The Active Obedience of Christ
There are certain doctrines that we call secondary when it comes to someone’s faith being genuine, yet the case is made by theologians that there is something of a necessary condition to the gospel at stake. Such is the case about the active obedience of Christ. It is typically a Reformed doctrine.
The early Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright asked, “How did Christ merit our righteousness?” Answer: “By fulfilling the Law, in that he walked in all the Commandments and failed in no duties, either in the worship and service of God, or towards men; whereby we are made fully and wholly righteous in the sight of God.”1
Perhaps the classic passage is Romans 5:18-19 in which Paul says,
“Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
That Jesus is our righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30) may seem uncontroversial among Bible-believing evangelicals. However, the moment we ask: “What exactly does that mean?” all agreement ends.
Defining the Doctrine
The roots of the doctrine are found where one would expect—in the beginning. Adam was commanded to be and to do something in Eden, but he was also forbidden from doing something. Genesis 2:17 gives the negative and it gives the threat. One must gather the positive and the promise by way of inference.
Whereas the active obedience of Christ refers to Him positively obeying the law for us and so earning our status of righteousness (Rom. 5:18-19), His passive obedience refers to Him suffering in our place. Thus we derive the label from the Latin word for “I suffer” (passio). This too was an obedience, one to death (Phi. 2:8). Yet that obedience is placed in the context of submission and humbling Himself by the Apostle in that passage, so that the obedience did not begin at His death, but was unto death—death being the extreme, the supreme end in that descent.
The Westminster Confession simply uses the pairing “obedience and satisfaction” (XI.1), “obedience and death … obedience and satisfaction” (XI.3). It would be question-begging to reduce the obedience in each of the three mentions to that which belongs to the suffering.
The Belgic Confession is more explicit about our faith,
“which embraces Jesus Christ with all His merits … For it must needs follow, either that all things which are requisite to our salvation are not in Jesus Christ, or if all things are in Him, that then those who possess Jesus Christ through faith have complete salvation in Him” (Art. 22).
Someone may be inclined to say that all that is necessary is that clean slate of forgiveness, and that it is this unblemished record that constitutes righteousness. But this is not what Jesus Himself says. Consider His words that, “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mat. 5:20). I am well aware of interpretations of this passage that make it a matter of degree by virtue of their peculiar hypocrisies. But then what will one do with the commands of the Old and New—“be holy, for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44) and “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat. 5:48).
Have we forgotten that when it comes to God’s requirements of man, that the standard is perfection? Is it not plain that if every sin was washed away, and the slate was “clean,” yet we would not have rendered unto God that honor which is His? It is right that God receives the glory of His image bearers, and it is wrong that we hand to Him nothing but a blank slate.
Notice that both the active and passive obedience of Christ are vicarious, that is, done in our place. Because Adam’s sin and ours implies a double disease, Christ brings a double cure. We not only need forgiveness for all of our sins. We need a positive righteousness before God.
In all passages contrasting faith alone to works of the law, we must ask: Whose works are sufficient to achieve the righteousness God requires if not Christ’s? Unless one wants to argue that God no longer requires perfect obedience to his law, which takes one from mainstream Reformed theology well into some antinomian framework, the question remains and demands one answer.
Finally, if we consider the possession by the believer of all that Christ is to the believer—think again of those words of 1 Corinthians 1:30—then it becomes more difficult to compartmentalize the righteousness imputed to us to a single act simply because the words of this one text in Romans 5 say “one act.” To have that which is Christ’s is to have that thing in a way proper to those in union with Christ.
Of course all parties agree that the sinless life of Jesus was necessary to His passive obedience because only a spotless Lamb would have sufficed to atone for our sins. Doubtless the critics of our doctrine would also allow that each act of obedience that is the flip side of the “sinless” coin are precisely acts of obedience. However, they will also draw a distinction between those acts as necessary conditions for Christ’s substitution proper and those acts as themselves substitutionary. Their status would not be that which is imputed to our account.
Answering the Exegetical Objection
The arguments that Romans 5:18-19 allow only a passive obedience seem persuasive at first glance. On further review they are an example of what I used to call “hyper-inductivism,” but which is now being called “biblicism.” This is a “bits and pieces” approach to reading where we fixate on the immediate word combinations, or even singular words, in isolation of various circles of context. This takes the perfectly healthy reasoning process called “induction” in which we begin with particular “pieces” of data and end in some more general conclusion or classification. This is legitimate if kept in its place. Where inductive reasoning occurs at the expense of deductive reasoning, it ceases to be “reasoning” altogether and devolves into a kind of mantra or superstition. Biblicism is when this happens with respect to biblical studies. Ordinarily it is creedal language or philosophical reasoning that are kept out of the process; but it can also keep systematic theological readings or the help of other relevant portions of Scripture at an arm’s distance.
How does this come to bear on the question of active obedience and Romans 5?
The argument is simple and twofold: “Paul never implies that Jesus’ positive act is what is counted as ours” and “The acts in the analogy between Jesus and Adam are both singular.” The same thinking cannot see the imputation of Adam’s guilt at the beginning of the text. Words such as “active” and “impute” are nowhere to be found here.
But this ignores several contextual matters. Let us ask: First, are there other concepts in the text itself that demand that more is being accomplished on our behalf than removing sin and death? Second, are there other texts that might lend support to these additional elements? I think the answer to both is Yes, and I would draw specific attention to the link in Romans 5 between justification and life (vv. 11, 17, 18, 21). That is, the righteousness gained in justification is not merely a negation of sin and death. Thus He was “raised for our justification” (4:25). Moreover, note the argument of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:20-23. How does he use “first fruits”?
Leon Morris’s commentary on this is useful. The firstfruits were brought by the head of the home, thus representing the whole family. So the resurrected Christ is like an offering, going before us, and “In a sense, it consecrated the whole harvest.”2 In short, the death and resurrection are treated as the culmination of a total, active, federal work. Along those same lines Paul’s “great exchange” language of 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that we “become the righteousness of God.” Obviously this is imputation language. God considers us according to Christ’s accomplishment. Yet it is this quality that Christ has as a whole—the very righteousness of God—that we share in this way. It is treated in its totality and cannot be reduced to a part. The same language is used in Philippians 3:8-9. No Protestant would deny that these texts imply imputed righteousness, yet those who deny the active obedience of Christ seem to neglect that there is at least a reductionism involved by logically eliminating from that ground every righteous thing Christ did except for what He did in His suffering.
New Testament scholar G. K. Beale even argues that, “‘Passive obedience’ is somewhat of a misnomer, since Christ’s enduring the penalty of sin was an active endurance.” Beale also points to passages that are not usually on people’s radar screens:
“Paul depicts Christ as the last Adam who has received the triumphant position and reward of incorruptible and glorious kingship as a result of having carried out all the conditions of obedience that were demanded of the first Adam, especially possessing and conquering. In 1 Corinthians 15:27 and Ephesians 1:22, Paul asserts that Christ has accomplished the Psalm 8:6 ideal that the first Adam should have carried out: “He [God] has put all things in subjection under his feet,” which means that Christ Himself as the last Adam also has “exerted the power . . . to subject all things to himself’” (Phil. 3:21). First Corinthians 15:45 clearly refers to Christ as the “last Adam” who has accomplished the heightened blessing of incorruptibility that the first Adam did not obtain. Furthermore, 1 Corinthians and Ephesians identify believers either with Christ’s having all things in subjection to Him (Eph. 2:5–6) or with His possessing incorruptible blessings (1 Cor. 15:49–57; see also Heb. 2:6–17).”3
We may recall those last words of Machen before he died, communicated via telegram back to Westminster Seminary, on his way to the speaking engagement he would never make: “I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.”
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1. Thomas Cartwright, A Treatise of Christian Religion (Sacra Press, 2024), 234-235.
2. Leon Morris, The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 213.
3. G. K. Beale, “The Twofold Obedience of Christ,” Tabletalk (April 2019)
