The Reformers taught that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone, as revealed in Scripture alone. I believe this also. I also believe that we are declared righteous, not because of ourselves, but due to the righteousness of Christ imputed to us.
Roman Catholicism tells us that this teaching is foreign to the history of the church, that the Church never taught it and the early church fathers never taught it. Rome claims that we believe in a legal fiction.
Granted, the church could have been wrong all along, but is that likely? Since some doctrines took time to develop, can we say that the church never spoke about the imputed righteousness of Christ? I would like to investigate this. Can you help?
Justification is an act of God's free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.
This statement sets forth the doctrine of justification held by the Reformers, and accurately represents the Bible's presentation of the constituent elements of a believer's judicial standing before an all holy God.
The magazine Modern Reformation has made Lecture 3 of Buchanan's excellent book available online here. In that lecture Buchanan supplies numerous and lengthy quotations from the early church fathers to support his assertion.
Buchanan wisely notes, "This doctrine was always held in substance by true believers; but it seems to have been reserved, for its fuller development, and more precise definition, till the great controversy which arose between the Romish and the Reformed Churches in the sixteenth century." (page 87) Just as controversies led to the carefully crafted Trinitarian formulations of Nicaea in the fourth century, and the Christological formulations of Chalcedon in the fifth century, so the controversies of the Reformation period led to the magnificent statements of our Reformed confessions on justification.
Is the Protestant doctrine of justification legal fiction? When I was a boy, I remember being taught by my Presbyterian Sunday School teachers a definition of justification that went like this: "God treats me as if I had never sinned." Such a definition is simply wrong, and opens the way to the charge of legal fiction.
God does not treat the believer as if he were righteous. He is in fact righteous by virtue of his union with Jesus Christ. God has made Christ "our righteousness" (1 Cor. 1:30), and in Christ we are "the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).
No fiction here. In Christ the believer is truly righteous.