'JI'

There is a renewed interest in the notorious ‘split’ between Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Dr J. I. Packer which resulted in the dissolution of the Puritan Conference and its replacement by the Westminster Conference in 1971. This interest has been sparked by a chapter of Dr Carl Trueman’s in J.I.Packer and the Evangelical Future ed. Timothy George (Baker) and an associated interview. As I write this I’ve not seen or heard this material, and before I do it seemed to me to be worth noting a number of points about Packer’s stance on cooperation.

I’ve no axe to grind on this, as I was brought up an evangelical Baptist (Baptist Union, y'know) though now for family reasons attend an Anglican congregation. Years ago I wrote publicly against the fruits of Dr Packer’s involvement in the Anglican-Methodist discussions.

One reason for putting together this piece is to redress the present imbalance that may arise as a result of the state of the of evidence. Dr Lloyd-Jones is dead, and his several defenders have access to the full range of his correspondence. Dr Packer is alive, and quite naturally his personal correspondence, and maybe other documents, are not available in the same way, even though as we shall see there are published fragments of letters and addresses. The second reason is that somewhat surprisingly, as far as I know, Packer has never published an account of his own outlook specifically addressed to those who were and are pained by his stance. If there is such an account I’d be pleased to know of it. (The nearest I think he comes to doing this is his booklet A Kind of Noah’s Ark, (Latimer House, 1981)) Iain Murray notes that Packer addressed the Westminster Fellowship, 21st March 1966, where he put the case for involvement in the Anglican ecumenical agenda. (The Fight of Faith, 515-6) He said

Am I separated from my friends in a way which is needless and which could be remedied? I am not sure that I am. Though we agree on essentials, there are other points on which we are divided...I do not see how the facts of the case can be met except by evangelicals maintaining fellowship while at the same time [continuing in] different denominational alignments.

When Dr Packer responded to Dr Lloyd Jones’s’ letter telling him of the decision of three of the organising committee members to stop the Puritan Conference because of Packer’s involvement with Anglo-Catholics in the writing of Growing into Union, this is part of what he wrote back

I naturally regret that you and David and John have felt bound to take this line, but I recognise it as one more application of the principles of co-operation which you have been advocating so strongly in recent years (and which, as you know, have never convinced me)...My respect for you and my gratitude for what God has given me through you in the past remains undimmed. (Quoted in Iain Murray, Lloyd-Jones: Messenger of Grace, 207)

I believe it is possible to offer a perfectly understandable explanation of this failure to be convinced, one that is in line with full Christian integrity, but it rests on grounds that are somewhat unfamiliar to the people who level the charge of compromise: How can a man organise a Puritan conference and not himself be a Puritan? What follows is very largely a defence of J.I. Packer’s position vis-à-vis Anglicanism to the extent that it attempts to convey the coherence and strength of that position as (I believe) he sees it, and the bearing that these reasons have on ‘principles of co-operation’. In the next post I shall make some remarks on these reasons.

Wherever possible I use Dr Packer's own published words. I think it is fair to say that he presently sees Anglicanism as his least worst option, and that he can see equally sincere and informed Christian people disagreeing with him. I shall offer my account under a number of headings: the nature and advantages of Anglicanism; the character of Puritanism; the effect of the Enlightenment upon theology and upon connexional Protestant denominations; and finally, Packer’s understanding of the relationship between regeneration and being in error.


Anglicanism

Packer’s loyalty to the Church of England has been undeviating, a loyalty which has historic precedents, and which many of Packer’s non-Anglican friends simply accepted without agreeing with (or arguing over) before the appearance of Growing into Union, and the consequences that it triggered. It is, I think. hard for a non-Anglican to appreciate the grip of the Anglican ethos.

I am an Anglican not so much by sentiment or affection as by conviction,,,,,I cannot say that I ever particularly liked the Church of England as I found it, but I remain an Anglican out of conviction that here is the right place, for here I possess the truest, wisest and potentially richest heritage in all Christendom. (The Thirty Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today (Latimer House, 1984, Preface).

I maintain that a man with his eyes open to the full range of Anglican doctrinal pluralism may yet responsibly choose to be an Anglican, even an Anglican minister, though it may be a hard-made decision bringing misery as well as fulfilment. I do not maintain (I had better say this outright) that choosing to be an Anglican is a virtue, or that choosing not to be one or not to stay one is a vice. Choice, we saw, is necessary, and anyone may conclude that, rather than be Anglican, Methodist, Baptist Union or United Reformed (all which bodies are doctrinally mixed), he should join one of the smaller groups (Brethren, Pentecostals, Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, Reformed Baptists, Free Church of Scotland, etc.) which debar from the ranks of their teachers anyone holding ‘critical’ views of Scripture or rejecting major evangelical tenets. To be sure, some think these smaller bodies purchase doctrinal purity at the price of theological stagnation, and are cultural backwaters out of touch with society around, just as some think Anglican allegiance is an unholy identification with cultural privilege, ecclesiastical worldliness and theological indifferentism. But these matters are arguable both ways, and neither estimate need be accepted. More important is respect for the other man’s deliberate decision, whether or not it coincides with your own. (A Kind of Noah’s Ark. Latimer House, 1981. Note that the digitalised version used here is unfortunately not paginated. Emphasis added. )

The key to his analysis is his understanding of the comprehensiveness of the Church of England. Historically speaking, that Church was held together by the Creeds, the Articles and the Prayer Book (each variously understood) and a commitment to the norms of Scripture, tradition and reason (also variously understood). The Prayer Book and the Articles have each been moved into the shadows. So what is comprehensiveness? Packer notes an 'enormous gap’ that has opened between the older Anglicanism by liberal and critical theology within the Church of England. He identifies

a worldwide crop of Christian reconstructionists, all starting from a non-incarnational view of Jesus, all working with a unitarian idea of God seasoned with more or less of process-theology, all claiming that modern secular knowledge makes their type of view the only one possible, and all vigorously offsetting themselves from the categories and content of traditional belief. Many Anglicans, leading scholars among them, are in this camp. (Ark)

Evangelicals perceive that much of the exploring is done on the basis of the academic freedom which all scholars outside Communist countries claim - that is, freedom to follow the argument wherever it seems to lead and to publish novel notions, hypothetically held, to see how the scholarly world reacts to them. Also, evangelicals perceive that if in the course of these explorations real fundamental heresy is put out, wittingly or unwittingly, more benefit comes to the church from public analysis and refutation (as when Paul trounced the Galatian and Colossian heresies, and Augustine the Pelagian heresy, and John Owen the Socinian heresy) than from any use of the big stick on the offending author. (Ark)

They [evangelicals] do not passively accept all the disorder they find. Nor do they accept that they are guilty by association of the errors they oppose (a nonsense notion, which has been given an unhappy airing during the past two decades); nor do they accept that they are settling for a situation in which no doctrinal discipline operates. They urge, rather, that discipline (which means training - Latin, disciplina) is in Scripture a primarily pastoral concept, and that the kind of pastorally-oriented controversy in which they engage is the basic form of discipline in the doctrinal realm. (Ark)

In effect, Packer proceeds to argue that in an age of academic freedom one either separates from heretics, or (in connexional congregations) takes them to the church courts, or maintains one’s own position vis a vis them in mutual tolerance.

However, the idea of a choice that must be made but which might equally be made one way as well as the opposite way, and part of the grounds of that choice being a principle of toleration grounded on human fallibility and ignorance, does not by itself seem a very strong ground for adhering to comprehensiveness. Packer supports it by other arguments.

Puritanism

The bulk of those who supported and attended the Puritan Conference, being independents (Baptists, mostly, but some Congregationalists), and some Presbyterians and of course a few Anglicans, saw the history of Puritanism as linear and progressive. As they see it, from the period from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Commonwealth, Puritanism became more and more itself, it got better and better. From being a reforming party in the Church of England it became Presbyterian and Congregationalist in ecclesiastical outlook. The 1662 ejection simply underlined the correctness of this view, for here the Church of England turned its back on Puritanism, and a chasm opened up between Anglicanism and Dissent.

Packer does not share this analysis. For him a Puritan is what used to be called a ‘doctrinal Puritan’, one who is soteriogically a Calvinist with a distinctive view of pastoral care. William Gurnall or Joseph Hall or Ezekiel Hopkins were all equally as much Puritans as were William Perkins or Thomas Goodwin or Anthony Tuckney. (If you did not know that Ezekiel Hopkins was Bishop of Londonderry you would not learn it from what he wrote.) Puritanism could co-exist with Laudian Arminianism if allowed to, just as George Whitfield was able to continue as a clergyman in the Church of England that contained virtual deists.)

Packer titled one of his pen portraits of Lloyd Jones ‘A Kind of Puritan’. You get the implication? In it he says of Dr Lloyd Jones ‘Regarding me as latter-day Puritan (which I took, as I was meant to do, to be a compliment), he once told me that I was not a real Anglican, and predicted with some distress that my fellow Anglicans would not accept me’. ((‘D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A Kind of Puritan’ in J.I. Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 4.65)

Packer goes on

The Puritans did not differ much in their ultimate goal, nor in their theological principles, nor in their sense of the urgency of action against scandalous things, not in their judgement that the honour of God and the welfare of Christians were always directly bound up with the current state of the church; but they frequently differed among themselves as to when and in what form action to remedy abuses and reinforce righteousness could best be taken. It would thus be misleading to generalize about them as if at each stage one group and one line of action have more right to be called Puritan than another – Presbyterian national-churchmen opposing toleration, for instance, rather than Independent gathered-churchmen supporting it, or vice versa.

And

Yet he [Dr Lloyd-Jones], with historians generally, was surely right when he view these as divisions (over Separatisim and non-Separatism) within a body of people whose common outlook on basics made it proper to call them all Puritans, whether they were so called in their own day or note. This is my own point exactly. (71)

It is implied that this historical analysis was not shared by some in their understanding of how and why the Puritan Conference was organised.

The Enlightenment

For all his love for the Puritans, in Packer’s view the church-political situation has become even more complex since the influence of the Enlightenment on the churches. This led to destructively critical methods of Bible study, the narrowing of the work of Christ to that of a teacher of ethics, and as a consequence the message of the liberal wing of Protestantism was largely a liberal-ethical one. He saw that what historic evangelicals, such as himself, and the Anglo-Catholics had in common was an anti-Enlightenment stance, a stance against liberal and pragmatic churchmanship. Together they held to the historic creeds and to the authority of Scripture, the 'Great Tradition', even though they had important theological differences. In other words, for Dr Packer there is a theological issue of some consequence at stake here. This might be stated as follows: wherever possible, in the Church of England I should cohere with and make common cause with those who hold to the historic conciliar views of the godhead and the person of Christ against those who ignore or reject those views.

So he celebrates the ‘happy fact’

that within the past thirty years the previously felt convictional and kerygmatic gap between the more conservative evangelicals and the more conservative anglo-catholics has shrunk.

It is in the context of a comprehensiveness with very wide limits that Packer argues that it is important not to miss the force of this reasoning by falling victim

to the sectarian idea, sometimes met, that evangelicalism, being Christianity at its purest, ought to practice self-sufficiency in theology, taking nothing from the mixed bag of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglo-Catholic and liberal Protestant thought on the grounds that nothing in that bag can help evangelicals in the least. Were this idea sound, the case for patience with the intermittently heterodox would be less strong; but the idea is not sound. I for one regard the evangelicalism outlined in the opening paragraphs of this essay as the purest Christianity that the world has seen since apostolic times, and in that sense I affirm Christianity to be evangelicalism and vice versa. But it does not follow that adherents of other mutations of Christianity, mutations which seem less close overall to the spirit, belief and thrust of the New Testament, have nothing to teach me on this or that particular point - nothing, that is, which I could not have learned from some evangelical source. Nor does it follow that I serve God best by assuming there are no new truths, or new applications of truth, that wait to break forth from his holy Word, so that as a teacher in the church I need only repeat traditional evangelical positions and I shall have done my job. The truth is rather this: Theology is an ongoing corporate enterprise which in principle involves the whole church. It is an enterprise through which everyone’s under- standing of what God has revealed is again and again enlarged. It proceeds by dialogue with past and present attempts to spell out that revelation, dialogue through which Scripture actually evaluates the various attempts made to expound it. We all need to examine and re-examine by Scripture whether our own traditions, as well as those of others, are true and adequate (two questions, not just one); and the late B. B. Warfield, as doughty a Reformed traditionalist as the world has seen, was right when he said in conversation that the theologian must be like the busy bee, always moving around gathering raw material for honey from all sorts of flowers. (Ark)

The rank and file of those ministers who attended the Puritan Conference typically did not seek theological allies and theological enlightenment beyond those who were like-minded, other pastors of independent or independently-minded congregations seeking to promote their health and their extension through faithful Bible-ministry and pastoral oversight. Independency means local autonomy and a considerable self-sufficiency (in the best sense, of course). In such churches, the sense of continuity with the historic church, going back to the patristic and conciliar eras is in my experience not strong. Nor is the view that local congregations are part of one holy, catholic and apostolic church. Rather, the strength of such separatism is the freedom is gives to the pulpit to preach the gospel. The weakness is the danger of sectarianism. Dr Lloyd-Jones seems to have reinforced this rather sectarian tendency, for his public attention (whatever his private sentiments may have been) was given exclusively to the Reformation, to Puritanism, and to the Evangelical Awakening and its bearing on current evangelicalism. Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy was taken for granted, and not dwelt upon, it being forgotten, perhaps, that this heritage has, as a matter of historical fact, been passed on in part through church authority and by Christian brethren of a very different kind than that espoused by evangelical independency.

There is a difference in perspective, then, and always has been, between Packer and his non-Anglican friends, those who used to invite him to preach, who read his books with relish, who attended rallies and conferences at which he spoke, and who came away both nodding and shaking their heads. Someone in Packer’s position, an evangelical Anglican in a comprehensive church who (at the same time) shuns pietistic withdrawal will be involved in ecclesiastical affairs more than is an independent pastor ever could be.

Regeneration and mental error

In his early work ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God, (IVP 1958) Packer asks why it is

that any Christian should ever deviate form the Bible’s view of itself? The same question arises in connection with unscriptural views of any doctrine. It does not seem hard to answer. Christians fall into mental error, partly through mistaking or overlooking what Scripture teaches, partly through having their minds prepossessed with unbiblical notions so that they cannot take scriptural statements seriously. (123)

I believe that these words, and the section of the book from which they are drawn, must have been overlooked by many of Packer’s subsequent critics, at least those who have subsequently accused him of inconsistency. They also give us reason for thinking that Alister McGrath is somewhat mistaken in seeing the writing and publication of ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God as the ‘coming out’ of Packer into the evangelical mainstream (as opposed to paddling along the Puritan and Reformed creek). Packer always saw himself, an Anglican Puritan, as being in the Anglican mainstream. In the Christian life there are points at which the head may go ahead of the heart, and points at which the heart may go ahead of the head. A person who is a Christian may have moral besetting sins which throw him off balance, so he may have intellectual besetting sins.

This piece has already gone on for long enough. In the next Taking a Line I shall try to assess these arguments, and then take a look at the infamous ‘split’ from another perspective.

(I’m grateful to Martin Downes and Melvin Tinker for pieces of information and sources which helped me in preparing this piece. They are in no way responsible for the result, of course.)

Christian Theology: Words about words about words?

How doth it appear that there is a God? The very light of nature in man, and the works of God, declare plainly that there is a God; but his word and Spirit only do sufficiently and effectually reveal him unto men for their salvation.

- The Larger Catechism, Question 1.

I think you will agree, then, that no form of natural theology has ever spoken properly of the God who is there. None of the great Greek philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, and none of the great modern philosophers, like Descartes, Kant, Hegel or Kierkegaard and others, have ever spoken of the God who is there.

- Cornelius Van Til to Francis Schaeffer, March 1969

Here’s an important question that you don’t often find discussed even in conservative and confessional Reformed circles. Namely, how can we be confident and assured that the discipline of theology, and the religion that lies behind it, has a subject-matter? How may we be confident that there is a God and Lord that our words ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ refer to? This question is never discussed, or very rarely. To use Van Til’s language, how do we know that the God who is there, is there? It is assumed that the words do have success in referring beyond themselves. This is not the question of what is true in theology, but a more basic question, How can we be sure that there is truth or falsity in theology? There are allied questions to this which are often discussed, the question of personal assurance, and the cognitive status of Scripture, for example. But not this question.

A number of factors may jointly contribute to the production of this deafening silence. I suggest three, which I place (lest you wonder) in no particular order.

Anyone who has any experience of the theological discussion that prevails in academic departments of religion and theology will be familiar with the phenomenon of theological autonomy, the sociological phenomenon, I mean. The business of theology is conducted exclusively between theologians with rules that exclude or forbid raising questions of truth and falsity. It is a game, as its practitioners will often concede. Basil Mitchell has an amusing essay ‘How to Play Theological Ping-Pong’. It is this fact that develops in the minds of non-theologians the further thought that theology is ‘not a subject’, and which is slowly but surely contributing to the demise of university departments of theology. Why should tax-payers money be spent on word games? Academia has been at the centre of the flourishing of ‘trinitarian studies’ in the last few decades? Whose model of the trinity works? Eastern or Western? One that tends to tritheism or the opposite which tends to modalism? Is the trinity a model for human community, even for politics? All of these are good questions. But they are only good questions if there is first a satisfactory answer to the question, Have we reason to think that there is a God who is triune?

Secondly, since the Second World War, an influential strand of conservative theology has been in thrall to ‘presuppositionalism’, the view that only by positing or presupposing the existence of God, or the Scriptures and their account of God, is it possible to uphold the rationality of Christian belief and to show the weakness of all positions which do not make that presupposition. Maybe that is so. But in Reformed theology ‘presuppositionalism’ is a striking novelty. Historically speaking, Reformed theology has been somewhat relaxed on the question of offering the arguments of natural theology to prove the existence of God. But presuppositionalism as an apologetic outlook is a complete novelty in the history of Reformed theology. It is strange, then, that the need to hold this outlook has come to be, for some, a test of orthodoxy, even in circles which uphold the Westminster Confession which perhaps is silent on the question but if anything appears to deny it. The project of natural theology is relegated to the theological museum, and (somewhat paradoxically) presuppositionalism shares its rejection of natural theology with Karl Barth. Extremes meet.

But in the zeitgeist that now prevails, such presuppositionalism simply becomes another form of insulation, another word game, this time a Bible word game, one practiced in the Bible-believing community. Paradoxically, presuppositionalism fits snugly into the relativistic post-modern mindset in which sociology triumphs over theology. More formally, it relies on a coherence theory of truth, not surprisingly given the Roycian background of its most notorious practitioner, Cornelius Van Til.

Suppose that those who propound presuppositionalism had paid less attention to the requirement of rationality, and more attention to the questions of the reality of Christian theology as a discipline, questions of the reality and objectivity of the faith. My guess is that the guarantees afforded by what is presupposed would look a lot less copper-bottomed than they appeared to those who were interested exclusively in rationality.

Those seeking an answer to the question; do words such as ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ actually succeed in referring to anything? will find no relief from the more recent proposals of the Vanhoozers and the Frankes. For they more or less meekly follow the academic temper of the times, being almost exclusively concerned with the in-house language of the church. In Vanhoozer’s case this shows itself in linguistic terms, the langue of speech acts and language games and theodrama, the fine tuning of the language of faith. You will look in vain for any discussion of natural theology or natural religion. In Franke’s case the terms of the debate-are sociological, the local church and its language, first-order language, with the theologians’ job being to fine turn that language giving considerable attention in doing so to the ‘context’ in which church and theologians are each situated. Christians talk to each other, confessing their faith, participating in the drama. But is there really a drama? Is anyone out there? Is there a God who occupies reality beyond the limits of the Christian village, beyond the moat and the drawbridge, and all similar enclosures?

All these outlooks are certainly different, but they have in common what I shall call ‘theological autonomy’, the idea that (for whatever reason) theology is a distinct discipline which does not depend upon any others. That is, supposedly, its strength. It has insulated itself from intellectual attack. But may theology not be the Emperor who has no clothes rather than the Queen of the sciences?

Thankfully, there are straws in the wind that suggest that things are slowly but surely moving away from such theological autonomy, even among those with a historic confessional stance. Two publications have recently come my way which indicate this. David Vandrunen, who teaches at Westminster Seminary West, Escondido, California, has recently published Bioethics and the Christian (Crossway, 2009). Writing of the ‘common task’ of bioethics, he pleasds for recognition of the relation between Christian and secular ethics in terms of what Christian ethics has in common with the world, and of how God is revealed in his law in nature as well as in Scripture. This is in fact the latest of a series of more technical publications by Vandrunen on natural law in Reformed theology. He is also the author of A Biblical Case for Natural Law, (Grand Rapids, Mich. Acton Institute.)

The other publication is an essay ‘Natural Theology and the Westminster Confession of Faith’, by John. V. Fesko and Guy M. Richard, which may be found in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, III ed. Ligon Duncan, (Mentor, 2009. I have borrowed part of the letter of Van Til’s from this article.) This is an informative review of the place of natural theology and natural religion in some of the Reformers and some prominent Puritans, culminating in a study of the outlook of representative Westminster divines and of the Confession itself.

How are we to form the conviction that we may successfully refer to God, the God who is there? My general answer to this question, the age-old answer, is that grace builds on nature, it does not destroy it. I hope to follow this up in a number of Analyses that are to follow.

The Logic of Imputation

Behold him there! The risen Lamb, my perfect, sinless Righteousness, The great unchangeable I AM, the King of glory and of grace.

- Charitie Lees Bancroft

Imputation is a central feature of accounts of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The word ‘imputes’ is generally held to be equivalent to Paul’s words translated ‘counts’, in Romans 4.6, ‘count’ 4.8, and ‘counted’ 4. 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11 (These words are more often than not translated as ‘credits’ and ‘credited’ by the NIV, and I shall return to that fact later.) In Reformed thought justification occurs through the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, and sometimes these two distinct blessings are combined together. (Imputation is also applied to the relation between the Fall of Adam and his connection with the race, but I shall not be concerned with this in what follows.)


Standard statements

The following are some of the ways that Reformed theologians have standardly understood the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.

(a) ‘Those whom God effectually calleth he also freely justifieth; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; not by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience, to them as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them’. (Westminster Confession of Faith, Ch. XI.I)

(b) ‘Therefore when we say that the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us for justification, and that we are just before God through imputed righteousness and not through any righteousness inherent in us, we mean nothing else than that the obedience of Christ rendered in our name to God the Father is so given to us by God that it is reckoned to be truly ours and that it is the sole and only righteousness on account of and by the merit of which we are absolved from the guilt of our sins and obtain a right to life; and that there is in us no righteousness or good works by which we can deserve such good benefits which can bear the severe examination of the divine court’. (F. Turretin, Institutes, II. 648)

(c) ‘The imputation of Christ’s righteousness, moreover, is totally misconstrued by Bellarmine and his associates. They picture it as a fiction that is opposed to reality. Imputed righteousness, according to them, is a righteousness that exists only in the imagination, whereas infused righteousness, according to them, is the only real and true righteousness. That picture, however, is completely mistaken. Justification is as real as sanctification, and imputation is not less real than infusion. The only difference is this: in justification righteousness is granted to us in a juridical sense while in sanctification it becomes ours in an ethical sense. Both are very real and very necessary’. (H. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics. IV.213)

In the context of the Reformation there has been great concern to protect the idea that the righteousness which justifies is not transfused or translated. We see this in the quotations: the righteousness which justifies, is not inherent, it is not infused. Whatever is transfused or translated in connection with the business of being justified by faith alone (whatever that may be) is never the ground of justification. The ground of justification is what is imputed. But such imputed righteousness is not fictional, it is real.

Any doctrine which proposes that justification is on the basis of what is transfused to the believer, as in Roman Catholic accounts of justification in terms of the acquiring of subjective righteousness (or later Baxterianism’s justification through evangelical righteousness, the keeping of a new law, and the like), are wholeheartedly repudiated. So Reformed theologians readily write and speak of justification by an alien or external righteousness.

My aim here is to offer some elucidation of this Reformed position by examining the logic of the idea imputing external righteousness. The word ‘logic’ need not frighten anyone. I am not attempting to argue for the truth of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness ‘by logic’, only to spell out some of its features by attempting to show what the idea of the imputation of righteousness, or reckoning or counting someone righteous, implies and does not imply.


Internal and external changes

Suppose that a person has a child, becomes a mother or a father. As a consequence someone else becomes a grandparent, a grandfather or grandmother. What sort of a change is that of becoming a grandmother? It’s a different sort of change than that which occurs when, giving birth, the wife becomes a mother; or, learning of the birth, the grandfather reaches into his pocket and buys the newborn baby a gift.

Or suppose a person comes to weigh less than his friend simply by virtue of the fact that his friend has put on weight, while his own weight has not changed. That’s a different sort of change than coming to weigh less by dieting. Without doing anything, the person has changed. We can say that the person is reckoned to be lighter in weight by virtue of something purely ‘external’ to him, to the fact that his friend has become inherently heavier. By the action of another, by a woman giving birth, and by nothing else, her father has been changed, he has become a grandfather. By the action of another, by his friend putting on weight, and by nothing else, a person has been changed, he has come to weigh less than his friend. Here we have a good guide what is an inherent change – becoming a mother, putting on weight, are good examples - and what is an ‘external’ change - becoming lighter than the friend, becoming a grandparent. Something we might say is that the ‘external’ change is ‘purely relational’. It is in virtue of someone’s relation to another person, and no other fact, that he may be said to have changed, to have become lighter, to have become a grandparent. But in the case of ‘inherent’ change – such as becoming pregnant and giving birth, putting on weight - something other than a relation.

We can, if we are careful enough, distinguish between changes in A that result solely from factors external to A , and those that are due to internal changes to A. One person really changes, and as a consequence someone else changes, but not in the same sense. for I am going to argue, as you have guessed, that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is best thought of as an ‘external’ change in the one to whom the righteousness is imputed.


Having righteousness imputed

As a result of what Christ has done, those to whom his righteousness is imputed change. But how Christ has changed, by procuring righteousness through his life and death, is very different from how the person to whom that righteousness is imputed changes. Something is true of him that was not true of him before. But the change, the new truth, is not brought about by a change within him, but by the establishing of a new external relationship for him, and by that alone.

Of course, there is one important difference between the examples of becoming a grandparent, and becoming less heavy than, on the one hand, and becoming righteous, in the case of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. There is a third party. There are two parties, Christ and the one who receives the imputation of his righteousness, but there is a third party, the one who imputes, or reckons, or counts that righteousness to another. That’s very important for the full statement of the doctrine, but it does not affect the point that those to whom the righteousness of Christ is imputed change in rather the way that the way in which a person becomes a grandparent or a person comes to be less heavy than his friend becoming more heavy.

They don’t thereby undergo any ‘internal’ change, but enter into a new relation of a purely external kind. This new relation has immeasurable consequences, and is accompanied by other sorts of change which are most certainly ‘internal’ and acquired, the changes that are associated with the acquiring of Christian graces, and the putting off of the old man, Christian sanctification, the work of the Spirit. Justification is distinct from but inseparably connected with the internal changes that sanctify. But this fact, vitally important though it is, does not alter the fact that in justification the only thing that changes about the one who is justified is that person’s external relation to God, the imputer.


Imputing and infusing

Sometimes it is said that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is ‘fictional’ and by that is meant that it is ‘made up’. But it is no more made up than the friend’s becoming less heavy is fictional. Is he heavier or not? In relation to his friend, he is heavier. A person who is pronounced innocent on grounds that ensure his innocence (in the case of ‘reckoned’ innocence, grounds provided by another) is not ’fictionally’ innocent, though it is certain a fiction to suppose that someone has an inherent quality that he in fact fails to have. Some accounts of imputation make it seem less arbitrary by interposing the thought that the one whom Christ thus benefits is ‘in union with’ Christ. What the Head has done is reckoned to the members. (Just as, becoming a grandfather is due to what has happened to the grandfather’s daughter, and to no other).

In becoming a grandfather, or coming to weigh less (in the examples given earlier) what comes to be true does so purely in virtue of a real change in one of the parties to an already existing relation. That is all, that’s the full explanation. Nothing moves, nothing transfers from one friend to another. The father of the mother is not infused with grandfatherliness, nor the friend that comes to weigh less infused with weight loss. Nothing is infused, and nothing becomes inherent than was not inherent before. So it is with the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.

In imputation is Christ’s righteousness credited?

That’s why the terms ‘imputation’ or ‘reckon’ or ‘count’ as used in the doctrine of justification, are vitally different from ‘impartation’ or ‘infusion’, or even (unless used with great care) from ‘transfer’ or ‘credit’. If something is imparted to A, then what is imparted to A becomes A’s; what is infused into A is fused with A. But what is imputed or reckoned or counted does not – in the same sense – become a part of A. A is benefited or blessed by having the righteousness of Christ reckoned, but not because he thereby receives the righteousness of Christ internally.

I suggest that the NIV’s use of ‘credits’ (Rom. 4. 4,6 – but ‘count’ in 4.8) is potentially misleading at this point. For crediting (at least in the financial sense) is not merely or purely external. If I pay your cheque to me into the bank my bank account is credited with the amount and I become better off, financially speaking. That’s not the sort of reckoning that imputation is. The pulpit illustration of imputation drawn from Philemon, ‘if he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account’ is not apt. Our sin is not charged to Christ’s account. He does not become really guilty, as Paul would have become really poorer had to had to pay up. We must therefore be careful not to let accountancy trump theology at this point. Christ’s righteousness is not credited to our account. Never. It is reckoned to be ours, something quite different. Imputation is not a relation between God and a person’s account, but between God and a person. What is imputed remains external; hence the aptness of thinking of Christ’s imputed righteousness as a covering, and clothing. ‘Blessed are they whose sins are covered’. Do I change when I put a hat on? Only in the sense that I have a different relation with the hat than before. It was on the peg, now it is on the head. Am I inherently changed by being hatted? Not a bit.

I develop an illustration I have used before when discussing Bishop Tom Wright’s views. If I am given insurance cover against accidents, do I change? Do I possess something called accident-cover, a sort of weird substance that only insurance brokers have the power to discern? Obviously not. What then do I have when I have that cover? I possess certain possibilities that I do not have without it. The possibility of claiming for the expenses incurred should I have an accident. What do I have when I am covered with Christ’s righteousness? I have the warrant to go before the judgment of God and to claim Christ’s righteousness as mine. And in view of my need, that warrant will most certainly be exercised. The believer will be accepted in the Beloved.