Imputation

The God who credits

To impute is to credit something to someone's account. Scripture's words for it are the Hebrew chashav (חָשַׁב) and the Greek logizomai (λογίζομαι), to count or reckon, like an entry in a ledger; logizomai comes eleven times in Romans 4 alone, where the BSB renders it ‘credit’ and ‘count’.

And David speaks likewise of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: “Blessed are they whose lawless acts are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.”

Romans 4:6-8

Paul wrote to Philemon about the runaway slave Onesimus, "if he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge it to my account" (Philemon 1:18). Moving another's debt onto one's own account is the picture. In Christ God was "not counting men’s trespasses against them" (2 Corinthians 5:19), because he counted them to Christ.

Reformed theology gathers what Scripture says into a threefold imputation. Adam's sin is counted to his descendants: "through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners" (Romans 5:19). Our sin is counted to Christ: "the LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6). And Christ's righteousness is counted to believers: God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, "so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). So Paul longed to be found in Christ, "not having my own righteousness from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ" (Philippians 3:9). On the first, see guilt; on the third, the righteousness of God.

How the church came to say it

The Reformers put imputation at the centre of their teaching on justification. In his lectures on Galatians Martin Luther taught that Christian righteousness consists of two things, faith in the heart and God's reckoning of that faith as righteousness Luther, Lectures on Galatians. John Calvin said that justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of Christ's righteousness Calvin, Institutes 3.11. The Heidelberg Catechism confesses it in the first person:

yet God, without any merit of mine, of mere grace, grants and imputes to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, as if I had never committed nor had any sin, and had myself accomplished all the obedience which Christ has fulfilled for me

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 60

The Westminster Confession says that God justifies "not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins" and by imputing Christ's obedience and satisfaction to them Westminster Confession 11.1.

Where the traditions differ

The Catholic Church teaches that justification is not only the forgiveness of sins but the inward renewal of the person by grace poured into the heart, and the Council of Trent condemned the claim that we are justified by the imputation of Christ's righteousness alone Council of Trent, Decree on Justification. The Orthodox churches speak of salvation chiefly as union with Christ and sharing in God's life, so this courtroom language is not central for them, and they hold that what we inherit from Adam is death and corruption rather than guilt Romanides, The Ancestral Sin. The Reformation churches also teach inward renewal, but as sanctification, which always accompanies justification and is never its ground.

Evangelicals explain imputation in slightly different ways. The Westminster Confession is careful to say that God does not count faith itself, or the act of believing, as our righteousness. John Wesley held that what Christ has done and suffered is the only meritorious cause of our acceptance, yet faith may be said to be counted for righteousness as its sole condition; and he added, "We may observe here, forgiveness, not imputing sin, and imputing righteousness, are all one" Wesley. Both views stand on this: we are accepted by God for Christ's sake alone. See also What is justification?