From Volume 1 of Michael Horton's work on Justification:
The Nature of the Union
Robert Preus notes that Roman Catholic scholar George Tavard wonders how to square imputation with the great exchange. “How do we coordinate these two motifs in Luther’s theology?” Tavard chalks this up to Luther’s love of “dialectical contrasts.” However, Preus counters, the mixing of metaphors is precisely what the great exchange encourages. Imputation is grounded in the great exchange.
28 “Rome did not discard the righteousness of Christ as playing no role in our justification,” Preus observes. “Neither did Rome reject or object to the term ‘impute,’ which was a very common term in the vocabulary of scholastic theology. What Rome rejected was the joining of the two concepts.”
29 According to Trent, Preus notes, Christ’s righteousness is the “meritorious cause” (causa meritoria). “Essentially, that means that Christ’s atoning work makes justification and sanctification by grace possible. Second, the righteousness of Christ’s doing and suffering is not the righteousness by which we become righteous.” What constitutes our justification (the unica causa formalis) “is not the imputed obedience and righteousness of Christ . . . but that by which He makes us righteous (nos justos facit), namely, that with which we being endowed by Him and are renewed in the spirit of our mind (Eph 4:23).”
30 There is thus “the divorce of any real, formal connection between Christ’s work of redemption and the sinner’s justification.”
31 Preus’s point is crucial, especially in displaying the fact that, ironically, it is Trent’s position that severs the real ontological connection between Christ and the believer’s salvation.
According to Preus, Trent followed the scholastic theology exemplified by Bonaventure, who taught that “neither to the resurrection nor passion [of Christ] can be attributed properly (proprie) the causality of justification or the remission of guilt,” since justification is in a different category (modo) from Christ’s passion and resurrection. It is obvious that Bonaventure did not consider the active obedience of Christ (Rom 5:15), His obedience to the Law and under the Law (which is clearly commensurate with man’s disobedience to the Law), as a part of His righteousness and atonement. The scholastics made little of the active obedience of Christ as part of Christ’s atoning work, and they restricted the merits of Christ to His death (Anselm; so also the Catholic Catechism, 1992).
32
Luther’s student Martin Chemnitz pointed this out against Diogo de Payva de Andrada (the Jesuit commentator on the Council of Trent): it is not a legal fiction because Christ’s active obedience is actually imputed.
33 This again refutes the charge that the Reformers adopted nominalism’s notion of an arbitrary decision of God. On the contrary, the righteousness imputed is real—that of Christ himself. Quenstedt argued, “For certainly our sins were extrinsic to Christ, and yet they could be imputed for punishment and guilt to Him and reckoned to Him.”
34 In addition it is worth observing that Rome never denied that our sins were imputed to Christ at the cross. Consequently, the same question could be put to Rome: Is this imputation a legal fiction as well?
The great exchange provides the proper context in which to understand faith, then, as neither a meritorious virtue nor a general existential or voluntaristic stance but as a very specific act of clinging to Christ. On this point Preus comments, “Again in Romans 3:25 we are told that these great benefits are received through faith in His blood,” faith being “the one means by which we receive Christ’s righteousness, forgiveness, and the grace of God, the one means through which we are justified (pistei: Romans 3:28; Acts 26:18; ek pisteōs: Romans 3:30, 5:1; Galatians 2:16, 3:7–9, 11–12; dia tēs pisteōs: Romans 3:31).”
35 He appeals to the Formula of Concord:
Faith is a gift of God whereby we rightly learn to know Christ as our Redeemer in the Word of the Gospel and to trust in Him, but solely for the sake of His obedience we have forgiveness of sins by grace, are accounted righteous and holy by God the Father, and are saved forever. . . . For faith does not justify because it is so good a work and so God-pleasing a virtue, but because it lays hold of and accepts the merit of Christ and the promise of the Holy Gospel.
36
We have noted the remarkable number of times that the phrase “faith alone” appears in the church fathers—in direct connection with justification and over against works and merits. Even Origen inserted “alone” in Romans 3:28. Besides, as Melanchthon noted in the Apology, “If they dislike the exclusive particle ‘alone,’ let them remove the other exclusive terms from Paul, too, like ‘freely,’ ‘not of works,’ ‘it is a gift,’ etc., for these terms are also exclusive.”
37 In short, works are opposed not only to grace or to gift in general, but to the gift of Christ in particular. United to Christ, we have all that we need in order to be justified before God.
The great exchange or union with Christ also attains a major place in Calvin’s understanding of the gifts of salvation.
38 Calvin observes, “that mystical union” is “accorded by us the highest degree of importance, so that Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed.” While our righteousness is indeed external to us—an alien righteousness that belongs properly to Christ rather than to us—Christ does not remain alien but joins himself to us and us to him. “We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body—in short, because he deigns to make us one with him.”
39 He rhapsodizes,
This is the wonderful exchange which, out of His measureless benevolence, Jesus Christ has made with us; that, becoming Son of man with us, He has made us sons of God with Him; that, by His descent to earth, He has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, He has conferred His immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, He has strengthened us by His power; that, receiving our poverty unto Himself, He has transferred His wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon Himself, He has clothed us with His righteousness.
40
For Calvin as well as Luther, therefore, union with Christ and the marvelous exchange were interchangeable terms for the same reality. Earlier in the Institutes Calvin supplies one of the richest summaries:
When we see that the whole sum of our salvation, and every single part of it, are comprehended in Christ, we must beware of deriving even the minutest portion of it from any other quarter. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that he possesses it; if we seek . . . purity in his conception . . . if we seek redemption, we shall find it in his passion; acquittal in his condemnation; remission of the curse in his cross; satisfaction in his sacrifice; purification in his blood; reconciliation in his descent to hell; mortification of the flesh in his tomb; newness of life in his resurrection; the inheritance of a celestial kingdom in his entrance into heaven; protection, security, and the abundant supply of all blessings, in his kingdom.
41
Notice how not only justification but every aspect of our salvation is “comprehended in Christ,” underscoring the point that it is the solo Christo that lies at the heart of the Reformers’ concerns. In fact, he concludes the preceding statement, “In summary, since in him all kinds of blessings are treasured up, let us draw a full supply from him, and from no other quarter.”
42
Calvin’s judicial emphasis with respect to justification is complemented by the organic imagery of union and ingrafting in relation to the inner renewal and communion with Christ, including his holiness. To be sure, justification is exclusively extrinsic—the imputation of Christ’s alien righteousness—but, more generally, salvation also includes transformation. Yet here too, such sanctifying transformation rests on Christ and our union with him through faith rather than on an inner movement of the soul that makes union with God possible for all who cooperate meritoriously. For the magisterial Reformers, union with Christ is no longer conceived as the goal but as the source of sanctification.
Thus, commenting on John 17, Calvin explains, “Having been ingrafted into the body of Christ, we are made partakers of the Divine adoption, and heirs of heaven.”
43 “This is the purpose of the gospel,” he says, “that Christ should become ours, and that we should be ingrafted into his body.”
44 (Hence, union has an intrinsically corporate, ecclesial dimension.) We are not first united to Christ and then justified on the basis of his indwelling righteousness, but justified through faith by the imputation of Christ’s alien righteousness. Nevertheless, one cannot grasp Christ without receiving all his benefits. Those who are justified are united to Christ and become fruit-bearing branches. Continuing this emphasis, John Owen writes, “There is no contemplation of the glory of Christ that ought more to affect the hearts of them that do believe with delight and joy than this, of the recapitulation of all things in him.”
45
According to critics like John Milbank, the Reformers’ doctrine of justification resulted from an absolute “extrinsicism” in their view of the God-world relationship. Consequently, nominalism does not allow for what the church fathers considered the ultimate end of salvation: deification. This, according to Milbank, is the test of nominalist soteriology: whether it allows for the ontological glorification of the saints, and the Reformers, following Scotus and Ockham, fail the test.
46 However, for the Reformers extrinsic justification does not eliminate analogical participation in God as creatures, and the former becomes the secure basis for an exact identity between Christ’s and our humanity. No one is united to God directly and immediately, the Reformers emphasized, but through faith believers are united to the God-human through his humanity, in the power of the Spirit working through the gospel. Thus, the intimate participation of the believer in Christ—even to the point of affirming “deification” as the greatest of all benefits (Calvin)—refutes the charge of nominalism.
47
Calvin’s understanding of union with Christ, then, is the same as the federal theology that followed in his wake, with Christ replacing Adam as our federal or covenantal head. It is not an abstract participation in being, says Owen, “as if it had been implanted in them by nature,” but a personal union with the mediator of the covenant: “But Christ dwells principally on this, that the vital sap—that is, all life and strength—proceeds from himself alone.”
48 Given the Trinitarian emphasis of his doctrine of union, including a high view of the Spirit’s role in uniting us to Christ, it is not surprising that his treatment suggests a more dynamic understanding. Whereas justification is a once-and-for-all and definitive verdict rendered at the moment that one embraces Christ through the gospel, we grow “more and more” into Christ and his body.
On the legal basis of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, believers can be united to Christ, confident that everything that belongs properly to him is given freely to us. In this marvelous exchange, all of our debts become his, and all of his riches become ours. And in our union with Christ, we actually receive these benefits to which his imputed righteousness entitles us. Not even in our sanctification, therefore, can we lodge confidence in our inherent holiness. “If you contemplate yourself, that is sure damnation.”
49 In the Institutes, Calvin adds,
Although we may distinguish [justification and sanctification], Christ contains both of them inseparably in himself. Do you wish, then, to attain righteousness in Christ? You must first possess Christ; but you cannot possess him without being made partaker in his sanctification, because he cannot be divided into pieces [1 Cor 1:13]. Since, therefore, it is solely by expending himself that the Lord gives us these benefits to enjoy, he bestows both of them at the same time, the one never without the other. Thus it is clear how true it is that we are justified not without works yet not through works, since in our sharing in Christ, which justifies us, sanctification is just as much included as righteousness.
50
When discussing justification, Calvin cautions emphatically, “The question is not how we may become righteous but how, being unrighteous and unworthy, we may be reckoned righteous. If consciences wish to attain any certainty in this matter, they ought to give no place to the law.”
51 Calvin recognizes here that justification need not be confused with sanctification by means of an all-encompassing ontology of union in order to recognize the inseparability of both legal (forensic) and organic (effective) aspects of that union. Possess Christ and you will have both the perfect righteousness of justification and the beginning of sanctification in this life.
Book 2 of the Institutes concentrates on “The Knowledge of God the Redeemer,” elucidating all that God in Christ has accomplished for us extra nos—outside of ourselves. Christ’s perfect person and work cannot be extended, completed, augmented, or improved. Our righteousness before God is alien: extrinsic, not inherent; perfect, not progressive. Yet “as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and dwell within us. For this reason, he is called ‘our Head’ [Eph. 4:15], and ‘the first-born among many brethren’ [Rom. 8:29].”
52
As is often the case in church history, erroneous views provide an occasion for greater refinement and clarity. Andreas Osiander is a case in point. Although the influence of Origen is evident, the more direct influence on his thinking was the Theologia Germanica. Luther had slowly extricated himself from this influence, but some of his early colleagues—many of whom became Anabaptist leaders—did not. Although Osiander’s views were roundly condemned by his fellow Lutherans, it was perhaps Calvin who drew the sharpest attention to them and in refuting them helped to define critical aspects of the Reformation consensus on justification. So concerned was Calvin with Osiander’s views that he added eight sections of refutation to the 1559 edition of the Institutes (3.11.5–12).
It made little difference in Calvin’s view to say that one was justified by cooperation with an infused righteousness or by the “essential righteousness” of Christ indwelling the believer. In either case the ground of justification would be an internal act of making righteous, rather than the imputation of an alien righteousness. “We too speak a great deal of mystical union,” says Calvin. In fact, he complained that Erasmus’s rendering of koinōnia as societas and consortium fell far short of the mystical union, so he chose communio.
53 “But Osiander has introduced some strange monster of ‘essential’ righteousness by which, although not intending to abolish freely given righteousness, he has still enveloped it in such a fog as to darken pious minds and deprive them of a lively experience of Christ’s grace.”
54 Besides indulging in “speculation” and “feeble curiosity,” Osiander is faulted for “something bordering on Manichaeism, in his desire to transfuse the essence of God into men,” with the additional speculation “that Adam was formed to the image of God because Christ had already been destined as the prototype of human nature before the Fall.”
55
Calvin accuses Osiander of several fatal conflations. First, he conflates Christ’s divine essential righteousness with our righteousness, as if it were not “that righteousness which has been acquired for us by Christ,” but rather “that we are substantially righteous in God by the infusion both of his essence and of his quality.” Second, he conflates the believer’s substance with God’s, not only introducing a Creator-creature confusion but failing to recognize that “it comes about through the power of the Holy Spirit that we grow together with Christ, and he becomes our Head and we his members.” The upshot is that justification is confused with regeneration and the believer is confused with the divine essence. We can still affirm a communion with Christ’s person, Calvin counters, without surrendering the doctrine of forensic justification.
56 In Osiander’s treatment, “To be justified is not only to be reconciled to God through free pardon but also to be made righteous, and righteousness is not a free imputation but the holiness and uprightness that the essence of God, dwelling in us, inspires.”
57
Justification and rebirth, Calvin counters, must be joined but never confused.
58 In addition, he criticizes Osiander’s view that “faith is Christ” rather than an empty vessel that receives Christ.
59 Faith is the instrument through which we receive Christ, not to be confused with Christ (the material cause) himself.
60
In addition to these conflations, Osiander separates the two natures of Christ, Calvin judges, leading to a Nestorian Christology and an atonement doctrine that eliminates the saving humanity of Christ as mediator.
61 Calvin counters that not even Christ was justified by his essential righteousness as divine but by his obedience as a servant under the law.
62 Consequently, there can be no saving deity of Christ apart from the covenantal obedience that he rendered in his humanity as the Second Adam. “For if we ask how we have been justified, Paul answers, ‘By Christ’s obedience’ [Rom. 5:19]. But did he obey in any other way than when he took upon himself the form of a servant [Phil. 2:7]? From this we conclude that in his flesh, righteousness has been manifested to us.”
63 It is not surprising that the new Finnish interpretation of Luther presents an essentially “Osiandrian” Luther, following the usual modern path of creating a false choice between participation and forensic imputation and identifying justification with deification. Calvin already noted this: “Osiander laughs at those who teach that ‘to be justified’ is a legal term; because we must actually be righteous. Also, he despises nothing more than that we are justified by free imputation. Well then, if God does not justify us by acquittal and pardon, what does Paul’s statement mean: ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not imputing men’s trespasses against them’ [2 Cor 5:19]? ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who had done no sin so that we might be the righteousness of God in him’ [v 21]?” Calvin compares several New Testament texts to ordinary legal usage and then concludes, “Osiander objects that it would be insulting to God and contrary to his nature that he should justify those who actually remain wicked.” To this Calvin replies with the familiar simul iustus et peccator (at the same time just and sinful), reminding Osiander that “they are always liable to the judgment of death before his tribunal” according to their own righteousness. The key, Calvin says, is to distinguish justification and inward renewal without divorcing them. Sanctification is always partial in this life. “But [God] does not justify in part but liberally, so that they may appear in heaven as if endowed with the purity of Christ. No portion of righteousness sets our consciences at peace until it has been determined that we are pleasing to God, because we are entirely righteous before him.”
64
According to Calvin, Osiander, no less than Rome, denies this comfort to believers.
65 Only because justification is constituted by an imputed rather than an inherent righteousness are believers able “not to tremble at the judgment they deserve, and while they rightly condemn themselves, they should be accounted righteous outside themselves.”
66 So we discern complementary emphases in Calvin’s account: the righteousness of Christ that justifies us is “outside of us,” although, by virtue of the mystical union, Christ himself—including his righteousness—cannot remain outside of us.