Is Righteousness Imputed, or Received Through Union with Christ?

What the Doctrine of Imputation Teaches

Imputed righteousness is a central doctrine in Lutheran and Reformed accounts of justification. To impute is to count or credit something to someone. The doctrine holds that God accepts sinners as righteous on the basis of Christ’s obedience, received through faith and never earned by their works. The Westminster Confession says that believers are justified “by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them.” The Heidelberg Catechism says that God credits to the believer the satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, as though the believer had obeyed as fully as Christ obeyed for him.

The doctrine separates two works of God. Justification is God’s declaration that a person is righteous in his sight. Sanctification is the renewal the Spirit works in that person’s life. Because the declaration rests on Christ’s obedience, the believer’s standing before God does not rise and fall with his progress in holiness. Many Christians have found deep comfort in that.

Defenders of imputation point to several passages. Abraham “believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:6), and Paul builds Romans 4 on that verse. In Romans 5:18–19 Paul sets Adam’s disobedience beside Christ’s obedience and ties the righteousness of the many to the obedience of one man. Many readers take 2 Corinthians 5:21 as a double exchange: our sin counted to Christ, and his righteousness counted to us.

Reformed theology also teaches union with Christ. The Westminster Confession speaks of believers united to him, and many Reformed writers describe imputation as one of the benefits received in that union. The disagreement on this page is a disagreement among Christians who affirm both union and a righteousness received by faith. It concerns how the two belong together.

What It Means to Be “In Christ”

“In Christ” and “in him” are among Paul’s most frequent ways of describing salvation. Believers are crucified with Christ, buried with him, raised with him, made alive with him, seated with him, and blessed with every spiritual blessing in him (Galatians 2:20; Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:12–13; Ephesians 2:5–6; 1:3). Jesus prayed for this union on the night before he died:

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

John 17:21

Paul says that “he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:17), and that “your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Chris White takes these phrases as a description of something real that happens to a person who comes to Christ. He offers the picture of a set of nesting dolls: the Father, the Son in the Father, and believers in the Son. The picture is imperfect. The Son is in the Father by nature and from eternity. Believers are in the Son by grace, because God has joined them to him. Christ dwells in them by his Spirit (Romans 8:9–10), and he remains distinct from them.

Hebrews shows how far this goes beyond what Israel knew. Aaron wore the names of the twelve tribes on his breastplate “when he goeth in unto the holy place” (Exodus 28:29), and the people stayed outside. Christ presents his people as his own household: “Behold I and the children which God hath given me” (Hebrews 2:13). Aaron took the people’s names in with him. Christ’s people are themselves in him.

Where Both Views Agree

The two views share a great deal.

• Righteousness is God’s gift. Paul says that to the one who works, the reward is reckoned “not of grace, but of debt,” and that God “justifieth the ungodly” (Romans 4:4–5). No one earns a righteous standing before God.
• It is received by faith. Abraham believed, and God counted it to him for righteousness (Genesis 15:6).
• It rests on Christ. His death and his life are the ground of the believer’s acceptance.
• Union with Christ is real. Both views affirm that believers belong to Christ and receive salvation in him.

Chris White agrees with the Reformed confessions that our sins were truly transferred to Christ and that righteousness is truly reckoned to believers by faith. The question between them is what is reckoned and how. The Reformed answer is that Christ’s record of obedience is credited to the believer. The answer in How Atonement Works is that believers share Christ’s righteousness because they are in him, and that Christ himself is their righteousness (1 Corinthians 1:30).

Philippians 3:9, Romans 3:21, and 2 Corinthians 5:21

Three passages carry much of the debate. Romans 3:21 and 2 Corinthians 5:21 use the phrase “the righteousness of God,” and its meaning is contested. It may name God’s own righteousness and saving action, a righteous status he grants, or both together. In the Old Testament God’s righteousness stands beside his salvation: Isaiah sets the two in parallel (Isaiah 51:5), and the psalmist asks God to deliver him in his righteousness (Psalm 71:2). N. T. Wright reads Paul’s phrase as God’s covenant faithfulness, his keeping of his promises to save. The book’s appendix adopts that reading of Romans 3:21 as an interpretation of the text, one among several held by careful readers.

In Philippians 3:9 Paul wants to be found in Christ, having a righteousness that comes from God through faith, and not his own righteousness from the law. The same sentence speaks of gaining Christ, and the next verses speak of knowing him and sharing his sufferings and resurrection. The appendix reads this as righteousness located within belonging to Christ. It also grants that someone who holds imputation affirms that belonging too, so the union language of this verse leaves the case for imputation standing.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

2 Corinthians 5:21

In 2 Corinthians 5:21 the words “in him” name the relation in which believers become God’s righteousness. The verse sits in Paul’s account of the ministry of reconciliation, where he calls himself and his fellow workers “ambassadors for Christ” (5:20). Wright reads the second half of the verse as describing that ministry: the apostles embody God’s reconciling faithfulness. The conclusion of How Atonement Works applies the verse to all believers through their union with Christ.

The appendix also names the strongest text on the other side. Romans 5:18–19 ties the righteousness of the many directly to Christ’s obedience. Everyone in the discussion agrees that Christ’s obedience is essential. They differ on how Paul understood the connection between that obedience and the believer.

What the Scapegoat Shows

The book reads 2 Corinthians 5:21 against the Day of Atonement. On that day the high priest laid both hands on the live goat, confessed the people’s sins over it, and put them “upon the head of the goat,” so that “the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities” (Leviticus 16:21–22). Chris White reads Paul’s words “made him to be sin for us” in that light: God made Christ, who had no sin of his own, the one on whom our sin lay, and he carried it as the goat did. Peter says that Christ “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). The page What does it mean that Jesus bore our sins? follows that line of the book in more detail.

In Leviticus the sins went from the people to the goat, and nothing went from the goat to the people. The law states what the people received:

For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD.

Leviticus 16:30

They were cleansed and forgiven, and God’s presence remained among them. They did not receive the goat’s innocence as a credit, because the goat had done nothing. Chris White presents this as his reading of Leviticus 16, and he applies the same pattern to Christ. Our sins went onto him, and we are forgiven. The righteousness believers have comes to them another way, through their union with him.

Reformed readers also see a real transfer of sin in 2 Corinthians 5:21. They read the verse as an exchange running both ways, with Christ’s righteousness counted to believers as their sin was counted to him. Whether Christ’s bearing of sin meant that God punished him is a further question, taken up on the page Did God punish Jesus?

This question is one part of a larger account. How Atonement Works traces the Day of Atonement through the work of Christ: the blood, the high priest in heaven, the scapegoat that carried sins away, and the believer’s life in Christ. Its appendix compares imputed righteousness and union with Christ in detail.

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The Book’s Answer: Righteous in Him

Chris White’s position is a participatory account of righteousness. It belongs to a long Christian conversation, and many Christians hold the doctrine of imputation instead. In his account, being in Christ is how believers share Christ’s place before the Father.

Christ is in the holy of holies, at the throne that is the true mercy seat, and those who are in him are there with him. Hebrews says that believers have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Hebrews 10:19–20). The way into God’s presence is Christ himself, and those who come in by that way come in him. In the same prayer Jesus says that the Father has “loved them, as thou hast loved me” (John 17:23). The reconciled come to God in Christ, who is already there, and the Father receives them with the love he has for his Son.

Paul describes the result in Romans 5. Being justified by faith, believers have “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” and “access by faith into this grace wherein we stand” (Romans 5:1–2). In the book’s account their righteousness belongs to them in Christ, who is alive in God’s presence. That is why the book ties forgiveness so closely to the living high priest, a theme traced further in the resurrection and forgiveness.

Remaining in Him

The appendix separates two questions that are often joined: how righteousness is received, and whether it can be lost. Reformed theology teaches that those whom God justifies cannot finally lose that standing, and it grounds this in God’s preserving work: his election, Christ’s intercession, and the Spirit who abides in believers. The Lutheran Formula of Concord affirms imputed righteousness and also teaches that faith and salvation can be lost through willful sin. Imputation and final perseverance are therefore distinct claims, and union with Christ, on its own, leaves the second question open as well.

Chris White reads the warnings of the New Testament as real. Jesus said, “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered” (John 15:6). Hebrews says:

For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end.

Hebrews 3:14

Defenders of final perseverance read these warnings as the means by which God keeps his people, or as marks of genuine faith. The book reads them as conditions: forgiveness and access belong to those who remain in Christ. Chris White also argues that a debt fully paid, joined to the imputation of Christ’s obedience, gives the teaching that salvation cannot be lost its strongest logical footing, though many who hold penal substitution reject that teaching.

Remaining in Christ is a life of faith, and it makes no demand of sinless performance. John writes to believers “that ye sin not,” and then says, “if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). The danger the warnings describe is turning away from Christ. Believers may have present confidence grounded in God’s promises, the witness of the Spirit, and their continuing trust in Christ, and that confidence is a reason to keep coming to him.

Where This Understanding Comes From

The book states the doctrine of imputation from its own sources: the Westminster Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Lutheran Formula of Concord, and John Piper’s defense of the doctrine in Counted Righteous in Christ. The participatory reading draws on Morna Hooker’s studies of “interchange” in Paul, where Christ shares the human condition so that believers may share in his life, and on N. T. Wright’s essay on 2 Corinthians 5:21 and his covenantal reading of the righteousness of God, alongside the earlier work of Ernst Käsemann and Peter Stuhlmacher. Irenaeus, in the second century, already described the Word becoming what we are so that we might become what he is. The chapter on reconciliation builds on David M. Moffitt’s work on Hebrews and on Peter Orr and F. F. Bruce on Christ’s intercession. Jacob Milgrom’s study of Leviticus informs the book’s reading of the hand-laying rites. How Atonement Works credits all of this work.