by Ken Hamrick
A consistently realistic system of theology is one in which a parallel is found between our realistic union with Adam and our realistic union with Christ–the former being the ground of justice for our suffering the consequences of Adam’s sin, and the latter being the ground of justice for our being justified and saved by the life, death and resurrection of Christ. That is the position I have sought to put forward as the best understanding of Scripture.[1]
One criticism of the consistent realistic system, which occasionally arises and must be addressed, is that such a system is a rehash of the sixteenth-century error of Andreas Osiander that was universally rejected by the Church. Timothy Wengert has written a very detailed book, entitled, Defending Faith,[2] about the “reactions to and condemnations of [Osiander’s thought by] …Evangelical theologians of all sorts throughout the Holy Roman Empire… for the better part of the 1550’s.”[3]
Wengert states:
What stirred the blood of Osiander’s opponents more than anything else was his insistence that the absolution and the “mere” imputation of righteousness to the sinner did not constitute the true righteousness of justification by faith. Indeed, Osiander argued, God’s righteousness was divine, not human, and therefore had to come directly from Christ’s divine nature and not from some external word that, once spoken, faded away. For him, without direct contact with Christ’s divine righteousness, the soul could never become righteous. Osiander could not conceive of reality apart from a substantialist reality and thus not in what already in the sixteenth century was labeled a Hebraic way of construing reality relationally, since God is a person, that is, a God of conversation and community.[4]
Osiander failed to understand that humans cannot be made righteous with divine righteousness in itself. The reason for this is because righteousness cannot be transferred–it can only be shared through a substantial union of being between two who are the same kind of being. This is why Christ became a man and walked in our shoes, so to speak. With every step, He earned a perfect human righteousness through human actions that we should have done. Although the Son of God was divinely righteous from eternity past, that divine righteousness had to be worked out in a human life in the moment-by-moment attitudes and actions of a real man, in perfect conformity to the Law of God. It had to be a righteousness and a life lived in such a way that we could relate to it and identify with it because it fits our humanity and our need.
When Christ, by the indwelling Holy Spirit, comes into our being and is spiritually united to us, the two human lives become one in such a way as to give us a rightful ownership of all of His human deeds just as if we had lived His life, died His death and were raised in His resurrection. The two cannot be joined unless Christ was genuinely human, and His deeds cannot be credited to us as ours unless His deeds were human deeds. As human sinners, we need two things to attain heaven: a perfectly righteous human life from cradle to grave; and the human experience of having endured the complete wrath of God against sin, resulting in our death. Christ experienced both of these as a man, and so He brings the human personal history of these two things with Him to the union with believers, and we gain a saving ownership of that history by virtue of our realistic, identifying union with Him
By the Holy Spirit, Christ indwells us and unites with us in such a way that the two human lives are joined into one. When justice sees the new man in Christ, it sees the sum total of the combined life experiences of Jesus and of the believer. When justice looks to my sins, it simultaneously sees that this new man suffered the full wrath of God against sin by dying on the cross two thousand years ago. When justice looks to my failures to measure up to God’s righteousness for my entire life, it simultaneously sees that I lived a perfectly righteous life from manger to grave, died an obedient, sacrificial death, and have already been raised from the dead. But this mysterious combining of the two does not result in an equal status of the histories of both. Rather, as we are regenerated in Christ, we die to both our old life and our sin and failures, and are now alive in Christ. In this way, we not only gain an ownership of Christ’s righteous deeds, we are also now hidden in Him–not a mere merger but a gracious redemption by which our sins and failures and old identity no longer come up for judgment. When the Judge’s piercing gaze is set on me, He sees Christ in me and the case is closed.
It is Christ’s righteous human deeds by which I am justified, and it is an alien righteousness when I am abstractly viewed apart from Him; but by our blessed union, I am so concretely joined to Him that I can never be apart from Him. I have nothing of my own to offer the Judge as righteousness, but I have everything of Christ’s to offer! And Christ in me is the authority and the reality by which I, an undeserving sinner, now own all His human deeds. I was crucified in Christ, raised the third day, and am seated in Him in heavenly places while writing this; because who I now am includes He who did these things.
What Osiander got partly right was that “mere” imputation is not the reality of the righteousness that is ours in Christ–and this was especially true in the Old Testament, when men were justified by faith but justice was not yet satisfied. Though they were justified long before the birth and death of Christ, justice waited for Christ to be incarnated and suffer and die. Until the cross, justice was not satisfied, and the imputation of righteousness to believers was an interim measure done on God’s good credit, but one which depended on the full reality to be effected after Christ came and died–and rose again. The ground of the righteousness that is ours in Christ was still future until Christ had in reality lived a perfectly righteous human life and died an atoning death as a man–and after that, He was spiritually joined to those saints of old whom He led out of Sheol and into Heaven. Only after this union was justice satisfied and God shown to be both just and the justifier. The point is that imputation cannot be as the Nominalists understand it: an act of God’s will that supplies its own ground of justice. Rather, for imputation to be real, it must be grounded in substantial reality.
Wengert states that Osiander insisted that Jeremiah 23:6, “YWHW is our righteousness,” “because of its reference to the divine name (Yhwh), referred only to Christ’s divine nature.”[5] Wengert cites Johannes Aepinus as having “went after the heart of the matter […]
Indeed, the natures of Christ, which ought not to be mixed, are rightly distinguished, since God and the human being are one without confusion of substance but with unity of person. Each nature’s own properties are rightly attributed to each nature, since each may be considered per se. But nevertheless this must be done in such a way that the benefits of Christ in redemption and justification are not divided and that we do not say that he redeemed, justified and saved us according [to] one nature, so that these things be taken away from the other. [Responsio, 1552].[6]
While it is only Christ’s human righteousness that saves men, it becomes ours by an imputation grounded on the reality (either present or future) of the believer’s union with the person of Christ, to whom belongs a genuine human nature that possesses a human righteousness. We are united to His person, to whom both natures belong, and it is His person who redeems and justifies us, because to be joined to His person is to be joined to all that He inseparably is.
Aepinus argues, according to Wegert, above, that Christ does not save us according to one of His natures but according to His whole person. This is biblical and true. Since He performed all His deeds with His two natures inseparably united, where is the distinction? His divine righteousness was involved in all His humanly righteous deeds, in that His divine righteousness was worked out in every step of the way in the performance of all His deeds of human righteousness–righteous deeds performed by a man during his human life (and even in His death). In this way, we are justified and redeemed by both of His natures together, His human nature having supplied the human righteousness that we need, but doing so only by manifesting in the life of a man the divine righteousness that His divine nature provided. Divine righteousness is eternal and essential, while human righteousness is temporal and earned through works. Even when imputed to sinners, the righteousness of Christ cannot be abstracted from the human works of Jesus by which this righteousness was earned for us.
Therefore, the consistent Realistic position does not fall into the errors of Osiander, but rather, it opposes him on nearly all points. But Osiander’s error must caution Realists to maintain the unity of Christ’s natures when emphasizing the necessity of His human righteousness for our salvation. Realism’s truth, that only by a spiritual union within substantial reality can a moral union be justly grounded, is not in the category of Osiander’s error, because Realism does not require the separation of Christ’s natures and it does require His human righteousness.
[1] See “What is Realism in Plain Language?” at https://theforgottenrealist.blog/2023/04/12/what-is-realism-in-plain-language/ , “The Role of the Holy Spirit in Justification,” at https://theforgottenrealist.blog/2018/12/22/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-in-justification/ , “A Strong Argument for Traducianism,” at https://theforgottenrealist.blog/2020/04/02/a-strong-argument-for-traducianism/ and “It’s Time for New Thinking on Atonement,” at https://theforgottenrealist.blog/tag/series-its-time-for-new-thinking-on-atonement/ .
[2] Timothy J. Wengert, Defending Faith (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012)
[3] Ibid., p. 10.
[4] Ibid., pp. 72-73
[5] Ibid., p.93
[6] Ibid.
The forgotten Realist 