Alien Righteousness? - Timothy Ministries

covenantal representative, superseding our father Adam. 16 As such, Christ
acted for His people, not only by suffering in their place, but also by His lifelong
obedience to God’s law as He “fulfilled all righteousness.” 17 As Wayne
Grudem puts it, “Jesus was our representative and obeyed for us where
Adam had failed and disobeyed.” 18 Grudem elaborates on this idea in a more
extensive passage, speaking of believers in the first-person and saying,
Throughout Christ’s entire life on earth, from the time of his birth to the time of
his ascension into heaven, God thought of us as being “in Christ.” That is,
whatever Christ did as our representative, God counted it as being something we
did, too. … God thought of us as going through everything that Christ went
through, because he was our representative. 19
The point not to miss here is that, according to this doctrine, Christ not only
represented us by His death for our sins on the cross, but also by His
preceding life. He represented us as He lived out his daily righteous conduct
throughout the course of His sojourn on earth.
This brings us to the matter of imputation.
4. Our sins were imputed to Christ.
Within the doctrine of Alien Righteousness, bound up with its core idea of
imputed righteousness, is the corollary idea of imputed sin. The doctrine
teaches that our sins were imputed to Christ. Scripture tells us that Christ
“bore the sin of many” and that “the LORD caused the iniquity of us all to fall
on Him” (Isa 53.6,12), and the doctrine of Alien Righteousness explains how
this occurred. Wayne Grudem spells it out:
God imputed our sins to Christ; that is, he thought of them as
belonging to Christ and, since God is the ultimate judge and definer of
what really is in the universe, when God thought of our sins as
belonging to Christ, then in fact they actually did belong to Christ. 20
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Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology Of The Christian Faith (Nashville, TN:
Thomas Nelson, 1998), pp. 439-440.
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Electronic Edition, Vol. II, III vols. (Oak Harbor,
WA: Logos, 1997), p. 554. See also Sinclair B. Ferguson and David F. Wright, New
Dictionary Of Theology, ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson and David F. Wright (Downers Grove:
IVP, 1988), p. 698.
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction To Bible Doctrine (Whitefish, MT:
Bits & Bytes, Inc., 1997, 2004), p. 540.
Ibid., p. 841, italics original. Grudem here echoes Luther’s words from the sermon of
1518, Two Kinds Of Righteousness, where Luther boasts, “Mine are Christ’s living, doing,
and speaking, his suffering and dying, mine as much as if I had lived, done, spoken,
suffered, and died as he did.”
Ibid., p. 574, italics original.
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