Origins of the Reformed Discourse on Imputed Active Obedience

The Reception of Georg Karg in Heidelberg (1565)

I received a pleasant surprise after a challenging semester this past Saturday at Westminster Seminary California’s 2025 Graduation Ceremony. Though I’m not graduating until (Lord willing) May 2027, I found myself—quite without forewarning—receiving The Samuel and Anne Van Til Student Scholarship Prize for the best major paper in theological studies. I’m very humbled by and grateful for this recognition. I’ve labored extensively in my research and hope it can help us to better tell the truth about the past and heed the ninth commandment in speaking about our fathers in the faith.

Although sharing my paper here would be a good next step, it’s under peer review for an academic journal that I fancy, so I’m unable to publish it on a public forum prior to its approval (or rejection). However, since it’s what I’ve been carrying on about for the past few months, I figured I’d share my main findings on the Reformed active obedience controversy below.

Note to Reader: Forgive me for not citing my sources here. I understand I’m essentially saying, “trust me, bro.” However, the footnoting in my paper is extensive. I’m content to wait for my paper’s publication. This is a blog, after all.

“Do the reading…”

There are (at least) three readings that one must be conversant in to understand what’s going on in my paper:

1. Heber Carlos de Campos, Jr.’s book on Johannes Piscator and the Reformed active obedience controversy. While outmoded in some respects by recent research, de Campos’s work is invaluable and my work would not have been possible without it. In particular, Chapter 3 constitutes a comprehensive survey of the literature, which can bring you up to speed on the competing and contradictory doxographical claims that have plagued it.

2. Gert van den Brink’s 2024 article on the imputed active obedience of Christ (IAOC) and its absence from the Heidelberg Catechism. I know that sounds provocative, but his argument is pretty straightforward (and rather irrefragable). Here is the abstract to give you a taste:

   There is a longstanding debate on whether the Heidelberg Catechism favors the imputation of the active obedience of Christ (IAOC). In this article, I argue that the IAOC is not present in the Catechism, not even latently. The main authors of the Catechism, Olevianus and Ursinus, denied the IAOC. Additionally, what the Catechism teaches about the interrelations between obedience, punishment and merit, makes clear that the IAOC does not fit in its theological structure. Therefore, a historically sensitive interpretation of the Catechism leads to the recognition that the Catechism leaves no room for the IAOC.

3. Erik Herrmann’s study on Georg Karg and the sixteenth-century Lutheran controversies over righteousness.

The Scope of My Paper

Most concisely, my paper locates the origins of the Reformed engagement with the IAOC in Heidelberg’s reception of Georg Karg’s 100 propositions on justification (1563) in 1565. I demonstrate its significance by noting how the secondary literature on the Reformed active obedience controversy has failed to observe this inflection point (it’s only hinted at in certain places), and thus suffers from a historiographic problem: scholars make contradictory claims about who believed what and when, but none identify when or how this debate actually began. Such a lacuna is essentially an interpretive vacuum wherein anachronistic and partisan readings of the early Reformed on the IAOC proliferate. By locating the catalyst for Reformed discourse in 1565 through previously overlooked correspondence, my study provides the missing foundation needed to properly contextualize all subsequent developments.

The Problem with Existing Scholarship

Illustrating the issue above, Norman Shepherd contends the IAOC was a Reformed scholastic accretion coinciding with the development of the covenant of works. Conversely, R. Scott Clark (who supervised my research) and John Fesko argue that the doctrine appears, at least seminally, in the earliest Reformed theologians, implying that Johannes Piscator emerged as a kind of idiosyncratic renegade who departed from established orthodoxy.

Heber Carlos de Campos's monograph represents the most significant attempt to address this historiographic lacuna. To his credit, de Campos recognized precisely what needed to be done—identifying the true turning point of the IAOC controversy rather than perpetuating partisan readings. His comprehensive treatment of Piscator and survey of secondary literature remains invaluable. Yet de Campos ultimately perpetuates the confusion by concluding that pre-Piscatorian theologians—including Ursinus and Olevianus—maintained ambiguous positions lacking theological grounds for a categorically contra-IAOC view. Such conclusions are especially problematic in that they deem further inquiry into this hitherto murky matter anachronistic; he places more evidentiary weight on the Piscatorian “turning point” than it can bear.

Consider how de Campos handles Daniel Tossanus's 1596 testimony that Ursinus possessed Karg's anti-IAOC theses and favored them over Beza's subtleties. De Campos minimizes this testimony by asserting that Ursinus merely preferred a more unified understanding of Christ's work rather than classifying this as evidence for his opposition to the IAOC. By interpreting Ursinus's documented reluctance to engage in public discourse as evidence of insufficient exegetical/systematic grounds rather than strategic restraint, de Campos obscures the chronological clarity his work seeks to establish.

Van den Brink recently injected clarity into the literature by showing that Ursinus and Olevianus explicitly opposed the IAOC. However, he focuses on interpreting the Heidelberg Catechism in light of this reality, whereas my study further grounds his article’s conclusions in a tangible chronology.

Key Findings: Establishing Origins

The Lutheran Genesis and Reformed Reception

As Herrmann demonstrates, the IAOC emerged within Lutheran circles as figures like Matthias Flacius and Justus Menius responded to Osiander's doctrine of justification through the impartation of Christ’s (the Godhead’s) essential righteousness. Where Osiander located justification in the remission of sins and the indwelling of Christ's essential righteousness, some of his opponents located it in Christ’s perfect obedience to the law, in addition to the remission of sins. Flacius and Menius predate the earliest Reformed expression of the IAOC. However, it’s worth noting that Calvin (per Flacius) had an affinity for Flacius’s refutation of Osiander. If we take Flacius’s word, this means that Calvin, apart from Beza’s confession, had early exposure to a developed expression of the IAOC. It is thus not unreasonable to speculate that there was a line of transmission of the IAOC from Flacius → Geneva (but this was beyond the scope of my paper).

Karg represented the first systematic opposition to this emerging Lutheran consensus. A student at Wittenberg under Martin Luther himself, as well as Philip Melanchthon, Karg became general superintendent of Bavaria and in 1563 published 100 propositions rejecting the IAOC. His critique centered on a number of objections, not the least of which was the fallacy of God demanding both obedience and punishment (the "double debt"). Karg's propositions proved potent because they exposed a tension within Lutheran soteriology: if Christ's death fully satisfied divine justice, why require additional imputed law-keeping? His formulation—that divine law obligates either to obedience or to punishment, not to both—became the cornerstone of all subsequent contra-IAOC arguments.

My research identifies March 1565 as when this Lutheran debate reached Reformed territories through the circulation of Karg's propositions.

The Heidelberg Connection

Multiple witnesses—Johannes Haller, Heinrich Bullinger, and Theodore Beza—reported in the spring of 1565 that Ursinus and Olevianus were rumored to be the authors of Karg's propositions. Haller suspected "someone from Heidelberg" had written them. Bullinger heard Olevianus was the author at one point, Ursinus at another. While both Heidelberg theologians denied authorship, Beza confirmed that these propositions "please [Olevianus] more than is fitting." The propositions’ rumored authorship potentially indicates these Heidelberg theologians' known sympathies aligned with Karg's critique, possibly reflecting distaste for Beza's formulation of justification in his 1559 Confession, which David Steinmetz notes resembles Flacius more than it does Calvin.

Documentary Evidence of Initial Reception

The correspondences reveal the immediate Reformed response to these propositions. Haller expressed alarm at propositions denying "that nothing should be attributed to Christ's obedience in the matter of our redemption." Bullinger feared unnecessary disputations would disrupt Reformed unity. Beza voiced concern about Olevianus's inappropriate enthusiasm for Karg's views. Most significantly, Ursinus's April 24 letter constitutes the only primary source evidence wherein Ursinus explicitly addressed the issue at stake in the Karg controversy, recognizing that both pro- and contra-IAOC positions identified Christ's full, perfect obedience as the meritorious cause of justification. His chief insight was that if one grants Christ's suffering and death "is equivalent to the most perfect obedience which the law demands from us," then the dispute concerns one’s manner of expression rather than a meaningful break in soteriology. He wrote that he found “no danger” in Karg’s position.

Resolution Through Deliberate Irenicism

Further evidence demonstrates Reformed leaders resolved this issue between 1565-1570 by designating it as adiaphora and finding unity in Pauline simplicity. Menso Alting's 1588 letter to Piscator confirms this resolution: when consulted about the controversy, Bullinger had counseled that new disputes ought not to be stirred up about a point that is clear and acknowledged by all, lest consciences be troubled and their adversaries given new occasion for slander. This echoes Bullinger’s same concern with the Osiander controversy in 1556. The solution, Bullinger suggested, lay in affirming with Paul that Christ has been made for us righteousness, sanctification, redemption, and so forth: “for the whole Christ is ours.”

His appeal to Pauline simplicity allowed Reformed theologians to maintain unity while acknowledging that both positions addressed the same question—the nature of our righteousness coram Deo—but reached different systematic conclusions about whether Christ's personal law-keeping constituted part of the righteousness imputed to the believer or merely qualified him for efficacious suffering. The irenic settlement reflected Ursinus's theological judgment and prefigured the Palatine and Hessian delegations’ counsel to the Synod of Dort in 1619: since both formulations achieved the same salvific end through Christ's obedience (whether conceived as active-and-passive or as suffering-equivalent-to-perfect-obedience), dogmatic precision on this point yielded no proportional benefit to its divisive potential. It should thus remain a matter of private judgment in the church and cordial disputation in the academy.

Historiographic Implications

This chronological anchor point shifts how we must read subsequent developments in Reformed theology. First, the IAOC debate cannot be understood as a Reformed development tied to covenant theology, contra Shepherd. Second, what de Campos and others characterize as theological ambiguity in figures like Ursinus and Olevianus represents a deliberate irenicism (though the latter struggled with this more than the former). The 1565 evidence, combined with that presented by van den Brink, reveals clear theological positions coupled with pragmatic and pastoral restraint.

Third, the rumored authorship and confirmed sympathies of Ursinus and Olevianus show that Heidelberg Calvinism developed along lines of reception distinct from Geneva on this point of doctrine. Fourth, the coexistence of divergent views on the IAOC within early Reformed orthodoxy—lasting until Beza, Johann Jakob Grynaeus, and Daniel Tossanus’s engagement with Piscator reignited the issue (c. 1588)—reflects not confusion but conscious irenic policy. Piscator emerges from this not as a renegade departing from an established Reformed consensus or an idiosyncratic reader of the Reformers, but as the chief systematizer of a legitimated stream of Heidelberg Calvinism, transmitted to him through his colleagues at Heidelberg, Neustadt, and Herborn.

There are many other implications I can think of, but this is where I’ll leave it.

Acknowledgements

Even though this is not a thesis, I can’t post this in good conscience without mentioning those who have helped me with this study. Thanks to my wife for putting up with me; to Damian Domke at the University of Heidelberg for translating Karg’s propositions, brainstorming, and using your academic powers to retrieve certain manuscripts for me; to my elder and friend James Burdette for prompting my interest in the IAOC debates; to Dr. R. Scott Clark for supervising my study—remaining encouraging, gracious, and humble even as I challenged his prior conclusions; to my friends for listening to me ramble about this for an entire semester. Though not a thesis, this took up much of my life, and I look forward to publishing the final product, with sources and all.