Yeah, great hymn, and I think we should restore the original line. But I suspect that the “double cure” Toplady on view was justification and sanctification, rather than imputation.

One website pointed me to the following comment in Calvin as a possible inspiration for Toplady -

“Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.”

Thanks Craig and Sandy. Excellent comments.

Craig, it’s often hard to know what was in a poet’s mind, isn’t it? Is the ‘making pure’ a reference to our ongoing progress in godliness (what theologically we call ‘sanctification’)? It could be—and Sandy, you rightly pick up places in the NT where are called upon us to cleanse or purify ourselves (2 Cor 7:1 being an good example).

But then the ‘making pure’ could also be a reference to the purity that is ours by exchange, the righteousness of Christ that now belongs to us by imputation. Given the context of the verse, which emphasizes our hiding in Christ, how the Rock was cleft ‘for me’, I took it to be a reference to the ‘alien’ righteousness and cleansing and purity that Christ achieved *for* us, and granted us, rather than the cleansing, sanctifying work his Spirit subsequently works *in* us (which is, of course, equally important and true).

But I might be wrong.

TP

Tony, you wrote:

The New Testament doesn’t say that we are cleansed from the power of sin.

The entirety of Romans 5-8 is precisely aimed at this idea, in particular the (admittedly hard to parse) 5:12-21 and the (easier to see) version in 6:4-6, and re-iterated in Romans 7:13-25.

In particular, Paul sees everyone in a state of spiritual death, unable to overcome the power of their own selfishness. He sees this in his own life prior to being strengthened by the spirit (Romans 7:19-20). He describes in Romans 5:12-21 that this weakness (which he calls death) was initially due to Adam’s rebellion but was increased by Israel’s failure to keep the law given to them.

But then in Romans 6:4 and 6:6 we see Paul claim that this was exactly the reason of Christ’s death, so that we would no longer be dominated by this sin. We are still tempted, but we now have the ability to overcome temptation. This is what Romans 6:4-6 says (twice) as well as Romans 8:7-8. It is also the point of the other verses that have been quoted already [Hebrews 9:14, Titus 2:14, and one from each of Peter’s epistles.]

Thanks, Steve.

I think some of the problem is with our tendency to “sound byte” the Bible (and the unfortunate chapter break that happens immediately after Romans 7:25). People do see the link between Romans 7:25 and 8:1.

There is, after all, a “Therefore” at the beginning of 8:1. People ignore this therefore (not looking back to chapter 7 to see what Paul is talking about) in the same way they ignore the “Therefore” in John 3:16, refusing to read it as part of the larger commentary [John 3:14-21]. What is even worse is how often John 3:19-21 get lopped off the end of discussions about John 3:16. This obscures John’s point and the theme of his entire gospel to the Greeks after the temple had been destroyed condemning the Jews [who have been “condemned already”]

What’s particularly important is Paul’s word choice in Romans 8:1. “There is therefore now no “katakrima” for those in Christ.” This gets translated “condemnation,” conflating it with the much more common [to the NT corpus] word “krima.”

Paul is the only person to use this term, and he only uses it in 3 places, Romans 8:1, Romans 5:16 and 5:18, which is of course discussing the same topic as Romans 7 just got through discussing: the spiritual weakness toward sin that Adam’s rebellion had cast all humanity under.

It should be clear that Romans 8:1 represents the break between Paul un-regenerated and Paul regenerated. In addition to the wording of Romans 8:1 itself we notice the complete absence of any discussion of the “Spirit” in Romans 7:12-23, contrast that with Romans 8:1-8 which describes the power of the Spirit liberally.