Think Wink.

I just finished reading an interview of Michael F. Bird by Trevor Wax. I really enjoyed the exchange and find myself liking Bird more and more. I really loved what he had to say about the relationship between union with Christ and imputation and justification.

Trevin Wax: How does the doctrine of imputation of Christ’s righteousness fit into Paul’s theology?

Michael Bird: This is a good question and I’ve thought much on this.
John Piper has presented a fairly thorough case for imputed righteousness. The problem I sometimes get with Piper is that in several of his exegetical displays (e.g. 1 Cor. 1.30, Rom. 4.4-5, 2 Cor. 5.21), I think he’s simply going a few steps further than what the text actually says, and you end up having to read a lot of stuff into the text for his argument to work.
In contrast, Wright can say that union with Christ gives you everything that imputation is ordinarily supposed to. That is fine, until you ask, “how does union with Christ result in me having a righteous status before God”?
My own approach has been to speak of “incorporated righteousness” whereby we are united to Christ by faith, and in that union God’s verdict against us is executed in the cross of Christ, and yet that verdict against us is transposed into God’s verdict for us in Christ’s resurrection. Jesus is justified by God in his resurrection and because we are in him, we too are justified.
So for me, union with Christ is absolutely central, and we need to relate justification to incorporation and participation in Christ. (I’m hoping to read Mike Horton’s book Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ soon because I hear that it represents another approach to combining the forensic and participatory aspects of justification).
Now if you take union with Christ, the representative nature of Adam and Christ, the language of reckoning, recognize that righteousness is a gift, etc., then the only way to hold it together in my mind is with some kind of theology of imputation.
So, I don’t think that any single text in the New Testament speaks of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to believers, but spread throughout the New Testament we find the ingredients for it when taken collectively. (I really do recommend Brian Vickers’ book, Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Imputation, for a judicious and sober account on imputation that approaches the subject much like the way I’m suggesting here!)
In the end, I would say that “imputation is a corollary of union with Christ”. Now to any in the Reformed spectrum who think that that is not a good enough a statement, I will simply plead that what I have just written is a direct quote from Leon Morris’ book, Apostolic Preaching of the Cross!

More Thoughts On N. T. Wright’s Justification

Waters on Wright

Isaiah 53:11 and 2 Corinthians 5:21