Basically, the argument is
that in the reformed view of imputation, the “righteousness” Christ earns via
His keeping of the law is *not a righteousness based on His divine energy
(since that is denied in reformed theology). So there are two options for what
this “righteousness” He merits in fulfillment of the covenant of works is.
1) Generally, as conceived in
reformed theology, it is the works proper to His human nature that are done
perfectly in accord with the Law, which legal status is then transferred to us.
In reformed theology, as you well know, this is the sole basis for our
salvation. Christ is the new Adam who fulfills the covenant of works in which
Adam failed. The problem is that all of these works must be the works of his
humanity, and therefore are created and temporal – thus the righteousness He
earns in this view is a created reality – similar to western Catholic notions
of “created grace.” The works Christ does, then, are not strictly and solely
the works of a single divine Person. This is seen clearly in the normative
reformed doctrine of the Father’s damning of the Son, which is anti-Trinitarian
to the core.
For this to occur, since most
reformed people don’t want to split the Trinity up, they must confess a human
subject or person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is the subject of this damnation by
the Father. So then the legal exchange is that a human subject keeps the law
and fulfills what Adam failed in (the covenant of works), giving rise to a
*created legal state (since the legal state is *not based on Christ’s divine
status as Son and His divine energy) which is transferred to us, while our
damnation/spiritual death is transferred to a human Person Jesus (which is
Arian/Nestorian). Thus, what saves us is ultimately a creature – a created legal
state. But Jesus isn’t a human person and what we get in salvation is not
another created state, but eternal life – the very glory He shared with the
Father from the beginning. That glory is obviously not a creature. Therefore
salvation cannot be a created legal state. As Steven Kaster writes, explaining
the western (Thomistic and Protestant) notions of created grace and divine
simplicity:
“. . . God is defined only in
terms of His essence [in Western Dogmatics]; whatever is not essence does not
belong to God; it is a creature of God, the result of the divine essence.
Consequently, the energies [operations] of God are either identified with essence,
which is active (actus purus), or else any external manifestation of theirs is
regarded as necessarily hetero-essential, i.e., a created result of the divine
cause,” and as Yannaras goes on to point out, “This means that, in the final
analysis, the theosis of man, his participation in the divine life, is
impossible, since even grace, the sanctifier of the saints, is itself an
effect, a result of the divine essence. It is created, even though
supernatural, as western theologians have rather arbitrarily defined it since
the ninth century.” To hold that created realities can bridge the gap between
the uncreated God and His creation is to fall back into a form of Arianism,
which held that the Son Himself was created. The only difference between Arianism
and the more modern idea of created grace, is that the Son is affirmed as
co-essential with the Father and thus He is uncreated, but the grace that He
bestows is somehow held to be a created reality; and so once again, like the
Arians, it is a created being or accident that acts as the intermediary between
God and man, and man’s deification becomes impossible because a created reality
simply cannot deify man.”
Kaster is here concerned with
the relation of created grace to the Trinity’s operations in the economy, but I
am applying this same idea to the reformed view of imputed righteousness and
soteriology. The righteousness Christ merits in this view has to be temporal
and created, since, in this view, the human-person-Jesus does these good
“works” in time and according to His humanity, and because of the reformed
acceptance of absolute divine simplicity. To my knowledge, because no reformed
person makes a distinction between God’s essence and His actions (just like in
Thomism) a reformed person must argue that this is a created, temporal
“righteousness” transferred to us as the basis of our justification. But a
creature is not what saves us (that’s Arian) – we need divine life: immortality
(1 Cor. 15). And divine life is not created.
2) The other possible option
(which no reformed person I’ve ever heard of holds to) would be to say that
Christ did His human works according to the divine nature. In other words, the
righteousness He merits is a perfect righteousness because it has the quality
of the divine nature, somehow. But Jesus’ operations in His humanity are not
the divine ousia and cannot be. The divine nature is not like anything created
(Acts 17:29) and cannot be participated in, considered in itself. It cannot be
looked upon or experienced or comprehended (Ex. 33). And, again, no reformed
person would argue this way.
So the argument here is just
a variation on the numerous problems associated with western notions of created
grace – that what we get in salvation is merely a created “accident” or state.
Whereas Catholic theology has tended to say what we “get” in salvation is a
created “accident” as a causal effect from the absolutely simple essence,
Calvinistic imputational theology must say that what we “get” is merely a
created “legal state” based on the created legal state earned by the
human-person-Jesus-of-Nazareth. But this denies that the Word – the second
Person of the Godhead – is the sole subject of all the actions of the Incarnate
One. Remember – classical Christology says Jesus is a divine Person with two
nature and two operations (energies). (Jay
Dyer, “How Calvinistic (Created) Imputed Righteousness is Refuted,” in Essays
on Theology and Philosophy [Samizdat Press, 2019], 295-96)