Friday, February 18, 2022

Robert Gundry on the Problems with the Traditional Reformed Understanding of 2 Corinthians 5:21

  

In 2 Cor 5:21 the making of him who did not know sin to be sin on our behalf refers again to the expiatory, propitiatory death of Christ, for which his sinlessness qualified him (cf. 1 Pet 3:18); and our becoming the righteousness of God in him refers to the attained purpose of that death, viz., God’s counting as righteousness the faith that united us to the Christ who died for us. We do not become the sinlessness of Christ, much less his righteousness, by having it imputed to us as a moral accomplishment on his part and our behalf. We become God’s righteousness, but not God’s righteousness as a moral quality. Just as in Gal 3;13 Christ “became” a curse in the sense that he became the object o God’s curse (see Deut 21:23 for God as the curser in the passage Paul quotes), so also in 2 Cor 5:21 we “become” the righteousness of God in the sense that we become the objects of his salvifically active righteousness, of his declaring us righteous because we have believed in his Son, whose death as the sinless-one-made-sin expiated our sins and propitiated God’s wrath against them (cf. Rom 10:3, which speaks of subjection to the righteousness of God and therefore implies being an object of its action; also Isa 53:11, which says that the Servant of the LORD “will justify the many, as he will bear their iniquities,” but says nothing about imputing to them his righteousness as a moral quality).

 

If Paul had meant that the righteousness of Christ replaces our sins we should expect him to have said so. How easy it would have been for him to write in 2 Cor 5:21, “in order that we might become the righteousness of Christ.” But he did not. Or to write I Phil 3:8-9, “in order that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having my righteousness [derived] from the law but [having] his righteousness [based] on faith.” But Paul did not. Instead, he writes about the righteousness of or from God (eleven times), almost always in passages where God and Christ are distinguished from each other (nine times) (Rom 1:17; 3:5, 21, 22, 25, 26; 10:3 [twice]; 1 Cor 1:30; 2 Cor 5:21; Phil 3:9. Only Rom 1:17 and 3:5 lack a nearby distinction between God and Christ, but neither do they associate God with Christ). It is perfectly astounding that time after time after time those who advocate an imputation of Christ’s righteousness—my former self included, and, for that matter, those who advocate its infusion and others who advocate participation in it through union with Christ—quote Pauline passages that speak of God’s righteousness only to substitute the righteousness of Christ in their expositions of those passages. This shift in gears seems to occur by automatic transmission. (Robert Gundry, “The Nonimputation of Christ’s Righteousness,” in The Old Is Better: New Testament Essays in Support of Traditional Interpretations [Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 178; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005; repr., Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and -Stock, 2010], 247-48, italics in original)

 

Further Reading


Response to a Recent Attempt to Defend Imputed Righteousness