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