Green Baggins has put up another post, this one working through a short article I wrote on pp. 7-8 of the FV issue of Credenda. Given the subject matter, this post will be very brief. Well, maybe not very brief, but comparatively brief. Man, look at it grow . . .
Just two issues. The central point of my article is that different views on the nature of Adam’s required obedience in the Garden constitute the crux of the whole matter. FV guys reject the idea of Adam doing anything meritorious, and FV critics, in order to maintain their version of the covenant of works, want Adam to be in a position to merit the “well done” from God if he passed the probationary test. Lane concludes his post by pressing me to accept a particular kind of merit.
“The principle by which Adam would have entered into life was a principle of obedience, not one of faith. Therefore, it was a principle of works. Not of condign merit, but of pactum merit. Not of congruent merit either, but of pactum merit.”
Two things in response to this. First, I am not crazy about the word merit, but I can live with it, depending. The only thing I want to insist on is that any merit Adam “earned” would have placed him under an obligation to thank God for it. This is how I put it in that article.
“Had Adam passed that probationary period of testing, the only appropriate response for him would have been to turn to God and give thanks for the deliverance.”
Another way of putting this is to say that, at bottom, the covenant of works has to be understood as a gracious covenant. Yes, and amen, and a long line of Reformed theologians have agreed with this over the centuries. But you have to be careful about agreeing with it these days, depending on the presbytery. So, to use Lane’s language, I don’t mind at all if Adam had received pactum merit, as you put it, just so long as he thanked God for all of it, because Adam, like all of us, needed to be a sola gratia man. You should always thank God for His gifts, and everything from God is always a gift — in Adam’s case, it would have been the grapes, the Garden, the woman, the world, the obedience . . . all of it, the sheer grace of God.
So, Lane, I will work with you and provisionally agree to the language of pactum merit. If Adam had obeyed, and God gave him his pactum merit, would Adam have needed to say thank you for it? Or do you take the only other possible position, which is to say that Adam would not have needed to say thank you for it?
As an aside, if you look again at the quotation above, I agree that everything depended upon Adam’s obedience, but I am just baffled by Lane contrasting obedience and faith. In my mind, that is like contrasting walking with legs.
The last point to make here is that Lane spent a lot of time in this post to show that had Adam obeyed God, he would have been promoted beyond his protological body and would have received his glorified eschatological body. I agree with this completely, and so maybe we are getting somewhere.