Theology That Bites Back
“Life and obedience are essential characteristics of the instrumentality of faith, in just the same way that life is an essential characteristic of a seeing eye. But I do not see blue as a reward or payment for having a living eye. This does not make life irrelevant to the seeing however.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 694
“When I say that faith is alive, I am saying nothing more than that faith is really faith. When I say that faith is obedient, I am saying nothing more than that faith is true faith. If it were not alive, not not obedient, you would not have the same basic thing, only with some of the paint chipped off. You wouldn’t have faith at all. And if you don’t have faith at all, then you don’t have justifying faith, or faith that lays hold of Christ. Put another way, faith must be faith to be the instrument of justification.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 694
“Now if you have a law/gospel hermeneutic, you have decided going into your exegesis what that exegesis can and cannot reveal to you. So if I produced a verse that said, ‘Thou shalt exercise justifying faith as your evangelical obedience,’ this would not even be a minor challenge to a law/gospel hermeneutic. A law/gospel hermeneutic would chase the verb around the room, until the aorist imperative ran out of the door screaming, turning the verse into gospel, remarkably enough.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 692
“If doing what God says to do is obedience, and true faith is doing what God says to do, then true faith is obedience.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 691
“Here is a good place for some good and necessary consequence. A command can only be disobeyed or obeyed. Ignoring it is disobedience. Pretending not to hear is disobedience Given the authority and legitimacy of the command, there are no other options. If someone wants to maintain a third possibility, I am open to hearing what it might possibly be. Now, does God command men to believe the gospel?”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 689.
“Now when God through His preachers tells us that Christ died and rose again, and commands us to repent of our sins and believe this message, is it possible to obey Him by repenting of our sins and believing the message? Of course. When we do as we are told, we are obeying. If we are told to respond to the goodness of God by faith alone, and we do so, are we disobeying? Of course not—we are obeying. If we try to shoehorn in some of our own autonomous works so that we might get some of the credit for our own salvation, are we obeying? No—in the name of works and obedience, we are disobeying. The motion of believing does not therefore displace the motion of obeying if believing is what we were commanded to do. The action of works-righteousness fails, not because it is obedience and obedience is bad, but rather because it is disobedience and disobedience is bad” ().
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 687-688
[Responding to 2 These. 1:5-8; Rom. 6:17; Rom. 1:5; Heb. 5:9; 1 Pet. 4:17]
“Because of a superstitious avoidance of certain words (obedience reminds some of merit-mongering) we not only find ourselves trifling with the sacred text, but also neglecting the simplest solution in the world, one that should fill every Protestant heart with gladness. ‘Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent’ (John 6:29).”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, pp. 686-687
“If Adam had stood the test, it would have been through the instrumentality of faith-animated obedience, graciously given by God. We, however, are fallen, and God does not justify us on the basis of raw, autonomous works, and He does not justify us on the basis of Spirit-animated obedience. He justifies us through the instrumentality of Spirit-animated faith, a faith which continues, after the initial moment of justification, to be animated in obedience.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 676
“I am not mono-covenantal . . . and I hold that there are two covenants—the covenant of creation and the covenant of grace. One, two.”
The Auburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 673
“If you have been in controversy like this one for five years, as I have, and have written hundreds of thousands of words about it, as I have, it is impossible to read through those Westminster quotations above and say, ‘Yep. I sure did all of that right.’ Specifically, I can say (and do say) that my purpose and intent was not to accuse any of the named individuals in this controversy with the sin of purposefully lying. But because I did not make this qualification carefully at that time, I believe that it would be quite reasonable for a reader not to see this, and that problem was my responsibility. I was not making a blanket accusation (for example) of flat-out lying against the men at Mid-America or Westminster West. I don’t believe that accusation to be true, but since my words could reasonably be construed that way, I need to seek the forgiveness of any FV critics affected by it. In short, any of the named Christian leaders, critics of the FV, who believed I was calling them liars simpliciter, please forgive me for my breech of the ninth commandment in this” ().
TheAuburn Avenue Chronicles Vol. 2, p. 671
