This is the seventh and final installment of this series; here are the links to the previous installments:
As we have seen throughout the presentation and discussion of the instances of λογιζομαι in literature contemporary with the New Testament, the preponderant (by a scholarly mile) meaning of the verb is that the verb refers to what someone is thinking of as a mental representation of the reality they are witnessing. It is incredibly rare to find instances where the imputation understanding (seeing in someone something that is not there that must be given from an outside/alien source) can be foisted upon the verb, and even in some of these instances (such as the quotations of Gen 15:6 and 31:15) do not hold up to exegetical scrutiny. This is only where one area Reformed theology is being refuted; much of contemporary biblical scholarship is rejecting the "legal fiction" reading of many key texts. Consider the following scholarly dismissal of the traditional Reformed reading of LXX Deut 25:1, a text often cited to support forensic justification:
Deuteronomy 25:1--ἐὰν δὲ γένηται ἀντιλογία ἀνὰ μέσον ἀνθρώπων καὶ προσέλθωσιν εἰς κρίσιν καὶ κρίνωσιν καὶ δικαιώσωσιν τὸν δίκαιον καὶ καταγνῶσιν τοῦ ἀσεβοῦς: "Now if there is a dispute between men and they enter into litigation and (the judges) rule and they give justice to the righteous and pass sentence on the impious." the sense is difficult to determine. It could mean "to declare righteous the righteous one," but besides being redundant, the righteous do not go to court to get a simple declaration, they go to see and get justice (flogging, in this text). On the other hand, "to find righteous" works well because it stands nicely antithetic to καταγιγνωσκω. The emphasis, nevertheless, focuses on the action that the judges impose, not what they find. (Chris VanLandingham, Judgment and Justification in Early Judaism and the Apostle Paul [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006], 257)
The soteriological implications of this is immense—when we read of a person being “credited with righteousness,” it is not a legal fiction, but, as in the case of Phinehas in Psa 106:30-31 and elsewhere, it is due to their truly being made, not simply declared, righteous, and one can see baptism being the instrumental means of one being made righteous (cf. Rom 6:1-4 [and other key texts such as Acts 2:38] where it is through the instrumental means of water baptism one is cleansed by the Spirit of God and engrafted into Christ), something that is nicely summarised by the following:
The explanatory γαρ in 6:5 links the verse with his previous comments about the believer’s death with Christ through water-baptism in 6:3-4. His argument appears to be that believers died to sin and should no longer live under its power (6:2). Their water-baptism proves that they participate in the death of Jesus and experience a spiritual death to the power of sin (6:3). Therefore, Paul concludes that believers have been buried with Jesus through their participation in water-baptism, a baptism that identifies them with the death of Jesus (their representative [5:12-21]) and thereby kills the power of sin in their lives, so that they would live with Jesus in the resurrection just as Jesus presently lives in the power of his physical resurrection (6:4). Believers who died to the power of sin by being baptized into Jesus’ death will certainly (αλλα και) participate in a physical resurrection just as Jesus died and resurrected, because those who died to the power of sin (just as Jesus died = τω ομοιωματι του θανατου αυτου) will participate in a future resurrection (just as Jesus has already been resurrected) (6:5). (Jarvis J. Williams, Christ Died for Our Sins: Representation and Substitution in Romans and their Jewish Martyrological Background [Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick Publications, 2015], 178).
Far from supporting Reformed theology, a careful lexical analysis of λογιζομαι refutes such an unbiblical soteriology while it supports Latter-day Saint soteriology. Again, far from being “unbiblical,” if any theology can be labelled (though not within a since of legal fiction . . . ) “biblical Christianity,” it is “Mormonism,” not Reformed theology.