The Gift of Christ’s Righteousness

Imputation and the heart of Christian salvation.

Jacopo Tintoretto, “Baptism of Christ”

With a milieu as extensive as Martin Luther’s output, one might be hard-pressed to identify his most memorable or notable contribution to the discipline of theology and the good of the church. His veritable library of writings persists as a cavern of truth waiting to be mined by clergy and laity alike. The great reformer’s grammar concerning “the great exchange” at the heart of the Christian gospel, however, remains his most permeable and accessible concept, serving as an amalgam for the crux of the biblical gospel, especially as the Reformers understood it. Even though there was an assortment of divergent points that ultimately led to the splintering of the Roman Church, the locus of much conversation and division can be traced back to the Reformers’ insistence on “the great exchange” as a concomitant extrapolation of the doctrine of justification as unfolded in Scripture. Not only was this an accompanying factor, but it was also the deciding factor or demarcating line between Romanism and Protestantism, which, if lost or abandoned, then “all true Christian doctrine will be lost,” as Luther himself explains in the 1535 edition of his lectures on Paul’s letter to the Galatians.¹

1. The Historical Roots and Theological Development of “The Great Exchange”

As prevalent as “the great exchange” nomenclature is within the vocabulary of the church, it might surprise one to know that Luther himself never used the phrase verbatim. Near equivalents such as “wonderful exchange”² or “favorable exchange”³ appear in Luther’s lectures on Psalm 22 and Galatians 3, respectively. However, since these lectures occurred later in his career as a reformer, some have suggested that “the great exchange” language is not reflective of the “historical Luther” but of the Melancthon-ized Luther, that is, of the Luther who “fell victim to the corrupting forces of orthodoxy.”⁴ While it is beyond the purview of this essay to trace not only the maturation of Luther’s theology but also its coherence, it is instructive to note that the wedge that some scholars attempt to drive between proto- and post-Lutheran assimilations of the reformer’s body of work represents a failure to appreciate the theological development of a medieval Augustinian monk who gradually “came to reject the doctrine of progressive justification in favor of the forensic doctrine of definitive justification.”⁵ Accordingly, as theological schools of thought, such as the so-called New Perspective on Paul and the New Finnish School, among others, seek to reinterpret the scriptural understanding of justification and imputation, they do so not only at the expense of Luther himself but also at the expense of the orthodox articulation of the gospel.

It is incumbent upon theologically-minded students and scholars alike to have a firm grip on the doctrine of imputation, which is nestled at the heart of the doctrine of justification. To understand the one is to understand the other. Symbiotically, as one’s grasp of what it means to have righteousness imputed to one’s standing coram Deo is diluted by the interpretive frameworks of Neo-Lutheranism and Neo-Orthodoxy, so, too, is one’s understanding of the gospel of the self-giving of God “for our sins” (Gal. 1:4) diminished. Consequently, interpreting the biblical doctrine of justification accurately inherently involves discerning the truth of the doctrine of imputation that is both Reformationally informed and scripturally defined and defended. As a result, imputation remains situated at the theological epicenter of the gospel, not merely as an abstract piece of doctrinal dogma but as the essential mechanism by which the righteousness of Christ is accounted to sinners, which undergirds the church’s enduring mandate to proclaim the message of salvation by grace through faith.

2. The Meaning and Mechanism of Imputation

Properly speaking, “imputation” is derived from the Greek term logizomai, which is often rendered as “counted,” “regarded,” or “reckoned” throughout the New Testament. It features quite prominently in Paul’s examination of Genesis 15 and the righteousness of Abraham in Chapter 4 of his letter to the Romans, particularly as he explains why “the righteousness of faith” is dependent upon faith alone (cf. Rom. 4:9–25). The act of imputation refers to something being given or credited that was absent or nonexistent before. “It ascribes to one,” Mark A. Garcia attests, “what belongs properly to another, and does so with an interest in expressing both the otherness and the unity involved.”⁶ This reflects the reformers’ unflinching determination that a believer’s justification is extra nos, that is, sinners are declared righteous by a righteousness that is “alien to them and proper to Christ.”⁷ In other words, imputation denotes an event that stands in contradiction to what is and to what the law’s judgment of the sinner is — it is suggestive of a gift given disproportionately to the worth of the recipient. In the auspices of Paul’s inquiry into Abraham’s standing before God, the former pagan from Ur is “accounted” (logizomai) as righteous not on account of his works but only according to the word of promise given to him by God alone (Rom. 4:3–5; cf. Gal. 3:7–9, 15–18).

The most vivid depiction of this concept is found in the fourth vision of Zechariah’s oracle, in which he is given a glimpse of the high priest, Joshua, who stands on trial in the courtroom of heaven (Zech. 3:1–5). Prosecuting Joshua’s case is the primordial accuser himself (cf. Rev 12:10), who, it is inferred, is eager to expose Joshua’s delinquency pictured in the “filthy garments” in which he is clothed (Zech. 3:3). As the one who stood to represent all of Israel on the Day of Atonement (cf. Lev. 16), a high priest with excrement-ridden robes is indicative of the culpability, shame, and guilt that permeates the entire nation. Consequently, Zechariah’s vision is representative of what God would do for his covenant people, both individually and nationally. In that way, then, even though the accuser’s indictment convincingly condemns Joshua, the charges are ultimately deemed inadmissible — not because they were untrue but because the Lord had already conceived of a method and means for his acquittal. According to the word of the angel of the Lord, Joshua’s filthy garments are taken away and replaced with “pure vestments,” an event that signals the removal of his iniquity (Zech. 3:4). This is consonant with the prophet Isaiah’s evocative declaration of the Lord clothing his people “with the garments of salvation” (Isa. 61:10), garments which, according to John’s apocalyptic vision, have been washed “white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14).

The previous example is one of the many ways in which the biblical portrait of imputation is, therefore, trenchantly and profoundly portrayed in the “wonderful exchange” of apparel, where “we who are Christ’s,” as the late David Broughton Knox affirms, “stand in God’s presence covered with the robe of Christ’s merits.”⁸ Inherent to this discussion are the positive and negative aspects of imputation. That is, not only is something given, but also something is removed in the process. Paul articulates this explicitly in his second letter to the Corinthians, where he notes that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” precisely by “not counting [logizomai] their trespasses against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). It is only as a result of this non-imputation that the divine pro-imputation of “the righteousness of God” can commence (2 Cor. 5:21). “He lays our sins on his Son and gives us his Son’s righteousness,” Hans J. Iwand explains. “He reckons to us what is not ours (imputatio), namely, a foreign righteousness and he does not reckon to us that which is ours, namely, our own sins (non imputatio).”⁹ The justice of God, therefore, by which the unrighteous are declared righteous, finds its contours in the language of imputation, wherein God the Father does not count the sins and transgressions of the perpetrators against them but, instead, counts them against the person of his Son, Jesus Christ.

3. Throwing Down the Theological Gauntlet

Notwithstanding the measure of comfort that countless saints and sinners have derived from the doctrine of imputation, it persists as a source of frustration and derision, if not outright division. Although modern theological debates concerning this tenet of the Christian faith extend at least as far back as the Protestant Reformation movement of the sixteenth century, Paul’s enthusiastic articulation of justification by faith in his letter to the Galatians gestures to extant apostolic-era contention regarding the means by which believers are made righteous, which serves as the crux of the imputation conversation. This is compounded by the debate and eventual determination of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, of which Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia was likely a precursor. Be that as it may, what remains troublesome for proponents of the Reformed view of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is the apparent absence of verbatim language within the biblical corpus detailing and/or defending the doctrine itself. Skeptics have exploited this dearth and proceeded to question its validity both scripturally and historically. This is the contention of Michael F. Bird, who insists that while imputation might be legitimate within systematic theology disciplines, it is inconsistent with the language of the New Testament writers.¹⁰

Scholarly suspicion over the viability — or lack thereof — of imputation is most pointedly expressed by the doctrine’s reigning critic N. T. Wright, who, in his treatment on justification, remarks with his insightful rhetoric, “If ‘imputed righteousness’ is so utterly central, so nerve-janglingly vital, so standing-and-falling-church important . . . isn’t it strange that Paul never actually came straight out and said it?”¹¹ Wright’s assertion is jarring, to say the least. His further comments on justification in general and imputation, in particular, lead him to conclude that the concept of imputed righteousness is, at best, “a category mistake”¹² — a latent holdover of Reformational history. Accordingly, Wright sees a glaring disconnect within the legal language of justification and imputation, as it is frequently understood among Reformed theologians, since in the paradigm of justification as a forensic verdict, the judge, he maintains, “does not give [a] person his own particular ‘righteousness.’” Rather, the judge “creates the status the vindicated defendant now possesses, by an act of declaration.”¹³ The righteousness of faith, therefore, does not so much involve imputed righteousness as the basis of the sinner’s newfound standing as much as it conveys the sinner’s welcome into the covenant community, the hallmark of which remains individual faithfulness within that community. As a result, any notion of justification as a legal verdict is diluted into mere personal or ecclesiological standing.

4. Biblical Foundations for Imputed Righteousness

Notwithstanding how compelling such scrutiny may be, the Reformational, not to mention the Pauline, interpretation of Abraham’s justification is, to be sure, not a Pauline or Lutheran invention. “Paul,” J. V. Fesko maintains, “does not create the doctrine [of imputation] ex nihilo.”¹⁴ Imputed righteousness, in other words, is no figment of the reformers’ imagination, meticulously articulated to thwart the ecclesiological overreach of Rome. Rather, as Brian Vickers observes, it is “a legitimate and necessary synthesis of Paul’s teaching” that emerges both theologically and exegetically from the entire corpus of Scripture.¹⁵ This underscores the fact that imputation is not inherently a Reformational idea but a biblical precedent, one that faithfully concurs with the essential understanding of justification throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Accordingly, Jordan P. Barrett concludes that although “the doctrine of imputed righteousness is not explicitly stated in Scripture,” it remains “the result of common themes which, when seen together, is best expressed through a doctrine of imputed righteousness.”¹⁶ The Scripture’s univocal testimony is that the locus of God’s program of reconciliation is discerned in the dissonance of God’s Son reckoned as a sinner.

As J. V. Fesko proceeds to demonstrate, there is an abundance of Old Testament corroboration for not only the notion of imputation but also the conviction that it is true. Chapter 53 of the prophet Isaiah’s oracle serves as Fesko’s primary point of departure, wherein the eschatological servant assumes the pain and grief due to humanity’s transgressions and iniquities as his own (Isa. 53:3–5). This he endures as “an offering for guilt” on behalf of the unrighteous that he might account them as righteous (Isa. 53:10–11). Despite the inviolable innocence of the servant (Isa. 53:8), he is “numbered with [logizomai, LXX] the transgressors” so that he might make “intercession” for them (Isa. 53:12). His unsullied obedience in spite of the gauntlet of disdain, rejection, and death not only satisfies the righteous will of the Lord but also creates the righteous gift by which “the many” are made righteous. “The many,” Fesko concludes, “receive the legal status and righteousness of the One.”¹⁷

Isaiah’s prophetic vision supports Paul’s apostolic annunciation that the Christ of God, whom Philip unassailably identifies as the eschatological servant (Acts 8:26–35), obeyed “to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). It is precisely by means of this obedience that, as Paul says elsewhere, “the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19). The breach that was caused by humanity’s transgression is repaired through no other means than the person of the Son of God — the one who is both man and God — succumbing to suffering the consequences of such transgressions himself. Just as all the iniquities, transgressions, and sins of the people of Israel were borne by the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16:21–22) and just as Isaiah’s servant is said to “bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11), so, too, has Christ been made sin “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21; cf. 1 Cor. 1:30). As Paul elaborates in his letter to the Romans, faith is the instrument by which “the ungodly” are “counted as righteousness” (Rom. 4:5) — not because they have amassed a requisite number of works, nor even because they have lived faithfully within their newfound status as covenant members of the kingdom of heaven, but exclusively because the object of their faith is the one who creates out of nothing.

The void left behind in the wake of humanity’s unrighteousness is precisely what the Christ of God comes to fulfill (Matt. 3:15; 5:17), both by living perfectly under the auspices of the law and by willingly surrendering to the curse of death (Gal. 3:13; 4:4–5). Left to their own devices, human beings are utterly incapable of conforming to, let alone consummating, the righteousness that God’s justice stipulates. Christ’s obedience, therefore, is both exemplary and substitutionary. In him, divine righteousness is deployed to effectuate the divine demand, corresponding to what is referred to as Christ’s active and passive obedience, both of which are absolutely “necessary for salvation, and may never be disconnected,” as Michael Howard Seal observes.¹⁸ Through his active obedience, Christ flawlessly conforms to the righteousness of the law in thought, word, and deed; but through his passive obedience, he vicariously endures the penalty of unrighteousness in his suffering and death on the cross. To be counted (logizomai) as righteous, therefore, means that Christ’s “passive righteousness comes to us,” as R. Scott Clark concludes, via the “imputation of Christ’s active, alien righteousness and is received through faith.”¹⁹ As Christ, the Son of Man, obeys in life and death, he creates out of nothing the right standing by which sinners are made right. The biblical doctrine of justification is, therefore, shaped by the incongruous word of the gospel, which, as Jonathan A. Linebaugh says, “creates righteousness and makes alive”²⁰ by the gracious reckoning of sinners as right with God through the imputation of Christ’s own righteousness.

5. The All-Surpassing Peace of “The Great Exchange”

With no apparent definitive biblical reference to point to, the controversy concerning imputation is left to fester in the halls of academia, leaving the laity to endure the fallout. The collateral damage of all this theological wrangling over imputation is sustained by those in the pews, which means that discerning the biblical basis for imputed righteousness is not only a historical or even a doctrinal concern as much as it is a pastoral concern. Accordingly, if one aims to provide a theologically robust foundation for genuine assurance in the life of faith, the doctrine of imputation must be a central theme in one’s preaching. This is why many of the most revered confessions of faith in the Reformed tradition include explicit affirmations of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers. Perhaps most conclusively, Question 60 of the Heidelberg Catechism asserts that one is made righteous “of mere grace, grants and imputes to [one] the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ.” The homiletical heritage of the church, therefore, concerns the clear articulation of imputed righteousness, without which believers are susceptible to doubt and uncertainty regarding their eternal standing before God. In that way, the doctrine of justification, as Paul Helm comments, “is not a matter merely of academic debate, one confined ‘within the precincts of the schools,’ nor is it basically an ecclesiological matter, but it has to do with the ‘judgment seat of God.’”²¹

Consequently, one is obliged to return to the biography of Martin Luther, whose crisis of religion ushered him from the performative shackles of Rome to the liberating shores of grace, the result of which saw the ecclesiastical landscape of the sixteenth century reshaped in the wake of the Protestant movement. At the heart of Luther’s so-called “breakthrough” was a thorough reawakening to the fact that the righteousness that is required by God corresponds to the very righteousness that is given to sinners by God in the gospel (Rom. 1:16–17). “I began to understand,” Luther later wrote, “that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous person lives by the gift of God, namely by faith.”²² Within this deeply personal realization, one finds a treasury of pastoral implications that have continually been rediscovered throughout the ages, affording countless believers the certainty of their standing. One’s righteous status before the God of the universe is, therefore, unfettered by the constraints of human performance and unfurled as a divine gift — an incongruously “great exchange.” In the profundity of imputed righteousness, Luther not only found peace for his soul but also charted a course for the church’s understanding of justification for centuries to come.

1. Martin Luther, Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535): Lecture Notes Transcribed by Students & Presented in Today’s English, translated by Haroldo Camacho (Irvine, CA: 1517 Publishing, 2018), xxx.

2. Martin Luther, Complete Commentary on the First Twenty-Two Psalms, translated by Henry Cole, Vols. 1–2 (London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1826), 2:369.

3. Luther, Galatians (1535), 248.

4. R. Scott Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi: Alien or Proper to Luther’s Doctrine of Justification?” Concordia Theological Quarterly 70 (2006): 276.

5. Clark, 287–88.

6. Mark A. Garcia, “Imputation as attribution: union with Christ, reification and justification as declarative word,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11.4 (2009): 419.

7. Clark, 273.

8. David Broughton Knox, Justification by Faith (London: Church Book Room, 1959), 6.

9. Hans J. Iwand, The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther, edited by Virgil F. Thompson, translated by Randi H. Lundell (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 71.

10. See, for example, Michael F. Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 70ff.

11. N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 46.

12. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 98.

13. Wright, Justification, 69.

14. John V. Fesko, “Imputed Righteousness: The Apostle Paul and Isaiah 53,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 32.1 (2021): 6.

15. Brian Vickers, Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Imputation (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 18.

16. Jordan P. Barrett, “Biblical judgments and theological concepts: toward a defense of imputed righteousness,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 32.2 (2014): 162.

17. Fesko, 9.

18. Michael Howard Seal, “Calvin and the Imputation of the Obedience of Christ to the Believer,” Puritan Reformed Journal 11.2 (2019): 37.

19. Clark, 295.

20. Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022), 27.

21. Paul Helm, “John Calvin and N. T. Wright on Imputed Righteousness,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 13.4 (2009): 60.

22. Martin Luther, “Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings, Wittenberg, 1545,” Luther’s Works: American Edition, Vols. 1–55, edited by Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958), 34:337.