God's Imputation: Not A Legal Fiction, But A Fashioned Reality

Excerpt taken from:
Kolb, Robert (2009-02-05). Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith (Christian Theology in Context) (pp. 125-127). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Luther often used the medieval term ‘imputation’ to describe how God delivers the benefits of Christ’s work to sinners. Relatively seldom used in late medieval scholasticism, it meant an accusation or, more generally, a way of viewing things, a pronouncement of evaluation. 84 For Luther, God’s regard, his pronouncement, created and sustained fundamental reality. God’s imputation could not be merely a legal fiction. His imputing fashioned actuality. Luther did not deny the reality of sin, but its reality could not trump God’s reality. The mystery of sin remained, but the fact of God’s gift of righteousness through his regard and his Word constituted the dominant truth of the sinner’s state. When addressing those deeply convicted of their continuing struggle against sin, he emphasized that God’s view of human creatures, his regard for the sinner, determines the future and promises life without sin despite its presence in the believer’s experience now. Here he depicted justification as the verdict of the judge who determines guilt or innocence by what he says. When highlighting the fundamental reality of what God has accomplished, he employed the language of re-creation, of death and new life. 

He based this on both Greek and German usage. Rechtfertigen—‘justify’ or ‘render righteous’—meant ‘to do justice to: that is to inflict punishment, “judicially” on the basis of a conviction, and thus to execute the law’s demands’, 85 or ‘to conduct a legal process as an activity of a judge’, ‘to execute, to kill’. 86 From early on, Luther spoke of God’s killing and making alive as he described justification, for he presumed that sinners must die (Rom. 6: 23a) and be resurrected to life in Christ. In his Romans lectures (1515– 16) he associated justification with baptism as Paul described it in Romans 6: 3– 11 in far less than his mature expression of its motif of the burial of the sinful identity and the resurrection of a new identity in Christ. There he interpreted this passage in terms of the ongoing struggle to put the desires of the flesh to death in the never-ending struggle against sin; he did not speak of God’s decisive restoration of righteousness through his Word of forgiveness. 87 In The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism of 1519 Luther favored baptism by immersion because baptism ‘signifies that the old man and the sinful birth of flesh and blood are to be wholly drowned by the grace of God. … the significance of baptism is a blessed dying unto sin and a resurrection in the grace of God, so that the old man, conceived and born in sin, is there drowned, and a new man, born in grace, comes forth and rises. … Through this spiritual birth [the baptized person] is a child of grace and a justified person.’ 88 This motif continued in his presentation of justification throughout his life. 89 However, Luther could also use language which placed the burden of preserving the baptismal covenant upon the baptized: ‘So long as you keep your pledge to God, he in turn gives you his grace,’ 90 the law’s call to faithful hearkening to God. 

Luther’s discourse on justification arose out of his presuppositions regarding sin. Luther defined sin as doubt of, and offense against, the Almighty Creator and loving Father, failing to hearken to his Word. Therefore, God’s law, the expression of his plan for human life— the Creator’s definition of what it means to be human— condemned sinners to death (Rom. 6: 23a). God , however, promised life as a free gift to his people (Rom. 6: 23b), and he bestowed that promise and the life it gives through his Word, first of all in baptismal form (Rom. 6: 1– 18). By 1520 Luther found the words of absolution in the sacrament of penance an absolute assurance of forgiveness. 91

Justification is also an act of new creation. In a doctoral promotion disputation of 1535 on faith and law, composed in the midst of papal initiatives for a general council, at which Luther wanted justification to be a topic, he wrote: ‘justification is in reality a kind of rebirth in newness’ (John 1: 12– 13; 1 John 5: 1) , ‘a washing of regeneration and renewal’ (Titus 3: 5), new birth (John 3: 3); the Holy Spirit calls God’s people ‘righteous, a new creature of God and the first fruits of God’s creatures, who, according to his will brought us forth by his Word (2 Cor. 5: 17; Jas. 1: 18)’. ‘It is as blasphemous to say that human creatures are justified by their own works as to say that they are their own gods, creators, makers.’ 92


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