The Power Of Christ's Righteousness Imputed

"For, even as Jesus Christ is stronger than Adam was, so is his righteousness more mighty than the sin of Adam. And, if the sin of Adam was sufficient enough to make all men sinners and children of wrath, without any misdeed of our own, much more shall Christ's righteousness be of greater force to make us all righteous, and the children of grace, without any of our own good works; which cannot be good unless that, before we do them, we ourselves be made good" (The Benefit Of Christ's Death, 19)

"Hence also it is proved, that it is entirely by the intervention of Christ's righteousness that we obtain justification before God. This is equivalent to saying that man is not just in himself, but that the righteousness of Christ is communicated to him by imputation, while he is strictly deserving of punishment….This is most clearly declared by the Apostle, when he says, that he who knew no sin was made an expiatory victim for sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Cor. 5:21). You see that our righteousness is not in ourselves, but in Christ; that the only way in which we become possessed of it is by being made partakers with Christ, since with him we possess all riches….'As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous,' (Rom. 5:19). To declare that we are deemed righteous, solely because the obedience of Christ is imputed to us as if it were our own, is just to place our righteousness in the obedience of Christ. Wherefore, Ambrose appears to me to have most elegantly adverted to the blessing of Jacob as an illustration of this righteousness, when he says that as he who did not merit the birthright in himself personated his brother, put on his garments which gave forth a most pleasant odour, and thus introduced himself to his father that he might receive a blessing to his own advantage, though under the person of another [Genesis 27:1-29], so we conceal ourselves under the precious purity of Christ, our first-born brother, that we may obtain an attestation of righteousness from the presence of God." (John Calvin, Institutes Of The Christian Religion, 3:11:23)

"The righteousness of God here spoken of is just the doing and dying of the Lord Jesus. It is called the righteousness of God, because it is that of God himself. You remember when Christ was a child, it is said he was 'the mighty God' [Isaiah 9:6]…And, in the same manner, the obedience of Christ was the obedience of one who was God; and when he obeyed his parents [Luke 2:51-52], it was the obedience of one who was God….Those of you who are awakened sinners, here is a righteousness that can cover you; behold, for each of your crimson sins, here is a stripe of one who is God. And, brethren, more than that, here are acts of holy obedience to cover your naked soul, here are holy words to cover your unholy words, here are holy deeds to cover your unholy deeds. O brethren! here is a lifetime of obedience to cover your soul….So it is with you; if you have on this righteousness you will be covered, and when God looks down, he will see nothing but the glassy sea of his Son's obedience….When Paul approached the gates of Rome, when he looked at its marble baths, when he saw the multitudes flocking to the theatre, and when he saw the crowds bowing down to the statue of Jupiter or Minerva, the heart of Paul was touched, and why? Because the wrath of God was revealed from heaven against them, and he knew that he had in his hand that which could cover every sinner. O, said Paul, if I could get them to put on this righteousness!…It is like casting a stone into the deep; it sinks, and it is not seen." (Robert McCheyne, A Basket Of Fragments [Scotland: Christian Focus, 2001], 99-101)

“A Serious Challenge to the New Perspective on Paul”

Not to be missed: Michael Kruger’s review of The Righteousness of God: A Lexical Examination of the Covenant-Faithfulness Interpretation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015):

http://michaeljkruger.com/a-serious-challenge-to-the-new-perspective-on-paul/

One of the major flash points in this debate is the term “righteousness of God.” Paul uses this phrase in a number of places, but it takes center stage particularly in Romans. Indeed, one might suggest that the “righteousness of God” is the theme of the entire book:

“For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith” (Rom 1:17).

So, what does this phrase mean? NPP advocates say it refers simply to God’s covenantal faithfulness. Reformed theologians have argued that it refers to a righteous status received from God.

It is on this very question that NPP advocates are facing a new and robust challenge from Lee Irons ...

Augustine goofs on justification; the whole medieval world followed him in his goof, and the Council of Trent ratified this error infallibly.

Since the Reformation, there have been a couple of major issues that have never been resolved. The issue of “justification” is an instance in which Roman Catholic “Tradition” clearly got something wrong – it turned a mistranslation into a dogma – and yet, the entire history of the Christian church since that time has been unable to resolve this issue. Rome claimed that it had the proper authority to define this dogma, and once defined by a council (Trent) and ratified by a pope, its dogma was “infallible”. The Reformers and their succeeding generations refused to accept the error.

The error started with the fifth-century theologian Augustine. The Hebrew Scriptures were written in Hebrew. Later they were translated into Greek. Augustine knew only a little Greek, and he worked primarily in Latin. It was Augustine’s misunderstanding of a Hebrew (Old Testament) concept that led to 1000 years of medieval speculation, and finally the codification of Augustine’s mistake at the Council of Trent.

The following article goes into some detail on this entire process.

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Historically, according to Alister McGrath (professor of Historical Theology at Oxford), “it will be clear that he medieval period was astonishingly faithful to the teaching of Augustine on the question of the nature of justification, where the Reformers departed from it” (“Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification ”, Third edition, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, ©2005, pg 216). However, the key to this was that Augustine's understanding/translation of iustitificare, a Latin term which he held to mean “to make righteous” was “a permissible interpretation of the Latin word”, it was “unacceptable as an interpretation of the Hebrew concept which underlies it.”

As McGrath (“Luther’s Theology of the Cross,” Oxford, UK: and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, ©1985, 1990) pointed out elsewhere:

There are two aspects to Luther’s discovery of ‘the righteousness of God’. The first relates to the nature of this righteousness: Luther discovered a ‘wonderful new definition of righteousness’ which stood in diametrical opposition to human understandings of iustitia. The second relates to the mode by which this righteousness comes to the individual: man cannot perform good works which are capable of earning justification on a quid pro quo basis, but he can totally abase himself, and cry out to God for grace.

This is one of those McGrath statements that has been picked out of his various works and used by Roman Catholics with some glee, noting that, “the Protestant understanding of the nature of justification thus represents a theological novum.” It is a novum because, after Augustine got it wrong, Luther was the first one to get it right. The “infallible” Roman church had gotten it wrong for a thousand years and counting.

One Roman Catholic blogger specifically asked,

The Righteousness of Christ imputed to believers

One of the sideshows from the recent Dave Armstrong threads involved a discussion of “the righteousness of Christ imputed to believers”. One of the commenters there said, “But you don't really care whether ‘the imputation of Christ’s righteousness’ is in the Bible or not, do you, John? Not really.” He also reiterated many times, “there just is no such thing as ‘the imputation of Christ's righteousness’ in scripture and no amount of verbal acrobatics can change that.”

Another commenter essentially quoted Roman Catholic doctrine: “Imputed righteousness is something that is not taught in the Bible. God's grace is infused and is able to actually clean and recreate a new heart in us as opposed to forensic justification which is the notion that God merely takes an eraser to our "account" and erases our sins.”

One of the better brief statements concerning the Reformed doctrine of “the righteousness of Christ imputed to the believer” is in John Murray’s Redemption Accomplished and Applied. The link here is to his chapter on Justification, but several of the specific pages which deal with that topic are missing. So I’d like to provide here the entire sweep of Murray’s argument that not only is the sinner’s sin forgiven in justification, but as well, the Righteousness of Christ is imputed to the sinner as well.

Murray deals effectively with the notion of why “our own righteousness”, even that given by God’s grace, is not sufficient for what God’s holiness entails: