Imparted righteousness

“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.”

— 2 Peter 1:3-4

Imparted righteousness is the real, inward righteousness that God works in believers at regeneration and grows in them through sanctification, as distinct from the righteousness of Christ credited to them in justification. Reformed theology treats both as benefits of union with Christ: imputed righteousness is legal and complete the moment a sinner believes, while imparted righteousness is actual and progressive over a lifetime. The two are never separated, since Christ never grants one without the other, but keeping them distinct guards justification from resting on a righteousness that remains incomplete this side of glory.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession keeps the two carefully apart. Justification rests on Christ’s righteousness alone: God “freely justifies, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous… 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 Sanctification, by contrast, is the confession’s category for what is imparted: those effectually called and regenerated “are also farther sanctified, really and personally… the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts of it are more and more weakened and mortified, and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces, to the practice of all true holiness.”²

The confession’s separate chapters for justification and sanctification formalize the same distinction the Reformed tradition worked out against Osiander: chapter 11 states what is reckoned to the believer’s legal standing, and chapter 13 states what is actually worked in the believer’s nature.

Biblical Basis

Paul describes the inward change worked in believers as a “putting on” of an actual, new righteousness: they are to “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24). Mastricht ties this text directly to what he calls inherent righteousness, distinguishing it in the same breath from the righteousness “of Christ that is imputed,” which “comes through… a desire for the righteousness of another… faith in Christ… justification through faith.” Believers, he writes, must also be understood in terms “of that righteousness that is inherent, and particularly: (1) original righteousness, which we received by creation… we lost through the fall of our first parents… and we recover by regeneration, conversion, and sanctification (Eph. 4:24-25).”³ This recovered righteousness is itself the means by which believers “are rendered partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), reflecting the divine image restored in them.⁴

Historical Development

The Osiander controversy

The imputed/imparted distinction became a point of open dispute in the mid-sixteenth century. Andreas Osiander (1498-1552), a Lutheran contemporary of Luther, taught justification by what he called “essential righteousness”: believers “are substantially righteous in God by the infusion both of his essence and of his quality,” so that Christ’s righteousness is imparted to them rather than forensically imputed.⁵ John Calvin answered Osiander at length in the 1559 Institutes (3.11.5-12) and in his 1550 Disputation on Justification. Osiander’s “view of real or imparted righteousness,” Calvin argued, “not only confuses justifying righteousness (justification) and sanctifying righteousness (sanctification), but it also teaches an ‘ontological union,’ which dissolves the Creator-creature distinction.”⁶ Justification, Calvin held instead, is that “the sinner, received into communion with Christ, is reconciled to God by his grace, while, cleansed by Christ’s blood, he obtains forgiveness of sins, and clothed with Christ’s righteousness as if it were his own, he stands confident before the heavenly judgment seat.”⁷

After Calvin

Later Reformed dogmatics kept Calvin’s distinction while insisting, as he had, that the two graces are never actually separated in a believer. Bavinck states the point this way: “Especially in his opposition to Osiander, Calvin distinguishes justification and sanctification but never separates them. Christ cannot be divided any more than the light and the warmth of the sun, though the two certainly produce distinct effects.” Christ, on this account, never justifies anyone he does not also sanctify: believers “are not justified by works, but neither are [they] justified without works.”⁸ The Second London Baptist Confession’s separate chapters on justification and sanctification put this same distinction into confessional form.

Opposing Views

Rome: imparted righteousness as the ground of justification itself

Where Reformed theology treats imputed and imparted righteousness as two distinct benefits, Roman Catholic theology grounds justification itself in what it calls infused righteousness. Trent taught that a person is righteous before God “not by an alien righteousness imputed… but only by an inherent righteousness imparted and improved by obedience”: an inward transformation begun at baptism, cooperated with through good works, and increased over a lifetime toward eternal life.⁹ Chen summarizes the resulting difference in ground: “While the Reformers taught justification on the basis of declared or imputed righteousness, granted from the righteousness of Christ that is alien to the believer, Roman Catholics taught an inner transformation of the sinner on the basis of imparted or infused righteousness which is initiated through the sacrament of baptism,” so that Rome “conflated justification and sanctification and claimed justification by sanctification.”⁹ Osiander’s essential righteousness was a Protestant version of the same move: locating justification in an imparted, rather than imputed, righteousness.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t distinguishing imputed from imparted righteousness make justification a “legal fiction,” declaring someone righteous who remains actually unrighteous? Bavinck treats imputed and imparted righteousness as equally real, just real in different senses: “justification is as real and necessary as sanctification, and imputation is no less real and necessary 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. The judicial act is not fiction even if the owner has not yet taken possession.”¹⁰ Christ never gives a believer his imputed righteousness without also beginning, in the same act of union, to work an actual, imparted righteousness in him,⁸ so the legal verdict is not detached from what it declares; it grounds it.

If imparted righteousness is real and inward, why does justification not rest on it, rather than on an alien, imputed righteousness? Because imparted righteousness, unlike Christ’s imputed righteousness, is incomplete in this life. Mastricht’s own ordering makes the point structurally: he treats “the righteousness of Christ that is imputed” as complete and received through faith alone, and only then turns to “righteousness that is inherent,” which believers “recover” gradually, across regeneration, conversion, and sanctification, not all at once.³ A progressive, still-partial righteousness cannot bear the weight Scripture places on justification, which requires a perfect standing before God’s law (Rom. 4:5); only Christ’s complete, imputed righteousness meets it.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” paras. 1, 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 13, “Of Sanctification,” para. 1. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 18, “The Righteousness of God,” 444. ↩ ↩²
Mastricht, chap. 18, 444-45: “in this righteousness is a great part of the divine image (Eph. 4:24), and through it we are rendered partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) and thus made perfect, just as our Father in the heavens (Matt. 5:48).” ↩
Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 26: “we are substantially righteous in God by the infusion both of his essence and of his quality.” ↩
Chen, 61. ↩
Chen, 61-62. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩ ↩²
Chen, 24-27. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩