Dispensational Federalists affirm the representative headship of Adam and Christ.
I’m sure we could find examples of dispensationalists who deny this, but I would hate to think we could find any who deny the doctrine of justification by faith.
As we consider our first tenet, the point I would like to make is that any affirmation of the doctrine of justification necessarily implies an affirmation of representative headship. This concept undergirds the doctrine of justification, and we can’t have one without the other.
When we stop and think about it, the doctrine of justification is rather unnatural to human reason. How is it that God can treat us as if we have kept His law, when in fact we haven’t? At first glance this does look ridiculous, and it is fair to ask, how can this be?
In Romans 5:12-19 God’s word answers with the biblical concept of representative headship, or what some call corporate solidarity. This means that the actions of the one can be imputed, counted, or credited to others. In the Bible, whether we like it or not, God has ordained that the relationship between God and man is governed on a corporate, rather than an individual basis. In the Bible, both Adam and Christ function as representative heads.
Romans 5:19 gives us a concise summary of this truth,
“For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.”
This means that when Adam sinned, his actions didn’t just affect himself. When he sinned all of mankind was imputed with his guilt and inherited a corrupt nature. Conversely, in the gospel, our faith unites us to Christ. He then becomes our representative and what he does answers for us. When we broke God’s law, He paid our penalty. When He kept God’s law, His righteousness is imputed to us.
Given this, representative headship is a Biblical reality. There is no gospel without it. And we cannot affirm the doctrine of justification by faith, or the doctrine of original sin for that matter, without first affirming the representative headship of Adam and Christ. The doctrine of justification is built on the foundation of imputation, and the doctrine of imputation is built on the foundation of representative headship.
But sadly, and in spite of this, there have been many like Charles Finney, who have continued to argue the absurdity of the doctrine of justification by faith. In Michael Horton’s excellent article, he quotes Finney as saying,
“But for sinners to be forensically pronounced just, is impossible and absurd… They hold to the legal maxim that what a man does by another he does by himself, and therefore the law regards Christ’s obedience as ours, on the ground that he obeyed for us.”
Then he goes further and says,
“The doctrine of imputed righteousness, or that Christ’s obedience to the law was accounted as our obedience, is founded on a most false and nonsensical assumption.” After all, Christ’s righteousness “could do no more than justify himself. It can never be imputed to us … it was naturally impossible, then, for him to obey in our behalf “
When representative headship is denied, this is the outcome. A pelagian soteriology. The futile attempt of sinners to present their own inherent righteousness to a Holy God who requires perfection.
Dispensational Federalism is not an attempt to find a half-way house between dispensationalism and covenant theology. We do have points of difference that we will address, but this is not one of them, and this should be a cause of joy and unity.
But perhaps this leaves us with one final question. If we affirm representative headship with respect to Adam and Christ, is it too much of a problem for us to say that we affirm federal headship? Does the word covenant really jeopardize the content of what we believe?
I don’t think it should.
In our next article we will consider another point of agreement, Tenet No.2, that dispensational federalists affirm The Pactum Salutis.
Dispensational Federalism 