For those interested in the Bible and especially Pauline thought, Bible scholar Daniel Kirk has written an article entitled “Nothing but the blood,” a reference to the title of this classic Evangelical hymn, which contains the line:
This is all my righteousness, nothing but the blood of Jesus.
Dr. Kirk’s essay is an exegetical defense of an allowable minority opinion within the Westminster Assembly, which the Westminster Confession was specifically crafted to allow for. Daniel has also written an informative and thought-provoking series of blog posts on this subject. For easy reference, here is the series entitled “Cruciform Justification (P)Redux”
You can also listen to an interview with Dr. Kirk via flash player here.
Personally, I think Dr. Kirk’s contributions are especially helpful for a couple of reasons. The first is because he keeps us close to the text of the Bible, a virtue I find fast disappearing in my own circles. Church history has its place but if the issue is not to be settled by exegesis, then we are not God’s friends and have no business talking about him like we know him.
The second reason because it helps deal with pastoral confusion. We constantly are told to preach “Christ crucified” and we do. When good Friday and Easter come around we really hit on the Gospel. We never preach Jesus’ life that way. No one ever says, after preaching say, Jesus being resisting Satan’s tempations in the wilderness, or raising Lazarus from the dead, “This is all our hope and trust. Only Jesus’ past acts of resisting temptation and raising the dead along with his whole record of doing good can wash away our sins.” This would be nonsense. If we tell people that all their righteousness is found in the blood of Jesus, and then tell them that, actually, it was thirty years of perfect obedience, we are seriously complicating the Gospel message that our people believe.
That is my opinion, at any rate. Jesus blood is sufficient for the full forgiveness of sins and therefore for complete righteous standing before God. Jesus’ own faithfulness is all-important, but it doesn’t function in the story the way the death and resurrection of Jesus functions. To insist on moving it to a different place in the story invites unnecessary confusion.
By the way, I do think that the imputation of the active obedience of Christ does seem to be a natural part of Christ’s office as our representative. I would affirm the doctrine itself on broad theological inferences (as opposed to mangled exegesis). But what bothers me is the claim that there is some special need for Christ’s obedience. As if the blood really only does a partial job. No, “this is all my righteousness, nothing but the blood of Jesus.” I hold to what I confess in song. And it is what I preach and teach.
Related blogs:
We should talk about what is important before deciding to kill each other over words.
So glad to see you linking to my good friend Daniel Kirk!…but you called him Daniel Fuller in the first paragraph.
Weird. I’ll probably never live that down.
It was probably a Freudian slip.