Within Christianity, it is almost a given to understand the work of Jesus Christ for sinners as taking place on the cross. In many ways, Christianity is a religion of the cross, with the apostle Paul’s oft-quoted determination to preach nothing else “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2) serving as a concise shorthand of its prevailing message. From its rich hymnody to its array of frescos and effigies to its diverse homilies and sermons, the Christian faith is thoroughly cruciform, and rightly so. Even still, as essential as Christ’s cross is, we risk becoming parochial if we conclude that the cross contains the totality of Christ’s work on our behalf. Consequently, although the cross remains unreservedly central to every believer’s life of faith, “the old rugged cross,” as the familiar hymn puts it, doesn’t constitute the entirety of Christ’s mission to redeem the world but is its necessary, eventual, and providential consummation.
The cross, in other words, is the culmination of the saving work of God in Christ, not its beginning—a work that necessarily includes Christ’s obedience on our behalf. To say that God’s Son obeys in our stead doesn’t quite capture the full picture of his work as humanity’s substitute. For that, we must distinguish the ways in which Christ obeyed passively and actively in order to secure our “eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12). “While the two should be differentiated,” Michael Howard Seal writes, “the active and passive obedience of Christ are both necessary for salvation, and may never be disconnected.” Understanding Jesus’s obedience through the lenses of passivity and activity is not a matter of theological hair-splitting, nor is it merely the residue of Reformation-era dogma. Rather, it is a core tenet of the Christian faith, one that clarifies the purpose behind Jesus’s incarnation and imbues the church with the requisite assurance of hope, meaning, and salvation.
When referring to Christ’s passive obedience, it is important to understand it not as inactive or inert but as the willing participation of the Son of God in the suffering and sorrow that afflicted humanity as a result of sin. Even though he is co-equal and co-eternal with the Father, the Christ of God condescends to the “likeness of men” and humbles himself “by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7–8). It is he who voluntarily “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age” (Gal. 1:4). Jesus’s passive obedience is his willing self-surrender and self-donation to ransom sinful humanity from certain condemnation by enduring sin’s curse by himself “becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). In so doing, he “make[s] many to be accounted righteous” (Isa. 53:11) by assuming “the record of debt that stood against us” as his own and obliterating it in the wake of his death and resurrection (Col. 2:14).
But as sinners, our helplessness is not only a result of our guilt for transgressing the words and will of God but also for failing to live righteously. Left to its own devices, humanity leaves God’s law perennially undone. We’re not at zero—we’re woefully and hopelessly in the negative! As sinners, we stand before the Judge and justly receive the law’s decisive sanctions because of our disobedience, but we are also held accountable for the obedience God’s law demands, the fulfillment of which remains forever out of reach. Justification, therefore, is not just a matter of absolution and remission but also imputation, that is, the reckoning of those who are unrighteous as righteous because of the righteousness of Christ. “In order to stand justified before a holy and just God,” Michael Howard Seal continues, “we need both perfect righteousness and complete forgiveness of sin.”
Accordingly, the scope of God’s gift of justification unfurls when we also consider the way in which Christ actively obeys the law in our stead. “The ground of justification,” declares R. Scott Clark, “is Christ’s active obedience credited to us.” When referring to his active obedience, the church understands the totality of Jesus’s life as the epitome of the righteous demands of God’s law. Several times throughout the Gospels, Christ divulges the fact that his mission wasn’t to do his own will but the will of the one who sent him (John 6:38). The Word of God took on flesh and was “born under the law” so that he might “redeem those who were under the law” by fulfilling the law in their stead (Gal. 4:4–5). “God the Son,” R. Scott Clark says, “became incarnate for the purpose of performing the demands of the law.” He actively participated in and accomplished “all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15) on behalf of those who never could in and of themselves.
From his circumcision in the Temple to his baptism in the Jordan to his temptation in the wilderness to his submission in the garden, the Christ of God actively obeys and fulfills God’s words for us (Matt. 5:17). “Christ not only voluntarily suffered the penalty of the law,” comments Cornelius P. Venema, “but he also fulfilled the requirements of perfect obedience to the law throughout the entire course of his incarnate life and ministry. When believers are justified, God grants and imputes Christ’s entire obedience to them.” As the true and better Adam, Christ succeeds in obeying every jot and tittle of the law (Matt. 5:18), doing what the first Adam didn’t. The failure of Adam not only plunged the rest of humanity into condemnation along with him but also abandoned the obligation to obey, choosing instead to believe the lies of the serpent. Consequently, to rectify the carnage left behind in the wake of humanity’s disobedience, God in Christ becomes human so that by his obedience, “the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19). Apart from this, sinners are well-nigh hopeless.
Integral to Christian faith and practice is the good news of Christ’s active and passive obedience in our stead, which crescendos at but is not confined to the cross. The church rejoices because it confesses what the Word reveals—namely, that sinners are justified not because they have kept the law, nor because they sufficiently reciprocated their sin-debt by mustering up enough good works, but precisely because of the work of someone else, whose lifelong obedience and sacrifice for us are not just exemplary but efficacious. Accordingly, Christianity is dispossessed of any sense of pious ladder-climbing or frantic religiosity. Instead, the Christian gospel is the sublime and shocking announcement that the whole business of justifying obedience has already been done. The cross, therefore, is not the conception of Christ’s redemptive work but the capstone of it—an incomparable finale to a life lived in perfect faithfulness for you.
Footnotes
Michael Howard Seal, “Calvin and the Imputation of the Obedience of Christ to the Believer,” Puritan Reformed Journal 11.2 (2019): 37.
Seal, 33.
R. Scott Clark, “Iustitia Imputata Christi: Alien or Proper to Luther’s Doctrine of Justification?” Concordia Theological Quarterly 70 (2006): 295.
R. Scott Clark, “‘Do This and Live’: Christ’s Active Obedience as the Ground of Justification,” Covenant, Justification, and Pastoral Ministry: Essays by the Faculty of Westminster Seminary California, edited by R. Scott Clark (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 246.
Cornelius P. Venema, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness: Another Example of ‘Calvin Against the Calvinists’?” Mid-America Journal of Theology 20 (2009): 19.
