On the atonement, part 1: headship and imputation

By Bnonn Tennant on December 17, 2008

10 minutes to read Part 1 of 6, in which I show that limited satisfaction is inconsistent with what is revealed in Scripture about federal headship and forensic imputation: two doctrines central to Jesus’ penal substitution.

Continued from the introduction

My first argument is that the Owenic view of limited satisfaction is incongruent with federal headship and forensic imputation. These two doctrines are central to penal substitution, which in turn is at the heart of the atonement: they say firstly that one man can represent another so that even his guilt or righteousness can be regarded as the other’s; and secondly that God, in fact, does impute our guilt to Jesus and his righteousness to us, by which we may be saved apart from any merit of our own—for we have none.

The mechanism of imputation

When we consider how imputation works, we find that it contradicts the mechanism assumed by Owenists—whether in regards to Jesus or ourselves:

Imputation to us

Jesus, having loved his God and his neighbors perfectly—because he is God—is righteous (cf. Matthew 22:37–40). This righteousness is imputed to us by God when we receive it by faith. Imputation simply means the righteousness of Jesus is counted or regarded or treated as ours (cf. Genesis 15:6).

But what is the form of this? Surely not the form of specific acts imputed, for this would result in obvious absurdities. For example, suppose I ask: did Jesus fulfill the whole law in the sense of keeping every single commandment given? Of course he kept every commandment which applied to him—but what if he never encountered his enemy’s donkey going astray, that he might return it (Deuteronomy 23:4)? Does this imply that his adherence to the law was less than perfect? Does it imply that his righteousness, imputed to me, is in any way deficient? Does it imply that, if I were a Jew prior to my conversion and had encountered my enemy’s donkey and returned it, I would have added to his imputed righteousness?

Surely not. God does not view the law in this way; as if, in Jesus, I am counted as having done exactly the acts he did, and no others. It is not Jesus’ acts which are imputed to me, but his righteousness, grounded in those acts. Since “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8), and Jesus loved perfectly, I am counted as having loved perfectly, and thus as having fully discharged my obligations to God. What is imputed to me is not a series of righteous acts, but righteousness itself: that is, the condition of being liable to approval.

Imputation to Jesus

Now, it is surely reasonable to suppose there’s a symmetry between imputation to us, and imputation to Jesus. To the best of my knowledge this is a standard supposition of the Reformed tradition. If there is an argument to the contrary, I’d like to see it—I cannot imagine what it would look like. Until then, I take it as given that imputation is imputation—if it works a certain way for us, it works the same way for Jesus.

Subsequently, although many Reformed Christians hold that God imputes our specific acts of sin to Jesus, this surely cannot be the case. Rather, what is imputed is our condition of sinfulness: our liability to punishment, our guilt. This is certainly what 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13 seem to say: that for our sake God made him to be sin (singular), so that he became a curse (singular), so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (singular). And is this not very congruent with John, who says that Jesus takes away the sin of the world—singular? These terms all seem to suggest an overarching, qualitative condition, rather than specific, quantitative acts.

This is because (at the risk of making this seem simple) guilt is guilt, and righteousness is righteousness. You’re either righteous or you’re guilty, “for whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:10–11). The law is a single, indivisible specification of kinship with God. The one principle of kinship is manifested in the various articles of the law, so that to break any of these articles is to break the principle: to violate kinship by acting disloyally, disobediently to God; refusing to faithfully represent our Father. When this happens we are liable to punishment (read: guilty). There may be a quality and a quantity to my guilt in terms of the articles of the law—that is, I break a certain number of laws a certain number of times (quantity); and each on occasion with a certain severity (quality). But in terms of the law, either I am loyal and obedient, and thus liable to approval—or I am not, and thus liable to punishment.

Put another way, I have either exercised perfect faithfulness to God, or I have dishonored him. My actions with respect to the law are merely a reflection of my attitude with respect to God.

This being the case, in penal substitution, it is righteousness or guilt, liability to approval or liability to punishment, honor or shame (cf. Heb. 12:2), which is being substituted. It is not individual acts of obedience or disobedience.

A bit of further explanation

My contention, in other words, is that imputation is the transference of a legal or covenantal status. As regards righteousness, it means that I’m regarded as a loyal covenant-keeper, liable to approval. The ground for being so regarded is the federal representation of Jesus, who actually was a loyal covenant-keeper in his personal life, and actually is liable to approval before God. But it is not his personal life itself which is accounted to me; rather, it is his covenantal status based on that life. Conversely, as regards sin, imputation means that Jesus was regarded as a covenant-breaker, liable to punishment. The grounds for being so regarded is the people whom he represents, who actually were and are and will be liable to punishment. But again—it is not their personal lives which are accounted to him, and not their personal sins; rather, it is the simple covenantal status of being liable to punishment. Individual actions are not legally transferable—God cannot rightly say, “You, Bnonn, have never taken up my name for a worthless cause.” In fact I have. Only a legal/covenantal status is transferable—God can rightly say, “You, Bnonn, are not guilty, not liable to punishment, for taking my name in vain; you are my son.” He can, in other words, choose not to impute my sin to me (Romans 4:8). Not only can he say this, but he must say this if I am to be saved from hell, because my natural legal status is identical with every other human being: guilty.

Guilt is guilt.

Therefore, even if it were only the elect whose sin was the grounds of imputation (a notion I am sympathetic to), it remains that the one status shared by every human person was imputed to Jesus on the cross. There is not one guilty status for me, and another for you. We all have the same status before God: guilty. Thus, since Jesus was treated as guilty on the cross, the scope of the satisfaction is unlimited or universal: by definition he can take the place of any human being with that status. Individual sins were not part of the equation; it was the condition of being a human sinner which was imputed to him—and so he is a fitting representative for any and all human sinners, by merit of sharing in their humanity.

Judicial v. pecuniary

This is a view which can be called judicial satisfaction; it sees the payment of sin as penal and personal: to be paid in our own persons through separation from God and by subjection to his personal wrath. It is opposed to pecuniary satisfaction, which sees the payment of sin as transactional and impersonal: like the payment of an amount of money from one party to another. As Steve Costley puts it, Christ has not paid a certain amount for so many sins. His blood is not like a quantity of money. His suffering is not a pain-for-pain equivalent for the suffering due to us. [ Steve Costley, Pecuniary vs. Judicial Debt.]

Charles Hodge observes, in the same vein:

All, therefore, that the Church teaches when it says that Christ satisfied divine justice for the sins of men, is that what He did and suffered was a real adequate compensation for the penalty remitted and the benefits conferred. His sufferings and death were adequate to accomplish all the ends designed by the punishment of the sins of men. He satisfied justice. He rendered it consistent with the justice of God that the sinner should be justified. But He did not suffer either in kind or degree what sinners would have suffered. [ Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology: The Complete Three Volumes (GLH Publishing, 2015), loc. 20466.]

When we think in terms of a judicial compensation like this, it seems nonsensical to imagine that Jesus’ satisfaction could be particular or limited in its scope. It may be particular or limited in whom it accrues to, but for the satisfaction itself to be limited requires a pecuniary view in which specific sins and no others are imputed to Jesus and expiated by him, as if he were paying off a sum of money for one man but not for another. This defies the judicial nature of the cross, and is even incoherent if our acts are by nature non-transferable. When Scripture likens the atonement to the payment of a ransom, we shouldn’t take this metaphor to mean that it was like a money transaction; just as when God says that he ransomed Israel from Egypt (Micah 6:4, NASB) we shouldn’t suppose that he paid Pharaoh off. The point of saying that God ransomed us, or redeemed us—i.e., “bought us back”—is to emphasize the price of our freedom: from Egypt, the life of the first-born; from death, the life of Jesus. The point is not that the satisfaction is like the payment of a money debt, which Jesus only paid for the elect. That Jesus had the elect specifically in view when he died, knowing that it was for them alone that his death was designed to be efficacious, does not mitigate the fact that in practice he can represent any given human being—that he has endured the judicial penalty owed to any given human being—because he himself was a human being. Thus his satisfaction can be made efficacious for even the reprobate, would they only turn and live.

The timing of imputation

Related to this is the significant question of when imputation takes place. Carefully assessing this question turns out to be fatal to the Owenic view.

At some point in time my sin must be imputed to Jesus, and his righteousness to me, or I would not be justified. Under the Owenic view, Jesus paid for my sins at the cross. In other words, on the cross, God counted my sins as his, who then bore the penalty for them. That being so, for God to ever count my sins against me is surely unjust. If my sins were covered in Jesus before I was ever born, then there was no time in my life when I was ever liable to punishment for them. Since my conception, they would have been concealed in Jesus. But I remember a time when I was a “child of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3), and a point in time when I was reconciled to God through the Spirit, by faith (Romans 5:1)—and I remember that at that moment my sins were put away and God counted them against me no more. Contra the Owenic view, I know that I was not identified with Jesus’s death, and my sin was not imputed to him, until my faith and immersion (Romans 6:3–6)—so how could my sins be counted as his two thousand years before that?

To be fair, there is a distinction in the Owenic model between the imputation of my sins to Jesus, and his righteousness to me, that correlates with the distinction between passive and active obedience, and the distinction between mere innocence and tested righteousness. Owenists would argue that it is only on the event of my obtaining faith that I stop being under God’s wrath, because only then is Jesus’ active obedience counted as mine. But this is an assertion in lieu of an argument. Even if this bifurcation were coherent, how can I justly be under God’s wrath if my sin is paid and I am counted as innocent? If my particular sins were imputed to Jesus at Golgotha, and the penalty for them was “paid in full,” then the debt is wiped away, and no wrath can justly remain on me. Indeed, this is the exact argument they make against a universal atonement, saying that it would entail universal salvation, as I will cover in part 5!

For the record, I don’t believe the bifurcation is coherent. If you think of imputation in terms of what it is, namely covenantal identification with a family head, rather than number-shuffling, it obviously makes no sense. And the forensic distinction between innocence and righteousness is one derived philosophically, not exegetically; Romans 4:5–8 knows of no such distinction whatsoever.

I want to emphasize this point, because a common objection from Owenists to my view is that if my specific sins were not imputed to Jesus at Golgotha, then “the cross didn’t actually do anything.” But to the contrary: if my sins were imputed to Jesus at Golgotha, then the cross did too much and my faith doesn’t actually do anything. It simply cannot be that the cross justifies us in and of itself. What the cross does is satisfy the requirements of God’s justice so that justification becomes possible later. Conflating these two very distinct issues is a serious error that results in a variation on the false doctrine of eternal justification. I will return to this point in part 6 because it bears further consideration. For now, however, there are other fish to fry…

Continued in part 2: the grounds for the universal gospel call

48 comments

Nancy

You do believe in the Trinity? Right? Just checking…