“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
(Blaise Pascal/ 1623-1662)

Not much to say about the last part. Garcia provides some pretty solid formulations. But the idea that these exclude someone like Rich Lusk is simply power play (one, I’m not convinced Garcia really wants to make). It has no basis in anything substantial.

Garcia want to safe guard that the righteous verdict we have in Christ is properly Christ’s and not ours. The only problem with this is that the claim that there is danger of confusion on this issue is simply made up. There is no danger. Wright doesn’t do it. Hays, whatever problems he may have, doesn’t do it. None of these poeple are Osiander. Lusk is quite the opposite. In fact, he is quite the Calvinist.

On the top of page 248, Garcia has a nice statement on how the order of union in salvation is not the same as the union of the natures in the incarnation. I’m glad he sees this, but it undermines his paper, in my opinion.

Instead of saying anything more, I will simply close with a really nice piece by Rich Lusk:

This justification requires no transfer or imputation of anything. It does not force us to reify “righteousness” into something that can be shuffled around in heavenly accounting books. Rather, because I am in the Righteous One and the Vindicated One, I am righteous and vindicated. My in-Christ-ness makes imputation redundant. I do not need the moral content of his life of righteousness transferred to me; what I need is a share in the forensic verdict passed over him at the resurrection. Union with Christ is therefore the key.

Note well, this does not downplay the significance of the active obedience. Without it, Jesus’ body would still be in the tomb. But to be precise, I am not justified by a legal transfer of his “obedience points” to my account. I am justified because the status he has as The Sinless One, and now as The Crucified and Vindicated One, has been bestowed upon me as well.

Allow me to illustrate. Suppose a woman is in deep, deep debt and has no means at her disposal to pay it off. Along comes an ultra wealthy prince charming. Out of grace and love, he decides to marry her. He covers her debt. But then he has a choice to make about how he will care for his bride. After canceling out her debt, will he fill up her account with his money? That is to say, will he transfer or impute his own funds into an account that bears her name? Or will he simply make his own account a joint account so it belongs to both of them?

In the former scenario, there is an imputation, a transfer. In the second scenario, the same final result is attained, but there is no imputation, strictly speaking. Rather, there is a real union, a marriage.

I would suggest the first picture (the imputation picture) is not necessarily wrong, though it could leave adherents exposed to the infamous “legal fiction” charge since the man could transfer money into the woman’s account without ever marrying her or even caring for her. It could become, as Wright has said, “a cold piece of business.”

The second picture (the union with Christ picture) seems more consistent with Paul’s language, and for that matter, with many of Calvin’s statements. It does not necessarily employ the “mechanism” of imputation to accomplish justification, but gets the same result. Just as one can get to four by adding three plus one or two plus two, or just as one can get home by traveling Route A or by Route B, so there may be more than one way to conceive of the doctrine of justification in a manner that preserves its fully gracious and forensic character.

For Calvin, the central motif of Pauline theology is not “imputation,” but union with Christ….

In my opinion, this is all the answer that needs to be made.

OK, I just read through part 3. What has this to do with anything that Garcia has said? There is great stuff showing Calvin’s view of Union with Christ. Then there is stuff showing Osiander’s weird view of ubiquity and the communication of attributes. Has Garcia shown that anyone he is criticizing holds to Osiander’s view? Just the opposite. For Hays he thinks that the union might be purely imaginary. How can this have anything to do with Lutheran ubiquity? The comparison makes no sense at all.

OK, I’m done through part two. Nothing else to report except Garcia tries again to tie Chalcedonian issues (God and man in one person with two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation) with the issue of union between persons (i.e. Adam and humanity, David and Israel, Christ and believers, husband and wife).

I think Garcia raises some good questions about Hays on pp. 223-225. However, he uses this to say that Hays and Wright must deal with pre-modern questions of “substance and nature.”

No. Substance and nature are questions raised about the union between the divine and the human in the man Jesus. They are not the same as questions about how David incorporated Israel or Jesus incorporates the Church.

Garcia also chooses this time to ask if the participation between believers and Christ is imaginary. I have a hard time believing this does justice to Hays, but it is certainly rather blunt and undeserved put down to mention this in relation to Wright. And since Lusk and Garlington have also been included in this mix, it is hard to believe that these are really well thought out questions. Other than raising a bunch of suspicions in the minds of those who don’t read Lusk or giving fodder to those who have already decided he is the Enemy, I don’t see much point in raising the possibility.

On the bottom of page 225 Wright is said to have an “ambiguous relationship” to “orthodox Christology.”

Wright has made claims about Christ’s self-consciousness that invite criticism. But Wright’s Chalcedonian orthodoxy has been seen again and again. Jesus is Yahweh, the God of Israel. He has personal pre-existence before his birth in Bethlehem. He has defended the Ecumenical Creeds as applying the truth revealed in the Bible to the philosophical needs of their day, coming up with true formulas.

The fact that Wright doesn’t believe that the man Jesus knew he was God in the same way that Wright knows he is human does not open up the door for people to make these false accusations in the face of Wright’s clear testimony to the contrary–a testimony and defense he makes in quarters where the Westminster Theological Journal, believe it or not, is not widely read.

The question Wright is addressing is how omniscience relates to the person of Jesus in his earthly ministry. When Jesus said he did not know the day or the hour of Jerusalem’s destruction, are we to assume that he was lying? [Addendum: When Luke claims Jesus grew in knowledge, are we to disbelieve him? Are we to tell people that, when the Gospel writers claim Jesus was sleeping, it wasn’t real sleep because God can never fail to be fully conscious?]

If Jesus can in some sense be ignorant of a future date, then how is a claim that Jesus didn’t know who he was from remembering, say, commanding the angels to guard Elijah, some sort of permission slip to question his Christological orthodoxy? Garcia goes on to say how kind he is being because others have made even balder assertions, but it doesn’t make his claims credible.

While he agrees that the “incorporative motif is clearly prominent in Paul, ” he asks, naming N. T. Wright and his conclusions, “How might the relationship of the Messiah and those incorporated into him be expressed theologically, that is, in conversation with the language and thought forms of catholic Christology? What kind of union-incorporation is in view? Within the reality of this union-incorporation, can we still speak of Christ, in any sense, as other than ourselves. If so, how does this affect the reality of the union. In Wright, as in most participants in the discussion, this question is left (to date at least) without elucidation.”

Umm. Maybe Wright’s material has not left Garcia to cognitive rest. I welcome his attempts to get Wright or others to elucidate more clearly what they mean. However, it is quite clear from Wright’s early work on Paul’s theology that confusion of persons is not remotely in view. Wright’s analogy and foundation for his view of Jesus’ representative function is that of the relationship between King David and the people of Israel. Now, I’m quite willing to hear calls for clarification in how we formulate that relationship, but it simply is not cogent to claim that Wright has left a big question mark in his writings so that we can rationally ask: “Within the reality of this union-incorporation, can we still speak of King David, in any sense, as other than the people of Israel?”

It simply does not make sense to ask such a question and it would frankly a pejorative assertion about Wright’s material to assert that it raises this sort of concern. Wright knows that David and Joab are two different people. He knows that he and Christ are two different people

On the top of p. 222 in the WTJ, Garcia says some really good things.  But he seems to be forgetting the distinction between a theological qualm and an exegetical one (though I  imagine he could say the same of those he is criticizing).  The bottom line is, does logizomai mean “impute” or not?  The answer is that if “impute” is a synonym for “reckon” or “ascribe” then, yes, it is fine.  But if one wants “impute” to be inherently transitive–a transfer term–then it is missing.  And we ought to develop a theology that at least allows itself to be expressed in the Bible’s terminology rather than our own.

It is  hard for me to see how Garcia can do justice to this without doing an exegetical paper rather than a theological inquiry about Christology.  So far he seems quite aware of these issues (and I’m sure he is), but his readers may not be.

So far, it looks like my earier comments (one, two) were dead on. The move to Christology is utterly arbitrary and unrelated to anything. Union with the first Adam and union with the second do no raise the sort of questions in Christology which Garcia wishes to treat as central.

Garcia writes of D. A. Carson’s “vigorous defense of imputation.” Carson’s defense was excellent. It was no different in substance from Rich Lusk and Peter Leithart. I highly recommend it–except for the deceptive pretense that this represents some great stand against enemies of imputation. That is simply a tribal rationale for warfare, not anything remotely related to the substance of what Dr. Carson articulated.

Here are some things I have written on Carson and the essay which Garcia sites:

• “Garver on Wright”: talks about both why Carson is so good and so bad (good: rational and exegetical on imputation/ bad: barbaric to the level of a blogger in dealing with Don Garlington.
• “Impute means Ascribe, Reckon, Regard, Attribute”: touches on Carson.
• “Seed Imputed from an Alien Source”

More as I read.

One more thing.

For Osiander, the righteousness was not a legal status but a moral quality. This is again light years away from anything Lusk has taught. In fact, the Mississippi Valley Presbytery/Guy Waters Papal pronouncement is that FV is aberrant because it speaks of the righteousness we have in Christ as a shared status we get from him. So I’m not the only one who sees this. When Calvin condemns Osiander for saying believers are justified because an essentially divine righteousness is given to them, it isn’t because Osiander is speaking of a forensic verdict.