The Law does not effect righteousness rather it  exposes and excites sin (Roms 3:20; 7:5).  Righteousness and life are always gifts from God (Roms 3:21-26; 5:17) and come only through faith.  And so Paul writes,

Gal 3:11-12 (ESV)
Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.”

and,

Rom 10:5-13 (ESV)
For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) or “‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

This last text is an important one.  For here, in NT language, we have the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant to which Ezekiel alluded (Ezek 37) and of which Jeremiah spoke.

Jer 31:31-33 (ESV)
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Obedience is no longer an impossibility (who shall ascend…descend) but entirely possible (the word is near and in your mouth and heart).  In the Roms 10 text, Paul takes a text from the OT (Deut 30) that refers to the Law (old covenant) and speaks of it as gospel (new covenant). How he can do this must wait a future blog.  The purpose of this post is simply to establish, by glancing at the OT, the truth of Paul’s contention that

Gal 3:12 (ESV)
… the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.”

imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (9)

In previous posts I tried to demonstrate that it is mistaken to claim that IAO is  to evangelical orthodoxy.  In the next few posts I shall contend that IAO is inadequate biblically; the case is biblically wanting.

But first, a recap.  Let’s remind ourselves of the basic position of those who argue for IAO.  They argue that when God justifies he does two things.  Firstly, he forgives sins through the death of Christ.  This, we are told, makes us like Adam – innocent but not righteous.  We need not only forgiveness but a positive righteousness before the Law.  This positive righteousness is the Law-keeping righteous life of Christ which God imputes to us (namely, IAO), the second necessary component of justification.

G Machen writes,

“…if that (dying on the cross) were all that Christ did for us, do you not see that we should be back in just the situation in which Adam was before he sinned? The penalty of his sinning would have been removed from us because it had all been paid by Christ. But for the future the attainment of eternal life would have been dependent upon our perfect obedience to the law of God. We should simply have been back in the probation again.”

Machen goes on to say that Christ was

“our representative both in penalty paying and in probation keeping,”

and that for those who have been saved by him, the probation is over since

“Christ has merited for them the reward by his perfect obedience to God’s law. (J. Gresham Machen, “The Active Obedience of Christ,” in God Transcendent (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982),

I ask, who says so?   Where is this distinction between penalty-bearing and probation-keeping so confidently asserted by Machen (and others) found in Scripture.  Where is this limitation of the cross in justifying that Machen affirms?  It is, I submit, the construct of a theological system without a trace of biblical evidence to support it.   I want to discuss this ‘system’ in later posts but for the moment  my contention, shared by many others,  is that Machen’s construction is built on sinking sands, even thin air.   I aver that while the Bible repeatedly locates justification, our righteousness, in the sacrificial death of Christ, it never locates it in his righteously lived life.  We search in vain for a text that teaches – even vaguely – the imputed law-keeping obedience of Christ.  There is no vicarious ‘probation-keeping’ biblical theology.  There is no scent of it in Scripture, not even a whiff.

Now I want to repeat this point because, for me, it is the absolutely basic and fundamental point.  I ultimately reject IAO as a construct in justification because in my view it is not evidently taught in the Bible. When the Biblical writers discuss the justifying righteousness of God (or indeed subjects like redemption, propitiation and reconciliation which the Bible closely aligns with justification) they locate  it firmly and exclusively in the death of Christ and his subsequent resurrection, not transferred law-keeping obedience.  IAO, despite the opining of a particular cast of theologians, is simply missing from the biblical text.  It is conspicuous by its absence.

Even some who support IAO concede this.

G E Ladd writes,

“Paul never states explicitly that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to believers.” (George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament p.491)

Brian Vickers, In his book ‘Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness’ written to make the case for IAO writes,

‘The contention of this book is that the imputation of Christ’s righteousnes [by which Vickers means IAO] is a legitimate and necessary synthesis  of Paul’s teaching.  While no single text contains or develops all the ‘ingredients’ of imputation, the doctrine stands as a component of Paul’s theology (Brian Vickers  ‘Jesus Blood and Righteousness’ Pg 18  Crossway 2006).

Vickers, proceeds to engage with each text considered to support IAO.  In each case, true to what he wrote above, he acknowledges the text does not teach IAO as such.  His thesis ultimately is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  However, if IAO is not the necessary conclusion of any one text, even those texts upon which it is supposedly based, as Vickers acknowledges, it is hard to see how any can affirm it is a core truth of the gospel.  Are we to believe that one of the most fundamental and critical truths of the gospel has no text that explicitly teaches it?

D A Carson,  a scholar and Bible teacher of the first calibre and one with whom I do not readily disagree, says,

‘the issues are extraordinarily complex’

He writes,

…if we agree that there is no Pauline passage that explicitly says, in so many words, that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to his people, is there biblical evidence to substantiate the view that the substance of this thought is conveyed?  And if such a case can be made should the exegete be encouraged to look at the matter through a wider aperture than that provided by philology and formulae?  And should we ask the theologian to be a tad more careful with texts called up to support the doctrine? (Vindication and Imputation  Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates  Edited M Husband and D J Treiers  IVP 2004 Pg 50)

For Carson, rather like Vickers, IAO, though exegetically inexplicit is systematically justifiable.  Having said that, Carson’s understanding of imputation is so nuanced that it tones down more traditional book-keeping definitions of IAO.  He is reluctant to make any hard and fast distinctions between active and passive obedience and locates Christ’s vindication and ours in Christ’s resurrection.  In his own words, commenting on W Shedd’s traditional expression of imputation he writes,

Shedd presupposes that what God requires is perfect righteousness. I entirely
agree with this, although I would track the matter rather differently, as we
shall see.(Vindication of Imputation  J:WSCD  Pg 53).

His discomfit at Shedd’s traditional formulation of IAO (similar to Machen’s) is clear when he writes,

… however sympathetic one wishes to be with Shedd, however much one
wishes to defend the view that the imputed righteousness of Christ is worth defending,
however much one acknowledges that the perfection of Christ is something
more in Scripture than the set-up that qualifies him for his expiatory death,
however heuristically useful the distinction between the active and passive righteousness
of Christ, one is left with a slightly uneasy feeling that the analytic categories
of Shedd have somehow gone beyond the New Testament by the absolute
bifurcation they introduce.

In summary, Mark Seifrid’s observation must be noted and weighed,

“It is worth observing Paul never speaks of Christ’s righteousness as imputed to believers, as became standard in Protestantism.” (Christ, Our Righteousness IVP, 2000 p.174)

And so we begin this examination of IAO and the Bible by recognizing that even some who support it concede it does not jump out of  the page of Scripture.  My contention is, that unless completely ‘sighted’ by a confessional grid, the very least any honest exegete of Scripture will do is confess with Ladd, Vickers and Carson that IAO is hard to justify purely exegetically.  I would go further and affirm, contrary to Vickers, that the sum of the parts in a biblically defined justification do not add up to IAO (imputed active obedience) plus IPO (imputed passive obedience, Christ’s death) but to the implications of Christ’s death and resurrection.  Justification, biblically considered, is not located in Christ’s life-plus-death but Christ’s death-plus-life.  Or, to be less cryptic, justification finds its synthesis not in ‘Christ’s-law-keeping-life-on-earth-and-his-sin-bearing-death‘ but in his ‘sin-bearing-death-and-his-vindication-in-resurrection-in-which-we-share’.

A degree of construction, of systematics, is inevitable as Carson argues, but this construction must be texted-based.  It should be little more than joining the dots between texts.   Gundry, responding to Carson says,

Of course theologians are not limited to repeating what the Bible says, but what they develop in and for their own circumstances should at least arise out of what the Bible says. So long as the Bible does not provide such statements, and in the present case says much that points in a contrary direction, an appeal to the difference between an exegetical field of discourse and a systematic theological field of discourse does no good for the putative doctrine.

This seems to me exactly right.  JRW Stott writes,

‘I take it for granted that we will have a text.  For we are not speculators but expositors’

The problem for IAO is it has no text and plenty that point in another direction.

But enough discussion.  Time to look at the Bible.  The question is, how to do so.    I shall try to move from the panoramic to the particular.  I shall first sketch the broad picture, considering some key texts in Scripture.  Later, I shall consider in more detail the subject of ‘the righteousness of God’ in Romans and also the key texts forwarded in support of IAO.  Clearly, this is not a scholarly inquiry.  However, I console myself that it is not scholars who win the day in the doctrines of the church but ordinary believers who hold fast to what is plain in Scripture and have a healthy skepticism for arguments that are rarefied and abstruse. Though, I may add, as far as I can judge, few scholars of note outside confessionally Reformed circles are patrons of IAO.  R Gundry writes,

It is no accident, then, that in New Testament theologians’ recent and current treatments of justification, you would be hard-pressed to find any discussion of an imputation of Christ’s righteousness . . . The notion is passé, neither because of Roman Catholic influence nor because of theological liberalism, but because of fidelity to the relevant biblical texts. Thus New Testament theologians are now disposed to talk about the righteousness of God in terms of his salvific activity in a covenantal framework, not in terms of imputation of Christ’s righteousness in a bookkeeping framework. (Why I didn’t Endorse The Gospel of Jesus Christ:An Evangelical Celebration  Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debate  IVP 2004)

At last…we turn to the Bible… in the next post!

Why I Didn’t Endorse The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration

imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (8)

We saw in the previous blog that both Methodists (C18) and Plymouth Brethren (C19) raised dissenting voices at IAO.  The initial teaching of J N Darby and W Kelly (that justification is located in the death and resurrection of Christ, not IAO) prevailed in Brethren theology well into the C20.  W E Vine (1873-1949), a Brethren Bible Scholar whose influence spread far beyond the boundaries of Brethren chiefly through his celebrated dictionary ‘Vine’s Expository Dictionary of NT Words‘ published 1940, along with C F Hogg another Brethren commentator, writes,

Neither the incarnation of the Son of God, nor His keeping of the law in the days of His flesh availed, in whole or in part, for the redemption of men…. His redemptive work proper began and ended on the cross; …Hence it is nowhere said in the New Testament that Christ kept the law for us. Only His death is vicarious, or substitutionary. He is not said to have borne sin during any part of His life; it was at the cross that He became the sin-bearer  [C. F. Hogg , W. E. Vine , The Epistle of the Galatians, (London; GB: Pickering and Inglis, LTD.), 1959, p.186].

A contemporary of Hogg and Vine, Open Brethren writer John Ritchie (1853-1930) commenting on Romans writes,

The theological phrase, “The righteousness of Christ,” so much used, is not a scriptural term. The meaning usually read into it is, that the sinner having failed to keep the law, Christ has kept it for him, that His obedience is counted mans’ righteousness, and put on all that believe as a “robe.” But this would not be “righteousness apart from law” (Rom. 3:21). If God reckons the sinner to have kept the law because Christ kept the law for him, then righteousness surely comes by law, and the death of Christ was “in vain” (Gal. 2:21). In all this, justification by grace through redemption, has no place. The gospel is not that a sinner is made righteous by the imputation of Christ’s legal obedience on earth, and saved by His death, but rather that “being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him” [John Ritchie, Romans, (Charlotte, NC : The Serious Christian, 1987), p. 161].

More recently, William McDonald (1917-2007), former President of Emmaus Bible College, and Brethren writer, commenting on Romans 5:18 writes,

The righteousness of Christ mentioned in Romans 5: 18 does not mean His righteousness as a Man on earth or His perfect keeping of the law. These are never said to be imputed to us. If they were, then it would not have been necessary for Christ to die. The New American Standard Bible is on target when it translates: “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men.” The “one act of righteousness” was not the Savior’s life or His keeping of the law, but rather His substitutionary death on Calvary’s cross  [William MacDonald, Justification by Faith (Romans), (Kansas City, KS: Walterick Publishers, 1981), p. 62].

Clearly IAO has been resisted by mainstream representatives of Plymouth Brethren theology in the C20.

In the early C20 Brethren influence was quite wide in evangelicalism.  Many reformed churches (in the UK and USA and further afield) had collapsed under the weight of German theology with its Biblical criticism and liberalism.  Evangelical life was nourished in the (now considered) more fundamentalist enclaves influenced by Darby’s dispensationalism.  I am not for a moment saying there was no evangelical life outside of dispensational circles, clearly there was, however, these ‘fundamentalist’ strongholds of the gospel were a significant force in the evangelicalism of the first 50 years of C20. And they were, as I say, influenced by Brethren theology.

For example, in the States, William Newell, Congregational Church pastor, famed preacher, and Assistant Superintendent of the Moody Bible Institute (under R A Torrey) writes in his commentary on Romans,

Jesus’ “was always obedient to His Father, but it cannot be too strongly emphasized that His life before the cross – His ‘active obedience’ … is not in any sense counted to us for righteousness.” (W. Newell Romans, Kregel (2004) Romans 5:19)

Arno C Gaebelein (1861-1945) a prominent and influential Methodist dispensationalist upon whom Wheaton College conferred an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 1922 writes,

“The term “Righteousness of God” is much misunderstood. Not a few think it is the righteousness of Christ (a term nowhere used in Scripture) which is attributed to the believing sinner. They teach that Christ fulfilled the law, lived a perfect life on earth and that this righteousness is given to the sinner. All this is unscriptural. Righteousness cannot be bestowed by the law in any sense of the word. If the holy life of the Son of God, lived on earth in perfect righteousness could have saved man and given him righteousness, there was no need for Him to die. “If righteousness came by the law then Christ is dead in vain” (Galatians 2:21). It is God’s righteousness which is now on the side of the believing sinner; the same righteousness which condemns the sinner, covers all who believe. And this righteousness is revealed in the Gospel. God’s righteousness has been fully met and maintained in the atoning work of Christ on the Cross. By that wonderful work God is now enabled to save sinners and to save them righteously. The righteousness of God is therefore first of all revealed in the Gospel of Christ. Apart then from the law, righteousness of God is manifested, the righteousness of God by faith of Jesus Christ. And this righteousness now revealed was also witnessed to by the law and the prophets. The law of the different sacrifices, insufficient in themselves to take away sins, pointed to the great sacrifice, in which God would be fully glorified as well as His righteousness satisfied. There were many types and shadows. Now since the righteousness of God is fully made known in the Gospel we can trace God’s wonderful thoughts and purposes in the types and histories of the Old Testament.  (Isaiah 41:10; 46:13; 51:5, 6, 8; 56:8).” http://biblecentre.org/commentaries/acg_49_romans.htm

The highly influential Scofield Reference Bible, to which Gaebelein had input, avers substantially the same. In Romans 3 Scofield comments,

21 But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets;

[1] righteousness of God

The righteousness of God is neither an attribute of God, not the changed character of the believer, but Christ Himself, who fully met in our stead and behalf every demand of the law, and who is, but the act of God called imputation Lev 25:50 Jas 2:23, “made unto us . . righteousness” 1Cor 1:30.

…

23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

…

Sin originated with Satan Isa 14:12-14, entered the world through Adam Rom 5:12, was, and is, universal, Christ alone excepted Rom 3:23 1Pet 2:22, incurs the penalties of spiritual and physical death Gen 2:17 3:19 Ezek 18:4,20 Rom 6:23 and has no remedy but in the sacrificial death of Christ Heb 9:26 Acts 4:12 availed of by faith Acts 13:38,39.

24 Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:

[1] Redemption

…

(1) agorazo, “to purchase in the market.” The underlying thought is of a slave-market. The subjects of redemption are “sold under sin” Rom 7:14 but are, moreover, under sentence of death Ezek 18:4, Jn 3:18,19 Rom 3:19 Gal 3:10, and the purchase price is the blood of the Redeemer who dies in their stead Gal 3:13 2Cor 5:21 Mt 20:28, Mk 10:45 1Tim 2:6 1Pet 1:18…

(3) lutroo, “to loose,” “to set free by paying a price” Jn 8:32 Gal 4:4,5,31 5:13 Rom 8:21. Redemption is by sacrifice and by power See Scofield Note: “Ex 14:30″ Christ paid the price, the Holy Spirit makes deliverance actual in experience Rom 8:2…

25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;

[2] propitiation

Lit. a propitiatory [sacrifice], through faith by his blood; Gr. hilasterion, “place of propitiation.” The word occurs, 1Jn 2:2 4:10 as the trans. of hilasmos, “that which propitiates,” “a propitiatory sacrifice.” Hilasterion is used by the Septuagint, and Heb 9:5 for “mercy-seat.” The mercy-seat was sprinkled with atoning blood in the day of atonement Lev 16:14 in token that the righteous sentence of the law had been (typically) carried out, So that what must else have been a judgment-seat could righteously be a mercy-seat Heb 9:11-15 4:14-16, a place of communion Ex 25:21,22.

In fulfilment of the type, Christ is Himself the hilasmos, “that which propitiates,” and the hilasterion, “the place of propitiation” –the mercy-seat sprinkled with His own blood–the token that in our stead He So honoured the law by enduring its righteous sentence that God, who ever foresaw the cross, is vindicated in having “passed over” sins from Adam to Moses Rom 5:13 and the sins of believers under the old covenant See Scofield Note: “Ex 29:33″ and just in justifying sinners under the covenant. There is no thought in propitiation of placating a vengeful God, but of doing right by His holy law and so making it possible for Him righteously to show mercy.

26 To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.

[3] righteousness

“His righteousness” here is God’s consistency with His own law and holiness in freely justifying a sinner who believes in Christ; that is, one in whose behalf Christ has met every demand of the law Rom 10:4.

28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.

[4] Justification

Justification, Summary: Justification and righteousness are inseparably united in Scripture by the fact that the same word (dikaios, “righteous”; dikaioo, “to justify”) is used for both. The believing sinner is justified because Christ, having borne his sins on the cross, has been “made unto him righteousness” 1Cor 1:30. Justification originates in grace Rom 3:24 Ti 3:4,5 is through the redemptive and propitiatory work of Christ, who has vindicated the law Rom 3:24,25 5:9 is by faith, not works Rom 3:28-30 4:5 5:1 Gal 2:16 3:8,24 and may be defined as the judicial act of God whereby He justly declares righteous one who believes on Jesus Christ. It is the Judge Himself Rom 8:31-34 who thus declares. The justified believer has been in court, only to learn that nothing is laid to his charge. Rom 8:1,33,34...

31 Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.

[5] Do we then

The sinner establishes the law in its right use and honour by confessing his guilt, and acknowledging that by it he is justly condemned. Christ, on the sinner’s behalf, establishes the law by enduring its penalty, death. Cf. Mt 5:17,18.

“Imputation is the act of God whereby He accounts righteousness to the believer in Christ, who has borne the believer’s sins in vindication of the law” (C. I. Scofield, Scofield Study Bible, p. 1308).

It should be obvious from the above that for Scofield (both a Congregationalist and Presbyterian in his career) the demand of the law for a sinner (death) was met in Christ’s death.  In his death the law is vindicated and upheld.  There is no mention here of IAO. Again, it is worth underlining that the Scofield Bible notes were the source of much popular evangelical theology throughout the greater part of the C20.

Robert P. Lightner, Amyraldian Baptist and previous Professor of Systematic theology at Dallas Seminary  In 1970, commenting on IAO and the supposed vicariously atoning life sufferings of Christ, he wrote:

First, the view fails to take into account that before the fall, Adam did not have a sin nature. Instead, it assumes that to be rightly related to God, Adam and his posterity were required to render perfect obedience to the commands of God. . . .It is not too much to say that the whole concept of the vicarious nature of Christ’s active obedience rests primarily upon the idea of the covenant of works. Since the supposed covenant promised eternal life for obedience and since Adam disobeyed and all his posterity in him, Christ, the Last Adam, came to accomplish what the first Adam failed to do. The fact that Adam came from the hands of the Creator, sinlessly perfect must not be overlooked. Thus the command of God to obey Him was not designed to produce eternal life in him or to relate him rightly to God. He already enjoyed a state of sinlessness and a proper relation to and right standing before his Creator. Contrary to the contention of covenant theologians, Scripture does not say that Adam would have inherited eternal life had he obeyed God. Human effort is never presented as a condition of salvation in Scripture for any dispensation; rather, the command of God to Adam was designed to demonstrate his submission to the authority of God.Second, the view amounts to a minimizing of the cross work of Christ. . . . Thus, according to this view, the death of Christ on the cross was not the sole basis upon which God provided redemption and everlasting life for man. If the life sufferings be viewed as substitutionary and vicarious, then the Savior’s passive obedience in the shedding of His blood on the cross must be viewed as less than the total or complete means by which God through His Son atoned for sin. The blood shed at Calvary would then constitute only part of the payment for sin.

Third, the most serious weakness of all is the stark fact that no Scripture assigns substitution to the life sufferings of Christ. On the contrary, Scripture abounds with evidence that through His substitutionary death on the cross, and through that alone, He took the sinner’s place and died in the sinner’s stead (Isa 53:6–7; Rom 3:18, 3:24–25 , 5:7–9 ; 2 Cor 5:14–21; 1 Peter 2:24). The defense of the vicarious nature of Christ’s active obedience for His suffering in life is voluminous, but scriptural proof is conspicuous by its absence.8 Lightner, Robert P., “The Savior’s Suffering in Life,” Bibliotheca Sacra 127:505 (1970) 33-34

In 1986, he made a similar argument specifically against the imputation of Christ’s active obedience to the believer while critiquing Theonomy:

A basic premise in the theological structure of theonomy, along with covenant Reformed theology, is the belief that Christ’s active obedience to the Law during His life was as substitutionary as His passive obedience in death. . . . That Christ obeyed perfectly the Law and suffered greatly during His life is not denied or even disputed by dispensationalists. The crucial question, however, is, Why did He suffer in life? What was accomplished by His obedience to the Law? Scripture simply does not teach that the life sufferings of Christ were vicarious. Rather it stresses His death alone as a substitution for sin and sinners. To be sure, the Savior’s sinless life demonstrated that He was qualified to be the sinner’s Substitute, but He atoned for sin only on the cross, where He became a curse (Gal 3:13). Viewing Christ’s active obedience in His life as substitutionary is the natural result of believing that God promised Adam and his posterity eternal life if he would obey God’s command not to eat of the forbidden fruit. Since Adam did not obey God’s command or law, Christ, the last Adam came and did in His life what the first Adam failed to do—to earn righteousness for His own. In this view the death of Christ was not the only basis on which God made substitution for man’s sin. Theonomy and Reformed theology in general believe that through His active obedience the Savior carried His people beyond the point where Adam was before he fell to give them a claim to eternal life. Dispensationalists do not view the theological covenant of works as promising Adam and his posterity eternal life for obedience. God promised Adam death for disobedience, not eternal life for obedience. Furthermore did not Adam possess creaturely perfection as he came from the creative hand of God? Was not all that God made “very good” (Gen 1:31), including man? Theonomy teaches that the way of salvation before the Fall differed from the way of salvation after the Fall. That is a strange doctrine coming from those who falsely accuse dispensationalists of believing in more than one way of salvation. 9 Lightner, Robert P., “A Dispensational Response to Theonomy,” Bibliotheca Sacra 143:571 (1986) 233-

Although a good number of dispensationalists did teach IAO, many were reluctant to do so and tended to emphasize simply the death of Christ.

Alva McClain, founder and first President of Grace Theological Seminary (Brethren by background) typically writes

Justification: “… deals with the guilt of sin. When a man sins, he is guilty and therefore deserves to be punished. In justification, God declares a man righteous, by virtue of the death of Christ on his behalf. … Thus justification is a declarative act of God. Justification does not make a man righteous. …. It means that God declares him to be righteous” (Alva McClain, Romans p. 140)

Thomas Constable, currently DTS Senior Professor of Bible Exposition observes,

“The obedience of Christ is a reference to His death as the ultimate act of obedience rather than to His life of obedience since it is His death that saves us.” (Notes on Romans 5:19 Pg 60)

Even George Eldon Ladd, who accepts IAO concedes in his NT Theology,

“Paul never states explicitly that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to believers.” (George Eldon Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament p.491)

Actually, I think it is fair to say that in the popular American fundamentalist/evangelicalism of the main part of C20, IAO, for most, was something unknown.  It was not part of the gospel as commonly preached.  The following  sermon, attributed online to Billy Graham but more probably that of Wil Pounds (since his name is injected), himself a Southerner,  a graduate of William Carey College and  New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, prolific writer, preacher and missionary, seems fairly typical of American fundamentalist/evangelical  preaching even yet,

We have been saved by grace through faith. The apostle Paul emphatically states, “a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.” (Galatians 2:16).

Justification is a legal standing with God based upon Christ’s death and resurrection and our faith in Him. The word Paul uses (dikaioo), comes from Roman legal courts meaning to declare to be righteous, or to pronounce righteous. Therefore, justification is the legal and formal acquittal from guilt by God who is Judge. It is the pronouncement of the sinner as righteous, who believes on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s suppose for a moment that I died tonight and stood before the Lord God who is the Supreme Judge of the Universe. No doubt He would ask me, “Wil Pounds, why should I let you into my heaven? You are a guilty sinner. How do you plead?”

My response would be, “I plead guilty, Your Honor.”

My advocate, Jesus Christ, who is standing there beside me speaks up for me. He says, “Your Honor. It is true that Wil Pounds is a grievous sinner. He is guilty. However, Father, I died for him on the cross and rose from the dead. Wil Pounds has put his faith and trust in Me and all that I have done for Him on the Cross. He is a believer. I died for him, and he has accepted Me as his substitute.”

The Lord God turns to me and says, “Is that true?”

I will respond to Him, “Yes sir! That is the truth. I am claiming the shed blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse me of all my sins. I have put my faith in Jesus to save me for all eternity. This is what You have promised in Your Word. Jesus said, ‘For God so loved the world (and this includes Wil Pounds), that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’”

The Lord God responds: “Acquitted! By order of this court I demand that you be set free. The price has been paid by My Son.”

Furthermore, I get to go home and live with the Judge!

Justification means that at the moment of salvation God sovereignly declares the believing sinner righteous in His sight. The believing sinner is declared to be righteous in His standing before God. From that moment on throughout life, through death, that sinner who has believed is now and forever right before God. God accepts him, and he stands acquitted of his sins.

A man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified (Galatians 2:16). (Find here.)

I submit that in the States it is only the ascendency in recent years of a more confessionally reformed evangelicalism that has once again raised the profile of IAO.

The UK story of C20 evangelicalism is somewhat different to the States.  Dispensationalism never gained the hold in the UK to the extent it did in the States.  However, like the States, in the first half of the C20 mainline reformed churches were deeply compromised by liberalism.  I am unsure just how widespread Brethren theological influence was, some say significantly so.  What is clear is that there were attempts by various writers to tone down the rhetoric of IAO.

H C G Moule, Anglican Bishop of Durham from 1901, convinced and influential evangelical, in his ‘Outlines of Christian Doctrines’ he writes,

A few words may come in here on the Imputed Righteousness of Christ. This phrase, once widely accepted, and not least by such Anglicans as Andrewes and Beveridge (cent. xvii.), is now much disputed, and even repudiated. But it rests securely upon Rom iv. 6, with its context. There has been a tendency to over-refinement upon it; a too elaborate distinction between our Lord’s active keeping of the moral law and His awful suffering beneath the penalty of our sins; the one considered as supplying our defects, the other as meeting our violations. But this is not the essential view of the phrase; and we see this all the more as we remember (above, p. 83) the profound connexion between the obedience of our Lord’s life and the merit of His Passion. The essential of the phrase is just this, that the Son of God, as the supremely meritorious One, as infinitely satisfactory to law, is, before the law, and for the purposes of law, accepted, reckoned as the believing sinner’s substitute. The man, incorporated in Him, is counted, reputed, as involved in His whole merit, as the Lord was counted, reputed, as involved in the man’s sin. His merit is thus imputed, that is to say, set down, to the man.  H C G Moule  Outlines of Christian doctrine 1889  Pg 188

Moule seems anxious to step back apace from a bald IAO.  James Denney, Free Church minister and Professor of Systematics at the Free Church College from 1897  until his death in 1917 seems to feel the same.  He writes in his book ‘The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation’,

But in proportion as men rose above the conception of sin and satisfaction, as mere things or abstract ideas, and had their faith and attention concentrated on the personal Saviour by whom they were reconciled to God, this position became intolerable. It left no significance for salvation to anything in Jesus except His death. It almost prompts us to ask again, as Athanasius did, why He did not die whenever He was born, and make the satisfaction in the most direct way.

The Christian soul felt instinctively that the life of Jesus must come into His work somehow as well as His death; wherever we see Jesus, in whatever attitude, however engaged, reconciling virtue goes out of Him. This was recognised when the life of Christ was dragged in, so to speak, side by side with His death, and, though it had not the significance of satisfaction for sin assigned to it, was nevertheless invested with another significance equally necessary to salvation. The life was the active obedience and the death the passive obedience, and though they were alike in respect that both were obedience, each fulfilled its separate and independent function.

Thus the Westminster Confession, in c. Xi. , repeatedly distinguishes in this way the “obedience and satisfaction” of Christ, or His ”obedience and death, ” the satisfaction or death being the ground on which we are cleared from sin, while the obedience constitutes a righteousness of Christ which is imputed to believers.

The utmost refinements or discriminations in this mode of thought were probably to be found in the Puritan theologians of America.

• “Though the Redeemer obeyed in suffering and suffered in obeying, and His highest and most meritorious obedience was acted out in His voluntary suffering unto death, and in this greatest instance of His suffering the atonement which He made chiefly consisted; yet His obedience and suffering are two perfectly distinct things, and answered different ends, and must be considered so, and the distinction and difference carefully and with clearness kept up in the mind, in order to have a proper understanding of this very important subject. The sufferings of Christ, as such, made atonement for sin, as He suffered the penalty of the law or the curse of it, the evil threatened to transgression, and which is the desert of it, in the sinner’s stead, by which He opened the way for sinners being delivered from the curse, and laid the foundation for reconciliation between God and the transgressors, by His not imputing but pardoning their sins who believe in the Redeemer and approve of His character and conduct.  By the obedience of Christ, all the positive good, all those favours and blessings are united and obtained, which sinners need in order to enjoy complete and eternal redemption or everlasting life in the kingdom of God. ” *

More important, however, than any such refinements was the persistence of the idea that the whole work of Christ, His active and passive obedience, constituted in some sense a merit or merits, in virtue of which men could be reconciled to God. It is to God, in the first instance, that the life and death of Christ have value; and it is out of regard to  their value, jointly or separately in other words, it is propter Christum that God admits men to His peace, or that men are justified or reconciled to God. Theologians, from the greatest to the least, are at one here. (James Denney: The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation   Hodder and Stoughton : Cunningham Lectures 1917: Pg 94-96)

Denney holds to the importance of active and passive obedience (as do all believers) but refuses to insist on the refinements that advocates of IAO say is vital to evangelical orthodoxy.

A more recent British theologian like I Howard Marshall (an evangelical Methodist) seeks to put the dogma of Christ’s imputed righteousness in perspective when he says, the imputed

‘righteousness of Christ may be a fair inference . . . but it goes beyond what Paul actually says” (p. 312 n. 10).

Given this diversity within evangelical orthodoxy over many centuries it is hardly surprising that the same differences regarding what is meant by imputation exist today.  The views expressed on imputation by Federal Visionists, N T Wright, Robert Gundry and Mark Seifrid are hardly novel, they simply are in line with evangelicals throughout the centuries who have baulked at the classical expression of imputation in covenant theology.  They baulked because they doubted its biblical validity. It is the same today.  Michael Bird observes,

‘It is no accident, then, that in New Testament theologians’ recent and current treatments of justification, you would be hard-pressed to find any discussion of an imputation of Christ’s righteousness . . . The notion is passe, neither because of Roman Catholic influence nor because of theological liberalism, but because of fidelity to the relevant biblical texts. (M Bird, Incorporated Righteousness).

Whatever may be said of how Federal Vision, Mark Seifrid, Robert Gundry or N T Wright understand other aspects of justification, on this aspect it seems crystal clear they are well within any reasonable definition of evangelical orthodoxy.  More importantly, they stand comfortably within biblical orthodoxy, that is, their view on imputed righteousness is not simply consonant with historical evangelical belief but with biblical teaching.

The litmus test for any belief must be Scripture.  It is Scripture that must test the veracity of IAO and any other theological construct.  In my view, the biblical case for IAO is less than compelling.

In summary, the case for IAO being integral to evangelical orthodoxy is found wanting.  I hope to demonstrate in future blogs that  the case for it being biblically cogent is weak.

imputed active obedience (IAO), a must or a misdirection? (7)

This is the third blog examining whether, historically considered, IAO is a necessary part of evangelical orthodoxy.  Two previous blogs argued that IAO although present (even dominant) in the evangelicalism of  C16 and early 17, it was by no means unanimously so.  The same can be said of the evangelicalism of the late C17 – C19.

C17

Although, through the Confessions, Covenant theology was becoming standard, in the late C17 a number of Puritans questioned the view that justification involved the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.  Richard Baxter, Christopher Cartwright, John Goodwin, and Benjamin Woodbridge held that imputation of faith was the formal cause of justification.  John Owen and Richard Baxter in particular apparently differed vehemently over this doctrine.

C18

Regarding IAO, John Wesley seemed to oscillate a little.  Early in his career Wesley wrote, “Do not dispute for that particular phrase ‘the imputed righteousness of Christ.’ It is not scriptural.”.

Michael Bird asserts,

‘Interpreters of Wesley have long noted that such remarks arise from a suspicion that imputed righteousness could potentially foster antinomianism and stifle the pursuit of righteousness.  However, under a barrage of criticism Wesley attempted to assuage his reformed critics in his sermon “The Lord our Righteousness” where he asserts, “To all believers the righteousness of Christ is imputed; to unbelievers it is not.’ (M. Bird Incorporated Righteousness: This is an excellent article that all studying this theme should read.  Find here.)

It would appear that while Wesley adhered to imputation he always had his reservations.  According to Jeff Paton, later in life, while in a debate with Rowland Hill, Wesley seemed to reject the notion of the imputed righteousness of Christ.   Paton writes,

In a debate with Mr. Rowland Hill, Wesley quotes his remarks and responds to them. (Hill) “Mr. Wesley “winds up this point of imputed righteousness with a resolution which astonishes me, that “he will never use the phrase, the imputed righteousness of Christ, unless it occur to him in a hymn, or steal upon him unawares.” Wesley responded to this complaint, “This is my resolution. I repeat once more what I said in the “Remarks:” “The thing, that we are justified merely for the sake of what Christ has done and suffered, I have constantly and earnestly maintained above four-and-thirty years. And I have frequently used the phrase, hoping thereby to please others “for their good to edification.” But it has had a contrary effect, since so many improve it into an objection. Therefore I will use it no more .” ( I mean, the phrase imputed righteousness; that phrase, the imputed righteousness of Christ, I never did use.)…And I will advise all my brethren, all who are in connection with me throughout the three kingdoms, to lay aside that ambiguous, unscriptural phrase, (the imputed righteousness of Christ,) which is so liable to be misinterpreted.”(Works 10:429, 430.)

It appears that a significant element within subsequent Methodism and Wesleyan thinking was hostile to IAO.  Adam Clarke, a follower of Wesley remembered mainly for his Commentary on the whole Bible which took him 40 years to complete and which was a primary Methodist theological resource for two centuries, wrote in a letter in the early C19,

“My DEAR BROTHER Dunn, Jan. 21st, 1823.

I am quite of Mr. Wesley’s mind, that once “we leaned too much toward Calvinism,” and especially in admitting in any sense, the unscriptural doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ. I never use the distinction of righteousness imputed, righteousness imparted, righteousness practiced. In no part of the book of God is Christ’s righteousness ever said to be imputed to us for our justification; .and I greatly doubt whether the doctrine of Christ’s active obedience in our justification does not take away from the infinite merit of his sacrificial death….I have long thought that the doctrine of imputed righteousness, as held by certain people, is equally compounded of Pharisaism and Antinomianism. (Christian Theology, Adam Clarke, Pages 140-142).

Paton cites too, ‘The Student’s Handbook of Christian Theology‘, by Benjamin Field, published 1870,

This doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ is capable of great abuse. To say that Christ’s personal righteousness is imputed to every true believer, is not Scriptural: to say that he has fulfilled all righteousness for us, in our stead, if by this is meant his fulfillment of all moral duties, is neither Scriptural nor true; that~ he has died in our stead, is a great, glorious, and Scriptural truth; that there is no redemption but through his blood is asserted beyond all contradiction in the oracles of God. (The Student’s Handbook of Christian Theology‘ by , Benjamin Field, Pages 199, 201.)

Another citation of Paton’s is from  the C20 Arminian work ‘ELEMENTS OF DIVINITY’  THOMAS N. RALSTON,

‘The Calvinistic theory of the basis for justification represents an opposite error from those already described. It affirms that the active obedience of Christ is so imputed to believers that they are as legally righteous as if they had been perfectly obedient to the law of God. In its extreme form it is antinomian. It rests on and is a part of the Calvinistic doctrine of imputation. It admits of no real forgiveness of the individual. When Christ’s obedience has been counted or imputed to the sinner as if he had done that obedience, then he is properly regarded as just because he is just. This is the theory in its advanced form. Those whom God declares to be righteous must first be made righteous in fact. In this theory justification is forensic in the strictest sense.

Imputation of righteousness to us in the sense that Christ obeyed the law of God in our stead and we therefore merit the reward of that obedience is not supported by the Scriptures, but is only an assumption of a certain class of theologians. Let us examine some of the texts chiefly relied upon for substantiation of this theory. “He shall be called, the Lord our righteousness” (Jer. 23: 6). It is said he shall be called our righteousness because he is our righteousness. Doubtless this is true. But in what sense is he our righteousness? He can be such only in the sense that he is the procurer of our righteousness or justification. “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous” (Roms. 5:19) Here again the words of the text furnish no conclusive proof of Calvinistic imputation. The question is, how does the obedience of Christ make many righteous? In our consideration of modal theories of native depravity, it has already been shown that the first part of this text can not mean many were made sinners by the imputation to them of the guilt of Adam’s sin. Through the passive obedience of Christ in suffering the death of the cross we are made righteous. This is taught in many other texts (John 10:17, 18; Phil. 2:8; Heb. 10: 10). Our justification is through the blood of Christ. No reason exists for supposing the text under consideration teaches anything more than that we are justified as a result of Christ’s obedience in dying to atone for our sins. Other texts assumed to support the theory under review are equally void of support of it as are those here cited.’ (ELEMENTS OF DIVINITY, THOMAS N. RALSTON, D.D., 1942 PAGES 377, 382; Find here)

Whether one agrees with Wesleyan theology or otherwise, it seems clear that IAO was viewed with some equivocation by John Wesley and denied by a good number of his heirs.  Thus a large section of C18-20 evangelicalism (Methodism) had doubts about IAO.

C19

If Wesleyan Methodism mounted an evangelical challenge to IAO in the C18 then Plymouth Brethren did so in the C19.  John Nelson Darby and William Kelly, fathers of both Christian Brethren and of dispensationalism, opposed IAO.

J N Darby, in one of a number of articles written in response to accusations regarding his view on justification writes,

What I deny is the doctrine that, while the death of Christ cleanses us from sin, His keeping the law is our positive righteousness; and that His keeping the law is imputed to us as ourselves under it, and that law-keeping is positive righteousness. I believe that Christ perfectly glorified God by obedience even unto death, and that it is to our profit, in that, while His death has canceled all our sins, we are accepted according to His present acceptance in God’s sight,…being held to be risen with Him, our position before God is not legal righteousness, or measured by Christ’s keeping the law, but His present acceptance, as risen…, and we accounted righteous according to the value of His resurrection  [J. N. Darby, Collected Writings, vol.14, (Kingston-on-Thames, GB: Stow Hill Bible and Tract Depot, ND), p. 250].

William Kelly held the same view.  While commenting on Roms 3:21-25 in ‘The righteousness of God: what is it?‘ he observes,

Here, then, we have the righteousness of God developed in the simplest and clearest way. It means that God is just, and justifies in virtue of Christ. He is just, because sin has been met in the cross: sin has been judged of God; it has been suffered and atoned for by Christ. More than that: the Lord Jesus has so magnified God, and so glorified His character, that there is a positive debt now on the other side. Instead of the obligation being, as it was, altogether on man’s side, who was accumulating that which never could be paid for by him, God now has interposed, and, having been so magnified in the man Christ Jesus in His death, He is now positively just when He justifies the soul that believes in Jesus. It is consequently the righteousness of God. For God is now approving Himself righteous to the claims of Christ. It is God now that owns and discharges His debt to Christ. Christ has undertaken the cause for God, and also for man. Very God, still He was a man; and it was in human nature, not before its assumption, that the wonderful work of atonement was done. The consequence is, although it was the witness of God’s love that He gave His own Son, and gave His Son to become a man and die for men, that now the scale is turned. The debt of man to destroy him is not so great as that which Christ has paid to deliver him. Scripture makes it a matter of God righteously justifying him that believes, in virtue of what Christ has suffered for sins. Thus nothing can be clearer or fuller, nothing more blessed and precious, than the meaning of this remarkable expression. It is, indeed, a priceless treasure. What Christ did, as living here, is not the point; or surely, where we have the great unfolding of divine righteousness was just the place to bring in what occupied Christ in His life, if it were the ground of this truth.

But I go further. Show me anywhere an unambiguous portion of the word of God, where His fulfilling of the law is treated as a part of the righteousness of God. You can produce none. I can tell you some of those Scriptures which, perhaps, you think about; but I affirm that there is no proof whatever. It is better to be plain about that which is certain. Let others venture to say, if they will, what can be contradicted; it were well, in such a case, not to speak at all. But really there is no Scripture which makes what Christ was doing as under law, — I will not say the exclusive ground, but — any ground at all, of God’s righteousness. Why not produce one?

… In Scripture, then, nothing can be more certain than that God’s righteousness means His justice in justifying by virtue of Christ. We have seen in Christ, as the ground of justification, first, blood to put away the guilt of the old man before God; and next, resurrection, the spring of a new, more abundant, and holy life, where no condemnation can be. “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” And what do men substitute for this? A mere patching up of the old man as living under the law! Are you prepared to follow them? Can you accept this traditional earthly scheme as Christianity? It is really no better than lowering Christ, and His work for our justification, to a making up of the flesh’s deficiencies as responsible under the law.* Is this YOUR Christianity?’ (Find here.)

Neither Darby nor Kelly tended to mince their words, but then, neither did their antagonists. Subsequently, Darby’s views, on dispensationalism and other matters, played an important role in the development of C19/20 evangelicalism.  While many mainline confessional Calvinistic churches in Europe and the States were leavened by liberalism it was those more fundamentalist churches influenced by dispensationalism that withstood this pressure.

Plymouth Brethren churches proliferated, particularly those of an ‘Open’ persuasion.  They became, especially in the first half of the C20, a significant force and voice in evangelicalism as it then was. Most Brethren churches (assemblies) resisted IAO.  Moreover, as Darby’s dispensationalism (itself an assault on the Covenant Theology on which IAO became predicated) spread in the evangelical world beyond, Brethren, not only in the UK, States and Australia but in Europe too (Darby translated Scripture into English, French and German) so too did questioning of IAO.

In the next blog on this topic, we will consider this influence on C20 evangelical theology.  However, once again we see that significant dissident voices in the Protestant Evangelicalism of the C17-19 (people who founded whole evangelical denominations) either were uncomfortable with, or opposed IAO.  Once again, the case for IAO being integral to evangelical orthodoxy is found wanting.

justification constitutive but also transformative

Have you noticed that in Galatians, a letter written to champion the gospel of justification by faith, that Paul’s first allusion to the gospel defines it not in justification language but redemption language.

Gal 1:3-5 (ESV)
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

For Paul, as we shall see, the gospel of justification, God’s declaration that we are righteous in Christ, involves nothing less than freedom from the world and all within the world.  God’s justifying verdict effectively delivers the Christian from the old creation and all that enslaves within it and brings us into new creation.  As we read through Galatians we discover that redemption allusions are regularly threaded into Paul’s theme of justification.  Not least redemption from law itself for it belongs to the old order, the world from which justification delivers. In Ch 3 we read,

Gal 3:13 (ESV)
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us-for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”-

The metaphor of slavery is clear.   The basic premise is laid out.  At the fall, God ‘imprisoned everything under sin’ (3:22).  Even the Law could not free from sin.  In fact, it only served as a further form of slavery.  Speaking to Jewish believers he  says, ‘we were held captive under law’ (3:23) ‘imprisoned until the coming faith be revealed’ (3:23) the law was ‘our guardian’ (3:24) no better than ‘a slave’ (4:1).  Indeed, in the Law the Jews had been ‘enslaved to the elementary principles of the world’.  The Law belonged to the world that Jesus gave himself to deliver his people from.

Gal 4:3-7 (ESV)
In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Gentiles, as part of the world,  were enslaved too.

Gal 4:8 (ESV)
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods.

And if they made the mistake of embracing the Mosaic Law as part of the gospel then they would simply be exchanging one kind of slavery to the world for another.

Gal 4:9-11 (ESV)
But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? You observe days and months and seasons and years! I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain.

The gospel of justification by faith redeems ( delivers, frees) from the world and all its powers, including the power of the Law.  Thus Jew and gentile believers were to refuse to put themselves under the authority of the Law and become its slaves (Gals 4:12-31).  Jerusalem (the present) was part of the world and was in slavery.  Christians had been delivered from the world, they belonged to the free ‘Jerusalem above’ (that is, not part of ‘the present evil world’).  Thus, Christians were to

Gal 5:1 (ESV)
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

and again

Gal 5:13 (ESV)
For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

Justification freedom in the gospel is radical.  It is freedom from the old life altogether.  Christians are not simply no longer free from Law but are free from enslavement to sin.   They do not live ‘in the flesh’ but ‘in the Spirit’ (5:13-25)

Gal 5:24 (ESV)
And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

They no longer are part of the old world to which they once belonged

Gal 6:13-16 (ESV)
… far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

For Paul so radical is the gospel of justification by faith that it takes us out of the present world altogether and makes us ‘new creation’.

How is this so?  How does justification change our position in this way?  Justification surely is a declaration of righteousness.  Surely that is all it is.  Well, no, it is not.  That declaration of righteousness that justification is was accomplished  through death.  The only way we could be justified is if we died.   The wages of sin are death and that death penalty must be carried out.  Adam was told, ‘the day you eat of it [the forbidden fruit] you shall surely die’.  Death for Adam and  all in Adam cannot be avoided.  The soul that sins must die.  Thus, if we are to be justified it cannot be by avoiding death; it must, in fact, be by the means of death.   And of course, that is precisely what it is.

In Galatians we discover the gospel is about the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘who gave himself for our sins’ (1:3).  It is in the death of Christ we die.  Our justification is in Christ and him crucified for all who look to him in faith are involved in his death.  His condemnation is ours.  His crucifixion is ours.  The wages of sin and the penalty of a broken law that demanded death are fully met at the cross.  There the full penalty is experienced.  In Christ, I die, and so I am justified.  The penalty is death and it has been borne.  I have died and so there is no further charge against me.  I am free.  That is what Paul is saying in Ch 2.

Gal 2:19-20 (ESV)
For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

The law demanded death, and so, in Christ, I died.  I was crucified with Christ.  In him the curse was borne.  But that is not the end.  For Christ rose from the dead, vindicated by his Father (1:1).  And as one united to him I rose too. .  He is the first of a new creation.  He rose to ascend to heaven.  That is, he no longer is part of this world.  In his death he died to this world no longer to be part of it.  He is new creation and I am new creation in him.  I live as a justified one who lives in Christ. I am righteousbecause there is now no charge against me and I share now in the righteous standing of Christ.  I am, in Christ, who gave himself for me,  ‘delivered from this present evil world’.  I am no longer under the control of the flesh, sin, Satan, law, or death.  The life I live, I live ‘unto God’.  That is to serve and honour him and no other.

Justification is by way of death and resurrection.  It takes me out of the world in death and then sends me into the world in resurrection as an ambassador of the new world to which I belong.

John 17:6-19 (ESV)
“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. … And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. … They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world…  As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

Thus, in the final analysis, justification is not simply constitutive, it is transformative, for it translates from this world through death into the next world and life.   Justification through death and resurrection  transforms (reconstructs) our relationship to everything; to this world and the next, sin, death, Satan, Law, and God.   This and nothing less, is involved in Paul’s gospel of justification by faith in Galatians.

PS

I am not for a moment suggesting that justification is not a verdict outside of ourselves; our righteousness is imputed.  Nor do I wish to support an imparted righteousness which is more about Christ in us (sanctification) than us in Christ; our status in Christ is not our practical sanctification.  Yet, in Christ, the new status of  justification involves resurrection  (Gals 1:1; Roms 4:25); it constitutes , a new position, a new relationship, a new reality; a new life; this is God’s work not ours.  From this newly constituted reality godliness will flow (sanctification)… nevertheless I live…yet not I but Christ lives in me (Gals 2:20)