“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?”
No Divine Distillery
“Can we really detach Jesus from the merit of His obedience like this? I don’t believe so. This view . . . presupposes that merit can somehow be impersonal. If you believe that in the life, death and resurrection of the Lord, God was operating a divine distillery through which He extracted the merit of Christ’s obedience from that obedience, storing it in a separate container in a separate place, then you hold to the view of merit that the FV is rejecting. If you don’t hold that, there is no need to get irate and post a hot comment, because if you don’t hold that, we are not rejecting it.”
The Giver and Gifts Come Together
“I honestly do not see how it can be considered possible to separate Christ from His benefits. So when I speak of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ, this means that I am ultimately speaking of the imputation of Christ Himself, and there is no way to understand this apart from the Pauline idea of union with Christ. We may distinguish Christ and His benefits (as the Bible frequently does), but if we try to separate them, we are guilty of a very serious mistake.”
A Paper-Mache Ordo
“The ordo is an illustration, a metaphor, meant to preserve a right understanding of God’s sovereignty in salvation. It is like a paper-mache model of an atom, hanging above a fifth-grade classroom. There is a point to the illustration, which must be grasped, but, once it is grasped, you ought to stop thinking of the atom as a teeny solar system.”
Faith Like a Carcass
[Responding to a rejection of active, living, obedient faith] “Apparently the only way to get through ambiguous justification debates is to insist that we are justified by an inert, dead, and disobedient faith. That way all the glory goes to Christ, and nobody gets the wrong idea.”
Srtrike Four
“A slight difficulty arises because, as readers of this blog know full well, I hold that there are two covenants, one before the fall and one after. I hold to the imputation of the active obedience of Christ, and I do so with robust gesticulations. And I deny that faith justifies because of any Boy Scout qualities it may have. Strike three. At this point, Clark needs to hand his bat to the bat boy and respectfully take his seat in the dugout. But he does nothing of the kind. He just assumes the stance again and looks at the pitcher with a steely gaze. ‘That all you got? Three pitches? I’ll hit one eventually. C’mon.’ Okay. I also affirm that justification is primarily about right standing before God. Strike four.”
Calvin Said That?
[On Calvin’s view that the “covenant of grace is common to hypocrites and true believers”] “If this is an error, it is an error within the Reformed pale—we share the error with no less than ol’ Jean himself. If it is not an error, then certain schoolmarm librarians at the John Calvin Memorial Archives and Book Stacks need to do a little less shushing and a little more reading.”
Like a Purple Boa
“In the aftermath of this debate everybody could plainly see that I hold to a Westminsterian soteriology and that I wear the traditional Reformed ordo around my neck like it was a feather boa. Where did all the plain heresy go?”
Appealing to Caesar
“You have appealed to the confessions, and so to the confessions we have gone. Saving faith yields obedience to the commands of God. Among many other activities, saving faith trusts in Christ alone for sanctification.”