I don’t think Brett’s post can be emphasized enough.

Now think about it. How can the de facto leader of Reformedom have a conference on the atonement and never teach on the resurrection?

I recently heard a a poptheological radio show where there was a great deal of emphasis on the essential importance of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ (a claim which I agree with, for what it is worth). But this wasn’t just true. It was essential to the Gospel so that anyone who denied it or even failed to affirm it (or who even failed to agree with how essential it is? or who refused to join them in their crusade in exposing those who “denied the Gospel” in this way?) was in fact compromised and (at least in danger of) preaching another gospel which is no gospel at all.

To complete the education of listeners, the slogan was repeated that we are saved “by the doing and dying of Christ”–by his life of obedience imputed to us and by his death (which is still somehow necessary even though, through the imputation of Christ’s active obedience, we are regarded as having lived totally sinless lives). This was the shorthand which the radio personalities were insistent that we hang onto in order to be people who believed the true Gospel as opposed to a false Gospel.

Well, I don’t mean to come across as “Biblicist” or anything, but I think we’ve got plenty of theological shorthands in the Bible for how to think of the work of Christ as it has bearing on our salvation, and these shorthands are not pointed toward a life of vicarious obedience culminating in a vicarious dath, but are pointed toward a vicarious death and a legally representative resurrection which is our vindication before God’s justice.

• Romans 1.1-4: Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God–which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures–the Gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.
• Romans 4.23-25: But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
• Romans 5.8-10: God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
• Romans 6.1-11: What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
• Romans 10.9: if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
• First Corinthians 15.1-4: Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
• First Corinthians 15.14-17: And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have tesitified about God the he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.
• Second Corinthians 5.14, 15: For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
• Ephesians 1.16-23: I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
• Ephesians 2.1-6: And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
• Colossians 2.11-13: In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.
• Philippians 3.8-11: Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
• Second Timothy 2.8: Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel

More could be cited. I didn’t even bother to go through the sermons on Acts which would probably double this list. Over and over the story of the Gospel and the source of our salvation in Christ is found in his death and resurrection, or his death, resurrection, and ascension.

There is another group of texts that, instead of centering on the death and resurrection of Christ, simply focus on his death. But where do we find anyone teaching people or relating a slogan that is equivalent to “the doing and dying of Christ.”

Nowhere.

In fact, this sort of advocacy can only lead to widespread skepticism toward that very doctrine among those who honor the Bible as the Word of God. Instead of merely arguing that the imputation of the active obedience of Christ is true, it is presented as absolutely essential to any true presentation of the Gospel. This raises the bar rather high. In that case one must find the doctrine taught or assumed in every passage which is intended to present the Gospel message. Teaching this as a needed slogan is an open declaration of the insufficiency of the Scriptures to clearly teach the essentials of salvation.

How have we gotten ourselves in this horrible postion? Truly John Wiliamson Nevin’s 1846 riposte to Charles Hodge has still not been heard even to this day:

Justification, to be real, must also be concrete–the force and value of Christ’s merit brought nigh to the sinner as a living fact. Strange, that there should seem to be any contradiction here, between the grace which we have by Christ’s death, and the grace that comes to us through his life. Could the sacrifice of Calvary be of any avail to take away sins, if the victim there slain had not been raised again for our justification, and were not now seated at the right hand of God our Advocate and Intercessor? Would the atonement of a dead Christ be of more worth than the blood of bulls and goats, to purge the conscience from dead works and give it free access to God? Surely it is the perennial, indissoluble life of the once-crucified Redeemer, which imparts to his broken body and shed blood all their power to abolish guilt… Abstract it [the sacrifice of Christ] from this, and it becomes in truth a mere legal fiction. The atonement, in this view [Nevin’s] is a quality or property of the glorified life of the Son of man.

POSTSCRIPT

I suppose I had better repeat that I do in fact believe and teach that Christ’s faithful life is reckoned as ours–imputed to us. Both Daniel Kirk and Norman Shepherd have recently written excellent and well-reasoned correctives to the way the doctrine is usually presented or grounded in Scripture, and early Reformers like Zacharias Ursinus as well as some Calvinists at the Westminster Assembly had no need for the doctrine at all, but I still think the doctrine is true. Two men who have articulated what seem to me to be weighty reasons for affirming the imputation of Christ’s active obedience are N. T. Wright and Rich Lusk.

In a word, I think the imputation of the active obedience of Christ is an aspect of union with Christ and/or Christ’s representative headship as king.

N. T. Wright has written that for Paul (and, no doubt, for Wright as well), Xpistos bears an “incorporative” meaning: “Paul regularly uses the word to connote, and sometimes even denote, the whole people of whom the Messiah is the representative” (boldface added).

But why should “Messiah” bear such an incorporative sense? Clearly, because it is enemic in the understanding of kingship, in many societies and certainly in ancient Israel, that the king and the people are bound together in such a way that what is true of the one is true in principle of the other.

Wright elaborates:

In Romans 6.11, the result of being baptized “into Christ”… is that one is now “in Christ,” so that what is true of him is true of the one baptized–here, death and resurrection. This occurs within the overall context of the Adam-Christ argument of chapter 5, with its two family solidarities; the Christian has now left the old solidarity (Romans 6.6) and entered the new one. 6.23 may be read by analogy with 6.11; whose who are “in Christ” receive the gift of the life of the new age, which is already Christ’s in virtue of his resurrection–that is, which belongs to Israel’s representative, the Messiah in virtue of his having drawn Israel’s climactic destiny on to himself. Similarly, in Romans 8.1, 2 the point of the expression “in Christ” is that what is true of Christ is true of his people: Christ has come through the judgment of death and out into the new life which death can no longer touch (8.3-4; 8.10-11), and that is now predicated of those who are “in him.” In Galatians 3.26 the ex-pagan Christians are told that they are all sons of God (a regular term for Israel…) in Christ, through faith. It is because of who the Messiah is–the true seed of Abraham, and so on–that Christians are this too, since they are “in” him. Thus in v. 27, explaining this point, Paul speaks of being baptized “into” Christ and so “putting on Christ,” with the result that (3.28) [translating Wright’s reproduction of Paul’s Greek here:] you are all one in Christ Jesus. It is this firm conclusion, with all its overtones of membership in the true people of God, the real people of Abraham, that is then expressed concisely in 3.29 with the genitive [again translating]: and if you are of Christ… When we consider Galatians 3 as a whole, with its essentially historical argument from Abraham through Moses to the fulfillment of God’s promises in the coming of Christ, a strong presupposition is surely created in faovor both of reading Xpistos as “Messaiah,” Israel’s representative, and of understanding the incorporative phrases at the end of the chapter as gaining their meaning from this sens. Because Jesus is the Messiah, he sums up his people in himself, so that what is true of him is true of them (pp. 47-48; boldface added).

Rich Lusk similarly writes,

If I am in Christ, he is my substitute and representative. All he suffered and accomplished was for me. All he has belongs to me.

With regards to justification, this means my right standing before the Father is grounded in Christ’s own right standing before the Father. So long as I abide in Christ, I can no more come under the Father’s negative judgment than Jesus himself can!

I have this assurance because Jesus died in my stead, taking the penalty my sins deserved to secure my forgiveness. On the third day, he was raised to life for my justification. His resurrection was his own justification, as the Father reversed the Jewish and Gentile death sentences passed against him. But it was the justification of all those who are in him as well. He was raised up on the basis of his flawless obedience to the Father. Death could not hold him because he was a righteous man. His status is now my status…

And again:

the verdict the Father passes over the Son in the form of the resurrection is grounded upon his perfect obedience. The imputed verdict brings with it the perfect record of obedience upon which the verdict was based. Thus, … the imputation of Christ’s active and passive obedience, as well as the resurrection, [are] internal to the doctrine of justification.

The point to remember is that Christ’s resurrection was the declaration of a verdict–a forensic act. Jesus was “justified by the Spirit” (First Timothy 3.16) in his resurrection (cf Romans 8). But he was justified as our representative so that “he was raised for our justification” (Romans 4.25) so that there “is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8.1). And that verdict, of course, overturns the (false) basis given for Jesus’ condemnation. It is a declaration over Jesus’ whole life that he did not sin but was completely faithful to the Father. If that verdict is shared with believers, then it means that Christ’s faithfulness is credited to them in that shared verdict. Christ’s obedience is imputed to them.

Furthermore, Lusk has also pointed out,

This doctrine is not new, even if it has been obscured and overshadowed. For example, Henrich Heppe paraphrases the view of Caspar Olevianus in this way in Reformed Dogmatics, 498-499:

[T]his first exaltation of Christ (i.e., the resurrection) . . . is itself a practical declaring righteous of all those who are aroused to faith in Christ. Just as by giving the Son to death the Father actually condemned all our sins in him, the Father also by raising Christ up from the dead, acquitted Christ of our sin-guilt and us in Christ (Olevian, pp. 76-77). So Christ’s resurrection is our righteousness, because God further regards us in the perfection in which Christ rose. Whereas the Father regarded us previously in the dying Son as sinners, He sees us now in the resurrected Son as righteous; or rather; whereas previously He regarded the Son in our sins as sinner, He regards Him now, and us in Him, as the person which He is, and which He is not for Himself [only] but for us [as well] (Olevian, p. 80).

In other words, Olvianus viewed the cross and resurrection as forensic events. In the cross, Christ is condemned as a sinner in our stead; in the resurrection, he enters into a state of vindication for us. It should be easy enough to see how Olvianus’ view arises from exegesis of passages like Rom. 4:25 and 1 Tim. 3:16. Further evidence of Olevianus’ single-minded preoccupation with the death and resurrection of Christ as the basis of our justification may be found in consulting his book, A Firm Foundation: An Aid to Interpreting the Heidelberg Catechism, translated and edited by Lyle Bierma, pages 111-112.

One of the Satanic ironies (“satan” = “false accuser of the brethren”) is that someone within the Reformed world who has done a great deal to actually root the imputation of the active obedience of Christ in the Holy Scriptures as they actually speak is being treated as an enemy of the doctrine. But God is faithful. He will vindicate Rich in the face of all his adversaries.