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 party to be punished for the sins of others?” Christ was innocent, and to maintain, as some do, that God then punished our sins in his flesh is to call God’s justice into question because a righteous judge would not punish an innocent party for the sins of another, “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the LORD” (Prov 17:15).
Caricaturing the analogy occurs when one makes a like-for-like comparison of the things being compared without allowing for the differences that might exist between them. For example, the human court analogy can only go so far in drawing out certain principles. It must not be pressed too far. There are aspects of God’s judgment that simply do not fit with our human categories. When Jesus was punished in our stead he was not an unrelated third-party. It is not as if one who is separate from us suffered for our wrongdoing. No, Christ, because of our union with him and his union with us, became liable for the consequences of our sins. It is a union which ensures that God the Father views Christ and his people as constituting one body, Christ being the head, and we his members. As John Owen puts it:
[God] might punish the elect either in their own persons, or in their surety standing in their room and stead [as their substitute]; and when he is punished, they also are punished [in their representative]: for in this point of view the federal head and those represented by him are not considered as distinct, but as one; for although they are not one in respect of personal unity, they are, however, one,-that is, one body in mystical union, yea one mystical Christ;-namely, the surety is the head, those represented by him the members; and when the head is punished, the members also are punished.91
In the application of redemption, our union with Christ was communicated to us when God effectively called us into fellowship with himself at a point in time (1 Cor 1:9). Having said this, in another sense, one can say that our union with Christ began before the foundation of the world in the covenant of redemption, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Eph 1:3-5). It is important to realize