Great quote from John Bunyan (or Why Christus Victor is Essential to the Justification of Sinners)

So, I’m listening to John Piper passionately preach about justification as dependent on what I think are a lot of less than credible exegetical conclusions, and the repudiation of what I think are a lot more credible exegetical conclusions that I don’t see as threatening justification at all but rather upholding it….

And he is quoting from John Bunyan to back up his position. The quotation he uses is also found here:

I was all this while ignorant of Jesus Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and (would have) perished therein, had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by nature…One day as I was passing into the field…this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he (lacks) my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself…Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons…now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.

But isn’t that exactly what we find in N. T. Wright and in others who are being declared deviant today? Our righteousness is found not in a mental operation in God’s mind by which he imagines some transfer of status, but in the vindication–the resurrection and ascension–of Jesus as Lord of the Whole world, “who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”

Are you right with God? If you belong to Jesus (and all who trust him do) then you cannot fail to be right with God. He has received His Son at His right hand and your are included. He can no more condemn you than throw Jesus down from heaven. Your righteousness is outside you, embodied in the risen and reigning king.

(Thanks to al sends for the idea for the added parentheses in the title)

3 thoughts on “Great quote from John Bunyan (or Why Christus Victor is Essential to the Justification of Sinners)

  1. pduggie

    The eventitudinousness of the resurrection and ascension are also highlighted.

    I can’t help but wonder, though, if Wright and others aren’t dealing with a righteosuness/acceptance being centrally related to the gospel EVENTS (death, resurrection, etc), and pushing off the personal application of those events as being of lesser importance.

    The WCF rules out someone being justified until they actually come to faith. Bunyan’s quote sounds like he *realizes* he’s already just in Christ.

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  2. Pastor TA

    Well, we’ve talked about it before, but it sounds like what we’ve seen in other balanced Calvinists, namely the understanding of the objective work as being true (regardless of whether it is applied), but not taking hold and having its effectiveness for the individual until he actually trusts Christ savingly. This is precisely what the WCF gets at when it condemns justification before historical faith. But it seems that Bunyan is simply showing how God imparted the faith by which he embraced Jesus Christ, and that, in his case, it came through understanding the objective work of Christ, and in understanding it, he came to embrace it, which was his personal application of Christ and all of his benefits to himself.

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