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Imputation Explained

So, I’ve gone on about ‘the Imputation of Righteousness’ a lot over the last year. I wrote my dissertation on it, I’ve made blog posts about it. What though, in simple terms, is it?

I think this is as simple as I can make it:

  • We lack the status of sons before God.
  • This is because of our sin.
  • Jesus has this status.
  • When on earth, he perfectly obeyed the Law. Something we couldn’t do.
  • God counts Jesus’ perfect-Law-obedience as though it were ours.
  • This means that we have Jesus’ status before God as a son and heir.
  • This is true because what God says happens.
  • And because the Bible says we’re ‘in Christ,’ we are counted along with him.
  • Therefore we are perfectly right before God, and always will be.

That’s about the level of it. Mark Driscoll describes the gospel as ‘Jesus lived the life we couldn’t live and died the death we should’ve died. That second bit is ‘propitiation.’ The first bit, that’s ‘imputation.’

Imputation says this: we couldn’t do it. Jesus did it for us. Permanently.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Imputation. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

3 Comments on “Imputation Explained”

  1. Rob Says:
    June 13th, 2007 at 10:58 am

    Very good, and I want you to tell me the difference (in all seriousness) between “impute” and “imbue”, but FIRST let me congratulate you on your degree result!

  2. Rob Says:
    June 13th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

    Also, I generally find your blog posts very ENGAGING. To follow the theme.

  3. Tim Suffield Says:
    June 20th, 2007 at 11:43 am

    Internet definitions of ‘imbue’ give me: ’spread or diffuse through.’ In that case, the main difference between that and impute is that they’re opposites. Opposites in the sense that the word ‘imbue’ would describe what the Catholics think ;)

    The Catholic doctrine is ‘infused righteousness.’ This basically means righteousness is worked inside of people - probably with their co-operation. Imputation is an external (normally termed ‘alien’) act - it’s a forensic declaration, not an ontological change (in and of itself, it does cause one - but imputation is not sanctification).

    Basically if our righteousness were imbued or infused then the Catholics would be correct: our distinction between justification and sanctification would be wrong.