Faith Alone: Imputation

Jesus' death on the cross was not the result of guilt on His part, but rather He is a substitute for us, and God transfers our guilt to Him. And when He dies on the cross, He is taking the negative judgment, the wrath of God, to satisfy God's judgment. God is really punishing our sins when He punishes Christ. That's Christianity in a nutshell. Salvation is by faith alone through the substitutionary death of Christ. But there are some Christian traditions that disagree with that statement. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday.

I'm Lee Webb. Our teacher, Dr. R.C. Sproul, continues his series, What is Reformed Theology?, with a look at a crucial aspect of Christ's atoning work. We've been addressing the question, what is Reformed theology? And in our last session, we gave a brief introduction to the chief article of historical evangelical theology, which article is embraced by Reformed theology as well as by all other Protestant denominations historically, namely the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which was the central issue of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. I want to go on with our exposition of that doctrine, and we've already looked at the meaning basically of the word justification, and we spend time on the rest of the formula, justification by faith alone.

And I want to look at the particular elements of this formula. Again, to recap, the term justification means that act by which God declares sinners to be just in His sight. Now, part of the controversy of the sixteenth century rested on the etymological derivation of the word justification. Our English word justification comes from the Latin justificare, and in the medieval church, what happened was the doctrine of justification began to be expounded in light of the background of the Latin Vulgate, the Latin interpretation or translation of the Bible, rather than on the basis of the Greek New Testament. And the problem that emerged as early as St. Augustine was that the term justificare in the old Roman judicial system meant to make righteous, to make righteous. Justificare means to make, and so the idea began to emerge that God would never declare somebody to be righteous until He had first actually made them righteous in some manner.

Whereas, according to the Reformers, the Greek New Testament word dikaiosune has to do with this accounting of people or reckoning people or deeming people to be righteous before they actually become righteous. Now, it is also important to say here that part of the debate over justification focused on how justification comes to pass. When we use the formula justification that justification by faith, we're using a form of speech, the word by here, which is in our language a dative word and refers to what is called the dative of means, or more specifically, the instrumental dative.

And so part of the debate of the sixteenth century focused on the question of what is the instrumental cause or the means by which justification takes place. Now, in the Roman Catholic Church, justification is seen as requiring faith, at least in the case of adults, but initially justification is accomplished through what Rome called the instrumental cause of baptism. That is, in the sacrament of baptism, grace is infused into the soul, and the infusion or the pouring in of this grace into a human soul is saving grace. And then as a person receives this infusion of grace as an infant, they are placed in a state of grace, and they are kept in that state of grace unless or until the person commits a sin that is so grievous that it is called mortal sin. And mortal sin is defined as being mortal rather than venial because it is a sin so serious that it kills the grace that's in the soul. So even as a person can grow to adulthood, commit a mortal sin, still have faith, but loses the grace of justification.

So the person who's in a state of mortal sin can still have true faith and not be justified. So that person, in order to be restored to a state of grace, has to come through what the Council of Trent called the second plank of justification for those who have made shipwreck of their souls. And the second plank of justification is defined by the church as the sacrament of penance. Now, in a very real sense, the whole controversy in the 16th century centered around the sacrament of penance. We know that the indulgence controversy that arose in Germany when Tetzel was going around peddling his indulgences and so on, that was all linked to the church's doctrine of the sacrament of penance, which includes several elements. For a person who has committed mortal sin to be restored to the state of salvation, in other words, to regain justification, they had to avail themselves of the sacrament of penance, which is performed by the church, and it has several elements to it. The first one is the sacrament of penance, the first of which is sacramental confession. The person had to go to the priest and confess their sins, Father, I have sinned.

I've done such and such and such and such. And also included in the sacrament of penance is priestly absolution, where after the penitent has made his act of contrition and so on and done everything that the church requires, absolvo, I absolve you of your sins. And then the next dimension of penance that was required for a person to be restored to a state of grace was to perform works of satisfaction.

So, faith was required, confession was required, priestly absolution was required, and works of satisfaction were required. Now, the church was very careful at this point to say that these works of satisfaction did not provide what they call condign merit, merit that is so virtuous, merit that is so authentic, merit that is so meritorious that it would impose an obligation upon a just God to reward the person. But rather, it was a lesser kind of merit that Rome defined as congruous merit, meritum de congruo. And that congruous merit is merit that is real merit, but it rests upon the prior reception of grace. And it is a merit that is less than condign merit, but it is meritorious enough enough to make it fitting or congruous for God to restore a person to justification. So, the means by which justification took place was chiefly sacramentally, in the first instance through baptism, in the second instance through the sacrament of penance. Now, the Reformers said, no, the instrumental cause, and they're borrowing from the language of the church and the language of tradition, which has its roots in Aristotle's fine distinctions about various types of causes, wherein Aristotle defined the instrumental cause as that through which a work was performed. And his analogy was like a sculptor who was making a piece of sculpture, and he was shaping a piece of rock or wood into a statue. The instrumental cause of his work would be his chisel.

That's the tool or the instrument he uses to accomplish his purpose. The Reformers said that the instrumental cause of justification is faith. Faith is the means by which the righteousness of Christ is given to us. Now, that raises another issue that perhaps more than any other point of the dispute was the center of the controversy, and that is the debate between grace that comes through infusion and grace that comes through imputation.

Infusion of grace was the Roman Catholic view that through the sacraments, grace in quantitative terms, being described quantitatively, is infused or poured into the soul of the person. And now that person has the righteousness of Christ poured into their soul. Now, without that righteousness of Christ, there is no justification. Protestants, I'm sorry to say, have often slandered the Roman Catholic Church for saying that the difference between historic Protestantism and historic Catholicism is that the Protestants believe that we're justified by faith, and the Roman Catholics believe that we're justified by works, as if there was no need for the work of Jesus Christ. That's pure slander to the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church has always been taught that the work of Christ is absolutely essential for our salvation. But here's how it works. The question then is, how does the work of Jesus Christ and the merit of Christ become appropriated to me?

How does it benefit me? Well, again, Rome answers this by the sacramental infusion of the righteousness of Christ into the individual soul. Then the individual has to cooperate with and assent to this infused grace to such a degree that they become actually righteous. So that, as Trent declares, righteousness, true righteousness, inheres within them. And only when they actually become righteous, through the help and assistance of the grace of Christ, it's not on their own strength, that they become actually righteous. It's not on their own strength.

They cooperate with it. But once the infused grace of Christ is given to the soul and the sinner cooperates with it to a degree that the sinner becomes actually righteous, then and only then will God declare that person righteous. That's one of the reasons why they have to have a doctrine of purgatory and thousands of years of cleansing and purging to continue working in the soul until that person becomes holy enough to become declared just by God. Now, the Protestant doctrine is this. Protestants believe that something is infused to the Christian at the time of his conversion, and that is the imporing of God the Holy Spirit, which works within us to help and assist us for our growth and sanctification. But with respect to justification, the Protestant view is that God justifies those who have faith by imputation.

Now, imputation means this. It involves a transfer from one person's account to another so that the righteousness of Jesus is transferred in God's sight to the believer's account, so that when God looks at the believer, He doesn't see the believer's sin in legal terms. Rather, He views that person under the covering of the righteousness of Christ.

And this concept of imputation has two dimensions to it. On the one hand, the atonement is seen as being centered to our salvation because when Jesus dies on the cross, He dies as a substitute for us. He dies vicariously as the sin-bearer of Israel, as the Lamb without blemish, to whom God imputes the sins of the people. In the Old Testament, drama of the Day of Atonement, the priest would lay his hands upon the scapegoat, signifying a symbolic transfer of the guilt of the people to the victim who would be driven out of the presence of God. And so, in terms of the New Testament view of the cross, Christ is the suffering servant who bears the sins of His people, not because He Himself in His own humanity becomes inherently wicked, but rather He is a substitute for us, and God transfers our guilt to Him. And when He dies on the cross, He is taking the negative judgment, the wrath of God, to satisfy God's judgment. God is really punishing our sins when He punishes Christ because He's transferred our sins to Him. Now, I've often said that if you ask a six-year-old child in Sunday school, what did Jesus do for you? The child has learned enough in Sunday school to answer by saying, Jesus died on the cross for my sins. We say, yes, that's true.

But what else? If all it would take to justify the ungodly is for Jesus to pay the negative penalty of the curse of God against evil, He could have come down from heaven and gone directly to the cross and then returned in glory. But instead, He's born of the woman. He is submitted to the law, and His whole life is lived in rigorous obedience to every point of every requirement that God gives to His people.

Why? Why did He say to John, baptize me? It is necessary to fulfill all righteousness. Here the Reformers understood the place of the active obedience of Christ, that Christ not only paid the negative penalty for our sin, but He positively achieved perfect righteousness. You see, if all He did was pay for our guilt, that would just simply put us back to square one, put us back to the status Adam had before the fall.

Not guilty, but innocent in the sense of not bearing any sin, but having no positive obedience to commend himself before God's justice, no basis for a righteous granting of reward, the granting of eternal life and of heaven. But Christ not only dies for us, He lived for us. That's the whole point of the gospel is that not only are my sins transferred to Him on the cross, but His perfect righteousness is transferred to me whenever I put my trust in Him. So again, when God judges us and declares us just, He declares us just because Christ is just and because we are in Christ by faith. And that's why the instrumental cause of justification is faith, because it's faith that is the tool or the instrument that links us to Christ. Now, Luther insisted that the merit or the righteousness by which sinners are justified is what he called a eustitium alienum, a foreign justice or an alien righteousness, a righteousness that Luther said is extra, no, extra, outside of us. If I have to wait before true righteousness manifests itself perfectly inside of me, how long will I have to wait to be justified?

I'll have to wait forever. But the good news of the gospel is that God justifies the ungodly freely by giving to all who believe a righteousness that is, properly speaking, not their own. It is somebody else's righteousness.

It is the righteousness of Christ that alone meets the test of the standard of God's perfect judgment. And so again, when we say that justification is by faith alone, this is mere shorthand for saying justification is by Christ alone because the grounds of our justification is the righteous merit of Christ who alone has perfect justice in the sight of God. And that is given to us freely when we believe. And so what's left for us to look at in this brief exposition is what do we mean that we're justified by faith? James tells us, you know, you believe in God, you do well, even the demons believe and tremble. And so it's possible for us to think of faith as simple intellectual assent to correct ideas. And if you say, well, do you believe that Jesus died for you?

And you say, yeah, yeah, I believe that. That doesn't constitute in and of itself saving faith. There are at least three elements to saving faith according to the Reformers that they distinguished.

First of all, notitia, which is the information, the data. There is content to the gospel that we must believe. We must believe that Jesus is our Savior. We must believe that He died on the cross for us. We must acknowledge it to be true that we are sinners before a holy God.

That's the information. The second element is assensus or intellectual assent. I have to agree that these things are true, that Jesus truly died for my sins. But again, it's not just passing a theology exam.

A person can be aware of the information and even agree that it is true. But Satan knows the content, and Satan knows that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. But he's not redeemed by that.

Why? Because the crucial element of saving faith is what's called fiducia or fiducia, which means personal trust and reliance. And saving faith is given to all of those who put their trust in Christ and in His righteousness and put their trust there alone. Now, the Reformers said that justification is by faith alone but not by a faith that is alone. That true faith, if you're really resting in Christ and you're really counted righteous by God, if you have true faith, that faith will immediately, necessarily, and inevitably produce the fruit of sanctification. And if no fruit follows from your justification, it is perfect proof that there was no justification, because the idea of faith without the fruit of obedience is what James called a dead faith, and that can't justify anyone. So for Luther, justification is by a faith that he described as a fides viva, a faith that is alive, a faith that is vital, a faith that shows itself by faithfulness. But again, the issue itself is, how am I justified?

Not by my own righteousness, not by my own merit, but by the righteousness of Christ and of Christ alone. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul from his series, What is Reform Theology? And you're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday.

Thank you for being with us. So many believers are unfamiliar with the Protestant Reformation and the importance of the doctrines that grew out of it. I hope Dr. Sproul's explanation this week has been helpful for you.

We must come to a biblical understanding of who Christ is, what His death meant, and what justification means. We're making all 12 of Dr. Sproul's lessons in this series available to you on three DVDs. Call us with a gift of any amount, and we'll send this series to you. Again, it's titled, What is Reform Theology? Our number is 800-435-4343.

But you can also make a request and give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. In the book of Jude, we're told to contend earnestly for the faith. That means we need to understand the Word of God and make sure that we're aligned with it.

That's really what this series is about. The biblical concept of faith alone must be a line of demarcation. The Reformers understood that, and we need to stand firm as they did.

So contact us today with your gift at 800-435-4343. Our web address again is renewingyourmind.org. The Christian Church in America, for the most part, doesn't consider itself to be Reformed.

At a Liget International Conference a few years ago, R.C. was asked why so many Christians seemed to oppose Reformed theology or Calvinism, and here's how he responded. There are two fundamental things, I think, that people find it very hard to leave semi-Pelagianism and embrace Augustinianism. The first is that they sense in the doctrines of grace that that theology of Calvinism teaches a corrupt view of God, a God who is not good, a God who may be sovereign, but He's not fair, because the idea that people have is that He arbitrarily chooses to save some, but not others, and that puts a shadow on the integrity of God, and people really struggle with that. And it takes a board over the head in the Bible to get you to see that your view of God is not high enough. You haven't really, really understood how righteous He is, how holy He is. I've had, I don't know how many people say to me that of the books I've written, the two that they've read were the holiness of God and chosen by God, and they say, I loved holiness of God.

I hated chosen by God. And I'm saying, well, that tells me you either didn't understand the holiness of God or you didn't understand chosen by God. And I think the one that didn't understand was the holiness of God, because if you really understand the holiness of God, then you understand.

If you understand who God is and you understand who you are, you know your only hope under heaven is the sovereign grace of God to save you. But the second problem that people have is they believe that Reformed theology extinguishes free will, and not only hurts our view of God, but hurts the view that we have of humanity. And the big problem I see there is that the vast majority of people have an understanding of free will that is pagan and humanistic, not biblical. The Bible teaches that we have free will in the sense that we have the ability to choose what we want. But it's very clear that there's a problem with our want to, that the desires and inclination of the hearts are only wicked continually, and that we are not free in our sin. We're dead in our sin. We're in bondage to sin, and this free will that we celebrate is one that is in prison by sin. It's not anything like what the secular world is teaching people from the day they go into kindergarten. And so people have been, in a word, brainwashed with a humanistic view of humanity rather than a biblical view of humanity, and consequently a humanistic and pagan view of God. And so we have to… it takes really getting immersed in the Scripture to grow in our understanding of who we are and our understanding of who God is. If we learn those two things, then Reformed theology is easy.