TL;DR
The Reformers taught that God legally credits Christ’s perfect obedience to believers—an unchangeable courtroom verdict called imputed righteousness.But Scripture’s emphasis is not on a legal transfer; it’s on union with Christ—a living participation in His life. Our righteousness isn’t Christ’s moral record applied to us, but God’s righteousness shared with us through being in Him.
In this view, salvation is relational and dynamic, not static or abstract. Remaining or abiding in Christ is essential; righteousness endures only as long as that union does. The call to holiness is therefore not optional but vital, because our standing before God depends on abiding in the Righteous One, not merely on a past declaration.
On Imputed Righteousness and Union with Christ
If there was one doctrine that was a signature of the Reformation, held in especially high regard by Calvinists and Lutherans, it was the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness.
Imputed righteousness, as taught in Reformed circles, is the teaching that Christ’s sinless life and perfect obedience to God’s law are credited to the believer’s account, as if they themselves had obeyed perfectly.
The doctrine is usually expressed in judicial terms, meaning that when Christ’s righteousness is imputed or accounted to the believer, it is like a not-guilty verdict in a courtroom—a once-and-for-all change in the believer’s ledger.
In this view, God in a sense no longer “sees” the sinner but His Son instead. In other words, righteousness is treated as a kind of legal fiction—God regarding us as if we had lived a perfect life, even though we have not.
There are aspects of the way imputed righteousness is taught that have been held since the earliest days of the church, while other parts originate with Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers.
First, let me be clear: I am not denying that righteousness is, in some sense, credited to believers through faith—Scripture plainly teaches this. As Paul writes:
“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:3)
What I am questioning is how that righteousness is given. The Reformers taught that Christ’s perfect obedience is literally and permanently transferred to the believer’s account. I disagree with that mechanism.
The righteousness we receive is not Christ’s moral performance credited to our name but is shared with us through union with Christ. And as we’ll see, that difference is not a small one—it has extremely serious implications.
Union With Christ
I would argue that in order to understand imputed righteousness, we need to first understand the doctrine known as Union with Christ.
If you have read the New Testament, you have likely noticed the repeated phrases “in Christ” or “in Him.” The idea is that, in a mysterious yet very real way, Christians are joined to Christ; we are said to be a part of His body.
It is one of the most common themes in the New Testament. For example, Christians are said to be crucified with Christ, buried with Christ, raised with Christ, seated with Christ in the heavenly realms, hidden with Christ in God, alive in Christ, a new creation in Christ, blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ, redeemed in Christ, forgiven in Christ, justified in Christ, sanctified in Christ, triumphing in Christ, and more.
I would argue that the idea of us being “in Christ” is not poetic language but a real thing that happens to a Christian upon salvation. We are literally in Him in the same way that the Holy Spirit is in us. And why not? This is, after all, exactly what Jesus prayed to the Father would happen in the new covenant:
John 17:21–23“That they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one;I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.”
So the idea is that Jesus was in God in the same way we are in Christ.
It is not a perfect analogy, but it is something like three Russian dolls: the largest one being God, the middle one Jesus, and the smallest one us.
How Union Shares Every Blessing
The consistent New Testament idea is that all the blessings that we can claim as Christians are ours only because Jesus has been given those blessings by God, and we share in them if we are in Him—if we abide in Him.
For example, the Bible says that we are co-heirs with Christ. Christ has been given the Kingdom by God, and if we are in Him, we also share in that inheritance:
Ephesians 1:11“In Him we have obtained an inheritance…”(Notice it says “in Him.”)
His rewards are our rewards. Jesus says it this way, speaking to the Father:
John 17:22“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one.”
Another important example: Jesus has attained eternal life, and Scripture says that if we are in Him, we share in His eternal life.
1 John 5:11–12“And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.”
John 6:56–57“He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me.”
John 14:19–20“After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also.In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.”
Abiding and Remaining in Christ
The union-with-Christ idea cuts both ways, though. The New Testament is full of passages showing that one who abides in Him can fall away, be cut off, or be spit out.
“Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15:2a)
Paul makes it clear that we can be cut off from the olive tree:
“…if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off.” (Romans 11:22)
Abiding or remaining in Christ is spoken of as conditional over and over in the New Testament.
“For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end.” (Hebrews 3:14)
“Yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach—if indeed you continue in the faith…” (Colossians 1:22–23a)
I would even argue that when Jesus spits out the lukewarm believers in Revelation, that shows that those believers were at one time abiding in Him—in order to be spit out of Him, they had to be in Him.
So let’s bring all this back to Imputed Righteousness.
In the end, both the early church and the Reformers sought to explain how believers come to share in Christ’s blessings—chief among them, His right standing before the Father. The difference, as I said earlier, lies in the mechanism by which that sharing is understood to occur.
The Reformers believed Christ’s righteous record was credited to the believer’s account as a legal declaration of innocence. In this model, the believer’s status before God changes instantly and irrevocably, as if Christ’s perfect obedience were transferred to their ledger.
The early church, by contrast, understood salvation less as a legal transaction and more as a transformational participation in the life of Jesus.
The exchange between Christ and the believer is not a legal swap of status but a sharing of blessings and rewards that Jesus is the rightful owner of—including eternal life. The believer’s transformation in status is not a fiction maintained by divine bookkeeping.
In addition, for the Reformers, righteousness was a completed judicial act in which God declares the believer righteous once and for all. Within this legal framework, justification was understood as irreversible—just as a person acquitted in court cannot be tried for the same offense twice.
The early church, however, understood righteousness not as something handed down but as something entered into—a participation in the very life of Christ. It was not a status that could exist apart from Him, but a reality that continued only through ongoing union with Him. In that view, righteousness could not be treated as permanently secured in the abstract, because its endurance depended on remaining in Christ, the source of it.
Proof Texts for Imputed Righteousness
With all that in mind, let’s consider the main proof texts for the Reformed view of imputed righteousness. Here I would point out that the doctrine of Union with Christ is arguably the main point of these passages. If you have never noticed it before, you probably will now.
Philippians 3:9
“…and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.”
There are key truths here that Christians of every tradition can affirm: this righteousness is wholly from God and truly found in Christ. Again, the real difference lies not in its source but in its means—whether righteousness is something legally transferred to the believer, or something personally shared through a living union with Christ.
When Paul says he wants to be “found in Him,” this is not a decorative phrase. It is the controlling idea of the whole passage. The righteousness Paul describes is not stored somewhere outside of Christ and then credited to him; it exists only within that living union.
The next phrase says—“not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law.” Both sides would agree that the believer’s righteousness is not self-generated. The question is whether Paul means God declares the believer righteous because Christ’s record is applied forensically, or whether he means the believer shares in God’s righteousness through union with Christ.
The latter view is more coherent in my opinion, and the context of Philippians 3 supports this: after renouncing his own credentials, Paul longs to “gain Christ and be found in Him,” linking righteousness to knowing Him and sharing in His life (3:8–10). This is not a legal verdict applied once for all, but an ongoing, relational participation in the life of Christ.
Then Paul concludes with “the righteousness which comes from God.” Notice again: it is the righteousness from God or of God, not “of Christ,” as the Calvinist tends to read it. In the Old Testament this phrase “righteousness of God” spoke of God’s covenant faithfulness—His saving power that sets things right (more on that later).
So when Paul says he wants to be “found in Him… having the righteousness from God,” he means that his life has been relocated inside Christ, the place where God’s saving power operates.
Romans 3:21
“But now, apart from the Law, the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets.”
This verse marks a turning point in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Everything before it (1:18–3:20) has been about human unrighteousness: both Gentiles and Jews stand guilty before God, unable to justify themselves by obedience to the Law. Then comes Paul’s great “But now”—a shift from human failure to divine initiative. Now, something new has been revealed which is “the righteousness of God.”
For the Reformed tradition, they understand “the righteousness of God” as Christ’s righteous status that comes from God and is imputed to the believer through faith. Yet, it does not say “the righteousness of Christ,” but “righteousness of God.” In fact, you can’t find the phrase “righteousness of Christ” in the Bible at all.
In the Old Testament background that Paul is drawing on, “the righteousness of God” typically refers to God’s own covenant faithfulness—His saving power to set things right, to act consistently with His promises.
The righteousness of God was when God showed up or revealed Himself in history in order to rescue His people or judge their enemies in accordance with His covenant promises to them. This is a well-established point, and many theological papers have been written on this subject. Basically, “righteousness of God” is His breaking into history to save His people.
Paul is picking up that tradition when he says, “The righteousness of God has been manifested”—that is, it has appeared openly in history in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the promised Messiah to the Jews and salvation to the Gentiles. God has shown Himself faithful to His promises to Israel and merciful to the nations in Jesus.
So when Paul says, “Apart from the Law, the righteousness of God has been manifested,” he does not mean that a new kind of righteousness has been imported from outside or credited to our files. He means that what the Law and the Prophets long anticipated—God’s own act of putting the world to rights—has finally broken into history. God’s righteousness is not a moral grade handed down from heaven; it is His saving faithfulness unveiled in Christ, into which believers are now invited to step by faith.
2 Corinthians 5:21
“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Paul’s compact—and famously difficult—summary in 2 Corinthians 5:21 deserves careful attention. Like Philippians 3:9, this text locates everything in Christ—union is again the mechanism. But this passage is more complex than the others we have looked at because Paul’s overarching purpose in this section is not just to preach the gospel but also to defend his apostolic ministry, and that dual purpose makes 2 Corinthians 5:21 multilayered.
So let’s take this one step at a time, starting with the first phrase:
“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us.”
He says Christ was made sin in some way. My view is that this phrase recalls the Old Testament imagery of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, where the sins of the people were symbolically transferred to the scapegoat when the high priest would lay his hands on it and confess the sins of the people. The scapegoat was then set free, and it bore or carried those sins outside the camp into the wilderness. In a parallel way, Christ identifies with our sins and carries them away, and we are forgiven by God.
“So that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
At first glance, Reformed interpreters often see here a clear statement of imputed righteousness—that our sins were laid on Christ, and His righteousness was legally credited to us. But the wording itself resists that interpretation.
Once again, Paul does not say “the righteousness of Christ.” He says “the righteousness of God.”
Then comes the verb: we become. Paul does not say we receive righteousness or that we are declared righteous, but that we become it.
This “becoming” idea connects beautifully with 1 Corinthians 1:30:
“By His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”
Notice the parallel—Christ became righteousness for us, and we become righteousness in Him. The verbs mirror each other, expressing shared life, not exchanged records.
The Righteousness of God
Now we have to ask the harder question: what does Paul mean by “the righteousness of God” in this case?
In the Hebrew Scriptures, as I have already alluded to, the phrase “the righteousness of God” often refers to God’s covenant faithfulness, particularly regarding saving His people or judging their enemies:
“My righteousness is near, My salvation has gone forth, And My arms will judge the peoples; The coastlands will wait for Me, And for My arm they will wait expectantly.” (Isaiah 51:5)
“In Your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; Incline Your ear to me and save me.” (Psalm 71:2)
So when Paul says we “become the righteousness of God in Him,” he means that God’s saving power is now being made visible through those who are preaching the gospel.
That is not to say that God’s righteousness cannot be understood as justification here—it can, because that is what the righteousness of God was doing in this case, saving people. It’s just that Paul is doing several things in this passage, and so it gets a bit complex.
The Ministry Layer
What I mean is that Paul’s immediate aim in this section is to describe and defend his ministry—what it means to be an ambassador of Christ. Throughout 2 Corinthians, Paul defends his ministry against misunderstanding, showing that his suffering, weakness, and endurance are not failures but evidence of God’s power working through him.
2 Corinthians 5:18–20“All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation…Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His appeal through us.”
That phrase—“God making His appeal through us”—is the key to verse 21. Paul sees his and the other coworkers in the gospel ministry as the continuation of God’s reconciling work. God’s righteousness—His covenant faithfulness and restoring power—is enacted through human agents like Paul who are preaching the gospel.
In this sense, “becoming the righteousness of God” means that Paul and his coworkers are instruments of God’s saving power—His righteousness. Their ministry extends God’s action into the world. As they preach, God’s righteousness is revealed through them.
That being said, we should not restrict the “we” in these passages only to the apostles and other evangelists. Indeed, Paul’s logic here clearly extends to the wider church: what is true of his ministry is true of every believer. The church as a whole shares in that same ministry of reconciliation, to a certain extent at least.
After all, there is a dual purpose to Paul’s statement here, which is what makes the verse so rich. “We” refers both to Paul and other evangelists as God’s agents of reconciliation—which is a continuation of his main point about the defense of his apostolic ministry—but it’s also a picture of justification through union with Christ, just like the other passages we have looked at.
Imputed Righteousness and Eternal Security
If there’s a single place where the Reformed reading and what I have argued in this chapter truly diverge, it’s here: eternal security.
In the Reformed system, imputed righteousness becomes the lynchpin for “once saved, always saved.” The logic runs like this: if God has legally credited Christ’s perfect obedience to my account, then my standing before Him can never change—just as a courtroom verdict cannot be changed.
But if, as we’ve seen, the New Testament speaks of righteousness as a result of being in Christ—as a life shared by union, not a status possessed apart from Him—then the conclusion about irrevocability doesn’t follow.
The permanence of our standing depends not on an abstract legal deposit but on remaining in the One who is our righteousness (John 15:1–6; Colossians 1:21–23).
Here lies the practical divide. In a strict imputation-as-legal-transfer model, present sin cannot affect one’s standing before God—only one’s fellowship or “rewards.”
But in the union model, sin threatens communion with Christ. We can grieve the Holy Spirit—even quench or extinguish the Holy Spirit—through our sin. The call to holiness, then, is not decorative or motivational; it is existential.
“Little children, make sure no one deceives you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.”— 1 John 3:7–8
So the point of this chapter is not to deny that God “reckons” righteousness to believers. Scripture uses that language clearly. It is to insist that such reckoning never floats free from union. Once union is central, the supposed pipeline from imputed righteousness to eternal security breaks.
Rejecting “once saved, always saved” does not mean believers cannot have assurance. Scripture teaches that we can know we are in Christ if we are presently abiding in Him.
“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?”— 2 Corinthians 13:5
“We know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.”— 1 John 4:13
“By this we know that we are in Him: whoever keeps His word.”— 1 John 2:5
True assurance is not presumption; it’s the present witness of the Spirit and the evidence of a life that continues to abide in Christ (Romans 8:16; John 15:10).
Conclusion
In sum, the question is not whether righteousness is God’s gift, but how God gives it.
To be found in Him is to have His standing, His life, His Spirit, and His rewards—including eternal life.
Thus, the church’s task is not to claim and rely on a past verdict of righteousness, but to abide in the Righteous One.
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