extent that the bare notion of remission does not express, nor does it of itself imply, the concept of justification. The latter means not simply that the person is free from guilt but is accepted as righteous; he is declared to be just. In the judicially constitutive and in the declarative sense he is righteous in God’s sight. In other words, it is the positive judgment on God’s part that gives to justification its specific character.81
The righteousness that God bestows on those in Christ occurs instantaneously, being a forensic declaration that one is now considered both forgiven and righteous. It is a consequence of being placed into Christ. This righteousness must not be confused with that which the apostle refers to in texts like Romans 8:3–4, where the righteousness is not forensic, but concerns the believer’s progressive sanctification. In regard to justification, the only ones who may dwell in his presence are those who meet the necessary criteria, namely, possessing righteousness and being forgiven for sin, as the Psalmist said, “O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill? He who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart” (Ps 15:1–2). Wright, however, maintains that forgiveness and membership of the covenant is sufficient:
Paul can assume that “reckoning righteousness apart from works and “not reckoning sin against someone” are equivalents. The covenant, we must always remind ourselves, was there to deal with sin; when God forgives sin, or reckons someone within the covenant [=justifies], these are functionally equivalent. They draw attention to different aspects of the same event.82
He holds no punches in regard to the imputation of righteousness, maintaining it to be impossible, even nonsense:
To imagine the defendant somehow receiving the judge’s righteousness is simply a category mistake. That is not how the language works . . . If and when God does act to vindication his people, his people will then, metaphorically speaking, have the status of ‘righteousness. That makes no sense all.83
He again states:
If we use the language of the law-court, it makes no sense whatsoever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across a courtroom.84
We must not forget that any analogy can be taken to extremes and caricatured. We need to heed the words of Carson, commenting on a popular caricature of the courtroom analogy:
In certain crucial ways, human law courts, whether contemporary or ancient Hebrew courts, are merely analogical models and cannot highlight one or two crucial distinctions that are necessarily operative when the judge is God. In particular, both the contemporary judge and the judge in the Hebrew law court is an administrator of a system. To take the contemporary court: in no sense has the criminal legally offended judge . . . the crime has been ‘against the state’ or ‘against the people’ or ‘against the laws of the land.’ In such a system, for the administrator of the system, the judge, to take the criminal’s place would be profoundly unjust; it would be a perversion of the justice required by the system, of which the judge is the sworn administrator. But when God is the judge, the offence is always and necessarily against him. He is never the administrator of a system external to himself; he is the offended party as well as the impartial judge. To force categories of merely human courts onto these uniquely divine realities is bound to lead to distortion.85
Wright has forced categories that are applicable to human courts onto the court of God, this has resulted in a gross distortion of justification. Campbell cuts to the chase, aptly summing up the implications of Wright’s understanding of justification:
For all its laboured originality, this theory completely fails to escape the gravitational pull of the religion of self-justification. Wright’s basic thrust is that justification is no legal fiction: the believer is righteous, but when all is said and done it is our own personal righteousness. It is inherent, not imputed. We are asked to stand on the rock of our own covenant-keeping. Could that have given Martin Luther peace? Could it give any of us peace? On the contrary, our hope would ebb and flow with every rise and fall in the tide of our personal spirituality.86
To suggest that the righteousness which justifies is like an object, substance or a gas87 is to grossly misconstrue the teaching. It needs to be emphasized that it is not God’s intrinsic or essential righteousness that is imputed to the believer, but the righteousness secured by Christ in his redemptive work. In Wright’s depiction of the courtroom, there is only the judge and the defendant in attendance, when, in fact, there are three persons, a judge, a defendant, and a third party, who is Christ. Indeed, the “Reformers and their heirs labored the point that it is Christ’s successful fulfilment of the trial of the covenant representative that is imputed or credited to all who believe. His meritorious achievement, not God’s own essential righteousness, is imputed.”88 Unlike God’s own essential righteousness, that righteousness secured by Christ’s covenantal obedience did not always exist. It is the result of what the third-party in the court has done on behalf of the defendant, and it is this that constitutes that which is imputed. About Wright’s deficient portrayal of justification, Horton states, “Wright’s account so far does not seem to allow for an inheritance to be actually given to anyone in particular. Justification may be forensic (that is, judicial), but there can be no transfer of assets, if you will, from a faithful representative to the ungodly.”89
Wright again tells us that justification arises out of the believer’s covenant membership. It is a declaration that one is in covenant with God. The problem with this is, to use the proverbial saying, “it puts the cart before the horse.” He limits justification to a relationship that has already been established when it is justification is that establishes the relationship. There can be no membership of the new covenant without it, as Gathercole tells us, “God’s act of justification is not one of recognition but is, rather, closer to creation. It is God’s determination of our new identity rather than a recognition of it.”90
Those who are justified have peace with God, “therefore, since we have been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also received access into this faith in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Rom 5:1). Such justification did not only apply after Christ, for Paul uses Abraham as an example. If, as Wright maintains, justification means that one belongs to the covenant, and if this was the position of Israel, then he seems to be saying that all had peace with God. To put this in the form of a syllogism:
• Justification means one is a member of the covenant
• Being a member of the covenant means having peace with God
• All Israelites were members of the old covenant
• Therefore, all Israelites had peace with God
Yet we know that it was only the remnant who had peace with God, even though all Israel belonged to the old covenant. Far from knowing the peace of God, the nation found itself under God’s wrath.
God is Just
Many ask the question: “Is not God unjust for allowing an innocent
