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For John Owen, the imputation of Christ's active obedience was a necessary component of the gospel. So important was it to Owen, that he believed it should be refelected in the church's confession. In his classic work, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith through the Imputation of the Righteousness of Christ; Explained, Confirmed, and Vindicated, Owen made clear that the passive obedience of Christ (i.e. Christ's suffering the curse to remove the penalty of sin from us) was not enough. Sinners do not merely need acquittal, they need to be declared righteous in God's sight. That requires perfect, active obedience to the law, which was fulfilled by Christ, the righteous One. He argued for the imputation of what is called the active and passive obedience of Christ to the believer: "the obedience of Christ unto the law, and the imputation thereof unto us, are no less necessary unto our justification before God, than his suffering of the penalty of the law, and the imputation thereof unto us, unto the same end...We have need of more than the mere sufferings of Christ, whereby we may be justified before God." (Works, V, 252, 254)

Why is it important to think about what someone like Owen said about Imputed Active Obedience (IAO)? It is important because in our day there are those who are denying IAO. Those who signed "A Joint Federal Vision Statement" (2007), namely, John Barach (minister, CREC), Randy Booth (minister, CREC), Tim Gallant (minister, CREC), Mark Horne (minister, PCA), Jim Jordan (minister ARC, Director of Biblical Horizons, member CREC), Peter Leithart (minister, PCA), Rich Lusk (minister, CREC), Jeff Meyers (minister, PCA), Ralph Smith (minister, CREC), Steve Wilkins (minister, PCA), and Douglas Wilson (minister, CREC), “deny that faithfulness to the gospel message requires any particular doctrinal formulation of the ‘imputation of the active obedience of Christ.’” (The full document can be found at www.federal-vision.com. For a crash-course on the Federal Vision, have a look at Dr. Clark's helpful summary here, or have a listen to Dr. Horton's adult Sunday school lectures on the same thing here)

A few notables include...

Rich Lusk, one of the signers of "A Joint Federal Vision Statement," goes even further by denying that Jesus performed active obedience for us, claiming that such a notion is unbiblical. Says Lusk, "justification requires no transfer or imputation of anything. It does not force us to reify 'righteousness' into something that can be shuffled around in heavenly accounting books." ("Response to 'the Biblical Plan of Salvation'" in The Auburn Avenue Theology, Pros and Cons: Debating the Federal Vision [ed. Calvin Beisner; 2004], 142)

Likewise, N.T. Wright, an Anglican bishop and prominent advocate of the so-called New Perspective on Paul, rejects the doctrine of the imputation of Christ's active obedience on the ground that it "gives the impression of a legal transaction, a cold piece of business, almost a trick of thought performed by a God who is logical and correct but hardly one we would want to worship" (in What Saint Paul Really said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? [Eerdmans, 1996], 110).

So problematic have been the teachings of the Federal Vision (FV) and New Perspective on Paul (NPP) within Reformed and Presbyterian churches, that the RCUS, PCA, OPC, and now URCNA have responded by assigning study committees, adopting statements, and/or making recommendations to their churches against the FV and NPP.

For this reason, and because I have just finished reading through Owen's vol.V, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith, I plan to do a series of blogs on Owen's view of IAO. More to come...