The Resurrection: Our Justification

“...to Paul the resurrection is an absolutely necessary step in the work of atonement and justifica­tion. ‘If Christ has not been raised,’ he says to the Corinthians, ‘your faith is vain’. That is to say, your faith is ineffective and worthless because ‘Ye are yet in your sins.’ It is justifying faith—faith in its connection with the forgiveness of sins—the efficacy of which is somehow bound up with the Saviour’s resurrection. ‘Ye are yet in your sins’ means ‘ye are yet under the condemnation of sin’, subject to the wrath of God, exposed to eternal destruction.

"This appears still more clearly from what the apostle adds straight away: ‘Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ have perished.’ Nor is this the only place in the epistles of Paul where the justification of the believer and the resurrec­tion of Christ are joined together. Elsewhere we read that our Christian faith, on which the imputation of righteousness depends, is in God as the one who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 10:9). Christ was delivered for our sins; he was raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25). Nobody can lay anything to the charge of God’s elect; God justifies and none can condemn because it is Christ Jesus who died and was raised from the dead (Rom. 8:33, 34).To speak in one’s heart despairingly, as if righteousness were still to be provided, would be equivalent to saying: Who shall ascend into heaven for the purpose of bringing Christ down to his life of suf­fering and humiliation, and who shall descend into the abyss for the purpose of bringing Christ up from the realm of death?

"The two things, therefore, on which righteousness depends are the descent of Christ from heaven to bear our sins and the resurrection. Hence, ‘if thou shalt believe in thine heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, thou shalt be saved’ (Rom. 10:9). From all this, it is perfectly plain that we are not dealing here with an isolated form of representation, but with something which stood out in the apostle’s teaching as a fundamental truth on which he dwelt repeatedly in the most various connections. We are therefore bound to put the question: ‘What is it that the resurrection contributes to our becoming righteous in the sight of God?’ I think we can put the answer in the most simple form by saying, ‘The resurrection stands related to righteousness in the same way that death stands related to sin.’”

“…In the living Saviour, Paul would have us by faith grasp our justification. In the same real sense in which on earth Christ was identified with our sin, he is now in his resurrection—life identified with our state of pardon and acceptance. According to the profound words of the apostle, we have become the righteousness of God in him (2 Cor. 5:20) because he has become the righteous­ness of God for us.” – Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory, pp. 158, 159, 162

Typology: a natural extension of literal interpretation

“Christian interpretation (is) an effort to read the Old Testament as a figure of the New, and to read both together as what the sociologists like to call a “symbolic universe” for making sense of and acting faithfully in today’s church and world.

“…According to Hans Frei’s account, precritical interpretation (or what I am calling typological interpretation) had three main features. First, ‘a biblical story was to be read literally’ and therefore ‘it followed automatically that it referred to and described actual historical occurrences.’ In typological interpretation, historical, literary, and theological considerations are inseparable. The Bible reports historical events, but like any historical writing, it reports from a perspective and in particular form of words, and the perspective embodied in the literary form exhibits the theological significance of the events.

“…Second, Frei continues, since the world described by the Bible is ‘a single world of one temporal sequence,’ ‘it followed that there is one cumulative story to depict it.’ Interpreters showed the coherence of the single story of Scripture by pointing to resemblances between earlier and later events; earlier events were ‘figures or types’ of later ones, and most crucially, the events of the Old Testament prefigured the later work of Jesus. The text describing those events brought out correspondences between the events in various ways…. And thus following the text’s guidance in finding analogies between one biblical account and another was a central concern of the interpreter. Importantly, Frei notes that ‘far from being in conflict with the literal sense of biblical stories, figuration or typology was a natural extension of literal interpretation. It was literalism at the level of the whole biblical story and thus of the depiction of the whole of biblical reality. Figuration was at once a literary and a historical procedure, an interpretation of stories and their meanings by weaving them together into a common narrative referring to a single history and its patterns of meaning.’

“Finally, the world described by the one story of Scripture was ‘the one and only real world,’ and therefore it must ‘embrace the experience of any present age and reader.’ It was the reader’s ‘duty’ to discover how his own experience and world were figures of the biblical world.” – Peter Leithart, “A Son to Me”, pp. 9,10