Foreign or Home-Grown Righteousness?

R. C. Sproul wrote a critical book for our time entitled Getting the Gospel Right: The Tie That Binds Evangelicals Together. If you attended the first T4G Conference in 2006, it was one of the books you were given. Among other things, it defined imputation with razor's edge accuracy. Imputation is, of course, the theological term referring to believers having the righteousness of Jesus transferred (or imputed) to their account at the point of their justification. The truth of this was one of the embattled doctrines of the Reformation. Imputation teaches that it is Jesus' righteousness that a believer receives at the second birth. A Christian is not given some of Jesus' righteousness as an exemplar to which he adds his own righteousness to finish his justification or to maintain his standing. The Bible teaches that the righteousness that is required to stand before our Holy Judge is completely foreign. It isn't ours. It is only through the utterly foreign righteousness of Jesus that we have standing to be in the presence of our God.

Why was this book and the defining of this doctrine so important? Roman Catholic doctrine teaches something that sounds a lot like imputation but is in actuality profoundly different: infusion. Infusion is where Jesus righteousness is seen as being poured into a believer and that the new man results in a mixture of His righteousness and their own growing righteousness. This teaching holds that the end result is righteousness, while inspired by Jesus' righteousness, is not foreign but their own. This teaching sounds sterile enough--a difference in finer point of theology perhaps--but it is actually spiritual treason. What is actually saying is that after my initial infusion of righteousness, I have the ability to actually earn righteousness through the works of the law. Sproul explains infusions @ p. 65, "Only when the person is inherently just by the help of the grace of Christ's infused righteousenss will God declare the person just." To say that I stand in my own righteousness to any degree (even though somehow began or sparked by Jesus') robs God of His glory. Paul would bluntly and soberly say to the Galatians, "I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justification were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose." (Gal. 2:21).

Here is the crux of this post: Consider how your grasp on imputation vs. infusion informs your thinking about sanctification. One of the goals of our men's conference coming up in May is that the men of our region will come and fellowship in gospel--that they will hear gospel-centered teaching, buy affordable gospel-centered books, and talk to other men about a gospel-centered approach to living. For us to truly believe in gospel-centered sanctification requires that we (to use his title) get the gospel right in the first place. If we don't have a clear understanding on imputation, sanctification becomes merely a legalistic way of trying to please God with our works. Gospel-centeredness springs from imputation. Martin Luther, a champion of imputation declared that believers are simul iustus et peccator, or "at the same time just and sinner." When we begin there, that we remain a sinner even though we have the benefits of the foregn righteousness of Jesus, we remember that any sanctification that will happen will have to be done in His power.