Imputed Verdict

I have been charged with deviating from Reformed orthodoxy for claiming that, strictly speaking, what is imputed to us in justification is the verdict that the Father pronounced in raising His Son from the dead. This verdict assumes that Jesus obeyed the law completely and died in obedience to His Father, but Jesus’ “active” and “passive” obedience are imputed only indirectly. The Father raised Jesus, and that was the Father’s enacted declaration that the Son is just; we are joined to the risen Son; therefore, the Father makes the same declaration concerning us.

Steven Wedgeworth writes to tell me that I am (somewhat surprisingly to me) in the welcome company of R. L. Dabney: “It may be said, without affecting excessive subtlety of definition, that by imputation of Christ’s righteousness, we only mean that Christ’s righteousness is so accounted to the sinner, as that he receives thereupon the legal consequences to which it entitles . . . . All are agreed that, when the Bible says, ‘the iniquity of us all was laid on Christ,’ or that ‘He bare our sins,’ or ‘was made sin for us,’ it is only our guilt and not our moral attribute of sinfulness which was imputed. So it seems to me far more reasonable and scriptural to suppose that, in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, it is not the attribute of righteousness in Christ which is imputed, but that which is the exact counterpart of guilt – the title to acquittal” ( Lectures in Systematic Theology , Lecture LIV).