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It all began innocuously. Someone handed me "The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration" in advance of its first publication in Christianity Today (June 14, 1999, pp. 51-6;) and asked for my opinion. I examined it without knowing the names of any of its drafters or endorsers and therefore had to interpret it in a vacuum. Designed as it says to unify evangelical Christians doctrinally for the new millennium, "Celebration" (as I shall call it from here on) contains much that I affirm; and it seems to me that much of what "Celebration" contains needs reaffirmation in view of currently noticeable tendencies to water down, if not wash down the drain, certain features of the evangelical tradition that are rooted in Scripture.
On an initial reading of "Celebration," however, some of its statements struck me as questionable, some as objectionable; and both I and others to whom I have talked in the meantime got the impression of a document strongly Reformed in tone and substance. Contributing to this impression were the anti-Roman Catholic statement, "We deny that we are justified by the righteousness of Christ infused into us" (p. 55, cols. 1-2) and the disproportionate amount of attention devoted to the doctrine of justification as compared with the amount of attention devoted to other doctrines in the soteriological universe of evangelicals. "Celebration" itself makes the point when referring to "our extended analysis of justification by faith alone through Christ alone" (p. 54, col. 1).
Now all evangelical Protestants would agree to justification by faith alone through Christ alone, and would deny the traditional Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by an infusion of Christ's righteousness. But "Celebration" goes on to demand no fewer than three times the contribution of Jesus' life as well as death to Christian believers' reconciliation to God and justification by him: (1) "Yet God in grace took the initiative to reconcile us to himself through the sinless life and vicarious death of his beloved Son" (p. 52, col. 2); (2) "God's justification of those who trust him, according to the Gospel, is a decisive transition, here and now, from a state of condemnation and wrath be cause of their sins to one of acceptance and favor by virtue of Jesus' flawless obedience culminating in his voluntary sin-bearing death" (p. 53, col. 1); and (3) "We affirm that Christ's saving work included both his life and his death on our behalf (Gal. 3:13). We declare that faith in the perfect obedience of Christ by which he fulfilled all the demands of the Law of God in our behalf is essential to the Gospel. We deny that our salvation was achieved merely or exclusively by the death of Christ without reference to his life of perfect righteousness" (p. 55, col. 1).
The equation of Christ's obedience with his life of perfect righteousness prior to dying then links up with repeated and explicitly emphasized statements defining justification in terms of the imputation of Christ's righteousness:
As our sins were reckoned to Christ, so Christ's righteousness is reckoned to us. This is justification by the imputation of Christ's righteousness. … We affirm that the doctrine of the imputation (reckoning or counting) both of our sins to Christ and of his righteousness to us, whereby our sins are fully forgiven and we are fully accepted, is essential to the biblical Gospel (2 Cor. 5:19-21). … We affirm that the righteousness of Christ by which we are justified is properly his own, which he achieved apart from us, in and by his perfect obedience. This righteousness is counted, reckoned, or imputed to us by the forensic (that is, legal) declaration of God, as the sole ground of our justification (p. 53, col. 1, and p. 55, cols. 1- 2).
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