I’ll explain the title shortly. Promise.
The next chapter in By Faith Alone is by Rick Phillips, and in it he tackles two different challenges to the Reformed doctrine of imputation. The first is on the part of contemporary Arminians, who say that God accepts our faith in lieu of righteousness, and the second is on the part of N.T. Wright, who says that that the ‘righteousness of God” has to refer to the righteousness of God Himself, and not ‘a righeousness that comes from/avails with god’ (p. 84). Wright denies that Paul teaches that the righteousness of Jesus Christ is imputed to or is reckoned to the believer. Rick does a good job in defending the doctrine of imputation on both fronts, and I commend the chapter to you.
Those who have followed this “Auburn Avenue” business on this blog for any length of time know that I have a great deal of respect for Rick. We have been on opposite sides of this thing, but I have a number of compelling reasons for concluding that he has not been motivated by “political” issues in this at all. One of those reasons is the fact that when I speak to an issue clearly and unambiguously, he is one of the few who is willing to acknowledge publicly that I have done so. He does that again in this chapter, where he quotes me arguing a point about imputation against N.T. Wright. He understood my point perfectly, and quoted me accurately, and I appreciate it a great deal.
That said, before I take up a few difference I have with Rick, I want to say that I agree completely with the position on imputation that he takes, over against the Arminians, and over against Wright. There will be a difference of opinion, that I will argue shortly, but the difference is not on the importance of the imputation of Christ’s obedience (in His life and on the cross) to a robust and Pauline doctrine of justification. We agree on that point. And let me point to some other areas of agreement before we get to the differences.
Rick sees and acknowledges that N.T. Wright has a doctrine of imputation, one that follows from his larger theology. It is just not the doctrine of imputation.
“We should acknowledge that Wright does see a righteous status being applied to those who have faith in Christ. For this reason, it is often argued that Wright does not deny imputed righteousness. Clearly, however, Wright pointedly refutes and denies that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to believers” (p. 86).
Rick also quotes Wright as saying that justification is not so much about “soteriology as about ecclesiology; not so much about salvation as about the church” (p. 86). Rick doesn’t follow this up, but I honestly cannot make any sense out of it. Soteriology and ecclesiology may be different departments in a large seminary, or different chapters in a work of systematics, but how can we possibly separate the two? They can be distinguished, certainly, but outside the church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. I put the word ordinary in so that people would know that I am being Westminsterian, and not a superstitious papist from the middle ages.
Rick also points to a misunderstanding that Wright has about the nature of a “righteousness transfer.” According to Wright, “Righteousness is not a quality or substance that can thus be passed or transferred from the judge to the defendant” (p. 86). It is here that Rick quotes an argument that I posted here at Blog and Mablog (p. 90). No one that I ever heard of in Reformed circles has described imputation as a substantive infusion or transfer.
In another place, Wright talks about this kind of transaction as a “cold bit of business.” This is another misunderstanding, and I believe it is of a similar nature to the first one. I was the foreman of a jury once, in a murder trial, and I can assure you that when the time came for the reading of our verdict, no one in that courtroom was bored or dozing off. The reading of the verdict, especially for the one on trial, is one of the most riveting things that a man can ever experience. We even have an entertainment term for it — courtroom drama. And for a man who is as guilty as sin, who comes to the bar of justice, and who hears the sentence of “not guilty” read out loud (by the God who will by no means clear the guilty, no less) . . . well, words to describe what this feels like should fail us. It certainly is not a cold bit of business.
Now, to a few differences that I would ask Rick to consider. The first has to do with what happened to Abraham, our father in the faith.
“Furthermore, note that in Romans 4:5 Paul adds the statement that faith ‘trusts him who justifies the ungodly.’ This can only be a reference to God justifying Abraham. If Abraham was ungodly when he was credited with righteousness, it cannot be because he did something that God considers righteous” (p. 82).
The difficulty with this argument is the time line. In order for Abraham to be ungodly just prior to the declaration of righteousness in Gen. 15, he would have had to be ungodly in Genesis 12, when he left Ur of the Chaldees. But . . . “So Abram departed, as the Lord had spoken unto him . . .” (v. 4). And in Hebrews 11, this action is explicitly described as an action of faith. “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed, and he went out, not knowing whither he went” (Heb. 11:8).
My second disagreement with Rick is more substantive, but I have to qualify it, because I am not sure if Rick would disagree. One of the things that plagues our discussion of this issue of justification is that the language tends to shift back and forth between justification as it is in the plan of God and justification as it is in the heart and mind of the person being justified. When we say that something or other is “necessary to justification” (p. 77), we have to be absolutely clear what we are meaning. Do we mean “that which is revealed in the Bible concerning justification,” or do we mean “that which a sinner has to understand in order to be justified”? If we affirm the latter, then we are denying the Pauline doctrine of justification apart from works of the law. As N.T. Wright has wonderfully pointed out, justification by faith alone is not by faith in justification by faith alone. Justification — apart from our works, theological or otherwise — is the sheer, gracious gift of God.
An understanding of this is most helpful in keeping debates over justification from getting ramped up unnecessarily. I have already agreed with Rick, over against Wright, on the doctrine of imputation. I think Rick is right and Tom is wrong. Now, if Wright is wrong on something as critical as this, doesn’t that make him a dangerous heretic? Doesn’t that mean he must not be a Christian? Absolutely not, and it is the confusion I described above that even makes us bring the question up.
Here the place where I explain the title of this post. Michael Behe used the helpful example of a mousetrap to illustrate the concept of “irreducible complexity.” The illustration comes from the debate over evolution and whatnot, but I think it is helpful here. Irreducible complexity refers to a system which requires all its parts to be present in order to work at all. With the mousetrap, we need the wood platform, and the spring, and the part that snaps, and so on. All parts must be there, and if you take just one of them away, the whole thing doesn’t work. Now there is a tendency among conservative Christians to want to get down to a very basic gospel, the mousetrap gospel. What is the point past which, if you take anything away, the whole function is lost?
Now the Bible rarely refers to the gospel this way, as though it were a simple machine. You could argue that the first verses of 1 Cor. 15 do this, as I believe, but this is not the normal way the word gospel is used in Scripture. The gospel is not a simple little machine, which can be undone by the removal of just one part. It is more like an ancient olive tree, with roots that go everywhere, and branches that have been there forever. It is possible to chop a tree like this down, but it can take a lot more interference than a mousetrap can — and keep on growing.
I agree that imputation is an important part of how this tree grows and flourishes, and I agree that N.T. Wright gums up this doctrine. I believe he is wrong at this point, and his Reformed critics are right. But this is not enough to get me yelling for his scalp because on other aspects of the gospel, he is right and many of his Reformed critics are wrong. We make a great deal (as we should) about how Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. But what was it, exactly, that Abraham believed? It was that his seed would be like the stars in their multitudinous glory, and Paul interprets this as meaning Abraham was going to inherit the world — not through the law but through the righteousness of faith (Rom. 4:13). N.T. Wright believes this to be true, just like Abraham did, and (I really hesitate to say this, honestly) his amillennial Reformed critics do not believe it. This proclamation to Abraham was a proclamation of the gospel, and many within the Reformed camp do not believe it.
Now does this make them heretics, or unregenerate men? Of course not. The gospel is not a simple little mousetrap that we can disable that easily. Perverse men, who intend to disable the gospel, do have the capacity to twist it beyond recognition, to the point where it becomes an anti-gospel. But that takes a lot of work, and a twisted heart. This is not true of a Christian gentleman like N.T. Wright, who gets imputation wrong, and a Christian gentleman like Kim Riddleberger, who wrote a very capable book on amillennialism, getting (according to my lights) the Rom. 4:13 part of the gospel wrong. If our justification were to be lost if we scored less than 100 percent on the justification test (administered by St. Peter at the Pearlies), every last one of us, yours truly included, would be headed for the bad place. We don’t take the justification test for our justification. Jesus took that test. And no, this should not make us want to sin that grace may abound.
One last comment. Rick took a great risk in quoting me favorably, but then he went out on the limb even further, and quoted John Murray favorably also (p. 96). I point this out because a few chapters later, T. David Gordon describes John Murray as the “drunk uncle” of Reformed theology (p. 118), and wonders why nobody is willing to talk about it. Two or three more quotations like this, and Rick might find that he is falling under suspicion as well.