Theopedia

Double imputation

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

— 2 Corinthians 5:21

Definition

Double imputation names the twofold, opposite-direction reckoning at the heart of justification: believers’ sin is credited to Christ, and Christ’s own righteousness, not the believer’s, is credited to believers in return. That righteousness is itself twofold. Christ’s passive obedience is his atoning suffering and death, paying the law’s penalty for sin; his active obedience is his lifelong, positive keeping of the law’s own precepts, which the law required as the condition of life, not only death for breaking it. Reformed Baptist teaching holds that both, not his death alone, are imputed to the believer.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the double imputation as the very mechanism of justification. Those God effectually calls, he “freely justifies, 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… by imputing Christ’s active obedience unto the whole law, and passive obedience in his death for their whole and sole righteousness by faith.”1

This is one of the places where the confession says something genuinely its own rather than simply restating its Westminster source. The 1689’s framers state in their own preface that they have “no itch to clog religion with new words” and retain Westminster’s wording almost verbatim throughout.2 Yet in the justification chapter they go further than Westminster does: 2LBCF 11.1 names Christ’s active and passive obedience explicitly as the twin ground of the believer’s imputed righteousness, where Westminster’s own parallel chapter leaves the same content more implicit. One of the earliest confessional receptions of Westminster’s doctrine made explicit what its source had only implied.2

Biblical Basis

Paul states both halves of the exchange in a single verse: God “made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). The believer’s guilt is reckoned to a sinless Christ in the first clause; Christ’s own righteousness is reckoned to the believer, “in him,” in the second.3

Paul draws the same double structure out at greater length in Romans 5:18-19, where Christ’s “one act of righteousness” and his “obedience” stand as the counterpart to Adam’s “one trespass” and “disobedience.”4 The passage does not read naturally as confining that obedience to the cross alone. Scripture elsewhere characterizes Christ’s entire mediatorial mission, not his death in isolation, as obedience: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). John Murray judged the concept “more embracive than any other” applied to Christ’s saving work, “generic and therefore embracive enough to be viewed as the unifying or integrating principle” of it.5 Read this way, Romans 5:19’s “obedience” names Christ’s whole life of righteousness under the law, of which his atoning death is the climax rather than the whole.6

Historical Development

The doctrine that Christ’s death satisfies the law’s penalty was never seriously contested among the Reformed; what became a live and contested question, beginning in the early seventeenth century, was whether his active obedience, his positive law-keeping, is also imputed.

Piscator’s denial

Johannes Piscator (1546-1625), formerly a Lutheran minister who moved into the Reformed church and taught for decades at the Hohe Schule of Herborn, was, in Charles Hodge’s judgment, “the first conspicuous departure from the Protestant doctrine of justification among the Reformed.”7 Piscator argued that the imputation of righteousness and the remission of sins are one and the same thing, so that Christ’s saving work consists simply in the expiation of sin; his active obedience to the law, on this account, “constitutes no part of the righteousness by which the believer is justified before God.”7 He granted that Christ rendered a twofold obedience, to the moral law as any man owes it and to his special commission as mediator, but held that only the second, his death, is imputable to others; the first was owed for himself as a true man and so could not also be credited to anyone else.7

Condemnation and its aftermath

The Reformed and Lutheran churches responded with near unanimity. Hodge records that Piscator’s teaching “was judicially repudiated by the national Synod of France on several different occasions; first in 1603, again at La Rochelle in 1607, and afterwards in 1612 and 1613,” and that “the Swiss churches in the ‘Formula Consensus Helvetica’… pronounced clearly in favour of the old doctrine.”8 Herman Bavinck likewise names “Johannes Piscator’s denial of Christ’s active obedience” among the post-Reformation departures the church’s doctrine of Christ’s work had to answer, alongside Stancarus’s denial that Christ’s divine nature itself was engaged in his mediatorial work.9 Hodge judged the confessional response theologically decisive rather than merely traditional: “where sin has been committed there is need of expiation as well as of obedience, and of obedience as well as expiation, if the reward of perfect obedience is to be conferred.”10 A sinner under the law owes both the penalty for having broken it and the positive obedience the law always made the condition of its reward; Christ’s passive obedience answers the first debt and his active obedience the second, so that neither can substitute for the other.

By the time the Second London Baptist Confession was drafted in 1677, the controversy had already settled decisively in favor of imputing both, which is why its justification chapter states the point with the explicitness noted above under Confessional Definition.

Opposing Views

Piscator’s substantive position still has modern defenders, now argued on exegetical rather than confessional-logical grounds: that Paul’s “obedience” language in texts like Romans 5:19 and Philippians 2:8 refers to Christ’s death specifically, not to a lifelong law-keeping distinguishable from it.6 Fairly stated, this position does not deny double imputation as such, that believers’ sin is imputed to Christ and Christ’s righteousness to believers; it denies that the imputed righteousness includes anything beyond Christ’s atoning death, collapsing what the confession treats as two grounds into one.

Roman Catholic and New Perspective on Paul objections to imputed righteousness generally, rather than to the active-obedience question specifically, are treated at Justification’s own Opposing Views.

Objections and Responses

If Christ’s death alone satisfies the law’s penalty, why does the believer also need his active obedience imputed? This was Piscator’s own argument: the law binds either to obedience or to its penalty, not both at once, so if Christ’s obedience is imputed there was no need for him also to die, and if he died there was no need for him also to obey. Hodge’s answer is that the premise holds only for an unfallen creature who has yet to sin, not for one already under both obligations at once: “where sin has been committed there is need of expiation as well as of obedience, and of obedience as well as expiation, if the reward of perfect obedience is to be conferred.”10 Christ’s death pays what the law’s penalty for sin demands; his active obedience supplies the positive righteousness that the law’s reward always required and that a sinner, having broken the law, has none of his own to offer.

Related Doctrines

Multimedia

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 1. ↩

  2. Micah John McCormick, “Historical Survey,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 62-63. ↩ ↩2

  3. Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 4, “Soteriological Foundations: The Pactum Salutis, the Historia Salutis, and the Ordo Salutis,” sec. “Redemption Accomplished,” 185-186. ↩

  4. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 256. ↩

  5. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans, quoted in McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” 259. ↩

  6. McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Fulfilled,” 259. ↩ ↩2

  7. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 181-182. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:183-184. ↩

  9. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation.” ↩

  10. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:183. ↩ ↩2