“As I have pointed out in many places, if Adam had withstood the tempter, it would have been necessary for him to thank God afterwards. This means that the covenant was fundamentally a gracious one.”
Merit Not Fungible
“We simply deny that merit can be extracted from a virtuous act and stored on shelves.”
Letters On the Very Threshold of November
Letter to the Editor: Can you recommend any good resources-books or video series-for learning church history from a Protestant point of view? Thank you and God bless. Ryan ...
The Westminster Standards, That Is
“He tries to justify this by some kind of discussion of Galatians, but I don’t know why he is messing around with that when we have the Standards.”
Did Jesus Trust God or Not?
“Was Christ’s obedience faithless or not? Now I agree that Christ’s obedience was imputed to us, but where did this obedience come from? Did Jesus gut it out for us on a works principle, or was His obedience grounded in His absolute trust in His Father? The answer is simple. It was perfect obedience, right? That meant that it was not grounded in the actions of the first successful Pelagian.”
The Little Drummer Boy Responds to Denny Burk
Introduction: The elders of Kenwood Baptist in Louisville recently publicized three classes taught at their church by Jim Hamilton and Denny Burk, the point of which was to warn their members ...
Obedience, Not Merit
“When Christ came into the world, He came to do the will of His Father. He obeyed. He was promised the nations of men, and He gloriously fulfilled the conditions attached to that promise. So in discussing this, words like promise, blessing, obedience, submission are straight out of the Bible, and we should stick to them. Merit isn’t one of those words, and the sooner we get this gum off our Reformed shoe the better.”
Figures
No, No, That Was My Point
“In this kind of debate, unless everybody involved watches his step closely, things can get pretty stupid—like a couple of dogs, neither of them very smart, debating quantum physics. ‘No! Arf, arf.’”
So Why Call It That?
“This is probably the central complaint I have about the prelapsarian covenant of works. I believe there was such a covenant but why call it by that name? The name throws just about everybody off, including Estelle. In the Pauline vocabulary works and grace are antithetical. So when you say works, you don’t think Adamic probation, you think of your standard issue Pharisees. And when you think of them, you think of their distortions of the Old Testament grace into their Ishmaelite system of works. And then you their distortions of Synaptic grace back into the Old Testament, and then read that back into the Garden. How else could Galatians 3:10 get applied so easily to the pre-fall Adam?”