Just finished listening to Michael Horton’s contribution to the Westminster conference. He made lots of fine points, and is clearly well-read in all the literature that surrounds this particular embarrassment to Christian discourse.
Nevertheless, some fundamental misapplications are still there, and the stumbling block is that pesky word merit. I am reminded of that section in Pirates of Penzance: “When you say, offen, do you mean offen, a person who has lost his parents, or offen, frequently?”
Horton believes that we have gone back to the medieval category of congruent merit, and this frankly baffles me. Whenever I see congruent merit on the street, I never fail to heap opprobrium on his pointy little head. Congruent merit is nothing if not synergistic, and when you are high octane predestinarians, as all the federal vision men are, congruent merit is simply a theological impossibility. Horton may not like what we are articulating, and we would be happy to discuss it. But it is not congruent merit, or any kind of merit at all.
Near the end of his talk, he rejects the idea that we “get in” by grace, and “stay in” by works. As do I, with enthusiasm. We get in by grace, we remain in by grace, we walk by grace, we talk by grace, we persevere by grace, we eat dinner by grace, we go to church by grace. We get in by grace. We stay in by grace. We finish by grace. Sola gratia. Tota gratia. Tota et sola gratia. Grace, grace, grace.
But you know me. Mr. Ambiguous.