“Those who want the Mosaic law to recapitulate the covenant of works from the Garden need to be aware that works will always drive out grace. To mix the covenant of works into the Mosaic administration of grace will ensure that the grace of the law will be entirely supplanted. It is astonishing that through this book, the recapitulated sense of law and condemnation has almost entirely effaced the Westminsterian understanding of the graciousness manifested at Sinai . . . God had brought the Jews out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, but apparently the hosts of recapitulation had not been drowned like Pharaoh, but chased them out into the wilderness, caught up with them, and subjected them again to a yoke of slavery.”
Thanks Would Have Been in Order
“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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”