The teaching of imputed righteousness is a signature doctrine of the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican traditions of Christianity.
[2][3] Catholic scholar Erasmus raises almost the first recorded distinction between to impute and to repute in 1503 Handbook of the Christian Knight.
[4]: 187 In his seminal 1516 Novum Instrumentum omne Latin rescension (finished late in 1515 but printed in March 1516), Erasmus consistently rendered the Greek logizomai (reckon) as "imputat" all eleven times it appears in Romans chapter four; however Erasmus did not believe that for every abstract word in Greek there was one exact equivalent in some other language.
The Vulgate Erasmus intended to improve usually rendered it "reputat" (repute); Lorenzo Valla had previously used both.
In Catholic theology, while everything originates with God, the entire process of justification requires human cooperation, and serious sin compromises it.
The position that they are potentially complementary was taken in a joint declaration of the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church.
[13] The concepts here are nominally derived from the letters of Paul the Apostle (particularly the Epistle to the Romans), which form a large part of the Christian New Testament.
The dispute in question in Christian theology is between those of faith (in God's promises: the covenant, the Messiah), and "the wicked," meaning everyone else.
(2 Peter 3:9) – though this passage is often interpreted by many Protestants as referring only to Christians, as the context of the epistle indicates that Peter's audience were believers, and the first half of the verse indicates that the promises of God to believers are not late but patiently enduring the unfolding of history as God sovereignly saves His own through time.
On the other, God is infinitely holy and just, which means that he cannot approve of or even look upon evil (Habakkuk 1:13), neither can he justify a wicked person (Book of Proverbs 17:15).
Because the Bible describes all men as sinners and says that there are none who are righteous (Epistle to the Romans 3:23, 10) this is a classic theological tension.
By this terminology, they mean that God legally credits the believer with the righteous acts that Christ performed while on this earth.
Luther uses the language of a "fortunate exchange" to describe this concept, borrowed from St Paul's imagery in Colossians 3.
Christ trades his "garments," holiness, righteousness, being blessed by God the Father, in exchange for human sin.
This is really good news for sinners – Christ takes their sin and believers receive His blessed condition and righteousness.
""The Catholic idea maintains that the formal cause of justification does not consist (only)[24] in an exterior imputation of the justice of Christ, but in a real, interior sanctification effected by grace, which abounds in the soul and makes it permanently holy before God.
Put starkly, the Catholic Church rejects the teaching of imputed righteousness as being a present reality.
[citation needed][dubious – discuss] This is at the very center of the disagreements between Catholics and Lutherans, and remains the primary sticking point to a unification of these traditions to this day.
[citation needed][dubious – discuss] Philipp Melanchthon, a contemporary of Martin Luther, stressed the classic Lutheran desire to distinguish carefully and properly between Law and Gospel.
[28] Historically, they have been more open to the broader biblical language the Lutheran Formula of Concord calls "correct" but not "proper.