⭐⭐ The quarrel on this thread most worth reading slowly: someone proposed a third road — righteousness is neither infused nor imputed; it is Christ's divine nature come to dwell within.
The issue
Whose, in the end, is the righteousness? Is it counted to me, or is it really in me?
Claim
Osiander (Disputation on Justification, 1550): justification, as González reports his view, is not something God credits to a person out of loving grace, as Luther said, but something God finds in us because Christ dwells in us; the righteousness of the believer is God himself, dwelling within the believer. His image: the vast ocean of his divine righteousness swallows up our small drop of sin, and God then looks at the pure ocean, not at the drop of sin, and declares us righteous. ⚠ He also held that Christ is Mediator according to his divine nature, and that atonement and justification are not the same thing (the atonement, he said, took place fifteen hundred years ago, while justification is still taking place in individual Christians).
⚠ He did not say this lightly; the position grew out of his Christology, and without seeing this one might think he was merely chasing novelty. The image of God is not something created in Adam; the image of God is the Son himself. As González gives his reasoning: Adam is said to have been made in the image of God because, before the founding of the world, God had already decided that the Son would become flesh; the Son dwelt in Adam and made him righteous, and when he sinned, it was exactly this that he lost. So what we now need for our justification is for the Son to dwell in us once again.
⭐ Following this road, he also held that the incarnation was God's eternal purpose, unconnected with the fall — even if Adam had not fallen, Christ would have become flesh.
Counterclaim
Three rebuttals, each striking a different point; we follow González's account. ⚠ Melanchthon: he was abandoning the doctrine of imputed righteousness and coming dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. ⭐ Flacius (whose rebuttal González judges the most convincing) struck not at imputation but at the atonement — the act of atonement and the act of justification are the same, for when we are justified God simply regards us as righteous on the basis of the atonement; on Osiander's account it is hard to see what the self-offering of the Word made flesh is for, and so his view had distorted not just one aspect of the doctrine of justification but destroyed the very heart of the gospel. ⭐ Calvin, two points: the view tends to erase the distance between God and us, amounting to a mixing of essence between God and the believer; and it removes the necessity of Christ's incarnation and suffering — if God justifies us because of Christ's divinity, why did Christ need to be crucified? ⚠ Another opponent, Stancaro, went too far the other way, holding that Christ is Mediator only according to his human nature.
The ruling
Article III of the Formula of Concord, 1577, puts the question this way: is Christ our righteousness according to his divine nature (Osiander) or according to his human nature (Stancaro)? — and then rejects both. The positive statement: Christ is truly our righteousness, “but yet neither according to the divine nature alone, nor according to the human nature alone, but the whole Christ according to both natures, to wit: in his sole, most absolute obedience which he rendered to the Father even unto death, as God and man”. It also declares that God remits our sins “of mere grace, without any respect of our works, going before, present, or following, or of our worthiness or merit.”
What was at stake for salvation
⭐ None of the three rebuttals says you have departed from Luther; each says your account makes the cross optional. This is the same form of argument as Athanasius against Arius on thread 1 and Augustine against Pelagius on thread 3: reasoning backward from what a view would actually mean for salvation. This is the fourth time this module has recorded this form. ⚠ And what Osiander himself was guarding was also salvation — his fear was that if the righteousness is only counted, with no real change inside the person, justification becomes empty words. Both sides were fighting for the cross.
Aftermath
⭐⭐ Read it alongside the thread on Christology: this ruling answers the question of justification in the grammar of Chalcedon — the two natures, without separation, without confusion, are used here to locate whose righteousness it is. A ruling in Christology (451) became, 1,126 years later, a tool in a quarrel over justification. This is the first instance of this site's six topic threads interlocking.
⚠ Note also a hint from González: when Flacius attacked Osiander for making the incarnation unconnected with the fall, he overlooked, González says, a whole host of theologians reaching back to Irenaeus, who saw the incarnation as the crowning point of creation without thereby damaging the link between the incarnation and the atonement. That is, Osiander was not alone on this point, and the blow against him was aimed too wide.