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The Imputation of Righteousness and our Future-Present Justification

Although justification is pronounced objectively in the resurrection (Rom. 4:25), it is received subjectively through faith that hears the promise: “For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved . . . [And] faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:10, v. 17).  No one can have faith apart from the electing and regenerative work of the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:14, 12:3, Gal. 3:2).  Christ makes intercession on behalf of believers in heaven, on the basis of his sacrifice on the cross (Rom. 8:34).  The Holy Spirit, the who is the spirit of the Son (Gal. 4:6), makes the fruits of Christ’s intercession – justification – present in the heart of the believer (Rom. 10:6-13) through the hearing of the Word (Rom. 10:7, Gal. 3:2).  Much as the elect representational persons stood in the place of Israel in the Old Testament as mediators, so too Christ and his righteousness stand in for the unrighteousness of the unbeliever through an act of imputation (Rom. 3:25, 4:9, v. 22, 8:10, 1 Cor. 1:30, 2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:6, Phil. 3:9).  The concept of representation that we see in the Old Testament therefore makes sense of Paul’s language of imputation in atonement and justification.  In atonement, Christ is imputed with human sin, and in justification humans are imputed with Christ’s righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21).

It is important to notice that Paul uses the term eschatological term “justification” for what happens proleptically (in the future) to believers in the present.  As we observed earlier, for Second Temple Jews, at the end of time God would “justify” (judge righteous and vindicate) those who had adhered to the covenant and usher them into the kingdom.  For Paul, Christ is the object of election and justification.  He is one the one who has adhered to the covenant and be vindicated on the eschatological day of his resurrection.  Therefore, in the present believers can proleptically receive through Christ what they will receive at the end of time through faith in the promise (i.e., election and justification).  This is because the eschaton has already happened for Christ, and therefore when believers enter into him the eschaton happens to them as well.  Outwardly, believers remain in the current age weighed down by sin and death, but in the inner being they already have been ushered into the kingdom of the resurrected: “But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness” (Rom. 8:10).  

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New Perspective on Paul and Works of the Law

Part of the issue with the New Perspective on Paul (NNP) is that this group of scholar reads Paul’s “works of the law” as being equivalent to “Judaism.” As Stephen Westerholm points out, the NNP scholars project their scholarly interpretation of what they think first century Judaism was like onto Paul’s statements about the “works of the law.” Of course, if one takes this line what Paul says about the law makes no sense, since it posits that first century Judaism was a “religion of grace” or, really, a religion that mixed grace with law. As a result, NNP scholars think that Paul must “really mean” to criticize first century Judaism for not knowing that the covenant signs of the old dispensation don’t really apply anymore. But Paul doesn’t make his point mysterious at all. In Galatians 3, he explains what he means by the “works of the law.” Namely, he refers to the Sinaitic covenant. Hence, all his statements about the law have nothing to do with Judaism or the empirical religion of Israel in the OT period. They have to do with the logic of reward and punishment that Sinaitic covenant establishes.

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Book Update and Paul and Rabbinic Judaism

I’m working on my new book on justification and have finished the portion directly dealing with Jesus in the Gospels. I’m now moving on to Paul. I’ve begun my assault on the New Perspective. If we look at the context of Rabbinic Judaism, I think we can find a number of polemical echoes in Paul – although it’s hard to say how much is pre-70 A.D. Rabbinic tradition and how much gets generated after the fact. There are two interesting ideas in Rabbinic Judaism to which Paul seems to be responding:

Image from St Paul Kpehe Parish, http://stpaulkpehe.org/st-paul-the-apostle/

Image from
St Paul Kpehe Parish,
http://stpaulkpehe.org/st-paul-the-apostle/

A. That there is an “evil impulse” in humanity, but that it can be master by the law.

B. That although Israel isn’t going to be 100% perfect in obeying the law, they can always draw on the reserve of good will in the merits of the patriarchs.

On the first point Paul argues not only that the evil impulse is morally incapacitating, but that the law actually eggs it on and makes it worse. Hence, the law doesn’t help us master it.

On the second point, Paul inverts the idea of the merits of the fathers and claims that we’re actually under the curse of our ancestor Adam.

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The “Wolf of Wall Street” and the Orders of Creation: Part II

Part 2 of a throwback post from February 8, 2014

From the perspective of Luther’s Genesis Commentary, the idea that the Kingdom of God comes if we fix politics is all wrong.  In his commentary on the primal narrative of human life before the Fall, Luther shows that God established first the Family and then the Church as the original and most authentic setting of human existence.  They were created before the Fall into sin and therefore are not necessarily a response to the condition of human sin.   Rather, they are a natural setting for human life on earth.  These orders only become unworkable on their own after sin arrived on the scene.  Therefore after the Flood, in Genesis 9 God promulgates the new law of retribution, thereby implying the establishment of the Order of the State, as Paul confirms in Romans 13.  Hence, the State and its coercion are not meant as a means of fulfilling human life.  It is, unlike the other Orders, something created in order to counteract human sin and therefore make up for the failures of the first two Orders.  As a result, it cannot replace these other Orders.

This of course brings us back to the Wolf.  Belfort, like many others in our society, did not belong to the Church and did not have much of a family life (the little he has, he systematically destroys).  In terms of his behavior, he is able to do many, many things which are illegal, but — oddly enough — the government doesn’t care about most of them. When he is finally convicted, the prosecutors have no interest in his use of prostitutes or cocaine!  Hence, the normal and natural settings for human life are barren for him.  They do not function as either a medium of vocation, or as a means of moral formation.  He has no ultimate hope in his life, and so he feels that Epicurean excess is the only reasonable goal of human existence.  He has no sense of the law of God as taught by the natural law and summarized in the Decalogue.  And, hence, the only thing left over to direct and restrain him is the State.  Since the State is not omniscient and omnipresent, it cannot actually regulate his moral and spiritual life — even if that was its role — in a way that could force him to live a productive life.  All it can do is come in and pick up the pieces.  He is free to get away with whatever he can.

Within such a situation then, the State must either remain impotent in the face of a corrupt culture in which the Orders of the Church and Family are non-functional, or it must actually take over those functions and become more and more intrusive, totalizing, and, indeed, tyrannical.  And this latter course more often than not happens.  And so there comes about a kind of symbiotic effect.  The more the Church and the Family deteriorate as Orders of Creation, the more the Order of the State takes over their functions.  And the State must then feeds children and supports families because there are no families or fathers.  The State teaches “virtue” (after a fashion) in public schools.  And to many secularists the State becomes a kind of religion and now brings the kingdom.  Nevertheless, it is likewise the case that as the State takes over these functions and becomes more and more totalizing, it also accelerates the deterioration of the Orders of the Family and the Church as well.