“Imputation” may not be a word we use every day, but use the word or not, it’s an essential concept in understanding how we are saved.
Hi, I’m Fred Zaspel, executive editor here at Books At a Glance, and we’re talking today with Dr. John Fesko, author of Death in Adam, Life in Christ: The Doctrine of Imputation – it’s a new book certain to take an important place in the discussion of the doctrine.
Dr. Fesko, congratulations on your new book, and thanks for talking to us today.
John Fesko:
Thanks for having me; it’s a pleasure to be here with you today.
Fred Zaspel:
Just briefly – because we’ll flesh it out as we go along here – just what is the doctrine of imputation?
Fesko:
That’s an important question. The doctrine of imputation is the teaching in general that when we look at the doctrine of justification, where God declares us righteous in his sight on the basis of Christ’s perfect obedience to the law and his suffering that he accredits or accounts or reckons to the believer, the person who believes in Jesus, Christ’s righteousness and suffering. In very general terms, to impute something is to assign it to somebody or to accredit it. So if we were to talk in accounting terms, we could say that I’m going to impute a $10 credit to your account. But it’s this law-keeping metaphor or this law-keeping term that the Scriptures use at a number of points to talk about how we receive Christ’s righteousness or his obedience in the doctrine of justification. I can think, most famously, in Romans 4:22, in the KJV, where Paul says of Abraham, “and therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.”
Zaspel:
Actually you point to three imputations in your book, right? Can you sketch them out for us?
Fesko:
Sure. When I talk about a threefold imputation, the first is the imputed guilt of Adam’s first sin; and that gets imputed to all human beings. You see that, for example, in Romans chapter 5, where Paul talks about the disobedience of one the man constituting many to be sinners. That’s the first imputation. The second imputation is when God imputes the sin of the believer to Jesus Christ, so that he bears the sin and therefore, not only does he bear the sin, he also bears the penalty for that sin. You see that, for example, in Isaiah chapter 53 when the prophet talks about the Messiah bearing the iniquity of us all. Or, for example, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5:20 – 21 where Paul says, “he who knew no sin became sin for us.” That’s the second imputation. The third imputation is when God imputes or credits to us Christ’s righteousness – his perfect law keeping to the believer. So that when looks to the believer, he does not see the believer’s sin, but rather, instead, sees the perfect law keeping, the perfect righteousness, the perfect obedience of Jesus. And to finish off that thought, in 2 Corinthians 5:20, when Paul says, “he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God.” Or in Isaiah 53, where he would make many to be accounted as righteous. Or in Romans 5 where it talks about the obedience of the one man as the grounds for constituting many to be righteous. So, those are the three imputations – Adams guilt to us, our sin to Christ, and Christ’s righteousness to us.
Zaspel:
Just to clarify, is it just Adam’s sinfulness that is imputed to humanity? Or is it guilt also? Or is there more to the discussion?
Fesko:
In one sense, it certainly is a complex discussion; but the basic idea is that God imputes to us Adam’s guilt, which therefore results in our sinfulness. We could summarize the idea in saying that we are sinners because we are guilty. There was another view in the church that said, “no, we are guilty because we are sinners,” but that view was in large part rejected, certainly within the reformed tradition. But we want to recognize that it’s Adams guilt that is imputed or credited to us; and that’s what I think lies behind Paul’s statement in Romans 5, when he says, “by the disobedience of the one, many were constituted.” It’s a legal term, kathistemi, they are appointed, they’re constituted sinners. There’s no discussion of transmission of sinfulness, but rather the imputation of a status of guilt.
Zaspel:
What is the contribution you hope to make? And maybe with this you can give us a broad overview of your book.
Fesko:
As I have reflected upon this doctrine, I think that it’s one that anybody coming out of the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran, or Reformed, or in our day, those that are broadly evangelical, who embraced that Reformation teaching of justification by faith alone in Christ alone, we affirm the doctrine of imputation, but what I have found lacking is at least a single volume that makes an attempt to deal with the doctrine somewhat comprehensively. There is John Murray’s wonderful little book, The Imputation of Adam’s Sin; and that’s a fantastic contribution, but if you’re looking for a dedicated book to the doctrine of imputation, they are very few and far between. Mine might be one of the only ones out there on it. You can find many treatments of the doctrine in systematic theologies and books on justification, but as far as a book that deals with the subject of Adam’s imputed guilt and Christ’s imputed righteousness under the one volume, I’ve not found any, at least that I am aware of.
Along those lines, I present the history of the doctrine, not just imputed righteousness or imputed guilt, but both. The history weaves back and forth between those two subjects, imputed guilt and righteousness as the church addresses them over the course of nearly 2 millennia. Then in the second portion of the book, I offer exegetical observations and exegetical work in order to set out the doctrine. There’s two chapters in that respect in that section that first deals with imputation in the Old Testament, and then a second chapter that treats imputation in the New Testament. Then in the third and final section I offer dogmatic or doctrinal construction where I present the systematic construction of this doctrine of imputation, so that people can see how the exegesis and the history and the various discussions and debates all gel so that there is one good, solid treatment of the doctrine so that people can refer to that and make that as a resource for better understanding of this teaching of Scripture.
Zaspel:
Can you sketch out a brief history of the doctrine of imputation for us, just in large strokes? How has it been variously understood and received?
Fesko:
Sure. I think that in the early church, the discussion focused upon the transmission of sin, because people naturally looked around, and they recognized that everybody universally dies. I think they wanted to answer that question as to why people universally die, so they naturally turned to the Scriptures. And you have, for example, among others, St. Augustine talking about Adam’s sin being transmitted to his offspring. And in large part the discussion in the early church hinges upon the idea of the physical transmission of sin. Sin is viewed as a physical contagion, like a disease, and in the same way that a father might pass on genetic characteristics to his children, or a mother might pass on genetic characteristics to her children, they look at sin in that type of a manner, in terms of the genetic passing on of a defect.
As you get into the Middle Ages, that’s in large part where the discussion remains. I think the flip side of that coin is that that’s more or less the same type of information that informs the discussion of righteousness. It’s something that we, ourselves, have to accumulate in order for God to declare us righteous, and that’s more or less the majority report. There are some very few notable exceptions in the early church in these discussions, but at least in my study I find that it’s difficult to discern whether or not they are explicit proponents of a doctrine of forensic imputation or declarative imputation. Because it seems as some cite the points, that they are just repeating the biblical texts. The precise nature of their views is uncertain, at least in my judgment.
Once we get into the Reformation, some important discussions begin to happen because theologians go back to the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible and they are exegeting it from the original languages and they discern the idea that justification is a legal term and that it has to do with declarative judgments of God. Along with that, they investigate terms like logizomai, which is the term that lies behind the English term impute. And they recognize that righteousness is not something that we, ourselves, accumulate in order to be declared righteous in God’s sight; but it is something that is accredited to us. It’s a gift that God gives us through Christ; and it’s Christ’s perfect law-keeping that gives us that right standing before the throne of judgment.
Along those lines, I think some of the most important information that I dug up in this book… I don’t know if it makes it worth the price of the book or not, but for me it was really, really important and I’m really glad that I was able to discover this… The Council of Trent reacted negatively to the Protestant doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ. And in the opening sessions of Trent they debated and dealt with that teaching. But when you read the proclamations of Trent some of my colleagues, and others, look at those statements and may think, well, did they truly understand the doctrine of imputed righteousness? It seems a little vague here. Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn’t. Well, in looking at what essentially amounts to some of the minutes that were transcribed at the Council of Trent, I was able to find one speech by a Jesuit theologian who spoke three hours against the doctrine of imputed righteousness. And I think, without question he knew exactly what the Protestant teaching was and he explicitly rejected it. His statement really sticks with me and, I think, will forever rest with my mind. He said, “where there is imputed merit, there is no room for personal merit.” So, in other words, it’s the idea that if we admit the imputed righteousness of Christ, then there is no place for our good works to assist in the process of securing redemption. And so it was on the heels of that three-hour speech that the Council of Trent voted and unanimously voted to reject and, sadly, to condemn the doctrine of imputed righteousness. I trace that out in the history.
Another interesting development in it is how much theologians align the doctrine of imputation with the doctrine of the covenants. What’s interesting along these lines is that this was not an exclusively Reformed kind of phenomenon. Believe it or not, it was Roman Catholic theologians, at Trent even, as well as earlier theologians such as Jerome or medieval theologians, that spoke of God’s covenant with Adam. It was a Roman Catholic theologian that even first talked about the imputed guilt coming through the covenantal arrangement that God made with Adam and Eve. He was saying this in the 1640s, roughly 40 years before you find a Reformed theologian making similar types of statements. What happens is that the idea of imputed guilt and imputed righteousness get lined up together and they put it under the rubric of the covenant that God makes with Adam. So that is another refinement of the doctrine.
As we progress into the 20th century, things go downhill very quickly. It was a hotly disputed topic in the 19th century American theological scene among the Presbyterians. You had virtually one of every view present in the 19th century American Presbyterian context. And you had some noted stalwarts of the doctrine of imputed righteousness such as Charles Hodge and A. A. Hodge defending it. But once we get into the 20th century, I think you find biblical scholars scuttling the doctrine. Because, I think, they think it’s a carryover from medieval theology of the older church. I think that’s a significant misunderstanding of the doctrine. They also allow the recent findings of science, particularly genetic research, to say there’s not a common human ancestor. Adam never existed. But how do we explain universal sin and its presence in the world? Well, it’s because it’s a defect that God allowed into the creation itself and so two Roman Catholic scholars talk about, not imputed guilt for imputed sin, but rather they talk about original selfishness. This basically causes them to completely reconfigure the doctrine of salvation, so that Jesus Christ is no longer a vicarious Redeemer, somebody who suffers and dies on our behalf and obeys the law on our behalf, but he merely becomes a moral example. In that respect I think the heresy of Pelagius is coming back with a vengeance in our own day. So that was another big reason why I wanted to try to set all of these ideas out, defend the doctrine of imputed righteousness and imputed guilt, as well as trace the historical development of these things so that people would be fully aware of all of the theological water that has gone under the bridge.
Zaspel:
Okay, let’s sharpen the point a bit further. Explain for us specifically how imputation is essential to the doctrine of justification. You call imputation a “key load-bearing pillar” of justification. How is that so?
Fesko:
We want to say that the doctrine of justification is larger than the imputed righteousness of Christ. For example, when we talk about the doctrine of justification we talk about it as being by faith alone. So we have to factor in the doctrine of faith and that it is Sola Fide, by faith alone that we receive justification. A second piece of the puzzle is that when we talk about justification, say, for example, as the Westminster Standards define it in chapter 11 of the Confession that it involves the pardon of sins. So we receive the forgiveness of sins through our justification. But the third element there is that we are accounted righteous in God’s sight, to use the language of the Confession. Or, more simply, that God accredits or imputes to us the perfect law-keeping of Christ. In that sense, the doctrine of justification is bigger than imputation. But if you pull out that pillar of imputed righteousness, and part of that would be also the imputed guilt that Christ bears on our behalf, so if you pull out imputation, the doctrine of justification comes crumbling down. And I think with the crumbling of the doctrine of justification, you also have the loss of the Gospel. Because, certainly the Gospel is bigger than justification because we would include other ideas such as the blessings of sanctification in the Gospel, but if we lose justification then we lose the Gospel; but if we lose imputation we also lose justification and hence the gospel. Because, at the end, we have to ask ourselves, on what basis do we stand or can we stand in the presence of a righteous and holy God and walk away with anything but a guilty verdict? The only way is that if we bring a perfect righteousness into his presence, and if we know that we are sinful and we are incapable of bringing that perfect righteousness before him, moreover, if we know that Adam, in a perfect world and in a sinless condition, was unable to bring that righteousness before the throne of God, then that means that it is absolutely essential that we receive that perfect righteousness, what Luther called the alien righteousness, of Christ imputed to us so that we can stand before the throne of God, and that God will declare us righteous in his sight. Because that, in the end, is the only righteousness that can withstand the scrutiny and the judgment of the divine bar where we are declared either righteous or unrighteous. So, you pull that pillar out, and justification crumbles and the gospel follows right behind it.
Zaspel:
If you had to select one or two most important passages in the Bible that develop this doctrine for us, what would they be? Can you highlight them for us?
Fesko:
I’d start, I think, with Leviticus chapter 16 in the Old Testament. That, I think, is a really important passage because there you have, not only the processes or the protocols of the Day of Atonement, but in particular you have the act of the priest, where he lays both of his hands upon the live goat, he confesses over the goat the sins of the nation, and then that goat goes and carries, it bears those sins away outside of the camp into the wilderness, never to return. That is imputed guilt – it is taking the guilt of the nation and transferring it by imputation to the goat. Along those lines, when you have a Jewish scholar such as Jacob Milgrom, who carries no faith for Protestant theology or the Reformed theology, he comes to that conclusion. So you think that’s important, that’s note-worthy that we would recognize his observations there.
Connected to Leviticus chapter 16, I think, is a second passage. And that second passage is Isaiah chapter 53. I suspect that it’s a passage that is largely familiar to us all, because it talks about the suffering servant, and in that respect I think we know, or are at least generally familiar with it. But, on the other hand, what we may not realize is that Isaiah invokes the language of Leviticus chapter 16 and the particular language of the goat bearing the sin. In this particular case, Isaiah writes, in chapter 53, verse 11, “and he shall bear their iniquities.” But the big difference is that it is not the goat any longer that is bearing those sins, but rather it is the suffering servant, it’s the Messiah. Alongside of that, you find the greater revelatory light cast upon the work of the Redeemer, and you see that the prophet says that, “he will make many to be accounted righteous.” And in particular here, Paul uses the language that he was counted with the transgressors or with the wicked, and this is the same term, logizomai, that Paul uses.
That brings us over to Romans chapters 4 and 5, which would be my third key passage. So, Leviticus 16, Isaiah 53, and Romans 4 & 5. Go and read Romans 4, and see how many times Paul uses the word accounted or imputed. Along those lines, how many times he invokes the word faith or believe. He is hammering the point that we receive the imputed righteousness of Christ. What’s even fascinating here is that when Paul says in Romans 4:25, that “he who was delivered up for our trespasses, and raised for our justification,” these are truths that find taproots deep in the soul of the Old Testament, but particularly with Isaiah 53 in the suffering servant, where we find these themes of imputed guilt and imputed righteousness. Paul is not just making this stuff up, but rather, he is mining it from the Old Testament. The image that I like to put in my own mind is that, chances are he had it memorized, and I would suspect he probably had the entire Old Testament memorized, but if not, then he certainly had his scroll of Isaiah open, and he had his scroll of the Torah open to Leviticus 16 and Isaiah 53, respectively, as he was writing to the Romans there in Romans 4 and 5.
Zaspel:
You make the point that traditionally treatments of the doctrine of imputation are rather too narrow in their exegetical focus. Tell us what you are trying to contribute in this regard.
Fesko:
One of the observations that I’ve made as I studied this doctrine is that, at least in contemporary discussions, you find scholars that are critical of the doctrine narrowly defining the area of debate. Or, to use another metaphor, the battlefield is a very narrow sliver of a few texts from the Pauline corpus. Even then it’s typically texts from the so-called undisputed Pauline corpus. They will look at Romans, they will look at Galatians, but they won’t look at the pastoral epistles, for example. Even defenders of the doctrine largely focus upon Romans 4-5, 2 Corinthians 5, and a few other New Testament passages. On the one hand, I want to say that this is good, we certainly need to exegete those texts as I do in the book; but on the other hand, I want to say whenever we are constructing doctrine, or we are looking to make doctrinal conclusions, we never want to isolate a few passages from the New Testament. But rather we want to base our doctrinal conclusions on the entire corpus of the Scriptures, in other words, Old and New Testaments. As Richard Hayes has rightly said, for Paul or any other first century theologian, the Old Testament was his Bible. In that respect, I hope that, with the book, I open up the discussion to say this is bigger than the few times that Paul addresses the subject in his letters, but rather it is all over the Old Testament. In particular, the two chief, twin peaks, I would say in the Old Testament, among a mountain range of other passages that we could refer to, are Leviticus 16 and Isaiah 53 – two passages rarely, if ever, consulted, at least in the contemporary discussion. I do find theologians of earlier periods, particularly 16th and 17th century, making a much broader appeal to other passages of Scripture in that respect. So that’s what I hope this book offers, by way of a unique contribution, that it broadens the discussion to include the Old Testament and a number of key passages in that respect.
Zaspel:
Absolutely. That’s a wonderful contribution, I think. This is a whole-Bible doctrine.
I’d like to ask you a question about Romans 4. Paul sometimes speaks of faith being imputed. This language can sometimes seem confusing. What is imputed – faith or righteousness?
Fesko:
I think it’s important that we recognize that faith is never self-referential. In other words, it’s not something that looks to itself. There are some New Testament scholars that say that what Paul is saying here is that it’s Abraham’s faith that is considered to be the righteousness. I think that they believe that that’s a solid conclusion – that’s a conclusion, by the way, that Jacob Arminius made. He believed that the idea was that it’s faith itself that was considered or treated as righteousness. But, I think it was John Murray who said that we have to recognize that when we are talking about faith, it is not self-referential, but rather, it is always extraspective. (I think he coined the term, but I’m not sure, exactly.) But it’s not introspective, in other words, that it looks to itself; but rather, it’s extraspective. And in this particular case I would want to invoke Christ’s words. He said that, “Abraham saw my day from afar and rejoiced.” It’s the idea that Abraham’s faith looked extraspectively, outside of itself, to Christ. So that when Paul talks about if Abraham was justified by works he would have something to boast about, but not before God, for what does the Scriptures say, Abraham believed God. There is the outward motion and it was counted to him as righteousness. In other words, Abraham by faith lays hold of this righteousness of Christ extraspectively. It is outside of him; so it’s not that the faith itself is considered righteous, but rather, it is the faith that lays hold of the righteousness of Christ. So that there is something outside of the believer; and I think this just confirms the idea that we are laying hold of Christ is the way that Luther would say it. We are embracing Christ with the empty hand of faith. It is not that the hand of faith is, itself, considered righteous, but rather, we lay hold of Christ. And there, by laying hold of Christ, we also lay hold of his righteousness.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. J.V. Fesko, author of the new book, Death in Adam, Life in Christ: The Doctrine of Imputation. It’s an excellent work that I’m sure will quickly earn its place in every theological library as an important contribution to this doctrine.
John, thanks for talking to us today.
Fesko:
Glad to do so, and I hope to be able to be on in the future.
