Union with Christ

Vanhoozer’s lecture and now article on Wright emphasizes the central importance of union with Christ in understanding justification. He suggests the term “incorporated righteousness” as a way of getting at Calvin’s focus on union with Christ and the double grace that flows from that union. Justification is thus an effective speech act of incorporation: “To declare someone righteous is to declare that person incorporated into Christ’s righteousness: ‘I now pronounce in man in Christ.’”

Vanhoozer’s point is well taken: Up with union with Christ! What surprises, though, is that Vanhoozer thinks this is somehow a corrective to Wright, an insight that Wright has failed to reckon with. I have always understood incorporation into the Messiah to be close to the heart of Wright’s explanation of Paul’s doctrine of justification, and an interview from late 2009 (before the Wheaton conference where Vanhoozer delivered his paper, and while Wright was formulating his response to John Piper) confirms this.

Wright said: “in line with many Reformed readers of scripture, including Calvin, I understand Paul’s doctrine of justification to be of those who are ‘in Christ’, whereas Piper and others don’t make that a central element in justification itself. Conversely, for Piper the center of justification is the ‘imputation’ of ‘the righteousness of Christ’, seen in terms of ‘righteousness’ as a kind of moral achievement earned by Jesus and then reckoned to those who believe. I believe that this is an attempt to say something close to what Paul actually says in Romans 6, namely that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is ‘reckoned’ to those who are ‘in him’. Putting it the way Piper (and one part of the Reformation tradition) puts it is a pointer to something which is truly there in Paul, but one which gives off misleading signals as well.”

This also indicates that Wright acknowledges that Paul teaches a form of imputation, God’s reckoning of something accomplished by Christ to sinners by virtue of their union with Christ.