What is the righteousness with which we stand before God? That is the most important personal question we could ever ask in this lifetime. Another way to ask the same question is this: How can I, the chief of all sinners, stand before a perfectly holy God? For all of the other struggles that made up the Protestant Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, this question over our right standing before God was really the cardinal controversy. Those who say that such questions are hairsplitting, fine print, second-order doctrines or a tempest in a teapot do not merely betray historical ignorance. They display a troubling sense of presumption about their own ability to stand. As the Scripture says,
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? [Ps. 130:3]
Another way to frame the debate over the righteousness of God gained in the gospel is to ask whether justification is primarily legal or moral in character. No one debates the basic definition of justification as God’s declaration that one is in right standing before him. The question is whether that righteousness is something that is intrinsic to the defendant or extrinsic. In other words, what is the ground of justification?
The Roman Catholic Position
Following the era of Scholasticism and the rise of Renaissance humanism, the official teaching of the Catholic Church gradually left behind its condemnation of the Pelagian (431) and Semi-Pelagian (529) heresies in order to embrace a system that became known as cooperative, or meritorious, grace. While the Church had jettisoned Augustine’s doctrines of grace, it retained his doctrine of the church with a vengeance. The dispensation of grace was thus an entirely sacerdotal matter. That is to say that the grace of God flowed only through the priesthood of the Church and its sacramental practices. Now it is true that Rome continued to maintain that no sinner has the ability to follow Christ and live righteously before God apart from a special work of grace. However such grace came to the sinner entirely through the seven sacraments of the Church. The chief plank that concerns us here is the initial sacrament of baptism in which the Holy Spirit infuses (or pours into) the participant with the righteousness of Christ. This grace of justification in baptism must then be assented to and cooperated with throughout one’s life. If anyone makes “shipwreck of their soul” through mortal sin, then that grace is lost, or killed. Such a one loses justification. It can be gained back by the second plank which is the sacrament of penance.
The idea here is that justification is indeed by grace; but it is grace ex opere operata—i.e. from the working of the works. If there is the need to regain that justifying grace, there are works of satisfaction to be done in penance. The purpose of this is to be the recipient of the merit of Christ in three degrees: congruous, condine and superogatory merit. This is a scale from least just to most just. The upshot of this system was that the sufficient condition by which one is justified before God must be inherent. Hence infused comes to mean inherent. These sacraments were seen as the instrumental cause of justification. Faith must be present. But faith was not a sufficient condition for justification. Rather, when the sinner cooperates with grace through these works, a real righteousness of his own begins to transform him. In Chapter 7 of the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent, it is said:
Not only are we reputed but we are truly called and are just, receiving justice within us, each one according to his own measure.
It is important to note here that when Trent assessed what they saw in the Reformed view, they called it a “legal fiction,” because, they reasoned, a perfectly just Judge could never declare a thing just that is not in fact just. The Proverbs even say so, “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord” [17:15]. Now we can begin to see the need in the Roman Catholic mind for infused righteousness. We can also get a sense of why Purgatory lasts so long, since it is said to be a place of purging impurities. All of the other abuses that led to the Reformation were but mere symptoms in comparison to this disease of cooperative grace which infuses righteousness in us.
The Reformed Protestant Position
One Augustinian monk teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg began to read Paul’s letter to the Romans for himself. He began to see—especially from meditating upon 1:17 and considering his own wretchedness—that the only righteousness that could ever cut it in God’s court is God’s righteousness. It led to despair and resentment toward God—until, that is, he was reading 3:21-22 and noticed the connection between faith and the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel. The perfect righteousness that God demands of us, He freely gives to us through simply believing him for it. It was the most revolutionary insight since the closing of the canon of Scripture itself. Martin Luther clearly saw that faith alone is the instrumental cause of justification.
John Calvin, using the biblical juxtaposition of “filthy rags” [Is. 64:6] with “white robes” [Rev. 7:9], added:
A man will be justified by faith when, excluded from the righteousness of works, he by faith lays hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothed in it appears in the sight of God not as sinner, but as righteous. Thus we simply interpret justification, as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as if we were righteous; and we say that this justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.
[1]
To impute simply means to credit, to consider, to count, or to reckon over to one’s account. Whether or not the word is used (actually, its synonyms are) in the Bible is irrelevant. Is the concept itself taught? Committed Trinitarians should never fall for that card trick, seeing how we face that objection all the time that the word “Trinity” is not in the Scripture.
One central text is 2 Corinthians 5:21 in which a great exchange occurs:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Is Paul saying that Christ becomes sin (ontologically) or that we become righteousness (ontologically)? Does the nature of God change or is man promoted to divinity? Surely not! What then is Paul’s meaning? It can only mean that, on the cross, God sees Christ and considers (counts, credits, reckons, imputes) all of our sin to be upon his Son. Likewise, God sees our faith and considers (counts, credits, reckons, imputes) all of his righteousness to be upon us. God is not confused. He meant to do this. The question, again, is, on what basis does He do this. If faith is merely the instrument, what is the material ground of our right standing? It can only be something perfect, since no one can be declared righteous by an imperfect righteousness.
Both the biblical usage of the dikaio word group as well as a common sense of review of earthly courtrooms, it was argued, render the concept of infused righteousness untenable. The Bible always views God’s justification of us—for all of its moral implications—as unilateral, immediate, entire, objective, alien and forensic [cf. Deut. 25:1, Prov. 17:15, Rom. 8:1, 33, 34]. A judge can render a verdict; it may be just or unjust. But the verdict itself is not the same as the nature, but in reference to judicial facts. Moreover, the converse of the word—condemnation—never means to “make bad,” but, quite obviously, is means to communicate a just rendering of a bad nature. Therefore the very essence of justification is that of a Judge rendering a verdict of objective facts and, as we have seen, the “not guilty” verdict can only apply to a righteousness that is utterly perfect.
The Reformed Scholastic, Francis Turretin, posed ten critical questions concerning Justification in his
Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1688). Questions 2 and 3 in particular dissect the matter: “(2) Is the impulsive and meritorious cause (on account of which man is justified in the judgment of God) inherent righteousness infused into us or good works? We deny against the Romanists. (3) Is the righteousness and obedience of Christ imputed to us the meritorious cause and foundation of our justification with God? We affirm against the Romanists and Socinians.”
[2]
A Biblical Assessment
These differences may seem hairsplitting to our superficial age, but they represent two different gospels. Rome confused justification with sanctification, opening up the irresistible urge in the sinner to smuggle in his or her own character into God’s work of grace. If the battle over justification has been minimized by Evangelical scholars, the doctrine of imputation has fared even worse. Those who have discovered a “new perspective” on Paul that went missing sometime in the first few centuries have informed us that the notion of Christ’s imputed righteousness is nowhere found in Scripture. These two battles are therefore inseparable.
As Sproul put it, “
Sola fide declares that the ground of our justification is solely the righteousness of Christ. It is a righteousness that is
extra nos. It is apart from or outside of us, not a part of us, before faith.”
[3] Those last two words are crucial: before faith! The actual righteousness that believers gain is prior to faith and independent of faith. The perfect obedience and sacrifice of Jesus Christ alone is that which God accepts on behalf of believers:
For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, soby the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous [Rom. 5:19].
Lest anyone misunderstand what is meant by Christ’s act being independent of faith, we do not mean that the atonement has no reference to faith or could ever fail to effect faith in the believer. It simply means that one’s faith does not contribute one ounce of righteousness to Christ’s sacrifice, nor is one’s faith the cause of one’s sins being atoned for on the cross. Rather, faith is causal in justification as the instrument through which God’s righteousness in Christ is reckoned over to the account of the believer. Jesus’ righteous act is what our trust is in. Our faith is not in our faith! Consider the following verses:
(We) 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 [Rom. 3:24-25].
and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, therighteousness from God that depends on faith [Phi. 3:9].
We could summarize the cumulative truth of Romans 3:24-25 and Philippians 3:9 by saying that the relationship between faith and righteousness is like that between an instrument and the matter itself. Faith is not that righteousness itself but the means through which God attaches his righteousness to us. It is God’s righteousness that we need, not our own, since no one can be declared righteous by an imperfect righteousness. Both the whole and the parts of justification are said to be an undeserved gift of God. He is willing and able to credit his righteousness to whomever He wills; and because no one can bring any charge against him doing that, no one can bring any charge against the one who believes it:
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 [Rom. 8:33-34].
The gospel is at stake here. And since the gospel alone is the power to save those who believe, your eternal destiny is at stake. Luther said that this doctrine of sola fide is “the article upon which the church stands or falls.” If that is true, then its sub-doctrine of imputation is absolutely foundational to the entire Christian faith. If we lose it, we lose everything. It is your only final answer on Judgment Day.
Recommended Resources: Jerry Bridges & Bob Bevington, The Great Exchange; John Piper, Counted Righteous in Christ; R. C. Sproul, Faith Alone; Francis Turretin, Justification
[1] John Calvin,
Institutes of the Christian Religion
[2] Francis Turretin,
Justification (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, Philipsburg, NJ 2004); xxv
[3] R. C. Sproul,
Faith Alone (Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI 1995); p. 73
